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?"