How Did a Jazz Singer Bring Bob Dylan Back to Writing Songs?

David Senra, reading Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One, says a tiny jazz bar restarted Dylan after he walked out of a Grateful Dead rehearsal. He told them he forgot something at the hotel. He planned never to return and to end his career, because he could not take any more. Senra takes the lesson to be getting out of his own head instead of running away.

Four or five or six blocks down the street, Dylan heard a jazz combo in a tiny bar, amateurs playing for almost nobody. Twenty-seven years earlier, that kind of room was where he had started. He got within four feet of the stage, ordered a gin and tonic, and faced an older man singing jazz ballads. The singer was relaxed, not very forceful, and he sang with natural power. The power was not the voice. Dylan had done the same thing long ago, with nobody teaching him, then forgotten a technique so simple it was like forgetting how to button his pants.

He ran back to sing that way with the Grateful Dead. At first it was like drilling a brick wall, and all he could taste was dust. Then something internal came unhinged. A blood choked grunt came up from the bottom of his lower self and bypassed his brain. It burned, and he was awake. He played the shows and never had to think twice. He had the old jazz singer to thank. Senra says that after this Dylan started writing songs again, for the first time in over 10 years.