When a young Bob Dylan was looking for answers to eternal hope, he traveled from his home in Minnesota all the way to a Brooklyn State Hospital. There he found his hero, Woody Guthrie. Guthrie would spend the final 12 years of his life in such facilties, suffering from Huntingtons chorea, a genetic disorder that generally meant institutionalization in a psychiatric hospital. Dylan would later write the following tribute to Woody Guthrie, who died on this day, Oct 3, 1967. Its kinda long (Im glad Im in good company when writing long pieces, lol), so I just copied and pasted excerpts here, but the full poem, Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie, is provided in the link. When yer head gets twisted and yer mind grows numb When you think youre too old, too young, too smart or too dumb When yer laggin behind an losin yer pace In a slow-motion crawl of lifes busy race No matter what yer doing if you start givin up If the wine dont come to the top of yer cup ...And yer minutes of sun turn to hours of storm And to yourself you sometimes say I never knew it was gonna be this way Why didnt they tell me the day I was born? And you start gettin chills and yer jumping from sweat And youre lookin for somethin you aint quite found yet And yer knee-deep in the dark water with yer hands in the air And the whole worlds a-watchin with a window peek stare And yer good gal leaves and shes long gone a-flying And yer heart feels sick like fish when theyre fryin ...And theres something on yer mind you wanna be saying That somebody someplace oughta be hearin But its trapped on yer tongue and sealed in yer head And it bothers you badly when your layin in bed And no matter how you try you just cant say it And yer scared to yer soul you just might forget it And yer eyes get swimmy from the tears in yer head And yer pillows of feathers turn to blankets of lead ...Am I mixed up too much, am I mixed up too hard? Why am I walking, where am I running? What am I saying, what am I knowing? On this guitar Im playing, on this banjo Im frailin On this mandolin Im strummin, in the song Im singin In the tune Im hummin, in the words Im thinkin In the words that Im writing In this ocean of hours Im all the time drinkin Who am I helping, what am I breaking? What am I giving, what am I taking? But you try with your whole soul best Never to think these thoughts and never to let Them kind of thoughts gain ground Or make yer heart pound But then again you know why theyre around Just waiting for a chance to slip and drop down Cause sometimes you hearem when the night times comes creeping And you fear that they might catch you a-sleeping And you jump from yer bed, from yer last chapter of dreamin And you cant remember for the best of yer thinking If that was you in the dream that was screaming And you know that its something special youre needin And you know that theres no drug thatll do for the healin And no liquor in the land to stop yer brain from bleeding ...You need something special all right You need something special to give you hope But hopes just a word that maybe you said or maybe you heard On some windy corner round a wide-angled curve But thats what you need man, and you need it bad And yer trouble is you know it too good Cause you look an you start getting the chills Cause you cant find it on a dollar bill ...And it aint in the fifty-star generals and flipped-out phonies Whod turn yuh in for a tenth of a penny Who breathe and burp and bend and crack And before you can count from one to ten Do it all over again but this time behind yer back, my friend The ones that wheel and deal and whirl and twirl And play games with each other in their sand-box world ...No but that aint yer game, it aint even yer race You cant hear yer name, you cant see yer face You gotta look some other place And where do you look for this hope that yer seekin? Where do you look for this lamp thats a-burnin? Where do you look for this oil well gushin? Where do you look for this candle thats glowin? Where do you look for this hope that you know is there And out there somewhere And your feet can only walk down two kinds of roads? Your eyes can only look through two kinds of windows Your nose can only smell two kinds of hallways You can touch and twist and turn two kinds of doorknobs You can either go to the church of your choice Or you can go to Brooklyn State Hospital Youll find God in the church of your choice Youll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital And though its only my opinion I may be right or wrong Youll find them both In the Grand Canyon at sundown ~ Bob Dylan
Posted on: Sat, 04 Oct 2014 03:52:01 +0000
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