Where is Bob Dylan? « American Songwriter

On this sequence, we try to reply questions despatched in by readers, or their attorneys. Any of a private nature will likely be saved non-public, however others will likely be printed which is likely to be helpful and/or entertaining to different readers.

Right this moment’s query comes from Mr. Gunn in Minnesota, who wrote us that he’s a retired miner after 49 years on the Hull-Rust-Mahoning Iron Mine on Minnesota’s Mesabi Vary. He’s been a part-time songwriter, he wrote, “since FDR was president, and a detailed private good friend and almost-collaborator with the legendary songwriter H.P. Danks, who wrote ‘Silver Threads Amongst The Gold.’” Married 48 years to his spouse Dolores, he’s the daddy of 9 kids and seventeen grandchildren “ultimately rely,”

QUESTION: Are you aware the place Bob Dylan is?

FROM: Elston Gunn
Eveleth, Minnesota

ANSWER: Thanks in your query.

The easy reply isn’t any. But it’s possible that  easy solutions aren’t what you’re after. Provided that it could be unsuitable to easily invent a solution with no precise information below my open title, I reached out to a number of of Dylan’s shut confidantes, together with one cousin,  for this reply. When that failed, we turned to different sources who, whereas much less dependable, did return emails. 

His longtime pal and infrequently producer, Jack Frost, was the primary to answer. Right here’s your reply.

JACK FROST: Sure, I do know the place he’s. He’s at Iguana Ranas in Tijuana. Zona Rosa. Within the again by the candles. He’s carrying a white Panama hat with Magdalena, the girl within the lengthy black gown. Canine are barking someplace. A choir of St. Lucy candles are singing outdated Inkspots songs. He is aware of each phrase however doesn’t let on.

Edguardo, a güey from Chiapas, is carrying Buddy Holly’s glasses. A lot later that night time he picks up a sea-green Telecaster and sings of “el otro lado” like Roy Orbison in Spanish. Then got here John the Revelator, each the music and the man, in an extended preacher’s coat and wild hair. Then both  Sarah and Martha, the dual daughters of the sojourner nobody can inform them aside, together with them. The opposite performs an outdated triangle. At all times. She isn’t not taking part in it “like Hendrix with guitar,” she says. 

Then that well-known reedy nasality cuts by way of the clamor. It’s him. The person generally recognized merely as The Man. “When everyone involves city,” he sings, then performs some outdated tune on one string.  “All I’ve is yours, all you see is mine, I can’t consider it, I can’t consider I’m alive…. The place are you tonight? I’d have you ever anytime….”  He laughs and says, “It’s a collage.” Somebody in shadows is singing “Senor” in A minor. “Attempt it in B minor,” he says. “It is likely to be successful for you.” 

Then Dylan picks up a harmonica, and places it to his lips however performs nothing anybody can hear. Anybody besides Magdalena, who begins to bounce slowly, like in a dream. Out within the alley seventeen canines start to howl, all deserted in Zona Norte. A blind man on a pale  horse rides by and disappears.  Dylan within the moonlit courtyard sees Johanna’s ghost and the everlasting burro, glowing with jewels and binoculars. All alongside the ruins of her balcony he hears the yellow railroad, and sings in his chains like the ocean, lovesick for love, for love in useless, for love unchained, for love minus zero, for love like a wheelbarrow in lightning, a baby-carriage rolling down the outdated stone Potemkin steps.

Those that are wed the place lightning strikes, he stated to her ghost  a siren to sing and  sew and make flowers develop, the mystic one, the tambourine wild youngster, of rain, of wind, of change, of bells, of the jingle-jangle morning, of the misplaced sheep, of the endlessly fifth day of Could in drizzling rain within the yr of who is aware of when sleepers wake opening eyes to the tune of an accordion, to sing with bongos and beat cadence of a valuable angel below the solar close to the tracks the place inexperienced smoky haze settles as melodies unwind, echoes of Woody and Cisco and Leadbelly too and Blind Willie McTell entangled and blue, a sluggish practice nonetheless coming, the yellow boxcar stars and the brand new tattoo like loopy glue, of Judas and his wild mercury brothers, of the diner in Duluth, of affection he threw away to time the thief, time the revelator, haunted by Ramon’s bloodied face within the cantina, and the hand that held the gun. 

After which there’s nothing left however the laughter, and to die and be reborn, then simply the geometry of sound, after which the empty music so hole, an excessive amount of and never sufficient, of the robust and stronger stuff, as he has another cup of espresso, robust, for San Fernando Highway results in the valley of stone to the Cahuenga Cross and the Pacific crossing, silhouetted by her sea, by the phrases they wrote in stone and kelp, songs of sand and seaweed, that dance  like castanets on stone, like Hank Williams on the phone, as lonely as loneliness will get on their lonesome on the  Iron Vary because the locusts sang. A wanderer he’s, he  wanders out after which in once more in a purple rodeo shirt with lengthy sleeves full of secrets and techniques, songs, prayers and sunflower seeds, laughing.

When God went electrical the entire world received quicker
They sang of the daddy the one true grasp
Gathering temple stones of alabaster
He swapped an outdated 12-string for a brand new Stratocaster.

Then with a wheel on fireplace the thriller tramp
Performed King David’s lyre by way of a Silvertone amp
And music like medication received below our pores and skin
On the hour that the ship got here in

So abandon not that which what the guts understands
That the circle of music is unbroken
And the chains of the ocean busted by our personal palms
Are all buried below Hoboken.