Waiting on the Moon, page 5
Three years later, I became friends with John Lee. I asked him, “Do you remember the time you played with Bob Dylan at Gerde’s?”
“Remember?” said John Lee. “Man, that guy would come up to my hotel room, asking me a million questions about my playing and the techniques of other blues players I knew. He always brought along his guitar. Then he’d start drinkin’ from my bottle. Man, that Bob. I sure liked him, but he was kinda a funny one.”
I asked him what he meant by funny. John Lee said, “He wasn’t like the other young blues players that came around. He just was different—not strange or weird, just different, trying to find out every little detail he could.”
Bob was always playing and trading songs with other musicians, and this exposed him to a wide array of influences, including Appalachian mountain music, Elizabethan ballads, and the songs of Hank Williams, Hank Snow, and Blind Lemon Jefferson. I came to learn that this voracious curiosity was typical of Bob. Whether I heard him at the sparsely attended concert that Izzy hosted not long afterward in a recital space at Carnegie Hall or in the back room of the Folklore Center, where I began to find him on a regular basis, he always seemed to be doing something new, expanding his taste and his repertoire. Hearing these backroom jam sessions firsthand and being exposed to the tremendous variety of styles he and the other musicians played had a major effect on broadening my musical knowledge.
One afternoon when I was painting at a little studio in the basement of a friend’s house, next door to my parents’ apartment building, I had the radio playing in the background, and a show called Folksinger’s Choice, hosted by Cynthia Gooding, came on. To my surprise, Bob was featured as a special guest. Immediately after the show finished, I called the station, WBAI. Ms. Gooding answered, and I asked her where Dylan would be playing next. She replied, “Hold on; I’ll ask.”
Several seconds later, surprisingly, Bob himself came on the phone. I told him how much I enjoyed his music and that I was a painter. “Oh, a painter! I love paintings—love to see your work someday.”
“I’m in the Village all the time,” I said, “and I’m a good friend of Izzy’s. I’d be more than happy to show you some of my paintings.”
Bob hesitated, then gave me an address. “Sometimes you can find me there,” he added, then quickly hung up.
I couldn’t believe my good fortune. I hurriedly gathered some paintings and drawings into a portfolio and rushed to catch the downtown train straight to the Village, heading right to the address Bob had given me. When I arrived at the brownstone apartment building, there were several performers I recognized sitting on the steps out front, including Mark Spoelstra and Patrick Sky. I looked for Bob’s name on the apartment buzzers. “Who you lookin’ for?” Mark asked me.
“Bob Dylan,” I answered.
“Oh, we’ve been waiting for him for over an hour. Just grab a step.”
A few minutes passed, and John Herald of the Greenbriar Boys bluegrass group passed by and said, “If you’re all waiting for Bob, he’s hanging out at the Kettle of Fish.”
Like the Pied Piper, John led us to the bar, where we found Bob seated with a group of people at a large round table littered with half-empty pitchers of beer, wineglasses, and ashtrays stacked with high hills of cigarette butts. I approached Bob and hesitantly said, “Hey, Bob. I’m the guy you spoke to on the phone a while ago… about seeing some paintings?”
He was holding a wineglass and turned, giving me a real long stare. It was the first time I realized he had blue eyes that could cut right through you. After emptying his glass, he turned away from me, saying, “Paintings? I don’t wanna see no damn paintings.” Then he drank another glass.
I was taken aback, but at that very moment, John Herald mentioned there was a good party happening over at Annie Bird’s apartment. Everyone drank the last of the beer and wine, then got up to leave. As they headed out the door, Bob turned to me as if motioning for me to follow. The group walked together amid shrieks of laughter, and I trailed behind them, lugging my unopened portfolio. When Bob entered the party, he began a conversation with a willowy brown-haired girl in a tight black turtleneck and miniskirt. Realizing that I wasn’t going to accomplish my objective—showing Bob my paintings—I drowned my disappointment and nervousness in endless glasses of red wine from the several jugs that were scattered around the apartment.
Bob’s first album, Bob Dylan, came out soon afterward, and I immediately bought it. When my sister saw the cover, she said, to my surprise, “I met him when I was at college in Wisconsin. He was playing the piano with a harmonica attached by a wire to his neck. That’s him on the cover. It was at a gathering in the room of my guitarist friend Danny Kalb.” (Danny Kalb went on to become a member, with Al Kooper, of the group the Blues Project.) My father, hearing me playing the album, looked at the cover and said, “That’s Bobby, Izzy’s friend. What a character that guy is. He’s a hoot!”
“Dad, you know Bob Dylan?”
“Sure. I met him lots of times when I’d visit Izzy. We even had lunch across the street, and one time we were joined by this really wild character who called himself Tiny Tim. When you’re down in the Village again, ask Izzy where Tiny Tim is playing. I thought I knew a lot of songs from the early days, but that fella seems to know almost every song that was ever written from the thirties on back.”
First my sister; now my father. And there I was thinking Bob was my own personal discovery.
Late one evening, I stopped in at a nearly empty Gaslight Café. Sitting together were Dave Van Ronk and, as I recall, singer Buffy Sainte-Marie and performer David Blue. Someone mentioned that Bob was supposed to come down and play that night. It was getting near closing, which for New York was pretty late, when finally, in walked Bob. I overheard him say to Dave that he had just been writing, and Dave asked Bob if he’d like to sing a few. Bob got up on the small stage and seemed to have difficulty tuning the guitar that someone handed him, so Dave tuned it for him. Bob tried several keys until he found the one he wanted.
I was sitting alone at the table nearest the stage. Bob played one song, then began singing, “Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son? / Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?” The song had many verses, and each line was as compelling as the one before it. Bob was totally absorbed, as if he were channeling every word. It had the form of an Elizabethan ballad but with imagery like nothing I’d ever heard before. He finished the last chorus, repeating, “And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard / It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.”
When he stepped off the stage, there was complete silence. We were spellbound by what we had just heard. I don’t know if that was the first time Bob performed the song, but it certainly was the first time I heard it, and that might have also been true for the small crowd gathered at the Gaslight. In one seismic moment, he had brought us into new and unexplored terrain, just as Picasso helped radically reshape the landscape of modern painting with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. My mind was filled with so many images from the song that as soon as I got home that night, I headed to my small studio and began a painting I called Hard Rain.
My next sighting of Bob was at the Monday hootenanny night at Gerde’s Folk City, where established musicians as well as recent arrivals in town signed up to perform. Tom and Jerry, who became Simon and Garfunkel; Judy Collins, in a formal dress and high heels; blind Puerto Rican José Feliciano; comedian Flip Wilson; and a long list of other notable performers—they all made appearances there. You paid a dollar at the door and got a free drink card.
Bob would usually show up, but he rarely played on these nights. He’d stand by the bar, order red wine, and hold court. I always tried to stand next to him to hear what he might be talking about. One evening, he was telling a guy that his producer, John Hammond, had given him an amazing record that came in a simple plain white sleeve. It was a 1930s recording of Robert Johnson. Bob was over the moon about it, and he couldn’t stop telling the guy at the bar just how great the recording was.
That night, I had used my drink ticket for a glass of 151-proof rum and Coke, which had certainly given me quite a buzz. I didn’t want the feeling to fade, but I couldn’t afford another drink. Bob, with his back to me, was still talking to this guy about Robert Johnson when I noticed his half-empty glass of red wine just sitting there next to me. I quickly drank it. Several minutes later Bob turned around, saw his glass was empty, and called the bartender over for a refill. He took a couple of sips, put the glass back on the bar, and continued his conversation. As I had with the first glass, I emptied most of the second. Bob was telling this guy, “I can look into people’s eyes and see truth in them. Robert Johnson had truth, a truth that only a few singers are capable of capturing.” Again Bob turned for his wineglass, saw it was almost empty, and ordered another. This went on for several more rounds, but never once did he suspect that the young squirt standing next to him kept guzzling his wine before he had a chance to finish it.
As Bob’s fame grew, I saw every major show that he played in New York, from Town Hall to Carnegie Hall. I didn’t attend the Newport Folk Festival, but I did see him perform at Forest Hills Stadium, and that, like Newport, turned into a chaotic and somewhat scary evening. The crowd was loud, and many folk fans booed Bob when he started his electric set. People began running onto the field in front of the stage, and one guy even made it onto the stage itself before he was dragged off.
In October of 1964, I moved to Boston to study at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. I was still planning to be a painter, not a musician, but I did join a band made up of several art students. We weren’t the greatest players, but we sure had attitude. Over time we talked our way into performing with some major artists, including John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, the Shirelles, Howlin’ Wolf, Sun Ra, and even the Byrds, whose cover of Bob’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” had just been released.
Bob’s right-hand man at the time was Bobby Neuwirth. I knew Bobby partly because he was a close friend of the lead guitarist in my band and partly because he had studied at the same art school. He got us tickets to Bob’s sold-out concert at Boston’s Symphony Hall and invited us to the after-party in Cambridge. It seemed like the entire folk community was there: Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band, Jim Rooney, Eric Von Schmidt, the Charles River Valley Boys, Leon Bibb, Tom Rush—the place was packed. Paul Butterfield and most of his band came, since they were also playing in town that same night at Club 47.
Bob was in the kitchen surrounded by a large crowd, mostly ladies, all asking him to sing. Maria Muldaur handed him a guitar, and he launched right into one of the top hits at the time, Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street.” Nobody else could have made that song so surprisingly enjoyable for such an orthodox traditional-folk crowd.
Back in New York City later that year, I was walking uptown on Sixth Avenue, having drunk a few too many Bacardi 151s at the White Horse Tavern. I was teetering along, feeling no pain, when I spotted Bob in front of O. Henry’s Steak House. He was sitting alone at a café table, reading the New York Times, wearing a black Spanish-style hat reminiscent of Zorro’s, dark Ray-Ban sunglasses, and a fitted leather jacket. Anxiously tapping his slimly denimed leg, he spotted my approach and raised the newspaper to hide his face. Too late! Uninvited and undeterred, I sat down at his table.
“Excuse me, Bob, I don’t mean to bother you.” (People often say these words upon encountering celebrities, then proceed to do exactly what they say they’re not going to do.) “I don’t want to interrupt you, but I wonder if you can tell me… uh… tell me… what is truth?”
Bob sat still. He didn’t move. Then very slowly, he lowered his newspaper and gave me a long, hard stare. I could almost feel those steel-blue eyes blazing right through his dark Ray-Bans. If my memory serves me well, to paraphrase the bard himself, this was his response.
“You mean you want ME to tell YOU what truth is? You want ME to explain to YOU what is TRUTH? You see that tree behind you?” I turned and looked and acknowledged, yes, I saw the tree. “How the FUCK do you know it’s there? How do you know it’s not some sort of APPARITION? Have you touched it? You believe it’s there because you see it? Do you BELIEVE everything you see is the TRUTH? What about what you DON’T SEE? Is that the UNSEEN TRUTH? Do you believe EVERYTHING you hear? How do you KNOW I’m going to be truthful if I DO try to tell you what I think truth MIGHT be? How do you know what I say ain’t nothing but ONE FUCKING BIG LIE? Lotsa people BELIEVE lies! What’s the difference between TRUTH and a LIE? Is the time on your watch the truth? You want ME to tell YOU what TRUTH is? Have you ever read T. S. Eliot? Ezra Pound? Jack Kerouac? Socrates? Plato? Aristotle? Ovid? Virgil? Dante? The ancient scriptures? The Talmud? The book of Revelation? The book of Numbers? You just casually come up to ME, as if I SHOULD REVEAL TO YOU what I know or don’t know? Why should I tell YOU ANYTHING? You think I’m some kind of PROPHET? You think I’ve been encountering ALL the mysteries back beyond thousands and thousands of years before the time of the PHARAOHS and the PYRAMIDS? You just want an EASY ANSWER! You just want ME to pass along to YOU some ancient secret that I might have discovered! Truth, if it exists, is something YOU have to search for YOURSELF! So I ain’t gonna waste my time EVEN ANSWERING YOU! The REAL TRUTH IS, I just wanna finish drinking MY coffee and read this newspaper and be left ALONE!”
Leaving the table, I realized that for a guy who said he wasn’t going to waste his time answering me, he sure did pack a lot of truth into everything he said.
In 1981, after Freeze-Frame became the Geils band’s most popular release, we were invited to tour, as special guests, with the Rolling Stones.
Our first date took place at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. I was hanging out after our set in Keith Richards’s dressing room. There was still some time before the Stones took the stage. At one point the door opened, and Ronnie Wood brought Bob in to chat with Keith. While Bob and Keith talked, I hung out to one side, still in my stage clothes, wearing custom-made zebra-print shoes. Bob sized me up and down, then asked, “Hey, what did you have to kill to get a pair of shoes like that?” It was too good a one-liner to even attempt a reply.
The years passed, and via a mutual friend, Bob and I came to know each other through our shared interest in painting and literature. He also dropped by the studio during the recording of my first solo album, Lights Out. His visit meant a lot to me and gave me confidence at a time when I truly needed it.
I started going to his sound checks, and it intrigued me to see how Bob continually rearranged his songs. I would always bring him books that I thought might interest him, and he sometimes did the same in return. Since painting was a frequent topic of our conversations, several times he shared some of his latest artwork with me.
It was during one sound check that I noticed Bob was wearing an especially sharp pair of black leather pants. At the end of the sound check, after complimenting him on these finely tailored trousers, I jokingly added, “What did you have to kill to get a pair of pants like that?”
Almost a year later, I received a large box in the mail. Inside was a stunning pair of lightly worn black leather pants, custom-made by Manuel of Nashville, who apprenticed to the famed rodeo tailor Nudie of Hollywood. There was no enclosed note, and I was confounded, though I recognized the return address on the box as Bob’s New York office. I called his chief coordinator and asked, “What’s the story about the pants that just arrived?”
He answered, “Didn’t you once tell Bob you liked his pants?”
Puzzled, I said, “Yeah, but that was a really long time ago.”
“Well, Pete, Bob must have remembered, and he wanted you to have them.”
Rolling On
“THERE’S A BIG WIDE WORLD I WAS BORN TO SEE”
9
HAVE THUMB, WILL TRAVEL
David Lynch
MY HIGH SCHOOL graduation was held at Carnegie Hall. As our names were called, we walked from the audience onto the stage to be presented with our diplomas. When it was my turn, I was instead handed a plain manila envelope, inside of which was a handwritten note: “If you want to know why your diploma is missing from the envelope, please come see me in my office at your convenience. Signed, Louis Wechsler, principal of the High School of Music and Art.” I never considered it convenient to see Mr. Wechsler, therefore I never actually graduated from high school.
In order to graduate, I would have had to attend summer school. I had once endured this torment and swore to myself that I’d never go through it again. I dreaded climbing the steps to some randomly chosen high school, feeling like there was a big bubble over my head with the word loser floating within it. Instead, I found a part-time job in the want ads. I planned that by the time fall arrived I’d have enough money saved to hitchhike around the country and visit my friends who had graduated and were attending various universities.
The job I found was in the main showroom of an interior decorating firm. The day began with designers searching for inspiration by riffling through endless swatches of fabric, which they casually dropped to the floor. It was my responsibility to pick up the swatches, fold them, and place them neatly onto the correct shelves, over and over again. The manager was a short, thin man, with shiny, greased-back hair and a very narrow face, onto which he drew a tiny mustache with an eyebrow pencil. He always wore an outlandishly colored ascot and favored a strong rose-scented cologne that lingered long after he was gone. One day, he called me into his office. “Peter, you can have a great future here at Stoman-Loman, but you need to tidy yourself up—a nice hair trim for a start. Any way I can be of assistance to you, please don’t hesitate to seek my guidance,” he said as he slid my weekly pay envelope across his desk.
