Chronicles, Volume One

by Bob Dylan

  Spring seemed like a long time to wait, but I can be patient. Maybe I should bring something to read. There were plenty of days coming when it would all come together. My destiny was shining silver in the sun. Life had lost its toxic effect. I had nothing more to bitch about…then it hit me.

  Returning from the emergency room with my arm entombed in plaster I fell into a chair—something heavy had come against me. It was like a black leopard had torn into my tattered flesh. It was plenty sore. After being on the threshold of something bold, innovative and adventurous, I was now on the threshold of nothing, ruined. This could be the last turn of the screw. The trail had come to a halt. Only hours earlier things had been pretty wholesome and methodical. I was anticipating the spring, looking forward to stepping out on the stage where I’d be entirely at once author, actor, prompter, stage manager, audience and critic combined. That would be different. Now I was staring into the dark where all things seemed to be coming from. Like Falstaff, I’d been heading from one play into the next, but now fate itself had played a nightmarish trick. I wasn’t Falstaff anymore.

  My bright eyes were dull and I could do nothing. All I could do was groan. Here’s why. Besides my devotion to a new vocal technique, something else would go along with helping me re-create my songs. It seemed like I had always accompanied myself on the guitar. I played in the casual Carter Family flat-picking style and the playing was more or less out of habit and routine. It always had been clear and readable but didn’t reflect my psyche in any way. It didn’t have to. The style had been practical, but now I was going to push that away from the table, too, and replace it with something more active with more definition of presence.

  I didn’t invent this style. It had been shown to me in the early ’60s by Lonnie Johnson. Lonnie was the great jazz and blues artist from the ’30s who was still performing in the ’60s. Robert Johnson had learned a lot from him. Lonnie took me aside one night and showed me a style of playing based on an odd-instead of even-number system. He had me play chords and he demonstrated how to do it. This was just something he knew about, not necessarily something he used because he did so many different kinds of songs. He said, “This might help you,” and I had the idea that he was showing me something secretive, though it didn’t make sense to me at that time because I needed to strum the guitar in order to get my ideas across. It’s a highly controlled system of playing and relates to the notes of a scale, how they combine numerically, how they form melodies out of triplets and are axiomatic to the rhythm and the chord changes. I never used this style, didn’t see that there’d be any purpose to it. But now all of a sudden it came back to me, and I realized that this way of playing would revitalize my world. The method works on higher or lower degrees depending on different patterns and the syncopation of a piece. Very few would be converted to it because it had nothing to do with technique and musicians work their whole lives to be technically superior players. You probably wouldn’t pay any attention to this method if you weren’t a singer. It was easy for me to pick this up. I understood the rules and critical elements because Lonnie had showed them to me so crystal clear. It would be up to me now to expel everything that wasn’t natural to it. I would have to master that style and sing to it.

  The system works in a cyclical way. Because you’re thinking in odd numbers instead of even numbers, you’re playing with a different value system. Popular music is usually based on the number 2 and then filled in with fabrics, colors, effects and technical wizardry to make a point. But the total effect is usually depressing and oppressive and a dead end which at the most can only last in a nostalgic way. If you’re using an odd numerical system, things that strengthen a performance automatically begin to happen and make it memorable for the ages. You don’t have to plan or think ahead. In a diatonic scale there are eight notes, in a pentatonic scale there are five. If you’re using the first scale, and you hit 2, 5 and 7 to the phrase and then repeat it, a melody forms. Or you can use 2 three times. Or you can use 4 once and 7 twice. It’s infinite what you can do, and each time would create a different melody. The possibilities are endless. A song executes itself on several fronts and you can ignore musical customs. All you need is a drummer and a bass player, and all shortcomings become irrelevant as long as you stick to the system. With any type of imagination you can hit notes at intervals and between backbeats, creating counterpoint lines and then you sing off of it. There’s no mystery to it and it’s not a technical trick. The scheme is for real. For me, this style would be most advantageous, like a delicate design that would arrange the structure of whatever piece I was performing. The listener would recognize and feel the dynamics immediately. Things could explode or retreat back at any time and there would be no way to predict the consciousness of any song. And because this works on its own mathematical formula, it can’t miss. I’m not a numerologist. I don’t know why the number 3 is more metaphysically powerful than the number 2, but it is. Passion and enthusiasm, which sometimes can be enough to sway a crowd, aren’t even necessary. You can manufacture faith out of nothing and there are an infinite number of patterns and lines that connect from key to key—all deceptively simple. You gain power with the least amount of effort, trust that the listeners make their own connections, and it’s very seldom that they don’t. Miscalculations can also cause no serious harm. As long as you recognize it, you can turn the dynamic around architecturally in a second.

  This is definitely a style that benefits the singer. In folk oriented and jazz-blues songs, it’s perfect. I needed to play this way though I didn’t need to be conspicuous about it because what I’d be playing was primarily orchestral, and if it’s orchestral it would make sense that there should be a combination of instruments playing the part. I didn’t have the time to put into that. I wouldn’t be able to get that. I had to be more subtle. If my instrument was buried in the mix, where only I could hear it, I was thinking that it might be more effective. It wasn’t like I was trying to play lead guitar and wow anybody. What I needed to do was phrase my singing off the bone structure of what I played. Ideally, I would have liked to have taken a song, played it more than a few times for a musicologist who would then write the basic parts for an orchestrated version. The orchestra could even play the vocal line. I wouldn’t even have to be there.

  What was different about this was that in the past on my records there is no kinetic arrangement to any piece. In the studio the songs had only been sketched out but never brought from the shadows. There’d always been too many problems—wrestling with lyric phrasing, changing lyrics, switching melody lines, keys, tempos, any number of things all the while searching for a song’s stylistic identity. Those who had followed me for years and thought they knew my songs might be a little confounded by the way they now were about to be played. The total effect would be physiological, and triplet forms would fashion melodies at intervals. This is what would drive the song—not necessarily the lyrical content. I had perfect faith in this system and knew it would work. Playing this way appealed to me. A lot of folks would say that the songs were altered and others would say that this was the way they should have sounded in the first place. You could take your pick.

  Once I understood what I was doing, I realized that I wasn’t the first one to do it, that Link Wray had done the same thing in his classic song “Rumble” many years earlier. Link’s song had no lyrics, but he had played with the same numerical system. It would never have occurred to me where the song’s power had come from because I had been hypnotized by the tone of the piece. I’d also thought I’d seen Martha Reeves do the same thing. I’d seen her in New York a few years earlier where she’d been playing with the Motown Revue. Her band couldn’t keep up with her, had no idea what she was doing and just plodded along. She beat a tambourine in triplet form, up close to her ear and she phrased the song as if the tambourine were her entire band. A tambourine makes no melody lines, but the concept was similar.

  When Lonnie had showed this to me so many years earlier i
t was as if he was saying something to me in a foreign language. I understood the etymology of it, I just didn’t get how it could be applicable in any way. Now it all clicked. Now I could start getting into it. With a new incantation code to infuse my vocals with manifest presence I could ride high, unconsciously drag endless skeletons from the closet. Thematic triplets making everything hypnotic. I could even hypnotize myself. I could do this night after night. No fatigue or weariness. I had all the technical theory I would need. My audience would stop being a shady army of face-less people. Of course, some of them would still only concentrate on the lyrics and they might be dismayed because the two-beat strum they’d been used to for so long would now be off rhythm, refocused and rushing the songs into the heart of unimagined territory. But that’s okay, they could handle it.

  I had too long been freeze frozen in the secular temple of a museum anyway. It’s not a complicated thing. There are thousands if not millions of variations of these patterns so you never run out of ideas. You’re always at some unexploited fix point. It’s not a heavy theorized thing, it’s geometrical. I’m not that good at math, but I do know that the universe is formed with mathematical principles whether I understand them or not, and I was going to let that guide me. My playing was going to be an impellent in equanimity to my voice and I would use different algorithms that the ear is not accustomed to. It should be, but it’s not.

  This was coming into my life at exactly the right time. The deal would be complete. My lyrics, some written as long as twenty years earlier, would now explode musicologically like an ice cloud. Nobody else played this way and I thought of it as a new form of music. Strict and orthodox. Not one thing improvisational about it. The opposite of improvisation. Improvisation wouldn’t have done me any good, in fact, it would have taken me the other way. Also, you don’t need to feel any certain way in order to play like this. It doesn’t run on emotion. That was another good thing. I had been leaving a lot of my songs on the floor like shot rabbits for a long time. That wouldn’t be happening anymore. The thing was, I needed two hands. If I couldn’t play, I wouldn’t be doing anything better than ever now. Nothing would be exactly right.

  It was noontime and I was shuffling around in my old-fashion garden. Cutting across the vacant lot to a bank of field flowers where my dogs and horses were, the strangled cry of a gull came whipping through the wind. Walking back to the main house, I caught a glimpse of the sea through the leafy boughs of the pines. I wasn’t near it, but could feel the power beneath its colors. Seemed like a net had fallen over me and if I’d tried to run, I’d only get more entangled. My hand had been gashed pretty good—no feeling in the nerves. Maybe it might not heal, never be the same, and the sooner I believed it, the better. Oh, the wicked ironies of life. I’d gotten a cosmic kick in the pants. I probably should have been wearing steel underwear.

  Things changed a little, though, later in the week when I went to a school play that one of my daughters was in. The creative energy displayed onstage brought me to my senses. In the midst of this, another piece of sad news came in. My sixty-three-foot sailboat had hit a reef in Panama. During the night, the harbor lights had been misread. The boat was put into reverse and the rudder broke off. She couldn’t come down off the reef and the wind blew the boat up further. She lay on her side for a week, but it was too late. A lot of lines snapped trying to pull her off. Eventually, the sea took her back and the boat was gone. In the ten years that I had her my family and I had sailed the entire Caribbean and spent time on every island from Martinique to Barbados. This loss paled somewhat compared to the use of my hand, but I had been grateful for the boat and the news came as an unwelcomed shock.

  One night I turned on the TV and saw soul singer Joe Tex on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Joe sang and left. Johnny didn’t talk to him—not like he did to the other guests. Johnny just waved to him from his desk. Carson used to like to talk to his guests about golf and things like that, but he had nothing to say to Joe. I didn’t think he would have anything to say to me either. All of his guests tried to be funny, put on a happy face, not come unglued, be like Gene Kelly and go singing in the rain even during a big downpour. If I did that I’d get pneumonia. You had to act as if everything was wonderful. Like Joe Tex, I’d never been much in the mainstream. I thought about how much more I was like him than like Carson. I shut the TV off.

  Outside I heard a woodpecker tapping up against a tree in the dark. As long as I was alive I was going to stay interested in something. If my hand didn’t heal, what was I going to do with the remainder of my days? Not be a part of the music business, that’s for sure. Get as far away from it as possible. I fantasized about the business world. What could be more simple or elegant than venturing into that? It might be interesting to try the conventional life for a while. I was thinking ahead. I called a friend of mine who put me in touch with a broker who bought and sold independent businesses. Starting one from scratch was out of the question. I told him that I was thinking about selling all I had and trading for something. What do you have? He came by and brought brochures on just about every enterprise going—facts and figures all down to the minutest detail…self-contained businesses all over the place—sugarcane, trucks and tractors, a wooden leg factory in North Carolina, furniture factory in Alabama, a fish farm, flower plantations and more. It was overwhelming. Just looking at this stuff made the weight press down above my eyes. How do you decide, especially if you don’t have any real interest in any of them? My trusty aide and mechanic, who was always helpful in a functional way, said, “Leave it to me, gov. I’ll go look at ’em—find the best one.” I knew he could do it, go out in the world and find something. I didn’t want to go ahead too fast, though, do anything that later I’d be sorry about. I told him I’d give him a definite date some other time. I wasn’t too anxious to do any follow-up.

  I began to see less and less of the daylight. I’d lay back in a chair to rest my eyes and then two or three hours later wake up—go off to get something and forget what I went there to get. I’m glad my wife was around. In times like this, it’s good if you’re with someone who desires the same things as you and is open and not closed to your energy. She could make me feel like I wasn’t in some godforsaken hole. One day when she was wearing metallic sunglasses I could see myself in miniature and thought how small everything had become.

  The one thing that I had no strong desire to do was to compose songs. I hadn’t written any in a long while, anyway. I had stopped doing that, just wasn’t crazy for it. My last couple of record albums didn’t contain many of my own compositions, anyway. As far as being a songwriter went, I couldn’t have had a more casual attitude. I’d written plenty and that was fine. I did whatever it took to get there, had reached my goal and had no more high ambitions for it. Had long ceased running towards it. When and if an idea would come, I would no longer try to get in touch with the base of its power. I could easily deny it and stay clear of it. Just couldn’t make myself do it. I never expected to write anything ever again. Didn’t need any more songs anyway.

  One night when everyone was asleep and I was sitting at the kitchen table, nothing on the hillside but a shiny bed of lights—all that changed. I wrote about twenty verses for a song called “Political World” and this was about the first of twenty songs I would write in the next month or so. They came from out of the blue. Maybe I wouldn’t have written them if I wasn’t laid up like I was. Maybe, maybe not. They were easy to write, seemed to float downstream with the current. It’s not like they’d been faint or far away—they were right there in my face, but if you’d look too steady at them, they’d be gone.

  A song is like a dream, and you try to make it come true. They’re like strange countries that you have to enter. You can write a song anywhere, in a railroad compartment, on a boat, on horseback—it helps to be moving. Sometimes people who have the greatest talent for writing songs never write any because they are not moving. I wasn’t moving in any of these songs, not externally
, anyway. Still, I got them all down as if I was. Sometimes things you see and hear outside of yourself can influence a song. The song “Political World” could have been triggered by current events. There was a heated presidential race underway, you couldn’t avoid hearing about it. But I had no interest in politics as an art form, so I don’t think that was all there was to it. The song is too broad. The political world in the song is more of an underworld, not the world where men live, toil and die like men. With the song, I thought I might have broken through to something. It was like you wake up from a deep and drugged slumber and somebody strikes a little silver gong and you come to your senses. There were about twice as many verses as were later recorded. Verses like, “We live in a political world. Flags flying into the breeze. Comes out of the blue—moves towards you—like a knife cutting through cheese.”