Bob dylan, chronicles, music, rock n roll, 1970s, 1960s, culture, poet

Transcript

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Oh, this is Chapter three. It's called new morning From the National Best Seller, The Bob Dylan Chronicles, Volume one. I had just returned to Woodstock from the midwest from my father's funeral, there was a letter from Archibald MacLeish waiting for me on the table. MacLeish poet laureate of America, one of them Carl Sandburg, Poet of the Prairie and the City and robert Frost. The poet of the dark meditations were the others MacLeish was the poet of the Night Stones and the Quick Earth. These three, the Yeats, Browning and Shelley of the New World, where gigantic figures had defined the landscape of the 20th Century America. They put everything into perspective. Even if you didn't know their poems, you knew their names. Previous week had left me drained. I had gone back to town for my early years in a way I could never have imagined to see. My father laid to rest. Now. There would be no way to say I was capable of saying. Before growing up, the cultural and generational differences had been insurmountable. Nothing but the sound of voices, colorless, unnatural speech. My father, who was plain speaking and straight talking had said, isn't an artist, a fellow who paints when told by one of my teachers that his son had the nature of an artist, it seemed I had always been chasing after something. Anything that moved, a car, a bird, a blowing leaf, anything that might lead me into some more lit place, some unknown land down river. I had not even the Vegas notion of a broken world. I was living in what society could do with you. When I left home, I was like columbus going off into the desolate atlantic. I've done that. And I had been at the ends of the earth to the water's edge and now I was back in spain where it all started, in the court of the Queen with a half a glazed expression on my face with even the wisp of a beard. What's with the decoration? One of the neighbors who had come to pay their respects said, pointing to my face. In the short time I was there. It all came back to me all the flimflam, the older order of things, The Simple Simons. But something else did too. That my father was the best man in the world and probably worth 100 of me. But he didn't understand me the town he lived in, in the town I lived and we're not the same all that aside, we had more in common now than ever. I too was a father three times over there was a lot that I wanted to share to tell them. And also now I was in a position to do a lot of things for him. Archie's letter said that he'd like to meet me to discuss the possibility of me composing some songs for a play that he was writing called scratch based on a Stephen Vincent Benet story. MacLeish had earlier won a Tony award on broadway for one of his plays called J. B. My wife and I drove over to Conway massachusetts where he lived to meet with him about his new play. It seemed like a civilized thing to do. MacLeish wrote deep poems. Was the Man of Godless Sand. He could take real people from history. People like emperor Charles of Montezuma and Cortez and conquest door and with the tender touch of a creator deliver them right to your door. He praised the sun and the great sky. It was fitting that I'd go see him the events of the day. All the cultural mumbo jumbo. We're imprisoning my soul, nauseating me, civil rights and political leaders being gunned down and the mounting of barricades, the government crackdowns and the student radical demonstrators versus the cops and the unions, the streets exploding fire and anger boiling the contra communes that lying noisy voices, the free love, the anti money system movement, the whole shebang. I was determined to put myself beyond the reach of it all. I was a family man now didn't want to be in that group portrait McLeish's place was up past a quaint village in a quiet mountain laurel road. Bright maple leaves piled high around the walkway. It was easy walking across the small footbridge leading to the wooded, shaded alcove and a rec reconstructed stone cottage with modern kitchen facilities. McLeish's studio. A caretaker had let us in and his wife placed a tray of tea on the table said something cordial and left. My wife went with her. I glanced around the room. There were gardening boots in the corner, photos on the desk and frames on the wall, lace cap, flowers with dark stems, baskets of flowers, geraniums, dusty leaf, flowers, white cloth, silver plates, bright fireplace, circular shadows, gallery forest. I discovered what MacLeish looked like through the photos there was a snapshot of him as a young boy who settled on the podium, a woman in a bonnet holding the reins. Other photos, Archie at the head of his class in Harvard photos of him at Yale and as a World War One captain in the artillery in an older photo, he's with a small company of people in front of the Eiffel Tower, photos taken of him at the library congress, another he's at the table aboard, editors of the Fortune magazine in another. He's being given the Pulitzer prize. There's a picture of him and some boston lawyers. I heard his steps come up the stone pathway as he entered the room, came forward and extended his hand. He had the aura of a general, a ruler, every bit of him, an officer, a gentleman of adventure who carried himself with a peculiar confidence of power, bread of blood. He got right straight to it starts right up the track and reiterates a few things, he said in his letter