Laughing with Bob Dylan: the Complete Hidden Story of his Instagram Posts

A Tale of Puns, Wordplay, and Sacred Song

Minstrel singer Lew Sully, the author of “I Don’t Love Nobody.”

Author’s Note: If you’re new here, welcome. You will pick up the gist of my tale just through this article. But if you want the whole story, please go back to the beginning. In this essay, I also refer often to my chapter, “Hindu Rituals and Gumbo Limbo Spirituals.” As you will see, Bob says you should check it out.

Dylan hasn’t posted on Instagram since June 9. No telling for sure if he’s done with this project, but it’s beginning to appear likely. Today I’d like to offer a summary. My previous twelve posts about his clips appeared in real time and I was always playing catch up. My intention here is to show the flow of our dialogue, put the essentials all together in one essay, and to clarify aspects of his visual and musical messaging that I didn’t fully grasp at the time. Only when Bob’s posts began to accumulate did I truly believe that I was conversing with the Master, and only then did I clearly understand the language he was speaking.

I know that some folks who are new here, or who have dismissed this story from the start, will skim that first paragraph and start guffawing. All I can say is settle down and start reading. In this essay, I intend to stand aside as much as I can, and let Mr. Dylan speak. Remember when he first cast his dancing spell your way? And you promised to go under it? Read this one all the way to the end and Bob may once again have you laughin’, spinnin’, swingin’ madly across the sun.

These Instagram articles will be included in the print edition of my book, currently available in draft here on Substack: “I Don’t Love Nobody”: Hidden Stories from Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways. I’m revising the final chapters and will publish them over the next few months. I’d originally intended to issue a hard copy this year, but Dylan’s creative Instagram shenanigans pushed my schedule way back. Now I’m aiming for early 2026. The paper edition will be offered for sale online in tandem with a reprint of the book that started this adventure, my 2011 memoir, The Golden Bird—a “cult” classic, currently available through absolutely no major outlets. Only available underground (just ask).

A quick review: beginning on Dylan’s birthday in 2024, I started posting “I Don’t Love Nobody” on this platform, and between that date and late January, 2025, I published six chapters. Chapter One, “The Underground Stories of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” holds the heart of my story: how Dylan transfigured certain intimate and uncanny passages of my memoir into his lyrics. I describe how the episodes Dylan used are from a period of my young life when I wandered the highways of America with a band of ascetic and messianic Christians.

Chapter Six, published on January 23, is concerned only with these mysterious lines:

I play the gumbo limbo spirituals

I know all the Hindu rituals

That essay outlines a connection between the second phrase and a bizarre episode that took place long after my cult escapades, when I was living a very different kind of life, in Boulder, Colorado, among the poets, Buddhists, and sensualists. I also show how the meaning of the first line is found in a pun. (Son-burned spirituals! See my chapter for the full story.)

On January 29, six days after I had published the chapter, Dylan began releasing an unprecedented series of Instagram posts. As I listened to the first set, and the ones he put out in quick succession over the following days, I was amazed to notice parallels to the text of “I Don’t Love Nobody.” I eventually discovered that in a continuation of his art project from 2020, the mirroring of my memoir into lyric, Dylan was reflecting my analysis of that mirroring back to me, in an allusive language of musical performance and film clips. Most astonishingly, his posts explicitly confirmed my ideas about Hindu rituals and gumbo limbo spirituals, and they did so with a great sense of humor.

Here we go. I hope you enjoy the ride. Please keep in mind, Bob is calling the shots here, I’m just the foil.

First up, Eddie Van Halen and Les Paul, chatting on stage, followed by Van Halen performing “Cathedral.”

This one introduces the big picture. By beginning with Les Paul, Dylan shows us that he’s talking about the live performance of music, his own history, and Rough and Rowdy Ways. I didn’t see it at the time, but this post also shows he is talking to me.

After a pandemic delay, the tour for Dylan’s new album finally opened in the fall of 2021 in Paul’s birthplace, Milwaukee. Between songs, Bob dedicated the show to Paul, a musical revolutionary and a man who invented many things, including one of the tools we immediately associate with early period Dylan: the harmonica neck brace.

Why do I think Dylan is talking to me? Because when Van Halen begins to shred, on “Cathedral,” everyone in the audience is in the church of music.

As you’ve read, The Golden Bird begins at an event that saved my soul: a Bob Dylan concert in 1978. The central theme of “I Don’t Love Nobody” is the spiritual power of music, as Dylan alludes to it, and demonstrates it, on Rough and Rowdy Ways.

Next, we have Ricky Nelson and his band, performing “I Believe What You Say” on the TV show Ozzie and Harriet, from 1958.

In my chapter called “Prophets, True and False,” I show how Dylan alludes to Nelson twice in the lyrics of Rough and Rowdy Ways. I show how he uses Nelson as a kind of twin, or double. I discuss how he does something similar in Chronicles, Volume 1. More recently, on the stage of the Outlaw Music Festival, Dylan played Nelson’s meta classic, “Garden Party.”

In this post, right off the bat, Bob Dylan, wearing his Ricky Nelson mask, offers me a blurb for the cover of “I Don’t Love Nobody”:

“I Believe What You Say”

But maybe you don’t? That’s okay. At this point, I was also asking myself why Dylan was suddenly putting up “random” clips on Instagram. Except I knew better. Dylan doesn’t do random. In reality, Bob is arranging his thoughts in a pattern, a pattern of wordplay and puns.

The third post from January 29 is a clip of Marilyn Monroe in Fritz Lang’s film Clash by Night. Here, Bob Dylan is making a joke, the first of many. One that is still cracking me up.

This film segment shows a strong and sassy Marilyn playfully arguing with her boyfriend after her shift in the factory. First, she tells him how a friend came to work with a black eye from her lover, and then she and her beau have a mock fight. As you will remember, in “Hindu Rituals and Gumbo Limbo Spirituals,” I speculate on a connection between the first phrase and an episode in my memoir depicting a violent storm in the Colorado mountains and a magical chant of poetry and song: a “Hindu Ritual.” The scene begins with an argument I had with my girlfriend, in which, after an infidelity, I smacked her. I know, terrible. I don’t think I gave her a black eye, but it wasn't cool… although she kinda deserved it. Anyway, the episode culminates with a life-changing accident and a much bigger smack: a clash by night. See my chapter for all the details, or better yet, read The Golden Bird.

How did I make the connection? How could I miss it? I’ve been writing about Rough and Rowdy Ways for five years now. When the puns began to mount, I simply joined the dots. Always during this project, I have held in my mind Dylan’s guidance issued in his 2020 New York Times interview about the images in “I Contain Multitudes”:

The names themselves are not solitary. It’s the combination of them that adds up to something more than their singular parts. To go too much into detail is irrelevant. The song is like a painting, you can’t see it all at once if you’re standing too close. The individual pieces are just part of a whole.

Here’s a good one: only recently, I realized that I had conjured the very scheme of this dialogue—me reasoning and intuiting the connections between the text of The Golden Bird and his song, and Dylan responding with wit and wordplay—in the opening paragraphs of “Hindu Rituals and Gumbo Limbo Spirituals.” My analysis of the second phrase begins with a review of Dylan’s delight in jokes. With his Instagram posts, Dylan is responding in the language I had described. I’ve said it before and I will say it again: Rough and Rowdy Ways is all about the mirrors.

I’m glad you’re here. All of this is still underground. Once upon a time, underground art was the coolest art, and Bob Dylan knows that well. It was usually made by freaks.

Bob plays with language, but his big ideas are dead serious. In my writing about “gumbo limbo spirituals,” I offered evidence that the phrase refers to songs in Dylan’s later catalog that convey a sense of separation from God, and a yearning for reconnection. In that discussion, I focused particularly on a track from Time Out of Mind that Dylan has played live 232 times: “Can’t Wait.”

The fourth post on January 29 was a film segment featuring Django Reinhardt on guitar, playing a number called "“J’Attendrai,” which translates in English to “I will wait.”

Dylan’s clip of Reinhardt is a response in wordplay, a statement that waiting, with guitar in hand, is part of the deal, until he is one day called to meet his King.

I published my initial essay on the Instagram posts on January 31. Dylan put up three more clips several hours later that same day. On February 2 and 3, he posted four more. (I’m not counting a couple of standard promo ads for the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour.)

First, up, we see flat-picking virtuoso Tony Rice playing Norman Blake’s “Church Street Blues.” The song’s narrator is away from home with a bad case of the “thin dime, hard times, hell on Church Street Blues.” Some “good time Charlie” is “driving me insane.” His answer? He sits in his rocking chair and picks.

Here, Dylan again highlights the restorative power of song and adds a specific reference to “church.” With Blake’s line about going crazy, he also echoes the only repeating triplet in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”:

Key West is fine and fair

If you lost your mind, you’ll find it there

Key West is on the horizon line

In Chapter One, I showed how the phrase “lost your mind” contains one of the clearest links to The Golden Bird, as it appears both at the beginning and the end of my “cult” section, just as it appears at the beginning and end of the song.

Next we see a minute of John Ford’s 1956 western, The Searchers. It features Ken Curtis attempting to woo Vera Miles away from her missing fiancee with a rendition of the children’s folk song, “Skip to My Lou,” a dance tune about swapping partners.

The puns continue. Dylan asks us to be “searchers,” just as he asked us at the release of “Murder Most Foul” to “stay observant.” He also offers a folk song, a genre which is, according to Dylan’s words in Chronicles and elsewhere, a gateway into hidden and mystical worlds. Here, this children’s tune about finding a new partner (“better than you!”) is an another allusion to the “Hindu Rituals” scene in The Golden Bird (that’s #2), an episode that begins with a betrayal and swapped partners.

Next up, we have The Band, minus Robbie Robertson, playing a Johnny Otis song, “Willie and the Hand Jive,” featuring the singing of Levon Helm and Garth Hudson on organ.

This one takes us down “Mystery Street”—the long avenue of faith and destiny that I discuss in Chapter One. Dylan walks it often in these Instagram posts, and it always begins in his teenage years. This performance is from 1984, but Johnny Otis wrote “Willie and the Hand Jive” in 1958, the same year Ricky Nelson played “I Believe What You Say” on the Ozzie and Harriet show. Two years after The Searchers probably played in one of the Hibbing theaters owned by Dylan’s uncle.

This clip makes us think of Dylan’s companions in the Band, and particularly of Garth Hudson, who had died just ten days earlier and whom Dylan had praised as the group’s “driving force.” In my article on this post, I mentioned that Hudson was also the recorder and preserver of the music that became known as The Basement Tapes, that most mystic set of Americana. For many years, most of the songs were only available underground, until they were all released in 2014 as part of the Bootleg Series, in a project assisted by Hudson. Mystery Street is a time machine; here, we travel from 1958 to the mid-60s to the mid-80s, and all the way to “Key West,” where Garth Hudson climbed the spiral staircase after inspiring us for 87 years.

Next we get Mae West and Cary Grant in a film from 1933, She Done Him Wrong. At this point, I doubt I need to explain much about this one. Like I said, it’s flat-out bad to hit a woman and I’ve never done it since (but she kinda deserved it). Another movie title, another pun on the “Hindu Rituals” scene from The Golden Bird. That’s # 3. Here, Dylan emphasizes his intent with the use of a movie in which Mae West utters a delightful flow of quips and double-entendres.

On February 3, Dylan posted the album cover from John Trudell’s album, Bone Days, and we hear one of the tracks, called “Spectator.” A person who watches. Someone who stays observant. In my post on this clip, I quoted Dylan on Trudell from The Philosophy of Modern Song, in which he talks about the “ancient spirit” and “ancient wisdom” in Trudell’s music. But the main reflection here is in the song’s opening lines:

In the way angels kiss

We have this time around

As you will remember from Chapter One, Dylan transfigures an episode late in my “cult’ section, in which angels kiss, into this lovely lyric, containing three song allusions, in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”:

Fly around my Pretty Little Miss

I don’t love nobody - gimme a kiss

Down at the bottom - way down in Key West

Dylan’s next post, the tenth overall, drives home the kind of language he is speaking. In case I was still kinda slow. Like I was. We see a segment from an episode of The Twilight Zone called To Serve Man. An alien species, the Kanamits, has arrived on Earth with avowedly beneficent intentions, and indeed, straight away, they begin to help. An alien representative addresses the United Nations and leaves behind a book called To Serve Man. A character named Patty sets out to translate it while her boss, Chambers, accepts that the Kanamits are an altruistic power. The scene Dylan posted shows Chambers boarding a spaceship to travel to the supposed paradise of the Kamanits home planet, when Patty suddenly rushes up and shouts at him:

Mr. Chambers! Don’t get on that ship! The rest of the book, To Serve Man, it’s a cookbook!

Alas, too late. Mr. Jones—excuse me, Mr. Chambers, a cryptographer even—has failed to understand what’s really happening.

If you’re in the habit of decoding Dylan, it’s important to stay observant and to know that the man has a good sense of humor. It’s important to understand that the pun is the thing.

Finally, in this series of posts from January 31 to February 3, we get Bobby Darin singing his hit, “Dream Lover” in May of 1959, on the Ed Sullivan show.

We are back at the beginning of Mystery Street, just after Dylan sees Buddy Holly at the Duluth Armory and as he prepares to graduate from high school. Just as he goes to seek out Bobby Vee in Fargo, North Dakota, and a few months before he shows up in the University of Minnesota campus neighborhood of Dinkytown, sporting an acoustic guitar and a new name.

We are also, however, once again, in the penultimate verse of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” in a place somewhere near heaven, where angels kiss. “Dream Lover” is, quite simply, a play on “I Don’t Love Nobody.” As I’ve shown, Dylan created the line from an episode of astral sex in The Golden Bird. Two Jesus freaks make love, but only in a dream. No actual bodies are involved. Bob summarized the episode, as he would, with a song. A song by Lew Sully, with more layers of allusion. Once again, see Chapter One for the full story, but we’ll also hear more about Sully’s “I Don’t Love Nobody” in a few moments, when we get to Paul Robeson.

On February 13, I published my second piece about Dylan’s Instagram posts. It concludes with a question: “How’d I do, Bob?” I guess I was feeling a little feisty.

Dylan answered on February 16, with three more pieces of film.

In “Hindu Rituals and Gumbo Limbo Spirituals,” in my commentary on the second phrase, I wrote about how, in many of his post-gospel period songs, the singer laments the “distance” between himself and and his Maker. I also mentioned a technique Bob shares with the great mystic poets in these spirituals: as in “Can’t Wait,” he addresses God as a lover.

Bob’s first clip from February 16 is Lowell George, in the studio with his band Little Feat, singing his poignant ballad of heartbreak, “Long Distance Love.”

The next clip Dylan posted is complex in its allusions, so look at my original piece for all the details. Dylan gives us the Osborne Brothers, blazing on mandolins, banjo, and guitar, and harmonizing beautifully, on “Ruby Are You Mad at Your Man.”

We are back on Mystery Street, in Dylan’s past, specifically at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964. The clip is from Murray Lerner’s gorgeous documentary, Festival, a film that spans several years and captures a few of Dylan’s performances, including the famed ‘65 electric “Maggie’s Farm.” In The Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan writes about how the Osborne Brothers were criticized for adding drums to their line-up—in doing so, he draws a parallel to his own controversial changes. This clip was published just as the movie A Complete Unknown was hitting the theaters and making a big splash in the press. Here, Dylan contrasts that publicity, with its focus on his electric moment, with the bigger picture. In Festival, it’s all cosmic folk music, from Pete Seeger to the Osborne Brothers to Bob Dylan—no matter what kind of guitar he’s holding. Dylan also wrote that “Ruby Are You Mad at Your Man,” is “church latin,” with “churchgoing harmony.” In this clip from Newport ‘64, we are once again in a cathedral of sacred music: folk song.

The last of Dylan’s February 16 posts is my favorite of the entire project, because in his language of classic film, hidden quips, and song, the artist gives an unambiguous answer to my question of “How am I doin’, Bob,” and one that is additionally, hilarious. He offers a detailed confirmation of my wildest claim of connection between the story I tell in The Golden Bird and the lyrics of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” I could not stop grinning for days after seeing this one. This is a scene from a 1956 film called The Rainmaker, starring Burt Lancaster and Katherine Hepburn. See my March 1 piece for the full story, but in a nutshell: Lancaster’s character, Bill Starbuck, is a con man trying to convince a family in drought-ridden Kansas that he can make it rain. In a poetic monologue, Starbuck describes how he will bring on a crop-saving tempest with chanting and song. With this scene, Dylan explicitly mirrors the storm episode from my memoir—the one where She Done Him Wrong, the one that ends in a Clash by Night, the one that features a chant of both T.S. Eliot and Bob Dylan: a “Hindu Ritual.” That’s #4.

I responded to these clips on March 1, but by February 26, Dylan had already added three more. The first is a scene from the 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives. The title is a pun on the idea of memoirs, and the scene Bob chooses evokes, once again, the healing powers of song. Hoagy Carmichael plays a bar owner named Butch Engel, and the clip shows him sitting at the piano with Homer, who is back from the war with prosthetic hooks for hands. Homer is worried that that his girlfriend can’t really want to marry a man with a disability, and Butch offers him musical comfort and reassurance. At Hoagy’s bar, we are in another chapel of song.

Next up, a post that has probably received more attention than any of the others—for mostly superficial reasons. We see Machine Gun Kelly, these days just MGK, in a Florida record store in-store performance, rapping to a highly attentive crowd, many of whom echo his rhymes. This performance is the very definition of a “Hindu Ritual.” For the fans in attendance, it is a life-altering, consciousness-changing, religious experience. The one dominant theme of these Instagram posts, and of Dylan’s use of my memoir in the lyrics of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”—a track which is also a “Hindu Ritual”—is the incantatory power of song. Near the end of his performance, MGK puts his palms together and intones “church.”

Apparently Dylan and MGK met at a show sometime after this, and Dylan contributed a promo audio track for the rapper’s new album. The Instagram post shows that Dylan admires MGK’s ability to hold a crowd spellbound, so I’m not surprised he would offer a helping hand to the young man’s career. But the hidden story here is Dylan alluding, once again, to his own lyric, and its source in The Golden Bird. That’s # 5.

Dylan’s next post shows the little-known swamp blues artist named Warren Storm, playing a song called “House of Memories.” How does Bob come up with this stuff? Here, he stacks up yet another allusion to the “Hindu Rituals” episode in my memoir: my house of memories. A moment ago we heard a poetic soliloquy from The Rainmaker, now we hear a country-blues lament from a man named Storm. Once again, I laughed. That’s #6.

I am honored to share Bob Dylan’s jokes with you!

The following post is of Blues/Folk artist Josh White performing a song with sexual innuendo: “Jelly Jelly.” We are back on Mystery Street. On his first album, Dylan included a tune that White had already recorded twice: “In My Time of Dying,” also known as “Jesus Make Up My Dyin’ Bed.” We are in that place of destiny, where the end is the same as the beginning, and a young man sings with the voice of a very old man. He is transcending time, already somehow walking the shadows after dark, in “Key West.” Miraculously, we are also in the singer’s prime, riding a blast of electricity, on the Newport stage in 1965. How so? After the insane moment passed, after Bob played a couple loud and rocking songs and people lost their shit, after Pete Seeger put down that ax and Bloomfield put down his, and after the crowd had calmed, who took a seat on that same stage, that very evening, and played a few folk songs? Josh White. What did he play? “Jelly Jelly.”

On March 4, Dylan put up the first of his fake histories, “Andrew Jackson Giving One of His Final Speeches.” He followed this over the next couple months with four more sketches based on real people: Stephen Foster, Edgar “Allen” (sic) Poe, Frank James, and a three-part take on Al Capone. You can read my original posts for the details, but in short, I was thrown off my game by these. No puns, no movie clips, no songs. I didn’t really understand if or how these biographies related to “I Don’t Love Nobody” until sometime after the last clip of Al Capone was posted, on June 9. It was only then that an essay by another Dylan writer helped me unlock the connection. Read my last post, from June 24, for the details, but the essence of the story can be summed up in a single word: replications. These histories, that allude to their own ambiguity through AI voices, are like folk songs. They are bigger and weirder than life. These fictional versions of real people exist at the crossroads of truth and propaganda, and it’s up to us to figure them out. This is Bob Dylan’s version of you, Andrew Jackson! And you, Stephen Foster! And you, Mr. Poe! Dylan even gives Edgar his own middle name: Allen, instead of Allan. These people are Bob Dylan’s monsters. These people are Bob Dylan, wearing a mask.

It’s all about the transpositions, one human to another. It’s all about the mirrors. My words, his story. His words, your story. From creator to created, and back again. I is another.

Dylan’s post from March 13, of Paul Robeson, a multi-talented man and a complicated artist, accompanied by his recording of a complicated song, Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home,” is another allusion to his lyric, “I don’t love nobody,” and as so, also to my book. I’m fond of this one because it took me so long to figure it out. At the time Stephen Foster wrote “My Old Kentucky Home”—a song celebrated as anti-slavery by Frederick Douglas—he was trying to end his reliance on racist minstrel shows to publicize his work. Nonetheless, the song became a mainstay of blackface performances.

In this audio, Dylan treats us to Robeson, a great intellectual of the early 20th Century, an actor, a singer, and a radical political activist, singing a song often played by white artists in blackface, that includes a word now seen as derogatory—“darkey”—in many lines. Many later singers changed this word, but Robeson does not. The artist, however, by touching the song with his beautiful voice and strength of character, repossesses it. He purifies it.

This post alludes to one of the story-lines of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” that culminates in the penultimate verse. Like “My Old Kentucky Home,” Lew Sully’s “I Don’t Love Nobody” was also first performed at blackface minstrel shows. But in the 1950s, Mike Seeger of The New Lost City Ramblers, a man whose musical influence Dylan has called “spiritual,” recorded Elizabeth Cotten, a daughter of slaves, singing and playing “I Don’t Love Nobody.” Her version is a celebration of freedom. She repossesses it and purifies it. She makes it holy.

He’s a clever guy, that Bob Dylan.

I headed my essay from March 8 with a large, smiling photo of the Man in Black. I included it, because in that piece, I wrote that Dylan’s portrait of Frank James was likely a tribute to Cash on the anniversary of his birthday.

On March 13, Dylan published a video of Johnny Cash and the Carter Sisters singing a lovely hymn, “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” On March 15, I published a post with a brief response, writing that the song was a confirmation of my idea about James and Cash. I didn’t get the whole story.

Anita Carter’s soul-shaking repeating line in “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord,” signifies her spiritual presence at Calvary, and at the Savior’s tomb with Mary Magdalene, when the stone was rolled away:

It made me tremble

On March 25, Dylan put up a recording of the Johnson Mountain Boys, playing a sweet bluegrass version of an obscure hymn by Adger Pace: “I Can Tell You the Time.” Here, Dylan gives me a little shove. The song is a gorgeous harmony about being touched by Jesus. Aha. I now recalled, that in the opening of “Hindu Rituals and Gumbo Limbo Spirituals,” while discussing the pun that is the basis for the second phrase, I had quoted Dylan from a May, 1979 interview:

Jesus put his hand on me. It was a physical thing. I felt it. I felt it all over me. I felt my whole body tremble. The glory of the Lord knocked me down and picked me up.

The Cash/Carter Family song alludes to this quote and so, once again, to my chapter.

Like the Johnsons, like Dylan, I can tell you the time and I can tell you the place, and in fact I did so in The Golden Bird. It’s a moment Dylan transfigured into one of the loveliest lines in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”:

I’m so deep in love that I can hardly see.

See Chapter One for the full story.

On March 24 and 25, Dylan added two other clips, including one of his “monsters”: Edgar “Allen” Poe. Another segment shows Carl Perkins, a Sun Records original, performing a powerful rendition of his “Blue Suede Shoes” on a colorized version of his appearance on 1957’s Ranch Party TV show.

Back to Mystery Street! In performances like this, Carl Perkins inspired a young Bob to have faith in Rock and Roll. He writes about “Blue Suede Shoes” in The Philosophy of Modern Song as if they are some kind of holy relic. He also points to the mysteries of destiny, which had Perkins laid up in the hospital while Elvis scored the bigger hit with the song.

Dylan didn’t post anything else for nearly a month. So on April 19, I pivoted. I decided to look at some of his fascinating tweets, a few of which I had also suspected of alluding to The Golden Bird and “I Don’t Love Nobody.” I focused particularly on the one about Bob attending a Nick Cave concert in Paris, on his Wild God tour (a show I saw later in Seattle—a deeply spiritual experience, a true “Hindu ritual”). As you’ll recall, Dylan quoted the song “Joy.” I drew an arrow between Dylan’s tweet and my chapter called “The Bleedin’ Heart Disease”: Finding Mercy with Brando, Down in the Boondocks of Key West.” Go to that chapter for all the details, but in brief, “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” contains several allusions to the virtues of mercy and compassion. Cave’s song is a prayer for the same, and culminates in a place where mercy meets joy.

Four days later, on April 23, after a month away, Dylan posted another “Ranch Party” video from the 50s on Instagram. It shows Lorrie Collins playing a song called “Heartbeat.” It may not be bleeding, but it’s pounding hard. I looked up this performance on YouTube, and found that the young singer strummed and sang another song on the same episode, one called “Mercy.”

I responded the next day, on April 24, with my jaw-dropped analysis, a bit loopy, punching a hole in the gossamer wall and addressing Bob directly. I asked for a little help in making this story plain, for the skeptics. I asked for a bit of help in bringing The Golden Bird and “I Don’t Love Nobody” to a wider audience (underground is fabulous but it doesn’t buy toilet paper).

I’m a fool. As if he wasn’t already doing everything an artist might do.

Still, the very next day, on April 25, for anyone who cares, he offered Proof. The rapper, that is. By the time I was able to write again, he also posted the first of his Al Capone audio clips, on April 28. I replied to both on May 3, in a post titled “Alone with Ghosts.”

Beyond the simple and very funny pun of “Proof,” Dylan’s post of the singer offers allusions to mercy, friendship, inspiration, and the pressures of playing music to the monsters you’ve created. We hear the first in one of the songs on Searching for Jerry Garcia, the album Dylan pictures, in a track called “Forgive Me.” We see the last in the song Dylan chooses for the audio: “Kurt Kobain.” My fellow Seattlite never much liked being a rock star; his adoring monsters still leave gifts on a bench outside his old house, where he killed himself, down by Lake Washington. This post of Proof also offers an allusion to John Lennon’s murder, one that is buried deeply, just like it is in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” In doing so, the post cites the same event as depicted in The Golden Bird, and as discussed in “I Don’t Love Nobody.” Chapter One will show you where the ex-Beatle appears in my book and in Dylan’s song, but on Proof’s album “Searching for Jerry Garcia,” it’s in “72nd and Central,” which opens with a reenactment of the killing. By one of Lennon’s monsters.

The Capone series, in addition to being an exercise in magnified versions of reality, otherwise known as imagination, otherwise known as folk story, stays with the idea of mercy. Dylan strung out these audio segments over a month and a half, and the final one, on June 9, is also his last Instagram post so far.

By giving his monstrous Capone the voice of Brando, Dylan alludes again to Chapter Three, “The Bleedin’ Heart Disease,” which includes a discussion of the actor’s appearance as Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, pleading for mercy. Malloy is “down in the boondocks,” a phrase that also appears in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” referring to Joe South’s song of the same name, in which the narrator cries again and again for mercy. In “My Own Version of You,” Dylan mashes Brando with Pacino, and hopes to “get the head on straight.” He wants to get it “upright.” So that he might be “saved.” And so receive mercy.

In his last post on Capone, Dylan returns to the spiritual power of song. In a monologue from the bardo of Dylan’s mind, Capone, in a confessional mode, offers two redeeming facts of his sordid life: how he learned to play music in prison, and how he stayed married to a devoted wife. As I wrote in my July 24 article, we last see Capone in his dilapidated Palm Island house—not that far from “Key West”—surrounded by the remains of his ill-gotten gains, dying of untreated syphilis, demented, and praying for mercy.

Dylan released two other posts in-between the Capone clips. The first, on May 13, is the Louvin Brothers playing “I Don’t Believe You’ve Met My Baby.” I didn’t manage a response until June 13. On May 23, the day before his 84th birthday, Dylan published a clip of the Shangri-Las, singing “Out in the Streets,” written by Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry. I hadn’t published anything since my May 3 article about Proof and the first Capone audio. The Shangri-Las put a fire under my toes and I whipped out a reply that same night, before driving three and a half hours the next day to see Bob play in Ridgefield, Washington.

With “Out in the Streets,” my Minnesota brother gives me a poke. From the moment I heard those girls singing, I once again began to laugh.

He don’t hang around

with the gang no more

He don’t do the wild things

that he did before

He used to act bad

Used to, but he quit it

It make me so sad

Cause I know that he did it for me

And I can see it

He’s still in the street

His heart is out in the street

Yes, I did it for you, Bob. And I used to act bad (she kinda deserved it), but I quit it. But my heart, my bleedin’ heart, is still out here in the street. Mystery street. Still on the highway. Still following the signs. Just like you.

Lastly, the Louvin Brothers post is all about the mystic powers of song. Here, Dylan points us toward another “House of Memories,” Charlie Louvin’s brutally honest 2012 memoir, named after one of the group’s records: Satan is Real. Charlie’s story holds it all: inspiration coming over the radio as teenagers, destiny, and the magical qualities of folk song. The Louvins first became well known as a gospel group and the title of their second record is Nearer, My God, to Thee. If you’ve been with me from the start, you know that the hymn plays a big role in the narrative of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” In Chapter One, I wrote:

The sacred song, written in 1841 by Sarah Flower Adams, relates the story of Jacob's ladder from the Book of Genesis. It describes how the patriarch falls asleep and sees angels ascending and descending a celestial staircase. The hymn is a prayer; it asks that angels, dreams, sorrows, and song itself may bring the singer closer to God. In the Bible verse, after Jacob wakes, he calls the place the "gate of Heaven.”

“Nearer, My God, to Thee” tells us everything we need to know about “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” It’s a confession and a prayer for mercy. It’s a song about dreaming and flying with angels:

Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee!

E'en though it be a cross that raiseth me;

Still all my song shall be nearer, my God, to Thee,

Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee!

Though like the wanderer, the sun gone down,

Darkness be over me, my rest a stone;

Yet in my dreams I'd be nearer, my God, to Thee,

Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee!

There let the way appear steps unto heav'n;

All that Thou sendest me in mercy giv'n;

Angels to beckon me nearer, my God, to Thee,

Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee!

Then with my waking thoughts bright with Thy praise,

Out of my stony griefs Bethel I'll raise;

So by my woes to be nearer, my God, to Thee,

Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee!

Or if on joyful wing, cleaving the sky,

Sun, moon, and stars forgot, upwards I fly,

Still all my song shall be, nearer, my God, to Thee,

Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee!

In early 2020, Bob Dylan borrowed a few startling and deeply intimate moments from my “House of Memories” and transfigured them into a song. I caught it, and he knows it.

Early in this journey, I wrote Dylan two letters via his business office (the same place I sent The Golden Bird), thanking him for his music, and asking for a blurb. In January of this year, he decided to give me that blurb, in the allusive voices he loves best: film, folk song, rock and roll, and humor. Because he knew I would catch it:

“I Believe What You Say”

Now I’m sharing our very funny conversation that proves, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the story I tell in “I Don’t Love Nobody” is, let’s just say, gospel.