A Complete Coincidence
On October 31, Bob Dylan will be releasing a handful of recordings that hit eerily close to home.
On a recent afternoon over coffee, my friend informed me that Bob Dylan was soon releasing some previously-unheard old recordings. An interesting enough fact in itself to me, as an avid Dylan fan, but the real hook was that some of the tracks were recorded in Madison, WI, my college town. The dates of recording also happened to line up with right around the time that he first ventured to New York/New Jersey to find Woody Guthrie, as documented by last year’s A Complete Unknown, starring Timothée Chalamet.
Knowing Dylan (born Robert Zimmerman) was originally from Minnesota, it made sense for him to have made a pit stop in Madison on his trek. I also knew that Madison had been a known destination decades ago for both performing and recording music.
The first thing I did when I got home from the coffee shop was pull up an article that promised to document Dylan’s time in Madison to see how my speculation lined up with reality. I wasn’t very close but I was very stricken by how close I myself had been to Dylan’s story. Beyond being a fun fact that Dylan had briefly stayed and even recorded music in my college town, this discovery was uncanny.
Bob Dylan’s time in Madison was in fact part of an initial retreat back to Minnesota, having stalled and turned back at Chicago. I’ll spare the details and encourage you to google “bob dylan madison” if you want the full story, but he stayed for at least several weeks during the chilly winter of 1960-61, crashing on the couches or in the spare rooms of any UW students that would host him. He played for whoever and wherever would have him, including a coffee shop known for their sub sandwiches (still a novelty at the time) that happens to now be the Jimmy Johns I purchased countless Slim #4s from when I worked just two doors down. What was even more striking than this sandwich irony, was that one of the addresses Dylan stayed at during his time on the isthmus was 430 W Johnson street, the very same address I called home for two years.
I pulled up the building I lived in on Streeteasy to see when it had been constructed. My suspicion about the age of the building was unfortunately proven correct, as it was built nine years after Dylan was there, but I couldn’t help but feel an uncanny spiritual connection that Dylan had briefly stayed in the same exact place I had. Perhaps it was a cosmic coincidence, but it was while I was at that apartment that I fell in love with Dylan’s early folk recordings. I had been in my junior and senior years of school and finding myself as an artist while also contending with the realities of the world in a way I never had before, in the midst of the first Trump regime. Not entirely dissimilar to the young Dylan trying (as yet unsuccessfully) to find his own artistic path.
I had another odd geographical coincidence just like this right before I moved into that building, in fact, but this time was in New York, so at the time I I found it more easy to dismiss. But shortly after moving in to the NYU housing building that would be my home for the next ten weeks, I happened upon a sign on the other side of the block for the Mudd Club. An icon of the late-seventies/early-eighties downtown art and music scene, the club was frequented by the likes of Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Byrne, and Debbie Harry, who just so happened to be my art and music Mount Rushmore at the time.
Of course, I realize the importance I put on these random occurrences may be a touch myopic. Countless anonymous (to me) people have walked these same paths in the time between Dylan or Basquiat did and I came along. Surely, many of them also were and are fans of their art.
I just read Keith McNally’s memoir and at one point he asks, “Why are past epochs so appealing?”. I can’t give any general answer, but for me, I am drawn to these specific past epochs–the fragile early ‘60’s and the unapologetic early ‘80’s–in particular as intriguing eras for American art. Considering myself to be some form of “artist”, whatever that really means, I see those eras as times when it was a lot simpler to make it by the fruits of your creation, not just labor. With this comes a sort of melancholy, knowing that the atmospheric conditions that allowed for Bob Dylan or Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “rags to riches” stories were like lightning in a bottle. Not to mention that the works of each of those geniuses were like even more powerful lightning in an even smaller bottle. To paraphrase Tony Soprano, “It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that and I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.”
I don’t know if that’s necessarily true, but it makes me think of what is alluring to me in a very different way about sports fandom. There is always the fond memory of past good times, but each season brings a new chance to catch the lightning again. (And forget the bad times). As a Brewers fan, not even 99 percent but 100 percent of the time the pursuit for the ultimate crown has failed, but every win throughout a long 162-game season hints at a promised future of glory, no matter how far away it feels. Fifty plus years of falling short can make one question that hope, but it also emphasizes it, for things can’t possibly be worse than they used to be.