From: williamgwilliams@gmail.com   
      
   I've always associated Mr. Tambourine Man with Bruce Langhorne. Heylin's   
   "Double Life" has this, though, about Dylan's trip in 1964 with Victor   
   Maymudes, Paul Clayton, and "scribe" Pete Karman that stopped in New Orlans   
   for Mardis Gras:   
   "Sure enough, he rolled into his room in the wee small hours with the germ of   
   an idea for a song about a musical muse, a Pied Piper figure wielding a   
   tambourine and offering the singer a trip on his 'magic swirlin' ship'   
   (Dylan's version of Rimbaud's le    
   bateau ivre - perhaps Arthur's most fabled illumination), a genesis he finally   
   acknowledged in the 1985 Biograph notes."   
      
   I went to my copy of Biograph, but it has no notes. Each of the three CDs has   
   a two-page insert in the CD case that has the album cover on the first page,   
   and the CD track listing on the last page, but the middle two pages are blank.   
   Does any one of you    
   have Biograph? If so, could you check and see if your copy has notes, not just   
   blank pages? (And if your copy has notes, do they say anything about that line   
   and Rimbaud?)   
      
   I'm curious about Heylin's claim. I'd thought about the "magic swirling ship"   
   being a reference to Drunken Boat, but I hadn't considered that the snippet is   
   "your magic swirling ship," meaning that the song is addressing Rimbaud, and   
   that one could argue    
   that Rimbaud is the tambourine man (even if Langhorne did play on the song and   
   was famous for playing a tambourine).   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)