Listen for the Trumpeter swans trumpeting / Bob Dylan dream / Someday I'll draw a masterpiece with my non-dominant hand (-:

A few nights ago I dreamed that I was line with about a dozen people in an intimate hallway, waiting to see an art exhibit for a second time and noticed Bob Dylan talking with other people farther back in the line.  It turned out that he was the curator for the exhibit which I soon found featured not only the art work of women but also included a section that was like a county fair as well as an outdoor garden section.  There was no commotion around him.  He was speaking calmly and quietly to each person in a gracious and friendly manner.  I hoped that he would notice me and talk with me, but I was okay if he didn't and he didn't.  A woman asked if he could sign one of his songbooks and he obliged her.  

He was dressed in a vaguely Middle Eastern cotton shirt jacket and faded jeans.  The shirt jacket had pale vertical stripes that were green, orange, red, tan and golden.

When it was my turn to the enter the exhibit, I walked in with much more awareness than the first time. Once again, the first thing I saw was a small square self-portrait of a young woman painted in mostly greens.  Her face was golden.  Her handwritten poetry inspired by her painting was on the wall underneath her self-portrait.  The exhibit walls were rounded.  I continued in a counter-clockwise direction, seeing each woman's art work as if for the first time.

On this second visit to the exhibit, I went further than before and came to a hallway with living rabbits in fanciful dioramas.  This part of the exhibit was something like the 4-H area of a county fair.  

Continuing on I discovered there was a door leading outside to a garden exhibit.  While I was looking at a display of flowering plants, I saw one of my former hospital co-workers, Eduardo.  He stopped to talk with me.  I wanted to tell him that I am learning to speak Spanish, but his grandson insisted that they keep walking to the next garden display.  His grandson appeared to be about 11 years old and was excited about the garden displays.  Eduardo smiled at me, at the same time shrugging his shoulders the way he always used to do, and let his grandson pull him forward.  

Another Self Portrait (1969-1971) / Talking 37th Dream with Rainbow (2013)

"... 'Copper Kettle' stood out on the original Self Portrait.  Dylan's commitment to this instant folk song -- it was written in 1953 -- was too strong.  But now, with the same vocal, on the undubbed master, you are in a different world. Here, Bob Dylan really does disappear.  1970 disappears.  The sixties never happened.  A moonshiner is telling you why he does what he does:  so he can lie back and think about nothing, forever.  The voice is so clear, so convincing, so plainly the voice of someone who has weighed life's choices and made his, that it shames your own compromises.  With the guitars so slight they could be hands waving in the air and Al Kooper's piping organ, which would be erased on Self Portrait, coming up slowly as the voice of the singer's nighttime dreams, it's as if the words too have disappeared, as if the song doesn't need them, as if the singer can communicate without even opening his mouth, by pure will."

(from the booklet written by Greil Marcus, accompanying the two-CD Another Self Portrait (1969-1971)

Everyone who was there has their own story of the years 1969-1971, when Bob Dylan recorded these songs.  In spring of 1969, my beloved Richard was drafted into the U.S. Army.  We were 19 years old.  He was in Vietnam for year of 1970.  We turned 21 years old in October of that year.  In 1971, we lived through the dark aftermath of his year in Vietnam and separated, "both agreeing it was best," just after our 22nd birthdays that year.  We listened to Bob Dylan's music before, during and after those years.  In one of the last letters I received from Richard, he asked, "How's Bob doing?" My copy of the CD arrived in the mail today.  I'm listening to it right now.

Richard was someone who weighed life's choices and made his.  I have tried not to compromise my life as a result.   I hear Richard's voice in Bob Dylan's voice.  Always have.

I recommend Another Self Portrait (1969-1971) The Bootleg Series Vol. 10.   I can't imagine someone not loving these recordings, but I know by now that not everyone will.

Here's Bob Dylan's 1970 version of "Copper Kettle":



You'll have to buy Another Self Portrait to hear the version without overdubs.  You won't regret it.  I promise.