On June 19, 2020, Bob Dylan released his thirty-ninth studio album, Rough and Rowdy Ways.
Like many of you, I listened to Rough and Rowdy Ways a lot in the pandemic summer of 2020. We had plenty of time at home to listen. Dylan’s tour had been cancelled, but the new record held marvels, and with every spin I heard more. I liked all the tracks, but for me, five stood out. The first was “Murder Most Foul,” because of its long story about the Kennedy assassination and its allusions to twentieth century song. The second was “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” for its heartfelt singing and lovely melodic structure. The third was “False Prophet,” a song in which Dylan is clearly playing with his own iconic identity. The fourth was “My Own Version of You,” a very funny and deadly serious Frankenstein skit. The fifth tune that drew me in deeply, and my favorite from the start, was “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).”
I have never been to the city of Key West, but I spent a lot of time in Florida in my youth, first as a teenager in the 1970s. My parents rented vacation condos on Marco Island on the Gulf Coast when it was still a vast, undeveloped sand dune. For a few years, we travelled down from St. Paul at spring break, and I sat scalding on the beach, reading books, and thinking about girls while my mother collected seashells. After I left home, they bought a condo of their own, new construction, one of thousands that would eventually cover the island. As a young adult I visited once or twice. In the late eighties, they built a house where they retired, and I spent one Christmas there in the mid-nineties with my wife and toddler son. In the mid-aughts, I travelled to Naples a couple of times to see my dad in an Alzheimer’s home. My last trip to Florida was for his funeral in 2009. I had never liked the state much, with its wide highways and endless strip malls, and since my father’s death, I’ve never desired to return.
I have one other recollection of Florida, and it exists on separate plane. In 1980, when I was twenty, I passed about two months on the southeastern seaboard, living on the streets and highways, as a member of a millennialist Christian cult. In the years immediately after I left the group and resumed a (somewhat) normal life, I pushed the memory of this time aside. Over the next thirty years, I rarely thought about that dream-like episode. In 2011, I recalled these images from my past as well as I could and wrote them down as part of the larger story of my twenties in a memoir I called The Golden Bird. The version I put down on paper became my memory, and once again, I let it go.
In 2020, my dream came back to me, transfigured.
In this chapter, I want to share how I came to the realization my tale inspired certain lines in Bob Dylan’s gorgeous song, “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).”
Many folks love “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)." Some fans consider it the best song on the record, maybe one of Dylan’s best ever, and I’ve read that it often makes people cry. The lyric presents a mysterious narrative with specific yet seemingly disjointed images. The music features a mesmerizing accordion, a delicate piano melody, and Bob’s precise, emotive phrasing. The song soothes and cheers the heart, but paradoxically, it also feels sad. On my first listens, I didn’t understand the lyrics or get many of the references, but that didn’t matter. Only the feeling mattered. “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” felt personal, but all great Bob Dylan songs feel personal. I certainly didn’t make any connection to my book.
As you read this chapter, I encourage you to reference the full lyrics on Dylan’s website.
After my first few listens, I began to wonder what I was hearing. Some allusions jumped right out:
I was born on the wrong side of the railroad track
Like Ginsberg, Corso, and Kerouac
When I was a young man, the heyday of the Beats was already ancient history, but I read all of Kerouac’s books, and I met Ginsberg once, briefly, at a poetry workshop in Boulder, Colorado, at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. Like many Dylan fans, I greatly admired these writers. They were a cultural touchstone for outsiders, artists, and intellectuals, and at Naropa in the eighties, their works still seemed current and alive. Diane DiPrima was my poetry teacher that week.
I loved the nature imagery in Dylan’s song — the flowers and the sunshine. As for Key West, I imagined the end-of-the-archipelago vibe, a cold drink under a palm tree, pretty sunsets and shadowy streets in the cool twilight. As I’ve said, I didn’t like Florida, but the singer made “Key West” sound magical.
As I listened to “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” that summer, nearly three years ago, I soaked in the strange mood the music conjures, half happy and half mournful. But I wondered, what’s it all about? The singer names a few streets and landmarks of the city. But “innocence and purity” seemed like unlikely descriptors for Key West. “Purity,” in fact, for Bob Dylan, seemed an unlikely concept. In his lyrics over the past couple of decades, the singer has collaged from innumerable sources, and musically, over his career, he has used nearly every style known. Once upon a time, the artist famously retreated from purity and the “crimson flames” tied through his ears. And, as a moral value, purity has a connotation of sexual chasteness. In the real city of Key West, I imagined cruise ships, crowds eating ice cream, drunks on barstools, and a fair amount of lascivious behavior. Not “innocence and purity.”
The opening, about the assassination of McKinley — which I soon discovered was from a song — had nothing to do with southern Florida. And the “pirate radio” signals from Europe, “the land of Oz,” and that odd verse about marrying a prostitute; how were these things related to the city of Key West? After a few listens, I realized that “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” was about a lot more than the pleasures of island life.
So, I listened and wondered some more — like some of you, I assume — what’s it all about? Well, death, obviously. Death is on the wall. Key West is “down at the bottom,” “way down,” and “down under.” That accounts for some of the sadness. And “immortality” — Dylan sings it twice. There’s a powerful phrase near the beginning about joy: “I’m so deep in love I can hardly see.” As I listened, I thought, I know that feeling. Many people know that feeling, at least once in their lives, if they’re lucky. But was it romantic love or something else? In the song, the emotion is evoked by a “radio signal, clear as can be” — music, or something more? The lyric about the Beats shows that the singer is concerned with inspiration. And other lines referred to old-time songs — Dylan’s “lexicon and prayerbook,” as he said in the late nineties. Somehow, it’s also about losing your mind — twice he sings that as well. And some version of heaven — “paradise divine,” “the enchanted land,” and “the land of light.”
Most of the images seemed only vaguely connected to each other — two presidents, one of whom is dying. The singer includes a street called Mystery that doesn’t exist in Key West — although Dylan says it does, and he even gives directions: “off Mallory Square.” That strange marriage to a prostitute. Toxic plants and bleeding hearts. Hindu rituals and gumbo-limbo spirituals. Pretty obscure stuff, I thought, but it's Dylan. And it’s poetry. That’s what you expect. I decided to look into these things, see if I could find the references. You’ve read the results of my research in the last chapter. But that came later, after the recognitions and realizations I’m going to tell you about now.
As I listened, over and over, some lines in the song popped out, words and images that seemed incredibly familiar. I was stuck on that half-verse about innocence:
Key West is the gateway key
To innocence and purity
Key West - Key West is the enchanted land
It seemed connected to lines in the other choruses, about immortality and lost minds and heaven, and to the lyric, “the healing virtues of the wind.” Innocence and purity are virtues. And beyond the words, I had a sense he was singing about something that had happened. The song felt alive.
And the lyric, “Key West is the gateway key.” Why did “the gateway key” ring a bell? I recalled it somehow. Especially the word “key,” repeated so many times. And more: "under the radar, under the gun.” On one hand, I thought it was out of place. What did the phrase have to do with anything in the song? Two clichés together. On the other hand, to me it meant something. Something I couldn’t find in my head, but something intimate and strange. I wondered, does anyone understand this line? It was oblique and impenetrable, but I recognized it.
But the lines that really got me, the ones that blew it open for me, the couplet that still gives me chills, is
Fly around my Pretty Little Miss
I don’t love nobody — gimme a kiss
I assumed these lines also referred to songs — like the opening about McKinley and like so many lyrics in “Murder Most Foul.” When I looked them up, I found two traditional compositions — one made famous by Elizabeth Cotten and the other an Appalachian fiddle tune from the 1920s — and a jazz number recorded by Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, and many others: “ A Kiss to Build a Dream On.”
But my first blast of recognition, my eerie sense of kinship with these lines, was not from old songs. It was from much closer range. On some dreamy listen to “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” — my twentieth or my fortieth, I don’t recall — it hit me. I knew this image because it rephrased, precisely, a pivotal scene from my book. Or, let me call it what it is: a scene from my life. I recognized these lines — these obscure, unlikely lines — because I had lived them.
Dylan always hits personal, I thought, but this is some powerful juju.
Where do they come from? Well, it’s kind of crazy and I understand if you can’t see it immediately. But if you stay with me, I know you will.
These lines arise from a passage in the cult section of The Golden Bird in which I have sex with a woman, another cult member, while we lay in the sand in a grove of palms just off the Florida highway, somewhere north of West Palm Beach, in January of 1981. Except it was astral sex because we were asleep.
Really.
It comes from these paragraphs, specifically:
I fell to sleep, but in the next moment, I was strangely wide awake. Rebecca and I lay together in some other glade, like the one that held our bodies but radiant, with a light stronger than the moon and softer than the sun. It wasn’t Florida.
Our robes disappeared and we made love. Our bodies felt lighter and more acrobatic than the ones we’d left behind in the dirt. I touched her face and lips and it was a physical sensation. We were inside of each other. Rebecca came into me as much as I came into her.
In the morning, our eyes opened at the same moment.
“I had such a dream, Steven. Was it a dream?”
Dylan has recast and re-imagined this passage into his holy language: the lexicon of song. Three songs, to be exact. Our night flight — “Fly around my Pretty Little Miss.” Our celestial, bodiless sex — “I Don’t Love Nobody.” Our cosmic love — “A Kiss to Build a Dream On.”
I knew from the moment it hit me that this was true. I also realized, and still understand, that all by itself most folks won’t believe me. Despite the presence of the same images in my passage and the song couplet, I knew most folks wouldn’t see it. Too strange. Despite the fact that the episode takes place in a limbo world, “in some other glade … with a light stronger than the moon and softer than the sun,” just like the in-between place of Dylan’s song. No way could I explain this to anyone. Even to myself, I said, maybe a weird coincidence. A really weird coincidence. I’m reading into things.
But it’s not all by itself. Not even close.
At that moment, when I realized Bob had taken this crucial image from my manuscript, other lines that had seemed familiar began to make sense. What Dylan, the magpie, the junkyard king, had lifted from my story, and what he had built, began to take shape.
I knew he had used my passage — he had described it perfectly — but I didn’t understand why. I couldn’t see how this reference fit in with the rest of the verse, or the composition as a whole, or exactly why he names those three songs. Something about lovers. Something about the relationship between the physical body and the spirit. Something about the doorway between one world and the next. Below, I will circle back to this triplet from the song’s penultimate verse. Because eventually I began to see the big picture.
Another familiar-sounding couplet that previously had no context now had context:
Key West is under the sun
Under the radar — under the gun
Before I show the passage in my book that gave birth to this rhyme, please consider, does the lyric seem to fit within the song in any vaguely understandable way? Does it not seem like Dylan just needed a rhyme for “sun” and chose “gun?” And “under the radar?” It seems meaningless. In no conceivable way can you say the city of Key West is “under the radar.” The couplet seems like a throwaway. Here it is again, within the full verse:
Key West is under the sun
Under the radar — under the gun
You stay to the left and then you lean to the right
Feel the sunlight on your skin
And the healing virtues of the wind
Key West — Key West is the land of light
But it’s not a throwaway. It comes from the following passage, just a few pages after the incident above, in which my character (me) finds himself in a car with three violent escapees from a mental facility:
“Best not to rile Thomas! He’s kind of touchy. I’m a lot sweeter. Look at me, boy! Ain’t I pretty? And look what I got down here between my legs!”
I hesitated, closing my eyes and praying hard.
She screamed in my ear, “Look between my legs you little fucker! You gay or something? Look!”
I did as I was told and saw something even worse than I’d expected. A small handgun was tucked between her thighs. She began to stroke and caress it with both pudgy hands.
“Oh, I like it! I like it here. Do you want to feel it?”
My face was tight. I could smell my sweat. She lifted the gun and held it to my head.
“Pop! Pop! Pop! Ha, ha, you silly boy! I’m not going to shoot you. Not yet, anyway.”
She tucked the gun back into its special place.
The scene continues for a few more pages. I was “under the gun” for a while. These nightmare characters continue their threats, and I describe how I believed I was about to die. Down on the bottom. I tell how I was afraid but also praying and holding to my faith. Seeing this passage in Dylan’s lyric, I began to understand that faith at the time of death is one of the main themes of the song.
I believe Dylan’s use of “under the sun” and “feel the sunlight on your skin” is also intentional. In Dylanesque, the first might be read as “under the Son,” and the second, “the light of the Son.” From one of his gospel era songs, “Precious Angel”:
Precious angel, under the sun
How was I to know you’d be the one
“Under the radar” is also deliberate. How so? First, because it means exactly what it says: something is hidden. Second, similar to “under the gun,” the poet is simply describing what he read in my pages. The Christ Family was a truly bizarre cult. To my knowledge, there was very little central organization. Group members drifted together and apart on the highways and in small towns at random, and my descriptions of this fact in The Golden Bird are crucial to the tone of the chapter. I joined in Eugene, Oregon and left the group ten months later in West Palm Beach, Florida. I covered this distance on foot, in rides offered (without asking), and in one Greyhound bus ride (from Indiana to Florida). We believed “Lightning Amen” was Jesus, but I never met him. The only regular gathering place was a camp in Arizona — where I never went in my year in the group. Some members must have maintained paperwork and bank accounts. This was necessary for the few vehicles — old school buses, mostly — that were owned by the cult and for disposing of the property of members when they joined, and holding the proceeds. I realize that this arrangement had unlimited potential for exploitation and abuse. Perhaps there was some. Perhaps there was a lot. More about this in a moment.
For me, it was beside the point. From down on the bottom and out on the highway, in the Florida flatlands, the group had no reference points in the world. We were absolutely “under the radar.” We could not be found by the families and friends we had abandoned, and we did not want to be found. We believed we were dead to the world. We believed that we lived in a place on the borderlands of Heaven.
In each of these phrases, “under the gun” and “under the radar,” the lyricist has employed a simple cliché to sum up an entire episode and convey an atmosphere. This is Dylan’s magic. Does it really matter if we know the source? Does it add or subtract from the effect? This is an age-old question for poetry. Decide for yourself as you read on.
Other images from my book now tumbled toward me.
The central agreement in the group, the second most important thing, after a metaphysical belief in a living Christ, was a commitment to a group of virtues we described as “the three Keys to heaven.” Gateway keys. If you wanted to join our crazy little band — as you might imagine, very few did — you would need to agree to live according to these “Keys”: No Killing, No Sex, and No Materialism. In capital letters. Innocence and Purity. These were the values we espoused and practiced. Most humans are not built for such an ascetic code, and as it turned out, neither was I.
Everywhere we traveled, it was all about “the Keys.” Repeating to anyone who would listen: “the Keys.” This strict code created our mad lifestyle: walking barefoot on the highway, high on God, feet torn to shreds and then healed into paws. We repeated these “Keys” like a chorus:
Key West is the place to be
If you’re lookin’ for immortality
Stay on the road — follow the highway sign
Key West is fine and fair
If you lost your mind, you’ll find it there
Key West is on the horizon line
And the salutation we used for every hello and goodbye as we came together and separated out there on the roadsides of America was “in the wind.” The “keys to Heaven” were the virtues we offered every soul we met, “in the wind.”
Feel the sunlight on your skin
And the healing virtues of the wind
Key West — Key West is the land of light
Well, now I was on a tear. I pored over the lyrics of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” looking for other lifts from The Golden Bird. I wondered how it all added up, why exactly Dylan would use my text. Be inspired by my text?
Next, I began to think about the point of view of the speaker. Sometimes, the songwriter seems to be the protagonist. Other times he appears as an echo — a voice in the background of his own lyric — and someone else, his own disembodied spirit from another age, or another character entirely, is singing. In several lines, this other character appears to be the narrator of my memoir. Believe me, I am as astounded by this statement as you are.
The next mirror I found, the next borrowing from The Golden Bird, provides a clear example.
A core image on Rough and Rowdy Ways, and in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” is the inspiration of song. Songs open our eyes and change our lives. This image is present in the first stanza, with its inference that we are listening to Charlie Poole or The New Lost City Ramblers play “White House Blues” on the “wireless radio.” As I mentioned in the last chapter, both Poole and the sixties folk band were cornerstone inspirations for Dylan. (I discuss more about Mike Seeger of the Ramblers in Chapter 16.) This idea of song as a transformative power continues in the second verse:
I’m searchin’ for love and inspiration
On that pirate radio station
It’s comin’ out of Luxembourg and Budapest
Radio signal clear as can be
I’m so deep in love I can hardly see
Down in the flatlands — way down in Key West
The source of the beautiful couplet in the second triplet now jumped out at me from the pages of my book. Before I share it, consider again the narrative voice: who speaks in the first three lines? It might be the songwriter or any music fan listening to a distant broadcast. It might be Dylan, as a boy, late at night, listening to the blues from Shreveport. It might be John Lennon listening to Bo Diddley on Radio Luxembourg. It’s ambiguous. It’s open. It might be you.
And who is playing on that pirate radio? It could be Howlin’ Wolf from that station in Louisiana, or Elvis coming across the transistor in young Lennon’s upstairs bedroom at Mendips. But it could also be Lennon himself, blasting “Instant Karma” out of a fan’s radio in the early seventies, or Dylan’s voice ringing over the fields at a massive outdoor concert in Surrey in 1978. These artists are fans and pirates both.
But what about the voice in the second triplet? Something changes in the second rhyme. Suddenly, no static. No weird hums or buzzes. A perfect tuning. Crystalline:
Radio signal clear as can be
And the listener is no longer “searchin.’” The listener has been changed.
I’m so deep in love I can hardly see
The narrative voice is now more specific (and Dylan’s phrasing on “I can hardly see” is heart-rending). The speaker has had an epiphany, in all senses of the word. And where is it happening? Down in the flatlands. In that edge-of-life land Dylan calls “Key West.”
This couplet comes from a moment at the opening of my chapter when I have an ecstatic vision of Christ. It comes from the passage below, when, in the hour after joining the cult, I am disposing of all of my belongings, including my eyeglasses.
We filled trash bags with the contents of my room. I threw in the Blackbushe t-shirt that had once sopped the blood from my cracked head. I threw in my Guernsey sweater.
Micah said, “Your glasses, too.”
“But I can’t see without them.”
“You can, brother. You have new eyes.”
I tossed them into the sack.
… I was in love and, for the first time since childhood, my love held no ambiguities.
Significantly, the lyricist has created this image of spiritual awakening — with its clever hidden pun in the idiom “so deep in love I can hardly see” — from a passage in which he appears as an inspiration — but an inspiration I am willing to discard. I toss away my Blackbushe t-shirt. I forsake the singer, along with my eyeglasses, for this new, brilliant love. Here’s the verse one more time. In the great leap between the first triplet and the second, we hear the transition from song to holy vision:
I’m searchin’ for love and inspiration
On that pirate radio station
It’s comin’ out of Luxembourg and Budapest
Radio signal clear as can be
I’m so deep in love I can hardly see
Down in the flatlands — way down in Key West
The songwriter, of course, was also willing to discard his old songs in the same time period. He traded “Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man" for “I Believe in You.” This passage from The Golden Bird reflects his own change — from a July evening in the Surrey countryside, to a day later that year when he met the Lord in an Arizona hotel room. In this lyric, Dylan’s 2020 song looks into my mirror, and holds up a mirror.
I know, nuts. Which brings me back to “lost minds.”
I understand that readers skeptical of spiritual matters, specifically Christianity — considering that religion’s long legacy of exploitation and abuse — might find these connections to be troubling. And cults! How insane! And I understand your possible reaction to this scene from my book: the boy was mentally ill, and he is being recruited to an extremist belief. Taking away his glasses is just a form of control. I want you to know, my fellow Dylan cultist, that I get this reaction, and I have no issue with it. It is a reasonable interpretation and a rational analysis. But that rationality is beside the point, and a distraction. You must let it go. Because here I remind you again, my brothers and sisters in Bob, that a repeating triplet of the chorus — in fact, the only triplet that repeats in the song — goes like this:
Key West is fine and fair
If you lost your mind you’ll find it there
Key West is on the horizon line
So please remember, the topic at hand is not rationality. It is faith and inspiration. The point is: I was so deep in love I could hardly see. In Chapter 15 I discuss more about this madness. I write more about cults and the activities of Bob Dylan during the spring of 1980. The artist was standing in front of thousands, singing not a single number from a catalog that had changed the nature of popular song. Instead, he was preaching that the Russians and the Chinese were about to go at it on the plains of Armageddon.
I’ll give you crazy.
He was also singing some of the most beautiful and powerful music of his career. He didn’t care what the money men at his record label said. He was so deep in love, he could hardly see.
As I mentioned, the half-stanza with “lost your mind” is the only repeating triplet in the song. It occurs in the third verse, and also composes the song’s final lines. I think it’s fair to assume, in these facts, the poet’s emphasis.
Faith often appears “crazy” to the world. After I realized that Dylan is working with this idea in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” and after finding all the connections I’ve outlined above, I finally remembered to search my memoir for that phrase: “if you lost your mind.” Here’s where any last wisp of doubt that the artist used my book as an inspiration for “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” evaporated. Because I found the idiom in two places, bookending my cult experience. I realized that nearly all of the artist’s borrowings are from passages in this forty-page section, called “Lightning Amen,” out of a book that is 201 pages. These “lost mind” quotes frame the other images Dylan used, just as they frame his song.
The phrase first appears in my book on the third page of the section, just before my conversion:
I wasn’t even listening to Dylan anymore, not his new stuff, anyway. He’d followed Slow Train Coming with another Christian album, called Saved. … I’d been influenced by my college buddies. They thought Dylan had lost his mind, trading creative thoughts for the dictates and dogma of a narrow creed. My friends disparaged these records as uncool and impossible to relate to. Logically, I also couldn’t see how the artist’s focus on Jesus, on one single religion, could lead to any higher awareness.
Keep in mind that in the 201 pages of my story, Dylan is mentioned infrequently. Here, just as he does a few pages later with the “so deep in love” line, he borrows from a passage in which I refer to his inspiration, and significantly, in this instance, the popular perception of the time: that the singer had gone nuts and become uncool. A few pages later I will lose my mind to Christ as well. And become uncool. And there’s more. In Chapter 15, I will discuss how the musician was having some problems from the stage with people like “my college buddies.” He even uses the same phrase, in the declarative, “You think I’ve lost my mind!” in one of his gospel raps. Much of Rough and Rowdy Ways concerns the relationship between Dylan and his audience. More about this also in later chapters.
The expression appears for a second time in the opening pages of the next section of the memoir, called “Mud Bay.” I have left the cult. I am back in Oregon, where it all started:
I returned to Eugene. My old college friends looked at me with pity. They thought I’d lost my mind, and I couldn’t blame them. All of them took pride in counter-cultural credentials, but I had pushed the limits. I was a bad freak among good freaks.
Between these two “lost minds,” The Golden Bird tells a story of faith, ecstasy, threats of death, human need, and human loss. It tells of a very brief period of my life when I travelled — despite the rational belief of family and friends that I had become unhinged — to an enchanted land.
I knew with certainty that Dylan had used my memoir for “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” — and honestly, it made me feel crazy again — but I still wondered about the big picture. I wondered if I could discern more about his purposes. I began to investigate the cultural allusions you’ve read about in the last chapter. A few of them come into direct play regarding Dylan’s borrowings from my book, and I discuss them below. All are related thematically, and upcoming chapters will tell more about what I’ve found.
I still wanted to understand the song’s penultimate verse, the “Fly around my Pretty Little Miss” stanza. I knew these mysterious lines, containing a reprise of the second stanza’s “pirate radio” phrase, placed near the end of the song, must be significant. I believed that the three images in the second triplet were transfigured from my astral sex scene into the titles of folk and popular songs, but why? And I thought, if the second triplet is taken from my book, perhaps the first triplet is connected as well. I wondered, what is Dylan getting at in the verse as a whole?
I play both sides against the middle
Pickin’ up that pirate radio signal
I heard the news — I heard your last request
Fly around my Pretty Little Miss
I don’t love nobody — gimme a kiss
Down at the bottom — way down in Key West
I soon found the passages in The Golden Bird that inspired the first half of the stanza, and it made perfect sense as the lead-in to the second. And of course, those paragraphs come just a few pages earlier in my text.
As I’ve described, the first chapters of the relevant section cover my initial ecstatic vision of Christ, and my early days walking the highways and roadsides of the Pacific Northwest, preaching the “Keys.” The middle chapters show my time holed up in a small Indiana farmhouse with a “brother” and a “sister” in the group. At this time I begin to have second thoughts about my path. I don’t quite trust my companions, and I want to be back out “in the wind.” Eventually, I board a bus to Florida, where I begin preaching again, to anyone who will listen. It’s there I meet the woman in the passage I quoted earlier. My astral sex partner.
The opening triplet of the “I Don’t Love Nobody” verse is telescoped (see the work of Scott Warmuth for his insightful exposition of this term, a Dylanism from Chronicles that the singer borrowed from Hemingway) from a couple of episodes in the Indiana pages, during my period of doubt. Here’s the first:
Struggle as I might, I can’t recall how I hooked up with Jack and Rose, but I remember precisely when I heard the news on the radio. It was December 9, 1980. We were driving back to the hideout, in a van with a faulty heater, from some errand in Indianapolis. We’d been chugging along for ages, past strip malls and cold, dead cornstalks and the stench of pigpens, through the flat fields that stretch forever in rural Indiana.
John Lennon had been shot dead by a crazy man, outside his apartment in New York City.
Jack said, “Ha, it’s part of the plan — another false idol gone.”
Rose said, “Amen.”
I was shocked — by the news and their reaction. I had loved and admired John. John believed in love.
Like millions of others that bitter December, and like Bob Dylan, fresh off the latest leg of his gospel tour, “I heard the news.” Late that night, I snuck out to the van, ran it for heat, clicked on the radio again, and picked up some signals: the “last requests” of a grieving nation. The songs of a fallen pirate:
That evening, I crept out of the house, started the van, and tuned in to memorial shows on FM radio. The song “#9 Dream” reminded me of childhood. I thought of the warm sun in my St. Paul backyard and my sister’s arms surrounding me. That time didn’t seem real. Was it just a dream? I also remembered, across a great distance, Marie, and a summer morning in Battersea. In that perfect moment, John’s voice on the radio had spoken to me in “Across the Universe.” I thought I had found a love that could never die.
Now the DJ played the song “God.” This one confused me. The lyrics equated the idea of God with personal pain. Lennon lists all the icons and concepts he’s discarded: magic, Elvis, Jesus, Zimmerman, and even The Beatles. He just believes in himself and Yoko. I considered how John Lennon and Bob Dylan had inspired me to think outside the confines of my own upbringing. They had led me to Blackbushe, to Marie, and to a mind-altering shock of ecstasy. They had led me to a revolution of my soul.
When I joined the Christ Family, I had abandoned their music with everything else. Now, for the first time in months I listened again, and Lennon sang that even God was a just a box. He was a box the size of your own despair. Here in the cornfields of Indiana, on a bitter December evening, I could nearly see that. I could nearly imagine alternatives to this life I had chosen. I could nearly imagine other possibilities of what might be true.
Once again, Dylan creates his poetry from a passage in which he appears. Once again, I remind you that the singer appears infrequently in my story. And this time, my paragraphs mostly feature his buddy, his rival, John Lennon. I am listening to the ex-Beatle and having an argument in my head. I sit, a crazy Jesus freak, in a cold van in Indiana, in my white robe, and:
I play both sides against the middle
I play my invisible belief in Jesus against the brilliant inspiration of Lennon and his death. I consider dreams, and I wonder what is real.
Play it for me, Wolfman: “Across the Universe.”
Play it for me, Wolfman: “God.”
I consider prophets, true and false. I consider if I may have blundered in joining this cult. A concept by which we measure our pain.
I play both sides against the middle
God on one side of the dial. “God” on the other. Where is the advantage?
But of course, Dylan is singing this. Dylan, who in December of 1980, was just off the road after the latest leg of his gospel tour, during which he had begun re-introducing his older, secular material into the set. He heard the news.
So how does this lead to the second half of the stanza, to three old songs, and, if I am to be believed, to a couple of Jesus freaks having astral sex by the side of a highway in Florida? Here’s what happens next in The Golden Bird:
But John was dead. I had surrendered the past months ago. I had walked away from my family, and I had tossed my Guernsey, my glasses, and the silver cross in a plastic sack. All that remained was a luminous golden bird pulsing within my chest. Lightning Amen was alive, and the reincarnation of Jesus on Earth. Surely there was no box big enough to hold him.
Play it for me: “#9 Dream.”
I believe, yes I believe. More I cannot say. What more can I say?
And then:
Each night after dinner, we lay smoking and staring into the dark. I began to have lucid dreams. I knew I was dreaming and I could fly. I didn’t actually go anywhere or do anything. I just practiced take-offs and landings. I began to look forward to sleep. Maybe I was undergoing some kind of initiation, a new stage of development. By day, I was a monk in a chill cell, a prisoner of God. In the dark, I was again finding freedom.
A few weeks later I am in down in the flatlands of Florida. Soon I discover a love different than my love of Christ. A love that is not so “innocent and pure,” but a love that is not completely carnal either. It exists between Heaven and Earth:
Our bodies felt lighter and more acrobatic than the ones we’d left behind in the dirt. I touched her face and lips and it was a physical sensation. We were inside of each other. Rebecca came into me as much as I came into her.
In the morning, our eyes opened at the same moment.
“I had such a dream, Steven. Was it a dream?”
Let’s think about those songs now, in the triplet that follows, the triplet that first blew my mind:
Fly around my Pretty Little Miss
I don’t love nobody — gimme a kiss
Down at the bottom — way down in Key West
“Fly Around my Pretty Little Miss” tells about lovers circling each other between Heaven and Earth. I Don’t Love Nobody” is a minstrel song, racist in its origin, repossessed and redeemed by Elizabeth Cotten, a Black woman of great Soul. She transfigures something ugly into something beautiful and holy. The song is a symbol of redemption. And through its double negative, we can hear the song’s rejection of romance as a statement of faith, and the root directive of the Master: Love everybody. The body fails. The body dies. Love everybody.
The body can be killed. On Earth, a marriage lasts “til death do us part.” But the Spirit lives on. Recall William McKinley, dying in Ida’s arms, singing “Nearer My God to Thee.” John Lennon, bleeding out in Yoko’s arms. L. Frank Baum, whispering to Maud: “Now we can cross the shifting sands.” Remember, too, that on Rough and Rowdy Ways, “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” and “Murder Most Foul” compose a concluding circle, and the latter song takes place in the same twilight of death. JFK bleeding out in Jackie’s arms.
And here’s a few lines from “A Kiss to Build a Dream On”:
Give me a kiss before you leave me
And my imagination will feed my hungry heart
Leave me one thing before we part
A kiss to build a dream on
In my story, my dance on the threshold with Rebecca is nearly the last I see of her. A few pages later I am staring into the barrel of a gun in the dust and heat of the Florida flatlands.
I don’t love nobody. I will love you forever. Leave me one thing before we part. Gimme a kiss. A kiss to build a dream on.
McKinley’s “last request”:
Play it for me: “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”
Or if, on joyful wing cleaving the sky
Sun, moon and stars forgot, upward I fly
Still all my song shall be
Nearer, my God, to Thee
Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee
“Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” is a story about inspiration and the limits of the physical body.
“Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” is a story about the meeting place of the material world and the spirit world. It’s a gospel song, and presents to us, if we can hear it, John Lennon’s “God” — a disavowal of everything except his basic human love of Yoko — as another kind of gospel. Lennon was anti-religion, but in the songs, his Spirit lives on. For any child of the late 20th Century, they are part of the “prayerbook and lexicon.”
The songs tell the story. The only advantage is found in the songs.
So that’s the gist of it. That’s the heart of my tale. But I think Dylan took more from The Golden Bird too, including this entire triplet:
I play the gumbo-limbo spirituals
I know all the Hindu rituals
People tell me that I’m truly blessed
The first line is a joke. The gumbo-limbo tree is a Florida native, also called the “tourist tree” because the peeling red bark evokes the image of a sunburned visitor. If you are familiar with any of Dylan’s stage jokes over the past thirty years, you know he loves a pun. And, as I mentioned earlier, the word sun might often be read in Bob’s verse as “Son,” meaning Jesus. Thus, a “gumbo-limbo spiritual” evokes the image of someone who is “Son-burned.” I discussed this theme in Dylan’s late-period music, in Chapter 4, about Tempest — when you see God, and then you don’t. We former zealots, although we might still have faith, we feel some spiritual loss at times. We feel “Son-burned.”
The second line gets a whole chapter, later in this book.
And the third line comes from very near the passage quoted above, when I hear about Lennon’s death:
Jack pushed a cassette into the player, a recording made at the Christ Family camp in Arizona. I usually found pleasure in these songs, but now I wished the brother had left the radio on so that I could hear more about Lennon. Instead, the clear voices of the sisters’ choir filled the frigid air. I couldn’t find the words very comforting: “Everything’s a blessing, So count your blessings.”
The sad irony that I am asked to count my blessings, despite my hero’s death, is the same sad irony contained in gumbo-limbo spirituals. A believer doesn’t stop believing in the face of tragedy. He still gives thanks.
Here, I’ve tried to give an overview of my puzzlement and astonishment that my images appear in a song by the greatest songwriter of the age. I believe I’ve proved that there are too many connections to put it down to coincidence. I’ve outlined some of Dylan’s intentions as I imagine them. And “imagine” is important. I still find “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” deeply mysterious. I know the lyricist used my passages, but beyond that, like any listener, I can only enter the dream-space of the song. The artist has transformed my story into something completely different, into a performed musical poem of exquisite beauty.
In the following chapters, I travel more alleys and avenues of Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways. In Chapter 15, I sail deeper yet into the largest mirror between his text and mine: our shared experience of millennialist Christianity. We also travel from “Mystery Street” in Key West, a lane that exists only in the singer’s soul, to the Sacred Heart Institute, in Duluth, Minnesota, next to St. Mary’s hospital, where Bob was born eighty-one years ago. Wherever he rambles, wherever he roams, he’s not that far from the “convent home.” Also in Minnesota, our mutual home state, I examine the role of Midwestern artists in Dylan’s work, and I show how Dylan’s use of The Golden Bird fits the pattern. Back down south, off the coast of Key West, we sail a “Caribbean Wind” and explore that song’s links to the new work. In Chapter 20, I meditate on Dylan’s “Hindu rituals” and decrypt the phrase using The Golden Bird as a cipher. I look at the prophets of Rough and Rowdy Ways, true and false. I also reenter the limbo world of the Shadow Kingdom and reveal a mystical portent the artist has concealed there — once again in plain sight.
First, let’s strap our belts, button our coats, and visit Bob where he lives: on the stage.