Behind the Song

by K. M. Walton

  I wasn’t part of that conversation.

  I was too young and too focused on a different kind of war. The one with my dad. The one where my father, despite his brutal treatment, was trying to make me be like him. He was a deeply racist person and ran the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Yes, we had that in Philly. Actually, Pennsylvania had more KKK chapters than any other state in the whole country. My young education at home was about hating blacks, browns, yellows, and reds. It was about hating Jews. This was the midsixties, so there wasn’t yet a pervasive hatred of Muslims, but if there had been, my father would have been the loudest one shouting.

  When that kind of thing is all you hear, it’s hard not to begin repeating certain words, certain phrases, and thinking certain thoughts.

  But Bob Dylan didn’t seem to share those sentiments. That confused me. His new album was named after a road that stretched from Canada all the way down to New Orleans, cutting through Duluth, where Dylan was raised. There was a lot of history attached to that road, and it wasn’t all “white” history. That road was tied to black history through blues music, and Justin’s dad was heavily into the blues. I’d heard a lot of that music at their house. Songs by Muddy Waters, Son House, Roosevelt Sykes, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Bessie Smith, Charley Patton, and others. Elvis Presley, who my dad thought was a “traitor to the white race” because he sang songs written by black songwriters, traveled the club route on Highway 61. And there was a cool spooky story about how a guitarist named Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in order to be the best bluesman in the world, and that deal was supposed to have been made at the crossroads of Route 49 and Highway 61.

  I listened to Highway 61 Revisited more times than I can count. All told, counting all the way up to it playing now as I write this, I bet it’s a thousand times. I’ve actually worn out vinyl copies of the album and several 45s.

  There are a lot of songs on that album that matter to me in different ways, but one hit me hard at age seven and continued to stay with me ever since.

  The track is “Ballad of a Thin Man.”

  If you listen to the lyrics, I can absolutely guarantee you won’t hear the same things I did. You couldn’t. We’re different. Even if you grew up in the same kind of fractured household, even if you were raised by monsters, even if you had to learn young to hide your bruises from your friends and eat your pain, even if there are a thousand common threads that sew your life to mine, we’re still different.

  Over the years I’ve spoken to so many people about that song and its meaning. I’ve introduced people to it, read commentary on it, relistened to it as a teen, a twentysomething, a thirtysomething, a fortysomething, and a fiftysomething. I’ll listen to it, I have no doubt, well into my sixties and however far beyond that I get. I have it on a dozen different playlists. Some of those playlists are songs I listen to when I want to be sad. Others are there for when I want to be happy. There are playlists for escape and playlists for arrival. There are playlists for when I want to ignite my creative fires and playlists for when I need to hush the voices in my head after a long day of writing.

  That song is on more of my playlists than any other.

  Mind you, there are a few that get played nearly as often. You may have heard of some of them. Or not. Stuff released before or after that year I discovered Dylan. Often they’re songs that serve as inspirations for some of my writing. “Murder in the Red Barn” and “Black Wings”—both by Tom Waits—were important for me when I plotted and wrote my first novel, Ghost Road Blues. Laura Branigan’s “Self Control” helped me dream up the Fire Zone, a magical place I’ve written about in plays and short fiction and which will soon be the centerpiece for my next novel, Glimpse. The 1982 song “Mad World,” recorded by the British band Tears for Fears and then rerecorded in 2001 by Michael Andrews and Gary Jules for the Donnie Darko movie soundtrack. The deceptively complex and metaphorical “Hundred Kisses Deep” by Leonard Cohen, which inspired two different cycles of my short stories, the Sam Hunter werewolf–private investigator stories and the Monk Addison dark fantasy revenge dramas.

  And so many others.

  But I keep coming back to “Ballad of a Thin Man.”

  The stanzas are filled with strange imagery. At first listen—or if you look them up online—they don’t appear to make any sense at all. Back in my day, we had what were called “liner notes,” which were lyrics and other information printed either on the paper sleeve around the vinyl or in booklets provided with the album. I read those lyrics a thousand times. At first I thought something like, “This is stupid.”

  That’s the kind of thought some people—kids or adults—have when encountering something they don’t immediately understand. And understanding the metaphors and subtext of a Bob Dylan song is a challenge even for the sharpest and most insightful listeners.

  The lyrics did not in any way speak to the complexities of my life experience. The song isn’t about child abuse, gang violence, crime, poverty, or poor educational standards. The lyrics were strange and inexplicable.

  But…

  And here’s the pivot point. That was the point in my life where I began to think beyond what I had been told. The act of deliberately trying to understand something beyond my reach made me reach farther. The desire to grasp truths that came from within—from thought and consideration—rather than accept what had been shoveled into my head was huge.

  I was seven years old.

  I’d already had to deal with things that were not part of any typical seven-year-old’s world. I was already different, though I hadn’t yet expanded my experience enough to know that what I was going through was not unique to me. It would be years before I realized that other kids got hurt like I was hurt. That realization was a different kind of pivot point. At seven, though, I thought I was a freak. One of a kind. Made from the wrong parts and put together hastily and without care. Years later, when I was more educated, more introspective, and better able to express myself, I referred to my kind of childhood as having been born in the “storm lands.” I have since met many people who have emigrated from that troubled country.

  At seven I was just becoming aware of how different I was, and how much I wanted to become more of a freak. Not less. I know, that’s contrary to how it’s supposed to be, but look at my reference point for “normal.” Almost everyone normal around me was a monster of some kind. If that was the norm, then I wanted no part of it.

  I began listening to “Ballad of a Thin Man” over and over again.

  Obsessively, I suppose.

  But really it was more like a focused study. I wanted to make sense of it. I suppose that on some level I felt that if I could understand that song—all on my own—then it would be proof that I had power. Any kind of power. I was still too junior at martial arts to feel powerful. Mostly I felt awkward and bruised. And no one had yet figured out that I needed glasses in order to see the blackboard in school or do much reading, so I wasn’t pulling good grades.

  Maybe that was part of it. The world had always been a little fuzzy to me, and the lyrics of that song, and the meanings hidden within them, were indistinct. Maybe if I could make them clear in my own head then other things might become clear, too.

  The first thing I needed to do was understand who “Mr. Jones” was.

  Was he me? Was the song about my own inability to understand the things around me?

  Or was Mr. Jones something else? Someone else?

  That felt closer to the mark. Once I had that thought, the door to understanding that song creaked open a half inch. My first real understanding was that Mr. Jones was a guy who didn’t know who Mr. Jones was. He had no self-awareness, and I knew this without framing it in those words. I was seven, so I can’t remember the exact mental vocabulary I used.

  There was a line, “You put your eyes in your pocket and your nose on the ground,” that was the next thing to click into p
lace, the next thing to nudge the door of understanding open a bit more. At first I thought that it was a reference to taking off a pair of glasses and putting them, literally, in a pocket. But I knew that was wrong as soon as I thought it. My father wore glasses, and he was just as blind to things with or without them. The blindness to the world around him was part of who he was. Even at seven I was coming to suspect that; and as I grew older I know it for sure. So, no, that line wasn’t about that. It was about deliberately choosing not to see. Mr. Jones takes his eyes off. He does this. It’s not an accident, he wasn’t born blind, it’s his choice.

  That, by the way, is the point at which I began wrestling with the question of what makes us who we are. The argument is called “nature vs. nurture,” a label I didn’t know then; but I understood the concept…and I always felt the concept was wrong. It isn’t always biology (nature) or environment (nuture) that shapes us. There is a component that’s every bit as valid and probably more important: choice.

  My father liked being a bad guy. Sure, he came from a rough childhood and was abused, but he didn’t have to become abusive himself. No one has to do that. He made my childhood every bit as bad as his own, but I didn’t become a predator. My father was abusive and violent because he enjoyed it. Maybe—and this is me being generous—he chose to focus on what made him happy and chose not to look at how unhappy it made other people. It’s possible he was that self-centered. Maybe it’s even likely, who knows? I wasn’t in his head. But what I saw as a kid and what I understood while listening to that song was my father choosing not to look at the damage he inflicted. Or its consequences. So, in that sense, he put his eyes in his pocket.

  Think about it from my perspective. A kid listening to something that was on an album. A song that was on the radio. A song that was climbing the charts. It couldn’t be about nothing, ergo it had to be about something. And I was determined to figure out what it meant.

  Why is that a pivot point? Ah. Remember the kinds of lessons I was learning from my father and his peers in our neighborhood. Intolerance and cruelty. In my father but also in the other adults—the people of power—in my neighborhood. None of them chose to see the world the way it was.

  Yeah.

  The song explained that to me.

  Sitting and listening to it over and over again. Hearing someone else say it. Knowing that someone else understood it. Wow. That was so powerful. That one line was the lever that made me pivot. One line, a few words, that made a battered little boy think beyond his experience. To think into that experience. To deconstruct it and try to understand it, and by doing so gain power over it. When you understand a thing, especially a dangerous thing, it loses a degree of power over you, and at the same time you gain a degree of power over it. Not understanding something, especially if you have an active imagination, always makes something feel worse than it is.

  Crazy that a lyric from a song that wasn’t even about a troubled childhood helped open the door of understanding.

  So, what’s the result? What’s the next act of that drama?

  There’s a saying that “you can’t unlearn” something. Just as you can’t unsee something.

  I saw my father as a deliberate monster. Not a victim of circumstance, but as a criminal, as a man who enjoyed the power he got from doing harm. I also saw him as weaker than I’d thought because he needed to feel powerful. He was addicted to the power he got from hurting others. That meant that he was not as invincible and unbreakable as he seemed to a seven-year-old.

  That understanding was massive. Absolutely massive.

  I was seven, and in less than a year I’d be eight. Then nine, then ten. I was growing up. I knew that I would continue to grow up. I know, that seems obvious, but little kids tend to think that they are who they are at the moment. Considering who you’ll be in time is a more abstract concept.

  Dylan taught me to be abstract in my thinking.

  At the same time, he helped me develop a kind of practicality. If I was going to get older, then I’d also get bigger. And stronger. I was already studying martial arts on the sly. There would come a point where my age and my size and those skills would align. That meant that there was going to come a point where I might be physically able to stop my father from hurting me. Or hurting my sisters.

  And as I grew older, he would grow older, too. He would age past the point of his prime strength long before I came into my full power. That’s the kind of race only a younger person can win.

  Was the Dylan song about that kind of struggle?

  Maybe. There was a lot of protest mentality in it. This was right when the Vietnam War was getting hot. The draft was starting. Nobody wanted that war, and the younger singers were writing songs about how wrong it was. The government wanted the war. They were the bigger, stronger thing that was hurting the younger, weaker thing. And that song spoke to that struggle.

  So, yes, Dylan was speaking to me through the lyrics of that song, and through others on that album.

  And I began to listen.

  I listened to the other songs on the radio. Protest songs. Songs about nuclear disarmament. Songs about what we were doing to the environment. Songs about hatred and intolerance and bigotry.

  All of those voices.

  Speaking to me.

  Calling out to me.

  Telling me that I wasn’t alone.

  That the struggle wasn’t mine. That if I was different, then that was okay. The normal world, so to speak, was the part of the world that had the power, used and misused it, and seemed to enjoy the effect.

  Those of us who were different did not want to be like them. We didn’t want our lives and our futures decided by either nature or nurture.

  We wanted to have a say in what happened. We wanted to have a choice.

  And we were determined to have that voice.

  I was seven when I first listened to “Ballad of a Thin Man.” I was fourteen when I was big enough, old enough, and tough enough to stand up to my father and stop the cycle of violence that made our house a battlefield.

  All because of a song.

  A song.

  Yeah, man. A song.

  Author photo

  by Sara Jo West

  Jonathan Maberry is a New York Times bestselling author, five-time Bram Stoker Award winner, and comic book writer. He writes in multiple genres including suspense, thriller, horror, science fiction, fantasy, action, and steampunk, for adults and teens. His works include the Joe Ledger thrillers, Rot & Ruin, Vault of Shadows, X-Files Origins: Devil’s Advocate, Captain America, and many others. He writes comics for Marvel, Dark Horse, and IDW. And he is the editor of several high-profile anthologies including The X-Files, V-Wars, Out of Tune, Baker Street Irregular, Nights of the Living Dead, and Scary Out There. Several of his works are in development for movies and TV, and has a tabletop board game out based on his novels and comics. He is a popular workshop leader, keynote speaker, and writing teacher. He lives in Del Mar, California. Visit jonathanmaberry.com and follow him on Twitter @jonathanmaberry.

  TIME TO SOAR

  A SHORT STORY INSPIRED BY AMY WINEHOUSE’S “OCTOBER SONG”

  By Donn Thompson Morelli, a.k.a. DONN T

  Birds and flight fascinate me. “October Song” was written about a bird, Amy Winehouse’s pet canary, named Ava. It’s a remix and rewrite of the legendary Sarah Vaughan’s “Lullaby of Birdland.” Another thing: October is my favorite month. It’s a transitional month, it brings the chill, the time before birds in the north migrate to the south. My goal was to create a story that pulled together and amplified those themes in a poetic and compelling way.

  —Donn Thompson Morelli

  I was a whisper of a girl, long and leggy, a picky eater except for what I term “fall” food. Of course, these foods weren’t exclusive to fall, but they existed in my mind that way. The tenth month of the year seemed to usher in the ar
rival of the foods on my list of favorites, which included candy corn, butternut squash soup, sweet potatoes, more candy corn, corn on the cob, caramel apples, apple butter, and, well, candy corn. Come October, my little world was all abuzz.

  At twelve years old, I was steady figuring out systems, categorizing things and counting. Counting made me feel safe. After all, potential land mines were in every field and danger was to be avoided.

  I obsessed.

  How many minutes could I hold my breath underwater in the bathtub? How many pogo stick jumps could I accomplish without falling off? For hours in solitude, I’d patiently carve out challenges for myself, practice in repetitive fashion until I conquered whatever task lay before me. I needed to uncover how things fit.

  By twelve, I’d also come to understand that everything of major importance took place in October. It didn’t. I just felt like it did, back then. That year, October’s significance would boom down the corridors of time, like a too-strong note played, shifting from an unruly clanging, to a diminished buzz, to reappear as a hum. Constant, infinite. I hear it now. Octobers in Philadelphia could be arrestingly beautiful and quietly foreboding.