Master Blueprints # 45: "How Many Roads Must a Man Walk Down, Before You Call Him a Man”

(Personal reflections inspired by Bob Dylan songs)

Song: “Blowin’ In the Wind”

Album: The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan

Release Date: May 1963

Pilgrimage 3 of 3

Back in early March I visited the town of Bob Dylan’s upbringing, Hibbing, Minnesota, while on a work trip to International Falls, Minnesota, which I wrote about in Master Blueprint # 10.  I took another Dylan-related journey to Woodstock, in the Catskills of Upper State New York in early September, in search of inspiration from that geographic cornerstone in his life, which I wrote about in Master Blueprint # 34.  And my trilogy of Bob Dylan-centric destinations was completed this past weekend when I traveled with my wife Nancy to Greenwich Village, in the heart of Manhattan, New York City. 

This was the 8^th trip to the Big Apple in my lifetime, all of which have been very memorable. Scattered among them, I’d pretty much taken in all the major sightseeing locales: The Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, Central Park, Rockefeller Center, Times Square, the United Nations, the Museum of Natural History, Strawberry Fields, Tribeca, Little Italy, Chinatown, Soho, Harlem, and of course, Greenwich Village.  I have written about a handful of my excursions to NYC in these Music and Memory blog pages over the past decade, including two indelible winter road trips with my Canadian brethren back in the 80s, each of which was spent homeless for a night (see Under the Big Top # 7 here ).  Another writeup that comes to mind was about heading down with a crew of great friends to see the Who perform Quadrophenia at Madison Square Garden (see Under the Big Top # 9 here ).  And then there was the fantastic Ray Davies show at the Westbeth Theatre that I witnessed with my great friend Mac, which I’ve discussed here and there in these pages.  I drove through a blizzard to see that one.

One trip I’d not elaborated on was taken in the spring of 2001, a few months before 9/11 (which, by the way is an event which I have also written about….see Under the Big Top # 37 here ).  That was the last time I’d traveled to Manhattan.  I was with Nancy and the kids.  Charlotte was only six at the time.  Peter was two.  I recently dug through the photos from that trip, knowing I’d be heading back there soon.  One photo is of us on a ferry heading out to the Statue of Liberty.  It was a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky.  Behind us are the Twin Towers, glimmering in the sunlight.  It brings back great memories, but it’s also eerie when I look at that photograph.  9/11 was also cloudless. 

Seventeen years have passed since that trip.  Our daughter is 24 now, our son 20.  Empty Nesters, Nancy and I, with quite a bit more freedom to hit the road. Not that I’m anywhere near there yet, but I now have another angle on why people travel a lot in their retirement:  Life on the road gets you to think out of the box far more than life at home, which in turn can get the creative juices flowing.  From this perspective, travel tends to feed itself.  Nancy and I have done a lot of travelling over the years, before and with children.  Those experiences can now pay off in ways that were unforeseen until these recent insights.  All we must do at this point is get back out there.

As mentioned in the last entry (Blueprint # 44), marriage is a blending of two individual’s values.  which played out to a tee over the weekend, seeing as Nancy and I tackled not one, but two locales for this trip, the other being Asbury Park, New Jersey.  This one was Nancy’s contribution.  She’s a big Southside Johnny fan, he who is one of a handful of Jersey Shore rock stars who got his feet wet playing at the local clubs along the boardwalk, including the most famous of them all, the Iron Horse (where we got to spend some time exploring that Friday evening).  Nancy and I have been to a good number of Southside Johnny’s shows in the Boston area over the years, she more than myself.  He’s a helluva showman. 

Anyhow, from a Bob Dylan ‘pilgrimage’ and blog-writing perspective, this side trek rounded out the journey perfectly.  For example, Dylan’s image was surprisingly cropping up all over the place in Asbury Park: Street art, murals, postcards, and other depictions. I’m now thinking this must have had a lot to do the man who inducted Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Bruce Springsteen.  The Boss is already a legend in this neck of the woods.  His image, along with others in his E Street Band takes up about half the wall space at the Iron Horse (Southside Johnny and the Asbury Juke cover a fair percentage too).  And so, if Bruce Springsteen looks up to Bob Dylan, it must follow that so does most everyone else who lives there. 

Nancy and I strolled the lengthy boardwalk early Saturday morning from the Asbury Park Convention Hall deep into neighboring Ocean Grove and back, talking about Charlotte (now in Colombia), Peter’s schoolyear, Hurricane Sandy, “Under the Boardwalk”, the value of sand dunes, and the day ahead.  Back at the Convention Hall, which was just opening for business, (photo below) we split up for a bit while shopping around.  My mind wandered to my blog world.  I thought about Bob Dylan getting detained by police while roaming the nearby streets in the pouring rain about 10 years ago, looking into the windows of a property that was for sale.  It’s been speculated he was in search of the home where Bruce Springsteen penned “Born to Run” ( Dylan-detained-Jersey-Shore ).  I thought about Dylan’s supposed ‘ode’ to Bruce Springsteen and his Jersey haunts, that being the song “Tweeter and the Monkey Man” off the Traveling Wilburys first album, which Joan Osborne performed brilliantly two nights earlier at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston (again see Blueprint # 44).  Was “Tweeter” and the Monkey Man” praise, or parody?  Bob Dylan’s not sayin’.  Finally, I thought about the relationship between these two men and the effect Dylan has had on so many of us, Springsteen right there near the top of the list.

The first part of our journey complete, we then drove north up the Garden State Parkway and Route 95, veering East on Route 78 into Jersey City, the Holland Tunnel minutes away.  I’d never had this view of Manhattan before, usually looking at it from the Northeast, North, or Northwest.  It was impressive.  The elevated highway view revealed the immensity of the metropolis in front of us, from Battery Park to the George Washington Bridge.  There’s nowhere else like it in the world to my knowledge.  I thought about Bob Dylan and what he must have felt like arriving here for the first time, hitchhiking from the Midwest on a wing and a prayer, in the harsh winter of 1961, a full year and a half before I was born. What was he doing there amongst the populous right now, 57 years later, near the end of his Beacon Theatre residency?  I thought about many of the other musicians and bands who adopted New York as their home-away-from-home over the years, including British groups like the Rolling Stones and the Who, and most notably, John Lennon.  I thought about those earlier treks of mine into New York.  I thought about Spider Man swinging from high rise to high rise, and all the great movies filmed there.  Aside from those random thoughts, Nancy and I were having fun, laughing at the cars in the cash lines as we cruised into the tunnel, having just gotten our first ever EZ Pass the day before (we the hapless ones to that date). 

Arriving in Manhattan we veered north a few blocks into Greenwich Village and immediately found a metered parking spot near the intersection of Bleecker and LaGuardia. We were here!  I thought I would be able to rely on my earlier instincts with this area, but in many ways, it was as if I were tackling the Village for the first time.  The familiarity was vague, which may have had something to do with coming at it from a different direction.  Anyhow, right in front of our car was The Bitter End, where Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Review band took shape in the mid-70s.  Great place to start.  It turned out this was ‘open mic’ day.  Musicians and their guitars were signing up and lining up, waiting for the place to open.  Nancy and I got in line with them.  When the doors opened, we took in the aura of the place and watched the first musician perform.  Her music was a bit of a downer, she obviously struggling, singing about selling out to make ends meet.  But she was singing from the heart and she was passionate.  Good luck there, young lady.  Many struggling musicians got their start on that stage, some who became quite famous.  Hopefully you will get to where you want to be too.

As already mentioned, I was very much aware of Bob Dylan performing that nite at the Beacon Theatre on the Upper West Side, and we dabbled with the idea of heading that way later in the day to see if we could scalp tickets.  The fact of the matter was that, like my Woodstock adventure, very little was planned for this trip, partly because we were not sure until the last minute if it would pan out due to other factors back home, and partly because… that’s the way we operate.  Amazing things can happen when you wing it, or they can fall flat.  It’s a crap shoot. But truthfully, the Dylan show was not my focus.  Being with Nancy in Greenwich Village was my focus; dining, shopping, doing whatever.  A melding of our values was my focus. Besides, I’ve seen so many great shows over the years, including Bob on five occasions. And so, I vowed I was not going to let that whisper get too loud in my ear. 

Despite this inner declaration, the notion was still tugging at me.  However, at the same time I was beginning to feel the effects of the prior 5 weeks; work travel (see Blueprint # 41), concerts, Thanksgiving, burning the candle at both ends, people hacking all around me all that time.  My body was yelling at me; cold, flu… something was happening.  I was suppressing it, but for how long?  We had not booked a place to stay yet.  That was both good and bad.  Good because it gave us flexibility.  Bad because it seeped into our thinking more than we would have liked.  We are usually good in this sort of situation, but Manhattan is a different beast than virtually anywhere else we’d made last minute decisions like this over the years.  There were a few options for us; places to stay.  But they were pricey to say the least.  Worth it in most situations was my thinking.  But in my state?

We chewed on our options as we roamed the streets, taking in our surroundings, and soon found ourselves in Washington Square Park (photo below) which was full of life.  Then over to the Washington Square Park Hotel, which is no longer the dirt-cheap place it used to be when Bob Dylan used it as a virtual squat house upon arriving in the city.  I thought about Joan Baez’ song “Diamonds and Rust”, which is about her romance with Bob Dylan and which mentions this hotel.  I thought about what that namesake Park in front of it must have been like in the 60s. A few blocks further down we passed the iconic location where Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo were photographed for the cover of Dylan’s second album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, the first song on it being this entry’s Blueprint.  I was feeling the vibes.

As darkness settled in, we made our way down to Soho for some Christmas shopping, and then up over to Little Italy, where we found a nice Italian restaurant for dinner.  My appetite was there, but I was fading, with the rain now coming down hard too, and the forecast for Sunday being more of the same.  We were slowly concluding that this was our last downtown stop of the day, and so, we took our time, and enjoyed it.  Then we headed back to our car.

We flirted with the idea of stopping somewhere on the way home and staying the nite, perhaps taking in some place in Connecticut or upper-state New York the next day, but in the end, we drove all the way back to our home in Pepperell Massachusetts.  For a good stretch we listened to the excellent soundtrack to the even more superb movie “I’m Not There”.  Nancy is not as enamored by Bob Dylan’s vocals as I am.  Not by a long shot.  But when the cover of “Ballad of a Thin Man” came on she made the comment that she liked Dylan’s vocals in the original.  I thought, ‘now that’s some very keen insight’, seeing as I’ve made the same observation myself.  There is hope! 

My mind wandered again as we drove late into the nite.  I thought once more about my last Blueprint entry (# 44) and the song of choice from it, “High Water (for Charley Patton)”.  It’s a song of such foreboding.  One contemplative aspect related to the song is that the album it’s on, “Love and Theft” - which includes many other foreboding tunes - was released on 9/11/2001.  Even though I’ve always known this fact, I did not bring it up for that entry, seeing as it did not fit my storyline. It does here though.  

How has the world changed in the 17 years since I was last in New York, back in 2001, months before 9/11?  I recalled a Rolling Stone interview with Bob Dylan week’s after that album release and that catastrophic event.  I searched for and found it a few days after settling in back home this week. As I had remembered, this reread once again revealed Dylan’s comments to be very poignant throughout the article.  It’s a real time capsule of a piece.  Near the end of the interview Bob Dylan was asked about 9/11.  First, he quoted a verse from the Rudyard Kipling poem “Gentlemen-Rankers”, which goes: 

“We have done with Hope and Honour, we are lost to Love and Truth

 We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung

 And the measure of our torment is the measure of your youth

 God help us, for we knew the worst too young!”

(I recalled showing this to my Dad back in those heavy, heavy weeks after 9/11.  Dad was quiet after reading this). Bob Dylan then went on to say, “If anything my mind would go back to young people at a time like this”.

Young people.  My son and my daughter today. American, Iraqi, and Afghani youth, on the cusp of fighting their parents and grandparents battles after 9/11 (I’m sure Dylan was referring to all of them with that quote above).  And of course, Bob Dylan when he released The Freewheelin Bob Dylan in 1963, at the tender age of 21, along with its powerful opener, “Blowin’ in the Wind” ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWwgrjjIMXA ) which was his true introduction to the free world.  Unlike those Gentlemen-Rankers of yore, Bob Dylan not only knew the worst too young, he expressed it, perfectly, in that very first hit, and he never let it go.  I am grateful for having recognized this.  My visits to New York City, Woodstock and Hibbing contributed to that recognition.  I’m grateful for that too.

- Pete