That
rainy day in July ’67 when Dylan wanted to know my story, I gave
him a present back: the image of Christ with the sign on the cross
that he decided to take from my caravan. Now, almost five decades
later, I would like to give him another on his 75th birthday. To do
that, I should go back to that summer and wrap up this confidence
well in gift paper. It’s not going to be easy, but I have to try.
Dylan
had invited me back to the basement that same afternoon taking with
me that guitar he’d liked so much, that same Ibanez which now
stares at me silently from a stand. I played it until the sky
cleared, turning the rain into a childish excuse. Then I crossed the
garden and put out my last cigarette in a puddle.
The
door to Big Pink was open, like it was most afternoons, and I
remember walking through it as if crossing a suspension bridge. In
the living room, a standing lamp cast orange gleams over a jumble of
used cups, newspapers, hats, bottles and various instruments. I
slowly descended the basement stairs, trying not to make a noise. But
my guitar was hanging around my neck and it was that- a faint knock
against the handrail- that announced my presence. They stopped playing. I froze.
-
Hi Nar! Come on down! Rick was the first to greet me, with a smiley
voice and a small glass held up in his left hand.
- Well, that Ibanez is back with us again… was Dylan´s mocking
hello. Sit down over there, ok?
With
a sharp flick of the head, Robbie signalled a chair by the organ. I
turned it around and sat down, hiding behind the guitar leaning
against the back of the seat. Garth gave me his minimalist welcome: a
burst of ascending notes on the keyboard.
- Come
on, let´s keep trying it out- in G now! ordered Dylan whilst he
finished tuning up his acosutic 12-string guitar. Richard drained his
cup and gave me a knowing wink from the piano.
What
I heard that evening was the genesis of a song between the spectral
and the sublime. The lyrics evoked a vague
hope of release and the successive versions rehearsed in different
keys managed to increase the emotional intensity to almost painful
limits. I remember hearing that sound as if it were from inside my
own body.
. . . I
see my light come shining . . .
That
music had something of a planetary phenomenon about it, the power of
an enigma suggested by the vision of a star whose movement
contravenes the laws of astronomy. They happily explored it in its
different variations completely unaware of my stupor, my hands
gripping the guitar as one might a lifeline whilst Dylan proposed
ever sheerer, barer lines, each closer to an octosyllabic rhythm into
which my breath became absorbed as if in a kind of trance.
I
could not say how long we spent in that outer
territory, but when Garth got up to close one of the windows I
suddenly realized that it was completely dark. They were still
engrossed in their exploration of words and harmonies, but I began to
feel like superfluous, as if I were sitting on someone else´s seat
at a magic show... I used one of their short breaks to play a couple
of chords on my Ibanez, and then I stood up. Dylan looked at me for a
moment, cocking his head and Rick gave me a thumbs up, smiling all
the while. Before any of them could say anything I hastily thanked
them and fled the basement two stairs at a time towards the orange
light still shining in the living room.
There
I stayed a while looking at that landscape of objects. Through the
open window towards the forest, a yellow moon lit up the table where
Dylan´s Olivetti was half-buried under a pile of loose papers,
magazines, half-full ashtrays and glasses with ochre dregs. An amber
paperweight gathered together a number of pencil sketches in
different shapes and formats. On top of them, I recognized an image,
surprised: it was the picture of Christ with the sign on the cross
which I´d given him that very same morning. Next to it lay a file
with different sized papers, manuscript notes written in varicolored
inks, machine-typed phrases with corrections, crossings out and small
drawings in the margins. Those pages held alternative drafts to those
diaphanous lyrics I´d just heard put to music in the basement. I
closed my eyes and with a faltering breath chose just one. With it in
my hand, I went out into the night. Everything shook. The moon was
setting behind the mountains, darkening the forest.
Fade
to black and pan across to the present, to a night in May 2016: my
hand now holds that fragment of a prodigy put on paper as I write
these lines which I began camouflaging as a secret. Maybe it was an
act of cowardice, the rest is nothing but ´objective
correlative´.
This
page that I have kept with me for nearly fifty years was the only
tangible thing I could preserve from that night I attended the first
rehearsals of I
Shall Be Released.
These typewritten lines were also the seed of a perfect song, a
magical anthem beyond solemnity and the univocal. I sensed it that
night in the summer of '67, when this piece of paper was but one of
many on a table lit by a yellow moon.
I
sensed it then, and now that we know it with complete certainty, this
is the gift I want to give Dylan on his 75th: a kind of restitution
or, better put, a retrospective "Love & Theft".
Happy
Birthday !
