Dylan and The Dead
I originally published this piece two years ago on the eighth anniversary of her death. I decided to revisit and revise it on the tenth anniversary of her passing. I’ve updated the dates, among other things. Dylanesque in a way because of the way he sifts through his back pages, rearranges his old work, and turns it into something new. I also wanted to lean on the Sinatra/Dylan connection further because of my grandmother’s love of Ol’ Blue Eyes and the album of Sinatra covers Dylan released the year she passed.
While living with my grandmother during grad school, I was surprised to find a quote attributed to Bob Dylan on her refrigerator.
She had so many things on her fridge’s door and sides. It was space for displaying photos of loved ones, magnets she had picked up on her travels, or ones that were gifted to her, prayers, and quotations printed off the computer or written in her neat elementary school teacher’s script.
Penmanship was important to her. I remember times when she tried to help improve the look of my cursive.
There was so much on the fridge that it was easy to lose track of its location.
“I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom. “ That surprised me, as she was a Bobby Soxer when she was young. Every Sunday morning, she could be counted on to do two things: listen to Frank Sinatra and go to church at Our Lady of Grace.
Ten years ago, she died on Bob Dylan’s birthday. On February 3, 2015 the anniversary of The Day the Music Died, Dylan released an album of Sinatra covers called Shadows in the Night, in the year that Sinatra would have turned 100. Dylan had this to say about the covers, “I don’t see myself as covering these songs in any way,” he said. “They’ve been covered enough. Buried, as a matter a fact. What me and my band are basically doing is uncovering them. Lifting them out of the grave and bringing them into the light of day.”
Dylan’s Sinatra appreciation goes back a long way, in his early, hungry days in NYC, Dylan played covers by Sinatra and he said this to The Guardian in the 1960s.
“When you start doing these songs, Frank’s got to be on your mind. Because he is the mountain. That’s the mountain you have to climb, even if you only get part of the way there.”
Dylan crossed the path of Sinatra a few times. At the first, they found they had a lot in common. “He was funny, we were standing out on his patio at night and he said to me, ‘You and me, pal, we got blue eyes, we’re from up there,’ and he pointed to the stars,” Dylan said. “These other bums are from down here.’ I remember thinking that he might be right.”
At the concert celebrating Sinatra’s 80th birthday, Dylan performed “Restless Farewell,” at the request of The Chairman of The Board himself. Initially, Dylan, had planned to sing “That’s Life.” At the end of the performance he says, “Happy birthday, Mr. Frank.” Today, Dylan is 84, two years older than Sinatra was when he passed away on May 14, 1998. Sinatra’s 110th birthday will be on December 12.
“Frank himself requested that I do it. One of the producers had played it for him and showed him the lyrics,” Dylan said in an interview with The Washington Post.
It was a Sunday morning, I remember getting the call from my mother. She was with her mother when she passed. It was news I was prepared for; her health had taken a sudden decline, and my mother had traveled to NYC to be with her.
I still went into my bartending job. Not because I was so dedicated to my employer, but because I had no idea what to do, I figured keeping some normalcy would make it easier to bear. I ended up tapping out early.
Eight years before that, I’d graduated from high school, celebrating the occasion by playing Exile On Main Street. Before or after that I played some Bob, too.
Dylan has played a part in my life long before I knew who he was. The early protest songs, the ones that most people know even if they aren’t conscious of it, they felt like they always existed.
Dylan was an artist I got into in high school and college. I remember a trip we took to Cleveland the summer before my sophomore year of high school. We went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and I listened to “Blowin’ In The Wind” on headphones at one of the exhibits.
That night, I dreamed about Dylan. We were sharing a hotel room. If I were in the main part of the room, he’d be in the bathroom and vice versa. I knew he was there because he’d narrate what he was doing in the stereotypical Dylan voice of Blonde On Blonde. “Oh, I’m shaving my face,” he’d sing, for example.
Mom was never a fan of Dylan. She hated his singing voice for the most part, but she was more open to the voice he used on Nashville Skyline.
One of her favorite movies was Hope Floats, released 27 years ago at the end of May. On the soundtrack were two covers of “Make You Feel My Love.” I didn’t know it was a Dylan cover until I got a three-album Dylan pack in high school. Included in the collection were Blonde On Blonde, Blood On The Tracks, and Time Out of Mind.
The writing and recording process for the latter took place from 1996 to 1997. Late in Spring 1997, Dylan contracted histoplasmosis. According to a July 10, 1997, Rolling Stone article, Dylan may have gotten the ailment from a stop on the tour.
“Histoplasmosis is contracted by inhaling fungal spores found in bird or bat droppings, primarily in areas located near river valleys such as those in Indiana, Tennessee and Illinois. Dylan played shows on April 30 in Evansville, Ind., and May 2 in Memphis, Tenn.”
A brush with mortality that seems fitting for an album that touches on that very matter in “Not Dark Yet.”
When accepting a Grammy for the album in 1998, Dylan said the following during his acceptance speech: “I just wanted to say, one time when I was about sixteen or seventeen years old, I went to see Buddy Holly play at the Duluth National Guard Armory...I was three feet away from him...and he looked at me. And I just have some sort of feeling that he was—I don't know how or why—but I know he was with us all the time we were making this record in some kind of way.”
That may seem like an out-of-left-field comment, but Dylan cited Holly as an influence on the album. He was also inspired by the sound of early blues recordings.
Dylan’s encounter with Holly was an experience that stayed with him because of its circumstances. The performance took place on Jan. 31, 1959, three days later Holly would be lying dead in a snowy field in Iowa alongside Richie Valens and The Big Bopper.
The tour had worn them down because of the amount of dates, the distance they had to go and the problems with the buses breaking down. The plane trip would have given them more time to relax, do laundry and take care of other needs they neglected due to the rigors of the road.
Waylon Jennings was playing bass for Holly on the tour. Originally he and Tommy Allsup were going to moving Holly on the plane, but J.P. Richardson, who had the flu, asked him to give up his seat. Allsup gave up his seat to Valens. When Jennings told Holly he was taking the bus, Holly joked that he hoped his bus would freeze up, Jennings quipped “I hope your ol’ plane crashes,” in response. Understandably, Jennings felt guilt over that.
That moment where Dylan and Holly locked eyes was like a passing of the torch from the music of the 50s to the music of the 60s. It was also the day my mother was born, a fact I used to tease her about because of her feelings about Dylan’s voice.
There’s a scene near the end of Martin Scorsese’s Dylan documentary, No Direction Home, where Dylan contemplates further travel.
“I want to go home. You know what home is?
I don't want to go to Italy no more. I don't want to go nowhere no more. You end up crashing in a private airplane...in the mountains of Tennessee. Or Sicily.”
The toll of touring wore out Dylan — his going electric provoked a hostile response from the audience — and his drug regimen — alcohol, marijuana, and amphetamines, to name a few.
“I’m gonna get me a new Bob Dylan and use him,” he says.
Not long after that, Dylan had the infamous motorcycle accident. It’s an incident still shrouded in memory. Some accounts have him being seriously injured, others have him walking away without a scratch, some speculate that the accident was really a nervous breakdown or an excuse to dip out of the limelight. Dylan wrote about it in his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One.
“I had been in a motorcycle accident and I’d been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different glasses.”
Dylan wasn’t the only folksinger from his era to suffer the ill-effects of fame and the grind of the business. His contemporary, Phil Ochs, suffered a similar breakdown, but unlike Dylan, he never recovered from it. His decline was driven not so much by fame, but by the lack of it and personal and political defeats.
As his biographer Michael Schumacher puts it in There But For Fortune: The Life of Phil Ochs, “By Phil's thinking, he had died a long time ago: he had died politically in Chicago in 1968 in the violence of the Democratic National Convention; he had died professionally in Africa a few years later when he had been strangled and felt that he could no longer sing; he had died spiritually when Chile had been overthrown and his friend Victor Jara had been brutally murdered; and, finally, he had died psychologically at the hands of John Train.”
It’s a shame he and Ochs had a falling out at one point; they had so much in common, and Dylan praised him as a songwriter: “I just can't keep up with Phil—and he's gettin' better and better,” Dylan was quoted as saying in a Melody Maker article.
Along with similar roots in folk music, they both had an affinity for film and Elvis, grew up in the midwest, one a Boy From The North Country and the other a Boy In Ohio. Ochs donned a gold lamé suit in the final chapter of his career and played Presley and Holly medleys.
“Thirsty Boots” was a song Dylan covered and that Ochs was fond of. The song was performed by Eric Andersen, the man who wrote it, at the Phil Ochs memorial concert. The memorial was held nearly two months after Ochs hung himself and four days after Dylan turned 35, the age Ochs was at the time of his death.
“The only thing I’ll say about Phil is, it’s very sad for anybody who dies that way, who feels they’re more alone when they die than when they’re born. It’s very heavy,” Andersen said.
Dylan wrote a song about what it might have been like to meet Elvis: “Went to See The Gypsy.” When my grandfather passed away, I thought of that song because of the headline in the Memphis Press-Scimitar about Presley's passing: “A Lonely Life Ends on Elvis Presley Boulevard.”
My grandfather’s final years were lonely, though he was active socially, he never quite got over losing his wife of more than 50 years. The state of his house reflected his age and his grief. I understand that better now in the wandering years after my mother’s murder.
The falling out seemed to stem from musical differences. Dylan played Ochs a song, reportedly “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” or “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later).” Though the truth about the limousine story is it’s mostly apocryphal. A game of telelphone that resulted in a lasting myth that for Ochs and Dylan partisans alike says something about the artist they admire. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend, to quote a Western that both Ochs and Dylan likely loved.
“‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘What do you mean?’ Dylan challenged Phil, instantly angry at him. ‘Listen to it again.’ Phil listened as Dylan ran through the song a second time, but another hearing did not alter his initial reaction. ‘It’s okay,’ he told Dylan, ‘but it’s not going to be a hit.’Dylan went through the ceiling. ‘You’re crazy, man,’ he raged. ‘It’s a great song. You only know protest, that’s all.’”— There But for Fortune: The Life of Phil Ochs by Michael Schumacher.
Dylan kicked Ochs out of the limo and reportedly told him, “You’re not a folk singer. You’re a journalist.”
They had a complicated relationship and were close and then distant at times. But Dylan was there for Ochs to help make his Friends of Chile Benefit Concert successful.
During that time, Dylan’s music shifted again, returning to his roots in the fertile soil of blues and folk, the weird America glimpsed on the Harry Smith anthology.
"Well, you might say that life is a series of returnings. You go out, you go out to school or you go out to work or you go out to get married or to war or anyplace, you always go back, you always return, even if it's only to yourself. You leave yourself and you come back" - Phil Ochs, introducing,” Song of My Returning, Live In Montreal, 10/22/66
Dylan never strays too far from his roots, it’s always there somewhere, whether in the production, the musical style or lyrics.
And so Dylan beats on, a boat against the current, born ceaselessly into the past.