March 2021: Busy Being Born

Books read this month: On The Road With Bob Dylan (Larry 'Ratso' Sloman, Three Rivers Press, 1978/2002); The Nigger Factory (Gil Scott-Heron, Canongate 1972/2010)

Perpetual motion. Two words, one meaning and used just the four hundred and odd times a year by this writer to describe the best of the art that moves me. Saying that back aloud has brought a realisation, too: talking about art moves me. Give me a craft ale and an episode of 'The South Bank Show' and I'm as happy as a hipster in the barbers. I finally got hold of a copy of Larry 'Ratso' Sloman's 'On The Road With Bob Dylan' this year. The definitive word on Dylan's 'Rolling Thunder Revue' ("the 'War & Peace' of rock 'n' roll" as Bob calls it), this primary source is one of the best things you will ever read on, around or about Bob Dylan. The book sent me down a Rolling Thunder rabbit hole and I had a Dylan week, revisiting the recent Martin Scorsese Netflix documentary, the original 'Live 1975' double live album from 'The Bootleg Series' and another go standing under the 'Hard Rain' record of 1976. In amongst the multitudes Dylan contains are a number of worlds to lose yourself in and the period around his reunion with The Band, Tour 74, 'Blood On The Tracks', Rolling Thunder and 'Desire' is one of the most fertile. "Life isn't about finding yourself or finding anything... life is about creating yourself," Bob said recently and bells went off under the garbage can lids of Dylanologists the world over.

Anyway, perpetual motion... whatever it is, this book contains it. Sloman, who's also known these days for his collaborative writing with US shock jock' (could I be more nineties?) Howard Stern, is an indefatigable writer with a knack for clarity and concision. There isn't a word wasted, or comma dropped, as his undulating style follows the rolling rhythms of the excitement and conjecture surrounding Dylan on arguably his most famous tour. "The Rolling Thunder Revue was a caravan of gypsies, hoboes, trapeze artists, lonesome guitar stranglers and spiritual green berets who came into your town for your daughters and left with your minds. We shook hands and stepped out into the MacDougal Street morning. It was raining hard, so I walked home to the sound of thunder. Rolling thunder." And that's just the first chapter! Sloman, then a Rolling Stone journalist with an unerring zeit for the geist, goes on to talk at us as he writes about nights with top Byrd Roger McGuinn, tender moments with Sara Dylan and Joan Baez, fun and games with Bob's mom Beatty Zimmerman and restless rancour with Joni Mitchell. It's namedropping, but not as we know it, as the author has no time for anything but the truth... whoever's and whatever it might be in the heat of the moment. "It was getting on to 2 a.m. and McGuinn was set to pack it in and go back to his room at the Gramercy, but I suggested we stop for a nightcap at the Other End. We took a cab over to LaGuardia Place, jumped out, and rang Jacques' bell. No answer. Roger led the way around the corner to the Other End. Bleecker Street was unusually quiet, almost eerie with a moist mist floating in. Something was in the air. I led the way into the club and, hidden in the centre of a motley crew, a black-jacketed Bob Dylan. "Roger!" Dylan screamed out, and lunged to hug McGuinn, spilling most of the drinks in the process. "Where you been, man, we been waiting for you all night." See? You're already there, tasting the heat of hard liquor in the back of your throat, smelling stale cigarette smoke as it melts into yellow fingers and feeling the hurricane that's coming.

Speaking of 'The Hurricane', some of the book's most revelatory reports rely on first-hand testimony of those there as Dylan's campaign to shine his spotlight on the plight of Rubin Carter, the middleweight boxer convicted of murder and later released following a petition of habeas corpus after serving almost 20 years in prison, first gathered momentum. Sloman's no investigative journalist with an eye for justice being served in a courtroom, but he pays strict attention to the moral motives of all involved: Carter, Dylan, Columbia Records and many more are all revealed in contrasting lights as the tour and its attendant atmospheres play out. It's left to Joni Mitchell, however, to cast aspersions on the aspirations of the whole thing: "We came here to give you love, if you can't handle it that's your problem," she tells the audience at a concert inside the New Jersey correctional facility where the Rolling Thunder Revue plays just before 'The Night of The Hurricane' concert at Madison Square Garden in late 1976. Joni plays a big part as the book picks up pace towards the end of the tour, talking to Sloman about earlier misunderstandings between the pair, her disappointment in meeting Carter and giving the author a glimpse of her creative process as the lost highways of the startlingly original 'Coyote' come up in her rear-view mirror. Creating a new map from the many new roads you've been down is also what 'On The Road With Bob Dylan' is all about... hang on, have we just stumbled on to the meaning of Dylan itself? Great book.

Speaking of artists busy being born, the late and great Gil Scott-Heron's 'The Last Holiday' was a book born-again in the aftermath of the prose pioneer's death. The non-linear chronicle from 2012 is a hard-hitting and recommended read, but its desperate finale left me wanting more. Sure, there's the music (all together now: "what's the word?"!), but Heron's literary life actually came to, well, life with the 1972 publication of 'The Nigger Factory'. A novel (his second) set on the campus of Sutton University in Virginia, reflecting the author's own student experiences from the late 1960s and early 1970s, the book is one that's always been on my list but alluded me. Thankfully, a 2010 paperback reissue came into my possession and I devoured the wonderful words within inside a week. The affecting language, attention to detail ("Calhoun stopped his monologue in time to try and light his pipe while Miss Felch erased notes and those attending the meeting used the time to whisper back and forth to one another...") and thorough examination of the workings of the human mind under pressure all contribute to an underrated book that remains as relevant as ever.

"Black America" is a phrase we read a lot in 2021. But the hypocrisies and hysteria that usually follow still sell its story short. "Change is overdue. Fantasies about the American Dream are now recognised by Black people as hoaxes and people are tired of trying to become part of something that deprives them of the necessities of life ever after years of bogus study in preparation for this union." A quote from an analysis of the murder of George Floyd? No, this is the book's introductory note from the author written almost forty years ago. The tales told in 'The Nigger Factory' resonate as they are age-old stories of ordinary men and women on the cusp of change: the students at the beginning of their journey, the college leaders stood sentinel on the precipice of something they can't (or won't) understand and those blocking up the windows and standing in the halls in between. An early chapter moves like a stream of light lapping on the page as Heron puts down an early marker for the internal life of main man Earl Thomas and we enter his head as it twists and turns taut on the tantalising distance between the possibilities and realities of the tightropes his plans walk. "As Earl combed his head of thick hair, his mind ran through the maze of emotions that gripped him, identifying first one and then the other. Jealousy? Fear? Anger. Anger was the most predominant. He felt as though he had been betrayed. Not betrayed by his friends, but by that insidious 'Brother' term. The word seemed to have less meaning every day. Long ago he decided he would not be part of a group that criticised the hypocrisy without an alternative."

I've been thinking about that sentence a lot recently. I thought about when I heard people talk about individual rights and individual freedoms (masks, lockdowns etc.), while all the time standing on the shoulders of socialism. I thought about it when I heard the collective voice of the city I'm from sometimes sound like libertarian laments lacking in imagination. And I thought about it while spending precious reading time in the company of Gil Heron and Bob Dylan. The conclusion? I first stumbled upon that listening to another American (song)writer I admire who walks unafraid into the grey areas life finds for us all: "Nobody wins, unless everybody wins." Bruce Springsteen said that. Are we really born to ruin? See you next month, Al x