Bob Dylan Is a Hell’s Angel (A Bob Dylan Story, Chapter 2)

you thought you knew died. This is his story. This is Dr Ed Sailor once again. It's now day two U nineteen sixty six. The patient Robert Zimmerman a K eight Bob Dylan remains here at my home in Middletown, New York. He is showing some signs of improvement physically, although he remains unsure of the details of his motorcycle accident. He can't seem to play specifics or even explain the cause of his injuries. He is still someone erratic and

is complaining of pain all over his body. Despite his complaints, something unable to detect major problems. I have given him morphine to calm him down and numb his pain. There is just one thing that needs to be addressed, though possibly without psychiatric evaluation. He keeps talking about about destiny. I've been thinking a lot about that. Destiny is a feeling you have about yourself. You know something about yourself that nobody else does. I always believed that had a

great sense of destiny. I always felt that was headed for bright lights. I talked to you before about inventing yourself. The universe helped me realize that. It also helped me believe in myself, and believing in myself gave me a lesson to invent more. Which I did. Things happened to me in my life that signal of the path I should take. I feel like I made a deal with someone who's been guiding me. But the universe has helped

me transform and make myself again again. I've lived multiple lives in my ears, done so many things, and left so much blood on the tracks. Chapter two, Bob Dylan is a Hell's ANGELA those doors, I can still see them now. The paint was peeling off of them. White gave way to a faded blue. As I put my hand to the door, I could hear screaming from the other side. I had no idea what I would find behind it. I pushed it open and prayed for what I might see on the other side. After the motorcycle crash,

I took it easy, like I told you. I settled into family life, and while writing songs wasn't my top priority in the beginning, I knew it wouldn't be long before I was back to it writing recording. I also tried to finish that film we'd shot for ABC on the UK tour. I thought we should shoot some additional scenes to finish it off. So Rick Danko and Richard Manuel from The Hawks as they were known, then joined

me in Woodstock. The Hawks were my touring band. They became the And of course, and went on to be quite successful in their own right. It was February and it was freezing. Streams were iced over and the roofs of the houses and Woodstock had a smattering of snow. It felt like a magical place. The rest of the Hawks, including Robbie robertson leave on Helm Garth Hudson, drifted up from New York City, joining us in our frozen wonderland.

I guess that's no real surprise. They were a road band without a road to go on, it made sense for us all to get together. Plus, after what we went through on that tour of England, we all felt some sort of bond. I guess I hadn't intended to record an album in Woodstock, the double album that appeared almost a decade later, the basement tapes that kind of just happened. Destiny is a feeling. We started recording for

Fun at my house high Low, Hi. We set up some tape recorders in the red Room, which wasn't actually read but had been at one time, and the name just stuck. Soon I realized that the one thing I had gained since the crash, a sense of separation between my music and my life. I guess that's what they call work life balanced these days. Well, that was being marginalized by this record. I didn't want to be working where my home was, so we moved to a house

that Garth, Richard and Rick had rented. It was a newly built house with pink siding, a soft, faded pink that blended well with its surroundings. Because of that, we started calling it Big Pink. I don't know if everything in Woodstock was named after the color it was or had once been, but that was certainly my experience. It became a recording environment like no other. No pressure, no watching the clock, no having to go home at a certain time, inventing yourself. It was purely music based. We

were there for the songs to play together. I didn't even think the world would ever hear the stuff we were recording, let alone it becoming this supposedly legendary thing to invent. Once at Big Pink, we settled into a routine. I realized routine was what I craved at that point. You see, so every day I'd show up at noon, usually with my poodle, his name was Hamlet. I'd put on a pot of coffee, make sure to clatter around

extra loud. If the band were still in bed, then I'd sit at the typewriter and wait for them to join me. You know, that's how they started calling themselves the band, you know, Capital T, Capital B, right, because everybody just referred to them as the band. They didn't begin performing under that name until the next year. If you didn't believe me when I said these songs were never intended to be released in the form we recorded them, then take Clothesline Saga as an example, we cut that

as a joke. Back then, Clothesline Saga was a song called Answer to Ode, the ode in question being Ode to Billy Joe, a Bobby Gentry song man. That song that was everywhere, and I mean everywhere. You turned on the radio and you were never more than five minutes away from it. It was inescapable. The whole country was talking about it. I've been thinking a lot about that.

The story of the thing is the suicide of a kid named Billy Joe McAllister is told by a young woman who has had something to do with the boy's death. She's somehow involved or something has happened, but you never find out what. That's the secret. The secret of the song is. It's secret. This thing became huge. It was like who shot Jr? Decades before people were asked sing that based on some TV show, you know something about yourself that nobody else does. I mean, hell, Bobby Gentry

even appeared in Life magazine. That's how big it was. Closed Line Saga wasn't really meant to be an answer to it, more of a joke, a kind of a parody. I guess point being that's what those sessions were about. Fun, cutting loose well to begin with, At least in those sessions, we've blurred the lines between the old music of America and our new compositions. I felt like we were continuing in old tradition, which was ironic given the public opinion of me at the time, calling me judas because I

plugged in a new fangled electric guitar. Geez, Louise, I talked to you before about inventing yourself. I also personally found common ground with the stories in these old songs, with the people who wrote them, who were in them, people like Doc Boggs, a hardened coal miner and banjo player. He was like an Appalachian Robert Johnson. He made music about death, always about death. He was an outlaw, and I felt like I could relate to that. These songs

were healing from me sense of destiny. One afternoon, with the basement windows open and the breeze passing through, we cut the song I Shall Be Released. While the majority of the recording with the Hawks had been fun and care free, when we cut that song, I knew, I knew there was something more. This wasn't just about having fun, This was my return. I felt like crying When we were cutting that, I thought I'd cry and never stopped.

It was beautiful. Actually that's not true. You want to know what was really going on as those sessions progressed money, that's what. Yeah, In the early days, it was for fun, like a gang in a clubhouse, and that didn't stop. But we needed to cut demos to sell to other artists. Well, Albert, my manager, needed demos for other artists. I had always had a successful career of writing songs that were covered by other artists, and that needed to continue. I wasn't

going on tour anytime soon. I still had bills to pay. You know. I made a deal with someone. It was successful too. Some of those big pink songs did well. Manford Man had a top ten hit with Quinn the Eskimo the Mighty Quinn. The Birds charted with You Ain't Going Nowhere, and Peter Paul and Mary had a hit with Too Much and Nothing. Sooner or later you come to realize that this business, the business, I mean, it's really all about money. You can't escape it. The world

is powered by money. You either jump aboard that train or you get crushed by it. And I had to choose a man dressed all in white, led me down a corridor. There were these doors everywhere. There must have been fifty, no sixty, all in a straight line. They all had a thick, square glass viewing window. Each one smudged and discolored, brown and yellow crept up their sides. Finally, the man said to me, said this is the one

you're looking for, and my heart leapt. I told you about how Bob Dylan died, how he died on that motorbike that day in Woodstock, But he was also born too, Ninette Man. That was a year for me. People talk about important years in my career, they all mattered one way or another. But sixty one, that was a year I've lived multiple lives lives. It was the year I met the King Woody Guthrie. It was the year I

started playing New York. The year I settled on the spelling of my last name, d y l A N. Robert Zimmerman had been my birth name, but I had been changing it around for a while until that point. Yeah, it was the year I became that man, that artist, that persona he was born to invent. Two things happened that year, two that are forever linked. One led to the other, and that other led straight back to the first.

It was the year I realized that fate and destiny play a role in life, and you must make deals with those fates and destinies. Universe has helped me transform. It all started in California. There was this Hell's Angels guy. He was about my age at the time, young or something like that. He was the president of the San Bernardino chapter of the Motorcycle Club. He was cruising down the highway, going fast and getting faster. The whole chapter was riding home from the Base Lake Run, an annual

angel event immortalized in that Hunter S. Thompson book. His bike pipes were gunning, but there was a problem, a problem that, like all lingering problems, started out small and ended in catastrophe. Three weeks later, and on the other side of the country, I'm in the wings of Gertie's Folk City in New York. Girty's was a legendary venue on the folk scene. Everyone played it and it was the place you went to see the best of the best. It was also the place artists were made. Destiny is

a feeling of that night. I wore a shirt tie and a waistcoat, and I topped it off with a motorcycle hat. I was nervous. I stood there in the wings. My hands were sweating, my toes twitching. I was due to go on any second. You know. There's nothing like that feeling of standing by a stage just before you go on. It's like a bardo, the Buddhists would say, an intense, timeless place, especially on that night because it was my first time there. The universe has helped me transform.

Girty's was hot and busy. It felt like I could be born or killed on that stage. It was like life and death for that scene. Back in California, that San Bernardino angel realized what was wrong. The muffler on his bike could come off. It had just been wired on until he could get around to welding it, but now it was on the road a few hundred yards back. He pulls a U turn to go back and get it, but he doesn't see another angel flying along the wrong side of the road as he turns the head of

bright lights. Of course, then he sees him straight away, but he knows it's too late. In New York, they announced my name, my stomach doest Somersaults I try and look nonchalant as I walk onto the stage. I'm sure I failed. The stage of Girty's wasn't really a stage at all. It was more like a raised platform too microphones, one which looked like it was from a CBS radio station that flat news mike they had in the thirties,

was pointed at my guitar. The other was one that would have looked at home in front of Frank Sinatra. That was from my voice. It instantly felt right in front of me. For the briefest moment, I felt like Frank. I can't explain it. I just felt like I had played this place a thousand times, like the stars are aligning, like I gained something from somewhere else. I talked to you before about inventing yourself. I welcomed the crowd and with my hands on my gifts and acoustics, saying Rangers

Command by Woody Guthrie back in California. After that, you turn. The Angel tried to avoid the other bike by throwing his ride left, but it was not enough. The road was too narrow and both bikes collided, smashing into one another. Metal crunches against metal, last slit skin. Rubbert burns against pavement, there's black marks all across the road. That horrible, blunt sound of the impact reverberating round and now it's accompanied by the smell of gasoline rising up from the wreckage.

In New York, feedback screeched from my microphone at Gertie's, I apologized before singing a song arranged by everyone's favorite band introducer Alan Lomax, Dink's song you Know That. It was that song which came halfway through my set when it was confirmed to me that I knew I had done it. I'd won them over. The night was mine. That also helped me believe in myself. The day after the show, I appeared in the New York Times for the first time. It was a glowing review announcing my

arrival in New York. The day after the Times piece came out, I was standing in the Columbia Records producer John Hammond, who had met a couple of weeks earlier. He's offering me a recording contract. Six months later, I released my debut album, Destiny Is a Feeling You Have about Yourself. It was a happy ending in New York, but back in California, California wasn't so good. The President of the San Bernardino Chapter didn't make it home that day.

In fact, he died instantly on the road, the muffler from his bike a few hundred yards back in his wake. It was September three. But that's not the end of the story. This is why I'm telling you all this. I've lived multiple lives in the President of the San Bernardino Chapter. His name, this is the thing. His name was Robert Zimmerman. Don't you think that's strange? Everything happened

so quickly for me in New York. It all snapped into action after Bobby Zimmerman died on that highway transfiguration three weeks before the Gurdie Show. He stopped being Robert Zimmerman. And in a different way, I stopped being Robert Zimmerman. I was born. You know something about yourself that nobody else does. I told you about the motorcycle crash that killed the Bob Dylan. You knew, well there was another crash that gave birth to him too. I didn't even

know this myself. No, it's not why I wrote a song called Highway sixty one Revisited, or why I chose that as the title from my sixth album, Highway sixty one is a road that runs from Duluth, where I grew up, to New Orleans. But I will agree that it is strange that what happened on a highway and sixty one had such an impact on me. Maybe that's

the universe talking back and leaving behind some clues. Regardless, I always felt different for years, decades even, and then I found out why there was something different in my soul, in my destiny around that time. Transfiguration is a change in form or spirit. I didn't know it then, but that's what I was going through. I'd had a new power,

a new addition to myself, brought from somewhere else. The universe helped me realize that a casual connectedness you heard of that it's the idea that two things with no cause and effect between them are on some level responsible for each other's manifestation. It's what allowed me to crawl out from under the chaos and fly above it. That's how I can still do what I do. But the problem with it is it never stops. Whether you like it or not, it never stops. We'll be right back

after this. We were were the room was small and yet imposing. It's white walls of brick were thick, felt like they'd been imported right from Victorian London. In the corner was a single wire framed bed with itchy white sheets and a gray blanket on top of it. I pulled it back, stenciled onto it and yellow typeface print with the words gray Stone Park Psychiatric Hospital. After that motorcycle crashing Woodstock, I didn't play live for almost two years.

It would take something big and important to get me back on stage after what happened on that previous tour of the UK, that Judas tour. I've lived multiple lives in my If you'd have asked me back then when I would be on the stage again, I would have told you it would be a very, very long time. But things change. Destiny isn't always yours to choose. When I did play live again, I wished it was years down the line, but for different reasons, done so many things.

It was January at Carnegie Hall, and it was on one of the saddest nights of my life. I met Woody Guthrie in one I told you that big year. His music ruled my world for a long time. I always believed you could listen to his songs and learn to live. I mean literally. I'd only been in New York for five days when I tracked him down. I knew being in the same city as him meant I had to see him as soon as possible. But it

wasn't how I imagined it. When I met him. He was not functioning at I still remember the first journey to see him. I got the bus from the Port Authority terminal, made the hour and a half ride, and walked the final half mile up a big hill. The building he was living and loomed into view as I walked down that hill. There was a hospital, at least that's what they called it, but it was really an asylum, one thousand acres of distress set in the New Jersey countryside.

It was a place that had no spiritual hope of any kind. It was somehow oversized, built out of granite, full of anxiety. It wasn't the kind of place anyone should be let alone the true voice of the American spirit.

Like all institutions of its kind, who was underfunded and understaffed, it looked like the kind of place that could be taken out of service at any minute, but due to the sheer desperation of the city, suation carried on existing wood He had been suffering from Huntington's disease, although at the time they thought it might have been some kind of schizophrenia. You know something about yourself that nobody else does.

My first visit is still so vivid. I remember pushing open the heavy wooden doors of the front entrance, seeing a once grand double staircase, then the quiet of walking down the corridor with the Orderly. The whole place had a threatening silence, but it was punctuated by loud noises every so often shout here, of banging there. The whole building was arresting to your senses, bright lights. The Orderly showed me to Woody's room and I waited there for him.

When he arrived, they had to bring him in on a wheelchair. He could barely move. I was told his speech weather good days and bad, and I was shattered to learn the possibility of him performing was long behind him. We spoke as much as we could. Eventually, on subsequent visits, I played for him, usually his own songs. He liked it would often ask for specific songs. I felt it was my duty to play for him a privilege. Even

patients would come in and out as I played. There was a guy who was constantly falling to his knees. He had fallen and get back up again and repeat. There was another who thought he was being chased by spiders. He'd run around his circles. Someone else imagined he was the president who walked around and Uncle Sam had would he just sat there in the middle of them. As I was leaving at the end of that first visit,

he beckoned me towards him. He had a little card that he weakly handed over to me, and it read, I ain't dead yet. I've kept it ever since. I would try to visit him as much as possible. From that day on, I was always on the bus then walking up that hill. That building put a rattlesnake into my stomach each time it came into view. I've been thinking a lot about that. During one trip, when he was having a good day wood he told me about a box of poems and songs that hadn't been put

to melodies yet. They were stored in a basement in his house on Coney Island. He told me they were mine. If I wanted them. I just had to go and see his wife, Margie. A few days later, in the freezing cold New York winter, I was on the subway from West Fourth Street, riding it all the way to the last stop. His Coney Island house was across the field, so I began my journey. A few steps in in the field had turned to a swamp. I sank to knee level, but I kept going anyway. I was a

servant to Woody. When I got to the other end, my pants and shoes were drenched. They actually started to freeze. My toes were numb too, and my legs were going the same way. I desperately knocked at the door, but to my surprise, I didn't find Margie. Instead, there was a much younger woman who turned out to be the babysitter. She explained Margie was out and that she didn't know anything about any poems or songs. I've been thinking a

lot about that. I ended up back on the subway platform, even more drenched than before, which was almost physically impossible. I never did get my hands on those songs or poems, but this guy named Billy Bragg did. Forty years later, He and that band Wilco put melodies to them and brought them to life. As for Woody, Woody wouldn't have an easy road to travel. I carried on visiting him, but he got worse and worse. Huntington's does terrible things

to a person, uncharacteristic aggression, emotional volatility, social disinhibition. It's like watching a man morph into something else in front of your eyes, but not in a good way. He lost his speech, then he was bedbound. On my last visit, I still saw the Woody I had listened to for years in his eyes, but everything else was different. He

died aged fifty five and nineteen sixty seven. There's a legend about him being asked about his religion on his deathbed and he replied, all of them in the orderly or whoever said, there's no box for that on this form, so wood he said, then say none of them. Now, I told you he lost his speech, so I don't think that's what really happened, but as sure as a

fitting story for Woody. In ninety eight, I didn't want to play a show at all, any show, but this was for Woody, for his legacy, for everything he gave me, for everything, he gave folk music for everything. He gave America, for all religions and for no religions, again and again. It was an honor to play that memorial concert for

him at Carnegie Hall. I opened up with his song I Ain't Got no Home, and by the time I was finishing up on my second, another woody original, Dear Mrs Roosevelt, I thought I would start crying and never stopped. And this time that's the truth. In early night, Garth Hudson rubbed his full beard as he stood outside the house he'd come to call Big Pink, took one last look at it for picking up a large pine box. The box's exterior was beautifully varnished. Garth ran his hands

down its smooth sides. It had taken him a while to make it, but he didn't mind. One of the perfect transport for his precious cargo. After struggling to handle both the box and his car's door, he put the box onto the back seat of his station wagon, carefully making sure it wouldn't slide around. During the fifteen minute drive to Bearsville and home of Albert Grossman. Garth drive reminded him of the beauty of woodsuck it's a cold day,

but the sun was bright yellow. It lit the small roads lined with trees in a never ending stretch of telephone poles. Upon his rival at the Grossman's, Albert's wife, Sally, opened the door. She hadn't been expecting anyone to visit that day, least of all the keyboard player for the band. She explained to Garth that Albert was out. Garth didn't feel much like waiting around in the large, messy kitchen.

Garth carefully removed the lid of the pine box, revealing real to real tapes, each one wrapped in cardboard notated with Garth's precise, fluid handwriting. In that box was the entirety of what would come to be known as the Basement Tapes, every single song the band and Bob Dylan had recorded together in those fabled Woodstock months. But it was more than that. They weren't just songs, and there

were moments in their conversations, jokes, memories. It was the sound of an icon coming back as a thing that had given him micn status in the first place. It was also the sound of a legendary band finding their and growing into what they would become. At points on those tapes, you could hear the Hawks becoming the band, the one that would announce itself to the world with their legendary nine debut album Music from Big Pink. It was the sound of an old America blended with the

sound of the counterculture. It was an important musical artifact, and this time would show a cultural one too. Garth, with an uncharacteristically serious face, looked directly into Sally Grossman's eyes and told her to guard the tapes with her life.

She must not let them leave the house with anyone except maybe Bob Dylan, and briefly loaning them to the Grossman's Garth Hudson held onto the tapes for decades until finally, in two thousand three, he sold them to Jan House to Canadian music archivist and producer Housed began the huge task of digitizing the fragile home recordings that had barely seen the light of day since Lindon B. Johnson was

in the White House. Most of the tapes held up, but to the producer's dismay, one of them was recorded over by the band's bass guitarist, Rick Danko. Rick had left the tape running while at home trying out some piano ideas. After his experiment on the keys, he didn't shut the recorder off, so most of the remaining tape featured Rick and his girlfriend watching television. No one knows

what was originally on that tape. It was in that moment lost Forever House finished his cleanup, and the songs were released by Bob Dylan in two thousand and fourteen as the Basement Tapes Complete. The set was nominated for the Best Historical Album at the Grammys and finally gave the world the full story of the recording that took place a Big Pink In the same year, Rolling Stone magazine drove Garth Hudson around Woodstock. He was back there for the first time since nineteen as part of the

promotion for the new box set. On his way to the Big Pinkhouse, he passed places he'd never seen before, like a chain drug store that sticks out of the geography like an unwelcome sore thumb. He also saw some sights he had seen before, like the motel now boarded up where the band stayed before Big Tank back in the very early days. He also saw Dylan's old home Hi Lo Ha, which elicited a smile on Garth's face when, for a brief moment he spied the red room through

the trees. His smile disappeared. At the next site and the car passed a cemetery, Garth spoke up Rick and leave On are buried there. When they got to Big Pink, Garth instantly remarked at how much smaller it now looked. He spent the next few hours looking around the place. He ran his hands over the window frames pine original apparently it reminded him of that box he made years ago, and he also played on an organ that the current owners had installed for the many music tourists who came

to stay at the joint. Later, Garth made his way down to the basement, which is occasionally rented out as a studio, and with a smile on his face, he remarked to everyone present about the basement's limitations for music recording. There's a happy return, though. When it came time to leave, Garth took one last look at the place. He knelt down and scooped a small handful of gravel into his

hand and then stuffed it into his jacket pocket. Big Pink became a sanctuary for Bob Dylan in the band, a place where the woodstock breeze danced in through the windows and brought something special with it. Winemakers called it tear War, a tranquil mix of domesticity and creativity, two things that usually don't go hand in hand. But they weren't able to remain in their safe haven forever. Eventually they all had to venture back out into the real world.

Out there, in the real world, life wasn't always a woodstock breeze. In fact, it could be quite the opposite. The calm always came before the storm, and what lay ahead was going to put a lot of blood on the tracks. Blood on the Tracks produced by Double Elvis in partnership with I Heart Radio. It's hosted an executive produced by me Jake Brennan, also executive produced by Brady Sadly.

Zeth Lundie is lead editor and producer. This episode was written by Ben Burrow, Story and copy editing by Pat Healey, Mixing and sound designed by Colin Fleming. Additional music and score elements by Ryan Spreaker. This episode feature Chris Anzeloni is Bob Dylan. Sources for this episode are available at Double Elvis dot Com and the Blood of the Tracks series page. Follow Double Elvis on Instagram at double Elvis

and on Twitch at s Grace Sland Talks. Need You Talk to Me per Usual on Instagram and Twitter at Disgrace Land, Pond rock and Roll, or Dad