by Bob Dylan
The jukebox in the place showed mostly jazz records. Zoot Simms, Hampton Hawes, Stan Getz, and some rhythm-and-blues records—Bumble Bee Slim, Slim Galliard, Percy May-field. The Beats tolerated folk music, but they really didn’t like it. They listened exclusively to modern jazz, bebop. A couple of times I dropped a coin right into the slot and played “The Man That Got Away” by Judy Garland. The song always did something to me, not in any stupefying, tremendous kind of way. It didn’t summon up any strange thoughts. It just was nice to hear. Judy Garland was from Grand Rapids, Minnesota, a town about twenty miles away from where I came from. Listening to Judy was like listening to the girl next door. She was way before my time, and like the Elton John song says, “I would have liked to have known you, but I was just a kid.” Harold Arlen had written “The Man That Got Away” and the cosmic “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” another song by Judy Garland. He had written a lot of other popular songs, too—the powerful “Blues in the Night,” “Stormy Weather,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “Get Happy.” In Harold’s songs, I could hear rural blues and folk music. There was an emotional kinship there. I couldn’t help but notice it. The songs of Woody Guthrie ruled my universe, but before that, Hank Williams had been my favorite songwriter, though I thought of him as a singer, first. Hank Snow was a close second. But I could never escape from the bittersweet, lonely intense world of Harold Arlen. Van Ronk could sing and play these songs. I could, too, but never would have dreamed of it. They weren’t in my script. They weren’t in my future. What was the future? The future was a solid wall, not promising, not threatening—all bunk. No guarantees of anything, not even the guarantee that life isn’t one big joke.
You’d never know who you were liable to run into at the Kettle of Fish. Everyone seemed like somebody and nobody at the same time. Once, me and Clayton were sitting, drinking wine at a table with some people and one of the guys there had sometime back provided sound effects for radio shows. Radio shows had been a big part of my consciousness back in the Midwest, back when it seemed like I was living in perpetual youth. Inner Sanctum, The Lone Ranger, This Is Your FBI, Fibber McGee and Molly, The Fat Man, The Shadow, Suspense. Suspense always had a creaking door more horrible-sounding than any door you could imagine—nerve-wracking, stomach-turning tales week after week. Inner Sanctum, with its horror and humor all mixed up. Lone Ranger, with the sounds of buckboards and spurs clinking out of your radio. The Shadow, the man of wealth and student of science out to right the world’s wrongs. Dragnet was a cop show with the musical theme that sounded like it was taken out of a Beethoven symphony. The Colgate Comedy Hour kept you in stitches.
There was no place too far. I could see it all. All I needed to know about San Francisco was that Paladin lived in a hotel there and that his gun was for hire. I knew that “stones” were jewels and that villains rode in convertibles and that if you wanted to hide a tree, hide it in the forest where nobody could find it. I was raised on that stuff, used to quiver with excitement listening to these shows. They gave me clues to how the world worked and they fueled my daydreams, made my imagination work overtime. Radio shows were a strange craft.
Before I had ever gone into any department store, I was already an imaginary consumer. I used Lava Soap, shaved with Gillette Blue Blades, was on Boliva Time, putting Vitalis in my hair, used laxatives and pills for acid indigestion—Feenamint and Dr. Lyon’s tooth powder. I had the Mike Hammer attitude, my own particular brand of justice. The courts were too slow and too complicated, don’t take care of business. My sentiment was that the law is fine but this time, I’m the law—the dead can’t speak for themselves. I’m speaking for ’em. Okay? I asked the guy who made the sound effects for the radio shows how he got the sound of the electric chair and he said it was bacon sizzling. What about broken bones? The guy took out a LifeSaver and crushed it between his teeth.
I can’t say when it occurred to me to write my own songs. I couldn’t have come up with anything comparable or halfway close to the folk song lyrics I was singing to define the way I felt about the world. I guess it happens to you by degrees. You just don’t wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs, especially if you’re a singer who has plenty of them and you’re learning more every day. Opportunities may come along for you to convert something—something that exists into something that didn’t yet. That might be the beginning of it. Sometimes you just want to do things your way, want to see for yourself what lies behind the misty curtain. It’s not like you see songs approaching and invite them in. It’s not that easy. You want to write songs that are bigger than life. You want to say something about strange things that have happened to you, strange things you have seen. You have to know and understand something and then go past the vernacular. The chilling precision that these old-timers used in coming up with their songs was no small thing. Sometimes you could hear a song and your mind jumps ahead. You see similar patterns in the ways that you were thinking about things. I never looked at songs as either “good” or “bad,” only different kinds of good ones.
Some of them can be true to life cases. I’d been hearing a song around called “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill.” I knew that Joe Hill was real and important. I didn’t know who he was, so I asked Izzy at the Folklore Center. Izzy pulled out some pamphlets on him from the back room and gave them to me to read. What I read could have come out of a mystery novel. Joe Hill was a Swedish immigrant who fought in the Mexican War. He had led a bare and meager life, was a union organizer out West in about 1910, a Messianic figure who wanted to abolish the wage system of capitalism—a mechanic, musician and poet. They called him the workingman’s Robert Burns.
Joe wrote the song “Pie in the Sky” and was the forerunner of Woody Guthrie. That’s all I needed to know. He’d been convicted on circumstantial evidence for a murder crime and shot by a firing squad in Utah. His life story is heavy and deep. He was an organizer for the Wobblies, the fighting section of the American working class. Hill is tried for killing a grocery store owner and his son in a petty holdup and his only defense is to say, “Prove it!” The grocer’s son, before he dies, fires off a shot at somebody, but there’s no evidence that the bullet ever hits anything. Yet Joe’s got a bullet wound and it looks pretty incriminating. Five people on the same night have bullet wounds and are treated in the same hospital, released, and they all disappear. Joe says he was somewhere else at the time of the crime, but he won’t say where or with whom. He won’t name any names, not even to save his own skin. There’s a general belief that a woman was involved, a woman who Joe does not want to shame. It gets weirder and more complicated. Another guy, a good friend of Joe’s, disappears the day after.
It’s all pretty twisted. Joe’s beloved by all workingmen nationwide—miners and meat cutters, sign painters and blacksmiths, plasterers, steamfitters, ironworkers—whoever they were, he united them and he fought for the rights of them all, risked his life to make things better for all the under-classed, the disadvantaged—the most poorly paid and mistreated workers in the country. If you read his history, his character comes through and you know he’s not the type who would rob and murder a grocery clerk at random. He just wouldn’t have that in him. It’s impossible he would have done something like that for a bit of change. Everything in his life speaks of honor and fairness. He was a drifter and protector and at all times on foot patrol. To the politicians and industrialists who hated him, though, he was a hardened criminal and an enemy to society. For years they waited for an opportunity to get rid of him. Joe was judged guilty even before the trial began.
The history of it all is amazing. In 1915 there were marches and rallies on his behalf that filled the streets in all the big American cities—Cleveland, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Brooklyn, Detroit, many more—wherever there were workers and unions. That’s how much he was known and loved. Even the president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, tried to get Utah officials to look at the case again, but the governor of Utah thumbed his nose at the president. In his
final hour, Joe says, “Scatter my ashes anyplace but Utah.”
Sometime after that, the song “Joe Hill” was written. As far as protest songs went, I had heard a few. The Leadbelly song “Bourgeois Blues,” Woody’s “Jesus Christ” and “Ludlow Massacre,” “Strange Fruit,” the Billie Holiday song, some others—and they were all better than this one. Protest songs are difficult to write without making them come off as preachy and one-dimensional. You have to show people a side of themselves that they don’t know is there. The song “Joe Hill” doesn’t even come close, but if there ever was someone who could inspire a song, it was him. Joe had the light in his eyes.
I fantasized that if I had written the song, I would have immortalized him in a different way—more like Casey Jones or Jesse James. You would have had to. I thought about it two ways. One way was to title the song “Scatter My Ashes Anyplace but Utah” and make that line the refrain. The other way to do it was like the song “Long Black Veil,” a song where a man talks from the grave…a song from the underworld. This is a ballad where a man gives up his life not to disgrace a certain woman and has to pay for somebody else’s crime because of what he can’t say. The more I thought about it, “Long Black Veil” seemed like it could have been a song written by Joe Hill himself, his very last one.
I didn’t compose a song for Joe Hill. I thought about how I would do it, but didn’t do it. The first song I’d wind up writing of any substantial importance was written for Woody Guthrie.
It was freezing winter with a snap and sparkle in the air, nights full of blue haze. It seemed like ages ago since I’d lay in the green grass and it smelled of true summer—glints of light dancing off the lakes and yellow butterflies on the black tarred roads. Walking down 7th Avenue in Manhattan in the early hours, you’d sometimes see people sleeping in the backseats of cars. I was lucky I had places to stay—even people who lived in New York sometimes didn’t have one. There’s a lot of things that I didn’t have, didn’t have too much of a concrete identity either. “I’m a rambler—I’m a gambler. I’m a long way from home.” That pretty much summed it up.
In the world news, Picasso at seventy-nine years old had just married his thirty-five-year-old model. Wow. Picasso wasn’t just loafing about on crowded sidewalks. Life hadn’t flowed past him yet. Picasso had fractured the art world and cracked it wide open. He was revolutionary. I wanted to be like that.
There was an art movie house in the Village on 12th Street that showed foreign movies—French, Italian, German. This made sense, because even Alan Lomax himself, the great folk archivist, had said somewhere that if you want to get out of America, go to Greenwich Village. I’d seen a couple of Italian Fellini movies there—one called La Strada, which means “The Street,” and another one called La Dolce Vita. It was about a guy who sells his soul and becomes a gossip hound. It looked like life in a carnival mirror except it didn’t show any monster freaks—just regular people in a freaky way. I watched it intently, thinking that I might not see it again. One of the actors in it, Evan Jones, was also a dramatist and I would meet him in a few years when I went to London to perform in a play he had written. I knew he looked familiar when I saw him. I never forget a face.
A lot was changing in America. The sociologists were saying that TV had deadly intentions and was destroying the minds and imaginations of the young—that their attention spans were being dragged down. Maybe that’s true but the three minute song also did the same thing. Symphonies and operas are incredibly long, but the audience never seems to lose its place or fail to follow along. With the three minute song, the listener doesn’t have to remember anything as far back as twenty or even ten minutes ago. There’s nothing you have to be able to connect. Nothing to remember. A lot of the songs I was singing were indeed long, maybe not as long as an opera or a symphony, but still long…at least lyrically. “Tom Joad” had at least sixteen verses, “Barbara Allen” about twenty. “Fair Ellender,” “Lord Lovell,” “Little Mattie Groves” and others had numerous verses and I didn’t find it troubling at all to remember or sing the story lines.
I had broken myself of the habit of thinking in short song cycles and began reading longer and longer poems to see if I could remember anything I read about in the beginning. I trained my mind to do this, had cast off gloomy habits and learned to settle myself down. I read all of Lord Byron’s Don Juan, and concentrated fully from start to finish. Also, Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. I began cramming my brain with all kinds of deep poems. It seemed like I’d been pulling an empty wagon for a long time and now I was beginning to fill it up and would have to pull harder. I felt like I was coming out of the back pasture. I was changing in other ways, too. Things that used to affect me, didn’t affect me anymore. I wasn’t too concerned about people, their motives. I didn’t feel the need to examine every stranger that approached.
Ray had told me to read Faulkner. “It’s hard, what Faulkner does,” he said. “It’s hard putting deep feeling into words. It’s easier to write Das Kapital.” Ray was an opium smoker, smoked opium in a bamboo pipe with a mushroom bowl. They had cooked it up once in the kitchen, boiling little kilos of bricks until they became like gum. Boiling and reboiling and draining liquid through filtered cloth—the kitchen smelled like cat piss. They kept it in a crock jar. He wasn’t like a slob junkie from the junkyard, though, not in any way, not like somebody who uses dope just to get normal—not a part time junkie, he’s not even addicted. He’s not someone who would rob anybody to pay for a habit. He’s wasn’t like that. There’s a lot of things I didn’t know about Ray. I didn’t know what saved him from arrest, either.
One time Clayton and myself came in late and Ray was asleep in a big chair—he looked like he was asleep in the room with the light on his face—dark hollows under his eyes, face caked with sweat. It looked like he was dreaming a dead dream. We just stood there. Paul is tall, has dark hair, Vandyke beard, resembles Gauguin the painter. Paul takes a deep breath and seems to hold it forever and then he turns around and leaves.
Ray dressed in a variety of ways. Sometimes you’d see him in a striped suit with a wing-shaped collar, pleated pants that were pegged. Sometimes he’s in a sweater, corduroy trousers, country boots. A lot of times he dressed in overalls like a garage mechanic. He wears a long coat. Tan. Camel’s hair. Wore it over everything.
Within the first few months that I was in New York I’d lost my interest in the “hungry for kicks” hipster vision that Kerouac illustrates so well in his book On the Road. That book had been like a bible for me. Not anymore, though. I still loved the breathless, dynamic bop poetry phrases that flowed from Jack’s pen, but now, that character Moriarty seemed out of place, purposeless—seemed like a character who inspired idiocy. He goes through life bumping and grinding with a bull on top of him.
Ray wasn’t like that. He wasn’t somebody who would leave any footprints on the sands of time, but there was something special about him. He had blood in his eyes, the face of a man who could do no wrong—total lack of viciousness or wickedness or even sinfulness in his face. He seemed like a man who could conquer and command anytime he wished to. Ray was mysterious as hell.
Through the narrow passageway, trailing through the apartment that led past one or two Victorian type rooms, there was another room—a larger one with a big window that backed up to an alley. The space was configured into a work-shop with all kinds of paraphernalia piled up. Most things either on a table with a long wooden top, or on another one with a slate surface. There were some iron flowers on a spiral vine painted white leaning in the corner. All kinds of tools laying around—hammers, hacksaws, screwdrivers, electricians’ pliers, wire cutters and levers, claw chisels, boxes with gear wheels—everything glistening in the backlight of the sun. Soldering equipment and sketch pads, paint tubes and gauges, electric drill—cans of stuff that could make things either waterproof or fireproof.
Everything in plain sight. A lot of firearms, too. You’d think that Ray was part of the police force or a lic
ensed gun-smith or something. There were different parts of guns—of pistols, large frame, small frame, Taurus Tracker pistol, a pocket pistol, trigger guards, everything like in a compost heap—altered guns…guns with shortened barrels, different brands of guns—Ruger, Browning, a single-action Navy pistol, everything poised to work, shined out. You’d walk into this room and feel like you were under the vigilance of some unsleeping eye. It was weird. Ray was anything but a macho tough guy. I asked him once what he did with all this stuff back there, what it was for. “Tactical response,” he said.
I’d seen guns before. My old hometown girlfriend, my Becky Thatcher had a father who wasn’t anything like Judge Thatcher. He had had a lot of guns laying around, too. Mostly deer rifles and shotguns, some long-barreled pistols and that was pretty creepy. She lived in a log house past the edge of town, off the asphalt. It was always kind of dangerous over there because the old man had a reputation for being mean. It was funny because her mother was the kindest woman—like Mother Earth. Her dad, though, was a hard-scrabble guy, weather-beaten face, always unshaven—wore a hunter’s cap, had calloused hands…nice enough when he’d been working, but when not, you’d have to look out. You’d never know which mood you’d catch him in. The kind of guy that’s always thinking that somebody’s out to take advantage of him. When he wasn’t working, he’d be drinking and get wrecked and then things would turn evil. He’d come into the room and mutter something through locked teeth. Once he ran me and a friend of mine off with a shotgun. He shot at us in the dark down a gravel road. But other times, he could be considerate. You just never knew. One of the reasons I liked going there, besides puppy love, was that they had Jimmie Rodgers records, old 78s in the house. I used to sit there mesmerized, listening to the Blue Yodeler, singing, “I’m a Tennessee hustler, I don’t have to work.” I didn’t want to have to work, either. I was looking at all the guns up at Ray’s place and thought about my old-time girlfriend, wondered what she was doing. The last time I’d seen her, she was heading West. Everybody said she looked like Brigitte Bardot, and she did.