“He sipped from the cup of greatness, and then spilled what it held.”

So what’s the link between perhaps the greatest Bob Dylan album, Highway 61 Revisited, and Scotland?

Of course, it could be linked to Bob’s love of traditional folk music. An early Dylan recording, Black Jack Davey, is widely believed to be derived from the Scottish tune The Gypsy Loddy (c 1720) which mentions the Earl of Cassilis in Ayrshire. This being Britain, there is still an Earl of Cassilis, twenty-seven year old Archibald David Kennedy. But no . . .

The answer lies in the fourth track of side one; the great From a Buick 6. The founder of the Buick Motor Company, David Dunbar Buick was born in 1854 in Arbroath – home of the famous Smokies (smoked Haddock). Admittedly, David’s family moved to Chicago when he was still an infant but he can still lay claim to founding the motor company which became General Motors.

By that time, however, a broke David had been bought out – taking with him a single share worth $100,000. Buick was a fine inventor (his important role in developing the overhead cam engine has been, sadly, lost in history) but expended all of his energies and cash on research and development. He then tried his hand in the oil industry and also land sales/development. Failing at both, with his son Tom Buick, he established the Lorraine Motor Company. Sure enough, despite producing what Buick Snr. thought his best car, Lorraine also went bust.

Tom later recalled the family’s financial plight being so acute that they were evicted from thirteen apartments. In 1928, a famous Civil War historian located David Buick and found him almost penniless, working as “an obscure instructor” at the Detroit School of Trades. Soon after, his health deteriorated so much that he was moved to the information desk.

David Dunbar Buick died penniless in the following year (1929) and his son Tom Buick died in 1942, a Fuller Brush salesman.

The quote is worth repeating. The advertising titan Theodore F. McManus said of Buick “Fame beckoned [to him]. He sipped from the cup of greatness, and then spilled what it held.”

[Sources; mainly Chrysler by Vincent Curio (OUP), plus wiki and various others online]