|
|
Chapter 5: River of Ice
Page 11 of
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12
On the Iron Range
it had been positively Dickensian. Just like the picture books: angels on Christmas trees, horse-drawn sleighs pushing through snowy streets, pine trees glistening with lights, wreaths strung over the downtown stores, Salvation Army band playing on the corner, choirs going from house to house caroling, fireplaces blazing, woolly scarves around your neck, church bells ringing. When December rolled around, everything slowed down, everything got silent
and retrospective, snowy white, deep snow. I always thought Christmas was like that for everyone, everywhere. I couldn't imagine it not being like that forever. Johnson conjured that up in just a few swift strokes, like nothing else-not even the great "White Christmas." Everything for Johnson is legitimate prey. There's a fishing song called "Dead Shrimp Blues" unlike anything you could expect-a screwed-up fishing song with red-blooded lines that's way beyond metaphor. There's one about a Terraplane, a clunker of an automobile, probably the greatest car song. If you'd never seen a Terraplane and heard the song, you'd think it was streamlined and bullet shaped. Johnson's car song is way beyond metaphor, too.
I copied Johnson's words down on scraps of paper so I could more closely examine the lyrics and patterns, the construction of his old-style lines and the free association that he used, the sparkling allegories, big-ass truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction-themes that flew through the air with the greatest of ease. I didn't have any of these dreams or thoughts but I was going to acquire them. I thought about Johnson a lot, wondered who his audience could have been. It's hard to imagine sharecroppers or plantation field hands at hop joints, relating to songs like these. You have to wonder if Johnson was playing for an audience that only he could see, one off in the future. "The stuff I got'll bust your brains out," he sings. Johnson is serious, like the scorched earth. There's nothing clownish about him or his lyrics. I wanted to be like that, too.
Eventually the record came out and it hit all the blues lovers like an explosion. A few researchers got transfixed on him and went looking for his past, whatever was left of it, and a few found it. Johnson recorded in the '30s, and in the 1960s there were still some folks around in the Delta who had known about him. Some even, who knew him. There'd been a fast moving story going around that he had sold his soul to the devil at a four-way crossroads at midnight and that's how he got to be so good. Well, I don't know about that. The ones who knew him told a different tale and that was that he had hung around some older blues players in rural parts of Mississippi, played harmonica, was rejected as a bothersome kid, that he went off and learned how to play guitar from a farmhand named Ike Zinnerman, a mysterious character not in any of the history books. Maybe because he didn't make records. He must have been an incredible teacher. Those who knew said that Ike showed Robert the rudiments of how to play like just about anybody and that Johnson did the rest on his own, that he mainly listened to records and got all of his approaches off those records. You can still hear them, the original records, the songs that were prototypes for all of Johnson's songs. This makes more sense. Johnson's even got a song called "Phonograph Blues" that's an homage to a record player with a rusty needle. John Hammond had told me that he thought Johnson had read Walt Whitman. Maybe he did, but it doesn't clear up anything. I just couldn't imagine how Johnson's mind could go in and out of so many places. He seems to know about everything, he even throws in Confucius-like sayings whenever it suits him. Neither forlorn or hopeless or shackled-nothing hinders him. As great as the greats were, he goes one step further. You can't imagine him singing, "Washington's a bourgeois town." He wouldn't have noticed or if he did, it would have been irrelevant.
More than thirty years later, I would see Johnson for myself in eight seconds' worth of 8-millimeter film shot in Ruleville, Mississippi, on a brightly lit afternoon street by some Germans in the late '30s. Some people questioned whether it was really him, but slowing the eight seconds down so it was more like eighty seconds, you can see that it really is Robert Johnson, has to be-couldn't be anyone else. He's playing with huge, spiderlike hands and they magically move over the strings of his guitar. There's a harp rack with a harmonica around his neck. He looks nothing like a man of stone, no high-strung temperament. He looks almost childlike, an angelic looking figure, innocent as can be. He's wearing a white linen jumper, coveralls and an unusual gilded cap like Little Lord Fauntleroy. He looks nothing like a man with the hellhound on his trail. He looks immune to human dread and you stare at the image in disbelief.
In a few years' time, I'd write and sing songs like "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)," "Mr. Tambourine Man," "Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," "Who Killed Davey Moore," "Only a Pawn in Their Game," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" and some others like that. If I hadn't gone to the Theatre de Lys and heard the ballad "Pirate Jenny," it might not have dawned on me to write them, that songs like these could be written. In about 1964 and '65, I probably used about five or six of Robert Johnson's blues song forms, too, unconsciously, but more on the lyrical imagery side of things. If I hadn't heard the Robert Johnson record when I did, there probably would have been hundreds of lines of mine that would have been shut down-that I wouldn't have felt free enough or upraised enough to write. I wasn't the only one who learned a thing or two from Johnson's compositions. Johnny Winter, the flamboyant Texan guitar player born a couple of years after me, rewrote Johnson's song about the phonograph, turning it into a song about a television set. Johnny's tube is blown and his picture won't come in. Robert Johnson would have loved that. Johnny, by the way, recorded a song of mine, "Highway 61 Revisited," which itself was influenced by Johnson's writing. It's strange the way circles hook up with themselves. Robert Johnson's code of language was like nothing I'd heard before or since. To go with all of that, someplace along the line Suze had also introduced me to the poetry of French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud. That was a big deal, too. I came across one of his letters called "Je est un autre," which translates into "I is someone else." When I read those words the bells went off. It made perfect sense. I wished someone would have mentioned that to me earlier. It went right along with Johnson's dark night of the soul and Woody's hopped-up union meeting sermons and the "Pirate Jenny" framework. Everything was in transition and I was standing in the gateway. Soon I'd step in heavy loaded, fully alive and revved up. Not quite yet, though.
Lou Levy had autonomy at Leeds Music Publishing company the same way John Hammond had autonomy at Columbia Records. Neither was a bureaucrat or egomaniac. Each came from an older world, a more ancient order, one with more piss 'n' vinegar. They knew where they belonged and they had guts to back up whatever their beliefs were. You didn't want to let them down. Whatever your dreams were, guys like these could make you realize them.
Lou shut off his tape machine and switched on some lamps. The songs I was recording for him were so unlike the big swinging ballads that he'd been used to. Night was coming on. Amber lights glowing from the windows across the street. The freezing sleet hit the side of the building like steel drums. Out the window it looked like diamonds slung onto black velvet. In the adjoining room I could hear the sound of Lou's secretary's racing feet going to shut tight one of the windows.
Lou's company would never publish any of my greatest songs. Al Grossman had seen to that. Grossman was the big-time manager around Greenwich Village. He had seen me around before but had paid me little mind. After my first record on Columbia had been released, there was a noticeable shift on his part to represent me. I welcomed the opportunity because Grossman had a stable of clients and was getting all of them work. When he began to represent me, the first thing he wanted to do was get me out of my Columbia Records contract. I thought that this was screwing around. Grossman informed me that I had been under twenty-one when I'd signed the contract, therefore I had been a minor, making the contract null and void . . . that I should go up to the Columbia offices and talk to John Hammond and tell him that my contract was illegal and that Grossman would be coming up to negotiate another one. Sure. I went up to see Mr. Hammond, but I had no intentions of doing that. Not if I had been offered a fortune would I have done it.
Hammond had believed in me and had backed up his belief, had given me my first start on the world's stage, and no one, not even Grossman, had anything to do with that. There was no way I'd go against him for Grossman, not in a million years. I knew that the contract would have to be straightened out, though, so I went to see him. The mere mention of Grossman's name just about gave him apoplexy. He didn't like him, said he was as dirty as they come and was sorry Grossman was representing me, though he said he would still be supportive. Hammond said that we should straighten this contract situation out right here and now before it becomes a pressing problem, and so we did that. A new young counsel for the record company came in and Hammond introduced me to him. An amendment to the old contract was drawn up and I signed it right then and there, now being twenty-one. The new counsel for the record company was the up-and-coming Clive Davis. Clive would take over Columbia Records full frontal in 1967.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
