"Heartbeat": Bob Dylan's Instagram Posts Part 8

The Hidden Story

Usually, when Bob Dylan does an interview, it’s big news. It’s in The New York Times, or Rolling Stone, or The Wall Street Journal, or, because he’s delightfully weird, AARP.

But right now, right here, I’m having a conversation with Bob Dylan about art and music, inspiration and spirit. It’s real and it’s as deep as anything the man has ever done without a microphone or a paintbrush in hand. But it’s undercover. It’s down under.

If you subscribe to this newsletter, this book I’m writing, “I Don’t Love Nobody”: Hidden Stories from Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, and you’ve been reading along for a while, you are in luck. Not because of me, obviously. I can’t tell you how much effort it takes to turn my clumsy prose into something halfway readable. No, you are lucky because the Master is present. Bob Dylan is at this party, right here in the kitchen. He’s over in the corner, where the light is dim, under the big hat, tapping his boots and smiling.

So let me lean across the table and speak with him a moment, more directly.

Hi Bob. I’m glad you’re here. You’re freakin’ me out. It’s a great honor. Let me know if you need a drink, or if you’d like some nuts. Okay, talk more later.

Dear Readers,

I believe you know the Story So Far. If not, if you have somehow wandered into this gathering off the (Mystery) street, please go back to the beginning and catch up.

Yesterday, after a month away, Dylan posted on Instagram. His clip shows Lorrie Collins playing a song called “Heartbeat” on Ranch Party, a 1958 syndicated TV series. Collins and her brother Larry were mainstays on the program and an earlier version called Town Hall Party, performing as The Collins Kids.

In this segment, Lorrie strums her guitar and sings while sitting on a bench under an old tree, next to a barn and a water barrel. She’s wearing a western dress with sparkly fringes. An unseen backing band provides a chugging rockabilly rhythm, and Collins sings the quick refrain, “hear my heartbeat,” with an emphasis on the second syllable of the key word. Near the end, Lorrie stands, still strumming, and she finishes the performance by blowing us a kiss. It’s powerful and charming.

As a child of the 60s, I wasn’t familiar with Collins, so I had to Google. I discovered that Town Hall Party featured primarily Country music, but early rockers like Eddie Cochran and Carl Perkins also performed. A quote on its Wikipedia page from a writer named Johnny Bond says:

Traditional country entertainers, singing cowboys, and rock singers never shared the spotlight in a more harmonious manner than on the Town Hall Party and syndicated Ranch Party shows.

You can see why Dylan would be a fan, as a teenager and now.

“Heartbeat” isn’t the only song Collins played on that episode of Ranch Party. Here’s another, and we can tell it’s from the same program because she’s wearing the same dress, under the same tree:

For my regular readers, I’m not sure how much more I need to say. I think you get it.

But again, in case there’s anyone here who was just wandering by and was drawn in by the rockabilly rhythms, I’ll review a couple things. In my last post, I showed how Dylan’s 2024 tweet about Nick Cave’s song “Joy” mirrored ideas from my chapter called “The Bleedin’ Heart Disease: Finding Mercy with Brando, Down in the Boondocks of Key West.”

Now, four days later, Dylan gives us “Heartbeat,” and by extension, as I discovered with the teeniest tiniest bit of detective work, “Mercy.”

He’s nodding his head, over there in the corner.

For the past two and a half months, since Dylan’s Instagram post on January 29, he’s been chatting with me here about art and music, inspiration and spirit. He’s been speaking mostly in the language he knows so well: popular song, but also with film, television, and American history. He’s been speaking in allusion, with rockabilly, folk music, and rock and roll. As we converse, Dylan laughs; he enjoys a pun and he’s used a bunch of them. He is a man of good humor.

The conversation really began five years ago, when Dylan transfigured prose from my memoir, The Golden Bird, into the lyrics of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” That mirroring of inspiration—he lifting the teenage me out of my Minnesota basement into a world of magic and beauty, and me, somehow, mind-bogglingly, inspiring the elder artist—is the subject of this recent dialogue. In my chapters, I discuss his use of my imagery and how it relates to other ideas on Rough and Rowdy Ways, and Dylan replies with Marilyn Monroe and Bette Davis, with Eddie Van Halen and The Twilight Zone.

What have we been talking about? Mostly about the spiritual necessity of song. We’ve been discussing those mirrors of inspiration and how a journey of self-creation starts as a teenager, with mystery and faith in some kind of Holy Grail. That’s why so many of these Instagram clips are from Dylan’s teenage years, in the 50s. In the beginning, with The Golden Bird and “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” we spoke about artists we’ve admired, like John Lennon and Mike Seeger, about going crazy for Christ, and about the loss of love, both earthly and spiritual, and the long highway back to God. More recently, we’ve discussed how great songs may hold cosmic power and how in certain sacred moments, conjured by these songs, the veil between this world and the next becomes transparent. About how, down in “Key West,” there is no veil.

Only a few people are listening to this conversation. I’m not sure why. As I said, usually a dialogue with Bob Dylan is big news. But I’m glad you’re here.

And we’re in luck, because this has never happened before. Bob Dylan has never used so much of a person’s true story for a song, much less carried on an artistic conversation with that person afterward. I’m not talking about snippets of prose from Henry Rollins or some Civil War era poet, I’m talking about the heart of my memoir, the tale of my young adulthood in the 1980s.

I guess I’m tooting my own horn now. But someone has to, because this is a big deal. It deserves an audience, not because of me, although I have a part, but because … Bob Dylan. The themes we have been discussing are his themes, and the songs of Rough and Rowdy Ways have been the focus of his last five years of performance.

I am blessed and blown away by Dylan’s use of The Golden Bird, by his song, and by this conversation, and if I never take anything else away from this experience, I will live my life and eventually die with a satisfied mind.

But I’d still like The Golden Bird to be read. I’d even like to get paid for my work. I suspect that part of what Dylan is doing in this dialogue is trying to help me, without reaching out on the surface. A couple years ago, I wrote him a letter asking for a blurb for The Golden Bird. This feels like his way of doing that. Maybe he thinks a more overt word might make my phone start ringing and wreck my life. I don’t know. Maybe he just likes this hidden conversation about real things. Mysterious things.

But I’d still like to sell The Golden Bird. My memoir is a compelling narrative that could be enjoyed by anyone who likes a good story about sex, magic, cults, and rock and roll in the late 20th Century. A few of you out there have read it and offered kind words.

A Nobel Laureate and the finest songwriter of the age seemed to like it. In fact, he used some of its episodes to create one of his most beautiful songs.

Do you think a publisher might be interested in that?

But frankly, I’m clueless. I’m not much good at selling things. Anyone out there have any ideas?

Anyone? How about you with the shades, over there in the corner?