Hello, my name is Josh Kurp and I am a Dylanologist. Today is Bob Dylan’s 71st birthday, a date that used to matter as much to me as my own birthday. For awhile, my obsession was bad. Instead of hanging out with friends in my freshman year of college, like a normal, well adjusted person, I’d stay in my dorm and listen to and sort through my extensive collection of Dylan bootlegs. I was a putz (and, literally, a virgin – can’t imagine why), and incredibly depressed because of it. I just didn’t realize at the time that Dylan was part of the cause.
Cajun’s wonderful post yesterday about his years-long love for John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces inspired me to look back at those dark days, and pick out some of the lowest lows of my all-things Dylan passion. Desolation row, indeed.
1: Convincing myself to like certain sh*tty albums
If movies have taught me anything, it’s that denial is the first step toward…I dunno, actually. But it’s the first step toward something, and I was in complete denial in high school. I thought that everything Dylan had recorded was amazing, A+++ — not a single dud. “Sure, while the rest of you guys are listening to Blonde on Blonde and Blood on the Tracks, I’m going to admire the unappreciated splendor of Slow Train Coming.” Like a Facebook motivational poster, that doesn’t mean anything, and neither do lines like:
Man gave names to all the animals
In the beginning, in the beginning
Man gave names to all the animals
In the beginning, long time ago.He saw an animal leaving a muddy trail
Real dirty face and a curly trail
He wasn’t too small and he wasn’t too big
“Ah, think I’ll call it a pig.”
That’s an actual Dylan song – it came from the same mind as “Visions of Johanna.” Now, I can see that songs like “Man Gave Names to All the Animals,” “Covenant Woman,” and “Wiggle Wiggle” are complete horse crap, but then, I couldn’t. I honestly felt like if I didn’t love everything a musician had recorded, I didn’t really love the musician. (It also took me years to admit that The Simpsons has a fair share of terrible, terrible episodes.) Oh, now I remember! The first step toward becoming a well-adjusted fan is admitting, not denying, that everything the person you’re a fan of makes isn’t perfect. Unless you like My Bloody Valentine — they’re pretty spotless, obviously.
2. Downloaded bootleg of every “Like a Rolling Stone”
In 2005, author Greil Marcus published a 283-page book, Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, that wasn’t so much an examination of Dylan’s career as a whole up to that point as it was an occasionally pleasurable, often uncomfortable cavity search that probed a single song of his: “Like a Rolling Stone.” Marcus traced the song’s beginnings all the way back to Sun House and Hank Williams, and spends endless pages discussing Bobby Gregg’s opening snare shot, Al Kooper’s charmingly clumsy organ playing, and the various takes that eventually lead to the greatest rock ‘n’ roll song of all-time (IMHO).
I ate up every page. It’s not Marcus’s best work (that would be Mystery Train, a must-read for any music fan), but I didn’t care — it was an entire book about ONE SONG, one of my favorite songs at that, and I’d finally learn its walloping mysteries. The end of Crossroads takes the format of a transcription (of sorts) of the complete “Like a Rolling Stone” sessions. It’s an effective device of showing the song’s evolution, from its 3/4th time waltz origins on the piano (later officially released on The Bootleg Series, Volumes 1–3) to its eventual take-no-prisoners conclusion, and I knew what I had to do: FIND THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS BOOTLEG.
So, I did – all 20 takes of “Like a Rolling Stone.” On one CD. Some, for instance Take 4, lasts only :39, but you can hear the musicians slowly figuring out the song, when to add certain inflections, when to hold back so Dylan’s voice can dominate (leading into the chorus). It’s the musical equivalent of, say, watching a behind-the-scenes documentary about Happy Gilmore that only shows Adam Sandler swinging his golf club, over and over and over again. It’s really f*cking boring, but I considered it a Holy Grail – and in my collection of over 1,000 bootlegs (seriously), that’s saying something.
I have no idea where that CD-R is today.
3. Read the Bob Dylan Encyclopedia
Even worse than Crossroads is the Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, 800 pages on the most minute details of the musician’s life. There’s no reason I had to know about “blues, inequality of reward in” or “kelp,” and yet, I did.
Seriously, there’s an entry on “kelp” because it’s mentioned once in “Sara.”
4. Yelled out obscure song at concert
As much as I loved Dylan, I didn’t see him live until 2006, more than three years into my unhealthy fixation. I’ve nearly convinced myself that I waited so long because I wanted it to be at a special venue, when actually, I was hoping a pretty woman would attend the show with me. We’d share a special moment during the harmonica fade-out of “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” (a song he doesn’t play live), and then later that night, I’d low her lands. Or something. But let’s go with the special venue thing, because I actually did see him somewhere “special”: at the New York City Center on November 20, 2006.
It was special because Dylan once lived in New York and…ANYWAY. The City Center is a majestic multi-tiered theater built in 1923, and the perfect place for me to yell out a song request to my hero. I had convinced myself that if I yelled out some obscure track, like the never-released “Sign on the Cross,” Dylan would hear me, enjoy my suggestion, and play the song, and everyone around me would pat my back and shake my hand. And then I’d get a handjob from a different pretty woman, the one sitting near me.
That’s not exactly how it happened. After playing “Ain’t Talkin’” during the encore, and while the band was getting ready to launch into “Thunder on the Mountain,” I yelled, “PLAY SIGN ON THE CROSS.” I was met with complete silence and stink-eyes of death from seemingly the entire audience. I was That Guy, the kind, when you talk about the show with your friends later, you’d say, “And f*ck That Guy who yelled out a song request.” I slunk back to my dorm after the show, without even a sad-eyed lady to keep me company.
5. Wrote a Screenplay about a song
“Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts,” the seventh song on Dylan’s 15th album, Blood on the Tracks, is a nearly nine-minute epic about a gang of bank robbers, lead by the Jack of Hearts, that invades a town, and the effect it has on Lily, Rosemary, and Big Jim, who owns “the town’s only diamond mine.” It’s intense — it basically boils down the plot of a Western into 8:51. Many people have tried to write feature-length screenplays about the song, including John Kaye (Where the Buffalo Roam), James Byron, and me.
I began writing my masterpiece, which was basically glorified fan fiction (read: crap), about four years ago, even though I had no idea how to write a screenplay and didn’t understand basic plot developments. (Oh, you CAN’T kill the protagonist in the first act?) I really wish I still had a copy of it, but in 2010, someone stole my laptop, where my script was saved, and I didn’t have it backed up. It probably looked like:
Rosemary: Hey, Big Jim, I’m going to commit suicide because I don’t like you.
Big Jim: OK.
Oscar, please! Anyway, if you’re reading this, burglars who stole my crappy computer, please don’t ever put the document “lily, rose, jack movie” online. Thanks. Being a fan sucks.
(Picture via and via)
