Bob Dylan’s first musical had a hell of a time

But Dylan and MacLeish weren’t just separated by age, but also by background, style, temperament, and sensitivity. MacLeish split his time between his home in western Massachusetts and a private club in Antigua and was the product of boarding schools and Ivy League universities. A more instinctive, less-considered artist, Dylan was the Minnesota-born son of a Jewish shopkeeper and, as he noted on “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” his latest album, “was born on the wrong side of the railroad route like Ginsberg, Corso and Kerouac. “

A disagreement about the lyrics to “Father of Night” embodied the difference between the two visions. Dylan’s song was full of contrasts (“Father of the day, father of night / father of black, father of white”). MacLeish liked the melody but thought the song should comment on the nature of evil more exclusively; he suggested alternative texts: “Father of the night, father of fear / father of the cold in the void above us / father of the serpent under the stone / father of fear alone in the dark.”

As reported in Dylan’s imaginative 2004 memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, a meeting between Septuagenarian MacLeish and 20-year-old Dylan – with the older poet talking about Sappho, Socrates, Dante and John Donne – reads like an erased one Dialogue from the scene in “Trading Places” when Eddie Murphy’s street smart con man is unlikely to be welcomed into the blue-blooded Dan Aykroyd’s apartment.

Inevitably, the creative process at “Scratch” has evolved. The story of how that happened depends on who is telling it.

“I’ve retired from production,” Dylan wrote in the liner notes for “Biograph,” his 1985 collection of outtakes, bootlegs and previously published material. “It was actually nothing, sort of like a misunderstanding that I assumed.”