"What Drives Bob Dylan?" Project, Episode Four: Chaos/Poetry
...And Your Whole World is Slammin' and Bangin'
And you need something special
Yeah, you need something special all right…
-Bob Dylan, “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie,” Live at Town Hall (April 12, 1963)
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Sometimes life makes you feel like you’re full of gaping holes, and you’re trying to keep your innards from falling out of each of them in tandem.
I had an intense life change starting a few weeks ago, and the last month has been a total whirlwind. I had to delay my driving endeavor temporarily near the end of February because a family member had to go to the hospital, although I am probably picking it up again this week. I feel a bit like a failure for it, but it was unavoidable.
One of Bob’s works that has gotten me through all of this is his poem “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie.” I have probably already mentioned it before, but I am going to discuss here, too.
The first time I ever heard it, I hadn’t even known it existed. Nightly Moth, a fellow Bob fam, showed it to me when I was feeling particularly horrible one January evening, and it was exactly what I needed to hear at that moment. Things had gotten tense at home. The family member I live with was having bad health but was unwilling to seek medical attention. The house was cold due to a thermostat that I didn’t think worked (which would later turn out to be untrue). I was scared of what would happen, of if I would even be able to get to the grocery store or not because of having to tell people I needed a way there (which I would end up solving later)…and that’s not even all of it. Everything that could have been wrong in that moment was wrong.
Utter and total chaos.
Enter Bob’s poem.
The poem tells you exactly what you are feeling. It matters that he uses the word “You.” The whole poem points to who’s reading it. Even though its title tells us all that it’s about Woody Guthrie’s influence on him, most of the poem’s content includes what leads someone to needing such a mentor — or, to the awareness of that need. It points out the myriad of things that go wrong or misconceptions we have about how to be fulfilled, though the reader doesn’t need these pointed out. If you’re responding to the poem the way I did, you already know damn well what it is to be in such a state. Dylan, by going ahead and pointing them out, is letting you know that he knows, too. That you can trust that, yes, he’s been there too. And all of this when he was just about 21 or 22 years old.
The questioning of the self is also crucial. We may not always do that consciously, but it certainly can happen in unconscious ways, such as convincing yourself not to do something that might have been good for you or convincing yourself that what you’re doing doesn’t matter and is, in fact, possibly detrimental or useless in some way. (“What am I saying, what am I knowing…”). But this kind of thinking gets you nowhere. Bob doesn’t spend that long on doing that in the poem, if you notice.
And the entire poem itself — its vastness and its form — is just like how those chaotic moments of life feel. You are pressed to find any single line alone that stands out most because they all are things we either have experienced or have seen someone else experience, so you take it all in as a huge gasp. Cataloging so many feelings for line after line with no end-stops and little separation of stanzas leaves you feeling like you’ve been drug through a thorn bush backwards at high speed by the end of it. The shorter stanzas at the end, where Woody finally appears along with God, are like little rafts at the end of a long ocean drift of parched-dry grief.
But it woke me up, didn’t it? After hearing it that first time, I felt like, “Okay, so…We’re going to get up and go forward.” It was just like how his songs made me feel when I first started listening to him a lot in December. I had already begun having intense issues at home then, and I remember feeling like I was surrounded by a sort of security blanket with his music. I could move and carry on, feeling safer because someone else has gone through this sort of moment, too. I felt almost kin to him, somehow. (Yeah, I know some people will balk at that, and that’s okay.)
And what made the difference between that and when I first tried to listen to him over a year ago and just couldn’t get into it? What changed in me that allowed me to appreciate him suddenly? What put him on my radar more this time around? I can’t answer that. I would like to think there was some sort of divine intervention that made my brain reach for his music and poetry — or maybe some sort of mental transformation that made me realize I needed it. Back in December, I remember just sitting there one night and thinking, “I need to look up Bob Dylan interviews.” I have no idea why it was so sudden and out-of-nowhere. And from there, it was the songs.
And isn’t this, again, the exact thing that this poem is about? Suddenly knowing that you require the work of some mentor or some influence, nothing else. The words of someone else who has been through life a few times over. I can’t help but wonder what Bob Dylan thought when he first got to meet Woody Guthrie, but we will probably never know.
Certainly, there are some accounts of when Bob visited Woody, such as this one from Bonnie Beecher. I love to hear her talk about it, and I wish I had more of that interview. It makes me want to know even more what that first visit was like. Obviously, if Bob’s name was on the list to be able to see Woody in the hospital, it means he frequently visited — not just sometimes when he felt like it. Another good resource is the interview with Nora Guthrie, Woody’s daughter, about when Woody was in the hospital; this interview is an absolute gem, and I would love to visit with her someday. This interview definitely gives you a glimpse of what Woody was like during that time. The fact that he wanted to hear the other musicians play his songs reinforces that image of a mentor quite a bit, and it’s also just really cool, to be honest. Those are not the only videos about Woody being in the hospital; there are a few others that I plan on watching and examining later.
I would say that Woody Guthrie is one of the answers to what drives Bob. I don’t think many would argue; it seems like a given, really.
So then…how has he not performed this poem more than the one time in 1963?
I understand, I suppose, that maybe he felt that he said what he needed to say about it all and didn’t need to say it again. He alluded to such a sentiment when he did his famous press conference in 1965 (at about forty minutes in), though it was not about this poem in particular. One of the reporters asked him why he would not use old pieces of songs he wrote, and Bob seemed to indicate that it wouldn’t be aboveboard. Maybe that is why he has not read this poem out loud to an audience again. I hope he does someday just because it is so good.
And since this was obviously an important piece but one he only spoke once, perhaps some of his other work that only got performed once or twice (or none, for that matter) also contain stories about what very much drives him…perhaps more than the ones he has performed many times. This is very sweeping, I realize, but still…It’s something to think about.
You guys know that I have to close with some interview questions for Bob, so I wrote some questions for him about Woody Guthrie. (A few of them are based on the videos I linked above about when Woody was in the hospital.) I know some people might see any of my questions in any of these articles as pointless or trite fangirling, but asking is better than just passively wondering.
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Questions for Bob about Woody Guthrie
Do you remember what the first thought in your mind was when you walked in the first time to visit Woody?
Did Woody ever see the poem “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie”?
How long did it take you to write the poem?
Were you nervous the first/only time you read the poem in 1963?
The last time you performed “Song for Woody” was in 2002. Will you perform it again ever? (Will you maybe perform it during this year?)
What was your favorite song of Woody’s to sing when you visited him?
What was Woody’s favorite song for you to sing to him when you visited?
Did Woody ever let you sing him any of your own songs?
What was the best advice Woody Guthrie gave you?
Was there a question that you never got to ask Woody Guthrie that you would ask if you had the chance?
Would you ever be okay with someone visiting you in the same way that you visited Woody? Would you ever directly mentor someone?
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Talk again soon. ;)
-Josee