The music is still lovely. God, it is lovely. Baez and Dylan look young. Of course, they were.
I was not political in 1962-63 unless being a Communist Republican counts as a category.
I am watching the PBS Martin Scorsese documentary about Bob Dylan. The film touches for a moment on Cisco Houston. I had heard his recordings because my fathers friend Fred Clark had introduced him to them. I vaguely recall Peter La Farge and The Ballard of Ira Hayes.
Peter was, I recently learned the adopted son of novelist and scholar Oliver La Farge, whose novel Laughing Boy I had by happenstance read during high school. I still have a copy of the book. We forget in youth how to see connections.
Being a teenager in Forest Park during the late fifties was strange. Television was the window on the world along with memories of grandfathers. There was a dia-lectic between memories of the elderly and images from televisionthe oral and the visual.
God, early in June 1963, I heard that songDont Think Twice. It was the first song by Dylan that I heard. I remember Dylans singing, but I am not certain that the cover I first heard was his version. It is still beautifultrue long before it was true for me and still truetoo true and true long after Im dust and ashes. True.
Many times, what I thought came as simple opposition to what seemed obvious to other people. Many times I found myself listening to our father but examining what he said with a critical ear. Often, I believed that he did not believe what he said that he believed.
Later, the sixties seemed to happen outside myselfI felt a bond with what hap-pened, because the civil rights struggle seemed just, but it was external to me.