carelessness and magic

---------------------------- [excerpt, Remnick article on Dylan, N. Yorker] ------------ When he was young and in the midst of that golden-era frenzy, Dylan was apt to dodge earnest questions about what led him to the music he made in the mid-sixties.  "Mistake or not, what made you decide to go the rock-and-roll route?"





Nat Hentoff asked him in a Playboy interview published in February, 1966.


================= [interview excerpt] =============== Dylan:  Carelessness.  I lost my one true love.  I started drinking.  I wind up in Phoenix.  I get a job as a Chinaman.  I start working in a dime store, and move in with a thirteen-year-old girl.  Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. 


I go down to Dallas. 


I get a job as a 'before' in a Charles Atlas 'before and after' ad.  I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chili and hot dogs.  Then this thirteen-year-old girl from Phoenix comes and burns the house down. 


The next thing I know I'm in Omaha. 


It's so cold there, by this time I'm robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. 


I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain't much to look at, but who's built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce.  Everything's going good until that delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. 


Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit the road.  The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star.  What could I say? ================== [end 1966 interview excerpt] =============





But as Dylan grew older, as the immense catalogue of his songs came to embrace everything -- folk, rock, gospel, blues, Tin Pan Alley -- he looked back on the golden period of 1965 - 66, the moment of the hot hand, when the songs came two and three a day, as if from heaven, and he seemed as filled with wonder as the rest of us.


"Those early songs were almost magically written," Dylan told Ed Bradley, of CBS.  "Try to sit down and write something like that. 


There's a magic to that, and it's not Siegfried and Roy kind of magic, you know?  It's a different kind of a penetrating magic. 


And, you know, I did it.  I did it at one time. ... You can't do something forever.  I did it once, and I can do other things now.  But I can't do that." 
------------------------------ [end, Today's excerpt--to the end of the article, "Bob Dylan and the 'Hot Hand'" -- written by David Remnick, The New Yorker.  November 9, 2015] ------------------- {(pictures added here, by Blue Collar Lit)}





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