Time Longer than Rope

Letters

Vol. 17 No. 24 · 14 December 1995

From Tony Woolfson

As a Glasgow-born Canadian, resident for four years in Switzerland, and a new subscriber to the LRB, I was concerned that there might be too much of a ‘London literary’ tone to your journal, somewhat alien to my rootless sensibility. Until, that is, I read the piece on Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus in my very first issue (LRB, 16 November).

In August 1982 I drove from Boulder, Colorado, through the Bad Lands of Nebraska, Wounded Knee and South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and on up to Sault Saint-Marie, and down across Manitoulin Island to Toronto. I took those endlessly long, straight rural roads, the ones you truck on at exactly 50 miles an hour, for ever. As I came through Minnesota on my way to Minneapolis-St Paul I noticed a huge mushroom cloud, from fields being burnt – ‘Señor, Señor, can you tell me where we’re headin’, / Lincoln County Road or Armageddon?’ At the next intersection I noticed the road sign: I was on Lincoln County Road Number 2; sure enough, I was in Bob Zimmerman land.

I was also one of the lucky ones who heard Bob Dylan doing ‘There’s a slow train coming, coming round the bend’, and ‘Man gave names to all the animals – in the beginning, in the beginning’ among many other greats, just after he went and got himself ‘born again’, and everyone was so pissed off and there were only two thousand of us in Toronto’s Massey Hall that night.

Tony Woolfson
Zurich

Vol. 18 No. 2 · 25 January 1996

From Frank Phillips

Massey Hall, Toronto, seems an ill-fated venue for slightly over the hill recording artists. Twenty-nine years before Tony Woolfson (Letters, 14 December 1995) witnessed Bob Dylan perform there before an audience of two thousand, Massey Hall hosted the legendary Quintet of the Year concert, often touted as the last act of bebop, and featuring Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. As Ross Russell, Parker’s biographer tells it, ‘the concert was ill-advisedly scheduled for the same night as the Rocky Marciano-Jersey Joe Walcott heavyweight championship fight, and attracted only about seven hundred people to the twenty-five hundred capacity Massey Hall.’ If Russell’s figures are correct the 80 per cent turn-out for Dylan doesn’t seem so bad.

Frank Phillips
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