YOU OPEN BOX 34, take the typescript from its folder. You can see right away that the song is pretty much finished. He’s got the first four verses locked in, save one lingering question about Ma. Should she be forty but say she’s twenty-four, or eighty claiming sixty-four? Or what if she’s twenty but wants you to think she’s sixty-four? Is that better? Nah. But this is small potatoes, a distraction from the real problem, which is the fifth and final verse, which is still stumping him.
He writes it longhand in the white space below the typing: “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.” Makes sense that after dealing individually with Maggie’s brother, Pa, and Ma over the last three verses, he’d finish by returning to the farm itself. But now what? He writes “You” on its own line. Adds nothing. He leaves some space, gives it a fresh go:
if you ain’t like everyone else
they think they’ve been insulted
everybody try keep track of the
He pauses. This isn’t working. Maybe he takes a break, stays away for a while, because what’s written next is written with a different implement, something darker and thicker. Could be charcoal pencil but who knows. In the white space beside the abandoned fragment, he writes:
I try My best t be just the way I am
but everybody wants me to be just like them
theythey SAY SING WHILE YOU SLAVE
/ I just bored
And there it is.
LIKE ROBERT ALLEN ZIMMERMAN, George Kaiser is a Jewish midwestern proto-boomer descended from European émigrés. The men were born in 1941 and 1942, respectively. Zimmerman’s people came over from Eastern Europe around 1910 and ended up in Minnesota: Duluth, then Hibbing. Kaiser’s parents fled Nazi Germany in 1937, spent a few years in England, came to the US in 1940. They settled in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Kaiser’s father, Herman, cofounded the Kaiser-Francis Oil Company. In 1969, George took over the family business after Herman suffered a heart attack. He grew said business exponentially, bought the Bank of Oklahoma, bought some other stuff, and long story short is today worth about $7 billion.
And Zimmerman? We know what he did.
The George Kaiser Family Foundation focuses primarily on fighting childhood poverty and promoting early-childhood education. (Turns out these issues are connected—who’da thunk?) Proud son of Tulsa that George is, GKFF does some local boosterism as well. It was their involvement with the Tulsa Community Foundation that led to the establishment of the Woody Guthrie Center in 2013, one of the milestone moments in the ongoing revitalization of Tulsa’s long-neglected downtown. (Once upon a time it was the heart of Black Wall Street, but that entire community was burned to the ground in the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, a premeditated act of localized genocide strikingly similar to the pogroms that made refugees and émigrés of the Zimmermans and Kaisers.) The Woody Guthrie Center’s permanent exhibitions tell the story of the folk singer’s life and activism, with particular emphasis on the hardships of the Dust Bowl era. There are temporary exhibitions and an event space, and the Center holds Guthrie’s personal archive: manuscripts, recordings, and musical instruments, among other things. Guthrie’s famous “This machine kills fascists” guitar is magisterial in its case in the main room. Nearby is Pete Seeger’s banjo, emblazoned with words inspired by Guthrie’s: “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender,” which, I gotta say, doesn’t roll off the tongue or stir the spirit quite the same way, but alas, not everyone can be Woody Guthrie. Even Bob Dylan had to learn that lesson. Which reminds me, John Mellencamp too has a guitar there. His says “Fuck facism.”
In 2014, Phil Ochs’s daughter donated her father’s archives to the Center, setting a sort of precedent that led, in 2016, to a collaboration between the Center, GKFF, and the Gilcrease Museum (itself a partnership between the University of Tulsa and the city) to buy Dylan’s archives and house them permanently in Tulsa in a new Center that would sit next door to Guthrie’s, to be jointly operated under the aegis of American Song Archives, another GKFF endeavor. “There’s more vibrations on the coasts, for sure,” Dylan said, in a characteristically laconic statement. “But I’m from Minnesota and I like the casual hum of the heartland.”
The Bob Dylan Archive had long been a subject of rumor and legend. Few outside the singer’s inner circle knew for sure whether it existed, let alone what it contained. It was kind of hard to picture Mr. Dont Look Back himself boxing up old notebooks for posterity. But if he didn’t, someone did. When the sale was announced in March 2016, the New York Times described it as “deeper and more vast than even most Dylan experts could imagine, promising untold insight into the songwriter’s work. . . . A private trove of his work, dating back to his earliest days as an artist, including lyrics, correspondence, recordings, films and photographs.”
Steadman Upham, then the president of the University of Tulsa, promised that “we will be set up for serious scholars and for people who have a record of being Dylanologists.” Upham died in 2017, and GKFF has since bought out the university’s stake in the Archive, but the promise of access has been kept. Two early hires were the curator Michael Chaiken (who has worked on the archives of Norman Mailer, Nicholas Ray, and D. A. Pennebaker), and the poet/biographer/Dylan-freak Robert Polito. Though it would be years before the Center would open its doors, Chaiken and Polito began bringing writers to Tulsa. The writers were invited to present a public program and to explore the Archive: find something in it that captured their interest, respond to it however they saw fit. A plan emerged to eventually publish an anthology of these responses. Lucy Sante, Richard Hell, and Amanda Petrusich were among those who heeded the call.
Clinton Heylin, Dylan’s most prolific and cantankerous biographer, was another early admit. Mark Davidson, who has been with the Center since 2017 and is now Senior Director of Archives and Exhibitions, told me that Heylin may be the only person in the world, himself included, who has read every piece of non-embargoed paper that the Archive contains. Heylin is the author of thirteen books about Dylan, including Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades (1991), a nearly eight-hundred-page biography that ends (Dylanishly, tweaking a line of Paul Valéry’s) by noting, “No book is ever finished, only abandoned.” Which in any case he couldn’t bring himself to do: substantially revised and expanded editions of Behind the Shades were published in 2001 and 2011. When the sale of the Archive was announced, Heylin set to work on a new multi-volume biography rather than the fourth edition of Behind the Shades that it seems safe to assume he’d been planning. The first volume of the new book, The Double Life of Bob Dylan: A Restless, Hungry Feeling (1941–1966), was published in 2021. It’s 530 pages long and it ends when Dylan is twenty-five years old. The second volume, Far Away from Myself (1966–2021) is 834 pages. It was published in the UK in September 2023, but its US publisher (Little, Brown) has so far declined to bring it out here.
B.05 F.01.03 07 — Two pages of lyrics to a song called “Florida Key,” written in 1967 and as near as you can tell never finished or recorded. You doubt you could get any quotes from the song cleared to share here, and in the end you decide not to even ask, but you figure that if anyone is wondering, as you were, whether this manuscript anticipates or otherwise relates to “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” off of 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, it’s OK to say that it doesn’t.
HEYLIN’S DOUBLE LIFE was the first major publication borne out of sustained engagement with the Archive. (Credit where due: the very first book to make use of Archive material was Terry Gans’s Surviving in a Ruthless World: Bob Dylan’s Voyage to Infidels, published by Red Planet Books in 2020.) The next big book was produced by the Center itself. Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine (Callaway, 2023), coedited by Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel, was developed out of the inaugural exhibitions with which the Center opened to the public (after requisite Covid delay) in 2022, under the directorship of Steven Jenkins, a veteran arts journalist with considerable experience in nonprofits, and—hardly his least important qualification—no major qualms about moving from San Francisco to Tulsa to take the gig.
Mixing Up the Medicine is not exactly a show catalogue, nor is it quite a literary anthology, though it contains elements of both, including many of the essays that Polito and Chaiken solicited. It’s a six-hundred-page full-color art book that costs $100 and would be easier to read on a Bible stand than in your lap. It is a tantalizing sampler of the Archive’s vast holdings—now more than a hundred thousand items—including tour posters, rare photos, fan letters, and original handwritten manuscripts. The thirty or so essays, by a wide range of writers, artists, and musicians, contain real revelations about both the songs under consideration and the writers doing the considering. The roster includes Gregory Pardlo, Ed Ruscha, Anne Margaret Daniel, Douglas Brinkley, Greil Marcus, and Heylin himself, who pays tribute to another Dylanologist, the late Paul Williams.
Griffin Ondaatje gets literary with “Highway to the Sea: Dylan, Conrad, and the ‘Tombstone Blues.’” Larry “Ratso” Sloman gamely attempts to rehabilitate Under the Red Sky via idiosyncratic parsing of “Handy Dandy.” “My girlhood is just miles up the road” from where the Center now stands, writes Joy Harjo in “Tangled.” (Harjo is the Center’s current Artist in Residence.) She recalls transcribing Dylan lyrics into spiral notebooks so she could sing “to myself under the tall cottonwoods on the Indian School campus. . . . Blood tales run through our bones, like these streets made of the unspeakable.” Greg Tate, in “Hendrix and Dylan,” invites us to “speculate a heated baton got passed through Dylan’s ‘Watchtower,’ one that moved Hendrix to become a more consciously unbridled, societally attentive artist. The same cat, who just a few months later will scorch heavens and earth with his electrifying epochal paeans to America’s unholy war in Vietnam, ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock, and ‘Machine Gun’ unleashed New Year’s Eve ’69 at the Fillmore East.”
Alex Ross, in “If You See Her on Fannin Street,” rightly identifies “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” as a moment when “the conflict between secular and sacred agendas in [Dylan’s] gospel phase is reaching a breaking point.” He traces that fracture through the lyrical evolutions of this song from its composition in the summer of 1980, over five live performances that November during a two-week residency at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco, and the version that was recorded for Shot of Love (1981) but cut from the album for reasons inscrutable to anybody not named Bob Dylan (see also: “I’ll Keep It with Mine,” “Up to Me,” “Angelina,” “Blind Willie McTell,” “Series of Dreams,” etc.) but then added to the reissue in 1985—the only time Dylan has ever revised a track list after release—as track six of ten, so it’s the first thing you hear after flipping the vinyl. “Dylan’s lifelong resistance to being defined makes another swerve inevitable,” Ross writes. Dylan hasn’t played “Groom” live in forty-four years.
I wouldn’t bet on this book making converts of many agnostics, but for those of us already, uh, invested in Dylan, Mixing Up the Medicine is a sound investment. (For the record, I was not sent a review copy. I paid cash on the barrelhead.) The more time I spent with the book, the more I wanted to visit the Center. As it happened, I was going to be driving across the country during the last week of May and was due to hit Tulsa on the 27th, which I’m sure I don’t need to tell you was three days after Dylan’s eighty-third birthday. If that wasn’t kismet, it was something. Or I was happy to believe that it was.
ANYONE CAN BUY a ticket to the Bob Dylan Center. In fact, you can buy one ticket that admits you to both centers—Dylan and Guthrie, like Disney and Epcot—and you could hit both in one day if you wanted to, though I confess I spent so much time in Dylan-land that I never made it farther into Guthrieville than that display of guitars in the front room.
The first exhibit in the Dylan Center is a walk-in mixed media-collage: archival footage from across the decades is projected onto multiple screens—some superimposed on others—that cover three of the large dark room’s four walls. (The film is directed by Jennifer Lebeau, whose Dylan priors include the bricolage documentary Bob Dylan: Odds and Ends (2021) and the “musical film” Trouble No More (2017), in which concert footage from 1980 is interspersed with scenes of Michael Shannon playing a preacher, delivering sermons written by Lucy Sante.) Toward the center of the room, sculptural agglomerations of totemic objects (upright piano, cardboard filing boxes, wheeled utility trunk labeled FRAGILE) surround a couple of structural support columns while hundreds of pieces of paper “swirl” overhead on wires that curves across the length of the room and eventually meld into the walls: the pages become the screens.
In the next room there are a half-dozen exhibits that each delves deep into the composition process of a single song. Dylan’s cramped cursive and copious cross-outs in the pocket-size Blood on the Tracks notebooks illuminate the fitful gestation of “Tangled Up in Blue.” A similar-sized notebook—mid-’60s, “Chimes of Freedom”—is splayed open toward its middle. On the verso page he’s scrawled a phone number and Hollywood address for Lenny Bruce. On the recto, in red pen faded pinkish, is a cluster of words that I could not at first decipher, though I had my face against the glass.
Only the strange
see strangeness
An only the
ruined see ruin
Under that, in a different pen (presumably written sometime later), it says “go away from.” Just those three words, which you probably recognize from the opening of “It Ain’t Me Babe” and may also know from the John Jacob Niles song from which he pinched the line. Here it is as unfinished fragment, a broken thought barely begun. Did he forget how it went? Unlikely. Was he second-guessing using it? Come on. Was he interrupted like Coleridge at work on “Kubla Khan”? That seems plausible, though we’ll never know by whom or what, and in the end it doesn’t matter. The salient fact is that he, unlike Coleridge, eventually got back to business and finished the song.
There’s a digital jukebox curated by Elvis Costello featuring 150 or so originals, covers, and tracks of variously adjacent relevancy. (For those of you without a trip to Tulsa in the offing, some noble enterprising soul has made it into a Spotify playlist.) There’s a “mixing booth” where you can mess around with the multi-track mixes of “Like a Rolling Stone,” “I Want You,” “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” “Most of the Time,” and “Mississippi.” Just in case you’ve ever wondered how your production work would stack up against Bob Johnston or Daniel Lanois.
The day was half over before I made it upstairs. The current exhibition, How Many Roads: Bob Dylan and His Changing Times, 1961–1964, focuses on the civil rights movement. (Dylan is, of necessity, the point of entry and orientation, but it is not suggested that he was said movement’s protagonist or hero.) On the Archive Wall, a hundred or so physical artifacts are on permanent display: tour memorabilia, foreign editions of LPs and singles, letters to Dylan from Johnny Cash and George Harrison, an overflowing bag of “get well soon” fan mail sent after his motorcycle accident in 1966. They’ve got the tambourine that inspired “Mr. Tambourine Man,” which, in true Dylan style, is not a tambourine but a large Turkish frame drum with little bells on it.
So that’s the museum. Of course there’s also the Archive, but you don’t just walk in there and start pawing through Dylan’s papers. You need to pitch a research project and have it approved before you can get buzzed in at the glass door and enter the cold quiet room where they bring you the boxes. (Query guidelines are on the website.) Happily, I had a project that the Center found of sufficient merit to grant me access. With apologies for coyness, I am not going to talk about said project because I am still trying to sell it (acquiring editors, my DMs are open), but I do want to say that the Archive staff was extremely helpful. They don’t let you bring in phones, cameras, recording devices, or pens, but you can bring your own notebook, and they’ll give you as many pencils as you need. They’re patient with you if you’re a little thick about how to use the finding aid, or if you keep accidentally closing out the window on the house desktop where they’ve cued up the rare concert footage you asked to see.
Chasing down my leads didn’t take as long as I’d thought it would, so I had some free time on my hands, and, god love these people, they let me do what anyone who walks in there must, at some level, be hoping to be allowed to do: start calling for boxes related not to your approved scholarship but to favorite songs, albums, and eras. Sit there like a kid on Christmas morning as the boxes arrive, and pore over every page they contain, one after the other, agog.
I know how cringe this sounds, believe me, but it is what it is, and if you know you know. (And if’n you don’t know by now, babe, there ain’t no use in wondering why.) Peter Carey says it well in his “Postcard from Tulsa”: “I had never expected to understand a genius by examining his droppings. What I intended was to show respect.” I guess that’s what I wanted to do as well, though honestly I think I’ve shown Dylan plenty of respect already—more, perhaps, than he wants or has any use for—in the form of who knows how many thousands of hours of listening and dollars spent and words written over decades, in organizing a good chunk of my summer around making this pilgrimage, in the fact that I’m writing this now. What I wanted was personal. It was, if anything, disrespectful. Covetous. You know all that Walter Benjamin shit about the ineradicable irreproducible aura of the original? I wanted to OD on it. I wanted to see, like Hubble telescope photos of the births of galaxies, the ground zeroes where the letters had flowed from the point of the pen and bled into the grain of the paper and became the words that became the lines that became the songs. Also the detritus, the false starts and fizzles. I cared less about what any of it meant than the fact that it was. Let be be finale of seem, babe, I’m on the cold side of the locked glass door.
B.07.F03.03.01 — Mostly loose leaves. Lyric fragments, religious and philosophical musings, lists of paint and art supplies he wants to buy; a couple of piquant non sequiturs that would have (sorry again) been perfect to include here but which, for unspecified reasons, you were denied permission to quote. The more time you spend in the Archive the more you find yourself overcome by the intensity of Dylan’s work ethic, the pathology of his drive. Scraps of paper bags, the backs of receipts, both sides of a business card, the insides of used matchbooks, hotel stationery from Miami and Sydney, from Skopje and Tokyo.
It’s tempting to call this graphomania, but you don’t think he suffers from a compulsion to write per se. It’s more that his mind never stops racing. He’s always thinking, riffing a mile a minute about girls and the fates of nations and chord progressions and what it is God put us here for (though in his hand it is nearly always written “G-d,” the Jewish way) and a better rhyme for the line and whatever he sees out the window and some old blues song and a tall tale sprung out of a daydream and he’s writing it all down not because he thinks he’s gonna use it—though he might, that’s why he’s saving it—but because it has to go somewhere. He has to get it out of his head. And so he is always, always writing, the gaunt letters straining ahead like hard-driven horses, the ideas pouring forth one on top of the next, good ones and bad ones, brilliance and bullshit, not that he’d know the difference, at least not right now, and sometimes the pages bear trace logics of association or sequence but mostly, you think, they’re random. This and that and that and that and this. The painstaking editing and revision will happen (eleven drafts of “Jokerman,” forty of “Dignity,” twenty pages of potential lyrics for “Like a Rolling Stone”), but for now it’s all he can do to bottle the lightning as it strikes. How does it feel? To you, it feels like the inexhaustibility of being Bob Dylan in any given minute must be exhausting. Now imagine doing it all day every day for eighty-three years. Imagine you’re doing it right now.
Back to Box 5, the one where you found “Florida Key.” On another page taken from another folder, below some unfinished lyrics to another unfinished song, he writes,
whomever you think I am
I would suggest you reconsider
You laugh out loud when you read this. Seated six hours at the plain white desk in the cold quiet room behind the locked glass door, you burst out with a hearty “Ha ha ha!” Man, what in the hell do you think we’ve been doing? But of course this piece of paper you’re holding is—or at any rate was—a personal document, a note to self at twenty-six years old, written with no notion of outside eyes, yours or anyone’s, though come to think of it that last part can’t be entirely true since the page got boxed up with the others and carefully stored for half a century and now it’s here. But that part isn’t important, it’s only the facts. What matters is that then as now, as always, it is first and finally himself he is performing for, at once courting and scorning, chasing after and fleeing from, who needs convincing that he is—that he isn’t—who he is.
Justin Taylor’s most recent book is the novel Reboot (Random House, 2024).
