Chronicles - Bob Dylan [101]
Jack was some master of musical tricks. The record cover was mysterious, but not in an ominous way. It showed a character with certain careless ease, rakish looking, a handsome saddle tramp. He’s dressed like a cowboy. His tone of voice is sharp, focused and piercing. He drawls and he’s so confident it makes me sick. All that and he plays the guitar effortlessly in a fluid flat-picking perfected style. His voice leaps all over the room in a lazy way and he is explosive when he wants to be. You could hear that he had Woody Guthrie’s style down pat and more. Another thing — he was a brilliant entertainer, something that most of the folk musicians didn’t bother with. Most folk musicians waited for you to come to them. Jack went out and grabbed you. Elliott, who’d been born ten years before me, had actually traveled with Guthrie, learned his songs and style firsthand and had mastered it completely.
Pankake was right. Elliott was far beyond me. There were a few other Ramblin’ Jack records that he had, too — one where he sings with Derroll Adams, a singer buddy of his from Portland who played banjo like Bascom Lamar Lunsford and sang in a dry and laconic witted style suiting Jack perfectly. Together they sounded like horses galloping. They did “More Pretty Girls Than One,” “Worried Man Blues” and “Death of John Henry.” Jack alone was something else, though. On the cover of his record Jack Takes the Floor, you could almost see his eyes. They were saying something, but I knew not what. Pankake let me listen to the record repeated times. It was uplifting, but it was being thrown down at the same time. Pankake said something earlier, like Jack being the king of the folksingers, the city ones, anyway. Listening to him, you wouldn’t doubt it. I don’t know if Pankake was trying to enlighten me or put me down. It didn’t matter. Elliott had indeed already gone beyond Guthrie, and I was still getting there. I had nothing near the compelling poise of self that I heard on the record.
I sheepishly left the apartment and went back out into the cold street, aimlessly walked around. I felt like I had nowhere to go, felt like one of the dead men walking through catacombs. It would be hard not to be influenced by the guy I just heard. I’d have to block it out of my mind, though, forget this thing, tell myself I hadn’t heard him and he didn’t exist. He was overseas in Europe, anyway, in a self-imposed exile. The U.S. hadn’t been ready for him. Good. I was hoping he’d stay gone, and I kept hunting for Guthrie songs.
A few weeks later Pankake heard me playing again and was quick to point out that I didn’t fool him, that I used to be imitating Guthrie and now I was imitating Elliott and did I think in some way that I was equivalent to him? Pankake said that maybe I should go back to playing rock and roll, that he knew I used to do that. I don’t know how he knew — maybe he was a spy, too, but in any case, I wasn’t trying to fool anybody. I was just doing what I could with what I had where I was. Pankake was right, though. You can’t take only a few dance lessons and then think you are Fred Astaire.
Jon was one of the classic traditional folk snobs. They looked down on anything that smelled of commerciality and were vocal about it: groups like The Brothers Four, Chad Mitchell Trio, Journeymen, Highwaymen — the traditional folk snobs considered them all exploiters of a sacred thing. Okay, so that stuff didn’t give me orgasms either. But they were no threat, so I didn’t care about it one way or another. Most of the folk crowd trashed the commercial folk stuff. The popular perception of folk music were things like “Waltzing Matilda,” “Little Brown Jug” and “The Banana Boat Song” and all that stuff had appealed to me a few years earlier so I didn’t feel the need to put it down. To be fair, there were snobs on the other side, too — commercial folk snobs. These kind looked down on the traditional singers as being old-fashioned