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THERE is a ghost in David Browne’s history of New York’s folk district, Talkin’ Greenwich Village. For a while, the whole place revolves around this skinny kid in corduroy; then he disappears, only to reoccur in almost phantasmagorical form. He sits in on harmonica at The Bottom Line with Muddy Waters, drops by at The Other End to catch Patti Smith, and is spotted as the brightest star on a Thursday night at Folk City, sitting beside Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. And there he is at an early concert by Lucinda Williams, mumbling, “Keep in touch.”
“Needless to say,” Browne writes, “she didn’t hear from him again, at least for many years.” And yet the sightings continue. “When his friends Levon Helm and Rick Danko were playing the Lone Star Cafe, Dylan, in a cashmere coat and fur hat, wandered in during their soundcheck. In his first time playing with them since The Band’s farewell Last Waltz show, he joined them for both their warm-up and their full set, playing what Helm would call ‘a rather liquid’ version of Hank Williams’ ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ and a medley of ‘Willie And The Hand Jive’ and ‘Ain’t No More Cane’. As Helm would write later, Dylan was then ‘out the door, into the night.’”