http://youtu.be/hk3mAX5xdxo
“I walk into a restaurant where a group of five jocks sit in a booth. Silence at first. Stares. Then, in a stage whisper, one of them asks, “Hey. What’s that? A boy or a girl?” Gales of laughter. They slap each other on the back. (High fives weren’t invented yet).
Dylan snarls:
You used to he so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used.
Go to him now he calls you. you can’t refuse
When you got nothing you got nothing to lose
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
A complete unknown
Like a Rolling Stone?
Harmonica wailing into the distance. The Lone Ranger never made such an impression with a single visit. On the record cover Bob Dylan sits holding dark glasses, wearing an open neon-bright shirt and underneath a T-shirt with a motorcycle on it. On Highway 61 Revisited there are no folk or “protest” songs as we had come to expect.
Recently Dylan had been booed off the stage at the Newport Folk Festival for appearing with his electric band. He clearly doesn’t care (or if he does he doesn’t show it). On the back of Highway 61 he writes, “Your rooftop – if you don’t already know – has been demolished.” If there were signs (like the booing at Newport) that all this was not going to be easy, it didn’t matter. If later Dylan sang, “Everybody said they’d stand behind me when the game got rough. But the joke was on me, there was nobody even there to bluff,” we didn’t know it then. ”
(From ETHAN RUSSELL:AN AMERICAN STORY available here.)
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