The French Savoie ‘Tartiflette’ dish, in the kitchen with pinklightsabre

We ate the last of the Tartiflette cold, mom most of it, and fought over the bites with our forks like we were playing a game of hungry hippos gulping down marbles. I got my first sunburn of the season with my back against a wall outside the Hirsch, up the street from mom’s, knocking back glasses of Pilsener, Lemberger Rosé, Hefe-Weizen. Mom gave me some coconut oil for the burn but when I put a spoonful on my forehead it melted and ran down my beard, my watch, my rings — and the kids had three German girls here for a sleepover playing hide and seek in the house, running in streams up and down the steps, collecting at the bottom.

It was this time 50 years ago Dylan finished mixing the tracks for his record Blonde on Blonde, considered one of the first double LPs in pop music, completing a trilogy of records he released in 14 months, starting with Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home.

It followed Dylan’s break from the folk music scene when he plugged in at the Newport Folk Festival in ’65 — after the release of Blonde on Blonde he suffered a motorcycle accident in Woodstock, but went on to release John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline next, continuing to play with the Canadian musicians who backed Ronnie Hawkins & The Hawks, and would go on to become The Band.

I keifed a copy of the CD from my mom’s house before we started our roadtrip to the UK in October, as we didn’t have much space for CDs and it packs a lot onto just one disc. The words and music, the sound Dylan captures, became the soundtrack for our time as we left Germany, passing through France to stay with our friends for a night, continuing on the next day across Belgium to Holland, an overnight ferry crossing to Newcastle, and Scotland for a month.

And we promised the kids we’d get them some treats to have in the car, so we bought a bag of Gummy bears and let them have a couple but stowed the rest between the seats in the front and not soon after the kids forgot about them, and I thought wouldn’t it be funny if I got the bag out again as we’re driving back into Germany three months later, and I’d play the Dylan album again, to see if anyone noticed how I was bookending things.

It smells like someone’s burning something outside at night, and it’s the fall and spring fires I like best, when it seems you can do something about the chill. The girls who are here for the sleepover are from right up the road, and will likely never leave this town. They will some day when they grow up, but they’ll always be back.

On Sundays work isn’t tolerated here in any form. Most stores are closed, so you have to plan ahead or resign yourself to gas station wine if you run out, or a self-service vegetable stand in the country where they have plastic lockers outside and you put a euro in a coin slot to get some potatoes or carrots.

We keep burning bad incense to beat back the smell of stinky cheese whenever someone opens the refrigerator door, as it’s stacked with the Raclette cheese Laurent and Nanou brought us we couldn’t eat, there was too much, and we didn’t have room for it in the fridge so we’ve been keeping it in the laundry room to compete with the sphagnum moss scents and cat litter smells, and whatever else there is in there we’ve forgotten about.

And when I was in Amsterdam I sat in a Dutch bar by my hotel in the Red Light District with a bartender who spoke American-English and played blues tracks all night on his tablet, or with cassettes given to him by locals, and showed off how much I knew each time he changed the songs, picking the singers off one by one: Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Canned Heat.

Last night mom pointed out the lyrics to The Band song The Weight refer to Martin Guitars in Nazareth, PA, where my stepdad John worked as a designer (‘I pulled into Nazareth, was feelin’ about half past dead’) — but unlike mom and I, John couldn’t stand Dylan and we weren’t allowed to play him while he was alive, so mom had to keep the CDs to herself to avoid John going on about him, how so many others were so much better than Dylan but never made it, which I can believe but never cared to hear much about.

Reading more about the making of the album, you learn how Dylan struggled to get just the right quality for each song, and struggled more on some than others. I think anyone who creates can relate to this, to latch on to some feeling or vision inside of us, the fact it will never be the way we imagined it, and to not let that get in the way of making it.

When we came back from the UK in February I cued up Visions of Johanna as we pulled off the A67, and the German countryside opened, but of course it wasn’t the same as when we started, it couldn’t be.

More on the making of Blonde on Blonde here, from a great Wikipedia article.

Through the fields in Besigheim

Categories: musings, travel

Tags: art, Blonde on Blonde, Bob Dylan, creative nonfiction, folk music, Memoir, Music, Ronnie Hawkins, The Band, the nature of art, travel, Visions of Johanna, writing