Dylan's Guitar
By Edward Sanders
Copyright © 1996
All Rights Reserved
From the soon to be released Tales Of Beatnik Glory, Volume III
Back in 1961, Talbot the Great had taken part in the Freedom Rides, when activists rode buses through the South integrating segregated facilities at bus stations. Johnny Ray's dad, Ethrom Slage, had led the klan mob that attacked Talbot's Freedom Ride bus when it arrived at the Birmingham bus station. Ethrom had kludded Talbot's knee with a lead pipe, the evidence of which was revealed in the slight limp and the way one hip went up a inch higher than the other whenever he stepped over the marble threshold into the Peace Eye Bookstore.
Then, when the klan had bombed the 16th Street Baptist church in Birmingham in the fall of '63, killing four teenage girls in choir robes, Talbot temporarily set aside nonviolence and flew to Birmingham, planning to kill Ethrom Slage in a dynamite ambush, a bomb for a bomb and a blown out eye for a blown out eye.
Ethrom Slage lived on a beat-up little farm in a town not far from Birmingham, where chickens with very few feathers on their undersides rested in dusty pits by the one corner of the house which was held up by a car jack. Talbot cased the place and set up an observation post in an abandoned shed on a sheep hill overlooking the farmhouse.
He had planned to spatter Slage when the klan king came to his barn in the morning. He had already laid out the lines from the battery and plunger down the hill to the bundle of dynamite he'd hidden in the barn. He watched a dark figure enter the barn just before dawn, and he was just about to detonate, when he thought he'd better double check and crouch-sneaked down the hill to the barn to gaze through a chink in the siding. What he saw was young Johnny Ray Slage, who had come instead of his father to feed the animals. Talbot felt a jolt of revulsion and shame, and vowed on the spot to risk every day of the rest of his life to educate and transform this quiet son of a klan leader.
Even as he snipped the wires from the dynamite and gathered his equipment to flee, Talbot began to lecture Johnny Ray. "You have to give up the life of the klan. There's a big, big world out there where people arenÕt racists. We're all part of the same blood. There's no real difference between you and me. You MUST give up the klan."
Johnny Ray could have shouted for help, probably should have, since he had been drilled from his days in the diapers that a black man encountered in a lonely place was the greatest threat to life imaginableÑbut this morning he listened quietly. Talbot asked for an address where he could send letters, and Johnny Ray told him he could write in care of an aunt named Mattie Farlo.
Once a month we gathered at the Peace Eye Bookstore to select items for the Freedom Packet and mailed it to Johnny Ray Slage. Over the months it had become a kind of party. We drank some vodka, smoked a little bu and sang songs, while figuring out how to educate our little klan friend without boring him.
We had a wild party the night Sam Thomas and Talbot brought the curve-headed Gibson to Peace Eye to send to Alabama. The Fugs were there and we sang songs for hours, taking turns with the guitar once owned by the great songbard, and there was much toasting and merriment before we packed it in wadded-up issues of the East Village Other while Sam Thomas and Talbot had their usual scorn-and-snicker debate on what books and mags they would include this month.
Sam glued a row of metal stars and moire pattern discs plus a peace sign decal on the body beneath the sound hole. Talbot and Sam had an ahimsic scuffle when at the same time Sam tried to stick on a Pot is Fun decal while Talbot was pulling it off. As a final adornment, Sam woodburned the word AHIMSA into the sounding board.
"Sacreligion!" I kidded him, whiffing the fumes I hadn't experienced since burning the name of my Troop on the side of my wooden gear trunk, it seemed so long ago, the night before going to Boy Scout camp.
"Why? Just because Bob Dylan once played it? Everything gets transformed in the New World. Look how Dylan himself transforms the tunes he borrows and weirdizes from the Appalachian tradition. The way we change this Gibson is symbolic of the way we are transforming our little klanling. If indeed we ARE transforming him."
Sam Thomas wasn't so sure that even years of packets were going to have any lasting effect on young Johnny Ray Slage. Talbot every month or so spoke with Johnny Ray on the phone, and was certain they were pulling off a successful klan-to-human-being Pygmalion job, so he was very serious and "conservative" in selecting the items to be sent. This months packet included a newsletter from The Congress of Racial Equality, some clippings of newspaper articles on the civil rights movement, a book of Langston Hughes poetry, articles on the klan from the Village Voice, and a transcript of a teach-in against the war in Vietnam.
Sam always wanted the packets a bit more surreal and less stuffy and so this month sought to slide a pamphlet "How to Grow Grass" Beneath the strings of Dylan's guitar and to secrete some hashish brownies on the inside of the sound hole. Talbot held his palms up toward Sam in a mock gesture of No NO NO!.
Talbot was especially touchy on the maryjane question. In order to replenish his tuition fund after he had purchased the guitar, he had undertaken an early harvest of his cash grass crop he had been raising in barrels in a hidden garden behind his mom's church in Harlem. She had caught him back there using HER pinking sheers to snip fresh fronds of bu into a satchel. She had made him destroy the precious five-leaved herbs, threatening to snitch him over to the police.
"That stuff grows wild there in Alabama," Talbot said to Sam Thomas. "All Johnny Ray has to do is go to the railroad where they use it to cut down on erosion. The Feds might inspect the package and we could all wind up in Leavenworth."
Sam also wanted to send some more nude photos of a just-about-to-be-hippie clothing designer named Indian Annie (the word hippie was not to come to parlance for another four months), the star of some of his underground movies, but Talbot was adamant.
"I think the aunt opens these boxes up. She's not going to let us send any more is we get too freaky," replied Talbot the Great as he marked the address on the package:
Johnny Ray Slage
c/o Mrs. Mattie Farlo
Rural Route 1
_______, Alabama
Mattie Farlo was Johnny Ray's mother's sister and she was very, very religious. She tended to wear black dresses and so tightly did she clutch her Bible every night kneeling by the bed, that grooves were worn in the black binding from the acidy grasp of her fingers. Mattie Farlo had smooth ultra-rounded cheeks beneath which were concentric eighth-circle band of lines in her skin that extended down to deep-etched worry grooves at the aides of her lips. Her hair was tightly pressed to the skull from the left side part toward the right where, just above the ear, she allowed a neat tangle of two-inch curls. This had been her hair-do all the way from child and teenhood, when she had been a famous local beauty. The town still recalled her great moment of glory Ñ the parade of convertibles and shiny chrome around Court House Square after she was voted "Queen of the 1954 Chevrolet" by the county dealers association.
A bad marriage and bad luck enhanced her proclivity toward prayer, and by 1966 she was devout as they get in rural Alabama. She had wounded, shiny eyes that always tried to catch her brother-in-law Ethrom's, who always felt a great uneasiness in directly meeting his sister-in-law's gaze, especially after what happened to Minnie Slage. Johnny Ray's mother had died of neglect. Ethrom had refused to call a doctor. "Don't worry, she'll pull through," He kept saying as he tended to important klanwork. But she didn't. She wasted away without any medical care. Minnie Slage was buried on the hill above the house and no one ever talked about her.
There was only one issue about which Ethrom could fully meet his sister-in-law's burning eyes. He had no choice. Over and over he had to swear to her, "I never killed no one. I never bombed no church. Never hit no one. If you ever find out different you go right to the FBI." She made him put his hand directly on the finger grooves of her bible and take an oath on the Book of Deuteronomy heÕd done nothing violent.
Mattie Farlo hated the ku klux klan, even though her own father had been a klan leader in the '30s. Her atred began one horrible night when she was six and her parents had driven her to a lynching. They arrived after the mob had calmed down, and in fact men and women were milling around quite jovial and festive. Cars were drawn in a semicircle to illuminate the victim. Mattie turned away from the spectacle but her mother grabbed her by the arm and brought her close to the tree, forcing her to stand with a group of chuckling and nervous children almost touching distance from the swaying legs.
She couldn't help noticing the gleam of his well polished shoes and the bottoms of his neatly creased striped trousers in the glare of the headlights. She was afraid to look up any further, toward the rope and the snapped neck.
She remembered how mean her dad had been in the car on the way. She suddenly realized the guy hanging with the shiny tasseled shoes was better dressed and probably nicer and definitely cleaner than anybody in her own family. She started praying out loud right then, moving slowly off to the side hoping no adult would spot her and ridicule her as the tears made her face as shiny as the tasseled shoes in the bright lights of her parents' '36 Buick. She vowed to turn her back on the evil done by her town.
So, thirty years later Mattie Farlo allowed the packets from the Peace Eye for Johnny Ray to be sent to her house. She was SO THRILLED at the smile and eager eyes of her sister's son and the quick way he ripped open the packages as if they were Christmas presents, that she barely paid attention to what was sent. The return address on the packages was:
The Baptist Federation of Hope
c/o Peace Eye Bookstore
383 East Tenth Street
New York, N.Y. 10009
It wasn't so easy finding a spot in the house to hide the booty from the Peace Eye Bookstore, for there was a barren quality to the rooms from years of embarrassing encounters with bill collectors. One of the searing images in Johnny's consciousness was of his skinny, loose-skinned mom with blood covering her tongue as she stood screaming on the porch while the repo guys set aside the lamps and chairs and rolled up the mail order rugs in the living room.
His dad tried many things - running a gun business from the trailer in the yard for instance, or working as a lineman for the power company. His quick temper made it impossible to keep a job. One year he had a concept of marketing smoked fish. Occasionally he trapped raccoons and sold their hides. Once he ordered a portable mail-order mink farm but a Ôpossum ate a hole in it and the seed mink ran into the woods. Out back was an old sorghum mill shot full of holes in rage by Ethrom when it failed. In the end there was no other way to get along than through the klan. Ethrom had just enough charisma giving fund raising pitches in front of burning crosses that sweating crackers would lift up their sheets and pull a few wet dollars from their trousers, out of which Ethrom would triple tithe in order to scrounge a poverty level existence for his family.
Ethrom spent time each day preparing his son to be leader of the klan. He was counting on his son "to be great." It was an obsessive and consuming mania. One of Johnny Ray's chores was to write down what dad recalled from klavern meetings and to type letters and coded communiques which Ethrom delivered by midnight in his telltale pickup with the clicking tappets.
"Some day you'll rule over all the South," he assured his son. "America is demanding you to be great, son. You're the one. You'll bring the South back to its age of White."
In the evenings, after Johnny had done two or three hours of klan correspondence, Ethrom would help him wash in a basin, pour water over his hands from a pitcher, and make sure he had a clean potty bucket under the bed. Then he would tell his son bedside klan tales he'd learned from his father about the "glory" days of the 1920s when the klan was large enough to defeat presidential candidates. Sometimes he read his son hate fliers as if they were stories from the Old Testament. One night he was shook to the ice of his soul to have learned of the psychiatrists in Alabama, 80% were Jewish. He'd just read about it in a bunch of klan fliers come that day from the printer. "They take gentiles to the distant jungles of Alaska and then they give them lobotomies. You know what a lobotomy is, son? It's when they stick a knife in the middle of your forehead to gearshift you into an atheist. The government does it all the time. There's this hospital in Alaska the F.B.I. runs where they turn you into a guaranteed Communist! You'd be like an Erector Set robot, son, and if they catch you, your job will be to make sure the Old Testament is the only sacred book in America! The Ollllllld Taystament. There won't be no New Taystement then."
Johnny shivered.
The regional klan power structure decided that local klaverns should form secret terror committees. They were to be small, well armed, mobile and ready to kill. Ethrom gladly heeded the call. His group was known as The Secret Six. "Soon," he said, looking intently at his son, "It'll be the Secret Seven."
He thought he was bestowing the keys to the Universe to Johnny Ray, who tried to look tough, impassive and yet noncommittal.
"Right, boy?"
Johnny wouldn't catch his eye.
"Right, boy!!!?" Ethrom came close and pushed his shoulder.
"Right!?"
"Right, dad."
He'd kiss his son goodnight, then Ethrom would pause to stare at himself in the hall mirror and hop with pleasure at the genetic continuity, the greatness to come, the money, the power, the calling from God and the nation.
Another of Johnny's klan chores was to make crosses from long lengths of four-by-fours and wrap them in burlap. Ethrom wanted them as big as possible by they still had to fit in the back of a pickup truck. Big crosses for big rallies Johnny had to saw, nail, brace and wrap in strips of potato sack in the field where the rally would occur.
In the late afternoon after wrapping the cross, he'd head for the secret clearing in the woods and chop the turf with a post hole digger. He'd lay the cross by the hole and set a can of gas nearby.
When that was done Johnny Ray Slage had a few minutes by himself and could practice the guitar. He had a pleasing, true-toned tenor. One of the more ironic sights of 1966 was Johnny Ray Slage sitting on a klan cross at the edge of a stand of butternut tress singing Dylan's "The Time's They Are A-Changin'" or John Lennon's "Norwegian Wood."
After dark and just before the rally he'd slosh gasoline up and down the burlap-wrapped crux and set it in the hole. Johnny stood at the edge of these fright nights and watched his dad in action. Sometimes he'd sit out in the pickup truck during the burnings and read articles Talbot had sent, with the fire from the doused burlap his reading lamp.
At home, Ethrom many times came upon Johnny Ray studying the forbidden items. Ethrom was so proud of his son that he was blinded even to the records that his son had around the house, such as The Fugs, the Mothers of Invention, Blues Project, John Fahey, Pete Seeger, the Beatles' "Rubber Soul," Leadbelly, Wilson Pickett, the Rolling Stones, Joan Baez and some early tapes of Janis Joplin and Big Brother.
We had no way of knowing what effect we were having on Johnny Ray Slage or how quickly we helped transform him. He told us he'd begun to let his hair grow long, by Alabama standards, and it was dangling to a proto-hippie Bacchic length. His father did not approve, even after Johnny tried to comb it on top into an Elvis-like pompadour. Ethrom wasn't fooled and one afternoon cut him almost bald with sheep shears.
I sent him an electric pickup for the Gibson, with a note on how to install it. The Fugs had an extra amplifier we mailed down to Alabama, though we were worried that the Eye of Horus painted on its cloth front surrounded by dayglo pot fronds might get him into trouble.
Johnny Ray told his dad he'd taken the amp from one of the churches the klan had torched. When he heard Johnny singing with an electrified guitar, it gave him an idea to have his son sing at rallies. Ethrom handed some lyrics: "I want you to write a song with this, and sing it tomorrow when we set go out to the Beulah Bethal church for the voter registration deal."
The armies of white are marching
Marching for Jesus and glory
The armies of white men
Are saving the South
From Satan's Soviet story
"That's all right, son, keep playing."
His dad now and then went into a drooly, tremble-shouldered zone of cruelty. The words "serial aggression" had not yet been coined, but the urges, which grew in ferocity, to go out nightriding, came in regular cycles. To Ethrom, nothing was more thrilling than watching a church burn, or to break into houses of sleeping voter registration workers and club them. He still savored the aural memory of the "thonk" that had ruined Talbot the Great's football career.
He had to hide these things from Mattie Farlo. When the violence increased during the summer of '66, she made him swear over and over he'd not had any part of any of it.
His denials were more elaborate when he was arrested and then went on trial for a church burning. Johnny Ray couldn't understand why his dad was so worried, since the trail judge belonged to the klan.
But because it was a jury trial, the judge couldn't automatically determine the verdict. "The communists are sending agents all the way from Russia to make sure the jury convicts me!" Ethrom wept to Mattie Farlo, and almost convinced her. The day before the trial was to begin, the family gathered at Mattie's house to pray for deliverance from atheists and communist race-mixers, and for Ethrom to prevail.
The trail was held at the other end of the state, so Ethrom decided to stay with klan people there. In the evenings he wanted to patrol the roads where the jurors lived - maybe leave a few notes, THE KLAN IS WATCHING YOU, under windshields. Since Johnny Ray was in school, he remained at home. He was glad. The house was his!! Aunt Mattie came over to fix supper each night and then went back to her house. It was the first time in his life Johnny Ray was by himself. It was wonderful. He could read what he wanted and leave it in open air. He could play his guitar and listen to records all night long.
He had written Talbot to see about getting a tape recorder, so we sent him a fine hand-painted reel-to-reel Wollensak that Andy Warhol had given me. It was silk-screened with one of Warhol's famous flowers across its aluminum front. The Warhol Wollensak arrived while Ethrom Slage was on trial.
The trail was supposed to last at least a week or two, but Ethrom was acquitted in just three days. A convoy of klan types drove toward Birmingham, honking their horns in rhythm. Johnny wondered what was happening when he heard the honks in the distance, but he didn't guess it was his dad.
Ethrom was swigging from Mason jars of hootch and hollering like the end of a war. He didn't want Mattie Farlo catching him drinking, so he stopped his car down the road from the house to hide the moonshine in what the family called "the still tree," an old dead pine with woodpecker holes wide enough for jars.
Warhol's Wollensak was in Johnny's bedroom. He'd been listening to some tapes we'd sent. The Fugs old amp was on his washstand and Dylan's guitar was on the pillow, connected to the amp with a homemade cable Johnny had made from an old radio out back in the dump.
Ethrom was in the house before Johnny Ray could hide everything. Ethrom looked with drunken amazement at the flower-painted reel-to-reel. He picked up the boxes of tapes to read the writing on them.
"What's that on the machine, son? Play it."
Johnny's hand's shadow spread quickly across Warhol's flower as he punched "play." It was a tape of the funeral service for the victims of the Birmingham bombing. Talbot had gone to the funeral after his encounter with Johnny Ray. Just before the service, heÕd gathered some chunks of brick and concrete from the rubble and they weighed as heavy in the satchel at his side in the church pew as Ethrom Slage weighed in his soul. We kept a piece of the concrete from the bombed church on my desk at the Peace Eye Bookstore.
On the tape that Johnny Ray played for his dad, Martin Luther King was just finishing his eulogy for the victims, and then the congregation wailed forth with a soul-eerying verse from Pete Seeger's civil rights anthem:
They won't die in vain
They won't die in vain
Deep in my heart
I do believe
They won't die in vain."
The enormity of it! His son, in whom he'd woven his vision of the future - his son, destined to be the spellbinding Prophet of the South Ethrom himself had longed to be - had been reached by the Communists!! His knuckles were bleeding from punching the amp, and he sucked them while trying to calm down.
"Where'd you get this, son?" Ethrom was holding the Gibson.
"It belongs to Bob Dylan, daddy."
"Who?"
Johnny Ray took the guitar from his dad and began to sing "With God on Our Side."
Ethrom grabbed the guitar and swung it at the wall to break it but lost his footing and missed. He kicked over a chair on the way out of the room, he was so eager to get to the furnace. "You think you're hot shit," he shouted over his shoulder. "But you're just a cold turd on a hot toothpick."
Johnny heard the furnace door open and the "skruckle-skruckle" of his dad wadding up paper followed by the scratch of the match, then the grating slither of the guitar being slid atop the burning paper.
Johnny went to the window, pulled aside the curtain, and gave out a gasp, "FBI daddy!"
There was a total terror in the house. dad left open the furnace door as he raced upstairs for his rifles, yelling at his to turn on the two-way radio. "Call the Secret Six. Tell them to get ready to fight!!"
"Okay, daddy."
Johnny took the hand axe by the woodstove and cut the powerline at the fusebox. There was a huge spark and the house went black. He raced to the porch; and skinnied up the trellis to the roof where he ripped up a shingle to block the smoke hole in the chimney. He thought maybe the house would fill up with smoke and confuse his father. The back to his room where he pulled out the secret stash of magazines from Talbot and took them to the furnace. He retrieved the guitar, miraculously unscathed except for some of the decals, which had wavy patterns of scorches like a Klee painting, and tossed the magazines in its place.
He was trembling with fright as he abraded his fingers speed-stuffing some of his possessions into the harsh canvas of his dad's Korean war duffle bag. He found his jeans jacket, some mismatched socks, and the family bible, for Johnny was religious. He took a knife from the kitchen so that later he'd be able to cut the Confederate flag from the back of the jacket. He knew where his dad hid the klan money. There was a few hundred dollars. He wouldn't take it all. His dad was so sloppy he never had an exact count. He looked around for something to put it in, and emptied the contents of EthromÕs Red Man chewing tobacco pouch, and wadded it full of cash.
He stared for about 15 seconds at the flower-stenciled Wollensak take recorder. He knew what his father would do with it - use it at klan rallies, or to tape "confessions" from torture victims, and decided to take it with him.
His father was crouched on the floor beneath the living room window with a rifle in his hand and kept whisper-shouting, "Get your shotgun, son, and all the ammunition you have. And then go fetch me that box of hand grenades from the cellar!"
"Okay daddy."
Johnny opened the front door and whispered. "There's five cars outside. One of them is the black car with the big aerial." He knew Ethrom would think it was the chief agent out of Birmingham office and dip to a Total Terror.
Just then his dad's parrot sqwawked out its one-word repertoire, "Klan! klan! klan!"
Johnny picked it from its perch and let it hop onto his shoulder. It would be a good gift, he figured, for Talbot the Great.
He set down the heavy tape recorder, the guitar, the parrot and the duffle bag at the edge of the driveway and walked up the hill to kiss his mother's gravestone. Then he hitched to the Lower East Side of New York City.
Ethrom quailed on the floor beneath the living room window for a few minutes, whispering to his son, 'til finally he crawled to the front door, cracked open the door and slithered upon the porch, his rifle-gripping fingers ready for an Armageddon shoot-out.
There was nothing - no black car with the tall aerial, no county sheriff's vehicles. He guessed that his son had run off, and felt a writhing knot in his stomach like a calcified cow ball. He wept and raged and railed in the sudden grief of betrayal. He loved his son so much he knew heÕd probably have to kill him.
One night a young man wandered into Peace Eye and said, "I'm Johnny Ray Slage." I recognized Warhol's tape recorder and then Dylan's guitar jutting out of the duffle bag. Johnny had slid a red-ringed gray wool hunting sock over the neck and tuning pegs to protect them.
He opened a small box and out hopped his dad's parrot. It stood there on my desk atop the piece of concrete Talbot had brought from the bombed church, sqwawking, "Klan! klan! klan!"
I tried to be cool and nonchalant, but I was overjoyed that he had escaped. I called Talbot who literally ran on his limping legs all the way from 14th Street to Peace Eye. Indian Annie was in the back room collating the new issue of The Marijuana Review. I introduced them and she went over to the commune where she lived and brought back a sleeping back for Johnny Ray. He crashed at Peace Eye a few days until there was space at Annie's.
The parrot stayed at Peace Eye, and during the next few months we worked hard to add new phrases to its vocals, so that by the Summer of Love the parrot now known as Freedom stood on my desk shouting "Piss on the klan! Grope for peace! Piss on the klan! Grope for peace!"