#429 Bob Dylan's Autobiography

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/f3bc4b0ba96cfc78

I had just signed a contract with Leeds Music, giving it the right to publish my songs.
Not that there was many great deal to hammer out. I hadn't ridden much yet.
Lou had advanced me a hundred dollars against future royalties to sign the paper, and that was fine with me.
John had taken me over to see Lou.
John had only heard two of my original compositions.
But he had a premonition.
That there would be more.
John was John Hammond.
The great talent scout
And discoverer of monumental artists.
Imposing figures.
In the history of recorded music.
Artists.
Who had created music that resonated
Through American life.
He was legendary.
He had followed his own heart's love.
Which was music.
Which he endorsed and defended with his life.
No one could block his way.
And he didn't have any time to waste. It's one of my favorite s sentences in the book. No one could block his way, and he didn't have any time to waste.
I could hardly believe myself awake.
Він сідне из офис.
Him signing me to Columbia Records.
It was so unbelievable.
It would have sounded like a made up thing.
Folk music.
Was considered junky.
Second rate.
and only released on small labels.
But John
Was an extraordinary man.
He had vision.
And foresight.
had seen and heard me.
Felt my thoughts.
And had faith.
In the things
To come.
That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is
Chronicles Volume One, and is written by Bob Dylan. In fact, he he wrote it with no help at all. He wrote every single word himself.
He didn't even have an editor. So I'm gonna go to the very beginning of the book.
First few pages is just blurb after blurb of praise for the book.
And there's just a ton of praise for the book. I think it's probably the best written autobiography I've ever read in my life.
fact Rolling Stone put this as the number one. It's number one on the list of the top fifty musician biographies and uh biographies and autobiographies.
But I want to read one of the blurbs that I think really speaks to why this book is so important.
And it says Bob Dylan hasn't really written the story of his life.
In this fascinating
Captivating
Intimate.
accessible and widely acclaimed memoir.
Instead
He's written mainly
The story of his birth
When he transformed himself.
From Bobby Zimmerman.
To Bob.
Dylan.
So I heard Bob Dylan say something.
uh when he was a much older man that I think speaks to what takes place in this book.
And what that review really hits on.
And Bob said, Life isn't about finding yourself.
Life is about creating yourself.
And so before I jump back into the book.
Wanna talk about one of the most interesting things is
The fact that Steve Jobs from the very early
Days when he was in his twenties, all the way to the point when he was dying, he would talk about the influence that Bob Dylan had on his work. And there's actually a lot of ideas, I think, for entrepreneurs. Steve mentions Bob Dylan probably fifteen times.
in the biography that he worked on with Walter Isaacson before he was dying, or as he was dying, or said.
So I went back and I pulled all the notes about
What Steve said about Bob Dylan.
And I'm just gonna run through them. In fact, Steve Jobs was obsessed with Dylan before he started Apple.
One of the first things that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak did together was track down underground recordings of Bob Dylan records. Steve would also collect these printed out brochures of Bob Dylan lyrics, and then he'd spend hours interpreting them.
Uh in that biography.
Steve says that he managed to collect hundreds of hours of Dylan's recorded concerts and would lay in bed listening to the concerts in headphones. So close to the end of his life, Steve Jobs is sitting inside his house with Walter Isaacs and his biography, and they're listening to Bob Dylan Records, and he says something to Walter I think is really important.
Because it's gonna pop up.
in the book over and over again.
And I think it's one of the main takeaways from the book, and Steve Jobs picked up on it.
immediately, and Bob Dylan, I think, did this intentionally. But Steve said to Walter, No one else could have been Bob Dylan.
So after
Apple releases the iTun store.
He actually gets to meet Steve Jobs gets to meet and he has a two hour one on one conversation with Bob Dylan.
And there's something that Dylan told him.
That resonated with Steve's own approach to creating new products.
And so Bob was talking about the way the music came. He says that the songs, quote, the songs just came through me. It wasn't like I was having to compose them.
And at the very end of the Steve Jobs biography.
that was written by Walter Isaacson, Steve is this fantastic
such as you like just this conversation about
what drove him, why he did what he did in his career.
And I think it obviously really hits home because he knows he's dying as he saying these words. And he's talking about learning from the Beatles and learning from Bob Dylan and the importance of always trying something new.
And talks about like, you know, why do you keep
He he kept and trying to invent new technology, try to keep uh create new products.
And he says what he lear he says he got that idea from them, which means the the Beatles and Bob Dylan. He says they kept evolving, moving, refining their art.
That is what I've always tried to do.
Keep moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you're not busy being born.
You're busy
Dying.
So the book starts with him being signed. He's in New York City. It's nineteen sixty one. So the record label sends him over to their in-house publicist, this guy named Billy. And Billy's asking him a bunch of questions. And I just wanna pull out
one sentence here because it's just something that reappears over and over again in the book. I think it's so important. Billy asked me who I saw myself like in today's music scene. I told him nobody and that was true.
I really didn't see myself like anybody else. Bob continues. There's other folk singers.
There's other folk musicians, but there was nobody like me.
So at this bo at this point.
Bob begins to tell the story of what led up
to this time in his life.
So it's about two years from
Him.
Uh arriving in New York City.
Uh from Minnesota.
And then be before he signed to Columbia Records. Now
The crazy part, one of the craziest parts, is this wildly ambitious act that Bob Dylan does to get to New York City.
And
He doesn't have any money, so he winds up hitchhiking. It's twelve hundred miles, about twelve hundred miles between Minneapolis and New York City. So he hitchhikes
From Minneapolis to New York City. He leaves Minneapolis.
With
Three things.
A guitar.
A suitcase.
And ten dollars.
So I gotta give you background because this is not like any other autobiography. It's
It's almost like disjointed. I can't even describe. It's a it's a very fascinating read. I hope you enjoy the podcast.
obviously and learn something from it and hopefully be inspired by the story.
But I really would really recommend
for you to like pick up this book on like a weekend trip or something,'cause it's just phenomenally well written and it's so hard to describe.
So one of the things that got me interested in Bob Dylan in in addition to he's a bunch of these biographies.
is that Bill Gurley gave this talk called uh How to Run Down a Dream.
And he profiles five people.
uh they go to great lengths to get their dream job and what they do. And it's just a phenomenal talk he gave, I think it's the University of Texas MBA students. So there's a bunch of
Um
Ideas from that talk were
Bill is talking about Bob Dylan.
That
I I think given the background
of this talk for this book and understanding Bob, I think it's uh
It's like really, really valuable. And so there's a couple of times where I'm gonna reference some of the things that Bill Gurley says.
In relation to
Bob Dylan.
And so Bill says over the course of eight or nine months, Bob studied every folk album he possibly could. This is before he gets
To New York. He didn't have a lot of money. And at that time you could walk into a record store and you can listen in a booth.
He would do that for hours and hours.
This is about two years before he signed to Columbia.
He would then become friends with people
that would have these hu that like folk music, but had money because Bob was completely broke.
He had no money to spend on folk albums. So he'd go to their house and then listen to their record collection as well.
When he gets to New York City, he does the exact same thing. He'd sit in these venues. This is what I just mentioned earlier. Some of these he's gonna wind up playing in. In fact, he would play anywhere. He'd play on the side of the street, play in a coffee house, play for one person, play for no people, play for a hundred people, just didn't matter.
And so some of the people that were playing at the time are ref are talking about Bob Dylan in the future. Says you don't understand how good Bob was about this. He watched us so much and would study us so much, he could perform any of our songs just like us. He could copy the tone, the tempo.
Everything.
Bob was studying, studying, studying.
And so remember where we were in the book, he's like, Hey
I got him I I'm back in the Midwest. I'm listening to this guy named Dave Van Ronk. He's playing at the gaslight. I need to go find him.
I need to go meet him. I need to then find out how to play and to break into the gaslight.
Before we get back into this, I want to tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp. I have been reading a lot about SpaceX lately. SpaceX is one of the most valuable businesses in the world.
And one of the main themes in the history of SpaceX is constantly attacking
And questioning your cost. Ramp.
Helps many of the most innovative businesses in the world do exactly that.
And they do this.
By using first principles thinking. The median company running on ramp.
Cuts their expenses by five percent.
And one thing that SpaceX has demonstrated is that a religious dedication to controlling your costs
helps increase revenue because you can pursue opportunities you couldn't otherwise.
And we see that in the ramp data too.
The median company running on ramp also grows their revenue by sixteen percent.
So when you're running your business on ramp and your competitors are not
You have a massive
competitive advantage that compounds over time. Ramp.
Is the only platform
Designed to make your finance team faster and happier.
Many of the top founders and CEOs that I know.
Run their business on ramp, I run my business on ramp, and you should too.
Go to ramp.com today.
To learn how they can help your business save time, save money, and grow revenue. That is ramp.com.
And so now that he's in New York City, he's just like I'm gonna take any opportunity I can get. And so he talks about this. I wanted to play for anybody. I could never sit in a room and just play all by myself. I needed to play for people and all the time.
You could say that I practice in published.
And my whole life was becoming what I practiced. I kept my sights on the gaslight. How could I not? And so he's describing these
Little places that he's forced to play, he calls them density.
This is why I'm trying to like
essentially convince you, persuade you to buy the book and to to read it.
There's just the mastery of language this guy has. It's just unbelievable. There's so many times
I'm reading this book.
It's just like you read sentences in the book that you just
You've never read them before. These words have not been
put together in this the same manner. Is that the way this guy writes, it's just incredible.
So he says the talent scouts did not come to these dens. They were dark and dingy and the atmosphere was chaotic. On weekends, if you played all the joints from dusk until dawn, you could make maybe twenty dollars.
You had to know a trick or two to survive.
And one of the best parts of the book is
All these other other folk musicians, all these other really musicians of all kinds of genres are in the same few block area of New York City.
And they're all trying to make it and he obviously they're interacting with each other, they meet each other.
Bob has to like sleep on some of their couches and you know crash at their house for a day or two or sometimes for a month.
And so one of the best parts of the book is the fact that he meets all these crazy characters and he's just gifted at describing their personalities and these pe he just makes these people jump off the page. And there's two really important parts about this. One, they're helping each other on their journey, but two, he's also able to compare himself.
Okay, I've been obsessed with this, but I've been r relatively isolated. I'm listening to th these records and
uh uh record store booths at these friends houses.
I don't actually know, like how do I actually stack up against them?
And so it's really, really important.
And he goes back to that idea that there was only one me. And again, I don't think he's doing it from a place of arrogance by any means.
So he says what really set me apart in these days was my repertoire. It was more formidable than the rest of the players.
My template was hardcore.
Folk songs.
And then we see this is very binary. You either love Bob Dylan
Or you don't listen to him at all. I'd either drive people away or they would come in closer and see what it was all about. There was no in between.
There was a lot better musicians around, but there wasn't anybody close in nature to what I was doing.
And so when he's not playing, he's reading biographies, he's reading history, and he's practicing. He's doing professional research. He's just consuming
Insane amounts.
of music. So he winds up meeting this guy named Izzy. Izzy owns one of these little dens that he was playing at, and the back of this den
Is this giant record collection. And so Bob writes. Izzy had a back room. The little room was filled with records and a phonograph.
Izzy would let me stay back there and listen to them.
I listened to as many as I could.
The madly complicated modern world was something I took little interest in. He's essentially muting the world and building his own.
Okay. It had no relevancy to me. It had no weight. I wasn't seduced by it.
But he was seduced by history. He's got a lot he gets a lot of his ideas.
from going through and studying the history of his industry.
From
People writing about war from people, uh biographies, all kinds of people. He w one of the most fascinating things to me is just like he he winds up getting trapped in this room. He traps himself in the room, and he's just reading biography after biography after biography. Now when it gets to the end of the end of the book, remember it's at the beginning.
Because it's out of secrets almost like a Christopher Nolan movie now I'm thinking of it.
And his life changes.
When he hears
the w the music of Woody Guthrie.
And then reads
Woody Guthrie's autobiography Bound for Glory, which is what happened at the very end of the book.
But the studying of history is the main point because he's gonna take lines from other songs that maybe came out thirty years ago. He would take tones, he would take uh like a guitar lick.
And it incorporates into what he's doing.
And so Izzy also plays another important role in Bob Dylan's life because it's yeah, Izzy's
When
Just a random chance he gets to meet one of the people.
that he came to New York to see, which is Dave
Fan Runk.
And so he's sitting in Izzy's place right there, and this is where he's gonna seize the opportunity.
He says one winter day a big burly guy stepped in off the street. It was Dave Von Rock.
He was gruff with a don't give a damn attitude.
My mind went into a rush.
There was nothing between the man and me.
So Dave's just sitting at the bar, he's playing a couple strings on the guitar. And so this is where Bob Dilling goes over to him. He goes, I stepped over and asked him, How does someone get to work at the gaslight?
Who do you have to know?
Van Ronk looked at me curiously, was snippy and surly, and asked if I was a janitor.
That's all no.
And he could perish that thought.
But it could play something for him.
And so he lets him play.
Dave liked what he heard and asked me who I was, then said I could come down around eight or nine that night and play a couple songs in his set.
That

Dave Von Rock.
And then what he had been trying to make happen happens I would soon be hired to play at the gaslight.
And I love he's again he's
probably wrote the book when he was sixty or seven years old and he's reflecting about what it was like being a young man in his twenties trying to make it. Outside the temperature was about ten below, but I didn't feel the cold. I was heading for the fantastic lights, no doubt about it.
Could it be that I was being deceived? Not likely. I had no false hope.
I'd come a long way off.
had started from a long ways down, but now destiny was about to manifest itself.
I felt
Like it was looking right at me.
And nobody
Else.
And so he talks about many times, many times he talks about this contrast between how cold it is outside and the fire that is burning inside of him.
Now what I'm about to read to you is amazing if you really think about it.
He's still unknown. He hasn't recorded his first album. He doesn't have he doesn't have his own place to live.
He has to rely on the the charity of others to put a roof over his head.
And this is what he says. I walked over to the window and looked outside. The air was bitter cold.
But the fire in my mind was never.
Out.
And so another main theme of the book that appears over and over again, he's got this insatia insatiable appetite for reading, which I absolutely love.
It's just incredible how much reading this guy is gonna do. And so he takes ideas from everything that he reads and applies it to his work.
And then in the book he's just got
This incredible writing which I just mentioned.
About this long chain of historical figures. So
Listen to how he describes this.
Hitler, Churchill, Mussolini, Stalin, Roosevelt.
Towering figures that the world would never see the likes of again.
Men who relied on their own resolve for better or worse.
Every one of them prepared to act alone.
Indifferent to approval.
indifferent to wealth or love.
All presiding over the destiny of mankind and reducing the world to rubble.
Coming from a long line of Alexander's and Julius Caesars.
Genghis Khan's, Charlemagne's, and Napoleons. They carved up the world.
They would not be denied.
And they were impossible to reckon with.
Rude barbarians stampeding across the earth.
and hammering out their own ideas
Into the geography.
And so so these books he's reading and these musicians that he's studying, some of them he's meeting, you really see what he values and what he's trying to emulate in his own career.
So he gives us this incredible description of this musician that he greatly admired, this guy named Roy Orbitson.
And what he realizes is like, hey, there's actually no one else like Roy. Roy had no peer, which is exactly what Bob Dylan was going for in his own career.
So Bob Dylan writes, Roy had transcended all the genres. His stuff mixed all the styles and some that hadn't even been invented yet.
With Roy you didn't know if you were listening to Mariachi or Opera.
He catch you on your toes.
With him, it was all about fat and blood.
He sounded like he was singing from an Olympian mountaintop and he meant business.
He was singing his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car off a cliff.
He sang like a professional criminal.
His voice could jar a corpse.
Always leave you muttering to yourself something like, Man, I don't believe it.
His songs had songs within songs.
He was deadly
Serious.
There wasn't anything else on the radio like him.
I'd listen and wait for another song.
But next to Roy
The playlist was strictly Dollsville.
Gutless.
And flabby.
And before we get back into this, I wanna tell you about app loving. One of my all time favorite quotes is from the book Zero to One. In that book, Peter Teal writes, he says the single most powerful pattern I have noticed
Is that successful people find value in unexpected places
And they do this.
By thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas. And that is exactly what Applevin has done with their advertising platform. Applevin
connects you with over a billion potential new customers.
in mobile games. Apple and allows you to capture undivided attention.
App Love and ads are full screen videos.
That are watched for an average of thirty-five seconds. That is retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water. And you can launch on AppLovin in minutes.
You set the goal.
And App Loving achieves it.
No complex setup.
No expertise needed and app loving scales quickly. They can put your ads
In front of over a billion customers.
Other businesses have seen immediate results, scale to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day, and increase their revenue by millions. So you want to get started quickly before all of your competitors are on App Levent, and you can do that.
by going to applovin.com.
That's applovin.com.
And then I want to tell you about Vanta. Vanta, Vanta, Vanta. Vanta helps your company prove you're secure so more customers will use your product or service. Vanta is an AI powered security expert.
That scales with you. The more your business grows.
the more complex your security needs get. And that complexity


For you.
Vanta automates compliance.
continuously monitors your controls and gives you a single source of truth.
for compliance and risk. So whether you're a fast growing startup.
or an enterprise company, Vanta fits easily
into your existing workflows.
Many companies won't sign contracts unless you're certified, and this is causing you to lose out on sales. That is why the average Vanta customer reports a five hundred and twenty six percent return on investment.
After becoming a Vanta customer, automate your compliance, security, and trust with Vanta.
Vanta will help you win trust, close deals, and stay secure faster and with less effort.
Go to vanta.com.
four slash founders and you'll get a thousand dollars off. That is vanta.com.
Four slash.
Found.
And so now he's staying with another friend.
This friend has this giant collection of books, and this is again still pre-record book.
This is still him trying to figure out things.
And just how to make it.
So he says,
I turned the radio off and went into the other room, a windowless one with floor to ceiling library.
The place had an overpowering presence of literature. You couldn't help but lose your passion for dumbness. That is a great line.
There were all types of things in here.
Books like The Athenian General.
A narrative that would give you chills.
It was written four hundred years before Christ, and it talks about how human nature is always the enemy of anything superior.
It's like nothing has changed from his time to mine.
There were novels by Balzac, Hugo, and Dickens.
I would usually open up some book to the middle, read a few pages, and if I liked it, I went back to the beginning.
I was looking for part of my education that I never got.
Sometimes I'd open up a book and see a handwritten note scribbled in the front.
Like in Machiavelli's The Prince, there was written the spirit
of the hustler.
Дір енлес рос в букс.
One of the books he read was actually about Alexander the Great.
And he has this script just uh this description of what he learned from Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great merchant to Persia.
When he conquered Persia in order to keep it conquered, he had all of his men marry local women.
After that.
He had never any trouble with the population.
No uprisings or anything.
Alexander knew how to get absolute control.
I wanted to read
All of these books. And so he's reading a ton of biographies.
He reads one
on Robert E. Lee.
And he said, Robert E. Lee, this is what I meant, like he almost does my job better than me.
where he's able to just describe these entire life stories in a paragraph just makes these characters come alive.
You know, just a few senses. It's incredible.
Robert E. Lee had grown up without a father. Lee had made something out of himself, nevertheless. Not only that, but it was on his word and his word alone that America did not get into a guerrilla war that probably would have lasted till this day.
The books were something. They were really something.
I read a lot of pages aloud and like the sound of the words. I like the sound of the language.
And so
He's reading and telling us the story of this education that he's giving himself.
And he's always relating it back.
To his craft.
says folk singers could sing songs like an entire book
But only in a few verses.
I'd always return to the books. I would dig through them.
Like an archaeologist.
So then he goes back to more biographies that he's reading. I read the biography of Thaddeus Stevens. He lived in the early part of the 1800s and was quite a character.
He's from Gettysburg and he's got a club foot.
He grew up poor, made a fortune, and from then on championed the weak in any other group who wasn't able to fight equally.
Stevens had a grim sense of humor, a sharp tongue, and a white hot hatred for the bloated aristocrats of his day.
He wanted to confiscate the land of the slave holding elite.
He once referred to a colleague on the floor of the chamber
As slink in his own slime.
Stevens was hard to forget.
He made a big impression on me.
He was inspiring.
Him and Teddy Roosevelt.
Bob Dylan calls.
maybe the strongest US president ever.
I read about Teddy too.
He was a cattle rancher and a crime buster.
Had to be restrained from declaring war in California.
He had a big run in with JP Morgan. There's actually an entire book about that. I did
An episode in the book called The Hour of Fate, which was the rivalry, then the partnership, and then the back to the rivalry between uh Theodore Rezero and JP Morgan.
It's a fascinating book if if you're looking for something to read about that time period. Roosevelt backed him down and threatened to throw him in jail.
Either one of those guys, Stevens or Roosevelt or even Morgan, could have stepped out of a folk song. That is the important part. He's taking everything he's learning.
And re and and relating it back to his craft, which is what he wants to do. All he wanna do it's like all I wanna do and all I ever am was just a folk.
Musician.
So then he starts reading Von Krieg, which is written by Klosowitz.
And he says they call Klawsowitz the premier philosopher of war.
The book was published in eighteen thirty two and Kosovit had been in the military since he was twelve.
His armies were highly trained professionals.
Not young men who served only for a few years or more.
His men were hard.
To replace.
Clauschewitz talks a lot about how to maneuver into position where the other side can see there's no fighting chance, and they basically lay down their arms.
I had a morbid fascination with this stuff.
I had always pictured myself dying in some heroic battle rather than in bed.
I wanted to be a general with my own
Battalion. So
At this point.
It's again just like this this strange structure and I mean in a great way.
of like the timelines in this book. So he has a flashback to when he was in Minnesota.
And he's just trying to play any gig that he possibly can.
He's I think seventeen or eighteen years old at this point.
And he's forming all these bands.
And then they keep breaking up and he's like, You know what, I don't care. I'm gonna keep going forward no matter what.
And so he says, I keep forming these bands because I was determined to play. There was a lot of halting and waiting, little acknowledgement, little affirmation, but sometimes.
all it takes is a wink or nod from some unexpected place to vary the tedium of your baffling existence. What he's talking about there is the importance
of words of encouragement.
And so he's gonna find
Words of encouragement from a very surprising source.
It's a super famous professional wrestler at the time.
That's gonna just happen to see Bob Dylan perform. Bob Dylan's
Performing in it.
In a lobby.

And so there's this guy named Gorgeous George. This is hilarious.
He says that happened to me when Gorgeous George, the great wrestler, came into my hometown. So in the mid nineteen fifties
I was performing in the lobby of the veterans memorial building.
I was playing on a makeshift platform in the lobby and suddenly the doors burst open and in came Gorgeous George.
He roared in like the storm in all his magnificent glory.
He had valets and was surrounded by women carrying roses.
He was wearing a majestic
Fur lying.
This is hilarious. He was wearing a majestic fur line gold cape.
He brushed by the makeshift stage and glanced towards the sound of music. He didn't break stride, but he looked directly at me.
He winked.
And seem to meld the phrase.
You're making it come alive.
I never forgot it. This is so important.
It was all the recognition and encouragement I would need for years to come. Sometimes that's all it takes.
The kind of recognition that comes when you're doing the thing for the thing's sake.
And you're on to something.
It's just that nobody recognizes it.
Yet.
And so
was very fascinating.
It's several pages later.
He's not a seventeen year old kid.
in Minnesota playing the lobby. He's back in New York City.
Okay.
And this is still before he signed to Columbia, but he had this very similar experience. And he's writing about this. And he says, Sometimes you know things have to change.
are going to change, but you can only feel it.
But you don't know it in a purposeful way.
Little things foreshadow what's coming.
But you may not recognize them.
But then something immediate happens and you're in another world.
You jump into the unknown.
You have an instinctive understanding of it.
You're set free.
You don't need to ask questions, and you already know the score.
It seems like when that happens, it happens fast like magic.
But it's really not like that.
It isn't like some dull boom goes off and the moment has arrived.
It's more deliberate.
It's a reflective
Thing.
Somebody holds the mirror up.
Unlocks the door.
Something jerks it open.
And you're shoved in and your head has to go into a different place.
Sometimes it takes a certain somebody
To make you realize it.
And so that is when he starts talking about another folk singer that actually forces him.
makes him realize that he has to change his thought patterns, that he had these
Essentially self limiting beliefs.
And so he's gonna talk about um this guy
Mike.
Seeger.
And he gets into the mentality that he had at this time. He says, I knew what I was doing and I wasn't going to take a step back or retreat for anybody.
And by studying Mike Seager, this is where you realize, okay, I have to change my thought patterns. What I had to work at
Mike already had in his jeans.
It was in his genetic makeup.
Before he was even born, the music had to be in his blood.
It dawned on me that I might have to change my inner thought patterns, that I would have to start believing in possibilities that I wouldn't have allowed to myself to believe in before.
Then I have been closing my creativity down to a very narrow, controllable scale.
That things have become too familiar and I might have to disorient myself.
I did everything fast. I thought fast. I ate fast. I talk fast. I walk fast. I even sang my songs fast.
I needed to slow my mind down if I was going to become a composer with anything to say.
I couldn't exactly put into words what I was looking for.
But he began searching for it in principle.
over at the New York City public library. Think about this. When he's lost, when he's not practicing
He turns
To the books.
And
Yeah it doesn't even talk about why.
But he develops this fascination and becomes obsessed with studying the American civil war.
And so he goes to New York City Library.
And he goes into one of the leading the reading rooms and he says I started reading articles and newspapers on microfilm from about eighteen fifty five to about eighteen sixty five to see what daily life was like.
I wasn't so much interested in the issues as intrigued by the language and the rhetoric of the time. Remember that he talks about the language. He loved the language of the books so much that he'd read them aloud. He talks about reading poetry, reading philosophy, reading biographies. Now he's reading newspapers. He wants to v he's he's essentially
Like he described himself as an archaeologist. I'm digging through history to find useful information for my craft. It's exactly what you and I are doing right now. And I love this idea, just being obsessed with language.
I I think I've said this I don't know before, but in case I haven't. So there's so many times it's like the way this guy puts words together. There's there's sentences in this book.
that I've never read anywhere else. They I don't think they could be anywhere else, but coming out of
The pen

So he goes back to what he's learning essentially human nature. It's constant
Uh
He says it wasn't like it was another world. It was the same one.
That I'm living in.
But with more urgency.
Then he talks about how things change. You know, we look at Abraham Lincoln. If you ask me like who my favorite president is probably probably Abraham Lincoln.
Talks about Yeah, but that's
You I wanna go back and read.
How did how was he perceived before his achievements before
The civil war.
And so it says Abraham Lincoln comes into depiction in the late n eighteen fifties, but he's referred to as a baboon or a giraffe.
And they make a lot of caricatures of him. So he's criticized. No one takes him seriously at this time. It's impossible to conceive that he would become the father figure that he is today. You wonder how people so united by geography and religious ideals could become such bitter enemies. It all makes you feel creepy.
The age that I was living in didn't resemble this age.
But yet it did in some mysterious and traditional way. Not just a little bit.
But a lot.
You could see the full complexity.
And then this sentence is so important.
It's like
Why you read all the time?
It's like ma'am, me me and you could be talking about something today.
You might hear an idea in a podcast or a book today you don't even use for ten years.
Bob Dylan hits it exactly right here. He says I cram my head full as much of this stuff as I could and I locked it away in my mind out of sight.
I left it alone.
I figured
I could send a truck back for it.
Later.
continues to study all these historical figures. He starts studying Beethoven. I learned that Beethoven had been a child prodigy and he had been exploited by his father.
And that Beethoven distrusted all people for the rest of his life. Even so.
That didn't stop him from writing symphonies. He's still studying the greats, so now he's starting
Going back to musicians, he's studying Hank Williams.
I didn't have to experience anything that Hank did to know what he was singing about.
I learned later that Hank had died in the backseat of a car on New Year's Day.
I kept my fingers crossed. I hope it wasn't true.
But it was.
It was like a great tree had fallen.
Hearing about Haig's death.
Caught me squarely on the shoulder.
The silence of outer space never seems so loud. This is just crazy beautiful language.
When I hear Hank sing, all movement ceases.
The slightest whisper seems sacrilege. In time I became aware that in Hanks recorded songs were the archetype rules of poetic songwriting. Remember.
Bob Dylan is probably referred to as maybe the greatest songwriter of all time, and he's just like, Hey, I just studied Hank.
These are Hank's rules.
I became aware that in Hank's recorded songs were the archetypes' rules of poetic songwriting. The architectural forms are like marble pillars.
And they had to be there. You can learn a lot about the structure of songwriting by listening to his records. And I listened to them a lot and had them internalized in a few years' time.
То фолк і джаз.
Critic for the New York Times
Would review one of my performances and it would say
Dylan.
Breaks all the rules in songwriting except that of having something to say.
The rules.
Whether that critic understood it or not.
Where Hanks
Rules.
And then he ends
This section of his life.
Just asking and then essentially answering like
How do you know you're on the right track?
Right?
March was coming in like a lion, and once more I wondered.
What do it take to get into a recording studio to get signed by a folk record label?
Was I getting any closer?
The future was nothing to worry about.
It was awfully
Close.
And so to me that first part, that first sentence where it's like, Hey
I've been here for months.
I'm wondering how do I get into recording studio, right? How am I gonna get signed?
That is Bob Dylan from the perspective when he's twenty years old, right?
And then he ends it, the end of that sentence to me is almost like he flipped to the older Bob Dylan.
Almost like he's talking to like the younger version of himself because he knows the outcome.
And how does it how does that sense it's in?
The future is nothing to worry about.
It was awfully.
Close.
And so then this is where he's fast forwards nine years into the future, skips over the apex of his fame, and he starts this chapter.
With his father's.
You know.
The previous week had left me drained. I'd gone back to the town in my early years in a way I could never have imagined, to see my father laid to rest.
Now there would be no way to say what I was never capable of saying before.
Growing up
The cultural and generational differences had been insurmountable. He's talking about this complicated relationship that he had with his father.
the fact that he had m greatly admire his father. I think he says later on that his father's might might be worth a hundred of him, but they had a he had a hard time relating to each other.
My father, who was plain speaking and straight talking,
And it once said, Isn't an artist a fellow who paints?
When told by one of my teachers that his son had the nature of an artist
It seemed I'd always been chasing after something, anything that might lead me into a different place, some unknown land downriver.
I had not even the vaguest notion of the broken world I was living in.
When I left home, it was like Columbus going off into the desolate Atlantic.
I had done that.
And had been to the ends of the earth and now I was back. And so that's super important because
Essentially what he's talking about is like, you know, I left this town.
Oh ten years ago.
In search of that dream.
I am now on the other side of that dream.
I've had experience things very few humans ever will I that th that have ever ex had this set of experiences that I've had.
And now I'm back to where my life started.
And I'm laying to rest my father. And they had the the it goes back to this complicated relationship now that his father's gone in the short time I was home. It all came back to me. The older order of things, but something else did too. That my father was the best man in the world and probably worth a hundred of me.
But he didn't understand me.
We had more in common now than ever.
I too was a father three times over now. There was a lot that I wanted to share and to tell him. So that part
becomes devastating.
When you're reading this, like
We have so much more in common. I'm older. I get to I now I can understand your perspective. There's so much that I can I wanna talk to you about.
But the ability to talk about
to his father is gone.
Forever.
And so this chapter is supposed to be about
Him trying to make this album New Morning, but it's really about the price of fame.
And essentially Bob Dylan
trying to run away from being Bob Denham.
The truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on.
Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me, and I was seeing everything do a different glasses.
Even the horrifying news items of the day, the gunning down of the Kennedys of Martin Luther King, of Malcolm X, I didn't see them as leaders being shot down, but rather as fathers whose families had been left wounded. He's talking about the transformation.
People that don't have kids don't even understand.
the the change that happens
When you ha until you have children.
Not seeing this as leaders being assassinated, but rather fathers whose families had been left
Wounded.
I didn't belong to anybody then or now. I had a wife and children who I love more than anything else in the world, and I was trying trying to provide for them to keep them out of trouble. But the press kept promoting me as the mouthpiece, the spokesman, or even a conscious of a generation.
This is very fascinating. His response to this. Remember, I I I do think his his um how would I put this?
The
When when Steve Jobs says the older he gets, the more important he thinks people's motivations matter, and understanding why they're doing what they're doing is really important to understand. It's like I just made the songs.
That spoke to me, that came through me. I I I'm just doing this for me. I cannot control the reaction to the outside world.
And so Bob Dylan talks about this. He goes, That was funny. All it ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities.
I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of.
Being true to yourself.
That was the thing.
I was more of a cowboy than a pied.
Piper.
And again, that's something you're gonna repeat over and over again, just like he told Steve Jobs many years later, I made songs for me.
They just came through me.
It wasn't even like I was having to compose them.
So this idea is like, hey, I'm just trying being true to myself, and because I was true to myself, it resonated with other people.
But then all the other interpretations, all the building up of the press
That's your thing.
That has nothing to do with me, is what Bob Dylan is saying there.
And what would be surprising about this book is, you know, he's one of the greatest people to ever do, got to the top of his question, how many times he thought about fantasized, about quitting, about running away.
of just the pressure just getting to him and him trying to run away. He spent a lot of time, you know, um
In nature, he winds up buying this, I think, like sixty-three foot sailboat and essentially like cruising around the Caribbean with just his family and kind of isolating himself from the world.
But again, he's just just having this inner monologue, this fantasy of like not no longer being Bob Dylan.
Uh, and so he says, I don't know what everybody else is fantasized fantasizing about, what I was fantasizing about was a nine to five existence. A house on a tree lined block with a white pick of fence, pink roses in the backyard. That would have been nice.
That was my deepest dream.
After a while you learn that privacy is something you can sell but
But you can't buy it back.
And so he's continuing to make music at this time.
Because he likes to make music.
But
He's also wrestling with hey, I mean may never
You you go to like some of the best work that he ever did happen early in his career.
And he's like, I may never create work that good again.
And the crazy point at this life where at this point in his life when he's struggling with all this, he's like
I don't even care if I ever do.
And so he writes, The novelist Herman Melville's work went largely unnoticed after Moby Dick.
Critics thought that he had crossed the literary line and recommended burning Moby Dick.
By the time of his death he was largely forgotten. I had assumed that when critics dismiss my work, the same thing would happen to me.
that the public would forget about me.
I owed nobody nothing.
I wasn't going to go deeper into the darkness for anybody.
My family was my light and I was going to protect that light at all costs.
What did I owe the rest of the world?
Nothing. Not a damn thing.
In my real life, I got to do the things that I love and
the best and that mattered to me the most. And so he's talk about this point in his life.
Little league games.
Birthday parties.
Taking my kids to school, going on camping trips.
Voting.
Rafting, canoeing.
Fishing talks about being in nature a lot, in fact.
I don't remember if I uh this this part is in the podcast or not.
But
Any time he has a problem. He's just like I have to get out into the outdoors.
It's like when when I'm too lost in my own head.
I'm too tied up in my own world.
I need to be reminded that
I'm just a small part of something much larger and bigger than me. I thought that was really good advice. I was living on record royalties sometimes in the past. This is very fasting. I was living on record royalties. Sometime in the past I had written and performed songs that were most original and most influential, and I didn't know if I ever would again, and I didn't care.
And so it's around this time. He's g there's all these like great like random tangents. You think about the greatest conversations you've ever had in your life, it's like
They're they're not linear, they don't follow like a predictable pattern, they go off on these weird tangents and the kind of these crazy stories that happen over a few minutes. The book is kinda like you're having this kind of this rambling conversation with Bob Dillon.
And so around this time
Princeton is gonna give him an honorary degree, he decides to accept it, and he convinces the the singer David Crosby to come with him.
And his description of uh his friend uh just makes me laugh.
And so he says early in the week we had gotten back from Princeton where I'd been given an honorary doctor degree. It had been a weird adventure. Somehow I had motivated David Crosby to come along.
Crosby was a colorful and unpredictable character.
He wore a cape.
didn't get along with too many people and had a beautiful voice.
He was an astr obstrepheus companion. So I had to look up that word and it means noisy and difficult to control.
And so then he tells the story of him and Crosby going on to Princeton.
He says we pulled off Route eighty, found the university on a hot and cloudless day. In short time the officials led me into a crowded room, put me in a robe, and soon I was looking out over a crowd of well dressed people. When my turn came to accept a degree, the speaker introducing me said how I had distinguished myself.
And so this is what the speaker speaker says.
Though he is known to millions, he shuns publicity in organizations preferring the solidity of his family and the isolation from the world.
He remains the authentic expression of
of the disturbed and concerned conscious of young America.
Bob had just been talking about in this life. He's like you're you guys are trying to make me the voice of a generation.
I'm just making songs that speak to me. I don't want your labels. I don't want to be responsible for anybody else.
And so this is this part kind of makes me laugh when you when you read it.
'Cause you just got through you know, this is I'm telling you, just the these notes and highlights, right? But this goes on for quite a bit of him just
struggling with this and trying to reject this.
And and so he's l he's sitting on stage dressed in a robe looking out.
And he hears the way that the speaker is introducing him.
And then he shares with us his inner monologue at the time, and he goes, Oh, sweet Jesus.
It was like a jolt. I shuddered and trembled and trembled. This is exactly what he spent the entire chapter saying. I don't want this.
It's making my life w miserable. Oh sweet Jesus. It was like a jolt.
I shuddered and trembled, but remained expressionless. The disturbed conscious of young America. There it was again. I couldn't believe it.
Tricked once more.
The speaker could have said many things. He could have emphasised a few three things about my music.
And he goes, This is the funny part, this is probably what made me laugh. He goes, I was so mad, I wanted to bite myself.
And then he ends the story.
After whispering and mumbling my way through the ceremony, I was handed the gree, we piled back into the Buick and drove away. It had been a strange day.
Day
And then at the very end of the chapter.
He actually gets to the point of the chapter, right, which is I am making this album.
And he's there's a lot of times in his life where he just realizes like
He's too lost in his own head. He can only control what he wants to control. You have to l just let go.
Just go back to the work.
Like
There's different times. He's still writing songs in in the same decade one of his career, he's still writing songs maybe decade five. He's still performing, he's doing all these things.
There is going to be a natural ebb and flow of the quality.
It's like he's not gonna maintain b the best work he ever had for five decades.
But that doesn't mean you stop. I think that's one of the most important things you take away from from this book.
And so Bob writes about this. I recorded some stuff.
At least these songs wouldn't make any headlines. Message songs? There weren't any B.
Anybody listening for them would have to be disappointed.
When will the old him be back?
They would ask. Not today.
That my records were still selling even surprised me.
But m there was some good songs and maybe there weren't. Who knows?
But they weren't the kind
Where you hear an awful roaring in your head. I knew what those kind of songs were like, and these weren't them. It's not like I didn't have any talent. I just wasn't feeling the for the full force of the wind.
I was listening to some of the playbacks and he sounded okay.
But it wasn't great.
Some critics would find the album to be lackluster.
Oh well.
Others would triumph it.
I took that as a good sign.
All this happened in what critics would later refer to
As my middle
Period.
Okay, so then this is where
Now he's he
Going to jump.
The next chapter.
Takes place seventeen years after the last story. At this point, he's forty six years old.
He's lost, he's broken down.
And
You you start reading through this section.
And I I didn't the very first time I read the book,'cause I read this book for the first time I don't know like five years ago.
I didn't know
Like if he ever stopped.
Right.
And I knew he was still performing, but I didn't know if he was still writing and w and what he was doing. And so
It's during this time where I'm like, Oh wait, I think this is the closest he ever got. There's an alternative
uh history for where Bob Dylan at forty six says, you know, no more performing.
No more I'm done with this.
And it would be at this point in the book where I think we would finally like break and say, Hey, I you know what, I had a twenty six year, twenty seven year run. That's good enough. I'm done.
'Cause this is the closest he ever gets.
To
Quitting.
And he's talking about just being
Trapped in his own head.
Always prolific, but never exact. Too many distractions to turn my musical path into a jungle of vines.
I had 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. 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 to myself. 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.
I hadn't actually disappeared from the scene, but
But the road had narrowed.
There was a missing person inside of myself, and I needed to find him.
I did try a few times, tried hard to force it.
In nature.
There's usually a remedy for everything. And that's where I'd usually go hunting for it. This is what I mentioned earlier.
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.
I'm in the bottomless pit.

Oblivion.
I'd been on an eighteen month tour with Tom Petty.
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.
My own songs had become strangers to me.
I couldn't wait to retire.
The mirror had swung around.
And I could see the future.
An old actor.
Fumbling in garage cans outside the theater of past.
Triumphs.
And this is where he is saved by the old
Jazz singer.
So in between breaks from Tom Petty, he's supposed to be playing a couple
Shows with the grateful dead.
He's with them right now. They're practicing.
And they're like, Hey Bob why don't we do some of your own song, old songs? And Bob's like, Yeah, okay, uh, I forgot something in my hotel.
And he walked out saying, Oh, I'll be right back.
And he was planning on
Never returning and literally ending his career right then. He couldn't take any more.
And I think the main lesson in this entire section is that instead of running away, you have to find ways to get out of your own head.
And so we pick up the story.
Where he just walked out and said, Hey, I'll be right back. I got I forgot something at the hotel. I wasn't planning on going back.
I started out at 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.
Now this is really fasting. He's stumbling on tiny bar.

musicians trying to play to a crowd of almost nobody. Think about what's happening.
twenty seven years in his past.
This is the exact sign of kind of place that he's started his own career.
I looked in and saw that the musicians were playing. There were just a few people inside. It looked like the last stop on a train in nowhere. Something was calling to me to come in and I entered. I got within four feet of the stage and just stood there. I ordered a gin and tonic and faced the singer. He was an older man.
They played jazz ballads. The singer wasn't very forceful, but he didn't have to be. He was relaxed.
But he sang with natural power.
Suddenly without warning, it was like the guy had an open window to my soul.
It was like he was saying.
You should do it this way.
All of a sudden.
I had understood something faster than I ever did before.
I knew where the power was coming from, and it wasn't his voice.
I used to do this thing, I'm thinking.
It was a long time ago and it had been automatic.
No one had ever taught me.
This technique was so elemental.
So simple.
And I had forgotten.
It was like I'd forgotten how to button my own pants.
I wondered if I could still do it and I wanted to try.
This causes him to run back.
to where he thought he was never gonna go back. He goes back.
to
the rehearsal hall where he's doing where he's practicing with the Grateful Dead.
He says I could not wait to get started. I wanted to see if I could sing using the same method that the old singer used.
At first it was hard going.
Like drilling through a brick wall.
All I could taste was dust.
But then miraculously something internal came unhinged.
In the beginning all I could get out was a blood choked coughing grunt.
And it blast it up from the bottom of my lower self.
And this is the main point.
But it bypassed my brain.
Get out of your own head.
It burned, but I was awake.
This was revelatory.
I played these shows with the dead with the Grateful Dead and never had to think twice about it.
I had that old jazz singer to think.
And so that idea of taking a break
getting out of your own mind, something that appears over and over again seems to be very useful to Bob Dylan in his career. And after that he's like, Okay, I'm gonna make great music again. And so he starts writing a bunch of songs for the first time.
First time in over like ten years, he's just writing, writing, writing.
And Bono from U two
He's gonna come over for dinner at his house and connect.
He's gonna read these lyrics, but I gotta read
But
Bob Dillon again.
in just like a few sentences can tell an entire story. So he he wants to describe to the reader what dinner with Bono is like.
One night, Bono, the singer from U two, was over for dinner with some other friends.
Spending time with Banu was like eating dinner on a train.
It feels like you're moving.
Going somewhere.
Bono's got the soul of an ancient poetry.
And you have to be careful around him.
He can roar till the earth shakes.
He's also a closet philosopher.
He bought a case of Guinness with him.
We were talking about things that you talk about when you're spending the winter with somebody.
Bono says things that can sway.
Anybody.
And so
At the towards the end of dinner.
But I was like, Hey, do you have any new songs? Do you have any new music?
And Dylan goes and pulls out all these compositions that he wrote.
Um and
Like he Barn was looking over them, reading them, he's like, Hey, uh, these are really good.
U I have a producer.
that you should go work with. And so Dylan is gonna work with the producer that Bono recommends.
And they set up shop and they're gonna record a new album together.
In this mansion in New Orleans.
And during this process in some cases they're making great music.
But there's other times when they're making this album that Bob Dylan feels lost. And so I just want to read the story that takes place.
'Cause it goes back to this idea of like
Him finding ways to get back on track. He feels that he's lost. He's not doing well.
He w he might sit with that for a little bit and he's like, Okay, I gotta do something about this. And most of it's like movement, doing something else, just not sitting walling, right?
I was up early and rooted my wife out of bed.
Daylight was still two hours away.
What's wrong now? she said.
I hadn't thought.
That anything was wrong.
Within minutes she had slipped out of her loose robe and was making coffee. By daybreak we were riding on the Harley and had crossed the Mississippi River heading towards road ninety.
No purpose in heading there. It was just a place to go.
I was feeling stuffy. I needed to get out of town.
Something wasn't clicking, like when the world is hidden from your eyes and you need to find it.
I parked the bike close to an old water tower, we got out and walked around.
It felt good to be off by ourselves. I looked at my wife. The one thing about her that I always love was that she was never one of these people who thinks that someone else is the answer to their happiness, me or anybody else. She always had her own built in happiness. I valued her opinion and I trusted her.
We pulled in for the night and I shut the bike down.
It was a nice ride. We stayed at a bed and breakfast cottage. I laid down, listened to the crickets and the wildlife out the window in the eerie blackness.
I like the night.
Things grow at night.
My imagination is available to me at night.
All my preconceptions
of things go away.
Sometimes you could be looking for heaven in the wrong places. This is such an interesting idea.
My imagination is available to me at night.
All my preconceptions
of things go away. Sometimes you could be looking for heaven in the wrong places. Sometimes it could be under your feet or in your bed.
Next day I woke up.
I felt like I had figured something out.
And so they wind up finishing the album and then there's just this random conversation that happens towards the end of the chapter that I really, uh really enjoyed and I thought was really, really valuable. So he's talking to this producer, the producer's name is Danny.
And
Дині'зак, вот озим то, ані'сактишок.
When he hears what Bob Dylan had been listening to. This is in the eighties.
And so
Uh I'm gonna read my note first and then I'll read the section to you.
And it's a I think I'll make sense in that order. So somebody different was bound to come along sooner or later. Bob Dylan knows that.
Because at one time that's somebody different.
was him.
And so Danny's like, Okay, you know, who have you who have you been listening to recently? And he says, I told him
Iced tea.
He was surprised, but he shouldn't have been.
Ice T, public enemy, N W A, run DMC. This is Bob Dylan describing who's listening to, right?
These guys definitely weren't standing around bullshitting.
They were beating drums.
Tearing it up.
Hurling horses over cliffs.
They were all poets and knew what was going on.
Somebody different was bound to come along sooner or later.
Who would know that world.
Who had been born and raised with it.
Be all of it and more.
He'd be able to balance himself on one leg on a tightrope that stretched across the universe.
And you would know him when he came.
There would only be one like him.
He'd be doing it with hard words.
And he'd be working eighteen hours a day. Again.
I love that part.
I just want to reread my note again.
Somebody different.
Was bound to come along.
Sooner or later.
Bob Dylan knows that.
Because at one time
That was him.
So that album is finished.
Bob Dilling gets to the last.
chapter. Okay, and this is he really does write
Like he wants to make sure you're paying attention.
Okay, you have to fill
a lot of this you have to film a lot of this stuff for yourself.
Because
We're at the very end of the book.
And this is now a flashback.
To when his father was still alive.
Even though this is the last chapter of the book.
So it says my father had his own way of looking at things.
To him, life was hard work.
He'd come from a generation of different values, heroes, and music, and wasn't so sure that the truth would set anybody free.
He was pragmatic and always had a word of cryptic advice.
Remember, Robert, in life anything can happen.
Even if you don't have all the things you want.
Be grateful for the things you don't have that you don't
What.
I was doing my best.
I had to thoroughly feel that I was earning my fe.
Nothing could have convinced me.
That I was actually a songwriter and I wasn't.
Not in the conventional songwriter sense of the world. So the thing
It's going back.
This is before record deal, before he'd even written his first song.
We are now back.
to the Bob Dylan that is trying to be signed, that is trying to achieve
His life
Dream.
And we get to
one of the the probably the the turning point of his life is when he's s first introduced into Woody Gutch, which is
Go back to the very beginning, where he's hitchhiking.
It's like I gotta get out of Minnesota, I gotta get to Witt of Gutchie, I've got to find this guy.
And so
Uh so he says, As far as serious songwriting went, outside of Woody Gutry, I didn't see a single soul who did it.
The one song that had hooked me up with Leeds music, which is how we started the book and how we started the podcast, right? The one that had convinced John Hammond to bring me over there in the first place was an homage and lyric and melody to the man who had pointed out the starting place for my identity and destiny, the great Woody Gushy. That's a crazy sentence.
This is the one man who had pointed out the starting place for my identity and destiny, the great Witty Gutchie. I wrote the song with him in mind and I used the melody from one of his old songs, having no idea it would be the first of maybe a thousand songs that I would write.
My life had never been the same since I first hood Woody on a record player in Minneapolis a few years earlier.
When I first heard him, it was like a million megatron bomb had dropped.
And then he goes back and gives you the prehistory of why he was so obsessed. This is when he's
It's around college, but I don't think he ever went to school. I think he dropped out. I don't even know if he took a single class.
Says I found a local record store.
What I was looking for were folk records.
This is when he locks himself in those booths that you could just listen to, and he would just stay there over and over again for hours and hours and hours. Then he says, Then I'd go further up the street and drop into a coffee house. So
Coffee houses where a lot uh where a lot of folk musicians would first start playing. Okay, this is before it gets to New York. I was looking for players with kindred pursuits.
The first guy I met in Minneapolis, who was just like me, was sitting around in there. It was John Connor. So John another uh folk musician is playing at this coffee house, okay?
Performers like John and myself would go anywhere to where anybody we thought we hadn't heard before.
I was beginning to feel like a character from within these songs, even beginning to think like one.
I played morning, noon, and night. That is all I did.
I usually fell asleep with my guitar in my hands.
I went through the entire summer that way.
And so this part of the book is again how bad
Do you want it?
How bad do you want to chase after and achieve the dream that you have for your life?
We already know what he wants to know. He knows without a doubt I'm gonna be a folk
musician. I'm going to sing and write songs.
And so he says by this time I was making three to five dollars every time I played at either a coffee house
Or pizza partless, what I mean.
Again.
How about you want it? This guy is doing shows at a pizza parlor. This is the same person later in his life. He's gonna sell 125 million records.
But first
You gotta play.
Pizza parlor.
The place I was living in was no more than an empty storage room with a sink and a window looking into an alley, no closet, and a toilet down the hall. I put a mattress on the floor.
I'm in an actress, an inspiring thespian named Flo.
Flow was odd looking, but beautiful in a wacky way.
She had long red hair.
Dressed in black from head to foot, and she had a folksy demeanor.
She was a mystic.
She believed in the occult powers of trees and things like that. She was also very serious about reincarnation. We used to have strange conversations. One day she asked me if I ever heard of Woody Gutry.
I said sure.
I had heard him on all these other records with these two other musicians.
Then she asked if I ever heard him all by himself on his own records.
I couldn't remember having done that.
Flo said that her brother had some of his records and she would take me over there to hear them.
that Woody Gutchie was somebody that I should definitely get hip to.
Something about this sounded important and I became interested.
When the record started to play, I was stunned.
I didn't know if I was stone or straight.
What I heard was Woody singing a whole lot of his own compositions all by himself.
All these songs made my head spin.
It made me want to gasp.
I couldn't believe it.
He had such a grip on things.
He was like none of the other singers I'd ever heard, and neither were his songs.
It was like the record player itself.
Had just picked me up and flung me across the room.
A voice in my head said
So this
Is the game.
A great curiosity had seized me, and I had to figure out who Woody Guthrie was.
It didn't take me long.
My friend Dave.
Happened to have Woody's autobiography Bound for Glory, and he lent it to me.
I went through it from cover to cover like a hurricane.
Totally focused on every word and the book sang out to me like the radio.
Gutchy writes like the whirlwind and you get tripped up on the sound of the words alone.
Pick up the book anywhere.
Turn to any page and he hits the ground running.
Who is he?
He's a hustling ex sign painter from Oklahoma.
An anti materialist who grew up in the depression and Dust Bowl days.
Migrated West, had a tragic childhood.
A lot of fire in his life.
Both figuratively and literally.

Poetic soul.
He divides the world between those who work and those who don't.
And is interested in the liberation of the human race and wants to create a world
Worth living in.
Bound for Glory is a hell of a book.
I decided then and there to sing nothing but Guthrie's songs.
It's almost like I didn't have a choice.
I said to myself.
I was going to be his greatest disciple.
I wasn't even sure if he was alive anymore.
The book makes it seem like he was a character from the old past.
But my friend put me up to date on him.
Told me that he was in ill health somewhere in the east.
And I pondered that.
One thing for sure.
Woody Guthrie had never seen nor heard of me.
But it felt like he was saying
I'm gonna be going away.
But I'm leaving this job in your hands.
I know I can count on you.
It was time for me to get out of Minneapolis.
New York City was the place I wanted to be.
with only a few tattered rags and a suitcase and guitar
I stood on the edge of town in Hitchhike East.
to find Woody Guthrie.
Although I might have been slack in a lot of things, my mind was ordered and disciplined.
New York City.
Mid winter.
Nineteen sixty one.
Whatever I was doing was working out okay.
And I intended to stay with it.
I felt.
Like I was closing in.
On something.
And that is where I'll leave it.
That is four hundred and twenty nine books down.
One thousand ago.
And I'll talk to you again soon.