I, Dynamo

Ragtime Talking Eddie Burroughs:

Another Look At Minidoka

by

R.E. Prindle

     While I was wandering through the pages of Minidoka one day looking for some firm dating device I came across what may very well be a key to explaining the method of reading the story.  When I first read the story I tried to read it straight which was a very unsatisfying experience.  The story seemed to be a clumsy first effort.  While a first effort, perhaps, the story is far from clumsy, indeed it is a well crafted and polished tale.

     The story isn’t written in plain English; it seems that our very hep ERB is ‘talking ragtime.’  First the proof and then an attempt to understand the concept of talking ragtime.

     On page 22 there is an exchange between Minidoka and the Hoobody:

     “Now, don’t be frightened,” said the Hoobody.  “I’m really very fond of young people, expecially hash browned.  But candidly, I have come to you as a friend, sent by the Little Horned Toad whom we all obey.  You are in terrible danger and if you don’t do just what I tell you, your name is Alkalai dust.”

     “I’m in the hand of my friends,:  replied Minidoka.  “But I glean that you are talking rag-time,”  he added to himself.

     The Hoobody’s speach can then be understood as an example of ragtime talking.  One can’t write what one doesn’t know so it is clear that ERB knows what ragtime talking is and knows it well enough to confidently reproduce it.  Hence ERB is a hep dude.  I’m not talking ragtime either.  It would seem that as in latter days ERB would have had an affinity to the Hipsters, the Beats, Beatniks and the Hippies.  He was cool.

     Now, what might talking ragtime be.

     Talking ragtime woud be based on the principles of ragtime music but independent of it.  Ragging at tune led to ragging the language.

     While ragtime is a distinct musical genre of original pieces any song can be converted into ragtime by changing the time values of melody notes.  This is known as ragging the piece.  (Wikipedia)  Thus ragtime talking distorts ordinary English into strange or outre phrasing and notions.  The Hoobody says he is fond of young people, especially hash browned.  The surprise effect of young people and an edible dish is clever or amusing if not outright funny.  Thus the language is being ‘ragged.’

     As ERB follows the technique throughout the book the story must be a ragtime story.  While my first thought was that ERB put the story aside because it’s quality wasn’t publishable I am now of the opinion that while within a ragtime genre the quality is fine perhaps there were no publications that accepted ragtime stories.  I may be wrong.

     That ERB may have been deep into the technique is evident from the transformation of Bodine into a Coyote.  I am not clear on the connection between the Coyote and ragtime talking and lyrics but the Coyote plays a central role.  Thus Bodine is a Coyote throughout most of the story.

     Ragtime music first surfaced as a genre at that place of all firsts the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893.  Thus from the age of seventeen on ERB would at least have known of Ragtime music.  The music was definitely popular from c. 1900-1918.  When Ragtime talking became a hipster dialect isn’t clear.

     In the story ERB has Smith driving a ‘horseless carriage.’  An anomaly of sorts as by the terms of the story it should have been a cowless carriage as ERB reverses nearly every conventional usage throughout the story.  The automobile wouldn’t have been that common in the first few years of the century while by 1907-08 when I believe the story was written, it would have been.  The electric car that Burroughs drove at the Expo wouldn’t have been called a ‘horseless carriage.’

     I can find no reference to ragtime talking on the internet so that if the method developed in the early years of the century until it was common amongst hipsters that would have to have been by 1907-08.  There would have been no way for ERB to learn the concept while he was in backward Idaho in 1903 and 04.  So that in my opinion the story written in ‘07-’08 and possibly later.

     The story is definitely not a children’s story.  The story is meant for adults.  the use of the term ‘threw a couple Delsartes’ would very likely be incomprehensible to children.  The Delsarte method was a series of sterotypical emotional responses designed for stage actors.  I append a page in demonstration borrowed from the incomparable Our Times by the great Mark Sullivan.

 Lyrics:  Since Birdie Commenced Her Delsarte:

Her right hand goes this way, her left one goes that,

And she flings them high into the air,

To show her improvement she give the “wave” movement

And impersonates Hate and Despair…

There’s lots of sleep-walking, also dumb talking,

Since Birdie’s commenced her Delsarte.

     So, if one reads Minidoka as an example of ragged English not unlike Fractured Fairy Tales or a couple of verses from Phil Harris; That’s What I Like About The South it makes perfect sense:

Won’t you come with me to Alabammy

Let’s go see my dear old Mammy

She’s fryin’ eggs and boiling hammy

That’s what I like about the South.

Well it’s way down where the cane grows tall

Down where they say “Y’all

Walk on in with that Southern Drawl

‘Cause that’s what I like about the South.

Did I tell you ’bout the place called Doo Wah Diddy?

It ain’t a town and it ain’t a city

It’s just awful small, but awful pretty

That’s Do Wah Diddy.

     Rag, Mama, rag.

      So Mindoka is ERB in a light hearted effort to amuse while demonstrating his coolness.   Can’t get much hipper.  Viewed from that perspective we have an accomplished effort on a level with the best of his work.

 1893 Columbian Exposition At  Chicago

Men Like Gods

Tarzan Pays Homage To Heracles

by

R.E. Prindle

First published in the online Magazine: ERBzine

Cover of The Mighty Atom

The Golden Age of Strongmen had captured the imagination of the world between 1890 and 1910….Into the 1920s the strongman continued as a living wonder and inspiring vision that could be had for the modest price of admission

-Ed Spielman: The Mighty Atom:

The Life And Times Of Joseph L. Greenstein

 

     When I was a child and youth in the 1940s and ’50s the legendary strongmen of the turn of the twentieth century were, if no longer living, living legends.  At least one, Bernarr Madfadden, the father of American bodybuilding, was still going strong.

     The most legendary of the strongmen was Frederick Mueller who was known professionally as the Great Sandow.

     In his heyday Sandow was so strong that he was capable of ‘exploding’ or breaking the ‘Test Your Strength’ machines in the arcades of Vienna, Austria.  There were so many broken machines that it was thought a vandal was destroying them but when apprehended it was discovered that Sandow was not only testing his own strength but the strength of the machines.  He flippantly suggested that they be made of better materials.

     On stage as Spielman relates, Sandow, who was trained as a turner, could do a back somersault over a chair with a thirty-five pound dumbbell in each hand.  He could do a one arm chin-up with the grip of any of his fingers of either hand, including his thumbs.

     He could…wait a minute!  I’ve heard something like that before.  Oh yea, I remember now.  In Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan And The Lion Man he has Tarzan leap up to seize stakes pointing down from a ten foot high wall, then draw himself straight up until his torso was above the stakes, then roll over the top defeating the purpose of the stakes.  Was he thinking of the Great Sandow when he wrote that?

     I think he was.

     Burroughs was a fan of boxing and a great admirer of the strongmen of the Golden Age, although he didn’t like the bulky physiques.  He repeatedly denounces the physical build of the Strongmen in preference for Tarzan’s ’smooth rippling muscles.’  In my day the bodybuilders were ridiculed as being ‘muscle bound.’  But the ladies panted when they said it.  Tarzan is as strong or stronger than the strongmen but sleek.

     Next one asks is there any place that it can be shown that Burroughs ever saw Sandow?  yes, and where else?  The Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893.  The Expo was a life changing experience for 17 year-old Ed Burroughs.  Bill Hillman of ERBzine has written a wonderful series on the influence of the Fair on young Burroughs.

     The influence of the Fair was as moving for the rest of America and the World as it was on Our Man.  There apparently has never been so influential a World’s Fair as that of Chicago of 1893.

     One of the best attended features of the Fair was put on by the Great Sandow.  Bodybuilding had already gotten started in England.  Sandow was a student of the innovative Professor Attila in London.  He came to the attention of Florenz Ziegfeld while performing in New York.  Ziegfeld brought him to Chicago for the Expo.  Sandow was a sensation.

The Great Sandow

     He created quite a stir at the fair.  Not only did Burroughs see him there but so did a man named Bernarr Macfadden.  At the time he was known as Bernard McFadden but he chose Bernarr because it sounded more like a lion’s roar and Macfadden because he thought it looked more distinguished in print.  As a result of seeing Sandow Macfadden became the father of bodybuilding and the health movement in the United States.  John Dos Passos spoofs him in Vol. III, The Big Money, of the his USA Trilogy.

     Macfadden was the discoverer of isometric exercises, which his student, Charles Atlas, renamed Dynamic Tension and made a fortune.

     Unless I’m mistaken Macfadden would cross ERB’s path sometime between 1908 to 1912.

     Sandow made bodybuilding a rage after the Fair while Macfadden organized the sport around his magazine ‘Physical Culture’ which he began publishing in the wake of the Fair.  Sandow also opened the way for a number of strongmen to build careers on their physiques.

     They all passed through Chicago.  How many of them ERB paid the modest price of admissio to see we can’t know, but as he always speaks of the strongmen in the plural one assumes that he saw several.

     Anyone who has watched the Strongest Men In The World competition on cable TV will understand how impressive both the feats and the physiques of these men were.

     In ERB’s day a man called Warren Travis Lincoln could lift a platform that held twenty-five men with his back.  That was a weight of about 4200 pounds.

     G.W. Rolandow could stack three decks of playing cards and tear them in two.  One assumes that was before they were plastic coated.

     Emil Knaucke who weighed in at five hundred pounds, a spectacle in itself, could hold a car above his head with one hand.  Spielman doesn’t specify make or model.

     Louis Cyr, one of the most famous strongmen, could restrain a team of horses on either side at the same time.  Really spectacular stuff.

Bent Press Arthur Saxon

     A man like Arthur Saxon of the Saxons was considered to be the strongest man in the world.  He could do a bent press of nearly five hundred pounds.  As in the photo, in the bent press a lifter raised a barbell above his head with one hand in a bent posture then raised another weight with his other hand.

     Eighteen ninety to nineteen-ten were formative years for ERB.  He would have from fifteen to thirty-five so that when he saw Sandow in ‘93 at seventeen he was at a most impressionable age.

     ERB turned 40 in 1915 and 50 in 1925.

     By the twenties vitamins and food supplements had been discovered and were being developed for commercial use.  Vitamins were still novel when I was kid in the late forties.  Not everyone knew of their value as late as then.

     The Great Sandow, Louis Cyr, and a trio of German strongmen called the Saxons were all naturally strong but by the 20s it was possible to build muscular Adonae from the scratch of a 98 lb. weakling.  With vitamins, food supplements and a rigorous regimen for bodybuilding a normal body could be turned into as mammoth a specimen as Tarzan, as witness Arnold Schwarzenegger and his contemporaries who emerged from New York City gyms in the 1960s.

     In point of fact you didn’t even need all that gym equipment.  If you followed the body building plan of the most famous Adonis of the 40s and 50s, Charles Atlas, all you needed were your own opposed muscles.

     Atlas took Macfadden’s isometric exercises and called them the more commercial sounding Dynamic Tension.  By pitting one muscle against its opposite fantastic results could be achieved.

     Charles Atlas, who changed his name from Angelo Siciliano, was voted the world’s most perfectly developed man in 1922 by his mentor, Macfadden and Physical Culture magazine.

     Angelo, born in 1894 in Acri, Sicily came to the US in 1904, thus he would have been 18 in 1922, 18 in 1912.

     Siciliano actually had been a 98 lb. weaking who had sand kicked in his face by a bully.  His girl friend actually did walk away from him.  Siciliano then built himself up into what I’ve always considered to be the image of Tarzan and changed his name to Charles Atlas.

    I was not as successful with the Dynamic Tension plan Chuck sold me in the 50s but then I didn’t try that hard and I couldn’t afford the food supplements which are indispensable.  Nevertheless it had become possible to turn out ‘Men Like Gods’ on an assembly line basis.

     It is more than likely that Burroughs was very familiar with the bodybuilding or fitness program of Macfadden.  That photo of him flexing his muscles on the dock at Coldwater is that of a man who has been working out.  I can’t beleive that a man who was interested in magazines as Burroughs was couldn’t be familiar with Physical Culture Magazine.  Not only would he have the living memory of the Great Sandow in his mind from the Expo but Bernarr Macfadden had moved his headquarters from Battle Creek to Chicago in 1908.  He had a very prosperous looking facility.

     During these years from 1899 when ERB was bashed in the head in Toronto to 1910 at least, he complainedof excruciating headaches that began when he got up in the morning and lasted through half the day.  These would have been very enervating affecting his ability to work.  In The Girl From Farris’s he has his hero Ogden Secor suffering from the same headaches going from doctor to doctor ‘tinkering with his skull’ in hopes of finding relief.  The doctors could do nothing for Secor so he undertook a fitness regime which eased his situation.  So must have ERB.

     Once again, the picture of ERB standing with his legs apart flexing his muscles on the dock at Coldwater in 1916 shows that he was either proud of a moderate physique or he was trying to develop those ‘rippling’ muscles like Tarzan and Charles Atlas.

     At fifty in 1925 ERB probably thought himself beyond the age when he could develop his physique into a semblance of his creation, Tarzan.  Ten or twenty years younger and you might have seen Burroughs as another Charles Atlas or Tarzan.

     There is every reason to believe that sometime between 1908 and 1912 he developed an interest in Macfadden’s program.

      When he sat down to begin his Tarzan series at the end of 1911, Burroughs’ mind must have been filled with the feats of Sandow and the other strongmen.  Anent this, Tarzan’s leopard skin loin cloth was borrowed from the strongmen.  Leopard skin shorts were de riguer for the bodybuilding crowd.

     Of course the role models for these strongmen were Samson and Heracles.  The latter is better known in his Roman usage as Hercules.  For the purposes of this essay I will refer to him as Heracles in hs Greek manifestation.

     Especially in his original manifestation Heracles was a Sun god as the companion of the Earth Mother, Hera.  When the Patriarchal system was imposed on the Matriarchy Hera was wed to Zeus while her former consort, Heracles- The Glory Of Hera- was demoted to the role of Holy Fool and the strngest man in the world.

     ERB often refers to Tarzan as a Jungle God and a latter day Hercules.  Burroughs had a good Greek and Latin education so one might asume that he had some familiarity with the cycle of myths devoted to the feats and tribulations of that ancient type of all strongmen, Heracles.

     In fact, without stretching the point unduly, one can posit a relationship between the Pelasgian Sun God, Heracles and the Flaming God of Opar and through them to Tarzan; they can be construed as one.

     Whether ERB was conscious of what he had done in conflating the three cannot be determined for sure but as he was manipulating valid historical data why shouldn’t he have been conscious of what he was doing?  The Aztec ritual of tearing the heart out to offer to the sun god is implicit in scenes where Tarzan lies across the sacrificial block, pardon me, altar.  The annual sacrifice of the queen’s consort is implicit once again as La raises the sacrificial knife.  A blatant resemblance to Cybele and Attis.

     While the subconsious is always important it is the conscious mind that organizes, plots and writes.  As a writer I may have subconscious motives which may emerge but assembling and organizing my material is a conscious intellectual act.  It is axiomatic that one cannot write what one does not know.

     One of the great mysteries of mythological studies has been the relationship of Heracles to his namesake the former Matriarchal Earth Goddess, Hera.    I noted just previously, during the matriarchy as the Sun, Heracles would have been appropriately called ‘The Glory Of Hera’ or of the Earth.  The same notion can be applied to Mesopotamian and Egyptian mythology.  For instance, as David Adams points out somewhere, the lion is a symbol of both the sun and the matriarchy.  It is a fact that the body of the Sphinx at Memphis is older than the head.  The head of the original has been replaced by that of a man.  It therefore follows that the Sphinx was carved during the Matriarchy having either a lion’s or a woman’s head.  After the succession of the Patriarchy the head was changed to reflect the New Order.

     In the Greek Oedipus myth the Theban Sphinx was still represented as the original matriarchal symbol of a lion with a woman’s head.  Woman-lion/sun/Heracles.  The answer to her riddle after which she committed suicide was ‘man’ which denied the Matriarchy, hence she had to kill herself as the Patriarchy thus symbolically replaced the Matriarchy.  Apply that to the Egyptian Sphinx and the change of heads.

Theban Sphinx

     Now, the original Egyptian Sphinx was exactly the same as the Theban Sphinx: a woman’s head on a lion’s body.  the Sphinx is positioned to be looking due East at sunrise in the Age Of Leo.  Thus, perhap, the secret of the Sphinx is simply that as Mother Earth she sat waiting for her consort Heracles (or his Egypian counterpart) to appear on the horizon each morning.

     The notion has simplicity to recommend it.

     As we all know, Oparians were a group of Atlanteans isolated from the main body when mythical Atlantis broke apart and sank beneath the waves of the Atlantic Ocean.  The worship of the Flaming God was inherited from the parent civilization by Opar.

     Thus whether Burroughs knew what he was doing or not he always gets the sequence of events right.

     Without getting into any discussion of if, where or when Atlantis may have existed, let me say, neverttheless, that all the evidence points to a predecessor civilization anterior to Crete, Pelasgian Greece, Egypt and Mesopotamia in much the same way Atlantis preceded Opar.

     The predecessor civilization must have existed in the Mediterranean Basin during the last ice age when ocean levels, scientists tell us, were several hundred feet lower than they are today.  There are evidences of quarrying several hundred feet below sea level on the flanks of the island of Malta for instance.  Given this as a fact, then when the ice melted and the waters rose during the Great Flood to their present levels any society or civilization that existed in the Mediterranean Basin was forced to move to higher ground which is to say above the present sea level.

     One thing is certain, if the Basin was habitable it was inhabited.

     The disruption caused a long dark age from which mankind only slowly recovered.  At the same time these relatively highly developed people moving into less developed savage societies had a fertilizing influence introducing more sophisticated ideas and methods such as agriculture.

     Lower Egypt, one of Two Lands, was obviously settled by the displaced Libyan dynasty.  After centuries of warfare the Upper Egyptians succeeded in conquering Lower Egypt uniting the Two Lands.  The Third Dynasty was a Libyan Dynasty so that the warfare was translated from an external one to an internal one in which the Libyans defeated the Upper Egyptians.  During the Libyan Dynasty the great pyramids were built reflecting in some way the the flooded predecessor civilization.

     So Crete and Pelasgian Greece received survivors also.  The Sumerians of Mesopotamia attribute their civilization to the advice of Oannes, John in English, who came from the sea.

     Often ignored by classical scholars but obviously part of this great Mediterranean culture is ancient Spain.  Now, Spain has one of the great traditions of the worship of Heracles as a Sun god.  This tradition preceded and was uninfluenced by any Patriarchal tradition from Greece.  In point of fact the Patriarchal Heracles went West to annex the Spanish traditions to the Patriarchal cause.  In the process he rounded up the cattle of the Sun i.e. the Matriarachal Heracles to bring back to Greece.  Throughout history, including modern Africa, lifting another man’s cattle transferred his authority to oneself.  See the great cattle raid of Cooley in Irish mythology.  It therefore follows that the Greek Patriarchal myths of Heracles are built on an earlier Matriarchal mythological cycle while being perverted or converted to Patriarchal needs.

     Heracles was originally a sun god.  He was the original of the Flaming God.  I can’t say Burroughs knew this either consciously or subconsciously, however as we will see there is substantial evidence to indicate that he was consciously manipulating the material.

     The city of Seville in Spain is built over a Sun Temple in which Heracles was the sun deity.  This site beneath Seville can still be vistited today.  Assuming that the history of the Spanish Heracles developed independently of the Greek Heracles which after all is a Greek interpretation of a Pelasgian god then it follows that the two traditions must have come from a common source.  That source cannot have been other than the ante-deluvian civilization of the Mediterranean Basin.

     It follows then that whatever names they were known by in this anterior civilization Hera was the Great Mother Goddess while her ‘Glory’ Heracles must be no other than the Flaming God, the Sun.  What else could the ‘Glory’ of the Earth Mother be?

     Thus when the Great Flood, which must be the same as that spoken of by the Sumerians who would have gotten the story from Oannes, destroyed the civilization of the Mediterranean Basin the inhabitants fled to the former highlands surrounding them taking their traditions with them.  The Spanish Heracles was yet identical to the Pelasgian and Cretan models which later became variant.

     When the Greeks entered Pelasgia at the beginning of the Arien Age, the Zodiac dates back to the anterior civilization, they found this remnant of the ante-deluvian civilization with immemorial religious traditions occupying the land.  As the Arien Age began a great shift in the mental and social organization of man progressed in its evoltuion.  The shift was from a Matriarchal consciousness to a Patriarchal consciousness.  In other words, the God replaced the Goddess as the most important sex.  Fecundation became more important than actual reproduction.

     This meant that all the divine myths had to have all the sexual relationships reversed so that the God took precedence over the goddess.  Hera could no longer be allowed to have a male god as her subordinate ‘Glory’, the roles had to be reversed. Hera would have to become the dependent of Zeus.

     Homer’s Iliad is one key in the story of this reversal.

     As Hera was unwillingly made subordinate to her Lord and Master, Zeus, Heracles had to be appropriated by the God.  The Patriarchy then turned Heracles into a scourge of Hera and she his enemy in ridicule of the previous dispensation.  Kind of a Burroughsian style sly joke.

     The meaning of the name Heracles as the glory of Hera was thus lost.  Heracles lost his identification with the Sun becoming a buffoon as the greatest of men; a physical giant of somewhat dim intelligence.  Hera’s glory was turned into a laughing stock but still a good sort of fellow who could aspire to godhood at death.

     In the Patriarchal myths Heracles destroyed various Matriarchal cult centers such as the Hydra at Lerna, the Stymphalian Swamps, the Stag of Artemis, the Nemean Lion and others.  His cycle of adventures was involved in replacing the Matriarchal with the Patriarchal sarcastic ‘Glory’ of Hera.

     To make a feeble Patriarchal attempt at accounting for the meaning of Heracles’ name Homer tells the following story in book XIX of the Iliad.  Zeus, influenced by the goddess Folly, announced to the assembled Gods on Olympus that before the day was out a descendant of his lineage would be born to a mortal woman who would be the greatest man in the world.

     Hera, who hated the infidelities of Zeus, heard his proclamation with scorn.  She knew her husband but too well.  She knew he referred to Alcmene who was bearing Heracles but she also knew that a son was to be born to the wife of Sthenelus who was only seven months pregnant.  Sthenelus was of the lineage of Zeus.

     Hera rushed off to visit Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth, to ask her to hasten the birth of Eurytheus while delaying that of Heracles.  The former having been born first became the greatest monarch of the age after the Patriarchal fashion but by Matriarchal means.

     Hastening back to Alcmene Eileithyia uncrossed her legs allowing Heracles to be the younger son of Zeus born on that day.  While Heracles was the bravest and strongest of men he was nevertheless compelled by Hera’s resourcefulness and prompt action to be subservient to Eurystheus.  Thus the will of Zeus which could not be averted was perverted by Hera to thwart the Big Guy’s will.

     Heracles was still the strongest man alive but he was subordinate to the will of Hera through Eurystheus, portrayed as one of th weakest and most cowardly men of his time hiding behind his mother’s skirts but by the grace of Hera and the matriarchy, the greatest ruler.

     Zeus, appalled by his lapse of judgment threw Folly off Olympus from which she is still banned.

     In that sardonic manner Homer explained the meaning of Heracles as the glory of Hera.  She had used him to Ace Zeus.  Heracles had been stripped of his role as the glorious Sun companion of Hera.  He comes down to us as the strongest man who ever lived.  In the Roman nomenclature of Hercules he became the role model of every strong man who ever lifted a dumbbell.  Yet they all wore leopard skin shorts, the leopard being a symbol of the Matriarchy.  You can’t fool Mother Nature.

     To Burroughs who was a student of Greek mythology the great strongmen of the Golden Age must have appeared as men like gods.  Their feats of strength, their marvelous physiques, were so far beyond the abilities of ordinary men that they must have seemed to be in a class by themselves far above mortal men.

     In that sense Tarzan is the greatest of the strongmen, above Sandow, Arthur Saxon and even Heracles.

     Heracles himself had been demoted to a mere mortal although his legend was so great that he was allowed immortality by the Patriarchy after his mortal death.  Unwilling to grant him too much credit he was allowed to be the doorman of Olympus.  He held this position throughout the Arien Age being replaced by St. Peter in the New Dispensation of the Piscean Age.

     Burroughs, familiar with the mythic cycle of Heracles, however he understood it, plays with both identities of Heracles in the person of Tarzan at Opar.  He also brings in a number of elements from H. Rider Haggard’s novel She.  There can be no doubt of the influence of Haggard.  Burroughs even names his heroine La which is what ‘She’ is designated as in French translations of Haggard’s novel.  The palance of Opar is also based to some extent on the labyrinthine caves of She.

     There are many literary influences for the creation of Tarzan not least of which are the real life H.M. Stanley and Haggard’s fictional heroes Sir Henry Curtis and Allan Quatermain.  I would now like to direct attention to a third, that of the heor of She, Leo Vincey.

     If one closely examines Vincey it will be discovered that he too was a Sun King whose death had been caused in an earlier incarnation by She.  The cartouche which contains the name of Leo’s distant Egyptian ancestor was translated as ‘The Royal Son Of Ra’ or son of the Sun as in Egyptian mythology Ra is the sun.

     Leo also translates from the Latin as Lion so we have the Son of the Sun who also is a Lion Man which is how Burroughs refers to Tarzan in ‘The Invincible’ and undoubtedly as how he always thought of his creation.

     Haggard translates Vincey as the Avenger.  Tarzan is the ‘Avenger’ or guard of Africa.  Haggard describes Vincey as almost inhumanly beautiful while Tarzan is the most handsome man in the world not unlike Charles Atlas.

     Haggard’s She is indescribably old kept forever youthful by having bathed in the fire of eternal youth.  Hera was also eternally youthful and a virgin queen.  She restored her youth and virginity by bathing annually in a holy spring.  Hera’s bath obviously refers to the Spring rains which inundated Mother Earth just prior to vegetation springing forth in virgin birth.  After the summer heat the vegetation dies down and Earthy Hera becomes barren once more to await her bath and return to virginity.

Mr. Dynamic Tension- Charles Atlas

     So a connection can be made between Sun>Heracles>Vincey>Tarzan and Mother Nature>Hera>She>La.

     Burroughs La was neither ancient nor immortal in the personal sense although she was the latest in an immortal line of Priestesses.  She is a priestess of the Sun or Ra, The Flaming God.

     Haggard’s Leo Vincey was the direct descendant of Kallikrates She’s great love of two millennia past.  She, or Alyesha, to use her name, had killed Kallicrates in a rage.  Kallikrate’s descendants were sworn to avenge the murder.  Thus Vincey travels from England to far off Africa to locate this fabulous woman.

     Kallikrates was the love of Alyesha’s very long life.  When she recognizes Leo Vincey as her lost lost love she saves his life while offering him eternal youth if he will only bathe in the flames of eternal life.  He hesitates to do so.  To encourage him Alyesha steps once again into the flames which was a serious miscalculation.  She crumbled to dust.  Thus while Leo Vincey doesn’t actually avenge the death of Kallikrates she is nevertheless his victim.

     Tarzan while actually born in Africa was conceived in England so he made the trip to Opar from England although he is ignorant of La.  When Tarzan is captured in Opar he is laid on the altar of the Flaming God, La with the sacrifical knife raised, looks down on this Jungle God, this man like a god, and falls in love.  Thus we have a replay of the She-Kallikrates situation.

     Unable to take Tarzan’s life, La releases him begging him for his love.  Alyesha’s full title was She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed in the Matriarchal sense.  The old conflict arises, Tarzan is more on the Patriarchal side, he has his moly in the waistband of his loin cloth, monagamous we are led to believe, happily married, so the Lion Man Sun King declines the honor of being mated to La>Hera.  He asserts his Patriarchal prerogative to disobey although he always has a soft spot in his heart for La.

     In a fairly masterful way ERB conflates the legend of Heracles, the fiction of H. Rider Haggard and the incredible strongmen of the Golden Age and his own little bit to write a charming and beautiful story which is fairly simple on the surface but one which becomes immensely rich with a deeper understanding of the sources.

     Ernest Hemmingway once said that before one sat down to write one should have ten time the information in your possession as you put on paper else the story will seem shallow and contrived.  It would seem that the sources upon which Burroughs was drawing, from the bodybuilding strongmen of his day to the legendary cycle of Heracles to the adventures of H.M. Stanley and the fiction of H. Rider Haggard might well fulfill Hemingway’s dictum.

     When one searches for the sources of Burroughs one finds layer after layer of golden riches while discovering that in fact ERB did indeed create a man like a god- Tarzan The Magnificent.

Addendum

      This is a quote taken from Bonzo Dog’s song Mr. Apollo.  I don’t know whether the reader is familiar with the Bonzos but they were one of my favorites.  Several glorious LPs.  Neil Innes came from them as well as the great but tragic Viv Stanshall.  Leave those drugs alone, boys.

Follow Mr. Apollo,

Everybody knows a healthy body

Makes a healthy mind.

Follow Mr. Apollo,

He’s the strongest man the world has ever seen.

If you take his courses

He’ll make you big and rough.

And you can kick the sand right back in their faces.

A few years ago I was a four stone apology-

Today, I am two separate…Gorillas.

Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band

Long may they wave.

Exhuming Bob IX, Pensees 7:

Into The Lost Land

by

R.E. Prindle

Texts:

Dylan, Bob, Chronicles Vol. I, Simon And Schuster, 2004

Prindle, R.E.   Exhuming Bob, VIII The Walls Of Red Wing, idynamo,wordpress.com 2008

Thompson, Toby, Positively Main Street, U. Minnesota, 2008, reprint from 1971

http://www.hibbing.org/dylan1/story.html  Life In Hibbing: Hibbing Chamber Of Commerce

http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/85-dec.htm  Bob Dylan Is Not Like A Rolling Stone Interview, Spin Magazine, Volume One, Number Eight, December 1985

http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/play78.htm  Playboy Interview: Bob Dylan 1978

http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/66-jan.htm  Playboy Interview:  Bob Dylan  February 1966

                                                                               1940

Abe And Beattie

     In attempting to put together a reasonable facsimile of Bob’s life in Hibbing and Minneapolis, Minnesota and New York City as he mythologized it in his chapter of Chronicles, The Lost Land, I have come to the following tentative conclusions.

     Bob was born in Duluth, Minnesota on 5/24/41.  In 1943 he was taken to Hibbing where he lived from then until graduation from high school in the Spring of 1959.

     Within the concept of normal Bob had a fairly advantaged childhood.  His parents were indulgent buying him anything he wanted while providing adequate pocket cash.  Bob’s family was one of the more important in town both within the Jewish community and the town at large.  In what appears to have been a tight small town social scene Bob either excluded himself or was excluded from the dominant social groups within which he had a right to be included.

     Perhaps Bob’s conception of the Hibbing period could be best interpreted from his favorite movie, Rebel Without A Cause, starring James Dean.  Bob is said to have seen the movie several times.  This was unusual as few people ever saw a movie more than once. He would have been a very impressionable fifteen at the time.   Most of us didn’t have the money while quite frankly few movies, if any, were worth watching twice including Rebel Without A Cause.  I was seventeen when I saw it and while I was in awe I wasn’t submerged.  Of course Bob’s relatives owned the theatres so he got in for free.

     As he set up a Dean shrine in his basement which greatly offended Father Abe we may be justified in assuming that Dean was a controlling influence in his life from the time he saw the movie.  It is of interest that Abe was to remove the Dean shrine from the basement after Bob left replacing it with a shrine to his own son Bob Dylan ne Zimmerman.

     Abe Zimmerman (1911-1968)   worked for Standard Oil in Duluth when Bob was born.  According to the C of C he lost his job in 1943 moving to Hibbing where his wife’s family, the Stones, could help the young couple.  Why Standard Oil should lay Abe off in the middle of the war during a manpower shortage seems to pose a question.  As can be seen from the photograph of Abe and Beattie above borrowed from the Flickr photostream of <drineevar> he was a well set up handsome man.  He appears to be exceptionally self-possessed, sound in the eyes.  Beattie appears to be a haughty high fashion queen which would accord with later facts.

      Abram Zimmerman, for such was his name.  Usually called Abraham, the name on his tombstone is Abram, and his two brothers Maurice and Paul bought the Micka Electric Company in 1943 changing the name to Zimmerman Appliance.  In 1968 Paul Zimmerman told Thompson that they had been in business for twenty-five years which would mean 1943 although the date seems odd.

     According to the C of C Abe came down with polio in 1946 requiring a lengthy convalescence.  The C of C says that the Zimmermans bought Micka’s after his convalescence but if Paul Zimmerman is accurate it would have to have been 1943.  There would be no record of what Abe did for a living then from 1943 to 1946.  As Bob says both his uncles served in the Army it would seem that they bought Micka’s going into the Army shortly thereafter leaving Abe to tend the business.

     Maurice and Paul became President and Vice-President of the corporation while Abe siginficantly assumed the controlling post of Secretary-Treasurer.  Managed the money, paid the bills.

     During the fifties at least Abe spent a fair amount of money on both Bob and Beattie.  Angel Marolt whose family bought the Zimmerman residence after Abe’s death was trying to tell him of Beattie’s several fur coats, diamonds and Cadillac but Thompson says he wasn’t paying attention.

     Thompson quotes Echo Helstrom as saying that the Zimmermans had stores in both Hibbing and Duluth.  Having a customer base of approx. 250,000 makes more sense when one considers the amounts of Abe’s expenditures and the fact that the profits had to be split three ways.

     The C of C describes Abe as a ‘big man’ in town partial to those big thick long cigars.

The Dylan Home

    The couple had enough money on arrival to buy the large nine room house that Bob grew up in so Abe must have been well paid at Standard Oil before he was laid off.  Both he and Beattie are well dressed in the picture while Beattie is actually overdressed.

     Bob was entrolled at Alice School for his kindergarten year in 1946 at five years of age.  The status of Alice School is unclear.  Perhaps it was closed the following year or consolidated with the Hibbing High complex as Bob was transferred.  Hibbing High housed kindergarten through twelve as well as the Jr. College.  Thompson describes it as a huge and rambling building.

     So from first grade to graduation Bob was with the same group of students.  I sure wouldn’t have wanted to move into town in tenth grade and try to break into that one.  While he wouldn’t have known them all well he must have known the entire student population on sight.  This presents the problem then of why Bob, who was the son of the Big Man in town, wasn’t included in the top social cliques.  Those cliques undoubtedly formed early persisting through graduation.  If Bob was in one he was either forced out early or found it uncongenial to remain for whatever reason.  Perhaps he thought his Jewishness excluded him.  So if something happened we don’t know what it was and won’t; unless Bob tells it’s going to be difficult to trace.

     Growing up in a small town anyone with any ambition looks around and sees very limited opportunities.  Working for his father wasn’t a viable option.  Not everyone wants to be a doctor or lawyer either.  Nuclear Science is OK but a lot of those guys are out of a job now too.  My next door neighbor when I was a kid for one.

     Bob’s mind turned early to music and then to Rock and Roll.  While Rn’R went on to conquer the world and become as respectable as such a spectacle could it was definitely considered discreditible and low class almost volunteer outlawry in the fifties.  At the very least it was ‘pimple’ music.  It took a certain amount of courage to say you liked Elvis Presley.  Pat Boone was set up as his rival and you had better say you liked ol’ White Bucks.  If you don’t think Elvis was considered a social criminal check out a couple of his movie roles like King Creole or Jailhouse Rock.  What was the Colonel thinking?  Clown roles, that’s all Elvis ever got.

      And then Bob chose as his hero and model Little Richard.  People looked at you funny if you said you

Young Bob On Harley

liked Little Richard!  I mean, Bill Doggett was a respectable Negro with music you could understand, Fats Domino was as lovable as a chubby ten year old but Little Richard!  They hadn’t even created the ghetto he could come out of.  His band might have passed but then he opened his mouth.  If there was ever a direct challenge to middle class sensibilities Tutti-Frutti was it.  Not only was the song incomprehensible it was about queers.  Nobody ever quoted the lyrics correctly, while I’m walking around saying ‘Tutti Frutti, I want Rudy?’  What does that mean?  I hope no one overheard me.  So when Bob gets up, ignoring Pat Boone entirely,  and launches into some screaming vision like Rip It Up or She’s Got It or God only knows what, was the crowd taken aback?  Chuckle, chuckle.

     So Bob having opted for the lifestyle was forced to associate with the hoody crowd or have become a loner.  Besides Colin Wilson’s book The Outsider  had appeared in 1956 that began a cult of The Loner that peopled the early sixties.  These guys, who were by no means rebels but deep thoughtful guys who had a line on the truth denied anyone else and that  penetrated sham and hypocrisy sat alone ever ready to resolve a situation setting things right were highly romanticized fellows.  There were as many Loners in those days as there were Hawkeyes a couple generations later.  So Bob wouldn’t necessarily have been thought of as weird, strange but a Loner.  A Loner was next door to weird and strange.  Thin line if you get my meaning.

     On the other hand the C of C describes the L&B Cafe as a regular jumping Bop Street right there in the heart of Hibbing, Minnesota.  Bands set up and played continuously.  They knew how to party in Hibbing.  The C of C even says there was a radio station in town playing Bob’s kind of music thereby contradicting every other source even Bob.  He says he had to go to Shreveport on the radio waves  to get his kind of music.  In this case I’m betting on Bob.

     The C of C  tells of Bob’s musical debut like this putting the best possible face on it:

Described by fellow students as polite, easy to talk with, and somewhat introspective, it was a total shock when he pushed back the piano bench and stood up to pound the first notes of a song into the auditorium, electrifying the student body.  Kids jumped up, stared at each other open mouthed not knowing what the reaction would be.

     Well, yes, they were electried but did they like it?

Rockin' Bobby Zimmerman

     According to the C of C, looking back fondly, Bob went over real well with his fellow students.  If you like this version don’t check the other sources as this is at variance with every other known account but then this is the Chamber Of Commerce  speaking.  Up to this point in the C of C account there is no reason for Bob to be as bitter as he is about Hibbing at all.

     A note of interest is the reoccurence of Fourth Street in Hibbing, Minneapolis and New York City.  Quite a coincidence, I knew there had to be some association with Fourth St. in Hibbing.  So far we learn that Bob attended Jewish shule there.  Whether the synagogue was also located there isn’t clear.  The synagogue Bob attended is no longer anywhere at any rate.  Tore it down.  It was in the way.  Had to go.  Even though Bob’s father was the most prominent Jew in town, the President of B’nai B’rith and ADL as well as his business interests, and even though Bob had a mega Bar Mitzvah with four hundred people in attendance some say at the most prominent spot in town, the Androy Hotel, some say at the synagogue, he wished to conceal he was Jewish.  This attitude may have contributed to his renouncing the Jewish fraternity house to which he pledged at UM while also hiding his religion in New York.  The attitude was strange since he seemed to prefer Jewish musicians around him to  the exclusion of goys.

     Bob’s father Abe, was quite frankly a marvelous provider, spending very large sums of money on son Bob, wife Beattie and his second son, David.  When he died in 1968 the house on 7th Ave., now Bob Dylan Ave. was sold.  The owners at the time of Thompson’s visit were the Marolts.  Angel Marolt who was at home when Thompson called offered to show him around.  One thing he learned was that Bob had a clause in the sale’s contract that allowed him to stay in his old room in the Marolt’s house whenever he was in town.  Too weird.

     What quirk in Bob’s mind compelled him to live in other people’s houses?  Perhaps Rebbe Maier back in 1954 impressed on Bob that Biblical scripture presribes that Jews would live in houses they never built.  As an article of religion that injuction is a mind boggler.  One can’t predict how anyone’s mind will interpret instruction.  Bob who functions out of his subconscious very heavily must have accepted such teachings in literal ways.  Rebbe Maier was a definite turning point in Bob’s life.  Imagine getting out of school, going upstairs at a Rn’R cafe to sit before the only bearded man you may ever have seen, dressed completely in black with a black yarmulke perched on the back of his crown intoning things like:  The Jews shall live in houses they never built and then go downstairs to boogie.  Pretty spooky, don’t you think?  And then as Bob says, he disappeared like a ghost.  Let that roll around your brain for little while and see what you come up with.

     Mrs. Marolt was trying to tell Thompson something about Mrs. Zimmerman’s multiple furs, heaps of diamonds, I’m sure all the latest fashions and her own Cadillac.

     Bob was indulged to the extent of apparently more than one motorcycle, a car, lots of amplifiers and electronic gear for his bands, whatever he wanted plus free movie admissions and plenty of pocket cash.  He must have had a large record collection for a kid as he spent his spare time at Crippas record store ordering the odd title.  You can bet Crippas didn’t discount either, charging full bore.  At the time (after 1958)   stereo was 5.98 and mono was 4.98.

     As the profits from a sole Hibbing store divided three ways could not have supported this sort of expenditure, having a store in Duluth could account for it.  It is significant also tha Abram died in June 1968 and the store closed a few months later.  Was the store a losing proposition for the last few years?  Did Bob provide the difference so Abe wouldn’t be embarrassed by going banko?  Then with his father gone there was no reason to support Uncles Maurice and Paul?

     There really is something happening here, isn’t there?

     Also as a petty expenditure for Bob (it would have been huge in my life) according to the C of C:

Almost every day Bob came in after school for his regular snack: cherry pie a la mode and coffee (or Coke.)

     And then to dinner?  No wonder the young Bob had all that baby fat. 

     If Echo bought those hot dogs for Bob and bought his story that his dad didn’t give him an allowance she was had in more ways than one.

     So, Abe was nothing if not a generous father and husband.  Beattie as President of Hadassah as well as a Stone must have made the Zimmermans the most powerful Jews in the syngogue while actually giving she and her husband the means to be petty dictators of the town,  I saw something like this in Eugene, Oregon in the sixties and seventies, or, as the C of C says a Big Man and big people.

     Bob must have a quirk in his mind to misrepresent his childhood so.  He was the Fortunate Son John Fogerty only sings about.

     In Thompson’s interview with Beattie he quotes her:

How can you know you have a genius in your house, when all my time is spent trying to feed him and keeping his clothes pressed.

     In Bob’s story, The Lost Land, Chloe Kiel is shown ironing Bob’s shirts and at the end of the chapter she ’slaps’ a plate of steak and fried onions in front of him just before he darts out the door to begin the next chapter, A New Morning, just as in the old days when he returned home from school for lunch and was fed by his mother he darted back to school.

     Ironing his shirts and providing free steaks was a signal service for bare acquaintances like Ray and Chloe.

     Chloe comes across as cold and indifferent and indeed there is a tinge of resentment and anger beneath Beattie’s statement.  Motherly, of course, but there.  Still, she doesn’t impress me as any Yiddishe Mama of the Mrs. Goldberg variety.  Whether Bob was a good boy or not he does have an ambivalent attitude toward his parents.  But then he claims that he was really raised by his grandmother, whether Stone or Zimmerman isn’t clear.

     I believe the big change came over Bob with his Bar Mitzvah and I’m not talking puberty alone.  According to the C of C Bob attended Jewish shule during his young years.  This was done after public school hours.  Then in 1953-54 when his Bar Mitzvah was approaching Father Abe sent to Brooklyn, New York to have an ultra-orthodox, almost certainly a Lubavitcher Rebbe, sent to Hibbing to indoctrinate Bob in untra-orthodox teachings.  It can’t be any surprise that when Bob exhibited his Jewish reverence after his Jesus indoctrination with the Vineyard Fellowship he chose to show himslef as a Lubavitcher.  Welcome home, Bob.  The C of C tells it this way:

According to a 1985 Spin Magazine interview by Dave Engel, Bob said it was above the (L&B) Cafe that Rabbi Reuben Maier stayed while giving Bob Hebrew lessons in preparation for his Bar Mitzvah.  The Rabbi and his wife showed up one day and stayed for a year while Bob got ready for his big event .  The article quotes Bob as saying he would learn Hebrew after school or in the evening for an hour, then go downstairs and boogie at the L&B.  After completing his Bar Mitzvah the Rabbi just disappeared.

     In the interview Bob tells it this way:

There weren’t many Jews in Hibbing, Minnesota.  Most of them I was related to.  The town didn’t have a rabbi, and it was time for me to be bar mitzvahed.  Suddenly a rabbi showed up under strange circumstances for only a year.  He and his wife got off the bus in the middle of the winter.  He showed up just in time for me to learn this stuff.  He was an old man from Brooklyn who had a white beard and wore a black hat and black clothes.  They put him upstairs in the cafe, which was the local hangout.  It was a rock n’ roll cafe where I used to hang out, too.  I used to go there everyday to learn this stuff either after school or after dinner.  After studying with him an hour, or so, I’d come down and boogie.  The rabbi taught me what I had to learn, and after conducting the bar mitzvah, he just disappeared.  The people didn’t want him.  He didn’t look like anybody’s idea of a rabbi.  He was an embarrassment.  All the Jews there shaved their heads and, I think, worked on Saturdays.  And I never saw him again.  It’s like he came and went like a ghost.  Later I found out he was Orthodox.  Jews separate themselves like that.  Christians, too.  Baptists, Assembly of God, Methodists, Calvinists.  God has no respect for a person’s title.  He don’t care what you call yourself.

     The C of C knows the Rebbe’s name was Reuben Maier and Bob Dylan doesn’t?  There were enough people in Hibbing to have a temple and shule but they didn’t have a Rabbi?  The Rebbe Maier showed up in time for Bobby Zimmerman’s Bar Mitzvah but what? it was the first Bar Mitzvah in Hibbing’s Rabbiless history?  No wonder four hundred people showed up.  The Jews in Hibbing shaved their heads and worked on Saturday’s?  I presume Bob means they didn’t wear beards but shaved their faces unlike the Lubavitcher in white beard and one of those funny round hats.  I serously doubt there were three hundred or more Jews walking around Hibbing with shaved heads in 1954.

     They took one look at Rebbe Reuben’s weird beard and outre attire and told him to get out of town?  Now that I can believe.  Beards in ‘54 were a sign of great eccentricity or a psychotic desire to draw attention to oneself.  But why in ‘85 the mysterioso act?  He just showed up to teach Bobby Zimmerman, a complete unknown with no direction home Lubavitcher tales like this:  (actually this is pretty standard esoteric doctrine adapted for Jewish needs)

The messianic thing has to do with the world of mankind, like it is.  This world is scheduled to go for 7,000 years.  Six thousand years of this where man has his way and 1,000 years when God has his way.  Just like the week.  Six days work, one day rest.  The last thousand years is called the Messianic Age, Messiah will rule.

     Essentially what we have here is a variant of Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy along with a little Hebrew Theology.  If one looks real closely one can see the outline of Sigmund Freud’s notion of the unconscious.

     According to Beattie Bob knew, oh, two hundred words of Hebrew.  So much for several years of shule and a year of intensive training by Rebbe Reuben.

     Whether Bob knows or admits it, it must be true that Father Abram sent for Reuben to instruct Bob in mysteries that Abe thought were essential to his vision of Jewish religion while they were not part of the services of the Hibbing congregation.

     It is possible that Abram brought the Rebbe in on the approval of the congregation who rejected him.  The comment by Bob of working Saturdays may be signficant here.  The Jewish sabbath begins on Friday sundown and continues to Saturday sundown.

     As a Lubavitcher, Rebbe Reuben could not have tolerated working during the sabbath while the congregation found it essential amidst a gentile population.  Likewise beards are an integral part of the orthodox religion so that the congregation  also refused to stop shaving.  The only thing mysterious is why it took Reuben so long to catch on.  Or maybe he had a contract for one year and the year was up.  Of course Bob did need help on those two hundred words.

     So Bob’s upstairs memorizing his two hundred words while the throbbing beat pounds insistently through the floor.  The super patient Reuben and his wife never object.  Bob shortly joins the revelers with his two hundred Hebrew words rattling round his skull, steps up to the mike and begins screaming: I’ve got a girl and her name is Echo.  Hmmm.  Quite an image out there in the Lost Land of Bob.

     Now indoctrinated in quaint antiquarian rites Bob is bundled off to Webster, Wisconsin and Camp Herzl to steep himself in Israeli style Jewish living.  Camp Herzl was conducted as Israel in America so those two hundred Hebrew words came in handy in that surrogate for summer in a kibbutz in the Holy Land.

     The summer sojourns must have set Abram back a handsome fee for the times.  Six to eight weeks of essentially summer boarding school does have expenses.  Abe apparently was deeply religious: in Protestant circles he would have been known as a Fundamentalist nut.  He and Mike Huckabee would have gotten along fine.  One wonders if younger son David was given the same treatment.

     So Bob from 1954 on is definitely the product of two nations.  The world of the Three Hanks as the C of C puts it and this world of Adam, Moses and the Messiah.  Bob was named after Sabbatai Zevi the last acknowledged Jewish messiah in the seventeenth century, his Jewish name is Sabtai.

     As kids we all have a lot to reconcile, begin working out at graduation.  Bob had a double load; he had two Bobs to reconcile.  Personalities wander and widen in those years, Bob made a clean split.  On the one hand he was the twerp Bobby Zimmerman of whom it may be said:  There’s no success like failure while on the other he was struggling to be the super successful Bob Dylan in which he failed to assume the mantle so that failure is no success at all.  At least he made this split off persona’s name mean something.  As a note, it was not generally known Dylan was Jewish until after Blonde On Blonde.

     Thus in his movie Renaldo and Clara he is not Bob Dylan.  Anybody can be Bob Dylan he says, you can be Bob Dylan.  Toby Thompson thought he could be and did a pretty good job of it walking a mile or so in Bob’s shoes.  Sounded just like him.

     As remarkable as it is that Bob realized his fantasy beyond anything he could have dreamed and became the hugely successful Bob Dylan he created an entire new set of problems whose solution eluded him.  Well, you know, there’s something lost and something gained while it’s hard to know whether the gain was worth the loss.  However the money has disappeared from the table.

     The result then is Bob looking backward from 2004 to create a fantasy of how it was in Ray and Chloe’s place on Vestry Street in NYC.  The chapter is approriately titled The Lost Land or possibly Never-Never Land might have been better.  The chapter isn’t a complete fabrication but it is fiction.  Something like the various incidents might have happened but not exactly the way Bob tells it.  The framing story of Ray Gooch and Chloe Kiel is pure fiction however.  They could not possibly have existed.

     Bob tells the whole story of the Lost Land within the reference of Ray and Chloe and their fabulous apartment near Vestry below Canal near the Hudson across the street fromt he Cathedral with its bell tower.  Thompson got it right.

     A troubling aspect of Bob for me is his insistance on bumming other people’s apartments.  This seems to be compulsive behavior.

     Bob was actually voluntarily homeless from January of ‘61 to October  or November of the same year when he and ‘roommate’ Suze Rotolo took up digs on Fourth St.  I suspect that Father Abe would have been only too happy to supply Bob with funds to live on Vestry Street if he had asked.  Bob is simply untrustworthy in any of his stories.  As he said of what he learned from folk music:  If you told the truth, well and good; if you told the untruth, well and good also, so in Bob’s mind there are no lies, there is only the truth or untruth both having the same value and whichever is more serviceable at the moment.  You can’t believe him.

     A troubling aspect of Bob’s behavior is his habit of bumming couches in other people’s nests; gaining meaning, as it were, from other people’s lives.  Perhaps that was the way he felt of his life in his mother and father’s house.  Or perhaps as a Jewish outsider in a goyish land it was his attempt to insinuate himself in the main stream much as he appropriated Woody Guthrie’s persona.  Of the houses I have traced they have all been those of goys; he didn’t choose to insinuate himself into the houses of his fellow Jews.  His imaginary hosts Gooch and Kiel are obviously goys.

     The Lost Land then is a mythologized version of his childhood and first few months in New York City.  To my mind Ray Gooch is a combination of Dave Van Ronk, Paul Clayton, Matt Helstrom and his father.  Chloe seems simply to be an idealized notion of his mother.  (Study her picture for a few moments again.)

     As the Gooch frame brackets the period from Bob’s encounter with Gorgeous George to the apartment with Suze Rotolo it must represent a time frame from sometime in ‘58 to October ‘61.  In October Bob Dylan ceased sponging off others to take up his own apartment.

      The only one in this time frame he knew who had a large gun collection was Matt Helstrom.  The Helmstroms also had a large record collection that Bob listened to.  The couch and apartment undoubtedly belonged to Van Ronk while certain exoticisms of Gooch are characteristic of Clayton.  The library of Gooch may simply be the New York City Library of which the long narrow room would merely describe the stacks.

     The Southern character of Gooch must represent a time after Bob studied the South in the library since there are several references to his Civil War studies.  Gooch himself is a Southerner from Virginia gone North which is a symbol in itself.  This can be symbolically described as Father Abe being a Jew in Gentile America.

     Here then Bob creates or accentuates the more pleasant aspects of his memories in contrast to the very bitter unpleasant memories of the songs.  He tells us a great deal about his dream life but little of its realities.  At this point I am of the opinion that the party of Camilla ( who Bob says he gets to know quite intimately) is another fabrication of the based on a true story variety.

     As Bob would say, folk music taught him that if what you said was true,well and good; if what you said was untrue well and good also.  We may probably construe the Lost Land as both true and untrue while a good folk tale.  Even the title has a fictive quality a la Edgar Rice Burroughs.

     To round off the period back in the C of C milieu of Hibbing:  Bob spent his last summer at Camp Herzl in 1957.  In the summer of ‘58 he was running back and forth between Hibbing and Minneapolis.  At that time he would have become familiar with Highway 61.

     In his Junior year of ‘57-’58 he took up his relationship with Echo Helstrom.  They were going steady hence were not supposed to be dating others.  As he was in Minneapolis most of the summer he left Echo sitting home alone.  She resented this.  As the Senior year began she told Thompson, she took a revenge on Bobby returning his token in public in the hall at school.  Boy, that hurts.

     The feelings must have been much harder than either Bob or Echo portray them.  A key problem area is did Bob spend time in Red Wing Reformatory on Highway 61 below Minneapolis and if he did what did he do to receive his sentence:  I examine this more fully in Exhuming Bob VIII:  The Walls Of Redwing.

     He says in Chronicles that he was absent from school from some time at the beginning of April of ‘59.  He was back at least by the June 5th graduation.  His birthday is May 24th.  After that date he would have been eighteen and subject to adult sentencing.  For what It’s worth he says in his song that no inmate was over seventeen.  I’m suggesting that he spent a month of two at Red Wing returning in time for graduation.  Certainly a Big Man in town like Abe could have arranged the graduation if he couldn’t get Bob off that time.

     The question is what did Bob do?  By the middle of this Senior year it appears that he had been in enough scrapes to be known as a troublesome boy; perhaps living out a Rebel Without A Cause persona.  Father Abe used his influence up to that time to avoid unpleasant consequences for the lad.

     I believe Bob’s song The Chimes Of Freedom tells the story of his crime.  Quite simply Echo set him up.  She obviously was not quite as complacent as she tells it.  See Exhuming Bob VIII:  Walls Of Red Wing.

     Returning home from Red Wing his parents threw a graduation party for him.  Bob was reluctant to attend the party, perhaps with good reason but was persuaded to do so.

     This then leaves a very sketchy account of the three or four months of the summer of ‘59 for which Bob provides little information.  In Walls Of Red Wing I place his stint at Red Wing in August but that is probably wrong.  In any event the period from April of ‘59 to September of ‘59 needs to be explained more fully.

     Bob gives some brief details of his stay at Dinkytown but not much.   A little bit of the John Pankake episode while avoiding the important details of his theft of Pankake’s records.

     Thompson has some good information from Ellen Baker whose father’s folk song collection Bob used extensively.

     Then to NYC and his account of The Lost Land segues into his New Morning.

Exhuming Bob IX

Pensees 6:  Bob And Dave

A Review

Dave Van Ronk: The Mayor Of MacDougal Street

by

R.E. Prindle

Texts:

Dylan, Bob  Chronicles Volume One  Simon And Schuster 2004

Thompson, Toby  Positively Main Street  U. Minnesota 2008, reprint of 1971 text.

Van Ronk, Dave  The Mayor Of MacDougal Street: A Memoir  Da Capo Press 2006

     Van Ronk’s memoir published in 2006 becomes part of the ongoing Bob Dylan debate.  A part of the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early sixties Van Ronk little knew how his life would be affected, destroyed, by the arrival of Bob Dylan from out of the West in 1961.

     At the time of Dylan’s arrival Van Ronk was one of the most important, if not the most important, folk singer in the Village.  Thus Bob set his sights to suck out Dave’s substance and cast the empty husk aside.

     On page 211 of the paperback Dylan is quoted at the beginning of Chaper 15:

I once thought the biggest I could ever hope to get was like Van Ronk.  And it’s bigger than that now, ain’t it?  Yeah, man, it’s bigger than that.

-Bob Dylan c. 1964

     Once Dylan learned of Van Ronk on his arrival, it is doubtful that he had heard of him in Minneapolis, he made it his goal to insinuate himself into Van Ronk’s life.  Dylan tells how he began his assault on page 21 of his Chronicles.  The scene takes place in the Folklore Center:

     One winter day a big burly guy stepped in off the street.  He looked like he’d come from the Russian Embassy, shook the snow off his sleeves, took off his gloves and put them on the counter, asked to see a Gibson guitar that was hanging up on the brick wall.  It was Dave Van Ronk.  He was gruff, a mass of bristling hair, don’t give a damn attitude, a confident hunter.  My mind went into a rush.  (My italics.)  There was nothing between him and me.  Izzy took the guitar down and gave it to him.   Dave fingered the strings and played some kind of jazzy waltz, put the guitar back on the counter.  As he put the guitar down, I stepped over and put my hands on it and asked him at the same time how does someone get to work down at the gaslight, who do you have to know?  It’s not like I was trying to get buddy-buddy with him,  I just wanted to know.

     Van Ronk looked at me curiously, was snippy and surly, asked if I did janitor work.

     I told him, no, I didn’t and he could perish the thought, but could I play something for him?  He said, “Sure.”

     I played him “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out.”  Dave then said I could come down about eight or nine in the evening and play a couple songs in his set.  That was how I met Dave Van Ronk.

     Possibly.  But one learns to take Dylan’s stories with a shaker full of salt.  Bob has a difficult time separating fact from fancy.  The way Van Ronk tells it he was hanging around with a bunch of the boys when someone burst in and said ‘New guy, come on, you got to hear this.’ and it was Bob.  So Van Ronk would have had an idea who Bob was not that he necessarily would have acknowledged him.  There are some interesting points in Dylan’s narrative which I believe is Bob at his most fanciful.  That he marked Van Ronk for destruction is apparent when he says he looked like he came from the Russian Embassy.  Maybe.  But Bob was a Jew and the Russians were the enemies of the Jews throughout the last two hundred years so Bob was casting him in the role of the enemy.  Then he identifies Van Ronk as a ‘confident hunter.’  Jews usually associate hunting with goys while traditionally despising the practice so Bob is saying that the hunter didn’t know he was being hunted.  And then Bob placed his hands on the guitar as he spoke to Van Ronk indicating that he was appropriating the man’s tool or emasculating him.   Very significant action.

      Bob says Van Ronk was snippy and surly.  Well, maybe but since I think he’s making this up he is casting a character on Van Ronk to make you dislike him.  Besides who wouldn’t appear surly if you placed your hands on the musician’s guitar.  The exchange after that when Dave asked if Bob did janitor’s work was a particular Jewish insult that gave Bob his excuse for hurting Van Ronk.

     Then like a parasite or lamphrey eel Bob latches onto Van Ronk slowly ’stealing everything that he could steal.’

     When the process was complete and Bob was way bigger than Dave could hope to be Bob then disses Van Ronk off.  As Van Ronk tells it p. 217: Van Ronk:

For myself I consider it fortunate that Bobby and I reached our parting of the ways fairly early.  Shortly after his third or fourth record had come out had gone diamond or whatever, he was holding court in the Kettle of Fish and he got on my case and started giving me all of this advice about how to manage my career, how to go about becoming a star.  It was complete garbage, but by that point he had gotten used to everybody hanging on his every word and applauding any idea that came into his head.  So I sat and listened for a while, and while I was polite and even asked him a couple of questions, but it became obvious that he was simply prodding and testing me.  He was saying things like “Why don’t you give up the blues?  You do  that, and I”ll produce an album on you, you can make a fortune.”  He wasn’t making a lick of sense, and I finally pushed back my chair and said, “Dylan, if you’re so rich, how come you ain’t smart?’  And I walked out.

     So within three years Bob met and surpassed his mentor then trashed him like he trashed everyone and everything else in his life.  Beware of Bob.  To a very large extent MacDougal Street is the story of Bob Dylan within the folk scene of Greenwich Village although within that context Van Ronk tells a rich and rewarding story of the emergence of Folk from 1940 to c. 1970.  A fabulous book with a generous dollop of belly laughs.  I loved the book.

2/

     Van Ronk himself never made it.  I first heard of him in 1967 and listened to the Prestige Folksinger album.  There was nothing there.  Van Ronk rasped out all his vocals in a monotonous fashion in that same gargling hoarse voice with nary a variation from song to song.  At that age and time I found the songs uninteresting.  The arrangments didn’t grab me.  The music was about as exciting as the New Lost City Ramblers which is to say a stone bore.

     Van Ronk may have prided himself on his musicianship and it may have been pretty good, I couldn’t care less.  I know few people who listen to records for musicianship and I don’t care to listen to records with those who do.  So Dave was concentrating on all the wrong things.

     There were people running around saying how great he was but I was in the record business and nobody bought his records.  you can foget the Hudson Dusters.  Over the years his legend grew with that of the vanished Folk Scene and I guess twenty-five years or so after the fact he was able to cash in on that basis.

     There is one really great song Van Ronk did though called Don’t Leave Me Here.  I have it on The Folk Box, Elektra EKL 9001.  That’s a really fine four record collection compiled and annotated by the Robert Shelton.  It has selections from nearly all the folkies of the Greenwich Village scene excluding Dylan.  A terrific collection and a perfect representation of the scene.  Hard to find though; I couldn’t find any copies on a quick search of the internet.

     However the story of Dave’s learning process is vastly interesting.  His history of the folk era, especially the late fifties and the people and personalities make the book a best buy.  But then we get back to Dylan.

     Bob not only wheedled his way onto Van Ronk’s stage but he wheedled his way into his very household appropriating Dave’s couch for his living quarters.  Now comes an interesting conjecture.  In Chronicles Bob says that he met a Ray Gooch and Chloe Kiel with whom he stayed for some time.  Now, Bob arrived in New York in January of ‘61 and he rented his apartment with Suze Rotolo in the Fall of that year becoming financially independent thereafter never going back to anyone’s couch.

     So that gives him a maximum of nine months to sleep on all those peoples’s couches.  He says in Chronicles that he first met Van Ronk and through Van Ronk Paul Clayton.  These are two colorful characters.  He then says that through Clayton he met Ray Gooch.  So far, so good.  But then he gives a fairly minute description of the street the Gooches lived on, the building, the apartment and significantly the church across the street.

     Before w go on let us consider an incident from Van Ronk on page 4:

…Bob Dylan heard me fooling around with one of my grandmother’s favorites, “The Chimes Of Trinity,” a sentimental ballad about Trinity Church that went something like:

Tolling for the outcast, tolling for the gay,

Tolling for the (something, something), long passed away,

As we whiled away the hours, down on old Broadway,

And we listened to the chimes of Trinity.

     He made me sing it for him a few times until he had the gist of it, then reworked it into the “Chimes Of Freedom.”  Her version was better.

     Now let’s check into a passage from Toby Thompson’s ‘Positively Main Street’ pp. 210-211:

     But the larger portraits of Ray Gooch and Chloe Kiel are complex and layered with mystery.  Why haven’t we seen them before?  Correct me if I’m wrong, but their names appear in no biography of Bob.  Could they be projectionsof his own divided psyche.  Ray, the competent man of the world, the toolsmith, the gun collector, the would be warrior, and Chloe, the dreamy, slightly stoned performance oriented homebody?  Bob’s not certain whether they are siblings or lovers.  I’m not certain they are real.  Chloe was the heroine of Longus’s second century novel Daphnis and Chloe.   She was an orphan, nurtured by sheep, and is described as ‘a naive lily-white girl” who falls for the youth, Daphnis.  Echo is mentioned in the story.  In my case the apartment Ray and Chloe inhabit on Vestry is a boho Eden, Every hipster’s wettest dream of Manhattan digs.

     The Sunday after reading Chronicles,  a blustery afternoon in New York I took a subway to Franklin Street and walked north then west along Vestry, looking for the building that might have housed it.  Bob describes it precisely, Federal style, facing a Roman Catholic church with a bell tower, on the same block as the Bull’s Head Tavern, below Canal Street, not far from the Hudson River.  The neighborhood hasn’t changed much since the early sixties, but I could find no building that resembled it.  Not the church, not the Bull’s Head Tavern.  Houses disappear, but churches aren’t often torn down.  I wanted to locate that apartment, only because he described it so beautifully.

     So I think it safe to say the whole dozen pages or so in Chronicles is a fabrication.  Bob dreamed it a few times and wrote it down as fact.  A clue lies in the progression  Van Ronk>Clayton>Gooch.  Gooch has a made up quality to it so Gooch is probably a conflation of the personalities of Van Ronk and Clayton.  And possibly the pair are also a sentimental portrait of Abe and Beattie, the mother and father.  Not as they were but wouldn’t it have been loverly if they had been.  Ray’s background also coincides with Bob’s studies of the pre-Civil War era in the South in the New York Library.

     The church across the street reflects Trinity Cathedral in Dublin as in Dave’s song the Bells Of Trinity so that places the story after his stay with Van Ronk.  Note the specified bell tower on the church.  Bob’s not there and neither is most of his early reported life.  I’ll say again anything he says is untrustworthy.  As they say in Hollywood:  Based on a true story.

     The last couple chapters of MacDougal tell of the changes in the Village and performance after 1960 to 1967 when drugs took the scene down.  These are relevant and important chapters as he describes how Dylan’s success caused the failure of the scene.  ‘There’s no success like failure and failure is no success at all.’

     Altogether I give Van Ronk’s Mayor Of MacDougal Street exceptionally high marks, worth a second reading and retention as a reference work.  Positively Fourth Street by Toby Thompson has a place on your shelf also.  I’ll review that after a second reading.  It is well worthy of study, picking up the stray hint and fact here and there.

     Chronicles of course is important to understand what Dave called the convoluted workings of Bob’s mind.  Bob’s an interesting study because he has managed to fool a lot of people all the time and another pack of us for a time.  I tell ya folks if I could live my life over I’d do some serious homework before I began but then even that probably wouldn’t help.

Exhuming Bob X:

Lubavticher Bob

by

R.E. Prindle

There’s something happening here

But you don’t know what it is,

Do you, Mr. Jones.

-Bob Dylan

     In 1979 Bob publicly embraced Jesus as his personal savior.  This was widely seen as a conversion to Christianity because Bob went to the Vineyard Fellowship of Tarzana for indoctrination into the Christian mysteries.  He could hardly have learned Christianity from Jewish circles although the Jewish group of Jews For Jesus was already active.  Pharasaic Jews have always despised Jews For Jesus so that may not have been a viable option for Bob.

     While non-Jews may be scandalized by the concept of Jews embracing Jesus there is no reason for them to be astounded.  After all Jesus was a Jew, preaching to Jews in the Jewish tradition.  The early Christian movement was entirely Jewish.  They were Jews of the Jews who had accepted Jesus as the Jewish Messiah.  Christianity became a universal religion only after Paul reconstructed it shedding the practices most repellent to gentiles while the Hellennic  or Greek religion and philosophy was grafted onto the religion which gave it substance and intellectual vigor displacing Semitic stultification.

     There should be little wonder then that Jewish Christianity should resurface  two thousand years later with Bob as its Messiah.

     Bob was uniquely trained for the role.  He grew up in a Christian community dominated by the Hillbilly music on the radio with a large and active Jewish congregation.  His father thought of himself as a Jewish scholar while heading the local chapter of B’nai B’rith and ADL.  His father was covertly ultra-orthodox.

     In 1990 Bob wrote a letter to the editor of a publication called Sister2Sister. (Bob’s Unshakeable Monotheism, Part IV, Scott Marshall http://www.jewsweek.com/ ) in which he said:

…until the entire world believes and obeys the same God, there can be no truth or justice or peace for anyone.

     What that means in the age old Jewish notion that as God’s chosen people they are destined to bring their vision of God to all the peoples of the Earth at which time they will become a nation of priests, the rulers and overseers of all others.  The Supreme People placed between God and humanity as demi-gods.

     The notion did not necessarily occur to Bob in 1990 but was placed in his mind at a much earlier date.  It would always have been present in the synagogue.  Anyone who has ever attended Jewish services will be be struck by the insistence that Jews are to rule the world and all the peoples.  It is the duty of every Jew to further that work.

     Whether Bob had the Messianic impulse before his Bar Mitzvah is the question.  It may have been there in embryo.  In 1954 as Bob was about to turn thirteen his father, Abraham, who obviously believed the proper religious education was lacking in Hibbing sent for a Lubavitcher Rebbe from Brooklyn to come to Hibbing specifically to indoctrinate Bob in the more recondite lore of the ultra-orthodox.  The intensity of the instruction would be virtual hypnosis.  It was at this point, I believe, that the Messianic impulse was fixed in Bob’s mind.

     The indoctrination had devastating results for the young boy’s character and personality.  He went off the rails becoming wild and dissolute.  In searching for a means to spread the message he had received he hit on music and from there it led into folk music.  Folk music had a special appeal because it was a pure expression of the dominant culture.  If one subverted folk music one subverted the culture.

     Thus after being  initiated into folk at Dinkytown near the University of Minnesota Bob left for the Big Apple, New York City.  The Folk scene of Greenwhich Village in New York was a virtual Jewish enclave or colony.  A great many Jews were already doing what Bob set out to do.  Disoriented by his conflicts between his Jewish and Christian education Bob nevertheless set about changing Folk music, discarding the content for Jewish themes while retaining the outer forms.  The Jewish world organization realizing they had something in Bob gave him maximum publicity actually turning him into a messianic figure through television and magazines.

     The stresses of intense fame to his personality and character were terrific almost destroying him.  Bob retreated at the height of his fame in 1966 after having established himself with three terrifically influential record albums.  His mind was now focused and somewhat cleared.  Placing a large Bible in the middle of his living room for easy reference Bob and his band worked and experimented with the Folk and old timey oeuvre of the White Christian hill people.  Once again retaining the forms while stripping the material of the content, he infused Jewish Biblical content which was familiar to the Christian culture into the material.  The immediate result was John Wesley Harding which is a Jewish religious album in tradtional White Christian dress. 

     The result is quite remarkable and on that basis is an astounding work of Jewish genius.  Unaware of what was being done to them White Americans could offer no defense except rejection.  There were quite a few of us who walked away from Bob at that point.  I can’t say that I understood what Bob had done but I felt the insult to my sensibilities.

     Thus, in retrospect, Bob’s so-called Christian period became inevitable as his strategy slowly unfolded in his mind.  There is no conflict with Bob’s intense Jewishness in his combined religious entities, or reclaiming the Jewish Jesus for Judaism.  Nothing could be more natural.

     The preemption of the goi culture for Judaism is the astonishing achievement of little Bobby Zimmerman.  Long after the fact there are still few who get it.

A Review

Slum Goddess From The Lower East Side

Some Thoughts On The Autobiography Of Suze Rotolo:

A Freewheelin’ Time

by

R.E. Prindle

1.

Sandoz The Great

     In 1938 Albert Hoffman, a Swiss chemist working for Sandoz isolated LSD-25.  In 1938 young Tim Leary was 18 years old.  It was in 1943 that Albert Hoffman discovered the effects of LSD.  Seventeen years after that LSD burt onto the world through the agency of the now, Dr., Timothy Leary, a psychologist with Harvard University.

     LSD was adopted by the Bohemian society and all its offshoots as the appearance of the new chemical Messiah:  Better living through chemistry as the slogan was.  Its use quickly spread through the folk music community of Greenwich Village in New York City.

     In 1923 a fellow by the name of Tuli Kupferberg was born and his partner Ed Sanders came along in 1939 a year after I did.  Kupferberg and Sanders were poets who became influenced by the folk scene forming a band sometime in 1964 originally called the Village Fugs, later the Village was dropped and they became simply the Fugs.  In 1965 they released their first LP on Folkways.  Now, cut one, side one was little number entitled Slum Goddess From The Lower East Side.  Sort of OK as a song, funny, as were a lot of Fugs songs.  Like Dylan they searched for social significance rather than write trite love songs.  Unlike Dylan you could easily understand the meaning of the lyrics.  Slum Goddess was one and then there was a song that many of us thought significant in the social sense back in those days entitled:  Boob A Lot.  ‘Do you like boobs a lot?  Gotta like boobs a lot.’  As I said deep and intense meaning.  This was followed by a song eulogizing jock straps.  ‘Do you wear your jock strap?  Gotta wear your jock strap.’  So the Fugs were with it.

     At some point after 1965 the Village Voice decided to run a feature depicting some East Village lovely as the Slum Goddess From The Lower East Side.  Suze Rotolo had the dubious honor of being selected as the very first Slum Goddess.

     To what did she owe this honor?  Well, she was famous on the Lower East Side for being featured on the album cover of Bob Dylan’s second LP, The Free Wheelin’ Bob Dylan.  She was at that time, 1962, I believe, Bob’s girl friend or, at least, one of them, perhaps the principle one but one can’t be sure as Bob had others as ‘part time’ girl friends.

     Thus one has to go back to the summer of 1961 to discover how Suze Rotolo began her odyssey to become the very first Slum Goddess.  Suze tells her story in her autobiography issued in May of 2008 called A Freewheelin’ Time.  It is a bitter sweet story not lacking in charm.  Bob was born in 1941 while Suze was born three years later.  All the disparate elements in our story born at separate times were slowly moving to a central focal point in New York City from 1961 to 1965 or so.

     Suze and Bob were of that age when freewheelin’ seemed possible while the psychological social moment was about to congeal and then vanish before it could be realized as psychological moments do.  Some catch the golden ring as it come around, some don’t.  Bob did, Suze didn’t.

     Suze was born in Queens, over there on Long Island, as a red diaper baby.  In other words in the romanticized Communist parlance her parents were Communists when she was born.  She was brought up in the faith.

     Bob described her as a libertine dream or some such epithet.  I’m not sure Suze saw herself in the same way.  I think she expected a little more of Bob than to be his sex toy.  As a Communist she should have had a more freewheelin’ attitude.

     Suze seems to have been brought up completely within the Red religion much as a Christian might be a Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran or as Jew in whatever stripe of Judaism it might be.

     She edged into race agitation at a young age.  She met Bob when she was seventeen while she had been working for CORE  (Congress Of Racial Equality) for  a couple years before that.  She would have been fifteen or sixteen.  Whether she had sexual experiences with the Africans she doesn’t tell us.  In her search for a raison d’ etre for her life she found herself in Greenwich Village in the Summer of ‘61 where she met the twenty year old Bob Dylan just in from the Iron Range of Minnesota.  They were mutually attracted, quickly forming a sexual relationship.

     Bob as everyone knows was and is Jewish.  He came not only from a Jewish background but from an orthodox background.  Hibbing, Minnesota, his hometown, had a Jewish population of about three hundred families with their own Jewish establishment and synagogue.