Jessi Klein's NotBlog

I just watched some of the Bob Dylan “No Direction Home” documentary on PBS, and holy Jesus, it brought back all the love and music-inspired longing I’ve ever felt for Bob in my whole life, which is tons and tons and tons, so vast and enormous I don’t even know where to begin.  Seeing that early footage of him playing in a Southern field, or him doing an angry Ballad of a Thin Man to a resentful, suspicious folkie crowd, it was like seeing my first love on the street after many years, that punched in the gut feeling you still get no matter how long it’s been because that person did something completely new and wild to you – first first first crazy love. 

Well, there’s a beginning.

My father was a huge Dylan fan.  I remember the album covers leaning against his record case, Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 and Bringing It All Back Home and Planet Waves.  When I was around seven, my dad brought home a poster of Dylan and tried to put it in my room - the photo was kind of blurry and purplish, and I’m almost certain it was him at Budokan, all big hair and crazy eyes and weird outfit.  I was terrified.  I think back now on the fact that my dad wanted to put this picture on a seven year old girl’s WALL and it’s pretty hilarious.  But he loved Dylan and he loved me, so he wanted me to have the poster.  He used to play “She Belongs To Me” and say it was my song, which I didn’t appreciate until years and years later.  Between the scary poster and Dylan’s kookoo voice, as a seven year old I was totally opposed to him, one of those people who says “but he can’t sing!”  I was a fucking jerk.

I don’t remember exactly what the turning point was, but I think I was 14, a freshman in high school.  I was home sick and bored and wanted to futz with the record player, and Dylan was already on the turntable.  I listened to Like a Rolling Stone, and I know this couldn’t be more cliche, but it suddenly clicked – maybe I was just old enough, or angsty enough, or smart enough; but the thing was I suddenly got Dylan and wanted to listen to him, and only him, all the time.  I bought a Dylan poster and put it on my wall.

High school was not my strong suit.  I was a tomboy with a total beanpole body and less than zero fashion sense.  I wore wingtips and a vest over a T-shirt, mostly because I took my wardrobe inspiration from Pretty in Pink - not Molly Ringwald, but  Duckie. The point is I looked and felt like a mess.

I didn’t have a boyfriend and I wanted one desperately, but shockingly, no one wanted to snuggle with the female Duckie.  I became obsessed with “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.”  The music, yes, absolutely and completely, but even more so with that cover, the one of young Bob and his girlfriend (I think Suze?) walking arm in arm down a snowy McDougal Street.  I lived around the corner from McDougal, which still looks sort of the same as it did then, all quaint fire escape and brick.  I was so enthralled with Dylan that somehow that picture came to represent everything I dreamed of having.  I wanted to be that brown haired girl who got to walk down snowy McDougal Street with my boyfriend, the genius.  And that winter that I got obsessed with it, the weather was particularly snowy, and I remember just sitting in the sill of my window on 6th Ave alternately watching the snow turning all pink as it went down past the streetlights and staring at that album cover, listening to that record over and over and over and feeling poetically lonely and awful and secretly happy because Dylan made snowy loneliness amazing.  And I now had a CD player, so I could just put it on repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat….

I used to do the twenty minute walk home from school, a place I would leave feeling outsidery and not knowing why I felt so outsidery.  As a freshman, I was still wrestling with why I couldn’t make friends there (wingtips! vest!) – it just felt surreal to be so unaccepted, and walking home the surrealness of  my high school day kind of clung to me – it was almost like that feeling when you’re in the middle of getting out of a pool that has steps, where as you emerge from the water your bathing suit gets heavy and you feel like you have to struggle to be fully on dry ground.  But I remember I would listen to my walkman the whole way home, and the song I listened to almost every day was Visions of Johanna, one of the most surreal and beautiful songs ever – and the lyrics of that song were so mysterious and enigmatic and weird and at the same time so deeply, smokily cool, that they made feeling weird feel like something beautiful and right, desirable.  After all, Johanna is a weird girl, right?   ”The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face….” The Mona Lisa of modern music?  Maybe?

So that was the first obsessive song, that freshman year.  Sophomore year, however, I developed a crush on a guy that turned into an absolute, painful, all encompassing love.  He seemed to appear out of nowhere one day in my class, and somehow we became friends, and I yearned for him like I had never yearned for nothin’ or nobody.  But I was completely stuck in the friend zone.   I was no longer wearing vest and wingtips; I was now on baggy plaid pants and a baggy G’N'R T-shirt; yet inside this guy was causing all kinds of womanly awakenings.  We were close – we would hang out at Washington Square Park, at diners, eating crappy chicken parms.  I thought he was the funniest person I ever met, and I made him laugh. 

And then he went out with someone else.  I was in so much agony – even though it’s so long ago it’s completely vivid.  I punched walls.  I cried.  But mainly, I remember just breathing through that first heartbreaking well of unrequited longing, studying it, wrapping myself in it, sleeping it and eating it.  And just at this precise moment the Bootleg Series box set came out.  A box set seemed like an enormous luxury moneywise but I needed Bob.  And the song that took over, and that I think is still my absolute favorite of all time, was Mama You Been On My Mind.  I would see my guy after school, and we would talk and laugh, and then he would go off with that other girl, and I would put my walkman on and do my slow walk home listening to these lyrics, over and over and over:

“Perhaps it’s the color of the sun cut flat and coverin’

the crossroads I’m standing at

or maybe it’s the weather or something like that

But Mama you been on my mind.”

Dylan’s voice is so raw and pure here – it dove deep down into my innocent little ache and eased the pain that felt so ridiculously big.  The song became my friend; the song understood; the song sings to the beloved and the unrequited lover both at once.  It sang me all the way through that first dumb love, steadily and tenderly; and when time took over and my obsession with the guy finally faded, the love that remained was for the song. 

I’m listening to it now, a new version I just found that’s a duet with him and Baez – it’s folksier and sweeter than the Bootleg one, but still wonderful.  I got it on Limewire, which my boyfriend downloaded for me right before I left New York.  Well, actually, my ex boyfriend – we broke up a few weeks ago.  I’m in LA, and the rain is coming down; and once again, Dylan is turning the loneliness into secret amazing happiness. 

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 15th, 2006 at 3:15 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.