Chronicles - Bob Dylan [32]
I wanted to see him again, so I took the D train out to the Brooklyn Paramount Theater on Flatbush Avenue where he was appearing with The Shirelles, Danny and the Juniors, Jackie Wilson, Ben E. King, Maxine Brown, and some others. He was on the top of the heap now. It seemed like so much had happened to him in such a short time. Bobby came out to see me, was as down-to-earth as ever, was wearing a shiny silk suit and narrow tie, seemed genuinely glad to see me, didn’t even act surprised. We talked for a little while. He asked me about New York, what it was like to be here. “Lot of walking. Got to keep your feet in good shape,” I said.
I told him I was playing in the folk clubs, but it was impossible to give him any indication of what it was all about. His only reference would have been The Kingston Trio, Brothers Four, stuff like that. He’d become a crowd pleaser in the pop world. As for myself, I had nothing against pop songs, but the definition of pop was changing. They just didn’t seem to be as good as they used to be. I loved songs like “Without a Song,” “Old Man River,” “Stardust” and hundreds of others. My favorite of all the new ones was “Moon River.” I could sing that in my sleep. My Huckleberry friend, too, was up there, waiting ’round the bend maybe on 14th Street. At Ray’s, where there weren’t many folk records, I used to play the phenomenal “Ebb Tide” by Frank Sinatra a lot and it had never failed to fill me with awe. The lyrics were so mystifying and stupendous. When Frank sang that song, I could hear everything in his voice — death, God and the universe, everything. I had other things to do, though, and I couldn’t be listening to that stuff much.
Standing there with Bobby, I didn’t want to act selfishly on his time so we said good-bye and I walked down the side of the theater and out through one of the side doors. There were throngs of young girls waiting for him in the cold outside the building. I cut back out through them into the press of cabs and private cars plowing slowly through the icy streets and headed back to the subway station. I wouldn’t see Bobby Vee again for another thirty years, and though things would be a lot different, I’d always thought of him as a brother. Every time I’d see his name somewhere, it was like he was in the room.
Greenwich Village was full of folk clubs, bars and coffeehouses, and those of us who played them all played the old-timey folk songs, rural blues and dance tunes. There were a few who wrote their own songs, like Tom Paxton and Len Chandler and because they used old melodies with new words they were pretty much accepted. Both Len and Tom wrote topical songs — songs where you’d pick articles out of newspapers, fractured, demented stuff — some nun getting married, a high school teacher taking a flying leap off the Brooklyn Bridge, tourists who robbed a gas station, Broadway beauty being beaten and left in the snow, things like that. Len could usually fashion some song out of all that, found some kind of angle. Tom’s songs were topical, too, even though his most famous song, “Last Thing on My Mind,” was a yearning romantic ballad. I wrote a couple and slipped them into my repertoire but really didn’t think they were here nor there.
I had been singing a lot of topical songs, anyway. Songs about real events were always topical. You could usually find some kind of point of view in it, though, and take it for what it was worth, and the writer doesn’t have to be accurate, could tell you anything and you’re going to believe it.
Billy Gashade, the man who presumably wrote the Jesse James ballad, makes you believe that Jesse robbed from the rich and gave to the poor and was shot down by a “dirty little coward.” In the song, Jesse robs banks and gives the money to the destitute and in the end is betrayed by a friend. By all accounts, though, James was a bloodthirsty killer who was anything but the