Bratville von Cheeseburgeren.

Y'know, usually I think my dreams are completely useless. I go to sleep next to my wife, I dream of chasing puppies through the house or being in the mafia. I wake up and I think "Well that was fun; time to go to work."

Then, last night, all that changed.

Last night I dreamt I was a regular at a busy greasy spoon in a rural town. I would go in and eat various breakfast foods (this, a by-product of Kristy's excitement that I've recently been risking eating breakfast, which usually doesn't agree with me), then leave, then be back in the diner for more. Suddenly, one trip I saw something I really didn't recognize.

"Hmm. Sausage/Egg Biscuit, Super Deluxe Breakfast, Steak and Eggs...wait a minute...what the hell?"

I blinked.

"'Bratville von Cheeseburgeren' with 'Bacon or Mushrooms'? Can I get it with both?"

Moments later, as time so quickly happens in dreams, I was served.

It looked like two sausage patties, but bratwurst, with three kinds of cheese, two slices of bacon and sauteed mushrooms on a hamburger bun. Or maybe it was on a biscuit. I don't remember. Either way, best food idea ever.

One of my best entrees came to me after staring blankly at a bottle of peanut sauce in a Wal-Mart for 15 minutes. It included seared ahi, paper-thin slices of watermelon, shrimp, fried shrimp tails, and a side of rice and mushrooms. Another, a sausage-and-peppers dish with provolone and Roma tomatoes (and tequila) was born from watching GoodFellas.

At the end of the day, whether your cooking delicacies are epiphanies whose geneses were mobster movies, dreams or random innovation, I plan on starting a family cookbook one of these days and I now have my first breakfast item.

Next piece for 100,000 Years in Detention: Clint Eastwood vs. Politicians. Yeah, it's happening.

See! The Tattooed Man!

“Did it hurt?”

My left arm is outstretched, the shirt sleeve rolled up and sitting on my shoulder, artwork showcased on my inner bicep. It’s all in black ink, approximately 7 inches wide, and took 90 minutes to permanently draw on my arm.

“A little. More so towards the shoulder; that area’s really sensitive.”

Since I met my fiancé in 2007, I’ve been telling her about the next tattoo I wanted. I’ve spent my life writing and playing video games, and Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda series has been a staple in my life since I was a baby. Its fourth major edition, The Ocarina of Time, is hailed as the best game ever made. I’ve wanted to get an insignia from Ocarina, the Triforce, tattooed on me for several years.

The idea came to me when I was 20 and my friend Kenny and I were driving around suburban Atlanta. He wanted a sleeve – a tattoo that starts at the shoulder and goes to the elbow or wrist – of Mr. Miyagi from the Karate Kid movies on one arm, and a ring around his other bicep of the Elven inscription of the One Ring from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series.

Other ideas we’d discussed were Master Splinter from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the words “Surf’s Up!” in the font used for Chinese food to-go boxes and a “Do Not Enter” sign on the smalls of our backs. Years later, he settled on an original piece of zombies tearing their way out of his calf and I stuck with the Triforce.

In early August, Kristy and I walked into The Body Gallery in downtown Leesburg to inquire about getting an appointment. While we were waiting to be helped, we browsed through the portfolios by each artist sitting on the coffee table in the lounge. There must have been ten books, but after the second artist’s I knew I didn’t have to look any further.

Jedediah Von Horror has some of the most intricate, detailed work I’ve ever seen and I demanded he book me. Unfortunately, the rest of Leesburg had done the same before I could, so his schedule was full for the next month. We spoke briefly, and his attitude and professionalism reinforced my decision. He gave me a reminder card for the date and, after seeing a print-out of my Triforce, said he was really looking forward to it. The card read “You’ve got an appointment to get ZAPPED! on Sept. 3 “ and Kristy clipped it to our refrigerator.

Four weeks crawled by, during which time I Googled some of my favorite American sideshow oddities - Jojo the Dog-Faced Boy, John Merrick (The Elephant Man) and so on. During my research I found that a hundred years ago, extensively-tattooed people held a very different stigma than they do today. Rather than be seen as just motorcycle owners or sailors or prostitutes or heavy metal disciples, folks like Conundrum (whose entire body is tattooed like a jigsaw puzzle) were placed in cages and given live chickens to eat, and for just a nickel, or, later, a quarter, people could walk through a tent where they could point and laugh at amputees, conjoined twins, little people and those with full-body skin conditions.

My appointment came and I met Jedediah in the parlor, where he spent a quick minute setting up an iPod to a speaker set so we could enjoy music while we talked and he worked. Following this, he spent a few more minutes – with a surgeon’s precision – cleaning and sterilizing his equipment, opening a fresh unused needle and carefully placing it into his gun.

He pristinely traced the edges of the print-out I’d given him the month prior with a purple marker onto what looked like wax paper and placed it on my arm, where I’d told him.

“Go over and look at it in that mirror so you can get a general idea of how it’s gonna be. Does that look ok? Little bigger, little smaller maybe?”

“No no; it’s perfect.” I couldn’t contain a big, asinine grin.

“Are you sure? It’s no problem to resize or retrace it if you want.”

I was already on my way back to the raised bed – not unlike the one you lay on in the doctor’s office – without another word. Jedediah had put on surgical gloves by this point and placed a few sanitized paper towels where my arm should rest while he worked. He lathered and shaved my arm with a new straight razor. Bad Brains came out of the stereo and I breathed deeply.

“Alright man, you ready?”

“Yep.”

“Ok; here we go.”

Then I heard the buzz, and felt the needle of the gun, and shut my eyes and relaxed.

The trick is to keep your body limp. If you tense up, tattoos hurt like Hell. I don’t know why; it’s something about nerves or your skin or muscles bunching up, but you have to keep limber. As we talked, my mind wandered, to my other tattoos and my circus freaks.

My first tattoos have been on my back since 2001. I’d just started college and wanted to get inked to symbolize such a monumental occasion, and with something universal. Some people have a yin-yang, others the Christian cross; I chose two empty circles.

Circles are atoms, planets, vinyls and cd’s, and geometrically represent the equalized nature of the give-and-take of most relationships. Much like Fibonacci’s Golden Ratio/Rectangle/Spiral, circles constitute most of the universe. For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction, as well.

I had them done at a parlor in the Rondout, on the Hudson River in upstate New York, on a fall afternoon. The owners of the shop had a two-year-old son who I talked to the whole time his mother committed my circles to me. They both eased the tension and I’m glad I got to meet them. I remember telling the girl I was with, “Every tattoo I get, I wanna come back here.” It was hard to reach back and rub the lotion on them to keep them from drying out – scent-free, dye-free lotion, they always told me – but in the end they came out fine.

As Jedediah traced the Triforce outline – this time forever, on my arm, with steady hands – I noticed the alternating black-and-white stripes of the wing-like structures on either side of it. Naturally, then, my train of thought led to Ota Benga and the time he spent living at the Bronx Zoo.

An Mbuti tribesman of meager stature, Benga found many of his people killed by soldiers of Belgian King Leopold II in the 1890s. Discovered by two Americans – a businessman and scientist seeking evidence for an exhibit detailing inequalities of ethnicity – he was brought first to St. Louis. There he and some of his other clan were displayed alongside Geronimo and others as a sort of live museum exhibit where people marveled at Benga’s size, teeth – which he had filed down to sharp points – and behavior.

Ota Benga’s living conditions worsened when he was brought to the Bronx Zoo in 1904 and displayed in the Monkey House alongside orangutans and chimpanzees. After meeting much protest from African-American clergymen James H. Gordon, the zookeepers allowed Benga to roam around the zoo freely until he was finally released into the care of Gordon, then to an orphanage under Gordon’s supervision and finally to a home of his own in Lynchburg, Virginia.

The world did what it could to mask Ota Benga’s misfortune – dressing him in suits and capping his customized teeth. As he was finally acclimated to American culture, the way he’d hoped for at his initial meeting with the men who brought him to St. Louis, he started a normal American life. He attended school for many years and then worked on a tobacco farm as he saved money and planned his return to the Congo. As international relations worsened in the 1910s, his trip back to Africa slipped from his grasp. All that he had left of his early life were his stories, which he told his co-workers in exchange for food and drink, and the permanent work to his teeth, which were now “corrected.”

I relayed this story to Jedediah as he worked on me. “I could never get my teeth filed down like that though,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, his arm completely covered in tattoos, drawing with the needle on mine. “Some people are just lookin’ for pain.”

We shook our heads; he reached the end of a line and pointed at my arm. “Hey man, you wanna take a break?”

“Nah, not yet.”

My third tattoo I got the summer after my first two. This was in July 2002, on the way to a Weezer concert. Their fourth album, Maladroit, had just hit shelves and despite not finding as big a place in my heart as their sophomore release, Pinkerton, two friends and I found ourselves hauling ass to Atlanta’s Hi-Fi Buys Amphitheater (at the time, Lakewood Amphitheater) anyway to catch Rivers Cuomo and the gang spit out “Buddy Holly” and some other favorites.

I’d been obsessed with Tool’s fourth album, Lateralus, since its release in 2001, and spent more time than I should have poring over Alex Grey’s artwork for it. An unmistakable mixture of anatomical and spiritual subjects (think med-school diagrams with chakras, but cool) dominated his portfolio, and his work for Tool was no different.

It was five or six transparent pages for the liner notes, each page displaying a different layer of the male human anatomy from head to chest. The muscular system, nervous system, skeletal system – all were represented with varying coiled spirals and flaming eyes politely floating about.

Tool’s lyrics have always been open to interpretation – lyrics sheets are never printed in their albums, and the band have openly expressed their disdain for telling their audience what meaning to take from their music. One song contains the symbol of the “third eye” to better perceive the world, and I feel like aiming to improve oneself is as good a practice as any.

In my own search for manual evolution, I went to a tattoo parlor on the way to Weezer.

I’d just started taking some college classes, working full-time to pay for them and weaning myself away from living off my parents, after a bout of mono that took me out of college for a semester. I committed to independence, wrote the first pieces for my first novel and booked my appointment with my flaming eye in hand.

I don’t remember exactly what the guy looked like who put Alex Grey’s piece on my hip, but in my head I remember him as a caricature, a mixture of Zach Galiafinakis and W.C. Fields. I dropped my pants down and the buddies I was with, Nick and Brian, poked fun at my pale ass sticking out for most of the time I was under the gun. The guy inking me was worse.

“Tool fucking sucks; why don’t you get something that’s important to you?” the artist said.

“Uh…I like ‘em ok, and this is pretty important to me.” I was nervous to start an argument with someone holding a pen that wrote on me for the rest of my life.

“Psh. Whatever. You should get something cool instead. Check this shit out.”

He picked up the legs of his shorts and on one shin he had an 18” tattoo of Darth Vader with a lightsaber, and on the other he had Gene Simmons in his KISS attire, tongue sticking out, playing his bass.

I dealt with his flak just long enough to finish up and not tip him. It remains the only tattoo I have that didn’t heal right and needs touching up, but since I’m the only one who sees my naked hip a lot, I’m holding off until I just find the spare $20 or $40 in the street it will cost to get it redone.

“OK, now I’m ready for a break,” I told Jedediah. He’d outlined my Triforce and used a broader needle to fill it in, and as he neared my armpit the skin became more and more sensitive.

“No problem man; you’re doing great. I’m gonna stretch out a bit, you take your time and we’ll get back to it when you’re ready.”

I went out back and sat in a wire frame black metal chair, one of four around a matching table on Body Gallery’s back porch, the golden and beige leaves falling from their trees around me, blanketing the brick porch. I sent a few text messages – for some reason I didn’t get service in the shop – and after ten minutes or so, came back in to let him finish the job. My skin was pink and tender, the tattoo was half-filled (or half-empty) and I craved completion.

The Feejee Mermaid was sought by P.T. Barnum (along with the decomposing body of outlaw Jesse James) for his Greatest Show on Earth. A creature born half-human and half-fish, it was claimed, swam in the waters of Fiji and was caught by sailors just before their return to these great United States for the viewing pleasure of you, a fine and lovely audience.

If you want to make a Feejee Mermaid, you need a monkey, a fish, glue and a bone saw.

You may guess where this is headed.

Saw the first two in half. Throw out the bottom half of the monkey and the top half of the fish, unless you can find something else to do with them. Affix, with the glue, the top half of the monkey onto the bottom half of the fish. You may, in this day and age, want to use Nair to get all the hair off that monkey torso. Then, you just have to let the glue dry.

They came by the hundreds to see Barnum’s Mermaid. There are no mermaids, of course, or at least none that mankind has discovered, so what P.T. yearned for – knowingly or unknowingly – was a nightmare of taxidermy and shop class. Even still, it became so popular that a half-dozen sources have stepped forward so far claiming to have the original Feejee, another of God’s creations born half-finished, half-spectacular to be seen by the eye, alongside Ota Benga and the Conundrum, Geronimo and John Merrick and Jojo.

“Alright man; you’re all set.”

My wedding and birth of our first child are within a six-month period of each other, and I got the Triforce on my arm in dedication and celebration.

I talked to Jedediah and we discussed all the after-care instructions. These include washing my hands with unscented antibacterial soap before touching the tattoo and washing the tattoo gently with the same and applying unscented, dye-free lotion to the tattooed skin and letting nature take its course.

When getting tattooed, the skin is penetrated by the ink gun and a dab of blood occasionally fights its way to the surface. The man or woman with the gun politely wipes away the blood with a moist towelette or wet-nap held by a latex glove on a clean hand and continues his or her work. After a few days, the tattoo scabs over, as bleeding wounds do, and if you pick and peel and pull at the scabs they mess up your tattoo. If you continue to moisturize and leave it alone, however, eventually the scabs fall away and your tattoo is forever a part of your body, as the glue dries on the Feejee Mermaid and she is forever made a creature of mythos.

So what’s the end result? John Merrick died in a hospital, riddled with tumors and physical disfigurations. Ota Benga chipped all of his teeth’s caps, returning to his dentally-tattooed self before cashing his check early with a stolen revolver in front of a bonfire. People beg oddities obsessives to come and stare at one half of a fish and another half of a monkey in their garage, glued together and collecting dust, pieces of it rotting off under the same watchful eye people reserve for magicians.

We, with tattoos, wash, moisturize and repeat until the old skin falls away like autumn leaves off a tree and our new, customized flesh lays vibrant and commemorative underneath.

Track Review: Massive Attack - "Splitting the Atom."

This is fun. I like new song reviews.

So it's been how many years since Massive Attack's 100th Window came out? Five? Six? Too many, that's how many. It was met with mixed reviews, never quite reaching the level of praise and worship as their third album, Mezzanine. Even still, these trip-hop masters have soldiered on and in 2006 released Collected, a two-disc a- and b-sides collection, featuring two new songs, "Live with Me" and "False Flags."

However, rumblings of a new album have been heard for years - in fact it was first thought that "Live with Me" and "False Flags" were the first two singles for this fifth release. After multiple delays, it seems the Heinz ketchup people were right and the best things do in fact come to those who wait.

Yesterday on Radio 1, Zane Lowe debuted "Splitting the Atom," from Massive Attack's upcoming EP, set for release this fall. "Atom" is a work of pure genius. The simple four-on-the-floor drumbeat alternates between a kick (or double-kick, depending on the bar) and a hand-clap and snare. Deeper swells rise from the abyss and spectral background vocals by Robert "3D" Del Naja accent the seething verses by Daddy G and smooth, if dismal, choruses by Horace Andy.

The real star of this show, however, is the keyboard. It sounds incredibly old, like old Dracula movie old, but it's heavy on the upbeat and almost dub-like. It lends so much texture and soul to "Splitting the Atom" it would be impossible without it. The song rocks for nearly eight minutes, and rides a slow, unchanging groove like "Protection," though it slowly, gradually picks up the background instruments to impose on the earlier steady groove fiercely and in a way only Massive Attack can.

If this is on the EP (I think due Oct) that didn't quite make the full album (due Feb 2010), Massive Attack's 2010 release could be the best album of next year. Find "Splitting the Atom" online and stream or download it as soon as you can; it's one of the best songs I've heard this year.

For fans of Gorillaz, Portishead, Tricky.

Track Review: Radiohead - "These Are My Twisted Words."

England's arguably second biggest band, Radiohead, are most lately known for pioneering the "tip jar" method of paying for an .mp3 download of their latest LP, In Rainbows in October 2007. It's said to have been a great success, and not to be estranged of the ever-(d)evolving music distribution system brought on by high-speed internet and crumbling record labels, a brand new song by the quintet from Oxford eaked onto the internet a couple days ago, just a week following "Harry Patch (In Memory Of)," their stringy tribute to England's last surviving World War I veteran, who passed away very recently.

The first new Radiohead song in nigh on two years starts with a lurching final part of a guitar chord and slow, sexy drums...at least for about four seconds before the song kicks into its 120bpm+ groove.

Phil Selway's quick, riding high-hat-and-snare drumline will sound right at home to fans of "Twisted Words"'s closest comparable relative, 2007's "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi." If you're running in the morning, or driving along a forgiving highway on a warm, bright day, Phil has your mood captured and this track should be first on your iPod playlist. Lead guitarist Jonny Greenwood meanders between a handful of chords he picks a string at a time after some early strumming, leaving the listener with a feeling of anxiety and unease as his brother Colin plucks a fuzzy, jerky progression that complements the other instruments nicely. Sometimes it drives, sometimes it rides passenger, but it always stakes its claim in the production.

This bizarre jam plods along to varying emotive effect for over two and a half minutes before Thom Yorke gently broods "These are my twisted words" and a few other despondent, satirically-pedestrian lines that have become his trademark since 1995, with enough reverb backing them to make any indie fanboy happy.

"When are you coming back? I just can't handle it," Yorke shudders out as the brothers Greenwood back him with a steady tenacity, Selway's metronome percussion providing a welcome backbone to the new piece.

It ends as abruptly as it begins, without ever reaching a crescendo, a finale, a point, or whatever you're looking for. Much like their Amnesiac b-side "Cuttooth," "These Are my Twisted Words" manages to ride a pleasing, solid groove for over five minutes and leave you with the kind of satisfied feeling you'd expect after eating a modest dinner you've prepared yourself. It doesn't climax and explode like "How to Disappear Completely" or "Life in a Glasshouse," but one of the most intriguing things to me about 2007's In Rainbows (and this new track) was how simply enjoyable and pleasant the whole album was without Kid A's minimalism or OK Computer's utter portending apocalypse.

Nobody knows for sure what this song is leading up to, if anything. Radiohead have toyed at the idea of releasing three or four songs together physically and/or online as little EP releases lately in interviews, and it's been said that Thom Yorke will be contributing a song to the new Twilight movie, not to mention the cryptic message and August 17 release date mentioned in a .nfo file accompanying the leaked .mp3 that brought this song to the world, but I for one am thrilled to have it to listen to, sing along with and casually throw onto future mixtapes.

Grammar School (Lesson Two).

I feel good about combining two lessons of contraction/possessive mix-ups into one blog today, so let's do it.

Your is what we say when we imply that something belongs to you. "Now I wanna be your dog." This is one of the simplest words in the English language, and is in a singular AND plural third-person possessive pronoun form. You may ask me "Is this your blog?" or exclaim to my fiance and I, "We're looking forward to your wedding." Sadly, this latter form is giving way to the Midwestern "your guys's" and the Southern variation, "y'all's."

The other spelling, you're, is how we shorten you are. If we wish to say, "You're one to talk," it's never spelled your.

Other examples include "What is it you think you're doing?" and "Is this yours?"

"You're the worst boss I've ever had."

"I've kidnapped your Dunny and I demand the ransom."

"What are your thoughts on The Virgin Suicides?"

"You're the worst phone company I've ever seen."

The other jumbling is its vs. it's.

If you hadn't noticed the pattern of you're and they're, you may by now have guessed how the contraction of "it is" will play out. It's is used with an apostrophe only when shortening "it is" or "it has," and never when a genderless person or object owns something else. "It's gonna be a hot one today." "It's been a hard day's night."

On the other hand, if an inanimate or genderless object is in possession of something, the singular third-person possessive pronoun is its - WITHOUT an apostrophe. "Remember my blue shirt? Its third button fell off." "It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again."

"It's a joke. It's all a joke."

"That snowblower is on its last legs."

More to come.

Grammar School (Lesson One).

I read my share of e-mails, blogs, letters, posted notices and the like, and just between us, the grammar in this country is beginning to resemble something cavemen would use, or pick out of their shower drain if, in fact, they'd discovered how to irrigate water or run pipeline.

So, while I'm researching new topics about which to write, I'm just going to trot along here and help the entirety of my readership function more aptly as communicative human beings. I think I'll just take grammatical errors I see in my everyday life and point out their errors, explain how they err, illustrate the proper method and correct it. It's my little part in helping the human race get a little smarter instead of a little dumber.

The first lesson is to learn how to differentiate between "there," "their" and "they're." It may sound easy to you, but you have no idea how many people confuse them.

There is an adverb (a word that describes an action) usually implying a destination away from oneself, among other things. For example, in its most common definition, one might say "I think the napalm is over there" or "There aren't enough bottles of whiskey in this town for the both of us."

It is ONLY used to describe a physical destination, even if a vague one. One never writes "This is there problem" or "There going to kill us all!"

Their is a pronoun (a word that describes a person, place or thing) implying multiple parties' ownership of an object. "Is this their zombie?" "Yes, this zombie belongs to both of them - it is theirs."

It is absolutely NOT used as a substitute when one wishes to avoid the effort of saying "his or her." For example, "Jonny Lupsha has just updated their Facebook status!" This is wrong. It's just...bloody...wrong. There aren't two of me, and if there were we surely wouldn't share a Facebook status, as one of me would be in playing video games and the other would be at work cursing losing that video game / work coin toss. So we instead say "Jonny Lupsha has just updated his or her Facebook status!' or "his/her Facebook status!" If you like, you can say "her or his," but I find "his or her" rolls off the tongue more fluidly.

Finally, they're. When spelled "they're," they're is a contraction (shortened word) meaning "they are." This is most commonly mistaken with their, and I cannot stress enough how important their separation is. "They're" means "they are," and "their" indicates what group of people something belongs to. One writes, "They're the worst '60s revivalist group I've ever heard!" or "I don't care what they're doing; get them off my horse!"

We never, EVER write "This is they're lightsaber," or "What's they're phone number?" Every time you mix "their" and "they're," your favorite messiah cries.

More to come with every grievance I feel like filing.

A Newborn Baby with Wild Wolves All Around It

The following essay is mostly true, though peppered with mythos. As a long-time lover and collector of stories, I often find it difficult and unrewarding to separate fact from legend. Hence, on occasion, a story I tell in turn will become a bit larger than life, and I hope no other storyteller would have it any other way - specifically the following subject. Any liberties taken with the truth are done with the utmost respect and love.

A warm May morning in 1941 brought Robert Zimmerman into the world. He was born in an unremarkable hospital in Duluth, Minnesota, and found an earnest love in music from an early age. His childhood heroes included Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie.

After high school, Robert hopped a cold train East to New York City with his acoustic guitar, harmonica and a few changes of clothes in tow. He befriended boxcar bums and salt-of-the-earth working class Americans along the way, dressed in muted burlap and rough cloth. When he arrived in New York, he joined the blossoming folk music culture and embraced the Do-It-Yourself lifestyle of proto-hippies and hippies’ older siblings, whose interest in Elvis Presley had long since faded.

Robert’s unassuming face and mid-sized figure betrayed his secret of a life without much prior struggle to his independent, often-homeless friends. He sought a job as a folk singer in bars, with a notebook full of cover songs, but his nasal voice – with an almost-hillbilly accent and slurred tone – cost him any worthwhile earnings at many auditions and debut shows. Countless club owners kicked Robert Zimmerman out on his ass, never giving him the chance to show them what he truly had to offer.

In the infancy of the 1960s, along with the frost-bitten winter weather, something inside Robert started to harden. He became more ruthless in his search for work in music, wrote an original song about his hardship in New York, and shed the moniker Robert Zimmerman for his professional name, Bob Dylan.

It’s widely believed that this first original track, “Talkin’ New York,” was a staple at his subsequent auditions and helped secure Dylan’s first nightclub gigs. The listener can’t help but be won over by its comedic tone, laced with hints of sarcasm and cynicism, as Dylan uses his unique wit to describe poverty, hunger and frosty winter weather in the Big Apple.

“Lot of people don’t have much food on their table, but they got a lotta forks and knives / And they gotta cut somethin’,” he sang.

At his first several gigs, Bob Dylan got onstage and sat on a stool, a harmonica hanging on his neck, a worn acoustic guitar sitting on his lap, and started to play. In all probability, the audience didn’t expect much from him, his first couple times onstage. They likely sat with their cigarettes between their first two fingers coiling smoke into the air, and their strong drinks, sweating from condensation and becoming watery from melting ice, the less kind of them elbowing each other in the ribs and making a quip about the Okie who came to the big city, chuckling so loudly they almost drowned him out as he awkwardly strummed his first two bars of “Talkin’ New York” or “Fixin’ to Die.”

Then Bob Dylan opened his mouth and sang into the microphone.

The earliest record of him, really, comes from audiences at these first shows, and those are scattered and conflicting at best. Tales of the clocks on the walls stopping as the barflies froze in stunned silence contradict those of the chaotic rush to throw money at Dylan for his debut LP. On the only note of consistency, most reviews of (and reactions to) him were along the lines of “What we saw onstage didn’t match what we heard.”

The crowds were flabbergasted. In front of their eyes was a kid, fresh from the middle of nowhere, cheeks with traces of baby fat still visible, singing with the wisdom, desolation and sadness of an elderly post-Civil War blues artist. They say he played the guitar like it was his only friend, blew the harmonica like he was born with it attached to him and sang with a level of despondence one would expect from seeing the world change under his feet, the last remnant of an old way of life unable to make heads or tails of the 1960s. The so-called goofy voice that he pokes fun at in “Talkin’ New York” took on a raspier, lonelier tone, and the city started listening.

“A very great man once said some people rob you with a fountain pen / Don’t take too long to find out just what he was talkin’ about.”

Dylan was discovered by the legendary John Hammond while playing harmonica for Carolyn Hester and was brought to the studio to record his self-titled debut album over the course of three sessions over the course of two days. “Talkin’ New York,” along with another Dylan original, “Song to Woody” – a tribute to Woody Guthrie – were accompanied by a dozen covers of folk and blues classics like “Man of Constant Sorrow” and “House of the Rising Sun.”

In “Song to Woody,” Dylan’s poetic lyrics truly begin to shine. “I’m out here 1,000 miles from my home / walkin’ the road other men have gone down / I’m seein’ your world of people and things / your paupers and peasants and princes and kings.”

Dylan continues a letter to the man whose torch he hoped had passed onto him. “Hey hey Woody Guthrie I wrote you a song / ‘bout a crazy ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along / Seems sick and it’s hungry, it’s tired and it’s torn / It looks like it’s a-dyin’ and it’s hardly been born.”

After achieving some success with his first album, Dylan became increasingly aware of the modern-day struggles of the world around him. His 1963 release, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, contained many more original songs, several of which were scathing anti-war pieces. By this point, his hair had grown out from merely shaggy to his trademark, a tangled ball of thin brown cotton. Freewheelin’ may be remembered for bringing us “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” but its damning “Masters of War” lingers as a timeless protest piece.

Speaking again to Dylan’s eerily prophetic insight is “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” which spends its six-minute duration warning the world that conflict is coming just around the bend. While a pre-Vietnam America was slipping into decadence and trading in careful progress for the limits of its reach, Bob Dylan saw a red flag and sent up his warning.

Nearly every line in “Hard Rain” is ripe with proverb or metaphor. One can picture the endless parade of a Kennedy-era Manhattan, joyous in its victory over Richard Nixon, and Dylan standing watch, leaning on a streetlight with his arms folded, shaking his head in disapproval.

“I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it,” he warns, and speaks to the fragile nature of an overindulging country ignorant of the international struggles that would surround it soon enough. While the hippie culture rose at a staggering rate, the consequences of the Bay of Pigs were waiting in earnest to arrest it.

“I saw a white ladder all covered with water” may easily describe the perilous nature of the borderline-racist socioeconomic structure of early 1960s America, before complete desegregation. Of course it could just be a simple image, but with Dylan’s lyrics that was rarely the case. His preternatural x-ray of the world was already showing by this point, and the track had four minutes to go.

“I saw guns ‘n’ sharp swords in the hands of young children.” Is this another cryptic foreshadowing of a world to come, with a government drafting high schoolers for the Vietnam war, or just a cheap graphic image?

“I heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter / I heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley, and it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.” The list goes on as quickly as the words are delivered.

Shortly after its release, and just hours after John F. Kennedy gave a speech on national television about civil rights, civil rights leader and NAACP figure Medgar Evers was shot in the back and killed outside his home by Ku Klux Klan member and White Citizens’ Council affiliate Byron De La Beckwith. Beckwith was tried twice in two years, both of which resulted in a deadlocked jury, and walked a free man for three decades.

And less than six months after Evers’ shooting, JFK himself was assassinated.

Subsequently, Dylan was noticeably shaken. The covers for his two albums released at the time speak volumes. If he looked lanky in his picture on the cover of Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, then by the time his photo was taken for 1964’s The Times They Are A-Changin, he was positively gaunt. He traded in Freewheelin’s care-free smile, arm-in-arm with a girl, for a sepia-toned, saddened frown for Times in a plain, heavy worker’s shirt.

Dylan’s work on Bob Dylan and The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan had not only been noticed by the proto-hippies and the DIY folk culture; it had caused a spark of enlightenment for the generation that would later be responsible for Woodstock, Jimi Hendrix and the closest the United States has come to revolution since the days of Paul Revere.

The songwriting on Times may be Dylan’s best, as well. Dylan bequeaths all ten songs like eulogies for dying stories he knew along the road to 1964. From the opening title track to its closer, “Restless Farewell,” Dylan’s melancholy Americana paints a portrait of a post-JFK nation lost and looking for answers, or perhaps salvation.

“The Times They Are A-Changin’” recognizes an America in turmoil, in which the bourgeoisie working-class was being forgotten in favor of a strange culture of Baby Boomers fed up with the system their parents had set up for them.

“With God on Our Side” satirizes the popular belief in all sides of a conflict that God defends them and only them. “The cavalries charged; the Indians died / For the country was young with God on its side,” Dylan observes with a loving sarcasm.

“Only a Pawn in their Game” bookends its five verses with the folksy circumstances of the death of Medgar Evers. “A finger fired the trigger to his name / A handle hid out in the dark, a hand set the spark, two eyes took the aim behind a man’s brain / But he can’t be blamed; he’s only a pawn in their game,” preaches Dylan at first, then “He’s taught how to walk in a pack, shoot in the back with his fist in a clench / To hang and to lynch / To hide ‘neath the hood / To kill with no pain, like a dog on a chain, he ain’t a-got no name / But it ain’t him to blame / He’s only a pawn in their game.” At last, Dylan brings it home with “When the shadowy sun sets on the one that fired the gun / He’ll see by his grave on the stone that remains / Carved next to his name, his epitaph plain / ‘Only a Pawn in their Game.’”

Between such gems as these, there is the fable of Hollis Brown, whose Tom Joad-esque existence was so poor with his impoverished family he took his final wages and bought enough shotgun shells to kill them all and himself to prevent fatal starvation; that of Hattie Carroll, a kitchen maid who was killed for no reason by the upper-class William Zanzinger who, in turn, was given six months in jail because the hammer of justice swings softly on the rich; and a doomed couple in “Boots of Spanish Leather,” whose young woman sails off to find adventure and her beau is left with no romantic trace of her to remember her by. All in all, an utterly despondent set of folk tunes – the last by Dylan.

Following the release of this third album, Dylan found himself followed in the streets by young Americans eager to worship him like a god. The deification is said to have shaken him to his core, specifically after a young girl addressed him as “Savior” upon meeting him, and he hung up his folk hat – for the most part – and turned instead to the loud rock ‘n’ roll being embraced by the other half of the urban American youth. He didn’t think he was the right man for the job, which may have been yet another manifestation of his oft-seen humility, and sought to shake the cult following any way he could.

He would return less than two years later with Highway 61 Revisited, featuring the raucous “Ballad of a Thin Man” and “Like a Rolling Stone,” both played by a full band, as was most of the rest of that album. The exception is the 11-minute-plus “Desolation Row,” which is mostly two acoustic guitars and a harmonica, which sounds as though it celebrates the end of times – this could be his fitting eulogy for his folk career, though we may never know for sure.

Dylan’s later work in the ‘60s and ‘70s included Desire, Blonde on Blond, Blood on the Tracks and supposedly getting The Beatles to smoke marijuana and open their eyes to the political conflict around them (“That’s when The Beatles started making good music,” some have quipped), but maybe his most endearing period is from 1961-1965, as the low-key folk poet with an uncanny knowledge of the world.

Lyrics taken from "Talkin' New York," "Song to Woody," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," "With God on Our Side" and "Only a Pawn in their Game." All songs written by Bob Dylan and released by Columbia Records. All rights reserved.