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vandals

Subterranean Homesick Blues / Bringing It All Back Home / 1965

The pump don't work 'cause the vandals took the handles...


Subject: Bard's pump don't work (you know why)
From: Mark Landis (pscmll@vaxc.hofstra.edu)
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 1997 21:33:22 -0700

>From the 8/28 issue of the Long Island Voice (a recent off-shoot of New
York City's Village Voice):

Get High on Education, Kids!
	by Lynn Samuels

	"My biggest college claim to fame has nothing to do with me at all. 
You know at the end of Dylan's (Bob not Jakob) 'Subterranean Homesick
Blues,' where he says, 'The pump don't work cause the vandals took the
handle"?  Well, I went to the actual place, Bard College, where the
handle-less pump was located.  Apparently Bob, who was not a student,
hung out at Bard during the very years I was there.  We are talking
pre-hippie here--it was still beatnik time and somewhere among the
scraggly boys with guitars and bad voices that matched their bad skin
was the future poet laureate of a generation.  For all I know, I drank
beer with him, or even--oh, never mind, my mother reads this."

The rest of the article deals with Samuels' years at Bard, but the real
issue is whether the above constitutes The Lost Years of Dylan Revealed
or mere wishful thinking.  As Criswell once asked, "Can you *prove* it
didn't happen?"


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