For Bob On His Birthday: An Overlooked Greatest Hit

Happy 71st Bob Dylan. In your honor I'm posting a poem I wrote a few years ago about what to me is one of your greatest overlooked hits--the time you scored a free Andy Warhol painting as a gift and then later traded it away for a sofa. Genius. May today bring you all the comfortable gifts wise men and women may bring.


A Good Sofa Trumps a Work of Art Any Day



Practically speaking,
A good sofa trumps a work or art
Any day.
I mean, really, who wouldn’t trade
A Rembrandt
For a good nap or a nice quickie?

January 1966,
Zeitgeist summit meeting
At the Factory, New York City.
Bob and Andy,
Fifteen-minute shaded avatars
By way of Hibbing, Minnesota,
And Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, respectively.
The yin and yan of ‘transcendent’ artifice
And iconic hair
—dark and tornadoed
—white and, uh, straight.
By all accounts they’re both nervous,
Circling each other—“a solicitous kind of dance”—
Like effete boxers,
Bob seeing what he can wrangle out of Andy,
Andy actually fawning, a fan,
Fingernail nibbling.
Perhaps they’re looking at one of the
Double Elvis pictures,
The gun-slinging silkscreen that
Andy—fawner extraordinaire—
Gave away to Bob that day,
Then watched Bob tie Double Elvis
To the top of his station wagon
And drive him home to Hi Lo Ha,
Bob’s house in Woodstock.
Riding with the King, indeed.
Did Andy chomp his fingers to the nub
With visions of Bob
Hanging the work of art
Upside down in a cupboard?
No infinity trials there.
Did his hair turn whiter
When he learned that Bob
Eventually traded the Double Elvis
To his manager, Albert Grossman,
For something ‘practical’ for Hi Lo Ha,
A sofa?
Grossman, Big Bear Landlord, would say,
“I hope Bob found a lot of change
under those cushions.”
His widow Sally, in 1988, sold
Double Elvis for 720 thousand pieces of silver.

Change under those cushions.
Perhaps Bob wrote or dreamt or received divine dictation
—however he comes up with his songs—
“I Shall Be Released” “Tears of Rage” “All Along the Watchtower”
“I’m Not There” “Apple Suckling Tree”
—all songs written around that time—
On that sofa.
Certainly “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight.”

Give me that third-hand sofa
For my attic museum.
A good sofa trumps a work of art any day.