Chronicles - Bob Dylan [40]
On one of my visits, Woody had told me about some boxes of songs and poems that he had written that had never been seen or set to melodies — that they were stored in the basement of his house in Coney Island and that I was welcome to them. He told me that if I wanted any of them to go see Margie, his wife, explain what I was there for. She’d unpack them for me. He gave me directions on how to find the house.
In the next day or so, I took the subway from the West 4th Street station all the way to the last stop, like he said, in Brooklyn, stepped out on the platform and went hunting for the house. Woody had said it was easy to find. I saw what looked to be a row of houses across a field, the kind he described, and I walked towards it only to discover I was walking out across a swamp. I sunk into the water, knee level, but kept going anyway — I could see the lights as I moved forward, didn’t really see any other way to go. When I came out on the other end, my pants from the knees down were drenched, frozen solid, and my feet almost numb but I found the house and knocked on the door. A babysitter opened it slightly, said that Margie, Woody’s wife, wasn’t there. One of Woody’s kids, Arlo, who would later become a professional singer and songwriter in his own right, told the babysitter to let me in. Arlo was probably about ten or twelve years old and didn’t know anything about any manuscripts locked in the basement. I didn’t want to push it — the babysitter was uncomfortable, and I stayed just long enough to warm up, said a quick good-bye and left with my boots still waterlogged, trudged back across the swamp to the subway platform.
Forty years later, these lyrics would fall into the hands of Billy Bragg and the group Wilco and they would put melodies to them, bring them to full life and record them. It was all done under the direction of Woody’s daughter Nora. These performers probably weren’t even born when I had made that trip out to Brooklyn.
I wouldn’t be going to see Woody today. I was sitting in Chloe’s kitchen, and the wind was howling and whistling by the window. I could look out on the street and see in both directions. Snow was falling like white dust. Up the street, towards the river, I watched a blonde lady in a fur coat with a guy in a heavy overcoat who walked with a limp. I watched them for a while and then looked over to the calendar on the wall.
March was coming in like a lion and once more I wondered what it would take to get into a recording studio, to get signed by a folk record label — was I getting any closer? “No Happiness for Slater,” a song off The Modern Jazz Quartet’s record, played in the apartment.
One of Chloe’s hobbies was to put fancy buckles on old shoes and she suggested wanting to do it to mine.
“Those clodhoppers could use some buckles,” she said.
I told her, no thanks, I didn’t need any buckles.
She said, “You got forty-eight hours to change your mind.” I wasn’t going to change my mind. Sometimes Chloe tried to give me motherly advice, especially about the opposite sex…that people get into their own fixes and not to care about anybody more than they care about themselves. The apartment was a good place to hibernate.
Once I was in the kitchen listening to Malcolm X talking on the radio. He was lecturing on why not to eat pork or ham, said that a pig is actually one third cat, one third rat, one third dog — it’s unclean and you shouldn’t eat it. It’s funny how things stick with you. About ten years later I was having dinner at Johnny Cash’s house outside of Nashville. There were a lot of songwriters there.