Hard Rain
I'll Let You Be In My House If I Can Be In Yours
I said when I started this newsletter that my purpose is to keep you posted on my book, When Once Destroyed, A Historical Memoir of the Life and Death of a Small Town. I should mention, then, that we’ve settled on a cover. The design was not an easy decision, but we all agreed that a photo Judy took was essential. I still think April is the likely date of publication, but things can change.
If you are interested in the decline of the rural American way of life since World War II, allow me to recommend the non-fiction The Left Behind by Robert Wuthnow, Heartland by Sarah Smarsh, Uprooted by Grace Olmstead, and the novel Go As A River by Shelley Read. With that group seems to be where I fit on the bookshelf. I guess I belong to a subculture I did not know exists.
Visiting Bob Dylan’s boyhood home in Hibbing, Minnesota this week was a thrill for me. A Bob Dylan archivist who lives a block over bought it a few years ago and is doing everything he can to keep it the way it was when Bob shared a bedroom with his little brother and carved his initials into the woodwork in the basement. Bob had been around for a while when I started listening to him in 1970, first with the Bringing It All Back Home record and then Freewheelin. I was 16 then and I’ve never quit listening to him and reading what he has to say, too. It’s never too late to get started, until it’s too late. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature, you know.
From what I’ve gathered over the years, I’m thinking that the idea of strangers traipsing around in his house probably annoys him. But, Bill Pagel told Judy and me when I asked about the James Dean movie poster on the wall in Bob’s room that after a concert in Indianapolis one night Bob visited Dean’s home in Fairmount, Indiana.
“The Winslow’s, that’s near where I went to junior high school,” I said. Bill seemed happy that I knew a little something and so then I mentioned that one of Dean’s classmates was my brother’s former father-in-law. Sometimes people who know something you don’t can seem self-satisfied, but Bill wasn’t like that at all.
Of all the artifacts that he displayed, the one I liked best was the 1963 TV Guide Bob signed from the week he refused to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show because the producers would not let him sing “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.” Along with the signature Bob has something nasty to say about the corporate bosses who ran things back then. Ain’t like that now, huh? Bill has a picture, too, of Bob rehearsing for CBS the day before. Antiques Road Show times a gazillion.
If you are interested in heading up that way give Bill Pagel a call (608-217-5232) and he’ll arrange a time when he can show you around. He doesn’t charge anything but a healthy donation certainly seems warranted. People these days pay $400 to watch through binoculars the Rolling Stones imitate themselves. Bob doesn’t do that.
The Stones changed their lyrics for Ed Sullivan in 1967. Bob only does that for himself.
Speaking of the real deal, allow me to recommend John Ganz and Timothy Snyder for help in getting a handle on the present state of the United States of America. I’ve been teaching Holocaust since 2001 and right now I can’t help but wonder what good that’s done. Both Ganz and Snyder have Substack newsletters. For foundational work, read When The Clock Broke and On Tyranny. It’s past time, though, to read The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic by Benjamin Carter Hett.
Time freezes when I listen to Bob:
I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin’
Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world
Heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin’
Heard ten thousand whisperin’ and nobody listenin’
—A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, Bob Dylan, Copyright © 1963 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991 by Special Rider Musi
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