November/3/2001
"A lot of people don't have much food on their table, but they got a lot of forks an' knifes and they gotta cut somethin'" Talkin' New York. March 1962DYLAN TALKIN' WITH NYC
When Dylan went to New York City leaving his rural hometown was just a young musician that loved Guthrie's songs and the folk culture that he represented. "Talkin' New York" is the first original recorded song included in "Bob Dylan": a death obsessed album made up of old tradional yankee and british songs' covers. Dylan went to visit his idol at the hospital and received his legacy that would have made him a folk singer. "You sound like a hillbilly, we want folk singers here" says to Bob the imaginary bartender of the Village club where he plays in. This line is a sort of premonition of the "purity issue" about Dylan's music that will overwhelm him when his guitar is not made of wood. Here ,on the other side, is clear that each american music traditonal archetype is present and influences Zimmerman's approach either towards the calvinistic individualism, hobo complexes or frontiers.
Dylan goes to Manahattan by himself: it's not a case, folk artists travel alone. "Leavin' the towns i love the best, i thought i'd seen some ups and down, till i come into New York town" : this concept is the same one of "Man of costant sorrow" that Dylan inteprets in the album. The big apple and the "Village" open to the young Bob "a new world of people and things": he touches with his own hand the american dream which discovers not only being made of a huge midwest middle class but also of people that in front of the glittering skyscrapers "go down to the ground" and of an alternative intellectual elite that by that time strongly defends the apparent purity of a genre, the folk one, which was born not to be the upper classes past time but popular tales catered for everyone. As a matter of fact his entire career has been a confident search for a personal artistic integrity, fair only to his own self beyond old purists' schemes and categories. When people will have tvs and washing machines in their houses and electricity will be familiar to everyone, the old wood folk guitar becomes Bob's electrict one, rock takes over folk audiences even if at first people boo him at the Newport Festival. Here his new condition, the one of a guy miles away from home that has to count only on himself, makes him wonder why if the New York Times said that that one was the coldest winter in seventeen years he hadn't felt so cold then when he was only a child and not a new immigrant trying to make his own way thru the Village bars.
In "Talkin New York"to demonstrate the maturity already reached by this young clean cut kid, Dylan here already uses literary techniques that will develop throughout his whole artistic production: inverting positions of words that in english are supposed to be put in an opposite way or, to express the frenzy and the precariousness of his first days in town, almost showing off an hasty list of verbs that rhyme with the nouns put at the end of the verse ("rolling, reeling, ride on the downtown side or sing and play, said, come back some other day"). In this song are even recognizable the first "symptoms" of an underlying social protest: the famous phrase about "people that don't have much food on the their table" but they have to cut something anyway is a new awareness of the capitalist system that doesn't create enough richness for everyone but leaves people only with their knifes and their forks (even if someone sees in it a reaction to the many criticisms against his first works).
In the end a weary and defeated Dylan decides to leave the big apple, even if he never did in reality, and head back towards his ol' western skies : so far away from "Highway 61 revisited" where in "Just like Tom Thumb's blues", completely accustomed to the urban life style, he wants to go back to Nyc "cuz he thinks he had enough".This one stands out among the few autobiographical Dylan's songs since by its lines describes the author's moment whereas lately he prefers let his changes of genre speak for him: he chooses folk when he's still very political, gospel when he "feels like a christian" or when, snobbish and disappointed in his audience, he let the 80's albums withhold the best songs recorded in those years sessions.
Dario Fabbri