Notes From The Hermitage
What Dylan Knew
I walked to the Barnes & Noble at Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street the day the first volume of Bob Dylan's memoirs came out. I arrived in the early afternoon but by then they'd sold out. The guy behind the counter shrugged. "It went fast," he said. I picked it up the next day someplace else, I don't remember where. Those folks who got it the first day knew something Dylan knew: Don¹t wait, start thinking too much about something and the moment's gone.
I started reading it on the subway, got through the first fifty pages that night, then stopped. It was strong tonic, he was pouring the drink straight. I shut the book and didn't get back to it for a month. Then a few nights ago I put some early Dylan into the CD player, opened the book and read the remaining 250 pages to the end, only stopping for smokes or to listen to a song. I finished near dawn. A friend had read it a couple weeks before. He carried it with him as a psychic safeguard during a visit to his ailing, half-mad father. He said it helped keep him sane. Another told me over drinks a week ago that reading it to the end, the thing that struck him most was Dylan's unimpeachable amorality. He has no values, this man said, no beliefs, no touchstones. I hadn't read the book then so I didn't want to add my judgment to his.
A year ago, after meeting a couple people for drinks, I dragged both of them through every record store in the East Village on a cold October night in search of Dylan's Basement Tapes sessions. I¹d convinced myself that somewhere on those sessions was an insight of great importance, a shamanic cure. To what? I don't know, I didn't know then. I'd been reading Greil Marcus' book on Dylan and become intoxicated by the vision he painted of an outlaw age given its fullest voice on a ragtag set of recordings put down in a house in Woodstock, NY. Neither of my friends was interested in walking the cold street, and at one point I became belligerent and slightly unhinged, telling them there was no option, I had to find the album. We discovered it eventually, and after a few drinks I returned home and slipped the discs into the machine.
In the late sixties, Dylan writes he was under siege, he felt like a hunted felon. There was not a town in the country that within a few days of his arriving in secret, he wouldn't be spotted and the gawkers and the fans and the flatout crackpots would start wandering the lot hoping to catch a glimpse of the great man. Dylan didn't feel much like a great man, he didn't feel much like anything. He had a wife, children, all he really wanted was to play games of cards or teach his kids how to fish. Outside his Manhattan apartment, a full-on siege was underway. Once worshipping fans flooded his block for weeks on end, demanding that he appear, like an apparition of the Second Coming, and lead them, the youth of the New Age, into a promised golden future. They shouted at him through blowhorns, they scaled his roof at night. His neighbors hated him.
Something of this same fever infected me when I went out in search of those Basement Tapes, and something of it no doubt tainted all of us who slipped into a bookstore the day his memoirs appeared on the shelves. By then, however, I'd been cured of any indulgent yearnings for transcendence I might've believed a folk singer, however extraordinary, could offer. I was interested in Dylan, plain and simple, I liked the sound of his voice and wanted to know something of what came behind it, an inkling to the ingredients of its power and force.
During a two-month recording session in New Orleans that's going downhill fast, Dylan rouses his wife in the early morning and the two of them get on his blue Harley and start driving. It is the 1980s and with his fame diminished, no one recognizes him. He notices the birds, the color of the sky, the kinds of houses, the bridges they pass, the foul smell along a gravel road. They stop for lunch at a crawfish shack and he asks his wife to order. All he eats are the onion rings. He remains stuck, he writes, in a bad mood, but that doesn't bother his wife. He says she knows how to bring happiness with her. They keep driving through the Delta floodplains and stop that night at a bed and breakfast. When he wakes, he understands something, the why behind the difficulties in the studio. He's done too much already to push himself any further, his job now is to hold his position. A small wiry man who runs a knick-knack shop tells him to get ready for the Chinese century, that the Chinese are preparing to invade, soon they'll be ruling the world. He sits down to talk to the man. Before he leaves, he picks out a bumper sticker that says WORLD'S GREATEST GRANDPA. After that, they head back.
When I listened to the Basement Tapes the night I bought them, I felt little of the exhilaration or excitement I expected. They were good, they were something, but they were more like sketches of a possible future, a musical future, dreamscapes that leaked imperfectly into the waking world. They are songs more accurately described by an ellipsis than a title, they're the space he needed to breathe outside the suffocation of his fame, a confident two-step taking a zigzag path to the masterpieces he was on the verge of recording. Those kids chanting for a leader, for the conscience of their age to step forward, didn't understand they already had him. He was right there, in the elliptical phrasing of those songs recorded in a basement, and he's there too in the time-upending narrative of his memoirs. Only he's saying something they didn't want to hear.
On arriving at the end of the book, it wasn't a sense of Dylan's amorality that struck me. I can't say one way or the other, because that's not what he's writing about. If he had a message to give to those kids in the sixties, this is what I think it would have been: I do my work, and you should do yours, whatever that is. And a clue to what made that voice? Simply this: Pay attention.
Ranbir Sidhu
Ranbir Sidhu is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize in fiction and his work has appeared in
The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, Zyzzyva, Other Voices, Press and a Houghton-Mifflin
college reader among other publications. Trained as an archaeologist, he has worked in
California, Nevada, Israel and France. One of his finds, a 3000 year old woman,
made cover skeleton of Biblical Archaeology Review. Most recently, he worked for
the United Nations in Sri Lanka. Recently, he received his first royalty check.
It was for 99 cents and for a story published over ten years ago.
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