Bob Dylan, Love, and Death in the Mountains

If you listen to your iPod on shuffle play, and you’re in the right meditative state, I swear it can speak to you like the voice of God. For one thing, these are your tunes. If they didn’t have something to say to you in the first place, you had no business putting them on your iPod.

OK, it’s a free country and you can do what you want. But I don’t put whole Beatles albums on my iPod, and there isn’t a Beatles album I don’t love. What I put on my iPod are just those tunes, by the Beatles or anyone else, that say something that matters so much to me that I don’t mind if I hear it over and over again.

The result is that I’ve got about 450 special tunes on my iPod, enough of them to give me the illusion in shuffle play of a random soundtrack, but each of them loaded with a personal message that—depending on what’s happening in my life on the particular day that the particular song jumps out at me from the mix—have the potential to crush me where I stand.

For example, when my friend David died of cancer I held my composure through the yearlong illness and final three months in the hospice and the entire memorial service. My breakdown moment didn’t come until I was sitting in the airport the day after the service waiting for the plane back home. I was listening to my iPod, and each time a song came on that I loved but had never talked to David about, I’d wonder if he had heard that one.

Talking with David’s family about him at dinner the night before, I realized that comparing notes on books, movies, and particularly music was what David and I did for a friendship. When Springsteen’s Born to Run album came out he sat me down, put it on the record player and made me listen. When I discovered he had not tuned into Little Steven’s Underground Garage radio show, I took him to the website and made him listen. Repeatedly, the music that mattered to him mattered to me, and vice versa.

So I’m running my iPod in the airport, counting the songs that I could have asked him if he’d heard had he been sitting beside me. As I listened I got up to walk down to the Starbucks for a snack and Dylan came out of the earbuds, singing an old song, one he didn’t write and David didn’t hear, an Appalachian murder song called Delia.

They knew something about grief management in the mountains back then, because there were plenty of sources of it, so many that sometimes you just let go and created your own. There was a whole class of songs—The Willow Garden, Knoxville Girl, Delia—about murder. First you’d kill your girlfriend; then you’d write a song about it.

In Delia, it’s not the singer who did the killing, it was some other rounder, and Delia took too many chances herself, for that matter. “Delia was a gambling girl,” the singer explains, “she gambled all around. Delia was a gambling girl, she laid her money down. All the friends I ever had are gone.

“Delia’s dear mother took a trip out West. When she returned, little Delia had gone to rest. All the friends I ever had are gone.

“Delia’s mother wept, Delia’s father mourned. Wouldn’t have been so bad if the poor girl died at home. All the friends I ever had are gone.

“Cuddy’s looking high, Cuddy’s looking low. He shot poor Delia down with a cruel 44. All the friends I ever had are gone.

“Man in Atlanta is trying to pass for white. Delia’s in the graveyard, boys, six feet out of sight. All the friends I ever had are gone.

“Judge says to Cuddy, ‘What’s this noise about?’ ‘All about them rounders, Judge, try to cut me out.

“Cuddy said to the judge, ‘What might be my fine?’ Judge says, ‘Poor boy, you’ve got 99.’ All the friends I ever had are gone.

“Delia, oh Delia, how can it be? You loved all them rounders, but you never did love me.

“Delia, oh Delia, how can it be? You wanted all them rounders, never had time for me.

“All the friends I ever had are gone.”

I didn’t make it to the Starbucks or even to the end of the song. I was sobbing after the second stanza.

What I Learned at Stanford

Riding up an elevator in the Washington D.C. Metro with my friend David, I hand him my IPod cued to a live 1969 recording of the Stanford University basketball band. I’m playing saxophone on the song, David is playing trumpet. Now we’re both pushing 60, David is in treatment at NIH in Bethesda, dying of cancer, I’m walking around blithely unaware of what I’m dying of, but I know I do want him to hear “Midnight Hour” one more time.

About 10 seconds into the recording, right on cue, he starts laughing, and I know he’s gotten to the point where, after four big introductory chords and a flourish of trumpets, there’s been an explosion in the drum section, as if the drummers had simultaneously experienced rapture but with great willpower and a communal spasm of energy had managed to fend off transport to the afterlife, and held the beat to finish the song.

I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but this same thing happens often in rock ‘n’ roll. The first time may have been in the 50s in “Jailhouse Rock,” when the inmate band turns down a chance to make a break out of the joint because as one of them puts it, “I wanna stick around I wanna get my kicks.”

The whole notion of “getting my kicks” was foreign to me when I joined the Stanford Band. In the winter of 1969 I was more or less fresh off the plane from Kansas, plopped down in chaotic, war-protesting, drugged-out, miniskirted-topless-and-worse California and playing rock songs with this zoo band. I was playing arrangements of big hits I hadn’t ever heard, not because the radio wasn’t playing them in Kansas, but because I wasn’t listening. I spent the fall of 1968 in a marching band that didn’t march but scattered, that never did disappearing diamonds in their halftime shows, instead performing theme shows on birth control and salutes to the parts of the body.

By the time basketball season came around, I was hooked. I know the moment it happened. It was about a month into the previous fall and we were on the practice field rehearsing an arrangement by a tuba player named Phil Imming. Imming was cool, what the Band called “godlike,” what Imming himself called “fat,” as in, “You’re fat, man.” He was tuba stocky, surfer blond. He wore T-shirts, shorts and a half-smile.

In these field arrangements saxophones seldom got the melody line. The melody went to the brass, the trombones or trumpets, people who could make themselves heard outdoors or in a noisy gym. Saxophones ended up playing background chords, whole notes, rests, more whole notes.

But in rock ‘n’ roll arrangements we also got the backbeats. I just didn’t know yet what to do with what I got. So we’re on the field and we’re playing Imming’s arrangement of Midnight Hour and Imming is walking up and down the line of players in formation, listening to what’s coming out of the horns.

As he came down the line I thought, “This is weird. What does this guy care what the song sounds like in microcosm?” When he got to me he stopped and listened, and I thought, “This is weird. What does this guy care what my dits sound like?” Because that’s what I was playing, back beat dits, on the second and fourth beats—rest, dit, rest, dit—short, precise, military band dits. “Who’s gonna hear these dits, anyway?”

Well, nobody, of course. At this point, I probably hadn’t heard Wilson Pickett’s original version of the song, and I certainly hadn’t heard Chuck Berry’s dictum “It’s got a backbeat, you can’t lose it.” On the Wilson Pickett version, there are no dits on the backbeat. There are big, fat, solid BOPs, that nobody could ever possibly lose.

And that’s what Imming started singing to me as I played my dits—rest, BOP, rest, BOP, rest, BOP, rest, BOP—until my dits got longer, and heavier, and more solid—rest, dit, rest, dit, rest, dat, rest, dot, rest, bot, rest, bop, rest, BOP, rest, BOP—and Imming smiled and said, “You’re fat, man.”

I also studied history of the English language and the French Revolution and biology and German at Stanford. But the most important thing I learned was the importance of the backbeat, and those who play it.

Runaway, Del Shannon, 1961

What's with all these questions? The old songs are full of them: Why do fools fall in love? Why must I be a teenager in love? Will you still love me tomorrow?

Sometimes there's adolescent male bravado behind the questions. "Do you love me?" screams the Contours' lead Billy Gordon, "I can really move, do you love me, I'm in the groove." Dumped earlier by the girl, now Gordon is back, he tells her, "to let you know, I can really shake 'em down." That'll show her.

Bo Diddley in "Who Do You Love?" takes the psychotic approach—he wears a cobra snake for a necktie, his chimney is made out of human skulls, and when he growls, "Take it easy, Arlene, don't give me no lip and tell me, 'Who do you love?'" what's she to answer but "You, Bo, forever."

This is the brutally male side of teenage innocence, the I-don't-care-if-you-don't-want-me-I'm-yours-right-now approach to romance.

On the female side the questions are more pathetically poignant, but just as detached from reality. "Is it in his eyes?" Betty Everett asks in "The Shoop Shoop Song," "Is it in his sighs? Oh no, if you want to know if he loves you so, it's in his kiss, that's where it is."

Sure it is. It makes you shiver to think that a generation this out to lunch had the atom bomb. The people in these songs lived in a different nation, the land of the clueless, and Del Shannon's "Runaway" was their national anthem.

Like much of the best rock 'n' roll, "Runaway" is nightmare music, rising out of dumb animal pain. I'm talking about suffering unrelieved even by an awareness of the cause of the suffering. It's bad enough to be crushed by life, but even worse to comprehend the agents of your destruction no better than road kill under the wheel understands the workings of the internal combustion engine.

Rock 'n' roll builds its myths out of this kind of suffering. The music best defines itself in moments that are mythic in their stupid, clueless, purely emotional response to life's least comprehensible, and therefore cruelest, blows.

So what's so mythic about dumb suffering? Where's the grandeur, the heroic vision, the bigger-than-life spectacle in the fate of a run-over possum?

It's in his kiss, that's where it is. If you've been run down, screwed over, cheated on, turned inside out, and hung out to dry by seven ratty guys in a row, how do you find the stomach to take a chance on number eight? You make up a myth.

You tell yourself you've got the magic love detector this time, that you can feel true love in the way his lips meet yours, that you can't possibly be fooled again because you've got the Book of Love in your hip pocket and passion in your heart.

At least that's what the poor sucker in "Runaway" told himself. And where did it get him? Well, his love affair didn't turn out that well, but that really doesn't explain exactly where he is.

He's out "a'walkin' in the rain" somewhere, and there's a tinkly cantina piano playing and this movie cowboy music swelling up like the theme from The Magnificent Seven, and when he tells his story it's like the Ancient Mariner spilling his guts to yet another complete stranger, not telling the story to anyone so much as reciting it again to himself in the darkness, like maybe if he goes over it one more time it will begin to make sense:

As I walk along I wonder

What went wrong with our love

A love that was so strong

And as I still walk on I think of

The things we done together

While our hearts were young

The story, the suffering, are transformed in the retelling into something less distinct, less particular—a hazier, dreamlike narrative—less specific in its details but more universal in its meaning. More like a myth, in other words.

This is not a hardboiled detective novel, where a relentless torrent of facts—it was a cold day in West Hollywood, the rain drifted down in a fine mist, I stopped under a drugstore awning at the corner of Sunset and LaBrea and lit a Chesterfield—drive the story down a blocked alley to an inescapable conclusion. In detective fiction the clues are all there and the cold, hard facts add up to cold, hard reality. The mystery dissolves in the wash of facts. If there are larger philosophical conclusions, they are cold, hard, tough conclusions delivered like a punch to the kidney.

"Runaway" lets the mystery be. "Runaway" lives in the moment of mystery, before anything is clarified. The storyteller in "Runaway" is up against questions of misery, loneliness, loss. He can and does tell you how that feels, but he never tells you why it must be, because he hasn't got those answers.

The song, rather than giving us an answer, itself becomes the answer. It elevates style and mood and beat into meaning, as all good rock 'n' roll does. "Don't know what I want, but I know how to get it," Johnny Rotten snarls, and in the rock 'n' roll world that's all you need to know.

So Del Shannon's voice cries out in the darkness:

I'm a'walkin' in the rain

Tears are fallin' and I feel the pain

Wishin' you were here with me

To end this misery

It becomes too much and the voice cracks in stuttering, falsetto agony;

And I wonder

I WA-WA-WA-WA WA-UN-DER

Why

WHY-WY-WY-WY-WY

She ran away

And I wonder

Where she will stay-ay-ay

My little runaway, run-run-run-run-runaway

Then the whole song is gathered up and carried away in the instrumental break, it just soars off, transported by this silly-assed, high-pitched, whining carnival calliope (actually an electric keyboard called the Musitron played by Shannon's co-writer on the song, Max Crook). It's a weird noise, like you would hear at a county fair on an unbearably hot, sticky August night in Mississippi, maybe, a sound so tacky and inspired it defies the forces of gravity and reason.

The singer comes back again, still stuttering and wailing the final chorus, but now he's riding on top of that whining keyboard line, irresistible, triumphant, and mythic in his suffering. And so he rides off into the fade-out.

I was six years old in 1956. As the great songs of that time were released they came to me unawares, over radios playing through open windows on a summer day, in snatches heard briefly as my parents turned the dial. They floated into my consciousness as if by magic, like unwritten truth absorbed through my skin. I didn't know from Lieber and Stoller; these songs could've been written by Homer, for all I knew.

Certainly now, looking back, "Runaway" strikes me as a talisman handed down from a time when myth and mystery were real and walked among us. But so the song always was, even on that day, almost a half century ago, when I first heard it and asked myself, "What was that?"