7
The time can’t be found t fit/all the things that I want t do.
—Bob Dylan, 1963
One immediate consequence of Svedburg’s provocative open letter was that Dylan returned to Columbia’s New York studios on the final day of October to record a direct response. The epitaph-in-song he’d written was based on a traditional Irish drinking song called ‘The Parting Glass.’ Originally called ‘Bob Dylan’s Restless Epitaph,’ and with the above two-line introduction, it suggested that, at the age of twenty-two, Dylan already felt time was not on his side. ‘Restless Farewell’ gave fair warning that he was no longer content to remain the Woody Guthrie of his generation.
Dylan may even have envisaged a restless farewell to song. In the next three months, he would write a profusion of other ‘epitaphs’ (eleven of which would appear on the back cover, and as a special insert, to his third album) but none of them carried melodies, original or appropriated. The only new song that he appears to have recorded during this period was a publishers’ demo (possibly written earlier) of the ironic ‘Guess I’m Doing Fine,’ in which he halfheartedly seeks to convince himself that he should count his blessings.
That ‘Restless Farewell,’ a first-person plea for understanding, was scheduled to close out an album of third-person topical songs was doubly ironic. It would be 1971 before Dylan would write another finger-pointer. Unfortunately, with his third album barely recorded, he had little choice but to present the persona he had seemed so determined to defend four months earlier as the current Bob Dylan. It was an identity he was increasingly uncomfortable with, especially after the chilling assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas three weeks after he completed his album. Dylan later told Anthony Scaduto that he played a show in upstate New York the day after the assassination and he began, as always, with ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’,’ ‘That song was just too much for the day after the assassination … I couldn’t understand … why I wrote that song, even.’ With the song not even commercially released, it had already been superseded by events. Perhaps writing for the moment was consigning his art to the moment.
With his responsibilities to Columbia completed for another year, Dylan withdrew from public gaze for three weeks at the end of October. He stayed at Grossman’s upstate retreat, hung out with Terri and Dave Van Ronk and Barry Kornfeld, and wrote a lot of poetry. He had come to feel he could best express the thoughts still knotting up his mind if he did not have to deal with the restrictions that song imposed. Already, he was looking for a way to step out of the traditional forms that had, so far, framed his songs. Already, he knew that his third album had been treading the same troubled waters as its predecessor. On the day he set about recording his next album, he discussed the constrictions the song form imposed with the trustworthy Nat Hentoff.
Bob Dylan: It’s hard being free in a song—getting it all in. Songs are so confining. Woody Guthrie told me once that songs don’t have to do anything like that. But it’s not true. A song has to have some kind of form to fit into the music. You can bend the words and the meter, but it still has to fit somehow. I’ve been getting freer in the songs I write, but I still feel confined. That’s why I write a lot of poetry, if that’s the word. Poetry can make its own form. [1964]
Dylan enjoyed writing the occasional free-form piece and, like Woody, he used an innate rhythmic sense as a substitute for rhyme. The talking blues had in many ways been his first attempts at free poetry. Indeed he had penned a talking blues on the page for Izzy Young back in March 1962. ‘Talkin’ Folklore Center’ and ‘Go ’Way Bomb,’ another piece for the page given to Young, seem to have been his two earliest attempts at the freestanding word. By the following April, when he presented two rambling poems to the audience at his Town Hall show, he had hit upon a style that suited him. The bio-poem ‘My Life in a Stolen Moment’ was included in the Town Hall concert program, while ‘Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie’ was performed as an encore at the show, the only known example of Dylan actually reading his poetry aloud. He sounds mighty nervous, and it is not surprising that the experiment was never attempted again.
‘My Life in a Stolen Moment,’ regularly reprinted in concert programs and bookleg productions prior to the Writings & Drawings collection, is a surprisingly straightforward account of his past. Though embroidered to include the myth of running away as a child, and taking the typically anti-intellectual stance of attending university ‘on a phoney scholarship that I never had,’ most of the poem rings true, save most obviously for an outrageous travelogue where young Bobby, between Minneapolis and New York, manages to take in Texas, California, Oregon, Washington, New Mexico, and Louisiana. He refers to learning to play guitar, to sing, and to write, ‘but I never ever did take the time to find out why.’ ‘My Life in a Stolen Moment’ was the start of a yearlong flirtation with a form of rambling proetry. In that time he willingly contributed to concert programs, album sleeves—his own and friends’—even to magazines published by friends.
Bob Dylan: I used to get scared that I wouldn’t be around much longer, so I’d write my poems down on anything I could find—the backs of my albums, the backs of Joan’s albums, anywhere I could find. [1965]
He also wrote and rewrote sections of some prototypical biography along similar lines, a series of ‘Incidents in a Stolen Moment.’ In a memorable statement to Studs Terkel on his Chicago radio show, a couple of weeks after the Town Hall concert, Dylan suggested that he had already begun to apply himself seriously to the task:
Bob Dylan: It’s about my first week in New York … It’s about somebody who has come to the end of one road, knows there’s another road there but doesn’t exactly know where it is, and knows he can’t go back on this one road … It’s got all kinds of … thoughts in my head … I’d never been to New York before, and I’m still carrying these memories with me. So I decided to write it all down. [1963]
That the process was ongoing is seemingly confirmed by what appears to be a two-page excerpt from the same ‘autobiography’ among the so-called Margolis & Moss manuscripts, acquired by Graham Nash in 1989 but dating from the fall of 1963. The 120-line typescript takes the form of college recollections, specifically about the 1959 Christmas vacation, which he wanted to spend with Judy Rubin. It is a surprisingly frank account of remembered feelings:
I love judy. judy says she loves me but she also says she’s busy. I told her I love her … I hate her cause I sense [sic] she don’t love me … I wish I didn’t love her I wish she’d invite me for christmas for christ’s sake.
The poem ends with Dylan phoning Judy, losing his cool, insulting her, and having her hang up on him. He admits that ‘girls have hung up on me an have hung me up as far back as I remember … each one promises t be the last.’ As a coda to his musings upon that Christmas, he unleashes one of many tirades directed at those willing to go through with the indignities attendant upon a college education:
what I saw connected with the fraternity house summed up the whole established world … underpants … cats standin in underpants being inspected by others with serious looks in their eyes … jive wide smiles in hairy sweaters … what the fuck thats got t do with learnin I never will know … never hope to either.
This particular rant coincides with Dylan’s description to Terkel of the kind of ‘thoughts’ he wanted his autobiography to contain:
Bob Dylan: All about teachers and school and all about hitchhikers around the country … college kids going to college it’s got and these are all people that I knew every one of them’s sort of a symbol for all kinds of people. [1963]
The autobiographical ‘excerpt’ is part of a sheaf of papers that date from the weeks following President Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963. As Dylan was struggling to find ways of expressing his many frustrations, he was working on the eleven poems that would later form the sleeve notes to his third album. These ‘Eleven Outlined Epitaphs’ would require an insert with the album, such was the stream of free-form proetry flowing from his pen at this point.
In Epitaph Two, Dylan again recalls his youth in Hibbing, clearly something he was coming to terms with in the wake of Newsweek’s public disrobing of his past, for the benefit of ‘unknowin eyes.’ In Epitaph Four he is questioning Jim (presumably Jim Forman of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee) about the validity of party politics. In Epitaph Six he ponders how and why Woody Guthrie was his last idol. Epitaph Eight is the confession of a self-acknowledged plagiarist: ‘Yes, I am a thief of thoughts/not, I pray, a stealer of souls.’ Epitaph Nine is a further attack upon Svedburg and her ilk, debunking the journalistic exposé by pointing out that he exposes himself ‘every time I step out on stage.’
The final two epitaphs seem more conciliatory variants on ‘Bob Dylan’s Restless Epitaph,’ expositions indeed on that song. Here, as there, he seeks to recall the wrongs he may have committed, the causes fought, and the battles lost. Three albums into his career, Dylan was already trying to relive hard times. In the tenth epitaph he muses on whether the cockroaches ‘still crawl’ around Dave and Terri Van Ronk’s apartment. Not that his autobiographical musings at this time were restricted to his outlined epitaphs or unpublished bio-poems. Sleeve notes that he wrote for Peter, Paul and Mary’s second album recollected his first New York winter: ‘Snow was piled up the stairs an onto the street that/first winter when I laid around New York City/it was a different street then.’
A couple of months earlier he had composed the most ambitious of his bio-poems for another album sleeve. Presumably written in September, when he was staying with Joan Baez in Carmel, the poem appeared in October on the rear of her In Concert 2 album. It starts in Hibbing, with a young Zimmerman crouching on the grass, watching the trains roll by. Passing through a time when his adopted idols were role models—choosing his idols ‘t be my voice an tell my tale’—he finally transcends them (‘I learned that they were only men/An had reasons for their deeds’). He begins to define his own terms, like beauty—‘the only beauty’s ugly, man’—before learning to recognize beauty in all forms, pure and impure. The coda, in which he realizes that the pure Baez caterwaul might somehow be ‘beautiful,’ reads like an ill-conceived tag to an otherwise powerful piece of poetry.
Dylan’s ‘Poem to Joannie’ proved that his free-form poems could move to their own rhythm. It gave him new confidence in his free verse as he began to utilize even freer forms in prose-poem letters to friends. Baez has also suggested that much of the material he wrote for his book at her house, but never reclaimed, was equally biographical:
Joan Baez: He wrote some beautiful things about running up to his own house and trying to get in … Something about his mother behind the screen door, and he was jumping up—he had to pee … He never edited anything. He couldn’t bear to take anything out of the sentence he’d written.
But Circumstance proved it still had the power to twist Dylan’s visions. As John F. Kennedy got caught in the crossfire of someone else’s cause, he was given the same crash course in Realpolitik as the rest of America. He later insisted, ‘If I was more sensitive about [the J.F.K. assassination] … I would have written a song about it,’ as if his post-assassination self couldn’t admit to buying into Kennedy’s dreamscape in the first place, but at least one eyewitness well remembers sitting with Dylan at Carla Rotolo’s apartment the day of the shooting, and the impact it had on someone who had sung out loud at the March on Washington, less than three months earlier:
Bob Fass: We spent some time together the night Kennedy was shot … It affected him very deeply … He said, ‘What it means is that they are trying to tell you “Don’t even hope to change things.” If you try to put yourself up against the forces of death, the military, forget about it, you’re done for.’
Dylan was being disingenuous when he told his first biographer that Kennedy’s death didn’t directly inspire any songs. This was because he had temporarily departed from his chosen path. On the other hand, the Margolis & Moss manuscripts include several unfinished poems about the assassination, clearly written as an immediate response to the events in Dallas. In one he admits ‘it is useless t’ recall the day once more.’ In another, he uses one image repeatedly to rail against the bullets and assassin/s: ‘there is no right or left there is only up an down.’
Three weeks, to the day, after they shot J.F.K. down, Dylan was stumbling to express the same feeling to a couple of hundred well-to-do liberals, using the same idea to inform them, ‘There’s no black and white, left and right to me anymore; there’s only up and down.’ This time he admitted, ‘And down is very close to the ground.’ Rather than empathizing with Dylan’s sense of dislocation, the suit-and-tie brigade that was his audience that night began to boo.
The occasion was a dinner at the Hotel Americana in New York, at which Dylan was due to receive the annual Tom Paine award for his contribution to the civil rights struggle, given by the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. The dinner proved to be a total fiasco. Dylan was a poor choice as recipient of such an award, unschooled as he was in the art of public speaking, and a chronically nervous performer at the best of times. Surrounded by middle-aged liberals beneficently donating money for ‘the cause’, he was immediately uptight and began drinking heavily. According to Edith Tiger, when it came his turn to speak, she found him vomiting in the men’s toilet. Led to the high table, he announced, ‘I haven’t got any guitar—I can talk though.’ His subsequent speech proved otherwise. Proclaiming that this was a ‘young man’s world,’ he then confessed that he saw something of himself in Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy’s alleged assassin. Since the dinner was primarily a fund-raiser for the ECLC, his ill-considered speech cost the committee a considerable amount of money.
Afterwards he penned an open letter, ‘A Message to the ECLC,’ in which he set out with the intention of apologizing for his actions, but ended up doing anything but. Forced to speak publicly, he wrote the ECLC, ‘I tore everything loose from my mind/an said “just be honest, dylan, just be honest.”’ He defended his comments concerning Oswald, insistent that he was ‘speaking of the times.’ In conclusion, he stated that he was no speaker, and that, in future, he should confine himself to speaking out in song:
I am a writer an a singer of the words I write/I am no speaker nor any politician/an my songs speak for me because I write them/in the confinement of my own mind an have t cope/with no one except my own self.
In less than six months he had turned full circle from the protest singer who baited Paul Nelson into someone determined to write only songs that ‘speak for me.’ He had been guilty in the recent past of doing no such thing. The ECLC dinner taught Dylan to let the songs do the singing, and leave the talking to speakers and politicians. When, a couple of months later, he finally made his national TV debut on The Steve Allen Show, and was asked about ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,’ he both ducked the question and summarized his position for many years to come by informing Allen, ‘If I talked about it, I could talk about it for a very long time; if I sing about it, it would only take as long as the song lasts.’
Dylan’s ambitions as a writer for the page, rather than as ‘a singer of the words I write,’ were further fed at the end of December when he met renowned beat poet Allen Ginsberg, author of Howl and Kaddish. Dylan had first been introduced to Ginsberg’s writings back in Minneapolis. Along with the French symbolists, the beats were a primary influence on his development as a songwriter, as he passed from immediate folk sources to a polychrome of literary styles.
Bob Dylan: I didn’t start writing poetry until I was out of high school. I was eighteen or so when I discovered Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Phillip Whalen, Frank O’Hara and those guys. Then I went back and started reading the French guys, Rimbaud and François Villon. [1985]
The meeting had been brokered by New York Post journalist Al Aronowitz, who made a habit of introducing leading lights to one another, enjoying the frisson of the moment. Aronowitz was an old friend of Kerouac and Ginsberg, and was more interested in hanging out with Dylan than writing about him, which suited Dylan. They would become friends, though largely on Dylan’s terms, in the coming year.
Al Aronowitz: I courted his friendship until it got to a point where it was more important to me to be friends with him than to write about him … You write about someone, and they don’t like it when you start really telling the truth.
Ginsberg had only recently returned to New York, and was intrigued to meet the author of ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ and ‘Masters of War.’ Though they discussed poetry, Ginsberg perhaps had other things on his mind.
Al Aronowitz: Allen was really a flaming queer. He came on to everyone I introduced him to—and he came on hard [to Dylan].
Despite his enduring desire to sleep with Bob, Ginsberg turned down Dylan’s offer to fly with him to Chicago, where he was due to play the following night, because, in his own words, he was ‘afraid I might become his slave or something, his mascot.’ The Chicago date was another rung up the ladder, from the Bear Pit to the Orchestra Hall, as Dylan continued to play-act the man depicted on The Times They Are A-Changin’.
In private, though, it was the prospect of publishing a book, or maybe staging a play, that now preoccupied him. Dylan makes references to both a novel and a play in a letter to Broadside at the beginning of January. The novel was frustrating him: ‘it dont even tell a story/it’s about a million scenes long/an takes place on a billion scraps/of paper.’ It would come to frustrate him a tad more. The play that Dylan was writing seemed to have taken him over, providing a new channel for his artistic energies:
an I’m up to my belly button in it./quite involved yes/I’ve discovered the power of playwritin means/as opposed t song writing means/altho both are equal, I’m wrapped in playwritin/for the minute.
The play that occupied Dylan at this point was probably the untitled, unfinished fifteen-page typescript that later emerged as part of the Margolis & Moss papers. The play concerns a number of characters with names like John B. Pimp, Mrs. Agnas McBroad, and Eeny Weeny, who meet in a combination church/barroom/hotel because they have been told they must do so or they will die; it shows that whatever power the play exerted over him, he himself had little control over the play. Little more than a series of portentous conversations, it defied resolution and, at some point, he seems to have moved on to another idea for a play. In May 1964 he informed Max Jones he was working on two plays, and a fragment of another appears among the Another Side manuscript material (of which more later). The idea, more than the realization, continued to intrigue him through the first half of 1964.
By the end of January, he was in Canada filming a half-hour TV special for the Canadian Broadcasting Company. While there, he talked to two Canadian journalists, informing both that he was working on a novel and a play, telling the journalist from Gargoyle magazine that the play would be finished before the novel, and that he wanted to see it performed. The novel as a project, though, would endure considerably longer than either play, even if it passed from quasi-autobiography to a more nebulous form of wordplay as contractual demands began to formalize. Dylan himself has liked to give the impression that he was cajoled into producing a book after the success of John Lennon’s two collections of whimsical prose and verse (In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works):
Bob Dylan: I was doing interviews before and after concerts, and reporters would say things like ‘What else do you write?’ And I would say, ‘Well I don’t write much of anything else.’ And they would say, ‘Oh, come on. You must write other things. Tell us something else. Do you write books?’ And I’d say, ‘Sure, I write books.’ After the publishers saw that I wrote books, they began to send me contracts … We took the biggest one, and then owed them a book. [1969]
In truth, it was Dylan who fancied himself to be an author of sorts, talking up the autobiographical novel to interviewers until he had not one but two contracts on which he was expected to deliver. If the book he had originally discussed with Studs Terkel in April 1963 had been no surreal voyage through language, but rather loosely historical, by the winter of 1964 the project had changed. In the fall of 1963, Dylan had met beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and discussed the possibility of producing a book for City Lights, publishers of poets. A City Lights book carried a certain prestige. However, by April 1964 he still had not forwarded any manuscript. Writing to Ferlinghetti about the ‘material’ he had accumulated, he betrayed the seeds of confusion that would leave his literary ambitions unrealized:
I do got things of songs an stories for you. my hangup is tho that I know there will be more. I want t send the more more then I want t send the got. yes I guess that’s it. [1964]
Meanwhile, he found himself contracted to produce a series of little vignettes to accompany a quite different book, a collection of photos of the ‘old Hollywood’ at its fin de siècle, taken by Barry Feinstein—husband of Mary Travers and the man responsible for the stark portrait of Dylan about to grace the Times They Are A-Changin’ cover—between 1958 and 1962, when he worked first for Columbia Pictures and then as a freelancer in Hollywood. Feinstein had already secured a contract with Macmillan when he approached Dylan to provide brief ‘commentaries.’ Dylan, having agreed to the task, discussed the book with Melody Maker’s Max Jones in London in May.
Bob Dylan: It’s just pictures and the words I’m going to write that [not so much] coincide with the photographer’s, but somehow fall into the same direction or mood. All the pictures were shot in Hollywood: shots of everything, a whole picture of Hollywood from the beautiful sign on the hill to Marlon Brando speaking while someone holds up a sign saying Nigger-Lover. [1964]
Whatever problems Dylan had conceptualizing his own book, he had no such problem with Feinstein’s, delivering his text with a minimum of fuss, only to find that the publishers were nervous about the controversial nature of some of its content: an image of the sign behind the bar at Barney’s Beanery reading ‘Fagots [sic] stay out’; of the exact bottle of pills that killed Marilyn Monroe, sitting empty on a table; and the photo Dylan described, of Brando on a CORE march, as a young punk walks alongside, carrying a banner saying, ‘Brando is a Nigger-Lovin’ Creep.’ In the end, Macmillan passed on the book and reverted the rights to the two parties. (The book was finally published in 2008.)
Where Macmillan editor Bob Markel comes into the picture is not clear. Macmillan was not in a position to demand the return of any monies and, anyway, it was essentially Feinstein’s book, not Dylan’s. However, at some point, Grossman decided to use the ‘in’ created at Macmillan to broach the subject of a Bob Dylan book. However much Dylan may have been enticed by having his name in City Lights, Grossman was not about to sign his boy up to such a small operation. Grossman managed to convince senior editor Bob Markel to sign Dylan up for an unspecified project. It was little more than an option on a future work, should there be one.
Bob Markel: I met Albert Grossman before I met Bob Dylan … Bob was just beginning to make an impression as a singer and writer. Albert explained to me that he thought Dylan was a very hot property who might want to do a book one day, and that if I were interested, we might be able to work out a contract for a book … We gave him an advance for an untitled book of writings … The publisher was taking a risk on a young, untested potential phenomenon. In time we’d figure out a book, but it was worth having a contract. He was uncertain what the book would be.
When Markel first met Dylan, Dylan was no nearer defining what his own book might be than when he had written to Ferlinghetti:
Bob Markel: Our first meeting took place in the great big marvelous old downtown Macmillan offices … When I spoke to Bob on the telephone he asked that the meeting take place after dark, as he felt he couldn’t travel in broad daylight. He was driving a motorcycle around New York in those days … There was no book at the time … The material at that point was hazy, sketchy. The poetry editor called it ‘inaccessible.’ The symbolism was not easily understood, but on the other hand it was earthy, filled with obscure but marvelous imagery … I felt it had a lot of value and was very different from Dylan’s output till then. [But] it was not a book.
It was to remain ‘not a book’ for some time. If the material at that point was ‘inaccessible,’ it was as nothing to what Dylan would eventually deliver. But then Dylan’s ‘obscure but marvelous imagery’ had not as yet become shot through with the stuff its author was ingesting. It remained like his other page-bound writings, little more than ‘thoughts in my head.’ Haphazard ideas from his free-form poetry, though, were beginning to feed back into his songs. At the beginning of February, for the first time on record, he had expressed disenchantment with the topical-song genre:
Bob Dylan: I used to write songs, like I’d say, ‘Yeah, what’s bad, pick out something bad, like segregation, okay here we go’ and I’d pick one of the thousand million little points I can pick and explode it, some of them which I didn’t know about. I wrote a song about Emmett Till, which in all honesty was a bullshit song … I realize now that my reasons and motives behind it were phoney. I didn’t have to write it. [1964]
Though his politically conscious audience may have hoped that this was the statement of someone seeking to transform the genre, he was already looking to transcend it. Though most of his free poetry was bound to stay on the page, a few lines here and there began to sing to Dylan. In particular, on one of the sheets in the Margolis & Moss papers, attached to a poem about his own response to the Kennedy assassination, was a six-line coda with a familiar ring to it:
the colors of friday were dull/as cathedral bells were gently burnin/strikin for the gentle/strikin for the kind/strikin for the crippled ones/an strikin for the blind.
This reads like a refrain. It is also the onset of a ‘chain of flashing images’ that, bound together, would form ‘Chimes of Freedom,’ and then lead on to ‘Mr. Tambourine Man,’ ‘Gates of Eden,’ and ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).’ There can be no real doubt which Friday’s colors were dull—Friday, November 22. So much for Dylan’s assertion that if he had been more sensitive to Kennedy’s assassination, he’d have written a song about it! With this sad refrain, Dylan would pass from topical troubadour to poet of the road. After all, he had been away from song too long.