|
|
Below is an excerpt from the Bob Dylan autobiography "Chronicles : Volume One" published by Simon & Schuster.
Chapter 5: River of Ice
Page 1 of
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12
 he moon was rising behind the Chrysler Building, it was late in the day, street lighting coming on, the low rumble of heavy cars inching along in the narrow streets below-sleet tapping against the office window. Lou Levy was starting and stopping his big tape machine-diamond ring gleaming off his pinky finger-cigar smoke hanging in the blue air. The place was like a room used for interrogation, a fixture like a fruit bowl hanging overhead and a couple of lamps, some brass ones on floor stands. Below my feet a patterned wood floor. It was a drab room and cluttered with trade magazines-Cashbox, Billboard, radio survey charts-an ancient filing cabinet in the corner. Besides Lou's old metal desk, there were a couple of wood chairs and I sat forward in one of them strumming songs off the guitar.
Recently I had called home. I did that at least a couple of times a month from one of the many public pay phones around town. The phone booths were like sanctuaries, step inside of them, shut the accordion type doors and you locked yourself into a private world free of dirt, the noise of the city blocked out. The phone booths were private, but the lines back home weren't. Back there every household had a party line. About eight or ten different houses all used the same line, only with different numbers. If you'd pick up the phone receiver, seldom would the line ever be clear. There were always other voices. Nobody ever said anything important over the phone and you didn't ramble on long. If you wanted to talk to people, you'd usually talk to them in the street, in vacant lots, fields or in cafes, never on the phone.
On the corner I put the dime in the slot and dialed the operator for long distance, called collect and the call went right through. I wanted everyone to know I was all right. My mother would usually give me the latest run of the mill stuff. My father had his own way of looking at things. To him life was hard work. He'd come from a generation of different values, heroes and music, and wasn't so sure that the truth would set anybody free. He was pragmatic and always had a word of cryptic advice. "Remember, Robert, in life anything can happen. Even if you don't have all the things you want, be grateful for the things you don't have that you don't want." My education was important to him. He would have wanted me to become a mechanical engineer. But in school, I had to struggle to get even decent grades. I was not a natural student. My mom, bless her, who had always stood up for me and was firmly on my side in just about anything and everything, was more concerned about "a lot of monkey business out there in the world," and would add, "Bobby, don't forget you have relatives in New Jersey." I'd already been to Jersey but not to visit relatives.
Lou snapped the big tape machine off after listening hard to one of my original songs. "Woody Guthrie, eh? That's interesting. What made you want to write a song about him? I used to see him and his partner, Leadbelly-they used to play at the Garment Workers Hall over on Lexington Avenue. You ever heard 'You Can't Scare Me, I'm Sticking to the Union'?" Sure I'd heard it.
"Whatever happened to him, anyway?"
"Oh, he's over in Jersey. He's in the hospital there."
Lou chomped away. "Nothing serious I hope. What other songs do you have? Let's put 'em all down."
I didn't have many songs, but I was making up some compositions on the spot, rearranging verses to old blues ballads, adding an original line here or there, anything that came into my mind-slapping a title on it. I was doing my best, had to thoroughly feel I was earning my fee. Nothing would have convinced me that I was actually a songwriter and I wasn't, not in the conventional songwriter sense of the word. Definitely not like the workhorses over in the Brill Building, the song chemistry factory that was only a few blocks away but might as well have been on the other side of the cosmos. Over there, they cranked out the home-run hits for radio playlists. Young songwriters like Gerry Goffin and Carole King, or Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, or Pomus and Shuman, Leiber and Stoller-they were the songwriting masters of the Western world, wrote all the popular songs, all the songs with crafty melodies and simple lyrics that came off as works of power over the airwaves. One of my favorites was Neil Sedaka because he wrote and performed his own songs. I never crossed paths with any of those people because none of the popular songs were connected to folk music or the downtown scene.
What I was into was the traditional stuff with a capital T and it was as far away from the mondo teeno scene as you could get. Into Lou's tape recorder I could make things up on the spot all based on folk music structure, and it came natural. As far as serious songwriting went, the songs I could see myself writing if I was that talented would be the kinds of songs that I wanted to sing. Outside of Woody Guthrie, I didn't see a single living soul who did it. Sitting in Lou's office I rattled off lines and verses based on the stuff I knew-"Cumberland Gap," "Fire on the Mountain," "Shady Grove," "Hard, Ain't It Hard." I changed words around and added something of my own here and there. Nothing do or die, nothing really formulated, all major chord stuff, maybe a typical minor key thing, something like "Sixteen Tons." You could write twenty or more songs off that one melody by slightly altering it. I could slip in verses or lines from old spirituals or blues. That was okay; others did it all the time. There was little head work involved. What I usually did was start out with something, some kind of line written in stone and then turn it with another line-make it add up to something else than it originally did. It's not like I ever practiced it and it wasn't too thought consuming. Not that I would sing any of it onstage.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
