Quality of Mercy

Highway 16 Revisited

Over and over, I am revisiting myself at 16. That year, I played Joe in a production of William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life at my arts high school in Dallas. It didn’t take much acting for me to be Joe. He was a barfly philosopher who was jaded and filled with ennui. The one moment a woman shows interest in him, he blows it by being too passive. One of my teachers knew me well enough to know that I wasn’t really acting at all. I was being myself, just years older. This guy was a heavy drinker and I had never been drunk in my life, but the whole thing just came naturally. The play is kind of corny, but it did win a Pulitzer Prize, and there was a movie made of it with James Cagney playing my role.

“In the time of your life, live—so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches. Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding place and let it be free and unashamed.”

Ok, then. I don’t even know what that means anymore, but it seemed profound at that time, and then there was that Pulitzer committee. I was a music student, so I got to be a tourist in this world and I thought I could act. When it was over, I took it hard. I became ill—I couldn’t eat anything, and this was around Thanksgiving, when I was supposed to. So as I was spending days in endless night, I opened up my vinyl copy of Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy, which had just been released. I had been swimming in the Lanois swamp for a while. I had written about the Lanois produced Robbie Robertson solo album for the high school paper—I asked my English teacher what Robbie Robertson was talking about, and he said that maybe Robbie Robertson didn’t know—and everyone knew what he did for U2. I had seen Dylan in concert the year before—1988, the beginning of the Neverending tour—and I thought he was a great artist in decline. He was just throwing it away, or so it seemed at 15. He was 47, and I didn’t see things getting better. Now Bob was 48, and I realized I could not have been more wrong. The voice that came on didn’t sound like the Bob I knew. His voice was deeper. He wasn’t pushing. He couldn’t recreate the Dylan of our memories. He had reinvented himself yet again. 48 seemed really old. Amazingly, unlike the concert I saw the year earlier, every choice was a musical choice. His voice hit in a melodic place the entire time. The lower end was the place to be. Basement tapes, indeed. He was using older age like a leather jacket, or a comfortable suit. He sounded kind of like the guy I thought I was playing. Maybe I’d be playing him down the line.

Sometimes, I think about myself coming from the year 2022. I’m a little older than the older Bob on the record, but because I have never smoked a cigarette, my voice is the pretty much the same as it was in ‘89. I don’t want to get into anything that too inescapably dark. I don’t really want to get into 9/11 or Trump or Covid, or personal, unavoidable misery. Some things are too hot to touch. The human mind can only stand so much. I really just want to lay music from the future on my 16 year old self. Leonard Cohen will make The Future, then 10 New Songs, all the way to You Want it Darker. Could I have handled You Want it Darker? Oh Mercy would pave the way for Time Out of Mind, then I would have selected tracks—”Mississippi,” “Ain’t Talkin’,” all the way to “Key West,” even though it has a verse that still eludes me. I was on the path to Joni Mitchell’s later work. Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm prepared me for all the great work that followed. (What if I had known that I would be her biographer? What if knowing it made it impossible?) Then I want to share Radiohead, Fiona Apple—her Fetch the Bolt Cutters would be a jolt into what 2020 sounded like for many of us—St. Vincent, Beck, Bjork, Elvis Costello and XTC’s later albums. How about The Pixies? Nirvana? Elliott Smith? Bowie’s Blackstar? Geoerge Harrison’s Brainwashed? How about archival masterpieces I hadn’t discovered yet, like Judee Sill or Nick Drake? If I have it early, before it’s made, what will it do for me? Will it expand my mind the way it should? Would it take me off of my path or would it put me on a new one?

I am of the Back to the Future generation. We were raised to think that time travel and its uses and abuses were possible.

I remember asking Stanley Crouch about what kind of world we would live in if Ornette Coleman were popular. “The same fucked up world we live in now,”
he said. “When I was your age I used to say things like that.”

I am not my age anymore. I’m a Wilbury. I’m nearly the age Leonard Cohen was when he released his first version of “Hallelujah.” I should have done more, or I am overqualified. I am grateful, I am appalled. I don’t like the way things are going, but on better days, I am still able to enjoy the ride. What is that?

I am more comfortable in my skin now then when I was the 16-year-old discovering the splendors of later Dylan. I am a year older than Oh Mercy Bob. The album seems more true now than it did then. I talked to Lucinda Williams and Joni Mitchell about “Everything is Broken.” It is, of course. Alternate verses have been released, and it’s a theme that runneth over. But then we must gather up the brokenness. There is still an unwritten poem.

I have long assumed that “Shooting Star” was about Richard Manuel’s suicide. The song that Manuel and Dylan wrote together ends with prophecy: “Life is brief.” But not for Dylan. He can’t stay off the road, and he keeps releasing music for me to share with my 16-year-old self. It’s a fantasy, making that share. I am a product my accumulated experiences, just like everyone else. When we write, we time travel, we go in and out of our former selves, lie in the old bedroom, the one where we first listened and loved and yearned.

Seen a shootin' star tonight
And I thought of me
If I was still the same
If I ever became
What you wanted me to be
Did I miss the mark
Overstep the line
That only you could see
Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of me

I was young and pretty, but I also had to go to Geometry class and I had no idea if life would get better or worse. I was taking a few sick days, lying in bed, isolated from the world, taking in Bob Dylan at 48. I’m listening to him now. “Shooting Star” is a pastoral elegy. Someone has died, but the singer is still here with the rest of us. I didn’t need to get a sneak preview of the future. I would get it in time. Lying in bed and listening to records was fieldwork.

Broken cutters, broken saws,
Broken buckles, broken laws,
Broken bodies, broken bones,
Broken voices on broken phones
Take a deep breath, feel like you're chokin',
Everything is broken

A few years after 1989, I decided that I really shouldn’t act. I found my way elsewhere. As of this writing, I’m still in my time. If I live to be old, I’ll be nostalgic for this moment. I’m a year older than the Dylan of Oh Mercy, and it doesn’t feel so old at all. I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.