Chronicles - Bob Dylan [56]
Buzzy Feiten, one of the guitar players, was laying the groundwork for a tune maybe we’d cut tomorrow or the next day or maybe never get to it at all. Johnston came in, cheerful as always and he had a lot of zest. Few people have it for long, but he’s got a never-ending supply and it’s not faked. I had just heard the song “New Morning,” on the playback and thought it had come out pretty good. New Morning might make a good title, I thought and then said it to Johnston. “Man, you were reading my mind. That’ll put ’em in the palm of your hand — they’ll have to take one of them mind-training courses that you do while you sleep to get the meaning of that.” Exactly. And I would have to take one of them mind-reading courses to know what Johnston meant by saying what he just said. It didn’t matter, I knew where Bob must have gotten that from, though. I’d brought a book, Secret of Mind Power by Harry Lorayne, to the studio and had left it laying on one of the couches. I thought that the book might help me to continue freeze-framing my image, help me in learning how to suggest only shadows of my possible self.
Harry Lorayne, however, was no match for Machiavelli. A few years earlier, I’d read The Prince and had liked it a lot. Most of what Machiavelli said made sense, but certain things stick out wrong — like when he offers the wisdom that it’s better to be feared than loved, it kind of makes you wonder if Machiavelli was thinking big. I know what he meant, but sometimes in life, someone who is loved can inspire more fear than Machiavelli ever dreamed of.
The record that we were working on was eventually indeed called New Morning (the title of one of the songs I’d composed for the MacLeish play) and it did have the photo of me and Vickie on it. The twelve-song record was released and the flow of reports came streaming in. Some critics would find the album to be lackluster and sentimental, soft in the head. Oh well. Others would triumph it as finally the old him is back. At last. That wasn’t saying much either. I took it all as a good sign. To be sure, the album itself had no specific resonance to the shackles and bolts that were strapping the country down, nothing to threaten the status quo. All this was in what the critics would later refer to as my “middle period” and in many camps this record was referred to as a comeback album — and it was. It would be the first of many.
The MacLeish play Scratch opened on Broadway at the St. James Theatre on May 6, 1971, and closed two days later on May 8.
4
Oh Mercy
IT WAS 1987 and my hand, which had been ungodly injured in a freak accident, was in the state of regeneration. It had been ripped and mangled to the bone and was still in the acute stage — it didn’t even feel like it was mine. I didn’t know what had befallen me, and this was a bizarre shift of fate. All potentialities had gone to pieces. With a hundred show dates scheduled for me starting in the spring it was uncertain that I would be able to perform. This was a sobering experience. It was now only January, but my hand was going to need plenty of time to heal and be rehabilitated. Staring out French windows into an overgrown garden, with a cast on my hand that went nearly to my elbow, I realized