Izzy Young at his Folklore Centrum store in Stockholm.
One of Bob Dylan’s most important mentors, in his early years as an artist, was Izzy Young. “To him, folk music glittered like a mound of gold,” Dylan once wrote. “It did for me, too.”
A fascinating hour-long documentary about Young, “Go to Izzy! The Book Keeper That Discovered Bob Dylan,” will be available online, all day Sept. 21, as part of The New Jersey Film Festival at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. Visit njfilmfest.com.
You can watch a trailer for it, below.
Young, who died in 2019 at the age of 90, owned and operated the Folklore Center store — selling folk-related books, folk records, musical instruments and more — in New York’s Greenwich Village from 1957 to 1973. Dylan once called it “The citadel of Americana folk music.”
But Young was more than just a store owner. “Izzy saw that somebody needs to put together a newsletter, somebody needs to start hosting concerts, somebody needs to write a gossip column about the folk revival, because no one else is doing it,” says Scott Barretta (editor of the book “The Conscience of the Folk Revival: The Writings of Israel ‘Izzy’ Young”), in the documentary.
In ’73, Young relocated to Stockholm — where he ran the similar Folklore Centrum store, devoted mainly to Swedish folk — until shortly before his death. Director Magnus Sjostrom interviews him and his daughter, actress Philomène Grandin, extensively, and also shows him presenting intimate folk concerts at the Stockholm store, and donning a tuxedo to attend the 2016 Nobel Prize banquet at which Bob Dylan was honored, and at which Patti Smith — who gave poetry readings at Young’s Folklore Center, back in the early ’70s — performed.
In one of the documentary’s most memorable scenes, longtime Patti Smith collaborator Lenny Kaye — in Stockholm to perform with her at a concert of her own — visits Young’s store for a sweet reunion. “You got me started,” Kaye tells Young, remembering the day in 1963 when he was still a high school student in New Brunswick and visited the Greenwich Village store, buying a songbook from which he learned his first guitar chord.
Izzy Young looks over some of his memorabilia.
A conservatively dressed Young is shown, in the documentary, leading a 1961 rally protesting the banning of folk music at Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park. “It was the stupidest, dumbest thing that ever happened, to say to people that you can’t play in Washington Square,” Young remembers.
Sjostrom also includes vintage footage of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel at the store, a photo of Tim Buckley performing inside it, and photos from Dylan’s first concert — presented by Young at Carnegie Chapter Hall in New York, in 1961.
Carnegie Chapter Hall was a 200-capacity room at Carnegie Hall. Young ended up selling just 52 tickets for that Dylan concert, and losing money.
There are not a lot of financial triumphs in Young’s life story. As he freely admits, he wasn’t much of a businessman. At the Stockholm store, lots of people stopped by to catch a glimpse of the man who discovered Bob Dylan. Not so many actually made purchases, though. And attendance at Young’s in-store concerts dwindled to the point where a dozen or so was expected, and to draw 50 or more was a rare success.
Much of the documentary is spent in the Stockholm store, where Young talks about his life and times. Sjostrom also visits the store’s basement apartment with Grandin. “There is stuff literally everywhere,” she says, opening a cabinet door to show a bag full of old reel-to-reel tapes. “The other day I opened the sink cabinet and found tapes of Patti Smith reading poetry in daddy’s store. I have to go through this. For all I know, this could be Bob Dylan.”
She also shows her father’s old notebooks — important artifacts of a musical era that now belong, Sjostrom notes, to the Library of Congress.
And, as a written message at the end of the movie reminds us, “Folk music can still be heard in Washington Square Park.”
For more on the film, visit gotoizzy.netlify.app.
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