Chronicles, Volume One

by Bob Dylan

  On the record, I had to make spur of the moment decisions which might not have had anything to do with the real situation. That was all right, though. It would have been good to vary the rhythms. There’s all kinds of ways you can do that. Eight pulses to the measure—six—four. You could do things where in four bars you play four beats and emphasize the 1 and the 3 and obscure the 2. You can go on and on like that in endless ways, varying tempos and rhythms. It would have been good if someone was paying attention to that kind of stuff, the rhythm combinations within the song instead of the song. The song would take care of itself. That being said, I had wholehearted admiration for what Lanois did. A lot of it was unique and permanent. Danny and I would see each other again in ten years and we’d work together once more in a rootin’ tootin’ way. We’d make a record and start it all over, pick up where we left off.

  5

  River of Ice

  THE MOON was rising behind the Chrysler Building, it was late in the day, street lighting coming on, the low rumble of heavy cars inching along in the narrow streets below—sleet tapping against the office window. Lou Levy was starting and stopping his big tape machine—diamond ring gleaming off his pinky finger—cigar smoke hanging in the blue air. The place was like a room used for interrogation, a fixture like a fruit bowl hanging overhead and a couple of lamps, some brass ones on floor stands. Below my feet a patterned wood floor. It was a drab room and cluttered with trade magazines—Cash-box, Billboard, radio survey charts—an ancient filing cabinet in the corner. Besides Lou’s old metal desk, there were a couple of wood chairs and I sat forward in one of them strumming songs off the guitar.

  Recently I had called home. I did that at least a couple of times a month from one of the many public pay phones around town. The phone booths were like sanctuaries, step inside of them, shut the accordion type doors and you locked yourself into a private world free of dirt, the noise of the city blocked out. The phone booths were private, but the lines back home weren’t. Back there every household had a party line. About eight or ten different houses all used the same line, only with different numbers. If you’d pick up the phone receiver, seldom would the line ever be clear. There were always other voices. Nobody ever said anything important over the phone and you didn’t ramble on long. If you wanted to talk to people, you’d usually talk to them in the street, in vacant lots, fields or in cafes, never on the phone.

  On the corner I put the dime in the slot and dialed the operator for long distance, called collect and the call went right through. I wanted everyone to know I was all right. My mother would usually give me the latest run of the mill stuff. My father had his own way of looking at things. To him life was hard work. He’d come from a generation of different values, heroes and music, and wasn’t so sure that the truth would set anybody free. He was pragmatic and always had a word of cryptic advice. “Remember, Robert, in life anything can happen. Even if you don’t have all the things you want, be grateful for the things you don’t have that you don’t want.” My education was important to him. He would have wanted me to become a mechanical engineer. But in school, I had to struggle to get even decent grades. I was not a natural student. My mom, bless her, who had always stood up for me and was firmly on my side in just about anything and everything, was more concerned about “a lot of monkey business out there in the world,” and would add, “Bobby, don’t forget you have relatives in New Jersey.” I’d already been to Jersey but not to visit relatives.

  Lou snapped the big tape machine off after listening hard to one of my original songs. “Woody Guthrie, eh? That’s interesting. What made you want to write a song about him? I used to see him and his partner, Leadbelly—they used to play at the Garment Workers Hall over on Lexington Avenue. You ever heard ‘You Can’t Scare Me, I’m Sticking to the Union’?” Sure I’d heard it.

  “Whatever happened to him, anyway?”

  “Oh, he’s over in Jersey. He’s in the hospital there.”

  Lou chomped away. “Nothing serious I hope. What other songs do you have? Let’s put ’em all down.”

  I didn’t have many songs, but I was making up some compositions on the spot, rearranging verses to old blues ballads, adding an original line here or there, anything that came into my mind—slapping a title on it. I was doing my best, had to thoroughly feel I was earning my fee. Nothing would have convinced me that I was actually a songwriter and I wasn’t, not in the conventional songwriter sense of the word. Definitely not like the workhorses over in the Brill Building, the song chemistry factory that was only a few blocks away but might as well have been on the other side of the cosmos. Over there, they cranked out the home-run hits for radio playlists. Young songwriters like Gerry Goffin and Carole King, or Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, or Pomus and Shuman, Leiber and Stoller—they were the songwriting masters of the Western world, wrote all the popular songs, all the songs with crafty melodies and simple lyrics that came off as works of power over the airwaves. One of my favorites was Neil Sedaka because he wrote and performed his own songs. I never crossed paths with any of those people because none of the popular songs were connected to folk music or the downtown scene.

  What I was into was the traditional stuff with a capital T and it was as far away from the mondo teeno scene as you could get. Into Lou’s tape recorder I could make things up on the spot all based on folk music structure, and it came natural. As far as serious songwriting went, the songs I could see myself writing if I was that talented would be the kinds of songs that I wanted to sing. Outside of Woody Guthrie, I didn’t see a single living soul who did it. Sitting in Lou’s office I rattled off lines and verses based on the stuff I knew—“Cumberland Gap,” “Fire on the Mountain,” “Shady Grove,” “Hard, Ain’t It Hard.” I changed words around and added something of my own here and there. Nothing do or die, nothing really formulated, all major chord stuff, maybe a typical minor key thing, something like “Sixteen Tons.” You could write twenty or more songs off that one melody by slightly altering it. I could slip in verses or lines from old spirituals or blues. That was okay; others did it all the time. There was little head work involved. What I usually did was start out with something, some kind of line written in stone and then turn it with another line—make it add up to something else than it originally did. It’s not like I ever practiced it and it wasn’t too thought consuming. Not that I would sing any of it onstage.

  Lou had never heard any of this kind of thing before, so there was very little feedback from him. Once in a while he would stop the machine and have me start over on something. He’d say, “That’s catchy,” and then want me to do it again. When that happened, I usually did something different because I hadn’t paid attention to whatever I just sung, so I couldn’t repeat it like he just heard it. I had no idea what he was going to do with all this stuff. It was as anti–big mainstream as you could get. Leeds Music had published songs like “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” “C’est Si Bon,” “Under Paris Skies,” “All or Nothing at All,” Henry Mancini songs like “Peter Gunn,” “I’ll Never Smile Again” and all the songs that were in Bye Bye Birdie, a big Broadway hit.

  The one song that had hooked me up with Leeds Music, the one that convinced John Hammond to bring me over there in the first place, wasn’t an outreaching song at all but more of an homage in lyric and melody to the man who’d pointed out the starting place for my identity and destiny—the great Woody Guthrie. I wrote the song with him in mind, and I used the melody from one of his old songs, having no idea that it would be the first of maybe a thousand songs that I would write. My life had never been the same since I’d first heard Woody on a record player in Minneapolis a few years earlier. When I first heard him it was like a million megaton bomb had dropped.

  In the summer of ’59 after leaving home early spring, I was in Minneapolis, having come down from Northern Minnesota—from the Mesabi Range, the iron mining country, steel capital of America. I’d grown up there in Hibbing but had been born in Duluth, about seventy-five mi
les away to the east on the edge of Lake Superior, the big lake that the Indians call Gitche Gumee. Though we lived in Hibbing, my father from time to time would load us into an old Buick Roadmaster and we’d ride to Duluth for the weekend. My father was from Duluth, born and raised there. That’s where his friends still were. One of five brothers, he’d worked all his life even as a kid. When he was sixteen, he’d seen a car smash into a telephone pole and burst into flames. He jumped off his bicycle, reached in and pulled the driver out, smothering the driver’s body with his own—risking his life to save someone he didn’t even know. Eventually, he took accounting classes in night school and was working for Standard Oil of Indiana when I was born. Polio, which left him with a pronounced limp, had forced him out of Duluth—he lost his job and that’s how we got to the Iron Range, where my mother’s family was from. Near Duluth, I also had cousins across the suspension aerial bridge in Superior, Wisconsin, the notorious red-light, gambling town and I stayed with them sometimes.

  What I recall mostly about Duluth are the slate gray skies and the mysterious foghorns, violent storms that always seemed to be coming straight at you and merciless howling winds off the big black mysterious lake with treacherous ten-foot waves. People said that having to go out onto the deep water was like a death sentence. Most of Duluth was on a slant. Nothing is level there. The town is built on the side of a steep hill, and you’re always either hiking up or down.

  One time my parents took me to see Harry Truman speak at a political rally in Duluth’s Leif Erickson Park. Leif Erickson was a Viking who was supposed to have come to this part of country way before the Pilgrims had ever landed in Plymouth Rock. I must have been seven or eight at the time, but it’s amazing how I can still feel it. I can remember the excitement of being there in the crowd. I was on top of one of my uncles’ shoulders in my little white cowboy boots and cowboy hat. It was an exhilarating thing, being there—the cheers, the jubilation, the attentiveness to every word that Truman spoke…Truman was gray hatted, a slight figure, spoke in the same kind of nasal twang and tone like a country singer. I was mesmerized by his slow drawl and sense of seriousness and how people hung on every word he was saying. A few years later he would say that the White House was like a jail cell. Truman was down to earth. Once he even threatened a journalist who criticized his daughter’s piano playing. He didn’t do any of that in Duluth, though.

  The upper Midwest was an extremely volatile, politically active area—with the Farmer Labor Party, Social Democrats, socialists, communists. They were hard crowds to please and not too much for Republicanism. John Kennedy, before he became president, when he was still a senator, had come up to Hibbing on the campaign trail but that was about six months after I left. My mother said that eighteen thousand people had turned out to see him at the Veterans Memorial Building and that people were hanging from the rafters and others were in the street, that Kennedy was a ray of light and had understood completely the area of the country he was in. He gave a heroic speech, my mom said, and brought people a lot of hope. The Iron Range was an area that very few nationally known politicians or any famous people ever made it through. (Woodrow Wilson had stopped there in the early part of the century and spoke from the back of a train. My mother had seen him, too, when she was ten years old.) If I had been a voting man, I would have voted for Kennedy just for coming there. I wished I could have seen him.

  My mother’s family was from a little town called Letonia, just over the railroad tracks, not far from Hibbing. When she grew up the town consisted of a general store, a gas station, some horse stables, and a schoolhouse. The world I grew up in was a little different, a little more modernized, but still mostly gravel roads, marshlands, hills of ice, steep skylines of trees on the outskirts of town, thick forests, pristine lakes large and small, iron mine pits, trains and one-lane highways. Winters, ten below with a twenty below wind-chill factor were common, thawing spring and hot, steamy summers—penetrating sun and balmy weather where temperatures rose over one hundred degrees. Summers were filled with mosquitoes that could bite through your boots—winters with blizzards that could freeze a man dead. There were glorious autumns as well.

  Mostly what I did growing up was bide my time. I always knew there was a bigger world out there but the one I was in at the time was all right, too. With not much media to speak of, it was basically life as you saw it. The things I did growing up were the things I thought everybody did—march in parades, have bike races, play ice hockey. (Not everyone was expected to play football or basketball or even baseball, but you had to know how to skate and play ice hockey.) The other usual things, too, like swimming holes and fishing ponds, sledding and something called bumper riding, where you grab hold of a tail bumper on a car and ride through the snow, Fourth of July fireworks, tree houses—a witches’ brew of pastimes. You could also easily hop an iron ore train by grabbing and then hanging on to one of the iron ladders on either side and ride out to any number of lakes where you could go out and jump in them. We did that a lot. As kids, we shot air guns, BB guns and the real thing—.22s—shot at tin cans, bottles or overfed rats in the town garbage dump. Also, we had rubbergun fights. Rubberguns were made from pine wood that were cut into L-shaped pieces. You’d grip the short end, which had a spring clothespin taped hard to the side. The rubber that we’d get from inner tubes back then was authentic, thick rubber that we’d cut into round strips, tie them in bows and stretch them from the hammer position, which was the top of the spring clothespin—stretch that all the way to the business end of the barrel. When you held the L-shaped gun in your grip (you could make them in varied sizes) and you squeezed it, the rubber would snap out with swift, violent force and you could hit a target to up to ten or fifteen feet away. You could hurt somebody. If you got hit with the rubber it stung like hell, burned and caused welts. These games would be played all day, one game after another. Usually you divided up sides in the beginning and hoped not to get popped in the eye. Some kids had three or four guns. If you got hit, you’d have to go to a certain spot under a tree and wait until the next game began. One year everything changed because the mines began using synthetic rubber on their tractors and trucks. Synthetic rubber wasn’t as good or as accurate as real rubber. It just dropped off the end of your barrel with a plop or else flew about four feet and flopped to the ground. This just wasn’t any good. I guess now, if you use real rubber, it would be like using dum-dum bullets.

  Just about the same time that the synthetic rubber came into the picture, so did the big-screen drive-in movie. That was a family activity, though, because you had to have a car. There was other stuff going on. Dirt track stock car racing on cool summer nights, mostly ’49 or ’50 Fords, bashed in cars, coffin contraptions, humpbacked cages with roll bars and fire extinguishers—seats taken out, doors welded shut—bumpin’ and rumblin’, slammin’ and swivelin’ on a half mile track, summersaulting off the rails…tracks littered with junkyard cars. There were three-ring circuses that came to town a few times a year and full tilt carnivals complete with human oddities, showgirls and even geeks. I saw one of the last blackface minstrel shows at a county carnival. Nationally known country-western stars played at the Memorial Building, and once Buddy Rich and his big band came and played at the high school auditorium. The most thrilling event of the summer was when The King and His Court fast-pitch softball team came to town and challenged the best players in the county. If you liked baseball, this was the team to see. The King and His Court were four players: a pitcher, a catcher, a first baseman and a roving shortstop. The pitcher was awesome. Sometimes he pitched from second base, sometimes blindfolded, at times between his legs. Very few players ever got a hit off him, and The King and His Court never lost a game. Television was coming in, too, but not every home had one. Round picture tubes. Programs usually started broadcasting at about three o’clock in the afternoon with a test pattern that ran for a few hours and showed a few shows broadcast out of New York or Hollywood and then went off at around seven o
r eight. There wasn’t much to watch…Milton Berle, Howdy Doody, the Cisco Kid, Lucy and her Cuban bandleader husband, Desi, the Father Knows Best family, where everybody’s always dressed up even in their own house. It wasn’t like in the big city, where there was a lot more happening on TV. We didn’t get American Bandstand or anything like that. Of course, there were other things to do. Still, though, it was all small town stuff—very narrow, provincial, where everybody actually knows everyone.

  Now at last I was in Minneapolis where I felt liberated and gone, never meaning to go back. I’d come into Minneapolis unnoticed, I rode in on a Greyhound bus—nobody was there to greet me and nobody knew me and I liked it that way. My mother had given me an address for a fraternity house on University Avenue. My cousin Chucky, whom I just slightly knew, had been the fraternity president. He was four years older than me and an all-around successful student in high school—captain of the football team, valedictorian, class president. It was no surprise that he’d become president of the fraternity. My mom said that she talked to my aunt about calling Chucky and letting me stay there—at least while the place was vacated during the summer and most of its members were gone. There were a couple of guys hanging around when I got there and one of them said that I could stay in one of the upstairs rooms, the one at the end of the hall. It was a nothing room with just a bunk bed and a table by a window without any curtains. I set my bags down and gazed out the window.