Eventually he was hired at the Green Door in Michigan City, Indiana, 50 miles east of Chicago. In 1955, he was booked into the Off-Beat Room in Chicago, where he met Albert Grossman. In 1956, Grossman opened the folk club Gate of Horn on the near north side of Chicago, where Gibson performed for eleven months, starting as an opener for many of the acts, and later becoming the headliner. Grossman booked numerous talented performers into Gate of Horn, including Josh White, Glenn Yarborough, Odetta, Hamilton Camp, Judy Collins, and Joan Baez. Gibson brought Baez to the 1959 Newport Folk Festival and introduced her, for the first time, to a national audience. Gibson steadily gained recognition in Chicago in the early 1960s, aided by Camp. In 1961 their debut album, Gibson and Camp at the Gate of Horn, was released on Elektra Records. A watershed album, it influenced singers from John Lennon and Gordon Lightfoot to John Denver. Lightfoot's "Canadian Railroad Trilogy" was patterned more or less opposite to Gibson and Camp's "Civil War Trilogy". Art D'Lugoff opened the iconic Village Gate in New York City in 1958, and Gibson and Camp became regular performers there. After they rejected D'Lugoff's suggestion that they add a female voice to their duo, he gave the same recommendation to Peter Yarrow and Paul Stookey; the resulting trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, was deeply influenced by Gibson's music. Yarrow later said of his friend, "When you listen to PPM, you are hearing Bob Gibson." Shel Silverstein, then a cartoonist at Playboy, was a regular fan and captured Gibson's attention when he completed lyrics to an unfinished Gibson tune. Gibson and Silverstein became close friends and writing partners, writing over 200 songs over the next 35 years. Their last joint project, in Nashville in 1993, was the album Makin' A Mess, produced by Silverstein and Kyle Lehning and released on Asylum Records. The last cut, "Whistlers and Jugglers and Singers of Song," was a last-minute substitution when Silverstein realized how ill his friend was. It was written about the relationship of "the trio from out of our past", about a girl who always loved a singer, and got together with him several years prior to his death. Drug abuse Gibson began abusing drugs and alcohol as a teenager. By the time of his rise to success in Chicago he was a heavy user of amphetamines.