Zelma Frances Owen, spring 1917

In the spring of 1917, the Oak Park and River Forest High School in Oak Park, Illinois, published its annual Commencement Memory Book. Among the graduates that year were Ernest Miller Hemingway and Zelma Frances Owen. Hemingway’s copy of his high school commemorative book may or may not still survive, somewhere. Zelma Owen kept hers, though. It surfaced recently, and is now heading to a major private Hemingway collection in New York—for excellent reason.

Hem stares down the camera, center, back row of graduating seniors

Hemingway signed Owen’s book three times. Once, he initialed a drawing, with a jokey arrow pointing to the printed image of a prophet identifying it as himself, above a transcription—likely Owen’s—of the “Class Prophecy” he had composed. Ernest’s chosen iconography for his “Sources of Inspiration” are two smoldering pipes flanking a full beer stein, with a box of Velvet tobacco below.

Hemingway signed himself “Hemingstein” or “Hemingstien” elsewhere when he was at Oak Park; in his classmate Virginia Reil’s high school scrapbook, he added a little couplet to go along with a similar drawing of a frothy beaker: “I’ve never guzzled beer nor wine / And yet they call me Heming ‘stien.’” Hemingway and his friends at Oak Park all had nicknames for each other: Pickles, Bunny, Cohen, Mussy, Butch (an alternate nickname of Hemingway’s own).

The “Prophecy” itself is fascinating; Charles A. Fenton wrote about it in The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway: The Early Years (1954) and it was published in Hidden Hemingway: Inside the Ernest Hemingway Archives of Oak Park (2016). Writing with the setting of a wartime camp with a radio operator transcribing “the news as it comes from the front,” Hemingway’s predictions for his classmates include jobs traditional and novel, serious and humorous—with his picks for the young women far more interesting: girls as bandits and veterinarians, bellhops and butchers, and a temperance advocate; boys as film directors, restauranteurs, and novelists. His sister Marcelline, nicknamed Marc, is to become a “noted lady veterinarian” (who is also a terrible driver). Hemingway delivered the “Prophecy” during the Commencement Day festivities.

Class Day Speakers, Hem in the center

Hemingway was also a member of the swim, track, and football teams, though nowhere was he noted for his athletic play. He also founded a school Shotgun Club, of which his classmate and friend Morris Musselman (“Mussy,” later a writer and filmmaker) recalled, for the Oak Park Hemingway Archives and Hidden Hemingway, “It was all phony, of course. There was no club; there were no contests…Hemingway was the only one of who owned or ever had fired a shotgun.” Hemingway edited the school newspaper, The Trapeze, belonged to a debating club called The Burke Club, and participated in the school play in 1917. Caught up in amateur theatricals by his mother Grace since he was a boy, Hemingway was in the cast of Clyde Fitch’s Beau Brummell as playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. A surviving photograph in the Oak Park Archives shows an uncomfortable-looking Ernest in white stockings, a high stock, and very George Washington wig.

Zelma doesn’t mention another classmate who would become a well-known writer, Janet Lewis. Lewis wrote The Wife of Martin Guerre and was a poet as well as a novelist, and the wife of critic Yvor Winters. She does note Musselman’s propensity to comic writing and compliments his acting ability (he starred as Beau Brummell).

School motto, colors, and Class of ‘17 cheer

After he was graduated from high school in the spring of 1917, Hemingway headed into the world of journalism, and wrote for six months for the Kansas City Star. A year after graduation, at the age of 18, Hemingway went to Italy to serve as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross—since he was not old enough to enlist in the army. Just days before his 19th birthday in July, Hemingway rode his bicycle down to the trenches to hand out mail, chocolate, and cigarettes to Italian soldiers. While among the soldiers, he was severely wounded by an Austrian mortar shell that killed several men next to him, and spent three months in a Milan hospital. Hemingway never entirely recovered from his injuries, and the ongoing pain they caused him.

Zelma

Zelma Owen went to the University of Chicago and studied science. In 1925, she married a fellow scientist named Avery Adrian Morton, and they moved to Watertown, Massachusetts. Morton was a professor at MIT, and they had two daughters. Zelma died in 1972.

All images courtesy of and reproduced with the permission of Glenn Horowitz Bookseller

Pauline Boty, portrait by Lewis Morley

In its sale of Modern Art commencing March 21, 2023, Christie’s is auctioning three paintings by Pauline Boty. One should make headlines—and set new auction records—on its own. But three? Remarkable, for the art of a woman who is still far too little known, who died heartbreakingly young, and whose remaining complete paintings are fairly few.

Boty was born in 1938 into a Catholic family in Surrey, and knew from an early age that she wanted to be an artist in myriad media. Her collages, paintings, stained glass, and passion for architecture sparked interest in Boty and her arts while she was still a student, first at The Wimbledon School of Art and then at the Royal College of Art. By 1961 she was celebrated, along with a host of other artists mostly men, as one of the first and leading Pop Artists in England.

In 1962, she, Peter Blake, Peter Phillips, and Derek Boshier were featured in Ken Russell’s BBC documentary Pop Goes The Easel. She was also starring in new wave films. Through her lover the director and actor Phillip Saville, Boty met musicians and television performers as well. When a young Bob Dylan came to visit London for the first time at Christmas 1962, Boty was one of his guides around town, taking him to a party at her friend Jane Percival’s at which he “sat in the corner and played ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’”—John Hughes has persuasively and engagingly told this story.

Boty in two stills from Pop Goes The Easel

In 1963, director Kenneth Tynan introduced Boty to Clive Goodwin, artist, writer, actor and agent. She and Goodwin married less than two weeks later, and were expecting their first child in 1965 when Boty was diagnosed with cancer. Refusing the treatments that might have saved her life but killed her unborn baby, Boty gave birth to a daughter, Katy, in February 1966. Though Boty then began radiotherapy for her cancer, it was too late. She died that July at the age of 28.

Clive Goodwin died of a brain hemorrhage, while in the custody of the Los Angeles police and suspected of drunkenness, in 1977. Katy Goodwin, called Boty Goodwin after her mother’s death, died of a heroin overdose at the age of 29. For decades, much of Boty’s art languished in a barn on a family property. Her rediscovery in the 1990s, a rush of articles about her and her art, and recent sale prices of her paintings all seem to indicate that Pauline Boty is at last becoming as appreciated and notable in the art world as she should always have been.

Christie’s are selling two paintings from Boty’s estate, “Golden Nude” (pictured above) and “Nude On the Beach.” The third is a preparatory sketch of one of Boty’s best-known, and last, paintings: “BUM.” (1966). A gift from the artist to Kenneth Tynan, “BUM” sold at Christie’s in 2017 for £632,750. Since then, her finished paintings have doubled in value. “With Love to Jean-Paul Belmondo” sold at Sotheby’s last year for almost a million pounds. Expect the sketch for “BUM,” estimated at £60-80,000, and also from Tynan’s estate, to considerably exceed its estimate.

For more about the gifted, conscientious Pauline Boty, browse through this website, and read Sue Tate’s Pauline Boty: Artist and Woman.

All images of Boty’s art are via Christie’s.

Edie Sedgwick with one of her horses in New York City, August 1965, by Enzo Sellerio for Vogue

Italian-greyhound thin and tiny, with shapely long dancing legs in opaque black stockings. Thick black eyeliner, mascara, and dark shadow like Elizabeth Taylor’s in Cleopatra (1963). Brunette hair bleached atomic blonde, dyed silver for good measure. Striped pull marin Breton sailor’s shirts, long enough to tug down and wear as the micro miniskirts she favored and popularized. With her slight build, wide innocent dark eyes, and radiant smile, she looked more like a teenage girl than a young woman when she became a New York City sensation in early 1965, at the age of 21. Edith Minturn “Edie” Sedgwick, in her black-and-white public persona from 1965 to 1969, was rightly called “superstar.” Photographs of her with Andy Warhol—snuggled against him in a banquette, emerging from a manhole in a Manhattan street, in stills from the movies he compulsively filmed to showcase her—are the most iconic images of that slim wild slice of life that spattered and flashed like a sparkler at The Factory on East 47th Street. Edie was the it girl of that place and time, the most beautiful and the most wanted, the most objectified by the throngs of men around her, the New York doll. It seems sometimes, reading accounts of those days, and reviewing the photographs and movies, as if Edie simply materialized, walking into a crowded hot room one night, dressed that way, looking like that, while the Velvet Underground were playing. New York City brought her attention, celebrity, and pain—but never, ever forget that Edith Minturn Sedgwick was a California girl. A previously unknown cache of her original artwork celebrates what Edie loved most, and the roots to which she returned at what turned out to be the end of her life: the golden hills of home, and what she loved in them.

Edie was born on a spring day in April 1943 in Santa Barbara, California, and grew up on her family’s ranches in Santa Ynez—properties both vast, covering many thousands of acres, and crowded, for Edie was the seventh of right children of Francis and Alice Sedgwick. The lovely little girl was first put on a horse when she was a toddler, just over a year old, and became an expert rider while quite young. It was her freedom and passion, to saddle up her pony or not even bother with the saddle, just to catch a horse and head out into the land. Said her brother Jonathan, years later, “I always thought Edie wanted to escape on her horse, but she couldn’t get off the ranch. She was penned in. Usually it started with a battle with my father. She always felt that he would come and get her. So she could only run away on the ranch. She would just disappear into the mountains with her horse, Chub, and you never knew where she was. Then she’d come back mellowed out.”

Edie Sedgwick, figure study of horses

Edie similarly despised the constraining boarding schools to which she was sent, first in California and then back East; she developed eating disorders there, and was hospitalized at a Connecticut psychiatric hospital, at her father’s insistence, when she was nineteen. A year later, she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts and began studying art with her cousin Lily Swann Saarinen (by then divorced from her architect husband Eero). In November 1963, Edie’s mother Alice wrote to Lily, “This is really nice of you to take Edie on, as a pupil. It will be wonderful for her, in every respect. I am sending her portfolio of drawings, also some of her ceramic work, etc., which she ought to receive early next week. Within the limits of your convenience, I hope Edie will work regular hours & a regular number of hours, even on the days she does not have a lesson.”

Edie Sedgwick, white horse, similar to her sculptures done while Lily Saarinen’s student

 Edie’s art studies ended in early 1964. Her mother was hopeful that Edie would come home after another period of ill health, and partygoing with Harvard and Radcliffe students. Alice wrote to Lily that spring: “the best plan, in everyone’s opinion, is to get her to come west, with Jonathan, on May 28th. Then we can talk with her & make future plans, while she cannot help but change her night-into-day present pattern. She’s a superb horsewoman, she can help me with some newly trained colts…Indeed, we all seem to have our problems with our young & so have they within themselves!” It wasn’t to be. Having turned 21 in April 1964, and inherited at that point a legacy from her mother’s mother that gave her her own money, Edie moved to New York and began a modeling career. That July, Alice was encouraged by Edie’s having an interview with Mademoiselle, and thought it all right for her to stay in New York just a little longer: “She seems to have settled down, quite a bit, so we’ll just wait & see.” Three things then happened in swift order: Edie’s brothers Francis Jr. and Robert both died; and she met Andy Warhol.

In a series of audio interviews recorded in 1970, Sedgwick recalled the underside of her first glamorous days as a New York celebrity, in 1965: “I was kind of turned off for the time being, going out with men, because I was very upset that two of my brothers had committed suicide, two that I loved very much. It had kind of screwed up my head, so I just freaked out for awhile. Then I must say I liked the introduction to drugs I received. I was a good target for the scene, I blossomed into a healthy young drug addict. I can have a sense of humor about it now, but for a couple of years it wasn’t very funny.” She was the face and figure of wild youth in the city that never sleeps, the luminous waif whose vital beauty fueled Warhol’s Factory and brought him increased celebrity and attention as a filmmaker, something he had always wanted to be. Edie was his star—for a while. Looking back five light-years later, Edie called it like it was. “While I was ‘girl of the year’ and ‘superstar’ and all that crap, everything I did was really underneath I guess motivated by psychological disturbance. But I’d make a mask out of my face, cause I didn’t realize I was quite beautiful. It’s taken me twenty-seven years to realize it, and practically destroy it. But I had to wear heavy black eyelashes like bat wings, and dark lines under my eyes, cut all my hair off, my long dark hair, cut it off and strip it silver and blond. All these little maneuvers I did out of things that were happening in my life that upset me; I’d freak out in a very physical way. And, um, it was all taken as a fashion trend.”

Sedgwick left the New York scene and went home to California to recover from her ongoing addiction and substance abuse problems, and a few failed love affairs, most notably with musician and artist Bobby Neuwirth in 1967. Her work on the semi-autobiographical movie Ciao! Manhattan (1972) occupied her between stints in the Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital. In 1970, Sedgwick lamented her loneliness: “I moved out to Santa Barbara, to straighten out, supposedly, and I started rollicking around with all kinds of kids a lot younger than me. I had fun, but I really didn’t have anyone I particularly loved….I haven’t been in love with anyone in years and years. But I have a certain amount of faith that it’ll come.” It did. In the summer of 1970, while at the Cottage Hospital, Sedgwick met Michael Post, 20, a student and fellow patient. On July 24, 1971, they were married. Edie Post died four months later, on November 16, 1971, after relapsing into barbiturate and alcohol use. She was twenty-eight years old.

Michael and Edie, July 24, 1971

     *       *       *       *

Michael Post, now 72, was easy to spot on the Santa Monica pier one sunny morning. Tall and handsome, his dark hair and beard now regal sweeps of white, he was in a blue Hawaiian print shirt of elegant, calm pattern and smiling out at the sea while he waited for me. He’d invited me to lunch to talk about Edie and her art. “She loved her horses best,” he said, of the prancing animals she most loved to draw. Early sketches show Sedgwick working out the forms of legs and shoulders, withers and necks she’d known all her life as a constant rider. “It was when she felt most free,” says Post. “She’d go up to the ranch, catch one of the horses, and just ride up into the hills.” He looked inland, at the sunburned chapparal rising above little clusters of houses. “On a horse they could be her place, just her alone, those golden California hills.”

Edie Sedgwick, horse head

Her love of fauna is clear, and full of joy. Other critters spice Sedgwick’s drawings. Her little raccoon has elegant paws, as it trit-trots on its way, carrying a rather precarious baby raccoon, catlike, in its mouth. I wondered if Edie saw, in the creature’s well-turned eyes and their surrounding mask, a correspondence to her own thickly drawn makeup. There is a sassy cartoon rat, straight out of a saloon in his cowboy boots.

Edie Sedgwick, raccoon and kit

In a sketchbook she used in New York City and after are some exceptional individual pencil drawings. Truman Capote, looking just as he did when he hosted the Black and White Ball in 1966. A poignant memory of her time with Neuwirth is their signal for each other when one was in the rooms they shared at the Hotel Chelsea—when the lights are on, I’m there, I’m waiting for you. Both switches are on, and Edie has written “for Bobby” on the drawing. Sketches of a baby, of a mother and child, are even more moving.

Truman Capote by Edie Sedgwick

*     *.    *

 After they married, Michael and Edie lived in a little apartment in Santa Barbara. He continued his studies at Santa Barbara City College, and she tried to stay clean, and away from her family ranch. But the horses were there. There, too, were stashes of pills, and she knew where. Edie remained under a doctor’s care, being prescribed barbiturates for sleeplessness and nervous conditions. One autumn night, she went to an art opening and party. She called Post, and asked him to meet her at the party. He did, and drove them both home. Edie took her prescribed pills when she got in. The following morning, he found her.

Edie Sedgwick, self-portrait, detail

Edie Sedgwick Post has long been known as a beautiful, young, laughing blank screen onto which fantasies could be projected. She’s the object of the longing gaze of Warhol in the films he constantly took of her, of songs by Bob Dylan that were purportedly inspired by her, of various male photographers’ camera lenses, of biographies that tell you as much if not more about the biographer than about Edie herself. How good to find out, finally, about the art she made for herself instead, as Edith, so long ago.

Selected works by Edie from the 1960s and 1970 were shown on Monday evening, November 14, at a private event at the Chelsea—where, once upon a time, she lived in Room 105. It has been almost fifty-one years to the day since her death; finally, her art is being publicly seen for the first time in conjunction with its sale by RR Auction of Amherst, New Hampshire and Boston. Present at the party were a sweep of New York City glitterati from her day to today: Danny Fields, Jay McInerney, John Stavros. Edie’s cousin Kyra Sedgwick wasn’t there, but her mother Patricia was. Everyone came to celebrate Edie’s life, and her own creativity. Libations were raised with two drinks the Chelsea created in honor of the night. Here, join us.

Edie ‘67

mezcal, raspberry, ginger, Lapsang Souchang tea, Gochujang honey

The Lost Weekend

Jamaican rum, Chartreuse, toasted coconut, snap pea

Still from the Andy Warhol movie “Afternoon,” showing Edie’s self-portrait on the wall of her apartment, 1965

All images reproduced here, and the quotations from Alice Sedgwick’s letters, are courtesy of and © RR Auction. Do not reproduce without permission.

Pilgrim on Tinker Street:  Desperately Seeking Dylan at the Woodstock Film Festival, 14 October 2007.

There were no more condoms in the Sunflower Natural Foods Market by Sunday afternoon.  The empty shelf where they’d been was clearly marked, and looked lonely above the vast selection of cruelty-free, leadless lipsticks I’d gone there to choose from.  Had they sold out just because of the big weekend?  I asked the mild-looking, long-haired, pleasant kid at the register.  He looked at me as if trying to determine my needs.  “I don’t know.”  Happy smile.  “But I’ve got some at home.”  Ah, Woodstock.  Friendliest of towns for lo these fifty years.  And with the Eighth Annual Film Festival in town, showcasing on its final night the Big Music Movie, no wonder some amenities were hard to come by.

Tickets for the last show of the last night were hard to come by, too.  They had sold out online very quickly, to the disgust of some local friends in a town where both cellphone signals and laptops get shut out by the Catskills (the sight of movie people shaking their BlackBerries angrily by the village green in the brilliant sunshine could only make you smile).  “I’m Not There,” the mockumentary that bobs and weaves all round and about the absent presence of Bob Dylan, has been screened before, and it’s due to open nationally on November 21 in New York.  The tiny Tinker Street Cinema is where it belongs, though, and “I’m Not There” should stay right there.  A multiplex will crush it like a bug, and Woodstock, where Dylan is still spoken of as a friend and neighbor – and might just still own a big chunk of land, somewhere up Ohayo Mountain – has the requisite kind of audience.  That’s to say an audience in which all the members knew something about Dylan, and many of them knew a lot.

All weekend, there were related events that could only have come to pass in this town.  The Lotus Gallery on Rock City Road had hung a show of Elliott Landy’s Dylan photographs – tenderly taken, not striving to intrude or redefine, but to entertain the sitters, and to preserve what Wordsworth would call a spot in time.  At the opening on a golden Saturday afternoon, you couldn’t see the photos for the people – there was even a Dylan Look-Alike contest, judged by, among others, Mary Lou Paturel, above whose coffeeshop on Tinker Street Bob once lived.  Zachary Sluser, a filmmaker from L.A., won the contest because of the Ray-Bans he borrowed from a friend at the last minute (“It’s the glasses,” one judge said to another in their huddle next to me) and the cigarette (“I don’t smoke.  I borrowed it,” said Sluser).  Landy walked around beaming, welcoming.  He seems a kind, modest soul, and when speaking of his photos of Dylan, the Band, and Woodstock (nope, it didn’t happen in town, so don’t ask where the site is), appears grateful to have been in the right place at a right-on time.  People were talking about the movie, and what to expect, as they looked into Landy’s capturings of the young face of the man who had agreed to have this family part of his life, among others, opened to a chronicling not his own.

Bob Dylan with the Paturel family, Woodstock,© Douglas R. Gilbert and via Gilbert’s Bob Dylan gallery

Todd Haynes, who had the idea for a biopic of Dylan, gained the needed clearance and authorizations (as he infamously didn’t for his take on Karen Carpenter via Barbie, barred from release by the Carpenter estate), wrote the screenplay, and made the film, wasn’t in Woodstock.  His co-producer Christine Vachon said he had “really wanted to be.”  Speaking before the screening that Sunday, Vachon felt the vibe, noting “It’s really amazing to show this movie at Woodstock ….This place had a huge effect on the movie you’re about to see.”  Quickly she retracted the word “experimental” after applying it – rightly – to “I’m Not There,” and substituted the thought, one she attributed to Haynes, that this is a movie that “you should let wash over you.”  And so we settled back to watch the river flow.  Vachon also referred to the movie as a “labor of love” just as the screening was beginning.  Well, it’s certainly as undefinable, splintered, and abandoned as love. 

“I’m Not There” is a series of those tangentially related sketches that are so popular these days – do they save a screenwriter from having to think up and write a whole movie?  “Babel” at least entwined the stories of which it was composed, and had them fall together like dominoes.  The sketches are a nice cultural comment:  our 15-minute attention span (and yes, of course there’s a cameo clip of Warhol in “I’m Not There”) can’t take more.  Horton Foote and Howard Koch, Waldo Salt and Robert Bolt, where are you when we need you?  Bob Dylan deserves continuity and something at least acquainted with grandeur, not this sort of shotgun approach.  Haynes’s movie makes a pattern in your mind like pellets blasted through a door:  scattershot, hit and miss, above all no direction home.

The movie begins, upsettingly more than provocatively, with Dylan dead.  A good way to ensure freedom in a pseudobiopic, maybe:  kill off your star.  The Bob avatar who lies first on a table in the morgue, with doctors opening him, that is her, up with scalpels (ok, block that metaphor!  We get it:  this is going to be a really intense, beneath-the-skin look at Dylan) is the one who looks most like Dylan, Cate Blanchett, playing a character named Jude Quinn.  Jude’s footage is in black and white, just like “Dont Look Back” and the rest of the D.A. Pennebaker – well, yes, you may call it the Pennebaker original.  Shift scene (in a brutal sudden smash cut; more metaphor and yep, we get it:  our heads are supposed to be swimming) to Jude in casket, “nailed by a Peeping Tom,” and a flat stretch of road evidently meant to be Woodstock, where Dylan wrecked his motorcycle in 1967.  The audience rustled, murmured, for the straightaway road with no mountains behind it looks nothing like the pertinent landscape.  But verisimilitude is the hobgoblin of little minds.  Even in what has been advertised as a biopic.  We remained quiet and paid attention.  One must, or “I’m Not There” is drowning you fast, instead of washing over you.

[read the rest in ISIS, in which it initially appeared in the Winter 2007 issue; and in the book of Dylan essays I’m working on even now]

Jerry Ivan “JI” Allison has died in Nashville, Tennessee at the age of 82. His death was announced yesterday on the social media page of the band in which he made history, Buddy Holly and the Crickets. The post, in part, reads: “JI was a musician ahead of his time, and undoubtedly his energy, ideas and exceptional skill contributed to both the Crickets and rock ‘n’ roll itself becoming such a success. Buddy is often heralded as the original singer-songwriter, but JI, too, wrote and inspired so many of the songs that would go on to be eternal classics. There’s more to be said and posted here in the coming days. For today, we think about his family and friends and wish JI to rest in peace.”

Allison was born in 1939 in Hillsboro, Texas and met Charles Hardin “Buddy” Holly when the two were in middle school in Lubbock. Holly was a few years older, but he and Allison swiftly became friends and began to play together as a duo. Then they were joined first by Niki Sullivan, and then by Joe. B. Mauldin.

The Crickets in Texas, 1957: Allison, Mauldin, Sullivan, Holly.

They called themselves The Crickets, and they shook the music world from the beginning during their terribly brief time as a band. As the El Paso Times observed during their very first tour, they “write their own music, play their own accompaniment and sing their own songs. They do their numbers in a completely unique style with all new trend arrangements.” “Oh Boy” and “That’ll Be The Day” swiftly joined “Jailhouse Rock” and “You Send Me” on the charts, along with a song written by Allison and Holly that paid tribute to the woman who would be Allison’s first wife, Peggy Sue Gerron. The lyrics and rhymes were simple: I love you / true / /blue / Sue. The music was something beyond compelling, with Holly’s flexible flying voice and Allison’s constant kinetic rolling drumming urging each other on and on and on.

The Crickets, “Peggy Sue,” on the Ed Sullivan Show, December 1, 1957.

Peggy Sue Gerron and Allison flank Buddy and María Elena Holly on the Hollys’ wedding day

Holly and The Crickets joined “The Biggest Show of Stars for ‘58” in the autumn of 1958, and toured with Bobby Darin and Frankie Avalon, Little Anthony and the Imperials, and Dion and the Belmonts. My hometown paper, The Richmond Times-Dispatch of Richmond, Virginia, called “Buddy Holly, Joe Mauldin and Jerry Allison” three “young men from Texas who seem to be setting the popular music world on fine with their playing and singing.” Holly continued on his own in January of 1959, on a show sometimes billed as the “Concert of Stars” and sometimes as the “Winter Dance Party.” He was killed, with Richie Valens (17), J.P. Richardson (26)—whose stage name was “The Big Bopper”—and their pilot Roger Peterson, 21, when their chartered plane crashed in a field outside Clear Lake, Iowa. Buddy Holly was 22 years old.

top to bottom: Allison, Holly, Mauldin

For years after Holly’s death, The Crickets continued as a band, with rotating lead singers and other personnel. Allison also worked as a touring and studio musician with many other artists, from Waylon Jennings to Paul McCartney—whose Beatles owed their “beetle-y” name in part to The Crickets. JI Allison was a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. His death marks the passing of the last surviving member of the original lineup of The Crickets.

One of the lovely things about being a professor is that one still gets to participate, if one wishes, in the collegiate institution of spring break. By middle March, everyone living in northern places is starved for sea and sand under a southern sun. After a snowy St. Patrick’s Day, and a visit to my elderly mother in Richmond, Virginia, I filled up my car with costly gasoline and followed John Hiatt’s dictum in one of my favorite road-tripping songs that will ever be written: “drive South.”

I wasn’t in a Chevy van, and had no one in the car with whom to hold hands—alas, not John Hiatt!—but was indeed heading way down south, in what some still call Dixie land, straight down Interstate 95 from middle Virginia to Beaufort, South Carolina. It is about a six and a half hour drive, and I took it slowly, taking exits for lunch and for places resting in my memories. Petersburg, and a pause early in the trip at the graveside of a beloved friend. A quick, happy wade at Roanoke Rapids. Lunch in Lumberton, in the heart of North Carolina’s piney woods that have supplied so many trees to so many industries, the setting for David Lynch’s classic Blue Velvet, in which you could set your watch to the “sound of the falling tree” on the fictional radio station WOOD. I took off layers as I drove. Already barefoot after Roanoke Rapids, I shucked off my jeans for a pretty dress in the parking lot at the rest stop near Hendersonville. By the time I took the exit at Yemassee for the slow roads to my friends’ house, the windows were down and I was happily sweaty, or as my grandmother would have insisted I say, glowing. Four days of catching up with my friends, who I had not seen since 2017, relaxing with their handsome golden retriever on daily walks by the marshes and the Atlantic, wearing sundresses by day and adding just a sweater at night, and I felt I had recovered a part of me long missing. Thank you, Bob Dylan, I said quietly to myself, for making your Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour leg for the spring of 2022 swing up this coast. I’d have gone south on this trip anyway, but the delightful coincidence of three tour dates within an hour or two’s drive of where I was going to be anyway? Benedictory. Single tickets for the three shows, in Savannah, Charleston, and Columbia, were easy to get; I splurged on good ones, in the first five rows, for all. (I invited my friends along for the Savannah show, so near their home, but they graciously declined. The venue didn’t require masks, and they would rather not, they said. None of the venues, it turned out, required masks or vaccines; I never removed my mask any of the evenings. It was surely sanest for safety’s sake, and, honestly, there’s something about the whole masked and anonymous feeling that seemed fitting to me. From the first row for two of the nights, I was also happy to know I wasn’t breathing on Bob and the band; they were so close).

***

Savannah

The city squares were fragrant and gray-green in the late afternoon, ancient live oak trees dripping with Spanish moss. There’d been a hard rain on Thursday, and by Saturday a transformation had come. Growing thickly on the broad backs and shoulders of the wide, spreading oak limbs are resurrection ferns. When there’s a drought, they turn brown and crisped, and you think they are dead. Come a downpour, though, they green up overnight, unfurling and waving in the air, celebrating. All the oak limbs bore jubilant, verdant color on March 26th. I got to town in the midafternoon and parked in a multistory deck next to the Savannah College of Art and Design. The evening’s venue, the Johnny Mercer Theatre, was just a block away from SCAD. It was too pretty, the air too soft, to be indoors, as tempting as the art museum might have been. Instead I moseyed down to the Colonial Park Cemetery and Chippewa Square, enjoyed The Book Lady Bookstore, and then sat on a bench in luscious Orleans Square, eating my sandwich. While I nibbled and swung my feet, I watched the activity at the tour buses and equipment trucks, parked facing me in the driveway of the Savannah Civic Center, of which the Mercer Theatre is a part.

The Mercer is a lovely room that seats just over 2500 people, and bears the name of John Herndon Mercer, born in Savannah in 1909. Singer, songwriter, composer, and superb lyricist Johnny Mercer struck it big in New York City, after failing to make it as an actor, when Hoagy Carmichael liked his lyrics and set them to music for the hit “Lazybones” (1933). Soon Mercer was in living in Hollywood, writing lyrics for both movie and Broadway musicals. He cofounded Capitol Records and the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and among his hundreds of memorable songs are four for which he won Academy Awards: “On the Atchison, Topeka, And Santa Fe”; “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening”; “Moon River”; and “Days of Wine and Roses.” Here’s Johnny with Steve Allen, not so very long ago, really. You’ll know some of the songs by heart. If you don’t, you can hear some of them on Bob Dylan’s great American songbook albums. Try Shadows In The Night. Dylan’s performed Mercer’s “Autumn Leaves” on tour in the past.

The merchandise lines were long. As I stood and waited for a poster, the couple in front of me, a mother and son, were trying to decide which t-shirts to get. The son, in his 30s, was all for a Rolling Thunder Revue shirt, of which there were a couple to choose. She went for the Rough and Rowdy Ways album cover shirt. “Really, these songs he’s writing today are better than the ones in 1970 whatever,” she said to him. They were having a lively debate over the merits of “Crossing the Rubicon” and “Isis” (“both full of ancient gods and places,” she was saying) as I walked away.

The theater was cozy and bright, beautifully spreading out in fans of red seats from a sleek blond stage. The strangely coffin-shaped acoustic baffles hanging from the ceiling gave me a bit of a pause, but only a bit. The show started right on time, with a symphonic burst of Beethoven’s magisterial Ninth Symphony—allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso, just like Dylan on stage these days. The band rattled around, shuffled into their positions, from which they are not wont to move, except for Dylan now and then, and set forth with “Watching the River Flow.” Indeed, we were still flowing into seats, hurrying, spilling beer and so forth. Savannah time, southern time, was surprised by a fairly punctual start.

Dylan’s current band is such a good band. Bob, Tony Garnier (bass) and Donnie Herron (multi-instrumentalist chiefly on fiddle and pedal steel; and a silvery accordion on “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)") could play in a smoky club as a trio any late night of the week. The addition of virtuoso guitarist Bob Britt, switch-hitting Doug Lancio who supplies everything extra needed, and Charley Drayton makes for such a grand lineup, especially on the Rough and Rowdy Ways songs. Drayton should stay with Dylan always; he gets it, the music, the timing, the not overwhelming His Master’s Voice with heavy bass thuds.

Highlights for me were hearing “Crossing the Rubicon” live for the first time; the pleasure Dylan was clearly taking in his new lyrics for old songs; the rough snaky dazzle of “False Prophet”; the mingled beauty and grit of “Mother of Muses”; and Charley Drayton’s playing. “Rubicon” was intense and grand, with Dylan enunciating every word to be heard. “Gotta Serve Somebody” was a hard-rocking joy, with words I’d not heard before, and people sedately seat-dancing—only at the Columbia show did folks stand up and dance. “Black Rider” was slowed down to a rocking beat, like many numbers quietly propelled and never drowned out by Drayton. Dylan deploys profanity only rarely in his songs, and almost always to flay the figure of a leader who has failed: another politician pumping out the piss; the size of your cock will get you nowhere. There was a ripple of laughter from the audience. And then, in “Mother of Muses,” a few scattered hisses on the verse beginning “Sing of Sherman, Montgomery, and Scott / And of Zhukov, and Patton, and the battles they fought / Who cleared the path for Presley to sing / Who carved the path for Martin Luther King.” William Tecumseh Sherman, Union commander during the Civil War, and leader of his victorious armies through Georgia from Atlanta to the sea. There’s a song about it, written by Henry Clay Work to commemorate Sherman’s march. The culmination of the march, which was an exercise in what Sherman called “total war” and left great destruction in its path, was Savannah. Sherman spared the city itself, but the hisses remembered. I was heartened, though, by the scattered applause for the name of Martin Luther King moments later, in the same theatre. The same thing happened at the Township Auditorium in Columbia when Dylan sang these lines; Columbia was, unlike Savannah, burned to the ground by Sherman’s army. Did this happen in any other venues across the south, I wondered. Dylan put, it seemed to me, a little extra oomph into that “Mother of Muses, unleash your wrath” every night, turning the song dark and contemplative.

Thinking of the drive back to Beaufort, and knowing it would be the last song, I left my seat and listened to “Every Grain of Sand” from the curtain at the back of the theater. The sound as just as good there, and the performance was beautiful. I applauded hard and happily, and then hurried through an empty lobby for the doors. Right behind me was a tall, thirtysomething man. “My wife’s home with the kids,” he said. “I live close by, and want to get there to tell them good night.” “It’s not even 9:45 yet,” I laughed. “How old are they?” “Seven and nine,” he said, and we slowed down as we walked out into the night. Next to us the buses and trucks were ranged, with one bus in the middle lane, as it were, of the driveway, its engine running and door open. No one was near it as we looked curiously, and then stopped walking, as Dylan came down the steps toward his bus not twenty feet away. He was fresh off the stage, with no hat on, and a towel draped like a boxer’s around his neck, bunching high on his head. His eyes were clear light blue in the dusk, and he was surveying the scene in front of him, the avenue down to Orleans Square, the live oaks green and gray, the two people standing all alone with no phones, no cameras. His security guard, a step or two behind him, saw us too, and began to raise his flashlight to stop us from taking photos. Seeing there was no threat of this, he dropped the light and they came on. Drayton was a few feet behind them. “Thank you for a fine evening, gentlemen,” I called. Bob did not look at me, but smiled, as he rounded the bus door and got on. Drayton grinned and flashed a peace sign, as the man next to me said, “It was a great show, thanks.” Then my new friend and I looked at each other, laughed, and went on. “It’s not every night you get to say thanks to Bob Dylan,” he said, as we shook hands at the street and went our separate ways. Out before the traffic had even begun, I saw the big bus in shades of brown a couple of blocks in front of me, its taillights above the cars. The Bobmobile took the high road and I took the low road; they swept up onto Interstate 16, heading for the 95 North and Charleston, while I meandered back to Beaufort on old roads hugging riverbanks, crossing marshy fingers to the sea.

***

North Charleston

The road from Beaufort to Charleston can be the Interstate 95, or it can be those slow low roads. If you have the time, take the latter. And, as you go, stop on the beaches and by the lagoon at Hunting Island State Park. The sun was brilliant, the sea cold but just swimmable, the shrimp shacks and sweetgrass-basket stands open and waiting on a lovely Sunday. The venue was in North Charleston, but I got to town, sandy and salty, by 3:30. It was easy to park in the tip of town on King Street and walk past beautiful homes, and gardens already in full spring glory, to the Battery, where, as the old Charleston phrase goes with a grin, the Ashley and Cooper Rivers come together to form the Atlantic Ocean. Wandering the streets, shopping a little, my freckles darkening in the afternoon sun, I ended up in Magnolia’s for a bite at the bar: fried green tomatoes, hold the ham; deviled eggs; a glass of Chardonnay. A little pixilated by the delicious food and sweet sunshine, I wandered for another hour before getting in the car and making the easy drive up to North Charleston.

The North Charleston Performing Arts Center is adjacent to the much larger Coliseum which, when I arrived, was disgorging thousands of South Carolina Stingrays fans. They’d had a 3 o’clock game, and were departing as the Dylan fans were arriving. I’ve never had a better parking spot for a concert in my life, I thought, pulling into a just-vacated space an easy walk from the will call. The crowd was more homogenous than that in Savannah, older, quiet. People were enjoying drinks rather than buying merch. Indoors was far more of a classical music concert space to me, and my seat was much better, in the second row. The Beethoven fit right in, as did the songs on which Dylan speak-sings most clearly. When one ages, and one’s voice changes, a male performer seems to have two singing style options for the most success: to shift into a more nasal, folky, tenor register—think Dr. Ralph Stanley or Pete Seeger—or go full-on crooner, emphasizing the phrasing in a way that I think of as speak-singing—think Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra, and the living master, Tony Bennett. Having begun his career in the first register, Dylan has chosen the second for now. Alternately crouched or standing behind his upright piano, upon which, tonight, two large untouched bottles of water caught the light between him and us most of the time, Dylan was relaxed and yet seemed in a hurry, too. His voice was rich and best on the low notes, relishing the ominous words of “Crossing the Rubicon,” “False Prophet,” and “My Own Version of You” as the band accompanied with the earthy, bump-and-grind arrangements of the tunes. Once upon a time Wesley Stace, as John Wesley Harding, recorded a romp of a song called “Making Love to Bob Dylan.” Honestly, you could get it on to any of the Rough and Rowdy Ways songs—if you take care not to listen to the words, which will prove both too distracting, too scary, and/or too profound!—in their arrangements on this tour. “Crossing the Rubicon” was so good the audience yelled and whooped; Bob obligingly came out from behind his piano and nodded politely from center stage while we clapped. “When I Paint My Masterpiece” reminded me of Levon Helm singing it in the late 2000s at his barn in Woodstock, New York, during the Midnight Rambles he held there. Dylan sang more of the original words to the song than he had in Savannah, a little throwback; maybe this is why. “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” was especially fine. The band and Bob seemed to want to rock and roll, but then decided not to. They’d make up for this in a couple of nights.

“I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You” was a slowly, sweetly swinging lyric that evening. The band held back and let Dylan’s voice hold us, from the gentle words, to the high notes he had to reach for giving way to the ensuing descents on which he shone. The “take you out travelin’” and last verses gained power as they went, and the line “I hope that the gods go easy with me” brought tears to my eyes. Thanks for the memory, Benedetto:

***

Columbia

Where did Bob and the band spend their time after North Charleston? It’s their practice to leave a town as soon as their show, or shows, there are through and go directly to the site of the next; perhaps they were in a nice hotel in downtown Columbia, home of the University of South Carolina, or perhaps they were somewhere between there and Charleston, in a resort or grand old house. I went straight to Columbia, and spent the off day and day of the next concert happily sifting through the letters of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. One of the first, and still most important, scholars studying F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Matthew J. Bruccoli, was for many years an English professor at the U of SC. He was also an early collector of all things Fitzgerald, and the rare books library of the university contains such gems. I also walked around the town, exploring the downtown—rebuilt after February 1865—and eating too much shrimp and grits, if there is such a thing as too much shrimp and grits. The poet Henry Timrod, whose poems certainly influenced Dylan’s songs on Modern Times, as Scott Warmuth has shown, is buried in Trinity Cathedral churchyard (spared by Sherman). Thanks to Richard Thomas for having reminded me of this. Whatever the guys did during their time off, they should do it every time, because the show at the Township Auditorium on March 29 was one of the best of many hundreds of Dylan shows I’ve attended.

I’d bet my bottom dollar that Dylan is involved in selecting the towns, and theaters, for the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour. The cities along the road are generally ones he’s played in many times before, and in almost every case the theaters are historic and well loved for many decades, or indeed centuries, by musicians. The Township is special even by these standards. Built in 1930, with white Greek columns across its cheerful red-brick facade and a lovely intimate bowl of an interior with comfortable roomy seats, the Township has hosted everyone from the Ink Spots to Skrillex, Duke Ellington, Patsy Cline, Buddy Holly, the Allman Brothers, Elvis, The Clash, and—repeatedly—Bob Dylan. Here’s a bit of him performing “Tangled Up In Blue” at the Township back in 2016, thanks to Elaine. He and the band took the stage promptly, eagerly, and they really knocked themselves out, as they followed in such footsteps. Dylan did a long harmonica solo to lead off “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,” seemed to be tickled by his own changes to the song, and was downright loquacious and happy in his band introductions. He urged Drayton to stand up from behind his drums so we could see him (Drayton did); he pleaded with Britt to talk to us (Britt didn’t), and introduced Herron as an “infant prodigy,” thereby cracking up both himself and Donnie. Why is it so much fun to watch Dylan laughing on stage? We all joined in. It’s a fair call for Herron, too, who founded BR5-49 when he was just 29 (I heard this fantastic band open for Dylan on his 1997 tour). Herron’s various instruments work like fine glue binding together the sets on this tour; hats off to him.

My extra ticket to the Township show had gone to a young fiddle player outside the venue. She said she never went to the shows, just played before and after for tips. I saw her as I left, playing for some twirling guys in flannel shirts. “What did you think?” I asked. She beamed at me and waved her bow. “That ticket’s the best tip I’ve ever gotten.” I walked back across the college campus in the sweet-smelling cool night, regretting already that the brown buses and red trucks were in their convoy north from one Carolina to another, on the way to Charlotte, and that I was not.

***

Coda

The show I missed that I wish I’d heard? The one at the old Brady Theater in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It is now called the Tulsa Theater, eliminating the name of Wyatt Tate Brady, a Ku Klux Klan member who participated in the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921, or as Greil Marcus has rightly called them, the Tulsa pogrom, in which hundreds of Black townsfolk were murdered and thousands of homes burned. The venue is vast, rambling and battered and beautiful. I’ve heard Robert Plant, and the aforementioned John Hiatt, there; the acoustics were equally fine for Plant’s skyrocketing voice and full band, and Hiatt’s solos with his acoustic guitar. Reviews of the show ranged from commending the sound, the lyrics of the new songs, and Bob’s genial delivery, to bashing his voice and even his age. To me, the night sounded absolutely golden. Here, settle in for the next hour and a half, and judge for yourselves, thanks to My Polished Boots:

The Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour rolls on, from Memorial Day weekend into June, with a string of just-announced dates on the west coast. You should go if you can. You will be glad, and also changed, if you do. Dylan will be a year older, having celebrated his 81st birthday on May 24. May he do so in absolutest privacy among family and friends, with splendid presents from books to boats, libations and celebrations and cake. After a month and a half off, with spring in the air and summer stepping in all across the country by then, he and the band will be rested and ready and, no doubt, rehearsing first.

And what about us? Are we ready, too? Dylan’s audiences, guests in the living room that these shows are so like, breathing—carefully—the same air for an hour and a half, rooted to the spot, rapt?

Postibus Augustis eadem fidissima custos

ante fores stabis; mediamque tuebere quercum: utque meum intonsis caput est juvenile capillis

to quoque perpetuos semper gere frondis honores

Approaching his eighty-second year, and forever young, Bob Dylan is still carrying us with him as he goes along his way, laurels and vine-leaves in his hair. . . whose silhouette is part of his iconic profile still.

Bob Dylan by Jerry Schatzberg, 1965 © Jerry Schatzberg via Rukaj Gallery

 Bob Dylan has now concluded the first leg of his revitalized “Never Ending Tour,” which was paused, along with the world, after March 2020. Scheduled to travel to Japan last April, Dylan canceled his dates in Tokyo and Osaka, and presumably sheltered at home in California. He wasn’t resting, though. Just after midnight on March 27, 2020, his website posted a nearly 17-minute long song, “Murder Most Foul,” circling around and about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Excited rumors of a record of new Dylan songs proved true when Rough and Rowdy Ways, his 39th studio album, was released on June 19, 2020. A year and a half later, Dylan and a newly constituted band finally took the record on tour.

 “The Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour 2021-2024” began in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on November 2, 2021. Expectations and protocols were both high. Venues required proof of vaccination against covid, or recent negative tests; all recommended, and a few mandated, masks. Dylan and his band consisted of longtime stalwarts Tony Garnier on bass and Donnie Herron on keyboards and steels, new hires Bob Britt and Doug Lancio on guitar, and Charley Drayton on drums. Dylan played an upright piano. His piano playing these days is rough and ready and rowdy itself, sounding like the mating of boogie-woogie and barrelhouse jazz under a table in a saloon in Dodge City, back in the day. The band began with an almost muffled “Watching The River Flow” and a new arrangement of Dylan’s 1966 classic “Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine).” Then the Rough and Rowdy Ways heart of the set began. The band played all the songs on the record save two: the gritty, classical-laced “Crossing the Rubicon,” which would have fit well into these set lists; and “Murder Most Foul.” The rollicks “False Prophet,” “Early Roman Kings” (from Tempest, 2012) and “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” alternated with slow ballads like “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” “Mother of Muses,” “Melancholy Mood” (the only cover song in the set), and “I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You.” The Milwaukee show ended with the double whammy of “Love Sick” (1997) and the 1965 blues wail “It Takes A Lot To Laugh / It Takes A Train To Cry.” Just a few days later, Bob and the band axed these last two songs and settled into his 1981 spiritual “Every Grain of Sand” as the closer. For the next month, ending on a triumphant note at the Anthem Theater in Washington, D.C. on December 3, Dylan played 21 sold-out shows across the Midwest, mid-Atlantic, and northeast.

 An 80-year-old Nobel Laureate in Literature who has spent the lion’s share of nights of his life performing on a stage somewhere in the world, and who is far wealthier than most entertainment stars alive after the sale last year of his music catalogue to Universal Music Publishing Group, has nothing to prove to anyone. What compels Bob Dylan to be out in his customized brown, black, and tan tour bus, on interstate highways from cities to towns, to luxurious hotels and beautiful mid-sized theaters old and new? The answer, it seems to me, is in the title of one of his recent songs that he sang every night: “I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You.” The feeling’s also inherent elsewhere in the carefully chosen set list; increasingly, that night’s particular audience was the “you” in every song. To be alone with you? He’s up for that. His own version of you? He’s composing that nightly, from different audiences all over the map. Tonight, he’ll be staying here with you? Yes, he will, at least for awhile. Sure, the tour sold tickets — but Dylan doesn’t need the money. Sure, every night received great reviews — but he doesn’t need critical acclaim.

 Dylan is not the voice of a generation, that ancient tagline that has always seemed to annoy him most because of its inherent limitation. He’s become the voice of generation. The Janus-faced songs on Rough and Rowdy Ways, looking back into the past to show the way forward, are utterly unconstrained by artificially marked human decades, into any categories under which their listeners meekly say they belong, Boomers and Gen X and Gen Z. Like his fellow Laureate William Butler Yeats, Dylan is rising into greater force and power as he ages. His circus animals haven’t deserted him any more than Yeats’s did; his command of words and symbols and rhyme becomes vaster and keener, year by year.

 The power, and magic, of Dylan’s shows this time around was in the open-armed acceptance of the new songs, and in the energy between relieved and delighted audiences, and visibly and audibly happy performers playing well together. After the annus horribilis of 2020, after so much fear and stress, loss and grief, Dylan’s giving us all, and perhaps himself, a break. Like the album on which it is almost entirely based, the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour is, in a word, generous. It’s a gift.

 Dylan was first known as a ballad singer, and then he became a rock star. That mid-1960s evolution is showcased, now, in terms of style: the ballads are rock-rimmed, even the good old songs. He’s altered them, not beyond recognition, but it’s a funhouse mirror recognition. “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” is, in its original album incarnation on John Wesley Harding (1967) a genial little carpe diem accompanied by plunky guitar and a swoony pedal steel. Now you could do a fine striptease to the tune, with its bumping, grinding guitars — and Garnier’s bass in particular serves up some solid 1970s-porn-soundtrack boomph — and ba-ba-da-daah, flourishy ending. Similarly, “To Be Alone With You,” which appeared on Nashville Skyline (1969) as a delightful ditty anticipating a lovers’ reunion at night after a hard day’s work, is that no more. Now it’s coarser, funnier, and raw, both in the tune and the words. Dylan debuted most of the rewritten lyrics he’s been singing live — likely an outgrowth of the rewrites in his Mondo Scripto art show of 2018, and his longtime penchant for changing lyrics in performance — in his filmed Shadow Kingdom performance of July 2021:

 I wish the night was here
Make me scream and shout
I’ll fall into your arms
And let it all hang out
I’ll hound you to death
That’s just what I’ll do
I won’t sleep a wink
Till I’m alone with you.

 In concert, he lingers over that “let it alllllllllll hang out,” and relishes biting off the “hound you to death.”

 What happened to me, darlin’?
What was it ya saw?
Did I kill somebody?
Did I escape the law?
My heart’s in my mouth
My eyes are still blue
My mortal bliss
Is to be alone with you….

 In Washington, on the final couplet in the refrain, Dylan put in an “ee” before the “mortal”: “My immortal bliss / Is to be alone with you.” Then he grinned.

 The 6000-seat Anthem is a riverfront cement box that manages, within, to echo an old vaudeville or moving-picture palace. Dylan and the band gave a show there on the last night of the tour that was, of all the gigs I heard live, tied for best with Boston’s. Washington gets the edge, though, for it was the final night. Dressed in a black suit with Western-style detailing, Dylan walked on stage punctually for the 8pm show, though there were still lines outside of people grappling with vaccine cards, identification, and wristbands. He spent much of the show behind his upright piano, but was never for a moment static. He shifted on the piano bench. He sipped from a black ceramic cup (hot tea with honey?) and a taller paper cup (of water). He stood up and scratched his head vigorously a few times. He smiled a lot, and looked out at the crowd between songs. At one point, he sat on an amp next to Garnier. For “Melancholy Mood,” his swingy version of the 1939 classic made famous by Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra, and for his band introductions, Dylan emerged from behind his sheltering piano and stood in plain view of most of the house, microphone in hand. He cued the band individually; all eyes are on him at all times. During “Key West (Philosoper Pirate),” he gave Herron a direction, and the passionate swell of the accordion softened. During “Mother of Muses,” he nodded several times at Drayton, who took up a whole set of sizzle chains, like a cat o’nine tails, and gave his cymbals the lightest brush imaginable. Drayton is a superb addition to the band; his touch and playing comports so well with Dylan’s voice and delivery, never overpowering as drums and bass can too often do, but complementing and accompanying.

 Dylan seemed happy to be in our nation’s capital, addressing the audience not once but twice — after years of no talking onstage, he’s been downright loquacious on this tour. The “Bob Talk,” should you wish to find it, is well chronicled at the leading Dylan fan site ExpectingRain.com. He referred in every city to landmark buildings, native sons, neighborhoods, historical events, celebrated musicians. In Washington, he first spoke to make a joke after smoke had rendered him only dimly visible. Smoke or dry ice was used on the tour to create atmosphere — and, I would guess, to obscure the stage from all the people who just won’t stop violating the clearly stated no photos / no video /no recording policy to take terrible mobile phone photos (with flash, no less). However, the atmosphere stirred up during the long, dark “My Own Version of You” was excessive. “Well, thank ya, friends,” Dylan said during the applause after the song, fanning his long fingers and waving his expressive hands through towering clouds of haze. Then he joked that Foggy Bottom must be somewhere near — it’s the lowlying part of town just upriver, home to many State Department buildings, George Washington University, and the infamous Watergate.

 “Watching The River Flow,” the opener, was something of a warmup, for both the instruments and Dylan’s voice. It worked. “Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine)” was full throttle, and the performers kept the needle at 11 for the rest of the night. “When I Paint My Masterpiece” is now a croony 1930s swing, with very altered words. One of my favorite Dylan rhymes has always been “Sailing round the world in a dirty gondola / Oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola.” This cynical traveler’s observation is now gentled into “Lookin’ over the world full of crimson and clover / Sometimes I think [that] my cup’s runnin’ over.”

 “False Prophet” was a standout. Dylan stood up and snarled and yowled the savage, assertive lyrics, often smiling as he did so. People sprang up to dance, and whoop in response to the ends of every line, as he sang:

 I’m first among equals — second to none
The last of the best — you can bury the rest
Bury ‘em naked with their silver and gold
Put them six feet under and then pray for their souls….

 You know darlin’ the kind of life that I live
When your smile meets my smile —something’s got to give
I ain’t no false prophet — naw, I’m nobody’s bride
Can't remember when I was born and I forgot when I died.

 Then he grinned again. Dylan deploys, and I do mean deploys, the word “darlin’” on several of his new songs. You flinch and step back, even as you like it.

 He’s also fond of the figure of the singer as seer, as oracle. In performance, he’s not just oracular but commanding, whipping out the words, giving orders he expects to be obeyed. The addressee of “Black Rider” better listen up. The slow, sung-spoken song was full of gravel and grit, sass and scorn: Dylan spat out the words, directed at every corrupt politician, every tinpot dictator, every wannabe emperor. He punches out the edgiest lines on “I Contain Multitudes.” Long gone are the days of the early nineties, of people complaining they couldn’t understand what he was singing, couldn’t make out the words. Gone too are the early 2000s, when Dylan’s voice was drowned out by the bass being turned up too high, by pounding drums. His enunciation is as clear as Professor Henry Higgins’s, and his voice loud and strong on the rock and roll and lyric ballads alike. Honestly, there’s something imperial about his performances and the songs these days. When he asks himself what would Julius Caesar do, that sounds like a real question. Conquer and civilize: art can do that as well as armies. Maybe better.

 “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” was my favorite song when I first heard the new album in May 2020, and it rose slowly to great beauty in live performance. Recordings of the early shows in Milwaukee and Chicago show sometimes muffled, and muffed, lyrics, and delicate but unblended instrumentals. The New York three-night stand at the Beacon Theatre resolved the last issues. The song was astounding in Boston and in Washington, from Dylan’s carefully phrased lyrics to Herron’s accordion and the swell of all the instruments in union on the refrains. Playing with Dylan, I’ve long thought, must be like being the little dog, Nipper, in the old RCA Victor advertisement. Listening to his master’s voice, Nipper cocks his ear attentively. Dylan’s drummers, guitarists, all his sidemen are in the same boat as Nipper: listen to that voice and where it’s going and when, or a song fast becomes chaotic. This band has it down pat. Dylan doesn’t shake them off or slip away. He seems to be enjoying this care, and the excellent sound it engenders, joking with his band between numbers, and generous, even affectionate, in his nightly introductions.

 The sheer enchantment of “Key West” was broken by a smashing “Gotta Serve Somebody.” A note to critics who would confine Dylan’s “Gospel period” to 1978-1981: his gospel days began when he was a boy in Minnesota, listening to Mavis Staples and The Staple Singers; they intensified with his own religious conversion in 1978 or 1979; and continue today. As he performs “Gotta Serve Somebody” it’s a camp meeting jubilation, while “Every Grain of Sand” is a benediction, with the rise and fall of his voice on the title line in the refrain an exact slice of a good old sevenfold amen.

 The lengthily and comprehensively entitled “I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You” was one of the most popular songs every night. When Dylan sings:

 I’m giving myself to you, I am
From Salt Lake City to Birmingham
From East L.A. to San Antone
I don’t think I could bear to live my life alone….

 the crowd takes it personally, and reassures him that we’re all here with him, giving ourselves right back in return. The lost-love cover of “Melancholy Mood” came next in the set list, giving way to “Mother of Muses.” This, too, is a song of “a love too soon to depart,” but that’s almost beside the point, given the sweep of American history from the Civil War to Civil Rights that Dylan spans. He celebrates warriors like William Tecumseh Sherman and George Patton,

 Who cleared the path for Presley to sing
Who carved out the path for Martin Luther King
Who did what they did and then went on their way
Man, I could tell their stories all day….

 He may be “falling in love with Calliope,” but isn’t quite ready to commit to the lyre-wielding singer of epic poetry just yet. The addressee of the superb last stanza, interwoven with quotations and echoes from hymns and poems, is still her mother:

 Take me to the river and release your charms
Let me lay down in your sweet lovin’ arms
Wake me — shake me — free me from sin
Make me invisible like the wind
Got a mind to ramble — got a mind to roam
I’m travelin’ light and I’m slow coming home.

 “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” is one of the most hard-rocking numbers Dylan’s written for years. Even in the more posh and sedate theaters, or theatres, people got up and moved to this one. Would you stomp and clap harder if you knew anything about Mathis James Reed of Dunleith, Mississippi? that he was one of the most electrifying, and among the first electric, blues guitar players of Dylan’s youth? Dylan likes to instruct his listeners in the music he loves; his entire Theme Time Radio Hour series for satellite radio illustrates this in every episode. “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” is both danceable and didactic, which is perhaps only possible in Dylan’s hands; it ends with a double tribute, first to bluegrass legend Bill Monroe’s “Can’t You Hear Me Calling” (1949), and a last shout-out to Reed, and his 1969 album Down In Virginia, the title track of which was written by his wife and backup singer Mary Lee “Mama” Reed.

 After “Jimmy Reed,” Dylan introduced his band, they concluded with “Every Grain of Sand,” lined up and acknowledged the audience briefly, and he was out of the building while the applause went on and on, well before the lights came on again. When he comes out from behind the piano for his final bow, Dylan moves lightly on the balls of his feet, like a cat. During the show, he stretches and squats and struts. He does a sassy little knees-bent half turn. He gestures and beckons and even gives a hint of music-hall jazz hands. He moves like no 80-year-old I know. No 80-year-old I know has just spent a month pouring out such performances for the better part of two hours almost nightly, while traveling in a bus — albeit a very comfortable bus — across the country. I hope Dylan takes off some solid time to relax and enjoy the holiday season. However, I don’t think he’s tired: he relishes this, and lives off it. The enjoyment he and his band — “the boys,” he called them sometimes — are taking in The Rough And Rowdy Ways Tour is not only evident but infectious. Go. Be moved. Dance as if we all lived in better days, and maybe we will.

 Where will the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour head next, after the holidays and Christmastime? Dylan has historically liked to go east — Far East — in the early springtime, or less frequently to a few places in Europe, or even less frequently to Australia and New Zealand, Brazil and Argentina. Most likely, though, will be America’s southern states, perhaps a swing from from California to Florida and up the Atlantic coast. With the pandemic still in force, and enforcing limits on all our lives, I would bet on the first 2022 dates being in places the big brown bus can readily drive to: Austin and New Orleans, Mobile and Clearwater, Richmond and Savannah and Memphis and smaller towns with beautiful old theaters — places where Dylan’s played before, and which he might just like to see again, in the warming air as the camellias begin to bloom.

*all lyrics, published and performed, © Special Rider Music, 2020 and 2021. Image of Bob Dylan and Tony Garnier in Salzburg, 2018. courtesy of and © Andrea Orlandi

A shorter version of this essay appeared in The Spectator World on 2 January 2022.

abstract nude by Bob Dylan, mid-1960s, via Julien’s Auctions

Julien’s Auctions has listed for sale, in November, a very early painting by Bob Dylan, formerly the property of Albert and Sally Grossman.

The painting, an abstract nude primarily in yellows, in oil on canvas, was done some time in the mid to late 1960s, when Dylan and his family lived in Bearsville and Woodstock, New York. It’s about 5 x 3.5 feet, mounted on a wood panel and framed in plexiglass. For most of the past forty years, the painting was in the Grossmans’ Bearsville home off Striebel Road. Sally loved it, and happily allowed a photograph of herself and the Dylan to grace the cover of ISIS Magazine 118.

Years after Albert’s death, Sally sold the house to Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer and moved into the far smaller streamside farmhouse that had been Albert’s office. The painting hung there briefly, in the company of Marc Chagall and other Modernist superstars, until Sally brought the painting to New York for valuation. Instead of schlepping it back up the Hudson in her trusty Range Rover, she left it in a friend’s apartment on the Upper East Side for a couple of years. Now it is heading out into the world, for the first time. Given that Bob Dylan’s recent canvases have sold for as much as $700,000 — and that this is the earliest oil painting of his, of which I am aware, that’s ever come on the market — the presale estimate of $100,000-$200,000 seems like a bargain. The auction in which it’s available, Icons & Idols: Rock’n’Roll, happens November 19 and 20 in New York City at the Hard Rock Cafe — just as Dylan and his band will have rolled into town for three shows at the Beacon Theatre.

Images via Julien’s Auctions

F. Scott Fitzgerald, by Hal Bayard Runyon, 1931.

I only know of two oil paintings of F. Scott Fitzgerald done during his lifetime. One is by David Silvette, and hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. The Silvette portrait, painted in 1935, has been much reproduced and often called the only painting of Fitzgerald done from life. There was another, though. This portrait was virtually unknown, in private hands for most of a century — and was destroyed in 2015. Its online image is all that we have left.

In autumn of 1931, Fitzgerald left Montgomery, Alabama, where he was living with his wife Zelda and daughter Scottie near Zelda’s family, on a train bound for Los Angeles. He was headed to Hollywood for a second attempt to make it as a screenwriter, under contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to work on the screenplay for a movie called Red-Headed Woman. Based upon the novel by Katharine Brush, it starred Jean Harlow in the title role as Lil, whose antics lived up to the film’s eventual tagline: “Every man — single or married — is fair prey.” Fitzgerald did some uncredited work before his contract ended; he had a miserable time in Hollywood, and left in early 1932.

While he was there, however, his path crossed at some point with that of Hal Bayard Runyon. Ten years Fitzgerald’s junior, Runyon was a San Francisco-born artist and engineer, who worked as a portraitist in Los Angeles in the early 1930s. Runyon spent most of his time in the movie world, painting its celebrities. Even after he left town to serve in the U.S. Navy during World War II, and as a designer for Bechtel thereafter, Runyon kept up his friendships in Hollywood, and was rumored to have had an affair with Sophia Loren early in her career. Runyon’s sculptures and paintings — many of lavish nudes — still appear at auction from time to time. A 1931 portrait of Darryl F. Zanuck by Runyon sold at Bonhams for $1000 in 2019; other works of his, less finished, can very infrequently be found on eBay for far less.

In 2010, Michaan’s Auctions of Alameda, California offered a Runyon portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald for sale. Though online auction sites showed it as having sold twice, once for $900 and then for $475, the painting did not, in fact, sell. It was returned to its consigner. I was saddened to learn, recently, that the portrait was badly damaged in a flood in 2015, and that the owner threw it away.

It may not be a great portrait of Fitzgerald, but the surviving photographs of it show detail both arresting and moving. Runyon must have encountered Fitzgerald in the MGM Writers’ Building, and persuaded him to sit, some time during the 1931 holiday season. The three-piece suit is Fitzgerald’s usual formal attire, and the full Windsor knot in the tie is also accurate. The imagined row of leaning books behind him denotes him as a writer of real books, which would have pleased Fitzgerald — though the tired, worn face would not. This, too, is accurate, though. 1931 had been a dreadful year for Fitzgerald. His father died at the start of it, and he returned to America from France alone for the funeral, as Zelda was in hospital at Prangins, Switzerland, where she had been since the summer of 1930. She was not released until September 1931, and the Fitzgeralds quickly sailed for home thereafter. One of the reasons they chose to settle in Montgomery was that Zelda’s father, Judge Anthony Sayre, was very ill; he died in November, shortly after Fitzgerald arrived in Hollywood. The bottom half of Fitzgerald’s face in the portrait is poorly done, but the top half is brilliant: the thin Irish nose, the large sea-green eyes and definite eyebrows, the hairline just thinning and greying but still ash blond. Fitzgerald’s direct gaze is hard to meet. He looks right at the artist, and viewer, straight into you, as by many reports he did in life. It is a real pity that, having survived for over eighty years, this painting could not have been recognized and found earlier, and preserved at Princeton in the Fitzgerald Papers, or in a gallery or museum. Even damaged, it might have been restored. I’m grateful to have at least this representation of it, thanks to Michaan’s.

Bob Dylan in concert, Esch-Sur-Alzette, 2017 © Andrea Orlandi

                                    Back in 1941

                                    I got shot from gattling gun

                                                                        — Bob Dylan, draft for Dope Fiend Robber, 1961

On May 24, 1941, Robert Allen Zimmerman was born in St. Mary’s Hospital in Duluth, Minnesota. World War II continued outside the United States of America, with the Battle of the Denmark Strait beginning on that day. At home, much of America was more concerned with Joe Louis having retained his world heavyweight boxing title the night before. That would change when little Bobby was just over six months old, and Japan attacked the naval base at Pearl Harbor, Honolulu, Oahu, Hawaii. When the brash and confident twenty-year-old singer-songwriter who had renamed himself Bob Dylan wrote the lines above, was he only talking about a soldier wounded in very early action in 1941 while “fighting for Uncle Sam,” or was he thinking also of the explosion of his own arrival into this world? It’s Bob Dylan, and the answer is — always — going to be both.

 “Both/and” is a critical way of talking about writers and artists who contain multitudes. It’s often applied to James Joyce, a favorite writer of Dylan’s, who never uses a word or phrase that means one thing if he can find a word or phrase that means two. Think of the beginning of Joyce’s short story “Araby,” in Dubliners (1914): “North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free.” Joyce could have called it a dead-end street, a cul-de-sac, but chooses “blind” — in a story focused on eyes, vision, window blinds, and the blindness of a boy in the grip of first love. Dylan similarly loves to have it both ways, and more.

A boy from a port town on Lake Superior, the biggest of the Great Lakes, those inland seas, Dylan moved with his family to inland Minnesota and Hibbing, farther north and in the Mesabi Iron Range, when he was six. The mountain mining town where he and his little brother David were raised was more rural, grittier, terribly cold in the winter. The “frostbitten North Country, a little corner of the earth where the dark frozen woods and icy roads didn’t faze me,” as he put it in his 2004 memoir Chronicles Vol. 1, remains Dylan’s home country. He left it behind when he was nineteen for New York City, also his home for years in the days of his first success and then as a young father, and for a life on the road all over the world — but Minnesota is a touchstone for Dylan. As he told Bill Flanagan in a 2017 interview, “Up north the weather is more extreme — frostbite in the winter, mosquito-ridden in the summer, no air conditioning when I grew up, steam heat in the winter and you had to wear a lot of clothes when you went outdoors.” Bringing it all back home matters: in Minnesota Dylan first listened to blues, folk music, and rock and roll on the radio; in Minnesota he learned to play the piano and guitar, wrote his first songs, and performed with high school friends. Both/and: he left it, and he returns to it when he wants or needs to — to finish the intensely personal album Blood On The Tracks, to spend time on a hundred-acre farm he has there, to feel where, and what, inspired him first.

 Dylan’s early days as a student of folk music and American history, a constant reader and writer, a swift success as a performer of others’ songs in Greenwich Village’s coffeehouses and, soon, larger and larger halls, are part of music legend and popular culture. Even as a very young man, at 22 and 23, Dylan basked on no laurels. Lionized as the new leader of the folk movement and prince of the protest song, he put aside his acoustic Gibson with the tangle of string-ends sprouting from its head, and picked up a Sunburst Fender Stratocaster. Touted as quintessentially American for his Woody Guthrie influence, Midwestern roots, and bohemian New York lifestyle, Dylan embarked for Europe and the South Pacific to perform. Hailed as a solo performer and chased as a teen idol by girls, Dylan began to perform with a band — soon The Band — and married young. He and his wife Sara, who had a daughter when she married him, soon had a family of five children, and Dylan has consistently and passionately guarded his private life with them, and their half sister born of Dylan’s second marriage. Pigeonholed as a singer-songwriter, Dylan began making movies, appearing in them, and directing and producing them. The Jewish-born rock star became a born-again Christian in the late 1970s, and celebrated his religion in new songs and in concerts, during which he also preached sometimes. Dubbed a recluse and written off by music critics in the 1980s, in 1988 Dylan began circling the earth in a series of tours that were, until 2020, never-ending.

Both/and; multitudinous. Bob Dylan is a novelist — of the wacky Modernist epistolary Tarantula; a record producer — often under the name Jack Frost, perhaps to remind you of that frozen North Country; and most recently a painter, sculptor, and co-developer of a line of high-end whiskey named Heaven’s Door. Though Dylan began sketching and drawing in the early 1960s, and his tour diaries and notebooks are full of art from doodles to finished faces and places, he first began to show and sell his paintings and prints in galleries some forty years later. His metal industrial sculptures of gears and wheels, car parts, found objects echo a line he wrote in 1973: “My dreams are made of iron and steel.” The whiskey is good, especially the straight Tennessee bourbon.

In 2016, when Dylan was seventy-five, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”  At that point, the Laureate could certainly have been expected to rest on his laurels. Bob Dylan does not do what is expected. He continued serenely on with his tour of the United States after the Nobel was announced, and then began his next leg of concerts in Stockholm, home of the Royal Swedish Academy, the following spring — but did not accept his prize in person (though it is reported that he met with the Nobel Committee), delivering his Laureate speech instead via recording in June 2017. The set list on April 1, 2017 in Stockholm began with the song “Things Have Changed” — a regular opener for Dylan’s shows, but with a difference, now.

Dylan remains hard-working, creating, and militantly unretired, thank heavens. He surprised us last March, as things were bleak indeed, with the sweeping, historic ballad “Murder Most Foul,” and graced us with a fantastic new album of original songs, Rough And Rowdy Ways, last summer. In terrible times, his art was a gift. As other musicians begin to take to the road again, under careful conditions, Dylan’s fans are hopeful. When his longtime band member Tony Garnier announced last week on Instagram that “Live gigs are coming back!” and we “will have more if everyone gets vaccinated[,]” I hoped devoutly to myself that Bob and the band had their jabs long ago, and that venues will soon welcome them and us, all together again at last, even if we must be distanced and masked and anonymous. Masked and anonymous: it is as if Dylan, who made and starred in a movie of this name in 2003, foresaw both the safety, and possibilities to explore, that this concept entails. Like W.B. Yeats — and I’ve written about Dylan’s kinship to his fellow Nobel Laureate since 2010 — Dylan is fond of masks, and the assumed, and lost, identities they can provide. He’s sung of them, he’s worn them in concert, and in Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story (2019), he mentioned them notably: “When somebody’s wearing a mask, he’s gonna tell you the truth. When he’s not wearing a mask, it’s highly unlikely.” These dark days have drawn out new appreciation for truths, and for what matters, in us all. I, for one, am happy to wear the mask (that, though I’m vaccinated, I’m still wearing when I go out anywhere) to a Bob show soon, and that is the absolutest truth.  

                                                                        *

            In May 1967, just before his 26th birthday, Dylan was doorstepped at his home in Woodstock, New York by reporter Michael Iachetta. Intent on finding and interviewing Dylan in the wake of his motorcycle accident nine months before, Iachetta traveled to Woodstock and spent hours (in his own somewhat hyperbolic words) “driving up narrow mountain trails, running from watchdogs, getting stuck in the mud and winding up hopelessly lost” before coming face to face with an elusive Dylan. When Dylan finally answered the door, he said, with an unreported sigh one can hear, “We can’t just stand here talking,” and invited Iachetta in for coffee. When asked what he had been doing in his home and with his time for most of the past year, Dylan replied, “What I’ve been doin’ mostly is seein’ only a few close friends, readin’ little ‘bout the outside world, porin’ over books by people you never heard of, thinkin’ about where I’m goin’, and why am I runnin’, and am I mixed up too much, and what am I knowin’, and what am I givin’, and what am I takin’. And mainly what I’ve been doin’ is workin’ on gettin’ better and makin’ better music, which is what my life is all about.” May his pandemic year, this past year of enforced isolation for us all, have been similar. Looking forward to what Bob Dylan does next, and not being able to predict it, is a part of life for many people. In old age he is gathering force and expanding his creativity. How lucky it feels to be living in the same times. Celebrating his birthday every year, which is done in an increasing number of cities, towns and venues around the world, is always colored by gratitude. Expect the outpouring in 2021 to be immensely festive and appreciative, and anticipating what is to come: “makin’ better music, which is what my life is all about.”

A shorter version of this essay appeared in the May 13, 2021 issue of Hot Press.

Bob Dylan, Lancaster Fairgrounds, California, 2001 © Andrea Orlandi

O, say were you ever in Rio Grande?

O, you Rio!

It’s there that the river runs down golden sand

And we’re bound for the Rio Grande.

Then away, love, away.

O, you Rio!

Sing fare you well, my pretty young girl,

And we’re bound for the Rio Grande.

The chorus comes in strong, as it is meant to do, while the grandly resonant voice of Roger Abrahams carries the tune. To me, “Rio Grande” by the Fo’c’sle Singers (Folkways, 1959) is the most thrilling of all the thousands of sea chanteys from times past — and times present, for they are now proliferating wildly (one hates to even use the word “virally” any more) on TikTok right now, to general delight.

This is thanks, largely, to Paul Clayton Worthington, later known as Paul Clayton. He was the organizer and sometime frontman, along with his good friend Dave Van Ronk, of the Foc’stle Singers, and by 1959 a longtime collector and recorder of working men’s ballads of the sea. They were a sub-specialty for this son of New Bedford, who’d grown up by and on the Atlantic, and who loved the writing of Herman Melville, the diaries of long-dead sailors, and above all the lyrics of lads who had gone down to the sea in ships. As an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, Clayton worked with Professor Arthur Kyle Davis and an English grad student named Matt Bruccoli, who’d later be one of the world’s leading scholars of F. Scott Fitzgerald, compiling a second volume of Davis’s celebrated Traditional Ballads of Virginia. Clayton’s field work in the 1950s was phenomenal: he moved into a log cabin that had a dirt floor, and neither electricity nor plumbing, about 20 miles from Charlottesville. With this as his base, he traveled deep in the hills with his guitar, banjo, and dulcimer, coaxing old souls to share with him their far older music, and playing it along with them. In 1956 Folkways released Clayton’s Traditional Ballads of Virginia, which is a record that, along with his sea chanteys, is one of the first to which I can ever remember listening.

Now New York Town is no place for me

O, you Rio!

I’ll pack up my trunk and I’ll go off to sea

And we’re bound for the Rio Grande.

Clayton was based in New York City part time, for recording purposes and as an integral part of the exploding Greenwich Village folk scene, when the young Bob Dylan arrived in town in 1961. He and Dylan became good friends; in his 2004 memoir Chronicles Vol. 1, Dylan recalls Clayton as “a scholar and a romantic with an encyclopedic knowledge of balladry” who “dressed in black from head to foot and would quote Shakespeare.” He also “sang a lot of sea shanties.” Dylan sang them too, as a young folk singer. He had learned them from Clayton before he met Clayton, back in the landlocked Midwest, where the great lakes like seas and the mighty Mississippi River intimated what sailing and whaling once were. John Koerner, of Koerner, Ray and Glover, let Dylan listen to his Folkways albums and learn from them: “Foc’sle Songs and Sea Shanties was one that I could listen to over and over again. This one featured Dave Van Ronk, Roger Abrams, and some others. The record knocked me out. It was full ensemble singing, hard driving harmonic songs like ‘Haul Away Joe,’ ‘Hangin’ Johnny,’ ‘Radcliffe Highway.’ Sometimes Koerner and I sang some of those songs as a duo.” It is exactly this ensemble quality, the hard-driving harmonies of sea chanteys, that I think is powering the current rage for the songs.

Now all you beachcombers we’ll have you to know

O, you Rio!

We’re bound to the southward and glad for to go

And we’re bound for the Rio Grande.

In her recent column on the Tik Tok sea chantey phenomenon for The New Yorker, Amanda Petrusich writes about the menhaden fishermen of the Chesapeake Bay and their working chanteys, as they harvested the tiny fish made into fertilizer near places like Tangier Island, now sadly settling beneath rising seas. When I was a child, the boat to Tangier passed right by the menhaden plant; the smell made you gag, and stayed in your hair and clothes all day. As they did this hard work, all pulling together, the menhaden fishermen — like thousands of sailors before them — found communion and connection in the rhythms of these songs. “Haul on The Bowline” is the perfect example: that’s exactly what the men singing the chantey were doing, and the repetitions and togethernesses in the tune helped them synchronize the motion and get the work done more smoothly and faster. It’s this collectiveness we are missing right now, locked down and out of range, alone and scared and waiting for vaccines. Says Petrusich, “In a moment where we are looking for escape and communion wherever we can find it, #shanteytok, as it has come to be called, feels like a safe and welcome portal to anywhere but here.” Exactly. Shanteytok makes us all less alone. It not only gives us all the history that sea chanteys contain, all the travel to faraway places and romance of the sea, but more importantly, these days, it gives us the feeling of standing on old salt-stained planks, shoulder to shoulder with others literally in the same boat. Long may it wave, and sincerest thanks to Nathan Evans, the Scottish postman who set us out onto Shantytok’s bounding main.

I’d like to close, though, with tradition — and in homage to one lost in this pandemic. Early last year, too early, Hal Willner died in New York City of complications from covid 19. His loss, to all who love him, music, and kindness and good nature, is tremendous, and will remain so. Thank you, Hal, for the glorious sea-borne records you made in 2006 and 2012, respectively Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs and Chanteys and Son of Rogue’s Gallery. These two albums, which I think underlie the current craze, feature sea songs sung by everyone from Richard Thompson and Shane MacGowan to Johnny Depp, Dr. John, Patti Smith, Jenni Muldaur and Michael Stipe — because everyone loved Hal and showed up for him. Go listen to these records if you haven’t heard them before, friends, and if you have. They will make you feel better, and in good company. Here’s Bob Neuwirth, channeling Van Ronk, with “Haul on The Bowline,” from Rogues Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs and Chanteys (ANTI- Records).

From autumn 1920 until spring 1921, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald and F. Scott Fitzgerald, newlyweds, were living at 38 West 59th Street in New York City. In the wake of the great success of his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), Fitzgerald was working quickly on a second, The Beautiful and Damned, to be published as soon as possible.

John J. Fitzgerald, an accountant in Paterson, New Jersey — and no relation to Scott — read This Side of Paradise, and wrote to Fitzgerald about it on December 1, 1920. The young writer — Fitzgerald was 25 — replied to him in a detailed letter that has resurfaced and is being sold, together with a remarkable photograph, by RR Auction of Boston, Massachusetts. Offered in 2009 by Swann Galleries in New York City, the letter and photograph swiftly went back into private hands. John Fitzgerald’s letter has never been reproduced, in part or in full. RR Auction posted the lot yesterday as part of an online auction concluding January 13, 2021.

John had this initial question for Scott: “Upon ending the story and learning that Amory says to an unadmitted God, ‘I know myself, but that is all’, I wonder if you have the courage to write a sequel to ‘This Side’, and inform us just what he is doing now?” John had a suggestion: “I should like you to marry him, after he knows kindness, to the estimable Clara; and then set them down in the vicinity of the Hotel Astor.” John foresaw a success on Broadway for Scott’s characters, which would surely have intrigued Fitzgerald — he always wanted to be a playwright, in his younger and more vulnerable years. Wrote John, “Getting on Broadway does not only mean power or money; many with money cannot stick there; it means exceptional talent, histrionic, industrial, commercial, professional, musical, or what not.” John was particularly bothered by Amory’s rejection of his Catholic faith, and attraction to socialism.

One bit of John’s advice is of singular interest. He suggests a novel in which “keen, efficient, capable, wonderful men and women” put together “great enterprises requiring trust, confidence, and understanding of each other,” thereby “mak[ing] the shore line of New York City such a great joy to look at from the standpoint of things done in the world.” Both The Beautiful and Damned (1921-2) and The Great Gatsby (1925), Fitzgerald’s next two novels, are about almost exactly the inverse of this proposal. John closes his letter by stating that he was heading off to read Flappers and Philosophers, Scott’s 1920 collection of stories first published primarily in The Saturday Evening Post.

Here is Scott’s reply.

Dear Mr. Fitzgerald: 

         Thanks for your letter. It’ll probably amuse you to know that “Amory” married “Rosalind,” two days before the publication of the novel. Their life in resumé and in rather lurid prospective is set down in my new novel which I’m just finishing + which I think will be serialized in the Metropolitan. However the characters have different names + pasts as I detest serials.

         “Clara” is a cousin of mine who lives in Norfolk—however she's about 12 years older than me (I?) in real life.

         Of course Amory’s “I know myself” is immature + entirely false. I finished the book when I was 22 + my point of view was much more ignorantly omniscient than it is now, when I should hesitate to proclaim anything except a pessimistic optimism. Don’t you think your “socialism won’t do” is a bit too certain. Seems to me it contains an echo of the “Democracy won’t do” + “Suffrage won’t do” in other ages.

         Of course commercially I am at present a success—probably making as much as any three men in my class at Princeton all together yet in my dealings with either the magazines or the movies or the publishers I have found them, as a class, dull, unimaginative, with a vague philosophy compounded of a dozen or so popular phrases. I have worked when I first left the army, as an advertising man at $90 a month and a car repairer and was extremely disgusted at being one of the exploited hogs in either hog-pen.

         I can see from your letter that you are a Catholic. I was a very strong one, very nearly a priest, and then when adversity really came + I struggled out of it it seemed that it was at first myself I must look to. My favorite writers are now Conrad, Haeckel + Nietche + Anatole France—of Americans H. L. Mencken.

         Except for Benediction, The Ice Palace, + The Cut Glass Bowl my collection of stories is trash—to tickle the yokelry of Kansas and get enough money to live well. I doubt if I shall ever do such stuff again. “Darcy” was Sigourney Fay, a monsignori + my best friend. When he died the church became an utterly unreal but beautiful story to me.

         I am utterly cynical about any moral law or the need of any. The one thing I am sure of is my love of beauty + even that fades + passes.

         I’ve answered your letter at length because tho I still get two or three a day from readers it’s very seldom that one is any more than a gushing pangyric (sp!).

                                             Sincerely

                                             F. Scott Fitzgerald

         Fitzgerald’s criticisms of his own work, reflections on the publishing industry and on his past employment, and opinion of his own short stories collected in Flappers and Philosophers are cuttingly keen. His brash tone is of a piece with other letters he wrote at the time; though it amused him to refer to his short stories as “trash,” he would privately admit in 1925 to H.L. Mencken, the American author he says here he most admires, that “my whole heart was in my first trash.” Fitzgerald’s passing defense of socialism is interesting, in that his fascination with Marxism and Russia would flower in an idealistic way in the early 1930s. His discussion of Catholicism, and the effect upon him of the death in January 1919 of Cyril Sigourney Fay, who succumbed to influenza during the pandemic, and to whom This Side of Paradise is dedicated, has not been put so succinctly or elegantly in anything previously published.

         Lastly, and most compellingly, while the relation of real people to the fictional ones they inspired is hardly new to Fitzgerald critics, the photograph included in this auction lot is one of a kind, to say the least. Autobiographical parallels between Fitzgerald’s life, and his novels and short stories, are standard in criticism of his writings, and in biographies of Fitzgerald. That there’s a lot of him in Amory Blaine, the arrogant, muddled young protagonist of This Side of Paradise, was recognized immediately; later, Fitzgerald would refer to Amory as his younger brother. Fitzgerald’s mention here that his favorite cousin Cecilia Delihant Taylor, who was a decade his senior and lived in Norfolk, Virginia with her family, is the model for Clara Page, Amory’s widowed distant cousin, is eye-catching to see in his own handwriting. And while Zelda Sayre’s presence in Rosalind Connage, the girl Amory loves and loses, has often been noted, the studio portrait of his wife that Scott sent to John — intended, I think, both jocularly and seriously — speaks for itself. The photograph is faded and torn, showing its age, but the 20-year-old Zelda’s eyes are full of light and life, her speaking smile and the shadow of a dimple dazzling. That a curl of her hair under the snug hat has strayed out into the frame is fine: it only enhances just how perfectly young and beautiful she is.

all images courtesy RR Auction 

text of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s letter © The Trustees of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Estate

Tony Glover, May 1965, via and © RR Auction 2020

Minnesota writer, musician, and blues-harmonica deity Tony “Little Sun” Glover — born David Curtis Glover in 1939, and active in his art up until his death in May 2019 — should be best remembered for his many decades as a founding member of Koerner, Ray, and Glover and for his biography, with Scott Dirks and Ward Gaines, Blues With A Feeling: The Little Walter Story (2002). With his friends “Spider” John Koerner and Dave “Snaker” Ray, Glover was a star of the Minneapolis folk scene from 1962 until Ray’s death in 2002. From their early appearances at the Newport Folk Festival and their classic album Blues, Rags and Hollers (1963), KRG helped protect, preserve, and promote American folk music and particularly the blues for forty years.

One of the musicians they met, befriended, and with whom Glover stayed in touch was Bobby Zimmerman, who arrived at the University of Minnesota as a student in the autumn of 1959, and at that time renamed himself Bob Dylan. In Chronicles Vol. 1 (2004), Dylan recalls his early days playing with his new friends in and around Dinkytown: “There was Dave Ray, a high school kid who sang Leadbelly and Bo Diddley songs on a twelve-string guitar, probably the only twelve-string quitar in the entire Midwest — and then there was Tony Glover, a harp player who played with me and Koerner sometimes. He sang a few songs, but mostly played the harp — cupped it in his hands and played like Sonny Terry or Little Walter.” Dylan readily admitted he couldn’t play like Glover and didn’t try to; he used a harp rack instead. “Glover’s playing was known and talked about around town, but nobody commented on mine.” Here, try a little twelve-bar rhythm with Tony.

The announcement this week that Glover’s widow Cynthia Nadler is selling his vast and important music archive through RR Auction of Massachusetts has sparked excitement among musicians, archivists, historians, and fans. RR are rightly showcasing Glover’s Bob Dylan Archive, but much more is for sale as well. Doug Brinkley has written for Rolling Stone about Dylan’s correspondence with Glover ($), quoting at length from some remarkable letters included. All are to be sold individually in an online auction that closes November 19th. I am hoping that all the letters end up in the Bob Dylan Archive in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where they belong: the excerpts available are a particularly important documentation of Dylan’s early days.

My favorite comes from time Dylan was spending in summer and fall of 1964, in Woodstock, New York. Woodstock was to be home for him and his young family by the end of the decade, but in November 1964, Dylan was staying in the home of his manager Albert Grossman and Sally Grossman in Bearsville with Joan Baez. He is composing on the typewriter — the way he would write, when one was available, until around 1967. At this time, Dylan began writing his song drafts, and letters and postcards, in longhand, with the drafts in small notebooks that were easily portable wherever he was. This wonderful letter scrolls out like Tarantula, like the Beat poetry he so appreciated at the time (Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky were among the visitors to Bearsville, while Dylan and Baez were there). Winter is coming, and the Catskills are getting cold. The Grossmans’ “groovy silent house” (owned today by Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer) is both a haven and a perfect point for exploring the nearby stretch of hills and Hudson Valley, with its “strange towns round here very ancient,” "the “old stone buildings - rip van winkle icabod crane demon horseback people / abandoned hotels within twenty mountain mile radius” and “mystic country no smell of any city.” That warm fireplace in the house is just the way Rick Danko would remember it in 1967, when a roaring fire in it induced him to move to Woodstock himself. Dylan and his friends go into Kingston to shoot pool. He loves the namelessness and secret of the Catskills, where a “vagabondcanadian hitchhike boy wonder poetsperhaps can imagine….”

Another typed letter, this one from December 1963, freestyles down the page with personal and political observations: “My guitar strings have escaped my eyesight…they remain with me now as a friend a flashin dashin friend who stands in front a me makin me look better…an its gettin so now that I'm growin not t need it…an soon I expect I will shout my words without it. for it's colors are wearin off on me an soon I myself will vanish into the sound hole…an all that will be going down will be stark naked undressed obscene flesh colored songs…yes maybe lunatic…ha you ask about harps I cant even understand how my own harp fits into me…it has the fuckin job of tryin t meet me hard hard…oh pity my own poor harp I am a writer of words I am honest I do not mean t harm nothin an nobody save that that runs against the boards of nature its a big nature…sometimes a circus nature an other times a courtroom nature but above all it is my nature an I own stock in it as much as anybody an I will defend my clown courthouse with the eyes of a lawyer.” Dylan also mentions that he’s recently donated to “snick,” or SNCC, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Earlier in 1963, SNCC had saved thirty-three African-American high school girls imprisoned in the Leesburg Stockade in Leesburg, Georgia after a protest March from Friendship Baptist Church to a segregated movie theater. Photographer Danny Lyon managed to get into the Stockade and photograph the girls in the horrible conditions under which they were being kept, and abused — at one point a guard threw a rattlesnake among them — and the published photographs led to outrage and the girls’ freedom.

These unpublished lyrics to a song, below, tentatively entitled “Brooklyn’s Stony Island Mind” — surely playing off Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s 1958 A Coney Island of the Mind, itself named from Henry Miller — were written after Glover, John Hammond, Jr., and Dylan visited Woody Guthrie in the spring of 1962. According to Glover, Dylan wrote them in the back seat of the car as they returned to Greenwich Village.

via RRAuction.com

Lot #5002 is a special item from Dylan’s days in his first NYC apartment of his own, which he shared with Suze Rotolo. Described as an “ALS signed ‘I, Me, Bob—161 West 4th Street Apt 3A,’” which is the address of Bob and Suze’s apartment, the letter tells Glover about a visit he’d had from their mutual friend, musician and photographer John Cohen: “I saw and talked with John Cohn last night for a while—he seems to have some grand ol time in Minneapolice—…told him and talked & babbled all about me I guess—no difference I can see tho—.” Cohen’s photographs of Dylan remain among the most intimate ever taken of him. Here’s Dylan on a New York City rooftop in 1962, the same year as this letter, holding his harmonica cupped in his hands à la Tony Glover:

Bob Dylan by John Cohen, 1962, via and © Getty

There’s a poster from Dylan’s 1961 appearance at Gerde’s Folk City, and a program from his 1961 concert at Carnegie Hall. There are a collection of Columbia Records studio photographs of Dylan, some very rarely seen and one I’d never seen before at all. There are never before reproduced photographs of Dylan chilling with Glover, backstage in Minneapolis in November 1965, before Dylan, Levon Helm, and Robbie Robertson went out and let the crowd have it. There are photos from the Newport Folk Festival and Dylan’s letter-poem “For Dave Glover” that was included in a Newport program. There is a copy of the 1963 number of Broadside that featured the sheet music for Dylan’s Masters of War, illustrated by Rotolo.

Glover’s reel-to-reel of the “Minnesota Party Tape” and another set of 1961 recordings, and his notes from a 1971 interview with Dylan, have garnered the most attention. There are other transcripts of unreleased interviews with Dylan being auctioned, but the 1971 interview contains Dylan’s handwritten corrections on all but one page, of the several “takes” of the interview. Each revision is offered as a separate lot. What Dylan has lined out, still clearly legible, is often as interesting as what remains:

The Dylan-related items for sale include an extensive clipping file, Glover’s copies of Dylan’s albums official and bootlegged, tapes, cds, proof or advance reading copies of books by and about Dylan, and his archive of books on Dylan. Michael Gray’s Bob Dylan Encyclopedia and Sean Wilentz’s Bob Dylan In America look to be much consulted, and the latter brandishes an excellent bookmark set into its pages.

Glover’s archives, as I said, are vast. Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, and The Doors were among his acquaintances and interviewees. There’s an inscribed copy of The New Creatures from Jim Morrison and an inscribed copy of Junkie from William S. Burroughs, and a signed copy of Jack Kerouac’s Visions of Cody. There’s a signed Annie Leibowitz of my favorite photograph of Keith Richards taken to date. There’s an interview tape and original photos of Pete Townshend. Tony’s own guitars, a full run of The Little Sandy Review, correspondence with Greil Marcus and with Pete Seeger, press kits for dozens of artists, and beautiful letters from Joan Baez are all for sale. There’s a brick from Sonny Boy Williamson’s house and a letter from Brownie McGhee. It is all solid gold, but I’ll leave you, before you run off to spend the rest of the day browsing the RR Auction website, with this telegram from Dylan to Glover, October 12, 1998. Glover had written the liner notes for The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The 'Royal Albert Hall' Concert, which was released on the following day. Glover was awarded the Deems Taylor Award from ASCAP for the liner notes; but Dylan’s gracious and heartfelt thanks for his friend’s fine writing is more moving than any award could be.

all images, unless otherwise noted, via RR Auction / The Tony Glover Archive 2020

all previously unpublished words and lyrics of Bob Dylan are © Bob Dylan

Rich, Dean, and Scott: this one’s for you, o Minnesota guys x

Bob, books, booze: beautiful.

warning: contains spoilers. GO listen to the show before you read this (link here; also available on youtube)

From 2006 until 2009, Bob Dylan manned a satellite radio show called Theme Time Radio Hour. The themes, dreams, and schemes he explored, with the help of an excellent staff of researchers and executive producer Eddie Gorodetsky, included cars, hair, trains, Christmas, flowers, and California. Individual shows on each topic featured familiar and obscure songs about them, poetry readings, history lessons, jokes so terrible they’re delicious, and whatever Dylan felt like tossing into the mix. The hundred shows are old friends, now, and some of the best road-tripping listening you can find.

The announcement of a brand-new episode of TTRH, to be aired September 21st on Sirius XM Radio, sent Dylan fans into transports. That it was to be about whiskey, and in conjunction with Bourbon Heritage Month, didn’t undercut any glee. Yes, Dylan is in partnership with Heaven’s Door Spirits, and therefore makes and sells whiskey himself these days. TTRH’s “Whiskey” isn’t about for-profit and self-promotion, though. Heaven's Door has just launched its second annual #ServeSomebody philanthropic program, which works with food banks across the United States. With more than 20 million Americans now jobless since COVID-19, and many of those people working in the food, beverage and hospitality industry, meal donations matter intensely. Heaven’s Door is donating for every bottle or beverage sold, and hopes to offer 300,000 free meals by October 31. If the popularity of this special radio show increases that number, so much the better.

“It’s nighttime in the city. There’s a hint of jasmine in the air. A startled cat runs across the piano keys….”

“Hello, friends, and welcome back to Theme Time Radio Hour. I’m your host, Bob Dylan. To paraphrase Alexandre Dumas in The Count of Monte Cristo, I’m so delighted to see you again, it makes me forget for the moment that all happiness is fleeting.” My, it’s good to hear Dylan sounding so fresh and clear. On stage, of course, he uses his singing voice — like all performers do. On the old TTRH, he had a persona, a gruff growly Wolfman-Jack dj way of speaking. Here, in “Whiskey,” he talks in his normal voice, and quite conversationally. It makes the stories and songs he shares feel porchside, living-room — a throwback to the days when families gathered around the towering wood-cased Zenith for fireside chats and all kinds of radio hours. “Theme Time Device Hour” isn’t going to happen, even if you’re listening on what looks like cigarettes shoved into your ears.

“Quiet Whiskey,” by Wynonnie Harris, comes with a lesson about Harris’s fellow songwriters. Dylan loves the standards and schools us in them: from a line in a 1928 book through a Sleepy John Estes song we arrive at Charlie Poole. The great Charlie Poole, Dylan’s fellow Columbia recording artist, who “knew how to take lemons and make lemonade,” mashed up Estes’s song with the earlier “Hesitation Blues” and “If the River Was Whiskey” was born. If you don’t like my peaches, dontcha shake my tree.

Dylan tells the story of a molasses flood in the North End of Boston in January 1919, when a rum manufacturing tank exploded and the 40-foot flowing wall of viscous sugar killed 21 people. He tells us of Johnny Bush and Willie Nelson’s friendship, and Bush’s unique voice, which, says Dylan, “it had a little catch in it, like a built-in heartbreak.” This episode of TTRH couldn’t have been without Nelson’s funky classic version of “Whiskey River.” Musing about whiskey bottles leads into bottleneck blues: guitars styled with slides from actual bottlenecks (and knives, and pieces of copper pipe). Dylan rightly calls Derek Trucks “maybe the best of them all, keeping that sound alive.” This may seem like a minor point, but it is not: one thing I have always appreciated about TTRH is Dylan’s giving credit not just to the recording artists and singers you know, but to the songwriters. He names them all, and lets you know about them. It’s appropriate, and generous.

A checklist of whiskey drinks ends with The Average Redhead….a new one on me. Someone needs to make me one, please. Bobby Charles would have known how to. Charles’s “He’s Got All the Whiskey,” a snaky, sexy, envious Southern blues that lights up the night, is one of the best moments in this episode of TTRH.

Bobby Charles, by Michael Ochs ©Getty

Penn Gillette, David Hidalgo, Jenny Lewis, John C. Reilly, Allison Janney, and other friends drop in to say a few words, without ever interrupting the flow. More effervescence in the water? Sure, teach us about that. And to hear Dylan say “beer goggles” and then describe Laura Cantrell’s “The Whiskey Makes You Sweeter” as a “spirit spectacles” song actually made me lonesome for crowded bars. When he leads into a song by talking about the particular joys of “a solitary evening of melancholy rumination” it could only be Frank Sinatra coming. It’s grand that Dylan follows Sinatra with Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart, and a song recorded in the same times, but released far later. “The generation gap is never as wide as people thought,” he asserts, with a grin you can see. “Voice of a Generation”? Ah, yes, but which one? Here he is in 2020, going, praise be, strong.

Dylan with a happy whiskey reference, Masked and Anonymous

Corn whiskey and its making gets a nice little story and Jimmy Witherspoon’s eponymous song, with its mesmerizing hand claps and concluding sound of a pour. Dylan gives you his recipe for a hot toddy, and then further warms and comforts you with Alfred Brown’s 1968 ska-reggae-blues version of “One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer.” “A hat-trick of inebriates,” says Dylan wryly. Rye whiskey is spicier, and based on Dylan’s story about it, more dangerous: the delirium tremens he had from withdrawal, while in jail, resulted in the death of 28-year-old Cajun fiddle king Harry Choates. Robert Burns, too, died too young — but he was only seventeen when he cleaned up, marginally, the very dirty old poem “Comin’ Thro The Rye” for the standard we know today. (If you want the raunchy Burns, please check out Paul Clayton’s Merry Muses of Caledonia, 1958).

Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s “Mountain Dew” is one of my favorite drinking songs; Dylan and Johnny Cash recorded it once upon a time. He and Van Morrison sang together on the Muses’ hill in Athens, and Dylan recounts a story Morrison told him about moonshine before playing The Man’s superb “Moonshine Whiskey.” Lotte Lenya is someone whose work Dylan compares to his: half-speaking, half singing, or Sprechstimme, is “a technique I’ve used myself.” We know from Chronicles Vol. 1 how he admired “the raw intensity of the songs” that Lenya’s husband Kurt Weill wrote with Bertolt Brecht. The whiskey-soaked “Alabama Song,” premiered by her in 1927 in the Brecht-Weill opera Mahagonny-Songspiel, is the recording he chooses for TTRH.

Joshua Soule Smith (1848-1904) is not a poet you will likely know, but this Georgia-born journalist and essayist (who often published as “Falcon”) wrote an ode to the mint julep that Dylan reads with relish. He then purposely states David Allan Coe as "Edgar Allan Poe.” 19th Century American poetry is never far from his mind, it seems.

another mint julep poem, 1845, not by Smith

The next song is the standout of the show for me. I’m so glad that, out of all the covers of this traditional tune available, Dylan plays the Thin Lizzy “Whiskey In The Jar.”

Dylan’s Irish roots have grown deep from his first days in the Village, when he became friends with The Clancy Brothers and particularly with Liam. In his own last visit to Washington Square, Liam fondly recalled the young man soaking up traditional Irish folk songs “like a sponge,” and did a perfect impression of Dylan that made Murray Lerner guffaw. No show about whiskey should be without Liam’s crystal voice and the hymn entitled “A Parting Glass.” As he replays a portion of an earlier TTRH for which Liam, who passed away in 2009, told a story, Dylan says, quietly, “I wanted to hear my friend’s voice again.” There is no reason to ever excuse hearing any story of Liam’s, twice-told or more.

Hangovers are part of drinking: cures include the hair of the dog, and scrambled eggs, as poet Hayden Carruth knew. Charles Bukowski, “hard-drinkin’ poet,” knew it too. The episodes of TTRH on which Dylan reads the most poetry and other literary selections remain my favorites. When I find out about a recording artist I’d never heard of before on one of the shows, it can be a revelation. Today’s wonder for me is Byllye “Jet” Williams, who recorded in the 1940s and 1950s and was rightly called “The Blues Girl.” Thank you, Bob.

“I never had a chance to talk about Bourbon Street,” mourns Dylan, leaving us hoping that the gang up in Studio B of the Abernathy Building will be back soon, with more about whiskey, or New Orleans, or the House of Bourbon, or any theme they dream up. Today’s show was such a relief and a pleasure to listen to, in a world gone wrong. Any time we’re left with a toast and blessing from David Crosby, and Dylan channeling Timmie Rogers’s signature “Oh YEAH” one more time, I will certainly continue to hope, and tune in.

The Waterboys, Good Luck, Seeker

Cooking Vinyl, 21 August 2020

The title of The Waterboys’ new album is perfect. Mike Scott has been for decades the dazzling, fleet-footed Golden Snitch of the music world, and this record is both a capsule and capstone showing just how he and his band cannot be pinned down, or confined to any genre.

A confession: I fell in love with Scott’s beautiful and entirely unique voice before I knew who he or The Waterboys were, when I heard “Fisherman’s Blues” on WBCN in Boston in October 1989. At the end of the month, their show at the Orpheum made a fan of me for life, and I’ve followed their long and varied trail of records, with a regularly shifting lineup of performers, ever since. 

Scott, who founded The Waterboys in the early 1980s, and the extraordinary fiddle player (and multi-instrumentalist, composer, artist, and photographer) Steve Wickham, are the longest-standing members of the group. Good Luck, Seeker also boasts the talents of Brother Paul Brown on keyboards, Ralph Salmins on drums, Aongus Ralston on bass, and Zeenie Summers, Jess Kavanagh, and Blaine Harrison on backing vocals. Many other musicians who have been past members of the group — like David Hood, the pride of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, who toured with The Waterboys in 2015 — appear on selected tracks.

Good Luck, Seeker opens with a burst of Motown ripple and funk, “The Soul Singer,” and follows with rather wily whimsy, “(You’ve Got To) Kiss A Frog or Two,” co-written by Scott and Brown. There is a beautiful version of the traditional love song “Low Down in the Broom” that gives way to a snappy, spicy ode to Dennis Hopper. How’s that for diversity? Keep going; there’s more.

Since the summer festival season in this dark year was canceled, and live music, that much-missed visceral part of our lives, remains a thing of the past and future but not the present, it’s a gift that The Waterboys are releasing so many videos of these new songs. Scott is a visual artist as well as a singer-songwriter, interested in everything from collage to sartorial style, and the videos are to me integral interpretations.

There’s “Freak Street,” which showcases Scott’s spectacular sneer:

The dark-haired lady of “Low Down In The Broom” is certainly not sitting around and waiting for any lover:

My favorite of the videos for Good Luck, Seeker, so far is that for the spoken-word lyric “Postcard From the Celtic Dreamtime.” Some years ago The Waterboys did an album, and live performance at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, called An Appointment With Mr, Yeats. Yeats’s beloved landscape in The West belongs to The Waterboys as well, and has, since their days of recording in Spiddal long ago. “Postcard From the Celtic Dreamtime” sweeps you over the Aran Islands and what remains of the ancient, magnificent cliffside fort of Dun Aengus — half of it now bitten away by time, the wind and the sea.

 Pick up Good Luck, Seeker and enjoy your trip away from what you think you know. The familiar is reinterpreted; the new is exciting; and all of it lightens the heaviness of the looming ending of the longest year.

Steve Wickham and Mike Scott, Patchin Place, New York City, 2015.

Once upon a time, people who could afford to wrote letters on personalized stationery, the paper thick and expensive, their names and perhaps addresses at the top in colored ink placed there by the channels cut in a copper plate.  We seem to reserve this behavior for wedding invitations and special occasions today, if even then. Personal writing paper is thermographically done, printed out on a printer. When you run your fingers over a name, it’s smooth: no dips and ripples to please the touch.

In these pandemic days when friends are far away and Zoom cocktails are how you see each other, when the United States Postal Service is under direct attack from the federal government that founded and is meant to foster and fund it, people are writing letters. Janet Somerville, the Toronto-based editor of Martha Gellhorn’s wartime letters, has been sending a #letteraday to friends around the world for years; more recently, writer Rachel Syme and politicians from Alexandra Ocasio-Cortes to Elizabeth Warren have been urging us to cultivate new penpals.

That my job entails reading the letters of the dead is sometimes an emotional burden.  Yet in this age of email and text, leafing through old letters can be such a pleasure. Even when one is reading letters as thoroughly studied by scholars as those among F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, and their family, surprises can happen — and beauty, and unexpected humor, spills from the very stationery itself.

After their marriage in April 1920, Scott and Zelda showed plenty of personality in their personalized notepaper.  The bestselling young author of This Side of Paradise had money, and one of the Fitzgeralds’ many indulgences was nice stationery, for themselves, for their baby daughter, and for their mothers.

Scott always preferred his name in full, in capitals, and in a very traditional font:  part of his author’s profession.  What he chose to append to “F. Scott Fitzgerald,” however, in 1921 is exceptionally fine.

best self-knowledge exhibited by a writer, ever

Did the former Zelda Sayre of Alabama choose to be “Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald”?  She did not.  The paper, and ink color, may change, but on most of her correspondence, Zelda is Zelda.

russet ink, perhaps once the color of her auburn hair

Ten years later, she was using the same copper plate.

love that red

In her letters from Highlands Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, during the late 1930s, Zelda’s distinctive and individual name is — with a sad appropriateness — lost.  She writes under her married initials, all in lower-case.  The “S” of her maiden name, Sayre, now appears. The background is blue, but those letters are golden.

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald

The Fitzgeralds picked writing paper in the 1920s for their respective mothers.  Zelda always called her mother, Minnie Sayre, “Mama.”

Mama from Montgomery

Mollie Fitzgerald was, if you’d asked her son Scott, easily identified thus:

Fitzgerald’s parents moved to Washington to be near their son and his family

After Frances Scott Fitzgerald was born in October 1921, Mollie made a delighted and significant change to her notepaper.

Little Frances Scott, or Scottie, as her family called her, was soon writing to her grandmothers — and to other important addressees like Santa Claus — from Paris and Cannes and Hyères on her own notepaper, with her name in fine Jazz-Age Metropolitan-style lettering.

These personal writing papers of the Fitzgeralds show intimate things about the personalities of their selectors:  boldness; silliness; sense of humor; sense of self; sense of family.  Be inspired by Scott and Zelda.  Write a letter to someone today, and carefully choose the paper you wish to use, as you sit down with your pen to savor the time.

Anne Margaret Daniel 2020

all images © Princeton University Libraries / Rare Books and Special Collections / Manuscripts Division

*please scroll down my blog for the lyrics to “I Contain Multitudes,” “False Prophet,” and “Murder Most Foul,” the three songs from this record that were released earlier in the year.

These are not official lyrics, just what I heard as I listened. However, all lyrics here are by Bob Dylan and © Special Rider Music 2020

My Own Version of You

All through the summers into January

I been visiting morgues and monasteries

Lookin’ for the necessary body parts

Limbs and livers and brains and hearts

Aw, bring someone to life is what I wanna do

I wanna create my own version of you.

Well, it must be the winter of my discontent

I wish youd’a taken me with you wherever you went

They talk all night and they talk all day

Not for a minute do I believe anything they say

I’m go’ bring someone to life, someone I’ve never seen,

You know what I mean, you know exactly what I mean.

I take the Scarface Pacino and the Godfather Brando

Mix ‘em up in a tank and get a robot commando

If I do it up right and put the head on straight

I’ll be saved by the creature that I create.

I’ll get blood from a cactus, gunpowder from ice

I don’t gamble with cards, and I don’t shoot no dice,

Can ya look at my face with your sightless eyes,

Can you cross your heart and hope to die?

I’ll bring someone to life, someone for real

Someone who feels the way that I feel.

I study Sanskrit and Arabic to improve my mind

I wanna do things for the benefit of all mankind.

I say to the willow tree, don’t wait for me

I’m saying the hell to all things that used to be

Well I get into trouble and I hit the wall

No place to turn, no place at all

I pick a number between one and two

And I ask myself “What would Julius Caesar do?”

I wanna bring someone to life in more ways than one

Don’t matter how long it takes, it’ll be done when it’s done.

I’m gonna make you play the piano like Leon Russell

Like Liberace, like St. John the Apostle

I’ll play every number that I can play

I’ll see you maybe on Judgment Day

After midnight, if you still wanna meet,

I’ll be at the Black Horse Tavern on Armageddon Street

Two doors down, not that far to walk,

I’ll hear your footsteps, you won’t have to knock

I’ll bring someone to life, balance the scales,

I’m not gonna get involved in insignificant details.

You can bring it to St. Peter, you can bring it to Jerome

You can bring it all the way over, bring it all the way home,

Bring it to the corner where the children play,

You can bring it to me on a silver tray

I’ll bring someone to life, spare no expense,

Do it with decency and common sense.

Can ya tell me what it means to be or not to be?

You won’t get away with foolin’ me.

Can ya help me walk that moonlight mile,

Can ya give me the blessings of your smile?

I’ll bring someone to life, use all of my powers,

Do it in the dark in the wee small hours.

I can see the history of the whole human race

It’s all right there, it’s carved into your face.

Should I break it all down, should I fall on my knees?

Is there light at the end of the tunnel, can you tell me please?

Stand over there by the cypress tree,

Where the Trojan women and children are sold into slavery,

Long before the First Crusade, way back ‘fore

         England or America were made.

Step right in to the burnin’ hell

Where some of the best known enemies of mankind dwell

Mr. Freud with his dreams, Mr. Marx with his ax,

See the rawhide lash rip the skin from their backs.

Got the right spirit? You can feel it, you can hear it.

You’ve got what they call the immortal spirit.

You can feel it all night, you can feel it in the morn,

It creeps in your body the day you were born.

One strike of lightning is all that I need,

And a blast of ‘lectricity that runs at top speed,

Show me your ribs, I’ll stick in the knife

Gonna jump-start my creation to life.

I wanna bring someone to life, turn back the years

Do it with laughter, and do it with tears.

I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself To You

I’m sittin’ on my terrace lost in the stars

Listenin’ to the sounds of the sad guitars

Been thinkin’ it all over and I thought it all through

I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you.

I saw the first fall of snow

I saw the flowers come and go

I don’t think that anyone ever else will ever do

I made up my mind to give myself to you

I’m givin’ myself to you, I am,

From Salt Lake City to Birmingham

From East LA to San Antone

I don’t think I could bear to live my life alone.

My eye is like a shooting star

It looks at nothing here or there, looks at nothing near of far

No one ever told me it’s just something I do

I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you.

If I had the wings of a snow white dove

I’d preach the gospel, the gospel of love

A love so new a love so true

I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you.

Take me out travelin, you’re a travelin’ man

Show me something that I’ll understand

I’m not what I was, things aren’t what they were

I’ll go far away from home with her.

I traveled a long road of despair

I met no other traveler there

Lotta people gone a lotta people I knew

I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you.

Well my heart’s like a river, a river that sings

Just takes me awhile to realize things

I’ll see you at sunrise, see you at dawn,

On the other side when everyone’s gone

I’ve traveled from the mountains to the sea

I hope that the gods go easy with me

I knew you’d say yes, I’m sayin’ it too

I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you.

Black Rider

Black Rider, Black Rider, you been livin’ too hard

Been up all night, have to stay on your guard

The path that you’re walkin’ too narrow to walk

Every step of the way another stumblin’ block

The road that you’re on, same road that you know

Just not the same as it was a minute ago.

Black Rider, Black Rider, you’ve seen it all

You’ve seen the great world and you’ve seen the small

You fell into the fire and you’re eating the flame

Better seal up your lips if you wanna stay in the game

Be reasonable, mister, be honestly fair,

let all of your earthly thoughts be a prayer.

Black Rider, Black Rider, all dressed in black

I’m walkin’ away, you try to make me look back

My heart is at rest, I’d like to keep it that way

I don’t wanna fight, at least not today.

Go home to your wife, stop visiting mine,

One of these days, I’ll hurt ya to be kind.

Black Rider, Black Rider, tell me when, tell me how,

If there ever was a time, then let it be now

Lemme go through, open the door,

My soul is distressed, my mind is at war

Don’t hug me, don’t flatter me, don’t turn on the charm,

I’ll take a sword and hack off your arm.

Black Rider, Black Rider, hold it right there

The size of your cock will get you nowhere

I’ll suffer in silence, I’ll not make a sound,

Maybe I’ll take the high moral ground

Some enchanted evening I’ll sing you a song,

Black Rider, Black Rider, you been on the job too long.

Goodbye Jimmy Reed

I live on a street named after a saint

Women in the churches wear powder and paint

Where the Jews and the Catholics and the Muslims all pray

I can tell a prayer [?] from a mile away

Goodbye Jimmy Reed, Jimmy Reed indeed,

Gimme that old time religion, it’s just what I need.

Well thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory

Go tell it on the mountain, go tell the real story,

Tell it in that straightforward Puritanical tone

In the mystic hours where the person’s alone

Goodbye Jimmy Reed, Godspeed,

Thump on the Bible, proclaim a creed.

You won’t a minded much, the people all said

Cause I didn’t play guitar behind my head

Never pandered, never acted proud,

Never took off my shoes, threw ‘em in a crowd

Goodbye Jimmy Reed, goodbye and goodnight

Put a jewel in your crown and I’ll put out the light.

They threw everything at me, everything in the book

I had nothin’ to fight with but a butcher’s hook

They had no pity, they never lend a hand

I can’t sing a song that I don’t understand.

Goodbye Jimmy Reed, goodbye and good luck

I can’t play the record cause my needle got stuck.

Transparent woman in a transparent dress.

Suits ya well, I must confess,

I break open your grapes, I suck out the juice,

I need you like my head needs a noose.

Goodbye Jimmy Reed, goodbye and so long,

I thought I could resist her, but I was so wrong.

God be with ya, brother dear

If you don’t mind me asking, what brings ya here?

Aw, nothing much, I’m just lookin’ for the man

Came to see where he’s lyin in this lost land.

Goodbye Jimmy Reed, and everything within ya

Can’t you hear me callin’ from (uh) down in Virginia?

Mother of Muses

Mother of Muses, sing for me

Sing of the mountains and the deep dark sea

Sing of the lakes and the nymphs of the forest

Sing your hearts out, all ye women of the chorus

Sing of honor and fate and glory be,

Mother of Muses, sing for me.

Mother of Muses, sing for my heart

Sing of a love too soon to depart

Sing of the heroes who stood alone

Whose names are engraved on tablets of stone

Who struggled with pain so the world could go free

Mother of Muses, sing for me.

Sing of Sherman, Montgomery and Scott,

And of Zhukov, and Patton, and the battles they fought,

Who cleared the path for Presley to sing,

Who carved the path for Martin Luther King

Who did what they did and they went on their way

Man, I could tell their stories all day.

I’m falling in love with Calliope

She don’t belong to anyone, why not give her to me

She’s speakin’ to me, speakin’ with her eyes

I’ve grown so tired of chasing lies.

Mother Muses, wherever you are

I’ve already outlived my life by far.

Mother of Muses, unleash your wrath

Things I can’t see, they’re blockin’ my path

Show me your wisdom, tell me my fate

Put me upright, make me walk straight

Forge my identity from the inside out

You know what I’m talkin’ about

Take me to the river, release your charms

Let me lay down awhile in your sweet lovin’ arms

Wake me shake me, free me from sin

Make me invisible like the wind

Got a mind to ramble, got a mind to roam

I’m travelin’ light, and I’m a-slow comin’ home.

Crossing the Rubicon

I crossed the Rubicon on the fourteenth day

Of the most dangerous month of the year

At the worst time, at the worst place,

That’s all I seem to hear

I got up early so I could greet the Goddess of the Dawn

I painted my wagon “Abandon all Hope”

         and I crossed the Rubicon.

Well the Rubicon is a red river goin’ gently as she flows

Redder than your ruby lips and the blood that flows from the rose

Three miles north of Purgatory, one step from the Great Beyond

I prayed to the cross, I kissed the girls,

         and I crossed the Rubicon.

Well at least this time I see in this world so badly [? bent]

How can I redeem the time a time so idly [spent?]

How much longer can it last, how long can it go on

I embraced my love, put down my hair, and I crossed the Rubicon.

I can feel the bones beneath my skin, and they’re trembling with rage

I’ll make your wife a widow, you’ll never see old age

Show me one boatman [good man?] in sight that the sun shines down upon

I pawned my watch, I paid my debts, and I crossed the Rubicon.

Put my heart up on a hill, where some happiness I’ll find

If I survive then let me love, let the hour be mine.

Take the high road, take the low, take any one you’re on

I poured the cup, I passed it along, and I crossed the Rubicon.

Well you defiled the most lovely flower in all of womanhood

Others can be tolerant, others can be good,

I’ll cut ya up with a crooked knife, law, then I’ll miss ya when you’re gone

I stood between heaven and earth and I crossed the Rubicon.

You won’t find any happiness here, no happiness or joy

Go back to the gutter, try your luck, find you some nice pretty boy

Tell me how many men I need, and who can I count upon,

I’ll strap my belt, I’ll button my coat, and I cross the Rubicon.

I feel the Holy Spirit inside, see the light that freedom gives,

I believe it’s in the reach of every man who lives,

Keep as far away as possible, it’s darkest ‘fore the dawn

Oh God

I turned the key and broke it off, and I crossed the Rubicon.

[?] baby, are you still in my mind, I truly believe that you are

Could it be anybody else but you who’s come with me this far?

The killin’ frost is on the ground and autumn leaves are gone

I lit the torch, I looked at the east, and I crossed the Rubicon.

Key West (Philosopher Pirate)

McKinley hollered, McKinley squalled,

Doctor said McKinley, death is on the wall

Say it to me, if you got something to confess

I heard all about it, he was goin’ down slow

I heard it on the wireless radio

Down in the boondocks, way down in Key West

I’m searchin’ for love, for inspiration

On that pirate radio station

Comin’ outta Luxembourg and Budapest

Radio signal play clear as can be

I’m so deep in love that I can hardly see

Down in the flatlands, way down in Key West

Key West is the place to be

If you’re lookin’ for immortality

Stay on the road, follow the highway signs.

Key West is fine and fair,

If you’ve lost your mind you’ll find it there.

Key West is on the horizon line.

I was born on the wrong side of the railroad track

Like Ginsberg, Corso and Kerouac

Like Louie and Jimmy and Buddy and all the rest

Well it might not be the thing to do

But I’m stickin’ with you through and through

Down in the flatlands, way down in Key West.

I got both my feet planted square on the ground

Got my right hand high with the thumb down

Such is life, such is happiness

Hibiscus flowers, they grow everywhere here

If you wear one, put it behind your ear

Down on the bottom, way down in Key West.

Key West is the place to go

Down by the Gulf of Mexico

Beyond the sea, beyond the shifting sand

Key West is the gateway key

To innocence and purity

Key West is the enchanted land.

I’ve never lived in the Land of Oz

Or wasted my time with an unworthy cause

It’s hot down here and you can’t be overdressed

Tiny blossoms of a toxic plant

They can make ya dizzy, I’d like to help you but I can’t

Down in the flatlands, way down in Key West

Well the fishtail palms and the orchid trees

They can give ya that bleedin’ heart disease

People tell me I oughta try a little tenderness

On Newton Street, Bayview Park

Walkin’ in the shadows after dark

Down under, way down in Key West

I play gumbo-limbo spirituals

I know all the Hindu rituals

People tell me that I’m truly blessed

Bougainvillea blooming in the summer and the spring

Winter here is an unknown thing

Down in the flatlands, way down in Key West.

Key West is under the sun, under the radar, under the gun

You stay to the left, and then ya lean to the right

Feel the sunlight on your skin, and the healing virtues of the wind

Key West, Key West is the land of light.

Wherever I travel, wherever I roam,

I’m not that far from the convent home

I do what I think is right, what I think is best,

[History?] Street off of Mallory Square

Truman had his White House there

Eastbound, westbound, way down in Key West.

Twelve years old, they put me in a suit

Forced me to marry a prostitute

There were gold fringes on her wedding dress.

That’s my story, but not where it ends

She’s still cute and we’re still friends

Down on the bottom, way down in Key West

I play both sides against the middle

Trying to pick up that pirate radio signal

I heard the news, I heard your last request

Fly around, my pretty little miss

I don’t love nobody, give me a kiss

Down on the bottom, way down in Key West.

Key West is the place to be

If you’re lookin’ for immortality

Key West is paradise divine.

Key West is fine and fair,

If you’ve lost your mind you’ll find it there.

Key West is on the horizon line.

* to repeat: these aren’t official lyrics, just my pass at them from listening to the album — and they’re all © Special Rider Music 2020.

“And many false prophets shall arise, and deceive many.”

Matthew 24:11

Early in the evening of May 7, 2020, Bob Dylan’s social media feeds posted the image above, with the accompanying phrase “What are you lookin’ at — there’s nothing to see.” It’s a stock, rhetorical query, usually a challenge, with no particular poetical roots (except perhaps a very obscure Romantic dash of Dorothy Wordsworth).

The decaying skeleton dandy is surely “The Shadow,” I thought, and soon saw that Dylan fans had found the image itself quickly. It seems to have been first posted by Dag Braathen on Twitter. The cover image for The Shadow #96, featuring the “Maxwell Grant” (Walter B. Gibson) stories “Death About Town” and “North Woods Mystery,” is this:

July 15, 1942. Dylan was a year and two months old when this issue appeared. The “north woods” story, originally published in 1936, begins in New York City’s Chinatown and sees The Shadow seeking criminals whilst making his way by canoe through Canadian woods (and he can talk to the animals). “Death About Town” involves murder among New York “gentlemen’s club” members.

Some were quick to speculate that the hanged man’s silhouette in the “False Prophet” image, with its protruding forelock, was “very Trumpy looking.” Others commented on the needle in the skeleton’s hand, filled with poison, illegal drugs, perhaps a vaccine. Would this be a new song from Dylan, to be released — like “Murder Most Foul” and “I Contain Multitudes” — soon after midnight? Or did the cryptic post herald a whole new Dylan album, something that has been rumored since autumn 2019?

I made tea and stayed up, while my self-isolation companions — husband, mother, and dogs — went off to their respective beds. These midnight music drops of Dylan’s are making me almost nostalgic for Yankees games on the West Coast that start at 10:05 pm New York time (of course I’m missing baseball terribly, aren’t you?).

Sure enough, on Bob Dylan’s YouTube site at 12:02, there came the announcement of a new album. Rough and Rowdy Ways, which takes its title from a grand Jimmie Rodgers song, will be released June 19. Together with the announcement, the song “False Prophet” is now available for you to listen to. It’s a stingy, gritty carpe diem song with riproaring lyrics that seduce and challenge, that harken back to the Bible and roll around in the barroomy beat. Be careful when Dylan sings “I’m just here to bring vengeance on somebody’s head.”

“And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.”

— Revelation 20:10

* May 8th and an update. Here’s my first pass at the lyrics.

“False Prophet,” © Bob Dylan and Special Rider Music 2020

Another day that don’t end, another ship going out

Another day of anger, bitterness, and doubt

I know how it happened, I saw it begin

I opened my heart to the world and the world came in.

Hello Mary Lou, hello Miss Pearl

My fleet-footed guides from the underworld

No stars in the sky shine brighter than you

You girls mean business and I do too

Well, I’m the enemy of treason, a enemy of strife

I’m the enemy of the unlived meaningless life

I ain’t no false prophet, I jus’ know what I know

I go where only the lonely [lowly] can go

I’m first among equals, second ta none,

The last of the best, you can bury the rest

Bury ‘um naked, with their silver and gold

Put ‘um six feet under, and I pray for their soul

Whatta ya looking at? There’s nothing to see

Just a cool breeze that’s encircling me

Let’s go for a walk in the garden, so far and so wide

We can sit in the shade by the fountainside.

[instrumental break]

I searched the world over for the Holy Grail

I sing songs of love, I sing songs of betrayal

Don’t care what I drink, I don’t care what I eat

I climb the mountain of swords on my bare feet

You don’t know me darling, ya never would guess

I’m nothing like my ghostly appearance would suggest

I ain’t no false prophet, I just said what I said

I’m just here to bring vengeance on somebody’s head.

Put out your hand, there’s nothing ta hold

Open your mouth, I’ll stuff it with gold

Ah, ya poor devil, look up if you will

The City of God is there on the hill.

[instrumental break]

Hello stranger, hello and goodbye

You rule the land, but so do I.

You lusty old mule, you got a poison brain

I’ll marry you to a ball and chain.

You know, darlin’, the kind of life that I live

When your smile meets my smile, somethin’s got to give

I ain’t no false prophet, Naw, I’m nobody’s bride

Can’t remember when I was born, and I forgot when I died.

Take a bow, Bob. We can’t wait for June 19.

Bob Dylan by Andrea Orlandi 2019.

Sleeplessness is a way of life, alas, these days. With so much gone wrong in a world in the grip of a pandemic virus, with an increasing number of people out of work and dipping into savings to pay bills, with political and professional and personal uncertainties, it’s hard to lie down and shut your eyes after dark. Recently, there has been a merciful bonus to being awake at midnight, if you like music — and Bob Dylan’s music in particular.

At midnight on March 26, Eastern Standard Time, the website bobdylan.com briefly went dark. It soon showed the announcement of, and a link to, a new Dylan song, “Murder Most Foul.” In a couple of weeks the seventeen-minute song — lyrics here — has garnered over three million views at BobDylanVEVO.

On April 16, at 6:25pm, Dylan’s official Twitter stated the hashtag #IContainMultitudes. The phrase comes from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself number 51. Dylan quoted this line of Whitman’s, while discussing Allen Ginsberg, in footage recently released as part of The Rolling Thunder Re-vue: A Bob Dylan Movie by Martin Scorsese (2019). Ginsberg, it should be noted, was a true disciple of Whitman, making this clear in his poetry and in public lectures all his life. It’s generally taken as a positive phrase, a compliment; but careful — if read in context, it’s darker. The line celebrates the speaker’s self-contradictions, something for which Dylan has been both damned and praised throughout his career, but the section concludes: “Will you speak before I am gone? will you already prove too late?”

Intrigued, of course, I decided to wait up for more. Say what else one will of him, Dylan doesn’t disappoint. When his social media mavens place a clue like this one, midnight seemed the right guess again. That he seems to like performing “Soon After Midnight,” the grim barroom ballad from Tempest (2012), his last album to date of original compositions, didn’t hurt the guessing.

photograph of Bob Dylan, July 1996 Salzburg Austria, by Andrea Orlandi

At 12:06, “I Contain Multitudes” appeared on YouTube at BobDylanVEVO. Here it is.

Thank you, Bob.

I Contain Multitudes

by Bob Dylan ©2020

*my unofficial pass at the lyrics

Today and tomorrow, and yesterday too

The flowers are dyin’ like all things do

Follow me close, I’m goin’ to Ballinalee

I’ll lose my mind if you don’t come with me

I fuss with my hair, and I fight blood feuds

I contain multitudes.

Got a tell-tale heart, like Mr. Poe

Got skeletons in the walls of people you know

I’ll drink to the truth and the things we said

I’ll drink to the man that shares your bed

I paint landscapes, and I paint nudes

I contain multitudes.

Red Cadillac and a black mustache

Rings on my fingers that sparkle and flash

Tell me what’s next, what shall we do?

Half my soul baby belongs to you

I rollick and I frolic with all the young dudes

I contain multitudes.

I’m just like Anne Frank, like Indiana Jones

And them British bad boys the Rolling Stones

I go right to the edge I go right to the end

I go right where all things lost are made good again

I sing the songs of experience, like William Blake.

I’ve no apologies to make

Everything’s flowing all at the same time

I live on a boulevard of crime

I drive fast cars and I eat fast foods

I contain multitudes.

Pink pedal-pushers, red blue jeans

All the pretty maids and all the old queens

All the old queens from all my past lives

I carry four pistols and two large knives

I’m a man of contradictions

I’m a man of many moods

I contain multitudes.

You greedy old wolf I’ll show you my heart

But not all of it, only the hateful part

I’ll sell you down the river, I’ll put a price on your head.

What more can I tell ya? I sleep with life and death in the same bed

Get lost madam get up off my knee

Keep your mouth away from me

I’ll keep the path open, the path in my mind

I’ll see to it that there’s no love left behind

I play Beethoven’s sonatas, Chopin’s preludes

I contain multitudes.

*a shorter version of this essay was published by No Depression on March 27, 2020

At midnight on March 27, 2020, Bob Dylan released a new song, “Murder Most Foul.”  It is sixteen minutes and fifty-seven seconds long, replacing “Highlands” (1997) as his longest studio recording.  Centering on the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, it is a master’s lesson in American history and in music history, rhyming couplets, and very much more.

Musically it is as simple in its rises and falls and refrains as are some of Dylan’s other long compositions — “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” “Desolation Row,” “Highlands.”  Complications in the tune would only distract from the power of the words, showcased in Dylan’s clear enunciations and slow singing.  He wants you to understand what he is saying.  The rippling Coplandesque start — and I assume the musicians here — of Dylan’s own keyboards and Tony Garnier’s thrumming bowed bass are slowly joined by Donnie Herron’s gentle fiddlethread weaving it all together, and the softest brush of drums. Is it George Recile? Matt Chamberlain? When was the song recorded? Some think it’s a Tempest (2012) outtake, recorded along with Dylan’s most recently known new songs.  I do not. Neither Dylan’s voice nor the instrumentals match with the sound of the Tempest tracks. On his website, where word of “Murder Most Foul” first broke, Dylan’s statement says simply “This is an unreleased song we recorded a while back that you might find interesting.”  For him, “a while back” could mean anything from something that came to pass in the days of Caesar Augustus to not much farther back than yesterday.  What matters is that we have the song now, to listen to in these dark days.

Why has Dylan released this song now? Does it herald a new album, rumors of which have been bruited about since last winter? Or is it an extended play in every sense of the phrase, its length an attempt at once to mirror the cultural sweep of America’s turbulent history since November 1963, and to give us a lot to reflect on during distracting, deadly days.

 All ballads begin “once upon a time.”  This is a ballad, about the darkest day for the United States of America during Dylan’s lifetime and in the past sixty years: the day on which President Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, with his wife Jackie sitting next to him in the car.  You listen to it as the unchanging sepia image of the young President watches you, his eyes calm, a half smile on his handsome face, his customary pinstriped Brooks Brothers suit and usual pocket square above the song’s title, written in a Medieval font.  Dylan couples the day of Kennedy’s assassination to the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in the first lines of “Murder Most Foul,” quoting another President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to compress and intensify the horror:  “‘Twas a dark day in Dallas, November '63 / A day that will live on in infamy.”

 The stanzas roll down like waters, and the sweep and swirl they contain of opinion and culture, observation and judgement, condemnation and comfort soon overwhelms.  The stealth simplicity of short words and rhyming couplets is a large part of what is overwhelming.  Dylan has always been one of the very best singer-songwriters at turning a couplet; he is in the company of Lord Byron and John Milton, William Shakespeare and his fellow Nobel Laureate W.B. Yeats in this.  Think of the way Shakespeare delivers almost a body blow with those seemingly simple rhymed couplets, that say such vital things in the course of a play.  Look at Hamlet, from which Dylan takes the title of this song.  The quotation is from Hamlet’s father’s ghost, the murdered King Hamlet, as he tells his son of his killing at the hands of his own brother, Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius: “Murder most foul, as in the best it is; / But this most foul, strange and unnatural.”  After a wild and tormented scene following Hamlet’s receiving this knowledge, he says to his terrified friends: “The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right.”  This couplet is the theme of the rest of the play.  The rhyme makes it fix in your head; the words are short and simple and straightforwardly said, making them all the more intense.

 “Murder Most Foul” slides on through the 1960s from the violent first stanza, with its colloquial phrases (“shot down like a dog,” “in broad daylight,” “blew off his head”) chilling as they pile up and accumulate. The lullaby comfort in the second stanza of “hush, little children” comes thanks to music:  The Beatles, arriving in America in February 1964, and singing five songs including “I Want To Hold Your Hand” on the Ed Sullivan Show.  “Ferry Cross the Mersey,” Gerry and the Pacemakers’ 1965 hit, the 1969 “Aquarian Exposition” called Woodstock, and the disastrous “Woodstock West” of the December 1969 Altamont Speedway Free Festival, at which chaos reigned and Meredith Hunter died, all appear here.  JFK’s murder never goes away:  it haunts and shades all in the progress of this song, as it has done in America since it happened.  Texas First Lady Nellie Connally’s words to Kennedy right before he, and her husband, were shot, “Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you,” are in Dylan’s song, inverted to rhyme with “pour the cement.” Jack Ruby, William Zapruder’s film, Lee Harvey Oswald: all appear where they may be unexpected, but they should be expected.  No part of the terrible story is ever gone.

 There are literary references aplenty, like the reminder of Tom Robinson’s being shot while —allegedly — running away from prison in To Kill A Mockingbird coupled with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.  The King James Bible, other Shakespeare plays, and classical allusions are here.  Movies appear too, most notably Gone With the Wind (1939), with Rhett’s famous last line to Scarlett altered to call her “Miss Scarlett” as her slaves and suitors alike called her in antebellum days; What’s New, Pussycat? (1965), Woody Allen’s first-produced antic screenplay set in Paris and with the theme song Tom Jones made famous; and Tommy (1975; based on The Who’s 1969 opera by Pete Townshend). I love the reference to Terry Malloy, Marlon Brando’s battered longshoreman hero of On The Waterfront (1954), based upon Budd Schulberg’s novel which was, itself, based upon Malcolm Johnson’s Pulitzer-Prizewinning stories “Crime on the Waterfront,” written in 1948 for the New York Sun. for Play Billy Joe Royal’s “Down In The Boondocks” for Terry, Dylan suggests.

 Parse the references for yourselves if you like to; I love better the flood of music, the litany, that shapes the end of “Murder Most Foul.”  Dylan catalogues a long list of artists and songs.  The repetition of “play” in his litany reminds us of everything the word means.  “If you want ta remember, you better write down the names,” Dylan sings.  He wants us to remember, and listen, and remember.  The recommendations are like those he made, and played, in his XM Radio show Theme Time Radio Hour (2006-2009). From Patsy Cline to Oscar Peterson, Stan Getz to Jelly Roll Morton, the playlist of “Murder Most Foul” is one to ease hard times.  It ends with songs and reminders of the end of the American Civil War and, perhaps, of Casablanca (1942) and of England’s “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, a burst of jazz — and, then, with itself.

”Murder Most Foul”

by Bob Dylan

 *these lyrics below are my transcription, as the official lyrics have not yet been released by Special Rider Music, Bob Dylan’s music company.  Even the putative lyrics are, however, © Bob Dylan and Special Rider Music.

 ‘Twas a dark day in Dallas, November '63
A day that will live on in infamy
President Kennedy was aright, alive [a-ridin' high]
Good day to be livin' and a good day to die
Bein’ led to the slaughter like a sacrificial lamb
He said, “Wait a minute, boys, you know who I am?"
"Of course we do, we know who you are,"
Then they blew off his head while he was still in the car
Shot down like a dog in broad daylight
Was a matter of timing and the timing was right
You got unpaid debts, we've come to collect
We gonna kill you with hatred, without any respect
We'll mock you and shock you, and we'll grinnin’ [put it] in your face
We've already got someone here to take your place.
The day they blew out the brains of the king
Thousands were watching, no one saw a thing
It happened so quick there, so quick, by surprise
Right there in front of everyone's eyes

Greatest magic trick ever under the sun
Perfectly executed, skillfully done

Wolfman, o wolfman, o wolfman howl,
Rub-a-dub-dub, it's a murder most foul.

 Hush, little children, you'll understand

The Beatles are comin,’ they’re gonna hold your hand
Slide down the banister, go get your coat
Ferry ‘cross the Mersey and go for the throat
There’s three bums comin’ and they’re dressed in rags
Pick up the pieces and lower the flags
I'm goin' to Woodstock, it's the Aquarian age

Then I’ll go ta Altamont and sit near the stage
Put your head out the window, let the good times roll
There's a party going on behind the Grassy Knoll
Stack up the bricks, pour the cement
Don’t say Dallas don’t love you, Mr. President
Put your foot in the tank and then step on the gas
Try to make it to the triple underpass
Blackface singer, whiteface clown
Better not show your faces after the sun goes down
Up in the red light district, they got cop on the beat

Living in a nightmare on Elm Street
When you're down on Deep Elem, put your money in your shoe
Don't ask what your country can do for you
Cash on the barrelhead, money to burn
Dealey Plaza, make a left-hand turn
I'm going down to the crossroads, gonna flag a ride
The place where faith, hope, and charity died
Shoot him while he runs, boy, shoot him while you can
See if you can shoot the invisible man
Goodbye, Charlie, Goodbye Uncle Sam

Frankly, Miss Scarlett, I don’t give a damn

What is the truth, and where did it go

Ask Oswald and Ruby, they oughta know
"Shut your mouth," said a wise old owl
Business is business, and it's a murder most foul

Tommy can ya hear me, I’m the acid queen
I'm riding in a long, black Lincoln limousine
Ridin' in the backseat next to my wife
Headin’ straight on in to the afterlife
I'm leaning to the left, I got my head in her lap
Hold on, I've been led into some kind of a trap
Where we’ll ask no quarter, and no quarter do we give
We're right down the street from the street where you live
They mutilated his body and they took out his brain
What more could they do, they piled on the pain
But his soul was not there where it was supposed to be at
For the last fifty years they've been searchin' for that
Freedom oh freedom freedom over me
I hate to tell you mister but only dead men are free
Send me some lovin' tell me no lie
Throw the gun in the gutter and walk on by

Wake up little Susie, let’s go for a drive

Cross the Trinity River let’s keep hope alive
Turn the radio on, don't touch the dials

Parkland Hospital only six more miles

Ya got me dizzy Miss Lizzy ya filled me with lead
That magic bullet of yours has gone ta my head

I’m just a patsy like Patsy Cline
Never shot anyone from in front or behind
I've blood in my eye, got blood in my ear
I'm never gonna make it to the new frontier

Zapruder’s film I seen right [night] before

Seen it thirty-three times maybe more
It's vile and deceitful it's cruel and it's mean
Ugliest thing that you ever have seen
They killed him once and they killed him twice
Killed him like a human sacrifice
The day that they killed him someone said to me "Son,
The age of the Antichrist has just only begun."
Air Force One comin' in through the gate
Johnson sworn in at two thirty-eight
Lemme know when you decide to throw in the towel
It is what it is, and it's murder most foul

What’s new, pussycat, what’d I say,
I said the soul of a nation been torn away
And it's beginning to go into a slow decay
And that it's thirty-six hours past Judgment Day

Wolfman Jack he's speaking in tongues
He's going on and on at the top of his lungs
Play me a song, Mister Wolfman Jack
Play it for me in my long Cadillac
Play me that “Only the Good Die Young”
Take me to the place Tom Dooley was hung
Play "St. James Infirmary" and the court of King James
If you want ta remember, you better write down the names
Play Etta James too, play "I'd Rather Go Blind"
Play it for the man with the telepathic mind
Play John Lee Hooker, play "Scratch My Back"
Play it for that strip club owner named Jack
Guitar Slim, “Goin’ Down Slow”
Play it for me and for Marilyn Monroe.

Play "Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood"
Play it for the First Lady, she ain't feelin’ any good
Play Don Henley, play Glenn Frey

Take it to the limit and let it go by

Play it for Carl Wilson, too

Looking far, far away down Gower Avenue
Play tragedy, play "Twilight Time"
Take me back to Tulsa to the scene of the crime
Play another one and “Another One Bites the Dust”
Play "The Old Rugged Cross" and "In God We Trust"

Alan Lomax, letter excerpt, 1938

Ride the pink horse down that long lonesome road
Stand there and wait for his head to explode
Play "Mystery Train" for Mr. Mystery
The man who fell down dead like a rootless tree
Play it for the reverend, play it for the pastor
Play it for the dog that got no master
Play Oscar Peterson, play Stan Getz
Play "Blue Sky," play Dickey Betts
Play Art Pepper, Thelonious Monk
Charlie Parker and all that junk
All that junk and all that jazz
Play something for the Birdman of Alcatraz
Play Buster Keaton, play Harold Lloyd
Play Bugsy Siegel, play '“Pretty Boy Floyd”
Play the numbers, play the odds
Play "Cry Me A River" for the lord of the gods
Play number nine, play number six
Play it for Lindsey and Stevie Nicks
Play Nat King Cole, play "Nature Boy"
Play "Down In The Boondocks" for Terry Malloy
Play It Happened One Night and "One Night of Sin"
There's twelve million souls that are listening in
Play Merchant of Venice, play Merchants of Death
Play "Stella by Starlight" for Lady Macbeth
Don't worry Mr. President, help's on the way

Your brothers are comin,’ there’ll be hell to pay

Brothers, what brothers, what’s this about hell
Tell them we're waiting, keep coming, we'll get them as well

Love Field is where his plane touched down

But it never did get back up off the ground

Was a hard act to follow, second to none
They killed him on the altar of the rising sun

Play “Misty” for me and "That Old Devil Moon"
Play "Anything Goes" and "Memphis in June"
Play "Lonely At the Top" and Lonely Are the Brave
Play it for Houdini spinning around in his grave
Play Jelly Roll Morton, play "Lucille"
Play "Deep In a Dream", and play "Driving Wheel"
Play "Moonlight Sonata" in F-sharp
And "Key to the Highway" for the king of the harp
Play "Marching Through Georgia" and "Dumbarton's Drums"
Play darkness and death will come when it comes

Play "Love Me Or Leave Me" by the great Bud Powell
Play “The Blood-Stained Banner," play "Murder Most Foul."

*on April 6, 2020, the official lyrics for “Murder Most Foul” were posted at bobdylan.com