Dylan on Brady with ghosts

Take care of all your memories. For you cannot relive them.

In July of 1973, I was working at a place called Edelman Studios in New York City, a company that packaged sales and convention material for JC Penney, near West 4th Street (the street featured on Bob Dylan’s second album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan). The work was mindless—repetitive boxing and labeling—but it was a glorious summer job during a glorious summer in Greenwich Village, walking distance from New York University, Washington Square Park, the second best pizza place in the city (Stromboli’s on University Place), and next door to an antique store run by twin Russian girls.

There’s a woman I long to touch and I’m missing her so much but she’s drifting like a satellite. There’s a neon light ablaze in this green smoky haze, laughter down on Elizabeth Street.^I 

    There wasn’t revolution in the air, as Dylan, who will be 75 in May, would write in “Tangled Up in Blue,” but there was unraveling. It was the summer of the Watergate Hearings—a time when, as Merle Haggard sang, “Nixon lied to us all on TV.”  They were broadcast live, the hearings, both on television and radio, and Hank and Gladys Edelman, the owners, as well as most of the older employees, listened throughout the workday. I was 16 and listening to other things.

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have to stand naked^II

“Would you make that crap lower? The country’s falling apart,” Hank Edelman demanded, as Bob Dylan’s “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” from his 1965 album, Bringing It All Back Home, blasted from my portable stereo.

“Crap? It’s Dylan.”

“I know who it is. I was listening to Dylan when you were still a baby. Are YOU listening to this?” he asked, pointing to the radio.

Out of one ear, yes. It was testimony by Alexander Butterfield, Nixon’s deputy assistant, who, at that very moment, was confirming to the Senate Watergate Committee that the president had taped all White House meetings.

“Hank, I already know. It’s right here,” I said “pointing to my cassette player.

I turned it up.

While some on principles baptized
To strict party platform ties
Social clubs in drag disguise
Outsiders they can freely criticize
Tell nothing except who to idolize
And then say God bless him^II

“Ach,” he said, before slamming the door, “leave me alone.”

I overheard someone else, “You call that a singer?”

And a voice that came from you and me.^III

Those lyrics, by the way, about presidents and parties and venality, were written in 1965, 51 years ago. It could have been written after a Trump rally.

Yeah, he’s a singer … and a prophet. 

There was, through the decades, always a new Dylan coming along—Bruce Springsteen, Phil Ochs, Townes Van Zandt, Loudon Wainwright, John Prine, David Bromberg—but then Dylan released Blood on the Tracks in 1975 and nobody ever talked again about the next Dylan. 

We drove that car as far as we could
Abandoned it out west
Split up on a dark sad night
Both agreeing it was best^IV

We didn’t need another. The new Dylan was the old Dylan. I remember buying the album on Asp Avenue in Norman and reading Pete Hamill’s liner notes on the back of my sealed copy as I walked past the Boomer Theatre.

But of all the poets, Dylan is the one who has most clearly taken the rolled sea and put it in a glass.

Tulsa now has that glass.

The Kaiser Foundation says a permanent exhibit space for The Archive will be designated near the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa’s Brady Arts District, which houses a museum dedicated to American folksinger and Oklahoma native Woody Guthrie. 

The former oil capital of the world, on the spot of the worst race riot in American history, will house the legacy of a man who wrote about Hattie Carroll, Maggie’s Farm, slavery, politics, the masters and forgiveness of war, the chimes of freedom, hard rains, and a nation’s ghosts. And that is a curious, wonderful thing, for the greatest musical influence of the 20th Century, save perhaps for the Beatles, is allowing his legacy, his reclusive exclusivity to be studied, picked apart, mulled over in—say this to yourself a few times, slowly—Tulsa, Oklahoma.  Unlike, Faulkner, whose archives are at the University of Mississippi, and Thomas Jefferson’s, whose collection is kept at the University of Virginia, both as they should be, there is no reason for Dylan’s recordings, writings, memorabilia to be scattered among repositories in Tulsa any more than Jim Thorpe’s remains need to be in eastern Pennsylvania, but that’s the choreography of commerce. 

Someone with enough money wanted history here.

They settled on a price of somewhere between $15 million and $20 million, which was a fraction of the appraised value. The parties would not elaborate on the details of the transaction, except to say that Kaiser wrote the bigger check. The first batch of items arrived from New York earlier this winter.

Good on Kaiser for bringing it here. And good on Dylan for allowing it.

“I’m glad that my archives, which have been collected all these years, have finally found a home and are to be included with the works of Woody Guthrie and especially alongside all the valuable artifacts from the Native American Nations. To me it makes a lot of sense and it’s a great honor,” Dylan said in a statement.

In Tulsa, our attractions—from the serious (Gilcrease) to the silly (the Golden Driller) to the historical (Route 66)—are organic; they move from the inside out. But the Dylan exhibit is a new paradigm, for this time, it’s not of or about us. 

Clearly, Woody Guthrie was the key—Dylan was greatly influenced by him— which, incidentally, may be a lesson to all those who always find something about which to bitch (whether it’s cost, effect on parking, or how Tulsa’s past and DNA are being obliterated) every time a new downtown development is announced. Without people who see the possibilities in abandoned buildings and parking lots, there’s no Guthrie Center, obviously, but there’s also no Philbrook Downtown, no urban lofts, no food carts, no free movies on Tuesdays on a lawn, and no music in the cafes at night. There’s no energy. And without that, nobody’s coming to Tulsa to see the mouth harp Dylan used on “Like a Rolling Stone” or a wallet he owned in 1965 with Otis Redding’s phone number inside.

The life and times of Robert Zimmerman, who grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota and became Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village, New York, will be housed in a building near a museum named for a man who never lived in Tulsa and on a street in a district named for a Brady from another time and place. 

The palimpsest is pure Dylan. 

I had to rearrange their faces and give them all another name.^V

I) From “Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)” Copyright ©️1978 by Special Rider Music

II) From “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m only Bleeding)” Copyright ©️1965 by Warner Brothers, Inc.

III) From “American Pie” Copyright ©️1971 by Universal Publishing Group

IV) From “Tangled Up in Blue” Copyright ©️1974 by Ram’s Horn Music 

V) From “Desolation Row” Copyright ©️1965 by Warner Brother, Inc. 

For more from Barry, read his article on the very troubling House Bill 2797, which would assert that Oklahoma "favor[s] childbirth over abortion," by, among other measures, requiring students to be taught that life begins at conception.