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crazy what you could have had
22 Apr 06
Dylan, Bob. Chronicles, Volume One. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.
Dylan tells an amazing story about how he used to visit Woody Guthrie in the hospital. He says he originally moved to New York just to meet Woody, who was hospitalized for quite some time before he died. Bob would visit him. He describes the hospital, more of an asylum, a pretty depressing place. This was in the very early sixties, while Kennedy was still president. Bob would take his guitar and sing Woody’s songs for Woody. At that time, Bob was just beginning to think about writing his own stuff. He was mostly singing traditional folk songs when he performed, and he was actively researching folk music, but hadn’t really started writing. So one day Woody tells Bob about a box of lyrics that was just sitting in his basement. He tells Bob how to find the house, and that if he goes and tells Woody’s wife that Woody said he could have them, she would give them to him and maybe he could finish some of them.
In the next day or so, I took the subway from the West 4th Street station all the way to the last stop, like he [Woody] said, in Brooklyn, stepped out on the platform and went hunting for the house. Woody had said it was easy to find. I saw what looked to be a row of houses across a field, the kind he described, and I walked towards it only to discover I was walking out across a swamp. I sunk into the water, knee level, but kept going anyway—I could see the lights as I moved forward, didn’t really see any other way to go. When I came out on the other end, my pants from the knees down were drenched, frozen solid, and my feet almost numb but I found the house and knocked on the door. A babysitter opened it slightly, said that Margie, Woody’s wife, wasn’t there. One of Woody’s kids, Arlo, who would later become a professional singer and songwriter in his own right, told the babysitter to let me in. Arlo was probably about ten or twelve years old and didn’t know anything about any manuscripts locked in the basement. I didn’t want to push it—the babysitter was uncomfortable, and I stayed just long enough to warm up, said a quick good-bye and left with my boots still waterlogged, trudged back across the swamp to the subway platform.
Forty years later, these lyrics would fall into the hands of Billy Bragg and the group Wilco and they would put melodies to them, bring them to life and record them. It was all done under the direction of Woody’s daughter Nora. These performers probably weren’t even born when I had made that trip out to Brooklyn. (99-100)
There’s an initial, somewhat predictable “what might have been, and at what cost” aspect of the story. If Dylan gets those lyrics, BB&Wilco don’t. Bob might have done an amazing job bringing those songs to life, but how might that have changed the history of what he became? But there’s a remarkably mythological, archetypal element, testimony to Dylan the storyteller—the young, as yet unproven hero who would one day remake the world, trudging through the cold and wet to find a warm sanctuary protected by a child, turned away because maybe he’s not ready to enter, or maybe it’s simply not the task he’s been given. Amazing.
Posted by pzed on April 22, 2006 at 2.29pm
Categories: fragments, scripture
