Bob Dylan, master songwriter and
septuagenarian, was sitting at his breakfast bar in his ranch in Colorado. In
his hand he held a letter from a fan. He didn’t usually pay much attention to
fan-mail. He reckoned that if your life was sad enough that you had to write
letters to folk you didn’t know, then he pretty much didn’t want anything to do
with you.
This letter, though, was very different from the common herd. It was from a man from Dundee, Scotland who was claiming to be the maestro’s son.
The author of this letter, one
Hughie ‘Shug’ McDivvett, claimed that the singer had had a sexual episode back
in the mid-sixties with his mother, Eileen, then Beattie, who worked in the
Electric Bakery where, he claimed, Dylan had gone ‘for a pie or a bridie’. The
rasp-voiced bard had asked Eileen out for the evening and the resultant passion
produced Shug.
Dylan was intrigued by this. He’d had so many sexual encounters in his long life that it was hard to identify single occasions. That he’d been to Dundee in the mid-sixties wasn’t difficult to confirm through the legions of books which listed all his tour dates for nutcases who cared about such things. He’d played a venue named Dundee Caird Hall during his infamous 1965 tour of the UK when he’d been called ‘Judas’ for his new electric sound.
One thing that he now brought to mind was how fascinated and confused he was by the local dialect, though he could barely make it out.
He even remembered visiting a
strange little shop that sold all sorts of savoury pastries and garishly
coloured cakes. If he remembered rightly, and it was an awful long time ago, he
and his friend Bobby Neuwirth were very stoned and spotting the foodstuffs in
the window and the wonderful smell that emanated from the wee shop, were
compelled to investigate.
There had been a very pretty
red-head behind the counter that he’d been instantly attracted to. Bobby had
asked her what nutritional delights were on offer (that’s the way he spoke,
usually followed by falling-about laughter) and the girl had said ‘mainly
peh’s’ and she indicated some strange looking things steaming in a glass case.
They asked her to repeat what she’d called them and she repeated ‘peh’s’.
For some reason this had cracked
the pair of them up, and he smiled even now reminiscing about the sweetly
stoned uproarious laughter shared by he and his old friend. They called
anything remotely resembling pie a ‘peh’ for the rest of the tour and other
folk had no idea what they were talking about.
But, to the substantive points, firstly; if he’d hosed the girl and, secondly; if he was responsible for this Shug character, he had no real idea. Many had tried to claim paternity on his ass before in an effort to access his fortune and he’d taken responsibility where he had to and batted the rest away with DNA tests, but this Dundee affair?
He decided to take the bull by
the horns and ring the number on the letter, a voice answered..
“Aye aye, Shug McDivvett speking,
ken, likesay?”
Bob Dylan listened closely but it
was mainly instinct which led him to say hi and reveal his identity as maybe
the most iconic rock star of the past 60 years.
“away an shite ya dobber, who is
this? Is that you Malky?”
Dylan was a master of language,
learned people had likened him to Keats and Rimbaud but he was at a loss with
‘dobber’ and people asking if he was ‘Malky’.
“You wrote me saying that I was
your father, do you remember that?”
He could hear this McDivvett
individual racking his probably addled brain.
“Och, that wis ma maw ken? She
wis bletherin’ aboot ye and said ye’d shagged her yonks ago an thit ah wis yer
wean n’that. Her heids waistit, ah telt her there wis cack a’ tae it bit ah
said ahd write tae ye jist tae stoap her spraffin”
Dylan had known Davy Furey back
in the New York days and had been a friend of Van Morrison’s the longest time.
He fancied himself to be a Celtic bard in many ways and had even sang a song
called ‘My Heart is in the Highlands’ but what this man was speaking might just
as well have been Korean for all the sense it made to him.
There was only one question he
could think to ask this man. The answer to it would prove nothing but it seemed
to matter to Dylan somewhere deep in his heart. He knew his heart would concede
something if he could hear it just one more time, though he could hardly
believe what he was going to say next.
“Sir…?”
“Aye fire away, buddy”
“In America we would ask for a
piece of pie. What would you call it where you are?”
There was a moments silence when
both men realised they were the only two parts of a very bizarre conversation
indeed. The one was the composer of some of the most revered songs in twentieth
century popular culture, who had played in front of millions, was the holder of
the French Legion d’honneur, played for presidents and kings. The other was an
unemployed plumber from Broughty Ferry. The one felt inexplicable anticipation
about the answer, the other utter puzzlement.
“A peh…?”
Bob Dylan hadn’t laughed so much
in years.
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