Dylan used to tell us that he came out doing it — out of the womb, singing and playing and writing,” folk-singer S. David Cohen, formerly known as Dave Blue, likes to recall. That's an exaggeration, certainly, but possibly not by that much; at least, Bob Dylan said it so often, with so many variations, that he must have come half way to believing it. A man who is cloaking himself in myth must believe in his own magic to make it all work. “After a while,” a close friend from the early days recalls, “he didn't seem to know any more what was truth and what was his own creation.”
During one of our talks, Dylan conceded that I was “right on target” in discussing the inner Self that he could not repress, that brought him so much pain he had to make himself invisible, and provided him with the strength to reach for higher levels of consciousness.
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