by Bob Dylan
3
New
Morning
I HAD JUST returned to Woodstock from the Midwest—from my father’s funeral. There was a letter from Archibald MacLeish waiting for me on the table. MacLeish, Poet Laureate of America—one of them. Carl Sandburg, poet of the prairie and the city, and Robert Frost, the poet of dark meditations were the others. MacLeish was the poet of night stones and the quick earth. These three, the Yeats, Browning and Shelley of the New World, were gigantic figures, had defined the landscape of twentieth-century America. They put everything in perspective. Even if you didn’t know their poems, you knew their names.
The previous week had left me drained. I had gone back to the town of my early years in a way I could never have imagined—to see my father laid to rest. Now there would be no way to say what I was never capable of saying before. Growing up, the cultural and generational differences had been insurmountable—nothing but the sound of voices, colorless unnatural speech. My father, who was plain speaking and straight talking had said, “Isn’t an artist a fellow who paints?” when told by one of my teachers that his son had the nature of an artist. It seemed I’d always been chasing after something, anything that moved—a car, a bird, a blowing leaf—anything that might lead me into some more lit place, some unknown land downriver. I had not even the vaguest notion of the broken world I was living in, what society could do with you.
When I left home, I was like Columbus going off into the desolate Atlantic. I’d done that and I’d been to the ends of the earth—to the water’s edge—and now I was back in Spain, back where it all started, in the court of the Queen with a half-glazed expression on my face, with even the wisp of a beard. “What’s with the decoration?” one of the neighbors who had come to pay their respects said pointing to my face. In the short time I was there, it all came back to me, all the flimflam, the older order of things, the Simple Simons—but something else did, too—that my father was the best man in the world and probably worth a hundred of me, but he didn’t understand me. The town he lived in and the town I lived in were not the same. All that aside, we had more in common now than ever—I, too, was a father three times over—there was a lot that I wanted to share, to tell him—and also now I was in a position to do a lot of things for him.
Archie’s letter said that he’d like to meet with me to discuss the possibility of me composing some songs for a play that he was writing, called Scratch, based on a Stephen Vincent Benet short story. MacLeish had earlier won a Tony Award on Broadway for one of his plays called JB. My wife and I drove over to Conway, Massachusetts, where he lived, to meet with him about his new play. It seemed like a civilized thing to do. MacLeish wrote deep poems, was the man of godless sand. He could take real people from history, people like Emperor Charles or Montezuma and Cortés the Conquistador, and with the tender touch of a creator, deliver them right to your door. He praised the sun and the great sky. It was fitting that I’d go see him.
The events of the day, all the cultural mumbo jumbo were imprisoning my soul—nauseating me—civil rights and political leaders being gunned down, the mounting of the barricades, the government crackdowns, the student radicals and demonstrators versus the cops and the unions—the streets exploding, fire of anger boiling—the contra communes—the lying, noisy voices—the free love, the anti–money system movement—the whole shebang.
I was determined to put myself beyond the reach of it all. I was a family man now, didn’t want to be in that group portrait.
MacLeish’s place was up past a quaint village on a quiet mountain laurel road—bright maple leaves piled high around the walkway. It was easy walking across the small footbridge leading to a wood-shaded alcove and a reconstructed stone cottage with modern kitchen facilities, MacLeish’s studio. A caretaker had led us in, and his wife placed a tray of tea on the table, said something cordial and then left. My wife went with her. I glanced around the room. There were gardening boots in the corner, photos on the desk and framed on the walls. Lace-cap flowers with dark stems—baskets of flowers, geraniums, dusty leaf flowers—white cloth, silver plates, bright fireplace—circular shadows…a gallery forest out the window in full bloom.
I discovered what MacLeish looked like through the photos. There was a snapshot of him as a young boy on a saddled pony, a woman in a bonnet holding the reins. Other photos—Archie at the head of his class at Harvard—photos of him at Yale and as a World War I captain in the artillery—in another photo he’s with a small company of people in front of the Eiffel Tower—photos taken of him at the Library of Congress—in another photo he’s at the table with a board of editors from Fortune magazine. In another, he’s being given the Pulitzer Prize…there’s a picture of him and some Boston lawyers. I heard his steps coming up the stone pathway, and he entered the room, came forward and extended his hand.
He had the aura of a governor, a ruler—every bit of him an officer—a gentleman of adventure who carried himself with the peculiar confidence of power bred of blood. He got right straight to it, starts right up the track. He reiterates a few things he said in his letter. (In his letter, he made mention of some lines in a song of mine that places T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound symbolically fighting in a captain’s tower.) “Pound and Eliot were too scholastic, weren’t they?” he says. What I know about Pound is that he was a Nazi sympathizer in World War II and did anti-American broadcasts from Italy. I never did read him. I liked T. S. Eliot. He was worth reading. Archie says, “I knew them both. Hard men. We have to go through them. But I know what you mean when you say they are fighting in a captain’s tower.” MacLeish would do most of the talking, told me some remarkable stuff about the novelist Stephen Crane, who wrote The Red Badge of Courage. He said he was a sickly reporter always on the side of the underdog—wrote Bowery stories for magazines, and that he once wrote a piece defending a prostitute being shaken down by the vice squad only to have the vice squad come against him and haul him into court. He didn’t go to cocktail parties or theater openings—went to Cuba to cover the Cuban War, drank a lot and died of tuberculosis at twenty-eight. MacLeish had more than a passing knowledge of Crane, said that he was a man who did things for himself and that I should check out Red Badge of Courage. It sounded like Crane was the Robert Johnson of literature. Jimmie Rodgers died of TB, too. I wondered if they ever crossed paths.
Archie said he liked a song of mine called “John Brown,” a song about a boy that goes off to war. “I don’t find the song to be about this boy at all. It’s really more of a Greek drama, isn’t it? It’s about mothers,” he tells me. “The different kinds of mothers—biological, honorary…all the mothers wrapped into one.” I’d never thought of that, but it sounded right. He mentioned a line in one of my songs, that says that “goodness hides behind its gates,” and asked if I really saw it that way and I said that sometimes it appears that way. At some point, I was going to ask him what he thought about the hip, cool Ginsberg, Corso and Kerouac, but it seemed like it would have been an empty question. He asked me if I had read Sappho or Socrates. I said, nope, that I hadn’t, and then he asked me the same about Dante and Donne. I said, not much. He said the thing to remember about them was that you always come out where you went in.
MacLeish tells me that he considers me a serious poet and that my work would be a touchstone for generations after me, that I was a postwar Iron Age poet but that I had seemingly inherited something metaphysical from a bygone era. He appreciated my songs because they involved themselves with society, that we had many traits and associations in common and that I didn’t care for things the way he didn’t care for them. At one point he had to excuse himself momentarily, left the room. I glanced out the window. The afternoon sun was breaking, throwing a vague radiance to the earth. A jackrabbit scampered past the scattered chips by the woodpile. When he returned things fell back into place. MacLeish picked up where he left off. MacLeish tells me that Homer, who wrote the Iliad, was a blind balladeer and that his name means “hostage.” He also told me
that there’s a difference between art and propaganda and he told me the difference between the effects. He asked me if I’d ever read the French poet François Villon, and I told him that I did read him and then he said he saw some slight influence in my work. Archie spoke about blank verse, rhyme verse, elegiacs, ballads, limericks and sonnets. He asked me what I had sacrificed to pursue my dreams. He said the worth of things can’t be measured by what they cost but by what they cost you to get it, that if anything costs you your faith or your family, then the price is too high and that there are some things that will never wear out. MacLeish had been a classmate of Douglas MacArthur at West Point and he talked about him, too. He also talked about Michelangelo, said that Michelangelo had no friends of any kind and didn’t want any, spoke to no one. Archie told me that a lot of things that were happening when he was young had blown over. He tells me about J. P. Morgan, the financier, that he was one of the six or eight persons at the beginning of the century who owned all of America. Morgan had said, “America is good enough for me,” and some senator commented that if he ever changes his mind, he should give it back. There was no way to measure the soul of a man like that.
MacLeish asked me who my boyhood heroes were and I told him, “Robin Hood and St. George the Dragon Slayer.” “You wouldn’t want to get on their bad side,” he chuckled. He said that he’d forgotten the meaning of a lot of his earlier poems and that an authentic poet makes a style of his own, a few masterpieces last across the years. The play for which he wanted me to write songs was laying on his reading desk. He wanted songs in it that made some comment to go along with the scenes, and he began reading out loud some of the speeches and suggested some song titles—“Father of Night,” “Red Hands,” “Lower World” were a few of them.
After listening intently, I intuitively realized that I didn’t think this was for me. After hearing a few lines from the script, I didn’t see how our destinies could be intermixed. This play was dark, painted a world of paranoia, guilt and fear—it was all blacked out and met the atomic age head on, reeked of foul play. There really wasn’t much to say or add to it. The play spelled death for society with humanity lying facedown in its own blood. MacLeish’s play was delivering something beyond an apocalyptic message. Something like, man’s mission is to destroy the earth. MacLeish was signaling something through the flames. The play was up to something and I didn’t think I wanted to know. That being said, I told MacLeish I would think about it.
In 1968 The Beatles were in India. America was wrapped up in a blanket of rage. Students at universities were wrecking parked cars, smashing windows. The war in Vietnam was sending the country into a deep depression. The cities were in flames, the bludgeons were coming down. Hard-hat union guys were beating kids with baseball bats. The fictitious Don Juan, a mysterious medicine man from Mexico, had become the new consciousness craze, had brought in a new level of awareness or life force and was wielding it like a machete. Books about him were sailing off the shelves. Acid tests were in full swing, acid was giving people the right attitude. The new worldview was changing society and everything was moving fast—lickety-split. Strobes, black lights—freakouts, the wave of the future. Students trying to seize control of national universities, antiwar activists forcing bitter exchanges. Maoists, Marxists, Castroites—leftist kids who read Che Guevara instruction booklets were out to topple the economy. Kerouac had retired, and the organized press was stirring things up, fanning the flames of hysteria. If you saw the news, you’d think that the whole nation was on fire. It seemed like every day there was a new riot in another city, everything on the edge of danger and change—the jungles of America being cleared away. Things that had used to be in traditional black and white were now exploding in full, sunny color.
I had been in a motorcycle accident and I’d been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different glasses. Even the horrifying news items of the day, the gunning down of the Kennedys, King, Malcolm X…I didn’t see them as leaders being shot down, but rather as fathers whose families had been left wounded. Being born and raised in America, the country of freedom and independence, I had always cherished the values and ideals of equality and liberty. I was determined to raise my children with those ideals.
A few years earlier Ronnie Gilbert, one of The Weavers, had introduced me at one of the Newport Folk Festivals saying, “And here he is…take him, you know him, he’s yours.” I had failed to sense the ominous forebodings in the introduction. Elvis had never even been introduced like that. “Take him, he’s yours!” What a crazy thing to say! Screw that. As far as I knew, I didn’t belong to anybody then or now. I had a wife and children whom I loved more than anything else in the world. I was trying to provide for them, keep out of trouble, but the big bugs in the press kept promoting me as the mouthpiece, spokesman, or even conscience of a generation. That was funny. All I’d ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of. I’d left my hometown only ten years earlier, wasn’t vociferating the opinions of anybody. My destiny lay down the road with whatever life invited, had nothing to do with representing any kind of civilization. Being true to yourself, that was the thing. I was more a cowpuncher than a Pied Piper.
People think that fame and riches translate into power, that it brings glory and honor and happiness. Maybe it does, but sometimes it doesn’t. I found myself stuck in Woodstock, vulnerable and with a family to protect. If you looked in the press, though, you saw me being portrayed as anything but that. It was surprising how thick the smoke had become. It seems like the world has always needed a scapegoat—someone to lead the charge against the Roman Empire. But America wasn’t the Roman Empire and someone else would have to step up and volunteer. I really was never any more than what I was—a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze. Now it had blown up in my face and was hanging over me. I wasn’t a preacher performing miracles. It would have driven anybody mad.
Early on, Woodstock had been very hospitable to us. I had actually discovered the place long before moving there. Once, at night, driving down from Syracuse after playing a show, I told my manager about the town. We were going to be driving right by it. He said he was looking for a place to buy a country house. We drove through the town, he spied a house he liked and bought it there and then. I had bought one later on, and it was in this same house that intruders started to break in day and night. Tensions mounted almost immediately and peace was hard to come by. At one time the place had been a quiet refuge, but now, no more. Roadmaps to our homestead must have been posted in all fifty states for gangs of dropouts and druggies. Moochers showed up from as far away as California on pilgrimages. Goons were breaking into our place all hours of the night. At first, it was merely the nomadic homeless making illegal entry—seemed harmless enough, but then rogue radicals looking for the Prince of Protest began to arrive—unaccountable-looking characters, gargoyle-looking gals, scarecrows, stragglers looking to party, raid the pantry. Peter LaFarge, a folksinger friend of mine, had given me a couple of Colt single-shot repeater pistols, and I also had a clip-fed Winchester blasting rifle around, but it was awful to think about what could be done with those things. The authorities, the chief of police (Woodstock had about three cops) had told me that if anyone was shot accidentally or even shot at as a warning, it would be me that would be going to the lockup. Not only that, but creeps thumping their boots across our roof could even take me to court if any of them fell off. This was so unsettling. I wanted to set fire to these people. These gate-crashers, spooks, trespassers, demagogues were all disrupting my home life and the fact that I was not to piss them off or they
could press charges really didn’t appeal to me. Each day and night was fraught with difficulties. Everything was wrong, the world was absurd. It was backing me into a corner. Even persons near and dear offered no relief.
Once in the midsummer madness I was riding in a car with Robbie Robertson, the guitar player in what later was to be called The Band. I felt like I might as well have been living in another part of the solar system. He says to me, “Where do you think you’re gonna take it?”
I said, “Take what?”
“You know, the whole music scene.” The whole music scene! The car window was rolled down about an inch. I rolled it down the rest of the way, felt a gust of wind blow into my face and waited for what he said to die away—it was like dealing with a conspiracy. No place was far enough away. I don’t know what everybody else was fantasizing about but what I was fantasizing about was a nine-to-five existence, a house on a tree-lined block with a white picket fence, pink roses in the backyard. That would have been nice. That was my deepest dream. After a while you learn that privacy is something you can sell, but you can’t buy it back. Woodstock had turned into a nightmare, a place of chaos. Now it was time to scramble out of there in search of some new silver lining and that’s what we did. We moved to New York City for a while in hopes to demolish my identity, but it wasn’t any better there. It was even worse. Demonstrators found our house and paraded up and down in front of it chanting and shouting, demanding for me to come out and lead them somewhere—stop shirking my duties as the conscience of a generation. Once the street was blocked off and our house was picketed by firebrands with city permits, demonstrators roaring and snorting. The neighbors hated us. To them it must have seemed like I was something out of a carnival show—some exhibition in the Palace of Wonders. They would stare at me when they saw me, like they’d stare at a shrunken head or a giant jungle rat. I pretended that I didn’t care.