A Freewheelin' Time (24 page)

Carla and Bobby each felt the other was bad for me. Neither of them was mistaken about that. I loved my tough, smart older sister and looked up to her. And I loved Bobby. But at a certain point I wanted nothing more than to get away from them both so that I could find out where I was.

I tended to look at the whole picture. Dwelling on who done who wrong—he said, she said—never got anyone anywhere, except into an argument without end. I grew up in a bickering, fighting, destructive environment filled with accusations and recriminations on an endless loop. I saw no way to make peace though I lived with the conviction that it was my duty to do so. I had failed. I was undone and the pressures were impossible for me to cope with. I saw no way out.

I
found out I was pregnant not long after I moved to Avenue B. Terrified, I didn’t know how to handle the situation. Bobby and I were going through a tumultuous time as it was; this was a complication we had not anticipated. I did not want to have a child. I was feeling confined, and a child would be even more of a confinement. On the other hand, maybe I would like to have a child. Bob was just as confused and very upset at the idea of an illegal—read dangerous—abortion. Information about where to get one was underground, and discretion when asking for information was imperative. Secrecy worked both ways. No one wanted to get anybody in trouble.

Botched back-alley abortions that left women maimed or dead were very real. Many women who had the money traveled to Puerto Rico, where abortion was legal. Fortunately there were good doctors who risked everything by secretly performing abortions in their offices or clinics. In the sixties everyone knew about a doctor in Pennsylvania who helped women.

The decision to have an abortion was not easily made, but we made it in the end. Through friends, a good doctor was found right in New York City. Everything went smoothly, the only complication was my uneasy state of mind. I withdrew more into myself and let people think I was feeling physically weak from the procedure. Instead I was depressed and wanted to sleep reality away.

CODA

The passage of time—days, weeks, and months—were all lumped together without a linear marking of them. The intensity of the bad created a weight that flattened the good we had together. One night at Avenue B everything came to a head. Like an overstuffed closet, all the bits and pieces I had shoved away into the dark corners of my brain burst open. I was a mess of whirling, wordless, and no longer containable sounds. There was no going forward for us, that much at long last was settled.

TOMORROW IS A LONG TIME

Breaking up takes time. After a stretch we reconnected again. It was painful, but then it wasn’t so painful. Sometimes we just enjoyed each other’s company.

We were in contact by phone at odd and even times. He would call when he was in town. No matter where I was living (Avenue B, East Houston Street, or West Tenth Street), I always seemed to have an apartment on the top floor of a walk-up. When I heard the phone ringing as I turned the key in the door, I’d race to answer it and say, catching my breath, Whew, I just got in.

When it was Bob, he would reply with skepticism, Yeah, yeah, you always say that.

But it was true.

One evening he called and said, I have a car, come for a ride with me. While we drove around the city, he spoke about fame and what it meant to become “a thing.” People wanted a piece of him, he said. He was learning how to keep whole.

ADDENDUMS

In June or July 1965, Albert Grossman’s wife, Sally, invited me up to their house in Woodstock, New York, for a few days. Sally said that no one else would be around except her father, so we could take it easy by the pool. The plan must have been for me to meet her at the recording session for
Highway 61 Revisited,
after which we’d drive up to the country.

The session was in progress when I arrived. Bob was quiet, intense, and twitchy behind his dark glasses. He was working. The other musicians I knew were Al Kooper and the extraordinary guitarist Mike Bloomfield.

What struck me about Al Kooper the first time I met him was his lust for life. Everyone was young and energetic—it comes with the territory—but Al took it up a notch. If I ran into him on the street, in a record store—anywhere—and he was excited about something, his enthusiasm was catching. Al was tall, wiry, and always full of droll tales and shaggy-dog stories. He was a really funny guy and a very serious musician.

During the session, Al was the liveliest thing in the room, popping up all over the place like a jack-in-the-box. He scooted around doing several things at once. I don’t recall many people hanging around; Albert Grossman was probably in the control booth with one of the producers, Tom Wilson or Bob Johnston, depending on the day I was there. In a photograph from the session I’m wearing somebody’s jacket around my shoulders, so I assume the studio was cold.

At some point Al called me over to the organ and told me to hold down two notes while he played something else. I’m sure I told Al I couldn’t possibly, but he paid me no mind—nor did anyone else. So I did what he asked, though I don’t remember the song, and Al doesn’t, either. It couldn’t have been “Like a Rolling Stone” because on that cut Al Kooper made his leap from the guitar to the organ.

Historical moments are usually framed in hindsight but that was instantly memorable.

My recollection is strong—I can see Al putting my hands on the keys—because it was such an unusual thing for a recording session. I was no musician.

Though details of the day elude me, the memory of playing those notes remains unforgettable because I was really nervous and because nobody questioned my presence—which speaks to everyone’s trust in Al Kooper, perhaps. More likely, this was a run-through, a work in progress—hence everyone’s indifference to my stint at the keyboards.

A
t the Forest Hills concert in August 1965, Dylan went electric for the second half to a raucous mix of booing and cheering, after opening with an all-acoustic set. I was mesmerized by the performance of “Ballad of a Thin Man.” The stage seemed to glow, to vibrate; Bob was taunting and challenging his audience with every syllable, and the band was a force behind him. I kept looking around to see if the audience was truly hearing the song.

When we were together afterwards, he was edgy because he was jumping off into the future, where he wanted to be. Transitions are scary; there are dangers of slipping or tripping or crashing and breaking something when moving on with the rest of your life. I worried for him.

By then the multifaceted Bobby Neuwirth, a painter, musician, and very clever wordsmith, was a fixture in Bob’s orbit, as was Victor Maimudes, Bob’s silent and creepy buddy-bodyguard. They were so cool, so hip, so cold. Things got strange. Negative. Bob was thin and tight and hostile. He had succumbed to demons. He needed to stop doing what he was doing to himself.

He and Neuwirth held court, mainly at the Kettle of Fish, the bar above the Gaslight, and pronounced sentence and declared truth to whoever approached them. It was depressing to see people bow and scrape to the reigning king and his jester.

A
lbert Grossman called me one morning and said if I signed a paper he could get my passport, which had been invalidated after my Cuban trip, back in plenty of time for me to join Bob’s tour to England in 1965. Obviously Bob wanted me to go—otherwise Albert would not have been calling. But this was another cue for me to sever another tie.

Slowly untying all those entanglements. I said thank you but no. Whatever the situation was, I knew I wouldn’t be comfortable. I was sick of the director by then.

Reflections

As the years went
by and I got a better handle on life, I understood Bob’s ways. Distance gave me perspective and I had a clearer understanding of what a complicated time it had been. Bob was assaulted by many forces, most of them good, since he was gaining the success he always sought; but some were bad, because there was a new kind of complexity to everything going on around him. It was tough going for someone who underneath all the ambition and drive was very sensitive. I was equally sensitive and so overwhelmed by circumstances that I had trouble seeing how hard he was trying to hold things together.

People close to me felt I was defending his bad behavior, but I saw things in another light, even though I was more than grateful for their loyalty to me. Yeah, he was a lying shit of a guy with women, an adept juggler, really; and when he was on his “telling it like it is” truth mission, he could be cruel. Though I was never on the receiving end of one of his tirades, I did witness a few. The power he was given and the changes it entailed made him lash out unreasonably, but I believe he was trying to find a balance within himself when everything was off-kilter. Some of the songs from that period, such as “Positively 4th Street,” give a sense of the backbiting that thrived in a hermetic environment.

Bob was driven—focused on his path. He could see how things were so very clearly that it could be scary to be around him. He was his own person from the beginning. There lies his honesty. Artists we admire aren’t necessarily exemplary human beings just because they are exceptional in their chosen fields. Their art is the work offered for public consumption, and nothing else.

We loved each other very much, and when it ended it was mutual heartbreak. His way was to do as he wished and let things sort themselves out without making decisions that might hurt. Yet that hurt more. He avoided responsibility. I didn’t make it easy for him, either. My mounting confusion and insecurities made me mistrust everything he said. I was difficult and unreasonable. He tried hard to reach me, but I was too far gone to hear him. I made him crazy.

He would have been fine with a girl in every port, but not many girls would choose such a scenario, if they really knew the play. A fling, a million flings for that matter, made no difference, but being seriously involved with two or more at once was not going to go over well with anybody in the cast.

I could say he took the easy way: let it be, let her do what she wants, and I’ll ride with it. We both knew it was over, but he left it to me to make it so. He would accept the action I took, whenever I chose to take it. But then when I did, he ignored it. He made me crazy.

It wasn’t easy; even when broken, the bond between lovers tends to hold in unpredictable ways. But I knew I was not suited for his life. I could never be the woman behind the great man: I didn’t have the discipline for that kind of sacrifice. Though I wasn’t sure where I was going and lacked a sense of mission or ambition, I knew what would not work for me, even if I was uncertain what would. I just knew with all my heart that I could not be a string on his guitar. I could not live in his shadow and I was ill-equipped to be his caretaker.

Art
Is
Work

Content is a glimpse of something, An encounter like a flash.

It’s very tiny—very tiny, content.

W
ILLEM DE
K
OONING

Though we had ostensibly
broken up—were no longer living together—when Bob recorded the
Times They Are A-Changin’
album in late 1963, it was full of our times and we saw each other a lot then, anyway.

Another Side of Bob Dylan
made for tough listening. Bob sure knew how to maul me with crazy sorrow, but I loved the sound in his voice.

Sylvia Tyson once told me that songwriters write their own story in their songs and include messages they want someone in particular to hear, with some abstraction for art’s sake. Hearing Bob sing songs that were close to home was always strange for me. In an intimate setting, where half the audience knew us, it was fun, it was all right—in-jokes, inside-story stuff. But as time and troubles went by, I felt laid bare and sorry for it. We weren’t in Gerde’s or the Gaslight anymore. People would speculate and make judgments and that became an intrusion. I began to feel that people knew more about my life than I did. Gradually I learned to let go and accept the abstraction of his art.

Some of his writings were so beautiful and heartfelt and full of love, longing, and pain while others were ironic, with doublespeak and double-talk. I could find myself in places and not in others, even though I might have been there. When someone paints your portrait, you don’t always recognize yourself and don’t always get the message. But I always recognized him.

I listen to Dylan’s songs spread over his early albums and I remember how it was; it’s like reading a diary. A private smile because no one knows about that, a laugh because that was really funny, or a tear because it was so hard. One thing I know: Bob used controversy to feed his art.

P
eople asked: How did he write? With a pencil or pen, I replied. Tinkering on the piano, strumming his guitar, humming. On a typewriter, in a notebook, on scavenged sheets of paper, and on napkins, just like the poets. I knew those weren’t the answers people wanted, but they were the only answers.

Someone once asked Bob to help a folksinger he knew write a song. You do it so well, she said, and he doesn’t, so why don’t you show him how? That assumes someone who can carry a tune can be taught to sing opera.

People say he is so secretive—why doesn’t he reveal more of himself? I never understand what they mean by that. Songs and poems reveal the artist’s core. Bob Dylan is his work. There is a fine line between analyzing lyrics and destroying the art. When does parsing words and phrases begin to smudge or erase the magic in them?

O
ver the years I downplayed or ran away from my role in Dylan’s life. I offered superficial information when pressed. The real story is that I think his songs say it all. The songs are translations of moods and sensations he experienced. They are fictions that allude to those experiences. Bob’s songs were for himself and to himself in another person’s voice as much as they were in his own.

I don’t like to claim any Dylan songs as having been written about me, to do so would violate the art he puts out in the world. The songs are for the listener to relate to, identify with, and interpret through his or her own experience.

Our time together fed his work. I know I influenced him. We marked each other’s lives profoundly. He once told me that he couldn’t have written certain songs if he hadn’t known me. But that doesn’t necessarily mean a particular song. It means I served as muse during our time together, and that I don’t mind claiming.

Fame came fast and hard for Bob Dylan. He was barely twenty-one when it hit. He has to be lauded for learning how to survive fame with all its pressures and responsibilities, glory and riches aside. He managed it. That took work and work is what he does best. He kept doing what he loved to do—make music. He served that gift and he survived.

“The Bob Dylan Story” has been interpreted and archived to create a unified vision for public consumption. That is the way it must be. What counts is if the work is solid and worth the accolades. Bob Dylan’s art—the work he puts out in the world—delivers.