Chronicles - Bob Dylan [19]
There was no place too far. I could see it all. All I needed to know about San Francisco was that Paladin lived in a hotel there and that his gun was for hire. I knew that “stones” were jewels and that villains rode in convertibles and that if you wanted to hide a tree, hide it in the forest where nobody could find it. I was raised on that stuff, used to quiver with excitement listening to these shows. They gave me clues to how the world worked and they fueled my daydreams, made my imagination work overtime. Radio shows were a strange craft.
Before I had ever gone into any department store, I was already an imaginary consumer. I used Lava Soap, shaved with Gillette Blue Blades, was on Boliva Time, putting Vitalis in my hair, used laxatives and pills for acid indigestion — Feenamint and Dr. Lyon’s tooth powder. I had the Mike Hammer attitude, my own particular brand of justice. The courts were too slow and too complicated, don’t take care of business. My sentiment was that the law is fine but this time, I’m the law — the dead can’t speak for themselves. I’m speaking for ’em. Okay? I asked the guy who made the sound effects for the radio shows how he got the sound of the electric chair and he said it was bacon sizzling. What about broken bones? The guy took out a LifeSaver and crushed it between his teeth.
I can’t say when it occurred to me to write my own songs. I couldn’t have come up with anything comparable or halfway close to the folk song lyrics I was singing to define the way I felt about the world. I guess it happens to you by degrees. You just don’t wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs, especially if you’re a singer who has plenty of them and you’re learning more every day. Opportunities may come along for you to convert something — something that exists into something that didn’t yet. That might be the beginning of it. Sometimes you just want to do things your way, want to see for yourself what lies behind the misty curtain. It’s not like you see songs approaching and invite them in. It’s not that easy. You want to write songs that are bigger than life. You want to say something about strange things that have happened to you, strange things you have seen. You have to know and understand something and then go past the vernacular. The chilling precision that these old-timers used in coming up with their songs was no small thing. Sometimes you could hear a song and your mind jumps ahead. You see similar patterns in the ways that you were thinking about things. I never looked at songs as either “good” or “bad,” only different kinds of good ones.
Some of them can be true to life cases. I’d been hearing a song around called “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill.” I knew that Joe Hill was real and important. I didn’t know who he was, so I asked Izzy at the Folklore Center. Izzy pulled out some pamphlets on him from the back room and gave them to me to read. What I read could have come out of a mystery novel. Joe Hill was a Swedish immigrant who fought in the Mexican War. He had led a bare and meager life, was a union organizer out West in about 1910, a Messianic figure who wanted to abolish