Bob Dylan in America
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37 “joked that Ginsberg”; “a bit of taunt and tease”: Anne Waldman, “Dylan and the Beats,” in Highway 61 Revisited: Bob Dylan’s Road from Minnesota to the World, eds. Colleen J. Sheehy and Thomas Swiss (Minneapolis, 2009), 255.
38 “ringing at dawn”: Allen Ginsberg, “I Am a Victim of Telephone” (1964), in Collected Poems, 1947–1997, 352. 78 “which is the power”: Allen Ginsberg, “Kral Majales” (1965), in ibid., 361.
39 “Angelic Dylan”: Allen Ginsberg, “Wichita Vortex Sutra” (1966), in ibid., 417.
40 “There aren’t any finger pointing songs”: Dylan quoted in Nat Hentoff, “The Crackin’, Shakin’, Breakin’ Sounds,” New Yorker, Oct. 24, 1964, reprinted in Cott, Essential Interviews, 15–16.
41 “join[ing] images”: Allen Ginsberg, Journals: Mid-Fifties, 1954–1958, ed., Gordon Ball (New York, 1995), 142.
42 “telescoping of images”: T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921), in The Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York, 1975), 60.
43 “a certain drear”: Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels (1965; New York, 1980), 222. On Dylan’s modernism, special thanks to Anne Margaret Daniel.
44 “Oh, that’s someplace in Mexico”: Television press conference, KQED (San Francisco), Dec. 3, 1965, in Cott, Essential Interviews, 72.
45 “to be a rock star”: Mark Shurilla quoted in Eric Hoffman, “Poetry Jukebox: How Rock and Roll Found Literature and Literature Found Rock and Roll: The Story of Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan,” Isis 145 (July–Aug. 2009), 41.
CHAPTER THREE: DARKNESS AT THE BREAK OF NOON
An earlier version of this chapter appeared as the liner notes to The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964: Concert at Philharmonic Hall (Sony/Legacy Records, 2003). Unless noted below, all quotations in this chapter can be found on that album.
1 “SHUT UP”: Johnny Cash, “Letter to Broadside,” Broadside, March 10, 1964, in Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader, ed. Benjamin Hedin (New York, 2004), 21.
2 “new songs”: Irwin Silber, “An Open Letter to Bob Dylan,” Sing Out! Nov. 1964, www.edlis.org/twice/threads/open_letter_to_bob_dylan.html.
3 “the voice of a generation”: “The Rome Interview” (2001), www.expectingrain.com/dok/cd/2001/romeinterview.html.
CHAPTER FOUR: THE SOUND OF 3:00 A.M.
An earlier version of this chapter appeared as “Mystic Nights: The Making of Blonde on Blonde in Nashville,” The Oxford American, no. 58 (2007), 142–49.
Unless noted below, all quotations in this chapter are from the New York and Nashville session tapes to Blonde on Blonde, courtesy of Special Rider Music.
1 “a minority of”: Interview with Klas Burling, April 29, 1966, www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/66-apr29.htm.
2 “that thin”: Interview with Ron Rosenbaum, Playboy, March 1978, reprinted in Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, ed. Jonathan Cott (New York, 2006), 208.
3 “nobody has ever captured”: Kooper quoted in Howard Sounes, Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan (New York, 2001), 205.
4 “He never did anything twice”: Johnston in Richard Younger, “An Exclusive Interview with Bob Johnston,” n.d., www.b-dylan.com/pages/samples/bobjohnston.html.
5 “half Gershwin”: Jonathan Singer to David Hinckley, March 4, 1999, www.steelydan.com/griffin.html.
6 “We knew we had cut”: Kooper, interview with author, Nov. 13, 2006.
7 “After that”: McCoy, interview with Richie Unterberger, n.d., www.richieunterberger.com/mccoy.html.
8 “everybody knew”: McCoy, interview with author, Nov. 20, 2006.
9 “standoffish”: Robertson quoted in Sounes, Down the Highway, 201.
10 “Those guys welcomed us in”: Kooper, interview with author.
11 “I wouldn’t have dared”: Kristofferson quoted in David Bowman, “Kris Kristofferson,” Salon, Sept. 24, 1999, dir.salon.com/people/lunch/1999/09/24/kristofferson.
12 “It made all the difference”: Buttrey quoted in Bob Spitz, Dylan: A Biography (New York, 1991), 339.
13 “the artist and the song”: McCoy, interview with Unterberger.
14 “was just unheard of”: McCoy, interview with author.
15 “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”: Thanks to Anne Margaret Daniel for this point.
16 “I saw Dylan sitting”: Kristofferson quoted in Bowman, “Kristofferson.”
17 “But he wasn’t”: Johnston quoted in Louis Black, “Page Two: A Personal Journey, Part 2,” Austin Chronicle, May 25, 2007, www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/column?oid=oid:477920.
18 “After you’ve tried”: McCoy, interview with Unterberger.
19 “If you notice”: Buttrey quoted in Clinton Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades: Take Two (London, 2000), 241.
20 “That sounds like”: Johnston and Dylan quoted in Louis Black, “Momentum and the Mountainside Sound,” Austin Chronicle, Sept. 30, 2005, www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid:293992.
21 “It just didn’t happen”: McCoy, interview with author.
22 “all of us walking around”; “It’s the only one time”: Black, “Page Two.”
23 “They couldn’t have any charts”: Johnston quoted in Black, “Page Two.”
24 “as goofy”: McCoy, interview with author.
25 “Everything was different”: Ibid.
CHAPTER FIVE: CHILDREN OF PARADISE
The key sources on the Rolling Thunder Revue are Sam Shepard, Rolling Thunder Logbook (1977; New York, 1978); and Larry “Ratso” Sloman, On the Road with Bob Dylan (1978; New York, 2002). See also Sloman’s liner notes to The Bootleg Series, Vol. 5: Bob Dylan Live 1975: The Rolling Thunder Revue (Sony/Legacy Records, 2002), a compilation of performances in Worcester, Boston, Cambridge, and Montreal. Norman Raeben and his influence on Dylan are discussed in Bert Cartwright, “The Mysterious Norman Raeben,” in Wanted Man: In Search of Bob Dylan, ed. John Bauldie (London, 1990), 85–90, and www.geocities.com/athens/forum/2667/raeben.htm. Interesting considerations of Renaldo and Clara and the rest of Dylan’s films appear in C. P. Lee, Like a Bullet of Light: The Films of Bob Dylan (London, 2000); and in Vince Farinaccio, Nothing to Turn Off: The Films and Video of Bob Dylan (n.p., 2007). On the background to “Tangled Up in Blue” and the rest of Blood on the Tracks, see Andy Gill and Kevin Odegard, A Simple Twist of Fate: Bob Dylan and the Making of “Blood on the Tracks” (New York, 2004). I was able to hear a compact disc made from an audience tape of the afternoon show in New Haven on November 13, 1975, which helped refresh my memories of the show; recordings of the concert also circulate as bootleg CDs under the titles New Haven (Morose Moose Music Company) and New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.A., 13.11.75 Afternoon Show (Great North Woods).
1 “It’s like I had amnesia”: Dylan quoted in Bert Cartwright, “The Mysterious Norman Raeben,” in Wanted Man: In Search of Bob Dylan, ed. John Bauldie (London, 1990), 87.
2 “down, down, down”: Interview with Jonathan Cott, Rolling Stone, Nov. 16, 1978, reprinted in Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, ed. Jonathan Cott (New York, 2006), 260.
3 “I found I could stand”: Dylan quoted in Alan Jackson, “Bob Dylan: He’s Got Everything He Needs, He’s an Artist, He Don’t Look Back,” Times (London), June 6, 2008.
4 “rich old ladies”: Dylan quoted in Cartwright, “Mysterious Norman Raeben,” 86.
5 “how to see”: Ibid., 87.
6 “I was just trying”: Dylan quoted in Cameron Crowe, liner notes to Biograph (1985); also Cartwright, “Mysterious Norman Raeben,” 89.
7 “something different”: [Camilla McGuinn], “Roadie Report 31—the Rolling Thunder Revue,” Roger McGuinn blog, rogermcguinn.blogspot.com/2007/11/roadie-report-31-rolling-thunder-revue.html.
8 “Roger!”: Dylan quoted in Larry “Ratso” Sloman, On the Road with Bob Dylan (1978; New York, 2002), 4.
9 “That’s our slogan”: Dylan quoted in ibid.
10 “just like Marlon Brando”: Dylan on what is familiarly known as the “Minnesota Hotel Tapes,”
recorded in 1960.
11 “He was having”: Carolina A. Miranda, “Q&A with D. A. Pennebaker,” Time, Feb. 26, 2007, at www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1593766,00.html.
12 “Really, I’m trying to be Ibsen”: Pennebaker quoted in ibid.
13 “is improvised, about a third is determined”: Interview with Cott, Rolling Stone, Jan. 26, 1978, reprinted in Cott, Essential Interviews, 191.
14 “naked alienation of the inner self”: Ibid., 178.
15 “a kind of Children of Paradise”: Levy quoted in Vince Farinaccio, Nothing to Turn Off: The Films and Video of Bob Dylan (n.p., 2007), 93.
16 “Something like that”: Sam Shepard, Rolling Thunder Logbook (1977; New York, 1978), 13.
17 “Bicentennial madness”: Ibid., 45.
18 “a Bicentennial picture”: Ginsberg to Louis Ginsberg, Nov. 4, 1975, in The Letters of Allen Ginsberg, ed. Bill Morgan (New York, 2008), 383.
19 “off and on”: Radio interview with Cynthia Gooding, WBAI (New York), March 11, 1962, in Cott, Essential Interviews, 3.
20 “a route song”: Dylan, concert remarks at Town Hall, New York, April 12, 1963. There have been two bootleg releases of this performance: one, on the Colosseum label, Bob Dylan in Concert, a “live” album that Columbia Records had intended to release but then scrapped; and a more recent release, on the Rattlesnake label, of the complete soundboard recording of the Town Hall concert, with the title New York Town Hall 1963.
21 “the traveling performers”: “Bob Dylan Talks About the New Album with Bill Flanagan,” www.bobdylan.com/#/conversation?page=5.
22 “wanna make you have two thoughts”: Radio interview with Gooding, as transcribed from Bob Dylan with Cynthia Gooding, Folksinger’s Choice, bootleg CD (Yellow Dog). Jonathan Cott’s rendering, in his compilation of Dylan’s essential interviews, truncates Dylan and Gooding’s conversation; see the transcription at www.expectingrain.com/dok/int/gooding.html.
CHAPTER SIX: MANY MARTYRS FELL
The most exacting study of Blind Willie McTell, interwoven with the author’s impressions of the American South today, is Michael Gray, Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell (2007; London, 2008). Gray includes a detailed discography of McTell’s performances, but readers may also wish to consult the illustrated McTell discography at Stefan Wirz’s fine Web site, American Music, www.wirz.de/music/mctelfrm.htm. The list of books, articles, and Web sites on the blues is enormous and growing rapidly. Two books deserve special mention for their pioneering and enduring contributions: Samuel Charters, The Country Blues (1959; New York, 1975); and Paul Oliver, Blues Fell This Morning: The Meaning of the Blues (New York, 1960). John Lomax’s life and career are covered in The Last Cavalier: The Life and Times of John A. Lomax, 1867–1948 (Urbana, Ill., 1996). On Alan Lomax’s writings, see the selected readings for Chapter One. I was able to listen to the session tape demo of “Blind Willie McTell,” as recorded in New York on May 5, 1983, which became the basis for the track released in 1991 on The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1–3: Rare and Unreleased, 1961–1991.
1 “I wonder”: The entire dialogue between Lomax and McTell comes from the 1940 Library of Congress recording, labeled, oddly, by Lomax as “Monologue on Accidents,” on disc 5 of the comprehensive six-CD selection Blind Willie McTell: King of the Georgia Blues (Snapper Records, 2007); as well as on a separate release of the 1940 session, Blind Willie McTell 1940 (Document Records, 1990).
2 “I told you”: Dylan, in Saved! The Gospel Speeches, ed. Clinton Heylin (Madras, 1990), 12–13.
3 “just made my hair stand up”: Dylan quoted in “The 100 Greatest Singers of All Time: 56—Mavis Staples,” Rolling Stone, Nov. 27, 2008, www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/24161972/page/56.
4 “fall into any category”: Dylan quoted in Clinton Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades: Take Two (London, 2000), 548.
5 “I run away and went everywhere”: McTell remarks on Blind Willie McTell, Last Session, originally released in 1960 and rereleased on several occasions, in LP and CD form, most recently as a CD by Fantasy Records in 2007. The album is now also available for MP3 download.
6 “Baby, I was born to ramble”: McTell quoted in Michael Gray, Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell (2007; London, 2008), 180.
7 “He always had him a contract”: Kate McTell quoted in ibid., 235.
8 “They lived”; “He never allowed”; “a keen sense of scripture”: W. Andrew Williams quoted in ibid., 240–42.
9 “brilliant but elusive”: Samuel Charters, The Country Blues (1959; New York, 1975), 93.
10 “On Blind Willie McTell”: Peter Guralnick, Feel Like Going Home: Portraits in Blues and Rock ’n’ Roll (1971; Boston, 1999), 23.
11 “I jump ’em from other writers”: McTell remarks on Last Session.
12 “God’s in His heaven”: Robert Browning, “Pippa Passes: A Drama,” in The Complete Works of Robert Browning (New York, 1898), vol. 1, 193.
13 “But God is in Heaven”: Herman Melville, “The Fall of Richmond: The Tidings Received in the Northern Metropolis (April, 1865),” in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (New York, 1866), 136.
14 “Perhaps the most entrancing”: Greil Marcus, The Dustbin of History (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 84.
15 “The past is never dead”: Gavin Stevens in William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, act 1, scene 3 (New York, 1951).
CHAPTER SEVEN: ALL THE FRIENDS I EVER HAD ARE GONE
The basic secondary sources on “Delia” are John Garst, “Delia’s Gone—Where Did She Come From, Where Did She Go?” paper delivered at the twentieth annual International Country Music Conference, Belmont University, Nashville, May 2003, kindly provided to the author by John Garst; and Sean Wilentz, “The Sad Song of Delia Green and Cooney Houston,” in The Rose and the Briar: Death, Love, and Liberty in the American Ballad, eds. Sean Wilentz and Greil Marcus (New York, 2005), 147–58. This chapter draws heavily on the latter, although it has been thoroughly revised and corrected.
1 “I’d kind of reached”: David Gates, “Dylan Revisited,” Newsweek, Oct. 6, 1997, www.newsweek.com/id/97107.
2 “felt done for”: Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (New York, 2004), 147.
3 “Sinatra, Peggy Lee, yeah”: Dylan, interview with Mikal Gilmore, Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Oct. 13, 1985.
4 “It’s never been simple”: Interview with Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston, “Positively Tie Dream,” Aug. 1965, reprinted in Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, ed. Jonathan Cott (New York, 2006), 50.
5 “the songs would come”: Dylan quoted in Clinton Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades: Take Two (London, 2000), 671.
6 “If you can sing those”: Ibid.
7 “Why, the judge”: Baker quoted in Cecil Brown, “We Did Them Wrong: The Ballad of Frankie and Albert,” in The Rose and the Briar: Death, Love, and Liberty in the American Ballad, eds. Sean Wilentz and Greil Marcus (New York, 2005), 138.
8 “I killed the President”: Czolgosz quoted in Buffalo Express, Oct. 30, 1901.
9 “got worried about”: Davis quoted in Stefan Grossman, “Reverend Gary Davis Interview,” Stefan Grossman’s Guitar Workshop, www.guitarvideos.com/interviews/davis.
10 “that song about Delia”: Davis quoted in ibid.
11 “No, I ain’t never heard of him”: Davis quoted in ibid.
12 “I wouldn’t want to forget”: W. C. Handy, Father of the Blues: An Autobiography (1941; New York, 1991), 28.
13 “older and wiser”: Johnny Cash with Patrick Carr, Cash: The Autobiography (1997; New York, 2003), 255.
14 “Now Coonie an’ his little sweetheart”: “Delia Holmes (Will Winn’s Version),” in Chapman J. Milling, “Delia Holmes—a Neglected Negro Ballad,” Southern Folklore Quarterly 1, no. 4 (Dec. 1937), 4–7.
15 “When Dylan sings”: Bill Flanagan, “My Back Pages,” Musician, Dec. 1993, 86.
CHAPTER EIGHT: DYLAN AND THE SACRED HARP
The pioneering scholar of shape-no
te music and the Sacred Harp tradition was George Pullen Jackson, whose most important studies include White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1933); Spiritual Folk-Songs of Early America (Locust Valley, N.Y., 1937); White and Negro Spirituals: Their Life Span and Kinship (Locust Valley, N.Y., 1943); and The Story of the Sacred Harp, 1844–1944 (Nashville, 1944). It is important to supplement Jackson’s work with more recent scholarship, above all Buell E. Cobb Jr., The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and Its Music (1978; Athens, Ga., 1989); and Dorothy D. Horn, Sing to Me of Heaven: A Study of Folk and Early American Materials in Three Old Harp Books (Gainesville, Fla., 1970). On the deep historical background, see Manfred Bukofzer, “Popular Polyphony in the Middle Ages,” Musical Quarterly 26 (Jan. 1940), 31–49.
The story of Joseph Thomas and of the composition and evolution of “The Lone Pilgrim” comes basically from the primary sources noted below. A number of them are easily accessible online at the Joseph Thomas page in the collection of Restoration Movement Texts posted by Memorial University of Newfoundland, www.mun.ca/rels/restmov/people/josthomas.html. See also Thomas Commuck, Indian Melodies (New York, 1845). For background on the numerous religious movements and revivals in the early American republic of which Thomas’s mission was a part, the best starting place is Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, Conn., 1989).
1 “Tunes, Hymns”: William Walker, “Preface to the Former Edition,” The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion (1835; Philadelphia, 1854), iii.
2 “And let this feeble body fail”: Walker, “Hallelujah,” in ibid., 107.
3 “great many good airs”: Walker, “Preface to the Former Edition,” iii.
4 “Why should we start”: Walker, “Prospect,” in Southern Harmony, 92.
5 “I have endeavoured”; “with a number”; “Those that are partial”: Walker, “Preface to the Former Edition,” iii.