530am

Brinetopia Autumn 2009

530 am Eastern Standard Time, woke up from a dream about my workplace with a few lines from Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row playing in my head. There’s over a 100 lines of verse in that 11 minute beast first found on his 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited. The one's that were stuck in a loop between my ears were:

“you would not think to look at him

but he was famous a long time ago”

L-R Simon Anderson, Joe Larkin and Peter Townend Noosa 2010

As I walk out onto the back deck a few kookaburras start laughing from under a blanket of pre-dawn clouds skidding from west to east as fruit bats fly in the opposite direction. What does it mean? Portents of rain? Earthquake? Crisp offshores? 

Noosa Autumn 2010

First time I saw Dylan (the Zimmerman) live, I was a teenager with a few rolls of Kodachrome at a place now demolished before I acquired a few stories of my own and a ton of adult responsibility.

Huntington Winter 1978

I go to the kitchen computer that doubles as my darkroom these days and hunt down Desolation Row on iToons. There's a dull roar in the distance. Peak "hour" has already started as I start making my lunch totake on the bus. There's Bob hiding on the hard drive in between Department of Youth by Alice Cooper  (never seen him) and Devil Got My Woman, an old Skip James blues cover by Bonnie Rait who supported Dylan the second time I saw him with GfG and Tony at the no-cameas-allowed-venue.  

Brinetopia 1977

Headphones on. Family's still asleep. Responsibility is at least one album and a commute away as Bob sings me a surrealistic tale of carnies, crazies and clowns and those lines that could apply equally to ageing shapers.

“you would not think to look at him

but he was famous a long time ago”

Bob Dylan Desolation Row 1965