Standing on a Corner in Winslow, Arizona

Now the bricks lay on Grand Street

Where the neon madmen climb

They all fall there so perfectly

It all seems so well timed

And here I sit so patiently

Waiting to find out what price

You have to pay to get out of

Going through all these things twice

Oh, Mama, is this really the end

To be stuck inside of Mobile

With the Memphis blues again.

~ Dylan

While in Puerto Rico, 1979, I met a fellow named Mike who knew more Dylan than even I did. Not that there aren't plenty of folks who do, but not very many whom I meet. He was staying at a Salvation Army halfway house about a half mile from where I lived in suburban San Juan.

I had gone to the S.A. place to see someone else and was waiting in the billiard room downstairs when this large man wearing dark shades entered and began reciting The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe. This is a poem of rather great length, and when he began it, "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I wandered, etc." I expected him to somehow interrupt himself to say hello. I did not expect him to recite the entire poem of several pages right up to the last few lines, at which point Mike broke off and laughed, saying, "You didn't know I was going to recite the whole thing, did you."

Being into poetry and the interplay of words, he was a lover of Dylan's work. One night as we talked he mentioned how when he was in Mobile, Alabama he had that zeitgeist experience of being suddenly aware that the lines from Dylan's "Stuck Inside of Mobile" were written while Dylan was himself in Mobile, standing on Grand Street. Mike shared how he was noticing the way the bricks were laid, and these lyrics above came to mind.

Dylan was observing reality. He wrote about his observations, thoughts and feelings in response to real places and faces, a very direct encounter with this place in particular.

Mike shared how this was the second time he'd had this experience with Dylan, the first being this description from Mr. Tambourine Man.

Then take me disappearin' through the smoke rings of my mind

Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves

The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach

Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free

Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus signs

With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves

Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

For Mike, it was a scene in San Francisco, out on the windy beach as he came back up toward the park... there they were, the circus signs. The hippie scene and the Haight and the Bohemian circus of that West Coast jungle of humanity...

Well, last month I had one of those moments because we were "standing on the corner in Winslow Arizona."

Well, I'm a standing on a corner

in Winslow, Arizona

and such a fine sight to see

It's a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford

slowin' down to take a look at me...

I experienced the corner, not the girl in the flatbed Ford. Susie and I were heading toward the Grand Canyon, and sure enough we had to go to the corner. It's on a bypassed part of old Route 66, and now it is something of a monument, an example of life imitatin' art, I guess.

There are a lot of songs about general places, like On the Banks of the Ohio, but which bank was he referring to when he wrote those lines? I like these lines which have locations very specific, like the reference to a balcony overlooking Washington Square in Joan Baez's Diamonds and Rust.

What descriptions from popular songs have you experienced? Ever been somewhere and suddenly realized that this place was something someone else had seen, experienced and put into verse?

"Meantime, life goes on all around you." ~ Bob Dylan