I, Dynamo

Exhuming Bob 4:

The Boulevard Of Broken Dreams

by

R.E. Prindle

…the confused, accused, misused, strung out ones and worse…

I got mixed up confusion

Man, it’s killing me.

Bob Dylan

 I walk the street of sorrow

The boulevard of broken dreams…

You laugh tonight and cry tomorrow

When you behold your shattered dreams…

Here is where you’ll always find me

Always walking up and down

But I left my soul behind me…

Harry Warren

 The Boulevard Of Broken Dreams

With each day of waiting

I love to pretend

One more tomorrow

And my waiting will end.

I’m waiting and watching

for ships that never come in,

I wonder where they can be.

after Jack Yellen

I’m Waiting For Ships That Never Come In

Everything’s Broken Down

Larry Hosford

     I received a couple comments on With One Hand Waving Free from R.M. that brought some thoughts I have into focus.  RM has a good understanding so I will incorporate some of her thoughts into this essay.

     First, let’s deal with ‘multi-culturalism.’  Multi-culturalism is merely twenty-first century racism.  If a separate cultural identity is being jealously maintained then this is done in oppostion to all other cultures; it is a form of exclusivity.  Yet such cultural exclusivity is considered a sin if not a crime in the West.  How to reconcile such an obvious contradiction?

     The first law of ‘culture’ is that two or more cultures cannot occupy the same territory at the same time.  Race and culture can be made synonymous for this purpose.  The less or least tolerant culture will eventually drive the more or most tolerant culture out.  This is a law.  Thus to be tolerant is a one way ticket to oblivion.

     In that sense tolerance will be made to seem to be intolerance.  Thus for the last few centuries until very recently England had been praised for its extreme tolerance.  Jews, Huguenots and whatever found a refuge there that delivered them from persecution.  That was when the immigrants were relatively few and the English culture dominant.  In the last few decades England has been all but swamped by Negroes, Moslems, Jews and whatever.  The Moslems although coming from different countries and races are culturally united through the intolerant Moslem religion.  Now that the immigrants are numerically strong enough to bully the ‘tolerant’ English the English are now described as intolerant monsters.  Quite a change in the perception of them even though the English themselves have not changed.  They do insist on the Common Law, their cultural norm, rather than adopting Moslem Sharia law as the Moslems insist.  The grossly intolerant Moslems then will subject the tolerance of the English and Moslemism will prevail in England.  Thus two cultures cannot coexist in the same space, one must eliminate the other.

     The Moslem method of subjection is the same today as it was in the year seven hundred when they subjugated a large part of the world.  The congeries of nations they thus created forced a temporary ‘tolerance’ on the Moslems.  They had to ‘tolerate’ other cultures to maintain order.  But they relentlessly forced intolerance in their dominions gradually imposing a culturally sterile Moslem uniformity on society that succeeded in quelling ‘diversity’ by the thirteenth century or so when a certain idiot maintains that ‘something went wrong.’  Nothing went wrong.  The Moslem religion finally achieved its goal.

     Now multi-culturalism is being forced on the West.  There is no multi-culturalism in the East.  China and Japan are as homogeneous as you can get and likely to remain so.  There is little change in South-East Asia and apart from the continuing Hindu-Moslem conflict in India, none there.  Africa is being occupied by the Chinese so that Africans in Africa will be all but eliminated.

     So, this is the nature of multi-culturalism; a form of racism by which the tolerant will be exterminated by the intolerant.  One may be view the process as a declared but non-shooting war.

     The intolerant are being aided by Western ‘Liberals’ who are deliberately and legally disarming the less tolerant Westerners in favor of the intolerant.  Liberals have actually passed laws making it a criminal offence for Westerners to defend or propagate their own culture or criticize anyone else’s.

     This process has gone much further in Europe and the British dominions including Canada.  The US is still protected by its Constitution but that is under attack.  Thus in the Multi-Cultural Wonderland dissent is still possible.  I do dissent.  And I will speak my mind.  I will not be tolerant of my own destruction or those of the West.

     As an All-American Boy I have grown up sharing in all these cultures as my own while not being a part of any of them.  I am as Jewish as a Jew, as Black as an African-American.  As Rebel as any Southener and as Puritan as any New Englander.  They are all my cultures.  I can mix and match any symbols and being a free American boy, America means freedom, I can say and do as I please.  I do and will.

     In point of fact I was excluded from all cultures by being in an orphanage.  I am probably closest to the Puritan heritage but neither it nor any other has any special meaning for me.  I am outside them all as an observer.  So, I’d appreciate it if you weren’t defensive about your own cultural hangups.  That’s the way it is friends: If you don’t like the reflection, don’t look in the mirror.  I am a camera.

     In her first comment RM gives a general discussion of the record business.  As it happens I was in the record business for fifteen years between 1967 and 1982.  I know something about records and musicians.  Musicians are at the bottom of the entertainment hierachy.  They have no, or little, status.  During the sixties and seventies they broke the bounds of the records labels and were able to dictate terms to the labels.  This was an anomaly and it didn’t last too long before the labels regained control.

     Musicians are generally considered offensive by movie and TV people.  They aren’t invited to many genteel parties.  To a very large extent this opinion is merited.  Witness all those stories about rock and rollers busting up hotels and being just generally rude and offensive.  Sad but true.  Just study those movies of Dylan and his entourage in London’s prestigious Savoy Hotel.  Bob should be embarrassed.

     Musicians are the ‘abused, confused, misused’ type of person Bob so unerringly identifies in his songs.  Bob was one too.  Consider his first rock song:  Mixed Up Confusion.  Relate it to The Chimes Of Freedom a couple years later.  I do not exclude myself from this group so don’t get hostile.

     The record industry above all others draws the type to it.  There is something about the direct mental connection between the sound on the disc, in the grooves, and the mind that allows the listener to incorporate the lyrics into his identity.  All the lyrics heading this essay are part and parcel of my mental makeup also.  Some of the type have talent and skills but most don’t.  Bob obviously was highly talented by no less psychotic for all that.

     For myself I owned and operated a medium sized record store chain from 1967 to 1982.  Until about 1979 I listened to everything issued.  I suppose I heard thousands of LPs at least once.  Some dozens of times.  I occasionally met various artists.  I was familiar with the record scene in LA and San Francisco.  I dealt with tens of thousand of customers.  I think I know the dreamy record type.

     Without exception they have a broken down psychology.  Consider songs like Broken down, second hand Rose, Here Comes The Rain, It’s Raining In My Heart, the talented but overlooked Larry Hosford’s Everything’s Broken Down.  In my experience with record store employees their attitude was:  If it ain’t broke, break it.  And they did.  I spent fifteen years dealing with broken people and I didn’t like it.

     Bob was broken, probably still is.  The part of his songs I identified with from 1964-66 was the broken down images of his ‘greatest’ work.  All those put down songs were answered in my soul as I walked up and down the street of broken dreams.  He spoke my own frustration and rage.  I thought at the time the vicious put downs of Positively Fourth Street was Dylan at his best and I still do but I can’t bear to sing along anymore.  The instrumentals he devised were pure genius.  In fact I would give him higher marks as a composer than I would as a lyricist.

     It scarcely needs pointing out but after Blonde On Blonde his pure rage was spent.  He had apparently put down everyone he wanted to put down.  His direction changed.

     So what I am interested in here is the cause of his breaking down and subsequent rage.  His biographers give scant clues when they assess his childhood.  For the present we are compelled to guess from various clues scattered throughout his lyrics directed at unknown people and his comments.

     In my estimation his put down songs are directed at people from Hibbing who he obviously feels put him down.  Bob projects that rejection onto his New York scene.

     One must rely on reports but it seems that everyone in New York was unusually supportive of this stranger from Minnesota.  People seem to have gone out of their way to be supportive.  They fed him didn’t they?  They offered their couches, they let him play their records, read their books.  In fact, they educated him to Bohemian standards.  Bob didn’t get there by himself.  Bob couldn’t have written those songs without that education that they gave him for free, from the goodness of their hearts.

     A complete greenhorn when he arrived, within the very short space of two years he was a star.  Nothing at 19, by 21 he was on his way.  Life wasn’t that good to me and yet Bob sees no reason to be thankful for his good fortune.  To my taste the music that gave him his start is detestable yet Robert Shelton, a very influential music critic for the NYTimes, the most influential newspaper in NYC and America, gave Bob a glittering review that his fellow folk singers wondered about at the time while being no less a source of wonder today.

     John Hammond at CBS, one of the three largest labels in the US, a very experienced judge of talent, apparently saw something in the caterwauling Dylan that I’m sure I wouldn’t have seen, signing Bob to a recording contract.  Any contract young Bob got would have been a wonderful contract even if he had worked gratis.  Once again as with Shelton, Hammond’s associates were set wondering.  Hammond’s Folly they called it.

     So what exactly did Bob have to complain of about his reception in NYC.  Nothing that I can see.  From what I gather from his biographers his hero Woody Guthrie even accepted him.  Why then all those bitter diatribes against his fellow folksingers in NYC?  Quite simply, Bob was projecting.  He’s not talking about the present, he’s talking about the past although he puts his lyrics in the present.  We have to go back to Hibbing.  He’d only been absent from Hibbing a little over a year when he hit the Big Apple so all his antecedents were very fresh in his memory.  If RM is correct it was exactly at this time that he wrote his song The Walls Of Red Wing.  The shock of his incarceration was searing his mind.

     In Hibbing we have two influential formative processes.  One, the interaction between Bob and his classmates and the other between Bob and his father.  The latter is especially important.  I am weak on being able to judge father-son relationships because I never had a father.  From I’ve seen of father-son relationships I have absoltutely no cause for regret.  I consider it a psychological trap I miraculously escaped.

     One thing is clear from the biographers, Bob did not run with the In Crowd of his high school class.  He obviously suffered rejection thus he visits rejection on everyone in his songs from ’64-’66.  All those songs are meant to show that he’s the one and they ain’t.  ‘Sooner Or Later One Of Us Must Know’,  ‘There’s something happening here and you don’t know what it is, do you?’  Sour grapes.  Even when they know they don’t care.  You’re still you and they’re still them and they’re still in control of the social structure.  You’re still on the outside and nothing’s changed except, of course, you’re famous.

     Those of us who learn, learn the hard way.  Unfortunately that is the only way.  If you don’t know let me tell you.  What’s done is done.

      As the Persian poet, Omar Khayam put it:

The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all they Tears wash out a Word of it.

     Here’s the hard part- that’s just the way it is and the way it must stay.  If you can’t deal with that, too bad.  Bang your head against the wall until you die.  Who cares?  Hard and mean, but true.  What did they used to say?  You’ve got to be cruel to be kind?  It’s all over now, Baby Blue.  Don’t forget it; learn from it.  But don’t you grieve no more.  However it may go on raining in  your heart.

     One can’t know what happened to Bob but I suspect it happened early, probably before Junior High.  When his biographers discuss his childhood he is always in the company of outsiders.  So Bob became broken down at an early age.

     Probably in an effort to win his classmates approval he chose to become a rock and roll musician.  It worked so well when he was four performing Accentuate The Positive for his family why wouldn’t it work at sixteen with his classmates?  Well, it didn’t.  What he wanted to play they didn’t want to hear and what they might have wanted to hear he wouldn’t play.  It was his way or no way.  They booed him roundly but he didn’t care.  Strangely Bob recreated the exact same scenario on his world tour.  He was not only booed in the metropolis of Hibbing but he was booed around the world.  Didn’t care, but how many people can say that?  Very unusual personality.

     Undismayed back in Hibbing he was undismayed around the world.  I can understand his continued playing against the boos but that doesn’t mean it didn’t break his heart.  The miracle is Bob Zimmerman went on to become Bob Dylan.  You can listen to him turn into Bob Dylan on Another Side. Before that he’s Bob Zimmerman trying on the name Bob Dylan. 

     So, I think we can assign all those put down songs to his rejection back in Hibbing even though he’s singing Positively Fourth Street to his NYC coterie.

     Probably Bob thought that whatever form the initial reaction took to his rejection back in Hibbing was that he had been a victim of a form of theft.  Something valuable had been stolen from his personality, his self-respect.  This is completely understandable.  But as something was stolen from him, in vengeance he became the thief.  Thus, if Bob wants an answer to his question:  Why must I always be the thief: the compulsion can be found in whatever this childhood incident was.

     I suspect Bob began small pilfering from that age, whatever year it may have been.  As he was definitely sentenced to a Reformatory for a crime commited in the twelfth grade I have to believe he was caught stealing items of sufficient value for him to have been brought before a court where he was convicted and received a sentence.

     It seems unlikely that as a first offender he would have been given time in a reformatory therefore it seems likely that he must have been arrested a couple times before and let off with a warning.  That’s the way it was back then before they put you in jail for first offence jay-walking.

     That Bob was not averse to breaking into other’s property is made clear by Howard Sounes story of Echo Helstrom’s jimmying the lock of the Moose Lodge.  That Bob was not particularly careful is evident by the fact that having broken in Bob banged away at the piano and sang.  After making an unauthorized entry that would seem foolhardy.  Bob wasn’t just a kid either.  That occurred sometime in the eleventh grade.

     I suspect these earlier crimes were all thefts.  As he was not a good thief, seemingly always being caught, he must have wanted his thefts to be discovered much as he himself was aware that something of value had been stolen from him.  The last theft for which the judge thought he had no choice but to give Bob time must have been a good one, perhaps a burlary or store break-in.  The crime may have been committed weeks or a couple months before graduation so Bob was allowed to finish school before serving his sentence in the Summer of ’59.  Worst summer of Bob’s young life.  Worse than church camp.  This much is certain, he was in a reformatory for a couple months in the Summer of ’59.  The question is where, and how does Father Abraham fit in?

     Bob seems to have had a difficult relationship with his father.  When that began and whether it had anything to do with his Judaism is the question.  There most certainly is a conflict in Bob’s mind between his Gentile cultural identity growing up in Hibbing amongst Gentiles and his Jewish cultural identity imposed on him by his family and probably most especially by his father.  Thus in later life Bob would first become a born again Christian, then revert to Judaism, and a fundamental Judaism at that, then form a compr0mise between the two that he is evidently following today.  His autobiography, Chronicles Vol. I, wasn’t involved with religion that I remember.  I’ll have to read it again.

     As I read the biographies Bob was relatively ignorant of the tenets of Judaism as of his Bar Mitzvah at 13.  In a situation that I would consider extraordinary a Rabbi was flown in especially for him just prior to his Bar Mitzvah to indoctrinate him and then returned to wherever he came from shortly after.  I don’t know, seems like Abraham was really concerned that Bob understand his relationship to Judaism.  They would have had to pay the Rabbi.  It would be interesting to know Bob’s reaction to this event.

     For myself I was forced to attend church through Junior and Senior High which I deeply resented, even hated.  I can control myself if I am forced to enter a religious edifice today, that mainly because I am a real trooper who does his duty, but there wouldn’t be any need for anyone to push it too hard.  I could break out cursing.  Oddly I’ve been in everthing from Catholic Churches to Jewish synagogues over the years.  What did I ever do to anybody?

     Also in subsequent years Bob attended a religious summer camp called Camp Herzl.  Whether he was compelled to or not I don’t know but in my case I was compelled to attend those accursed church camps.  If there is anything in my religious background I care to take back it is those few weeks spent there.  Absolutely hated it.  It would be interesting to know how Bob enjoyed the experience.

     Now, Bob tells us that his father Abraham at one time told him that it was possible for a son to become so defiled himself that his father and mother would disown him.  Bob doesn’t tell us when or under what circumstances his father told him this.  Was it a sort of admonition Abe thought every father should tell his son at, say, ten, or possibly at his Bar Mitzvah, or was it something Abe told Bob just before the authorities took Bob away for his sojourn at the reformatory- possibly even, probably Red Wing?  Certainly his departure would have been as horrific an occasion for his father as it was for Bob.

     So here’s the crux of the father problem.  RM in her comment described Abraham a ‘passive-aggressive’ but clearly abusive father.  RM says that an old girlfriend said that Bob seemed quite afraid of his father but she didn’t know if he hit him or not.  RM seems to think Abe did but I’m not so sure but as we’ll see there is evidence that points to the fact that he may have.

     A statement like ‘I’m not so sure the truth will set you free’ may sound innocuous enough but who knows how many lectures lay behind it or how they pertained to it.  Enigmatic at best, what religious truth was Abraham trying to convey to young Bob?  Not so clear to me.  I’ve known some pretty nutty religious types in my time, just because Abraham was Jewish doesn’t mean he wasn’t a nutty religious type, and some of them were quite terrifying.  I mean, de Lawd gave them verbal instructions and they heard it.  A statement like a boy may become so defiled his parents would reject him is enough to set any boy shaking especially as Bob had already been rejected by his classmates.  If a kid isn’t secure in his parents estimation who is he secure with?  To me that statement was a terrific threat.

     Defiled? Defiled?  Bob might ask himself, I must be defiled but am I that defiled yet?  I mean, why tell me Dad?  I mean, do you want me to leave now?  Crap like that going on for seventeen years or so would make you afraid of any parent.  I could learn to hate a guy like that.

     Judging from appearances Bob’s subsequent life seems to have been to determine how defiled he could be before everyone would turn away from him.  What kind of test would it be?  Getting drunk at midday and collapsing in your own vomit in the middle of the Minnesota campus?  Was that enough?  No.  Bonnie Beecher didn’t deny him; she showed her love.  The question there is how it is Bob collapsed where Bonnie would likely be?  Coincidence?  Nah.  It wouldn’t taken too much to know her class assignments and be in the the appropriate place.  Maybe planned, maybe not.  We won’t know unless Bob tells us.

     Bob’s whole career from that point on seems to consist of tests to see how much others will endure before they disown him.  I mean, think about it.  What kind of character does it take to offend his fans with noise you know beyond doubt they don’t want to hear, to go on doing it when you know they are going to go on booing you unmercifully?  Bob did this around the world and was booed round the world.  Amazingly his fans didn’t desert him but continued to show up if for no other reason than to boo him.  Bob wasn’t too defiled for his fans, was he?  They continued to accept anything he did.

     Of course he lost a few of these contests.  Suze Rotolo for instance.  Bob was just too much for her mother and sister if not Suze herself.  Otherwise the boy forced the world to take him on his own terms.  Defilement was the issue between him and his dad.  Bob seems to have won that particular defilement issue too.

     Did he do time at Red Wing or not?  RM and I both think he did.  I agree with RM that the lyrics to Walls Of Redwing sound like authentic although very generalized experience.  The Minnesota DOC (Department Of Corrections) says on one of their websites that Bob Dylan was never incarcerated at Red Wing.  Maybe not.  But if Bob Dylan wasn’t how about Robert Zimmerman?  There is not doubt however that he was incarcerated somewhere.  Wherever that was records must exist.

     I believe that if one has the key all Bob’s lyrics ’64-66 will be found to be autobiographical.  Why should Bob be different than any other writer?  All writers are autobiographical.  What else can they be?  Thus in relation to Red Wing if RM doesn’t have the right slant the song has to relate to Bob’s life in some way, and some way that goes back to before he left Hibbing.  The title Highway 61 Revisited has to have that exact meaning.  Bob is revisiting Highway 61 whatever meaning the phrase has for him.  RM’s understanding of the following lyrics seems brilliant to me whether it turns out Bob did his time at Red Wing or not.  Remember it is certain that he did time somewhere, that is not the question.  If the song does not physically describe Red Wing then the ‘country club’ in Philadelphia must.

 Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”

Abe says, “Man you must be puttin’ me on.”

God say. “No.”  Abe say, “What?”

God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but  The next time you see me comin’ you better run.”

Well Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”

God says, “Out on Highway 61.”

     RM goes on:  Red Wing is DIRECTLY on Highway 61 separated only by a barbed wire fence.  Thus, Bob may have experienced his incarceration as a form of psychological death for which he held his father, Abe, responsible.  Highway 61 as I see it has no signficance otherwise.  The Civil Rights stuff going on in the South couldn’t possibly have figured largely in Bob’s imagination besides it had nothing to do with killing a son.

     Consider also these lines from Chimes of Freedom:

Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting

Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking track

For the lonesome hearted lovers with too personal a tale

An’ for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail

As we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

Starry eyed and laughing, as I recall, when we were caught…

     I think those lines can be related back to Highway 61 and the crime for which the ‘unharmful gentle soul’ Bob paid.  The last line would imply that he and Echo? were caught together.  That sounds like a burglary or break-in.

     Another word on possible influences for Highway 61.

     While both Folk and Pop music were important to the era, equally as important, possibly more so, were the Comedy records.  The late fifties and early sixties were the golden age of comedy LPs.  The three most important were Bob Newhart, The Smothers Brothers and Shelley Berman.  These three were huge.  Trailing behind them were Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Lord Buckley, Allan Sherman, Jose Jimenez and a couple others.

     Newhart and the Smothers would have have had the most direct influence on Bob at this time.  Both artists did monologues or dialogues of an historical nature.  The Smothers Brothers were, of course, a comedy Folk act.  Overwhelming in their appeal.  We were all blown out of the saddle by these comedy records that seemed so nouveau and groundbreaking that they could easily be seen as the Chimes of Freedom flashing.  Thus the first verse of Highway 61 can be seen as a comedic takeoff on God, Abraham, and Isaac a la Newhart or the Smothers.

      After the first and obviously key verse that deals with the Son and father, Abe, Bob cobbles some historical verses together.  Mack the Finger (Knife) and Louie (XIV) the king.  Verse two deals with Jesse James:

He asked poor Howard where can I go

Howard said there’s only one place I know

Sam said tell me quick man I got to run

Ol’ Howard just pointed with his gun

And said that way down Highway 61.

     As we all know Bob Ford was the dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard, the name Jesse James was living under at the time.  I think we can chalk Highway 61 up as an attempt to emulate the Smothers and Newhart along with Bob’s other needs.  Think about Desolation Row as a comedy routine.

     If one does want to really understand the early sixties it is essential to be familiar with Newhart, the Smothers and Shelley Berman.  Still good stuff too.

     Bob would have been released from the reformatory just in time to leave for U. Minnesota.  One can only imagine his state of mind as he left for Minnesota as the defiled son.  He began by testing everyone.  As a nobody there were few who would put up with his antics.  We can’t be sure how far he would go with his antics or exactly what he would have done.  If the scene with Bonnie Beecher is any indication he had pretty wide parameters to work within.  He claimed that in New York he hustled, that is sold his behind as a male prostitute.  Did he?  I don’t know but having consciously established himself as a liar or teller of tall tales he could tell any preposterous truth and not be taken seriously.  Thus he would be able to get such things off his chest while being disbelieved.  Hustling would probably be a form of defilement that would offend his father.  He told the journalist Al Aronowitz that he had done time in Red Wing.  Why would anyone tell stories that were reputation destroyers?

     Testing people is one thing, of course, but would a guy who puked all over himself and lay down in the middle of campus balk at hustling in NYC?  You tell me.

     Through ’66 Bob exhibited all the characteristics of the man walking up and down the boulevard of broken dreams.  Everything in his life was broken down.  He was apparently filthy and unkempt.  Many people refer to his complete lack of hygiene.  They use such emphatic terms as Bob must have been avoiding soap and water.  Hygiene, he didn’t have any.

     Except for the brief honeymoon period with Sara after his acident he always affected a bum or hobo like character.  He even called his recording studio, Rundown Studios.  The pain lived on in his heart as a steady downpour.  He made his environment reflect the shambles in his mind.  He had mixed up confusion and man it was killing him.  He built a multi-million dollar house and then made it look like a junkyard.

     He made one attempt to escape the Boulevard.  There is some question as to the seriousness of the motorcycle accident.  There seems to be evidence that he wasn’t seriously hurt if hurt at all.  I think that after Blonde On Blonde his initial torment was spent.  At best Grossman was working him so hard, setting up the next grueling tour that as Bob said if he had gone on it would have been the death of him so he opted out, took some much needed time off to recover.

     During the brief period of recuperation he seems to have calmed down somewhat. If the photos of Elliot Landy are accurate evidence,

http://www.landyvision.com he seems to have cleaned up his act trying to be the good country squire for Sara.  The photos look as though he were bathing and wearing clean clothes.  It couldn’t last.  His inner devastated compulsion urged him  on.  At some point he must have decided how much defilement Sara would take before he could drive her away.

     Lord, how he tried that woman’s soul.  Bob was shameless beyond belief.  She finally threw in the towel when she came to breakfast to find Bob eating with another woman. 

     In the divorce proceedings she claimed she was in fear of her physical well being, that Bob had offered her physical violence.  It is quite possible that after years of drug and alcohol abuse Bob’s decency was so lowered that he did offer her violence.  Perhaps he was then visiting the violence on her that RM thinks his father dealt him.  Perhaps he was only trying to see exactly how much defilement she would take before checking out.  Perhaps Bob merely wanted Sara to be as defiled as himself so that they would be equals.

     Bob cruelly shattered the poor woman’s life.  After standing by him through terrific emotional abuse Bob had the audacity to remonstrate ‘But people in my family just don’t get divorced.  Chutzpah on a stick.  Didn’t he even care what the effect on his children would be?  Hard to feel sorry for ya, Bob.

     Bob punished himself to the tune of many millions of dollars.  It must have hurt so good.  Balm for a wounded soul.  Not satisfied Bob had another brief marriage bestowing additional millions on that wife.  These sexual adventures compelled him to work non-stop to support his various establishments.  It isn’t cheap being Bob Dylan.  A life style was forced on him that required vast sums, perhaps millions a year to maintain.

     Thus Bob laughed tonight and cried tomorrow when he beheld his shattered dreams, but no matter how defiled Bob was he was holding his own in the war.  Everything was still broken down, rundown, second hand Rose but then for the psychological type, Only A Hobo, there’s a certain pleasure in that.

End.

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