Chronicles - Bob Dylan [94]
I suppose what I was looking for was what I read about in On the Road — looking for the great city, looking for the speed, the sound of it, looking for what Allen Ginsberg had called the “hydrogen jukebox world.” Maybe I’d lived in it all my life, I didn’t know, but nobody ever called it that. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of the other Beat poets, had called it “The kiss proof world of plastic toilet seats, Tampax and taxis.” That was okay, too, but the Gregory Corso poem “Bomb” was more to the point and touched the spirit of the times better — a wasted world and totally mechanized — a lot of hustle and bustle — a lot of shelves to clean, boxes to stack. I wasn’t going to pin my hopes on that. Creatively you couldn’t do much with it. I had already landed in a parallel universe, anyway, with more archaic principles and values; one where actions and virtues were old style and judgmental things came falling out on their heads. A culture with outlaw women, super thugs, demon lovers and gospel truths…streets and valleys, rich peaty swamps, with landowners and oilmen, Stagger Lees, Pretty Pollys and John Henrys — an invisible world that towered overhead with walls of gleaming corridors. It was all there and it was clear — ideal and God-fearing — but you had to go find it. It didn’t come served on a paper plate. Folk music was a reality of a more brilliant dimension. It exceeded all human understanding, and if it called out to you, you could disappear and be sucked into it. I felt right at home in this mythical realm made up not with individuals so much as archetypes, vividly drawn archetypes of humanity, metaphysical in shape, each rugged soul filled with natural knowing and inner wisdom. Each demanding a degree of respect. I could believe in the full spectrum of it and sing about it. It was so real, so more true to life than life itself. It was life magnified. Folk music was all I needed to exist. Trouble was, there wasn’t enough of it. It was out of date, had no proper connection to the actualities, the trends of the time. It was a huge story but hard to come across. Once I’d slipped in beyond the fringes it was like my six-string guitar became a crystal magic wand and I could move things like never before. I had no other cares or interests besides folk music. I scheduled my life around it. I had little in common with anyone not like-minded.
I gazed out the second story window of the fraternity house overlooking University Avenue through the green elm trees and slow-moving traffic, low hanging clouds…the birds were singing. It was like a curtain was being lifted. It was early June and a fine spring day. There were just a few other guys in the house besides my cousin Chucky, and they hung around mostly in the mess hall, a kitchen in the basement that ran the length of the building. They had all recently graduated from the university and were working at odd jobs for the summer — were waiting to move on. Most days, they sat around playing cards and drinking beer in torn tee-shirts and cutoff jeans. Cocksmen. They paid me no mind. I saw that I could easily come and go and nobody would bother me here.
First thing I did was go trade in my electric guitar, which would have been useless to me, for a double-O Martin acoustic. The man at the store traded me even and I left carrying the guitar in its case.