Founders - #259 Bob Dylan

Episode Date: July 27, 2022

What I learned from reading Chronicles: Volume One by Bob Dylan.----Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com----[0:51] No one could block his way and he didn't have any time to waste.[2:38] Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. —Bob Dylan[3:01] The best talk on YouTube for entrepreneurs: Runnin' Down a Dream: How to Succeed and Thrive in a Career You Love by Bill Gurley[3:21] Estée: A Success Story by Estée Lauder (Founders #217)[7:52] Billy asked me who I saw myself like in today's music scene. I told him, nobody. I really didn't see myself like anybody.[8:12] We may be in the same genre but we don't put out the same product.[16:34] What really set me apart in these days was my repertoire. It was more formidable than the rest of the players. There were a lot of better musicians around but there wasn't anybody close in nature to what I was doing.[18:00] Bob spends a lot of time thinking about and studying history.[20:34] I'd come from a long ways off and had started from a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else.[21:27] I walked over to the window and looked outside. The air was bitter cold but the fire in my mind was never out. It was like a wind vane that was constantly spinning.[21:45] It is incredible how much reading this guy is going to do. He takes ideas from everything that he reads and applies it to his work.[22:30] Towering figures that the world would never see the likes of again, men who relied on their own resolve, for better or worse, every one of them prepared to act alone, indifferent to approval—indifferent to wealth or love, all presiding over the destiny of mankind and reducing the world to rubble. Coming from a long line of Alexanders and Julius Caesars, Genghis Khans, Charlemagnes and Napoleons, they carved up the world. They would not be denied and were impossible to reckon with—rude barbarians stampeding across the earth and hammering out their own ideas of geography.[26:29] Alexander the Great: The Brief Life and Towering Exploits of History's Greatest Conqueror--As Told By His Original Biographers by Arrian, Plutarch, and Quintus Curtius Rufus. (Founders #232)[29:37] I don't think there's been another human invention that can evoke deeper emotions than a great book —than great writing.[31:17] “What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic." —Carl Sagan[32:35] On War by Carl von Clausewitz[37:55] I knew what I was doing and wasn't going to take a step back or retreat for anybody.[46:40] This idea of being completely separate from the outside world is a main theme in the book.[48:00] Being true to yourself. That was the thing.[51:11] After a while you learn that privacy is something you can sell but you can't buy it back.[57:44] Too many distractions had turned my musical path into a jungle of vines.[58:29] There was a missing person inside of myself and I needed to find him.[59:53] You have to find ways to get out of your own head.[1:01:47] At first it was hard going like drilling through a brick wall. All I did was taste the dust.[1:05:14] Sometimes you could be looking for heaven in the wrong places. Sometimes it could be under your feet or in your bed.[1:07:25] Decoded by Jay Z. (Founders #238)[1:07:42] Somebody different was bound to come along sooner or later who would know that world, been born and raised with it. . . be all of it and more. He'd be able to balance himself on one leg on a tightrope that stretched across the universe and you'd know him when he came-there'd be only one like him.[1:08:23] A new performer was bound to appear. He'd be doing it with hard words and he'd be working 18 hours a day.[1:09:15] Advice from his Dad:“Remember, Robert, in life anything can happen. Even if you don't have all the things you want, be grateful for the things you don't have that you don't want."[1:11:54] I was beginning to feel like a character from within these songs, even beginning to think like one.[1:12:28] Y’all can't match my hustleYou can't catch my hustleYou can't fathom my love dudeLock yourself in a room doin' five beats a day for three summersI deserve to do these numbers[1:12:51] I played morning, noon and night. That's all I did, usually fell asleep with the guitar in my hands. I went through the entire summer this way.[1:13:31] The place I was living was no more than an empty storage room with a sink and a window looking into an alley, no closet, a toilet down the hall. I put a mattress on the floor.[1:15:22] Bound for Glory: The Hard-Driving, Truth-Telling, Autobiography of America's Great Poet-Folk Singer by Woody Guthrie----Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ”— GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast  ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

I had just signed a contract with Leeds Music, giving it the right to publish my songs. Not that there was any great deal to hammer out. I hadn't written much yet. Lou had advanced me $100 against future royalties to sign the paper, and that was fine with me. John had taken me over to see Lou. John had only heard two of my original compositions, but he had a premonition that there would be more. John was John Hammond, the great talent scout and discoverer of monumental artists, imposing figures in the history of recorded music, artists who had created music that resonated through American life. He was legendary. He had followed his own heart's love, music, preferably the ringing rhythm of hot

jazz and blues, which he endorsed and defended with his life. No one could block his way, and he didn't have any time to waste. I could hardly believe myself awake when sitting in his office. Him signing me to Columbia Records was so unbelievable, it would have sounded like a made-up thing. Folk music was considered junky, second-rate, and only released on small labels. But John was an extraordinary man. He had vision and foresight, had seen and heard me, felt my thoughts, and had faith in the things to come. That is an excerpt from the incredible book that I hold in my hand and the one I'm going to talk to you about today, which is the autobiography of Bob Dylan. It is called Chronicles Volume 1,

written by Bob Dylan, in fact, with no help at all. He wrote every single word himself. He didn't even have an editor. And so I'm going to tell you how this book fits into everything else that you and I have been talking about. But first, I want to go to the very beginning. The first few pages is just blurb after blurb after blurb of praise for this book. And there is a ton of praise for the book. In fact, Rolling Stone put this as number one on its list of the top 50 musician biographies and autobiographies. But I didn't read the blurbs until after I had finished reading the book. Last night. I was rereading over all my highlights and I found one that really speaks to why I think this book is so important and important specifically for entrepreneurs to read. And it says Bob Dylan hasn't really written the story of his life in this fascinating,

captivating, intimate, accessible, and widely acclaimed memoir. Instead, he's written mainly the story of his birth, when he transformed himself from Bobby Zimmerman to Bob Dylan. I heard Bob Dylan say something when he's a much older man that I think speaks to what takes place in this book and what that review really hits on. And Bob said, life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. And so I found this book because my friend Truman Sachs, who listens to the podcast, actually texts, he ordered it. And I was like, Ooh, that's a good idea. I should read it. I had previously, I'd previously told Truman. And I've said this a bunch of times on the podcast that I think the single best talk

on YouTube that's available for YouTube for entrepreneurs and founders to listen to comes from the billionaire investor, Bill Gurley. I'll leave the link down below, but you can just find it on YouTube. It's called Running Down a Dream, How to Succeed and Thrive in a Career You Love. I've watched that talk over and over again. I will continue to watch it over and over again in the future. It has had a huge influence on how I approach my work. If you want to hear more details about that, I talked about that when I reread the autobiography of Estee Lauder. So I talk about Bill Gurley's approach and the stuff he talks about in that talk and how I apply it to my work. It's episode 217 of Founders if you want to go back and listen to that. But Bob Dylan is one of the people that Bill Gurley talks about in that talk. And he heavily, on Twitter, Bill Gurley has recommended this book. He said it is a must read. And so in addition to that, Bob Dylan was also one of Steve Jobs' heroes and one of his main influences on how he approached his work. Steve mentions Bob

Dylan probably 15 times in the biography that he worked on as he was dying with Walter Isaacson. So I went back and pulled all of my notes about what Steve said about Dylan. I want to introduce you to that real quick. I'm just going to run through the list real fast before I jump back into the book. And what was remarkable, maybe something I even forgot, was that Dylan's influence on Steve Jobs lasted Steve Jobs' entire career. In fact, Jobs was obsessed with Dylan before he started Apple. In fact, one of the first things that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak did together was track down underground recordings of Bob Dylan records. Jobs would then collect printed out brochures of Bob Dylan lyrics,

and he would spend hours interpreting them. In his biography, Steve says that he managed to collect hundreds of hours of Dylan's recorded concerts and would lay in bed listening to the concerts in headphones. And he would do this for hours before he got kicked out of Apple. When he was presenting, when Jobs presented the Macintosh for the very first time, he opened that presentation by reading a poem, but written by Bob Dylan. It was a Bob Dylan song. So that's before he got kicked out of Apple. More than 20 years later, when he returns and then he's launching the iTunes store. So that happened over 20 years after introducing the Macintosh.

He introduces that presentation with a slide of Bob Dylan. When Jobs gets kicked out of Apple, he'll see he stays home with his blinds closed for days, just listening to Bob Dylan records close to the end of his life. He's sitting inside of his house with the biographer of biographer Walter Isaacson, and they're listening to Bob Dylan records. And he says something to Walter. This is really important to remember because it's going to pop up in the book in Bob's own words later on. I think that is a main takeaway from the book. And Steve Jobs picked up on it. And Bob Dylan, I think, did it intentionally. But Steve said to Walter, no one else could have been Bob Dylan. So I'll go into more detail about that later on in the book. But I think the lesson to you and I is very obvious. It's like your

product should be differentiated. So after Apple made the iTunes store and the iPod, he was able to meet and he actually had a two hour one on one conversation with Bob Dylan and something Dylan told him resonated with Steve's own approach to creating new products. And Bob was talking about the way his the music came. He says the songs just came through me. It wasn't like I was having to compose them. And then at the very end of the book, Steve gives this fantastic speech about what drove him, why he did what he did in his career. Again, saying these things really hits home because he knows he's about to die. And he talked about learning something from the Beatles and Bob Dylan and the importance of always trying. Like, why was why did Steve keep

taking risks and would always keep trying new things? And he said they, meaning the Beatles and Bob Dylan, they kept evolving, moving, refining their art. That is what i've always tried to do keep moving otherwise as dylan says if you're not busy being born you're busy dying okay so let's jump into the book it's absolutely incredible it starts right that's how the what i just read to you at the very beginning that's the that's the the intro to the book there's no fluff here it's not organized like any other biography i've ever read in my life. I'm going to calm down because I'm like, this is, it's just amazing. And I'll get to like just the emotional rollercoaster that this book can put you on. So the book starts with him being signed. It's he's in New York city, 1961. I'll get to how he get, he, he, he arrived at that point,

but first I want to go to the end. So you get, he just got signed. They send. They send him over to the record company's in-house publicist, this guy named Billy. Billy's asking him a bunch of questions. I just want to pull out one sentence here because this is just something that appears over and over again in the book. Again, Bob is writing this. He didn't have an editor. These are his own words. He's clearly telling us what he feels is important.

He won the Pulitzer Prize for literature. And according to my research, he's the only musician to ever do that. That's how good this book is. So Billy's talking, they're talking about him. And it says, Billy asked me who I saw myself like in today's music scene. I told him nobody.

That was true. I really didn't see myself like anybody else. And so that's really important. That's gonna appear multiple times throughout the book. I have my own Maxim. I actually stole it from a hip hop lyric by this rapper named NF, and it really speaks to the importance of having differentiated product. And NF said, we may be in the same genre, but we don't put out the same product. And I feel that's exactly what Bob was saying there. There was other folk singers, there's other folk musicians,

but there was nobody, just like Steve Jobs said, there was nobody like him. So at this point, Bob begins to tell the story of what led up this year, about it was between one to two years of him arriving in New York City from Minnesota before he is signed by Columbia Records. And this is something that Bill Gurley talks about in that fantastic talk. And I'm going to read a quote from Bill Gurley's talk that that's going to set up exactly where we are in the book. And it said, Bob did an incredibly ambitious action to pursue his dream job. He hitchhiked from Minneapolis to New York City. He had a guitar, a suitcase and ten dollars. That is a twelve hundred mile trip. And so it says the big car came to a full stop. At last, I was here in New York City. I was

there to find singers, the one that I heard on record, most of all, to find Woody Guthrie. It wasn't money or love that I was looking for. I had a heightened sense of awareness, was set in my ways, impractical and visionary to boot. So keep in mind, he's describing himself when he's about 20 years old. My mind was strong like a trap, and I didn't need any guarantee of validity. I didn't know a single soul in this metropolis, but that was about to change and quick. And so one of the musicians he wanted to seek out was this guy named Dave Van Ronk. And he says Van Ronk worked at the Gaslight, which was a club that had a dominant presence on the street. It had more prestige than any place else. So you can think about what's happening in the book right now is, OK, he's got to figure out this is like the top of the heap.

Gaslight's the club that he wants to get into the most. He's like, OK, how do I break into the Gaslight? I don't know yet, but I'll figure it out. And so he starts out playing any crappy gig that he can get. And so this is really the very early days of a career that's going to span six decades. And so this is what he knows about the gaslight at this point. It says it opened early in the evening with about six performers

that rotated throughout the night. It was a closed circle that an unknown, which is him at this point in his life, could not break into. There weren't any auditions. It was a club I wanted to play. I needed to. I had heard Van Rock back in the Midwest on records and thought he was pretty great. And I copied some of his recordings phrase for phrase. And so that part right there, what Bob Dylan is talking about really jumped out to Bill Gurley when he, when he, in that talk he gave, because he has this phrase that I think he got from Danny Meyer and he calls it professional research. And what Bill noticed by studying great people, and I've noticed because I've read 260 something biographies of great people as well, is they are constantly studying and learning and

trying to get better at their craft, even when they're not working. And so in that talk, Danny Meyer uses the term professional research. And Bill says, I think that's an interesting phrase because most of us think about studying and research we do around curriculum and a teacher. And he gives an example of he's like, that's not what professional research is. He's like, it's something you do on your own. You can think of founders. Founders is just one, it's 400 hours so far, something like that, of professional research for entrepreneurs and founders that you should be paying attention to when you're not working,

right? And so Bill says in the talk, if you're in finance or marketing or accounting, do you go home at night and study to improve your own skill set? Most people don't. And then Bill says, I think that's interesting. And so his point is just like, all the greats did this. And that's exactly what Bob is telling us where we are in the book. He's like, listen, I heard Van Rock back in Midwest on records and thought he was pretty great. I copied some of his recordings phrase for phrase. How much would you have to be listening to somebody to be able to copy them perfectly?

Let's go back. I got to give you a background because again, this is not like any other autobiography. He's not going to run through his life. It's five chapters, if you want to call them. The first three chapters is just about this year of him breaking in to become Bob Dylan. It's that year that he spends in New York City before he is signed, right? Then he fast forwards in the book by nine years, skips over the peak of his career, right? Then he fast forwards in the book by nine years, skips over the peak of his career, right? Then there's another chapter about this other album he's doing. Then he skips ahead 17 years.

Then the last chapter is flashbacks to this time we're in. It's incredible. Okay, so I got to go backwards though because Bill Gurley gives background that I think is very useful. I think like his talk and this book and hopefully this podcast kind of go together. That's why I'm going to go constantly reference the three.

Right. And so what Bill realized was what Bob was doing before the book starts. And so this is back when he's in Minnesota. He attended University of Minnesota. I don't think he went to class. I know he was living in like a like he was he talks a little bit about this in the book where he's living in like a frat house for free, but he's not part of the frat.

And so Bill says over the course of eight or nine months, Bob studied every folk album he possibly could. He didn't have a lot of money. And at the time you could walk into a record store and you would listen in a booth. He would do that for hours and hours and hours. Remember, this is probably two years

before he's going to wind up sitting in the office in Columbia Records. Can't believe that he's being signed to one of the biggest record companies in the world. He would then become friends with people that, this is back in the Midwest, he would become friends with people that also liked folk music,

but had money because Bob was completely broke. People had money to spend on folk albums. He would go to their house and listen to their record collection as well he does the same thing when he goes to new york city he'd sit in these venues some of these he's going to play and he would just listen to what all the other artists were doing right just like we're all what are we doing we're studying what all the history's greatest entrepreneurs did in the past we're doing the exact same thing and it was funny because there's some people that were playing at the time like he got you don't understand how good bob was about this he could he watched us so much and stayed so much he could perform any of our songs like us he could copy the

tone the tempo everything and bill says in his talk bob was studying studying studying and that is going to be so important because it's how good he played. Remember, he's like, I got to meet this guy, Dave Van Rock. I'm listening to his albums. I'm copying him. Okay, I'm going to hitchhike across the country with no money. I'm going to wind up playing at the club he's going to play. That actually happens.

He goes up, and I'll talk about this later, how he seizes the opportunity for the very first time that he sees dave van rock in person but we're not there yet he's like okay i can't just jump into the gaslight right it's this closed circle i don't know anybody i don't have any resources i don't have a network so i'm just gonna go out and play all these crap they're usually like containing like a few blocks in in new york City is where all these like folk singers and people are performing. And so that's where he goes. Like, I'll just take any opportunity I can get. And so he talks about this. I wanted to play for anybody.

I could never sit in a room and just play all by myself. I needed to play for people and all the time. You can say that I practiced in public and my whole life was becoming what I practiced. I kept my sights on the gaslight. How could I not? And so he's describing these like crappy little places that he's forced to play. He calls them dens. That's such a, he's the mastery of language. This guy has is just unbelievable. The writing. I just, I really hope you pick up the book because it's just really incredible. Uh, talent scouts did not come to these dens. They were dark and dingy and the atmosphere was chaotic. On weekends, if you played all the joints from dusk until dawn,

you would make maybe $20. You had to know a trick or two to survive. So he's making, he's playing from the time the sun sets, the sun rises, making less than 20 bucks in a weekend has no he's just like crashing on other musicians and one of the best uh parts of the book is that he he meets all these crazy characters and he's just gifted at describing these personalities these people jump off the page they just make life really interesting but part of that is he's like just crashing you know maybe he'll spend the night at somebody's couch for a few days and then move to somebody else's house for a few days. And so he says you had to know a trick or two to survive. Now let's go back the same exact page a few paragraphs later. He repeats this over and over again. There's only one me and he's not doing

it from a place of arrogance by any means. Okay. What really set me apart in these days was my repertoire. It was more formidable than the rest of the players. My template was hardcore folk songs. And we see it's very binary. You either love Bob Dylan or you don't listen to him at all. I'd either drive people away or they would come in closer to see what it was all about. There was no in between. There were a lot better musicians around, but there wasn't anybody close in nature to what I was doing. Again, there is no one like me. That's exactly what he's telling us. Again, that's like the third or fourth time. I'm on page 18. And if you read the book, that idea, that main theme just jumps out to you over and over again. Let's go into more professional research. He meets this guy named Izzy.

Izzy owns one of these like little dens. And in the back of Izzy's den or bar or whatever you want to call it, the venue, I guess, is this giant record collection. So we already know, I think you already know by now, what is Bob going to do here?

And what's fascinating, so a bunch of these people he's going to talk about throughout the book, you know, he's had a bunch of influences like every single other person we studied. I didn't know who they were. I wind up looking these up, these names. So a bunch of these people he's going to talk about throughout the book, you know, he's had a bunch of influences like every single other person we studied. I didn't know who they were. I wind up looking these up, these names. And sure enough, they were all a generation or two generations before him.

Some of the people were still alive, but they were like they had been playing for many years. Some of these people were dead. So, again, one thing that's going to jump out to you is like Bob spends a lot of time thinking and studying history. He says multiple times in the book, he's just not interested in current affairs at all. And I'll get to more about that. So it says Izzy had a back room. The little room was filled with records and a phonograph. Izzy would let me stay back there and listen to them. I listened to as many as I could. The madly complicated modern world was something I took little interest in. It had no relevancy, no weight. I wasn't seduced by it, but he was seduced by history. He got a lot of ideas from going through and studying the history of his industry. He would take lines from songs. He would take like tones. He winds up learning how to play a guitar specific way by studying something that happened, you know, many decades before him.

But he does repeat this idea that the modern world, he's just really not interested in. It doesn't really pay attention to it. And so it says Izzy would pull out records for me. And then I'm going to list just some of these people. These are the people I looked up. I didn't know who they were, like Charlie Poole and Big Bill Bronzy. And so one day when he's in Izzy's, this is where he's going to seize the opportunity. Why he came, one of the reasons he came to New York City. One winter day, a big burly guy stepped in off the street. It was Dave Van Ronk. He was gruff with a don't give a damn attitude. My mind went into a rush. There was nothing between the man and me.

So Dave is just sitting at the bar playing a couple of strings on the guitar. And so this is where Bob sees this as opportunity. I stepped over and asked him, how does someone get to work at the Gaslight? Who do you have to know? Van Ronk looked at me curiously with snippy and surly and asked if I was a janitor. I told him no and he could perish the thought. But could I play something for him? He said, sure. Dave liked what he heard and asked me who I was. Then said I could come down about eight or nine that night and play a couple songs in his set. That was how I met Dave Von Ronk. And so he talks about that is his first big break in New York City.

And then he talks about the mentality of an entrepreneur. Anybody that's on the on like chasing their life dream it's i guess it's not just uh exclusive to entrepreneurship but i think entrepreneurs know exactly this feeling where he's just like i know something's about to happen i'd soon be hired to play at the gas light and i would never seen the basket houses again those are like those crappy little places he had been playing before that outside the temperature was about 10 below, but I didn't feel the cold. I was heading for the fantastic lights, no doubt about it. Could it be that I was being deceived?

Not likely. I had no false hope. I'd come from a long ways off and had started from a long ways down. But now, destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else. That is the 20 year old Bob Dylan. Think about the 60 or 70 year old Bob Dylan when he said life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. We are witnessing him create Bob Dylan. And so he talks about the contrast many, many times. I'm going to skip ahead a few pages, give you another example, the contrast between how cold it is outside and

the fire that is burning inside of him. Now, what I'm about to read to you is amazing. If you really think that one, he's still unknown. He hasn't recorded his first album. And he doesn't even have his own place to live. He does not have enough money to have a place of his own. I walked over to the window and looked outside. The air was bitter cold. But the fire in my mind was never out. It was like a wind vane that was constantly spinning. And so another main theme of the book that appears over and over again.

And one that really surprised me, it is incredible how much reading this guy is going to do. And he takes ideas from everything that he reads and applies it to his work. This is just incredible writing about a long chain of historical figures. He's now tying it in because again, he doesn't really talk too much about, he'll give you like little hints about his early life, right? But this is not, again, it's not organized in like any other biography or autobiography that I've read before. So it says, I was born in the spring of 1941. The Second World War was already raging in Europe and America would soon be in it. If you were born around this time or were living and alive, you could feel the old world go and the new one beginning.

It was like putting the clock back to when BC became AD. Everybody born around my time was part of both. Hitler, Churchill, Mussolini, Stalin, Roosevelt. Towering figures that the world would never see the likes of again. men who relied on their own resolve for better or worse, every one of them prepared to act alone, indifferent to approval, indifferent to wealth or love, all presiding over the destiny of mankind and reducing the world to rubble, coming from a long line of Alexanders and Julius Caesars, Genghis Khans, Charlemains, and Napoleons. They carved up the world. They would not be denied and were impossible to reckon with. Rude barbarians stampeding across the earth and hammering out their own ideas of geography.

And so when he's not practicing, when he's not playing, he's reading. And I'll go into more detail about that. He starts making friends with the eminent dead, which is some advice that Charlie Munger gave to you and I about why he's read hundreds of biographies. He thinks it's essential. And so Dylan's saying, I'd read all this stuff. Voltaire, Rousseau, John Locke, Martin Luther, visionaries, revolutionaries. It was like I knew So now he gives us an incredible description of this musician that he greatly admired, this guy named Roy Orbinson. And again, another theme he realizes, hey, there is no one else like Roy. Roy had no peer.

So Bob Dylan writes, Roy had transcended all the genres. His stuff mixed all the styles and some that hadn't even been invented yet. With Roy, you didn't know if you were listening to mariachi or opera. He kept you on your toes. With him, it was all about fat and blood. He sounded like he was singing from an Olympian mountaintop and he meant business. He was singing his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car off a cliff. He sang like a professional criminal.

His voice could jar a corpse, always leave you muttering to yourself something like, man, I don't believe it. His songs had songs within songs. He was deadly serious. There wasn't anything else on the radio like him. I'd listen and wait for another song, but next to Roy, the playlist was strictly Doleville, gutless and flabby. So now he's staying with another friend. This friend has a giant collection of books. This might be my favorite part of the entire book. This is still pre-record deal. This is him still trying to figure things out.

So he says, I turned the radio off and went into the other room, a windowless one with floor to ceiling library. The place had an overpowering presence of literature and you couldn't help but lose your passion for dumbness. There were all types of things in here. Books like Thucydides, the Athenian general, a narrative that would give you chills, which is exactly what happened to me during this section. It was written 400 years before Christ, and it talks about how human nature is always the enemy of anything superior. It's like nothing has changed from his time to mine. There were novels by Balzac, Hugo, and Dickens. I usually opened up some book to the middle,

read a few pages, and if I liked it, I went back to the beginning. I was looking for the part of my education that I never got. Sometimes I'd open up a book and see a handwritten note scribbled in the front. Like in Machiavelli's The Prince, there was written the spirit of the hustler.

There were endless rows of books. Then he starts reading about one of the books he read was about Alexander the Great. I just read a biography of him, too. If you haven't listened to it, it's Founders number 232. And his description of Alexander the Great is fantastic. Alexander the Great marched into Persia. When he conquered Persia, in order to keep it conquered, he had all of his men marry local women. After that, he never had any trouble with the

population, no uprisings or anything. Alexander knew how to get absolute control. I wanted to read all of these books. And he's reading a lot of biographies. He says, I read a biography about Robert E. Lee. Robert E. Lee had grown up without a father. Lee had made something out of himself nevertheless. Not only that, but it was on his word and his word alone that America did not get into a guerrilla war that probably would have lasted till this day. The books were something. They were really something. I read a lot of the pages aloud and liked the sound of the words, the language. And as he's reading and telling us the story of this education he's giving himself, he's always relating it back to his craft. Folk singers could sing songs like an entire book, but only in a few verses.

I'd always return to the books. I would dig through them like an archaeologist. That's exactly what I feel like I do. I read the biography of Thaddeus Stevens. He lived in the early part of the 1800s and was quite a character. He's from Gettysburg and he's got a club foot. He grew up poor, made a fortune, and from then on championed the weak and any other group who wasn't able to fight equally. Stevens had a grim sense of humor, a sharp tongue, and a white-hot hatred for the bloated aristocrats of his day. He wanted to confiscate the land of the slave-holding elite. He once referred to a colleague on the floor of the chamber as slinking in his own slime. Stevens was hard to forget.

He made a big impression on me. He was inspiring. Him and Teddy Roosevelt may be the strongest U.S. president ever. I read about Teddy too. He was a cattle rancher and a crime buster, had to be restrained from declaring war on California. He had a big run-in with J.P. Morgan. Roosevelt backed him down and threatened to throw him in jail. Either one of those guys, Stevens or Roosevelt or even Morgan, could have stepped out of a folk song. So I got to read you this note I left myself as I was going through this section. This goes on for many, many pages. And I said, these last few pages impacted me so greatly. I'm currently sitting in the Central Library in Austin, Texas, with tears in my eyes.

And so I was in Austin for a few days. And every morning I would get up and go to this beautiful library. It's actually in downtown Austin. It's like five stories tall. I think it was just built. It's called the Central Library. And that's where I read most of this book. And I left that note because I wanted to remember when I look back on what I was doing and where I read this book, because I had tears in my eyes, not because of sadness, because of joy. And there's a few

different reasons for that. One is I don't think there's been another human invention that can evoke deeper emotions than a great book, than great writing. And so to read Bob Dylan experiencing like his self-education and the impact that great, these great books and great writing has had on him. And then for him in turn to be able to describe that to the reader in just a beautiful use of language as well. And then when that happens, I think it's natural for you to think of it like in terms of your own life. And it's like, I know exactly the feeling that he is writing about. I'm experiencing it right now. And then what I think really pushed me over the edge was just like a deep sense of gratitude.

I cannot believe this is my job. And when Bob writes, the books were really something. They were really something. I read a lot of the pages aloud and I like the sound of words and the language i knew exactly what he's talking about and i think what made this experience even more overwhelming is like i'm in the reading room i think it's on the fourth level of the austin central library and they have these like giant pieces of steel where it looks like pieces of steel hanging off the building i think it's like a decoration but from the inside so on the outside you just see like a you know what looks like pieces of steel hanging off the building, I think is like a decoration. But from the inside, so from the outside, you just see like a, you know, what looks like some kind of

added design on the building. But from the on the inside, from where I was, there's etched into what I think is steel is all these fantastic quotes about the power of reading and about the power of books. And I look up and I see one of my favorite quotes ever. Might be my favorite quote ever on books. And that's from Carl Sagan. I'm going to read the whole quote to you. Only half the quote that could fit. There's probably a hundred different quotes from all kinds of people throughout history talking about the importance of reading. And Carl said, is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on it which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person.

Maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside of your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic. And that is the way this section of the book feels to me. The idea that Bob had this experience over 60 years ago. He decided to write it down almost 20 years ago. I pick up the book 20 years, maybe 20 years after he wrote it, and I had that exact same emotional experience. This book bound together people who never knew each other. I will never know Bob Dylan. The book broke the shackles of time. It was just

incredible. There's one other book I want to talk to you about that he wrote about. And this is just amazing because in this case, Dylan is going to sound like a captain of industry instead of a folk singer. So he picks up the Clausewitz book. So he says, I also looked at Von Krieg, the Clausewitz book. They called Clausewitz the premier philosopher of war. The book was published in 1832 and Clausewitz had been in the military since he was 12. His armies were highly trained professionals, not young men who served only for a few years or more. His men were hard to replace. So in the middle of this, I double underline two things that Bob was talking about, because I think they're applicable to you and I, thinking about the people

you want to work with. you want highly trained professionals, and number two, you want people that are hard to replace. His men were hard to replace, and he talks a lot about how to maneuver into position where the other side can see there's no fighting chance, and they basically lay down their arms. I had a morbid fascination with this stuff. I'd always pictured myself dying in some heroic battle

rather than in bed. I wanted to pictured myself dying in some heroic battle rather than in bed. I wanted to be a general with my own battalion. And so at this point, he has a flashback to when he was in Minnesota and he's just trying to play any gig he can. He's extremely young. I think he's like 17 or 18 at this point. And he forms all these bands and then they keep breaking up and he's like, I don't care. I'm going to keep going forward no matter what. So he says, I kept forming these bands because I was determined to play. There was a lot of halting and waiting, little acknowledgement, little affirmation. But sometimes all it takes is a wink or a nod from some unexpected place to vary the tedium of your baffling existence.

And so he is talking about the importance of words of encouragement. And there's a super famous wrestler, professional wrestler at this time, that is going to see Bob Dylan play and provide that word of encouragement. That is this guy named Gorgeous George. That happened to me when Gorgeous George, the great wrestler, came to my hometown.

In the mid-1950s, I was performing in the lobby of the Veterans Memorial Building. I was playing on a makeshift platform in the lobby, and suddenly the doors burst open and in came Gorgeous George. He roared in like a storm, in all his magnificent glory. He had valets and was surrounded by women carrying roses. He was wearing a majestic, fur-lined, gold cape. He brushed by the makeshift stage and glanced toward the sound of the music. He didn't break stride, but he looked at me.

He winked and seemed to mouth the phrase, You're making it come alive. I never forgot it. It was all the recognition and encouragement I would need for years to come. Sometimes, that's all it takes. The kind of recognition that comes when you're doing the thing for the thing's sake and you're onto something. It's just that nobody recognizes it yet. And so what's fascinating is several pages later, when he's back in New York City, before he signed to Columbia,

he has a very similar experience. It's really the way I thought about it. It's a great description of the time in his life before he is Bob Dylan. And so I want to read this whole thing to you because I think these experiences are important because they keep you going. And so it says, Sometimes you know things have to change, are going to change, but you can only feel it, but you don't know it in a purposeful way. Little things foreshadow what's coming, but you may not recognize them.

But then something immediate happens and you're in another world. You jump into the unknown. You have an instinctive understanding of it. You're set free. You don't need to ask questions and you already know the score. It seems like when that happens, it happens fast, like magic. But it's really not like that. It isn't like some dull boom goes off and the moment has arrived.

It's more deliberate. It's a reflective thing. Somebody holds the mirror up, unlocks the door, something jerks it open, and you're shoved in and your head has to go into a different place. Sometimes it takes a certain somebody to make you realize it. And so to me, what he's describing there is all the years and years and years of practice, of his craft, the studying that he's doing. It may seem, okay, I'm signed to a major record company in 1962.

I'm world famous 12 months later. But that is just a public recognition of all the private work that he had been doing that very few people. He talks about, you know, playing in venues where there might be three or four people in the audience. And so I think about that part in the book is very similar to what happened maybe half a decade earlier in Minnesota with Gorgeous George. So I mentioned earlier, one of my favorite parts of the book is that he's got he's meeting all these crazy characters. He does a great job describing their personality. They really jump out from the page. And they really help him and influence the trajectory of not only his career but his life as well.

Right from the start, you could tell that Nerwith had a taste for provocation and that nothing was going to restrict his freedom. This is another folk singer. He was in a mad revolt against something. You had to brace yourself when you talked to him. Somebody should have immortalized Nerweth. He was that kind of character. He could talk to anybody until they felt like all their intelligence was gone. With his tongue, he ripped and slashed and could make anybody uneasy. Also could talk his way out of anything too. Nobody knew what to make of of him nerweth was a bulldog

then he talks about another folk singer that he met before i get there he just has a great line and i think a very short way to understand his mentality at this time i knew what i was doing and wasn't going to take a step back or retreat for anybody so then he talks about this guy mike seger who also had an influence on him. And this is what I mentioned earlier, how the people that he is meeting are actually changing his life. And so when Bob studies Mike, he realized he's come to the realization, oh, I have to change my thought patterns. What I had to work at, Mike already had in his genes. It was in his genetic makeup. Before he was even born, this music had to be in his blood.

It dawned on me that I might have to change my inner thought patterns, that I would have to start believing in possibilities that I wouldn't have allowed before, like getting signed to Columbia Records less than 12 months later, right? That I had been closing my creativity down to a very narrow, controllable scale. That things had become too familiar, and I might have to disorient myself. And then he goes into more detail about more professional research that he's doing. I did everything fast. I thought fast. I ate fast. I talk fast and I walk fast. I even sang my songs fast. I needed to slow my mind down if I was going to become a composer with anything to say.

I couldn't exactly put in words what I was looking for, but he began searching in principle for it over at the New York City Public Library. And so I'm not sure why, but he becomes obsessed with studying the American Civil War. And I mentioned to you earlier how he's really not interested in current events. He repeats that over and over again, but he does have this deep love of history. So this is free. he doesn't explain why he's doing this, but he does explain what he gets out of it. And so he goes to the New York City library. He goes to one of the reading rooms and he says, I started reading articles in newspapers on microfilm from 1855 to about 1865 to see what daily life was like. I wasn't so much interested in the issues as intrigued by the language and rhetoric of the times. And one thing he's realizing is that human nature is constant.

It wasn't like it was another world. It was the same one, but with more urgency. Abraham Lincoln comes into the picture in the late 1850s. He's referred to as a baboon or a giraffe, and there were a lot of caricatures of him. Nobody takes him seriously at this time. It is impossible to conceive that he would become the father figure that he is today. You wonder how people so united by geography and religious ideals could become such bitter enemies. 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. You could see the full complexity of human

nature. And then he wraps up why he's doing this and what he's going to get out of it with this fantastic metaphor. I crammed my head full as much of this stuff as I could and locked it away in my mind out of sight. I left it alone. I figured I could send a truck back for it later. And so having read this book, and you can already tell from what you and I have discussed so far, you can see why Bill Gurley put Bob Dylan in his talk. It's just this constant self-education, this constant professional research doesn't stop there. He starts studying Beethoven, looking for ideas in the life and work of Beethoven that he can use in his own. I learned that Beethoven had been a child prodigy and he had been exploited by his father and that Beethoven distrusted all people for the rest of his life. Even so, that

did not stop him from writing symphonies. And I think that point is going to be important later on because the next chapter, when it skips over Bob Dylan at the peak of his fame, goes into how much he distrusts people. He did not like people saying he was a voice of a generation. He turns into a little bit of a recluse, tries to find ways to, on purpose, to make himself less famous. But we're not there yet. He's still studying the greats. And in this case, he's studying Hank Williams. And then he just has fantastic writing about all these people that he studied and admired and the people that influenced his work. I didn't have to experience anything that Hank did to know what he was singing about.

I'd learned later that Hank had died in the backseat of a car on New Year's Day. I kept my fingers crossed. I hoped it wasn't true, but it was. It was like a great tree had fallen. Hearing about Hank's death caught me squarely on the shoulder. The silence of outer space never seemed so loud. Remember, Bob Dylan, not at this point in his career, but now he's referred to as maybe the greatest songwriter of all time. And he's saying, I just studied Hank. These are Hank's rules. He's going to get there in a minute.

I became aware that in Hank's recorded songs were the archetype rules of poetic songwriting. The architectural forms are like marble pillars, and they had to be there. You can learn a lot about the structure of songwriting by listening to his records, and I listened to them a lot and had them internalized. In a few years' time, the folk and jazz critic for the New York Times would review one of my performances and would say something like, he breaks all the rules in songwriting except that of having something to say. The rules, whether that critic knew it or not, were Hank's rules.

And then he ends this section of his life asking and then answering, how do I know I'm on the right track? March was coming in like a lion, and once more I wonder what it would take to get into a recording studio, to get signed by a folk record label. Was I getting any closer? The future was nothing to worry about. It was awfully close.

And that is important that it really struck me when I reread this last night. What's happening there? To me, the first part of that, the first sentence where it's like i've been here for months i'm wondering like how am i going to get into recording studio how am i going to get signed that is bob dylan from the perspective when he's 20 years old and he ends it to me is the older bob dylan almost talking to himself because he knows the outcome the future was nothing to worry about it was awfully close and if you think about, even the structure of the book is amazing because the first three chapters is all about Bob Dylan becoming Bob Dylan.

It starts with him getting signed and it ends with him wondering, am I on the right track? And the older version, in my opinion, of himself saying, yeah, it's right there. Don't worry. Okay, so now he fast forward nine years into the future, skips over the apex of his fame, and starts with his father's funeral. The previous week had left me drained. I had gone back to the town of my early years in a way I could never have imagined, to see my father laid to rest. Now there would be no way to say what I was never capable of saying before. Growing up, the cultural and generational differences had been insurmountable. My father, who was plain speaking and straight talking, had said, isn't an artist a fellow who paints? When told by one of my teachers that his son had the nature of

an artist, it seemed I'd always been chasing after something, anything that might lead me into a different place, some unknown land down river. I had not even the vaguest notion of the broken world I was living in. When I left home, it was like Columbus going off into the desolate Atlantic. I had done that and I had been to the ends of the earth and now I was back. And so that line is really important because he's saying, I left 10 years ago in search of my dream. I have now on the other side of that dream, I have experienced things that very few humans that have ever lived have experienced. And now I'm back to where my life started, laying to rest my father. And they had a complicated relationship. In the short time I was home, it all came back to me. The older order of things.

But something else did too. That my father was the best man in the world and probably worth a hundred of me. But he didn't understand me. We had more in common now than ever. I too was a father three times over. There was a lot that I wanted to share and to tell him and so that part is also devastating to the reader because it's like we have so much more in common we are I'm older I understand your perspective now there's so much I want to talk to you about and he can't and he never will be able

to again and so this chapter is supposed to be about him making the album New Morning. But really, it is about the price of fame and Bob Dylan trying to run away from Bob Dylan. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on. So this idea of being completely separate from the outside world is a main theme in the book. It is why some people think that Bob Dylan is like more like a recluse or an extremely private person, even though he's one of the most famous musicians to ever live. He did that intentionally. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me, and I was seeing everything through different glasses. Even the horrifying news items of the day, the gunning down

of the Kennedys, of Martin Luther King, of Malcolm X. I didn't see them as leaders being shot down, but rather as fathers whose families had been left wounded. And then when I got to this part where he's describing what's taking place at this point in his life. I wrote the Bob Dylan of 1970 is not the Bob Dylan of 1961, nor does he want to be. I didn't belong to anybody then or now. I had a wife and children whom I loved more than anything else in the world. I was trying to provide for them, to keep out of trouble. But the press kept promoting me as the mouthpiece, spokesman, or even conscience of a generation. That was funny. All I'd ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation

that I was supposed to be the voice of. Being true to yourself, that was the the thing i was more of a cowboy than a pied piper so that's something he's going to repeat over and over again he's listen these songs just like he told steve jobs many years later i made songs for me they just came through me it wasn't even like that i was having to compose them so this idea is like i was just trying to be true to myself and because i was true to myself, it resonated with other people. But then all the other interpretations and the building up of the press, that's your thing. That has nothing to do with me. And when I got to that part, it made me think of something that he said almost 100 pages earlier in the book, where he's talking about the influence of like that brief interaction

with Gorgeous George, where it just kind of fueled him. And he says something at the end there that I think is advice to you and I, for anybody that wants to get to, like, not only the top of your profession, but also doing work that you feel is worthy of your life energy. We all have one life. We're all going to die. We have limited time, and so, therefore, we have to really think long and hard about how do I want to spend my time? What is the work that I want to do, the craft that I'm going to engage in that I'm going to give one third or one half of my limited time on earth

here? And he says, it's the kind of recognition that comes when you're doing the thing for the thing's sake. That was Bob Dylan in the 1950s. This is Bob Dylan in 1970. And he's like, I did the songs for the song's sake because I wanted to do them. And as a result of doing that, it resonated with other people. And then the press runs, okay, I'm a voice of a generation. He's going to accept this honorary degree from Princeton, which I'm going to share this part. It's really funny because he's running from this. This label is like, I don't want this label. And he says, somebody else would have to step up and volunteer. I really was never anything more than what I was, which is a folk musician. And he's saying,

having this label put on you, all this pressure that you're a voice of a generation that he didn't even identify with or even understand. He says it would have driven anybody mad. And so he talks about, hey, I'm getting away. I'm trying to be less famous. He buys a house in Woodstock, California or Woodstock, New York, rather. And he's just trying to raise his family there. And word gets out. This is Bob Dylan's house. And these people just abuse him and his family. I could not believe when I got to this part. This same house, where again, the house that he's raising his family in, this same house that my family was in, intruders started to break in day and night. Peace was hard to come by. Roadmaps to our homestead must have been posted in all 50 states. Moochers showed

up. Goons were breaking into our place all hours of the night. This was so unsettling. I wanted to set fire to these people. These gate crashers, trespassers, demagogues were all disrupting my home life. Everything was wrong. The world was absurd. It was backing me into a corner. And then he has this inner monologue. He's like, I don't even want this. Listen to what he's fantasizing about. No place was far enough away. So obviously you're going to have to get out of there. And so that's what he's talking about. I don't know what everybody else was fantasizing about, but I was fantasizing about what I was fantasizing about was a nine to five existence, a house on a tree line block

with a white picket fence, pink roses in the backyard. That would have been nice. That was my deepest dream. After a while, you learn that privacy is something you can sell, but you can't buy it back. So he's feeling violated. He feels like he can't get away from the image of who he is in the public's eye. And he's also continuing to make music because he likes to make music, but he doesn't. Now he's having, he's wrestling with, he's like, oh, I may never create work that good again. And the crazy part, what he's about to tell us, he's like, I don't even care at this point in his life. In 1970, Bob Dylan, he's like, I don't even care if I ever do. And so he writes, the novelist Herman Melville's work went largely unnoticed after Moby Dick.

Critics thought that he had crossed the literary line and recommended burning Moby Dick. By the time of his death, he was largely forgotten. I didn't know that. That's crazy. I had assumed that when critics dismissed my work, the same thing would happen to me, that the public would forget about me. I owed nobody nothing. I wasn't going to go deeper into the darkness for anybody. My family was my light,

and I was going to protect that light at all costs. What did I owe the rest of the world? Nothing. Not a damn thing. In my real life, I got to do the things that I loved the best, and that was all that mattered. And he's going to describe what he feels matters the most, and it really speaks to how complicated being a human is. The idea that we can give our entire heart and soul and life energy into achieving a goal like he did of becoming a folk singer,

getting to the very top of his profession and realizing realizing I don't want it. I think it also speaks that the feeling that you don't want it might be temporary and to not give up because Bob is still touring. He's in his 80s. He's still touring to this day. In my real life, I got to do the things that I love the best. And that was all that mattered. The little in games, the birthday parties, taking my kids to school, going on camping trips, boating, rafting, canoeing, fishing. I was living on record royalties. Sometime in the past, I had written and performed songs that were most original and most influential, and I didn't know if I ever would again, and I didn't care. And so it's around this time in his life that Princeton decides to give him an honorary degree. I'm going to read my entire note, which is kind of long, before I read what takes place over these three pages.

The way Bob Dylan writes is incredible. His description of his friend, the famous singer David Crosby, made me laugh. We also see his response for representing anyone but himself. And a sentence that I've never read before. The book is full of them. As you probably, I've already read a bunch of sentences that I've never read anywhere else before. So that you might already pick up on that. But it says, early in the week,

we had gotten back from Princeton where I had been given an honorary doctorate degree. It had been a weird adventure. Somehow I had motivated David Crosby to come along. Crosby was a colorful and unpredictable character. He wore a cape, didn't get along with too many people, and had a beautiful voice. And this is the sentence that made me laugh. He was an obstreperous companion. So I had to look up that word. I thought it meant like cantankerous or mean. It says noisy and difficult to control. So then he tells the story of him and

Crosby going to Princeton. We pulled off of Route 80, found the university on a hot and cloudless day. In short time, the officials led me into a crowded room and put me in a robe. And soon I was looking out over a crowd of well-dressed people. When my turn came to accept a degree, the speaker introducing me said how I had distinguished myself. And this is what the speaker said. Though he is known to millions, he shuns publicity and organizations preferring the solidarity of his family and isolation from the world. He remains the authentic expression of the disturbed and concerned conscience of young America. And this part made me laugh, too, because that's the end of what the person introducing him said. And then we hear his inner monologue.

He goes, oh, sweet Jesus. It was like a jolt. I shuddered and trembled. Remember, this is exactly what he spent the entire chapter saying. I don't want this. It's making my life miserable. And this is why people call him a recluse. Oh, sweet Jesus.

It was like a jolt. I shuddered and trembled, but remained expressionless. The disturbed conscience of young America. There it was again. I couldn't believe it. Tricked once more. The speaker could have said many things. He could have emphasized a few things about my music. And this is a song, this is a sentence I've never read in any other book before. I was so mad, I wanted to bite myself. And then he ends the story. After whispering and mumbling my way through the ceremony, I was handed the degree. We piled back into the Buick and drove away. It had been a strange day.

Bunch of dickheads on auto stroke, Crosby said. And then he finally gets in. He finally ends the chapter, which is a couple pages on actually making the album. And it's remarkable that he the album. And it's remarkable that he admits this and it's done intentionally. So you can kind of understand what's taking place. Like when you read, you feel like you're almost like experiencing his life through his eyes. Right. And really what he's talking about is like, this is when you know that your soul just isn't in the work. And so after I read this, I wrote a note to myself.

I was like, now it makes sense why 90% of this chapter wasn't about making the album, but about struggling with this time in his life. And so Bob writes, I recorded some stuff. At least these songs wouldn't make any headlines. Message songs, there weren't any. Anybody listening for them would have to be disappointed. When will the old him be back, they would ask. Not today.

That my records were still selling surprised even me. Maybe there were some good songs, and maybe there weren't. Who knows? But they weren't the kind where you hear an awful roaring in your head. I knew what those kind of songs were like, and these weren't them. It's not like I didn't have any talent. I just wasn't feeling the full force of the wind. I was listening to some of the playbacks and they sounded okay, but it wasn't great. Some critics would find the album

to be lackluster. Oh well. Others would triumph it finally as the old hymn is back. I took it as a good sign. All this happened in what critics would later refer to as my middle period. And then this is 17 years after the last story. He's 46 years old. He's lost and broken down. And so as I was reading through the section, I left a note a few pages from now. I was like, this is the closest I think he gets to ever quitting. Always prolific, but never exact.

Too many distractions had turned my musical path into a jungle of vines. Like, this is the closest I think he gets to ever quitting. Always prolific, but never exact. Too many distractions had turned my musical path into a jungle of vines. I'd been following established customs, and they weren't working. The windows had been boarded up for years and covered with cobwebs. And it's not like I didn't know. The previous ten years had left me pretty whitewashed and wasted out professionally. Many times I'd come near the stage before a show and would catch myself thinking that I wasn't keeping my word with myself. I had single-handedly shot myself in the foot too many times.

It's nice to be known as a legend, and people will pay to see one, but for most people, once is enough. I hadn't actually disappeared from the scene, but the road had narrowed. There was a missing person inside of myself, and I needed to find him. I did try a few times, tried hard to force it. In nature, there's a remedy for everything, and that's where I'd usually go hunting for it. Think things out. But it was no use. I felt done for. An empty, burned out wreck. Too much static in my head and I couldn't dump the stuff. I am in the bottomless pit of cultural oblivion. And this is the part where I said I think this is the closest he ever gets to quitting. I had been on an 18-month tour with Tom Petty. It would be my last. I had no connection to any kind of inspiration. Whatever was there to begin with had all vanished and shrunk. Tom was at the top of his game and I was at the bottom of mine. My own songs had become strangers to me. I couldn't wait to retire. The mirror had swung around and I could see the future.

An old actor fumbling in garage cans outside the theater of past triumphs. And this is where he is saved by an old jazz singer. He's supposed to be playing a couple of shows with the Grateful Dead. They're practicing. They say, hey, why don't we do some of your old songs, Bob? And Bob's like, yeah, okay. I forgot something in my hotel. And he walked out, said, I'll be right back. He was planning on never returning. And I think the main lesson in this entire section, that is instead of running away, you have to find ways to get out of your own head.

And so we pick up the story where he just walked out, said, hey, I'll be right back. I got to get something from my hotel. I wasn't planning on going back. I started at the street, maybe four or five or six blocks went by. And then I heard the sounds of a jazz combo playing up ahead, walking past the door of a tiny bar. I just realized when I read that sentence, this is exactly the kind of places that he started his career in. So 27 years in the past, I looked in and saw that musicians were playing. There were just a few people inside. It looked like the last stop on a train to nowhere. Something was calling to me to come in and I entered. I got within four feet of the stage and just stood there. I ordered

a gin and tonic and faced the singer. He was an older man. They played jazz ballads. The singer wasn't very forceful, but he didn't have to be. He was relaxed, but he sang with natural power. Suddenly and without warning, it was like the guy had an open window to my soul. It was like he was saying, you should do it this way. All of the sudden, I understood something faster than I ever did before. I knew where the power was coming from, and it wasn't his voice. I used to do this thing, I'm thinking. It was a long time ago, and it had been automatic. No one had ever taught me. This technique was so elemental, so simple, and I'd forgotten. It was like I forgot how to button my own pants.

I wondered if I could still do it, and I wanted to try. Returning to the Grateful Dead's rehearsal hall, I could not wait to get started. I wanted to see if I could sing using the same method that the old singer used. At first, it was hard going, like drilling through a brick wall. All I did was taste the dust. But then miraculously, something internal came unhinged. In the beginning, all I could get out was a blood-choked, coughing grunt. And it blasted up from the bottom of my

lower self and this is the main point but it bypassed my brain get out of your own head it burned but I was awake this was relevatory I played these shows with the dead and never had to think twice about it I had that old jazz singer to thank. And so this idea of taking a break, getting out of your own mind, something that appears over and over again, seems to be very useful for Bob Dylan and his career. After that, he's like, okay,

I'm going to make great music again. And so he starts writing a bunch of songs for the first time in maybe over 10 years. Dylan winds up, I think Bono comes over. I think they're having dinner at Dylan's house, if I remember correctly. And Bono asked Dylan, like, do you have any new songs? Do you have any new music? And Dylan goes and pulls out all of these compositions that he wrote. It had been decades before he had like a productive spurt that is happening at this point in his life.

And Bono's reading over the lyrics. He's like, hey, I have a producer that you you need to go and work with and so Dylan is going to work with the producer that Bono recommended on this album called Oh Mercy and so they set up shop in this mansion in New Orleans and they're recording new music and in some cases great music but there's also times during the making of this album where Bob Dylan feels lost and so I just want to read a story that takes place because this is, I think, again, something that Dylan would suggest over and over again. It's going to take place over a couple of pages. And it's this idea that if you find yourself stuck, take a break, grab your lover and get out of town. I was up early and I rooted my wife out of bed. Daylight was two hours away. What's wrong now? she said. I hadn't thought that anything was wrong.

Within minutes, she had slipped out of her loose robe and was making coffee. By daybreak, we were riding on the Harley and had crossed the Mississippi River, heading towards Route 90. No purpose in heading there. It was just a place to go. I was feeling stuffy. I needed to get out of town. Something wasn't clicking. Like when the world is hidden from your eyes and you need to find it.

I parked the bike close to an old water tower. We got off and walked around. We walked along adjoining roads that were dwarfed by ancient Cyprus trees, some 700 years old. It felt far enough away from the city. So that's another main theme he just said that nature has all the answers to your problems anytime he feels like lost or he just wants to get away he goes out gets away from the city and goes into nature it felt good to be off by ourselves i looked at my wife the one thing about her that i always loved was that she was

never one of these people who thinks that someone else is the answer to their happiness. Me or anybody else. She always had her own built-in happiness. I valued her opinion, and I trusted her. We pulled in for the night, and I shut the bike down. It was a nice ride. We stayed at a bed and breakfast cottage. I laid down, listened to the crickets and the wildlife out the window in the eerie blackness. I like the night. Things grow at night. My imagination is available to me at night.

All my preconceptions of things go away. Sometimes you could be looking for heaven in the wrong places. Sometimes it could be under your feet or in your bed. Next day, I woke up. I felt like I had figured something out. And it was also interesting from this point of his life is as he's about to wrap up his album, he's having the conversation with the producer. His name is Danny. And Danny is shocked to learn who Bob Dylan had been listening to. And so I'm going to read my note to you first,

and then I'll read this section or make sense. Somebody different was bound to come along sooner or later. Bob Dylan knows that because at one time that was him. And so I don't think there's anything shameful about the fact that Bob Dylan of 87 does not have that same creative spark that Bob Dylan of 1962, 63 and 65 had. In fact, in that in Steve Jobs biography, when they're having that conversation and he's telling Steve, this two hour conversation, he's like, hey, listen, like the songs just come through me. It wasn't even like I was having to compose them. He also says that that just doesn't happen anymore. I just can't write them that way anymore. But he says I can still sing them. And so what I think Bob is about to tell Danny here in the book really speaks

to the environment that is conducive to your best creative work. Danny asked me who I'd been listening to recently, and I told him Ice-T. He was surprised, but he shouldn't have been. A few years earlier, Curtis Blow, a rapper from Brooklyn, had asked me to be on one of his records, and he familiarized me with all that stuff. Ice-T, Public Enemy, NWA, Run DMC. These guys definitely weren't standing around bullshitting. They were beating drums, tearing it up,

hurling horses over cliffs. They were all poets and knew what was going on. Somebody different was bound to come along sooner or later who would know that world, who had been born and raised with it, be all of it and more. And I'll pause there to say that's very interesting because when I read Jay-Z's autobiography, if you haven't listened to it, it's episode 238. He was somebody different who was born in that world, raised in it. And one of the most surprising things about Jay-Z's autobiography is just how steeped he was in the history of hip hop, how he studied all those guys, how he learned from them. In some cases, he wound up meeting them and going on tour with them. Somebody different was bound to come along sooner or later who would know that world, been born and raised in it,

be all of it and more. It's almost like Bob Dylan's describing the younger version of himself, isn't it? He'd be able to balance himself on one leg on a tightrope that stretched across the universe. And you'd know him when he came. There would be only one like him. He is describing his younger self. Bob Dylan knows that because at one time, that was him. What crazy language. He'd be able to balance himself

on one leg on a tightrope that stretched across the universe, and you'd know him when he came, there'd only be one like him. With Ice-T and Public Enemy Enemy who were laying the tracks, a new performer was bound to appear. He'd be doing it with hard words and he'd be working 18 hours a day. I love that part. Just want to read my note again. Somebody different was bound to come along sooner or later. Bob Dylan knows that because at one time that was him. So that album is finished. Bob Dylan gets to the last chapter. This is my note to myself, which I think. So that album is finished. Bob Dylan gets to the last chapter. This is my note to myself, which I think explains my experience with the book. He writes like he wants to make sure that you are paying attention.

You have to fill in a lot of this stuff for yourself. This is a flashback to when his father was still alive, even though this is the last chapter of the book. My father had his own way of looking at things. To him, life was hard work. He'd come from a generation of different values, heroes and music, and wasn't so sure that the truth would set anybody free.

He was pragmatic and always had a word of cryptic advice. Remember, Robert, in life, anything can happen. Even if you don't have all the things you want be grateful for the things you don't have that you don't want I was doing my best I had to thoroughly feel that I was earning my fee nothing would have convinced me that I was actually a songwriter and I wasn't not in the conventional songwriter sense of the world so that's what I mean about he writes like he wants to make sure you're paying attention. You have to fill in a lot of stuff for yourself without warning.

Now we're back to the Bob Dylan of 1961, the Bob Dylan trying to be signed, trying to achieve his life's dream. And he spends a lot of time expounding on that same theme that Bill Gurley talks about in Running Down a Dream, how to survive or how to succeed and thrive in a career you love. And that's this professional research. And now he gets to his hero, Woody Guthrie, the main person he wanted to meet when he hitchhiked to New York. As far as serious songwriting went, the songs I could see myself writing if I was that talented would be the kinds of songs that I wanted to sing. Outside of Woody Guthrie, I didn't see a single living soul who did it. The one song that had hooked me up with Leeds music, the one that had convinced John Hammond to bring me over there in the first place, was an homage in lyric and melody to the man who

had pointed out the starting place for my identity and destiny, the great Woody Guthrie. I wrote the song with him in mind and I used the melody from one of his old songs, having no idea it would be the first of maybe a thousand songs that I would write. My life has never been the same since I first heard Woody on a record player in Minneapolis a few years earlier.

When I first heard him, it was like a million megaton bomb had dropped and then he goes back and gives you the pre-history of why he was so obsessed and he discovered woody in minnesota so he goes back to this time this is when he's around in college but he dropped out i found the local record store in the heart of dinkytown what i was looking for were folk records this is when he locks himself in the booth and just listens to this over and over again i then went further up the street and dropped into the 10 o'clock scholar, which is a coffee house. I was looking for players with kindred pursuits.

The first guy I met in Minneapolis, like me, who was like me, was sitting around in there. It was John Corner. Performers like Corner and myself would go anywhere to hear anybody we thought we hadn't heard. I loved all these ballads right away. They were romantic as hell and high above the popular love songs that I'd ever heard. I was beginning to feel like a character from within these songs, even beginning to think like one. And so the experience that Bob Dylan is having in music,

I think you and I have with books. I feel like I'm a character in a lot of these books, and I even begin to think that I start to think like one as well. I know exactly what he is talking about. There's a fantastic lyric on Kanye West's first album. It's in this song called Spaceship. It's describing the struggle that he went through to try to become a producer and then a rapper.

It's a series of lines I think about all the time. He says, y'all don't know my struggle. You can't match my hustle. You can't catch my hustle. You can't fathom my love, dude. Lock yourself in a room doing five beats a day for three summers. I deserve to do these numbers. And that idea, you can reduce that idea to five beats a

day. Lock yourself in a room doing five beats a day for three summers. That experience that Kanye is describing in that song is exactly what Bob Dylan is describing in this autobiography. I played morning, noon, and night. That is all I did. I usually fell asleep with my guitar in my hands. I went through the entire summer that way. And so this part of the book is how bad do you want it? By this time, I was making $3 to $5 every time I played at either a coffee house or another place in St. Paul called the Purple Onion Pizza Parlor.

He is doing shows at a pizza parlor. This is a guy that's going to sell 125 million records. The place I was living was no more than an empty storage room with a sink and a window looking into an alley. No closet, a toilet down the hall. I put a mattress on the floor. I met an actress, an inspiring thespian named Flo Kastner. Flo was odd looking, but beautiful in a wacky way. She had long red

hair dressed in black from head to head to foot. And she had a folksy demeanor. She was a mystic. She believed in the occult power of trees and things like that. She was also very serious about reincarnation. We used to have strange conversations. One day she asked me if I had ever heard of Woody Guthrie. I said, sure, I had heard him on these other records with these two other musicians. Then she asked if I had ever heard him all by himself on his own records. I couldn't remember having done that. Flo said that her brother had some of his records and she would take me over there to hear them. That Woody Guthrie was somebody that I should definitely get hip to.

Something about this sounded important and I became definitely interested. When the record started to play, I was stunned. I didn't know if I was stoned or straight. What I heard was Woody singing a whole lot of his own compositions all by himself. All these songs made my head spin. It made me want to gasp. I couldn't believe it. He had such a grip on things. He was like none of the other singers I had ever heard, and neither were his songs. It was like the record player itself had just picked me up and flung me across the room. A voice in my head said, so this is the game. A great curiosity

had seized me and I had to find out who Woody Guthrie was. It didn't take me long. My friend Dave happened to have Woody's autobiography, Bound for Glory, and he lent it to me. What a fantastic title for an autobiography, Bound for Glory. I love that mentality. I went through it from cover to cover like a hurricane, totally focused on every word, and the book sang out to me like the radio. Guthrie writes like the whirlwind, and you get tripped out on the sound of the words alone. Pick up the book anywhere, turn to any page, and he hits the ground running. Kind of like what Bob did with his own autobiography.

Who is he? He's a hustling ex-sign painter from Oklahoma. An anti-materialist who grew up in the Depression and Dust Bowl days. Migrated west, had a tragic childhood, a lot of fire in his life, both figuratively and literally. Woody's got a fierce, poetic soul. He divides the world between those who work and those who don't, and is interested in the liberation of the human race and wants to create a world worth living in. Bound for Glory is a hell of a book. I decided then and there to sing nothing but guttry songs. It's almost like I didn't have any choice. I'm going to finish the

section, but pause there and just think about this. What is the difference in Bob Dylan's life if he never picked up that book? There's so many examples just like that. That's why I feel extremely comfortable being an evangelist. Everybody I come in contact with, the podcast, everybody I talk to, read biographies. It doesn't matter who it is. Whoever you just happen to be interested in, they will change your life. Imagine if he never picked up Bound for Glory. I said to myself I was going to be his greatest disciple. I wasn't even sure if he was alive anymore. The book makes it seem like he was a character from the old past. His friend Dave actually knows about it. He says he

got me up to date on him, that he was in ill health somewhere in the East. And I pondered that. One thing for sure, Woody Guthrie had never seen nor heard of me, but it felt like he was saying, I'll be going away, but I'm leaving this job in your hands. I know I can count on you. It was time for me to get out of Minneapolis. New York City was the place I wanted to be. With only a few tattered rags and a suitcase and a guitar, I stood on the edge of town and hitchhiked east to find Woody Guthrie. Although I might have been slack in a lot of things, my mind was ordered and disciplined. New York City, midwinter, 1961. Whatever I was doing was working out okay, and I intended to stay with it. I felt like I was closing in on something.

And that is where I'll leave it. I highly, highly, highly recommend reading this book. I would not overthink it. If somebody like Bill Gurley tells you to read a book, just buy the book. If you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes in your podcast player, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time.

That is 259 books down, 1,000 to go. And I'll talk to you again soon.