Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan Chronicles

Bekki

 For starters, folk music was considered junky, second rate and only released on small labels. Big-time record companies were strictly for the elite, for music that was sanitized and pasteurized. 

Someone like myself would never be allowed in except under extraordinary circumstances. 

But John was an extraordinary man. He didn't make schoolboy records or record schoolboy artists. He had vision and foresight, had seen and heard me, felt my thoughts and had faith in the things to come.

 He explained that he saw me as someone in the long line of a tradition, the tradition of blues, jazz and folk and not as some newfangled wunderkind on the cut-ting edge. 

Not that there was any cutting edge. Things were pretty sleepy on the Americana music scene in the late '50s and early '60s. 

I listened to as many as I could, even thumbed through a lot of his antediluvian folk scrolls. 

The madly complicated modern world was something I took little interest in.

 It had no relevancy, no weight. I wasn't seduced by it. 

What was swinging, topical and up to date for me was stuff like the Titanic sinking, the Galveston flood, John Henry driving steel, John Hardy shooting a man on the West Virginia line. 

All this was current, played out and in the open. This was the news that I considered, followed and kept tabs on.

He'd pull out records for me. He'd given me a Country Gentlemen record and said I should listen to "Girl Behind the Bar." 

He played me "White House Blues" by Charlie Poole and said that this would be perfect for me and pointed out that this was the exact version that The Ramblers did. 

He played me the Big Bill Broonzy song "Somebody's Got to Go," and that was right up my alley, too. 

I liked hanging around at Izzy's. The fire was always crackling.

I'd seen and heard trains from my earliest childhood days and the sight and sound of them always made me feel secure. The big boxcars, the iron ore cars, freight cars, passenger trains, Pullman cars. 

There was no place you could go in my hometown without at least some part of the day having to stop at intersections and wait for the long trains to pass. 

Tracks crossed the rural roads and ran alongside them as well. 

The sound of trains off in the distance more or less made me feel at home, like nothing was missing, like I was at some level place, never in any significant danger and that everything was fitting together.

 "Ooby Dooby" was deceptively simple, but Roy had progressed.

 He was now singing his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car over a cliff.

In the past, I'd never been that keen on books and writers but I liked stories. Stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs, who wrote about the mythical Africa - Luke Short, the mythical Western tales Jules Verne-H. G. Wells. 

Those were my favourites but that was before I discovered the folksingers. 

The folksingers could sing songs like an entire book, but only in a few verses. 

's hard to describe what makes a character or an event folk song worthy. 

It probably has something to do with a character being fair and honest and open. Bravery in an abstract way. 

 Capone had been a successful gangster and was allowed to rule the underworld in Chicago, but nobody wrote any songs about him. 

He's not interesting or heroic in any kind of way. He's frigid. A sucker fish, seems like a man who never got out alone in nature for a minute in his life. He comes across as a thug or a bully, like in the song "looking for that bully of the town." He's not even worthy enough to have a name comes across as a heartless vamp. 

Pretty Boy Floyd, on the other hand, stirs up an adventurous spirit. Even his name has something to say. There's something un-bound and not frozen in the muck about him.

He'll never rule over any city, can't manipulate the machine or bend people to his will, yet he's the stuff of real flesh and blood, represents humanity in general and gives you an impression of power. At least before they trapped him in the boonies. 

There was no place too far. I could see it all. All I needed to know about San Francisco was that Paladin lived in a hotel there and that his gun was for hire. I knew that "stones" were jewels and that villains rode in convertibles and that if you wanted to hide a tree, hide it in the forest where nobody could find it. I was raised on that stuff, used to quiver with excitement listening to these shows. They gave me clues to how the world worked and they fueled my day-dreams, made my imagination work overtime. Radio shows were a strange craft.

I can't say when it occurred to me to write my own songs. I couldn't have come up with anything comparable or halfway close to the folk song lyrics I was singing to define the way I felt about the world. I guess it happens to you by degrees.

You just don't wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs, especially if you're a singer who has plenty of them and you're learning more every day. Opportunities may come along for you to convert something something that exists into something that didn't yet. That might be the beginning of it. Sometimes you just want to do things your way, want to see for yourself what lies behind the misty curtain. It's not like you see songs approaching and invite them in. It's not that easy. You want to write songs that are bigger than life. You want to say something about strange things that have happened to you, strange things you have seen.

You have to know and understand something and then go past the vernacular. The chilling precision that these old-timers used in coming up with their songs was no small thing. Sometimes you could hear a song and your mind jumps ahead.

But America wasn't the Roman Empire and someone else would have to step up and volunteer.

 I really was never any more than what I was - a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze. 

Now it had blown up in my face and was hanging over me. I wasn't a preacher performing miracles. It would have driven anybody mad.

As long as I was alive I was going to stay interested in something.

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