bobdylan.com: Tracking Bob Dylan, by Peter Coyote

	Tracking Bob Dylan by Peter Coyote
	I have been listening to and thinking about the music of Bob Dylan since a morning in 1962 when I placed his first record on the KLH portable I'd proudly lugged to college along with my collection of 1200 jazz lp's and blues 78's, which represented six years of research and scrimping. Like a slap in the face, his plaintive, wry, sarcastic, and penetrating voice woke me to the presence and purpose of an authentic artist, and inspired me to dedicate my own writing to the guitar. Though this is not the way I make my living, it is a pursuit to which I am seriously dedicated, and my high intentions were fostered by my respect for Dylan's mastery.
	I've met Bob Dylan twice, briefly each time. Once in the late Fifties, in a dark and unloved apartment in Greenwich Village where my friend Johnny Panken, a flamenco guitarist known professionally as Juan Moreno, had come to ground after a year in Spain living in a cave he'd rented from gypsies. Dylan was smoking a cigarette and pacing restlessly. He wore peg-legged jeans and a short jacket and barely acknowledged our introduction. I thought of a scruffy street-dog whose feet were burning, and I glanced at Johnny to determine why I should mark this particular person. Johnny stood in the background, a towering silhouette, apparently content to watch Dylan pace. His Spanish-hatted shadow replied, "He's great."
	We met once again, in the late Sixties. My running-partner and fellow Digger, Emmett Grogan, and I were sluicing Manhattan for adventure, squatting in Chelsea Hotel rooms abandoned by Janis Joplin and her band, friends from our home turf in San Francisco. We had bluffed the hotel into believing that we were connected to her band so our room charges were forwarded to an office somewhere, leaving our cash available for our primary preoccupation, hard drugs.
	Dylan's manager was Albert Grossman, a portly, Ben Franklin look-alike with similar shoulder-length grey hair. He had perfected a give-away-nothing casualness of behavior which belied his large perpetually surprised eyes magnified by rimless granny glasses. Albert used Emmett and me as hall-passes to an adventurous street-life and we guided him through shooting-galleries, Puerto-Rican gang hang-outs, chop-shops and the demi-monde of jewel thieves and the Safe and Loft Squad of New York's finest. In exchange, Albert allowed us to use his office as a base to receive phone calls and messages, and supplied entree and access to us we could not have gained otherwise.
	He invited us to stay awhile at his country estate in Woodstock. Emmett and I were out of place there, in our greasy jeans and biker's attitudes; a little too down-town for the sybaritic chic of big-money rock-and-roll, where people aspired to all the edges of melted butter. Still, we adjusted to lounging by Albert's pool, eating his home-grown organic delicacies, and sharing the best drugs lots of money could buy. Dylan was the overriding presence and organizing principle of this rarified community that included The Band; hipsters like Herbert Huncke, an early influence on William Burroughs; actor John Brent; Dylan's filmographer Howard Alk, a bearded, bear-like man with huge intellectual, sexual, and narcotic appetites; and numerous lissome women who seemed to appear and disappear as if summoned and dismissed. Like the prophet Elijah, there was always an empty chair at the table for Dylan, though he was rarely present.
	One day, however, Emmett took me to Dylan's large, brown-shingled house, and for some reason, known only to himself, introduced me as Tiny Montgomery, the name of a character from a Dylan song. I was too startled by this substitution to protest, and watched Dylan shoot pool with cronies, while I gradually determined that my fictional identity had been passed to Dylan like a coin that would somehow redound to Emmett's credit.
	While these two occasions may place me in a slightly more intimate orbit around my subject than some, this sketchy acquaintance affords me no special intimacies, and I am glad. By not knowing Dylan personally, I am freed from confusing my regard for his talent with regard for his person. I have no idea whether we would enjoy one another's company; and long ago dismissed any idea that affection and respect for his music signaled any special resonance between us, despite the fact that that is precisely what the work of a fine artist always suggests. But, sometimes even as small a perch as proximity is useful, and I offer the following story for its utility.
	During my time in New York, I was visiting Albert's office one day. "Blonde on Blonde", Dylan's latest record, was on the sound system and Albert was speaking, and smoking a cigarette, in the curious way he had of holding it between his fourth and fifth fingers and curling his hand into a light circle as if he were gripping an imaginary pole. He'd place his lips against the mouthpiece formed by his thumb and first finger to inhale. At one moment, as Albert took a long pull on his smoke, Dylan's lyrics in the background captured my attention:
	Mona tried to tell me To stay away from the train line. She said that all the railroad men Just drink up your blood like wine. An' I said, "Oh, I didn't know that, But then again, there's only one I've met An' he just smoked my eyelids An' punched my cigarette."
	Albert was droning on with a cigarette jutting out of his fist, oblivious to the Rosetta stone accuracy of Dylan's observations on the speakers behind him. I was transfixed by the literalness and specificity of the images. I felt like I was hearing a headline, and decided at that moment, that for all his surrealistic affections, Dylan was a very literal chronicler of an absurd world. It was not his lyrics, but his subject matter which was bizarre, and much could be learned by paying attention.
	I have been paying attention for over thirty years and it is a mark of Dylan's skill that I am still struggling to describe in language the unique style he invented to express himself. When we hear him sing, "I waited for you inside of the frozen traffic, When you knew I had some other place to be..." we intuit the emotional pitch exactly, without explanation. He is not ranting, recriminating or blaming. His precision of expression has the "suchness" of sculpture. Whether this line castigates a thoughtless girlfriend for leaving him junk-sick is immaterial, the emotional facts of the situation are monumentally clear and simple. The critical mass of the song resides in the twisted inflection of "knew" and "other"; the deliberately affected spin -- half sarcasm, half amused self-entertainment -- which deepens the song's twinkling, silvery, surface like dropping one end of a concertina. The wheezy, unkeyed drone note beneath the entire song, beneath everything he does really, is that Dylan no longer identifies with the sufferring he felt at the moment he sings about; as if personal discomforts are too mundane to be granted undue attention. The song itself is their cure.
	For me, this is Dylan's most radical accomplishment. If I read him correctly, he has hinted at this in an interview once. Describing young blues-singers [1], he observed how they often seem to miss the point musically: "The old timers sang to make themselves feel better," he said. That was all they had. What was left unsaid was that the contemporary singers are trying to show us how badly they feel, as if, in this post-Holocaust, post-Vietnam-War world, their sufferring was worth a smog-choked sunset.
	Dylan's detachment is impeccable. He sings as one already dead, beyond the pull of superficial temptations, beyond the expectation that things might get better or ever be different. Yet, the songs themselves and the effort to create them, are his most eloquent statement of hope. He is thus committed and removed at the same time, and it is this critical distance that gives him the ability to move us with even an image-less line like the quintessential verse from "Isis":
	She said, "Where ya been?" I said, "No place special." She said, "You look different." I said, "Well, I guess." She said, "You been gone." I said, "That's only natural." She said, "You gonna stay?" I said, "If you want me to, yes."
	Usually I can remember where I was when I first heard a song, like the shock of recognition on hearing "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right". I was in my late teens or the first years of my twenties (and so was Dylan, we're both born in 1941), sufferring the torments of a ruined love affair, confused and unhappy. "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" was just released and I bought a copy. Dylan was on the cover, his cool an unstated reproach, a happy girl clinging to his arm like he was the main man. Pitying my bum romantic luck, I play his lilting song about a breakup, where the girl, the sufferring, the confusion, are not only gone and over, but more surprisingly, more revelationally,... dismissed!
	I ain't sayin' you treated me unkind You could have done better but I don't mind You just kinda wasted my precious time...
	Such expression was wholly outside the lexicon of popular romance ballads. Hell, they were outside the possibility of my imagination. The song staggerred me. I was in my apartment with the shades drawn, sculpting the lard of my sufferring into a song that would articulate how crushed by the acts of a careless girl I'd been; hoping she might hear the song and have a change of heart, and Dylan had flipped things inside-out, marked it, stated it clearly, and dropped the whole deal. He was already a pilgrim, "on the road", and I was just reading the book. It was impossible to continue my indulgence in the face of such developed self-knowledge. He had executed my mental pet.
	Years and miles have passed since that epiphany; many lovers, addictions, and freedom; a career as a writer and actor; and the tempered pleasures of children. I've had brushes with death and some measure of success in the world, but I still track Dylan's course as eagerly as I wait for the next Carlos Castaneda book; to discover what he's thinking about, and how his conversation has changed.
	Dylan has illuminated my passage on earth. He been its chorus; arbitrating and judging succintly and pungently, reflecting it accurately and authentically. He has never, to my knowledge, made the slightest deviation from his own dead-center to procure popular acclaim, and more than any other artist I can think of currently, has deliberately deconstructed his most popular songs in live performances to keep them fresh and preclude sentimentality or habitual responses. He has remained consistent to his orphan's eye, "never been too impressed" and managed to take himself repeatedly to the high ground of personal truth, reminding all who would attend of its irreplaceable value.
	I don't track him as a leader, a prophet, an illuminati or as a celebrity, but as a fixed point on the interior compass I use to orient myself. If he is East, Miles Davis was West and that opposition is the highest compliment I can offer. To complete the metaphor, I am the oscillating needle responding to the tugs and attractions of the world. When I stumble, Dylan's steadfastness is a recall to the right path; when I am truest and at my best, I feel that our eyebrows are tangled, that we see in the same way. No matter how I feel about him, however, he is, in the final analysis, like the rest of us: inexplicable. No one, not even he knows why his songs come over his spinal telephone; what created his rage and moral urgency. He exists in it, like a whirlwind, his fate, to be the voice for the rest of us whose "heads are exploding." What more can one ask of an artist except that they give honest and exact form to the inchoate feelings we sense but cannot articulate? Why else would I have paid such a king's ransom of attention to Dylan, except to talk to myself sometimes with his voice? In Zen practice, describing the relationship of body and mind, we say, "Not one, not two." It's that way with Dylan and the rest of us: not one, not two -- not the same, but yet inseparable, like time and place. We are both standing at that crossroad, and share it with the rest of creation. Like a chorus of crickets and frogs on a summer night, Dylan too is the sound of the universe singing. At dawn, the footprint of his passing impresses only memory, (and luckily for us, its mechanical equivalents) and marks the trail clearly for the rest of us.
	Mill Valley, California August, 1997 Peter Coyote came from nowhere and is working his way back. His memoir, Sleeping Where I Fall, will be published by Counterpoint Press this April.
	_________________________________ 1 Most people don't consider Dylan a blues-singer, but for my money he is one of the best. I spent my youth listening to old "race-records" from the Twenties: Sleepy John Estes, Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell, Mississippi John Hurt and Bukka White trained my ears and sensibilities. I would assert that Dylan is the only white blues singer who captures the essence of this music, without ever trying to sound black. He is not, like so many, colonizing the attributes of black culture for his own. He has assimilated its central truths: despair, endurance, courage and made them his own. Ry Cooder expresses these old tunes wonderfully, and can capture their flat-footed, loose and funky rhythyms. However Ry transforms them into something wondrously modern and inherently upbeat. It's his nature. Dylan sings them, for the same reason that they were sung originally, not imitating their style, but re-living their intention and you can hear the difference.

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