The Writer's Almanac from Thursday, July 25, 2013
The Writer's Almanac from Thursday, July 25, 2013
"The Day I Die" by Krista Lukas, from Fans of My Unconscious. © Black Rock Press, 2013.
ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2013
It was on this day in 1897, that the novelist Jack London left San Francisco for the Klondike to join the gold rush. He was just 21. A few weeks earlier, a ship had arrived in San Francisco from the Klondike carrying more than a million dollars' worth of gold, and London got his stepsister to mortgage her house and lend him the money for the trip.
It was an arduous journey, a long haul over the famous Chilkoot Pass. And winter came before Jack London could even start looking for gold. He spent that winter in a little fur trader's cabin the size of a tool shed, reading the books he'd brought with him: Dante's Inferno and Milton's Paradise Lost.
By spring, he'd realized that all the good claims had already been made. So instead of looking for gold, he talked to people and he gathered their stories. He almost died of scurvy on the way home, but he went on to write about his experiences in his book The Call of the Wild, which became one of the most popular books of the time.
It's the birthday of saxophonist Johnny Hodges, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1906. He took up the soprano sax when he was 14, and later specialized on the alto. Hodges joined Duke Ellington's orchestra in 1928, and he was a soloist and mainstay of the ensemble until his death in 1970. Among his best-known solos are those on "Warm Valley" and "Passion Flower." His nickname, "Rabbit," came from his love of lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches. As he grew older, Hodges used fewer and fewer notes in his solos, preferring to stay closer to the melody.
It's the birthday of the painter Thomas Eakins, born in Philadelphia (1844). He painted realistic American scenes of the late 1800s like Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, and The Gross Clinic. Many of his paintings featured Eakins himself in the background, sometimes swimming, rowing a scull, or treading water next to his setter dog Harry.
Today is the anniversary of the day when Bob Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, to the great consternation of folk music fans.
Actually, Bob Dylan had grown up listening to rock and roll. He loved Elvis. He once said: "When I first heard Elvis's voice, I just knew that I wasn't going to work for anybody and nobody was gonna be my boss. Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail."
Dylan played in rock bands in high school, but when he went to college at the University of Minnesota, he fell into the folk scene and started singing songs of Woody Guthrie. He performed wearing blue jeans and a work shirt.
But in 1964, he heard the Beatles and other British bands who played rock and roll the way Dylan remembered hearing it as a kid. He did some rock and roll on his album Bringing It All Back Home in 1965 and came out with a hit song that summer: "Like a Rolling Stone."
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®
Garrison Keillor will be out on the road! For details and tickets, click HERE.
I LOOKED AT GARRISON'S LIST OF SHOWS FOR THE NEXT COUPLE OF DAYS, WEEKS AND MONTHS AND MARVEL ON HOW ELVIS OR DYLAN COULD HAVE DONE ONLY A WEEK OR TWO LIKE GK'S. THEY WOULD BE TOTALLY WIPED OUT. INSTEAD, GARRISON HAS THIS NEXT SHOW ROUTE TODAY TO TAKE AND DO. AND, YES, FOLKS, HE'S IN HIS EARLY 80'S! WELL, MANY OF US WILL BE OFF TO SEE AND HEAR THE WIZARD, AS GARRISON IS THE WIZARD, BUT HE HAS NO NEED FOR THE LEVERS. GARRISON'S VISITING TALENT HAS THEIR OWN.
PS: I LOVE GK'S WRITING STYLE TOO. IT'S NOT TOO LONG OR TOO SHORT, BUT INVITING AND JUST RIGHT. JUST LIKE READER TOM KING WISHED HE WERE.
In the summer of 1977, I was twenty years old, and I had already been busted for the baggy of marijuana that the cops found in my sock under the pant leg of my bell bottom jeans the second time that they illegally searched me. I had already dropped out of college too, the one I’d gotten into on a full tuition scholarship as a reward for all the hard work I had put in during the first 19 years of my life.
I’d been living on my own in my own small apartment out of my broken-hearted parents’ home so that I could “do my own thing” of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.
But even though I could do as much of that as I now wanted, I wasn’t hardly doing any of it at all or, at least, not as much as I thought I needed to be doing to be “happy.”
And that was the dirty little secret that I wouldn’t tell anyone . . . not even myself. I was completely free, or so I thought, and I was NOT happy.
So now I found myself walking in the rain down the street of some neighborhood in New England some two thousand miles away from my Arizona home trying to sell books door to door so that I could make enough money so that I could buy a gun and a motorcycle and move to California where I would try to find happiness there. My plan was to sell pot for a living and try hard not to get busted again.
Out of an open living room window I heard Bob Dylan singing about a “rolling stone” . . . and I thought to myself, “He’s singing about me.”
A few weeks later, I met Jesus in the stories of some people who said that they knew Him and that He “loves me and has a wonderful plan for my life.”
After that I never did buy a motorcycle . . . and I never did sell pot . . . and I never did move to California.
Some months later after I became what they called back then a “born again Christian,” and I had made enough money to purchase a ten-year-old Volkswagen beetle for $500, I heard that same song on the car’s radio, and I prayed, “Lord Jesus, please save Bob Dylan like You did me. He could tell the whole world about You . . . and the whole world will listen too.”
I’m not saying that my single throwaway prayer turned the trick, but three years later, Bob Dylan released his “born again” album “Saved.”
My soul brother, Robert Zimmerman, is now in his early 80s. And me, I’m in my late 60s, if you haven’t already done the math. There’s no telling which of the two of us will get home to Glory first, but me & Bobby Z . . . we both did about the best we each could do to tell the world about Jesus Christ . . . as best we each know Him . . . and we ain’t neither of us done yet.