#429 Bob Dylan's Autobiography

What I learned from rereading Bob Dylan's autobiography. Made possible by: Ramp: ⁠⁠https://ramp.com⁠⁠ Applovin: ⁠⁠https://www.applovin.com Vanta: ⁠⁠https://vanta.com/founders

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  I had just signed a contract with Leeds Music, giving it the right to publish my songs. Not that there was many great deal to hammer out, I hadn't written much yet. Lou had advanced me a hundred dollars against future royalties to sign the paper, and that was fine with me. John had taken me over to see Lou. John had only heard two of my original compositions, but he had a premonition that there would be more. John was John Hammond, the great talent scout and discoverer of monumental artists, imposing figures in the history of recorded music. Artists who had created music that resonated through American life. He was legendary. He had followed his own heart's love, which was music, which he endorsed and defended with his life.

• 0:41Speaker 00

  "No one could block his way, and he didn't have any time to waste." It's one of my favorite sentences in the book. "No one could block his way, and he didn't have any time to waste." "I could hardly believe myself awake when sitting in his office, him signing me to Columbia Records." It was so unbelievable. It would have sounded like a made up thing. Folk music was considered junky, second rate, and only released on small labels. But John was an extraordinary man. He had vision and foresight, had seen and heard me, felt my thoughts, and had faith in the things to come. That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Chronicles, Volume One, and is written by Bob Dylan.

• 1:26Speaker 00

  In fact, he wrote it with no help at all. He wrote every single word himself. He didn't even have an editor. So I want to go to the very beginning of the book. First few pages is just blurb after blurb of praise for the book. And there's just a ton of praise for the book. I think it's probably the best written autobiography I've ever read in my life. In fact, Rolling Stone put this as the number one. It's number one on the list of the top 50 musician biographies and autobiographies. But I want to read one of the blurbs that I think really speaks to why this book is so important. And it says, "Bob Dylan hasn't really written the story of his life in this fascinating, captivating, intimate, accessible, and widely acclaimed memoir. Instead, he's written mainly the story of his birth,

• 2:08Speaker 00

  when he transformed himself from Bobby Zimmerman to Bob Dylan." So I heard Bob Dylan say something when he was a much older man that I think speaks to what takes place in this book and what that review really hits on. And Bob said, "Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself." And so before I jump back into the book, I want to talk about one of the most interesting things is the fact that Steve Jobs, from the very early days when he was in his twenties, all the way to the point when he was dying, he would talk about the influence that Bob Dylan had on his work. And there's actually a lot of ideas, I think, for entrepreneurs. Steve mentions Bob Dylan probably 15 times in the biography that he worked on with Walter Isaacson before he was dying, or as he was dying or said.

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  So I went back and I pulled all the notes about what Steve said about Bob Dylan, and I'm just going to run through them. In fact, Steve Jobs was obsessed with Dylan before he started Apple. One of the first things that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak did together was track down underground recordings of Bob Dylan records. Steve would also collect these printed out forshers of Bob Dylan lyrics, and then he'd spend hours interpreting them. In that biography, Steve says that he managed to collect hundreds of hours of Dylan's recorded concerts, and would lay in bed listening to the concerts in headphones. So close to the end of his life, Steve Jobs is sitting inside his house with Walter Isaacson, his biography, and they're listening to Bob Dylan records. And he says something to Walter I think is really important, because it's going to pop up in the book over and over again. And I think it's one of the main takeaways in the book.

• 3:33Speaker 00

  And Steve Jobs picked up on it immediately, and Bob Dylan, I think, did this intentionally. But Steve said to Walter, "No one else could have been Bob Dylan." So after Apple releases the iTunes Store, he actually gets to meet, Steve Jobs gets to meet, and he has a two-hour one-on-one conversation with Bob Dylan. And there's something that Dylan told him that resonated with Steve's own approach to creating new products. And so Bob was talking about the way the music came. He says that the songs, quote, "The songs just came through me. It wasn't like I was having to compose them." And at the very end of the Steve Jobs biography that was written by Walter Isaacson, Steve gives this fantastic, essentially like just this conversation about what drove him, why he did what he did in his career.

• 4:16Speaker 00

  And I think it obviously really hits home, because he knows he's dying as he sings these words. And he's talking about learning from The Beatles and learning from Bob Dylan, and the importance of always trying something new. And he talks about like, you know, why do you keep? He kept in trying to invent new technology, try to create new products. And he says, what he learned, he says he got that idea from them, which means The Beatles and Bob Dylan. He says, "They kept evolving, moving, refining their art. That is what I've always tried to do, keep moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you're not busy being born, you're busy dying." So the book starts with him being signed. He's in New York City, it's 1961. So the record label sends him over to their in-house publicist, this guy named Billy. And Billy's asking him a bunch of questions. And I just want to pull out one sentence here,

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  because it's just something that reappears over and over again in the book. I think it's so important. "Billy asked me who I saw myself like in today's music scene. I told him nobody, and that was true. I really didn't see myself like anybody else." Bob continues, "There's other folk singers, there's other folk musicians, but there was nobody like me." So at this point, Bob begins to tell the story of what led up to this time in his life. So it's about two years from him arriving in New York City, from Minnesota, and then before he signed to Columbia Records. Now, the crazy part, one of the craziest parts, is this wildly ambitious act that Bob Dylan does to get to New York City. And he doesn't have any money, so he winds up hitchhiking. It's 1,200 miles, about 1,200 miles between Minneapolis and New York City.

• 5:46Speaker 00

  So he hitchhikes from Minneapolis to New York City. He leaves Minneapolis with three things, a guitar, a suitcase, and $10. So I got to give you background, because this is not like any other autobiography. It's almost like disjointed, I can't even describe. It's a very fascinating read. I hope you enjoy the podcast, obviously, and learn something from it. Hopefully be inspired by the story. But I really would really recommend for you to like pick up this book on like a weekend trip or something, because it's just phenomenally well-written, and it's so hard to describe. So one of the things that got me interested in Bob Dylan, and in addition to he's in a bunch of these biographies, is that Bill Gurley gave this talk called How to Run Down a Dream. And he profiles five people that go to great lengths to get their dream job and what they do. And it's just a phenomenal talk he gave.

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  I think it's a University of Texas MBA students. So there's a bunch of ideas from that talk where Bill is talking about Bob Dylan that I think, given the background of this talk for this book and understanding Bob, I think is like really, really valuable. And so there's a couple of times where I'm going to reference some of the things that Bill Gurley says in relation to Bob Dylan. And so Bill says, "Over the course of eight or nine months, Bob studied every folk album he possibly could." This is before he gets to New York. He didn't have a lot of money. And at the time, you could walk into a record store and you can listen in a booth. He would do that for hours and hours. This is about two years before he signed to Columbia. "He would then become friends with people that would have these huge, that liked folk music,

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  but had money, because Bob was completely broke. He had no money to spend on folk albums. So he'd go to their house and then listen to their record collection as well. When he gets to New York City, he does the exact same thing. He'd sit in these venues, this is what I just mentioned earlier. Some of these he's going to wind up playing. And in fact, he would play anywhere. He'd play on the side of the street, play in a coffee house, play for one person, play for no people, play for 100 people, it just didn't matter." And so some of the people that were playing at the time are talking about Bob Dylan in the future. Says, "You don't understand how good Bob was about this. He watches so much and would study us so much. He could perform any of our songs just like us. He could copy the tone, the tempo, everything. Bob was studying, studying, studying." And so remember where we're in the book. He's like, "Hey, I got him, I'm back in the Midwest. I'm listening to this guy named Dave Van Rongk.

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  He's playing at the gaslight. I need to go find him, I need to go meet him. I need to then find out how to play and to break into the gaslight." Before we get back into this, I want to tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp. "I have been reading a lot about SpaceX lately. SpaceX is one of the most valuable businesses in the world, and one of the main themes in the history of SpaceX is constantly attacking and questioning your cost. Ramp helps many of the most innovative businesses in the world do exactly that. And they do this by using first principles thinking. The median company running on Ramp cuts their expenses by 5%. And one thing that SpaceX has demonstrated is that a religious dedication to controlling your costs helps increase revenue, because you can pursue opportunities you couldn't otherwise. And we see that in the Ramp data too.

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  The median company running on Ramp also grows their revenue by 16%. So when you're running your business on Ramp and your competitors are not, you have a massive competitive advantage that compounds over time. Ramp is the only platform designed to make your finance team faster and happier. Many of the top founders and CEOs that I know run their business on Ramp. I run my business on Ramp, and you should too. Go to ramp.com today to learn how they can help your business save time, save money, and grow revenue. That is ramp.com." And so now that he's in New York City, he's just like, "I'm going to take any opportunity I can get." And so he talks about this. "I wanted to play for anybody. I could never sit in a room and just play all by myself. I needed to play for people and all the time.

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  You could say that I practiced in public, and my whole life was becoming what I practiced. I kept my sights on the gaslight, how could I not?" And so he's describing these little places that he's forced to play. He calls them dens. And then, this is why I'm trying to like essentially convince you, persuade you to buy the book and to read it. This is the mastery of language this guy has. It's just unbelievable. There's so many times I'm reading this book, and it's just like you read sentences in the book that you just, you've never read them before. These words have not been put together in this same manner as the way this guy writes. It's just incredible. So he says, "The talent scouts did not come to these dens. They were dark and dingy and the atmosphere was chaotic. On weekends, if you played all the joints from dusk until dawn, you could make maybe $20.

• 10:11Speaker 00

  You had to know a trick or two to survive." And one of the best parts of the book is all these other folk musicians, all these other, really musicians of all kinds of genres are in the same few block area of New York City, and they're all trying to make it. And obviously, they're interacting with each other, they meet with each other. Bob has to like sleep on some of their couches and you know, crash at their house for a day or two, or sometimes for a month. And so, one of the best parts of the book is the fact that he meets all these crazy characters, and he's just gifted at describing their personalities. And he just makes these people jump off the page. And there's two really important parts about this. One, they're helping each other on their journey, but two, he's also able to compare himself. He's like, "Okay, I've been obsessed with this, but I've been relatively isolated. I'm listening to these records in record store booths, at these friends' houses.

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  I don't actually know, like, how do I actually stack up against them?" And so, it's really, really important. And he goes back to that idea, that there was only one me. And again, I don't think he's doing it from a place of arrogance by any means. So he says, "What really set me apart in these days was my repertoire. It was more formidable than the rest of the players. My template was hardcore folk songs." And then we see this is very binary. You either love Bob Dylan, or you don't listen to him at all. I'd either drive people away, or they would come in closer and see what it was all about. There was no in-between. There was a lot better musicians around, but there wasn't anybody close in nature to what I was doing." And so, when he's not playing, he's reading biographies, he's reading history, and he's practicing. He's doing professional research. He's just consuming insane amounts of music.

• 11:39Speaker 00

  So he winds up meeting this guy named Izzy. Izzy owns one of these little dens that he was playing at. And the back of this den is this giant record collection. And so, Bob writes, "Izzy had a back room. The little room was filled with records and a phonograph. Izzy would let me stay back there and listen to them. I listened to as many as I could. The madly complicated, modern world was something I took little interest in." He's essentially muting the world and building his own. Okay? "It had no relevancy to me. It had no weight. I wasn't seduced by it." But he was seduced by history. He's got a lot, he gets a lot of his ideas from going through and studying the history of his industry. He'll also take ideas from people writing about war, from people, biographies, all kinds of people. One of the most fascinating things to me is just like, he winds up getting trapped

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  in this room, he traps himself in the room, and he's just reading biography after biography after biography. Now, when he gets the end of, the end of the book remembers at the beginning, because it's out of sequence, almost like a Christopher Nolan movie now I'm thinking of it. And his life changes when he hears the music of Woody Guthrie, and then reads Woody Guthrie's autobiography Bound for Glory, which will happen at the very end of the book. But this studying of history is the main point, because he's gonna take lines from other songs that maybe came out 30 years ago. He would take tones, he would take like a guitar lick, and incorporate into what he's doing. And so Izzy also plays another important role in Bob Dylan's life, because it's at Izzy's, when just a random chance, he gets to meet one of the people that he came to

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  New York to see, which is Dave Van Ronk. And so, he's sitting in Izzy's place right there, and this is where he's gonna seize the opportunity. He says, "One winter day, a big burly guy stepped in off the street. It was Dave Van Ronk. He was gruff with a 'don't give a damn' attitude. My mind went into a rush. There was nothing between the man and me." So Dave's just sitting at the bar, he's playing a couple strings on the guitar, and so this is where Bob Dylan goes over to him. He goes, "I stepped over and asked him, 'How does someone get to work at the gaslight? Who do you have to know?'" Van Ronk looked at me curiously, was snippy and surly, and asked if I was a janitor. I told him, "No." And he could perish that thought, but I could play something for him. And so, he lets him play. Dave liked what he heard and asked me who I was, then said I could come down around

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  eight or nine that night and play a couple songs in his set. That was how I met Dave Van Ronk. And then what he had been trying to make happen, happens. "I would soon be hired to play at the gaslight." And I love, again, he's, he probably wrote the book when he was 60 or 70 years old, he's reflecting about what it was like being a young man in his twenties trying to make it. "Outside, the temperature was about 10 below, but I didn't feel the cold. I was heading for the fantastic lights, no doubt about it. Could it be that I was being deceived? Not likely. I had no false hope. I had come a long ways off, had started from a long ways down, but now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else." And so, he talks about many times, many times, he talks about this contrast between how

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  cold it is outside, and the fire that is burning inside of him. Now, what I'm about to read to you is amazing, if you really think about it. He's still unknown, he hasn't recorded his first album, he doesn't have, he doesn't have his own place to live. He has to rely on the charity of others to put a roof over his head. And this is what he says, "I walked over to the window and looked outside. The air was bitter cold, but the fire in my mind was never out." And so, another main theme of the book that appears over and over again, he's got this insatiable appetite for reading, which I absolutely love. It's just incredible how much reading this guy is gonna do. And so, he takes ideas from everything that he reads and applies it to his work. And then, in the book, he's just got this incredible writing, which I just mentioned, about this long chain of historical figures.

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  So, listen to how he describes this. "Hitler, Churchill, Mussolini, Stalin, Roosevelt. Towering figures that the world would never see the likes of again. Men who relied on their own resolve for better or worse. Every one of them prepared to act alone, indifferent to approval, indifferent to wealth or love. All presiding over the destiny of mankind and reducing the world to rubble. Coming from a long line of Alexanders, and Julius Caesars, Genghis Khan's, Charlemagne's, and Napoleon's, they carved up the world they would not be denied, and they were impossible to reckon with. Rude barbarians, stampeding across the earth and hammering out their own ideas into the geography."

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  And so, so these books he's reading, and these musicians that he's studying, some of them he's meeting, you really see what he values and what he's trying to emulate in his own career. So he gives us this incredible description of this musician that he greatly admired, this guy named Roy Orberton. And what he realizes is like, hey, there's actually no one else like Roy. Roy had no peer, which is exactly what Bob Dylan was going for in his own career. So Bob Dylan writes, "Roy had transcended all the genres. His stuff mixed all the styles and some that hadn't even been invented yet. With Roy, you didn't know if you were listening to mariachi or opera. He kept you on your toes. With him, it was all about fat and blood. He sounded like he was singing from an Olympian mountaintop, and he meant business. He was singing his compositions in three or four octaves that made you wanna drive your car off a cliff.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  He sang like a professional criminal. His voice could jar a corpse, always leave you muttering to yourself something like, 'Man, I don't believe it.' His songs had songs within songs. He was deadly serious. There wasn't anything else on the radio like him. I'd listen and wait for another song, but next to Roy, the playlist was strictly Doleville, gutless and flabby." And before we get back into this, I want to tell you about AppLovin'. One of my all-time favorite quotes is from the book Zero to One. In that book, Peter Thiel writes, he says, "The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas."

• 17:27Speaker 00

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  And you can do that by going to applovin.com. That's applovin.com. And then I want to tell you about Vanta. Vanta, Vanta, Vanta. Vanta helps your company prove you're secure, so more customers will use your product or service. Vanta is an AI-powered security expert that scales with you. The more your business grows, the more complex your security needs get, and that complexity turns into chaos. Vanta tames that chaos for you. Vanta automates compliance, continuously monitors your controls, and gives you a single source of truth for compliance and risk. So whether you're a fast-growing startup or an enterprise company, Vanta fits easily into your existing workflows. Many companies won't sign contracts unless you're certified, and this is causing you to lose out on sales.

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  That is why the average Vanta customer reports a 526% return on investment after becoming a Vanta customer. Automate your compliance, security, and trust with Vanta. Vanta will help you win trust, close deals, and stay secure faster and with less effort. Go to vanta.com/footslashfounders, and you'll get $1,000 off. That is vanta.com/footslashfounders. And so, now he's staying with another friend. This friend has this giant collection of books, and this is again, still pre-record book. This is still him trying to figure out things, and just how to make it. So he says, "I turned the radio off and went into the other room, a windowless one with floor-to-ceiling library. The place had an overpowering presence of literature. You couldn't help but lose your passion for dumbness." That is a great line. "There were all types

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  of things in here. Books like The Athenian General, a narrative that would give you chills. It was written 400 years before Christ, and it talks about how human nature is always the enemy of anything superior. It's like nothing has changed from his time to mine. There were novels by Balzac, Hugo, and Dickens. I would usually open up some book to the middle, read a few pages, and if I liked it, I went back to the beginning. I was looking for part of my education that I never got. Sometimes I'd open up a book and see a handwritten note scribbled in the front. Like in Machiavelli's The Prince, there was written, 'The Spirit of the Hustler.'" There were endless rows of books. One of the books he read was actually about Alexander the Great, and he has this description of what he learned from Alexander

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  the Great. "Alexander the Great marched into Persia. When he conquered Persia, in order to keep it conquered, he had all of his men marry local women. After that, he had never any trouble with the population, no uprisings or anything. Alexander knew how to get absolute control. I wanted to read all of these books." And so he's reading a ton of biographies. He reads one on Robert E. Lee, and he said, "Robert E. Lee, this is what I meant, like, he almost does my job better than me," where he's able to just describe these entire life stories in a paragraph, just makes these characters come alive, you know, in just a few sentences. It's incredible. "Robert E. Lee had grown up without a father. Lee had made something out of himself nevertheless. Not only that, but it was on his word and his word alone that America did not get into

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  a guerrilla war that probably would have lasted till this day. The books were something. They were really something. I read a lot of pages aloud and liked the sound of the words. I liked the sound of the language." And so, he's reading and telling us the story of this education that he's giving himself, and he's always relating it back to his craft. He says, "Folk singers could sing songs like an entire book, but only in a few verses. I'd always return to the books. I would dig through them like an archaeologist." So then he goes back to more biographies that he's reading. "I read the biography of Thaddeus Stevens. He lived in the early part of the 1800s and was quite a character. He's from Gettysburg, and he's got a club foot. He grew up poor, made a fortune, and from then on, championed the weak and any other group who wasn't able to fight equally. Stevens

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  had a grim sense of humor, a sharp tongue, and a white-hot hatred for the bloated aristocrats of his day. He wanted to confiscate the land of the slave-holding elite. He once referred to a colleague on the floor of the chamber as slinking in his own slime. Stevens was hard to forget. He made a big impression on me. He was inspiring. Him and Teddy Roosevelt, who Bob Dylan calls maybe the strongest US president ever. I read about Teddy, too. He was a cattle rancher and a crime buster, had to be restrained from declaring war in California. He had a big run-in with JP Morgan. There's actually an entire book about that I did, an episode on the book called The Hour of Fate, which was the rivalry, then the partnership, and then the back-to-the-rivalry between Theodore Roosevelt and JP Morgan. It's a fascinating book, if you're looking for something to read about that time period.

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  Roosevelt backed him down and threatened to throw him in jail. Either one of those guys, Stevens or Roosevelt or even Morgan, could have stepped out of a folk song. That is the important part. He's taking everything he's learning and relating it back to his craft, which is what he wants to do. All he wanted to do, it's like, all I want to do and all I ever am was just a folk musician." So then he starts reading Von Krieg, which is written by Clausewitz, and he says, "They called Clausewitz the premier philosopher of war. The book was published in 1832, and Clausewitz had been in the military since he was 12. His armies were highly-trained professionals, not young men who served only for a few years or more. His men were hard to replace." Clausewitz talks a lot about how to maneuver into position where the other side can see

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  there's no fighting chance, and they basically lay down their arms. "I had a morbid fascination with this stuff. I had always pictured myself dying in some heroic battle rather than in bed. I wanted to be a general with my own battalion." So, at this point, this is again, this is like this strange structure, and I mean that in a great way, of like the timelines in this book. So he has a flashback to when he was in Minnesota, and he's just trying to play any gig that he possibly can. He's, I think, 17 or 18 years old at this point, and he's forming all these bands, and then they keep breaking up, and he's like, "You know what? I don't care. I'm gonna keep going forward no matter what." And so he says, "I kept forming these bands because I was determined to play. There was

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  a lot of halting and waiting, little acknowledgement, little affirmation, but sometimes, all it takes is a wink or a nod from some unexpected place to vary the tedium of your baffling existence." What he's talking about there is the importance of words of encouragement. And so, he's gonna find words of encouragement from a very surprising source. It's a super-famous professional wrestler at the time, that's gonna just happen to see Bob Dylan perform. Bob Dylan's performing in a lobby, which I'll get to in a minute. And so, this guy named Gorgeous George, this is hilarious. He says, "That happened to me when Gorgeous George, the great wrestler, came into my hometown. So, in the mid-1950s, I was performing

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  in the lobby of the Veterans Memorial Building. I was playing on a makeshift platform in the lobby, and suddenly the doors burst open, and in came Gorgeous George. He roared in like the storm in all his magnificent glory. He had valets and was surrounded by women carrying roses. He was wearing a majestic, fur-lined..." This is hilarious. "He was wearing a majestic, fur-lined, gold cape. He brushed by the makeshift stage and glanced towards the sound of music. He didn't break stride, but he looked directly at me. He winked and seemed to mouth the phrase, 'You're making it come alive.' I never forgot it." This is so important. "It was all the recognition and encouragement I would need for years to come. Sometimes, that's all it takes. The kind of recognition that comes when you're

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  doing the thing for the thing's sake, and you're on to something. It's just that nobody recognizes it yet." And so, what's very fascinating, is several pages later, he's not a 17-year-old kid in Minnesota playing in the lobby. He's back in New York City, okay? And this is still before he signed to Columbia, but he had this very similar experience, and he's writing about this. And he says, "Sometimes you know things have to change, are going to change, but you can only feel it. But you don't know it in a purposeful way. Little things foreshadow what's coming, but you may not recognize them. But then something immediate happens, and you're in another world. You jump into the unknown. You have an instinctive understanding

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  of it. You're set free. You don't need to ask questions, and you already know the score. It seems like when that happens, it happens fast like magic, but it's really not like that. It isn't like some dull boom goes off and the moment has arrived. It's more deliberate. It's a reflective thing. Somebody holds the mirror up, unlocks the door, something jerks it open, and you're shoved in, and your head has to go into a different place. Sometimes, it takes a certain somebody to make you realize it." And so that is when he starts talking about another folk singer that actually forces him, makes him realize that he has to change his thought patterns, that he had these essentially self-limiting beliefs. And so, then he's gonna talk about this guy named Mike Seeger,

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  and he gets into the mentality that he had at this time. He says, "I knew what I was doing, and I wasn't going to take a step back or retreat for anybody. And by studying Mike Seeger, this is where he realized, okay, I have to change my thought patterns. What I had to work at, Mike already had in his genes. It was in his genetic makeup. Before he was even born, the music had to be in his blood. It dawned on me that I might have to change my inner thought patterns, that I would have to start believing in possibilities that I wouldn't have allowed myself to believe in before, that I had been closing my creativity down to a very narrow, controllable scale, that things had become too familiar, and I might have to disorient myself. I did everything fast. I thought fast, I ate fast, I talked fast, I walked fast. I even sang my songs fast. I needed to slow my mind down

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  if I was going to become a composer with anything to say. I couldn't exactly put into words what I was looking for, but I began searching for it in principle over at the New York City Public Library." Think about this, like, when he's lost, when he's not practicing, he turns to the books. And he doesn't even talk about why, but he develops this fascination. He becomes obsessed with studying the American Civil War. And so he goes to New York City Library and he goes into one of the leading, the reading rooms and he says, "I started reading articles in newspapers on microfilm from about 1855 to about 1865 to see what daily life was like. I wasn't so much interested in the issues as intrigued by the language and the rhetoric of the time." Remember, he talks about the language. He loved the language of the books so much that

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  he'd read them aloud. Talks about reading poetry, reading philosophy, reading biographies. Now he's reading newspapers. He wants to, he's essentially, like, he described himself as an archaeologist. "I'm digging through history to find useful information for my crafts. It's exactly what you and I are doing right now." And I love this idea, just being obsessed with language. I think I've said this, I don't know, before, but in case I haven't. So there's so many times, it's like, the way this guy puts words together, there's, there's sentences in this book that I've never read anywhere else. Like, I don't think they could be anywhere else but coming out of the pen of Bob Dylan. So he goes back to what he's learning, essentially, human nature is constant. He says, "It wasn't like it was another world. It was the same one that I'm living in, but with more urgency." Then he talks about how things change. You know, we look at Abraham Lincoln. If you

• 28:57Speaker 00

  ask me, like, who my favorite president is, probably Abraham Lincoln. Talks about, yeah, but that's, I want to go back and read how, well, how did, how was he perceived before his achievements, before the Civil War? And so he says, "Abraham Lincoln comes into the picture in the late 1850s, but he's referred to as a baboon or a giraffe. And they make a lot of caricatures of him, so he's criticized. No one takes him seriously at this time. It's impossible to conceive that he would become the father figure that he is today. You wonder how people so united by geography and religious ideals can become such bitter enemies. It all makes you feel creepy. The age that I was living in didn't resemble this age, but yet it did in some mysterious and traditional way. Not just a little bit, but a lot. You could see the full complexity of human nature." And then this sentence

• 29:40Speaker 00

  is so important. It's like, why you read all the time? It's like, man, me and you could be talking about something today. You might hear an idea in a podcast or a book today you don't even use for 10 years. Bob Dylan hits it exactly right here. He says, "I crammed my head full as much of this stuff as I could, and I locked it away in my mind out of sight. I left it alone. I figured I could send a truck back for it later." Continues to study all these historical figures. He starts studying Beethoven. "I learned that Beethoven had been a child prodigy, and he had been exploited by his father, and that Beethoven distrusted all people for the rest of his life. Even so, that didn't stop him from writing symphonies. He's still studying the greats." So now he's starting, going back to musicians. He's studying Hank Williams. "I didn't have to experience anything

• 30:24Speaker 00

  that Hank did to know what he was singing about. I learned later that Hank had died in the backseat of a car on New Year's Day. I kept my fingers crossed. I hope it wasn't true, but it was. It was like a great tree had fallen. Hearing about Hank's death caught me squarely on the shoulder. The silence of outer space never seemed so loud." This is just crazy, beautiful language. "When I hear Hank sing, all movement ceases. The slightest whisper seems sacrilege. In time, I became aware that in Hank's recorded songs were the archetype rules of poetic songwriting." Remember, Bob Dylan is probably referred to as maybe the greatest songwriter of all time. And he's just like, "Hey, I just studied Hank. These are Hank's rules. I became aware that in Hank's recorded songs were the archetypes' rules of poetic songwriting. The architectural

• 31:08Speaker 00

  forms are like marble pillars, and they had to be there. You can learn a lot about the structure of songwriting by listening to his records. And I listened to them a lot and had them internalized. In a few years' time, the folk and jazz critic for the New York Times would review one of my performances, and he would say, 'Dylan breaks all the rules in songwriting except that of having something to say. The rules, whether that critic understood it or not, were Hank's rules.'" And then he ends this section of his life, just asking and then essentially answering, like, "How do you know you're on the right track?" Right? "March was coming in like a lion, and once more I wondered, what would it take to get into a recording studio, to get signed by a folk record label? Was I

• 31:52Speaker 00

  getting any closer? The future was nothing to worry about. It was awfully close." And so to me, that first part, that first sentence where it's like, "Hey, I've been here for months. I'm wondering, how do I get into a recording studio?" Right? "How am I gonna get signed?" That is Bob Dylan from the perspective when he's 20 years old, right? And then he ends it. The end of that sentence, to me, is almost like he flipped to the older Bob Dylan, almost like he's talking to, like, the younger version of himself because he knows the outcome. And how does it, how does that sentence end? "The future was nothing to worry about. It was awfully close." And so then, this is where he's fast forwards nine years into the future, skips over the apex of his fame, and he starts this chapter with his father's funeral. "The previous week had left me drained. I'd gone back to the town of my early years in a way I could never

• 32:37Speaker 00

  have imagined, to see my father laid to rest. Now there would be no way to say what I was never capable of saying before. Growing up, the cultural and generational differences had been insurmountable." He's talking about this complicated relationship that he had with his father, the fact that he had greatly admired his father. I think he says later on that his father's might, might be worth a hundred of him, but they had a, he had a hard time relating to each other. "My father, who was plain speaking and straight talking, and at once said, 'Isn't an artist a fellow who paints?' When told by one of my teachers that his son had the nature of an artist, it seemed I'd always been chasing after something, anything, that might lead me into a different place, some unknown land down river. I had not even the vaguest notion of the broken world I was living in. When I left home, it was like

• 33:21Speaker 00

  Columbus going off into the desolate Atlantic. I had done that and had been to the ends of the earth, and now I was back." And so that's super important because essentially what he's talking about is like, you know, "I left this town 10 years ago in search of that dream. I am now on the other side of that dream. I have had, experienced things very few humans ever will, that have ever had this set of experiences that I've had. And now I'm back to where my life started, and I'm laying to rest my father." And they had, it goes back to this complicated relationship now that his father's gone. "In the short time I was home, it all came back to me. The older order of things. But something else did too, that my father was the best man in the world and probably worth a hundred of me, but he didn't understand me. We had

• 34:04Speaker 00

  more in common now than ever. I too was a father three times over now. There was a lot that I wanted to share and to tell him." So that part becomes devastating when you're reading this. It's just like, we have so much more in common. I'm older. I get to, now I can understand your perspective. There's so much that I can, I want to talk to you about, but the ability to talk to his father is gone forever. And so this chapter is supposed to be about him trying to make this album, New Morning, but it's really about the price of fame and essentially Bob Dylan trying to run away from being Bob Dylan. "The truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest

• 34:48Speaker 00

  for me, and I was seeing everything through a different glasses. Even the horrifying news items of the day, the gunning down of the Kennedys, of Martin Luther King, of Malcolm X, I didn't see them as leaders being shot down, but rather as fathers whose families had been left wounded." He's talking about the transformation. People that don't have kids don't even understand the, the change that happens when you, until you have children, not seeing this as leaders being assassinated, but rather as fathers whose families had been left wounded. "I didn't belong to anybody then or now. I had a wife and children who I loved more than anything else in the world, and I was trying to provide for them, to keep them out of the trouble. But the press kept promoting me as the mouthpiece, the spokesman, or even a conscience of a generation." This is very fascinating, his response to this. Remember, I, I do think his, his, how

• 35:33Speaker 00

  would I put this? The, when Steve Jobs says, "The older he gets, the more important," he thinks people's motivations matter and understanding why they're doing what they're doing is really important to understand. It's like, "I just made the songs that spoke to me, that came through me. I was doing this for me. I cannot control the reaction to the outside world." And so Bob Dylan talks about this. He goes, "That was funny. All I'd ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of. Being true to yourself, that was the thing. I was more of a cowboy than a pied piper." And again, that's something he's gonna repeat over and over again, just like he told Steve Jobs many years later. "I made songs for me. They just came through me. It wasn't

• 36:16Speaker 00

  even like I was having to compose them." So this idea is like, "Hey, I'm just trying to be true to myself, and because I was true to myself, it resonated with other people." But then all the other interpretations, all the building up of the press, that's your thing. That has nothing to do with me, is what Bob Dylan is saying there. And what would be surprising about this book is, you know, he's one of the greatest people to ever do, got to the top of his profession, how many times he thought about, fantasized about quitting, about running away, of just the pressure just getting to him and him trying to run away. He'd spend a lot of time, you know, in nature. He winds up buying this, I think, like, 63-foot sailboat and essentially like cruising around the Caribbean with just his family and kind of isolating himself from the world. But again, he's just having this inner monologue, this fantasy of like not, no longer being Bob Dylan. And so he says, "I don't know what everybody else was

• 37:00Speaker 00

  fantasizing about. What I was fantasizing about was a nine-to-five existence, a house on a tree-lined block with a white picket fence, pink roses in the backyard. That would have been nice. That was my deepest dream. After a while, you learn that privacy is something you can sell, but you can't buy it back." And so he's continued to make music at this time because he likes to make music, but he's also wrestling with, "Hey, I may never," you, you go to like some of the best work that he ever did, happened early in his career, and he's like, "I may never create work that good again." And the crazy point at this life, or at this point in his life, when he's struggling with all this, he's like, "I don't even care if I ever do." And so he writes, "The novelist Herman Melville's work went largely unnoticed after Moby Dick.

• 37:43Speaker 00

  Critics thought that he had crossed the literary line and recommended burning Moby Dick. By the time of his death, he was largely forgotten. I had assumed that when critics dismissed my work, the same thing would happen to me, that the public would forget about me. I owed nobody nothing. I wasn't going to go deeper into the darkness for anybody. My family was my light, and I was going to protect that light at all costs. What did I owe the rest of the world? Nothing. Not a damn thing. In my real life, I got to do the things that I love the best and that mattered to me the most." And so he's talking about this point in his life. Little league games, birthday parties, taking my kids to school, going on camping trips, boating, rafting, canoeing, fishing. Talks about being in nature a lot. In fact, I don't

• 38:25Speaker 00

  remember if I, uh, this, this part is in the podcast or not, but anytime he has a problem, he's just like, I have to get out into the outdoors. It's like when, when I'm too lost in my own head, I'm too tied up in my own world. I need to be reminded that I'm just a small part of something much larger and bigger than me. I thought that was really good advice. I was living on record royalties sometimes in the past. This is very fascinating. I was living on record royalties. Sometime in the past, I had written and performed songs that were most original and most influential, and I didn't know if I ever would again, and I didn't care. And so it's around this time, he's, there's all these like great, like random tangents. Think about the greatest conversations you've ever had in your life. It's like, they're, they're not linear. They don't follow like a predictable pattern. They go off on these weird tangents and you kind of these crazy stories that happen over

• 39:09Speaker 00

  a few minutes. The book is kind of like you're having this, this rambling conversation with Bob Dylan. And so around this time, Princeton is going to give him an honorary degree. He decides to accept it and he convinces the singer, David Crosby, to come with him. And his description of, of his friend, uh, just makes me laugh. And so he says, early in the week, we had gotten back from Princeton where I'd been given an honorary doctor degree. It had been a weird adventure. Somehow I had motivated David Crosby to come along. Crosby was a colorful and unpredictable character. He wore a cape, didn't get along with too many people and had a beautiful voice. He was an astre- a strephus companion. So I had to look up that word and it means noisy and difficult to control. And so then he tells the story of him and Crosby going to Princeton. He says, we pulled off Route

• 39:53Speaker 00

  80, found the university on a hot and cloudy day. In short time, the officials led me into a crowded room, put me in a robe, and soon I was looking out over a crowd of well dressed people. When my turn came to accept the degree, the speaker introducing me said how I had distinguished myself. And so this is what this speaker says. Though he is known to millions, he shuns publicity in organizations preferring the solidary of his family and isolation from the world. He remains the authentic expression of the disturbed and concerned conscious of young America. Bob had just been talking about in his life. He's like, you're, you guys are trying to make me the voice of a generation. I'm just making songs that speak to me. I don't want your labels. I don't want to be responsible for anybody else. And so this is, this part kind of makes me laugh when you read it. Cause

• 40:36Speaker 00

  you just got through, you know, this is, I'm telling you, just these notes and highlights, right? It's like, this goes on for quite a bit of him just struggling with this and trying to reject this. And, and so he's, he's sitting on stage, he's dressed in a robe, looking out, and he hears the way that the speaker is introducing him. And then he shares with us his inner monologue at the time. And he goes, oh, sweet Jesus. It was like a jolt. I shuddered and trem- and trembled. This is exactly what he spent the entire chapter, saying, I don't want this. It's making my life miserable. Oh, sweet Jesus. It was like a jolt. I shuddered and trembled but remained expressionless. The disturbed conscious of young America. There it was again. I couldn't believe it. Tricked once more. The speaker could have said many things. He could have emphasized a few things about

• 41:21Speaker 00

  my music. And he goes, this is the funny part. This is probably what made me laugh. He goes, I was so mad, I wanted to bite myself. And then he ends the story. After whispering and mumbling my way through the ceremony, I was handed the degree. We piled back into the Buick and drove away. It had been a strange day. And then at the very end of the chapter, he actually gets to the point of the chapter, right? Which is, I am making this album. And he's, there's a lot of times in his life where he just realizes like, he's too lost in his own head. He can only control what he wants to control. You have to just let go. Just go back to the work. Like, there's different times. He's still writing songs in, in, let's say, decade one of his career. He's still writing songs, maybe decade five. He's still performing. He's doing all these things. There is going to be a natural album

• 42:05Speaker 00

  flow of the quality. It's like, he's not going to maintain the best work he ever had for five decades. But that doesn't mean you stop. I think that's one of the most important things you take away from, from this book. And so Bob writes about this. I recorded some stuff. At least these songs wouldn't make any headlines. Message songs? There weren't any. Anybody listening for them would have to be disappointed. When will the old him be back? They would ask. Not today. That my records were still selling even surprised me. But there were some good songs and maybe there weren't. Who knows? But they weren't the kind where you hear an awful roaring in your head. I knew what those kinds of songs were like, and these weren't them. It's not like I didn't have any talent. I just wasn't feeling the for, the full force of the wind. I was listening to some of the playbacks and he sounded okay, but it wasn't great. Some critics would find the album

• 42:48Speaker 00

  to be lackluster. Oh, well. Others would triumph it. I took that as a good sign. All this happened in what critics would later refer to as my middle period. Okay. So then this is where, now he's, he going to jump the next chapter, takes place 17 years after the last story. At this point, he's 46 years old. He's lost. He's broken down. And you, you start reading through this section and I, I didn't, the very first time I read the book, cause I read this book for the first time, I don't know, like five years ago. I didn't know, like, if he ever stopped, right? And I knew he was still performing, but I didn't know if he was still writing and what he was doing. And so it's during this time where I'm like, oh, wait, I think this is the closest he ever got. There's an alternative,

• 43:33Speaker 00

  uh, history for where Bob Dylan at 46 says, you know, no more performing, no more, I'm done with this. And it would be at this point in the book where I think we finally like break and say, hey, you know what? I had a 26 year, 27 year run. That's good enough. I'm done. Cause this is the closest he ever gets to quitting. And he's talking about just being trapped in his own head. Always prolific, but never exact. Too many distractions had turned my musical path into a jungle of vines. I'd been following established customs and they weren't working. The windows had been boarded up for years and covered with cobwebs, and it's not like I didn't know. The previous 10 years had left me pretty whitewashed and wasted out professionally. Many times I'd come near the stage before

• 44:15Speaker 00

  a show and would catch myself thinking that I wasn't keeping my word to myself. I had single handedly shot myself in the foot too many times. It's nice to be known as a legend and people will pay to see one, but for most people, once is enough. I hadn't actually disappeared from the scene, but the road had narrowed. There was a missing person inside of myself and I needed to find him. I did try a few times, tried hard to force it. In nature, there's usually a remedy for everything. And that's where I'd usually go hunting for it. This is what I mentioned earlier. Think things out, but it was no use. I felt done for. An empty, burned out wreck. Too much static in my head and I couldn't dump the stuff. I'm in the bottomless pit of cultural oblivion. I'd been on an 18 month

• 44:59Speaker 00

  tour with Tom Petty. It would be my last. I had no connection to any kind of inspiration. Whatever was there to begin with had all vanished and shrunk. Tom was at the top of his game and I was at the bottom of mine. My own songs had become strangers to me. I couldn't wait to retire. The mirror had swung around and I could see the future. An old actor fumbling in garage cans outside the theater of past triumphs. And this is where he is saved by an old jazz singer. So in between breaks from Tom Petty, he's supposed to be playing a couple shows with the Grateful Dead. He's with them right now. They're practicing and they're like, hey, Bob, why don't we do some of your own song, old songs? And Bob's like, yeah, okay. Uh, I forgot something in my hotel. And he walked

• 45:42Speaker 00

  out saying, oh, I'll be right back. And he was planning on never returning and literally ending his career right then. He couldn't take it anymore. And I think the main lesson in this entire section is that instead of running away, you have to find ways to get out of your own head. And so we pick up the story where he just walked out and said, hey, I'll be right back. I got, I forgot something at the hotel. I wasn't planning on going back. I started out at the street, maybe four or five or six blocks went by. And then I heard the sounds of a jazz combo playing up ahead, walking past the door of a tiny bar. Now, this is really fascinating. He's stumbling on tiny bar of these amateur musicians trying to play to a crowd of almost nobody. Think about what's happening. 27 years in his past. This is the exact kind of place that he's started his own career. I looked

• 46:27Speaker 00

  in and saw that the musicians were playing. There were just a few people inside. It looked like the last stop on a train to nowhere. Something was calling to me to come in and I entered. I got within four feet of the stage and just stood there. I ordered a gin and tonic and faced the singer. He was an older man. They played jazz ballads. The singer wasn't very forceful, but he didn't have to be. He was relaxed, but he sang with natural power. Suddenly, without warning, it was like the guy had an open window to my soul. It was like he was saying, you should do it this way. All of the sudden, I had understood something faster than I'd ever did before. I knew where the power was coming from and it wasn't his voice. I used to do this thing, I'm thinking. It was a long time ago and it had been automatic. No one had ever taught me. This technique was so elemental,

• 47:12Speaker 00

  so simple, and I had forgotten it. It was like I'd forgotten how to button my own pants. I wondered if I could still do it and I wanted to try. This causes him to run back to where he thought he was never going to go back. He goes back to the rehearsal hall where he's doing, where he's practicing with the Grateful Dead. He says, I could not wait to get started. I wanted to see if I could sing using the same method that the old singer used. At first, it was hard going, like drilling through a brick wall. All I could taste was dust, but then miraculously, something internal came unhinged. In the beginning, all I could get out was a blood choked coughing grunt and it blasted up from the bottom of my lower self. And this is the main point. But it bypassed my brain. Get out of your

• 47:56Speaker 00

  own head. It burned, but I was awake. This was revelatory. I played these shows with the, with the Grateful Dead and never had to think twice about it. I had that old jazz singer to thank. And so that idea of taking a break, getting out of your own mind, something that appears over and over again, seems to be very useful to Bob Dylan and his career. And after that, he's like, okay, I'm going to make great music again. And so he starts writing a bunch of songs for the first time. First time in over like 10 years. He's just writing, writing, writing. And Bono from U2 is going to come over for dinner at his house and connect. He's going to read these lyrics, but I gotta read.

• 48:33Speaker 00

  Bob Dylan, again, in just like a few sentences can tell an entire story. So he wants to describe to the reader what dinner with Bono is like. One night, Bono, the singer from U2, was over for dinner with some other friends. Spending time with Bono was like eating dinner on a train. It feels like you're moving, going somewhere. Bono's got the soul of an ancient poet and you have to be careful around him. He can roar till the earth shakes. He's also a closet philosopher. He bought a case of Guinness with him. We were talking about things that you talk about when you're spending the winter with somebody. Bono says things that can sway anybody. And so at the, towards the end of dinner, Bono's like, hey, do you have any new songs? Do you have any new music? And Dylan goes and pulls out all these compositions that he wrote.

• 49:16Speaker 00

  And like, Bono's looking over them, reading them. He's like, hey, uh, these are really good. You, I have a producer that you should go work with. And so Dylan is going to work with the producer that Bono recommends. And they set up shop and they're going to record a new album together in this mansion in New Orleans. And during this process, in some cases, they're making great music, but there's other times when they're making this album that Bob Dylan feels lost. And so I just want to read the story that takes place because it goes back to this idea of like him finding ways to get back on track. He feels that he's lost, he's not doing well. He, he might sit with that for a little bit and he's like, okay, I gotta do something about this. And most of it's like movement, doing something else, just not sitting wall on, right? I was up early and rooted my wife out of bed. Daylight was still two hours away. What's wrong now? She said.

• 50:00Speaker 00

  I hadn't thought that anything was wrong. Within minutes, she had slipped out of her loose robe and was making coffee. By daybreak, we were riding on the Harley and had crossed the Mississippi River, heading towards Route 90. No purpose in heading there, it was just a place to go. I was feeling stuffy, I needed to get out of town. Something wasn't clicking, like when the world is hidden from your eyes and you need to find it. I parked the bike close to an old water tower. We got out and walked around. It felt good to be off by ourselves. I looked at my wife. The one thing about her that I always loved was that she was never one of these people who thinks that someone else is the answer to their happiness, me or anybody else. She always had her own built in happiness. I valued her opinion and I trusted her. We pulled in for the night and I shut the bike down. It was a nice ride. We stayed at a bed and breakfast cottage.

• 50:44Speaker 00

  I laid down, listened to the crickets and the wildlife out the window in the eerily blackness. I like the night. Things grow at night. My imagination is available to me at night. All my preconceptions of things go away. Sometimes you could be looking for heaven in the wrong places. This is such an interesting idea. My imagination is available to me at night. All my preconceptions of things go away. Sometimes you could be looking for heaven in the wrong places. Sometimes it could be under your feet or in your bed. Next day I woke up, I felt like I had figured something out. And so they wind up finishing the album. And then there's just this random conversation that happens towards the end of the chapter that I really, uh, really enjoyed and I thought was really, really valuable. So he's talking to this producer, the producer's name is Danny.

• 51:29Speaker 00

  And Danny's like, hey, what other music are you listening to? And Danny's actually shocked when he hears what Bob Dylan had been listening to. This is in the eighties. And so, uh, I'm going to read my note first and then I'll read the section to you. And it said, I think it'll make sense in that order. Says, somebody different was bound to come along sooner or later. Bob Dylan knows that because at one time that somebody different was him. And so Danny's like, okay, you know, who, who have you been listening to recently? And he says, I told him, Ice T. He was surprised, but he shouldn't have been. Ice T, Public Enemy, NWA, Run DMC. This is Bob Dylan describing who's listening to, right? These guys definitely weren't standing around bullshitting. They were beating drums, tearing it up, hurling horses over cliffs. They were all poets and knew what was going on.

• 52:14Speaker 00

  Somebody different was bound to come along sooner or later. Who would know that world? Who had been born and raised with it? Be all of it and more. He'd be able to balance himself on one leg on a tightrope that stretched across the universe and you would know him when he came. There would only be one like him. He'd be doing it with hard words and he'd be working 18 hours a day. Again, I love that part. I just want to reread my note again. Somebody different was bound to come along sooner or later. Bob Dylan knows that because at one time that was him. So that album is finished. Bob Dylan gets to the last chapter. Okay. And this is, he really does write, like he wants to make sure you're paying attention. Okay.

• 52:58Speaker 00

  You have to fill a lot of this, you have to fill in a lot of this stuff for yourself because we're at the very end of the book. And this is now a flashback to when his father was still alive, even though this is the last chapter of the book. So it says, my father had his own way of looking at things. To him, life was hard work. He'd come from a generation of different values, heroes and music, and wasn't so sure that the truth would set anybody free. He was pragmatic and always had a word of cryptic advice. Remember, Robert, in life, anything can happen. Even if you don't have all the things you want, be grateful for the things you don't have that you don't want. I was doing my best. I had to thoroughly feel that I was earning my fee.

• 53:39Speaker 00

  Nothing could have convinced me that I was actually a songwriter and I wasn't, not in the conventional songwriter sense of the world. So the thing, it's going back. This is before a record deal, before he'd even written his first song. We are now back to the Bob Dylan that is trying to be signed, that is trying to achieve his life dream. And we get to one of the, the, probably the turning point of his life is when he's first introduced into Woody Guthrie, which is, go back to the very beginning where he's hitchhiking. He's like, I gotta get out of Minnesota. I gotta get to Woody Guthrie. I've got to find this guy. And so, uh, so he says, as far as serious songwriting went, outside of Woody Guthrie, I didn't see a single soul who did it. The one song that had hooked me up with Leeds music, which is how we started the book,

• 54:23Speaker 00

  how we started the podcast, right? The one that had convinced John Hammond to bring me over there in the first place was an homage and lyric and melody to the man who had pointed out the starting place for my identity and destiny, the great Woody Guthrie. That's a crazy sentence. This is the one man who had pointed out the starting place for my identity and destiny, the great Woody Guthrie. I wrote the song with him in mind and I used the melody from one of his old songs, having no idea it would be the first of maybe a thousand songs that I would write. My life had never been the same since I first heard Woody on a record player in Minneapolis a few years earlier. When I first heard him, it was like a million Megatron bomb had dropped. And then he goes back and gives you the prehistory of why he was so obsessed. This is when he's, it's around college, but I don't think he ever went to school. I think he dropped out. I don't even know if he took a single class.

• 55:08Speaker 00

  He says, I found a local record store. What I was looking for were folk records. This is when he locks himself in those booths that you could just listen to and he would just stay there over and over again for hours and hours and hours. Then he says, then I'd go further up the street and drop into a coffee house. So coffee houses were a lot, where a lot of folk musicians would first start playing. Okay. This is before he gets to New York. I was looking for players with kindred pursuits. The first guy I met in Minneapolis, who was just like me, was sitting around in there. It was John Kohners. So John, another folk musician is playing at this coffee house. Okay. Performers like John and myself would go anywhere to where anybody we thought we hadn't heard before. I was beginning to feel like a character from within these songs, even beginning to think like one. I played morning, noon and night. That is all I did. I usually fell asleep with my guitar in my hands.

• 55:53Speaker 00

  I went through the entire summer that way. And so this part of the book is again, how bad do you want it? How bad do you want to chase after and achieve the dream that you have for your life? We already know what he wants to do. He knows without a doubt, I'm going to be a folk musician. I'm going to sing and write songs. And so he says, by this time I was making three to $5 every time I played at either a coffee house or a pizza parlor. This is what I mean. Again, how bad do you want it? This guy is doing shows at a pizza parlor. This is the same person later in his life, he's going to sell 125 million records. But first, you gotta play the pizza parlor. The place I was living in was no more than an empty storage room with a sink and a window looking into an alley, no closet and a toilet down the hall. I put a mattress on the floor. I met an actress, an inspiring thespian named Flo.

• 56:38Speaker 00

  Flo was odd looking, but beautiful in a wacky way. She had long red hair, dressed in black from head to foot, and she had a folksy demeanor. She was a mystic. She believed in the occult powers of trees and things like that. She was also very serious about reincarnation. We used to have strange conversations. One day she asked me if I ever heard of Woody Guthrie. I said, sure. I had heard him on all these other records with these two other musicians. Then she asked if I ever heard him all by himself on his own records. I couldn't remember having done that. Flo said that her brother had some of his records and she would take me over there to hear them. That Woody Guthrie was somebody that I should definitely get hip to. Something about this sounded important and I became interested. When the record started to play, I was stunned. I didn't know if I was stoned or straight.

• 57:23Speaker 00

  What I heard was Woody singing a whole lot of his own compositions all by himself. All these songs made my head spin. It made me want to gasp. I couldn't believe it. He had such a grip on things. He was like none of the other singers I'd ever heard and neither were his songs. It was like the record player itself had just picked me up and flung me across the room. A voice in my head said, so this is the game. A great curiosity had seized me and I had to figure out who Woody Guthrie was. It didn't take me long. My friend Dave happened to have Woody's autobiography, Bound for Glory, and he lent it to me. I went through it from cover to cover like a hurricane, totally focused on every word and the book sang out to me like the radio.

• 58:05Speaker 00

  Guthrie writes like the whirlwind and you get tripped up on the sound of the words alone. Pick up the book anywhere, turn to any page and he hits the ground running. Who is he? He's a hustling ex-sign painter from Oklahoma, an anti-materialist who grew up in the depression and Dust Bowl days. Migrated west, had a tragic childhood, a lot of fire in his life, both figuratively and literally. Woody's got a fierce, poetic soul. He divides the world between those who work and those who don't and is interested in the liberation of the human race and wants to create a world worth living in. Bound for Glory is a hell of a book. I decided then and there to sing nothing but Guthrie's songs. It's almost like I didn't have a choice. I said to myself, I was going to be his greatest disciple.

• 58:50Speaker 00

  I wasn't even sure if he was alive anymore. The book makes it seem like he was a character from the old past, but my friend put me up to date on him, told me that he was in ill health somewhere in the east and I pondered that. One thing for sure, Woody Guthrie had never seen nor heard of me, but it felt like he was saying, I'm going to be going away, but I'm leaving this job in your hands. I know I can count on you. It was time for me to get out of Minneapolis. New York City was the place I wanted to be. With only a few tattered rags and a suitcase and guitar, I stood on the edge of town in hitchhike east to find Woody Guthrie. Although I might've been slack in a lot of things, my mind was ordered and disciplined. New York City, mid-winter, 1961.

• 59:31Speaker 00

  Whatever I was doing was working out okay and I intended to stay with it. I felt like I was closing in on something. And that is where I'll leave it. That is 429 books down, 1,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon.