The songs Bob Dylan wrote at the Chelsea Hotel
At The Chelsea Hotel, myth and fantasy collide. The New York hotel is a legend unto itself. Delve into the pages of Patti Smith’s Just Kids, and you can hear the footsteps shuffling down the carpeted hallways, poetry slipping out from beneath each locked door.
No artist was attuned to this more than Bob Dylan. Beady eyes might have spotted the hotel in A Complete Unknown, the recent biopic in which skittish superstar Timothée Chalamet wore the likeness of the folk hero to critical acclaim. In the picture, he uses the hotel to do what Dylan does best: brood, a cigarette lilting out of his mouth, learning over a guitar and scratching out the best melody ever known to man.
But which song did he actually write within those haunted walls? One of his songs joins the long list of legendary pieces that were born in 222 West 23rd Street, such as ‘Chelsea Morning’, the Joni Mitchell song written during her stay at the hotel. It also joins Patti Smith’s first ever song, ‘Fire of Unknown Origin’, which would of course open her eyes to the path on which her iconic album Horses would eventually lie.
It wasn’t just melodies that made themselves known in that busy hotel. William S Burroughs wrote the lauded postmodernist text, Naked Lunch, while living at the Chelsea. Across the way in another timeline, Stanley Kubrick wrote the screenplay for his film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, in one of the quaint rooms.
How could such a healthy stream of creativity spurt from only 155 rooms? Smith would put this down to the echoes of the sublime held almost supernaturally in the building. She wrote, “I loved this place, its shabby elegance, and the history it held so possessively… So many had written, conversed, and convulsed in these Victorian dollhouse rooms. So many skirts had swished these worn marble stairs. So many transient souls had espoused, made a mark, and succumbed here.”
Dylan, if anything, was undoubtedly a “transient soul”. Fittingly, the Dylan hit that sprung out of the velvet curtains and the plush bed throws was, in fact, ‘Visions of Johanna’. The song, which ended up on his 1966 double album Blonde on Blonde, came out of the time when he was living at the hotel with his then-wife, Sara Lownds. Fans will, of course, know the lore behind his 1975 song ‘Sara’, which includes the nostalgic lyrics: “Stayin’ up for days in the Chelsea Hotel / Writin’ ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ for you.”
The epic song, reaching close to eight minutes, opens up with the flickering depiction of a communion of souls, weighed down by a curious senselessness in a quiet dark. “Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re tryin’ to be so quiet? / We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it,” he sings, contemplatively.
For many, the Chelsea Hotel represents the inevitable triumph of art over fear, pain, loathing, and the human trappings of life. There is no better representation of this than ‘Visions of Johanna’, showcasing the best of Dylan’s lyricism compounded by the warm ghosts of the greats shedding their skin in the very fibre of his sound.
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