Posted on by

Scenes from Hamilton College II: Freshman Year Continued (with cameos from Honey, the Print Shop, and Billy Bragg)

Note: In Part I of this series I wrote about my freshman year at Hamilton, focusing on two friends, Ian and Jake. Part II will branch out and cover a fairly wide, and somewhat random, set of memories.

Epigraph:

I had an uncle who once played for Red Star Belgrade
He said some things are really best left unspoken
But I prefer it all to be out in the open

Billy Bragg

I have already written quite a bit about the characters who lived in the North Dorm freshman year at Hamilton, however there are a few more to cover. First were the first floor stoners. Basmo was a stoner, and he lived on my side of the dorm, but on the other side of the first floor lived the hardcore stoners. This consisted of a quad of guys whose names I don’t totally recall, but one was Peter Kimber, and who got baked at all waking hours and played Roger Waters’ Amused to Death solo on repeat. Next to them, in a double I believe, lived Keys. Keys’ actual name was Caleb, but everyone called him Keys because of the six to eight keys he had dangling from around his neck at all times. What on earth did he need all those keys for? One for the dorm, maybe one for a car (although he should not have been driving at all because he was the single biggest stoner in the dorm and perhaps on campus), what else? I can’t imagine.

Keys and I were not that close, but I did see a lot of him because we had the same job, which was in the school print shop. I don’t know if print shops still exist in the same form in this digital age, but back then the print shop was busy as. We held the campus down. There were two slightly older women who worked at the print shop full-time and three of us students helping out. The full-timers were Sally and Deb. Deb was the boss, and she was kind of motherly and kind to the students. Sally was nice too, but she could be tough. She would bark at us when we made mistakes, which was often because we were running large machines that would glitch pretty frequently. Sally was both the little sister to Deb and also the enforcer. I liked them both, even though Deb ended up firing me, which I’ll get to later.

So Keys would come in lit every day and sort of fumble through his work, which consisted mostly of stapling and collating. I was trusted more than Keys, with good reason, so I ran the machines, but I also did stapling and collating. We printed things for professors, menus for the dining halls, the school newsletter, and a bunch of other stuff. The third student was a girl whose name I don’t recall, and she was a super-hardcore feminist. Everything in the world that was wrong was men’s fault, and it was her only topic. She didn’t seem to dislike me so much as just want to lecture Keys and I all through work, which usually lasted two to three hours in the afternoon, about the ills of men. I was, and am, up for a little feminist theory but Keys was no help and I don’t even think he noticed her, so it was kind of just me and her. Serious feminism and collating are, perhaps, not best paired.

I didn’t originally want the print shop job. I needed work, and there was kind of an intake for all working students where you put your first choice. I put library, but didn’t get the gig. John Innes put audio/video and he got it, which meant he often had to get up early to set up videos for professor’s classes. I would not have been good at that. The print shop was more my speed, but eventually it got really repetitive and I started skipping work more and more. I would go walk in the woods behind campus, or just drink coffee with about a half cup of honey and hang around after class. I also improved as a student through the year, and took my English classes pretty seriously so I was spending more time in the library, although still not sleeping much.

My money situation was tight, although not as bad as it would later be during my junior year abroad in New Zealand where it was super tight. I had a little income from the print shop and my parents sent a small allowance once in a while, but I usually didn’t have more than about 15 bucks in my pocket at any one time. What money I did have went mostly to CDs, as many as I could afford. I had a dining hall pass, but the dining hall food was not really my style so I mostly lived on toast and coffee with honey. Then at night people would order pizza from a local shop, but that was too expensive for me so I would get “friend dough.” Fried dough is just what it sounds like–deep friend pizza dough with powdered sugar, and it cost about $1.50 for a big box. Not the best diet, but it was what I could afford.

One time the father of one of my classmates from high school visited for some reason; he must have been in the area. We met for lunch, and when he left he handed me $100 bucks. This was a serious windfall, and I immediately blew it on CDs, perhaps Neil Young’s Harvest Moon and others. My CD collection, although no rival to Ian’s was slowly increasing and I liked it.

Back in the dorm, in addition to the guys I have discussed, there were also girls, who lived on the second and fourth floor. I got to know the girls directly above us on the second floor pretty well, although not many of the others in the dorm. Among these was Rochelle, who was the girl I was closest to. Rochelle was, I think, from New York, and when she arrived on campus she made a big deal about having a boyfriend. This didn’t last long however, and although I didn’t want her to be my girlfriend I did like hanging out with her. She kind of mothered me a bit though, which I wasn’t so into, because I was going to do what I was going to do. I still have her contact, and I believe she might even read this piece! I think I also met Marie Bishko freshman year, and Marie is someone I thought was really cool.

I don’t really remember any us North guys hooking up with the second floor girls, but it must of happened. Another incident which occurred around this time had to do with my roommate B. and his girlfriend from high school. Like Rochelle, and even more so, he made a big deal of his girlfriend and told us all kind of semi-salacious details. Then one day he told us she was coming to visit and he wanted the three of us in the quad to go to a hotel for a night. I told him sure, if you pay, but he said no. He was dead serious but we told him to forget it, so sure enough she arrived and they hooked up while we all pretended to sleep. That only happened once, thankfully, and it still strikes me as pretty odd. He later broke up with her and fell in love with a Jewish girl, but that didn’t last either because he wasn’t Jewish.

I mentioned in Part I that Jake pledged the fraternity Sig. Ian and John Slack also pledged, Chi Psi (I had to Google the spelling). I spent some time at Chi Psi as well as, where I was alleged to sit on the steps in my trench coat, but I preferred Sig. There was another frat called Deke, and that was where the wildest, and the worst parties were. At Deke there was copious amounts of Milwaukee’s Best (the fabled Beast) and jungle juice. The parties were terrible, but there was a pool table which was a bonus. I didn’t drink much at college, mostly because I had no money, but I did drink some at Deke, with exactly the results you would imagine. I believe it was at Deke where Marc Campbell pulled off his famous pacification move. I didn’t pledge a frat, and I was and remain glad I didn’t. Greek life wasn’t for me.

One guy who I believe lived in North was called Gabe. Gabe was super popular at first in freshman year, and he played guitar on the grass outside the dorm. He was pretty good and he would play “Sexuality” by Billy Bragg which was surprisingly popular in 1992. People, including girls, would flock around him, but over time something seemed to happen to Gabe. He ran for class president and lost to a guy called Kerry who was African American. Kerry lived down the hill in a different part of campus, and he ran really hard for the job. I think Gabe’s ran mostly on a music ticket, and although he got a lot of votes I think he came in second. He may have taken this hard, because he kind of faded into the background, or maybe he just changed up his action. I think I voted, but may have voted for Kerry.

As I mentioned, Jake and I saw less of one another once he started pledging, however we still saw each other in English class and in the English building. We overlapped professors, although he knew some I did not. The two best professors in the English department were George Balkhe and Fred Wagner. Balkhe was still in his prime, maybe late 50’s, whereas Wagner was older and I believe in a semi-emeritus role. I wasn’t even sure I ever took a class from Wagner, but it’s been confirmed that I did, Modern British and American Drama, which makes sense. I didn’t much like 20th century American plays, as plays are mostly blueprints anyway. In any case, Mr. Wagner knew me early in the year because Balkhe praised my reading knowledge to him. Jake and I would go to Wagner’s house, also down the hill toward the town of Clinton (the closest town to Hamilton, about a 15 minute walk), and I recall once we played him the song “Marlene Dietrich’s Favorite Poem” by Peter Murphy, formerly of Bauhaus, with Peter Murphy murmuring “sad-eyed pearl and drop lips…”

Peter Murphy is super underrated by the way, and Wagner liked the song, which just showed how cool he was.

I took a few classes with Balkhe, and we studied poems, and novels–typical choices mostly. I enjoyed these and read most of them, even Faulkner who is really dense. For the ones I didn’t I just faked it. Like I said, Balkhe thought I was amazing because on the first day of class he asked for a list of books we had read and I listed like 200. These were mostly Agatha Christie and John LeCarre and such, but I guess it was good enough. Balhke liked the singer Donovan and the song “Mellow Yellow.”

Electrical banana
Is gonna be a sudden craze

(I later saw Donovan at a new age convention in Boston when I was visiting Ian after college, which I will recount later).

Wagner and Balkhe are both passed away now, so rest in peace to two great English teachers and mentors.

That’s about all I have on freshman year. The last thing is about the featured image for this post, which is the album cover for Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy. I have written about The Pogues quite a bit, but the album I listened to most freshman year was Oh Mercy. After geology class had a break before lunch and would go back and semi-sleep to Oh Mercy. The quad was always empty at that time of day, and this was the best rest I would get. The album still makes me sleepy to this day, and features excellent production from the famed producer Daniel Lanois. So thank you Bob and Daniel.

Dedication: For Fred. And for George–I hope you are enjoying a little electrical banana up there in heaven.

to be continued…

Posted on by

On My Week with Isobel (aka London Girl) Part II

Oh sister when I come to lie in your arms

Please don’t treat me like a stranger

Boy Dylan

Note: This is Part II of the series on my week with Isobel. Part I is here, and left off with my decision not to sleep with her, come what may.

PART II — Thursday → Saturday, Early Morning

Thursday

I woke up Thursday a little shook to be honest. Things had progressed so far, so fast, and although my feet seemed under me, it was hard to be sure. The fact that she had made a hard pass at me the day before was on my mind. In any case, we met by appointment in the morning . It went the same as before; we walked over to Pret again, but this time she ordered lightly and barely ate. As it turned out this was a sign of things to come. I finished my sandwich and coffee, and we walked back to campus, side by side, talking easily but underneath it something had shifted. We were no longer orbiting — we were a dyad, openly.

Back in the garden, same bench, same proximity. We weren’t spying on sessions anymore. We weren’t even pretending to. We talked all morning like our lives depended on it. And in a way, they did. We covered the history of thought, we recovered our careers, and I told her all about the various ups and downs I had had over the last several years at my school. We talked about astrology and she voiced some of her doubts. I told her I wasn’t a “believer” per se, but that the study fascinated me. We left it open.

After the morning break, we reconvened at a bench in the courtyard, this time in public. I was in a bit of a dilemma, you see my wife was scheduled to come to town that very night, and she would attend the dinner gala, the final dinner for the week. Somehow, I had to get ahead of this situation; I had to lower the temperature. So, I did what I often do in a difficult situation, I leaned on Dylan, specifically the quote from “Oh Sister” off of the album Desire.

I told her, “I feel like we should be like brother and sister.” Containment disguised as poetry. It was the best I could do. This took her aback a bit, and then I explained that my wife would be arriving, in a matter of six or seven hours. She didn’t say much, just took it in. She already knew I was married. She didn’t know my wife would be in Oxford. Whole different deal.

This revelation changed something in her body, and something in mine. We went to lunch — Indian again. Normally I ate fully, and she usually ate less, but that day we both pushed food around the plates. She couldn’t eat a bite; her appetite had totally shut down. Mine was not much better, and I picked at the curry to try to make it look decent. We paid and left. The epiphany of Tuesday had tipped into cognitive and bodily overload by Thursday.

During the afternoon, we talked as before but because the sessions were winding down I think we actually went to a session. I also browsed the bookstore, which was really cool. It was a big table in the common area and it was run by a bookseller who had his own astrology bookshop somewhere in the south. I had switched from the Mendoza Line to Dylan and was playing “Red River Shore” and “Mississippi” in addition to Oh Sister.

Evening arrived. My wife arrived at the hostel two minutes from campus. I went to meet her and walked her back to FAS. She met Isobel and Maddy before dinner — brief, surface-level. My wife complimented Isobel’s shoes. I could barely hold in a laugh for some reason. After all, she couldn’t have known what she was stepping into.

We ate in the dining hall — I sat with my wife and the one Japanese woman there, switching English and Japanese. Isobel sat elsewhere with Mystery and her daughter. There was a collection for the tutors — I took the box table to table, people applauding, giving money. My wife later said I was performing. Maybe I was. I was also alive.

After dinner my wife was tired from travel and wanted to sleep. I walked her to the hostel, kissed goodnight, then went back to the courtyard. Wine, tutors, Maddy, Isobel. A lighter night between us — more social, less fused — but the thread held. We probably stayed until one.

I slept well.


The finish line was visible.

Friday

We met again in the morning — Pret. This time she made a scene of helping me pick breakfast. My appetite returned. She still didn’t eat. We walked fifteen minutes to a large park, quiet, green, open.

She was struggling — not with me, but with everything. Engagement, career, identity, meaning. We sat on a bench. “Don’t sit too close to me,” she said.

“OK, how close is good?”

“Right here,” she said, indicating a space about one inch to her right. We talked about our situation–there was nothing else to talk about. We named it outright.

Then she got up and walked to a small arched bridge over a narrow river and said, She stood there for a bit, and then said in a loud declarative voice:“This is my bridge.”

I said, your bridge absolutely.

She stayed there a long time, twenty minutes maybe. I sat on a bench farther back. Eventually she came back to sit beside me — to my left again, shoulders touching. Then, she began to collapse onto me. Shoulders low, breath shallow. I half carried her back to campus. Ambulances and sirens on the street — not symbolic, actual. The world felt like an emergency. We moved slowly. It took almost 40 minutes.

At this same time, I was thinking, obviously. I came up with a name for what Isobel and I were experiencing. I called it the “catalyzed emergency,” just instinctively. I knew at once what I meant, and I also knew one day I would write this story.

We got back to campus and she went to look for Claire Martin, the tutor from day one. She ended up finding Claire, who was free, and Claire held space for her for ninety minutes. No charge. A private grace from a wonderful soul.

I went to the bookshop again. I talked to another Dylan fan and we had such a good chat that I pulled up Dylan’s Red River Shore and played it to him on my phone. He didn’t know it, but loved it. He did a moment chart on his phone and we talked about Dylan’s chart.

At the bookstore I met Melanie Reinhart, for the first time in person. Melanie was the first astrologer I reached out to in 2012 when I was first getting deep into the subject, and it was she who referred me to Darby Costello. So this was a fortunate meeting indeed.

We talked for nearly an hour about her childhood in Africa and her longing to return. I bought Sue Tompkins — Aspects in Astrology because Melanie said another author, who had a book on the charts of musicians, wasn’t a real astrologer. I couldn’t lose face in front of Melanie so I chose Tompkins, but although it’s a great book, I suspect the other one was more my speed.

Melanie asked me up to her room to help carry her bags down the three flights of strips. When we got to the room, she finished packing, and I carried her bags down from her third-floor suite and said goodbye at the gate.

Afterward I found Isobel again, near the entrance. She was steadier, post-Claire. We pushed through the crowd in the quad and slipped to the chapel to say goodbye privately. We spoke plainly — never forget, life-changing, go back to our lives. I told her I wanted to know her as an old woman. She agreed. We exchanged WhatsApp.

She left campus.

I said goodbye to Maddy later in the quad. I said goodbye to Jim, the dream tutor whose session Isobel and I attended and I left out of this story. “You’re a funny guy,” I said. “Takes one to know one,” he answered. The Exeter gate closed behind me, and I walked to the hotel my wife and I were to stay at alone.

My wife was in London at the Sherlock Holmes Museum. I wandered Exeter, then went to the Tolkien exhibition — letters to his children, original sketches, it was a really moving experience. Afterward a stationery shop — a single Tintin postcard. Dinner at the hotel restaurant — bouillabaisse and red wine. Then I texted Isobel. One message became a hundred.

I sent her “Leave the City” by Jason Molina and Red River Shore. She listened and cried. She said she wouldn’t go home to her fiancé that night — too flooded — she would stay at a hotel instead. We planned how we would keep in touch.

I slept next to my wife in a new bed, and in a new world.

Saturday, Early Morning

My wife had returned somewhat late from London and she was tired and slept early. She had an early flight, and a bus pickup 5:15 AM.

When the morning came I walked her to the stop. Street quiet, air washed and pale.

We hugged, kissed briefly, light and familiar, and she boarded the bus.

I stood there watching it pull away.
Not knowing yet what I had broken open.
Not knowing yet what I had kept intact.

Posted on by · 3 Comments

On the Ump

Epigraph I:
It’s better to burn out than to fade away.
Neil Young
Epigraph II:

I’m seething in the feeling that I’m driving the dynamite truck

Seam (originally by Breaking Circus)

Epigraph III:

Anything can come

John O’Donohue

New Note: I first wrote and published this piece in September of 2018, after I left my job, temporarily, and was casting about in a somewhat indistinct way. It’s about 1200 words, and I wrote in about 12 minutes on my phone, which is not normal. What was happening of course was, I was recovering my childhood abuse through PTSD symptoms, and this led me, at least at this moment, to a kind of hyper-clarity. PTSD is really quite interesting, in that it can lead to hyper-clarity and the total opposite, sometimes within the course of a pretty short amount of time. Such it was with this time period.

This piece was about me trying to enlist my father, specifically, into understanding and taking some kind of action, on the abuse that I had suffered. This was not happening at the time, and I was a little frustrated by it, but then I hadn’t fully worked out all the pieces, so how could he have, I guess? Basically, I was saying “read what I have to say and you be the judge.” Instead, other things occurred, which I won’t get into at this time; I got over the immediate PTSD phase, and went to New York to see rock bands. 

I am still working on getting my father to come up to the plate on this whole issue, and I think he is getting there. The other night I discussed with him Oedipus at Colonus, the play by Sophocles, written between 406 and 405 BCE. That’s a while back. Here is the AI summary (yes I’m giving way to AI summaries):

Oedipus at Colonus is a Greek tragedy by Sophocles that follows the blind and exiled king Oedipus as he arrives in Colonus, near Athens. Accompanied by his devoted daughter Antigone, Oedipus learns that this sacred ground is prophesied to be the place of his death, and his burial there will bring blessings to Athens. The play chronicles his final days as he confronts his past, is threatened by his brother-in-law Creon, and is unlimitedly received by King Theseus of Athens, who helps him find a peaceful end.

That’s a pretty heavy plot; the ancients knew their business for sure. My own father is neither blind nor exiled, although he is a little deaf and tends to repeat himself from time to time, but I think he is still on top of things, or has the capacity to be. What I believe is, there is still time, because there is always time.
=====

Original Preface: This little piece alighted on the author a few weeks ago when he was undergoing a bit of a midlife re-orientation.  The piece is presented as it presented itself, with edits for cleanliness only. 

Karma is simply the field of what you put in place in your last lifetime.  As a person you arrange your life in such a way that it leaves clues as to the road you took.  When it’s time to switchback, all you have to do is have the courage to take the turn.  After the turn, it’s basically just a matter of reading the tree markers in the forest.  The challenge is, some of the tree makers have fallen in the leaves, been washed out by rain, or moved by the wind.  So you are in new territory.  The map, the degraded set of markers you left behind, is not the territory.  However the last path was so densely specific that we keep trying to use our old map on the new path.  We need that old map for a bit because those markers are the only ones we have.   However we need to find our footing pretty darn quick in order to learn to navigate the new territory.  Otherwise, we follow the markers and mistake them for fresh signs.  Very quickly, the old signals become noise. And then we are in a deep dark wood and are in danger of over-exposure, or, worse, pure confusion and terror about where the path may lie.

The individual is mortal, and beyond mortality is the mystery.  Tribes and societies are forms of collectives, and collectives form a spiral pattern that we call a system. Collectives, and spirals, are mortal as well, and when a spiral approaches its switch back point, the map begins to degrade and the particles of the spiral, the people in the current incarnation of the pattern, must attempt to discriminate the signal from the noise.  Of course this is a much more difficult task than it is for an individual because there are many more tree markers and the winds and rains are howling all about.  This is simply because the field is larger to accommodate so many souls.  So instead of just having to read a few old tree markers, folks must try to receive the field.

To receive the field you have to read the field, and the only way to read the field is to be looking right at it.  In baseball, there is only one position that can see the field and this is the catcher.  That’s why catchers are said to be good management material in general. Another way to say this is they have a wider view of the constraint set.  However, although the catcher can see the field and understand the constraint set in front of him, there is one variable he cannot control.  And this is, of course, the umpire.  The ump.

The ump calls the balls and strikes and the ump is a court of no appeal.  After all, he has the power to toss you from the ballgame altogether.  The only way to deal with this particular variable is to hone the craft of a catcher.  The first piece of craft is the act of framing a pitch.  Here the catcher subtly adjusts his glove in order to obstruct the ump’s view of the location of the pitch.  It is easy for the catcher to whip his glove on a ball in the dirt back to the strike zone, but the ump will spot that in a second.  So a catcher, if he wants to be any good, has to learn a little guile.

This guile can taken pretty far; and there are other ways to work an ump as well.  The classic, “ah come on ump,” is OK, but it’s the same as whipping the bill out of the dirt really.  A more effective trick is chatting the ump up.  Becoming his friend and letting him think you are actually on his side.  This is effective to a point as well, and extends the craft.   However here is where we need to remember our Dylan.  From “Just Like the Tom Thumb Blues,” we learn the following:

As Dylan once sang, you can start out soft and end up hitting the hard stuff — thinking people will stand behind you when things get rough, only to find out the bluff was your own. Sometimes you just want to go back to New York City and say you’ve had enough.
— after Bob Dylan

Dylan is saying that though the use of guile helps you work the ump, you can start to mistake guile for the deeper craft.  You start to fall into your own trick.  You start to think you are the ump.  And these are deeper waters indeed.  In fact, this is the most dangerous game.  And in this zone, we need a secret weapon.

The idea of a secret weapon is apparently popular in many superhero movies these days, and we can read the field just a little to see why.  These so-called secret weapons may take the outward form of a literal weapon, one which defends against the apparent enemy and leaves death and destruction in its wake.  However when we use this kind of weapon, the forest we are in is in fact that of the irreal, where the furies shriek and howl.  However the superhero’s true secret weapon is something altogether different.  His true secret weapon is the light within, which can be transmuted into gold and used to navigate the irreal, and hunt the most dangerous game.  Where is that light within?  To find it, the catcher has to go pretty far back into things to find it.  In certain eras, folks may need to do something a little difficult to get there—as the Chinese say, may you live in interesting times.  The catcher, here, has to remember.

The first song I remember my own father singing, and one of the only ones I head from him, was from Bob Dylan.  I didn’t know who Dylan was, nor did I know the name of the song. The line my father sang was one of those old Dylan riddles — something about a pump that won’t work because someone stole the handles. I didn’t understand it then, but it landed in me like a talisman.
— after Bob Dylan .

If the catcher is blessed to have such a talisman, he has a fighting chance.  The thing to do here is to keep your eyes and ears on the field and your gut and your body tuned into the ump.  Only this way can the little catcher tell when it’s time to play his card, which is of course the joker.  People have sought Dylan in all his guises to the ends of the earth and no one, to my knowledge, has caught onto his tricks.  I can’t say for sure that I’m onto all of them either, but I knew one thing.  When the vandals have those handles, the pump ain’t working. This is the moment the catcher makes his break with the ump. This is when he calls his bluff.

Dedication: For my Father, who caught me how to catch.

Posted on by

On the Between-Song Patter on the Bob Dylan Bootleg Record “Peco’s Blues”

Introduction

Behind any work of art, pretty much, there is some kind of “process.” The scope and complexity of this process differs across art forms, of course. The writer’s process is rather different than that of, let’s say, the magician David Copperfield. I find all artistic processes fascinating, and am drawn specifically to what happens “backstage.” Backstage is a world unto itself.

In the early 1970’s, the film director Sam Peckinpah was making a film called Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and he asked Bob Dylan to do the soundtrack. He also offered him a small role in the movie, a character called Alias. Dylan hadn’t really done a soundtrack before, nonetheless he headed down to Mexico to work on the film with Peckinpah. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid the film is ok; it’s not my favorite Peckinpah by any means. (That is reserved for Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, with the one and only Warren Oates in the lead role. Oates around this time also starred in the film Cockfighter, which features the greatest rejected tagline of any film even “he came into town with his cock in his hands and what he did with it was illegal in 48 states.”) The Pat Garrett soundtrack in many ways transcends the film, mostly because this is where we are first introduced to “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” which would go on to become one of Dylan’s best known songs, and is a really good soundtrack overall, however I am more interested in an extended set of outtakes from the sessions which are collected on a bootleg record called Peco’s Blues. Peco’s Blues features a number of alternate versions of the best known songs on the soundtrack, including Heaven’s Door and “Billy,” however the most interesting part of Peco’s Blues for me is the black and forth patter between Dylan, his sound engineer Chuck, and his band. This patter, I suggest, opens a fascinating and unique window into Dylan’s working methods and general approach to art. In what follows we will look at each incident of patter or conversation in the order they occur. All of the instances occur within the first 20 minutes of the nearly 70 minute recording as Dylan, his band, and the engineer endeavor to get on the same musical page.

Patter at the End of “Billy 2,” around the 7:34 Mark:

Dylan (D) wraps up a lengthy take of Billy 2 and asks his engineer Chuck (C):

D: Was that any good?

C: Pretty good Bob. What happened was was you hit the mic twice when you were moving around out there and we had a couple of clunks on it.

D: That’s too bad (…) Shit, I wish Sam was here. He’d know what to do.

C: That mic’s just a little more sensitive than the Sennheiser’s and I’m getting a little…

D: That’s too, uh…that’s…

C: And I’m getting a little puff of wind sometimes when you get real close to it when you sing.

D: That’s too sensitive.

C: Let me move it back a little for you Bob.

D: I think we must have got it though Chuck.

C: (with what sounds like a pencil in his mouth) Oh I recorded it, darn tootin’. I had a little puff from your voice once and you knocked the mic twice.

D: Well that might have been alls that we need.

C: You wanna, you wanna hear a playback on it?

D: Yeah, I would.

Comment:

We see right away here that Dylan is the boss and that the engineer is walking on eggshells a little bit. This is made clear by Dylan’s reference to “Sam,” who he obviously thinks is a better engineer than Chuck. We have more than a little sympathy for Chuck, as it wasn’t he that knocked the mic and he is trying his best to give Dylan the relevant information.

I love how Dylan here, while implicitly criticizing Chuck, also picks up on Chuck’s framing of the microphone situation and agrees that “that’s too sensitive.” However, the relative sensitivity of the mic is not Dylan’s main concern. Dylan, famously, likes to work fast. For some of his records that has been a positive, on these the sound and performances come across as organic and coordinated, like all of the players grasped their roles and just ran with them. On other records, Dylan’s preference for speed let’s him down, and songs, and especially the production, can feel rushed, even a little sloppy. Dylan famously warred with Uber-producer Daniel Lanois, who had produced U2 and Peter Gabriel among others before Dylan asked him to produce 1989’s Oh Mercy. Oh Mercy sounds great and was Dylan’s “comeback” album after a mixed, to say the least, mid 80’s period, however Lanois’ sonic fingerprints are all over it. Too much so for Dylan, who wanted a faster, looser approach. Lanois is no pushover, and held his own with Dylan. We get the sense that Chuck is no Lanois.

So, despite the knocks on the mic and the puff of wind, Dylan is going to be fine with using this version on the record. Chuck, of course, is going to want Dylan to play it again. Chuck, or someone, would win this one because the extended take of Billy 2 here is not the one used on the final album. The little tussle between Dylan and Chuck ends in a draw as they agree to listen to the playback.

Patter at the Beginning of “Turkey,” around the 8:40 Mark:

D: Hey Roger, when I stop, when I stop, you stop. I’ll do something else and you figure it out. So it might go like this (Dylan starts playing and the band fills in a little hesitantly behind him).

D: Say Chuck, Chuck?

C: Yeah

D: Let’s take this down and mark it under, uh, Turkey…We got a buzz in the amp.

C: I’m not picking it up.

D: OK come on now.

The band plays on the instrumental Turkey for about a minute before Dylan stops.

D: OK, this is under Turkey.

Dylan begins again, and this time the band fills in much better, the song sounding fuller and tighter in all ways.

Comment:

This is in my opinion the most illuminating of Dylan’s comments and gives us a window into his way of working throughout his career. As mentioned above, Dylan works fast and expects his musicians to do the same. Thus he instructs Roger that when he Dylan stops, Roger is to stop, Dylan will “do something else” and Roger needs to “figure it out.” Dylan’s instructions may not sound very fair to poor Roger, but I think they actually are. A musical team is in this case not unlike a sports team, say a basketball team, where even if an offense is running a designed play or “set,” players need to figure out what’s going on and adjust their own position and movements constantly and on the fly. There is no playbook, not set of absolute rules about how to accomplish this any more than there is a set of rules about how to follow Dylan musically. The musician, like the athlete, just has to work by feel, take in all the information around him or her, and figure it out. If they can, they will keep their job; if not, not.

Patter at the Beginning of “Billy Surrenders,” around the 18:10 Mark:

D: Let’s see now. You know, you know what we want when Billy starts (laughs) this guy Jerry Fielding’s gonna go nuts man when he hears this (laughs). You know what we want when like Pat Garrett comes down from the hills right, and all these guys come out like one by one. And Billy comes out, he’s almost standing in a circle you know, so like (indistinct) one by one and then there’s like a big pause and he stops and there’s silence. You know those big organ notes, those scary things (hums organ notes) (laughs). Can you get behind that? (Dylan and the band laughing.)

Comment:

The recording of the Pat Garrett soundtrack was pretty complicated, in large part because Jerry Fielding, Peckinpah’s usual composer, was relegated to a supporting role and apparently resented it. Accounts differ as to whether Fielding quit, walked off set (and maybe came back), actually did try to advise Dylan as requested, or some combination of the above, however the history of the film makes clear that there was friction. Dylan is clearly aware of the tension with Fielding, and makes a joke about it in a place where it doesn’t even seem relevant. Dylan seems to almost revel in the conflict, setting up Fielding to his band as a “suit” who is not in the field so to speak, and who Dylan enjoys winding up with his musical choices. Whatever the exact situation with Fielding was, the issue is clearly a live one at the time of recording.

My sense is that Dylan is mostly talking to his band here, as there are a number of people in the background laughing along with Dylan through this monologue. Despite his reputation for playing fast and loose most of the time, Dylan shows a pretty good grasp of particular scenes in the film and clearly knows what he wants. The “big organ notes” he mentions do indeed feature on the soundtrack, however maybe not to the extent Dylan wanted. I have to laugh at the very 1970’s question “can you get behind that?”

Conclusion

Overall, Peco’s Blues provides a fascinating window into Dylan’s working methods and expectations for his crew. Of course not every musician works this way; many will give much more precise instructions I am sure, and in the era of computer aided music Dylan’s approach on Pat Garrett is certainly a old-fashioned one. But I like it. It is absolutely worth listening to the entirety of Peco’s Blues to get a sense of Dylan’s working methods as well as how a band, here playing together live and recorded live, “figures itself out” and gets from sketch to finished product. I am myself not a musician but a writer, and the writing process, although never exactly easy, is perhaps a little less complex, mostly because most writers write by themselves, with an editor or editing team looking over the work at a later date. There is nothing in writing quite like “I’ll do something else and you figure it out,” and it is the shifting, quicksilver like nature of Dylan’s approach to music making here that continues to interest me and draw me in.