{"id":672,"date":"2019-05-15T14:39:58","date_gmt":"2019-05-15T14:39:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/edwardoconnor.ca\/?p=672"},"modified":"2019-06-10T12:50:30","modified_gmt":"2019-06-10T12:50:30","slug":"dylans-voice-part-three","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edwardoconnor.ca\/dylans-voice-part-three\/","title":{"rendered":"Dylan’s Voice, Part Three"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nothingness made visible<\/strong> <\/em><\/p>\n

The cook at the halfway house where I worked was a Ukrainian woman named Connie. A widow in her sixties, she was loquacious, vain, and opinionated, a born storyteller. I could sit in the kitchen for hours and listen to Connie\u2019s tales of the lumber camps where she worked in her youth or of the tensions and rivalries that animated the ethnic groups\u2014the Finlanders and Poles, the French and Italians, the Serbs and Croats and Slovenians, the Aboriginal peoples\u2014who formed Thunder Bay\u2019s complex cultural mosaic.<\/p>\n

Connie knew I liked her, and sometimes she would invite me to her house for Sunday dinner. This usually consisted of steak and potatoes with strawberry shortcake for dessert. One Sunday, she and her sister Mary picked me up early so we could visit their friend Petra, who was married to a sculptor named Stefan. He had an extension appointment at the university, and this had become a source of conflict in their marriage ever since Petra discovered that Stefan was banging one of his students.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a little tense there,\u201d said Connie, \u201cbut that doesn\u2019t matter. I think you should meet Stefan because you\u2019ll have lots to talk about.\u201d<\/p>\n

They were both Serbs, and Petra resembled a gypsy, with shining black eyes and black hair that even in her forties didn\u2019t show a trace of grey. Her figure verged on the voluptuous, but she had a tense, nervous, high-strung manner. Her hands were always in motion, and her mouth was like a red gash on her face. Stefan had a big Slavic handlebar moustache and a full head of hair but with a deep widow\u2019s peak on either side. The house they lived in was built of stone and stained wood, and the fa\u00e7ade was almost entirely of glass, so that even from the inside, you felt close to the trees and shrubs in the front yard.<\/p>\n

As we seated ourselves in the living room, Connie pointed out that Stefan had made all the furniture himself. \u201cIsn\u2019t it wonderful,\u201d she said, \u201cto be able to do things like that with your hands?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYes,\u201d said Petra as she rearranged the items on a side table. \u201cSometimes it\u2019s too wonderful.\u201d Then she went in the kitchen to make everyone coffee. Afterwards, we got a tour of the house, which ended in Stefan\u2019s studio. This was filled with lathes and worktables and pieces of wood and stone. After a few minutes, the women returned to the living room, and Stefan took up a hammer and chisel and started to work on a block of soapstone.<\/p>\n

Chipping at the stone seemed to release something in him, and he spoke to me in an easy, fluid, unselfconscious manner about art and the people who create it. He thought that great artists usually made some sort of passage in their youth, a process of transformation that confirmed their status as an artist. For many, this passage was a physical journey from the country, where they were surrounded by nature, to the city, where they would immerse themselves in a community of like-minded people who could challenge and stimulate their creative powers. Shakespeare, for instance, moved as a young man from the English countryside in the West Midlands to London, the largest city in the country. There he discovered a vibrant theatre scene, and this brought his talent to life in a way that wouldn\u2019t have happened if he\u2019d stayed in the sticks. At the same time, he needed his country upbringing for what it gave to him, which was a profound appreciation for the natural world. Nature informed everything Shakespeare wrote. Stefan stopped working on the stone for a moment to close his eyes and recite the opening lines from one of the sonnets.<\/p>\n

That time of year thou mayst in me behold<\/em>
\nWhen yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang<\/em>
\nUpon those boughs which shake against the cold,<\/em>
\nBare, ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.<\/em><\/p>\n

Then he returned to working on the stone, and I could see a form start to take shape under his hands, the hunched shoulder and low-slung head of a bear.<\/p>\n

In the moment I recognized the animal that Stefan was bringing to life out of the stone, a thought came into my mind. I realized that he\u2019d been talking to me\u2014without knowing it himself\u2014of Bob Dylan, of the arc Dylan\u2019s life described when he left Minnesota at the age of nineteen and established himself in New York City, where he found a community of folksingers and other performers who would support him and compete with him in the same way Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Kyd did with Shakespeare in sixteenth-century London. As I watched the bear take shape before my eyes, another thought also occurred, that Dylan had served as his own sculptor, that in fashioning his particular identity as a singer and songwriter, the tool he\u2019d used was his voice, which for him had been as sharp and incisive as a sculptor\u2019s chisel.<\/p>\n

Why did I think of Dylan then? Maybe it was those four lines from Shakespeare that brought to the surface another quatrain that had been delivered to my ears in a certain weary, old-man\u2019s voice and that I\u2019d memorized years before:<\/p>\n

The last of leaves fell from the trees<\/em>
\nAnd clung to a new love\u2019s breast,<\/em>
\nThe branches bare like a banjo moan<\/em>
\nTo the winds that listen the best.<\/em><\/p>\n

Could Dylan have written a song like \u201cLay down Your Weary Tune\u201d (or \u201cGirl from the North Country,\u201d for that matter) if he hadn\u2019t grown up in Hibbing, Minnesota or someplace similar? At the beginning of his career, he lied shamelessly about his childhood. He\u2019d run away from home seven times, he told interviewers such as Cynthia Gooding and Studs Terkel, travelled all over the country, and worked as a carny in a circus. He\u2019d seen Woody Guthrie perform in Burbank, California and \u201cdidn\u2019t go to school for a bunch of years.\u201d Then at some point\u2014certainly by the time of his third album\u2014he stopped lying and accepted the apparently prosaic facts of his upbringing. In 11 Outlined Epitaphs<\/em> (which functioned as the liner notes for that album), he wrote:<\/p>\n

an\u2019 I know I shall meet the snowy North<\/em>
\nagain\u2014but with changed eyes nex\u2019 time \u2019round<\/em>
\nt\u2019 walk lazily down its streets<\/em>
\nan\u2019 linger by the edge of town<\/em>
\nfind old friends if they\u2019re still around \u2026<\/em>
\nembracin\u2019 what I left an\u2019 lovin\u2019 it\u2014for I learned by now <\/em>
\nnever t\u2019expect<\/em>
\nwhat it cannot give me.<\/em><\/p>\n

Similarly, in the Playboy<\/em> interview from 1978, he told Ron Rosenbaum: \u201cI meet a lot of people from New York that I get along with fine, and share the same ideas, but I got something different in my soul. Like a spirit. It\u2019s like being from the Smoky Mountains or the backwoods of Mississippi. It is going to make you a certain type of person if you stay twenty years in a place.\u201d<\/p>\n

By then, his attitude towards his childhood and hometown had changed. It was no longer important to trick people into believing he\u2019d run away from home and had all kinds of romantic adventures in exotic places. By then, home itself was the important thing, having stayed there for the first twenty years of his life was what made him authentic and gave his music a certain credibility. By then, he recognized Hibbing as the place \u201cthat has left me with my legacy visions.\u201d<\/p>\n

After Bill and I left the bowling alley, we walked to where the car was parked in front of Tuffy\u2019s Bar on First Ave. Since we had nothing else to do, we went inside. Walking into Tuffy\u2019s was like stepping into a different world, a world that transported you fifty years into the past and hundreds of miles further west. The bar itself was an antique wooden affair that ran the length of the room. There were a few tables and chairs, a pool table at the back, and a jukebox set against one wall. What intrigued me was the mirror behind the bar, which was so covered with signs and advertisements, with postcards, calendars, and stuffed fish that it functioned more as a bulletin board than a mirror in the proper sense, what Nietzsche liked to call a \u201creflecting apparatus.\u201d As we adjusted ourselves on the bar stools, I counted four signs that spoke to the impossibility of cashing checks on the premises. The only other customer at the bar was a skinny guy in his thirties wearing a jean jacket and cowboy boots. He had a ballpoint pen in his fist and was weaving back and forth over his check book, which lay open on the bar beside an empty draught glass and two six-packs in a paper bag. The bartender had to repeat the total three times and count out his change twice before they got squared away and the guy staggered out.<\/p>\n

Then the bartender looked at us. \u201cWhat are you boys going to have?\u201d Bill ordered a small bottle of Pabst, and I asked for a draught. He nodded. \u201cA short and a tap, coming up.\u201d<\/p>\n

We sipped our beers and watched Airport \u201975<\/em> with the sound off. The bartender was in his early sixties. He walked with a limp and kept a glass of beer for himself under the counter at the end of the bar. When we ordered another round, I asked if the place had been there very long.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, twenty-five years at least,\u201d he said. \u201cTwelve as Tuffy\u2019s, and before that it was Sanders\u2019. I been working here ten years.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo kidding,\u201d said Bill. \u201cDid you know Bob Dylan when he used to live around here?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, no. I never knew him, he never came in. A couple of his uncles used to come in all the time, though. In fact, one of \u2019em was in last night. You know, we got another boy from near here who\u2019s doing real good too. He writes his own songs, and he\u2019s had a couple records out. I think there\u2019s one of \u2019em on the jukebox here.\u201d<\/p>\n

He hobbled over to the jukebox and spent two or three minutes flipping through the offerings. \u201cI\u2019m not finding it now,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I can\u2019t remember the boy\u2019s name for anything. But one of his records is called \u201cSnowflakes and Teardrops.\u201d Have you ever heard of it?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d I said. \u201cIs it sort of a country-sounding song?\u201d<\/p>\n

He looked at me uncertainly, as if trying to figure out what made a song \u201ccountry-sounding.\u201d Then he walked into the kitchen to see if his wife could remember the singer\u2019s name.<\/p>\n

While he was gone, I checked out the jukebox myself. It had a few pop hits by Fleetwood Mac and the Bee Gees, but most of the songs were from country-and-western and bluegrass artists: Hank Williams, Doc Watson, Bill Munro, George Jones, the Carter Family, on up to Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson, Tammy Wynette, and Johnny Cash. It occurred to me that the reason the bartender didn\u2019t know what I meant by \u201ccountry-sounding\u201d was that for him that was what music sounded like, period.<\/p>\n

In chapter two of Chronicles<\/em>, Dylan writes about what he calls \u201cthe soundtrack of my life.\u201d This he divides into three categories. The first is freight trains; not just their whistles, but the rumbling, clicking noise they make rolling down the tracks, the noise that carries so far on a still night. \u201cI\u2019d seen and heard trains since my earliest childhood days, and the sight and sound of them always made me feel secure.\u201d<\/p>\n

The second category is bells, especially church bells, but, \u201cI even liked doorbells and the NBC chimes on the radio\u2026. The ringing of bells made me feel at home too.\u201d<\/p>\n

The third category is the radio, and by extension, the jukeboxes that were ubiquitous in the 1950s. \u201cI was always fishing for something on the radio,\u201d he noted, and mostly what he fished for were songs, those three-minute stories-set-to-music (Dylan himself called them \u201cpictures\u201d) that allowed him to inhabit a parallel universe to the one where he lived. \u201cSongs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic. Greil Marcus, the music historian, would some thirty years later call it \u2018the invisible republic.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

As a by-product of all his listening, Dylan got to be adept at describing other performers\u2019 singing voices. When you read these descriptions, you get the sense that singing wasn\u2019t just a pastime for him or the people he listened to, it was a matter of life and death.<\/p>\n