Speaker 1: Blood on the Tracks is the production of I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio and Double Elvis. Bob Dylan was a musical genius
Speaker 1: and one of the greatest songwriters of all time. He
Speaker 1: didn't follow leaders. He chased that thin, wild mercury sound.
Speaker 1: He never looked back. Even as the times changed, and
Speaker 1: as the times changed, Bob Dylan changed. He tried on
Speaker 1: and discarded identities like they were mass He transformed. He
Speaker 1: transfigured in somewhere along the way, the Bob Dylan that
Speaker 1: you thought you knew died. This is his story. Is
Speaker 1: this recording? Okay? This is Dr Ed Taylor. It's Friday,
Speaker 1: July six. I'm at my home in Middletown, New York.
Speaker 1: I have an unexpected patient here in my house. Robert
Speaker 1: Allen Zimmerman, a k a. Bob Dylan. He was involved
Speaker 1: in a motorcycle crash about an hour north to hear
Speaker 1: up in Woodstock. He was brought here to me. I'm
Speaker 1: not entirely sure why, but I assume he wants to
Speaker 1: keep a low profile. He is suffering multiple injuries, although
Speaker 1: as of yet I have been unable to ascertain exact details.
Speaker 1: There is little bruising and there appears to be no
Speaker 1: broken bones, but the patient is alarmed and erratic and dead.
Speaker 1: He did that cat, that song and dance man that
Speaker 1: judas the voice of a generation, whatever the hell that means.
Speaker 1: The man named Bob Dylan. He died on a road
Speaker 1: in Woodstock earlier today. The history books will tell you otherwise.
Speaker 1: But believe me. Believe me when I say that he
Speaker 1: died that day. He went over the handlebars of his motorcycle.
Speaker 1: The sun is still burning in his eyes, and his
Speaker 1: head hit the pavement back dead. I know because I
Speaker 1: was there. I saw it all happen, Because it happened
Speaker 1: to me. I needed it. I needed it to get free,
Speaker 1: free from the pressure, free from being Bob Dylan. But
Speaker 1: death is not the end, you know. The funny thing
Speaker 1: about life is it's not about finding yourself. People always say,
Speaker 1: go and find yourself. No, it's about inventing yourself. That's
Speaker 1: what life is. When you create, you're in control, you
Speaker 1: hold the cards, you write the narrative, and when you create,
Speaker 1: you can also kill. With every death comes rebirth, transfiguration
Speaker 1: as I like to call it, as with every journey.
Speaker 1: Though there's a lot of pain, you can't travel through
Speaker 1: life without leaving a little blood on the tracks. Yeah,
Speaker 1: chapter one, Bob Dylan is Judas. It was the sun, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was it. The sun caught my eyes and then
Speaker 1: I don't know the bike just I couldn't see anything.
Speaker 1: I guess we should start at the start. Every end
Speaker 1: has a has a start, right, even death. Well, the
Speaker 1: end of Bob Dylan, you knew, began on July Newport
Speaker 1: Folk Festival. I was king of the world. Then, well
Speaker 1: somebody's world, I suppose, but everything was about to unravel.
Speaker 1: I remember sitting backstage with my manager, Albert Grossman and
Speaker 1: Alan Lomax. Do you know him? They call him an
Speaker 1: ethno musicologist. That's a job. Apparently. Joining us was the
Speaker 1: folk singer Pete Seeger. Pete and I went way back.
Speaker 1: He helped me get noticed by Columbia Records, the record
Speaker 1: company I had a contract with. I had a smoke
Speaker 1: with each drag. It felt like everything was starting to
Speaker 1: speed up. The whole day had been a drag. We
Speaker 1: were due to play on Sunday night, but before we
Speaker 1: had to do what they call a contemporary Songs workshop,
Speaker 1: that sort of thing that sucks the life out of
Speaker 1: previously living art. I sped through some of my songs
Speaker 1: with my guitar, and we were due to cut the
Speaker 1: song Tombstone Blues and Studio next week, so I gave
Speaker 1: that a run out alongside a couple of earlier tunes.
Speaker 1: I was happy enough until Paul Butterfield's Electric blues bands
Speaker 1: took the stage right after me. My friend Mike Bloomfield
Speaker 1: played guitar with them, and so I stayed to watch.
Speaker 1: If I hadn't done that, well, maybe none of this
Speaker 1: would have happened. Maybe I wouldn't even be talking to
Speaker 1: you about this right now. I know because I was there. Anyway,
Speaker 1: someone had to introduce the acts onto the stage. That's
Speaker 1: the tradition. Right well before Paul Butterfield's band appeared, Lomax
Speaker 1: had to introduced them. Now. I liked Lomax. I had
Speaker 1: spent many nights at his apartment meeting all kinds of
Speaker 1: folk music people that I would never have come in
Speaker 1: contact with otherwise the history books will tell you otherwise.
Speaker 1: He also introduced me to sus in New York. She
Speaker 1: was the one on the cover of the Free Wheeling album.
Speaker 1: But that day Lomax, being part of that folk set,
Speaker 1: sneered at this electric band coming on with a little
Speaker 1: curld smile on his face. He said something like, now
Speaker 1: you're going to hear a group of young boys blah
Speaker 1: blah blah with electric instruments blah blah blah. Let's see
Speaker 1: if they can play this hardware at all. It was
Speaker 1: so pompous man, so repressed. Fuck him for being disparaging.
Speaker 1: Everything doesn't have to be the way it was, the
Speaker 1: way we always have done it. Life is about inviting yourself.
Speaker 1: That's what life is. I thought my annoyance would pass,
Speaker 1: but by the time the first notes from the Butterfield
Speaker 1: Band rang out, I was still pissed. I wasn't alone.
Speaker 1: Just when I thought my anger was going to boil over,
Speaker 1: I saw Albert march up to Lomax and shove him
Speaker 1: with both hands. Do you write the narrative? Lomax fell
Speaker 1: to the floor, and Albert, who wasn't a small guy
Speaker 1: by the way, everyone called him the bear for crying
Speaker 1: out loud, he threw himself on top of Lomax. Lomax
Speaker 1: managed to get a punch in right on Albert's neck.
Speaker 1: Albert was about to smack him right back, but somebody
Speaker 1: pulled him apart. I didn't throw a punch that afternoon,
Speaker 1: Unlike Albert, but I made up my mind to throw
Speaker 1: one later and when I was due to perform. As
Speaker 1: always alone with an acoustic guitar, but now I wanted
Speaker 1: everyone to drown in the sound of a band, a
Speaker 1: fucking rock and roll band. I put Albert on a
Speaker 1: mission go round up members of Paul Butterfield's band and
Speaker 1: some other guys at the festival who weren't too snooty.
Speaker 1: I went back to my dressing room and changed straight away.
Speaker 1: I wore all black, black jeans, black Chelsea boots. I
Speaker 1: felt like a million bucks. I also threw on a
Speaker 1: black leather jacket to a race. All doubt I was
Speaker 1: a rock star. It's about inventing yourself. Why did I
Speaker 1: wear black? I thought I was going to a funeral, man,
Speaker 1: It turns out I was early. At the sound check,
Speaker 1: I was still pissed. We rattled through some Oregan riffs
Speaker 1: and two songs with the full band, but we didn't
Speaker 1: need to. This show wasn't about rehearsal. It was the
Speaker 1: culmination of what I'd been feeling about this whole stuff
Speaker 1: He's seen over the last few months. Eight o'clock sharp,
Speaker 1: we were due to go on I stood at the
Speaker 1: side of the stage and saw seventeen thousand people waiting
Speaker 1: that happened. I grabbed my sixty Fender stratocaster and didn't
Speaker 1: even reply to Albert when he asked if I was okay.
Speaker 1: Peter Yarrow from the group Peter Paula Mary. He introduced
Speaker 1: me in the band onto the stage. He said, ladies
Speaker 1: and gentlemen, the person that's going to come up now
Speaker 1: as a limited amount of time, limited amount of time.
Speaker 1: Never has a truer sentence been uttered. We strode on
Speaker 1: and I shouted, let's go. I needed it to get free.
Speaker 1: We launched into Maggie's farm and the sound of the
Speaker 1: band was like a Tommy gun, like we were spraying
Speaker 1: the audience with bullets from the speakers. He did. I
Speaker 1: watched lights flash brightly from camera bulbs and the sea
Speaker 1: of heads. The noise was so loud it was chaotic.
Speaker 1: All my anger from earlier pulsed through my fingers. As
Speaker 1: I beat the stratocaster into shape, flash more camera bulbs.
Speaker 1: The huge floodlights blurred into spots in my eyes as
Speaker 1: I hit the strings harder. With each downstrum of the guitar,
Speaker 1: you hold the cards. I could already hear a din
Speaker 1: from the crowd. I always told reporters that I couldn't
Speaker 1: hear anybody booing over the loud music. But I did
Speaker 1: hear it, and it did bother me. I was just
Speaker 1: using what the politicians would call plausible deniability. The way
Speaker 1: I was telling it was a good story, and why
Speaker 1: let the truth get in the way of a good story.
Speaker 1: Those vultures would probably thank me for a quote like
Speaker 1: that if sells them more papers. The folk purists, meanwhile,
Speaker 1: they hated us seventeen thousand Alan Lomax's The strings on
Speaker 1: the strato caster took more of a pounding as finally
Speaker 1: the camera flashes stopped, and then so did we. I
Speaker 1: remember blurting out thank you very much as the booze
Speaker 1: rained down. They hung there in the air like invisible violence.
Speaker 1: Sure there were a couple of cheers sprinkled in there,
Speaker 1: but it was mainly booze. We reloaded and gave it
Speaker 1: to them again like a rolling stone. Was next. How
Speaker 1: does it feel? At that moment, I knew the answer
Speaker 1: to the question that song was asking. I know because
Speaker 1: I was there. It was an act of defiance and
Speaker 1: it felt good. But It also felt kind of lonely
Speaker 1: in the moment, even though I was surrounded by other musicians.
Speaker 1: I can't say why. We were halfway through, like a
Speaker 1: rolling stone. When Pete Seeger appeared at the side of
Speaker 1: the stage. He was outing that it was too loud,
Speaker 1: that no one could hear the words good. I saw
Speaker 1: something in his hand, caught by the flash of the cameras.
Speaker 1: But death is not the end. It was an ax.
Speaker 1: For a split second, I thought he was gonna come
Speaker 1: for me. With it comes rebirth. He was screaming, screaming
Speaker 1: about cutting the power. He drew the axe above his head,
Speaker 1: demanding that we stopped or he'd strike the p a cable.
Speaker 1: Suddenly Albert appeared and wrestled the ax from him, both
Speaker 1: of them falling to the ground and ruining a stack
Speaker 1: of perfectly good guitars in the process. Acoustic guitars. How appropriate,
Speaker 1: It was a destructive end to a destructive set because
Speaker 1: it happened to me. I mean, was there an ax
Speaker 1: there that day? No? But it makes for a better story. Okay,
Speaker 1: don't forget. Life is about inventing yourself. That's what life
Speaker 1: is her. I was on a jet back to New York,
Speaker 1: staring at my strats, sitting on the seat opposite me.
Speaker 1: I just couldn't bear to hold it anymore. If I
Speaker 1: held it, I could feel the booze from the crowd
Speaker 1: resonating from inside the guitar's body. That reaction was worse
Speaker 1: than I ever thought it could be. I kept telling myself,
Speaker 1: this is just one show, this is just one show.
Speaker 1: But what happened that night under flashes from the cameras
Speaker 1: and the Tommy gun fire of the music, it would
Speaker 1: open up Pandora's box for me, one I could never close.
Speaker 1: It was an oily patch on the road. That was it.
Speaker 1: That's the thing that caused it. I saw it, and
Speaker 1: right away I knew it was going to cause the
Speaker 1: bike to flip. I tried to avoid it, but it
Speaker 1: was it was too big. The Newport gigs set the
Speaker 1: tone for the next three sixty five days of my life.
Speaker 1: Back in New York, I was cutting what would become
Speaker 1: the Highway sixty one Revisited album. I began recording that
Speaker 1: song positively Fourth Street, about all those purists who complained
Speaker 1: about that electric stuff, the same ones who would call
Speaker 1: me a judas. When I returned to England, in the
Speaker 1: following spring. A lot of nerve those people. And when
Speaker 1: you create everything that had recently happened to me I
Speaker 1: put into that song. I couldn't get it down quick enough.
Speaker 1: I was still writing the thing as we recorded it.
Speaker 1: Hunched a were a huge amp in Columbia Studio A
Speaker 1: scribbling down these words. My hand was possessed. It was
Speaker 1: so last minute. The band had to wait till I
Speaker 1: was done the narrative. I've written some vicious songs in
Speaker 1: my time and regret them. I still WinCE over a
Speaker 1: tune called Ballad and playing d childish dig at a
Speaker 1: former love of mine. But this time it felt healing,
Speaker 1: kind of cathartic. I guess I was getting lost in
Speaker 1: the bitterness. And when you create, you can also kill. Fittingly,
Speaker 1: this mood was the backdrop to my first meeting with
Speaker 1: Andy Warhol. I knew who he was. Of course, you
Speaker 1: couldn't be in New York and not know of the
Speaker 1: great Andy Warhol. He was a king, No, not a king,
Speaker 1: he was more of a dictator, our very own Napoleon.
Speaker 1: Andy apparently liked my stuff, which meant I was famous,
Speaker 1: and he wanted to be with me because I was famous.
Speaker 1: Mr Knnis Soup was just desperate to get me to
Speaker 1: his what was it called his factory. Dy a girl
Speaker 1: whom we both knew, invited me up. The place was
Speaker 1: something else. Man aluminum foil all over the walls, cameras everywhere,
Speaker 1: strange people everywhere. It was like a spaceship had landed
Speaker 1: on street. Andy himself looked like a ghost. I mean
Speaker 1: a fashionable ghost, sure, but still a ghost. He wanted
Speaker 1: me in front of his camera for a screen test,
Speaker 1: as he called it. He liked to make these kinds
Speaker 1: of movies. All it was was me in front of
Speaker 1: a camera for I don't know three minutes. I just
Speaker 1: had to stand there while they filmed me right up close.
Speaker 1: He just kept saying to me, be natural, be you.
Speaker 1: The camera's not here. I know because I was there.
Speaker 1: He kept calling me a beautiful thing, the voice of
Speaker 1: a generation. When it was done, I joked about my payment.
Speaker 1: I muttered something like, well, if this is art, then
Speaker 1: pay the artist. Can of Soup didn't really see the joke,
Speaker 1: so he actually offered me payment in the form of
Speaker 1: one of his Elvis pictures. It was a seven foot
Speaker 1: tall silk screen of Elvis from one of his movies
Speaker 1: slinging a gun cowboy style double Elvis. He called it man.
Speaker 1: I loved Elvis, and while I wasn't particularly moved by
Speaker 1: this picture, I accepted it, and he asked if I
Speaker 1: would like it packaged up and sent over to my house.
Speaker 1: I said I'd just take it now, So me and
Speaker 1: my friend Bobby Knewarth tied it to my old station
Speaker 1: wagon and drove it all the way home. I needed
Speaker 1: it to get free. The fashionable ghost was apparently horrified.
Speaker 1: I do have one regret, though, for a start I
Speaker 1: had nowhere to put the damn thing. It sat in
Speaker 1: the closet in my house forever. Eventually Albert took a
Speaker 1: liking to it and offered to take it off my hands.
Speaker 1: We broke it a deal. I'd swapped the Andy original
Speaker 1: for Albert Grossman's sofa. Done. The joke was on me,
Speaker 1: though Albert's wife would sell the picture for over seven
Speaker 1: hundred thousand dollars in the eighties. The sofa barely lasted
Speaker 1: a year after the factory, we were back on tour.
Speaker 1: We were always on tour. I was exhausted. I had
Speaker 1: always had an intense type of fame from the press,
Speaker 1: from fans, but after Newport it got worse. People always
Speaker 1: say go and find yourself. I was expected to have
Speaker 1: answers on every political problem of the day, just because
Speaker 1: I'd written songs that pointed some fingers. I was also
Speaker 1: expected to speak for an entire generation just because what
Speaker 1: I had a stage. I learned just how bad things
Speaker 1: had gotten. When we got to Denmark, I wanted to
Speaker 1: see Cronberg Castle, the setting for Shakespeare's Hamlet. Hamlet is
Speaker 1: one of my favorite pieces. I even named my giant
Speaker 1: poodle after it. Quite the accolade for Bill. I'm sure
Speaker 1: the castle is grand and opulent. Who dominates the landscape.
Speaker 1: I was staring at it when Albert told me that
Speaker 1: folk singer and poet Richard Farina had been fatally killed
Speaker 1: in a motorcycle accident. I had known Richard well. He
Speaker 1: was a big part of the Greenwich village scene. He
Speaker 1: had also married Joan by as his sister Mimi. Apparently
Speaker 1: it was Mimi's twenty first birthday and they were having
Speaker 1: a party. Richard saw a guest with a motorcycle and
Speaker 1: he asked for a ride. At an s turn, the
Speaker 1: driver lost control, motorcycle tipped over on the right side
Speaker 1: of the road, came back to the other side and
Speaker 1: tore through a barbed wire fence into a field. He
Speaker 1: went over the handlebars of his motorcycle. The driver survived,
Speaker 1: but Farina dead instantly. Transfiguration, as I like to call it.
Speaker 1: I felt like death was everywhere in my life at
Speaker 1: that point. Geno Foreman an activist again, part of the
Speaker 1: Greenwich Village scene. He died around that time drugs. Of course,
Speaker 1: on tour. He'd asked me for money. I wasn't in
Speaker 1: a good mood and told him to funk off. I
Speaker 1: never saw him again. Bablo Clayton, a folk singer and
Speaker 1: friend of mine, died in April nineteen sixty six. He
Speaker 1: got into a bathtub and pulled an electric heating and
Speaker 1: after himself. I kept thinking about Richard though. That was
Speaker 1: the one that got me. Of course I was sad,
Speaker 1: real sad about it. But there was something else there,
Speaker 1: another feeling jealousy. He was free. We'll be right back
Speaker 1: after this word word. It was the brakes, the damn
Speaker 1: breaks on that old bike. It was a Triumph Tiger.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they get a problem with the brakes. Apparently they
Speaker 1: just locked up. I remember that gray day clouds everywhere.
Speaker 1: I wanted to get home quick, but I never made it.
Speaker 1: After that tour had finished, I returned home to High
Speaker 1: LOHI the first house I ever boughtve dollars for eleven rooms.
Speaker 1: It stood in the woodstock trees. It was a place
Speaker 1: where I could go and finally get away from all
Speaker 1: the bullshit. But I never seemed to spend any significant
Speaker 1: time there. I needed it to get free. When I
Speaker 1: walked in the front door, I caught my face in
Speaker 1: the rectangular mirror we had up in the hallway. It
Speaker 1: was pinched and paper white. My eyes were dark and vacant.
Speaker 1: I drew my hands up to prod the bags under
Speaker 1: my eyes and saw that my fingers were nicotine stained
Speaker 1: and my fingernails were blackened. God, I've gone full Warhol.
Speaker 1: My wife Sarah was on the back porch with our
Speaker 1: son Jesse and Maria, Sarah's daughter from her first marriage,
Speaker 1: who I had already began adoption proceedings for The porch
Speaker 1: overlooked a parade of American elms, which crowded the back
Speaker 1: of the house. Time felt different here, like I was
Speaker 1: seeing everything through a new set of glasses. Pressure pure.
Speaker 1: Jesse was only four months old at the time. He
Speaker 1: was sitting in his high chair, a milk bottle full
Speaker 1: in front of him, with his pacifier in his hand.
Speaker 1: Maria was on her tricycle. I stared at them both.
Speaker 1: I was struck by how content they were. The simplicity
Speaker 1: of it marveled me. Their whole world was on this porch.
Speaker 1: Everything they needed was here, everything they could ever want.
Speaker 1: That's what life is. Our old phone rang from the hallway.
Speaker 1: It brought me back to reality. It was Albert informing
Speaker 1: me that I'd be back on the road for a
Speaker 1: six day tour in August. It was already the end
Speaker 1: of May, and dance Man two months, two lousy months off?
Speaker 1: Is that all I had? Then? What? Back to playing
Speaker 1: the part of Judas? They loved, calling me Judas in
Speaker 1: England Man. They booed me and ship talked me and
Speaker 1: said that I had turned my back on all of them.
Speaker 1: It got so add that leave on our Drummer went
Speaker 1: back to the States. He couldn't handle it anymore. I
Speaker 1: wasn't sure I could either, To be honest, finding yourself.
Speaker 1: Albert didn't stop there, though, He sternly reminded me that
Speaker 1: we had to finish a tour film we've been making
Speaker 1: for the ABC television network. It was titled Eat the Document.
Speaker 1: The last thing I wanted to do was watch the
Speaker 1: last tour I've been on. I was there, man, and
Speaker 1: it had nearly broken me. I didn't need to see
Speaker 1: it again from multiple camera angles. Before our call ended,
Speaker 1: he said that Columbia was playing hardball about a negotiated
Speaker 1: contract for our terms to be met. They wanted a
Speaker 1: new album quick, Oh is that all a new record?
Speaker 1: The last one, a double album, I might remind you,
Speaker 1: was being written while we were recording it when I
Speaker 1: was running on fumes, and now they wanted another one.
Speaker 1: I made a joke about possibly calling it Judas Returns.
Speaker 1: Albert didn't laugh. For the next week, I tried to
Speaker 1: avoid any thoughts of film edits and new tour dates.
Speaker 1: Every day I would play with Jesse and walk Maria
Speaker 1: to school. I started to fantasize that this was my
Speaker 1: life forever, even though I knew I'd be on stage
Speaker 1: soon enough. It's funny people dream of being a rock star,
Speaker 1: but at this time I had started to dream of
Speaker 1: white picket fences and household chores. The funny thing about
Speaker 1: life is one day, we had to go to Albert's
Speaker 1: house in Bearsville to pick up my motorcycle and a
Speaker 1: j S five hundred that previously belonged to Rambling Jack Elliott.
Speaker 1: Jack had run her into the ground and she was
Speaker 1: barely functioning, but I love the ride. Sarah and I
Speaker 1: left Albert's house. She was in the station wagon we
Speaker 1: had acquired to fit our new Woodstock lifestyle and I
Speaker 1: rode out up front on the bike. I was cruising
Speaker 1: pretty fast at the top of a hill near Woodstock,
Speaker 1: very close to Woodstock. It was a little foggy, kind
Speaker 1: of moist in the air. As I came down the slope,
Speaker 1: I don't know the bike. I lost control. He went
Speaker 1: over the handlebars of his motorcycle. I skidded for a
Speaker 1: few feet, still trying to steer. I went left, then right.
Speaker 1: The bike was now diagonal across the road, steam billowing
Speaker 1: from the tires. The sun is still burning in his eyes.
Speaker 1: I managed to get it straight, but I hit something
Speaker 1: and instantly I was pushed up. I vaulted over the front.
Speaker 1: My knee clipped the bike's front light. As I did,
Speaker 1: I seemed to stay in the air forever. I just
Speaker 1: hung there the bike below me. Trees either side the road.
Speaker 1: Out ahead, there was a strange quiet. The bike must
Speaker 1: have made a racket, but I didn't hear it. It
Speaker 1: was almost serene in that moment. I thought of Richard Farina.
Speaker 1: I thought of the barbed wire fence, and then then
Speaker 1: I just thought of Jesse and Maria and Sarah. I
Speaker 1: hit the ground with a cold, hard thud, and all
Speaker 1: I could taste was grit. It was all in my mouth,
Speaker 1: grit and blood. I was on my back, spread out,
Speaker 1: looking up at the sky. Then everything went black. Bob
Speaker 1: Dillon died that day. Who came back? It's hard to say.
Speaker 1: I took time off. No film, no new album, no
Speaker 1: fucking tour man. I wouldn't play another show for almost
Speaker 1: eight years. I tried to write, but it wasn't the
Speaker 1: same him as it was before. Things I've done unconsciously
Speaker 1: before we're now having to be done consciously. Songwriting didn't
Speaker 1: flow in the way it used to. Even though that
Speaker 1: concerned me a bit, it was also a blessing. I
Speaker 1: got out of the rat race. I found contentment. I
Speaker 1: guess you could say that it came at the perfect time.
Speaker 1: I couldn't have planned it. Better myself. For the first
Speaker 1: time in years, I had a purpose that wasn't shrouded
Speaker 1: and blame expectation or questions. All I wanted to do
Speaker 1: was be a father and a husband. I carried on
Speaker 1: my daily routine of playing with Jesse and taking Maria
Speaker 1: to school. That's what life is. In fact, one day
Speaker 1: after dropping her off, I spoke to our neighbor and
Speaker 1: artist named Bruce Dorfman. Sarah had got me some oil
Speaker 1: paint for my twenty seven birthday, and I wanted to
Speaker 1: know how to use them. I figured, if I don't
Speaker 1: want to write songs, and I'd paint. I even had
Speaker 1: fantasies of becoming a painter, like a proper painter, not
Speaker 1: just printing cans of soup. Bruce introduced me to the
Speaker 1: work of Mark Chagal, and that was it. I was off.
Speaker 1: I painted day and night. When the kids were in
Speaker 1: school or down for a nap or eating. I was
Speaker 1: painting with or without Bruce. I took to it straight away.
Speaker 1: I was still writing songs, but the songs took a
Speaker 1: back seat for the moment as I lost myself in
Speaker 1: paints and canvases. Every day comes rebirth. That's the funny
Speaker 1: thing about inspiration, though, especially with songwriting, it comes and goes.
Speaker 1: You don't choose when it appears. It can reappear without
Speaker 1: you even noticing. One day, Bruce was in my studio
Speaker 1: and I had just finished the piece which he was admiring.
Speaker 1: The imagery was sparse, apocalyptic, surreal. I was inspired by it.
Speaker 1: Bruce asked me what it was called. I told him
Speaker 1: All along the watch Tower. On August two, two, Don
Speaker 1: Peterson sat in her New Jersey kitchen waiting for her
Speaker 1: phone call. She anxiously spun her wedding ring round and
Speaker 1: round on the bottom of her finger. She'd been spinning
Speaker 1: the ring and waiting for the call for over half
Speaker 1: an hour. She thought about what had happened to her
Speaker 1: only two months ago, and how it had led to
Speaker 1: this moment, a moment that change her life forever. On
Speaker 1: a quiet Tuesday evening, she had been watching a documentary
Speaker 1: on Bob Dylan. Suddenly her stomach did a somersault as
Speaker 1: she watched perform with Electric Venom all those years ago
Speaker 1: at the Newport Folk Festival. She fixated on the guitar.
Speaker 1: She knew that guitar. She stared at the screen, the
Speaker 1: black and white image from nearly forty years earlier flashing
Speaker 1: before her eyes, and she could hardly believe it. The
Speaker 1: guitar Bob Dylan had played on that faithful night at
Speaker 1: Newport was identical to the one that currently sat in
Speaker 1: her attic. It was a guitar that had been given
Speaker 1: to her more than a decade ago by her father,
Speaker 1: Victor Quinto. Victor was a private jet pilot who often
Speaker 1: worked for rock and roll stars, farrying them around on tour.
Speaker 1: After flying a visibly shaken Bob Dylan home to New
Speaker 1: York on July, he noticed Bob and left his Electric
Speaker 1: Vendor stratocaster with its sunburst finish, on one of the
Speaker 1: plane seats. Despite contacting Dylan's people, Victor ended up taking
Speaker 1: the strap back home, which is where it came to
Speaker 1: stay for decades. Don knew if the guitar was the
Speaker 1: one Dylan had left on her father's plane, that it
Speaker 1: was a piece of rock history, and perhaps a priceless
Speaker 1: piece of rock history. Her phone finally rang out. She
Speaker 1: drew a deep breath and answered it quickly, and the
Speaker 1: person on the other end was Agnes Davidson from the
Speaker 1: PBS television show History detectives. Agnes informed Don that after
Speaker 1: a lot of research and tests, they had determined that
Speaker 1: her Fender Stratocaster with a sunburst finish was, in fact
Speaker 1: the very guitar Bob Dylan had played at the Newport
Speaker 1: Folk Festival in or at least the chances were high
Speaker 1: around Don stood holding the phone and the receiver now
Speaker 1: shaking in her hand. Tears made her vision blur as
Speaker 1: she thanked Agnes for the update and they discussed possible
Speaker 1: filming dates. The Stratocaster would go on to sell for
Speaker 1: nine hundred and sixty five thousand dollars at auction, the
Speaker 1: most expensive guitar to ever hit the auction block. Around
Speaker 1: two hundred and sixty miles away, Bob Dylan sat backstage
Speaker 1: in his trailer at the Newport Folk Festival. It was
Speaker 1: the first time he had played the festival in thirty
Speaker 1: seven years, and the man he was looking at in
Speaker 1: the mirror was unrecognizable. His hair was long and straightened,
Speaker 1: the brown color deep and rich. His face was decorated
Speaker 1: with a medium length beard, gray tips in the middle,
Speaker 1: and both the hair and the beard were fake, and
Speaker 1: the glue that was used to attach the beard was
Speaker 1: uncomfortable and irritating, so we rubbed it with his fingertips
Speaker 1: before brushing the wig hair into a slight parting. He
Speaker 1: finished the look by placing a pure white stetson on
Speaker 1: the top of his head, smiling to himself as he did.
Speaker 1: His thoughts then turned to Alan Lomax, who died some
Speaker 1: two weeks ago. Dylan felt like Alan, while maybe not
Speaker 1: in person, would be somewhere in the crowd that day,
Speaker 1: looking on, perhaps approving of the whole thing. And there
Speaker 1: was a knock at his trailer door. It was the
Speaker 1: third time the event organizers had asked him if he
Speaker 1: was ready. He was now ten minutes over his call time,
Speaker 1: and the spaghetti western music that usually accompanied his arrival
Speaker 1: on stage had already played through twice. Dylan reassured them
Speaker 1: he was coming before taking one last look in the mirror,
Speaker 1: and then he opened the door of his trailer and
Speaker 1: made his way down the tiny metal steps, where a
Speaker 1: golf buggy greeted him. It was the one thousand, four
Speaker 1: hundred and thirty second show of Bob Dylan's famous never
Speaker 1: ending tour, and while the press, critics, and fans had
Speaker 1: made a big deal of his return to Newport. To Dylan,
Speaker 1: it felt no different than any other gig, and there
Speaker 1: was a brief moment that changed all that, though. It
Speaker 1: happened when the band launched into the set seventeenth song
Speaker 1: Like a Rolling Stone. As he sang the song's chorus,
Speaker 1: Dylan's mind drifted back to that day in nine. He
Speaker 1: recalled that different man, that man he no longer knew,
Speaker 1: that man who was no longer alive, That man was
Speaker 1: living in a sped up world all alone. He thought
Speaker 1: about how everything from that moment in sixty five had
Speaker 1: led to this. He thought about how you make yourself
Speaker 1: in this life, and about how he transformed himself with music,
Speaker 1: about how he presented a different man to the world
Speaker 1: through his art. He thought about all the water under
Speaker 1: the bridge between those two new Ports shows, all the
Speaker 1: time that had elapsed, all the lives he had lived,
Speaker 1: and all the things that had happened. Events from the
Speaker 1: past three decades came and went in his mind as
Speaker 1: he played that day, crazy moments like God appearing in
Speaker 1: a hotel room, or the time he spent in Nashville,
Speaker 1: the madness of the Rolling Thunder review tour in a
Speaker 1: Bloody Murder, which he himself became embroiled in and he
Speaker 1: thought about how when he lived so many lives, you
Speaker 1: can't help get Blood on the Tracks. Blood on the
Speaker 1: Tracks produced by Double Elvis in partnership with I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: It's hosted an executive produced by me Jake Brennan, also
Speaker 1: executive produced by Brady savy Zeth Lundy is lead editor
Speaker 1: and producer. This episode was written by Ben Burrow, Story
Speaker 1: and copy editing by Pat Healey. Mixing and sound designed
Speaker 1: by Colin Fleming. Additional music and score elements by Ryan Spreaker.
Speaker 1: This episode featured Chris Anzeloni is Bob Dylan. Sources for
Speaker 1: this episode are available at double Elvis dot com and
Speaker 1: the Blood in the Tracks series page. Follow Double Elvis
Speaker 1: on Instagram at double Elvis and on toy ch at
Speaker 1: s Grace Slant Talks, and you can talk to me
Speaker 1: per Usual on Instagram and Twitter at Disgrace Land, Pond
Speaker 1: Rock and rood Di Baby, Her Dad m