Part 6.
Do you share this fascination for trains?
Absolutely. I grew up in a tiny apartment on the fifth floor of an ugly postwar building, but right behind our house there were open fields and train tracks. You can see them on the back cover photo of the CD. When we were little my friends and I used to walk on those tracks for hours and I always dreamed of hopping one of the freight trains that came by once or twice a day and ride it to some unknown exciting place. They probably wouldn't have taken me very far, but the idea was intriguing enough. Ever since I moved to Berlin I've done a lot of traveling by train and I still like it much better than going by car. You can enjoy the landscape floating by outside, and inside you have this more or less random assemblage of people who happen to have similar destinations. It's a good way of getting somewhere.
What is the "Marley Bone Coach" in the Tom Waits song? Is it a train as well? I was wondering about that.
I'm not sure either. It's one of Waits' many beautiful, evocative expressions that make you wonder where in God's name did he dig those up. The name may refer to a street in London, the Marylebone Road, which is itself a corruption of "Marie la bonne," the site of a famous courthouse. But there's also an old expression, "to ride in the marrow bone coach," which means to go on foot. One of the things I love about Tom Waits' songs is that they're full of weird names of places, people and items. Dylan's sixties stuff is like that as well.
Okay, Bob Dylan. He's your great idol, isn't he?
Hmm, I try not to idolize anybody. That makes people distant and untouchable. Dylan himself once said about Woody Guthrie that he was his first and last idol because he taught him that men are men and have reasons for what they are doing ... But you're right, Dylan's music definitely changed my life when I was introduced to it at the age of, well, seventeen. I think he's written some of the most amazing songs I've ever heard. For some time, I hardly listened to anything else. So obviously, at least one Dylan tune had to be on Another Man Done Gone.
