Down in “Key West,” the aged bard from the North Country wanders in the shadows, reflecting on his life in song and looking outward to the horizon line. In that space between worlds, time loses meaning and spirits walk beside him, including the ghost of his great frenemy from Liverpool. Once more, they chat, laugh, wrestle, and poke, like brothers.

As Chapter One of “I Don’t Love Nobody” shows, I’ve long understood that Dylan is addressing Lennon in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” and that the song is his final epitaph for his fallen buddy. I’ve long known that Lennon’s inspirational presence in my memoir, The Golden Bird, is a main reason Dylan used it as a source. By reading Windolf’s Where the Music Had to Go, however, I have discovered two allusions to Lennon, one in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” and another in its cousin, “False Prophet,” that I hadn’t previously noticed. Each one deepens my understanding of these songs. To be clear, although Windolf writes extensively about answer songs between Bob and John, he does not mention Rough and Rowdy Ways at all. His book ends with the final cut on Dylan’s 2012 album Tempest, “Roll on John.”

Before publishing “I Don’t Love Nobody” in hard copy (someday!), I will integrate these newly discovered allusions into Chapter One. For now, however, I’m excited to share them with the small number of readers who are on this journey with me. I’m grateful that you’ve tuned in.

What is an “answer song?” It is Dylan’s “4th Time Around,” responding to “Norwegian Wood” and three other Lennon-authored tunes that Bob believes were copped from him. It is Lennon’s “I Want You (She’s so Heavy)” replying to Dylan’s song of a similar name, and it is Dylan’s “I Wanna be Your Lover” adding complexity and clever jokes to Lennon’s “I Wanna be Your Man.” It is Lennon’s “Nowhere Man” adding an empathic view to Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man.” Check out Windolf’s book for full context on these, and more. The important thing to know is that in each case, the reply is both a nod of respect and a barbed attempt at one-upmanship.

Here’s a quick look back at the references to Lennon in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” that I’ve previously named, beginning with the most obvious one, in that all-important penultimate stanza:

I play both sides against the middle

Pickin’ up that pirate radio signal

I heard the news - I heard your last request

Here, Bob refers to the death of his friend with the same phrase he uses in “Roll on, John”: “I heard the news.” The line also appears twice in The Golden Bird, each time about the murder, and its original source is, of course, “I read the news today, oh boy,” from Lennon’s “A Day in the Life”—another song about a death. As you’ll recall, this triplet and the succeeding one are tightly bound. Look back at Chapter One for all the details. Here, suffice to say that “both sides against the middle” is from the perspective of a certain Jesus freak.

The second line is a reprise of an allusion to Lennon in the second stanza:

I’m searchin’ for love and inspiration

On that pirate radio station

It’s comin’ out of Luxembourg and Budapest

Windolf’s Where the Music Had to Go covers Bob Dylan’s visit to John Lennon’s childhood home in Liverpool, Mendips, in some detail. We get a beautiful sense of Dylan standing in John’s teenage bedroom. We see visions of John lying on his bed listening to early American rock and roll—say Little Richard—crackling in on Radio Luxembourg. We imagine Bob, recalling his own childhood bedroom in Hibbing, where he would listen to blues broadcast from the American south.

So, that’s two allusions to Lennon. Here’s another in the second triplet of that penultimate stanza:

Fly around my Pretty Little Miss

I don’t love nobody - gimme a kiss

Down at the bottom - way down in Key West

Most of these lines, as you will recall, concern the otherworldly nature of “Key West,” as a place where the angels ascend and descend Jacob’s ladder. This lyric blends the magic of folk song with the incorporeal nature of the spirit world, as taken, in part, from a pivotal scene in the story of that Jesus freak. This includes the pun in the first half of the second line, from which I’ve borrowed the title of this book.

“I Don’t Love Nobody” however, also refers to a song by the turn-of-the-20th Century minstrel Lew Sully, recorded decades later by Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten. As such, it is another veiled reference to Lennon and his early inspirations, coming in on those “pirate” stations.

How so?

One of Cotten’s most famous songs is “Freight Train,” written when she was all of eleven years old. Libba taught it to Peggy Seeger, of the well-known folk singing family, while she worked as a housekeeper in their childhood home. Seeger later took it to Britain, where it spread on the folk revival circuit and was eventually recorded in a skiffle version by an artist named Chas McDevitt. "Freight Train” became a big hit and was played often on the radio, although for a time, very few realized it was written by a Black woman from America. Here we see that “pirate” means not so much an illegal station (Radio Luxembourg was completely above-board), but a borrowed song.

Now John is no longer lying on his bed, he is sitting at the kitchen table, drumming his fingers on the table to the beat. He’s listening to the BBC’s Saturday night Six-Five Special. “Freight Train” gives him ideas, as does another song they play, that I’ve written about recently, Lonnie Donegan’s “Lost John.” Lennon’s Quarrymen will include both in their repertoire.

Peggy’s brother Mike, who also appears covertly in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” will eventually record Cotten singing “Freight Train,” along with an 1896 minstrel song she knows, a racist tune that she converts into a song of liberation: “I Don’t Love Nobody.”

Now, here’s the first of my newly discovered allusions to Lennon, and I believe it is a case of Bob giving his brother John a sharp elbow:

Mystery Street off Mallory Square

Truman had his White House there

In my previous thinking about “Mystery Street,” I have mostly focused on the second phrase of the line. I have written about Confederate Naval Secretary Stephen Mallory, his membership at St. Marys, Star of the Sea (site of the convent home), and his letter to his son from prison, encouraging him to stay true to the “mysteries” of their Catholic faith. I have also focused on the second line in the couplet, which is, according to the poet, another defining aspect of “Mystery Street.” I have written about Harry Truman’s visit to Duluth and the story Dylan tells about it in Chronicles, how as a child he heard the President speak at Leif Erickson Park, and how he was “mesmerized,” as he would again be “mesmerized” a decade later, across the street at the Armory, by the rocker Buddy Holly. I have focused on “Mystery Street” as a long avenue of fate and faith that runs from the beginning of Dylan’s life to the twilight passageways of “Key West.”

All of these, I believe, are intended allusions. But I made a mistake. I identified the song that Dylan is referring to as Junior Parker’s “Mystery Train,” because of its association with Bob’s hero Elvis and the roots of rock and roll. Somehow, I missed Alma Cogan’s 1957 hit that matches exactly: “Mystery Street.” Cogan’s spooky song seems to be about forces, including fate, that bring the narrator to an illicit love, and the results:

Jealousy, hate
And misery wait
Happiness too
You'll find if you can be true

Mystery street
Fate has guided your feet
Bitter or sweet
It's all in mystery street

Here’s the thing: in Where the Music Had to Go, Jim Windolf tells us that one of John Lennon’s diversions in the mid-60s, while married to his first wife Cynthia, was an extended affair with Alma Cogan.

Why might Dylan include a reference to such an intimate detail in John Lennon’s life, as one of the many allusions in the couplet?

Because it proceeds directly from the answer songs that came before. As mentioned above, the first one Dylan addressed to Lennon was “Fourth Time Around” as a response to “Norwegian Wood.” Dylan copied both the melody and the idea of Lennon’s tune, because, according to Windolf, he considered it a rip-off of his own style. The lyrical setting of both tracks, as I’m sure you know, is romantic affair between a man and a woman, and in both cases, it’s not going well. Lennon’s song is a simple story of sexual rejection, sweet and to the point, while Dylan’s is altogether more complex, poetic, and humorous. Windolf claims that Dylan addresses Lennon directly in his final lines:

And I, I never took much
I never asked for your crutch
Now don’t ask for mine

He offers no evidence and I’m not sure I agree, but overall, without a doubt, “Fourth Time Around” is a brutal rebuttal to “Norwegian Wood.”

“Mystery Street,” a hit for John Lennon’s lover, Alma Cogan, is also about an affair. By including it in the poetic narrative of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” Dylan brings an early battle with his old friend back to the front. Still, why exactly?

Well, as T.S. Eliot wrote, “in my beginning is my end.” In “Key West,” time is circular.

In the last year of his life, Lennon recorded twelve versions of a song called “Serve Yourself.” He considered including it on Double Fantasy, but decided against it, according to Windolf, because its bitter tone did not fit with the upbeat vibe of the album. “Serve Yourself” is John’s riposte to Dylan’s song of Christian conversion, “Gotta Serve Somebody.” On this track, Lennon repeats the argument he made nearly a decade earlier in “God”:

You say you found Jesus

He’s the only one

You say you found Buddha

Sittin’ in the sun

You say you found Mohammed

Bowin’ to the east

You say you found Krishna

Dancin’ in the street

Well it’s too much cockamamie, too much cock-a-doodle-doo

You know there’s somethin’ missin’ in this godalmighty stew

And it’s your mother

Don’t forget your mother, boy

You got to serve yourself

In case we somehow miss the point that this one is for Bob, later in the tune, Lennon name checks Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business,” the progenitor of Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”

We know that John had abandonment issues from his own mother, Julia, but these lyrics clearly refer to Yoko, whom he often addressed as “Mother.” This rude couplet makes it plain:

Well, you may believe in Mickey Mouse or even Donald Duck

But who the hell you turn to when you really need a _____

From “God”:

I just believe in me. Yoko and me. That’s reality.

In “Serve Yourself,” Lennon addresses Dylan’s faith in Jesus as just another concept by which we measure our pain. He makes clear his belief that Dylan has "lost his mind” to dogma.

Alma Cogan’s “Mystery Street” in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” is a return jab. According to Windolf, Bob denied any irritation at “Serve Yourself” when one of his band members played it for him, but we know that he expresses himself most truly in song. And, as Windolf makes clear, the two lyricists never pulled punches in their answer song exchange.

Lennon’s crutch, instead of the Lord, was always and ever a woman:

It’s your mother

You gotta serve somebody.

Dylan is the consummate master of a multi-pronged allusion, however, and “Mystery Street” is vastly more than a return insult from Bob to John. “Mystery Street” is a rock and roll road of fate and faith that leads right to the end of a life. Along with one well-hidden jibe, Dylan’s last answer song to Lennon carries deep respect. In “Key West,” Dylan places himself with Lennon on a single, on one 45, with “I Believe in You” on Side A, and “God” on Side B. Two men, two artists, two mortals, who ain’t no false prophets. And who sees them as such? Who is trying to understand where he might turn next in his life, according to the songs, the only inspiration he has ever known? Who is the music for? A fan, of course. A Jesus freak in a cold van in the December waste of Indiana.

In Where the Music Had to Go, Windolf also unknowingly reveals an allusion about Lennon in “False Prophet.” I found it in his fascinating summary of the controversy surrounding Lennon’s “more popular than Jesus” comment in a 1966 interview. As you probably know, American evangelicals seized on John’s offhand statement and began organizing bonfires for Beatles’ albums. The backlash intensified and John was eventually called upon to explain himself at a Chicago press conference. Lennon confessed regret, but insisted he had been misinterpreted:

I’m not saying we’re better, or greater, or comparing us with Jesus Christ as a person or God as a thing whatever it is, you know. I just said what I said, and it was wrong, or it was taken wrong. And now it’s all this.

From False Prophet:

You don’t know me darlin’ - you never would guess

I’m nothing like my ghostly appearance would suggest

I ain’t no false prophet - I just said what I said

Here, Dylan combines another reference to the insubstantiality of the physical form with his mischievous triple-negative refrain about his status as prophet. Now I see that he also includes Lennon. In doing so, he reinforces the bond between the two that we hear about, between the lines, in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” Are they or are they not? Who is true and who is false?

I write lots about '“False Prophet” in Chapter Five, a song which also features Bob’s old buddies Roy Orbison and Ricky Nelson, as well as lines from the Bhagavad Gita and the Egyptian Book of the Dead. I write a bunch about this lyric, which I thought of while listening to Lennon the other day:

I’ve searched the world over for the Holy Grail

I recalled it because I was humming along to one of my favorites from John, a song I need these days, the wonderfully positive and hopeful “Mind Games”:

We all been playin’ those mind games forever

Some kind of druid dude

Liftin’ the veil

Doin’ the mind guerrilla

Some call it magic

The search for the grail

Love is the answer

And you know that

For sure

Love is a flower

You gotta let it

You gotta let it grow

So keep on playin’ these mind games together

Faith in the future

Out of the now

The songs of both Bob Dylan and John Lennon continue to inspire the life of this Jesus freak.

Be well, friends.

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Hey!

I’ve been quiet here for a while, as I work on the next full chapter of “I Don’t Love Nobody”: Hidden Stories from Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways. Chapter Eight, coming soon, is titled “I am Bob Dylan’s Monster (and so are You).” It’s a study of the poetics and allusions of the song, “My Own Version of You.” I’ve also been away because, except for Patreon promos, Dylan has gone silent on Instagram. His last post, on April 10, featured Little Hat Jones’ 1930 recording of “Kentucky Blues.” On April 24, I published an essay showing how the artist, by sharing the old blues song, summons the ghosts of Lonnie Johnson, Lonnie Donegan, and John Lennon. If you missed it, please check it out. My article describes how Dylan’s post circles all the way back to his tranfiguration of episodes of my memoir, The Golden Bird, into “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” in 2020. It’s all part of the master’s secret art, and the dialogue we’ve been having for a more than a year between Instagram and Substack.

It’s weird, it’s unbelievable, it’s down under, and if you read all my chapters, starting at the beginning, you might just agree that it’s true.

Today I’m back, briefly, with stories about Dylan’s recent shows here in the suburbs of Seattle and one of his recent Patreon tales. I attended the second and third performances of the new tour, my 61st and 62nd Bob shows. My first was back in 1978, on a concrete plain in the south of England. In Woodinville, 48 years later, I discovered that a Bob Dylan concert is still a kind of miracle, still able to break my head open.

If you’ve wandered by hoping for news about Bob Dylan the personality, however, I’m sorry, I don’t have anything for you. As you’ve surely noticed, the man himself is hardly visible anymore, at the back of the stage under his white or black hoodie. He is on retreat from view.

I’m also not writing about the full set list or Dylan’s changing line-up of band members. Many fans and critics are covering those things, and you can hear the shows for yourself on Youtube. I will say on the second night, the 7th of June, I wandered around the grounds during his set, and the further away from the stage I got, the better everything sounded. Up close, the first night, from the 7th row, the mix was a bit sludgy. Sometimes it’s best to just close your eyes and listen from far away.

My story today, a continuing story about how Bob Dylan’s poetry—live in concert, on record, or just playing back in my head—has helped guide me through life, concerns a single number he performed in Woodinville. It’s a song I wrote about in The Golden Bird, in fact, in a section that takes place directly after the Christian cult episodes that Dylan borrowed for “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” For full context, I include an excerpt below. The section is called “Mud Bay” and the setting of this passage is a rental house in the dank woods on the outskirts of Olympia, Washington, in the fall of 1981. I have recently arrived in the city and enrolled at the Evergreen State College to study organic agriculture. I am 21 years old and seeking a direction, in a period when all of my old friends in Oregon have come to believe, because of my adventures at spiritual extremes, that I have “lost my mind.” Luckily, I’ve connected with one of my new classmates:

Under a soggy sky, logging trucks rumbled and screamed down Mud Bay Road. Just beyond a dilapidated tavern, behind a towering untrimmed laurel hedge, I found a house that had begun to return to the earth. A thick sheet of moss bent the roof at an odd angle. Plastic covered broken windows. Puzzling bits of metal and plastic lay strewn in the muddy front yard. An ugly, banged up compact car rusted on the dirt driveway.

Loud music blared from inside so I knocked extra hard. Paint flaked off on my hand as I pushed open the door and cautiously peeked. The interior of the house was only slightly more appealing than the shell. In a dim light, I noticed a couple of worn couches suspiciously similar to the dorm room furniture. The air smelled of mildew, soil, and sewage. Bryan later told me that he had emptied many barrels of dirt from an upstairs bedroom, remnants of someone else’s pot-growing operation. The rest of the stink came from the bathroom plumbing, which emptied directly into the basement and an open cesspool behind the house.

Bryan sat on a straight-backed chair at a heavily scarred dining room table, fiddling with something in his hands.

“Bryan? Hey, Bryan! Hello?”

He jumped up immediately, rushed over to me, and grabbed my hands. His brown beard, thick on the neck, mirrored my own golden whiskers. Keen, dark eyes probed straight through me until I self-consciously looked away.

“Steven! Welcome! So glad you came! And absolutely perfect timing! I was just rolling up a few joints! Do you know this record? No? You must hear it! Captain Beefheart! Trout Mask Replica. It’s brilliant!”

I nodded and smiled. Whatever — I was just so happy to be invited over.

At the table, I saw what Bryan had been working on. A small mountain of marijuana was crumbled on the cover of Dylan’s Nashville Skyline. He’d been cleaning out the seeds, in the usual way of the times, by gently shaking the record sleeve. The motion sent seeds cascading and jittering across Bob’s face, into a waiting dish. Next to this, Bryan had constructed a great pyramid of doobies — little skinny ones at the top and massive spliffs, supporting beams, at the base.

He plucked one from the apex, looked at me with a maniacal gleam, and put a match to it. Over the next hour, we smoked them all, lighting each new joint from the butt of the last. Bryan explained his outlook on the pot.

“This boo is ditch-weed, but it’s all I could afford. But when we get to the last roach, it will be super-loaded with resins! We can smoke it in a pipe!”

Strange songs wailed and howled in the background. Frank Zappa replaced Beefheart, John Cage replaced Zappa, and an odd cassette of Hawaiian tunes mixed with sex instruction replaced Cage. This latter had been made by one of Bryan’s friends from Michigan. At least there was some melody on that one. It was difficult to hear over the music, but Bryan kept up a steady monologue.

“Did you buy your books yet? Man, they’re expensive! Had to create my own discount on one or two. How can a paperback cost thirty dollars? What a rip-off! Made by workers getting paid pennies, no doubt, while the bosses get rich. That’s why I’m here! Agriculture should be socialism at its best — reclaiming the means of production!’

The record had ended and Bryan began to sing in a low voice.

“Power to the people! Power to the people! Power to the people right on!”

He started to ad-lib.

“Fuck you, Ronald Reagan! Fuck you, Ronald Reagan! Fuck you, Ronald Reagan right on!

“Man, I cried when John Lennon got shot. I was living in Ann Arbor, delivering white flour, white sugar cakes, for minimum wage when I heard the news. I decided, at that moment, something had to change for me!”

“How’d you make your way out here?”

“I heard about Evergreen and the Farm Program from a friend. A few weeks ago, I drove out from Michigan in Commie, that little Mercury Comet out front. The trip over the mountains nearly killed it! How about you, Steven? How did you end up here?”

I wasn’t sure what to say. I couldn’t begin to tell Bryan about the Christ Family. I didn’t know how to talk about it, and I didn’t want to alienate a new friend. Instead, I told him about Kari — the girl I’d met in Chelan — and my summer, and my earlier, aimless studies in Oregon. I skipped my adventures of the previous year — maybe another time.

We vaporized the pile of doobies and smoked the tarry roach. I wasn’t really high but a big wet sponge had replaced my brain. Bryan put on Nashville Skyline, a record made in 1969 — a hymn to simple pleasures and the rural life. Here was more common ground. Two city boys were ready for the country and Dylan provided the soundtrack.

After a while, Bryan shut off the turntable and pulled a mountain dulcimer out of a worn cloth case. I’d never seen one before. It’s an Appalachian original, a bow-shaped string instrument, strummed or picked while lying across the musician’s lap. It has a high, sweet sound a bit like a mandolin. Bryan looked at me with a sincere, intense grin and launched into a rollicking take of Dylan’s “You Ain’t Goin Nowhere.”

Whoo-ee! Ride me high

Tomorrow’s the day

My bride’s gonna come

Oh, oh, are we gonna fly

Down in the easy chair!

“That one’s special. I’m getting married in Michigan, over the winter break. Ilene is back there finishing her Master’s Degree in Library Science. Whoo-ee! She’s the girl of my dreams.”

At the conclusion of my last post, on May 24, I wished Bob a happy 85th birthday and mentioned that I’d be in the audience in Woodinville, on June 6 and 7. On the first of those dates, he opened the show by singing these words, from a song he hadn’t performed in fourteen years:

Clouds so swift

Rain won’t lift

Gate won’t close

Railings froze

Get your mind off wintertime

You ain’t goin’ nowhere

Whoo-ee! Ride me high

Tomorrow’s the day

My bride’s gonna come

Oh, oh, are we gonna fly

Down in the easy chair!

More than a month later, he hasn’t performed the cut from The Basement Tapes again.

I confess, in the story I’ve been telling for six years now, I can’t always distinguish clearly between the cosmic, the coincidental, and Bob Dylan’s intentions. He only speaks, after all, in music and symbol. But I trust my intuition, I trust our long and detailed artistic exchange, and I believe in the songs. I might miss a few of his allusions and I might create meaning here and there where none exists. But overall, the logic of this narrative is sound. And it still blows my mind, every single day.

Do I really believe Bob pulled out “You Ain’t Goin Nowhere” for me personally, as another acknowledgment of our strange bond? I guess I do. Most of the time I actually do. I also realize that he’s been playing a couple other deep tracks from those late 60’s recordings—“Baby, Won’t You be my Baby” and “ I Shall be Released”—so it could just be chance. But I’d like to point out the presence of John Lennon, alongside Bob Dylan, in the excerpt above. If you’ve been following along, you know that the relationship between the two musicians is central to my narrative. The Beatle appears in the penultimate verse of “Key West (Philospher Pirate),” in imagery I claim Dylan has taken from an episode in The Golden Bird:

I play both sides against the middle

Pickin’ up that pirate radio signal

I heard the news - I heard your last request

As you will recall, I use the phrase “I heard the news” in the cult section of the memoir, when I learn of John’s murder. Immediately afterwards, I experience an ordeal of faith and doubt, from which I believe Dylan created the first couplet. Only now have I realized that the phrase also occurs in the excerpt above, uttered by Bryan regarding his own reaction to John’s death.

Dylan and Lennon, two singers hailed as prophets, two sides of a record called “God,” two sides of the radio dial, two inspirations over a young man’s life. And Lennon, as I’ve shown, is all over Dylan’s Instagram: buried between the lines in his post of the rapper Proof, and also in Little Hat Jones’ version of a “Lost John” song, “Kentucky Blues.” He’s there in the two long boxing clips from 1980 Dylan posted on February 21—in the offscreen presence of Howard Cosell, who would tell the a national television audience about Lennon’s murder later that year.

Once again, I assert that Bob Dylan is not like you and I, or your grandpa, putting up random shit on Instagram about about music and films he likes. Everything he does in the public sphere has a reason. The story behind “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” is a mystery play, and among Dylan’s many creative pursuits, he is telling that story, under the radar, in collaboration with a fan—one of his monsters. Whether his one-off performance of “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” in Woodinville in early June is a part of that narrative, or not, I can’t say with certainty. But it fits. And it seems to be my job to “stay observant” and document these things.

On to the next “coincidence” that set my antennae quivering. If you’ve been reading my articles, you know that I’ve decided, for the most part, not to write about Dylan’s Patreon stories. These tales are fascinating, wise and compassionate, but most of them seem unrelated to my narrative. Today, however, I want to mention one that takes place entirely here in Washington state. “King Bolete,” by “Kika Kobiela,” is about a mushroom picker named Cal, a lost soul on the trail of the king—a mountain man, or perhaps a Pan-like nature god. Cal hopes that Bolete will help him find the fungi fortune he desires. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Cal’s boots had been wet since Olympia and possibly before birth. He stood under the coughing neon of the Fern & Fork Diner with a paper map melting in his hands, listening to a dishwasher named Denise explain that King Bolete had come through three days ago with a beard full of spruce needles and two pillowcases of porcini.

I suppose Olympia, the capital of Washington, is a well-known city, and goodness knows Dylan has probably spent plenty of time standing outside his bus by small town diners. He’s travelled all the state routes and byways from Seattle to Orlando:

Stay on the road - follow the highway sign

But I was struck by the synchrony between the setting and themes of “King Bolete”—a story that appeared on June 24, two weeks after the shows in Woodinville—and the excerpt above, and a few of the ideas that have come up in my art dialogue with Dylan.

From this diner south of Olympia, on Highway 12, Cal catches a lift with a truck hauling cedar planks to Aberdeen. You may have heard of the old logging town, where the Chehalis river flows into Grays Harbor, because it’s the birthplace and childhood home of Kurt Cobain. From there, Cal travels north on the Olympic Peninsula, where he meets up with some other pickers, and then to Bellingham. Later, he heads east Spokane, searching everywhere for King Bolete and a personal holy grail.

Eastbound - westbound

Cal finally encounters Bolete—“weather wearing a man”—and when his questions are answered with koans, he breaks down and confesses that he doesn’t know where to go. Bolete says:

Good. Most folks are lost and defending a direction.

King Bolete and Cal share a “plain and magnificent” meal—spiritual food. Bolete disappears and Cal carrries on, perhaps with a bit more courage.

Three times in the story, a saxophone plays—twice it is “cracked,” and the other time it is “bright and bruised”—the sound of Cal’s heart, damaged but still beautiful, still looking for meaning. “The apostles of snack food,” two boys that Cal meets, say that headlights are “souls looking for bodies,” as if, out there on the highway, angels are waiting, ready to fill a willing heart.

All of this is strangely familiar—the wet Washington setting, the motif of music as a consoling force, angels roaming the backroads, a young man in Olympia seeking a way forward, and Kurt Cobain—whom we last saw in Dylan’s Instagram post of the rapper Proof. No, I can’t be sure there’s any causal connections with my writing, but I feel a deep kinship with this story.

Like King Bolete to the mushroom pickers, Bob Dylan is a mythical, mystical figure to his fans. He’s moving through the world with his bag of songs, beholden only to his muse, and to some extent, his monsters. We seek him out, looking for meaning, as if his pursuit of the grail, that he describes in “False Prophet,” is our own. Each time we encounter him, however, he offers not answers, but riddles. We are left, like Cal, to construct our own meaning. The facts rarely provide enough evidence for clear conclusions. We can barely see Bob Dylan there, under his hoodie, behind his piano. But we can hear him just fine. He is Song, wearing a man.

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The dove descending breaks the air

With flame of incandescent terror

Of which the tongues declare

The one discharge from sin and error.

The only hope, or else despair

Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—

To be redeemed from fire by fire

Who then devised the torment? Love.

Love is the unfamiliar name

Behind the hands that wove

The intolerable shirt of flame

Which human power cannot remove

We only live, only suspire

Consumed by either fire or fire

— T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding”

Without fail, in whatever new moment we find ourselves with Bob Dylan—country or gospel or Sinatra, you name it—fans who claim to admire him disparage his motives. Lately, the criticism has centered on his possible use of AI—for exactly what, nobody really knows. Nobody knows. But we have already attacked our fire-bearing hero like eagles, hungry for a taste of liver. We can hardly wait to tear him open. The short stories on Patreon, I read, are “terrible.” They are “bland and pointless garbage.” The entire social media project is “baffling.” Each week, a new and similar piece appears, decrying Dylan’s reasoning. These scribes should have their pencils broken.

In the next chapter of “I Don’t Love Nobody”: Hidden Stories from Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, coming soon, I discuss Dylan’s relationship with his audience, as portrayed in “My Own Version of You.” I show how Dylan’s Frankenstein satire continues the album’s theme of artistic and spiritual inspiration. In this song, however, the philosopher pirate describes the ghastly flip side of becoming a literate rock god. Chapter 8 is titled “I am Bob Dylan’s Monster (And So are You).” In “My Own Version of You,” Dylan, like Mary Shelley’s doctor, grieves his culpability in creating his monsters: his fans. You and I. He asks if we know what it is to be truly alive—if we can say what it is, “to be or not to be.” He asks if we possess the Holy Spirit — if we are able to “cross our hearts and hope to die.” He wonders if we even know how to breathe. And by comparing himself to Victor Frankenstein, he confesses his hubris in making us:

No one can conceive the variety of feeling which bore me onwards, like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success. Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.

In the 60s, Bob was fantastically inspired. He wished we’d take him with us where ever we went, and we did. We still do. Now we talk all night and we talk all day about nothing much. In “My Own Version of You,” the rawhide lash that rips the skin from Freud and Marx also tears the singer’s own flesh. Each of these cultural titans created a legion of monsters, many of whom are still with us, rampaging over the earth, from the ad agencies of NYC to the hallways of the Kremlin to the towers of the Academy.

Dylan opened our eyes, and now? We are relentless in our demands. We gaze upon our fetish and try to capture his image in cell phone photography. We want to save his likeness and look at him in private. Why won’t he show himself? We think he is just an errand boy to satisfy our wandering desires. How dare he use AI?

Like Frankenstein’s creature, we cry out for his affection and it angers him, because he knows he bears responsibility. He created us and he is bound to us. Even at the end, at the Black Horse Tavern on Armageddon Street, Bob will be waiting. He’ll hear our footsteps, we won’t need to knock. We are always so close.

How does Bob Dylan bear this heavy burden? He stays apart and he maintains his artistic integrity. He keeps making music and painting pictures. He doesn’t owe us a thing, but he makes up his mind to give himself to us, one more time. He keeps touring and transforming old songs, his own and dozens of others, into something new. He just sets up a little further back on the stage. He wears a hoodie.

I go right where all things lost - are made good again

The least we can do is lay off the superficial nonsense and pay attention. The least we can do is stop doubting his motives and his integrity. Sometimes, as with his possible use of AI, that might mean to just wait, watch, and listen. “Stay observant.”

I’ve adopted that credo throughout writing this book, and incredibly, Dylan has confirmed my observations on Instagram, with allusion and pun. The inspiration for many of his posts has been my seven currently published chapters of “I Don’t Love Nobody”: a deeply-researched history of how Dylan transfigured episodes of my memoir, The Golden Bird, into the lyrics of his lovely song, “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” His inspiration has been my 26 sub-chapters, in which he and I have engaged in an artistic dialogue about those transfigurations and my analysis.

There’s no need to be baffled; the evidence is overwhelming. His monsters in academia and Dylanology-lite have not caught up yet, but they will.

In contrast, the short stories and “letters never sent” on Dylan’s Patreon seem to have nothing to do with my tale, beyond a spiritual bent. In general, I won’t be writing about them, because I need to finish the final chapters of “I Don’t Love Nobody.” I need to stay in my lane. Before I let go, however, I have a couple more thoughts.

These stories are simple in the telling, but they are in no way “terrible.” Indeed, they shine with compassion and wisdom, and they contain depths of allusion. Here again, the artist is digging up lost jewels and laying them out before us. I don’t know if other writers, or AI is involved, but I’m not sure it matters. Because Dylan is at the helm.

In earlier articles, I showed how “Bull Rider” and “Frozen Pizza,” are, respectively, allegories for Lent and Easter. These, and all the others, contain keen observation, empathy, and moral reflection—for example, Jonah Mercer’s desire to fix the wrongs of his past in “Goin’ Back to Woodstock.” Fred Bals, in a new article on his Medium page, tells us about some old ideas “Dylan the curator” puts into “Ripgut” and “High Tide.” Fred writes that these stories present a dichotomy: a “listening cosmos” versus an indifferent one.

Bals asserts that the name of “High Tide’s” purported author, Reuben Bond, may be significant, and cites the Biblical reference of Reuben, son of Jacob, who was “unstable as water.” (A few author names in other stories are certainly meaningful. Bals gives the example of “Roger Fairweather” as the ironically named scribe of a story about ecological catastrophe, and in a previous article I told about the existence of a real world “Marty Lombard,” a dancer, who has a twin that he works with artistically—this, in the very first story, “Bull Rider,” “curated” by the famous Gemini Dylan.)

Dylan may indeed be citing the Genesis story of Jacob and Reuben, with its metaphor of a son who has betrayed his father, a son who cannot be relied upon. Men like this, who are unstable as water, can bring ruination. The allegory of this sort of flood is apt for our current political moment. Dylan, however, often brings more than a single allusion to a line or an image, or in this case, a name. A Google search for Reuben Bond reveals a young man who published an article in the British newsletter of The Salvation Army, The Salvationist. Bond describes his grief at the loss of his beloved father, his initial anger at God, and how he eventually began to recover:

I realized I knew nothing and cannot guess God’s plans … I’m no longer angry at God, because I’ve accepted that he knows best. That doesn’t mean my pain is gone, but I’ve learnt to live with it … It’s OK to question God, because even Jesus did …

The Genesis Reuben, who betrays his father, is faithless and unstable. The Reuben Bond of The Salvationist loves his God so much that despite a terrible human loss, despite his pain and questions, he keeps his faith.

“High Tide” is the story of a helpless man caught by a rising water that he sees coming. He is a victim, as we all are, to the power of nature and the reckless and often evil machinations of men.

God, Dylan once said, is “arbitrary.” As he sings in “Tempest”:

When the Reaper’s task had ended

Sixteen hundred had gone to rest

The good, the bad, the rich, the poor

The loveliest and the best

They waited at the landing

And they tried to understand

But there is no understanding

On the judgment of God’s hand

Christians, however, do not settle on despair. We settle on faith. On Mystery Street, with faith, we believe in grace and salvation despite our lack of understanding. Despite the rising water. We believe in a loving, listening God, despite all.

Recently, I’ve been finishing Robert Polito’s After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace. Polito brings together all the elements of Dylan’s second half brilliantly; as one example, he shares a staggering amount of detail on the songwriter’s integration of ancient and 19th Century poetry in the lyrics of Modern Times and Tempest. Dylan has been astoundingly productive in the last 35 years, never mind the full 65. As I mentioned in an earlier article, however, although Polito is good overall on Rough and Rowdy Ways, he only skates the surface of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” His book relies heavily on research at the Tulsa archives, which, in my understanding, do not yet contain any documents about Rough and Rowdy Ways.

In “I Don’t Love Nobody,” I’ve shown that the final song on Dylan’s last album conceals a horde of buried treasure, all to do with the life-changing inspiration that passes between artists, and between artists and fans. I’ve shown how the song presents Dylan as a fan himself, and how he used the story of one of his own, one of his monsters, to create some of his imagery. I didn’t need the archives to discover the connections, but one day, I’m confident that Dylan’s documents will confirm my story. I’m sure they will also reveal allusions to other works that I’ve missed.

My tale, however, is less about interpretation and more about how we live our lives. In After the Flood, Polito quotes Sam Shepard on Bob, who says, “the point isn’t to figure him out but to take him in. He gets into you anyway, so why not just take him in?” Shepard says that “Dylan” is an invention of the artist, meant to be used, like an airplane or a freight train, “as a means to an adventure.”

Dylan transposed episodes from my memoir into his song because I experienced his music as the means to an adventure, and that’s how I describe it in my pages. The story is about my own life.

Bob Dylan is an artist of great power and integrity. He ain’t no false prophet. I am his monster, one of legions, and he’s still inspiring me to new adventures. I’m just trying to stay upright and keep my head on straight. Just trying to stay observant.

Speaking of which, today, Bob Dylan’s 85th birthday, is also the Feast of Pentecost, a day on which Christians celebrate the Holy Spirit descending upon the disciples. Dylan refers to the Pentecost in “Murder Most Foul,” with the Wolfman “speaking in tongues.” The Pentecost also features in the episode of my memoir from which I believe Dylan derived his phrase “Hindu rituals,” in a passage from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, that I have included at the top of this page. I shared my ideas about this in Chapter 6, the essay, as some of my readers may recall, that I claim precipitated Dylan’s Instagram project, as alluded to in several of his posts. Check it out!

Happy Birthday, Bob! See you in Woodinville, in a couple weeks!

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Here we go again. Today, I have for you my 24th list of coincidences connecting Bob’s Instagram posts with my essays, links that make it appear to dreamers like myself that Dylan and I are exchanging ideas. Follow along and you might fall into the dream too. And this one, I assure you, is a doozy.

On April 6, I published Part 21 of this series, about Dylan’s Patreon short story, Frozen Pizza, released on Easter Sunday, April 5. In that essay, I shared my idea that Frozen Pizza is a parable for the holiday. I also included a few thoughts about Dylan’s friendship with John Lennon, as described in a new book by Jim Windolf, Where the Music Had to Go: How Bob Dylan and the Beatles Changed Each Other—and the World. I mentioned the book because of Lennon’s part in this story—his slightly concealed presence in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” inspired by scenes in my memoir that take place at the time of his murder. Check out Chapter One of “I Don’t Love Nobody” for the entire hallucination.

On April 10, Dylan put up four posts on Instagram, including a song by Texan singer George “Little Hat” Jones, “Kentucky Blues,” along with a photo of the 1930 Okeh records disc. Jones is an obscure figure; he only recorded a couple dozen tracks in his lifetime. “Kentucky Blues” is a “Lost John” song, a folk blues motif, based, according to musicologist Alan Lomax, on a character from African American oral tradition: “John the Trickster Slave.” The singer portrays a quick-witted fugitive who can’t be caught, no matter how furious the pursuit. In “Kentucky Blues,” Little Hat vanishes, “just like a submarine.” Woody Guthrie recorded a version of “Lost John,” as did Doc Watson, Etta Baker, and many others, including, knock me over with a Q-tip, John Lennon.

Lennon recorded “Lost John” in the fall of 1970 in sessions for Plastic Ono Band; the track first appeared years later on the 1998 John Lennon Anthology set. John also played the number with the Beatles in the Let it Be rehearsals. But Lennon wasn’t simply messing around with old folk songs; “Lost John” is foundational to the genesis of the Beatles. On February 20 of 1956, British musician Lonnie Donegan released the song as a follow-up to his cover of Leadbelly’s “Rock Island Line,” the hit that launched Britain’s skiffle craze. “Lost John” was so popular that all the new skiffle groups, including Lennon’s Quarrymen, learned it and added it to their sessions.

Dylan’s post of Little Hat Jones’ version of “Lost John” alludes to Lennon through Donegan. But it also alludes to himself. How so? Follow the dancing ball. Lonnie Donegan, whose birth name was Anthony James, began his career as a jazz musician. In 1952, The Tony Donegan Jazz Band opened a London show for blues great Lonnie Johnson; soon after, Tony changed his first name as a tribute. You can see why our man would enjoy this story. It’s a classic case of Dylan doubles.

In the liner notes to Biograph, Dylan claims Johnson as a great influence. Moreover, every time Lonnie Johnson appears in Dylan world, we see trickster Bob diving down, like a submarine, while simultaneously sending up an invisible flag that says “Look Here.” Because, as all literate Dylan hounds know, Bob wrote about Johnson in Chronicles, in a wacky passage describing a style of guitar playing that only makes sense to musicians from some other planet. Those lines, of course, were adapted from a section in Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power about creating a cult (credit, as always, to Warmuth). We are again in the realm of prophets, true and false.

Mirrors: Looking at Little Hat Jones and “Kentucky Blues”—his “Lost John”—we see Lonnie Donegan. Looking at Lonnie Donegan, we see John Lennon. Looking at Lonnie Donegan, we see Lonnie Johnson. Looking at Lonnie Johnson, we see Bob Dylan.

As an aside, Johnson has a connection to George Jones that goes further back in history than his link to Donegan. In the 20s and 30s, Lonnie, like Little Hat, recorded for Okeh records. They never played together, but each guitarist collaborated with Texas Alexander in 1929, in consecutive sessions.

Johnson, of course, also showed up recently on Dylan’s Instagram directly. On February 21, Dylan posted a clip of him singing “No Time to Cry,” a performance from late in the bluesman’s career, when he lived in Toronto. The film was one in a sequence with the theme of betrayal—a concept that comes up repeatedly in the lyrics of Rough and Rowdy Ways. Dylan also featured clips of James Cagney and Marlon Brando, each feeling quite let down by supposed colleagues, albeit cops and gangsters, who are not really known for trustworthiness. The same day, Dylan posted two long boxing excerpts. I wrote about all these segments on March 4, in “Howard Cosell Makes the Call.” I showed how Dylan’s posts on betrayal are part of our discussion of Joseph Smith and prophets. And I shared that the world-shaking announcement Cosell made in 1980 was not the winner of the Mercado/Shavers fight, but the assassination of a rocker.

Dylan’s post of George Little Hat Jones and his “Kentucky Blues” is a concealed allusion, via several mirrors, to John Lennon’s friendship with Bob Dylan.

Through Lonnie Johnson, the song also compounds the February 21 allusion to Lennon’s tragic death. Here’s the first verse of Dylan’s 2012 ode, “Roll on John,” in which he employs a classic floating blues motif:

Doctor, doctor, tell me the time of day

Another bottle’s empty, another penny spent

He turned around and he slowly walked away

They shot him in the back and down he went

Here’s the opening lines of Lonnie Johnson’s “Oh Doctor the Blues”:

Oh doctor, doctor, tell me the time of day

Doctor, doctor, tell me the time of day

All I want is a good drink of whisky

To drive my blues away

Credit to the research of Kees de Graaf for pointing out this connection.

Now I’ll show how Little Hat Jones and the two Lonnies take us all the way to Lennon’s appearance in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” On two separate routes, connected by secondary roads.

de Graaf also writes about this couplet from “Roll On, John”:

Sailing through the trade winds bound for the South

Rags on your back just like any other slave

He makes a case that the slave is St. John the Apostle, on his way to exile on Patmos, where he would write the Book of Revelation.

In “Kentucky Blues,” we hear about a slave named John who vanishes. Through the Lonnies, we hear allusions to both Lennon and Dylan. In “Roll on John,” we hear about a slave named John imprisoned by Rome, a prophet, the author of a book of apocalypse. We also hear about a rock and roll singer named John, acclaimed by the people of his generation as a prophet—enslaved as one, you might say—and martyred in front of his New York City home.

As I showed in Chapter One, John Lennon appears in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” when the narrator plays both sides against the middle. He appears as a man attempting to overcome the label of prophet with a song called “God.” He appears as an icon of iconoclasm betrayed and killed by a demented acolyte. He appears on Side A. I’m sure you recall who appears on Side B.

But if all that is too crazy for ya, with the addition of another of Dylan’s Instagram posts and one more mirror, we can ride to “Key West” on a parallel highway. On April 10, Bob also gave us a clip of Jean Harlow and Wallace Beery, as Kitty and Dan Packard, in the 1933 film, Dinner at Eight. The couple is having a furious argument, with Kitty hurling some real zingers at Dan, like “ya great big noise” and “ya big gasbag.” The movie was a critical and popular hit, and I’m sure Bob recommends a viewing, but the allusion here is a song Dylan once played on Theme Time Radio Hour, Leadbelly’s “Jean Harlow.”

Remember Leadbelly from “Rock Island Line?” Looking at Leadbelly, we see Lonnie Donegan. Looking at Lonnie Donegan we see Lonnie Johnson. Looking at the two Lonnies we see …

Check out how “Jean Harlow” is connected to Johnson’s “Oh Doctor the Blues”:

Jean Harlow died the other day

These are the words I heard her say

Her mother was sittin’ at her bedside and cryin’

I believe to my soul that my child’s dyin’

(Scatting)

Send for the doctor, the doctor come

Mother says: Doctor, can you save me one

Doctor says: Well, I believe I will go

Need me tomorrow, you can let me know

(Scatting)

Doctor left, he was looking mighty sad

Said: This is the hardest case I ever had

Jean Harlow said just before she died:

Two more moving pictures I would like to write

(Scatting)

Once again, a singer is calling on the doctor, a stand-in, I do believe, for the only Doctor who has a cure for death. Strangely, on the way to a doctor’s appointment today (I’m not joking here), I was feeling kind of nervous so I wanted to hear some gospel, so I put on my favorite, the Goodbye Babylon collection. Blind Lemon Jefferson started singing “All I Want is that Pure Religion”:

Well, the doctor’s standin’, lookin’ sad, hallelu,

Doctor’s standin’, lookin’ sad

Hardest case I ever had

Then you’re gonna need that pure religion, hallelu, hallelu

It reminded me how Bob Dylan phrases the idea in another song that takes place on the horizon line of this life and the next:

McKinley hollered - McKinley squalled

Doctor said McKinley - death is on the wall

Say it to me if you got something to confess

I heard all about it - he was going down slow

Heard it on the wireless radio

I guess that completes the circle back to “Key West.” Again. But you should not be surprised to hear that the New Lost City Ramblers, who introduced Dylan to “White House Blues”, which he adapted for these lines, also recorded a version of “Lost John,” in 1969, with Cousin Emmy.

One more note about “Kentucky Blues.” One more reflection. As Fred Bals mentioned in his recent Medium article, the song contains a reference to the trash-talking tradition of “the dozens,” a game of trading insults:

Well I don't play the dozen and neither the ten, 'cause you keep on talkin' I'll ease you in
Well, you keep on talkin' 'till you make me mad. Gonna tell you 'bout your mother that your father had

Insulting your opponent’s parents is a particular pleasure. Here’s Dylan, in the sung lyrics of “Pay in Blood” (they don’t appear on the website version):

You’ve got the same eyes that your mother has

If only you knew who your father was

So Bob is well familiar with the tradition, as we also know from a riff on Theme Time Radio Hour. See Bal’s article for the quote.

In my April 6 post, I mentioned Lennon and Dylan in the context of the new Windolf book, and specifically about the episode excerpted in the New York Times: Bob and John’s excruciating limousine ride filmed for Eat the Document. The scene is hard to take because Dylan is a sick and vulnerable young man. A brilliant, wasted young man. As Windolf points out, Dylan seems to be trying to pin down Lennon about who began copying from who first. Lennon, the more sober of the two, deflects with humor. Bob isn’t cogent enough here to let loose any of his trademark jibes, but he had already poked John pretty hard in “Fourth Time Around.” Years later, when Dylan became a Christian, Lennon returned the favor with a satirical song. They loved each other, truly, like brothers. I’m not sure if the allusion is intentional, but Little Hat Jones’ lyric about trading insults fits perfectly into “The Ballad of John and Bob” (sorry Yoko).

On to Hoagy Carmichael and “Hong Kong Blues.” Surely I’m not going to tell you that it also, in some bizarre way, is related to “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)?”

Well … actually … no …

Because the connection is clear and direct. The clip Dylan released is a “soundie,” an early kind of music video, made to be played on a special jukebox called Mills Panorams. This one was made in 1942. But Carmichael also plays “Hong Kong Blues” in Howard Hawk’s 1944 film “To Have and Have Not,” starring Bogart and Bacall, a movie based, of course, on the novel by Ernest Hemingway. Hawks transfers the action to the French island of Martinique, but Hemingway’s book is set on that pretty spit of sand that Hemingway sometimes called home: Key West. Bob Dylan, in fact, if his comments from the stage are to be believed (don’t think so), even wrote “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” while staying in Hemingway’s house, where Papa wrote To Have and Have Not. Sorry about the italics. I get excited.

By the way, Hoagy Carmichael is our first Dylan Instagram two-timer! He featured in a clip from February 26, 2025, also tickling the ivories, in a scene from The Best Years of Our Lives, as a musical and spiritual mentor to a young man just back from the war, with hooks where his hands used to be. I wrote about that one and more, including a Hindu ritual by the rap artist MGK, back in March of 2025.

I guess I could just be making all this stuff up.

Except I can’t think of anything yet for Steve Earle and “Galway Girl.” My imagination fails me. It’s true that a couple of small sections of The Golden Bird take place in Ireland, but that tea is a bit weak. I’ll keep brewing.

I also haven’t written yet about Dylan’s posts featuring Hank Williams III or Ray Benson—performing another song set in Ireland—but I do have a few ideas on those, concerning the spiritual inspiration of song, another of our main topics here. Later.

Not to mention, Bob’s newest story on Patreon, “High Tide” by Rueben Bond. I’m all over that one, but I’ll also save it for another post.

Finally, I’m not writing about the letters between famous characters. I think they have nothing to do with my story. They also seem to be as they appear: imagined missives that comment poetically on the cultural ripples created by the two characters involved. Not sure.

If you’ve made it to the end here, thanks ever so much for reading. These pieces are for you.

This dream, featuring live entertainment by Bob Dylan, is for us.

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The man loves a silly pun.

We can infer from “Rational Subtitles” that Bob also enjoys a cartoon. Edward Linley, the featured character, shares a good part of his name with Edward Linley Sambourne, who was “First Cartoonist” for the British satirical magazine Punch from 1901 until 1910. Sambourne specialized in caricatures of famous literary and political figures, such as Oscar Wilde and Lord Randolph Churchill (father of Winston). Apparently, the meaning of cartoon, in its current sense as a comic illustration, began with Punch in the mid-19th Century, which makes Sambourne a spiritual ancestor of R. Crumb.

Trust Bob Dylan to be familiar with funny drawings from the 1800s. Sambourne also illustrated books, including one that I wouldn’t be surprised to find in Dylan’s library, an 1881 edition of Edgar Allan Poe. (Wouldn’t that be the greatest treat? To browse Bob Dylan’s library?)

I don’t want to read too much into Mr. Summer’s choice of name for his protagonist, but the Edward Linley of “Rational Subtitles” is prone to exaggeration, as in a caricature, where the head is often bigger than the body. Linley habitually misrepresents his motivations. He only begins to know himself when subtitles describing his true feelings start appearing in the air over his teacup.

If “Bull Rider” is a Lenten allegory and “Frozen Pizza” is a story of Easter, “Rational Subtitles” is a story about being seen by a higher power. Linley is not a bad man, but he is sleepwalking through life. He doesn’t understand how to be a better person until the subtitles offer him greater self-awareness. When he finally asks what’s going on, he is told:

You are being described

Edward felt, not fear, but a peculiar clarity, as though a window had been opened in a long-closed room.

“By whom?” he asked.

The answer came, simple and unadorned.

By the one who knows you.

Dylan doesn't put these ideas into Christian words, but as with the previous two stories, the allegory is plain. “Frozen Pizza” and “Bull Rider” were also mostly secular in their language (the latter had a character named Lazarus). In these stories, Dylan doesn’t preach, he allows readers their own ideas about this higher power. For an atheist, it might be one’s conscience.

All three stories are perfectly artless and lucid. At the beginning of “Rational Subtitles,” Dylan includes a clue about this intent:

It began on a Thursday, an unremarkable day by all accounts …

Literary snobs may sniff, but these parables written in the voices of regular people are comforting and uplifting. It works for me. Most modern fiction, the arty kind anyway, is about the minutia of human stupidity. It gets wearing. Publishing, after all, is just another entertainment industry, like pro basketball.

Excuse me. I’m trying to read the subtitles here.

Folks are worried about AI in Bob’s art, but Industry and the Academy are also machines. They tell us what’s good, what’s bad, and what we should consume. And here’s a funny one, maybe just a coincidence: remember Dylan’s reference to Britain’s Royal Academy, via the satire of Gulliver’s Travels, in this line from “My Own Version of You?”

I get blood from a cactus - make gunpowder from ice

According to Wikipedia, the work of Edward Linley Sambourne was exhibited by The Royal Academy for 20 years. His job was making fun of people in the government and the arts, but he was also a member of The Academy. It reminds me of when some punk band gets inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Something about it just doesn’t sit right. The Establishment needs artists to perpetuate itself. It needs artists to praise each other and hand each other awards. Once fame hits, you can’t escape its maw. Apparently I can go downtown here in Seattle to the MOPOP museum and see one of Kurt Cobain’s sweaters. It’s morbidly fascinating but also not very rock and roll. In the early 90s you could go downtown and see Cobain inside that sweater. He didn’t live long enough to accept any of those awards.

I’m sure some of my readers know the story about how when Dylan was in Tulsa performing a couple years back, he took a pass on The Bob Dylan Center but he did go to a minor league baseball game. Obviously the museum has tremendous value, but we need to be mindful about who’s running the shop and how things are curated. Perhaps that’s part of Bob’s purpose in saying the Patreon is “curated” by him. It makes you think. Everyone is like, Huh? Give us some subtitles, please. Or some of those little informational cards.

I was an elementary school librarian for 18 years and it occurs to me that “Frozen Pizza,” “Bull Rider,” and “Rational Subtitles” may have been written with children in mind. You could read these stories to your adolescent grandkids and while they might find them mysterious, they would probably stay interested, and they would come away a bit wiser.

At the end of Wilton Summer’s story, Edward Linley “goes out to live, slightly more honestly than before.” That’s a good feeling. That’s what I’m hoping for, every time I walk out of church. I usually think it’s possible, because after praying, I feel known.

Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand

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Author’s Note: I’ve made a few edits to this piece since I published it earlier today.

On April 10, Dylan put up four new posts on Instagram. I’ll be writing soon about what they add to this ongoing discussion about art, music, inspiration, and faith.

Today, however, I have a brief follow-up to my last two essays, about Dylan’s short stories on Patreon: “Bull Rider” and “Frozen Pizza.”

Contrary to what you might read in articles like this one, from GQ magazine, these tales are not especially mysterious. Any old Mr. Jones can know what’s happening if he chooses to pay attention to facts and poetics instead of indulging in cliché and hype. As I’ve shown, here and here, the allegorical intent of the stories is not mysterious. It is as plain as a glass of water. It’s not even arguable. Once you’ve seen it, you can’t miss it.

In a self-promotional Instagram post, the author of the GQ piece infers that “Bull Rider” and “Frozen Pizza” are AI generated. This is deceptive click-bait. In the essay itself, he admits that 3 out of 4 AI detectors came to the opposite conclusion.

Dylan’s exact use of AI on his Instagram and Patreon accounts is an open question, along with his meaning. Bob Dylan loves a puzzle. But why stir up indignation? Why don’t we implicitly trust that the artist is working with intent, even if we are still discovering what that intent might be? The odds are vanishingly low that Dylan is trolling us, deceiving us, or merely producing AI slop (such a ridiculous thought). The odds are extremely high that he is, as ever, challenging us to be creative in our thinking. The odds are that he is saying something we need to hear.

We have been in this place before, more than once. Whether Dylan is strapping on an electric guitar, playing gospel, or covering Frank Sinatra, writers and critics are usually caught two steps behind and many pesos short. Last decade’s manufactured outrage was “plagiarism.” Thanks in large part to the work of Scott Warmuth, we now are able to stroll through lush vineyards of subtextual meaning in Bob’s use of other people’s words. We now understand this borrowing as pure genius.

This time around, at least one writer, Fred Bals, has published plausible ideas about Dylan’s use of AI, by working under the reasonable assumption that our great bard is up to something meaningful and fascinating. I have my own ideas, which I will write about soon.

Why would anyone hype the opposite? After all:

I’m the enemy of the unlived, meaningless life

Are we still not listening? After all these years?

About those Patreon short stories:

The author of the GQ article calls them “utterly unremarkable.” In doing so, he dances around a truth he can’t quite seize. In “Bull Rider” and “Frozen Pizza,” the simplicity is the point. These tales are written by versions of Dylan called “Anthony Swilly” and “Marty Lombard.” They are not written by William Faulkner or his opposite, a machine. The plain font and formatting, like a draft on your own computer, is the point. These stories are written by versions of Bob Dylan who are not famous, renowned in literary circles or, some might say, even very talented. I can relate. Maybe you can relate. That’s the point. Nonetheless, the writing is clear and evocative. “Bull Rider” and “Frozen Pizza” achieve what their kitchen-table author versions of Bob Dylan set out to achieve: The first tells a story of Lent and the second tells a story of Easter. “Frozen Pizza” was released, of course, on Easter Sunday.

Bob Dylan, in the guise of two regular people, Anthony Swilly and Marty Lombard, is giving us two simple, touching stories about faith. He’s offering us a plain glass of water because he knows, as a culture, we are parched. That’s what’s happening here.

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In the opening paragraph of Frozen Pizza, Dylan gives us a town named after a flower, the larkspur. He writes that on Sundays, the ushers in church are often confused by the Lundgren twins—which one is which?—because of their matching outfits. He tells us about grocery store freezers that “hum like a choir” and have “given up on perfection but not on faith.”

My subtitle on these posts has been “the hidden story,” but there’s nothing very hidden about the spiritual subtext of the story Dylan published on Easter Sunday. Frozen Pizza follows directly from Bull Rider, which, as I showed in my previous essay, takes much of its imagery from the Lenten Gospel of John. Frozen Pizza features several ideas from the Feast of the Resurrection and offers us a story about hope in a dark time.

Frozen Pizza is set in a frozen Minnesota January, when Carl Peterson is still grieving the loss of his wife the previous April. He hasn’t yet changed the page on the calendar. Carl worked in the hardware store and is gifted in the way of ordinary, hard-working people: he can tell the type of a screw by touch alone.

Reading this, I was reminded that Dylan’s father Abraham worked with his brothers in an electrical appliance store in Hibbing. As a boy, Bob sometimes swept the floors.

At Halvorson’s grocery, Carl considers the array of frozen pizzas and has the thought that his wife preferred plain cheese. Marlene Hobbs appears and helps Carl with his decision, with a few friendly words: “you can forgive a lot if the crust is right.” Carl says that Elaine used to say the same thing.

Marlene and the departed Elaine may as well have been sisters, perhaps even twins, like the Lundgrens. We are all pretty much the same.

Marlene, a second grade teacher, offers a couple more gentle aphorisms: In preparing the pizza, have “a willingness to wait … Start simple.”

At home, Carl preheats the oven and sees visions of Elaine in the atmosphere of their kitchen, in “the jar of wooden spoons … the faint scent of something floral that no longer had a source.” He hears her humming as she cooks. He looks at her empty chair that tonight feels “more like a pause than an absence.” He recalls the way she laughed at his old jokes and saved him the “last slice” of everything.

Elaine has died, but she is still around.

Carl is patient in preparing his frozen pizza, as Marlene advised. He is mesmerized by its transformation from something “frozen and rigid” to something “warm and alive.” The crust, it turns out, is “fine. Not remarkable, not terrible.” The pizza is “in its way, honest.”

He speaks to the air, “Crust’s not bad.” He hears Elaine’s voice, agreeing and teasing, and he smiles.

The pizza is not great, but it’s not bad. It’s given up on perfection. It’s honest. It can be forgiven.

Spring will eventually return and Marlene will continue “to teach her students the importance of beginnings.” Meanwhile, that freezer in Halvorson’s grocery store continues its “low, faithful hum.” Carl is an old man, but he has learned to “wait for the warmth to come back, however slowly it might arrive.”

The promise of Easter is that Jesus is here, alive in Spirit, and also that He is coming. The promise of the new covenant is that if we love our neighbors as ourselves and if we repent of our sins, we might be forgiven. The promise of Easter is victory over death.

As Dylan sang in 1979:

Of every earthly plan that be known to man, He is unconcerned

He’s got plans of His own to set up His throne

When He returns

Along with faith and love, much patience is required.

Before I sign off here, I’d like to mention an article I read in yesterday’s New York Times. No, not the one about the sick and deranged tweet from our Commander-in-Chief, the child killer. The essay about the friendship of Dylan and John Lennon, and Lennon’s appearance in Eat the Document, taken from an upcoming book by Jim Windolf about the creative relationship between Dylan and the Beatles. Windolf retells a well-known story about Lennon’s “Norwegian Wood” and Dylan’s “Fourth Time Around.” He also includes, however, a tender detail about the tortuous limo ride shown in Eat the Document in which Bob appears so completely fucked-up. John apparently helped Dylan into his hotel bed and then stood nearby for a while to be sure he was going to be okay. Twelve hours later Dylan was on stage playing his revolutionary set of electric songs, while John was in the audience, applauding and defending Dylan against the hectoring and boos. The filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker claims, in an interview quoted by Windolf, that John and Bob “adored each other.”

I mention the essay here because John Lennon plays a large role (as my regular readers know) in the hidden story of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” and Dylan’s use of material from The Golden Bird. Dylan valued the creativity of Lennon highly, and presumably his friendship as well. Besides a few other musicians of the period we could name, including Harrison and McCartney, Dylan had few true peers. Only Lennon, however, was seen by the public and the media of the sixties in the same light as Bob: as a prophet. This is the key to his covert inclusion in the lyrics of Dylan’s 2020 song. I invite you to read all about it in Chapter One of “I Don’t Love Nobody.”

Happy spring!

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No, that’s not right. Bob Dylan launched a Patreon account more than a month ago! And no one noticed. No one even noticed.

Dylan’s first post was on February 24. For more than four weeks, our greatest American artist had an account on Patreon with a single post and no followers.

In this age of self-aggrandizement, is that not a work of art in itself?

Dylan’s entry in late February was a YouTube link to Mahalia Jackson singing a spirited version of “Old Time Religion.”

I’ve read maybe a dozen articles about Dylan’s Patreon now, from major newspapers like The Guardian to online music journals. Each is a variation on a theme: “Huh …. What? … Bob Dylan is so cryptic … AI! AI! AI!” Rolling Stone derides the “esoteric content.”

About the AI audio: have you listened to any New Yorker articles lately? They are written by some our smartest humans but they often sound as though they are being read by one of those talking pull-string toys with a really long pull-string.

Not one of the music critics mentions the fact that the Mahalia Jackson video was posted in late February. The Guardian writer described that post as “context-free.”

I guess he hasn’t been reading “I Don’t Love Nobody.” Here’s a bit of freaking context:

On February 4, in “Proclaim the Creed, Bob Dylan’s Instagram Posts Part 16,” I quote the opening verses from “Goodbye Jimmy Reed.” The first, as I’m sure you know, concludes with the line:

Give me that old time religion, it’s just what I need

One of my arguments in that essay is that the subtitle of Dylan’s Instagram post, Articles of Faith—How Does it Look? (Excerpts from Chapter 5), is a reference to Chapter 5 of this book: “Prophets True and False: Bob Dylan’s Search for the Holy Grail.” Another is that Dylan is responding to my essays in the language of art, a language that Jack Kerouac called “personal secret idea-words blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image.”

In a follow-up article on February 21, I write about the power of imagination, as alluded to in Dylan’s Instagram post of the “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” I write about the invisible current of inspiration that passes between artist and admirer. I write again about my “House of Memories,” my memoir, a story of faith, that Dylan mirrors with his imagery—based on my imagery—in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” I quote Dylan’s statement of old time religion in his 2022 interview with Jeff Slate.

Now, on February 24, we get Mahalia Jackson’s moving gospel, buried in an account no one knew existed. Blowing with her spirit-wind. Kind of like a secret. Hidden in plain sight.

Sort of like this book, I guess. But I’m really not so hard to find. All of these music writers are craning their necks until they break but they can’t figure out anything not written in spray paint on a wall.

Of course, I realize that lots of folks stick their fingers in their ears and go “nah nah nah nah” whenever someone mentions Dylan and Jesus. These fans and critics may understand dozens upon dozens of Bob Dylan’s artistic ideas and tricks but they will never see into the bleedin’ heart of Rough and Rowdy Ways.

For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory

Go tell it on the Mountain, go tell the real story

Which brings us to the short story on Dylan’s Patreon, Bull Rider. Here’s a few things I notice:

The title echoes “Black Rider,” Dylan’s song about the shadow. In each tale, the narrator is sick and weary unto death. The character in Bull Rider describes himself as a “ghost,” and as he walks down the highway,

Trucks screamed past like prophets who had somewhere better to be.

Prophets true or false?

Marty Lombard, the “author” of Bull Rider, strangely enough, carries the same name as a dancer and actor, Martin Lombard, a man with an identical twin, Facando, who is also his partner in art.

In the second line of the story, the narrator name-checks Jack London’s The Sea Wolf, reminding us of Dylan’s creative appropriations in Chronicles, and by inference, elsewhere.

We meet a black bull named Lazarus, who, “throws em back from the dead,” as if he makes regular trips to the underworld. He is “closer to Minotaur than livestock.” The Minotaur is a fearsome figure from myth, half man, half beast. He is Picasso’s vulnerable, sexual, melancholy monster. A self-portrait. He is the artist and the artist’s creation.

In Bull Rider, we see shadows. We see death in life. We see twins and mirrors.

We see doubles:

They called my name before I had a chance to forget it.

Lazarus.

Of course it was Lazarus.

Who is bull and who is man?

About all of this, the music writers have not a clue. Criticize the writing of the Nobel Laureate all you want, so-called music critic from Consequence of Sound, but I don’t think you’d recognize a parable if it bit you in your skinny ass. (You know, I’m 66 years old today and feeling kinda feisty.)

Because above all, we hear The Gospel of John. Bull Rider alludes to a story commonly read at the last Sunday in Lent—a week and a half ago. I’m tempted to print out the whole passage, but somehow I don’t think that’s going to increase my readership. So allow me to summarize:

Jesus loves everyone, but he especially loves Mary and her sister Martha and their brother Lazarus. Lazarus gets sick. Jesus is not around; he’s out with the disciples preaching and healing and feeding people. But when he hears that Lazarus is sick, he says to the disciples Hey! We’re going back to Judea. The disciples say Hey! They want to stone you there! Jesus says walk in the light with me, not the darkness. When they get back to Judea, Lazarus is already dead and in the tomb for four days. Jesus talks with Mary and Martha and they are all really sad. Then Jesus tells Martha, I am the Man. Do you believe? Martha says Yes. Later, Jesus talks to Mary and sees how sad she is, and how sad everyone is. He cries about all this sadness in life, about death. Then Jesus goes to the tomb and says take away the stone! Martha says Really? It’s not gonna smell good. Jesus says Yes! Really! They move the stone and Jesus says Lazarus, Come out! He does, covered in his death rags. Jesus says Unbind him and let him go.

Here’s the character in Bull Rider, during his ride on the back of Lazarus:

There’s a strange peace in the moment after you lose control. Like falling out of a dream you didn’t know you were having.

Come out! Unbind him and let him go!

For a second, I was nothing but dust.

Then movement … hands grabbing, pulling dragging me clear …

Come out! Unbind him and let him go!

Ray handed me a beer.

“To Lazarus,” he said.

“To not dying,” I answered.

The story of Lazarus is a preview of the Resurrection. If you believe in the Spirit, you will live in the Spirit. But it’s also about life in the current moment. It’s about facing your fear and gaining freedom. With some help.

It was about that thin, razor-edge moment when everything burns away; the past, the names, the endless road (“the wailing of chimes?”), and you’re left with nothing but the fact that you’re alive and it hurts and it’s beautiful and it doesn’t make sense but you don’t need it to.

Come out! Unbind him and let him go. Follow me.

Finally, for today:

The historical fiction narratives rarely seem to have much to do with my topic, so I don’t think about them too hard. Fred Bals has many perceptive things to say about “The Lectures from the Grave” on his Medium account.

But my guess is that the only AI involved is in the voices of the characters. I believe, without any evidence, that Dylan and maybe some friends write the text themselves.

I do know that Bob Dylan doesn’t need your $5 a month. So why? I’m not sure, but he might be saying, I’m just an artist guy, like you. And you and you and you. And, related to a point that Bals makes, Bob might be saying, here’s some of my thoughts in other voices. Here’s some stuff that most folks will never understand. Ideas that will make most people say, That’s crazy. I really don’t get it.

I can relate. Mirrors and doubles and twins.

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Today, I’d like to share some research about Dylan’s January 25 Instagram clip of a bearded, long-haired Jerry Lee Lewis in Paris, 1972, performing an early 20th Century blues with staying power, “C.C. Rider.” It’s also given me new ideas about his January 17 post featuring country music star Ray Price.

It will surprise no one that I believe the Jerry Lee film is a direct reply to my articles, a part of my ongoing dialogue with Dylan about inspiration and faith. Or that in this clip, I have discovered a hidden allusion related to our conversation.

For clarity, it’s helpful put our most recent exchange in sequence:

On November 21 of last year, I published Chapter 7 of this book, “I Don’t Love Nobody,” about Dylan’s admiration of the Beats, secret community, and subversive creativity: “Bob Dylan, Underground Artist.” On January 17, in his first set of Instagram posts since September, Dylan included a text-only entry, The Academy by Larry Morrison. He also posted clips of Ray Price singing “Invitation to the Blues” and Gene Vincent performing “Dance to the Bop.” On January 23, I published “History of Bop: Bob Dylan’s Instagram Posts Part 15,” in which I show that Vincent’s song is an allusion to Kerouac and the argument of my chapter. I describe how Dylan’s text post criticizing the rigidity of The Academy and praising “disruptors” also reflects my theme. I cite the research of Fred Bals, who theorized that Ray Price represents an example of The Academy while Gene Vincent is a disruptor; I now believe there’s more to this part of the story.

Two days later, on January 25, Dylan posted Jerry Lee, along with a clip from the film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and another text post, Articles of Faith. Since then, I’ve written a lot about the latter two, especially Articles of Faith, showing how they continue the same conversation, but until now I missed the hidden treasure buried in the Jerry Lee Lewis performance. I overlooked it even though on the surface the thematic link is clear: music has never experienced a bigger disruptor than Jerry Lee Lewis. With his label mates at Sun Records—several of whom Dylan has featured in previous Instagram posts—he pretty much invented Rock and Roll.

Here’s Dylan’s allusion, hidden in plain sight: when Jerry Lee first recorded for Sun Records in 1956, he played a favorite song for Sam Phillips, a tune that was currently number 2 on the country charts, down from the top position it had held for half a year. The song was called “Crazy Arms.” The singer? Ray Price.

Price’s “Crazy Arms” was in itself disruptive. According to his obituary in New York Times:

Mr. Price first helped change country music in the mid-1950s, when, hoping to distinguish his sound from that of his former roommate Hank Williams, he and his band transformed the gutbucket country shuffle of the postwar era into sleek, propulsive honky-tonk.

“We were having trouble getting a good, clean bass sound,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post in 1998, talking about the session that produced his breakthrough hit, “Crazy Arms,” a No. 1 country record for 20 weeks in 1956. “So instead of going with the standard 2/4 beat, I said, ‘Let’s try a 4/4 bass and a shuffle rhythm,’ and it cut. It cut clean through.”

Later in his career, Price became a standard-bearer for the smooth, string-accompanied “countrypolitan” sound. From the NYT obituary again:

Quoted in the roots music magazine No Depression, he said: “There’s no difference between singing a country song in a Western suit and then going around behind the curtain and walking out the other side with a tux on and singing the same country song with a pop arrangement. It’s the same thing.”

Now, here’s a fun fact: the song that Price’s “Crazy Arms” knocked out of the top spot on the charts was Carl Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes.”

Ray Price was pure country. He wasn’t a rebel or rock or rockabilly, but he was innovative and unafraid of changing styles. He knew what sounded good on the radio. He was a disruptor.

Enter Jerry Lee Lewis. He loved “Crazy Arms” and wanted to put his own spin on the song. So he sat down at his “pumping piano” and played it for Sam Phillips. Peter Guralnick, in Sun Record Company, The Birth of Rock and Roll, describes what happened:

So incendiary was his style, so original his approach that Sam unhesitatingly chose it as his first single, saying he didn’t care how big Ray Price’s version was, this was a certifiable hit.

And he was right.

It worked in a way that few other debuts, with the exception of Elvis’s, have ever worked. But it’s what came next, as a result of that first record’s success, that would really turn the world on its head.

What came next was “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On,” also a number 1 hit. In the introduction to the same book, Jerry Lee Lewis writes:

It was what the people wanted to hear. It was real rock ‘n’ roll, and that’s what we did at Sun: We cut real rock ‘n’ roll records. That was the beginning of it all. Rock ‘n’ roll started at Sun Records, and without Sun there would be no rock ‘n’ roll.

Dylan’s posts of Carl Perkins, Ray Price, Gene Vincent, and Jerry Lee Lewis are about inspiration and the evolution of sound. Ray Price and Jerry Lee Lewis worked in different genres, but each had moments of epiphany that changed the game.

One could argue that both became members of The Academy in later years. Jerry Lee is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame while Price is in the Country Music Hall of Fame. Following commercial success, it’s nearly impossible to escape the clutches of The Academy, an institution that captures artists and holds them as prisoners of their own vanity. The committees of The Academy love their gate-keeping and their awards. The Academy honors excellence of uniformity and wants the artists to behave and pose for pictures. Most of the greats eventually find themselves standing on a stage accepting accolades, frozen in place by their past achievements. Our man from Hibbing has certainly had to fight out of such cages.

Creativity, meanwhile, is imitation times skill times inspiration. That’s the story of Ray Price, Jerry Lee Lewis, and “Crazy Arms.” That’s the story of Libba Cotten transmuting Lew Sully’s “I Don’t Love Nobody” into a song of redemption. That’s the story of The New Lost City Ramblers reinventing Charlie Poole and lighting a fire for Bob Dylan. That’s the story of Bob Dylan remaking … well, everything he touches, including turning the sludgy riff of Billy “The Kid” Emerson’s “If Lovin’ is Believing”—also on Sun Records—into “False Prophet.”

Creativity is Bob Dylan putting words from another Emerson tune, “Something for Nothing,” into “My Own Version of You”—a song about remaking everything he touches.

“Something for Nothing”:

I told you once and I told you twice

I don’t play cards and I don’t shoot dice

“My Own Version of You”:

I get blood from a cactus - make gunpowder from ice

I don’t gamble with cards and I don’t shoot no dice

The blood is a simulation, carminic acid, made from cochineal bugs that feed on prickly pears. It’s as vivid as the real thing. “Gunpowder from ice” is from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels; the phrase describes an experiment in intellectual vanity. It refers to a project of “The Grand Academy of Lagado,” a satiric stand-in for Britain’s Royal Society. In other words, the lyric is an allusion to Swift’s satire of The Academy.

Rough and Rowdy Ways, as I’ve noted previously, is all about the mirrors.

Here’s one more. As mentioned, Dylan posted his clip of Lewis in the same set with his now deleted text, Articles of Faith, which, as I describe in recent essays, contains allusions to the idea of betrayal. My last piece, “Howard Cosell Makes the Call,” discusses how the theme also appears in Dylan’s posts featuring Brando, James Cagney, and Lonnie Johnson. I show how all of these reflect the study I present in Chapter 5: “Prophets, True and False: Bob Dylan’s Search for the Holy Grail.”

“C.C. Rider,” also called “See See Rider” and “Easy Rider,” is, like Lonnie Johnson’s “No Time to Cry,” a blues take on unfaithful love. On Rough and Rowdy Ways and in this Instagram dialogue, we are asked repeatedly to consider the difference between betrayal and artistic evolution: between Judas and “Judas!” We are shown that they are, in fact, opposites (take note, wussies and pussies).

Finally, while watching this post of Jerry Lee Lewis, we are again time-traveling on “Mystery Street” with Dylan and his musical heroes. We are in 1972, with Jerry Lee ascendant after his early 60’s scandal. Dylan was doing some reconstruction of his own in those years; he would, like Jerry Lee, soon reach a new artistic peak. Previously, we’ve travelled Mystery Street with Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Ricky Nelson and Bobby Darin. We are listening to pop, country and “rock ‘n’ roll.” The clip of Cash and the Carter Sisters was pure church gospel. The genre doesn’t matter so much as the inspiration.

On Mystery Street, we are in all periods of life at once. We are even in the days of the youth of our grandparents, in 1924, when Ma Rainey recorded “C.C. Rider” and sang:

I’m going away baby

I won’t be back ‘til fall

And so we might be at any of 548 Dylan concerts in the years from 2006 to 2014, when Dylan sang “Spirit on the Water”:

I been in a brawl

Now I’m feeling the wall

I’m going away baby

I won’t be back ’til fall

And we are once again down in the flatlands of “Key West,” gazing out at the horizon line. Gazing “beyond the sea” with Bobby Darin and a pair of dream lovers.

This Instagram post of Lewis not only continues our dialogue, it serves as a tribute to departed heroes, who have passed over that horizon line. Fifteen days before Dylan showed us The Killer banging his piano and belting “C.C. Rider,” his friend and occasional musical accomplice Bob Weir left the stage. Weir, of course, sang “C.C. Rider” in the Grateful Dead’s rendition. Shortly after Weir’s passing, Dylan posted a picture of himself with Weir and Jerry Garcia.

The post also reminds us of Dylan’s salute to The Killer on October 28, 2022:

Don Robertson’s composition was among the very last songs Lewis recorded in sessions for Sun Records. It wasn’t released until 1970. It’s a song about lovers at the end of the line.

Dylan reassures us, however, that “Jerry will live forever. We all know that.”

When Sam Phillips first heard Jerry Lee Lewis, it wasn’t just his personality and piano playing that attracted him. Again, from Guralnick:

“I said, ‘where in the hell did this man come from?’ I mean, he played with abandon.” But that wasn’t all; others might do that just as well. “Between the stuff he played and didn’t play,’ Sam said, “I could hear that spiritual thing, too.”

Inspiration and faith.

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Author’s note: Thanks to Fred Bals for sharing facts and observations that sparked some of my thoughts in this essay. Check out his Medium page for more on Dylan’s recent Instagram posts.

On February 21, Bob Dylan put up eight new posts on Instagram. Today I’ll write about five of them, and show how they continue the social media dialogue we’ve been having for over a year. The first of these is a segment of the 1954 film On The Waterfront, featuring Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy, engaged in a rooftop conversation with Leif Erickson, as Glover, an officer from the waterfront crime commission. Glover is asking Malloy about a boxing match he lost, and Malloy grows defensive, saying he only hit the canvas because of a “lousy bet.” Later in the film, we learn that Terry was told to throw the bout by his brother, a member of the local mob. The second clip features bluesman Lonnie Johnson, singing a song about a faithless lover, “It’s Too Late to Cry.” And the third shows Jimmy Cagney as gangster Cody Jarrett, in the 1949 film White Heat, in the moment he discovers he’s been deceived by a partner who is really a cop. As I’ll show, each clip mirrors my articles by the theme of betrayal.

Two of the posts Dylan put up on the 21st feature long excerpts from a March, 1980 boxing match between Ernie Shavers and Bernardo Mercado. As I’ll describe, these fit into my story via the distinctive voice of legendary sportscaster Howard Cosell.

Finally, I have new ideas about Dylan’s text based post called Articles of Faith, from January 26, now deleted, that I wrote about previously in a story called “Proclaim the Creed.”

In that essay, I show how Articles of Faith, with its allusion to the Mormon doctrine written by Joseph Smith, and its subtitle, (excerpts from Chapter 5 — How does it look?), is in conversation with Chapter 5 of this book: “Prophets, True and False: Bob Dylan’s Search for the Holy Grail.” The new clips of Johnson, Cagney, and Brando confirm my take: the other topic of Chapter 5 is the theme of betrayal in the songs of Rough and Rowdy Ways. I write about all of these lyrics:

I sing songs of love - I sing songs of betrayal

— “False Prophet”

I’m the enemy of treason - the enemy of strife

— “False Prophet”

I’ll sell you down the river - put a price on your head

— “I Contain Multitudes”

Get up Madam - get up off my knee

Keep your mouth away from me

— “I Contain Multitudes

In that chapter, I also recall Dylan’s anger at being maligned as a traitor when he shifted his art from one tradition to another in the mid-sixties, from folk to blues-rock. Also regarding betrayal, I quote his famously contentious interview in 2012 with Mikel Gilmore of Rolling Stone, the one in which he says the critics calling him a plagiarist because of his transpositions from other works are “wussies and pussies.” I include this memorable passage:

These are the same people that tried to pin the name Judas on me. Judas, the most hated name in human history! If you think you’ve been called a bad name, try to work your way out from under that. Yeah, and for what? For playing an electric guitar? As if that is in some way equitable to betraying our Lord and delivering him up to be crucified. All those evil motherfuckers can rot in Hell.

But if that’s still not enough Proof (the rapper) for you that Dylan is once again casting his shadow over my work, consider Chapter 3, “The Bleedin’ Heart Disease: Finding Mercy with Brando, Down in the Boondocks of “Key West.”” As the title suggests, the chapter discusses the themes of mercy and compassion in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” as shown in the twinned allusions to Terry Malloy in that song and in “Murder Most Foul.” But I also write about Terry’s betrayal by his brother Charley. I describe a scene that follows from the Instagram clip Dylan posted, in which Charley, who is in league with the mob, attempts to convince Terry not to testify to the crime commission. Malloy recounts how he threw the fight on Charley’s orders, and delivers the memorable line: “I coulda been a contender!” Check out my chapter for the full story.

In my last post, I wrote about Robert Polito’s new book, After the Flood, Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace. In one of his chapters, I was reminded of a Dylan quote that appeared in that same Rolling Stone interview with Gilmore in 2012. In the midst of a fascinating exchange about “transfiguration,” Dylan asked:

Have you ever heard of a book called “No Man Knows My History?” It’s about Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet. The title could refer to me.

Because the new Instagram clips confirm that Articles of Faith (excerpts from Chapter 5 - How does it look?) points at my Chapter 5, I’m guessing that Dylan is also directing us to his quote about Smith. It appears, after all, in the same interview with his statement about betrayal. We know that Bob uses interviews to offer counter-narratives and subversive takes, and that 2012 conversation was a doozy.

I also cite the Rolling Stone interview in Chapter 4: “From Duluth to St. Paul to “Key West”: Minnesota Roots and “Transfiguration.”” I tell how Dylan eventually directs Gilmore to the roots of the concept:

You can go and learn about it in some old mystical books.

One those is the Bible, specifically the Gospel of Matthew, in which, before Jesus is condemned, He reveals Himself in all His glory:

And after six days Jesus took with him Peter and James, and John his brother, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light.

I write about how in the 2012 interview Dylan equates himself with others who have been “set apart,” or “transfigured,” and I show how this correlates with passages at the end of Chronicles Volume 1, in which he writes about his kinship with other well-known Minnesotans, including one whom he twice calls a “prophet”: F. Scott Fitzgerald. I offer these stories as more evidence for why Dylan would have been attracted to the doubles he found in a memoir of a Minnesota boy who fell in with a Christian millennialist cult.

Dylan brings up Joseph Smith and No Man Knows My History so that we might meditate more on prophets, true and false. Here’s Smith’s full quote from which Fawn M. Brodie took the title for her 1945 biography:

You don’t know me; you never knew my heart. No man knows my history. I cannot tell it; I shall never undertake it. I don’t blame anyone for not believing my history. If I had not experienced what I have, I could not have believed it myself.

With his question to Gilmore, Dylan equates himself with Smith, and it’s not hard to see why. No artist in American history has been so popular over so many years, and so accessible in performance, and yet so unknowable.

I checked out No Man Knows My History from my local library. The story of Joseph Smith’s life offers many reasons why Dylan might use him as a double. I was surprised to discover that he was, by all accounts, a philosopher pirate.

Smith was a charismatic fabulist. As a young man he was known as a treasure hunter who passed many days digging in the hills, looking for loot that the local Indians had buried. He was intelligent with a good sense of humor. He eventually claimed that an angel had led him to two “golden plates” engraved with prophesies that only he could read. These artifacts became the basis for the religion he founded, and The Book of Mormon. Smith kept the plates in a sealed box which he opened for only a few of the select, who then testified to their existence. No one can say if they simply lied, or whether Smith’s powers of suggestion and the strength of their belief induced visions. He was one heck of a storyteller, and the story changed pretty often, as it suited his needs. He was the Prophet, and although he followed much of traditional Christian belief closely, he also made rules as they suited him and as they were “revealed” to be best for his congregation. He made up crazy stories about Native American and Hebrew history. He created a spiritual justification for polygamy, so that he could have lots of women. I won’t summarize his entire life, but as you may know, he and his followers were heavily persecuted for their beliefs and chased out of several settlements. Smith was eventually martyred while in jail for treason, after a dispute with some of his own people who had betrayed him.

Obviously, a comparison with Bob Dylan only goes so far. Both, however, have personas that seem bigger than life, as if out of a folk tale. Both have told stories that touch souls and make people see visions. In the Rolling Stone interview, Dylan infers that both were “transfigured.” Both were disavowed multiple times by their own followers. Both have been called prophets and also:

Judas!

Mid-19th century America was thick with cults and all of them were based on a story someone told, supposedly direct from the Big Man. Most didn’t last. But Google tells me there are now over 17 million Mormons in the world (although only 5 to 6 million are practicing members of the church). I often play Pickleball with some young men who show up at the court in their dress shoes and button down shirts, name tags attached. You couldn’t meet nicer fellows.

Was Joseph Smith a false prophet? Decide for yourself. Jesus said “Judge them by their fruits.”

All I know is that the idea of telling fantastic stories and new myths, of repeating histories while adding your own twist, of replicating the old songs but also changing them, of paying homage to inspirations while creating a new thing, is key to Dylan’s art and his genius. It’s key to the two stories he tells in Chronicles, above and below the surface, with its use other people’s art to represent a “true” story about himself. It’s key to his use of The Golden Bird in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” with its embedded story of a Bob Dylan fan, a boy who joined a cult of Christ.

The lie can be the truth and “all the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.”

Betrayal, however, always ends in misery, and often in death. Everyone can be weak, everyone can be afraid, but betrayal is another matter. The disciple Peter, who witnessed the transfiguration, denied his Lord three times at the time of his arrest, as Jesus had prophesied. At the third instance, however, as the cock crowed, he “wept bitterly.” After the resurrection he recognized Jesus and was forgiven. The betrayal of Judas, in contrast, led to the crucifixion of the Lord and the suicide of the apostle.

Lonnie Johnson, in “It’s Too Late to Cry” sings about a woman who has let him down. Underneath the surface, the clip also concerns prophets. It takes us back to the mysterious passage in Chronicles in which Dylan credits the singer, in the early 60s, for offering him a mathematical way to play the guitar that listeners will find irresistibly compelling. This is the passage that Scott Warmuth discovered was sourced from Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power, in a section about creating a cult.

Clearly, Dylan is interested in the ways that people are mesmerized by charismatic personalities, from carnival barkers to authors to spiritual leaders to his fellow blues singers to himself. He was interested enough in my tale of cult life to write a song around it. If you’ve been with me for a while, or if you are one of the few who have requested and actually read The Golden Bird, you know that my experience took place in the year 1980, when I was 20 years old, and innocent in a way that I can barely imagine now.

The boxing match between Ernie Shavers and Bernardo Mercado that Dylan replays on Instagram took place on March 8, 1980. Later that spring, I had an encounter with Christ in which I disposed of my eyeglasses and all my possessions and fell “so deep in love I can hardly see.” Dylan himself had just finished the recording sessions for “Saved” in Alabama, and was about to begin the second leg of the gospel tour, in which he would play only his new Christian songs. In the preceding fall he had opened the tour in San Francisco, to savage reviews that accused him of betraying his audience and his supposedly authentic, iconoclastic voice. The critics implied that for the counterculture, Dylan now looked to be a false prophet.

The boxing match is brutal to watch. Shavers lost his advantage when he was betrayed by a torn glove and the fight had to stop for a few minutes, giving Mercado time to recover. Shavers was eventually defeated in a TKO.

Dylan includes these extended scenes of the fight so that we might sink deeply into that long-ago moment in time. It’s a fascinating slice of life, with all the mustachioed men at ringside, the Playboy Bunnies with floppy ears and cotton tails carrying trays through the crowd. In the spring of 1980, our culture still shared a single screen, more or less. You might switch to a different channel, but you had a pretty good idea of everything that was on. In these fight excerpts, that’s Howard Cosell, a major media figure of the era and a highly distinctive voice, making the calls. Most of his commentary has been muted in these clips, but shortly into the second, you can hear him, and then we see him on camera for thirty seconds, just after the incident with Shaver’s glove. The same scenes on YouTube feature much more of his commentary.

It’s just like Dylan to keep a vital part of a story nearly out of sight. I believe he includes this sporting event because it brings to mind another moment announced by Cosell, nine months later, that appears obliquely in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” On an early December evening in 1980, on Monday Night Football, Howard Cosell made the call:

Yes, we have to say it. Remember this is just a football game, no matter who wins or loses. An unspeakable tragedy confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City: John Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the West Side of New York City—the most famous, perhaps, of all of the Beatles—shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, dead on arrival. Hard to go back to the game after that newsflash …

I wasn’t watching TV that year. I heard the news the next day, on the radio.

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Well, heck. After working on this article all day, I’m just about to push publish when I think I’d better check Instagram. And I see that Bob has put up not one, but EIGHT new posts. Lordy, Lordy. I haven’t even watched them yet. Will I have a story about them? Will I feel like a hero (see below), or bat-shit crazy? No idea. Anyway, what’s crazy in this world? I ain’t hurtin’ no one. Here’s what I’ve got for you tonight.

Bob Dylan has removed two posts from his Instagram account, both of which I wrote about recently: The Academy by Larry Morrison (character from a forthcoming science fiction novel “Fool’s Gold”), and Articles of Faith. Each of these differed from his more usual posts, because they were text-based. (The Academy had an accompanying soundtrack by Itzhak Perlman.) Musical and film clips that Dylan put up on the same days remain on the site. I had been slowly writing an article about one of these: an excerpt from the film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Now I find that Dylan’s removal of those strange and fascinating text posts adds a new twist to my tale. I can’t know for sure why Dylan took them down, but I’ve got ideas. I’ve also been inspired in recent days by Robert Polito’s new book: After the Flood, Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace.

Once again, from Jack Kerouac:

Time being of the essence in the purity of speech, sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image.

The subject I have been discussing with Bob Dylan over the last five years is the unseeable, spiritual inspiration of song. How the feelings and ideas that pass between artist and admirer are real, as real as it gets, as powerful as a force of nature, as a Hindu ritual, with both physical and spiritual effects in the world. But they are also invisible, and all the stronger for being so. Here again are the epigraphs from my memoir, The Golden Bird:

Earth, isn’t this what you want, to arise within us, invisible?

— Rainier Maria Rilke

You’re invisible now, you’ve got no secrets to conceal

— Bob Dylan

Notes blown, notes passed on the air, arise within. The songs on the radio become part of our secret lives. They make us want to reach higher. They help us create new art, and even new ways of life, in response.

In my last two pieces, I told you how Dylan’s post of The Academy reflects my Chapter 7, “Bob Dylan, Underground Artist,” and my descriptions of his identification with The Beats, before they became cartoons in the media. When they were still complete unknowns, living secret lives. I told you about how The Articles of Faith reflects my story of hidden prophets in Chapter 5. Now the Instagram posts for these articles have disappeared.

Who can say why Dylan has taken them down? They were exceedingly weird to begin with, and now they have gone away. All I know is that the only narrative that exists about these posts, one that follows a line of logic from January 2025 to February 2026, is the one you are reading here. The “idea-words” themselves, meanwhile, have become invisible.

A couple nights back, I listened to an interview with Robert Polito about After the Flood. It’s a good discussion, check it out. I bought the book the same evening and I’m only about halfway through it, but it’s great. Polito gives us an intellectually rich survey of the second half of Dylan's career, an allusive overview of Bob’s climb from the nadir of the 80s back to the top of his game, including Rough and Rowdy Ways.

I began my reading of After the Flood at the final chapter because Polito chooses, unsurprisingly perhaps, to end his book with a discussion of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” I was very curious to see his take. His research is impressive and his perspective is poetic. He highlights the song’s theme of “transcendence,” and he uncovers several slightly concealed allusions. He writes about the “confession” and “last request” of “Nearer, My God, to Thee” in Dylan’s twist on “White House Blues.” He mentions Dylan’s citation of L. Frank Baum’s “beyond the shifting sands” and the two convents that Dylan is never far from, and the road that runs between them, from Duluth to Key West.

I first published these citations here, more than three years ago, in earlier drafts of this book. I notice that Polito is a subscriber to this blog, but he makes no mention of my work. I can accept that, because while these references are slightly buried, they are easy enough to find for anyone who cares, especially anyone as well-read and dedicated as Polito. In those first days of my own research, I traced as many of the song’s allusions as I could decipher, in an article I titled “A Visual Guide to “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).”” I wanted to make clear that these citations are, as Dylan said in reference to another song on Rough and Rowdy Ways, “real things, not metaphors.” I have integrated these stories into many places in subsequent drafts, but you can read about the ones Polito mentions in Chapter One.

He adds one reference that I missed. Polito cites a 1950’s recording by the British singer Alma Cogan, of a song called “Mystery Street,” that includes the lyrics, “you may lose your heart and then your mind,” and “mystery street, fate has guided your feet.” It’s a good catch and ties more directly into my story of “lost minds” and destiny than the song I had cited, a more famous 50s tune, “Mystery Train.”

Polito, however, does not wander any further down “Mystery Street” (at least in the chapters I’ve read so far). He does not mention that hard-to-find intersection in “Key West”—“off Mallory Square”—and the corresponding allusion to Confederate Naval Secretary Stephen Mallory’s writings on faith. He does not discuss Mallory’s membership at one of those convent homes, the Basilica of St. Mary, Star of the Sea, or Dylan’s many references to mercy in the song, including the “bleedin’ heart disease.” Polito does not travel “Mystery Street” to Duluth, and Dylan’s fateful evening with Buddy Holly. See Chapter One for the full story, and many more.

My purpose here, however, is not to critique After the Flood, or offer a full review. I mention Polito’s writing about “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” mainly to point out that Dylan is doing something new and unexpected in the song, something that would be difficult for any scholar to discover. In fact, Dylan is circumventing The Academy completely. On Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan transfigures the art of a fan into his poetry. What’s more, he is discussing his use of that work, and continuing the collaboration, right here and on Instagram. And he is doing so as if we were in a small club down a dark alley, “as per jazz musician.”

As a result, many of the diamonds buried by the Philosopher Pirate in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” can only be found here, and in the pages of The Golden Bird.

Once again, why would Dylan do such a thing? Readers who have followed along since the beginning know that I’ve answered that question several times, in several ways. It’s about the spiritual inspiration of song, and it’s about mirrors. It’s about fandom. But let’s look at Dylan’s process in terms of the beautiful metaphor Robert Polito uses in his book: “memory palaces.” He traces the idea back to a 16th Century Jesuit missionary named Matteo Ricci, via a historian named Jonathan Spence. Polito summarizes these memory palaces, in the context of Bob Dylan’s art, as “mental structures, particularly songs, that will house past and present, the living and the dead.” Later he refers to it as “a spiritual practice with ancient links to writing, alchemy, and magic” and also a “mechanism for rendering all time—past, present, future—modern times.” Read Polito’s book for all the details, but it sounds to me like these ‘memory palaces” are a row of beautiful but somewhat spooky old houses right off “Mystery Street.”

As you know, my story hinges on a claim that Dylan has plundered intimate moments from my memoir, the tale of a Bob Dylan fan, for the most beguiling of lyrics in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” And what is a memoir but a memory palace? Throughout this series on Dylan’s Instagram posts, I’ve offered many examples on how he reflects incidents from my book, incidents that he included in his song, in clips from songs and movies—many from his youth in the 50s. I’ve probably reminded you enough of Bill Starbuck and his chanting in The Rainmaker. But here’s one that I missed when Dylan first put it out. Remember Bobby Darin singing “Dream Lover?” It’s still up, check it out. What a great song. Anyway, in my initial post about that one, I showed how it mirrors these lines from “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”:

Fly around my Pretty Little Miss

I don’t love nobody - gimme a kiss

I showed how Darin’s title puns on my story told in Chapter One, from the pages of The Golden Bird, about two dream lovers, two Jesus freaks, doing it astrally, up in the middle of the air. But what I missed, even in my initial research, is the obvious fact that one of Bobby Darin’s biggest hits is called “Beyond the Sea,” a line Dylan pairs with his reference to L. Frank Baum early in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”:

Beyond the sea - beyond the shifting sand

Baum, as I’ve discussed, was an adherent of theosophy, a religious philosophy in which the line separating the physical body from the celestial one is felt as being very thin—it’s an idea that runs all through Rough and Rowdy Ways. As I’ve previously shared, Baum, when he worked as the editor of a South Dakota newspaper, once attempted to explain to his readers, to their great bewilderment, the ins and outs of astral travel.

Let me do a sum: in Dylan’s Instagram post of Bobby Darin singing “Dream Lover,” he mirrors his use of a mystical episode from my “memory palace” twice, first through the pun of the song’s title, and again through a reference to the line about Baum in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).”

Here’s one more example of how Robert Polito’s metaphor might help us understand Dylan’s project with my memoir and our dialogue on Instagram and Substack. On March 3 of last year, Dylan posted a clip of Warren Storm playing “House of Memories.” In this clip, Bob follows his puns from Burt Lancaster in The Rainmaker, about his borrowings from the episode of my memoir describing, how shall I say … some wild psychic weather … with a song about being caught in our “memory palaces,” by a man named Storm.

Could I make this stuff up? No. Because it is part of Dylan’s “spiritual practice with ancient links to writing, alchemy, and magic.”

In “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” and our subsequent social media exchange, Dylan, in act of humility and generosity nearly inconceivable in this age of grandiosity and pride, has opened a door between his vast House of Memories, his grand storehouse of knowledge and song, and my tiny gallery—my small attempt at art, the story of a Bob fan, searching for the Holy Grail.

Still, you don’t need to know any of this.

When Bob Dylan sings that Key West is “under the gun,” maybe you feel a discordance, an undercurrent of violence in the atmosphere, just this side of the horizon line, so close to Paradise. Maybe that’s enough.

But I am here to tell you that “under the gun” is a real thing, not a metaphor, based on a time when my earthly life nearly came to an end, down in the flatlands, and that there was a literal gun involved. You can read about it, if you want. Like Bob Dylan did.

When Bob Dylan sings “I heard the news,” perhaps you hear an echo, from “Roll on John” and “A Day in the Life,” and perhaps you sense the death of a great inspiration. Maybe that’s enough.

But some future Dylanologist might be curious to know that when the narrator of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” plays “both sides against the middle,” the A-side is a song about “false prophets,” called “God,” by a real one. A devoutly secular one. The B-side is “I Believe in You,” by Bob Dylan.

You can read about these things in my earlier chapters, and in my “memory palace.”

Meanwhile, back on Instagram:

In the scene Dylan posted from the 1947 film, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Danny Kaye is lost in another dream, another fantasy. He is Gaylord, a suave and dignified riverboat gambler, who gains the heart of a southern belle by winning back the stolen deed to her father’s farm in a game of poker. When his cheating opponent draws a pistol, Gaylord cooly disarms him with a flick of his cane.

In another scene from the film, Mitty imagines himself a dashing RAF pilot, celebrated by fellow soldiers and his captain for his deadly skills in the cockpit, and not only that, in the same fantasy he shows himself to be a witty cabaret singer. In other dream scenes, Witty is a fashion mogul surrounded by beautiful models, a cowboy, and a sea captain. In each episode, Walter is in total command, bold and clever.

Only Walter sees these secret versions of himself. In his waking life, Mitty is meek, clumsy, and firmly under the thumbs of his mother, fiancé, and boss. He works at a company that publishes pulp fiction, the sort of true crime and adventure novels that you can imagine Bob Dylan mining for phrases to use in his songs. Much to his astonishment, however, on another mundane day, his secret life suddenly bleeds into the real world. Mitty becomes involved in an intrigue right out of one of these books, complete with the woman of his dreams. He attempts to meet the moment and although he continues to bumble, he keeps imagining himself as a hero. Because of this, he begins to discover his deeper Self. He overcomes the social proprieties that are keeping him down, defeats the bad guys, and wins the girl.

In this Instagram post, Bob Dylan directs our attention to the greater reality of our secret lives, in which, with the inspiration of our heroes, we create songs and art and perform courageous acts and overall, make better versions of ourselves.

I empathize with Walter Mitty’s story. I am only stumbling through this adventure. I’d like to see myself as a hero but most days I am doubtful and alone. All I know is that sometimes my eyes go glassy and I hear my life, my secret life, in a Bob Dylan song. But then again, that’s always been true, since way before “Key West.” I imagine it’s true for you, too.

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Most fans and followers will find themselves bewildered by The Articles of Faith. No music, no movies, no obvious figures from history. The numbered pieces of text beneath the title are bizarre. Featuring four characters and a narrator, they read like excerpts from an absurdist script. Some phrases sound like aphorisms—“grievance without structure is noise” and “resentment needs proper grammar” are two examples—and in the comments, a few folks seize on these as evidence of profundity. I don’t think so.

At the risk of being repetitive, here’s a reminder. This Instagram post is a reply. As unbelievable as it seems, even to me, especially to me, over sixteen previous articles in this series Dylan and I have engaged in a dialogue about his art and, well, mine too. I’ve shown how he uses an allusive language of song, film title, and wordplay to reflect ideas presented in this book, I Don’t Love Nobody: Hidden Stories from Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways. Why? Because in 2020 he mirrored episodes from my memoir, The Golden Bird, into a dream-like musical meditation on the spiritual power of song: “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” I believe that Dylan is using this exchange, and me as a foil, to delve deeply into the allusions of Rough and Rowdy Ways. On this path, I’m just walking behind the Master.

If you’ve been with me up until now, if you accept, for example, that Bob’s post of Bill Starbuck describing how he will summon a rainstorm with “cuss words” and a “pretty little tune” reflects an episode from my memoir, as well as my description of that episode in Chapter 6, “Hindu Rituals and Gumbo Limbo Spirituals,” then you will be not be so surprised by my ideas about The Articles of Faith. If, on the other hand, you think such a thing can not be possible, and that Bob Dylan would never correspond through image with an unknown fan, well, you’re in the wrong place, my friend. You had better leave.

In this post, The Articles of Faith, amusingly subtitled “(Excerpts from Chapter 5 — How Does it Look?),” Dylan is once again communicating in the manner I described in Chapter 7, “Bob Dylan, Underground Artist.” Recall how Joyce Johnson observed, in Minor Characters, that the artists she knew in 1950s New York City, including the Beats, were “nourished by each other more than by fame or by the public.” In Chapter 7, I also quoted Kerouac from the Black Mountain Review, as cited by Johnson. His words describe Dylan’s technique in this Instagram post:

Time being of the essence in the purity of speech, sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image.

I also shared Johnson’s observation that the essential question the Beats asked each other is “Did you understand?” I recalled a statement by Dylan about “the folk movement”:

You felt like you were part of a different community, a more secretive one … Some people say it’s still there. I hope it is … I hope it is. I know, in my mind, I’m still a member of a secret community.

I concluded my chapter with a question, directed at my readers: “Did you understand?”

Dylan’s subtitle in The Articles of Faith, “How does it look?,” is a riposte. With these questions, we continue to exchange “personal secret idea-words blowing (as per jazz musician) on the subject of image.” We continue to participate in “secret community.”

How does it look?

It looks like this Instagram post is about prophets, true and false.

Let’s start with the title, written in large print, against a red background. The Articles of Faith is the only allusion in this post in which Google can help: thirteen statements of belief written, as it says on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints website, by “the prophet Joseph Smith in 1842.” As it also says, they “explain the basic doctrines and practices” of the Mormon faith.

Has Dylan become a Mormon? That’s unlikely. As a Christian, however, he very likely shares many of the beliefs laid out in The Articles of Faith. Me too. I attend an Episcopal church and the only item I don’t agree with on this list is that the Book of Mormon, like the Bible, is the book of God. For me, that’s a stretch. All the rest, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, I’m right there, and if we are to believe the songs, so is Bob Dylan. Here’s the second verse of “Goodbye Jimmy Reed”:

For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory

Go tell it on the Mountain, go tell the real story

Tell it in that straight forward puritanical tone

In the mystic hours when a person’s alone

Goodbye Jimmy Reed - Godspeed

Thump on the Bible - proclaim the creed

I was surprised by my agreement with Smith’s Articles of Faith. Generally, I’ve tended to think of Mormonism as a cult, as a version of Christianity to be dismissed, because of its relatively recent vintage and the strange tenets of some of its sects, like polygamy. Nothing in The Articles of Faith, however, talks about sister-wives or abstaining from caffeine.

Dylan’s citation of The Articles of Faith is a statement of Christian belief. It thumps on the Bible and proclaims the creed.

That’s how it looks.

But why Joseph Smith? The answer is in the subtitle: “(excerpts from Chapter 5)”?

Dylan is pointing toward the allusions in his song “False Prophet,” which I explore in my Chapter 5, called “Prophets, True and False: Bob Dylan’s Search for The Holy Grail.”

At Bob’s suggestion, here’s an (excerpt from Chapter 5):

… in this discussion of prophets and betrayal, I’d like to return briefly to the idea that inspired this book, and the way my own path long ago became entangled with a prophet whom most would consider to be “false.” As I’ve described, I believe Dylan transposed elements from my memoir—particularly a forty-page section titled “Lightning Amen”—to his song. My exceedingly obscure book shows, among many other adventures, my activities in 1980, a year I spent wandering the highways of America with a messianic Christian cult, who were led by a “prophet” who claimed to be Christ returned. I never met the fellow, so I can’t say that I ever believed in him, exactly. But I did have a vision of Jesus, of a living breathing God, that filled me from top to bottom and inside-out.

In 1980, Bob Dylan was also proclaiming the creed:

Now there’s spiritual warfare and flesh and blood breaking down

Ya either got faith or ya got unbelief and there ain’t no neutral ground

— “Precious Angel”

The Articles of Faith lists the beliefs of a cult leader. Read them for yourself and decide if Smith was a false prophet, or a true one. But one thing is sure. He did not stand on neutral ground.

Here’s another “(excerpt from Chapter 5)”:

And what about cults? The word is a very fashionable negative right now, a term tossed around with abandon, to describe any group affiliation with a restricted way of thinking and acting. But cult is just another word for religion. Here’s what Bob has to say:

Corporations are religions. It depends what you talk about with a religion … Anything is a religion.

It depends what you talk about. There are cults and there are cults. There is Jim Jones, there is Trumpism, there are Methodists, there are Quakers. There are corporations. There is atheism. In 1978, just before his own conversion, Dylan himself seemed concerned with the belief systems that people become attached to, and entrapped by:

Socialism, hypnotism, patriotism, materialism

— “No Time to Think”

My cult was like none of these. Whatever it was to others, for me it was an authentic experience of spiritual mysticism.

Read Chapter 5 for the full story. Encouraged by Bob, however, here’s another “excerpt,” one that connects the idea of “false prophets” back to the music:

What are the meanings of true and false on Rough and Rowdy Ways? What is a false prophet? In playing a trickster, one who uses other artists’ words or chord progressions—F. Scott Fitzgerald or Billy Emerson or take your pick—to express feelings of heart and soul, yours and mine, Dylan complicates our picture of true and false. The imitator might be as authentic as the originator, or at least reach more ears. If I swing to Elvis Presley channeling Billy Emerson’s “When it Rains, It Pours,” am I denying Emerson’s genius or worshiping it? Have I been led astray, off the one true path, or am I coming closer to the Spirit of the Blues? If I scream along to John Lennon inhabiting Little Richard, am I a heretic or simply a disciple in the Church of Rock?

I also write about a musician who appears obliquely in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate), the man who recorded Elizabeth Cotten’s “I Don’t Love Nobody”:

In Chronicles, Volume 1, Dylan rhapsodizes about the effect Mike Seeger had on him in his early days in New York. He recalls seeing him perform in Alan Lomax’s loft:

… it dawned on me that I might have to change my inner thought patterns … that I would have to start believing in possibilities that I wouldn’t have allowed before …

I can’t give a better description of a prophet than Bob offers here. Mike Seeger led Dylan to the top of a hill and pointed to the horizon line.

And finally, I quote Dylan from Chronicles, about how he viewed Seeger’s band, The New Lost City Ramblers, in relation to the early 20th Century musicians whose songs they copied:

All their songs vibrated with some dizzy, portentous truth. I’d stay with the Ramblers for days. At the time, I didn’t know they were replicating everything they did off of old 78 records, but what would it have mattered anyway? It wouldn’t have mattered at all. For me, they had originality in spades, were men of mystery on all counts.

One hundred years have passed since the Carter Family and Charlie Poole recorded their songs. Sixty years have passed since the Ramblers recorded their versions. From the vantage point of 2026, they all look like musical prophets. They all spoke truth.

Here’s the first verse of “Goodbye Jimmy Reed”:

I live on a street named after a Saint

Women in the churches wear powder and paint

Where the Jews and the Catholics and the Muslims all pray

I can tell a Proddy from a mile away

Goodbye Jimmy Reed - Jimmy Reed indeed

Give me that old time religion, it’s just what I need

You might be a Jew, you might be a Catholic, you might be a Mormon, you might be a Protestant … you know the rest. In Chapter 5, I also show how Dylan includes an allusion to a basic tenet of Hinduism in “False Prophet.” It’s not so much about which cult you belong to. It’s about faith versus unbelief.

From 2022:

I’m a religious person. I read the scriptures a lot, meditate and pray, light candles in church. I believe in damnation and salvation, as well as predestination. The Five Books of Moses, Pauline Epistles, Invocation of the Saints, all of it.

How about those “articles” in Dylan’s post, the numbered dialogues and statements below the title and subtitle, involving four characters: Stafford Monk, Captain Carlsen, Wilkins, Doctor Farrell, and the Narrator? How do they fit into this discussion of prophets, true and false?

How does it look?

With the exception of a single “article,” it looks like nonsense. It looks like dialogue from the asylum. As Monk asks Carlsen about grievance and structure, noise and ritual, Carlsen just grins. Like a sycophant. But now Stafford Monk says something that sounds kinda deep: “You don’t silence people, you outgrow them.” Well, I guess. Next, he tells Wilkins to speak only in “absolutes,” because they simplify loyalty and clarify enemies. He’s raving like a demagogue. Wilkins meekly agrees. The narrator bursts in to tell us about Monk’s charisma. “He was a natural-born leader.” But wait. Next thing we know, Doctor Farrell is telling Monk he’s “clumsy fool” and a “follower, a silly babbler … a hybrid … only half a man.” The inmates are rioting.

Who are these people? Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee? Trump’s cabinet?

Speaking of the latter, in Article 6, the Narrator gives us the only statement in this series that makes objective sense. For those who despair that Dylan is not commenting on the current culture, the current politics of our nation, well, here it is. The narrator steps outside the small world of these mindless players:

By the time the danger became obvious to everyone, it was no longer something you could step away from. It had become the air inside the room.

This one hits hard. It speaks directly to our moment. Article 7 tells us more about the source of the danger:

Hear me, Wilkins! You’ve got no beliefs!

And what does Monk himself believe?

Resentment needs proper grammar.

Please, don’t quote this sentence as something profound from the mouth of Bob Dylan. It’s a joke.

These characters are silly babblers. They have no belief. They have no Articles of Faith. Dylan includes them as a contrast, as a negative reflection of Joseph Smith’s principles and the deeply held faith we hear in the songs of Rough and Rowdy Ways, as described in my Chapter 5. Monk makes statements that sound strong but his words are hollow. Monk is surrounded by yes-men, except for his doctor, who diagnoses him as less than a man, and an idiot. Monk is a false prophet.

Remind you of anyone?

The babblers do not understand what Joseph Smith wrote in Article 13:

We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all men; indeed, we may say that we follow the admonition of Paul—We believe all things, we hope all things, we have endured many things, and hope to be able to endure all things. If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things.

Could any statement be more clear? Less full of babble?

The liars and dissemblers and propagandists have made this moment in time perilous. We are choking on the air inside the room. Many of the worst speak with Bibles in their hands. They are Pharisees and false prophets. They believe in nothing and they have no creed to proclaim. Truly, they have no Articles of Faith. They serve the devil.

That’s how it looks.

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On January 18, in the stories section of his Instagram account, Dylan posted a copy of a 2026 tour poster made by a fan, Arturo Bandini, whose social media moniker is dylanbootlegs. The poster shows a collage of characters from the lyrics of Rough and Rowdy Ways, including a young football-uniformed Jack Kerouac, front and center, along with a cross-legged Allen Ginsberg, just to his right.

Bandini makes art for unauthorized field recordings and Dylan tours. His work features amusing bootleg titles in attractive typefaces, often based on original sources, along with uncredited photos of Dylan. For example, his cover for the November 2025 show in Belfast, in a venue called The Waterfront, puts together images from Dylan’s typical merchandised tour poster—the stripes, stars, BOB DYLAN and HIS BAND in big letters, and a picture of our mustachioed hero—with the title, On the Waterfront, in a direct copy of the cursive font of the 1954 film poster.

I use the words “uncredited” and “unauthorized” not to accuse Bandini of anything illicit, but to spotlight that Dylan himself values these qualities. We know this from his own pirating of many original sources, as I’ve highlighted in these chapters, and as you may have read in other studies.

Dylan loves a good collage. The reason this book exists, “I Don’t Love Nobody”: Hidden Stories from Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, is the artist’s uncredited use of a self-published memoir in the lyrical composition of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” As I’ve shown, he cut up my images and words and rearranged them into his song, to magical effect. If you are new here and don’t know what I’m talking about, please start at the beginning and read on through my six chapters and fifteen previous Instagram pieces. The release of Rough and Rowdy Ways in 2020 was only the beginning of an art project that has continued until the present moment, on stage and on social media. His theme is the spiritual inspiration of song: the ever-renewing creative dance between artist and fan.

In these latest Instagram posts, Dylan is once again in dialogue with my text.

On November 21, I published Chapter 7, titled “Bob Dylan, Underground Artist.” My essay details the inspiration Dylan took from the Beat writers, including Kerouac and Ginsberg (as cited in “Key West”). It describes the early, outsider status of the Beats and how Dylan was attracted to their poetry when it was little known and critically disparaged. I support my argument with quotes from Dylan’s interview with Cameron Crowe, published in the liner notes to Biograph, and I show how his use of my memoir and our social media dialogue is in itself an episode of underground art.

Now we get a repost of a fan-created piece of art in which Kerouac features dead center—a repost in which Dylan implicitly approves of its bootleg, underground nature.

We also get Gene Vincent’s performance of “Dance to the Bop,” from the Ed Sullivan show. As we’ve seen in many clips through the Instagram series, the video is from Dylan’s teenage years, from his formative days walking “Mystery Street.” Here’s what he said in 1985 about Vincent and “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue”:

I had carried that song around in my head for a long time, and I remember that when I was writing it, I'd remembered a Gene Vincent song. It had always been one of my favorites, Baby Blue... ‘when first I met my baby, she said how do you do, she looked into my eyes and said... my name is Baby Blue.’ It was one of the songs I used to sing back in High School. Of course, I was singing about a different Baby Blue."

Where does this quote appear? In the Biograph notes.

Speaking of “Baby Blue,” let’s take a little more of what we can gather from these “coincidences.” Dylan chose a Gene Vincent song with an interesting title: “Dance to the Bop.” By the late 50s, the word '“bop” had widely permeated the culture in songs from early rockers like Vincent, Little Richard, and of course, J.P. Richardson—The Big Bopper, who died with Buddy Holly one stormy night in the winter of 1959. The origin of the term, however, goes back to jazz music in the 1940s. Here’s a recording from a man who can explain it a lot better than me:

As you’ve heard, according to Kerouac, “Bop” arose from a mistake and a flash of inspiration:

Bop began with jazz
but one afternoon somewhere on a sidewalk maybe 1939, 1940 Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker or Thelonious Monk was walking down past a men’s clothing store on 42nd street or south main in L.A. when from a loudspeaker they heard a wild and possible mistake in jazz that could have only been heard inside their own imaginary head
and that is a new art.
Bop.

In truth, it’s no coincidence at all that Dylan’s post of Gene Vincent alludes to a poem by Jack Kerouac, “The History of Bop,” on the nature of inspiration. You can also find his rap on the 1960 record, Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation.

I go right to the edge - I go right to the end

I go right where all things lost - are made good again

— “I Contain Multitudes”

Kerouac says that “Dizzy or Charlie or Thelonious” took a mistake, “half Lester Young, half raw rainy fog,” and turned it into a musical style “talking eloquent like great poets of foreign languages singing in foreign countries with lyres by seas
and no one understands because the language isn’t alive in the land yet.
Bop is the language from America’s inevitable Africa.”

Let’s leave Jack there for a moment, rhapsodizing into the night, and have a look at Dylan’s so-called “science fiction” text. As others have pointed out, there is no Larry Morrison and there is probably no “Fool’s Gold.” There is, however, Bob Dylan wearing a mask, offering a few thoughts on creativity. The narrator of this piece writes that his one-time desire to belong to “The Academy” was misplaced. He writes that institutions are “not searching for vision, but for compliance—people who could reproduce what had already been approved.” He tells us that he learned to see “systems as cages, not ladders.”

The phrase “The Academy,” which originates from Plato’s school in ancient Athens, commonly refers to an institution of higher learning and its members. The term describes an organization of high achievers, where admission is controlled by gatekeepers. Dylan’s fictional text criticizes the rigidity of such institutions. He says that the guardians are usually “men of limited imagination,” and that the only path for creative people is “around them—or over them.” His character concludes that in the pursuit of his goals, he “was no longer obliged to seek permission.”

First, why would Dylan express these thoughts in the guise of a science fiction character? Especially as the piece contains no tropes of the genre? Dylan researcher Scott Warmuth’s work, as explicated in a recent Instagram post, offers a clue. He looks at The Academy and recalls how Dylan transposed lines and phrases from passages of H.G. Wells into Chronicles Volume 1. Warmuth stops there, but the clear inference we can make is that by calling this essay “science fiction,” Dylan refers to the recycling of art. The inference is that Dylan is reminding us of his previous adventures in love and theft.

Let’s turn to another Dylan researcher for more context. Fred Bals, in a recent post on Medium, offers a detailed analysis of The Academy. He says:

it reads as the artist realizing that being an outsider is the only place where real art happens. If the Academy accepts you, you’ve probably compromised.

And:

Even at 80+ years old, arguably the most decorated songwriter in history, Dylan still positions himself as the rejected outsider. He maintains the stance that true vision is always at war with the “Academy.”

This is an accurate take. Because in The Academy, Dylan is once again reflecting the work of an outsider. Me. He is, in fact, reflecting the entire thesis of my last chapter, that Dylan sees himself primarily as an underground artist, in the mold of early Kerouac and Ginsberg.

In November, The Academy, in the form of The Berklee College of Music, awarded Dylan an honorary Doctor of Music degree. He accepts these kind of tributes with grace, and sometimes with a tongue in his cheek. Here’s what he said:

Thank you, Berklee College of Music, for bestowing on me this prestigious honor. What a pleasant surprise. Who knows what path my career might have taken if I’d been fortunate enough to learn from some of the great musicians who taught at Berklee. It’s something to think about.

Yes it is. If he’d had some instruction from experts, who knows what he might have achieved.

Now, a bit more about those music clips. I was initially stumped by Ray Price’s performance of “Invitation to the Blues,” because I couldn’t see any puns or wordplay that connect it to my thesis. Bals’ Medium piece, however, offers an answer. He shows that Dylan is presenting a contrast between Price’s song and the Gene Vincent segment. Read his article for the complete story, but here’s the gist; in one clip, Dylan offers the Countrypolitan crooning of Price and Miller, representing the accepted standard for commercial country music in the late 50s: The Academy. Next, Dylan presents the antithesis: the rebel Gene Vincent and “Dance to the Bop.” Vincent, with his leather and rockabilly ruckus, is the “disruptor” mentioned in The Academy. By going “around them - or over them,” Gene Vincent and his fellow boppers, like Buddy Holly, created a new, exciting, culture-changing sound. Thanks for the insight, Fred!

Dylan’s Instagram assessment of The Academy, in the voice of a fictional “Larry Morrison,” is harsh: the institution rewards “repetition” “compliance,” and “mediocrity.” The Academy does not “recognize what is vital.” But I’m sure Dylan’s post of Price also shows admiration. Bob’s pal Willie Nelson was an early member of Price’s band, The Cherokee Cowboys. And Price’s singing on “Invitation to the Blues,” while polite and traditional, has probably moved many forsaken men to tears. Members of The Academy are not rebels, but they are, by definition, highly talented. On the other hand, listen to The Essential Ray Price, a hits collection which includes “Invitation to the Blues.” A few tunes are exceptional, but many are, in a word, boring.

The Academy perpetuates the status quo, but the nature of inspiration is that someone creative comes along and runs right over it. New art arises from the destruction. New art arises when Gillespie or Parker or Monk make something new out of a mistake, out of something lost or found or old.

Dylan’s fictional essay is accompanied musically by violinist Itzhak Perlman playing “The Four Seasons.” Perlman made his artistic breakthrough at age 13, performing, like Gene Vincent, on the Ed Sullivan show in the late 50s. I don’t know much about classical music, but I assume his performance took The Academy by surprise. And perhaps a young Bob Dylan, although an aspiring rocker himself, was impressed.

Beyond its reflection of Chapter 7, what does Dylan’s post on The Academy say in our ongoing dialogue? What do his Kerouac allusions say?

Tell your story. Be a disruptor. Forget the gatekeepers and their “Fool’s Gold.” Tell your story. You are not obliged to seek permission.

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A few days later, Dylan blew the remaining doors and windows out of my brain. He took his project to another dimension of carnival craziness by responding to my chapters on Instagram with a whole slew of new mirrors, using song and film and pun. This has ushered in the For the Sweet Love of Jesus, Not Only is My Story True but I’m Talking to Bob Dylan phase. My last sixteen essays are the result of this period, all written in real time.

In Chapter One, “The Underground Stories of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” I showed how Dylan transferred scenes from the Christian cult section of my memoir into his song. Dylan’s Instagram art attack, however, points toward another segment of The Golden Bird as equally important in his transfigurations. As I’ve detailed, his film clips and puns referred six separate times to a scene featuring a supernatural poetic incantation: a “Hindu ritual.” These allusions, which often teleported us back in time to the very genesis of his art in the 1950s, have led me to take another look at how the Beat poets appear in my memoir and in his song:

I was born on the wrong side of the railroad track

Like Ginsberg, Corso and Kerouac

Like Louie and Jimmy and Buddy and all the rest

In Chapter Six, I introduced my discussion of “Hindu rituals” with an excerpt from The Golden Bird in which I banter with my friend Rich about an encounter with Allen Ginsberg at a Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics workshop. Our dialogue takes place just prior to the poetic incantation and “cosmic storm” episode that Dylan cited so often on Instagram. The conversation turns on a quote from Ginsberg’s early masterpiece, Howl, when Rich playfully asks me if Ginsberg was “burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.”

Here’s the well-known first line of Howl:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked …

Howl is a cry of desire, ecstasy and despair, a poem whose first live recitation, at the 6 Gallery in San Francisco in 1955, had such immense power, it opened a new chapter of American history. Ginsberg later recalled that he was '“driving forward with a strange ecstatic intensity” that evening, as Kerouac sat by the stage shouting “Go, go!” At that pivotal moment, the poetic chanting of Ginsberg and his compatriots—Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and Philip Whalen—released a new spirit-based, nature-based artistic energy into the world, a psychic sledgehammer that would soon shatter the repressive foundations of postwar society. It’s no exaggeration to say that the counterculture of the 60s and beyond was birthed that evening in San Francisco.

Howl is a “Hindu ritual” of the highest order. Only now, after Dylan’s Instagram posts, can I see that his triplet featuring the Beats is mirrored, like so many other lines in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” from The Golden Bird. As I’ve shown, when Burt Lancaster, as Bill Starbuck in The Rainmaker, rhapsodizes to a family of drought-stricken farmers that he can summon rain with a chant, Dylan alludes to T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and his own song, “She’s Your Lover Now,” via their context in my memoir. Only now, because of Dylan’s half-dozen explicit Instagram communiqués about Hindu rituals, can I see that he also alludes to Ginsburg’s great incantation. Only now can I see where “Ginsberg, Corso and Kerouac” fit into the story Dylan tells in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).”

Let me show you. First, let’s look more closely at Howl, the Beat poets, and their influence on Dylan.

Ginsburg’s long stream-of-consciousness lines in Howl were inspired by his friend Kerouac and his spiritual ancestor Walt Whitman; they describe an array of characters attempting to live authentic lives, driven mad by a society built on materialism and artifice. Howl describes these “best minds” with compassion and an honest sexuality that was shocking for the era. Part Two of the poem lists the sacrifices demanded by Moloch, the Eater of Souls, the false God of consumerism, technology, and militarism. It was inspired when Ginsberg had a vision of Moloch in the cityscape of San Francisco while tripping on peyote. Howl is dedicated in its subtitle to the poet Carl Solomon, whom Ginsberg met when both were being treated at a psychiatric institute in the 1940s.

The word “beat” was coined by Kerouac, based on a conversation with Herbert Huncke, and first described to the world in a 1952 New York Times Magazine article by another of Kerouac’s friends, John Clellon Holmes:

…. one day he said, “You know, this is really a beat generation.” The origins of the word “beat” are obscure, but the meaning is only too clear to most Americans. More than a mere weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and, ultimately, of soul; a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness.

Years later, Kerouac added on to this definition, saying that the word Beat described his friends and fellow poets who reacted to the hollowness of the consumerist society by becoming “beatific.”

The Beats lived far outside the values of dominant culture and for many years, out of its sight. Their poetry and prose was considered unmarketable and obscene by major publishers. In a time of conformity, they bravely and recklessly chose paths devoted to art and experience. In her 1983 memoir, Minor Characters, Joyce Johnson, an author of several novels and Kerouac’s lover in the late 50s, tells of the New York City cafe and bar scene in which the Beats roamed when they weren’t “on the road” or in San Francisco. She describes her coming of age and shows us a group of friends who would not and could not conform to traditional expectations. They often suffered as a result, especially the women, who endured condemnation and ostracism from their elders and the usual sexism from their otherwise free-thinking partners.

After publishing Howl, Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books was arrested for selling obscene material. From the point of view of the puritanical and censorious, the move backfired. The resulting trial, in which Ferlinghetti was acquitted, brought national attention to Ginsberg and the Beats. In late 1957, with the release of Kerouac’s On the Road and a favorable review in the New York Times, the Beat writers gained more recognition; a tide of magazine and newspaper articles soon began to appear.

By that time, however, in a certain sense, Kerouac was already done. He would complete and publish several more books, but the life they described was a thing of the past. The events he depicts in On the Road—his cross-country journeys with Neal Cassady—took place in the late 40s. His sudden fame brought in some much needed cash, but otherwise did him no favors; it mostly ushered in bright television studio lights, the parodies of fashion, and the reduction of his expression to stereotypes. Suddenly there were “beatniks.” Johnson describes Kerouac’s battle with his new-found notoriety, and how in interviews, in his innocence, he “failed to protect that deep visionary part of himself that had to remain in darkness, that could only reveal itself in dreams or books.” The world of spiritual seeking that Kerouac described so brilliantly in On the Road and his other works was an underground world. It couldn’t survive the glare of the media money machine.

Allen Ginsberg handled fame better and continued to be a cultural force his entire life. Johnson says he “believed in nakedness as the best defense against the world. A self exposure so pure and indiscriminate, so total, that no room would be left for interpretation. No legend but in the passing moment’s reality.”

Kerouac was uncomfortable being naked in public and his only defense was more booze. At the conclusion of her memoir, thinking of her old lover, Johnson quotes William Carlos Williams:

The pure products of America go crazy.

The poets are in agreement, including Bob Dylan, who mentions the ones who’ve gone “crazy” a couple times in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” I’ll get back to that in a moment, but first let’s hear Dylan speaking about the Beats.

Here’s an excerpt from the liner notes to the pre-Bootleg Series compilation, Biograph, from an interview by Cameron Crowe. Dylan is talking about his early days in Minneapolis, after having just arrived from Hibbing in the fall of 1959. I’ve left out some lines here, so look up the original for full context:

I had already decided that society, as it was, was phony and I didn’t want to be a part of that … also, there was a lot of unrest in the country. You could feel it, a lot of frustration, sort of like a calm before a hurricane, things were shaking up …. there were a lot of house parties most of the time … There were always a lot of poems recited …. it kind of woke me up … Susie Rotolo, a girlfriend of mine in New York City, later turned me on to all the French poets but for then it was Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso and Ferlinghetti—Gasoline, Coney Island of the Mind…oh man it was wild—“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness” that said more to me than any of the stuff I’d been raised on, On the Road, Dean Moriarty, that made perfect sense to me … Most of everybody, you had the feeling that they’d just been kicked out of something. It was outside, there was no formula, never was ‘mainstream’ or ‘the thing to do’ in any sense. America was still very ‘straight,’ ‘post-war,’ and sort of into a gray-flannel suit suit thing, McCarthy, commies, puritanical, very claustrophobic and what ever was happening of any real value was happening away from that and sort of hidden from view and it would be years before the media was able to recognize it and choke hold it and reduce it to silliness. Anyway, I got in at the tail-end of that and it was magic …

Here, we see that Dylan’s triplet about the Beats in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” is not just a random name drop. It is a reference to the underground nature of Dylan’s interests. It is an allusion to a time when a new work by an artist was advertised by handbill and first performed in a gallery or a cellar coffeehouse or a “house party.” (We can hear some Dylan performances of this kind on the recently released Bootleg Series Volume 18, Through the Open Window.) It is a nod to the kind of people Jack Kerouac called Subterraneans, and a clue that the song is about the nature of inspiration itself: how it passes like a beam of light between generations, between artist and admirer, from Desolation Angels to “Desolation Row.” The triplet is an indication that the song itself contains hidden stories, and that one of these is a subterranean memoir.

Now let’s look again at how Bob refers to the “crazy” ones in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” in a lyric that is so central to my tale:

Key West is fine and fair

If you lost your mind you’ll find it there

Key West is on the horizon line

Previously, I have described this “lost mind” as one given over to Christ, as per its context in The Golden Bird, bookending my cult section, that offers a mirror of Dylan’s life in the late 1970s. I have described it as a mind that cannot be ever fully reclaimed in this world, one that can only sing “gumbo limbo spirituals” until we are reunited with our deeper Self, which is a part of God, while climbing the spiral staircase way down in Key West.

Dylan’s allusion to Howl via The Golden Bird shows another, related context. Dylan’s “lost mind” is also Ginsberg’s “best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” Down on the bottom, in “Key West,” we are in the place John Clellon Holmes called “the bedrock of consciousness.” Here again, we are a few steps away from the spiral staircase and the gate of heaven. We are, like Ginsberg and Kerouac, naked before God. We have returned, like the crazy Christian cult members I show in my memoir, to a place where sensitive souls have responded to the demands of Moloch by becoming “beatific.” A place of “innocence and purity.”

In Minor Characters, Joyce Johnson quotes Kerouac from an issue of the Black Mountain Review, the journal of the eponymous college that produced many influential artists of the 60s:

Time being of the essence in the purity of speech, sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image.

She tells us how in the Beat circles she roamed, artists were “nourished by each other more than by fame or by the public,” and that “criticism is crushing and humiliating,” even for artists who would later be hailed as geniuses, like Kerouac and Jackson Pollack. Of praise, she writes, “somehow it falls short, empty superlatives.” The more consequential measurement of success is contained in a question the artists asked each other, and one they asked of anyone reading or viewing their work: “Did you understand?”

As any Dylan fan knows, at several high points of his career he has done a one-eighty. At Newport, he turned away from purist definitions of folk and from “protest” music, and formed an electric band. In the late 60s, after a world-changing series of albums and concert performances, he retreated to the country, where he played obscure old songs and strange new compositions in secret, with friends. After a 1978 world tour in which he played to millions—including to his largest crowd ever, at a show I attended, on a concrete plain in Surrey—he took nearly a year off from performing, and when he returned, he played gospel songs to half full theaters and surly college kids shouting for Rock and Roll. More recently, he interrupted a series of acclaimed albums of original compositions to put out five discs of standards from the 40s and 50s. After all of these turnabouts, he asked his fans, “do you understand?” The answer he usually received, unfortunately, was no.

No matter his reception in the world, Bob Dylan always returns to the deep clear source of his magic, to hidden underground springs. The mainstream art world speaks in a language of accolades and cash, but artistic freedom is found only in creation and in dialogue with others who are creating. The meaningless chatter dies and true conversation can begin. I don’t know much about Dylan’s paintings, but in that medium he is often interpreting scenes from films he loves and thus conversing with the auteurs who made them.

Bob Dylan’s use of my memoir and our subsequent Instagram dialogue is an extension of Kerouac’s idea of “personal secret idea-words blowing.” We live in a culture in which praise and adulation is currency, because it leads to the passing of another kind of currency, the green. In the 50s, 60s, and 70s, the blurb on a book jacket would tell you something about the content; now all we get is a dozen critics or celebrities offering their superlatives. The question is no longer “did you understand?,” but “how can we sell, sell, sell?”

Jack Kerouac’s experience with fame shows how the media machine is often the enemy of art. Dylan’s project with my memoir exists outside the known boundaries of that machine. In my self-published, media invisible pages, Dylan found mirrors of inspiration, and he wrote a song recasting them into his poetry. Because I recognized those reflections and wrote about them accurately on a media invisible blog, he recast my ideas on Instagram, in allusions that continue the artistic dialogue, allusions imperceptible to anyone without my translations. Both sides of the conversation are necessary.

We live in an age when virtually nothing escapes the lens. Dylan’s project with my memoir, and our dialogue on Instagram, cannot be photographed or reduced to a blurb. It is another version of Bob Dylan wearing a raincoat and hoodie on stage while he goes about his real task, which is not posing, but playing music.

Johnson tells us that “the true artist knows the pitfalls of vanity,” and then offers a sentence that could serve as a credo for the career of Bob Dylan:

Praise has to do with the past, the finished thing; the unfinished is the artist’s preoccupation.

From Dylan’s interview with Doon Arbus in Richard Avedon’s book, The Sixties:

One of the feelings [of the folk movement] was that you were part of a very elite, special group of people that was outside and downtrodden. You felt like you were part of a different community, a more secretive one … That’s been destroyed. I don’t know what destroyed it. Some people say it’s still there. I hope it is … I hope it is. I know, in my mind, I’m still a member of a secret community. I might be the only one, you know?

Dylan alludes to the “secret community” with his reference to “Ginsberg, Corso, and Kerouac” in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” His next line expands the guest list:

Like Louie and Jimmy and Buddy and all of the rest

We can fill in our favorite surnames to go with these given names, but it’s “all of the rest” that I find most fascinating. In this phrase, Dylan includes anyone “born on the wrong side of the tracks” and anyone creating themselves in hidden places. Anyone with “secret idea-words blowing” through their minds, anyone in dialogue with the art and artists who have inspired them. Anyone who’s “just been kicked out of something.” Anyone living life freely and honestly without bowing down to the almighty dollar. In “all of the rest,” Dylan includes everyone who refuses to sacrifice themselves to Moloch. All who are “enemies of the unlived meaningless life.”

Have I been clear? Did you understand?

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On September 17, Dylan posted a photo of mid-20th Century country music and movie star Tex Ritter on his Instagram account, with audio of the artist singing a version of “Froggy Went A-Courtin’.” This isn’t the first time Tex has been hanging around Dylan’s Instagram, but until now he’s stayed backstage. Two of Bob’s previous posts were pulled from the 50’s TV show, Tex Ritter’s Ranch Party. First we saw Carl Perkins doing “Blue Suede Shoes,” and later we heard Lorrie Collins singing “Heartbeat,” on a show where she also performed a song called “Mercy.”

In my post from April 24, I showed how each of Collins’ songs is a pun on ideas I presented in Chapter 3, “The Bleedin’ Heart Disease: Finding Mercy with Brando, Down in the Boondocks of Key West.” The title alone encapsulates the story, but read both articles for all the details.

In my essay from September 6, I wrote about how Dylan’s clip of Perkins takes us to “Mystery Street,” that long road of inspiration, faith, and destiny that begins in youth and leads to the horizon of another world in the long shadows of “Key West.” On Dylan’s Instagram, we are often in the 1950s, standing over the teenager’s shoulder, as he watches Ricky Nelson on Ozzie and Harriet, the Louvin Brothers on Stars of the Grand Old Opry, and Bobby Darin on the Ed Sullivan Show. We are in a dark theater in Hibbing watching John Wayne in The Searchers and Burt Lancaster in The Rainmaker.

As I’ve shown, Mystery Street is an avenue where time folds back on itself, where the future is contained in the past. That’s the nature of destiny. So Dylan’s post of Tex Ritter doing “Froggy Went A-Courtin’” takes us not only to 1945, when Ritter released it on a children’s record and Bob was just a tot, but also to 1992, when Dylan released the song himself, on an album of folk covers called Good As I Been to You. Older Dylan fans may recall the surprise and delight of that record. I loved it and the follow up, World Gone Wrong, with a passion. My eldest child was a baby in those years, and I played those murder ballads, train songs, and tales of woe on repeat, as if they were lullabies. They soothed my son and took me to another dimension. The two albums of stark, obscure old songs, featuring just Bob’s voice and guitar, were a magical change from Dylan’s run of over-baked, meandering records of the 80s (sorry Bob).

With this Instagram post of Tex Ritter, Dylan takes us to the address on Mystery Street where he regained full powers. On World Gone Wrong and Good as I Been to You, Dylan rekindled his creative soul with some of his earliest and deepest inspirations: folk songs. The albums that followed, Time Out of Mind and “Love and Theft,” stand with anything he recorded in the 60s and 70s. His live shows over the next decade, with stellar bands, particularly the line-up with Charlie Sexton and Larry Campbell, smoked, twanged, and preached. A regular feature of these shows was a selection of traditional numbers, often spirituals.

The songs on World Gone Wrong possess cosmic powers; Dylan poetically annotates them in the album’s liner notes. In Chapter One, I described how the otherworldly nature of folk music is key to several multi-layered allusions in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” On Mystery Street, from Greenwich Village to the enchanted land, Dylan is a wizard of the form.

Speaking of time folding back on itself, a few nights ago Dylan played Farm Aid in Minneapolis at the University of Minnesota football field, on the site of the old Memorial Stadium. Dylan and the band played select cuts from his recent set list—four songs from the 60s and a Bo Diddley cover— and they were marvelous. The venue sits right on the edge of Dinkytown, where Dylan wandered the coffee shops in 1959 and 1960 with his acoustic guitar. As I wrote in Chapter Four, I was born in that moment and lived my childhood just downriver by the wide and muddy Mississippi. Mystery Street is a place of uncanny intersections.

Prior to my article of September 6, “Laughing with Bob Dylan: the Complete Hidden Story of his Instagram Posts, A Tale of Puns, Wordplay, and Sacred Song,” Dylan hadn’t posted on Instagram in three months. Two days later, he put up a song, “Southern Cross,” which responded to my essay in the language of pun, wordplay, and sacred song. Dylan’s post of Tex Ritter continues the pattern of using the allusive and sometimes playful language of song to convey meaning. Bob’s version of “Froggy Went A-Courtin’” on Good As I Been to You is amusing and complete—he sings all the verses, telling the whole story—but Ritter’s take is serious nonsense. Where the middle stanzas should go, we hear:

kimi kaimo!

In the land of the pharaoh!

Comma rat trap penny winkle tommy doodle

rattle bugger rat trap penny won’t you

kaimio?

Ritter puts a child and his parent under the song’s spell with humor and wordplay.

At the end of my article on “Southern Cross,” I borrowed a few words from the song to express a wish for Dylan: that he keeps “sailing for tomorrow.” In my September 16 piece, I showed how Dylan replied with the sailing lyrics in C.W. Stoneking’s “Jungle Blues.” I also mentioned how the video’s desert island pirate setting mirrors the main subject of our dialogue: the imagery in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” But I overlooked Dylan’s reference to another storyline in our conversation: minstrelsy, and its affection for wordplay.

A recent article by Fred Bals points out that one of C.W. Stoneking’s albums is called King Hokum, and contains songs that mimic early 20th Century minstrel numbers. As you know, the title of this book, and a lyric from the song under discussion, is taken from an 1896 minstrel tune. My article of September 6 highlighted this fact with a photo of the song’s author, Lew Sully. And as I’m sure you recall, the phrase “I don’t love nobody” is also a play on words describing an episode in The Golden Bird.

Hokum means nonsense but it doesn't connote meaninglessness. Lyrics with wordplay can be packed with emotional resonance. It’s a way of addressing the crazy world with both humor and the spiritual power of song. Witty mischief can be inspirational. Here’s the second-to-last paragraph of my September 16 essay, in which I adapt the lyrics of “Jungle Blues”:

We’re swimming blind, every one of us. So, my fellow expeditioners, keep on beating those drums, plucking that banjo, and blowing those horns. Keep on praying and hoping. Keep on singing.

Here’s the conclusion of Ritter’s “Froggy Went a Courtin’,” posted by Dylan on the 17th:

little piece of cornbread lying on the shelf

little piece of cornbread lying on the shelf

little piece of cornbread lying on the shelf

if you want any more you can sing it yourself

aha

kimi kaimo!

In the land of the pharaoh!

Comma rat trap penny winkle tommy doodle

rattle bugger rat trap penny won’t you

kaimio?

Kimbo kaimo heyro jayro

hey comma rat trap polly winkle lolly bubba rat trap penny

won’t ya kaimbio?

No doubt, every little kid who hears Tex Ritter’s song tries to sing it himself, including one who was four years old in 1945. That little boy from the North Country kept on singing, and went on to inspire millions.

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On September 6, I published “Laughing with Bob Dylan: the Complete Hidden Story of his Instagram Posts.” Two days later, Bob put up his first new post in three months, Stephen Stills’ “Southern Cross.” He followed this on the 10th, with a clip from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

I published a piece about “Southern Cross” on September 11. On the 12th, Dylan posted the complete original video for C.W. Stoneking’s “Jungle Blues.”

I puzzled over Psycho for a while. As a person born in 1960, I’m familiar with the film. I looked at that creepy scene many times and read all about the movie and about Janet Leigh—but I still didn't get it. So I slept on it.

It’s a song, of course. Actually, quite a few songs are called “Psycho,” but I’m pretty sure Bob Dylan is talking about this one, from 1965, by The Sonics:

Oh-wow

Baby!

You’re drivin’ me crazy

I said baby

You’re drivin’ me crazy

Well, ya turn me on

Then you shut me down

Oh well tell me baby

Am I just your clown?

Psycho

Ow

oh wow

Baby

You’re drivin’ me crazy

I said, I’m losin’ my mind

You treat me so unkind

Psycho

Like our friend in the cowboy band, I’m Minnesota born and bred, but several times in these articles, I have mentioned that I live here in Jet City. And every self-respecting rock and roll fan in the Great Northwest knows about Tacoma’s legendary proto-punk pioneers, The Sonics. I see that their newest collection of “hits” is called “They Inspired Nirvana.” Not a super creative title, but true.

Two phrases in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” are at the center of the story I tell in “I Don’t Love Nobody.” I have adapted the first for my title, as Dylan adapted it from an old song and a strange passage in The Golden Bird. The second is found in the song’s only repeating triplet, just as it is found twice in my memoir, where it bookends the main section of prose that Dylan transfigured into his song. That phrase is the first half of this line:

If you lost your mind, you’ll find it there.

Find the whole story in Chapter One. I also pointed out a reference to the phrase in my article, “Laughing with Bob Dylan,” in Tony Rice’s rendition of Norman Blake’s “Church Street Blues.”

“I lost my mind” is a common saying about going momentarily crazy, but in the context of Dylan’s song, it alludes to a moment in time when the singer went nuts for Jesus. Here, again, is what he said from the stage on May 9, 1980:

… you need the power of God in you. Power of God manifested in the flesh, justified in the spirit, preached out in the world, believed on in the nations. Raised on up into glory. You need that kind of power. Or you ain’t gonna make it. You’ll die all right. You’ll live and you’ll die. I know you might look at me and say, “Wow, he’s just lost his mind!” But I never did lie to you … I’m telling you the truth now but it’s like trying to tell somebody what a piece of bread tastes like …

In 1979, Dylan lost his mind to God and he never got it back. As he said a couple years ago, in his interview with the Wall Street Journal:

I’m a religious person. I read the scriptures a lot, meditate and pray, light candles in church. I believe in damnation and salvation, as well as predestination. The Five Books of Moses, Pauline Epistles, Invocation of the Saints, all of it.

Tell me that quote is any less “crazy” than what he said in 1980. When you lose your mind to God, it’s not a temporary arrangement.

I’m under the impression that many Dylan fans still think the idea is Psycho, just like they did in 1980. Still, they don’t get to choose. Rough and Rowdy Ways is a religious album.

I had never encountered C.W. Stoneking before seeing Dylan’s post of September 12. Now I’ve listened to several of his songs, and I understand why Bob is a fan. According to an old interview in the Village Voice, Stoneking is influenced by some of Dylan’s touchstones: Charlie Patton, Blind Willie McTell, Robert Johnson. Like Bob, he also favors old-style recording techniques, such as recording live in front of a 50s two-track tape machine.

In my post on “Southern Cross,” I concluded with these words, taken in part from the chorus:

Keep on sailing for tomorrow, Bob. Thanks for all the music.

The next day, we see C.W. Stoneking and his band singing and acting out “Jungle Blues.” The video opens with Stoneking, a carnival barker in a sailor suit, announcing a voyage through a megaphone and then being interrupted by one of the crew :

That’s right folks, who knows what strange wonders awaits our expeditioners on this journey to the dark corners of the globe, for the scientific purpose …

Uh, excuse me sir, there’s a problem with the boat. Ship’s engineer wants to see you at once!

Quieten down man. We sail by midnight!

The ship’s horn sounds and the boat sets sail, while we see and hear a musical interlude of trombone, trumpet, French horn, drums, and banjo. The sea is rough and the skies are stormy. The scene changes to an island, complete with palm trees and parrot, where the men are washed up. They begin playing and Stoneking begins singing again:

I went off sailing for the Congo

In a sloop called the Mississippi Song-o

Now I’m here singing those jungle blues

In a shipwreck way out on the ocean

Swimming blind, lord, praying and hoping

I washed up singing them jungle blues

Here, Dylan once again expresses himself in the language of song—a tune by another artist—and it’s darn funny. The philosopher pirate is sailing into tomorrow on his ship of song. The fact that Stoneking’s boat is called “the Mississippi song-o” is marvelous. We are reminded of Bob’s wonderful turn of the millennium track “Mississippi,” which springs from the same country-blues roots as “Jungle Blues.”

Dylan is sailing into tomorrow with song, but in this world, the seas are rarely calm. The waves are crashing over the deck of the sloop. Sometimes it makes you want to put on a raincoat and stay behind the piano. It makes you want to hide from those monkeys in the crowd with their screeches and monkey toys and just concentrate on the music. It’s enough to give you those jungle blues:

Buddy, that’s what gets my heart to jumpin’

It ain’t nothin’ but them jungle blues

And the monkeys, goin’ pitter patter

In the darkness, my teeth begin to chatter

There ain’t no cure for them jungle blues

We’re swimming blind, every one of us. So, my fellow expeditioners, keep on beating those drums, plucking that banjo, and blowing those horns. Keep on praying and hoping. Keep on singing.

And maybe we should build a raft. Maybe the next island over is “Key West.”

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Author’s Note: Yesterday afternoon, I was moments away from pushing “publish” on this article, when I noticed that Dylan had posted again on Instagram: a segment of Hitchcock’s Psycho, with Janet Leigh. So I decided to take 24 hours to contemplate that one. It stumped me for a while, but I’ve got it now, and I’ll be back as soon as I can with my ideas.

The actual name of the constellation is Crux. Crux is Latin for “cross.” It’s mostly visible in the southern hemisphere, but in the northern winter, a pirate standing on the deck of his schooner, just off “Key West,” can see it for a few hours each night.

On the horizon line.

Monday morning, on Instagram, Dylan responded to the article I published here last Saturday, titled “Laughing with Bob Dylan.” He posted the entire audio of CSN singing Stephen Stills’ “Southern Cross.”

I had been hoping for an answer, and sort of expecting it, so I looked during a break in my Pickleball session on Monday and saw his post. Then I had to go sit by the lake for half an hour and gaze at the water and the sky.

I’m sure those of you who read my last piece already understand why Dylan would post “Southern Cross.” It’s not complicated.

My job here, however, is to summarize the allusions in Dylan’s Instagram, so here goes:

My article from the other day ended with a transcription of the old hymn, “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” because of its connection to Dylan’s Louvin Brothers post, as well as its significance in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” My other chapters tell about those allusions. The essay ended with the word “gospel,” with a double meaning. The first is that Dylan, in his Instagram posts, has confirmed my story—the transfiguration of episodes from my memoir, The Golden Bird, into the lyrics of his song—as true, and the second, that the main commonality between my text and his song is our shared experience, earlier in life, of a mystical encounter with Christ.

Ever since Dylan released “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” in 2020, we’ve been sailing together under the sign of the cross.

Stephen Stills’ beautiful song is based on an earlier composition by Rick and Michael Curtis. A quote from Stills on the Wikipedia page for the song, taken from the liner notes from a CSN box set, says:

It’s about using the power of the universe to heal your wounds

I’ve written in a couple places about Dylan’s technique in his “gumbo limbo spirituals” of addressing God as a lover, in the manner of other great mystic poets. Here, Stills does something similar. The song is a lament for a failed marriage, but also a prayer of gratitude.

Here’s part of the chorus:

Think about how many times I have fallen
Spirits are using me; larger voices callin'
What heaven brought you and me cannot be forgotten

On Monday morning, I was very moved when I listened to that last line. I still am. It describes perfectly and intimately the connection, based in faith, between my memoir and the lyrics of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).”

But there’s more. There’s always more with Dylan! Here’s the fifth verse of “Southern Cross”:

So I'm sailing for tomorrow. My dreams are a-dying.
And my love is an anchor tied to you, tied with a silver chain.
I have my ship, and all her flags are a-flying.
She is all that I have left, and music is her name.

This verse beautifully evokes the main idea that flows through Rough and Rowdy Ways: the spiritual power of song. As you know, it’s the theme of this book, and as I’ve shown, Dylan poeticized passages from The Golden Bird concerning the life-changing inspiration of music.

So, not much more to say. I don’t know if this story will ever see the light of day, or if the literary world will ever develop an interest in reading an obscure book that inspired one of Bob Dylan’s greatest songs. Sure, that would be nice, but right now I don’t much care. Over the next several months, I’ll finish “I Don’t Love Nobody” because here on Mystery Street, that’s my job. Then I’ll release it on paper, along with a new edition of my memoir, as part of the historical record on our greatest American artist. I’ll send a copy of each to the Dylan archives in Tulsa and hopefully the smart people there won’t shred them. Maybe they’ll link up my books with Dylan’s dog-eared copy of The Golden Bird when it arrives, sometime in the future. But I can’t imagine being more artistically fulfilled by this project than I am now. Over five years, I’ve been having a dialogue with Bob Dylan, based in creativity, humor, and faith. What an honor. What a joy.

Keep on sailing for tomorrow, Bob. Thanks again for all the music.

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The photo at the top of the page is via Wikimedia Commons. Here’s a link to the license.

Author’s Note: If you’re new here, welcome. You will pick up the gist of my tale just through this article. But if you want the whole story, please go back to the beginning. In this essay, I also refer often to my chapter, “Hindu Rituals and Gumbo Limbo Spirituals.” As you will see, Bob says you should check it out.

Dylan hasn’t posted on Instagram since June 9. No telling for sure if he’s done with this project, but it’s beginning to appear likely. Today I’d like to offer a summary. My previous twelve posts about his clips appeared in real time and I was always playing catch up. My intention here is to show the flow of our dialogue, put the essentials all together in one essay, and to clarify aspects of his visual and musical messaging that I didn’t fully grasp at the time. Only when Bob’s posts began to accumulate did I truly believe that I was conversing with the Master, and only then did I clearly understand the language he was speaking.

I know that some folks who are new here, or who have dismissed this story from the start, will skim that first paragraph and start guffawing. All I can say is settle down and start reading. In this essay, I intend to stand aside as much as I can, and let Mr. Dylan speak. Remember when he first cast his dancing spell your way? And you promised to go under it? Read this one all the way to the end and Bob may once again have you laughin’, spinnin’, swingin’ madly across the sun.

These Instagram articles will be included in the print edition of my book, currently available in draft here on Substack: “I Don’t Love Nobody”: Hidden Stories from Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways. I’m revising the final chapters and will publish them over the next few months. I’d originally intended to issue a hard copy this year, but Dylan’s creative Instagram shenanigans pushed my schedule way back. Now I’m aiming for early 2026. The paper edition will be offered for sale online in tandem with a reprint of the book that started this adventure, my 2011 memoir, The Golden Bird—a “cult” classic, currently available through absolutely no major outlets. Only available underground (just ask).

A quick review: beginning on Dylan’s birthday in 2024, I started posting “I Don’t Love Nobody” on this platform, and between that date and late January, 2025, I published six chapters. Chapter One, “The Underground Stories of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” holds the heart of my story: how Dylan transfigured certain intimate and uncanny passages of my memoir into his lyrics. I describe how the episodes Dylan used are from a period of my young life when I wandered the highways of America with a band of ascetic and messianic Christians.

Chapter Six, published on January 23, is concerned only with these mysterious lines:

I play the gumbo limbo spirituals

I know all the Hindu rituals

That essay outlines a connection between the second phrase and a bizarre episode that took place long after my cult escapades, when I was living a very different kind of life, in Boulder, Colorado, among the poets, Buddhists, and sensualists. I also show how the meaning of the first line is found in a pun. (Son-burned spirituals! See my chapter for the full story.)

On January 29, six days after I had published the chapter, Dylan began releasing an unprecedented series of Instagram posts. As I listened to the first set, and the ones he put out in quick succession over the following days, I was amazed to notice parallels to the text of “I Don’t Love Nobody.” I eventually discovered that in a continuation of his art project from 2020, the mirroring of my memoir into lyric, Dylan was reflecting my analysis of that mirroring back to me, in an allusive language of musical performance and film clips. Most astonishingly, his posts explicitly confirmed my ideas about Hindu rituals and gumbo limbo spirituals, and they did so with a great sense of humor.

Here we go. I hope you enjoy the ride. Please keep in mind, Bob is calling the shots here, I’m just the foil.

First up, Eddie Van Halen and Les Paul, chatting on stage, followed by Van Halen performing “Cathedral.”

This one introduces the big picture. By beginning with Les Paul, Dylan shows us that he’s talking about the live performance of music, his own history, and Rough and Rowdy Ways. I didn’t see it at the time, but this post also shows he is talking to me.

After a pandemic delay, the tour for Dylan’s new album finally opened in the fall of 2021 in Paul’s birthplace, Milwaukee. Between songs, Bob dedicated the show to Paul, a musical revolutionary and a man who invented many things, including one of the tools we immediately associate with early period Dylan: the harmonica neck brace.

Why do I think Dylan is talking to me? Because when Van Halen begins to shred, on “Cathedral,” everyone in the audience is in the church of music.

As you’ve read, The Golden Bird begins at an event that saved my soul: a Bob Dylan concert in 1978. The central theme of “I Don’t Love Nobody” is the spiritual power of music, as Dylan alludes to it, and demonstrates it, on Rough and Rowdy Ways.

Next, we have Ricky Nelson and his band, performing “I Believe What You Say” on the TV show Ozzie and Harriet, from 1958.

In my chapter called “Prophets, True and False,” I show how Dylan alludes to Nelson twice in the lyrics of Rough and Rowdy Ways. I show how he uses Nelson as a kind of twin, or double. I discuss how he does something similar in Chronicles, Volume 1. More recently, on the stage of the Outlaw Music Festival, Dylan played Nelson’s meta classic, “Garden Party.”

In this post, right off the bat, Bob Dylan, wearing his Ricky Nelson mask, offers me a blurb for the cover of “I Don’t Love Nobody”:

“I Believe What You Say”

But maybe you don’t? That’s okay. At this point, I was also asking myself why Dylan was suddenly putting up “random” clips on Instagram. Except I knew better. Dylan doesn’t do random. In reality, Bob is arranging his thoughts in a pattern, a pattern of wordplay and puns.

The third post from January 29 is a clip of Marilyn Monroe in Fritz Lang’s film Clash by Night. Here, Bob Dylan is making a joke, the first of many. One that is still cracking me up.

This film segment shows a strong and sassy Marilyn playfully arguing with her boyfriend after her shift in the factory. First, she tells him how a friend came to work with a black eye from her lover, and then she and her beau have a mock fight. As you will remember, in “Hindu Rituals and Gumbo Limbo Spirituals,” I speculate on a connection between the first phrase and an episode in my memoir depicting a violent storm in the Colorado mountains and a magical chant of poetry and song: a “Hindu Ritual.” The scene begins with an argument I had with my girlfriend, in which, after an infidelity, I smacked her. I know, terrible. I don’t think I gave her a black eye, but it wasn't cool… although she kinda deserved it. Anyway, the episode culminates with a life-changing accident and a much bigger smack: a clash by night. See my chapter for all the details, or better yet, read The Golden Bird.

How did I make the connection? How could I miss it? I’ve been writing about Rough and Rowdy Ways for five years now. When the puns began to mount, I simply joined the dots. Always during this project, I have held in my mind Dylan’s guidance issued in his 2020 New York Times interview about the images in “I Contain Multitudes”:

The names themselves are not solitary. It’s the combination of them that adds up to something more than their singular parts. To go too much into detail is irrelevant. The song is like a painting, you can’t see it all at once if you’re standing too close. The individual pieces are just part of a whole.

Here’s a good one: only recently, I realized that I had conjured the very scheme of this dialogue—me reasoning and intuiting the connections between the text of The Golden Bird and his song, and Dylan responding with wit and wordplay—in the opening paragraphs of “Hindu Rituals and Gumbo Limbo Spirituals.” My analysis of the second phrase begins with a review of Dylan’s delight in jokes. With his Instagram posts, Dylan is responding in the language I had described. I’ve said it before and I will say it again: Rough and Rowdy Ways is all about the mirrors.

I’m glad you’re here. All of this is still underground. Once upon a time, underground art was the coolest art, and Bob Dylan knows that well. It was usually made by freaks.

Bob plays with language, but his big ideas are dead serious. In my writing about “gumbo limbo spirituals,” I offered evidence that the phrase refers to songs in Dylan’s later catalog that convey a sense of separation from God, and a yearning for reconnection. In that discussion, I focused particularly on a track from Time Out of Mind that Dylan has played live 232 times: “Can’t Wait.”

The fourth post on January 29 was a film segment featuring Django Reinhardt on guitar, playing a number called "“J’Attendrai,” which translates in English to “I will wait.”

Dylan’s clip of Reinhardt is a response in wordplay, a statement that waiting, with guitar in hand, is part of the deal, until he is one day called to meet his King.

I published my initial essay on the Instagram posts on January 31. Dylan put up three more clips several hours later that same day. On February 2 and 3, he posted four more. (I’m not counting a couple of standard promo ads for the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour.)

First, up, we see flat-picking virtuoso Tony Rice playing Norman Blake’s “Church Street Blues.” The song’s narrator is away from home with a bad case of the “thin dime, hard times, hell on Church Street Blues.” Some “good time Charlie” is “driving me insane.” His answer? He sits in his rocking chair and picks.

Here, Dylan again highlights the restorative power of song and adds a specific reference to “church.” With Blake’s line about going crazy, he also echoes the only repeating triplet in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”:

Key West is fine and fair

If you lost your mind, you’ll find it there

Key West is on the horizon line

In Chapter One, I showed how the phrase “lost your mind” contains one of the clearest links to The Golden Bird, as it appears both at the beginning and the end of my “cult” section, just as it appears at the beginning and end of the song.

Next we see a minute of John Ford’s 1956 western, The Searchers. It features Ken Curtis attempting to woo Vera Miles away from her missing fiancee with a rendition of the children’s folk song, “Skip to My Lou,” a dance tune about swapping partners.

The puns continue. Dylan asks us to be “searchers,” just as he asked us at the release of “Murder Most Foul” to “stay observant.” He also offers a folk song, a genre which is, according to Dylan’s words in Chronicles and elsewhere, a gateway into hidden and mystical worlds. Here, this children’s tune about finding a new partner (“better than you!”) is an another allusion to the “Hindu Rituals” scene in The Golden Bird (that’s #2), an episode that begins with a betrayal and swapped partners.

Next up, we have The Band, minus Robbie Robertson, playing a Johnny Otis song, “Willie and the Hand Jive,” featuring the singing of Levon Helm and Garth Hudson on organ.

This one takes us down “Mystery Street”—the long avenue of faith and destiny that I discuss in Chapter One. Dylan walks it often in these Instagram posts, and it always begins in his teenage years. This performance is from 1984, but Johnny Otis wrote “Willie and the Hand Jive” in 1958, the same year Ricky Nelson played “I Believe What You Say” on the Ozzie and Harriet show. Two years after The Searchers probably played in one of the Hibbing theaters owned by Dylan’s uncle.

This clip makes us think of Dylan’s companions in the Band, and particularly of Garth Hudson, who had died just ten days earlier and whom Dylan had praised as the group’s “driving force.” In my article on this post, I mentioned that Hudson was also the recorder and preserver of the music that became known as The Basement Tapes, that most mystic set of Americana. For many years, most of the songs were only available underground, until they were all released in 2014 as part of the Bootleg Series, in a project assisted by Hudson. Mystery Street is a time machine; here, we travel from 1958 to the mid-60s to the mid-80s, and all the way to “Key West,” where Garth Hudson climbed the spiral staircase after inspiring us for 87 years.

Next we get Mae West and Cary Grant in a film from 1933, She Done Him Wrong. At this point, I doubt I need to explain much about this one. Like I said, it’s flat-out bad to hit a woman and I’ve never done it since (but she kinda deserved it). Another movie title, another pun on the “Hindu Rituals” scene from The Golden Bird. That’s # 3. Here, Dylan emphasizes his intent with the use of a movie in which Mae West utters a delightful flow of quips and double-entendres.

On February 3, Dylan posted the album cover from John Trudell’s album, Bone Days, and we hear one of the tracks, called “Spectator.” A person who watches. Someone who stays observant. In my post on this clip, I quoted Dylan on Trudell from The Philosophy of Modern Song, in which he talks about the “ancient spirit” and “ancient wisdom” in Trudell’s music. But the main reflection here is in the song’s opening lines:

In the way angels kiss

We have this time around

As you will remember from Chapter One, Dylan transfigures an episode late in my “cult’ section, in which angels kiss, into this lovely lyric, containing three song allusions, in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”:

Fly around my Pretty Little Miss

I don’t love nobody - gimme a kiss

Down at the bottom - way down in Key West

Dylan’s next post, the tenth overall, drives home the kind of language he is speaking. In case I was still kinda slow. Like I was. We see a segment from an episode of The Twilight Zone called To Serve Man. An alien species, the Kanamits, has arrived on Earth with avowedly beneficent intentions, and indeed, straight away, they begin to help. An alien representative addresses the United Nations and leaves behind a book called To Serve Man. A character named Patty sets out to translate it while her boss, Chambers, accepts that the Kanamits are an altruistic power. The scene Dylan posted shows Chambers boarding a spaceship to travel to the supposed paradise of the Kamanits home planet, when Patty suddenly rushes up and shouts at him:

Mr. Chambers! Don’t get on that ship! The rest of the book, To Serve Man, it’s a cookbook!

Alas, too late. Mr. Jones—excuse me, Mr. Chambers, a cryptographer even—has failed to understand what’s really happening.

If you’re in the habit of decoding Dylan, it’s important to stay observant and to know that the man has a good sense of humor. It’s important to understand that the pun is the thing.

Finally, in this series of posts from January 31 to February 3, we get Bobby Darin singing his hit, “Dream Lover” in May of 1959, on the Ed Sullivan show.

We are back at the beginning of Mystery Street, just after Dylan sees Buddy Holly at the Duluth Armory and as he prepares to graduate from high school. Just as he goes to seek out Bobby Vee in Fargo, North Dakota, and a few months before he shows up in the University of Minnesota campus neighborhood of Dinkytown, sporting an acoustic guitar and a new name.

We are also, however, once again, in the penultimate verse of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” in a place somewhere near heaven, where angels kiss. “Dream Lover” is, quite simply, a play on “I Don’t Love Nobody.” As I’ve shown, Dylan created the line from an episode of astral sex in The Golden Bird. Two Jesus freaks make love, but only in a dream. No actual bodies are involved. Bob summarized the episode, as he would, with a song. A song by Lew Sully, with more layers of allusion. Once again, see Chapter One for the full story, but we’ll also hear more about Sully’s “I Don’t Love Nobody” in a few moments, when we get to Paul Robeson.

On February 13, I published my second piece about Dylan’s Instagram posts. It concludes with a question: “How’d I do, Bob?” I guess I was feeling a little feisty.

Dylan answered on February 16, with three more pieces of film.

In “Hindu Rituals and Gumbo Limbo Spirituals,” in my commentary on the second phrase, I wrote about how, in many of his post-gospel period songs, the singer laments the “distance” between himself and and his Maker. I also mentioned a technique Bob shares with the great mystic poets in these spirituals: as in “Can’t Wait,” he addresses God as a lover.

Bob’s first clip from February 16 is Lowell George, in the studio with his band Little Feat, singing his poignant ballad of heartbreak, “Long Distance Love.”

The next clip Dylan posted is complex in its allusions, so look at my original piece for all the details. Dylan gives us the Osborne Brothers, blazing on mandolins, banjo, and guitar, and harmonizing beautifully, on “Ruby Are You Mad at Your Man.”

We are back on Mystery Street, in Dylan’s past, specifically at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964. The clip is from Murray Lerner’s gorgeous documentary, Festival, a film that spans several years and captures a few of Dylan’s performances, including the famed ‘65 electric “Maggie’s Farm.” In The Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan writes about how the Osborne Brothers were criticized for adding drums to their line-up—in doing so, he draws a parallel to his own controversial changes. This clip was published just as the movie A Complete Unknown was hitting the theaters and making a big splash in the press. Here, Dylan contrasts that publicity, with its focus on his electric moment, with the bigger picture. In Festival, it’s all cosmic folk music, from Pete Seeger to the Osborne Brothers to Bob Dylan—no matter what kind of guitar he’s holding. Dylan also wrote that “Ruby Are You Mad at Your Man,” is “church latin,” with “churchgoing harmony.” In this clip from Newport ‘64, we are once again in a cathedral of sacred music: folk song.

The last of Dylan’s February 16 posts is my favorite of the entire project, because in his language of classic film, hidden quips, and song, the artist gives an unambiguous answer to my question of “How am I doin’, Bob,” and one that is additionally, hilarious. He offers a detailed confirmation of my wildest claim of connection between the story I tell in The Golden Bird and the lyrics of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” I could not stop grinning for days after seeing this one. This is a scene from a 1956 film called The Rainmaker, starring Burt Lancaster and Katherine Hepburn. See my March 1 piece for the full story, but in a nutshell: Lancaster’s character, Bill Starbuck, is a con man trying to convince a family in drought-ridden Kansas that he can make it rain. In a poetic monologue, Starbuck describes how he will bring on a crop-saving tempest with chanting and song. With this scene, Dylan explicitly mirrors the storm episode from my memoir—the one where She Done Him Wrong, the one that ends in a Clash by Night, the one that features a chant of both T.S. Eliot and Bob Dylan: a “Hindu Ritual.” That’s #4.

I responded to these clips on March 1, but by February 26, Dylan had already added three more. The first is a scene from the 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives. The title is a pun on the idea of memoirs, and the scene Bob chooses evokes, once again, the healing powers of song. Hoagy Carmichael plays a bar owner named Butch Engel, and the clip shows him sitting at the piano with Homer, who is back from the war with prosthetic hooks for hands. Homer is worried that that his girlfriend can’t really want to marry a man with a disability, and Butch offers him musical comfort and reassurance. At Hoagy’s bar, we are in another chapel of song.

Next up, a post that has probably received more attention than any of the others—for mostly superficial reasons. We see Machine Gun Kelly, these days just MGK, in a Florida record store in-store performance, rapping to a highly attentive crowd, many of whom echo his rhymes. This performance is the very definition of a “Hindu Ritual.” For the fans in attendance, it is a life-altering, consciousness-changing, religious experience. The one dominant theme of these Instagram posts, and of Dylan’s use of my memoir in the lyrics of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”—a track which is also a “Hindu Ritual”—is the incantatory power of song. Near the end of his performance, MGK puts his palms together and intones “church.”

Apparently Dylan and MGK met at a show sometime after this, and Dylan contributed a promo audio track for the rapper’s new album. The Instagram post shows that Dylan admires MGK’s ability to hold a crowd spellbound, so I’m not surprised he would offer a helping hand to the young man’s career. But the hidden story here is Dylan alluding, once again, to his own lyric, and its source in The Golden Bird. That’s # 5.

Dylan’s next post shows the little-known swamp blues artist named Warren Storm, playing a song called “House of Memories.” How does Bob come up with this stuff? Here, he stacks up yet another allusion to the “Hindu Rituals” episode in my memoir: my house of memories. A moment ago we heard a poetic soliloquy from The Rainmaker, now we hear a country-blues lament from a man named Storm. Once again, I laughed. That’s #6.

I am honored to share Bob Dylan’s jokes with you!

The following post is of Blues/Folk artist Josh White performing a song with sexual innuendo: “Jelly Jelly.” We are back on Mystery Street. On his first album, Dylan included a tune that White had already recorded twice: “In My Time of Dying,” also known as “Jesus Make Up My Dyin’ Bed.” We are in that place of destiny, where the end is the same as the beginning, and a young man sings with the voice of a very old man. He is transcending time, already somehow walking the shadows after dark, in “Key West.” Miraculously, we are also in the singer’s prime, riding a blast of electricity, on the Newport stage in 1965. How so? After the insane moment passed, after Bob played a couple loud and rocking songs and people lost their shit, after Pete Seeger put down that ax and Bloomfield put down his, and after the crowd had calmed, who took a seat on that same stage, that very evening, and played a few folk songs? Josh White. What did he play? “Jelly Jelly.”

On March 4, Dylan put up the first of his fake histories, “Andrew Jackson Giving One of His Final Speeches.” He followed this over the next couple months with four more sketches based on real people: Stephen Foster, Edgar “Allen” (sic) Poe, Frank James, and a three-part take on Al Capone. You can read my original posts for the details, but in short, I was thrown off my game by these. No puns, no movie clips, no songs. I didn’t really understand if or how these biographies related to “I Don’t Love Nobody” until sometime after the last clip of Al Capone was posted, on June 9. It was only then that an essay by another Dylan writer helped me unlock the connection. Read my last post, from June 24, for the details, but the essence of the story can be summed up in a single word: replications. These histories, that allude to their own ambiguity through AI voices, are like folk songs. They are bigger and weirder than life. These fictional versions of real people exist at the crossroads of truth and propaganda, and it’s up to us to figure them out. This is Bob Dylan’s version of you, Andrew Jackson! And you, Stephen Foster! And you, Mr. Poe! Dylan even gives Edgar his own middle name: Allen, instead of Allan. These people are Bob Dylan’s monsters. These people are Bob Dylan, wearing a mask.

It’s all about the transpositions, one human to another. It’s all about the mirrors. My words, his story. His words, your story. From creator to created, and back again. I is another.

Dylan’s post from March 13, of Paul Robeson, a multi-talented man and a complicated artist, accompanied by his recording of a complicated song, Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home,” is another allusion to his lyric, “I don’t love nobody,” and as so, also to my book. I’m fond of this one because it took me so long to figure it out. At the time Stephen Foster wrote “My Old Kentucky Home”—a song celebrated as anti-slavery by Frederick Douglas—he was trying to end his reliance on racist minstrel shows to publicize his work. Nonetheless, the song became a mainstay of blackface performances.

In this audio, Dylan treats us to Robeson, a great intellectual of the early 20th Century, an actor, a singer, and a radical political activist, singing a song often played by white artists in blackface, that includes a word now seen as derogatory—“darkey”—in many lines. Many later singers changed this word, but Robeson does not. The artist, however, by touching the song with his beautiful voice and strength of character, repossesses it. He purifies it.

This post alludes to one of the story-lines of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” that culminates in the penultimate verse. Like “My Old Kentucky Home,” Lew Sully’s “I Don’t Love Nobody” was also first performed at blackface minstrel shows. But in the 1950s, Mike Seeger of The New Lost City Ramblers, a man whose musical influence Dylan has called “spiritual,” recorded Elizabeth Cotten, a daughter of slaves, singing and playing “I Don’t Love Nobody.” Her version is a celebration of freedom. She repossesses it and purifies it. She makes it holy.

He’s a clever guy, that Bob Dylan.

I headed my essay from March 8 with a large, smiling photo of the Man in Black. I included it, because in that piece, I wrote that Dylan’s portrait of Frank James was likely a tribute to Cash on the anniversary of his birthday.

On March 13, Dylan published a video of Johnny Cash and the Carter Sisters singing a lovely hymn, “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” On March 15, I published a post with a brief response, writing that the song was a confirmation of my idea about James and Cash. I didn’t get the whole story.

Anita Carter’s soul-shaking repeating line in “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord,” signifies her spiritual presence at Calvary, and at the Savior’s tomb with Mary Magdalene, when the stone was rolled away:

It made me tremble

On March 25, Dylan put up a recording of the Johnson Mountain Boys, playing a sweet bluegrass version of an obscure hymn by Adger Pace: “I Can Tell You the Time.” Here, Dylan gives me a little shove. The song is a gorgeous harmony about being touched by Jesus. Aha. I now recalled, that in the opening of “Hindu Rituals and Gumbo Limbo Spirituals,” while discussing the pun that is the basis for the second phrase, I had quoted Dylan from a May, 1979 interview:

Jesus put his hand on me. It was a physical thing. I felt it. I felt it all over me. I felt my whole body tremble. The glory of the Lord knocked me down and picked me up.

The Cash/Carter Family song alludes to this quote and so, once again, to my chapter.

Like the Johnsons, like Dylan, I can tell you the time and I can tell you the place, and in fact I did so in The Golden Bird. It’s a moment Dylan transfigured into one of the loveliest lines in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”:

I’m so deep in love that I can hardly see.

See Chapter One for the full story.

On March 24 and 25, Dylan added two other clips, including one of his “monsters”: Edgar “Allen” Poe. Another segment shows Carl Perkins, a Sun Records original, performing a powerful rendition of his “Blue Suede Shoes” on a colorized version of his appearance on 1957’s Ranch Party TV show.

Back to Mystery Street! In performances like this, Carl Perkins inspired a young Bob to have faith in Rock and Roll. He writes about “Blue Suede Shoes” in The Philosophy of Modern Song as if they are some kind of holy relic. He also points to the mysteries of destiny, which had Perkins laid up in the hospital while Elvis scored the bigger hit with the song.

Dylan didn’t post anything else for nearly a month. So on April 19, I pivoted. I decided to look at some of his fascinating tweets, a few of which I had also suspected of alluding to The Golden Bird and “I Don’t Love Nobody.” I focused particularly on the one about Bob attending a Nick Cave concert in Paris, on his Wild God tour (a show I saw later in Seattle—a deeply spiritual experience, a true “Hindu ritual”). As you’ll recall, Dylan quoted the song “Joy.” I drew an arrow between Dylan’s tweet and my chapter called “The Bleedin’ Heart Disease”: Finding Mercy with Brando, Down in the Boondocks of Key West.” Go to that chapter for all the details, but in brief, “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” contains several allusions to the virtues of mercy and compassion. Cave’s song is a prayer for the same, and culminates in a place where mercy meets joy.

Four days later, on April 23, after a month away, Dylan posted another “Ranch Party” video from the 50s on Instagram. It shows Lorrie Collins playing a song called “Heartbeat.” It may not be bleeding, but it’s pounding hard. I looked up this performance on YouTube, and found that the young singer strummed and sang another song on the same episode, one called “Mercy.”

I responded the next day, on April 24, with my jaw-dropped analysis, a bit loopy, punching a hole in the gossamer wall and addressing Bob directly. I asked for a little help in making this story plain, for the skeptics. I asked for a bit of help in bringing The Golden Bird and “I Don’t Love Nobody” to a wider audience (underground is fabulous but it doesn’t buy toilet paper).

I’m a fool. As if he wasn’t already doing everything an artist might do.

Still, the very next day, on April 25, for anyone who cares, he offered Proof. The rapper, that is. By the time I was able to write again, he also posted the first of his Al Capone audio clips, on April 28. I replied to both on May 3, in a post titled “Alone with Ghosts.”

Beyond the simple and very funny pun of “Proof,” Dylan’s post of the singer offers allusions to mercy, friendship, inspiration, and the pressures of playing music to the monsters you’ve created. We hear the first in one of the songs on Searching for Jerry Garcia, the album Dylan pictures, in a track called “Forgive Me.” We see the last in the song Dylan chooses for the audio: “Kurt Kobain.” My fellow Seattlite never much liked being a rock star; his adoring monsters still leave gifts on a bench outside his old house, where he killed himself, down by Lake Washington. This post of Proof also offers an allusion to John Lennon’s murder, one that is buried deeply, just like it is in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” In doing so, the post cites the same event as depicted in The Golden Bird, and as discussed in “I Don’t Love Nobody.” Chapter One will show you where the ex-Beatle appears in my book and in Dylan’s song, but on Proof’s album “Searching for Jerry Garcia,” it’s in “72nd and Central,” which opens with a reenactment of the killing. By one of Lennon’s monsters.

The Capone series, in addition to being an exercise in magnified versions of reality, otherwise known as imagination, otherwise known as folk story, stays with the idea of mercy. Dylan strung out these audio segments over a month and a half, and the final one, on June 9, is also his last Instagram post so far.

By giving his monstrous Capone the voice of Brando, Dylan alludes again to Chapter Three, “The Bleedin’ Heart Disease,” which includes a discussion of the actor’s appearance as Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, pleading for mercy. Malloy is “down in the boondocks,” a phrase that also appears in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” referring to Joe South’s song of the same name, in which the narrator cries again and again for mercy. In “My Own Version of You,” Dylan mashes Brando with Pacino, and hopes to “get the head on straight.” He wants to get it “upright.” So that he might be “saved.” And so receive mercy.

In his last post on Capone, Dylan returns to the spiritual power of song. In a monologue from the bardo of Dylan’s mind, Capone, in a confessional mode, offers two redeeming facts of his sordid life: how he learned to play music in prison, and how he stayed married to a devoted wife. As I wrote in my July 24 article, we last see Capone in his dilapidated Palm Island house—not that far from “Key West”—surrounded by the remains of his ill-gotten gains, dying of untreated syphilis, demented, and praying for mercy.

Dylan released two other posts in-between the Capone clips. The first, on May 13, is the Louvin Brothers playing “I Don’t Believe You’ve Met My Baby.” I didn’t manage a response until June 13. On May 23, the day before his 84th birthday, Dylan published a clip of the Shangri-Las, singing “Out in the Streets,” written by Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry. I hadn’t published anything since my May 3 article about Proof and the first Capone audio. The Shangri-Las put a fire under my toes and I whipped out a reply that same night, before driving three and a half hours the next day to see Bob play in Ridgefield, Washington.

With “Out in the Streets,” my Minnesota brother gives me a poke. From the moment I heard those girls singing, I once again began to laugh.

He don’t hang around

with the gang no more

He don’t do the wild things

that he did before

He used to act bad

Used to, but he quit it

It make me so sad

Cause I know that he did it for me

And I can see it

He’s still in the street

His heart is out in the street

Yes, I did it for you, Bob. And I used to act bad (she kinda deserved it), but I quit it. But my heart, my bleedin’ heart, is still out here in the street. Mystery street. Still on the highway. Still following the signs. Just like you.

Lastly, the Louvin Brothers post is all about the mystic powers of song. Here, Dylan points us toward another “House of Memories,” Charlie Louvin’s brutally honest 2012 memoir, named after one of the group’s records: Satan is Real. Charlie’s story holds it all: inspiration coming over the radio as teenagers, destiny, and the magical qualities of folk song. The Louvins first became well known as a gospel group and the title of their second record is Nearer, My God, to Thee. If you’ve been with me from the start, you know that the hymn plays a big role in the narrative of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” In Chapter One, I wrote:

The sacred song, written in 1841 by Sarah Flower Adams, relates the story of Jacob's ladder from the Book of Genesis. It describes how the patriarch falls asleep and sees angels ascending and descending a celestial staircase. The hymn is a prayer; it asks that angels, dreams, sorrows, and song itself may bring the singer closer to God. In the Bible verse, after Jacob wakes, he calls the place the "gate of Heaven.”

“Nearer, My God, to Thee” tells us everything we need to know about “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” It’s a confession and a prayer for mercy. It’s a song about dreaming and flying with angels:

Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee!

E'en though it be a cross that raiseth me;

Still all my song shall be nearer, my God, to Thee,

Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee!

Though like the wanderer, the sun gone down,

Darkness be over me, my rest a stone;

Yet in my dreams I'd be nearer, my God, to Thee,

Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee!

There let the way appear steps unto heav'n;

All that Thou sendest me in mercy giv'n;

Angels to beckon me nearer, my God, to Thee,

Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee!

Then with my waking thoughts bright with Thy praise,

Out of my stony griefs Bethel I'll raise;

So by my woes to be nearer, my God, to Thee,

Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee!

Or if on joyful wing, cleaving the sky,

Sun, moon, and stars forgot, upwards I fly,

Still all my song shall be, nearer, my God, to Thee,

Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee!

In early 2020, Bob Dylan borrowed a few startling and deeply intimate moments from my “House of Memories” and transfigured them into a song. I caught it, and he knows it.

Early in this journey, I wrote Dylan two letters via his business office (the same place I sent The Golden Bird), thanking him for his music, and asking for a blurb. In January of this year, he decided to give me that blurb, in the allusive voices he loves best: film, folk song, rock and roll, and humor. Because he knew I would catch it:

“I Believe What You Say”

Now I’m sharing our very funny conversation that proves, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the story I tell in “I Don’t Love Nobody” is, let’s just say, gospel.

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I’ve been away from my desk. I love summer and the days keep soaring by, like the hawk I saw a couple mornings back, flying low over my house with a rat in its talons, chased by crows. Sometimes I feel like the hawk, sometimes like the rat, and sometimes like the crows. The corn is deep green and getting tall, the tomatoes are trying to sprawl, and I need to be out there every other day with my secateurs, clipping those suckers. The eggplants are starting to drip with shiny black fruit and the neighborhood bunnies need constant chasing if I hope to keep them out of my parsley patch. You get the picture. The days are long and I’ve got plenty to keep me busy. Even if that just means a nap in the afternoon, and the baseball game. Of course, being a Mariners fan ain’t easy.

Maybe we’re getting caught up now anyway, more or less, on all the mirrors in Bob Dylan’s Instagram project—mirrors of song, movie mirrors, pun mirrors—to mercy and inspiration and the spiritual power of song, as sung about on Rough and Rowdy Ways, and as described in earlier chapters of this book, “I Don’t Love Nobody”: Hidden Stories from Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways. If you’re new here and don’t get what that means, please go back to the beginning of this series, or better, all the way back to Chapter One.

Luckily for my slow writing, perhaps, Bob Dylan hasn’t posted on Instagram since June 9, when he put up “Al Capone in his own words: Part 3.” I know he’s been pretty busy himself, singing obscure old blues tunes along with a selection of his own classics, on tour with Willie Nelson. I saw him here in Washington in May, on his birthday, and I’ll share a few thoughts about that below. I’ll begin, however, by finishing up with Al Capone. I wrote about the first segment already, in “Alone with Ghosts: Bob Dylan’s Instagram Posts Part 9.” In that piece, I emphasized Dylan’s mash-up of the “Scarface Pacino” in “My Own Version of You” with “the Godfather Brando,” and all the connections that summons to allusions of mercy on Rough and Rowdy Ways.

In the six months of Dylan’s Instagram experiment, he’s put up two kinds of clips. As I’ve shown, the first sort, musical performances and film segments, have replied directly to my chapters and to this series about those posts, in another layer of meta for his art project that began with his use of scenes in my 2011 memoir, The Golden Bird, for crucial lyrics in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).”

The second type is those long audios from beyond the grave, in the purported voices of Andrew Jackson, Stephen Foster, Frank James, Edgar Allan Poe, and Al Capone. I’ve had a harder time connecting these latter posts to my chapters. I’ve suspected, however, that Dylan would have a unity of theme within his Instagram series. It made no sense that one kind of post would be part of our dialogue about Rough and Rowdy Ways, and the others would be unrelated. Recently, however, an essay by another Dylan writer has helped me see how these tales fit squarely within the context of the conversation.

In a post on his Medium page, Fred Bals has posted a perceptive article about Dylan’s historical audios. His piece showed me that I was caught in the details and missing the bigger picture. He writes about Bob’s apparent use of AI for the audio and emphasizes that these monologues are not the real words of any of the characters. Bals has put his finger on the key fact: these people are replications. The stories that Dylan tells in these sketches are important, but the essential link to our dialogue is the artifice of the voices. In these made-up historical audios, Dylan is once again creating monsters, as in “My Own Version of You.” He is creating his own version of the past—his own versions of Poe, James, Jackson, Foster and Capone. And in his use of episodes in my story, Bob Dylan created his own version of me.

Dylan has long been obsessed with the relationship of a copy to its source. Lately, we see this in his paintings, in their reproduction of movie scenes. One of the best examples of this career-long concern is his veneration of the New Lost City Ramblers. As I quoted from Chronicles back in Chapter Five:

All their songs vibrated with some dizzy, portentous truth. I’d stay with the Ramblers for days. At the time, I didn’t know they were replicating everything they did off of old 78 records, but what would it have mattered anyway? It wouldn’t have mattered at all. For me, they had originality in spades, were men of mystery on all counts.

It “wouldn’t have mattered,” because the replications of the Ramblers were as good as the 1920’s recordings. It “wouldn’t have mattered,” because the replications of the Ramblers still offered the “dizzy, portentous” truth of folk song. They could transport a young Bob Dylan straight to that place of faith and destiny, to “Mystery Street.”

Rough and Rowdy Ways is a tribute to Dylan’s past and to his inspirations. The album is concerned with the artists who created Dylan and the artists and fans he has in turn created. We are his monsters. In this continual process of re-creation, reality itself is quite literally, a matter of “interpretation.” As an example, Dylan was thoroughly castigated in some quarters for his use of Billy Emerson’s guitar riffs in “False Prophet,” a lazy criticism that misses the point entirely: everything made by humans is a copy. From a Christian point of view, there is only one true Maker. The important thing is that Dylan’s guitarist—Charlie Sexton or Bob Britt—played the riff well. The attribution is found in the quality of the reproduction—as the movie paintings are fine tributes to films Bob has enjoyed. Sure, he could cite his sources, but he never has, and it’s a lot more fun to figure it out for ourselves anyway. The mystery is the magic.

The idea that Dylan is creating versions of history that we must weigh for ourselves, against other sources and against our own lives, is at the center of my tale. It’s at the center of his use of The Golden Bird for “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” Dylan, in his use of passages from my memoir, created a poeticized interpretation of my mystical experiences—because they mirrored his own. He passed certain of my episodes through his magic prism and made something else, a song with “originality in spades.” And as I’ve shown, every passage he chose involved the inspiration of Bob Dylan: mirrors within mirrors.

The AI Instagram posts continue the conversation. Dylan channels the dead in his own words to show us that’s what we’re all doing as we walk through life: channelling the dead, in our own words. We reimagine the ideas of the past as we encounter them in moments of need and transformation. I’ve shown how “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” is filled with specters—Mike Seeger, William McKinley, L. Frank Baum—and how at the song’s culmination, the ghosts of Elizabeth Cotten and John Lennon hover with the astral spirit of a Bob Dylan fan, a boy who is trying to live as a replication of Christ. And yet all that matters in the end is how a listener hears the song. How the images sink into his or her own experience.

Recall Dylan’s tweet upon the release of A Complete Unknown, a bio-pic he approved, and for which he apparently wrote a few lines:

There’s a movie about me opening soon called A Complete Unknown (what a title!). Timothee Chalamet is starring in the lead role. Timmy’s a brilliant actor so I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me. The film’s taken from Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric – a book that came out in 2015. It’s a fantastic retelling of events from the early ‘60s that led up to the fiasco at Newport. After you’ve seen the movie read the book.

Here Bob says that the actor playing “some other me” is “completely believable.” But in the same breath, he urges his fans to read Elijah Wald’s well-researched history. Because, as “believable” as Chalamet is, the Bob Dylan portrayed in A Complete Unknown is also imaginary—with his fictional early stay at the Seegers, his Newport tear-jerker scene with Suze, and, and, and …. Still, the Dylan in A Complete Unknown is a remarkably good fake. The movie carries at least a trace of his essence, for those who will unfortunately never see him “live and in person.” Those who care can follow that trace to the actual recordings and videos, and they will be transfixed and transformed. As for the rest, perhaps Bob thinks it’s not so bad if when they think “Bob Dylan” they see Chalamet.

Of course, Dylan makes us question what “live and in person” even means. Let’s consider Shadow Kingdom for a moment. Ray Padgett’s recent interviews with two key musicians—one who played guitar on the music we heard, and the other who played the accordion in the film—demonstrate another instance of Dylan’s fascination with different versions of reality.

Apparently, the music released on the album—the music we heard on the streaming broadcast—was recorded at an earlier time by a first band. Incredibly, the same music was then learned and replayed note by note by a second band, the one who appeared on screen. And that band, whose music we have never heard, are the only ones who have received published credit. Why? Why not credit the first band? Why not stick with one band? Why would Dylan go to all that trouble? The second group, apparently chosen in part for their appearance on screen, was composed of the same quality of musicians who played on the record. The accordion player, Alexander Burke, reports that Buck Meeks, who usually works in the wonderful group Big Thief, even reproduced bum notes that were part of the original recording.

Dylan goes to all that trouble because one of his recurring ideas, from the beginning of his career to Rough and Rowdy Ways, is a question: Who is real and who is a shadow? What is the difference between me and you?

I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours

Anything that I’m saying, you can say it just as good

We always did feel the same, we just saw it from a different point of view

This, again, is why Dylan would transform the prose of a fan, a fan who described an experience of Christian mysticism that mirrored his own, into his poetry. This is why he offers his own version of historical figures in his Instagram posts.

In his replications, Dylan brings whatever he chooses to the fore. I’ve explored some of the details in previous pieces, about James, Jackson and Capone, as they pertain to my themes. Bals, in his Medium article, makes great points about each these monsters, and why Dylan might have highlighted certain ideas. In the remainder of this essay, I’ll just say a few things about Parts Two and Three of the (A)(I) Capone story.

Dylan’s tale is connected to at least three previous fictionalized versions of the mobster: a 1930 novel by Armitage Trail, a 1932 Howard Hawk Film, and a 1983 remake by Brian De Palma, all of which are titled Scarface. Researcher Scott Warmuth has shown how Dylan used lines from Trail’s novel in Chronicles Volume One. Dylan the cinephile is surely a fan of the first film, and “My Own Version of You” directly refers to the second. The important thing, however, is that all of these works are figments of their creators’ imaginations. The De Palma movie is set in a completely different era than the one in which the real Capone lived and all of these versions only concern the gangster years.

Dylan’s folk tale has a wider scope and less sensationalistic approach than the book or the two movies. Parts Two and Three emphasize the latter half of Capone’s life: his downfall, his disease, and his stirrings of conscience. Here, Dylan highlights an idea he included in all the musical Instagram clips, and one I’ve described often in “I Don’t Love Nobody”: song is a portal to Eternity, and everyone can get a glimpse, even a soul as lost and depraved as Al Capone. As Dylan sings in “Across the Rubicon”:

I feel the Holy Spirit inside and see the light that freedom gives
I believe it’s within the reach of every man who lives

In Part Two of “Al Capone in his own words” (ha-ha!), Dylan’s version of the gangster mostly talks about three things: first, how his marriage to May was “the smartest thing I ever did;” second, how learning to play music while imprisoned at Alcatraz gave him gratitude at being alive; and third, how he remained a believer in Christ, despite his awareness of his terrible sins.

In Chapter One, I showed that several images of marriage appear in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” William McKinley’s deathbed confession with his beloved wife Ida by his side is a crucial moment at the song’s opening. Next, with his hand held high and his thumb down, the narrator asks for mercy and in the next moment, asks a woman to put a hibiscus behind her ear, to say whether she is married, or free. I also discussed Dylan’s allusion to the “shifting sands”—more last words, shared by L. Frank Baum with his wife Maud, about crossing over into Oz. Late in the song, we hear about the narrator’s strange union with a prostitute that, through its allusion to the Biblical story of Hosea and Gomer, echoes an ancient tale from Judaism about keeping faith with the Lord, while stating plainly that that Judaism is not where his story ends.

In this context and in classic folk story fashion, Al Capone’s marriage takes on spiritual significance. The AI voice tells us:

We married in the church, just like our families wanted. Respectable. Clean. Through everything. The rise, the fame, the blood, the prison. May stayed. She didn't like the life, never pretended to. She kept to herself, stayed out of the papers, protected our boy. And when the world turned its back on me, when even my own mind started slipping in Alcatraz, she never did. She visited. She prayed. She waited. She was loyal in a way most people can't even understand.

This is what Dylan chooses to highlight in his version of Al Capone. In Part Three, Capone talks about his regrets, and top among these is the how he failed his wife. Still, she remained:

She didn't sign up to be the wife of a legend, or a convict, or a dying man. But she bore it with grace. Catholic, loyal, proud in her own quiet way. So yeah, our relationship changed, but not the part that mattered. She was there when I rose, and she was there when I fell. In the end, May Capone was the only thing I never lost.

In “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” you get closer to God in two ways: through a relationship with a merciful and spiritual woman, and through music.

The end of Part Two of “Al Capone in his own words,” highlights the comfort the gangster found by learning the banjo in Alcatraz. Despite losing his brain function through untreated venereal disease, music, he says, “gave me peace”:

I wasn't playing for applause. I played to remember who I used to be before the headlines, before the blood. Music reminded me that I wasn't born a gangster. I became one. And in those quiet moments, plucking strings with fingers that used to grip pistols, I felt not innocent, but alive. So yeah I could play. Not Carnegie Hall good, but good enough to make a prison cell feel like a back porch in Brooklyn. And when you're locked in a cage that means more than gold…

The group had about five or six of us. I played the banjo and mandola, alongside a saxophone, clarinet, guitar, drums, and sometimes piano. We weren't just passing time. We were trying to remember what it felt like to be men again, not numbers. We performed on Sundays during chapel services. Nothing fancy.

Just quiet music in a stone room filled with silence. For a few moments, the other inmates weren't convicts and we weren't criminals. We were just human beings listening to something honest. Playing with other inmates, guys I didn't talk to on the tier, guys who'd killed, stolen, betrayed.

We came together for one thing that didn't belong to the past or the crime. Sound. Harmony, rhythm, no lies, no schemes, just the truth that comes from strings and breath and beat. We weren't saints. Hell, most of us weren't even decent. But in those moments, when the chapel filled with music instead of silence, it felt like the bars faded just a little. We weren't trying to escape the island. We were trying to escape ourselves.

So how did I feel? Grateful. Grateful for every note, every broken melody, every stolen second of peace. Because when the music started, I wasn't Al Capone the gangster. I was just a man, still capable of beauty.

In Dylan’s Instagram posts, we’ve been here before. We’ve attended services in Eddie Van Halen’s “Cathedral” and we’ve heard Tony Rice picking away his “Church Street Blues.” We’ve hung out with MGK in a Florida record store when he put his palms together in the middle of his rap—his “Hindu ritual”—and intoned the word, “Church.” We’ve harmonized with the Osborne Brothers on “Ruby Are You Mad at Your Man,” a song Dylan called in The Philosophy of Modern Song, “Church Latin.” We’ve listened to Johnny Cash and the Carter Sisters trade parts on “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord.”

Probably not coincidently, Dylan’s version of Al Capone mentions “You Are My Sunshine” as one of his favorite tunes to pluck, a song famously covered by Cash. He also cites “Swanee River,” by another of our Instagram crew, Stephen Foster.

Finally, (A)(I) Capone takes us back to his Catholic upbringing. Wherever he wanders, wherever he roams, and wherever he machine-guns people down, he’s not that far from the convent home:

Now was I a good Catholic? Not by a long shot. I bent a lot of rules. Broke even more. I lived by a code. Loyalty, family, respect. But it wasn't always the church's code. I ran saloons. I sold liquor during prohibition. I ordered hits when business needed it. I knew the difference between right and wrong. But in my world, sometimes wrong paid the rent. Still, the church never left me. I always considered myself a believer.

I donated a lot of money to Catholic charities, to churches, to hospitals. Quietly. I wasn't trying to buy forgiveness. I guess deep down, I wanted to stay connected to something pure. Something bigger than me. Even when I was doing the devil's work by day, I still made the sign of the cross at night. I still taught my son to pray. I still asked God for protection. for my family, for myself.

When I got locked up, first in Atlanta, then Alcatraz, the faith I grew up with came back stronger. There's something about a prison cell that strips you down to what you really are. When the lights went out, when the cold crawled up through the floor, I'd lie there whispering Hail Marys into the dark. Not bargaining. Not begging. Just trying to remember who I was before the streets hardened me.

So how close was I to the Catholic religion? Close enough to never turn my back on it. Far enough that I always knew if there's a final judgment. I got a lot of explaining to do.

Dylan’s (A)(I) Al has evolved from the the “sucker fish” mentioned in Chronicles, but he’s never suffered much from the “bleedin’ heart disease”—the compassion of Christ. At the end of his life, however, full of regret, he’s at least got a pulse. As he sits in his dilapidated Palm Island mansion, among the ruins of his earthly treasures, not far from “Key West,” he understands that he’s unlikely to be invited up the spiral staircase. He’s making “the sign of the cross by night,” but he understands that what really counts is the devil he served during the day. Dylan’s version of Al Capone is a man who waited too long to get right with God.

Bob Dylan, at least the version I saw in Ridgefield, Washington on his 84th birthday, May 24, 2025, is still telling us we gotta make a choice. He opened with the gospel era rocker, and as I’m sure you know from the setlist, continued with a set of lost blues numbers (raising those ghosts) and an eclectic selection from his catalog. This was my 60th Bob show—a good number, over 47 years (will there be more?)—and it was an honor to be there on his birthday. But I don’t much enjoy a festival anymore, with all the hassles; give me a small theater and just Bob Dylan any day. The folks who don’t care enough about Bob—who don’t even understand what they’re witnessing—are distracting, wandering past you four times sloshing their beer and chatting loudly. The drive was three and a half hours from my home down a horrific stretch of I-5. I was fried getting in and frazzled getting out. All that said, Dylan sang beautifully. If this turns out to be the end between me and live Bob Dylan, I’ll feel forever blessed to have heard “Blind Willie McTell” and “Don’t Think Twice” as the last two numbers. Two of his greatest, for sure, delivered with clarity, subtlety and grace. I was close enough to see his face and hear his voice, and that’s all I can ask.

Lastly, I hear there’s another academic conference, The World of Bob Dylan 2025, coming up this weekend in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I’ve had a quick peek at the program and for folks who like to go deep into Dylan, I’m sure it will be a fascinating few days. I’d like to go myself, but getting to Tulsa is rough from way up here in the northwest corner and well … so many college professors … it always makes me think:

You’ve been with the professors
And they’ve all liked your looks
With great lawyers you have
Discussed lepers and crooks
You’ve been through all of
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books
You’re very well read
It’s well known

Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

Now that’s rock and roll.

I’ll be here, just a fan, working on my Bob Dylan book. Playing some pickleball. Tending my garden. Watching those Mariners, for good or ill. (Mostly ill.)

But if anyone reading this is attending, I hope you have a wonderful time. I hope, among all the presentations and readings, you get a big shot of why you’re there—a big Shot of Love. No doubt, you’ll meet many versions of Bob Dylan. But I hope you’ll meet yourself again too. In Tulsa, I hope you’ll meet, among all the Dylan monsters, a very special one. The one he brought to life, a long time back, out of found parts. His own version of you.

I want to bring someone to life - someone I’ve never seen
You know what I mean - you know exactly what I mean

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Hello again. Today, my story is about Dylan’s Instagram post of the Louvin Brothers from May 13, singing their biggest hit, “I Don’t Believe You’ve Met My Baby.”

I also have thoughts to share about Dylan’s last two Instagram posts, “Al Capone in his own words, Parts Two and Three,” from May 20 and June 9. And not least, I’d like to offer my impressions about Dylan’s performance on his 84th birthday, at the Outlaw Music Festival in Ridgefield, Washington—my 60th Bob show over 47 years. To keep this piece from getting way too long, however, I’ll save these topics for next time.

As you know, crazy as it sounds, over the past four and half months I’ve been conversing with Bob Dylan on social media—he on Instagram, me on Substack—about the book I began publishing here in May of 2024: “I Don’t Love Nobody”: Hidden Stories from Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways. My book is about Dylan’s poetics on Rough and Rowdy Ways, and especially in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”—a song with several verses transfigured from episodes in my 2011 self-published memoir, The Golden Bird.

On Instagram, in an allusive language of musical performance, movie clips, and many puns, Dylan has concisely and humorously confirmed his transmutation of my passages into poetry. He’s also reflected my writing on the essential themes of his 2020 record. The first of these is mercy and compassion, the second is the way folk song reaches beyond a purely rational concept of reality, and the third is how song, delivered “live and in person!,” or through a small radio speaker, can hold incantatory and spiritual power.

Many of Dylan’s Instagram posts feature performance clips captured during his own high school years. Teenagers who are “searching for love and inspiration” are most open to the life-changing power of song. As I’ve shown, in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” and elsewhere on Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan alludes to episodes in his memoir, Chronicles Volume One, in which he describes his first glimpses of destiny. For the young Zimmerman, “Mystery Street” began at a Buddy Holly concert when he was 17; for me, it began at a Bob Dylan concert just after my 18th birthday; for a young person of another generation, it might begin at an MGK in-store performance.

[Author’s Note: On June 10, MGK released audio of Dylan narrating a trailer for his new album, “Lost Americana.” As you may have read, the two apparently met at Dylan’s Outlaw Tour show in Los Angeles. Some sources speculate that Dylan is supporting MGK because of a connection through his grandson. These stories are reported as big news, but they stay on the surface of Dylan’s art. In them, we are led to assume that Dylan’s Instagram shot of MGK exists in isolation from his other posts, and that Bob is just a grandpa sitting on his couch like you or me, sending random fan appreciation clips out into the Internet abyss. As this series shows, nothing could be further from the truth. Do we really believe that the greatest artist of the age, the one who expanded our conception of popular song, has no intent in his public messages beyond saying, “Eddie Van Halen! Cool! Also, check out this old movie!?” Dylan’s shout-outs to MGK, as unexpected as they may be, are not in themselves a creative act. And Dylan is ever creative. We might say, “that rascally old Dylan, always doing crazy shit,” but if we stop there, we are missing most of the real story.

For sixty-five years, crafting language and sound, Dylan has led us far from the mainstream, up tributaries, toward lost springs of culture. In “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” he takes us “beyond the sea,” to the “horizon line” of a mortal life. As I discussed in “Bob Dylan’s Instagram Posts Part 7,” his clip of MGK is a “Hindu ritual,” an example of the incantatory power of song, and as such, tied directly to his other posts. From the release of Rough and Rowdy Ways until today, Dylan has shown a tight unity of theme in his poetics, which includes the allusive language of his Instagram posts. That’s the hidden story. That’s the creative act. That’s the story I’m telling here, in “I Don’t Love Nobody.”]

Dylan’s post of the Louvin Brothers is another mirror of the ideas I mention above. Charlie Louvin, the younger sibling, told the story of his life, and his brother Ira’s, with heart-piercing honesty in a 2012 memoir named after one of their best gospel records: Satan is Real. I’m guessing Dylan’s clip alludes to the entire world of musical inspiration revealed in Louvin’s book. Satan is Real offers one more memoir, one more “House of Memories”—as cited in Dylan’s post of the song by Warren Storm—for our philosophical pleasure.

The magic began for the Louvin Brothers—who were born as Ira and Charlie Loudermilk—with a voice coming over the airwaves in rural Alabama, when they were sixteen and fourteen years old. Every Saturday evening they would gather with local families in the yard of the shopkeeper, who had the only radio in the area, and take turns going into the house to listen to the weekly broadcast of the Grand Old Opry. One night, Charlie and Ira heard Roy Acuff announce a show coming to their very own school. On the appointed day, after their work in the fields was done, the brothers hurried to the concert and, because they were unable to afford tickets, listened to Acuff and his band through the open windows. Afterwards, they watched with admiration as the group departed in their expensive automobile, an “air-cooled Franklin.” Charlie and Ira were so impressed that they resolved at that moment to get off the farm and make a career as singers.

From the stage of the Grand Old Opry, Roy Acuff issued an invitation to Charlie and Ira Loudermilk to embrace their destiny. In the sweltering cotton fields of Alabama, the teenagers received the signal, clear as can be, over the pirate radio. Years later, Charlie and Ira would harmonize on that same Grand Old Opry stage, sending out their own songs over the radio, inspiring another generation.

In Satan is Real, Charlie tells about the long road to that stage. It began in a tough childhood filled with music. Colonel Monero Loudermilk worked his boys hard and was harsh with discipline—with Ira taking most of the blows—but he supported their gift for singing. After work, “he’d pick up his banjo and do three or four songs most every night.” Their mother, Georgiana, the daughter of a Baptist preacher, taught them songs she’d learned from her parents:

Her people were from a part of the world where a lot of folk songs come from, England, and we learned songs from her that most children wouldn’t ever have known. She raised us on those songs, singing them while she worked. And she was always working.

Probably my favorite was “Mary of the Wild Moor.” Ira and I learned it while helping her with her housework, before we were old enough to be out in the fields with Papa. Mama knew all those tragic songs, and she loved music.

On some weekends, their father would travel to Knoxville to sell vegetables, and he brought home records for the boys from a shop on the market street. Colonel Monero would also force the brothers to perform for guests in their home, and although they sometimes sang from under the bed, they eventually overcame shyness and stage-fright.

The Loudermilks traveled each year to a large family reunion organized by an aunt, where everyone joined in singing songs from the Sacred Harp, the 19th Century shape-note tune book. (Dylan recorded one of its loveliest songs, “Lone Pilgrim,” on his 1993 album, World Gone Wrong. I write more about that story in the coming epilogue to “I Don’t Love Nobody.”) Here’s how Charlie recalls the experience:

A Sacred Harp church ain’t like most churches. They don’t have any instruments, not even a piano. As soon as everybody made their way inside, the leader, who was this guy from Ider with a perfect ear, shouted out somebody’s name. Then that person stood up with their immediate family and walked to the middle, where they called out what song they was gonna sing, usually by page number from the songbook. Then the leader sang out the notes and gave a hum for the pitch, and we all stood up and laid into it.

That first song was electric. The whole church filled with the music of our voices. That was the first time I was really expected to sing along, but I joined in as easily as if I’d been doing it a hundred years. The human voice, that’s what they’re tallking about when they say Sacred Harp, and there’s nothing like it in the world. You can’t really record it either. Since everybody sings, it’s awful hard to get a microphone positioned so you can mix all of them. But it does your soul good to hear it.

Charlie also writes about Ira’s gift for copying singing techniques he observed at the Sacred Harp gatherings. One girl could sing “way up in the treetops, and then, just when you thought no human being could go any higher, her voice swooped down like a bird from the treetops, ran along the floor with us, and then soared again. It gave me chills.” Rising and falling harmonies, with changing parts, would become an astonishing part of the Louvin’s act.

My edition of Satan is Real has a subtitle that reads, A Real Life Cain and Abel Story From the American Heartland. That might be overstating things a bit. Charlie never killed Ira, but he did pummel him a few times. Ira was a drunk and while Charlie forgave many of the problems his drinking caused, he couldn’t overlook it when Ira insulted their mother. When Ira was soused, which was often, he lost his temper easily and screwed up many gigs. The clip Dylan posted on Instagram provides a case in point. According to Charlie, Ira’s actions at that session cost the group millions of dollars in lost royalties. The brothers were scheduled to perform more than fifty songs for a series of television shows, “Stars of the Grand Old Opry.” On the first day of filming, one of the crew told Ira that the shine on his mandolin interfered with the camera, so he’d need to paint it over. Ira, hungover from a bender and vain about his instrument (although he would sometimes destroy it on stage when frustrated, and rebuild it later) became abusive and told the camera-man to go to hell. As a result, the producer sent the band packing after they’d filmed only two songs: “I Don’t Believe You’ve Met My Baby” and ironically, one of their gospel hits, “Love Thy Neighbor.” Charlie writes that Ira’s alcoholism and rage were a reaction to his father’s beatings and also a self-inflicted punishment for not following his other calling, as a preacher.

Originally, the Louvin’s recording contract called only for gospel songs, released as singles. Eventually, however, they began to record secular material as well, and their first album, Tragic Songs of Life, contained several traditional tunes, including “Mary of the Wild Moor.” The murder ballad, “In the Pines,” also appears, a song recorded by many artists, including one alluded to in Dylan’s Instagram post of the rapper Proof: Kurt Cobain.

So many links exist between the story Dylan tells in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” his Instagram posts, my writing in “I Don’t Love Nobody,” and Satan is Real, that it’s hard to say which in particular he might intend, and which simply exist under the cosmic sky of folk song and musical inspiration. Here’s another example: the Louvin Brothers’ second record was named after the 19th Century hymn, “Nearer My God to Thee” and includes the song as the second track. In Chapter One, I wrote extensively about Dylan’s buried allusion to “Nearer My God to Thee” in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” The hymn is the “confession” and the “last request” of a dying William McKinley, and its lyrics tell the story of Jacob’s ladder from Genesis: a celestial staircase to heaven and the Biblical version of Dylan’s “Key West.”

Here’s another connection, involving some of the same musicians who’ve appeared in Dylan’s previous Instagram clips. Early in their career, the Louvins met a guitarist and promoter named Eddie Hill, and together they formed a group called The Lonesome Valley Trio. As I discussed in “Bob Dylan’s Instagram Posts Part Seven,” “Lonesome Valley” is the title of a song by the Carter Family and also a phrase that appears in Dylan’s song from the mid-90s, “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven.” I showed how Bob’s post of the Carter Sisters and Johnny Cash singing “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord,” with its refrain “It made me tremble,” points directly to Dylan’s own 1979 quote about meeting Jesus: “I felt my whole body tremble.” In Satan is Real, Charlie tells how the trio were about to perform in Arkansas when he encountered a teenage boy standing outside the venue—dark-skinned from working the fields, dressed only in shorts. The boy had come to hear the music through the windows, just as the Louvins had done years earlier with Roy Acuff. Charlie invited him to sit on a bench just inside the door with his friends. Years later, when they met again, Charlie discovered the boy’s name: Johnny Cash.

Louvin tells another story about Cash from after the singer had become well-known, when they were all on tour with, you guessed it, the Carter Family. Charlie was going through a hard period and Cash loaned him a thousand dollars, for which he would never accept repayment.

In Dylan’s post of the Louvins, I can’t say if he intends an allusion to these tales about Cash and the Carters, buried deeply in Satan is Real, but they add more fascinating context to the “lonesome valley” lyric from his 1996 “gumbo-limbo spiritual,” “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven.”

Finally, here’s one more connection between Louvin’s memoir and the story I tell in “I Don’t Love Nobody.” Again, I don’t assume intentionality on Dylan’s part in this detail; I’m just strolling down “Mystery Street.” Late in life, Cash recorded one of the Louvin’s biggest hits: “When I Stop Dreaming.” Here’s the chorus:

When I stop dreaming

That’s when I’ll stop loving you

As I’ve shown, “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” features a dream in its penultimate verse—including three song titles which transfigure episodes from another memoir— which, once it stops, so does all the love.

Fly around my Pretty Little Miss

I don’t love nobody - gimme a kiss

Down at the bottom - way down in Key West

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