What is it about some metropolitan cities and the weird and wonderful things they do to ones' head? I am writing this piece on the tube to Heathrow airport. It is fairly cold and grey outside but something inside glows with warm pleasure, excitement and interesting new thoughts.
Let me backtrack a bit. Just before hopping on the train I had lunch at the Red Fort, my favourite Indian restaurant in London. The familiar smell and taste of the herbs and spices – from the carrot and coconut powder to accompany the introductory pappadoms to the concluding kulfi ice cream (pistacchio) – made my head spin. Admittedly, the few pints of Cobra, an Indian beer, made the spin that much merrier. And with the triumphant closing chords of Coldplay's Fix You at Earl's Court the night before still echoing in my ears I was in seventh heaven.
As I was dining alone, I decided to dip into the book I was reading – Chronicles Volume One,
Bob Dylan's autobiography. Expectations of great prose flowing from the hand which wrote Like a Rolling Stone and Just like a Woman were not high. He has rarely communicated with the world except through his songs. And even the most inspirational and inspired rock stars could be counted on for having the eloquence of nine year-olds at a soccer game.
True to form, Dylan took everyone by complete surprise. The Daily Telegraph described Chronicles as “the most extraordinarily intimate autobiography by a twentieth-century legend ever written”. Nick Hornby, Bryan Appleyard, Kazuo Ishiguro, Griff Rhys Jones and Mojo, the authoritative rock magazine, all rated it as their Book of the Year.
Having read about 250 pages by the time I got to the Red Fort I could see why. It is quite different from anything else I have ever read; certainly unlike any other autobiography. It is not so much the story of a life as a song about it. It is a
Dylan lyric about his life which took the form of a book almost by accident.
Chronicles is painfully enigmatic and, at the same time, fiercely insightful. Here, for instance, is how he describes New Orleans, the mysterious city of voodoo, Mardi Gras, French roots, blues, jazz, red hot cajun cooking and funeral marches.
“The night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. Around any corner, there's a promise of something daring and ideal ... There's something obscenely joyful behind every door, either that or somebody crying with their head in their hands. A lazy rhythm looms in the dreamy air and the atmosphere pulsates with bygone duels, past-life romance, comrades requesting comrades to aid them in some way. You can't see it, but you know it's here ... No action seems inappropriate here. The city is one very long poem.”
The book is full of such delicious morsels of genius. But I was still unprepared for the few pages waiting for me as I opened the book between the chicken tandoori and the curried cottage cheese at the Red Fort.
Woody Guthrie was one of the early giants of American folk music who influenced an entire generation of artists, including Dylan. He wrote heart-wrenching songs about, and for, the downtrodden at the margins of society - factory workers, poor farmers, hobos, prostitutes, trade union activists. His songs exposed the mean and ugly face of American capitalism, a face which stood in stark contrast to the hopeful and idealistic one of the Statue of Liberty. The American establishment kept this America hidden in the shadows of its skyscrapers, factories and barnyards. Guthrie's songs put a searchlight on it.
When he was dying in a New Jersey hospital, penniless and lonely like the characters he sang about, Dylan was one of the few who visited his mentor. In Chronicles, Dylan gives a riveting account of the bomb detonated at the very centre of his being when he heard Guthrie's songs for the first time.
“It was like the land parted ... It was like the record player itself had just picked me up and flung me across the room ... The songs ... had the infinite sweep of humanity in them.”
Dylan describes in poignant detail those extremely rare moments in a lifetime when the penny drops, when in a flash one’s life becomes unrecognisable. And nothing could ever be the same again. Most people live without ever experiencing such a moment.
“For me it was an epiphany, like some heavy anchor had just plunged into the waters of the harbour. That day I listened to Guthrie as if in a trance and I felt like I had discovered some essence of self-command, that I was in the internal pocket of the system feeling more like myself than ever before.
“...I knew little about Woody. I wasn't even sure if he was alive anymore ... One thing for sure, Woody Guthrie had never heard of me, but it felt like he was saying, 'I'll be going away, but I’m leaving this job in your hands. I know I can count on you'...The sun had swung my way. I felt like I'd crossed the threshold and there was nothing in sight.”
… The sun had swung my way. What a beautiful way of putting it! As these words percolated in my head while the cumin, cardamons and saffron did the same in my belly, a thought rushed to my head. What Dylan experienced was freedom, real freedom. He had just described a moment which gives true meaning to the word: a man finding out who he is and what he has been put on this earth to do.
Plato once said that the sign of a good teacher is that his students transcend him and move, even rebel against him. At the end of the journey, the student, the best student, finds his own voice. This is what happened to Bob Dylan.
Guthrie had helped him cross ‘the threshold’ but still he saw ‘nothing in sight’. Yet as the sixties loomed on the horizon Dylan started seeing things very few others did. The world was changing and so was his. Few men, except for The Beatles, could embody both. “The air would soon shoot up in intensity and become more potent. My little shack in the universe was about to expand into some glorious cathedral, at least in songwriting terms.” And the rest is history.
As I stepped out of the Red Fort into the cold grey streets, I felt like something deep and pleasant had happened inside me. Dylan, London and the sizzling chicken tandoori had conspired to give me a glimpse of freedom. Fix You indeed.
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