by Bob Dylan
From the far end of the kitchen a silver beam of moonlight pierced through the leaded panes of the window illuminating the table. The song seemed to hit the wall, and I stopped writing and swayed backwards in the chair, felt like lighting up a fine cigar and climbing into a warm bath. This was the first song I’d written in a while and it looked like a clawish hand had written it. I knew that if I ever was to record again, I could use it. I was aware that I wasn’t in the song, but that was all right; I didn’t feel like being in there. I put the words in a drawer, couldn’t play them anyway, and snapped out of a trance.
The low growl of a motorcycle rumbled up the roadway alongside the garage and I cranked the window open wider—smelled the pomegranate blossoms blowing in a breezy fashion. I cast an embracing glance over the primordial landscape. It had been a while since I had written a song from start to finish all at once. “Political World” reminded me of another song I had written a couple of years before called “Clean-Cut Kid.” I wasn’t in that one, either.
Later in the week we went out to see Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. The play was hard to bear, family life at its worst, self-centered morphine addicts. I was glad when it was over. I felt sorry for these people, but none of them touched me. After that, we stopped into Harvelle’s, a local blues club on 4th Street, to see Guitar Shorty and J. J. “Badboy” Jones. It’s always a trip seeing Shorty. He plays guitar with everything but his hands. I wished I could have done that. Shorty sounds like Guitar Slim, but he does some wild gymnastics that you’d never imagine Guitar Slim doing. While strolling back to the car along 4th Street, a homeless guy holding his head in his hands was being ordered to move by a couple of cops. A tiny spaniel lay at the guy’s feet, the dog’s beady black eyes following the nervous movements of his master. I couldn’t see that the officers took any pride in what they had to do.
Later that night back at the house I started writing the song “What Good Am I?”…wrote it in a small art studio on the property. It’s more than an art studio. There’s arc-welding equipment in there, and I’d made ornate iron gates out of junk scrap metal in the barnlike room. Most of the place has a cement floor, but there’s another area covered with linoleum. There’s a table there and a window with lowered blinds that looks out over a gully. The entire song came to me all at once; don’t know what could have brought it on. Maybe seeing the homeless guy, the dog, the cops, the dreary play and maybe even the antics of Guitar Shorty might have had something to do with it. Who knows? Sometimes you see things in life that make your heart turn rotten and your gut sick and nauseous and you try to capture that feeling without naming the specifics. There were extra verses for this, too. Here’s one. “What good am I if I’m walking on eggs, if I’m wild with excitement and wet between the legs? If I’m right in the thick of it and I don’t know why, what good am I?” I put this song away in the same drawer with “Political World”—I wondered what they’d have to say to each other. No melodies for either. I went to sleep.
My mother and my aunt Etta were staying with us and they’d be up early, so I wanted to be up early, too. The next day was overcast and a fog hung in the air. My aunt was in the kitchen and I sat down with her to talk and drink coffee. The radio was playing and morning news was on. I was startled to hear that Pete Maravich, the basketball player, had collapsed on a basketball court in Pasadena, just fell over and never got up. I’d seen Maravich play in New Orleans once, when the Utah Jazz were the New Orleans Jazz. He was something to see—mop of brown hair, floppy socks—the holy terror of the basketball world—high flyin’—magician of the court. The night I saw him he dribbled the ball with his head, scored a behind the back, no look basket—dribbled the length of the court, threw the ball up off the glass and caught his own pass. He was fantastic. Scored something like thirty-eight points. He could have played blind. Pistol Pete hadn’t played professionally for a while, and he was thought of as forgotten. I hadn’t forgotten about him, though. Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it’s like they didn’t fade away at all.
I started and completed the song “Dignity” the same day I’d heard the sad news about Pistol Pete. I started writing it in the early afternoon, about the time the morning news began to wear away and it took me the rest of the day and into the night to finish it. It’s like I saw the song up in front of me and overtook it, like I saw all the characters in this song and elected to cast my fortunes with them. I have a problem sometimes remembering someone’s real name, so I give them another one, something that more accurately describes them, and I had a tendency to do that throughout this song. There were more verses with other individuals in different interplays. The Green Beret, The Sorceress, Virgin Mary, The Wrong Man, Big Ben, and The Cripple and The Honkey. The list could be endless. All kinds of identifiable characters that found their way into the song but somehow didn’t survive. I heard the whole piece in my head—rhythm, tempo, melody line, the whole bit. I’d always be able to remember this song. The wind could never blow it out of my head. This song was a good thing to have. On a song like this, there’s no end to things. You hold an electric torch up to someone’s face and see what’s there. Yet to me, it’s amazingly simple, no complications, everything pans out. As long as the things you see don’t go by in a blur of light and shade, you’re okay. Love, fear, hate, happiness—all in unmistakable terms, a thousand and one subtle ramifications. This song is like that. One line brings up another, like when your left foot steps forward and your right drags up to it. If I’d have written this ten years earlier, I’d have gone immediately to the recording studio. But a lot had changed and I had no anxiety about that stuff anymore, didn’t feel the urge and necessity of it. I didn’t feel like recording anyway. It was tedious and I didn’t like the current sounds—mine or anybody else’s. I didn’t know why an old Alan Lomax field recording sounded better to me, but it did. I didn’t think I could make a good record if I tried for a hundred years.
One day I went to the clinic where the doctor examined my hand, said the healing was coming along fine and that the feeling in the nerves might have a chance of coming back soon. It was encouraging to hear that. I returned to the house where my eldest son was sitting around in the kitchen with his soon-to-be wife. There was a thick seafood stew brewing up on the stove as I walked by. I took the cover off the pot to check it out.
“What do you think?” my future daughter-in-law asked.
“What about the whiskey sauce?”
“It has to be arranged,” she said.
I dropped the cover back on the pot and went out to the garage. The rest of the day went by like a puff of wind.
The song “Disease of Conceit” definitely has gospel overtones. Again, events might trigger a song—sometimes they might start the motor. Recently, the popular Baptist preacher Jimmy Swaggart had been defrocked by the Assembly of God leadership for refusing to stop preaching. Jimmy was Jerry Lee Lewis’s first cousin and was a big TV star, and the news came as a shock. He’d been linked to a prostitute, caught on camera leaving her motel room in sweatpants. Swaggart was ordered to vacate the pulpit temporarily. He wept in public and asked forgiveness, but still was told to stop preaching for a while. He couldn’t help himself, though, and quickly went back to preaching as if nothing had happened and they defrocked him. The story was strange. Swaggart clearly wasn’t in good shape, hadn’t looked at the road. The story didn’t make any sense. The Bible is full of these things. A lot of those old kings and leaders had many wives and concubines and Hosea the Prophet was even married to a prostitute, and it didn’t stop him from being a holy man. But these were different times and for Swaggart, it was the end of the line. Reality can be overwhelming. It can also be a shadow, depending on how you look at it. As for me, I wondered what this harlot might have looked like that lured this famous preacher into rolling in the muck. A damsel of tempting statuesque beauty? Probably. It would have to be. If you paid any amount of mind to all this Mickey Mouse stu
ff, the way these hoity-toity people’s doors and windows aren’t shut tight, you might end up in a private lunatic asylum. This incident might have had something to do with inspiring the song, but then again, it’s hard to say. Conceit is not necessarily a disease. It’s more of a weakness. A conceited person could be set up easily and brought down accordingly. Let’s face it, a conceited person has a fake sense of self-worth, an inflated opinion of himself. A person like this can be controlled and manipulated completely if you know what buttons to push. So in a sense, that’s what the lyrics are talking about. The song rose up until I could read the look in its eyes. In the quiet of the evening I didn’t have to hunt far for it. As always, there were a few verses left behind. “There’s a whole lot of people dreaming tonight about the disease of conceit, whole lot of people screaming tonight about the disease of conceit. I’ll hump ya and I’ll dump ya and I’ll blow your house down. I’ll slice into your cake before I leave town. Pick a number—take a seat, with the disease of conceit.”
I finished the lyrics and left the studio, went back to the main house. Wind was blowing through the tall bamboo. The heavy chrome bumper from my old battered Buick was shining in the moonlight. I hadn’t driven that car in years, was thinking of taking it apart and using it for scrap metal sculpture. The dark gully was overgrown with brush and there was a fox or a coyote down there. The dogs were yapping and chasing something. The lights from the main house were glittering like the inside of a casino. I went in, shut ’em off and glanced at one of my guitars which I hadn’t touched in a while. I was reluctant to touch it. Might as well get some rest, I thought, and then I crawled into bed.
The song “What Was It You Wanted?” was also a quickly written one. I heard the lyric and melody together in my head and it played itself in a minor key. You have to be economical writing a song like this. If you’ve ever been the object of curiosity, then you know what this song is about. It doesn’t need much explanation. Folks who are soft and helpless sometimes make the most noise. They can obstruct you in a lot of ways. It’s pointless trying to resist them or deal with them by force. Sometimes you just have to bite your upper lip and put sunglasses on. Songs like this are strange dogs. They don’t make good companions. Again, there were extra verses. “What was it you wanted? Can I be of any use? Can I do something for you? Do I have enough juice? Wherever you’re off to, one thing you should know. You still got seven hundred miles yet still to go.” The song almost wrote itself. It just descended upon my head. Maybe a couple of years earlier I might have rejected it, never finished it. Not now, though.
Another song, “Everything Is Broken” was made up of quick choppy strokes. The semantic meaning is all in the sounds of the words. The lyrics are your dance partner. It works on a mechanical level. Everything is broken or it looks that way—chipped, cracked, in need of repair. Things are broken, then rebroken, made into something else, then broken again. Once when I was lying on the beach in Coney Island, I saw a portable radio in the sand…a beautiful General Electric, self charging—built like a battleship—and it was broken. I could have remembered that image at the top of the song. But I had seen a lot of other things broken, too—bowls, brass lamps, vessels and jars and jugs, buildings, busses, sidewalks, trees, landscapes—all these things, when they’re broken, make you feel ill at ease. I thought of all the best things in the world, the things I had a great affection for. Sometimes it might be a place, a place to start an evening from and go all night, but then these places become broken, too, and can’t be pieced back together. There’s a smashing and crashing of furniture and glass. Something just breaks and gives no warning. Sometimes your dearest possession. It’s beastly hard to fix anything. There were extra verses for this, too. “Broken strands of prairie grass. Broken magnifying glass. I visited the broken orphanage and rode upon the broken bridge. I’m crossin’ the river goin’ to Hoboken. Maybe over there, things ain’t broken.” That was my bit of optimism to go along with a song like this. These then, and some other songs, I wrapped up and put them away to stay where they lay, kept them in a drawer, but I could sense their presence.
In time, my hand got right and it was ironic. I stopped writing the songs. The doctor encouraged me to play my guitar—that stretching my hand was therapeutic, actually good for my hand, and I was now doing that a lot. I could begin the shows that were scheduled for me, starting in the spring and it seemed like I was back where I began.
One night, Bono, the singer from U2, was over for dinner with some other friends. Spending time with Bono was like eating dinner on a train—feels like you’re moving, going somewhere. Bono’s got the soul of an ancient poet and you have to be careful around him. He can roar ’til the earth shakes. He’s also a closet philosopher. He brought a case of Guinness with him. We were talking about things that you talk about when you’re spending the winter with somebody—talked about Jack Kerouac. Bono knows Kerouac’s stuff pretty good. Kerouac, who celebrated American towns like Truckee, Fargo, Butte and Madora—towns that most Americans never heard of. It seems funny that Bono would know more about Kerouac than most Americans. Bono says things that can sway anybody. He’s like that guy in the old movie, the one who beats up a rat with his bare hands and wrings a confession out of him. If Bono had come to America in the early part of the century he would have been a cop. He seems to know a lot about America and what he doesn’t, he’s curious about.
We talked about fame and both agreed that the funny thing about fame is that nobody believes it’s you. Warhol’s name got batted around, too. Warhol, the king of pop. One art critic in Warhol’s time had said that he’d give you a million dollars if you could find one ounce of hope or love in any of his work, as if that was important. Names appear in conversation and slip away. Names that have a certain feel to them. Idi Amin, Lenny Bruce, Roman Polanski, Herman Melville, Mose Allison, Soutine the painter, the Jimmy Reed of the art world. When Bono or me aren’t exactly sure about somebody, we just make it up. We can strengthen any argument by expanding on something either real or not real. Neither of us are nostalgic, and nostalgia doesn’t enter into anything and we’re gonna make damn sure about that. Bono says something about the English coming here and settling Jamestown and that the Irish built New York City—talks about the rightness, the richness, glory, beauty, wonder and magnificence of America. I told him that if he wants to see the birthplace of America, he should go to Alexandria, Minnesota.
It was just me and Bono sitting around the table. Everyone else was scattered about. My wife came by and said she was going up to bed. “Go on up,” I said. “I’m going up in a minute.” It took me a while to get there, though, and the case of Guinness was almost gone. “Where’s Alexandria?” Bono asked. I tell him that’s where the Vikings came and settled in the 1300s, said that there’s a wooden statue of a Viking in Alexandria and it doesn’t look anything like a dignified founding father of America. He’s bearded, wears a helmet, strapped knee-high boots, long dagger in a sheath, holding a spear at his side, wearing a kilt—holding a shield that says, “The birthplace of America.” Bono asks me how to get there and I tell him to follow the river up through Winona, Lake City, Frontenac and get onto Highway 10 all the way to Wadena, make a left on 29 and you’ll run right into it. You shouldn’t have any trouble getting there. Bono asked me where I was originally from and I told him the Iron Trail, the Mesabi Iron Range. “What does Mesabi mean?” he asked. I told him it was an Ojibwa word, means Land of Giants.
The night wore on. Out at sea, the lights of a freighter moved by every so often. Bono asked me if I’d had any new songs, any unrecorded ones. It just so happened that I did. I went into the other room and pulled them out of the drawer, brought them back and showed them to him. He looked them over, said I should record them. I said that I wasn’t so sure about that, thought that maybe I should pour lighter fluid over them—said that I had been having a hard time making records, making that work out. He said, “No, no,” and he brought up the name of Daniel Lanois…said tha
t U2 had worked with him and he had been a great partner—that he’d be perfect for me to work with—would have much to scramble into the mix. Lanois had musical ideas that were compatible to mine. Bono picked up the phone and dialed the man, put him on the phone with me and we spoke for a moment. Basically, what Lanois said was that he was working out of New Orleans and told me that if I was ever there, I should look him up. I said that I would do that. To be sure, I was in no hurry to record. Performing was what was on my mind first and foremost. If I ever did make another record, it would have to have something in common with that purpose. I had a clear road ahead and didn’t want to blow the chance to regain my musical freedom. I needed to let things straighten out and not get mixed up anymore.
