Highway 60 visited

Congratulations Bobby. Best wishes El D. Happy birthday Zimmy.

Yep, my good friend Bob Dylan turns 60 on May 24 and, in common with half the planet, I’m getting the salutations in early. The reason why should be pretty obvious: anyone who has seen His Bobness in the recent past will know that he looks about as healthy as a 2,000 year old mummy exhumed from its resting place in the Valley Of The Kings and then left out in the open air for a month. Indeed, the only way you could tell ‘em apart is if you asked them to sing. The one with the parched, two thousand year old croak? That would be Bob.

So scribes are falling over themselves to mark the great occasion well in advance just in case Bob is blown off the face of the planet by a puff of wind any time in the next few weeks. Every other day, news arrives of the latest biography purporting to tell for the first time the true story of rock’s greatest enigma. Sam Snort just laughs when he reads this stuff. The truth? Your average rock hack – and there’s no other kind – wouldn’t recognise the truth if it put a straw in its mouth and blew cocaine up his ass.

The fact is that I, the great Sam Snort, am the only person in the world qualified to write the definitive story of Bob Dylan, because without me, frankly, there would be no story to tell. From the very beginning to the almost-end, it is Sam Snort who has been Dylan’s constant muse, inspiration and drug supplier. And it is time I told my story.

Woeful Racket

It was 1962 when I first clapped eyes on Bob Dylan in Gerdi’s Folk City, the legendary folkie hang-out in Greenwich Village. Bob was wearing a workshirt, jeans, strumming a battered guitar and wheezing out the words to ‘Blowing In the Wind’. A more depressing sight and a more woeful racket you have never heard in your life. Frankly, I deemed it absolutely vital that the world be spared this shite.

At the time, I was managing The Nancy Brothers, the world’s first androgynous glam-folk band, and I invited the young Dylan along to see one of our gigs, positioning him in the shadows at the back of the room so he wouldn’t have to sign any petitions. Half-way through the show – in the middle of our intensely dramatic ‘Rambling, Gambling Cross-Dressing Willie’, as I recall – I turned around and noticed that Bob’s hair was suddenly frizzier. He had gone electric. Just like that. And so, thanks to me (and the Nancy Brothers, who would themselves evolve into southern-fried boogie meisters Foghat), the world was spared too much dreary protest-song and all that other buttock-clenchingly bad poetic stuff that nowadays you only hear at the more anal end of the folk-mass circuit.

Of course, nobody would have paid the slightest bit of attention if a little controversy hadn’t been whipped up around the notion of Bob plugging himself directly into the national grid. Sure, I expected the odd deranged folkie to stick his fingers in his ears (his own, not Bob’s, though with that crowd anything was possible) but in order to maximise the column inches I felt it was essential that we stage some grand public display of disaffection.

Hence the legendary Manchester Free Trade Hall gig when a stooge I’d planted in the audience – complete with script – set out to heckle the spokesman for his generation. Unfortunately, I’d bribed this bearded zealot with so many bottles of Newcastle Brown that by the time the moment came he could barely remember his own name, let alone that of Christ’s betrayer. “Peter!”, the dingbat roared. “No, Paul!… No, fuck it, was it Mark?”. At this point, I snuck up behind him and felled the moron with a hefty belt of a rolled-up copy of Sing Out, simultaneously roaring “Judas” to muffle the blow. And the rest, as they say, is hysteria.

My next important intervention was when I introduced Bob Dylan to The Beatles. I’ll never forget the way that historic moment went down. “Bob, these are The Beatles. The Beatles, this is Bob.”

Bob next’s big break – and I speak quite literally – was also organised by me. Aware that his public profile was dipping, I nipped into the garage in the house in Woodstock and went to work with a pair of pliers. Next thing, Bob takes the bike for a spin, the brakes mysteriously fail, Bob ends up in traction and – voilà – Zimmy the enigma is born.

Sheer Hugeness

That pretty much takes us into the ’70s, a period of conspicuous creative waste on the part of Bob, salvaged only by one of the most selfless acts a friend and fan has ever committed in the name of his mainman’s art.

That’s right, I shagged Bob’s missus.

The result was Blood On The Tracks, one of the most painful documents of lost love ever recorded, and widely acclaimed as the bard’s masterpiece. To be fair, Bob was a bit pissed off with me for a while – hence the coded line in ‘You’re A Big Girl Now’: “I know that I can find you in somebody’s room/in all probability the room of a man with a frankly prodigious schlong” – but when the good reviews and decent sales figures came in, he very much saw the funny side of it.

The only period during which myself and Bob parted company for any length of time was in the mid-eighties. Not surprisingly, with the Snortian one preoccupied with his burgeoning South American business interests, Zim filled the void by turning to the only thing that could rival Sam for sheer fucking hugeness and general know-how – God.

The results, as you might expect, were an absolute abomination, with Zimmy pointing his finger a lot and using the word “ye” at every available opportunity.

This time I really did have to take drastic action, organising through my sources in the pharmaceutical industry for El Zimmo to contract a virus which almost stopped his ticker. Almost, but not quite, the carefully administered dose ensuring that while Bob didn’t croak it he could also go on croaking it. The upshot of this sobering experience was Time Out Of Mind, a record so thoroughly grim and depressing that the critics couldn’t help but hail it as a classic.

Now as Bob nears 60, Sam’s work is almost done. There isn’t too much chance of Bob disgracing himself at this late stage but just in case he does take a funny turn, rest assured that Snort will be close at hand, a steadying influence on rock’s most mercurial figure.

As His Bobness himself sang way back when: “Don’t follow leaders - apart from that great man, Samuel J. Snort Esq, obviously.”

Your ever lovin’ Samuel J. Snort Esq