by Bob Dylan
Being an heir of the ’40s and ’50s cultures, this kind of talk was fine with me. Gutenberg could have been some guy who stepped out of an old folk song, too. Practically speaking, the ’50s culture was like a judge in his last days on the bench. It was about to go. Within ten years’ time, it would struggle to rise and then come crashing to the floor. With folk songs embedded in my mind like a religion, it wouldn’t matter. Folk songs transcended the immediate culture.
Before I moved into a place of my own, I’d stayed pretty much all over the Village. Sometimes for a night or two, sometimes for weeks or more. I stayed a lot at Van Ronk’s. I probably stayed at Vestry Street off and on longer than anywhere. I liked it at Ray and Chloe’s. I felt comfortable there. Ray had an elite background, even studied at Camden Military Academy in South Carolina, which he had left with “sincere and utter hatred.” He’d also been “expelled with gratitude” from Wake Forest Divinity School, a religious college. He had parts of Byron’s Don Juan memorized and could quote it—also some of the beautiful lines of “Evangeline,” the Longfellow poem. He was working in a tool-and-die factory in Brooklyn, but before that had drifted around, had been employed at the Studebaker plant in South Bend and also at an Omaha slaughterhouse on the kill floor. Once I asked him what that was like. “You ever heard of Auschwitz?” Sure I had, who hadn’t? It was one of the Nazi death camps in Europe and Adolf Eichmann, the chief Nazi Gestapo organizer who’d managed them, had been put on trial recently in Jerusalem. He’d escaped after the war and was captured by the Israelis at a bus stop in Argentina. His trial was a big deal. On the witness stand Eichmann declared he was merely following orders, but his prosecutors had no problem proving that he had carried out his mission with monstrous zeal and relish. Eichmann had been convicted and his fate was now being decided. There was a lot of talk about sparing his life, even sending him back to Argentina, but that would have been foolish. Even if he was set free he probably wouldn’t last an hour. The State of Israel claimed the right to act as heir and executor of all who perished in the final solution. The trial reminds the whole world of what led to the formation of the Israeli state.
I was born in the spring of 1941. The Second World War was already raging in Europe, and America would soon be in it. The world was being blown apart and chaos was already driving its fist into the face of all new visitors. If you were born around this time or were living and alive, you could feel the old world go and the new one beginning. It was like putting the clock back to when B.C. became A.D. Everybody born around my time was a part of both. Hitler, Churchill, Mussolini, Stalin, Roosevelt—towering figures that the world would never see the likes of again, men who relied on their own resolve, for better or worse, every one of them prepared to act alone, indifferent to approval—indifferent to wealth or love, all presiding over the destiny of mankind and reducing the world to rubble. Coming from a long line of Alexanders and Julius Caesars, Genghis Khans, Charlemagnes and Napoleons, they carved up the world like a really dainty dinner. Whether they parted their hair in the middle or wore a Viking helmet, they would not be denied and were impossible to reckon with—rude barbarians stampeding across the earth and hammering out their own ideas of geography.
My father was stricken with polio and it kept him out of the war, but my uncles had all gone and come back alive. Uncle Paul, Uncle Maurice, Jack, Max, Louis, Vernon and others had gone off to the Philippines, Anzio, Sicily, North Africa, France and Belgium. They brought back mementos and keep-sakes—a straw Japanese cigarette case, German bread bag, a British enameled mug, German dust goggles, British fighting knife, a German Luger pistol—all kinds of junk. They returned to civilian life as if nothing ever happened, never said a word about what they did or what they saw.
In 1951 I was going to grade school. One of the things we were trained to do was to hide and take cover under our desks when the air-raid sirens blew because the Russians could attack us with bombs. We were also told that the Russians could be parachuting from planes over our town at any time. These were the same Russians that my uncles had fought alongside only a few years earlier. Now they had become monsters who were coming to slit our throats and incinerate us. It seemed peculiar. Living under a cloud of fear like this robs a child of his spirit. It’s one thing to be afraid when someone’s holding a shotgun on you, but it’s another thing to be afraid of something that’s just not quite real. There were a lot of folks around who took this threat seriously, though, and it rubbed off on you. It was easy to become a victim of their strange fantasy. I had the same teachers in school that my mother did. They were young in her time and elderly in mine. In American history class, we were taught that commies couldn’t destroy America with guns or bombs alone, that they would have to destroy the Constitution—the document that this country was founded upon. It didn’t make any difference, though. When the drill sirens went off, you had to lay under your desk facedown, not a muscle quivering and not make any noise. As if this could save you from the bombs dropping. The threat of annihilation was a scary thing. We didn’t know what we did to anybody to make them so mad. The Reds were everywhere, we were told, and out for blood-lust. Where were my uncles, the defenders of the country? They were busy making a living, working, getting what they could and making it stretch. How could they know what was going on in the schools, what kind of fear was being roused?
All that was over now. I was in New York City, communists or no communists. There were probably plenty around. Plenty of fascists, too. Plenty of would-be left-wing dictators and right-wing dictators. Radicals of all stripes. It was said that World War II spelled the end of the Age of Enlightenment, but I wouldn’t have known it. I was still in it. Somehow I could still remember and feel the light of something about it. I’d read that stuff. Voltaire, Rousseau, John Locke, Montesquieu, Martin Luther—visionaries, revolutionaries…it was like I knew those guys, like they’d been living in my backyard.
I walked across the floor over to the cream colored drapes, pulled up the venetian blinds, seeing into the snowy streets. The furniture in the place was nice, some of it even hand built. That was nice, too—inlaid industrial dresser cabinets with highly stylized carvings with florid latches—floor-to-ceiling ornamental bookcases, a long narrow rectangular table with metal elements with geometrics that seemed to follow some unguided rule—one amusing piece, an organically shaped console table resembled a big toe. There were electric plates ingeniously placed in closet shelves. The small kitchen was like a forest. Kitchen herb boxes stuffed with pennyroyal, woodruff, lilac leaves, other things. Chloe, a Southern girl with Northern blood, was skilled in the use of bathroom clotheslines and sometimes I’d find one of my shirts hanging in there. I usually came in before dawn and slid onto the sofa, which came out into a folding bed in the high portico living room. I often fell asleep to the sounds of the night train rumbling and grumbling through Jersey, the iron horse with steam for blood.
I’d seen and heard trains from my earliest childhood days and the sight and sound of them always made me feel secure. The big boxcars, the iron ore cars, freight cars, passenger trains, Pullman cars. There was no place you could go in my hometown without at least some part of the day having to stop at intersections and wait for the long trains to pass. Tracks crossed the rural roads and ran alongside them as well. The sound of trains off in the distance more or less made me feel at home, like nothing was missing, like I was at some level place, never in any significant danger and that everything was fitting together.
Across the street from where I stood looking out the window was a church with a bell tower. The ringing of bells made me feel at home, too. I’d always heard and listened to the bells. Iron, brass, silver bells—the bells sang. On Sunday, for services, on holidays. They clanged when somebody important died, when people were getting married. Any special occasion would make the bells ring. You had a pleasant feeling when you heard the bells. I even liked doorbells and the NBC chimes on the radio. I looked out through the leaded glass window across to
the church. The bells were silent now and snow swirled off the rooftops. A blizzard was kidnapping the city, life spinning around on a drab canvas. Icy and cold.
Across the way a guy in a leather jacket scooped frost off the windshield of a snow-packed black Mercury Montclair. Behind him, a priest in a purple cloak was slipping through the courtyard of the church through an opened gate on his way to perform some sacred duty. Nearby, a bareheaded woman in boots tried to manage a laundry bag up the street. There were a million stories, just everyday New York things if you wanted to focus in on them. It was always right out in front of you, blended together, but you’d have to pull it apart to make any sense of it. St. Valentine’s Day, lovers’ day, had come and gone and I hadn’t noticed. I had no time for romance. I turned away from the window, from the wintry sun, crossed through the room, went to the stove and made and poured myself a cup of hot chocolate and then clicked on the radio.
I was always fishing for something on the radio. Just like trains and bells, it was part of the soundtrack of my life. I moved the dial up and down and Roy Orbison’s voice came blasting out of the small speakers. His new song, “Running Scared,” exploded into the room. Lately I’d been listening for songs with folk connotations. There had been some in the past: “Big Bad John,” “Michael Row the Boat Ashore,” “A Hundred Pounds of Clay.” Brook Benton had made “Boll Weevil” a contemporary hit. The Kingston Trio and Brothers Four were getting radio play. I liked The Kingston Trio. Even though their style was polished and collegiate, I liked most of their stuff anyway. Songs like “Getaway John,” “Remember the Alamo,” “Long Black Rifle.” There was always some kind of folk type song breaking through. “Endless Sleep,” the Jodie Reynolds song that had been popular years before, had even been folk in character. Orbison, though, transcended all the genres—folk, country, rock and roll or just about anything. His stuff mixed all the styles and some that hadn’t even been invented yet. He could sound mean and nasty on one line and then sing in a falsetto voice like Frankie Valli in the next. With Roy, you didn’t know if you were listening to mariachi or opera. He kept you on your toes. With him, it was all about fat and blood. He sounded like he was singing from an Olympian mountaintop and he meant business. One of his early songs, “Ooby Dooby,” had been popular way previously, but this new song of his was nothing like that. “Ooby Dooby” was deceptively simple, but Roy had progressed. He was now singing his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car over a cliff. He sang like a professional criminal. Typically, he’d start out in some low, barely audible range, stay there a while and then astonishingly slip into histrionics. His voice could jar a corpse, always leave you muttering to yourself something like, “Man, I don’t believe it.” His songs had songs within songs. They shifted from major to minor key without any logic. Orbison was deadly serious—no pollywog and no fledgling juvenile. There wasn’t anything else on the radio like him. I’d listen and wait for another song, but next to Roy the playlist was strictly dullsville…gutless and flabby. It all came at you like you didn’t have a brain. Outside of maybe George Jones, I didn’t like country music either. Jim Reeves and Eddy Arnold, it was hard to know what was country about that stuff. All the wildness and weirdness had gone out of country music. Elvis Presley. Nobody listened to him either. It had been years since he had done his hip thing and taken songs to other planets. I still kept turning the radio on, probably more out of mindless habit than anything else. Sadly, whatever it played reflected nothing but milk and sugar and not the real Jekyll and Hyde themes of the times. The On the Road, Howl and Gasoline street ideologies that were signaling a new type of human existence weren’t there, but how could you have expected it to be? 45 records were incapable of it.
I agonized about making a record, but I wouldn’t have wanted to make singles, 45s—the kind of songs they played on the radio. Folksingers, jazz artists and classical musicians made LPs, long-playing records with heaps of songs in the grooves—they forged identities and tipped the scales, gave more of the big picture. LPs were like the force of gravity. They had covers, back and front, that you could stare at for hours. Next to them, 45s were flimsy and uncrystallized. They just stacked up in piles and didn’t seem important. I had no song in my repertoire for commercial radio anyway. Songs about debauched bootleggers, mothers that drowned their own children, Cadillacs that only got five miles to the gallon, floods, union hall fires, darkness and cadavers at the bottom of rivers weren’t for radiophiles. There was nothing easygoing about the folk songs I sang. They weren’t friendly or ripe with mellowness. They didn’t come gently to the shore. I guess you could say they weren’t commercial. Not only that, my style was too erratic and hard to pigeonhole for the radio, and songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic. Greil Marcus, the music historian, would some thirty years later call it “the invisible republic.” Whatever the case, it wasn’t that I was anti–popular culture or anything and I had no ambitions to stir things up. I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk on it. I didn’t know what age of history we were in nor what the truth of it was. Nobody bothered with that. If you told the truth, that was all well and good and if you told the un-truth, well, that’s still well and good. Folk songs had taught me that. As for what time it was, it was always just beginning to be daylight and I knew a little bit about history, too—the history of a few nations and states—and it was always the same pattern. Some early archaic period where society grows and develops and thrives, then some classical period where the society reaches its maturation point and then a slacking off period where decadence makes things fall apart. I had no idea which one of these stages America was in. There was nobody to check with. A certain rude rhythm was making it all sway, though. It was pointless to think about it. Whatever you were thinking could be dead wrong.
I cut the radio off, crisscrossed the room, pausing for a moment, to turn on the black-and-white TV. Wagon Train was on. It seemed to be beaming in from some foreign country. I shut that off, too, and went into another room, a windowless one with a painted door—a dark cavern with a floor-to-ceiling library. I switched on the lamps. The place had an overpowering presence of literature and you couldn’t help but lose your passion for dumbness. Up until this time I’d been raised in a cultural spectrum that had left my mind black with soot. Brando. James Dean. Milton Berle. Marilyn Monroe. Lucy. Earl Warren and Khrushchev, Castro. Little Rock and Peyton Place. Tennessee Williams and Joe DiMaggio. J. Edgar Hoover and Westinghouse. The Nelsons. Holiday Inns and hot-rod Chevys. Mickey Spillane and Joe McCarthy. Levittown.
Standing in this room you could take it all for a joke. There were all types of things in here, books on typography, epigraphy, philosophy, political ideologies. The stuff that could make you bugged-eyed. Books like Fox’s Book of Martyrs, The Twelve Caesars, Tacitus lectures and letters to Brutus. Pericles’ Ideal State of Democracy, Thucydides’ The Athenian General—a narrative which would give you chills. It was written four hundred years before Christ and it talks about how human nature is always the enemy of anything superior. Thucydides writes about how words in his time have changed from their ordinary meaning, how actions and opinions can be altered in the blink of an eye. It’s like nothing has changed from his time to mine.
There were novels by Gogol and Balzac, Maupassant, Hugo and Dickens. I usually opened up some book to the middle, read a few pages and if I liked it went back to the beginning. Materia Medica (the causes and cures for diseases)—that was a good one. I was looking for the part of my education that I never got. Sometimes I’d open up a book and see a handwritten note scribbled in the front, like in Machiavelli’s The Prince, there was written, “The spirit of the hustler.” “The cosmopolitan man” was written on the title page in
Dante’s Inferno. The books weren’t arranged in any particular order or subject matter. Rousseau’s Social Contract was next to Temptation of St. Anthony, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the scary horror tale, was next to the autobiography of Davy Crockett. Endless rows of books—Sophocles’ book on the nature and function of the gods—why there are only two sexes. Alexander the Great’s march into Persia. When he conquered Persia, in order to keep it conquered, he had all of his men marry local women. After that, he never had any trouble with the population, no uprisings or anything. Alexander knew how to get absolute control. There was Simón Bolívar’s biography, too. I wanted to read all these books, but I would have to have been in a rest home or something in order to do that. I read some of The Sound and the Fury, didn’t quite get it, but Faulkner was powerful. I read some of the Albertus Magnus book…the guy who mixed up scientific theories with theology. It was lightweight compared to Thucydides. Magnus seemed like a guy who couldn’t sleep, writing this stuff late at night, clothes stuck to his clammy body. A lot of these books were too big to read, like giant shoes fitted for large-footed people. I read the poetry books, mostly. Byron and Shelley and Longfellow and Poe. I memorized Poe’s poem “The Bells” and strummed it to a melody on my guitar. There was a book there on Joseph Smith, the authentic American prophet who identifies himself with Enoch in the Bible and says that Adam was the first man-god. This stuff pales in comparison to Thucydides, too. The books make the room vibrate in a nauseating and forceful way. The words of “La Vita Solitaria” by Leopardi seemed to come out of the trunk of a tree, hopeless, uncrushable sentiments.