I knew there were some stories out there of interactions between Dylan and Ginsberg post-1980 — thanks to a reader for helping me find where they are documented. In Scott Marshall’s and Marcia Ford’s book “Restless Pilgrim: The Spiritual Journey of Bob Dylan,” there is this passage:

In search of feedback after recording some of the songs that would become Empire Burlesque, Dylan visited an old pal whose legend was securely established in the 1950s and 1950s — poet Allen Ginsberg. Raymond Foye, cofounder of Hanumen Books, was at Ginsberg’s apartment at the time. “At one point Ginsberg thought he detected a quasi-religious overtone,” Foye said. “Aha!” he said sarcastically, ‘I see you still have the judgment of Jehovah hanging over our heads!’ ‘You just don’t know God,’ Dylan replied, twice as sarcastic. ‘Yeah, I never met the guy,’ countered Ginsberg.”

Ginsberg himself recounted this exchange for interviewer Wes Stace. “There was a great deal of judgmental Jehovaic or ‘Nobodaddy’ — nobody daddy up in heaven’ — a figure of judgment hyper-rationality,” recalled Ginsberg. “And he [Dylan] said ‘Allen, do you have a quarrel with God?’ and I said, “I’ve never met the man,’ and he said, ‘Then you have a quarrel with God.’ And I said, ‘Well, I didn’t start anything!’”

There’s also notes on some other 1980s encounters between the two in one of a series of pieces by Scott Marshall in Jewsweek, including the following:

On the second night at Radio City [in 1988], Dylan added this commentary before singing “In the Garden”: “Next year the Amnesty tour, I think, they’re gonna use ‘Jokerman.’ Anyway, I’m trying to get them to change their mind, trying to get them to use this one!” It almost seems perverse that Dylan would, amid the publicity of the Amnesty tour, offer up his Bible-thumping number from the Saved album.

Among the attendees at Radio City was Dylan’s longtime friend Allen Ginsberg. It would have been interesting to hear Ginsberg’s take on Dylan’s rumblings before “In the Garden.” Oddly enough, when Ginsberg cited a handful of personal favorite Dylan songs, in 1985, he included “In the Garden” and said he thought it was “a great song.” Perhaps even more odd was that, years later, Rabbi Manis Friedman (Dylan’s longtime friend from the Lubavitchers) also acknowledged that “In the Garden” was “a good song.” That a non-theistic Buddhist like Ginsberg and an Orthodox Jew like Friedman could appreciate a song like “In the Garden” suggested a tolerance that many media critics refused to grant Dylan in 1979-1981, or even today, when the period is referred to.

...................
Share this!

Posts which might be related to this one based on a mysterious algorithm:

• In the Music Hall
• Q & A
• In the garden again