From Blackbushe to "Key West"

A journey by Slow Train

Today is the 46th anniversary of Dylan’s fabled show in the Surrey countryside, on an vast expanse of concrete and withered grass called the Blackbushe Aerodrome. I came by train from Waterloo, as did the artist. The promoter billed it as a “picnic” and that sounds lovely, but really it was three hundred thousand humans jammed together in the dust and heat, with not much to drink or eat. It was fabulous. No phones, no screens of any kind, just music blasting over the fields and you and your fellow late-seventies Dylan-o-philes, sprawled on the dirt, listening. I came to see the Man for the first time but at my half-mile from the stage I could only see bodies and banners and balloons and the visions in my head. I could only see the songs.

I was a boy of eighteen, three days away from my home state of Minnesota and my home city of St. Paul, where one generation earlier, in the early winter of 1961-1962, after sleeping in a back room at the Purple Onion Pizza Parlour up on Snelling, the “original vagabond” famously stood by the freeway and hitched east. He had learned as much as he could in the hinterlands, in the provinces, down in the boondocks. Now he would seek his destiny. I remained in St. Paul, growing up, listening to the songs, dreaming of life, dreaming myself “down the highway, down the tracks, down the road to ecstasy.”

I didn’t know it, but on July 15, 1978, as I lounged on the tarmac of Blackbushe, I tottered dangerously on the precipice of these dreams. I walked blindly toward the ancient barrow of my ancestry, in the land my parents had abandoned for the prosperity of the New World. At Blackbushe I walked like a dreamer toward the deep and sacred well of fate. I walked toward the pagan gods and the Holy Ghost, all of whom required that my blood be spilled in the soil of England. I walked toward my life while my Minnesota brother prayed in song, in waves of air over Blackbushe.

Many years after that day in the Surrey countryside, many years after all the events that followed, after the spells of the island sisters had been broken and after Jesus came back and then left me behind, after the ritualistic chanting of the poets, after the firestorm, after the katabatic wind blew the tree onto the unfaithful lovers, after I forsook a life of magic for the love of a true woman, I wrote it all down. I called it The Golden Bird and I sent it to Bob Dylan because he had inspired me to climb out of the box of my birth family and seek my destiny.

To my great and everlasting amazement, Bob Dylan read the book I wrote. I know he did, because several years later I heard a part of my story in a song he wrote, called “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” Not the part about Blackbushe and the lovely, loving, troubled witches, but the part about Jesus and the highway and a pretty little miss, flying away. But that part couldn’t have happened, I couldn’t have lived that story, if I hadn’t attended “A Picnic at Blackbushe,” on July 15, 1978. Because Blackbushe delivered my life.

So I’m here to tell you that the very last song released by Bob Dylan, “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” began 46 years ago today, in the heat and the dust of the Blackbushe Aerodrome.

More of the story here.But the only way to understand the whole thing, the entire tale of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” is to read the book Bob Dylan read: The Golden Bird. Currently only available underground.