Rolling Thunder
A case of Bob Dylan fever
Time out of mind and all that… wandering, half sleep-shot, through the Marrickville Market at Addi Road when I stumble over a copy of Sam Shepard’s Rolling Thunder Logbook. Not a penny on me after using up my cash buying half a dozen free-range eggs, but the bookstall holder knows me and says I can come back and pay him next week.
The pages are mine.
With film ‘A Complete Unknown’ Bob Dylan fever is beginning to max out everywhere, so I count myself double-lucky to find the Shepard view and get it on trust.
I’m one of those guys who has thirty Bob Dylan albums and forty books. Or as a friend of mine and fellow BD fan joked, “Is that all?! What a lightweight!”
The bookstall guy and I talk about all the Dylan books and biographies… the definitive Clinton Heylin editions (excellent, even if he is overly territorial, downright tiresome about owning his subject); Anthony Scaduto (an early breakthrough recorder); Dylan’s own ‘Chronicles’ (fantastic, myth-making, like a Jack London adventure story with an hallucination about recording in New Orleans in the middle of it); a great pictorial history in hardback by Rolling Stone writer Jonathan Cott; Greil Marcus’ song anthropologies; the wonderful collected interviews that are ‘Dylan on Dylan’; plus the absolute pile of okay and not-so-good books on BD that are out there.
As Tom Waits once said Dylan is a planet everyone should explore a little of at some point or another. Everyone has their landing vehicle; some come better equipped or committed than others.
I did not really ‘get’ Dylan till my mid-late teens and his ‘Hurricane’ era, picking up on ‘Blood on the Tracks’ and ‘Desire’ and his dreamBeat cowboy vibe – helped along by the film ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’ – backtracking to the early protest and dandy sixties stuff and staying the course ever since the start of falling into his work in the 1970s.
I am looking forward to the movie. I don’t need it real, just inspiring.
I am also looking forward to reading the ‘Rolling Thunder Logbook’ in the meanwhile. Sam Shepard was a big influence on my twenties after reading ‘Motel Chronicles & Hawk Moon’, a book of fragmentary tales and stories that has affected me more than I maybe ever realised. From memory it blurs diarising and storytelling, existential reportage with something otherworldly.
Looking back as I write today, I see that Shepard influenced my writing a lot. Not to mention a renewed taste for double-denim after having left behind my earlier teenage Bernie Taupin phase. Cowboy poets really are the best.
Amazing to think Dylan was – and is – such a radiation point for so much in modern culture. An America in the mind. Out of which the likes of Shepard and Waits and so many others continued.
This vision comes to me of him singing ‘Tangled Up in Blue’… white hat on with feathers, white smeared make up, the hat casting a shadow over his face, his eyes an ice blue that burns.
I am listening to him a lot again, of course. My favourite songs currently seem to be ‘Jokerman’, ‘Queen Jane Approximately’, ‘Mississippi’, ‘Up To Me’, ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’.
This will no doubt change once I have seen the movie. I wish it was colder so I could keep my boots and jeans and jacket on and stay inside the realms that Dylan always puts you in: half on this harsh earth and half in your own movie, changing and moving, life as one great big story you have to tell to yourself and keep imagining.
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