I first saw Bob Dylan in 1961 at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village. He was not overly impressive. He looked like an urban hillbilly, with hair short around the ears and curly on top.
I have been true to the principles of nonviolence, developing a stronger and stronger aversion to the ideologies of both the far right and the far left and a deeper sense of rage and sorrow over the suffering they continue to produce all over the world.
There is chaos. There’s bloodshed. There’s carnage.
Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm. A fullblown storm where everything changes.
Now I know I understand that it was Sgt. Pepper’s Band, that put the sixties into song, where have all the heroes gone?
Put tattoos all up and down our thighs, do anything our parents would despise. Take uppers, downers, blues, and reds and yellows, our brains are turning into jello.
The foundation of my beliefs is the same as it was when I was 10. Non-violence.
And my voice now is a struggle, it’s a daily struggle to keep it up. Gravity has begun to fight the vocal cords the way it does with everybody. So I have a vocal therapist, and we record the sessions and I use them on tour every day.
Somebody else does the rigor and then I listen. I have an assistant, and my manager, and other people who hunt and find and send it to me, and then I just figure out which ones I can do justice to.
If it came back I would be thrilled. I would be delighted to write more songs. I need them now because I want to make an album and I have to depend on other people’s music, which I’ve done for years. But still, it’d be really nice to be able to sprinkle it with my own.
I’d hear a tune in my head and the words would come. And then, very suddenly it just stopped. It seemed too stilted to try and learn how to write a song, to go to round robins and to learn things from other people on how to write a song. So I just stopped and did other things.
Some people don’t even notice. “Oh, you sound exactly like you did!” And I say, “OK, if that’s what you want to believe, that’s fine.”
We need to have faith in the people who are giving this movement direction to be smart enough to stay one step ahead of what’s coming up next.
I asked him what made us different, and he said it was simple, that I thought I could change things, and he knew that no one could.
Maybe that afternoon was the closest I ever felt to Bob: his eyes were as old as God, and he was fragile as a winter leaf.
I was born gifted. I can speak of my gifts with little or no modesty, but with tremendous gratitude, precisely because they are gifts, and not things which I created, or actions about which I might be proud.
God respects me when I work. He loves me when I sing. Tagore.
He was rarely tender, and seldom reached out to anticipate another’s needs, though occasionally he would exhibit a sudden concern for another outlaw, hitchhiker, or bum, and go out of his way to see them looked after. He was touching and infinitely fragile. His indescribably white hands moved constantly: putting a cigarette almost to his mouth, then tugging relentlessly at a tuft of hair at his neck, inadvertently dumping the cigarette ashes in dusty cavalcades down his jacket.
His humor was dry, private, and splendid. Sometimes he would start to chuckle. A little at a time, his lips would move from a genuine smile to a pucker. Then, instantly, he would tighten them back in, until a tiny convulsion of laughter would bring them back to the smile, and sometimes, a full grin followed by laughter.
Twelve years later, when I finally met and became friends with Sara, we talked for hours about those days when the Original Vagabond was two-timing us. I told Sara that I’d never found Bob to be much at giving gifts, but that he had once bought me a green corduroy coat, and had told me to keep a lovely blue nightgown from the Woodstock house. “Oh!” said Sara, “that’s where it went!