When the Ship Comes In

Bob Dylan seems to have written “When the Ship Comes In” after a hotel clerk insulted him for his shabby attire. So Joan Baez told Anthony Scaduto for his influential Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography (1972). Last year the University of Minnesota Press published transcripts of Scaduto’s interviews for the bio in The Dylan Tapes: Friends, Players, and Lovers Talkin’ Early Bob Dylan (2021).

Most recently, Clinton Heylin refers to the story without attribution in The Double Life of Bob Dylan: “A Restless Hungry Feeling” (1941-1966) (2021). I first read of the incident in Janet Maslin’s smart essay on Dylan for the 1980 edition of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll (and, she adds, “he composed the song in a single evening at that”).

Anyone can have a fight with a hotel clerk. It takes a genius to generalize the feeling and turn it into a song of apocalyptic rage. It seems to me a fitting song for election day 2022. It certainly suits my attitude. Ladies and gentlemen, Minnesota’s own Bob Dylan.

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