When he came to Montreal, less than a year later, I went to meet him at a down town bar to take him to The Finjan. By now his fortunes had improved. He had a small but devoted following, mainly musicians themselves, who thought he was brilliant. He seemed more assured, that perpetual orphan look, helpless and bereft, was almost gone. As soon as he saw me he launched into one of those sad funny monologues I was to become so fond of, explaining why he was late. He told me that upon arriving at the Montreal airport the customs officials put him through some intensive questioning — probably because he looked dishevelled and spoke with a rambling cowboy drawl. This came as a shock. “Hey man,” he responded to one question, “that ain’t none of your business.” His behaviour must have seemed so erratic, so surly, so resentful of authority, that the officials decided to search him thoroughly. “Can you believe those mother fuckers, they started poking into my things… my personal things.”
He was outraged by the intrusion into his privacy. When the officer had the audacity to open his bag he pulled it away, “hey man you can’t do that, them’s my personal belongings.” He looked at me, took a long pull on his cigarette, and said, “I hate that kind of stuff.” Apparently he didn’t know they could do exactly that and they did it. He became increasingly incensed as they not only probed his belongings but searched his person. He was at the mercy of authority and he detested it. Through sheer perversity he smiled sardonically and said, “hey man, if it’s the dope you want, I got it hid right here … in my harmonica.” He couldn’t believe what happened next.
“D’ye know what those mother fuckers did… they unscrewed every screw in every one of my harmonicas looking for dope. Those dumb-assed coppers thought I was going to tell them where I stash the dope, those creeps couldn’t even speak English.” By the time the search was over he’d missed his bus and had to wait over an hour for another one.
“When I got to town I went into a bar for a drink, y’know, just to cool my head, it needed cooling real bad. I ordered a drink and handed the barman a $10 bill. That dood took my good U.S. money and gave me monopoly money for change, y’know that phoney coloured money, he even gave me a $2 bill.” I remembered that American money has no $2 bills, and was all one colour, whereas Canadian money has a different colour for each denomination.
“Hey man, what do you take me for, I ain’t no fool, I ain’t taking none of your funny money. You some kind of a crook, or what? He started hollerin’ and screamin’ and I started hollerin’ and screamin’ louder, and he said he was callin’ the po-lice. That dood was sure fuckin’ with my head. And all those streets were headin’ down the hill into the river and I just knew if I didn’t sit tight I’d roll right down into that river and drown.” He turned to me with a look of total incomprehension, “what kind of a place is this anyway? I sure could use some salvation.”
As he puffed relentlessly on his cigarette I wondered if it was possible that he knew nothing about border crossings, customs, countries with different languages, different currencies, if this was his first time out of the U.S.A. I never knew if that traumatic entry into Canada was entirely real or partly imagined or a bit of both, but I loved the story and its dead-pan delivery.
Later, when I got to know him better, I understood that the impression of baffled innocence and inability to fathom the ways of the world, of being a primitive anti-intellectual, as though he’d never read a book, was cultivated as part of his persona. In fact he was astute, knowledgeable, even disciplined. It was his way of keeping people off-balance, of controlling the situation by not letting on if what he was saying was fact or fantasy. I came to accept this and to enjoy which ever it was.
That attitude of incredible naivety when dealing with the practicalities of life, like he had just stepped into the twentieth century was much in evidence during the subsequent times I saw him in New York. Once I introduced him to Rivka, an Israeli friend of mine. They hit it off immediately. He said he’d never eaten Israeli food and she invited him to dinner. He was delighted by the invitation and was in the process of noting her address. “Eighty-eighth street,” she told him. He stopped writing, returned the pencil and paper to his pocket and looked at her with a sad apologetic smile.
“I can’t come.”
“Why?” she asked confused, things had been going so well.
“I don’t go above forty-second street.” He paused, then as if in explanation added, “there’s some real weird people up there. Forty-second street, that’s as far as I go.” And that was final.
Another time, inspired by my passion for travel, he said, “Yeah, I’d like to travel.… I’d like to see Israel… what d’ye have to do to get there?”
“Well first you have to get a passport.”
“How d’ye do that?”
I couldn’t tell if he really didn’t know, but went along for the ride. “You go to the passport office, fill out a form, take some photos, pay some money and apply for a passport.”
He looked disheartened. “Y’got to do all that?”
“It’s not that much.”
“I ain’t going nowhere if I gotta do all that.”
Israel was dropped.
Bob Dylan played at The Finjan and shared Ronit’s room. He was the only performer we ever had who people walked out on. (Later, young musicians like Toronto’s Murray McLaughlan, who was to became famous himself, vied to sleep in the bed he had slept in.) His rough, gravelly voice with its nasal twang didn’t appeal to Finjan audiences and, not knowing what to make of him, they walked out. One night, discouraged by the lack of appreciation, he said to Shimon, “this is the last time I play clubs, from now on I only do concerts. I’m going to play Carnegie Hall. I’m going to make it big.” Shimon laughed at the absurdity of the idea.
“Yeah, you and who else?” he teased. Shimon wasn’t particularly impressed by Bob Dylan’s non-melodic songs, and by his tuneless, often off-key voice. But I was mesmerised by his songs, by his performance style, by the combination of his dishevelled appearance and the careless informality of his music, juxtaposed with the precision of his poetry, the startling bite of his layered imagery, by his raw vital energy. For me the growling monotone voice people objected to was a third instrument interwoven with his guitar and harmonica, producing a tortured sound, counterpointing, complementing, adding a new dimension to his powerful lyrics. I thought he was unique, great. I loved his imagination, his original way of seeing things, his off-beat humour, and I loved what he was singing about, his challenge to authority, to “the masters of war,” his celebration of the young, the powerless, the outcasts.
After one discouraging Finjan performance, when he was hurt by the audience’s insensitive behaviour and, pretending it didn’t matter, he confessed