SALLY GROSSMAN, BOB DYLAN COVER MODEL, DIES AT 81

Sally Grossman, the wife of Bob Dylan's one-time manager, Albert Grossman, and cover model for Dylan’s 1965 LP Bringing It All Back Home has died at the age of 81.

Born in 1939, Sally grew up in Queens, N.Y., where she attended Adelphi and Hunter colleges. She’d eventually drop out, pursuing a career with Trans World Airlines and later becoming a waitress, all while remaining ensconced in the Greenwich Village folk music scene. It was there that she met Albert, who ran the Gate of Horn club at the time.

The two were married in 1964. Albert managed many of the era’s biggest names, including Janis Joplin, Peter, Paul and Mary, the Band and Gordon Lightfoot. Still, it’s Dylan with whom Sally will be eternally tied.

For his 1965 album, the rocker opted for an image of himself perched on a living room lounge chair, while Sally lay behind him wearing a red jumpsuit and holding a cigarette. The photo captured the imaginations of music fans the world over, with many wondering who this mysterious brunette was.

Bringing It All Back Home went on to sell more than a million copies. It is regarded as one of Dylan’s defining releases, a pivotal LP which featured the rocker’s shift from folk to electric sound.

“I was around and Bob just asked me to do it,” Sally matter-of-factly explained of the picture in 1996. "It's amazing to be on an album cover that people remember 30 years later." Grossman noted that Dylan "thought we looked dynamic, like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton" in the image.

Albert and Dylan would end their professional relationship in the late ‘60s. In 1970, the manager founded Bearsville Records, a recording studio and record label based in Woodstock, N.Y.. Sally would take over the enterprises in 1986, following Albert’s death. In 1989 she opened the Bearsville Theater, a music venue that had been her husband’s passion project. She’d help run the theater until selling it in 2004.

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From Wiki...

Artwork
The album’s cover, photographed by Daniel Kramer with an edge-softened lens, features Sally Grossman (wife of Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman) lounging in the background. There are also artifacts scattered around the room, including LPs by the Impressions (Keep on Pushing), Robert Johnson (King of the Delta Blues Singers), Ravi Shankar (India’s Master Musician), Lotte Lenya (Sings Berlin Theatre Songs by Kurt Weill) and Eric Von Schmidt (The Folk Blues of Eric Von Schmidt).

Dylan had “met” Schmidt “one day in the green pastures of Harvard University” and would later mimic his album cover pose (tipping his hat) for his own Nashville Skyline four years later.

A further record, Françoise Hardy’s EP J’suis D’accord, was on the floor near Dylan’s feet but can only be seen in other shots from the same photo session, as well as a copy of the Wilhelm/Baynes version of I Ching.

Visible behind Grossman is the top of Dylan’s head from the cover of Another Side of Bob Dylan; under her right arm is the magazine Time with President Lyndon B. Johnson as “Man of the Year” on the cover of the January 1, 1965 issue. There is a harmonica resting on a table with a fallout shelter (capacity 80) sign leaning against it.

Above the fireplace on the mantle directly to the left of the painting is the Lord Buckley album The Best of Lord Buckley. Next to Lord Buckley is a copy of GNAOUA, a magazine devoted to exorcism and Beat Generation poetry edited by poet Ira Cohen, and a glass collage by Dylan called “The Clown” made for Bernard Paturel from colored glass Bernard was about to discard.

Dylan sits forward holding his cat (named Rolling Stone) and has an opened magazine featuring an advertisement on Jean Harlow’s Life Story by the columnist Louella Parsons resting on his crossed leg.

The cufflinks Dylan wore in the picture were a gift from Joan Baez, as she later referenced in her 1975 song “Diamonds & Rust”. Daniel Kramer won a Grammy nomination for best album cover for the photograph.

On the back cover (also by Kramer), the woman massaging Dylan’s scalp is the filmmaker and performance artist Barbara Rubin.

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