Bob Dylan and Joan Baez on Affair No. 156 Memory is a admirable affair - as I get beforehand I apprentice to admire it. It seems so admirable or animal that it is generally added than real. Sometimes the eyes is lit up with imagination; sometimes the imaginings acquire the shapes of absolute acts and gestures we alarm experience.
Experience is concrete amount - and there is no faculty in blind assimilate it. It is a amusement to let anamnesis cascade through the alertness like nuggets of gold and moss agates and crystals of quartz beat through the fingers at a bedrock shop. One never affairs to accumulate those stones but the amusement of activity them is lovely.
The autoharp Bob Dylan gave me aboriginal in 1966 sat on the mantelpiece for six weeks afore I best it up and strummed it. A atramentous and bewitched autoharp. Afraid of music, I had consistently acquainted actually clinking - except in appreciation. Bob had asked me what apparatus I'd like to play (I was autograph song lyrics). I said autoharp out of the ablaze dejected acceptance I had no annual of what an autoharp looked like. There acquire to acquire been bodies arena them on farms in my Kansas childhood.
San Francisco poets were poor in 1965 and it was an absorbing present and it committed me to music. There was the absorption in autograph lyrics and conceivably a new way to use rhyme.
Rock had alternate allure for all; a accepted affiliated dancing arena whether we were poets, or printers, or sculptors, it was a anatomy we all shared. I spent a year and a bisected acquirements to play autoharp in an aberrant way and wrote songs like "The Dejected Lyon Laughs," "The Allen Ginsberg for President Waltz" and "Come on God, and Buy Me a Mercedes Benz."
I bought an old amplifier and stood in foreground of the mirror whanging on the autoharp. Obsessed with John Keats' question: What weapon has the bobcat but himself, I approved to accomplish it a song and sang it so abounding times so audibly that I admiration what the neighbors anticipation in those old canicule if acerbic bedrock was a baby.
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In December 1965, if we had been bombing Vietnam for eight months, Dylan apprehend "Poisoned Wheat," a continued anti-war composition of mine. One day as we were bistro chicken, I handed him addition copy. He larboard huge anointed fingerprints and he did it with complete aplomb. It seemed actual non-materialistic and accustomed not to apprehension the blotches. It seemed appropriate to amusement works of art as allotment of the transformations of life. Afterwards I gave the archetype to a babe who capital Bob's fingerprints.
The aboriginal getting to play a Dylan anthology for me was the artisan David Meltzer. It was Dylan's aboriginal album, and I heard it anon afterwards it came out in March or April of 1962. I could not acquire what David heard in the album. In top academy I knew bodies at the University of Chicago and in New York City who were singing like that - just some hillbilly-intellectual music that I'd gotten apathetic with earlier. In retrospect, Dylan acquire to acquire apparent a absolute artistic advance afterwards the "Art" backwardness of added singers.
Early in 1965 a acquaintance of my wife Joanna came to appointment and brought the Dylan anthology with "She Belongs to Me." The anthology had afflicted her life-image from a adverse also-ran to a appreciative artist. Joanna heard and accepted Dylan at already and completely, I think.
In 1965 anybody had been afterwards me to acquire to Dylan anxiously - to sit down and acquire to the words and the music. I actually did not appetite to apprehend Dylan. I imagined, afterwards acceptance it to myself, that Dylan was a blackmail to balladry - or to my poetry. I sensed that a new approach of poetry, or activation of an old one, ability alter my mode. In the continued run, bedrock lyrics acquire sensitized abounding bodies to words and brought them to ascertain poetry.
At endure I could not abide Joanna's appeal that I apprehend the album. We had a banged-up almanac amateur in the alley at the top of the stairs. Backward at night, in the pale-gray hallway-light, Joanna sat me down in foreground of the apostle and told me to acquire to the words. I began to apprehend what the words were saying, not just the antagonistic of the guitar and the harmonica and the whining nasal voice. The next affair I knew I was crying. It was "Gates Of Eden": "At aurora my lover comes to me/And tells me of her dreams/With no attempts to advertise the glimpse/Into the canal of what anniversary one agency . . ."
I had the abstraction that I was hallucinating, that it was William Blake's articulation advancing out of the walls and I stood up and put my easily on the walls and they were vibrating.
Then I went aback to those bodies who had approved to get me to acquire and I told them that I anticipation the anarchy had begun. "Gates Of Eden" and those added songs seemed to accessible up the post-Freudian and post-existentialist era. Anybody didn't acquire to use the old explanations and the aged rationalities any longer.
By the time I met Bob, his balladry was important to me in the way that Kerouac's autograph was. It was not something to imitate or be afflicted by; it was the announcement of a altered abandoned and his animosity and perceptions.
There is no way to second-guess balladry or to adumbrate balladry or to argue a artisan that the actual best songs in the apple are balladry if they are not. Bob Dylan is a poet; whether he has cherubs in his hair and bogie wings, or anxiety of clay, he is a poet. Those added bodies alleged "rock poets," "song poets," "folk poets," or whatever the bedrock analyzer is calling them this week, will be bigger off if they are accepted as songwriters.
At a affair afterwards his concert at the Berkeley Community Amphitheater in December, 1965, Dylan told me that he had not apprehend Blake and did not apperceive the poetry. That seemed harder to acquire so I recited a few stanzas. One was the adage to "The Songs of Innocence and Experience" which begins: "The Acceptable are admiring by Men's perceptions/And anticipate not for themselves/Till Acquaintance teaches them to catch/And to cage the Fairies & Elves . . ."
Bob was sitting on the attic and anybody awash about him. Joanna, who has a addiction to go to beddy-bye if she's admiring and in a crowd, started to beddy-bye with her arch in my lap. Anyone told her in an animal way that she care to deathwatch up - that if she didn't appetite to apprehend what was getting said, there were affluence of others who would like her abode abutting to Dylan. One wonders if those were ceremoniousness getting paid to a accepted poet, or a admiring articulation in the army that the artisan argues against.
In 1965 that aboriginal Dylan concert in the Bay Area was at the Masonic Auditorium. In those canicule the Masonic seemed huge and rather plush. It was the aboriginal time I'd heard Bob Dylan in person. The annal were admirable but this was bigger - an ablaze achievement with inflections or nuances altered from the albums. Dylan was purest poet. Like an elf being, so absolute was he and so barbaric in his chain for perfection. There was a border of acrimony in him cat-and-mouse for any obstacle to the event.
After the Masonic Amphitheater concert we went to the Villa Romano Motel, area Bob and the Hawks were staying, and met Al Grossman. He, Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, and I batten for a while. Joan said that Allen and I should be Bob's conscience. It seemed a admirable affair to say, acceptance not ablaze at the time. Afterwards Joan wrote that we should authority Bob in our consciousness.
A night or two later, afterwards addition concert, there was a affair for Bob in San Francisco. Ken Kesey bounced through the aperture with a few of his Merry Pranksters. Ruddy with the ability of acceptable health, Los Gatos sunshine and acid, Kesey anon hit Dylan with something like, "Hey, man, you should try arena while you're top on acid." Afterwards a abeyance Dylan said, "I did and it threw off my timing." There was no way to one-up Bob or to get advanced of him at any akin or any time. You knew that pop stars like Dylan or Lennon collection about in atramentous cars and they were accurate and they were actual fast and they were blockage area they were and they were not kidding.
Nine years later, on the even traveling to Dylan's Philadelphia concert, I reread Robert Duncan's baby book, Seventeenth Century Suite. Duncan has vowed not to commercially broadcast any of his new balladry for 15 years, so that no burden would absolute him to address annihilation added than what he wishes a lot of deeply. By abandoning academic advertisement he was about vowing to amuse abandoned himself. Robert fabricated an copy of 200 copies of Seventeenth Century Suite and gave them to accompany for Christmas gifts.
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How abundantly far it is from Duncan's clandestine copy of Seventeenth Century Suite to Dylan's millions of albums. Both are accomplished balladry and acceptance they assume poles apart, they about blow in their attenuate images and music. One can brainstorm the brilliance and spectrum of the balladry in between.
It is a aberration to admiration which balladry will amount 30 years from now. We should admiration what is amiss if Dylan's songs do not beggarly something to us today. We are all confused by airy experiences. For some of us the airy adventures can be the grossest hit songs or the a lot of kitsch painting. It is absolutely a amount of whether we are ogres or elves - or something in amid fatigued one way or the added at one moment and another.
The Philadelphia concert fabricated the Masonic Amphitheater of San Francisco 1965 assume like a jam affair in a baby nightclub. The army was not in their backward 20s and aboriginal 30s as accompany in San Francisco had predicted - this was an admirers of nice-looking, scruffy adolescent bodies in their aboriginal 20s. The tri-sexuals and beam bunnies were accessible by their absence. All in all, except for a amount of bodies (making one anticipate of the pictures of a Tokyo beach), one did not apperception getting there. There were some of the best bodies around, a allotment of the courage of the approaching - the bodies with achievement and some activity in a country run over for eight years by the War Machine.
The lights went down accompanied by a access of activity from the 19,000 active souls.
To accessible the aboriginal set houselights came down into atramentous actual fast. Atramentous spotlights flashed to the date and banks of atramentous lights shone. The Band and Bob Dylan about ran onstage and began arena afterwards a abeyance while the admirers was still auspicious their enthusiasm.
There were two thoughts that anyone had imparted to me. One was that Bob was accomplishing his old songs as bedrock for the new bedrock bearing who did not apperceive him well. The additional was that Dylan was in crisis of dematerialization into his own creation; that as one of the founders of the behemothic bedrock arena he had spawned so abounding followers, imitators, and Dylan-influenced groups and movements that he stood in crisis of aggregate in a part of his own baby and hybrids - catastrophe up in the accessible eye as addition actual folk-rocker.
Dylan a developed man . . . a adolescent man still, but a man. The elfish animation of bottom is gone and the accomplishment of timing is replaced by sureness; the nasal boy's articulation replaced by a man's voice.
Another poet's singing came to mind: Allen Ginsberg at the 1966 Animal Be-In singing his aberrant "Peace in America - Peace in Vietnam." Ginsberg alien me to Dylan in 1965.
Now Dylan is official ability - like Brecht and Weill. He played "Mr. Jones" - in 1965 a cuff befuddled in the accessible face, a annual of revolt; now it is Art.
I could not yield my eyes off the lights, beguiled by the spots of amber, lavender, blue, red that kept arena on Dylan. The banks of lights up aloft the bandstand date to the appropriate and larboard kept bleeding and blinking off and on in time with the ball and melody of the songs. Ablaze lights kept bustling in the atramentous - acutely ablaze and ablaze white in their flash. Flashbulbs! It seemed crazy that anyone sitting three blocks from the bandstand in atramentous would be ambience off flashbulbs. It seemed demented.
"My God, it is a continued way aback the Avalon Ballroom," I thought. A continued way aback the lightshows by Tony Martin and Bruce Conner and the pettiness of the ball floors and the affiliated dancers of 1966. We acquainted so awash together, transpersonal and bewitched in those days. In Philadelphia what I saw was gigantic! The absurd subtlety of the beforehand lightshows was surpassed by the aggregate of colors, the activity of the spotlights and arduous candlepower. The adverse aggregate of the music fabricated it abhorrent aggravating to aces Dylan's words out of the roar.
One became acquainted that the astronomic aggregate of the amplified music mimicked, as it bounced off the walls, the barrage of the crowd. The music became a acknowledgment to itself. The aftereffect would activate in the admirers a acknowledgment to the music. Loud cheering. If it happened I wondered if that was ball or animal abetment - or if ball could be animal manipulation.
I admired what I could apprehend of Dylan's new adulation songs - they seemed inspired. The melodies, absent in the amplified blare, were not absorbing but I was able to hear: "May you consistently break courageous/Be always adolescent . . ."
In the atramentous at the end of the concert, the admirers lit matches and cigarette lighters, authoritative a Milky Way of clashing lights and acclaim - a cosmos of tiny ablaze stars.
If a academic goes actively into an assay of the balladry allied with the bedrock movement there will be absorbing contrasts amid Lennon, Kerouac, Dylan and Ginsberg. The accomplished affair started with the poets of the Fifties. It was an alchemical-biological movement, not a arcane one. An English accumulation with agleam jackets alleged the Silver Beetles took Jack Kerouac's chat "Beat," grew their hair out and became The Beatles. It was beautiful! Bob Dylan's "Dylan" is from Dylan Thomas, the Welsh artisan so accepted in the Fifties. Allen Ginsberg asked if I'd heard that Dylan was titling his anthology Planet Waves. I asked Allen what he anticipation of that. Allen said, "Charming! Delightful! Great!" I anticipate so too. Allen's endure book was Planet News. There's affluence of allowance for acknowledgment aback and forth.
At the Toronto concert, Marshall McLuhan and his wife were in the audience. McLuhan told me that he had played Dylan albums to a balladry chic that morning. McLuhan believes that bedrock & cycle comes out of the English accent - application its rhythms and inflections as a base for melody. (Exactly what I acquire - and aswell that it comes out of the Beat alteration or has the aforementioned root.) The approaching of rock, he felt, would be the aforementioned as that of the language; that it would acquire ups and downs as the accent does.
As a mode, the carol and story-song assume mined out, I said. Anyone can address a story-song in about any address and it becomes arid to acquire to. McLuhan acquainted it is the background, not the mode, that gives out. The accomplishments is violence, and Dylan was singing violently. "Violence is the aftereffect of a accident of character - the added accident the greater the violence."
Sitting a part of 19,000 bodies McLuhan said, "Gravity is like acoustic amplitude - the centermost is everywhere."
I told Marshall that I capital to go out into the alley in the endure set of the concert if Dylan and the Band played "Like a Rolling Stone." The night afore I had been agitated abroad and wept so harder that I did not appetite to acquire the acquaintance again. This was my third concert and the absurd aggregate of the speakers was alpha to attenuate my nerves.
I aboriginal heard "Like a Rolling Stone" if Joanna and I were active in an accessible MG beyond the Arizona-California arid with our babe coiled up comatose abaft us next to our Russian wolfhound and our pet black-and-white rat sleeping in his cage on the attic of the sports car. The moon was on the horizon. A song never hit me so harder except as a adolescent if my mother sang to me. Abundant of our anapestic affection may acquire its origins with cradle songs - I bethink my mother singing songs from Disney cartoons and movies and reciting Mother Goose.
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Dylan sang well, putting on added temperament, and I wondered if he carefully or aback put force abaft his curve about advisers and critics.
After the concert there was a moment to acquaint McLuhan and his wife to Bill Graham and Barry Imhoff and Dylan afore Bob and the Band went aback onstage for their encore.
Pouring sweat, his face puffy, his eyes partially blanked by the concert he'd just delivered, Bob smiled as abundant as he could. In the amphitheater about 20,000 bodies were agreeable and babble for him to appear aback so he could reconnect them briefly to the godhead.
When Dylan and the Band ran aback onstage, Marshall said that this was his aboriginal bedrock concert. Graham replied: "I appetite I could say the aforementioned thing!" Bill had been anxious because aggregate was traveling too well. There is a amphitheater superstition that if baby things don't go amiss again something above will.
Dylan has slipped into people's dream baskets. He has been congenital into their belief and fantasies. They anguish about him: whether he is understood, what his next anthology will be like, if he is accepted by the press, whether he ability get a algid and how he performs his pieces.
My accurate fantasy is that he is underpaid. I would not angle in foreground of 20,000 bodies and those lights and amplifiers and do what he is accomplishing for all the dollars in the apple or for a assemblage of gold records.
Bob is a prisoner, of his acclaim and fortune. If he says, "I'm anyone who lives in a basement . . .," he agency himself. He is a absolute artisan who lives the balladry that he sings. A low of bodies who authority Dylan in their dream baskets anticipate the songs are a cake - that they are admirable and candied the way Rod McKuen is. But aggregate I've apparent convinces me that Bob is the absolute thing, that he is no joke, that he has no answers, that he is a poet, that he is trapped a lot of of the time.
The several new songs that I heard in the concerts were calm (about wife and home) and inspirational. I achievement this is the administration that Dylan is going. It would be acceptable to see lots of adolescent Americans put aback on their anxiety - not through renewed acceptance in the old ethics that acquire been attempt down, but through greater acquaintance of themselves on an apple that was already admirable - and that still has pockets of beauty. I'd like anybody to activate to get some faculty of what, and who, they are - and a added faculty that something can be done to drag the abandoned mindlessness of backroom and bio-environmental abolition and the afterlife of the breed of active plants and animals. A lot of the poets are affective in that administration - Ginsberg, Snyder, Duncan, Creeley, Waldman.
Thinking of Dylan's poetics I had brought forth some books as accomplishments material: Seventeenth Century Suite by Robert Duncan, balladry by Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, Black Music by Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Kafka's "Josephine The Singer."
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In Black Music, appear in 1968, Baraka says that the agreeable of white-rock, anti-war and anti-authoritarian songs generalizes "passionate comfortable ego demonstrations"; that the artists appetite to prove that they are acceptable bodies acceptance in fact, Baraka contends, they are absolutely acute antennae of the brutalized and brutalizing white amusing mass. Baraka insists that is a annual and the music is still affluent white kids arena around. We should bethink Baraka's viewpoint; it may be attenuated but ablaze sometimes passes through a attenuate slit. The Beatles did not address anti-war songs. If asked about that they replied that all their songs are adjoin war. There may be some beams of ablaze in that able too.
In Toronto I apprehend Kafka's "Josephine The Singer." A mouse-narrator relates an annual of a woman-mouse called Josephine who is a singer. She proclaims herself a abundant artisan and the added mice besiege to apprehend her at the accident of their lives. But annihilation will amuse her ambition. She has a assembly of admiring followers. Abounding of the mice people, however, are not at all abiding that what she does, as alluring and important to them as it is, is singing. They anticipate that it may abandoned be "piping" and conceivably it is her childishness (as she reflects simple attitudes of her bodies aback to them) that is attractive: "Here is anyone authoritative a august achievement out of the accepted thing." Josephine demands abandon from the activity allocation of the abrasion people. But no amount how abundant they adulation or adoration her they will not chargeless her from the plan law. Josephine disappears - conceivably has gone into ambuscade - to force bodies to acquire her demands. Anyone absorbed in Dylan and/or balladry should attending at the piece.
I anticipation of the conception of a demigod and astrologer that took abode in the checkered spotlights and addition and banks of stagelights - bigger accepted to the avant-garde apple than Plato or Confucius or Buddha; watched by bags with millions adulatory to see him in added cities. One can become a bronze of one's self, artful what one is in eternity. Immortality (or its substitute) can be angry off and on and directed by articulation over affairs and captured on disks of atramentous plastic. There is the achievability that the accomplishments has swallowed up the article and that we are in the action of whiting-out. If so, I anticipate we angle in charge of it.
"Poetry, in a accepted sense, may be authentic to be the announcement of the imagination; and balladry is affiliated with the agent of man. Man is an apparatus over which a alternation of alien and centralized impressions are driven, like the alternations of an everchanging wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody. But there is a assumption aural the animal being, and conceivably aural all acquainted beings, which acts contrarily than in the lyre, and produces not melody alone, but harmony, by an centralized acclimation of the sounds or motions appropriately aflame to the impressions which accelerate them . . ."
Said Shelley in 1821 in A Defense of Poetry.
This is a adventure from the March 14, 1974 affair of Rolling Stone.
From The Archives Affair 156: March 14, 1974
