All the Lies That Are My Life: Bob Dylan, Lorre Wyatt and “Blowin’ in the Wind”

It’s windy, spitting snow, and just above freezing the night of Monday, April 16, 1962 in New York City’s West Village. Joan Baez jumps into a cab parked at 11 West 4th Street and starts babbling to the driver about a song she just heard.

“A cesspool where you could barely see anybody because of the smoke, and you couldn’t talk to anybody because half of the people you wanted to talk to wanted to sell you narcotics.”

Joanie: “You wouldn’t believe this. I mean, this is amazing. This is real poetry.”

Cabbie: “Does it rhyme?”

Earlier that day, two aspiring musicians are hanging at the Fat Black Pussycat, a dimly-lit Greenwich Village coffee house in the era when it meant something to be a dimly-lit Village coffee house, as the New York Times puts it on the occasion of the Pussycat’s demise.

The two musicians are Jewish boys who have changed their names to better fit into the folkie scene. One has just turned 22, one is still a month shy of that birthday. The Pussycat is pretty much a dive, “a cesspool” its future owner would call it, where “you could barely see anybody because of the smoke, and you couldn’t talk to anybody because half of the people you wanted to talk to wanted to sell you narcotics.”

Funky or not, the Pussycat is a legit Village venue. Tiny Tim performed there, as did Mama Cass Elliot, Richie Havens, Shel Silverstein and Bill Cosby. But in the afternoons, like this cold…