globalnook

Mr. Dylan IV

      In the fall of 1969, I was working as a county courthouse reporter for my hometown newspaper, The Gadsden Times. My days were spent covering and writing news stories about new county tax ordinances, inside politics and more groundbreakings than I ever want to remember. There were profiles about new county officials, farm summary reports and murder trials. On weekends, to make extra money, I would cover high school football games.
      One weekend in late October of 1969,  the sports editor asked me if I wanted to cover the state's  AAA football championship in a nearby town. I told him I’d love to. I could use the $25, I had some old college friends in the town and I loved this little Bar-B-Q joint located near the stadium.
      So, two weekends later, me and a photographer drove to a nearby county to cover the AAA Football championship. Inside the press box, I met my old friend Jerry Rochester. The year before, Jerry had been the county reporter at the Gadsden Times and I was working on the copy desk.  At some point, he got into an argument with the executive editor and left the Times  two weeks later.  Jerry shook my hand, said he was glad to see me and explained that he was there in the press box to cover the championship for the local radio station.
      When Jerry was working at the Times, he and I and another staffer were almost killed one night. We had been drinking and left a party in Jerry’s 1967 Toyota Celica and were cruising into town at too high a rate of speed. As we zipped along at 80 miles an hour, Jerry had gotten too close to the shoulder, had hit a six-inch bridge abuttment over a little creek and the Celica had gone airborne. The car (with the three of us inside) turned over five times, rolled across the other lane, across a front yard and came to rest on the porch of an old, abandoned house on the opposite side of the road. The Celica was totalled. The only injury to the three passengers was that Hal, who was in the back seat, got a broken toe. We were lucky to be alive! Big time lucky!
      After the game, Jerry suggested that we go down to the Bar-B-Q joint I loved for some food and reminiscing.
       The moment we got into his car, he asked me if I remembered the accident.
       “Of course,” I said. "You never forget coming that close to death."
        We made small talk about this and that and finally I asked him what it was like to work in radio. He explained radio is essentially a verbal medium and, while you go for the good quotes, the way people  say things is much more important in radio that it is in print. He said, in print, the reader can't actually hear the inflections of their words whereas, in radio, the listener could. As a result, inflections and the way people say things is more important than what they say.  I asked him what was the favorite part of the job.
     “Being a disk jockey…,” he said quickly. “You play all of your favorite music and get paid for it.  It’s great!”
      We laughed together.
      “But,” he said mindfully, “Sometimes you can’t play everything that you like. You get censored.”
      “What do you mean?”
      “Some songs are so risque, you can’t air them publicly.”
     “Yeah, but that’s mostly black music, isn’t it,” I asked.
      “Not necessarily” Jerry replied, reaching for an eight-track tape and popping it in the player. “Listen to this guy! The managers won’t let me play it.  The churches say it is too vulgar”.
       As the controversial song came up on the speakers, I heard the words: ”Lay, lady, lay….”
       Instantly I recognized the nasal twang as Bob Dylan.
       Mr. Dylan was being outrageous again! The only difference was this time the theme was sexual and his treatment was too in-your face for backwoods folks. The sexual revolution hadn’t caught up to them yet. For them, sexuality was supposed to stay in the barnyard. Human sexuality was too personal and private to be brought into a public forum with such unabashed honesty. The same mentality that had kept Elvis from swinging his hips on TV was now keeping Mr. Dylan’s “Lay, Lady Lay” off local radio.
        The next morning, I hit the record store and bought “Nashville Skyline”. On the cover was Mr. Dylan dressed in black, looking down at the camera over his guitar and tipping his hat like a street minstrel for whom you had just out a dollar bill in his jar. The album included “Girl of the North Country”, “Peggy Day”, “Country Pie” and “Tell me that it isn’t true”.
       Chalk up another one for Mr. Dylan!!

Mr. Dylan III

     During the late fall of 1966, a freakish tornado whipped through North Alabama, picked up the soil sample shack I worked in and dumped it in a creek about 500 yards away. Fortunately, the tornado struck on a Sunday night and I wasn’t in the shack at the time. With the shack went around 100 soil samples that had never been tested. The chief engineer said there was no way the samples could be recollected because the center concrete slab had already been poured over almost 20 per cent of the highway from which the samples were taken. The chief engineer concluded that, since 98 percent of the samples tested met specifications, it was a good bet that the lost samples met specs also.
     As for me, they moved me into the chief engineer’s office in Attalla. They said they needed somebody to sweep the floor, help write letters for the chief engineer and close the office at night. When I went to interview for the job, the chief engineer’s assistant told me he thought he I would be a good fit got the job, but there was one single qualification I had to have which more important than all the others.
      “What’s that?” I asked.
      “You have to love to drink coffee and BS,” he said with a grin.
      I laughed.
      “I think I can handle it,” I replied.
      So I became an office boy. I kept the place clean, wrote letters to contractors and subcontractors and closed the office at night. By early April of 1967 I felt right at home in the position.
      At the end of the day, after everybody else was gone and I was in the office by myself waiting to close, I would goof off, read and listen to the radio.
      One night in late April, I was lounging around the office waiting to close and suddenly, on the radio, I hear a voice starting to sing…..”You’ve got a lot of nerve…”
      It was a testimony to the people in the world who stab you in the back, belittle you and betray you although you have gone overboard to please them, befriend them and try to peacefully coexist with them. Every word, every line in the song made its own special, unique contribution to that theme. The title of the song was “Positively 4th Street”. It was a masterpiece!
     Two days later, I bought the album. The title was “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits”. The cover featured an up-close side view silhouette of the head of Mr. Dylan against a deep royal blue background. Included in the album was “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35”, “It Ain’t Me, Babe”, “Just like a Woman”, and “I Want You”.
     Mr. Dylan had done it again! From out of nowhere this guy had come back to speak effectively to the innermost depths of my internal self. He had presented the “a**holes” of the world in words which not only drove to the heart of the syndrome, but, as far as I know, is the only song of its kind in all of rock and rock. I had to take my hat off to this guy once again. He was something else!!

Mr. Dylan II

     In the late spring of 1966, I was living back at home in Alabama. I guess I was what you would call a wandering soul. I had no aims, no goals, no expectations. I read a lot, lived off my mother’s and my grandmother’s table and wandered from job to job to job. I worked in a pool hall; was a car mechanic, delivered newspapers, ran a printing press and worked for the State of Alabama Highway Department.
     By day, I worked for the state highway department on the stretch of I-59 between Attalla and Duck Springs, Alabama. I spent my days inside a little wood shack along the soon-to-be-built highway testing the density of soil samples. The samples were taken from the highly-compacted earth which would be directly under the superhighway’s main two-lane concrete slab. If soil densities beneath the slab were below a certain level, it would wash out in wet weather and consequently cause holes in the highway’s center slab.
     By night, I hung out in town with my old high school friends, especially “John Man”.  In late 1964, when “John Man” was dating Linda, his wife-to-be, her parents wouldn’t let “John Man” and Linda go on a date alone so they would send Linda’s younger sister Amy along as a “chaperone”. As soon as “John Man” had Linda and Amy in his car (it was an old black 1962 Chevy we called “The Black Bitch") John man would come get me and we would go park.  John Man and Linda would do their thing in the front seat and me and Amy would do our thing in the back.  "John Man" always called me “I.Q.”
    One night, John Man and I were at his house passing a bong, drinking cheap wine and going through his albums.
     “'I.Q.', you gotta hear his guy,” he said.
     He held up an album cover. In the forefront was a very serious-looking Bob Dylan with a gray cat and an open magazine in his lap looking straight at the camera. Behind him, at the other end of a lounger, was a beautiful brunette, dressed in red and holding a cigarette prominently in her right hand.  The cover read: “Bob Dylan:Bringing It All Back Home”
    “Yeah,”  I said thoughtfully, “I remember him from California.”
    “He’s great,” "John Man” said, putting the needle to the vinyl.
    We listened to the entire album without saying a word.
    When it was finished,  “John Man” looked over at me with an impish smile.
    “The pump don’t work because the vandals took the handles,” he said, quoting from the song  “Subterreanean Homesick Blues”
     I smiled.
     “Yeah,” I said happily. “That’s a great line.”
     So the rest of that summer, I rediscovered the magic of  Bob Dylan. It was like becoming reacquainted with an old, dear friend. During those months, "John Man" and I soaked ourselves in “Mr. Tambourine Man”, “Maggie’s Farm”, “It’s Alright, Ma”, and “Love Minus Zero.” In  “Maggie’s Farm” and “Love Minus Zero,” Mr. Dylan once again showed his magical  ability to tap into the mass subconscious.  While the sequence of images were totally metaphorical, they all made perfect sense within a larger psychological framework. I was totally fascinated with his ability to do that. Nobody else that I knew of could do it. And like all great poets, he ALWAYS has something important to say. And he said it well. And he made me think. After listening to this guy, I always learned something. That’s what I liked the best. You always came away from this guy with something you could use.

Mr. Dylan I

(Prologue: They say, over the course of your life, most of the people you meet will have some kind of influence on you. You will remember their face or something they did or something they said or how they looked and it sticks with you over the years. Then there are people whom you never know in person, but they keep popping up in your life over and over and over down through the years. They seem to always be there at the most appropriate moment to counsel you and try to show you yourself and help you better understand the world.  Bob Dylan was that person to me. This will be a series of articles about the way this rock legend appeared in my life over and over to show me or teach me something about myself and the world at a given moment. This is the first article in the series.)

       In the late fall of 1963, I was going through my wild and crazy twenties. I was 21, single, a college dropout and footloose and fancy-free. My friend Jim and I decided we were leaving Alabama for good. On the day Kennedy was killed, we decided we were going to California and be rich and famous and we never coming back to Alabama.  We packed all of our goods in a 1953 Chevy named “Buddha’s Buggy” and started driving westward. In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, we stopped and picked up this black kid near the University campus to give him a ride and the state troopers stopped us and made the black kid get out. Then he gave us a lecture about race relations in the Deep South. We never did know why he made us dump the black kid, other than to say: “You’re from Alabama, you should KNOW how it is.” Anyway, after we dumped the black kid, we continued westward. After we were almost arrested in Sierra Blanca, Texas and had to replace the alternator in “Buddha’s Buggy” somewhere in Arizona, we arrived in Los Angeles.
      Within days of our arrival, we settled into the low-rent district in suburban Glendale and made friends with some of the locals.  The center of the group we entered was a young, hip Philippino woman named Sheri who worked as a telephone operator, had an apartment on Colorado Blvd. and loved having friends over to drink coffee, talk about Kierkegaard and Yevtushenko and intellectualize about the state of the modern world. There was me, my friend from Alabama, Sheri, her older brother Jerry, his friends and some local teenagers from Eagle Rock and Pasadena. We thought we were the young intellectuals. We wore Marine pea coats and had beards, listened to Peter Paul and Mary and tested pot and over the counter sniffer drugs. We read Baudelaire, listened to Dave Van Ronk, were big fans of the Broadway show “People”, read Life magazine and listened to lots and lots of new music.
      One afternoon, me and the others were waiting at her apartment door when Sheri got off work. As she unlocked the door, she held up a package she had been carrying under her arm.
      “I’ve got this new guy you gotta hear,” she said, opening the door.
      “What’s his name?” somebody said.
      “Bob Dylan,” she replied.
      “Sounds kinda funky”, someone replied.
      We laughed among ourselves and went inside.
      When she opened the package, she withdrew an LP album. On the cover was a photo of a lonely-looking young boy with his hands in pockets trying to stay warm against the bitter cold of a New York winter.  He looked like he was on a desperate search and couldn’t be disturbed, Walking beside him, grasping his arm and snuggling up to him was a hip-looking, beautiful young woman looking straight at the camera. The album cover read: “The Free-Wheeling Bob Dylan”. When she put the album on the turntable and it started playing, it sounded sort of hokey at first. This guy’s voice had a nasal, raspy quality and the background music was like something you would hear when family singers would practice at home. His instruments were essentially a guitar and a harmonica, but he dealt with subjects that other singers wouldn’t dare touch. Most rock musicians of the day were singing about broken hearts, unrequited love and metaphorical sex. This guy dealt with tough subjects like politics, social issues and the state of the modern world. In dealing with those subjects, he was not only incisive and to-the-point, he was absolutely outrageous. And he had a biting humor which plunged into the gut of the social issues of the day... racism, the atomic bomb and the War in Vietnam. You knew this guy was on the cutting edge of human social and political evolution. Most of all, he had a way of tapping into your subconscious mind. He had a way of tip-toeing across the horizons of the generic modern psychoscape. I liked that!!
       So, all that summer, we listened to “Masters of War”, “Blowing in the Wind”, “Girl of the North Country”, “Corrina, Corrina”, “Oxford Town”, and “Talkin’ World War III Blues”. After listening to the same album over and over and over, we knew all of the words to all of the songs. We would find ourselves quoting words from the songs like you would quote from the poems of Shelly or Byron or Shakespeare. In particular, I remember one summer night when about 15-20 members of our group were at La Costa beach drunk out of our minds and singing “Masters of War” at the top of our lungs. It’s safe to say that this guy had influenced us.
       The following spring, I went back to Alabama. My friend Jim said he wanted to go to San Francisco and “feel the scene” so he signed over the “Buddha’s Buggy” to me and asked me and the Philippino woman to take him to Santa Barbara and drop him off on the highway. He said he was going to hitchhike to San Fransico and become a "flower child".  So we dropped him off and me and the Philippino woman went back to LA together. Some two weeks later, Sheri decided she was going to San Francisco. She said it was “bitching” and it was the place her heart yearned to be.  So, with Jim and the Philippino woman both out of the picture, I decided to head homeward. I have to admit I was tired of living hand to mouth and I longed to see some southern pines.
       So I went back to Alabama and forgot about Bob Dylan and the Masters of War and Talking World War III Blues and the budding brilliance of one of the greatest minds of our time. When I left, I never dreamed I would ever hear from Bob Dylan again. I thought he was a flash in the rock and roll pan and would be there for a split second and then disappear forever in the mists of musical history. How wrong I was!

They call it "Driving"

     Everyone knows what "driving" is.
     In the most common usage, "driving" is the act of getting into your car, starting the engine and instructing this form of mechanical media to move you from point A to point B. The car is the hardware (equipment)  and you are the software (instructions). The interface you have to accomplish this is a steering wheel, brakes, gear shift, accelerator, turn signals etc. The mechanical media moves you across the surface of planet earth and you and your passengers witness the scenery as you travel.
      The person "driving" is the person responsible for providing a comfortable, interesting experience for their passengers. As a result, the "driver" is constantly getting comments and judgements from others who are along for the ride. In fact, car culture has invented a host of colloquial names for wanna-be drivers, including "back-seat driver".
      As with cars, most computer users are a single driver at the "wheel" of a single pc. They take the routes they like and control the "scenery" according to their personal goals and individual tastes.                                        
      When computer nerds get together to discuss and review some new computer program, there may be 10 to 15 people who gather together in a room and the presentation is on a screen controlled by a single computer. One person, usually the head nerd "drives" the computer through cyberspace and controls the sequence of  images which appears on the screen. He is responsible for the flow of the "experience" and the nature and quality of the "scenery",  so to speak. If someone else takes control of the computer, they are the new "driver". The interface the "driver" has to the machine is a mouse and keyboard. His "windshield", so to speak, is the computer's monitor. In this scenario, the onlookers are his "passengers".
     You can have a "back-seat driver" at a computer just like you can for a car. Whenever someone is "driving" a car and a passenger says: "Slow down...I want to see that!", it's the same thing as a computer "driver" having someone over their shoulder point to the computer screen and shout: "Click on that! Click on that!"
     The culture of the automobile changed mating habits, methods of buying and selling and man's vision of the world and himself.
     The culture of the computer and the internet is doing the same thing.
     It has been said that cars brought the world to the common man. The very thing can be said for computers.
     So the next time somebody asks you: "Do you want to drive?",  ask them: "Are we taking the car or the computer?"