Bob Dylan: The Man In The Attic (A Memoir)

That year there seemed no place to keep warm. Wintertime in New York town, the wind blowing snow up and down the streets, sleet spinning against the glass storefronts, wind coming gritty and razorous out of the mouths of alleys, cutting through your clothing to the bone. This was the last of 1963, the cusp of ’64; Kennedy was in the graveyard and Johnson in the White House, and something was in the wind. The first hints of disquiet in the air. Some dire chord had been strummed, the vibrations were rolling outward, wars and rumors of wars.

Drunk on the rhetoric of Thomas Wolfe, I had left my home in the South and come looking for experience. I had determined to open myself to everything the world had to offer, good and ill, to accumulate life and hoard it like a miser and, at some more contemplative point, try to make sense of it. I had joined the Navy, and now I was in Brooklyn, where Thomas Wolfe had walked the midnight streets and chanted: “I wrote ten thousand words today.” The Navy had promised travel and experience, and so far it was working out. I was new at the job, but already I had been hassled by cops and hustled by folks in the financial end of the love business, beaten up by Canadian Airmen in Esquamalt, by a street gang in Brooklyn and by a surly bartender in Long Beach. Experience was unfolding itself to me like a flower.

I even had a girl. Her name was Sara and she had almond eyes and long, straight chestnut hair. She was a freshman at a city college and she was into social causes like the burgeoning civil-rights movement. She loved poetry and books and music. She even believed me when I told her I was going to be a writer. We had met in the summer and been together as often as we could through the fall and winter. It was understood that we were soulmates, that we would always be together.

We hung out mostly in the Village, looking for the already ancient footprints of Ginsberg and Kerouac, listening for the fading chants of the Beat Poets, listening to jazz and folk music and blues in the cafés and coffee houses. I was in my civilian clothing, trying to blend, but already the world was aspiring toward a hip scruf?ness the Navy wouldn’t tolerate and I had to make do with my regulation haircut and polished shoes.

One night we were in a coffeehouse when a girl sang a song unlike anything I’d ever heard. This place was a basket-house, a club where musicians who didn’t have paying gigs could perform a set then pass the basket around the audience. If you liked the songs you’d drop in a half-dollar or handful of change.

This song seemed to be called, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”—that was the refrain that ended every chorus. It sounded full of contradictions—traditional in form yet new in sentiment, a love song and a kiss-off, hard and soft, tough and tender at the same time. It was a way of looking at things, a way of turning a hard exterior toward a world always looking for your weaknesses, and it came at you from all over the place. It was bathed in a gothic twilight, roosters crowing at the break of dawn, with more departures down long lonesome roads than a noir novel. It was love and bitterness swirled together: “Goodbye’s just too good a word, babe. So I’ll just say fare-thee-well.” I have to talk to her, I told Sara. I want to know where she learned that song.

I don’t think so, Sara said. You just want to meet that singer.

We met her anyway.

Haven’t you heard of Bob Dylan? This is a Bob Dylan song. He’s got a lot of others, too, and they’re all great.

Bob Dylan. I had a vague memory of reading his name in a Nat Hentoff Playboy article on folksingers. But Hentoff hadn’t mentioned this.

The next weekend Sara took me uptown to a record shop she said carried everything, and I bought two Bob Dylan albums. The second one, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, had “Don’t Think Twice” on it. Listening on the phonograph in Sara’s bedroom I realized the words were only half the story: the song was at least half attitude, acting, role-playing… something. As if James Dean had merged with Rimbaud and Raymond Chandler and strapped on a flat-top Martin. And I realized something else. You couldn’t duplicate this; this was a one-time thing. Spend a lifetime learning the picking, and you couldn’t get it the same way twice. Learn every shading and nuance of voice, and this would still be the only one in the world. Even Dylan couldn’t duplicate it—try to Xerox it and the machine would short-circuit and smoke and burn. I felt there was no precedent for this—that you could trace folk music back through its entire history, and you would not hear anything like this. The song and the song’s performance came out of someplace raw and powerful, painful as an open wound. It was a way of looking at things in a single frozen moment of time.

Of course there were other songs on the album, and sure enough, they were all great. There was even a song that evoked Sara, a Girl from the North Country, where snowflakes fall and the wind hits heavy on the borderline, a girl with hair that hung long and rolled and flowed all down her breast. Of course, more properly this was the East, not the North, but to the heart, the points of the compass are not only useless, but irrelevant.

In the fullness of time, “Don’t Think Twice” showed up on all the jukeboxes. Not by Dylan, but by Peter, Paul and Mary, who’d made it a moderate hit. Every bar and restaurant we went to, I rolled a lot of change down the throats of jukeboxes. I didn’t notice that Sara was becoming much vexed with the song until it was too late. I had suspected something was amiss. Long silences had crept into conversations that previously held no space for them. I would glance at her, and she would be watching me in a sort of speculative way. Perhaps our souls did not interlock as perfectly as we’d thought.

I’m sick of that damn song, she finally said. And I may have misjudged you. Your taste. He can’t sing, and not only that, but he’s not a poet, the way you say he is. It’s ridiculous, that rooster crowing at the break of dawn crap. Does he assume everyone owns a rooster? I’ve never even seen a rooster. And he’s always walking down those long lonesome roads. It’s just sentimental bullshit. I was outraged. Sentimental was the kiss of death, bullshit was even worse. Her own taste was now being called into question. It’s not sentimental. Romantic, maybe, but not sentimental. Romantic sentimental narcissistic bullshit. You only like it because it’s the way you think. Or the way you’d like to think. And it’s not only that. He’s got into your head. You’ve gotten too far into this stuff, and you’ve let him into your head. It’s warped your whole philosophy. My philosophy? Well, this was a hell of a note. Here I didn’t even know I had a philosophy, and the damned thing was warped. Broken before I even had a chance to use it. I tried to protest. This wasn’t another girl. It wasn’t another guy. It was a song. Just a song, and I should be able to turn this thing around. If you’d think about it, I said, if you could change your mind and stay…

Her eyes went cold. She was receding already, accelerating through the red shift, a girl from the North Country seen through the wrong end of a telescope. I had inadvertently paraphrased a line from the song, and naturally she’d recognized it.

Stabbed in the heart. Here on the dark side of the road. The future yawned before me. Years of the Navy to go, I was barely out of the starting gate. Our lives together forfeit. Our house unbuilt, our children unconcieved.

Nothing to do, nothing to say. Except goodbye’s too good a word, babe. So I’ll just say fare-thee-well.