I'm doing this gig for a month in midtown, and I have to take a subway tunnel on 14th st to get to the 1, and as well as a "New York Times published poet" there's always someone playing music in there…this morning there was a guy doing an amazing version of Knockin on Heaven's Door…it sounded perfect, underground, mournful, acoustic, the sadness mirroring the people on their way to somewhere, in between places…
it made me think of watching Peckinpah's "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" which is a fitfully amazing film, and for which Dylan wrote the song…I remember watching it with Brooks M when we were in HIgh School and he was crazy…he was telling me how if you really want to make a film you should pick your favorite film and just watch it over and over, learning what shot cuts to what, and trying to figure out how it was made…this sounded horrible to me…I did not have any kind of discipline back then, and the idea of analyzing a movie shot by shot seemed awful…Brooks told me he had done it to PG & Billy the Kid…then we watched it…
parts of it were crazy boring, parts of it were amazing…the part where Knockin on Heaven's Door shows up is amazing…
unfortunately I can only find it in Spanish, but maybe you can still get the impact of it…even today when I heard it, I thought immediately of Brooks and how I've been meaning to break down a favorite film of mine for ages and have never sat down and done it…gotta do that some day…
