Jimmy Gabacho

Pretty soon, all of our friends were coming out to the bridge, even Billy, the one with the most common sense. He even drove his Mustang out on the service road and parked it along the side of the tracks. Things didn’t always go well. We had our share of mishaps. One day Harold and Billy were throwing rocks off the bridge to see who could throw the highest. Now, these weren’t small rocks; these were the big, thick ones that formed the railroad bed. Harold, who had the best arm, threw one so high into the air that we lost sight of it. I was in the water and Billy tossed a rock down to me so I could try to skip it. I caught it with my left hand and the rock left a deep cut in one of my fingers. A second later, my foot got stuck in the mud; I pulled it out and lost my shoe. So, I was shoeless and bleeding.

John Hicks

I was talking to Bob Dylan last night, and there was not a hint of Violence as we got down to our discussions. ‘We may never be able to defeat these swine,’ he told me, ‘but we don’t have to join them.’

Yes sir, I thought. The too much fun club is back in business. Let us rumble.

–Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear

The revised plan of action was a lengthy extension of my “summer hiatus” that would stretch well into November, until after the elections.

Returning to the deadline grind had little appeal, especially during the final wretched months of Decision 2012.

Over the summer, I had become a man of Science. I had grasped the essentials of Pure Research and Development.

I always knew I had the freakish genes necessary for prolonged scientific inquiry. Mistakes were made, but they were Fun.

Someone else would have to write the sentences. I had Projects.

Gary Mays

Lyrically, and spiritually at least they’ve been trying to find the new ‘Bob Dylan’ since, well, since the former Robert Zimmerman from Hibbing, Minn., broke through the din of the1960s folk scene in Greenwhich Village to tell the world that “A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall.” Yet while many singer-songwriters over the decade have tried the title on for size — voice of a generation — few have passed the test of time, digital music, and a wandering cultural attention span.

Perhaps listeners, ears accustomed to auto-tune inanity, could care less about lyrics anymore. Dylan’s new record, Tempest, came out with much marketing fanfare last week, and from the one track I’ve heard, it’s pretty good. Yet lyrically, Dylan’s best days seem behind him — and that’s OK, for even an aging, cynical and wealthy Bob Dylan is better than most of the crap out there.

But in the view of this writer, the lyrical claim to fame these days belongs to the obscure, the twisted, the relatively unknown and the deeply personal. And that’s why, while I’ll always be a Dylan fan, singer-songwriter John Darnielle is my new life coach.

Darnielle, front man for the intrepid band, ‘The Mountain Goats’ writes with demonic power and urgency, and like Dylan at his earliest and angriest, he senses the cultural zetgeist and tears at it with pen and rapid fire downstroke on his acoustic. The chorus to the first Darnielle song that grabbed me went like this:

“And Sonny Liston rubbed some tiger balm into his glove, some things you do for money and some you do for love, love, love.” (Love, Love, Love, The Sunset Tree)

Next song I heard: “St. Joseph’s baby Aspirin , Bartles and James; and you, or your memory…” (‘You or Your Memory’, The Sunset Tree)

B2L2