Chronicles - Bob Dylan [18]
One night a guy named Bobby Neuwirth came through the door with a couple of friends and caused a lot of commotion. Bobby and I would meet again sometime later at a folk festival. Right from the start, you could tell that Neuwirth had a taste for provocation and that nothing was going to restrict his freedom. He was in a mad revolt against something. You had to brace yourself when you talked to him. Neuwirth was about the same age as me, from Akron, played clawhammer banjo and knew some songs. He was going to art school in Boston and could paint, too — said he was going back to Ohio in the spring to his folks’ house to take down the storm windows and put up the screens. That was his customary thing to do and it had been mine, too. I wasn’t planning on going back, though. Later we’d become pretty tight and travel around together. Like Kerouac had immortalized Neal Cassady in On the Road, somebody should have immortalized Neuwirth. He was that kind of character. He could talk to anybody until they felt like all their intelligence was gone. With his tongue, he ripped and slashed and could make anybody uneasy, also could talk his way out of anything. Nobody knew what to make of him. If there ever was a renaissance man leaping in and out of things, he would have to be it. Neuwirth was a bulldog. He didn’t provoke me, though, not in any way. I got a kick out of everything he did and liked him. Neuwirth had talent, but he wasn’t ambitious. We liked pretty much all the same things, even the same songs on the jukebox.
The jukebox in the place showed mostly jazz records. Zoot Simms, Hampton Hawes, Stan Getz, and some rhythm-and-blues records — Bumble Bee Slim, Slim Galliard, Percy May-field. The Beats tolerated folk music, but they really didn’t like it. They listened exclusively to modern jazz, bebop. A couple of times I dropped a coin right into the slot and played “The Man That Got Away” by Judy Garland. The song always did something to me, not in any stupefying, tremendous kind of way. It didn’t summon up any strange thoughts. It just was nice to hear. Judy Garland was from Grand Rapids, Minnesota, a town about twenty miles away from where I came from. Listening to Judy was like listening to the girl next door. She was way before my time, and like the Elton John song says, “I would have liked to have known you, but I was just a kid.” Harold Arlen had written “The Man That Got Away” and the cosmic “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” another song by Judy Garland. He had written a lot of other popular songs, too — the powerful “Blues in the Night,” “Stormy Weather,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “Get Happy.” In Harold’s songs, I could hear rural blues and folk music. There was an emotional kinship there. I couldn’t help but notice it. The songs of Woody Guthrie ruled my universe, but before that, Hank Williams had been my favorite songwriter, though I thought of him as a singer, first. Hank Snow was a close second. But I could never escape from the bittersweet, lonely intense world of Harold Arlen. Van Ronk could sing and play these songs. I could, too, but never would have dreamed of it. They weren’t in my script. They weren’t in my future. What was the future? The future was a solid wall, not promising, not threatening — all bunk. No guarantees of anything, not even the guarantee that life isn’t one big joke.
You’d never know who you were liable to run into at the Kettle of Fish. Everyone seemed like somebody and nobody at the