On the Road with Bob Dylan Read Online Free PDF Page A

‘Durango’ but the first thing that came was an image I had from a postcard that was once sent to me by Jack Gelber, the playwright. He sent me a postcard with a picture of a Mexican hacienda or something, some Mexican shack not a hacienda, a shack with a bunch of chili peppers on the roof in the sun. So the first line was ‘Hot chili peppers in the sun,’ and I remember saying,‘No,
blistering
sun,’ so we got the first line. And then there was this escape.”
    “You know what Dylan told me? He told me he was eating chili peppers every morning,” I laughed.
    “He was eating chili peppers, that was when we were staying out in East Hampton, but I should go back to the story I was telling you before about how we started to write. What happened was that we finished Isis that one night, up all night till the next morning, not the final version, we redid some stuff, but the basic story was there and I would write this stuff down and then type it up and we would go over the stuff. And we went down to the Other End and Bob read the lyrics to a bunch of people sitting around the bar, just read them, and everybody responded to the thing because everyone gets hooked in that story, apparently. The two of us didn’t know that at that time, I mean we were getting hooked.”
    “You know what I thought, I read a story by D. H. Lawrence called ‘The Man Who Died,’ the story about Christ meeting Isis …”
    “It doesn’t have anything to do with that, it doesn’t have anything to do with the Egyptian goddess either. The only thing it has to do with the Egyptian goddess is that at some point we threw in the pyramids instead of the Grand Teton Mountains, which is probably really what it’s about. Going up into the hills somewhere in Wyoming or something.”
    “Where does the story come from?”
    “I don’t know the story of that. I don’t know how that story came about and Bob doesn’t either. It came about through the two of us, just a kind of unconscious connection we were making.”
    “Who wrote ‘One More Cup of Coffee’?”
    “Bob had written that before we got together in the summer. He had written a couple of songs ….”
    “‘Sara’?”
    “No, he had not written ‘Sara.’ Bob wrote that during the time that we were out in East Hampton. You see what happened is thatwe finished ‘Isis’ then we wrote a couple of other songs, but what was happening was that we were going out and hanging out late at night and we were getting together the next afternoon and there were lots and lots of distractions. So we said, ‘Let’s get out of here,’ and suddenly it became serious that we were really going to do some serious work together, so we went out to a place out in the Hamptons. Nobody was around, and the two of us were just there for like three weeks together, that summer. We had already written a couple of songs so there was a feeling of confidence that we both had that we could really do it. Some of the songs that we’ve been doing, one of the things about them that’s so wonderful is that they give him a chance to do some acting. Some of the things that happened with us over that period in the summertime was that feeling that Bob had is that he was really open, ready to come out, ready to express how he felt about things, and as far as I was concerned I couldn’t have been happier. I know I was spurring him and he was spurring me.”
    “That’s what he needed, I think.”
    “He was doing all right without me,” Jacques chuckled.
    “That’s true,
Blood on the Tracks was
a great album. Did you ever hear the original takes? They’re chilling, really down to the bone …”
    “I’ll tell ya, I had never listened to
Blood on the Tracks
. I had heard of
Jack of Hearts
on the radio and Bob sang a couple of love songs from the album to me because I’d never heard them before. He played ‘Idiot Wind’ and ‘Simple Twist of Fate’ and I thought they could be better than they were and he’s gone