It’s been too long (for me) that I felt left out of that ball of fire, that fire of inspiration, that solid, manic, deeply driven passion, that mad stuff that makes me who I am.
To be mad and heaven-held and to know what I’m doing and to know I’m all right, that my body is free and my mind isn’t chained to the ground. It’s not about living intensely, it’s about writing songs and playing them out to people. As many people and as often as possible. It’s been too long till last night, when I started reading Bob Dylan’s autobiography and, boom, I was swished back to myself, to that place where I totally belong. What can I say, that shiny black-and-white NYC, just the way I know it, that freezing winter, and the coolest, coolest places and sounds, steaming underground and starry, starry upper life, the East Village, cutting the cold with an inner fire greater than anything that might stand on your way. Myself turning into my own kind of music. Mad man making music and the air is oh so blasting free. LOVE itself cannot even come close to it.
And no religion too. Everything, the city and an entire era is being born. Everything that happens to you, people you meet and places you go, makes a cryptically firm kind of sense. And you have a million songs in your hand. Oh, man. Last night, Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, a glass of wine and a new song in my hands, my piano and all, it felt like NYC at its best again, right here in the freezing cold of Jerusalem.

Here’s a quote:

“I wanted to play for anybody. I could never sit in a room and just play all by myself. I needed to play for people and all the time. You can say I practiced in public and my whole life was becoming what I practiced.” (Bob Dylan)

And another one:

“I’d either drive people away, or they’d come closer to see what it was all about. There were a lot of better singers and better musicians around these places but there wasn’t anybody close in nature to what I was doing. Folk songs were the way I explored the universe…” (Bob Dylan)