Chronicles - Bob Dylan [67]
I started and completed the song “Dignity” the same day I’d heard the sad news about Pistol Pete. I started writing it in the early afternoon, about the time the morning news began to wear away and it took me the rest of the day and into the night to finish it. It’s like I saw the song up in front of me and overtook it, like I saw all the characters in this song and elected to cast my fortunes with them. I have a problem sometimes remembering someone’s real name, so I give them another one, something that more accurately describes them, and I had a tendency to do that throughout this song. There were more verses with other individuals in different interplays. The Green Beret, The Sorceress, Virgin Mary, The Wrong Man, Big Ben, and The Cripple and The Honkey. The list could be endless. All kinds of identifiable characters that found their way into the song but somehow didn’t survive. I heard the whole piece in my head — rhythm, tempo, melody line, the whole bit. I’d always be able to remember this song. The wind could never blow it out of my head. This song was a good thing to have. On a song like this, there’s no end to things. You hold an electric torch up to someone’s face and see what’s there. Yet to me, it’s amazingly simple, no complications, everything pans out. As long as the things you see don’t go by in a blur of light and shade, you’re okay. Love, fear, hate, happiness — all in unmistakable terms, a thousand and one subtle ramifications. This song is like that. One line brings up another, like when your left foot steps forward and your right drags up to it. If I’d have written this ten years earlier, I’d have gone immediately to the recording studio. But a lot had changed and I had no anxiety about that stuff anymore, didn’t feel the urge and necessity of it. I didn’t feel like recording anyway. It was tedious and I didn’t like the current sounds — mine or anybody else’s. I didn’t know why an old Alan Lomax field recording sounded better to me, but it did. I didn’t think I could make a good record if I tried for a hundred years.
One day I went to the clinic where the doctor examined my hand, said the healing was coming along fine and that the feeling in the nerves might have a chance of coming back soon. It was encouraging to hear that. I returned to the house where my eldest son was sitting around in the kitchen with his soon-to-be wife. There was a thick seafood stew brewing up on the stove as I walked by. I took the cover off the pot to check it out.
“What do you think?” my future daughter-in-law asked.
“What about the whiskey sauce?”
“It has to be arranged,” she said.
I dropped the cover back on the pot and went out to the garage. The rest of the day went by like a puff of wind.
The song “Disease of Conceit” definitely has gospel overtones. Again, events might trigger a song — sometimes they might start the motor. Recently, the popular Baptist preacher Jimmy Swaggart had been defrocked by the Assembly of God leadership for refusing to stop preaching. Jimmy was Jerry Lee Lewis’s first cousin and was a big TV star, and the news came as a shock. He’d been linked to a prostitute, caught on camera leaving her motel room in sweatpants. Swaggart was ordered to vacate the pulpit temporarily. He wept in public and asked forgiveness, but still was told to stop preaching for a while. He couldn’t help himself, though, and quickly went back to preaching as if nothing had happened and they defrocked him. The story was strange. Swaggart clearly wasn’t in good shape, hadn’t looked at the road. The story didn’t make any sense. The Bible is full of