our life will never end

 

[excerpt from Chronicles, by Bob Dylan] --------------- A lot was changing in America.  The sociologists were saying that TV had deadly intentions and was destroying the minds and imaginations of the young--that their attention spans were being dragged down.

     Maybe that's true but the three minute song also did the same thing.  

     Symphonies and operas are incredibly long, but the audience never seems to lose its place or fail to follow along.  

With the three minute song, the listener doesn't have to remember anything as far back as twenty or even ten minutes ago.  There's nothing you have to be able to connect.  Nothing to remember.  A lot of the songs I was singing were indeed long, maybe not as long as an opera or a symphony, but still long . . . at least lyrically.  

"Tom Joad" had at least sixteen verses, "Barbara Allen" about twenty.  "Fair Ellender," "Lord Lovell," "Little Mattie Groves" and others had numerous verses and I didn't find it troubling at all to remember or sing the story lines.

     I had broken myself of the habit of thinking in short song cycles and began reading longer and longer poems to see if I could remember anything I read about in the beginning.  I trained my mind to do this, had cast off gloomy habits and learned to settle myself down.  

I read all of Lord Byron's Don Juan, and concentrated fully from start to finish.  Also, Coleridge's Kubla Khan.  I began cramming my brain with all kinds of deep poems.  It seemed like I'd been pulling an empty wagon for a long time and now I was beginning to fill it up and would have to pull harder.  

I felt like I was coming out of the back pasture.  

I was changing in other ways, too.  Things that used to affect me, didn't affect me anymore.  I wasn't too concerned about people, their motives.  I didn't feel the need to examine every stranger that approached. ------------------ [end, Dylan excerpt]

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     On You Tube there's a song by The Doors called 

"Riders on the Storm"

uploader: 215 Days 

Play and enjoy.

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