Self Portrait/New Morning
Woodstock—Saugerties—Saratoga
I.
If I were you, I wouldn’t listen to Bob Dylan’s 1970 album Self Portrait. Life is too short. But I’m not you, and so I have listened to it too many times to count. At one point in my life, during one phase of my life, I would have told you that it was my favorite Bob Dylan album. But I’m not at that point in my life and I’m not sure what a phase of life even means anymore.
New Morning, Dylan’s album that came out four months after Self Portrait in 1970, is a different story. That one you can probably enjoy pretty much all the way through. You’ve probably heard “The Man in Me” when it plays in The Big Lebowski and you probably know “If Not For You” from the better known version that appears on George Harrison’s triple album All Things Must Pass.
These two albums serve as a kind of song cycle, a set of albums in conversation with each other. They were both released at the start of a new decade for Dylan. After he had become perhaps the most important singular figure in popular music during the mid-1960’s, Dylan had signaled that he had moved on to a new phase of his career.
This shift came after he crashed his motorcycle in July 1966 outside of Woodstock, New York. Dylan had been touring nonstop for nearly a year, had become reliant on amphetamines to keep up the pace, and was facing increasingly hostile crowds that felt he had turned his back on them by “plugging in” and going electric. One day, he set out on his Triumph motorcycle, followed in a car by his wife Sara Lowdns, and crashed. What caused the crash, and if the crash in fact happened, is still debated. But Dylan’s motorcycle accident has become shorthand for an artist changing phases in their career.
After his crash, in the spring of 1967, Dylan began writing and recording songs with The Band, which became The Basement Tapes. The songs on The Basement Tapes have been analyzed and scrutinized for years, most famously by Greil Marcus in his book Invisible Republic, which was first published in 1997 and later reissued in 2001 under the title The Old, Weird America. That phrase “old, weird America” was Marcus’s way of putting the music Dylan and The Band were making in context with The American Anthology of Folk Music (1952), a compilation of folk, blues, and country music recorded in the 1920s and 1930s by a variety of artists that was a formative influence on Bob Dylan and that represented, to Marcus, something of the mythical American Past.
On The Basement Tapes, Dylan and The Band tapped into that old, weird past and crafted loose, seemingly ad-libbed, songs full of colorful characters and folky jokes that felt distinctly “American.” These are songs that have more in common with Herman Melville and Abraham Lincoln than any music that was being created in the late 1960s. The fact that Dylan was creating these songs in “rustic” Woodstock New York, outside of the America music centers of New York and Los Angeles, only added to the aura that this music was tied to some part of America’s agrarian roots.
This was Dylan’s pivot point, which he continued on 1967’s John Wesley Harding (more polished than The Basement Tapes, but still as out of time) and 1969’s Nashville Skyline (even more polished and the introduction of Dylan’s “new voice”). These albums, along with The Basement Tapes, seemed completely in juxtaposition with the music Dylan had released in successive albums from 1965-1966 on Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde.
The Basement Tapes, John Wesley Harding, and Nashville Skyline represented a new phase in Dylan’s sound and songwriting, but Self Portrait and especially New Morning reflect the new phase of life he was entering. In 1984, looking back on this time, Dylan told Rolling Stone the following:
“At the time, I was in Woodstock, and I was getting a great degree of notoriety for doing nothing. Then I had that motorcycle accident [in 1966], which put me out of commission. Then, when I woke up and caught my senses, I realized that I was workin' for all these leeches. And I didn't wanna do that. Plus, I had a family, and I just wanted to see my kids.
I'd also seen that I was representing all these things that I didn't know anything about. Like I was supposed to be on acid. It was all storm-the-embassy kind of stuff—Abbie Hoffman in the streets—and they sorta figured me as the kingpin of all that. I said, 'Wait a minute, I'm just a musician. So my songs are about this and that. So what?' But people need a leader. People need a leader more than a leader needs people, really. I mean, anybody can step up and be a leader, if he's got the people there that want one. I didn't want that, though.
But then came the big news about Woodstock, about musicians goin' up there, and it was like a wave of insanity breakin' loose around the house day and night. You'd come in the house and find people there, people comin' through the woods, at all hours of the day and night, knockin' on your door. It was really dark and depressing. And there was no way to respond to all this, you know? It was as if they were suckin' your very blood out. I said, 'Now wait, these people can't be my fans. They just can't be.' And they kept comin'. We had to get out of there.
This was just about the time of that Woodstock festival, which was the sum total of all this bullshit. And it seemed to have something to do with me, this Woodstock Nation, and everything it represented. So we couldn't breathe. I couldn't get any space for myself and my family, and there was no help, nowhere. I got very resentful about the whole thing, and we got outta there
We moved to New York. Lookin' back, it really was a stupid thing to do. But there was a house available on MacDougal Street, and I always remembered that as a nice place. So I just bought this house, sight unseen. But it wasn't the same when we got back. The Woodstock Nation had overtaken MacDougal Street also. There'd be crowds outside my house. And I said, 'Well, fuck it. I wish these people would just forget about me. I wanna do something they can't possibly like, they can't relate to.”
And he released Self Portrait, which you probably don’t want to listen to, and he released New Morning, which you may very well enjoy. The former album was a way to fully break his image in pop culture, while the latter was an attempt to reflect the slowness he wanted from his life, that he wasn’t the spokesperson for a generation but simply a singer and songwriter with a family.
It was a new phase and it didn’t last. Eventually he got divorced and released Blood on the Tracks in 1975.
II.
In 2003, I started as an undergraduate at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. Saratoga Springs sits just above the Hudson Valley. It is about an hour and a half north of Woodstock and about an hour and a half south of the Adirondack Mountains.
Most of my college experience can be defined by my lack of imagination: all I did was drink, dream about being a serious writer, waste time, sometimes write a story or two, and listen to a lot of music. I never once took a trip to the Adirondacks or even the Catskills to hike. I can’t quite remember what I even took the time to enjoy.
Well, except for music. Whenever I think of college, I think of all of the music I listened to and tried to get my hands on. Most of my time was spent talking with friends about music or trying to piece together this history of 20th century popular music through its different genres, but especially rock music and more specifically country rock and alternative country.
One of the things I was obsessed with was “phases.” And most of that boiled down to the evolution of rock music through the 1960s. In that decade, broadly speaking, early rock and roll branched into garage rock and the folk movement, which then blossomed out into the psychedelic period, which then gave way to the “roots rock” movement that closed out the Sixties (birthing early country rock) and bled into the singer songwriter era of the early 1970s.
I can’t emphasize how much—and how stupidly—I used this kind of framework to measure my life. There was an important girl in my life at the end of college who couldn’t stand that I did this. But I drove her crazy thinking about and talking about this kind of thing.
To my mind, my high school years had covered my early rock, garage rock, and psychedelic phases. The latter one of those especially. After I had watched The Beatles Anthology and learned about the Beatles being turned onto LSD by their dentist and seeing the way they used it to further their creativity and curiosity about the world, I undertook my own experiments with psychedelics starting when I was 15. I can’t say that I necessarily recommend this for anyone else, but it was formative for me. Without them, maybe I would have become a different, better person. It’s impossible to know. But one of the most important things I learned from taking psychedelic drugs as a teenager was that it is always nice to come home to a neatly made bed—a discipline I’ve always kept.
So when I was at Skidmore, perhaps it was the setting or perhaps it was my own contrivance, but I was ready to exit my psychedelic phase and enter my “roots” phase. And to me, that meant learning about the evolution of Americana and country rock, wearing brown boots all the time, and using mouth tobacco.
The records that I lived and breathed were as follows: The Gilded Palace of Sin, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, GP, Grievous Angel, Music from Big Pink, The Band, Pickin’ Up the Pieces, White Light, No Other, The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard and Clark, Through the Morning, Through the Night, all of the Uncle Tupelo records, Rainy Day Music, Hollywood Town Hall, The Basement Tapes, John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline, New Morning, and Self Portrait,
I’d sit in my dorm rooms, my on-campus and off-campus apartments, or in my car listening to all of these albums and think of myself as some kind of person in touch with the roots of American music, a person who knew how to appreciate a good time, to enjoy the simple things in life—like a cold cheap beer. My big dream was to one day have a party with all my friends in one place where there was a honky tonk piano and we could take turns playing songs we knew from the albums we loved.
But I wore my love of Self Portrait as a particular badge of honor. No one else I knew liked the album or could understand why I listened to it so much and, to a budding music snob, that is the sign you are onto something. So I drove around the campus roads and the quiet neighborhood streets leading up to school with the windows open singing loudly along to “Days of 49,” “Alberta #2,” “Little Sadie,” “Copper Kettle,” and “The Mighty Quinn (Quinn the Eskimo).” The last song especially gave me a singular spark of joy to sing aloud on a sunny spring day with a light breeze blowing through a car window.
III.
When Bob Dylan crashed his motorcycle and fully retreated in Woodstock, Upstate New York seemed like an entirely different planet. It’s funny to think about it now: Woodstock is only about two hours from New York City. But when you read stories or books or watch documentaries that cover this period, it's discussed as if Dylan and The Band were hiding out in some kind of remote wilderness.
But back then, maybe Woodstock did feel like that. In the documentary Once Were Brothers (2019), which covers the formation, breakup, and legacy of The Band, there is an interview with David Geffen where he talks about convincing The Band to move out to Malibu in the 1970s. At one point Geffen says he hated Woodstock and calls it a “shithole” twice. I’m not inclined to trust David Geffen’s word, but maybe in this case “shithole” just means “not Los Angeles.”
Now, places like Woodstock and other towns in the Hudson Valley are being called the Camptons. That was even before the COVID-19 pandemic. Transplants from Manhattan and Brooklyn are now increasingly heading to towns in Upstate New York to set up second homes or to relocate completely as offices become increasingly remote friendly.
Living partly or completely in The Hudson Valley has become a kind of status symbol. People with the means are able to put in higher than asking price cash offers for homes in small towns and either establish a second residence while they continue to rent an apartment in New York City or become full-time residents.
This kind of migration Upstate has caused the market to overheat. Local residents in towns throughout Upstate New York are having a hard time affording homes in towns they have spent their lives in because of the influx of transplants. And some of those transplants are even regretting their decisions when they have to face the inevitable difficulties of home ownership.
I relay this without judgment. All kinds of people move to all kinds of places for all kinds of different reasons. In Ellenville, a pair of Bushwick transplants have worked with longtime community members to start a creative agency to help market all the town has to offer. I’m sure there are plenty of stories like that all over the Hudson Valley.
When I go on weekend trips to Upstate New York now, I mainly do it to go apple picking in the fall. I go to places like Kingston that have completely changed over the last decade or so. And the fact that I stay in an AirBnb in Kingston contributes to these changes in the community. Another AirBnb is another home that a local resident can’t afford to live in or raise a family in. But it makes a great weekend getaway for me when I want to escape from the city and indulge in activities that are a bit more “rural.”
Every time I drive Upstate in a rental car or ZipCar now, I want to listen to the music that I listened to while I was in college and living in Saratoga Springs. I want to listen to albums like New Morning and Self Portrait. I want to feel that fantasy, to dimly make palpable those visions I had in my head of who that music made me feel like I could be. But I don’t even know who that person was. The vision was never clear in the first place—it was all based on music mythology and my approximation of what making that music meant to Bob Dylan at that time.
And I obviously have no idea about any of that.
IV.
One of the reasons I love Self Portrait so much is because as an album or artistic statement, it is all about control. Bob Dylan wanted to control what the world thought of him; he wanted to change what the world thought of him. So he released Self Portrait.
The album is an assortment of odds and ends. There are covers of old folk songs like “Copper Kettle” and “Little Sadie,” doo wop classics given a folky arrangement like “Blue Moon,” and contemporary ones like “Early Mornin’ Rain” by Gordon Lightfoot. There is also the infamous cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer,” which is both baffling and damning. Dylan turns perhaps one of Simon and Garfunkel’s most dramatic and accomplished productions into a loping trifle of a song that sounds like someone decided to strum out a ditty around a bonfire at dusk to make a few friends laugh.
But there are also truly well-done originals that stand with his best work of the period; songs like “Alberta #1” and “Alberta #2,” “Wigwam” (notably used in The Royal Tenenbaums), and “The Mighty Quinn.” There is also, of course, “All the Tired Horses.”
“All the Tired Horses” is perhaps the most fascinating Dylan song in his catalog and maybe one of my favorites. The song is based around a strumming guitar that is joined by a building orchestral arrangement and a chorus of women repeatedly singing “All the tired horses in the sun / How’m I s’posed to get any riding done? Hmm.” Dylan never sings a note on the track.
The song has been interpreted as Dylan’s plea to the world to leave him alone. The “riding” being a switch out for the word “writing.” I have no idea if that’s true, but I like it as a story. And whenever I feel exhausted and world weary and like I can’t accomplish anything I think of “All the Tired Horses.”
For similar reasons, that’s why I love so many of the songs on New Morning. New Morning appears to be more directly about being tired and weary and only wanting to live a quiet, domestic life. And two songs in particular address this theme explicitly.
“Time Passes Slowly” is about a person living somewhere up in the mountains where “time passes slowly when you’re lost in a dream.” In the song, the narrator sings about sitting beside bridges, walking beside fountains, and catching wild fishes in a stream. In the middle of the song there is a refrain where Dylan sings:
Ain't no reason to go in a wagon to town
Ain't no reason to go to the fair
Ain't no reason to go up, ain't no reason to go down
Ain't no reason to go anywhere
The other song is “Sign on the Window.” It, like “Time Passes Slowly,” is a plaintive piano ballad where Dylan sounds like he really means it. The lyrics of “Sign on the Window” mainly focus on an obscurely told story about a love triangle, that is until Dylan gets to the final verse:
Build me a cabin in Utah
Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout
Have a bunch of kids who call me "pa"
That must be what it's all about,
That must be what it's all about
When I heard these songs while I was living in Upstate New York as an undergraduate, they had such a strong effect on me. If one of the icons of music history could so plainly express his desire for a domestic life, there surely had to be something true about it; something I should and could aspire to.
Dylan didn’t live in Upstate New York when he recorded those songs. He lived in New York City at that point. Just like I do now. And very often, sitting in New York City, I aspire to a life where I don’t need to go anywhere, to a life where time passes slowly, to a life that is made up of being with my wife, catching rainbow trout, and listening to my kids call me pa. In those moments, I’m sure that must be what it’s all about.
Except those are just songs. Dylan sounded like believed those things then, but I don’t know if he really did. Maybe it was a phase. He later had a Christian one too.
V.
The phase of life where I dove so deeply into the music of Bob Dylan and The Band and the beginnings of Americana and country rock came to a culmination in the September of my senior year.
For my birthday, one of my best friends got us tickets to one of Levon Helm’s Midnight Ramble shows. Levon Helm was the legendary drummer for The Band and his Midnight Rambles had started as a way for him to be able to afford mortgage payments on his home in Woodstock, New York. Soon they evolved into a regular display of 20th century music history.
My friend and I drove down to Levon Helm’s home from Saratoga and as we pulled into his humble driveway and were instructed to find a parking spot on the large dirt lot, my car engine started smoking. We were thankful that we had made it to our destination and, in our naïveté and not knowing anything about cars, assumed that it would cool off during the show and in the crisp late summer air.
We walked into Levon Helm’s garage where the show-goers had brought various dishes and desserts as part of the potluck tradition that accompanied the festivities. Inside, we found standing room in the rafters overlooking the stage and were offered organic wine from two older women.
Levon emerged to a standing ovation. He had recently recovered from throat cancer treatments and was starting to perform at the Rambles again. Levon and his band began to play and my friend and I were in awe watching him play drums and sing. Watching Levon belt out the lead vocal on “Ophelia” on a stage at his home in Woodstock, New York remains one of my favorite music watching experiences ever.
At one point during the show, I went to the bathroom, which was filled with memorabilia and keepsakes from Levon’s days in The Band. The item I remember the most was a picture hanging above the toilet: it was of The Band’s organist, multi-instrumentalist, and secret weapon Garth Hudson with his head stuck through a rendering of a bear—the kind you see at a state fair—and smiling with his big beard.
When the Ramble was over, my friend and I went to my car and I started it up. We made it back out onto the road when the car started smoking again. I was able to pull over at a gas station in Saugerties and we saw that the radiator was leaking fluid. I tried to fill it up with coolant, but it wouldn’t take. So, we had to get towed an hour and a half from Saugerties to Saratoga by a tow truck driver who hated us upon sight and who smoked almost a full pack of cigarettes in ninety minutes while we sat three across in the cabin.
About eight months later, I graduated from Skidmore College and the time when I lived in Upstate New York came to an end.
VI.
Todd Haynes’s 2007 film I’m Not There is perhaps the best film of any kind about Bob Dylan. It’s also perhaps the best film about what it means to have multiple selves or what it means to have different, distinct phases in your life.
In the movie, multiple actors play Dylan at different phases in his career. Some of these are direct allusions (Cate Blanchett’s depiction of Dylan’s mid-1960s phase, Christian Bale’s depiction of both Dylan’s folkie, protest-singer phase and his Christian phase, and Heath Ledger’s depiction of Dylan’s “divorce” phase) while others are a bit more obscure.
Richard Gere portrays Dylan in the post-motorcycle crash period. But the role he takes is not Bob Dylan, but that of a retired Billy the Kid in hiding. He lives a quiet life in a small town called Riddle in Missouri but it feels a lot like someplace in Upstate New York. At one point, he looks out in the distance and can hear what sounds like the echoes of a large concert—a nod to Woodstock. This section of the movie also features references to characters in The Basement Tapes as well as a performance of one of the songs from that album—“Going to Acapulco.”
Gere’s Billy eventually has to reveal himself to an aged Pat Garrett, the deputy sheriff who shot and killed the real life Billy the Kid. Garrett can’t believe that Gere’s Billy is still alive and locks him in jail. In the end, Billy is broken out and flees the town, escaping by hopping on a freight train.
During the last moments of I’m Not There, there is a reenactment of Dylan’s motorcycle crash. As the camera hovers over the broken motorcycle, one of its wheels spinning, Dylan’s “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” from Blonde on Blonde plays. It is the last song on the last album he released before he got into a motorcycle accident and ceased being one version of Bob Dylan and became another.
I rewatched Haynes’s film last year, and it still remains one of the most unique movies I’ve ever seen. All of the performances in the movie are fantastic and the cumulative effect of seeing the different phases of a legendary performer's life and career interpreted and put on screen is dazzling and moving. Even if you aren’t Bob Dylan, your life can still be broken out into multiple characters built upon the multiple myths of your life.
But when I think about the phases of my life now, I don’t even know what they mean. At one point, I willingly constructed and measured my life by how it compared to shifts in music and pop culture. Now, I wouldn’t know what to compare my own life to.
I’m 36 years old and I’ve lived in New York for 14 years. I’m not married and I don’t have children. I don’t think there is a “spend as much time with your girlfriend as you can and watch movies at the theater around the corner from your apartment and make jokes that are only funny to you while trying not to lose touch with your friends” phase of life.
The fact that there are no phases, no easy comparisons for me to make, in my life anymore has been the most freeing thing for me. On my best days, I’m comfortable with my life. I’m comfortable and feel relieved of measuring myself against other people, whether they are my friends, colleagues, people my age who are more notable or successful than I am, or the famous people from history I admire. I don’t need movements in music or ages in culture to be my barometer anymore. On my best days, I honestly believe that.
In a 1991 interview with Rolling Stone, Dylan was asked if he was happier than he had been twenty years earlier. In part of his response, he said: “Knowing that you are the person you were put on this earth to be—that’s much more important than just being happy.” In the piece, he continues, saying, “Anyway, happiness is just a balloon—it’s just temporary stuff. Anybody can be happy, and if you’re not happy, they got a lot of drugs that can make you happy.”
Twenty years ago, I probably wouldn’t have understood that. Ten years ago, I wouldn’t have either. But I’m starting to realize that I wasn’t happier 20 years ago or 10 years ago. I was just different and what was happening in my life and around me was different.
There aren’t any pivot points that signify phase changes. I’m 36 years old and I live in New York City. I don’t know exactly the person I was put on this earth to be, but I don’t think I’m supposed to yet. Because there is nothing I can compare myself to other than who I am today.