Tarantula Read online

  TARANTULA

  Also by Bob Dylan

  Chronicles: Volume One

  Lyrics: 1962-2001

  SCRIBNER

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1966 by Bob Dylan

  Copyright © 1971 by The Macmilllan Company

  Copyright renewed © 1994 by Bob Dylan

  All rights reserved, including the right of

  reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  First Scribner trade paperback edition 2004

  SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of

  Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license

  by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

  For information about special discounts for bulk purchases,

  please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales:

  1-800-456-6798 or [email protected]

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dylan, Bob, 1941-

  Tarantula / Bob Dylan—1st Scribner trade pbk. ed.

  p. cm.

  I. Title

  PS3554.Y56T3 2004

  811′.54—dc22

  2004040616

  www.Simonspeakers.com

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-0766-9

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-3041-4

  ISBN 0-7432-3041-8

  Here Lies Tarantula

  (Preface to the original edition)

  In the fall of 1966, we were to publish Bob Dylan’s “first book.” Other publishers were envious. “You’ll sell a lot of copies of that,” they said, not really knowing what that was, except that it was by Bob Dylan. A magic name then. “Besides, look how many copies of John Lennon’s book were sold. This would be twice as big—maybe more.” Didn’t matter what was in it.

  Bob would visit our offices occasionally. It was hard for him to travel in broad daylight in those times, even to our old 12th Street and Fifth Avenue building, a marvelous structure with a marble staircase and thick walls covered with portraits and photographs of people like W. B. Yeats. We had published his first book too, all his books in fact.

  One day when Bob appeared the receptionist at the big oak desk decided she didn’t care for the look of him and phoned upstairs to see if it was all right to allow him to enter. It seemed funny then, because there were very few places in which he found himself unwelcome. He would go in and people would look and whisper and stand back. They thought it was poor form to press him. They didn’t quite know what to say to him anyway.

  We talked about his book, his hopes for it and what he wanted it to look like. And what he wanted to call it. We knew only it was “a work in progress,” a first book by a young songwriter, a quickly famous shy boy who sometimes wrote poetry and who was having an odd effect on a lot of us.

  We weren’t quite sure what to make of the book—except money. We didn’t know what Bob was up to. We only knew that good publishers give authors a chance to catch up with themselves. Robert Lowell talks about “free-lancing out along the razor’s edge,” and we thought Bob was doing some of that.

  We worked out a design for the book that we liked. Bob liked it too, and we set it up. We also made up some buttons and shopping bags with a picture of Bob and the word Tarantula. We wanted to call everyone’s attention to the fact that the book was being published. We wanted to help Life and Look and The New York Times and Time and Newsweek and all the rest who were talking about Bob. We brought a set of galleys to him so he could take one last good look at it before we printed it and bound it and started to fill all the orders that had come in.

  It was June. Bob took a break from some film-editing he was doing. We talked a little about the book and about Rameau and Rimbaud and Bob promised to finish “making a few changes” in two weeks. A few days after that Bob stopped working. A motorcycle accident had forced him into a layoff.

  The book might have been published just the way it had been left. But we could not do that. Bob did not want that. Now he was not ready to “make the changes.” It was nothing more than that.

  Time went by and the year came to an end. Some people were furious. Where was this so-called book? He had promised. The Macmillan Company had promised. They even had made those buttons and shopping bags, and there were some left over that people were snitching from the warehouse and selling because they had Bob’s picture on them and maybe a picture would be better than the book anyway.

  There were also a few sets of galleys that had gone around to different people who were being given a preview of the book. These advance review galleys are made of every book. Sometimes they are loose and sometimes they are bound up with a spiral binding.

  More time went by. There were still many people who talked about the book and wondered when it would come out. But it couldn’t come out unless or until Bob wanted it to. He didn’t.

  The more time that went by, the more curious and furious some people became. Doesn’t matter that it’s his work, they said. Doesn’t matter what he wants, they said. What right has he got anyway. And so they managed to get hold of a copy or two of those galleys and they started to make some copies of the copies. They sold even better than the buttons had.

  Some newspapers saw that this was happening and decided to print parts of the book and long reviews and speculations and denunciations. Bob didn’t like this idea and neither did we. We know that an artist has the right to make his own decisions about what happens to his work. And a publisher should protect this right, not abrogate it. Everyone should know this. You don’t take what doesn’t belong to you, and the only thing that truly belongs to us is our work.

  Poets and writers tell us how we feel by telling us how they feel. They find ways to express the inexpressible. Sometimes they tell the truth and sometimes they lie to us to keep our hearts from breaking.

  Bob has always been out ahead, working in ways which can be hard to understand. A lot of what he wrote then in Tarantula doesn’t seem so hard to understand now. People change and their feelings change. But Tarantula hasn’t been changed. Bob wants it published and so it is now time to publish it. This is Bob Dylan’s first book. It is the way he wrote it when he was twenty-three—just this way—and now you know.

  The Publisher

  TARANTULA

  Guns, the Falcon’s Mouthbook

  & Gashcat Unpunished

  aretha/ crystal jukebox queen of hymn & him diffused in drunk transfusion wound would heed sweet soundwave crippled & cry salute to oh great particular el dorado reel & ye battered personal god but she cannot she the leader of whom when ye follow, she cannot she has no back she cannot … beneath black flowery railroad fans & fig leaf shades & dogs of all nite joes, grow like arches & cures the harmonica battalions of bitter cowards, bones & bygones while what steadier louder the moans & arms of funeral landlord with one passionate kiss rehearse from dusk & climbing into the bushes with some favorite enemy ripping the postage stamps & crazy mailmen & waving all rank & familiar ambition than that itself, is needed to know that mother is not a lady … aretha with no goals, eternally single & one step soft of heaven/ let it be understood that she owns this melody along with her emotional diplomats & her earth & her musical secrets

  the censor in a twelve wheel drive semi

  stopping in for donuts & pinching the

  waitress/ he likes his women raw & with

  syrup/ he has his mind set
on becoming

  a famous soldier

  manuscript nitemare of cut throat high & low & behold the prophesying blind allegiance to law fox, monthly cupid & the intoxicating ghosts of dogma … nay & may the boatmen in bathrobes be banished forever & anointed into the shelves of alive hell, the unimaginative sleep, repetition without change & fat sheriffs who watch for doom in the mattress … hallaluyah & bossman of the hobos cometh & ordaining the spiritual gypsy davy camp now being infiltrated by foreign dictator, the pink FBI & the interrogating unknown failures of peacetime as holy & silver & blessed with the texture of kaleidoscope & the sandal girl … to dream of dancing pillhead virgins & wandering apollo at the pipe organ/ unscientific ramblers & the pretty things lucky & lifting their lips & handing down looks & regards from the shoulders of adam & eve’s minstrel peekaboo … passing on the chance to bludgeon the tough spirits & the deed holders into fishlike buffoons & yanking ye erratic purpose … surrendering to persuasion, the crime against people, that be ranked alongside murder & while doctors, teachers, bankers & sewer cleaners fight for their rights, they must now be horribly generous … & into the march now where tab hunter leads with his thunderbird/ pearl bailey stomps him against a buick & where poverty, a perfection of neptune’s unused clients, plays hide & seek & escaping into the who goes there? & now’s not the time to act silly, so wear your big boots & jump on the garbage clowns, the hourly rate & the enema men & where junior senators & goblins rip off tops of question marks & their wives make pies & go now & throw some pies in the face & ride the blinds & into aretha’s religious thighs & movement find ye your nymph of no conscience & bombing out your young sensitive dignity just to see once & for all if there are holes & music in the universe & watch her tame the sea horse/ aretha, pegged by choir boys & other pearls of mamas as too gloomy a much of witchy & dont you know no happy songs

  the lawyer leading a pig on a leash

  stopping in for tea & eating the censor’s

  donut by mistake/ he likes to lie about

  his age & takes his paranoia seriously

  the hospitable grave being advertised & given away in whims & journals the housewife sits on. finding herself financed, ruptured but never censored in & also never flushing herself/ she denies her corpse the courage to crawl—close his own door, the ability to die of bank robbery & now catches the heels of old stars making scary movies on her dirt & her face & not everybody can dig her now. she is private property … bazookas in the nest & weapons of ice & of weatherproof flinch & they twitter, make scars & kill babies among lady shame good looks & her constant foe, tom sawyer of the breakfast cereal causing all females paying no attention to this toilet massacre to be hereafter called LONZO & must walk the streets of life forever with lazy people having nothing to do but fight over women … everybody knows by now that wars are caused by money & greed & charity organizations/ the housewife is not here. she is running for congress

  the senator dressed like an austrian

  sheep. stopping in for coffee & insulting

  the lawyer/ he is on a prune diet &

  secretly wishes he was bing crosby

  but would settle for being a close

  relative of edgar bergen

  passing the sugar to iron man of the bottles who arrives with the grin & a heatlamp & he’s pushing “who dunnit” buttons this year & he is a love monger at first sight … you have seen him sprout up from a dumb hill bully into a bunch of backslap & he’s wise & he speaks to everyone as if they just answered the door/ he dont like people that say he comes from the monkeys but nevertheless he is dull & he is destroyingly boring … while Allah the cook scrapes hunger from his floor & pounding it into the floating dishes with roaring & the rest of the meatheads praising each other’s power & argue over acne & recite calendars & pointing to each other’s garments & liquid & disperse into segments & die crazy deaths & bellowing farce mortal farm vomit & why for Jesus Christ be Just another meathead? when all the tontos & heyboy lose their legs trying to frug while kemosabe & mr palladin spend their off hours remaining separate but equal & anyway why not wait for laughter to straighten the works out meantime & WOWEE smash & the rage of it all when former lover cowboy hanging upside down & Suzy Q. the angel putting new dime into this adoption machine as out squirts a symbol squawking & freezing & crashing into the bowels of some hideous soap box & it’s a rumble & iron man picking up his “who dunnit” buttons & giving them away free & trying to make friends & even tho youre belonging to no political party, youre now prepared, prepared to remember something about something

  the chief of police holding a bazooka

  with his name engraved on it. coming in

  drunk & putting the barrel into the face

  of the lawyer’s pig. once a wife beater,

  he became a professional boxer & received

  a club foot/ he would literally like to

  become an executioner. what he doesnt know

  is that the lawyer’s pig has made friends

  with the senator

  gambler’s passion & his slave, the sparrow & he’s ranting from a box of black platform & mesmerizing this ball of daredevils to stay in the morning & dont bust from the factories/ everyone expecting to be born with whom they love & theyre not & theyve been let down, theyve been lied to & now the organizers must bring the oxen in & dragging leaflets & gangrene enthusiasm, ratfinks & suicide tanks from the pay phones to the housing developments & it usually starts to rain for a while … little boys cannot go out & play & new men in bulldozers come in every hour delivering groceries & care packages being sent from las vegas … & nephews of the coffee bean expert & other favorite sons graduating with a pompadour & cum laude—praise be & a wailing farewell to releasing the hermit & beautifully ugly & fingering eternity come down & save your lambs & butchers & strike the roses with its rightful patsy odor … & grampa scarecrow’s got the tiny little wren & see for yourself while saving him too/ look down oh great Romantic. you who can predict from every position, you who know that everybody’s not a Job or a Nero nor a J.C. Penney … look down & seize your gambler’s passion, make high wire experts into heroes, presidents into con men. turn the eventual … but the hermits being not talking & lower class or insane or in prison … & they dont work in the factories anyway

  the good samaritan coming in with the

  words “round & round we go” tattooed on

  his cheek/ he tells the senator to stop

  insulting the lawyer/ he would like to

  be an entertainer & brags that he is

  one of the best strangers around, the

  pig jumps on him & starts eating his face

  illiterate coins of two head wrestling with window washer who’s been reincarnated from a garden hoe & after once being pushed around happily & casually hitting a rock once in a while is now bitter hung up on finding some inferior. he bites into the window ledge & by singing “what’ll we do with the baby-o” to thirsty peasant girls wanting a drink from his pail, he is thinking he is some kind of success but he’s getting his kicks telling one of the two headed coins that tom Jefferson used to use him around the house when the bad stuff was growing … the lawrence welk people inside the window, theyre running the city planning division & they hibernate & feeding their summers by conversing with poor people’s shadows & other ambulance drivers, & they dont even notice this window washer while the families who tell of the boogey men & theyre precious & there’s pictures of them playing golf & getting blacker & they wear oil in the window washer’s union hall & these people consider themselves gourmets for not attending charlie stark-weather’s funeral ye gads the champagne being appropriate pagan & the buffalo, tho the restaurant owners are vague about it, is fast disappearing into violence/ soon there will be but one side of the coin & mohammed wherever he comes from, cursing & window washers falling & then no one will have any money … broad save the clean, the minorities & liberace’s countryside.

  the truck driver coming in with a carpet
/>
  sweeper under his eyes/ everybody says

  “hi joe” & he says

  “joe the fellow that

  owns this place. i’m just a scientist. i

  aim got no name” the truck driver hates

  anybody that carries a tennis racket/ he

  drinks all the senator’s coffee & proceeds

  to put him in a headlock

  first you snap your hair down & try to tie up the kicking voices on a table & then the sales department people with names like Gus & Peg & Judy the Wrench & Nadine with worms in her fruit & Bernice Bearface blowing her brains on Butch & theyre all enthused over locker rooms & vegetables & Muggs he goes to sleep on your neck talking shop & divorces & headline causes & if you cant say get off my neck, you just answer him & wink & wait for some morbid reply & the liberty bell ringing when you dont dare ask yourself how do you feel for God’s sake & what’s one more face? & the difference between a lifetime of goons & holes, company pigs & beggars & cancer critics learning yoga with raving petty gangsters in one act plays with V-eight engines all being tossed in the river & combined in a stolen mirror … compared to the big day when you discover lord byron shooting craps in the morgue with his pants off & he’s eating a picture of jean paul belmondo & he offers you a piece of green lightbulb & you realize that nobody’s told you about This & that life is not so simple after all … in fact that it’s no more than something to read & light cigarettes with … Lem the Clam tho, he really gives a damn if dale really does get nailed slamming down the scotch & then going outside with Maurice, who aint the Peoria Kid & dont look the same as they do in Des Moines, Iowa & good old debbie, she comes along & both her & dale, they start shacking up in the newspapers & jesus who can blame ’em? & Amen & oh lordy, & how the parades dont need your money baby … it’s the confetti & one george Washington & Nadine who comes running & says where’s Gus? & she’s salty about the bread he’s been making off her worms while dollars becoming pieces of paper … but people kill for paper & anyway you cant buy a thrill with a dollar as long as pricetags, the end of the means & only as big as your fist & they dangle from a pot of golden rainbow … which attacks & which covers the saddles of noseless poets & wonder blazing & somewhere over the rainbow & blinding my married lover into the ovation maniacs/cremating innocent child into scrapheap for vicious controversy & screwball & who’s to tell charlie to stop & not come back for garbage men arent serious & they gonna get murdered tomorrow & next march 7th by the same kids & their fathers & their uncles & all the rest of these people that would make leadbelly a pet … they will always kill garbage men & wiping the smells but this rainbow, she goes off behind a pillar & sometimes a tornado destroys the drugstores & floods bring polio & leaving Gus & Peg twisted in the volleyball net & Butch hiding in madison square garden … Bearface dead from a flying piece of grass! I.Q.—somewhere in the sixties & twentieth century & so sing aretha … sing mainstream into orbit! sing the cowbells home! sing misty … sing for the barber & when youre found guilty of not owning a cavalry & not helping the dancer with laryngitis … misleading valentino’s pirates to the indians or perhaps not lending a hand to the deaf pacifist in his sailor jail … it then must be time for you to rest & learn new songs … forgiving nothing for you have done nothing & make love to the noble scrubwoman