Intel M U S I C
A Twist of
Fate HOW A SECRET RECORDING SESSION WITH BOB DYLAN CHANGED KEVIN ODEGARD’S LIFE. BY KATE NELSON
Minnesota songwriter Kevin Odegard was just 24 when, in the winter of 1974, he was tapped to play guitar in a super-secret recording session on Bob Dylan’s pièce de résistance, Blood on the Tracks. Legend has it that the music icon wasn’t satisfied with the existing tracks, which had been recorded with New York City talent. So Odegard helped round up Minneapolis’s finest, even contributing the “Tangled Up In Blue” opener. Though he and the other Minnesota musicians weren’t credited on the album, the experience changed the trajectory of both his career and his life. Nearly half a century later, Odegard shares his story.
ARTFUL LIVING: WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO BECOME A SONGWRITER?
KEVIN ODEGARD: It was a guy named Dale Menten from Mankato. His band, the Gestures, got airplay on WDGY. The fact that he could write a hit song and get it on the radio gave me something to shoot for. All the Minneapolis bands were my inspiration, really: the Gestures, the Trashmen, the Underbeats, the Castaways, the Accents, David Rivkin’s Chancellors. It was a twangy Fender guitar sound, a sound Minnesota was really famous for at that time. In my hometown of Princeton, there were two places you could play, one being the armory. When I was in junior high, I would sit at these guys’ feet when they’d come through town and study
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what they were doing. They’d play on these big Fender Showman amps, and I aspired to do that. I really started writing in earnest on July 25, 1965, when I was 14. I heard “Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan on the transistor radio, and it was like nothing I’d ever heard before.
AL: HOW, THEN, DID YOU END UP WORKING AS A RAILWAY BRAKEMAN?
KO: I drifted out of college and hitchhiked to New York City with my girlfriend to get discovered in Greenwich Village in the folk clubs, just like Bob Dylan had. That led to an album deal. We went out on tour for a while, and we got some good radio airplay. That ended after a year. I was at a Super Bowl party, and I met some railroad brakemen. I had wanderlust. Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan told all kinds of tall tales about hitching rides on the rails, and it was romantic to me. And the job turned out to be very romantic — and very strenuous. I did that for four years. By 1974, I was invited to play at Bob Dylan’s cousin’s wedding at Camp Teko on Lake Minnetonka. (His brother, David, was my manager at the time.) Bob had just written and recorded a new song, “Forever Young,” that I played. He was sitting about five feet in front of me with his back to me. I gave a very nervous performance, but I think it might have helped lead to an invitation to the Blood on the Tracks sessions later that year.