Chronicles - Bob Dylan [50]
While in New York, my wife and I went to the Rainbow Room on top of Rockefeller Center to see Frank Sinatra Jr., who was singing with a full orchestra. Why him and not somebody on the hip circuit? No hassles and nobody chasing me, that’s why…that and maybe because I felt a connection — I reckoned that we were about near the same age and that he was a contemporary of mine. Anyway Frank was a fine singer. I didn’t care if he was as good as his old man or not — he sounded fine, and I liked his big blasting band. Afterwards he came by and sat with us at our table. Obviously it had surprised him that someone like me would come see him, but when he saw that I genuinely liked show tunes, he eased up and relaxed, said he liked a few of my songs, “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Don’t Think Twice,” asked me questions about what kind of places I played (I was retired and lived like a hermit but didn’t say that). He talked about the civil rights movement, said his father had been active in civil rights and had always fought for the underdog — that his father felt like he was one himself. Frank Jr. seemed pretty smart, nothing faked or put-on or ritzy about him. There was a legitimacy about what he did, and he knew who he was. The conversation rolled along.
“How do you think it would make you feel,” he said, “to find out that the underdog had turned out to be a son of a bitch?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “probably not so good.”
Gazing out through the wall of windows, you could see the spectacular city view. From sixty floors up, it was a different world.
After a while, I bought a red flower for my wife, one of the loveliest creatures in the world of women, and we got up on our feet and left, said good-bye to Frank.
A reply from MacLeish eventually arrived and he had some questions. I knew he would. He invited me to come back up to his place — we could tune up the compositions, integrate them and talk about them further. With little hesitation, I jumped behind the wheel of our long, four-door Ford station wagon sedan and headed up again across the New England countryside. Even behind the wheel with my eyes on the open road, I couldn’t keep the clanging reverberations out of my mind. I felt like a caged bird — like a refugee — zigzagging up the winding highways — felt like someone who was transporting a corpse across state lines and could be pulled over at any time.
I clicked on the radio. Johnny Cash was singing “Boy Named Sue.” Once upon a time Johnny had shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. Now he was saying that he was stuck with a girl’s name that his father had given him. Johnny was trying to change his image, too. Aside from that, I didn’t see much similarity between my situation and anybody else’s — felt pretty isolated with just myself and my small but growing family facing a fantastic world of sorcery.
One intriguing thing that caught my eye was that in the boxing world Jerry Quarry had fought Jimmy Ellis in Oakland and it was a fired up affair. Jimmy Ellis was a “take the money and go home” kind of guy — boxing was a job to him, no more no less. He had a family to feed and