"What Drives Bob Dylan?" Project, Episode Two: Leaving Home
(Grievin' and Leavin')
I feel like ramblin’ and runnin’ around
Because my mind is all full of sound
I only hear God when I hear your songs
And I feel like I need to leave this town.
(Just some Dylan-inspired lines I’m working on.)
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Why does anyone leave home, especially when they are as young as Bob Dylan was? He was literally about seven years old the first time he left, according to one interview he gave in New York City in 1961, recorded in the book Bob Dylan In His Own Words (Miles 13). However, some liner notes say otherwise - that he was ten when he left the first time. I know he has said in various interviews like this one on 60 Minutes that he just didn’t feel that he was where he was supposed to be, but is it really that simple?
He doesn’t seem to discuss his very early leave-takings in Chronicles, Volume One; mostly, he discusses the main time that he left for New York…The only time he didn’t get “caught an’ brought back,” as the liner notes say. In that book, he is circular and cinematic — each scene fading into the next like his paintings. It is never about when it happened in that book — it’s about where it happened and why (and we know the why was partially Woody Guthrie). Bob is the king of evading reporters. However, the when of things will be important in just a moment…
There’s the song “I Was Young When I Left Home”…a horrifying and perfect thing, bone-thin, worn from time and yet with life ahead of it.
There are some things to consider. The speaker of the song might be a character’s voice and not necessarily Bob’s own for the obvious reason that the song is his own version of the old folk song “Nine Hundred Miles” (lyrics here and here) and also because some of the speaker’s experiences, even the parts Bob rewrote, are not all things Bob had gone through at the time — it seems to be a character, to an extent. Still, I’m sure Bob partially used his own experiences to write the song, something he has confirmed he has done at other times (about a song on Love and Theft when he was doing the 2001 press conference in Rome).
More importantly, the song makes my hands tremble, and it makes me want to voice record my grandmother’s old family stories, stories that I want to tell my kids later in my life…
It makes me want to go back and capture all of the moments which I left on the coffee table like they were some throwaway books I got at a yard sale. ($5…Buy one get one free.)
Homesickness could have been more of a factor than we even know when Bob wrote this song, which Nathan Wood for Gaslight Records discusses in his article about the song. Bob claims to Billy James early on in Chronicles that he had been “kicked out” (7), but he might have been making that up for some reason. Did he just feel such a strong need to get out of his hometown that he just got up and left? He says in the 1961 interview I cited earlier that things were dismal in Hibbing and there was not much to do, so that could be a lot of it (Miles 13). One article cites that he told The New Yorker in 1964, talking about the constraint of family, “I kept running because I wasn’t free.”
As someone who’s lived in a small town in the back of beyond my entire life (southeastern Oklahoma), I can attest to the fact that you will want so much to run. Every younger person I talk to says they want to get the hell out as soon as they can, and I don’t blame them in some ways even though we have beautiful land here.
I can see Bob, hair standing up on end, eyes glittering and each with their own sliver of moon, case in hand, jumping a car of a night train, almost tripping into it. Feverish to get to somewhere…anywhere…Unable to sleep overnight, dark circles under his eyes for days.
But that feverish and restless need to leave is gone in “I Was Young When I Left Home” (as he says, “I don’t like it in the wind”). It seems more about someone who feels that they have not lived up to what they wanted to do. It discusses his wages, and he sounds ashamed to return home in the state he’s in, which could refer to money or other aspects (“Well I can’t go home thisaway”). The regret of it all pulses.
But there’s more. And it’s about the when.
There seem to be two different timeframes happening in these lyrics. Those lyrics above are both very much in the present tense. Most of the lyrics about the family crisis and his dire straits, in fact, sound like it is all ongoing in the present time of the song’s universe. Then, there is the refrain “I never wrote a letter to my home.” The heavy past tense here, as opposed to him simply using the present perfect tense, is palpable. He could have written, “I haven’t written to my home,” and it would have been the same rhythm and would have coincided with the present tense apparent in the rest. The way it is, though, the stone-heavy “when” and “never” both give a sense of someone who has regretted not being or writing home for ages - for an entire lifetime.
It sounds tantamount to a person who left and stayed gone rather than returning at all (as he apparently did several times in actuality). Is it possible that maybe, in his heart or his mind, he had left and stayed gone from home long before he made the final move to New York? Had he maybe hardened his heart a bit in order to make that final move to the big city?
(Don’t misunderstand. This is not really “analysis,” so to speak; it’s just me exploring the world of Bob Dylan. I’m not here to psychoanalyze or play “Gotcha.” I’m just wanting to learn the rules of the road for myself.)*
And Bob is infinity, after all.
In the spirit of all of this, I’ve written some questions to add to my interview list for Bob. I hope I get to meet him and ask him some of these at some point. (Yeah I know, that’s insane and won’t happen, especially if he sees any of this stuff I write.) Some of these questions may be things we can infer answers to from some of his interview responses to others:
When you wrote “I Was Young When I Left Home” based on “Nine Hundred Miles,” you talked about never writing a letter home. If you wrote a letter home, how long would it be and would you send it?
Did you ever feel guilty in real life for leaving home? Was that why you made your own version of “Nine Hundred Miles”?
Do you think everyone should leave their hometown at least at some point? Or do you think it’s not necessarily for everyone?
After reading the liner notes “My Life in a Stolen Moment” (1962), I was wondering who stole the moment?
What was the most dangerous thing that happened or almost happened when you left home the first time?
What was most exciting to you when you would leave home and venture out somewhere?
I know you said in that one interview that you didn’t want people to leave home just because you did. What advice would you give to someone who did want to leave home?
What do you think is the most important thing you learned from leaving home several times so young?
Did you ever get any keepsakes from places where you went?
Did you manage to get any of the turquoise in New Mexico? (My grandmother used to live there when she was younger and has always talked about how beautiful the turquoise jewelry was.)
*And yes, I am still studying my driving manual. I had to put off actual driving practice because of the weather where I am, but I am going to start as soon as I can. ;)
Talk soon. :)
-Josee
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Miles, Barry, editor. Bob Dylan In His Own Words. Omnibus Press, 1978.
****Correction on Sunday, January 28, 2024: I had written that Bob had never performed “I Was Young When I Left Home” live. However, I misread something on the official webpage, so I cannot actually verify that and removed that statement from the article.