I had a lot more records now: blues and folk and the new singer/songwriters who were working Dylan’s side of the street.
Timing is everything. I was playing the album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, a song called “All I Really Want to Do.” To the untrained ear this song is particularly grating. There’s a part where, on the work, his voice rises and rises and pulsates until it screeches into a sort of yodeling giggle. It’s great, and funny as hell, but there are folks who regard this moment as a perpetual fingernail on an interminable chalkboard.
McPherson, my leading petty officer and boss, chose this moment to come through the hatch and see what was going on. If it had been another song, a moment earlier or a moment later, everything might’ve gone down differently.
He gave a sort of strangled inarticulate cry. He seemed taken with some manner of fit. His mouth was a horrified; his eyes bulged in agony. He clasped his hands to his ears. God Almighty damn! He screamed, and ran across the deck and jerked the cord from the wall. He grabbed up my records blindly Dylan, Joan Baez, Brownie McGhee, Jimmy Reed. He jammed them between the lid and turntable and forced the lid down and grabbed up everything and whirled and went through the hatch. I could hear him going up the ladder to the main deck.
I followed him. He was at the rail. The deck rose and fell in the chop.
Drown this caterwauling son of a bitch, he said.
He hurled everything into the sea, albums skipping like Frisbees, the phonograph listing and filling with water, going down for the third time, do not resuscitate.
He turned and went without a word.
I stood watching the records drift toward the shore. Like messages sent into space, hello out there. I wondered what the Vietcong would make of these strange cultural artifacts. All these drowned bluesmen and Cambridge girls with ironed-looking hair. I imagined them putting Dylan on the turntable, lowering the tonearm. Scratching their heads in perplexity. Goodbye’s just too good a word, babe. So I’ll just say fare-thee-well.
Timing is everything. When I stepped off the plane that had flown me from Japan to Long Beach for discharge, a crewman’s tinny radio was blasting away. I stepped into the hot glare of sunlight, and a familiar voice was demanding, How does it feel? To be on your own? A complete unknown? With no direction home? Like a rolling stone?
That sounds like Dylan, I thought. But the music sure doesn’t. What the hell’s happened here? Dylan hadn’t been in his room for a few months. He was on the road, more changes in the wind.
There was more strangeness around. Changes abounded, they seemed to be the order of the day. I’d been gone 18 months. In days to come I saw men on the streets with hair down to their shoulders, people carrying signs protesting the war. Something’s happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones? I saw rock music on primetime TV, a show called Hullabaloo. The Byrds were singing Dylan, granny glasses, more long hair. McGuinn was even phrasing like Dylan. I saw a duo calling themselves Sonny and Cher. They looked like Brill Building hippies. They were singing a song called I Got You Babe. The words were drivel except for one word. Babe? Where’s that Babe coming from? They’re stealing from Dylan, picking his pocket, ripping him off like a Tijuana pimp. Where’s a cop when you need one?
More calendar pages blowing in the wind, a veritable snowstorm of them. Time passes slowly up here in the mountains, the world goes its weary way. Dylan and I grow older. He’s much on the road these years, identities flicker like frames in a film. He’s a family man, a gypsy rover, a whiteface minstrel, a born-again Christian. He’s an 80-year-old bluesman from the Mississippi Delta: masks shuffle like cars in a deck. I try a few masks of my own.
Then comes a day when the attic is almost deserted. Except for Dylan, the tenants are long gone. Who knows where perhaps they’re winos living like street people. Heroes have feet of clay; they stand on shifting sands. A man must make his own way. A cold wind blows down Desolation Row, the ambulances are long gone, the sweeping Cinderella is so far past the age of being easy, her Bette Davis style is a grotesque vamping.
A man could learn to live listening to Woody Guthrie, Dylan said a long time ago. I believe that this is just as true of Dylan. You could learn to live listening your way through all those albums. Especially if you have an affinity for masks and one-eyed jacks and shifting identities: now you see me, now you don’t.
And you learn to accept growing older. You become aware of mortality. The sun lowers, hovers over the horizon. I got new eyes, Dylan marvels. Everything looks so far away.
Don’t think twice, it’s all right. The more things change the more they stay the same.
A man must make his own way, and you grow too old for heroes. But Dylan and I go back a long way; we’ve been through a lot together, and you never grow too old for a friend, even one you’ve never met.
Presidents come and go, and empires rise and crumble, but Dylan’s still on the road. The never-ending tour rolls on to its inevitable end. But nobody’s giving up here, nobody’s getting old. On Love and Theft, the most recent studio album, Dylan sounds positively rejuvenated, shot full of some kind of goat-gland tonic, funny as Charlie Chaplin, brash as Robert Johnson and wise and fatalistic as Mississippi John Hurt.
So jump into that hopped-up Mustang Ford, babe, and throw your panties overboard. This ride’s not over yet.
And hey girl from the North Country: Goodbye’s just too good a word, babe. So I’ll just say fare-thee-well.
CALVES HOWLING AT THE MOON
— To accept art you have to accept mystery–
I’M NOT AN ARTIST, I just paint for the reasons most people do the things they like, because they’re fun and because of the satisfaction you get when you have completed (or decided you’ve completed) a picture. And because you have an idea in your head, you try to paint pictures that equal it. They never do, but the feeling that you get a little closer each time is part of that satisfaction.
The first painting that ever affected me deeply was by Andrew Wyeth. I was in elementary school, about the fourth grade. Wednesday was library day, and although most of the books were off-limits to fourth graders, I looked forward all week to roaming around the shelves, and picking out titles that I promised myself I would read one day.
The librarian controlled us with an acerbic tongue and a fierce eye, but she liked me for a couple of reasons: because I could refold a newspaper and keep all the sections in order (If he can do that, I don’t know why the rest of you can’t) and because I had once asked her how much she had to pay to be in charge of all those library books.
She noticed that I was always drawing pictures, comic-book panels with Zane Grey Westerners pummeling each other with their fists or battling with six-guns.
She was also the high-school librarian, and one day she brought down from there a coffee-table book of prints of great American paintings. She told me I could take it home and study it for a few days. Look at something besides trash, she said. But don’t tear it. And don’t spill anything on it.
The picture that grabbed me was Christina’s World. Wyeth had painted a woman crouching on a grassy slope, who awkwardly faces away from the viewer, toward a New England farmhouse. Years later I read that the woman was disabled and that Wyeth had painted her climbing the hill in the only means of locomotion available to her. But the knowledge was not necessary to appreciate the painting. What affected me about the painting was its mystery. The background story neither deepened the mystery nor explained it. It was like that Frost poem about stopping by the snowy woods, miles to go before you sleep. The woman seemed affected by the gravity or enormity of something just out of view. To me, as a child, Christina’s World needed an explanatory panel before and following it.