Dave Read

Sept. 1998 interview by Dave Read

On November 7, 1975, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Thunder Revue spent the day at the Mama Frasca’s Dream Away Lodge in Becket, MA. They had played two shows the day before at the Springfield Civic Center, with special guest and Berkshire county resident Arlo Guthrie, who turned Dylan on to his friend Mama Frasca’s lodge. (See related: Interview with Arlo Guthrie)

This interview is the account of a friend of Mama Frasca’s who asked us to refer to him as “A.I.I.” (Anonymous Indigeneous Individual). It was conducted by Dave Conlin Read in Lenox, MA in 1998 and was excerpted in Q magazine’s special edition Maximum Bob.

D.C.R.: How did you come to be involved with Mama Frasca’s Dream Away Lodge?

A.I.I.: Just a Berkshire hillbilly, I was living up there on Becket mountain, and I used to visit the Lodge. It was my social milieu. And I used to help Mama Frasca; she was basically illiterate, and I used to write alot of postcards for her. I’d be sitting with her in the afternoon or evening and she’d tell me what she wanted to tell her friends. We were just good pals, myself and Mama.

(Sample photos from the party: Rolling Thunder: Photographs by Ken Regan. )

D.C.R.: You were invited to the Rolling Thunder Revue party?

A.I.I.: Yes, I was up there when there was a phone call and Mama got very excited. She kept saying, “Joan Baez is coming, Joan Baez is coming.” She didn’t say much about Bob Dylan. So, I was invited to the party the next day. I went up there early in the day, around noontime. A couple of guys from Shenandoah came up there shortly. Arlo Guthrie came up in his Ford pickup, I think it was a ’51 Ford – faded green pickup, maybe it was gray. I remember watching the hawks circling with one of the guys from Shenandoah, on the front steps of the Dreamaway.

And then, after a while, various people started arriving. I remember Dylan coming up in a Winnabago. He had a little sign in one of the side windows, it said “Kemp Fish Co.” I remember the cinematographers coming up in a big red Cadillac convertible. Then I was inside having a beer at the bar, and I guess Bob was having a brandy and talking with Mama. I remember introducing Bob to my friend Bob, saying “Bob, meet Bob”.

When Joan Baez got there, Mama swooped her right upstairs. Joan came in in dungarees, all denim. She went upstairs like that – she came down in a white dress with a white pearl necklass. She went right into the music room and Mama took her over to the big square piano. I think she sang – what’s that song – with a wretch like me? – she sang “Amazing Grace.”

Alot of people started crowding into the music room, and the photographers, the cinematographers, started taking alot of shots of Joan and Mama at the piano. Mama was coming out with these mountain-oracle words-of-wisdom and wit and everybody was sucking it up. Because that was about what she was – she was the Oracle.

Earlier, I remember Dylan leaning over the bar to listen to her – to one thing that she said to Dylan, and he was just hanging on every word she said. She had this big thing about love – “With love you’re like the egg – without love, you’re like the hollow egg, without yolk, all white”. Something like that, she had a way of saying things, you had to be there to hear her.

She was quite a character. She had a little guitar, it was painted lime-green, and she used to like to play when she sat in front of the fireplace. She used to call everybody children or sonny – she’d make you feel like you were a child and she was the adult.

They served the standard dinner – salad, chicken, spaghetti, and Mama’s famous hot potatoes, and coffee and Anisette after. Ginsberg was walkin around with Moby Dick, reading it, reading Moby Dick as he was walking around, because he knew of Melville’s stay in the Berkshires, writing Moby Dick in Pittsfield. And then Dylan was going in and out the window, of the freshly-painted north side of the Dreamaway.

D.C.R.: How did you know it was freshly-painted?

A.I.I.: Because my friend was painting it, who I had introduced to Bob – “Bob, this is Bob”, because Bob lived there. He was the caretaker of the place – the bartender, the dishwasher, and everything else. So the next day Bob, the other Bob, made a little sign that said, “Bob Dylan’s footprints”, with an arrow going to the window where he had been climbing in and out – to get away; to get a breath of fresh air from the packed place.

D.C.R.: How many times did Bob go in and out of the window?

A.I.I.: It was just a little prank – he may have done it only once. But I remeber we had the footprints, and they were there for a while, until it got painted again. I remember singing “Be bop a lula” at the piano – Arlo playing the piano.

Singing that song with Bob and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and the whole crew there. We all did a good rendition of “Be bop a lula.” I remember Joan seemed like a very genuine, sincere individual, interested in the people at large there – the natives. She just seemed genuinely friendly – just a regular person.

D.C.R.: Did Bob take the initiative with any of the music, did he take the lead?

A.I.I.: Not to my recollection. He was belting out the “Be bop a lula” lyrics, I was right there beside him, singing – he was getting into that. His wife was there, Sara, and she and Ginsberg seemed to be talking quite a bit, I don’t know how much weight that had. And Ronee Blakely was there. I had a nice conversation with her, down by the fish pond, feeding the catfish. They used to eat bread out of your hand. It was kind of like feeding piranas, because they’d all come to the surface as soon as you’d throw a little piece of bread in there – they would swarm around. That was another little gig that Mama had there for people – “Oh go down and feed the fish, here take some bread and feed the fish.”

D.C.R.: How did the party break up?

A.I.I.: I didn’t stay into the night time, I kind of drifted away, went home. I left before Bob and the crew. It was like a poetic moment – a happening – it was living poetry, very memorable.

D.C.R.: How did Mama feel about the party afterwards?

A.I.I.: Well Mama loved all kinds of people, but for some reason, she had a real affinity with Joan Baez. She really loved Joan Baez’ voice, essentially. She thought she had a wonderful, beautiful voice, and that it was a gift. So she was just very, very happy to be Joan Baez’ hostess that day.

780 Holmes Road Revisited,* or, Where’s the Art, Bob?

Throughout his career, Bob Dylan has been an exponent of the “folk process,” wherein an artist appropriates an extant song, modifies it to the degree that now there are two songs, which may appear to be siblings, but not identical twins.

Blowin’ in the Wind is an example, adapted from the African-American spiritual No More Auction Block; no one would confuse the two, nor would anyone deny that the new song has it’s own merit.

Whether or not one improves the other or amounts to a meritorious extension of the other, is irrelevant – upon composition of the new work, a new discussion begins.

But Dylan also has simply appropriated the folk process product of others when it suited him, such as on his first album, when he recorded Dave Van Ronk’s adaptation of the traditional folk song House of the Rising Sun, depriving his mentor Van Ronk the full benefit of his own artful work.

Dave Van Ronk was a big man, got over it, and eventually was delighted to point out that Dylan eventually stopped performing the House of the Rising Sun after Eric Burdon and The Animals had a big hit with it, for fear of being dissed for ripping them off!

Now there’s news that Bob Dylan has taken the “folk process” to a whole new level, of particular interest to us in the Berkshires, because he’s playing fast and loose with Moby-Dick. In order to fulfil his obligation to the Swedish Academy, which blew the world’s mind last year when it awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature, he delivered a lecture on June 4, just 2 days before the $923,000 cash part of the prize would have turned to dust.

In it, he said Moby-Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Odyssey “have stuck with me ever since I read them way back in grammar school…” and he wanted to tell us about them. Regardless of precisely when Bob Dylan attended “grammar school,” it’s clear he’s referencing a long-ago time, and so we wouldn’t begrudge him a little “googling” in preparing his remarks.

But, especially with a million bucks at stake, one would expect a little more “folk process” than what Mr. Dylan delivered. If you google “Moby-Dick,” the website SparkNotes appears – and if you read the Moby Dick section of Dylan’s lecture, you’ll see enough of SparkNotes to earn a grammar school kid a failing grade for plagiarism.

As reported by Andrea Pitzer in Slate:

“Across the 78 sentences in the lecture that Dylan spends describing Moby-Dick, even a cursory inspection reveals that more than a dozen of them appear to closely resemble lines from the SparkNotes site. And most of the key shared phrases in these passages (such as “Ahab’s lust for vengeance” in the above lines) do not appear in the novel Moby-Dick at all.”

I’ll bet there are a thousand MFA candidates in writing programs across America, and not a few tenured professors too, who would pay good money for a chance to help Bob Dylan edit his shopping list! Why, then, wouldn’t he reach out for help on a $923,000 speech – at least enough help that would merit a passing grade in grammar school?

*780 Holmes Road is the Pittsfield, MA address of Arrowhead, where Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick; Bob Dylan’s most famous album is called “Highway 61 Revisited.”