One day, around 1972, Hugh Roche rode over to my house on his Bultaco motorcycle with a guitar strapped to the back fender and played “Desolation Row” and “Just Like a Woman” and “Girl of the North Country” and I was forever and irrevocably changed. After that, everything—I mean everything—was different. Especially me. That whole sensible linear cosmology I had embraced so naturally was transformed into a metaphoric island hub, where I stood with a thousand roads before me, spoking and forking and forking again into infinite space, challenging and confounding the grasp of my newly hatched imagination. The colors, the textures, the meanings of words were all now immediately subjective. It was revelatory to the point of vertigo. I saw ideas as the mortar mix of my inner identity, the defining components of my soul. Activities, actions, were the bricks this mortar held together, forming walls that separated the good from the bad, truth from lie, redemption from oblivion. I was fifteen years old. And in a word, what I felt was a budding responsibility—the cornerstone of artistic sensibility.
But I wasn’t smiling like before.
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