Gardner Remembers: the lost tapes
Page 6
CM: How would you rate your guitar playing?
BG: Back then or now?
CM: Um, back then.
BG: I was the best, one of the best. Clapton, Hendrix…uh, B.B.
CM: You hung out with Hendrix for a while, right? Tell me what that was like.
BG: Hendrix was a cool cat, man. He was just cool. He sweated it. He fucking slept with his guitar, you know?
CM: Slept with it?
BG: Literally. Fucking literally slept with it. He said it made it more a part of him, made him more in tune with it. I believe him, man, because nobody, I mean nobody could get the sounds out of a guitar that Hendrix did. Nobody can now. In one way he was just so far above all of us—even Clapton. I mean, he was untouchable. But, yeah, we hung out for a while. This would have been, uh, early 69, I think. He slept on my couch for a while. We’d get stoned, sit up all night talking, blues, soul—he knew it all, man. The cat lived music. And, you know, he was bleeding, that’s the sad truth, man, he was bleeding and no one could see. I didn’t know it. He was just full of pain, man. He had to do drugs. The rest of us, we were like just blowing our minds, you know, but Jimi, he needed it. Just to get through a day, just to keep down the demon that made him play like that. A cold wind blew through Jimi, yet he was the sweetest cat. Sad death, man. He died for all of us. You know? So we could go on.
LE: He showed us the way through death.
BG: That’s right man. Jimi and Janis, they did it early so we could keep playing. Why I left the electric stuff behind partly.
CM: Really. Why?
BG: Well, I mean, he did it all, he took it to the edge and then when the edge laughed at him he laughed back, man, and he went over. And he fucking took it with him. It’s disrespectful in a way to continue in that vein.
CM: So you went softer, acoustic?
BG: Careful saying “softer,” man. To players it sounds too much like “weaker,” you dig? Like tea. Like wimpy. Well, anyway, not totally. Not just. I don’t know. Don’t write this down, man. It’s just talking about Jimi makes me feel, I don’t know, useless somehow. Vulnerable. You dig?
CM: Did you go to the funeral?
BG: Naw. I didn’t, man. We were playing that weekend, I think. But, it was like, he’s dead, you know? He’s dead forever. What does one day have to say about forever? You follow me? But, he was the best of us. Write that. He was the best of us.
(garbled here…low sound quality, it appears that a few moments are lost)
CM: On the new album, you’ve got a little instrumental piece, right before “Song for L. Enos,” it sounds like “Third Stone from the Sun.”
BG: That’s good, man. You’re listening. See, no one got that. Yeah, that was actually Lorelei’s idea, that we should include this little hidden tribute to Jimi in the song for her. She was like all humble about the song being named for her.
LE: I’m not sure it was my idea.
BG: It was. It fucking was. You said, play that beautiful part of Jimi’s song. This was on my twelve-string. And I said, hell, I’m putting that in there, that’s beautiful, man. That’s just so right.
CM: Would you say Hendrix influenced you then?
BG: No.
CM: You didn’t—
BG: Influenced me? No. He didn’t influence me. I loved the cat, man. That’s enough isn’t it? I mean I learned from him, he learned from me, I’m still learning from Lor, you know, that’s the world, man. If you ain’t learning you’re dead. So, I’m still trying to absorb some things, follow some things that I thought of maybe back then and Jimi was there, he was undeniably there, like the monolith from 2001, you know? So, there were a lot of us cats playing the guitar, and…uh, I’ve lost the thread of what I was saying.
CM: What about Dylan?
BG: I have confused recollections of my first awareness of Bob Dylan. I have a vague memory of hearing “Song for Woody” on FM 100, back in Memphis, which at that time was an album-oriented station, not limited to a ludicrous playlist like it is today. It was a source back then, a touchstone. You could hear music unavailable elsewhere. The music of the planets. I listened to it alone in my parent’s living room, hearing sounds that transformed me as surely as did Lorelei, the finding of my own voice. “Talkin World War III Blues” was beyond my ken. I thought, perhaps, my head would explode. I didn’t understand.
In my reptile brain I have also the memory of my friend Ricky Adams’ big brother having “folk” albums, some by a handsome, young, angular-faced singer named Bob Dylan, whose songs were meant as social anthems, wrong-righters. I didn’t know what to make of these threnodies. They were so stark, so naked. It was just a man’s voice, crying in the wilderness. This must have been shit, what? 1962? Earlier? I can’t do a timeline, man, not even of my own life—some of it is such a blur. Is it like that for everyone?
I have a memory of our family kitchen before school, oatmeal warming in a pan on the stove, my father dunking his folded toast into his coffee, and the plastic radio tuned to some “hits” station, probably WHBQ. This was the same radio from which I would later hear about deaths: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Martin Luther King. Shit, I still have that little radio—I kept it because it seemed important. (laughs) It was my mother’s kitchen radio—it’s still around here somewhere. And, on this particular morning of oatmeal and familial familiarities, a song emanated from that plastic box, bellowing something about a “black branch with blood that kept dripping.” You know? And, “a white ladder all covered with water.” I thought, holy hell. Of course, by this time, I was making my own music, fixing to go out on my own, and, in a way, I saw Dylan as a map, as a way out into the world. What more can we ask of art, right? Later, when I met him, I talked to him about this and he was, well, flattered, I guess, and he talked about how Guthrie and Leadbelly were like that for him.
All these memories collide in my head to form a capharnaum around what I want to know more concretely: how did Bob Dylan become important to me? And the process must have been gradual, an accretion, Bob Dylan never became, for me, what James Joyce was for Richard Ellmann, or to use a less pretentious comparison, what hamburgers were for Wimpy. A centering object, a holy thing. But he became a dream-figure, a part of my unconscious, as I understand the term.
Is Bob Dylan more than a man? Is he more than a man with an extraordinary gift? Is he really something holy? Of course not. He is just an exceptional artist, a poet, a singer of peculiar power and persuasion and grace. So, what happened? What happens to any of us who find a particular artist who speaks to our very hearts? Is it right, just, meet? What’s the difference? At some point, at some fulcrum point, I understood.
Today, Bob Dylan remains a force in my life, though now, he’s also a pal. And I can go to him—to his songs--when I am blue, when I am feeling that the world is a place of malefaction and discommoded energy, when I am feeling that there is nothing to be said for the human race, and I can be readjusted. How this happens, why this happens, is secondary to the fact that it does. I can listen to “Frankie Lee and Judas Priest” or “Visions of Johanna” or “On the Road Again” or “Clothesline Saga” or “Watching the River Flow” and feel that there are angels within humankind. I can feel that we are not all lost in the caliginous wastes of our hopelessly chaotic lives. Art redeems us. This is the seed I’m seeking, the truth I’m trying in my clumsy way to impart. Dylan is art, for us anyway, for what we’re talking about. Now, knowing Bob, I have to say, he’s a humble prophet, you know?
But I still wish I had a clearer picture of how it all happened, to me, Dylanwise. Perhaps the mystery is more apropos. Perhaps mysteries always are.
CM: Wow. Ok. I didn’t know Dylan was that…
BG: Man, he was That, for all of us. He was that for you, even you, Creole (laughs)—he just is, like the moon. Like political chicanery. Like the Illuminati conspiracy. Man, he’s
in our consciousness. The Beatles, too, of course.