I just finished reading Chronicles, the first volume of Dylan’s autobiography. it’s fascinating. Here are a couple of quotes.
He goes to the New York Public Library and spends hours reading old newspapers from 1855 to 1865 on microfilm. This is in 1960. Then he says this:
“It all makes you feel creepy. The age that I was living in didn’t resemble this age, but yet it did in some mysterious and traditional way. Not just a little bit, but a lot. There was a broad spectrum and commonwealth that I was living upon, and the basic psychology of that life was every bit a part of it. If you turned the light towards it, you could see the full complexity of human nature. Back there, America was put on the cross, died and was resurrected. There was nothing synthetic about it. The godawful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything that I would write.”
He hung out with Dave Van Ronk a lot and often slept on his couch. Van Ronk was a hard-core intellectual Marxist. Dylan says, “There was no point in arguing with Dave, not intellectually anyway. I had a primitive way of looking at things and I liked country fair politics. My favorite politician was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who reminded me of Tom Mix, and there wasn’t any way to explain that to anybody. I wasn’t all that comfortable with all the psycho polemic babble. It wasn’t my particular feast of food. Even the current news made me nervous. I liked old news better.”