Chronicles - Bob Dylan [57]
The public had been fed a steady diet of my complete recordings on disc for years, but my live performances never seemed to capture the inner spirit of the songs — had failed to put the spin on them. The intimacy, among a lot of other things, was gone. For the listeners, it must have been like going through deserted orchards and dead grass. My audience or future audience now would never be able to experience the newly plowed fields that I was about to enter. There were many reasons for this, reasons for the whiskey to have gone out of the bottle. Always prolific but never exact, too many distractions had turned my musical path into a jungle of vines. I’d been following established customs and they weren’t working. The windows had been boarded up for years and covered with cobwebs, and it’s not like I didn’t know it.
Prior to this, things had changed and not in an abstract way. A few months earlier something out of the ordinary had occurred and I became aware of a certain set of dynamic principles by which my performances could be transformed. By combining certain elements of technique which ignite each other I could shift the levels of perception, time-frame structures and systems of rhythm which would give my songs a brighter countenance, call them up from the grave — stretch out the stiffness in their bodies and straighten them out. It was like parts of my psyche were being communicated to by angels. There was a big fire in the fireplace and the wind was making it roar. The veil had lifted. A tornado had come into the place at Christmastime, pushed all the fake Santa Clauses aside and swept away the rubble. It was mystifying why it had taken so long for this to happen. That it didn’t happen earlier is a damn shame. I also knew that I had written perfect lyrics to complement the style of music that I played. The previous ten years had left me pretty whitewashed and wasted out professionally. Many times I’d come near the stage before a show and would catch myself thinking that I wasn’t keeping my word with myself. What that word was, I couldn’t exactly remember, but I knew it was back there somewhere. I tried to figure this out, but there didn’t seem to be any formula. Maybe if I had seen it coming, I could have fixed it in its tracks, but I didn’t. My performance days in heavy traffic had been grinding to a halt for a while, had almost come to a full stop. I had single-handedly shot myself in the foot too many times. It’s nice to be known as a legend, and people will pay to see one, but for most people, once is enough. You have to deliver the goods, not waste your time and everybody else’s. I hadn’t actually disappeared from the scene, but the road had narrowed, almost was shut down and was supposed to be wide open. I hadn’t gone away yet. I was lingering out on the pavement. There was a missing person inside of myself and I needed to find him. Now and again, I did try a few times, tried hard to force it. In nature there’s a remedy for everything and that’s where I’d usually go hunting for it. I’d find myself on a houseboat, a floating mobile home, hoping to hear a voice — crawling at slow speed — nosed up on a protective beach at night in the wilderness — moose, bear, deer around — the elusive timber wolf not so far off, calm summer evenings listening to the call of the loon. Think things out. But it was no use. I felt done for, an empty burned-out wreck. Too much static in my head and I couldn’t dump the stuff. Wherever I am, I’m a ’60s troubadour, a folk-rock relic, a wordsmith from bygone days, a fictitious head of state from a place nobody knows. I’m in the bottomless pit of cultural oblivion. You name it. I can’t shake it. Stepping out of the woods, people see me coming. I knew what they were