From Robyn on Patreon in 2023
We each make our own deal with reality, and function courtesy of denial. What we choose to ignore is selected by instinct, and in many cases involves the passage of time. As we grow older, our reality tends to become embedded in the past, like a golden egg in amber. So mine is encased in the year 1967, as I’ve always trumpeted and waved from the ramparts - hence my forthcoming memoir of it.

With the book comes the album, natch; 1967 yielded a fantastic harvest of songs, some of which I’m recording for an acoustic companion piece to my story. When I hear them or sing them I’m in my happy place, old fool that I now am, marooned in a bewildering future - uh-huh, baby! This song, however, appeared - at least in Britain - just over the border into 1968. Bob Dylan wrote and recorded it in 1967, taking great care - it seemed - to sidestep all the musical hallmarks of that year: no sitars, no phasing, no multi-tracking, no lengthy solos - nothing to get stoned about. And the following year, guess what? - he took everyone with him: the Beatles, the Stones, the lot. But that’s another story.

I first heard “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” in the grey dismalia of January 1968. News had just come in that hippies were surrendering in droves to hordes of paramilitaries in Ronald Reagan masks - only kidding! But I did sense that we had peaked, as a civilisation, and now the long climb back down was beginning. Perhaps Dylan sensed that too, which is why even by his standards, this is such a sad song. Sadder than a cross-eyed girl at a barn dance. Sadder than a ladybug in fine port wine. Even to think of it makes me cry sometimes, and the best songs all do that. “Oh I awoke in anger, so alone and terrified” - was that to be our fate, now we that the Gates of Eden had closed behind us? Time to pack up your Tootsie Roll Fudge and reach for eternity, folks…