Chronicles - Bob Dylan [58]
I’d been on an eighteen month tour with Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers. It would be my last. I had no connection to any kind of inspiration. Whatever was there to begin with had all vanished and shrunk. Tom was at the top of his game and I was at the bottom of mine. I couldn’t overcome the odds. Everything was smashed. My own songs had become strangers to me, I didn’t have the skill to touch their raw nerves, couldn’t penetrate the surfaces. It wasn’t my moment of history anymore. There was a hollow singing in my heart and I couldn’t wait to retire and fold the tent. One more big payday with Petty and that would be it for me. I was what they called over the hill. If I wasn’t careful I could end up ranting and raving in shouting matches with the wall. The mirror had swung around and I could see the future — an old actor fumbling in garbage cans outside the theater of past triumphs.
I had written and recorded so many songs, but it wasn’t like I was playing many of them. I think I was only up to the task of about twenty or so. The rest were too cryptic, too darkly driven, and I was no longer capable of doing anything radically creative with them. It was like carrying a package of heavy rotting meat. I couldn’t understand where they came from. The glow was gone and the match had burned right to the end. I was going through the motions. Try as I might, the engines wouldn’t start.
Benmont Tench, one of the musicians in Petty’s band, would always be asking me, almost pleadingly, about including different numbers in the show. “Chimes of Freedom” — can we try that? Or what about “My Back Pages”? Or “Spanish Harlem Incident”? And I’d always be making some lame excuse. Actually, I don’t know who was making the excuse, for I had closed the door on my own self. The problem was that after relying so long on instinct and intuition, both these ladies had turned into vultures and were sucking me dry. Even spontaneity had become a blind goat. My haystacks weren’t tied down and I was beginning to fear the wind.
The tour with Petty was broken up into parts and during one of the layoffs, one of the organizers, Elliot Roberts, had set up some shows for me to do with The Grateful Dead. I needed to go rehearse with the band for these shows, so I went to San Rafael to meet with The Dead. I thought it would be as easy as jumping rope. After an hour or so, it became clear to me that the band wanted to rehearse more and different songs than I had been used to doing with Petty. They wanted to run over all the songs, the ones they liked, the seldom seen ones. I found myself in a peculiar position and I could hear the brakes screech. If I had known this to begin with, I might not have taken the dates. I had no feelings for any of those songs and didn’t know how I could sing them with any intent. A lot of them might have been only sung once anyway, the time that they’d been recorded. There were so many that I couldn’t tell which was which — I might even get the words to some mixed up with others. I needed sets of lyrics to understand what they were talking about, and when I saw the lyrics, especially to the older, more obscure songs, I couldn’t see how I could get this stuff off emotionally.
I felt like a goon and didn’t want to stick around. The whole thing might have been a mistake. I’d have to go someplace for the mentally ill and think about it. After saying that I’d left something at the hotel, I stepped back outside onto Front Street and started walking, put my head down against the drizzling rain. I wasn’t planning on going back. If you have to lie, you should do it quickly and as well as you can. I started up the street — maybe four or five or six blocks went by and then I heard the sounds of a jazz combo playing up ahead. Walking past the door of a tiny bar, I looked in and saw that the musicians were playing at the opposite end of the room. It was raining and there were few people inside. One of them was laughing at something. It looked like the last stop on the train to nowhere