Popular radio was sort of at a standstill
and filled with empty pleasantries.
What I was playing were hard-lipped folk songs
with fire and brimstone servings.
LPs were like the force of gravity.
They had covers, back and front, that you could stare at for hours.
Next to them, 45s were flimsy and uncrystallized.
They just stacked up in piles and didn't seem important.
I had no song in my repertoire for commercial radio anyway.
Songs about debauched bootleggers,
mothers that drowned their own children,
Cadillacs that only got five miles to the gallon,
floods, union hall fires, darkness
and cadavers at the bottom of rivers
weren't for radiophiles.
There was nothing easygoing about the folk songs I sang.
They weren't friendly or ripe with mellowness.
They didn't come gently to the shore.
I guess you could say they weren't commercial.
Bob Dylan, "Chronicles: Volume One"
