Chronicles - Bob Dylan [53]
We pulled off of Route 80 in a ’69 Buick Electra, found the university on a hot and cloudless day. In short time the officials led me into a crowded room and put me in a robe, and soon I was looking out over a crowd of well-dressed people in the sun. There were also others on the stage getting honorary degrees and I needed mine as much as they needed theirs but for different reasons. Walter Lippmann, the liberal columnist, Coretta Scott King, some others — but all eyes were on me. I stood there in the heat staring out at the crowd, daydreaming, had attention-span disorder.
When my turn came to accept the degree, the speaker introducing me said something like how I distinguished myself in carminibus canendi and that I now would enjoy all the university’s individual rights and privileges wherever they pertain, but then he added, “Though he is known to millions, he shuns publicity and organizations preferring the solidarity of his family and isolation from the world, and though he is approaching the perilous age of thirty, he remains the authentic expression of the disturbed and concerned conscience of Young America.” Oh Sweet Jesus! It was like a jolt. I shuddered and trembled but remained expressionless. The disturbed conscience of Young America! There it was again. I couldn’t believe it! Tricked once more. The speaker could have said many things, he could have emphasized a few things about my music. When he said to the crowd that I preferred isolation from the world, it was like he told them that I preferred being in an iron tomb with my food shoved in on a tray.
The sunlight was blocking my vision, but I could still see the faces gawking at me with such strange expressions. I was so mad I wanted to bite myself. Lately the public perception of me had begun to shift and move around like a yo-yo, but this kind of thing could set it back a thousand years. Didn’t they know what was happening? Even the Russian newspaper Pravda had called me a money-hungry capitalist. Even the Weathermen, a notorious group who made homemade bombs in basements to blow up public buildings, who had taken their name from a line in one of my songs, had recently changed their name from the Weathermen to the Weather Underground. I was losing all kinds of credibility. There were all kinds of things going on. I was glad I came to get the degree, though. I could use it. Every look and touch and scent of it spelled respectability and had something of the spirit of the universe in it. After whispering and mumbling my way through the ceremony, I was handed the scroll. We piled back into the big Buick and drove away. It had been a strange day. “Bunch of dickheads on auto-stroke,” Crosby said.
Johnston asked over the phone if I was thinking about recording. Of course I was. As long as my records were still selling, why wouldn’t I be thinking about recording? I didn’t have a whole lot of songs, but what I did have were the MacLeish pieces — and I figured I could add to them — make up more in the studio if I had to and Johnston was raring to go…working with him was like a drunken joyride. Bob was an interesting cat — originally from West Texas, living in Tennessee, built like a wrestler, thick wrists and big forearms, barreled chest, short but with a personality that makes him seem bigger than he really is — a musician and songwriter who had even written a couple of songs that Elvis recorded.
Johnston was trying to get us to move to Nashville, and every time we were there he tried to sell it to us as being very laid-back and having everything you need. It’s been reformed, he told us. People do their own thing here. Nobody cares who anybody is. You can stand on the street ’til morning and no one will see you.
I’d been there a few times to make some records — first time I recorded there was in ’66. The town was