I’m a child again when I was really miserable, a grope pizzicato …
FRANK O’HARA, ‘On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday’
I wanted other music, the kind I heard in passing from a car, through an open window, from behind the doors of older children’s rooms. In our last year without television and before we were each given a transistor radio, I started, as I had with books, with what was to hand. This was the late Sixties, a period my mother referred to as ‘the time your father tried to be swinging’. They had acquired a handful of pop records: Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline, Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, the Moody Blues’ In Search of the Lost Chord, and the soundtracks to West Side Story and Midnight Cowboy. I hadn’t seen these films and I had no idea who anyone was. I read the titles and listened to the lyrics as if deciphering hieroglyphics. To me, Bob Dylan was another form of music box or wind-up toy. There was a box gramophone in the corner of the living room and I would crouch over it, put on Nashville Skyline and close my eyes. If I could, I would have dug a foxhole in the floor or put up a tent.
I can’t remember my parents playing these records and it never occurred to me that they might do so after I had gone to bed. I assumed that they were my discovery and my secret. My parents had fetched up as medical students in Fifties London. She arrived from the Sorbonne, he from National Service. They married in 1958 and two years later, the first of their children was born. My father was starting out in general practice. When would they have time to listen to music? If you don’t hear this kind of music at the right time, can it ever make sense to you?
I knew all the words to Nashville Skyline long before I knew what they meant: LAY LAY DEE LAY, LAYER PONYA BIG BRA SPED … UNTILLA BRAKE ODAYEE … LEMMY CEEYER MAIKIM SERMIYUL. I was not interested in who Dylan was or even what he said but in how he said it. He had difficulty finding words and then couldn’t get them out straight. I imagined them swelling on his tongue and pushing each other out of shape.
‘Lay Lady Lay’ was, I thought, a song about delay (and I was right). I worked this out partly from the title, LAY LAY DELAY, but also from the feel of it, how Dylan injected delay into the lyrics. His delivery of the phrase ‘big brass bed’ stands rhythmically apart from what is going on around it which might be why, once I realised what the words were, the image came to stand out so. I wasn’t interested in the drama of the man asking a woman to spend the night with him. I was captivated by the emblematic vision of that huge, golden, shining, empty bed.
In the opening duet with Johnny Cash, ‘Girl from the North Country’, I recognised an echo of a song I knew, ‘Scarborough Fair’, yet this was not what I thought of as singing. Dylan and Cash were out there struggling through the snow, barely able to gather the strength to hit the note. Their fraying harmonies are the most moving thing on the record especially when they lift at the end, becoming freer and higher as they repeat the barely recognisable phrase: ‘True love of mine’.
On this album, Dylan is feeling out the big words in particular and letting them go only when the edges have been worn down. For years, I didn’t realise that these spasmodic moans were in fact ‘cruel’, ‘fool’, etc. The words falter, their connections fail in an awkward pause such as ‘she said she’d always … stay’ or an odd moment in which the word gets stuck. This left me with the feeling of not having quite caught whatever it was the man was throwing away.
What takes three minutes to play seemed to take ten minutes to listen to. It provoked emotions and suggested circumstances I couldn’t wait to experience – being trapped by regret or riveted by desire; trying to be offhand about passion or grown-up about loss; moving on or giving in. It was, for me, a rehearsal of feeling.
A woman who babysat for us remembered me at the age of eight, throwing myself back on a chaise-longue and declaring that what I wanted when I grew up was peace in my life. Listening to Nashville Skyline, I could be quiet at least: someone else was making my noise for me.