Chronicles - Bob Dylan [66]
From the far end of the kitchen a silver beam of moonlight pierced through the leaded panes of the window illuminating the table. The song seemed to hit the wall, and I stopped writing and swayed backwards in the chair, felt like lighting up a fine cigar and climbing into a warm bath. This was the first song I’d written in a while and it looked like a clawish hand had written it. I knew that if I ever was to record again, I could use it. I was aware that I wasn’t in the song, but that was all right; I didn’t feel like being in there. I put the words in a drawer, couldn’t play them anyway, and snapped out of a trance.
The low growl of a motorcycle rumbled up the roadway alongside the garage and I cranked the window open wider — smelled the pomegranate blossoms blowing in a breezy fashion. I cast an embracing glance over the primordial landscape. It had been a while since I had written a song from start to finish all at once. “Political World” reminded me of another song I had written a couple of years before called “Clean-Cut Kid.” I wasn’t in that one, either.
Later in the week we went out to see Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. The play was hard to bear, family life at its worst, self-centered morphine addicts. I was glad when it was over. I felt sorry for these people, but none of them touched me. After that, we stopped into Harvelle’s, a local blues club on 4th Street, to see Guitar Shorty and J. J. “Badboy” Jones. It’s always a trip seeing Shorty. He plays guitar with everything but his hands. I wished I could have done that. Shorty sounds like Guitar Slim, but he does some wild gymnastics that you’d never imagine Guitar Slim doing. While strolling back to the car along 4th Street, a homeless guy holding his head in his hands was being ordered to move by a couple of cops. A tiny spaniel lay at the guy’s feet, the dog’s beady black eyes following the nervous movements of his master. I couldn’t see that the officers took any pride in what they had to do.
Later that night back at the house I started writing the song “What Good Am I?”…wrote it in a small art studio on the property. It’s more than an art studio. There’s arc-welding equipment in there, and I’d made ornate iron gates out of junk scrap metal in the barnlike room. Most of the place has a cement floor, but there’s another area covered with linoleum. There’s a table there and a window with lowered blinds that looks out over a gully. The entire song came to me all at once; don’t know what could have brought it on. Maybe seeing the homeless guy, the dog, the cops, the dreary play and maybe even the antics of Guitar Shorty might have had something to do with it. Who knows? Sometimes you see things in life that make your heart turn rotten and your gut sick and nauseous and you try to capture that feeling without naming the specifics. There were extra verses for this, too. Here’s one. “What good am I if I’m walking on eggs, if I’m wild with excitement and wet between the legs? If I’m right in the thick of it and I don’t know why, what good am I?” I put this song away in the same drawer with “Political World” — I wondered what they’d have to say to each other. No melodies for either. I went to sleep.
My mother and my aunt Etta were staying with us and they’d be up early, so I wanted to be up early, too. The next day was overcast and a fog hung in the air. My aunt was in the kitchen and I sat down with her to talk and drink coffee. The radio was playing and morning news was on. I was startled to hear that Pete Maravich, the basketball player, had collapsed on a basketball court in Pasadena, just fell over and never got up. I’d seen Maravich play in New Orleans once, when the Utah Jazz were the New Orleans Jazz. He was something to see — mop of brown hair, floppy socks — the holy terror of the basketball world — high flyin’ — magician of the court. The night I saw him he dribbled