Tony,
Well, thank you. I can still manage a few serviceable hours each day, sometimes, provided I get my nap.
We seem to be in general agreement about the Dylan-Fariña relationship. It fairly pulsates with dramatic potential. Two gifted young men, thrown together because of their lovers, charismatic in very different ways, consumed by competitiveness and ambition and the egotism that often accompanies ambition, eyeing each other’s women covetously and eyeing each other’s talent equally covetously, and circling each other suspiciously … and yet, for all their mutual mistrust, also genuinely fond of each other. I’m not sure I see it as a Henry James novel, but it sure would make a superb Woody Allen film, one in the tradition of Hannah and Her Sisters. I suspect that, had Fariña lived, the way their relationship played out over the years would have engaged us all.
Back in the 1970s, a former police reporter named Anthony Scaduto published an intermittently interesting biography of Dylan. (It’s going to be reissued in October, presumably with new material added.) I read it when it first appeared and haven’t looked at it since, but I still recall two anecdotes from it (you know how it is with us crocks; the olden days seem so much clearer to us than what happened five minutes ago), anecdotes that seem relevant to our current discussion.
The first concerns a 1950s high-school talent show in Hibbing, Minn., in which the teen-age Bobby Zimmerman, performing at the piano, sang a couple of Little Richard numbers. Those present at the time later told Scaduto that the young Dylan made a god-awful noise and embarrassed himself and everybody else, and that isn’t hard to believe. But the very fact he did it suggests something about his early musical alliances. When he issued Bringing It All Back Home in 1965, he wasn’t repudiating his roots at all; he was, rather, doing exactly what the title of the album suggests. Rock was his initial and most authentic enthusiasm. As Fariña says (now it’s my turn to complete a quotation you’ve cited in your posting), “Some of us had been listening to AM radio for a number of years.” Dylan appears to have been listening to it his entire sentient life.
The second concerns an evening at some Village coffee house, in which a group of young folk singers, Dylan included, were sitting around a table schmoozing. One of the people present mentioned that Ramblin’ Jack Elliott was actually the son of a Jewish dentist from Brooklyn and that his given name was Elliott Adnopoz. Apparently, when Dylan heard this, he began to laugh hysterically and couldn’t stop, finally actually collapsing off his chair and under the table in helpless hilarity. We don’t hear many instances of Dylan laughing. His reaction to this news suggests, it’s fair to speculate, some deep-rooted and deeply ambivalent feelings about his own origins. And Hajdu’s book adds to the significance of the anecdote; he tells us that, when the news of Dylan’s own Jewishness became public (in a Newsweek article Hajdu sees fit to characterize as “an exposé”), he went into virtual seclusion for a number of weeks, refusing to talk to the press and even canceling a planned concert tour with Richard Fariña.
All those lies Dylan told, and all that self-mythologizing–all the bullshit–must have come out of some profound misgivings about himself. As, it seems likely, have all his subsequent changes of identity. Some of which have appeared, along the way, bafflingly wrong-headed and misguided. But maybe even his most perverse choices have served his art. Perhaps the words James Joyce put in the mouth of Stephen Dedalus are right: “A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.” The young Dedalus was talking about Shakespeare, but his observation may be even more applicable to the mysterious maddening figure who transformed the very nature of popular song. If only because the latter’s errors have been more numerous and more public.
It’s been great to revisit this period and some of its most exciting music with you. Of course, it’s true that, as you’ve had occasion to point out several times, I have several years on you, and therefore I can remember the period first-hand and you can’t, but that discrepancy may not mean much. Because after all–everybody sing!--I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.
All best,
Erik
