Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Manly Duckling
2007
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ............................................................................... 7
THE WOODY GUTHRIE JUKEBOX .......................................... 11
FINGER-POINTING SONGS ....................................................... 23
IF MY THOUGHT-DREAMS COULD BE SEEN ........................ 47
OTHER FORMS OF PSYCHIC EXPLOSION .............................. 63
DRIFTERS ESCAPE ...................................................................... 77
WHAT THE BROKEN GLASS REFLECTS ................................. 91
HANGING ON TO A SOLID ROCK ......................................... 109
SURVIVING IN THE RUTHLESS WORLD............................... 131
DIGNITY ...................................................................................... 143
MY HEART IS NOT WEARY ...................................................... 161
DO NOT GO GENTLE ........................................................... 173
NOTES AND SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................... 183
INTRODUCTION
Introduction
Perhaps the most infuriating thing for the elitists is the claim that
Dylan is a poet. It upsets people because written literary language and
song have long been seen as distinct entities in the West; the age when
ancient bards would sing or recite their poetry to music is long gone.
Dylan is a songwriter, born into a time in which the cultural elite values
written literature over oral performance. His works are meant to be sung.
The words of a song should have maximum impact when you hear them;
the refrain is all important, and even if the words have depth and
substance there has to be a surface immediacy, a reliance on certain
techniques such as repetition and the cultivation of direct, ordinary
speech, that are no longer requirements of poetry. Furthermore, they
have to obey the rhythms of the song. And yet, many of Dylans major
songs do not easily conform to this definition.
Dylan, more than any other contemporary songwriter, blurs the
distinction between song and poetry. Sometimes, the words are relegated
in the service of the melody, and their immediate impact emphasised
over subtlety and depth, without fine textures (as in Lay Lady Lay or
Knockin on Heavens Door). Dylan uses broad strokes very well - he
realises that song is an oral medium, and in his folk incarnation
particularly he reminds us of an ancient bard, who had to continually
maintain the audiences interest. For such a poet reciting a work aloud,
too many complex metaphors would have been redundant, even if the
poet had had them in his vocabulary - the narrative poems of Old
English, like the verse of Homer, rely on easily-identifiable similes,
similes that compound everyday, shared experience. On the one hand,
Dylan belongs in this oral tradition. When he says, come gather round
people he is making a call to attention, common in medieval verse; he is
not inviting a critical, analytical approach. Even in the oblique, surreal
and ambiguous lyrics of Like a Rolling Stone and Desolation Row
such devices, derived from early folk songs and oral storytelling, are still
operational. When Dylan cries How does it feel? he is going as much
for the marrowbone as for the head.
At the same time, however, there is complexity and depth, and Dylan
is constantly negotiating between the more immediate requirements of
song - rock and roll included - and the subtleties of poetry. You cannot
completely remove Dylan from the context of songwriting, and the critics
who would seek to elevate his words as pure poetry will have always to
be on the defensive; they will have to strip his words of the clothing of
song and let them stand naked, as it were, next to works that were written
9
10
CHAPTER ONE
THE WOODY GUTHRIE JUKEBOX
BOB DYLAN AND EARLY SONGS
21
22
CHAPTER TWO
FINGER-POINTING SONGS
THE FREEWHEELIN BOB DYLAN AND
THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN
here before Dylan had imitated the image and singing style of
Woody Guthrie, and invented a background for himself that
was modelled on the hard travelling of Bound for Glory, it was
not until he had written Blowin in the Wind that he appeared a serious
successor to Guthrie the songwriter. Song to Woody was an impressive
effort by a young man to write in the style of his hero; even The Death
of Emmett Till, an early attempt at topical writing, had enough impact
to get Cynthia Gooding, the host of Folksingers Choice, a show on New
Yorks WBAI radio, enthusing about how the song didnt have any sense
of having been written, how it was free of those poetic contortions that
mess up so many contemporary ballads.6 But with Blowin in the
Wind, Dylan offered the developing Civil Rights movement its own allpurpose anthem to stand alongside Guthries This Land Is Your Land.
Unlike several of the protest songs of the time, Blowin in the
Wind did not zero-in on a specific contemporary incident. Instead, it
was a broad, all-purpose anthem that seemed to express hope for change
(even though this is never actually voiced in the lyric, except in the
ambiguous terms of the refrain). It caught the optimistic mood of the
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Blowin in the Wind expressed and expresses sentiments greater
than the personal, and that is because in Dylans world at this time causes
were more important than selfish individual quests. It became the
anthem of 60s protest, passing out of its creators hands and becoming
something much bigger, articulating at once the dissatisfaction and the
optimism of a generation that was acquiring a political consciousness and
an awareness of the need for wide-reaching social change. In many cases
these were teenagers who had been fostered on rock and roll and who
had reacted against the staid values of the 40s and 50s, their parents
generation, but were maturing from vague rebellion into political
activism. The scope of the song is wide, because Dylan uses general
landscapes and archetypes, thereby encompassing the whole of mankind.
The curious thing is that the song seems to reject the notion of
progress that had accompanied Americas increasing post-war affluence,
and yet still offer hope for change. In its verses, man is not improving his
lot or advancing to a better state. So despite its 60s idealism, the song
refutes the optimism of the post-war boom nothing, Dylan is saying,
has really changed. The optimism that does dwell in the song comes
largely from the mood of the music, and from its clear-sighted exposition
of the forms of injustice. A sense of unending oppression and repeated
injustice is what Dylan seems to have had in mind when he wrote the
song, along with an awareness of mankinds inability to act. We know
what we must do to change things, yet we remain passive, and thus by
implication we share in the blame. The waters of a Biblical Flood,
representing eternal strife and conflict, are forever covering the earth, and
the dove of peace is never able to find dry land (to sleep in the sand, as
Dylan puts it). The specific problems of mid-century America are eternal
ones and a cry must be for global change if mankind is to progress and
wake from this nightmarish situation. It is the nightmare of injustice
forever recurring, the same world of the later Blind Willie McTell, with
its ghost of slaverys ship, a world in which the past is forever haunting
the present; the repeated question how many? invites us to consider
when we are going to put a stop to things. Our tendency to make war on
one another, to enslave our fellow human beings, to ignore suffering, is
inexhaustible. We all refuse to look at whats happening, not just the
ordinary people but the so-called politically enlightened ones as well.
Dylan holds up a mirror of mankind; he lets us see our failing, the very
human tendency to think but not act, and prompts us to question what is
behind this apathy of ours. We dont have to stay silent, we dont have to
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folksingers of the Village were embracing Blowin in the Wind as the
anthem of the times, he threw himself into writing with the fervency of a
rebel. The fact that Peter, Paul and Marys version of his anthem reached
the top of the charts could only have fuelled the impulse to write more
songs. One of the most fertile periods in the career of any major artist
had begun.
Dylan came to regret his method of selecting song subjects at this
time. He later said: I used to write songs, like Id say, Yeah, whats bad,
pick out something bad, like segregation, OK here we go, and Id pick
one of the thousand million little points I can pick and explode it, some
of them which I didnt know about. I wrote a song about Emmett Till,
which in all honesty was a bullshit song. . . I realise now that my reasons
and motives behind it were phoney. I didnt have to write it.9
Nevertheless, a number of the topical songs Dylan wrote between 1962
and 1964 are enduring classics, standing outside of their time and
independent of the issues that gave rise to them. Their greatness derives
not from Dylans astute political awareness or his eye for a good injustice
story (though admittedly he was reading the right newspapers and
hanging out with socially-conscious individuals) but, rather, from his
ability to transform the raw material of social protest into art. He is able
to make us care about characters like Hattie Carroll or James Meredith,
or even Medgar Evers killer, in the songs about specific incidents.
Elsewhere, as in Blowin in the Wind, he evokes the prevailing winds
of the times in allegorical terms, using resonant, Biblical language. Next
to his best songs, the works of his contemporary protest songwriters (one
thinks of Phil Ochs and Tom Paxton) sound like one-dimensional
polemics.
The new kind of folk song emerging in the early years of the decade
was the contemporary protest song. Guthrie had belonged to the
Depression era, and his songs were about issues that affected the people
of his day. The civil rights movement, however, needed its own
contemporary ballads. With segregation in the South and civil rights
injustice across the continent, contemporary relevance was paramount.
Traditionally, a folk song was only authentically a folk song when time
had proved its worth; when it had been passed down from generation to
generation, continuing to change and be adapted long after its original
creator was forgotten. Woody Guthrie was an exception to this rule: his
songs had been accepted into the repertoire of folksingers across
America while he was still alive. Peter Seeger had earned himself a similar
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have been embarrassed by the songs descent into patriotic hyperbole in
the final line: We could make this great land of ours a greater place to
live. The same kind of straining to please can be heard in Youve Been
Hiding Too Long behind the American Flag, another original which
Dylan performed live in 1963: Come you phoney super patriotic people
and say / That hating and fearing is the only way, Dylan sings; and later:
dont talk to me bout your patriotism / When you throw the Southern
black boy in prison.
Dylans involvement in folk music culture extended to civil rights
rallies; he became actively involved in the struggle for freedom against
oppression, culminating in his participation in the historic March on
Washington, where he sang Only a Pawn in Their Game in front of the
Lincoln Memorial for a mass television audience. Whilst Blowin in the
Wind had a much broader scope, there were songs on The Freewheelin
Bob Dylan and its follow-up The Times They Are A-Changin that dealt with
the burning issues of civil rights; they pointed the finger directly at the
oppressors in the system, not at the poor, uneducated whites who carried
out the crimes.
James Meredith was the first black student to enrol at the University
of Mississippi in Oxford. The ensuing clash between whites and blacks
brought the police out in force, and inspired one of Dylans most
memorable songs of a particular incident, Oxford Town. Dylan
sketches the incident with sharp conciseness: Oxford town around the
bend / He come in to the door, he couldnt get in / All because of the
colour of his skin / What do you think about that, my frien?. The song
goes on to point out that blacks were facing more than just denial of
access to education; hostility led to violence and murder (Two men died
neath the Mississippi moon / Somebody better investigate soon).
Dylans Oxford Town is a place where violence erupts and tear gas
bombs are thrown. What makes the song even more effective is its bright
tune, and indeed the counterpointing of words and tune, the setting up of
a dynamic contrast between serious lyrics and bright, jangly pop tunes,
would be one of Dylans later contributions to popular music culture, as
seen in the classic Positively Fourth Street.
His second protest album, The Times They Are A-Changin, has two of
his most memorable civil rights songs, The Lonesome Death of Hattie
Carroll and Only a Pawn in Their Game. We glimpse Dylan singing
the latter to an audience made up of freedom workers in Greenwood,
Mississippi in the classic D.A. Pennebaker documentary Dont Look Back.
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who he knows, Hattie is characterised by her servants job; it is notable
that the one action by Zanzinger that dominates our thoughts, the
murder of Hattie, is not directly attributed to him but to the cane. The
description of the attack seems impersonal, as if Dylan wants to distance
the act from Zanzinger, to make the cane itself the agent (lay slain by a
cane / Thatcame down through the room), but it is likely that Dylan
is suggesting that the act, for Zanzinger, was impersonal. He was
detached, unable to feel any moral guilt or responsibility for someone like
a serving maid; he doesnt want to get his diamond-ringed fingers dirty,
so it is appropriate that the responsibility is transferred to the murder
weapon. Behind his presentable appearance, there is a snarling tongue
and (as the newspaper account attests) a foul mouth. The court room
scene reveals Dylans great control of dramatic tension as he manipulates
the listener by instilling a strong desire for justice to be done, inflating the
judge as an administrator of justice, suspending the moment of the actual
sentence and building up the nobility of the proceedings and the judge so
that we have no doubt that the punishment will fit the crime. The bathos
in the deflationary six-month sentence, is therefore powerful because
wholly unexpected.
One other common theme that inspired topical songs at the time,
and which Dylan duly incorporated into his compositions, was anticommunist propaganda, particularly in Talkin John Birch Paranoid
Blues and Talkin World War III Blues. The Cold War atmosphere
bred paranoia, and in such a controlled space it was easy for the
government to manipulate the publics fears. In the early 60s, American
artists from various fields were still shaken by the communist witchhunts instigated by Senator Joseph McCarthy. The folk singer Pete Seeger
had found himself before the House of Un-American activities and had
been banned from recording. Right-wing America still perceived the Red
Threat. Dylan showed his colours when he withdrew from the Ed
Sullivan show over Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues when CBS-TV
refused to allow him to sing the song, and even Freewheelin was delayed
because the song was deemed too controversial by the record company,
if some accounts are to be believed.
Aside from the contamination of American values posed by the
threat of communism, generations growing up in the 50s and 60s had
also to watch the skies, whilst their parents dug fall-out shelters in the
garden. The Cold War brought the most powerful mind-control tool of
all, the one thing that would ensure loyalty to country and president: the
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Finger-Pointing Songs
the fact that they each spoke a different language, of the older generation
in Dylans time. Dylans generation was a Cold War generation, warned
every day about the horrors of nuclear holocaust, exposed to the
oppression of black Americans and cynical about the system and the
government and traditional values, yet still it was patronised to by its
elders and by the television and popular press. It was a generation that
lost its innocence at a very young age. Parents must have seemed
impossibly complacent, ignorant of the abuses of civil rights, perhaps
even oblivious to the threat of nuclear war, not treating their children
with the respect due to thoughtful, concerned young people but
regarding them as young darlings. The difference between the tone of the
opening address, and the nightmarish tone of the verses, therefore, is an
index of the great gulf between the generations.
In the holocaust nightmares that make up the verses, Dylans
Biblical-sounding language speaks about contemporary society; he sees a
clear analogue between the ancient world and the modern. Like a
prophet, Dylan is able to see what is eternal and true, behind the surface
fluctuations of historical events, and here he draws the parallels between
modern America and the world of the Old Testament. The awareness of
the symbolic power of numbers (six crooked highways, seven sad
forests, a dozen dead oceans and so on) is a particularly common
Biblical device, although one doubts that Dylan is employing any specific
system of numerology, but rather simply selecting numbers for their
alliterative quality and the vague associations some of them have with The
Bible or myth. It seems that the sons journeying has been extensive,
taking him to many and various places, threatening landscapes of
crooked highways and sad forests, dead oceans and misty
mountains; not a familiar, hospitable world. Ive been ten thousand
miles in the mouth of a graveyard, the son states, suggesting that the
world is a vast open cemetery or that the earth has given up all its dead.
Consciously or not, Dylan even offers a premonition not just of a Biblical
holocaust, or an apocalyptic aftermath of nuclear war, but a world
ravaged by pollution, with pellets of poisonflooding their waters,
here suggesting the sort of environmental disaster that would haunt later
generations in place of the bomb. The young mans travels in the world
outside, the world beyond home comforts, have returned him to the
same basic world picture. This is the world the young are born into, and
inherit as their own.
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medium that will transmit his message to the widest possible audience.
The speaker (the son but also now Dylan himself) does not intend to see
truth only to die in obscurity like the poet of the third verse; he will
reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it, thus taking on the
responsibility of legislator of the world, and deciding to bring his visions
to the masses. He is therefore closer to the role of prophet than the
Romantic concept of the poet in the ivory tower, sitting apart from the
world.
Dylan has remarked that every line in A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall
was meant to be the beginning of another song, and it is in this that the
songs suggestive power lies. Indeed, these strange images seem to be
telescoped from some wider context. The force of the song comes from
the insistent build up of these disconnected yet thematically connected
images, and from the flash of each image we get in our mind, in a couple
of breathless seconds, before it is replaced by the next one. The
elusiveness of some of the symbols also helps things; the images strike
us, they prompt investigation, but we cannot always pin down what
Dylan is saying, or what he is leading us to think. Does, for example, the
young woman whose body is burning refer to the martyrdom of Joan of
Arc, and thus to other female martyrs? Does the image of the tenthousand talkers with broken tongues represent a world where freedom
of speech is denied? We cannot really fix what Dylan means, and it is
really with this song that he began to become more abstract, more
ambiguous yet suggestive, in his use of language. Joan Baez later wrote of
him, You who are so good with words / And at keeping things
vague.12 A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall is a powerful song precisely
because its various meanings cannot be pinned down.
If the Cuban Missile Crisis had brought home the idea of modern
atomic warfare as total destruction, the more traditional warfare being
fought in Vietnam was nonetheless a haunting spectre in itself. The draft
bill was an indication of the governments control over the youth, a
reminder that despite Dylans declaration, the times werent changing fast
enough. If going head to head with Russia was a no-win situation, there
was always the chance of mounting a direct fight against communism in
South East Asia. At a time when Americas youth was rising up to
question the Establishment, when the politics of peace was taking hold
amongst the young, the government was sending its children to war. On
cue, Dylan wrote his own anthem against the war makers, though he
avoided making any reference to a particular conflict. Masters of War is
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contemporary ills, interpreted as signs of the last days. Dylan uses Biblical
imagery with the force of a fire-and-brimstone preacher, presenting an
apocalyptic account of a sinful world, though of course his gospel is
change, with the world passing out of the control of the corrupt older
generation and into the hands of the young and socially-concerned. The
song is full of signs and portents of apocalyptic change, much like A
Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall, with rising flood waters, Fortunes wheel
and war. Indeed, the image of a cataclysmic flood has long obsessed
Dylan, and even on the recent Love and Theft he can be found using a
deluge as a metaphor. The idea that the victims of the flood will be
drenched to the bone is particularly apt, because it registers not just the
shock of being a victim of change; it also conjures up the actual fate of
flood victims, when little is left behind after the fishes have done their
work. Dylan warns us, If your time to you / Is worth saving / Then you
better start swimmin / Or youll sink like a stone. In other words, he
means us to accept the coming change, for stasis means death, a literal
petrification. Dylan invokes images of Biblical judgment because he sees,
in contemporary times, a movement (mainly among the young, the
liberally conscious) who are already in the process of overturning the old
order and creating a radically new world. Like all revolutions, there will
be casualties. In The Bible, the Flood occurred because of the iniquity of
mankind. In the present times, enough is amiss to call down vengeance.
The appropriate symbol of non-change, and simultaneously of the
absence of human feeling, is the stone, which can do nothing but sink in
the movement of waters, in the flux of change.
The songs second verse is directed at writers and critics, who
prophesize with your pen (how equitable of Dylan to lump writers and
critics together). These, traditionally, are the chroniclers of change, but
they may also in a sense prophesise the changes to come, if they keep
abreast of things; in other words, the astute critic and chronicler of
change can, like a prophet, see it coming. Paradoxically, they are warned
not to speak too soon, meaning they should not pronounce things
finished; they are cautioned to observe the changes in action before
commenting. Given the fact that critics and journals like Sing Out! and The
Village Voice were at the forefront of the new movement, Dylan must
have felt himself under constant scrutiny even from the folk press itself,
and perhaps has personal reasons for asking for caution. With hindsight,
the lines, stressing the importance of documenting and recording these
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obvious statement, but it is too often forgotten that all things run into
the past, everything is consigned to history, and even social and political
systems will be superseded. Thus, those who put their faith in the present
order, in the seeming permanence of the things they hold dear, stand to
perish.
The lyric of The Times They Are A-Changin is revealing. This is
the vision of justice when wrong will be made right, but the time is now:
Dylans kingdom of the just is already beginning. Although writing about
the newfound awareness of the youth movement, and the campaign to
change American society, he is using what is primarily Biblical language
to envision the change: those who hitherto had been first are now the
last, the slow are now fast. The battle - Biblical in proportions - is already
raging: the young are about to inherit the earth, to overturn the old social
order and replace the staid values of their parents. No more sons will be
sacrificed on the altar of war or of conservative America - the young are
the righteous ones who will judge their elders. Paradoxically however, it is
the Jewish idea of vengeance that informs this vision: punishment is
harsh for those who stand in the way. So, although he is railing against
the symbols of society and religion that belong to the traditions of his
own family, the Jewish God somehow informs his own vision of
youthful vengeance. And, though this God himself is absent, the
machinery of apocalypse - not Armageddon - is set in motion. Even the
apocalypse is imagined in Old Testament terms at times: it is another
flood to match Noahs, a flood already beginning (the waters around us
have already grown). Nor is it not a battle between good and evil but the
usurping of the old values by the new. Lawyers, doctors, senators,
congressmen are the primary targets; and especially mothers and fathers,
who can only stand in the way of their childrens march towards
emancipation; they are berated for criticising what is beyond their
understanding - their childrens values, and the nature of the revolution
itself. It is worth viewing this call for emancipation within a Jewish
context: in a certain sense, the old order are the pharaohs of this world,
the young the Hebrews who await emancipation and are witnessing their
deliverance from bondage.
As a modern secular sermon, incorporating apocalyptic Biblical
language, The Times They Are A-Changin perfectly expressed the
contemporary feeling of radical optimism that attended the protest
movement. Listening to it today, it has taken on an unexpected sense of
sadness, since the moment of opportunity and change has passed along
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young really be expected to obey the laws and respect the Establishment,
he prompts?
The American history books, clogged full of heroes, tell the story of a
land that was tamed and a barbarian people subdued. In the movies
Dylans generation grew up with, the films of John Ford and Howard
Hawks, you were meant to root for the cavalry. But here Dylan conveys
with skilful economy the genocide of the Native Americans, calling to
mind countless depictions of Army bravado in American cinema, but
changing the tenor (the cavalries charged / The Indians fell / The
cavalries charged / The Indians died). Then, sardonically, he offers: Oh
the country was young / With God on its side. The country had, of
course, already been the home of Native American tribes for thousands
of years. It is a bitterly ironic statement, and directs us to the fact that, for
many years, the history of the Native Americans was relegated to the
darkness of a kind of barbarian pre-history.
The heroes from the Spanish American War and the American Civil
War are memorised by the narrator as having guns in their hands / And
God on their side, an obvious image of duplicity, were it not for the fact
that in traditional education this has never appeared a contradiction. The
pilgrim fathers worked hand in hand with the Spanish conquistadors to
subdue the primitive tribes of South America, religion itself being a tool
in conquering the new world. But the context here is war - the timeless
belief is that there is such a thing as a just war, exemplified in the
twentieth century as the war against Nazi Germany. Since God favours
the victors, he must have favoured the conquerors of the Native
Americans too. The idea of learning by rote the names of the heroes also
expresses the uncritical methods of learning about the past, the insistence
on learning and accepting without question the received wisdom of our
elders.
The Great War, the so-called war to end all wars, is also presented
as a moral war; though few history books do so now, Dylan is aware of
the contemporary propaganda that presented it so. With feigned naivety,
he admits that he never got the reason for fighting - neither did most
of the soldiers who were sent to their deaths by their generals in the mass
slaughter of the trenches. Motives for fighting are not really necessary
and often clouded, enemies are chosen out of convenience. The masses
who lay dying in no mans land certainly believed they were fighting a just
war, a war to protect their country. Coming to the Second World War,
the controversial comment about the Germans, who murdered six
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kind of imagery, drawn from The Bibles prophetic books, is employed
every day when we seek to convey our feelings about ecological disaster
or nuclear holocaust. In When the Ship Comes In there is no mention
of God, just the actions of a tempest that seems to be divine in origin;
furthermore, God is not watching the unjust of the world, the whole
world is watching them. The righteous ones, no doubt the young, are
united as omnipresent witnesses.
Aside from protest songs, Dylan also wrote some of the most striking
and beautiful ballads in contemporary folk. Girl From the North
Country, from The Freewheelin Bob Dylan, is Dylans free adaptation of
the folk ballad Scarborough Fair. It is an exquisite love song, evidence
of Dylans precocious genius. The language of the song does not express
the times, it isnt hip like the rock and roll lexicon, and therefore the song
stands outside of its context more than just about anything else written
contemporaneously; The Beatles, even at their most traditional, still reek
of the 60s hippy culture of which they were a part (even Norwegian
Wood fails to achieve the timeless relevance of a true folk song,
something Dylan manages easily). While the landscape of the North
Country the song evokes is archetypal, it is obvious that the cold
northern winters of Hibbing, Dylans childhood home, provided a
convenient model. Near the Canadian border, the Hibbing of Dylans
youth is a place where the winds hit heavy and the rivers freeze.
Biographers have suggested that Dylans North Country girl was a figure
from his youth, perhaps his girlfriends Echo Helstrom or Bonnie
Beecher. The impressive thing about this song is how perfectly Dylan has
mastered the traditional ballad idiom, with its romantic imagery, its sense
of yearning and sadness, its cycles of seasonal shift traditionally linked to
decay and rebirth. The North Country, be it Hibbing or otherwise, is not
simply a place where it snows, but a romanticized, mythical location
where summer ends. One notable thing about the song is that the
person to whom it is addressed is not the northern muse herself but a
third person, a mediator between the bard and his sweetheart; as listeners
this is the role we adopt (Dylan would employ the same technique, with
perhaps greater poignancy, in If You See Her, Say Hello). Thus, the
remembered muse is made all the more remote and idealised, herself
seeming to be part of the North Country with her hair like a river that
rolls and flows; memory holds her as one who must be kept from
changing like the landscape; like the landscape she must be a permanent
thing, as sure as perpetual snows and summers ending. The bard would
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and presumably meant to replace the lover. The abandoned lover
counters every such suggestion with an insistence that the only gift worth
receiving is the lover herself (throughout he has been rejecting the tokens
that belong to traditional romantic balladry). From the sixth verse
onwards, the song becomes a monologue as the speaker relates how he
has received a letter effectively breaking off the relationship. The final
verse, and its request for Spanish boots of Spanish leather, is therefore
a bitterly ironic condescension to what his lover has been suggesting all
along.
The last major early love song to be considered is Dont Think
Twice, Its All Right, which goes further than Boots of Spanish
Leather in that it is very much an anti-love song, a song asserting
independence and thus a standout amongst the traditional teenage fare
that characterised the pop charts of the day. Its a parting song again, a
song that margins on expressing selfish sentiments, a sort of break-up
note that looks at love from the opposite side to Boots of Spanish
Leather, the side of the itinerant lover. The song displays Dylans
complete confidence in writing in an intimate, conversational tone, and is
peppered with contemporary idioms. The subject was again Suze and
what Dylan saw as her rejection of him; in his biography of Dylan No
Direction Home, Robert Shelton recounted how he inspired the line I
once loved a woman, a child Im told when trying to comfort Dylan
over the troubled relationship.14 The sexual politics that would emerge
more fully in Another Side of Bob Dylan are present here, particularly when
the lover offers one of his many justifications for leaving, the powerful I
give her my heart but she wanted my soul. To read the song as a
vindication of misogyny would be to miss the point and place too much
emphasis on the gender of the speaker. Emergent here is a rejection of
love as ownership, and an advocacy of the no-strings attached free love
that would shortly dictate the way relationships played out among the
young. Even so, there is no quite getting rid of the sense of cruelty and
bitterness present in the speakers dismissive, You just kinda wasted my
precious time, a masterly put-down characteristic of Dylan, written a full
twenty-five years before R.E.M. were to attempt something similar with
The One I Love.
The Freewheelin Bob Dylan and The Times They Are A-Changin were
albums that satisfied the public need for contemporary protest ballads,
and earned Dylan the title of spokesman for the protest movement.
Fellow folk artists like Joan Baez publicly admitted that Dylan, more than
45
46
CHAPTER THREE
IF MY THOUGHT-DREAMS COULD
BE SEEN
ANOTHER SIDE OF BOB DYLAN AND
BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME
62
CHAPTER FOUR
OTHER FORMS OF PSYCHIC
EXPLOSION
HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED AND BLONDE
ON BLONDE
CHAPTER FIVE
DRIFTERS ESCAPE
THE BASEMENT TAPES TO PLANET
WAVES
rom the latter part of 1966 through 1967, Dylan disappeared from
public view. His absence only added to his legendary status, and
gave rise to all kinds of wild speculation he was dead, some
insisted, or had been horribly disfigured in the motorcycle accident; he
was a drug addict, brain-damaged by chemicals. The reality was that he
had retreated to the artists colony of Woodstock, West Saugerties, with
Sara and kids in tow, to lead an ordinary, rural existence.
The motorcycle accident, real or imagined, afforded Dylan the
opportunity to extract himself from touring commitments and the
pressures of being under the public gaze twenty-four hours a day. The
accident, and the contemporaneous withdrawal from drug dependency,
almost certainly saved Dylans life.
In his wake, Dylan had left a pop scene intoxicated on its own search
for self-expression. Without his cynical edge and sharp intelligence to
guide them, pop groups experimented with new sounds, took gargantuan
amounts of drugs, and encouraged the youth to drop out, to oppose
Americas foreign policy in Vietnam. The impossibly nave peace and
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picture of the Big Pink sessions. For a start, there are major original
songs that Robertson left off. Even more disappointing, in a sense, is the
fact that Robertson chose to ignore the vast body of traditional material
and cover versions that Dylan and The Band recorded. Collectors have
been privileged to listen to their exploration of traditional American folk
music in full. These were musicians connecting with old, neglected
musical forms, realising that the future of American music lay in the past.
Dylan, particularly, felt freedom from the weight of his old
responsibilities as spokesman and leader as he rediscovered and
discovered his heritage.
It was a return to roots-based music and a withdrawal from the
contemporary fixation with everything new and supposedly
groundbreaking, a reminder, if you will, that the blues and rock and roll
were just one branch of the folk music tradition.
There are some truly astonishing, spectral performances among the
tapes, striking traditional songs like Young But Daily Growing and
Bonnie Ship the Diamond. These performances show Dylan and The
Band going back to the old, weird America, as Greil Marcus put it in his
study of the sessions, Invisible Republic. There are also two songs not
included on the belated album release that number amongst Dylans most
successful compositions, at least commercially: Quinn the Eskimo
(based on an Anthony Quinn picture and popularised by Manfred Mann)
and I Shall Be Released, the latter displaying an economy of language
that marks some of Dylans most universal, all-encompassing works.
There were other nuggets, too, particularly two major compositions that
were left unfinished, the haunting, melancholy Im Not There (1956)
and Sign on the Cross. The latter, a meditation on the crucifixion, filled
with anxiety about the titulus Pilate had placed on the cross, prefigures
the Christian conversion albums. The titulus, of course, declared Christ
the King of the Jews. The song also ushered in a new era of Dylan songs
that displayed a searching interest in Biblical themes (as opposed to songs
using Biblical imagery towards other ends, though admittedly the early
Long Ago, Far Away did as much), present on the spiritual I Shall Be
Released and of course widely in evidence on John Wesley Harding.
Among the songs that did make the cut for the official album
(released, incidentally, almost ten years after the recordings were made)
are such major compositions as This Wheels on Fire and Tears of
Rage. These display the more serious side of Dylan and The Bands
songwriting in comparison to the light-hearted nature of much of the
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John Wesley Harding, the eponymous hero of the title track, is an
obvious identification figure for Dylan. The song is not ironic, nor is it
critical of the hero, as some critics have claimed, projecting their own
liberal sensibilities onto Dylans unashamed celebration of the outlaw
(the same kind of outlaw who was eulogised in Joey, uncomfortably so,
since Joey Gallo was a gangster whose crimes were far less remote in
time).27 Likewise in the song Billy from Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,
Dylan attempts no such deconstruction of the western hero. He is an
anti-Establishment figure, and of course, to live outside the law, you
must be honest.
But there is another dimension to John Wesley Harding itself:
another type of outlaw is lurking behind the portrait of the western icon,
and that is the religious saint. The album so clearly fuses western and
Biblical myth that it is easy to forget that the fusion often takes place
within the same song. In the minds of the early pioneers, there were clear
parallels between their hard, ascetic life and that of the Old Testament
Israelites or the early Christians. America was Gods country indeed, the
promised land, but it was a promise set in the middle of a harsh,
unknown wilderness. In the mythology of the west, the outlaw often
paralleled the Christian saint, or even Christ himself, making enemies of
the law, making his own mythology, moving as an exile through the
countryside while stories of his deeds spread around, going on before
him.
John Wesley Harding is a romanticised Robin Hood who befriends
the poor, perhaps who even provides for them like Guthries Pretty Boy
Floyd. He is a man who opened a many a door, characterised by his
generosity to others. He sounds like a saint, and perhaps even Christ is
recalled, the Christ on trial before the priesthood (no charge held against
him / Could they prove.) But he also has a gun in evry hand, which
does not sit comfortably with the idea of the outlaw as hero, at least not
to modern liberal sensibilities. The idea of having a gun in every hand is a
curious one, much less travelling in this fashion. But an outlaw, of the
type Dylan is writing about, is, plainly, one that would have had to live by
his wits, and who would also have had to use his prowess with firearms
to extract himself from danger: danger from the law, danger from hungry
kids trying to make a name for themselves. Thus, just as it is necessary to
have eyes in the back of ones head, it is also necessary to have a gun in
every hand. Its a myth, but an attractive one, and importantly, it is a
national myth. In the Woodstock countryside, Dylan might have looked
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Drifters Escape
Fame of such outlaws, of course, spreads (All across the telegraph /
His name it did resound), and so does the reward money, but, most
important, and unusual for the kind of outlaw we are being asked to
imagine, there is nothing to pin him on. This may be taken as an
admission of Hardings slipperiness, as some have claimed, or, more
likely, that he is innocent of wrong doing. Like the Ford hero, if he finds
himself in trouble, he shoots when he has to, but only when provoked. A
fast gun is a wanted man, and he is invariably faced with fresh challengers
everywhere he goes. We never hear of Harding robbing a bank. He is the
kind of outlaw who becomes wanted simply because he is a famous
gunfighter. And, of course, he manages to keep one step ahead of the law
(there was no man around / Who could track or chain him down.) Its
a very attractive image for Dylan, one surmises - the unfettered outlaw; in
other words, free, or only free insomuch as he has to live in permanent
exile, something Dylan would readily identify with. If you live the
outlaws life, you do not allow yourself to be chained down. The final
lines: He was never known / To make a foolish move may be seen to
add further fuel to the idea that Harding is a con man, but they may be
taken in another way: as an outlaw, you have to be extremely clever, you
have to keep one step ahead of all pursuers and think ahead of all the
rest. These are the rules of the western landscape. In western myth,
righteous men invariably do have guns in their hands and God on their
side. Despite penning a song to the contrary, Dylan has obviously found
this idea deeply attractive, just as he once criticized boxing in Who
Killed Davey Moore and went on to write Hurricane Carters
hagiography. John Wesley Harding is not a deconstruction of this
mythology, it is a celebration of it, and stays true to the images of
countless western films.
Elsewhere, there are no flaws, though the standout tracks are I
Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine, I Pity the Poor Immigrant and All
Along the Watchtower. The latter is undoubtedly the most celebrated
song on John Wesley Harding, and appears as a stark acoustic ballad,
though its electric arrangement, thanks to the popularity of the Jimi
Hendrix version, is now much more familiar to Dylan concert goers.
Drawing imagery from The Book of Isaiah, this is an open-ended, enigmatic
tale of the wilderness, steeped in Biblical imagery. The symbolist
landscape may stand for contemporary America, or it may be any place at
any time, but whatever the truth is, it is clear that Dylan is looking out
upon a wilderness from which he must escape. Amongst so much
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The final two songs on John Wesley Harding had indeed pointed the
way to the future; Nashville Skyline, released the following year, was, in its
very straightness, a major shock. First, Dylans voice had changed, having
lost its rough edges, but also its clear, precise enunciation; he was singing,
now, like Elvis Presley or any number of country crooners. Second, the
poet laureate of the 60s was now penning lines like oh me, oh my /
love that country pie. The country music station plays soft / But
theres nothing, really nothing to turn off Dylan had written in Visions
of Johanna. His acceptance of country music here became a full on
affair, and, to the dismay of some long-time admirers, he embraced its
worst clichs along with its most sublime strengths.
The change in style stemmed, evidently, from continued contentment
in his domestic life. Woodstock still offered refuge, though a move back
to New York was just around the corner. Photographs taken by Elliot
Landy (for some time believed, wrongly, to be a pseudonym of Dylan,
since the two surnames are anagrammatic) from the period show Dylan
playful and happy around his Woodstock home. Other photographs,
intimate and extremely surprising for those who had grown up with the
wild-haired image of Dylan the rock star, showed him at home with his
kids. The art mirrored the photographs. In the mid 60s shots, there was
an intensity and mystery in Dylans lean face and shock-wave hair; now,
he was chubby, calm, at peace with himself, the proud father and
dignified happy man; the enigmatic sunglasses were temporarily removed.
There is not much to discuss about Nashville Skyline, except to say
that it did influence a number of musicians at the time to go country,
following the lead of The Byrds on Sweetheart of the Rodeo (though this,
itself, took the nod from John Wesley Harding). For some, it seemed that
Dylan was at last singing properly (amazing to think that some ears are so
lazy that they will accept anything as easy as a warm croon but reject the
virtuoso vocal gymnastics of Dylans 60s voice; for his part, Dylan
jokingly remarked that the change had come about as a result of his
giving up smoking). There is little of particular note on the album; he
even took the unprecedented step (for him) of revisiting a song, this time
Girl of the North Country, sung in a shaky duet with country great
Johnny Cash. Best of the new songs were I Threw It All Away (Love
is all there is, Dylan sings with the conviction of a man at peace) and the
fine Tonight Ill Be Staying Here with You.
Self Portrait, which followed swiftly on from Nashville Skyline, should
not have come as such a slap in the face. It was, after all, a
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Drifters Escape
kids who call me Pa, / That must be what its all about - not a pose,
then, but an idealistic fantasy. Unfortunately the calm wouldnt last.
Went to See the Gypsy is an account of a meeting with Elvis
Presley, Dylans idol going back to his childhood years (He did it in Las
Vegas / And he can do it here). The one slice of overt autobiography,
Day of the Locusts, details Dylans acceptance of an honorary
doctorate in music from Princeton University. He was accompanied for
the occasion by David Crosby, and it is his head which is exploding
from a drug trip. The halls of academia are depicted much like the
museums in Visions of Johanna in other words, this is a place of
decay (Darkness was everywhere, it smelled like a tomb), and the
locusts themselves appear as symbols of the world outside, the natural
world, calling the narrator back to the land of the living. Father of
Night, the hymn of praise that closes the album, was Dylans most
straightforwardly religious up to this point, and is perhaps the most
touching track on the album.
The years between New Morning and the soundtrack to Pat Garrett and
Billy The Kid were Dylans longest recorded silence thus far. There was a
second Greatest Hits selection to follow the 1967 release, this time with a
couple of minor new songs (the best of them, When I Paint My
Masterpiece), and a few unheard gems. When the soundtrack to the Sam
Peckinpah film appeared, it could not satisfy the hunger for some
genuine new material (essentially, there are only two songs, Billy in its
various forms and Knockin on Heavens Door, an anthem that went
on to become Dylans most celebrated popular song of the 70s). Dylan,
arguably, had first dipped his toes into thespian waters on Dont Look
Back and Eat the Document, playing the American rock star abroad. The
part of Alias was written for him, a sort of non-character who serves as a
sidekick to Kris Kristoffersons Billy. It was particularly appropriate that
Dylan was playing such a mysterious character; when asked what the alias
is for, the character replies: anything you want. During the days of
filming, when Peckinpah and crew dined on roast goat in Durango,
Dylan had the inspiration for the song Romance in Durango, which
would later emerge on Desire in late 1975. He also wrote some
instrumental pieces for the film, and was angered when the sequence of
tracks was subsequently changed in the editing room. Perhaps this was
what made him take such absolute control over his critically-mauled art
movie/concert film, Renaldo & Clara.
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Drifters Escape
never been very convincing when writing about his early life; the lovely
Bob Dylans Blues from The Freewheelin Bob Dylan is no less calculated
than these songs. The fact that he for so long desired to escape, and
constantly sought more than smalltown life could offer, may explain why
he finds it difficult to look back with nostalgia on those years (something
his near contemporary, Van Morrison, has never had any difficulty in
doing). On a Night Like This is a cousin to If Not for You and says
little more than the earlier song already said; at least on Going Going
Gone, Dirge and Wedding Song there is a discontent emerging, a
desperation even, in the latter to hold things together when they are ever
so subtly falling apart. The best of the songs is Forever Young, a cradle
song for one of his children, not characteristic Dylan but wholly
successful at what it sets out to do, which is to bless the child. It forms
one small part of a little sub genre of Dylans work, along with Lord
Protect My Child from the Infidels sessions.
The discontent showing through on Planet Waves foreshadows Blood
on the Tracks, and it is easy to neglect the former because Dylans mature
masterwork followed it so closely. Nevertheless, it is an enjoyable album,
the first to have sleeve notes for a good long while. The language was still
awkward at times (a-hotter than a crotch springs to mind) but there
was a hint, at least, of what was to come.
89
90
CHAPTER SIX
WHAT THE BROKEN GLASS
REFLECTS
BLOOD ON THE TRACKS TO STREET
LEGAL
107
108
CHAPTER SEVEN
HANGING ON TO A SOLID ROCK
SLOW TRAIN COMING TO SHOT OF
LOVE
130
CHAPTER EIGHT
SURVIVING IN THE RUTHLESS
WORLD
INFIDELS AND EMPIRE BURLESQUE
142
CHAPTER NINE
DIGNITY
KNOCKED OUT LOADED TO UNDER
THE RED SKY
Dignity
original genius. Under Your Spell, one of their collective efforts,
contains an inkling of characteristic Dylan writing, but for the most part
it is restricted by the formula writing of his co-writer.
The really infuriating thing about Knocked out Loaded, in a sense, is that
in the middle of such second rate material Dylan delivers one long,
completely focused, perfectly enunciated, deftly-written narrative,
Brownsville Girl, which throws the rest into stark contrast. It improves
the album immeasurably, but that is not the point; the point is that we are
reminded of just what Dylan is capable of, and of how much is being
lost. It stands out like classical architecture in a ghetto; it astounds us that
Dylan could be so switched on. What was his motive, one wonders, in
placing an obviously major song in this context? Does he think we can
ignore the fact that a long, word perfect song like this one sits in such
company? It deserves to be elsewhere.
Once more it is a song written with a collaborator, but this time its
the playwright Sam Shepherd, whose association with Dylan dated back
to the time of the Rolling Thunder Revue, when he produced a logbook
of the tour. Its a song about an actor, Gregory Peck, playing a
gunfighter, and of the singer standing in line to watch the movie. The
source is the film The Gunfighter, and it is obvious that the young Dylan
was inspired by this kind of western and the impression never really left
him. It is a marvellous song, but again its origin goes back a few years, to
an earlier version called New Danville Girl. If Dylan wasnt still writing
with such inspiration, he was at least taken enough with the writing to
coax a committed performance out of himself. So impressive was
Brownsville Girl that, in a live broadcast from the Kennedy Centre,
Gregory Peck eventually thanked Dylan for the tribute, telling him how
much it meant to him.
Down in the Groove, released the following year, had no such saving
grace. Little more than a bad covers album, and still drawing on material
dating back to the Infidels sessions, it was a wholly successful attempt perhaps even conscious attempt - to sabotage his reputation and cement
the notion that he was a spent force. The opener, Lets Stick Together,
a pro-marriage song which had sounded somehow lascivious when
crooned by Bryan Ferry, sounds plain embarrassing, like a desperate
single man fantasising about married existence. The rest wallows in the
mud: The Ugliest Girl in the World is an astoundingly bad song, an
insult to any intelligent listener and perversely crude. Coming across such
a track, one feels that Dylan is purposefully trying to demolish his myth.
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Dignity
concert or recent album his best in years; the long-term fans, wary of
such caprice, know better than to listen to them.42 Every few years or so,
you would be forgiven for thinking that Dylan has suddenly woken from
long slumber, and rediscovered his genius in exile.
The catalyst in this latest rehabilitation of Dylans reputation was
Daniel Lanois, producer of, amongst others, U2 and The Neville
Brothers. Dylan was apparently impressed with The Neville Brothers
recording of With God on Our Side on the Lanois-produced Yellow
Moon, and, recognising a producer who seemed unusually sensitive to the
songs spirit, he began recording under Lanoiss direction. Lanois has said
that he had to keep fighting Dylan to get good results. And, while he was
successful in coaxing a whole album of strong material out of Dylan, we
can speculate that it was some impulse of the latters to withhold the two
best songs from the final cut. Lanois, in fact, is on record as saying that
he had wanted Series of Dreams on the album but that Dylan had had
the final say. One gets the feeling that Dylan wanted to sabotage the
comeback, for, despite the acclaim in the press, what Oh Mercy lacked was
a strong single. Dignity, released at the proper time, in the midst of this
brief Dylan renaissance, might have given him one. When it finally was
released some years later, its rolling river beat chastised by producer of
the moment Brendan OBrien, the moment had passed.
Oh Mercy is nevertheless a strong album, his best since Infidels.
Political World is a striking minimalist opening, the groove building up,
repetitive, circular, restricted but bristling with energy. The lyrics also
expose a new weakness in Dylans contemporary writing: Political
World, like much of the album, is a list song; Dylan is listing the features
that make the world so political and therefore inhuman and uncaring;
such writing is automatic and one can be helped for desiring a more
creative way of structuring and developing his ideas. The images,
however, are memorable and have a cumulative effect; apocalyptic in
tone, the song depicts a world that places no value on human life, one
that has imprisoned Wisdom (like the later Dignity, Wisdom is an
allegorical figure, here left to rot in a cell) and does not embrace the
children that are born into it. Politics is the instrument of the devil, Dylan
has said; if this is the case, the devil rules the world, since the world turns
on the whims of politics.43 All the things that we should be living for,
things that make life richer, including love, wisdom, truth, courage, even
children, are forgotten or not needed any more. One wonders what
qualities are needed for survival in such a ruthless place. Dylan is not
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Dignity
why, precisely, Dylan includes such a people. However, the scope of the
song is panoramic, stretching from the wretched to the saints, and
curiously enough Dylan elects to make the first group one of the
messengers of God. The sound of the bells they toll is deep and
wide, like the shape of the valley through which they resound; they are
tolled by an iron hand (the bell ringer, heathen or no, is godlike in tolling
Gods message). The world has been overturned; there is no time or
history left to run, and things must be brought to an end. St. Peter is thus
next in being petitioned to ring the bells that will announce Gods
kingdom to the worlds people. In these lines, Dylan compounds Biblical
imagery, recalling Revelations trumpets blown from the four corners of
the earth (the four winds that blow may indeed be from the breath of the
four angels that unleash plagues upon mankind) and the Golden Calf,
worshipped still in the modern world by a people who pursue hedonistic
pleasures, upon which the sun is already descending and therefore for
which time is running out. Sweet Martha, the sister of Mary and Lazarus,
is requested to ring the bells for the poor and to remind the world that
God is One (presumably this is not intended as a refutation of the Trinity
but as a slight on pluralistic attitudes to religion). The shepherd who
should do this, representative of the Church, is asleep and has let his
flock wander untended. Bert Cartwright has taken this reference to the
sleeping shepherd as a possible reference to Jesus, and therefore as
evidence of cynicism on Dylans part. It need not, however, be taken as
such. For, as Cartwright knows, whereas Jesus is the archetypal model of
the good shepherd, the priest, as his human representative, is also the
good shepherd who guides the flock and brings the lost to God. These
lines are, then, not a criticism of Jesus but of the modern Church, which
is, so to speak, asleep on the job, with the result that people drift through
life without spiritual guidance.45
Next to be comforted by the bells are the blind and the deaf
(comfort, it is to be presumed, is what the tolling brings, in announcing
the imminent arrival of Gods kingdom on earth). The construction for
all of us who are left gives both a sense of the countless who have
passed away before our time and hints that we are among the last living.
The Biblical prophecy that the saints will judge the world lies behind the
reference to the chosen few and their judgment of the many. They are
singled out just like the impoverished and unfortunate because they were
victims in their own time of persecution, set upon by the worlds powers
while they testified their spiritual belief. St. Catherine is presented as a
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Dignity
a melancholy that belies the good news of what, superficially, his message
seems to be. The bells are rung on behalf of man, and we hope that their
sound reaches heaven. Therefore we have a change of perspective to the
evangelical songs. There, he was counting himself among the saved,
those already with their feet in another world, and who did not feel the
need to complain of their suffering; now, there is more empathy for all
of us who are left, no longer such a subject-object dichotomy. Still, the
people in the song are chiefly the pious, those who are waiting for their
just rewards. His role, then, is to petition on behalf of the righteous
awaiting Gods intervention, the people who, like the Old Testament
Jews, feel the need to remind God of their suffering and to hurry down
the day of his judgement.
Man in the Long Black Coat is an atmospheric tale set in a
landscape as apocalyptic as the Depression-era Midwest, amongst people
who eke out a living like the first settlers. The opening is a writing class in
scene setting: Crickets are chirpin, the water is high / Theres a soft
cotton dress on the line hangin dry, / Window wide open, African trees
/ Bent over backwards from a hurricane breeze. At once, and with
graceful economy, Dylan conjures up an ascetic world of poor folk
battling against the elements, close to the soil yet aware of natures
destructive aspect. It is night-time, and the levy waters are risen; the soft
cotton dress is a window into character, both individual and general. This
is both individual tale and allegory; the preacher and the allegorical
setting are like something out of Charles Laughtons film noir The Night of
the Hunter. A young woman has been enticed away from her parents, her
dress fluttering emptily to express her absence. The preacher has blown
into town with the hurricane breeze, his presence full of menace,
somehow tied to the auspices of doom hidden in nature itself. The
preachers view of human nature is unremittingly bleak: every mans
conscience is vile and depraved; the seed of evil is inside us, turned
against nature. There are powerful images, especially the person beating
on a dead horse, as if he is trying to pound life, desperately, into his only
means of escape. People do not live or die, they merely exist without
remark, floating through life on waters that now are risen because of
impending apocalypse. The vocabulary of emptiness, of windblown
husks, is prevalent; the night is empty of all except the crickets, the dress
hanging lifeless on the washing line, the window wide open (empty after
the girl has eloped); the spirit has gone out of the dead horse, the trees
bent-over backwards, broken by the wind, and the preachers face is a
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Dignity
a ruse to puncture the image of the serious artist, the prophet of the end
times, a complete u turn. Dylan had opened Oh Mercy with the declaration
that we live in a world without love; here his opening gambit was
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a gypsy queen. You were not supposed to
say these things in rock.
We are adrift in the waters of nonsense. Where could it have come
from? The same kind of nonsense, words free of embarrassment, had
been set playfully loose in the basement of Big Pink, and before that,
Dylan had come across child ballads in his apprenticeship as a folk singer,
and had learned some of the numerous childrens songs written and sung
by Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly. Songs like Froggy Went A-Courtin
had been familiar to Dylan for many years. Perhaps only an artist of
Dylans magnitude could sing Frog went a courtin and he did ride, ah
ha, without being self-conscious. In early rock and roll, especially the
rock and roll of Chuck Berry, similar cadences had given expression to
adolescent sexuality, and in some degree Wiggle wiggle sounds sexual,
like a childs attempt to express adolescent lust in code. And yet, amidst
the childishness and apparent nonsense, scatterings of sense emerge:
you can raise the dead and til you vomit fire are hardly playground
thoughts, and neither are they the words of someone with courting on
the brain. On one level the song is about being free of all constraints, of
all embarrassment; of having nothing to fear and no one to reproach you.
Its about doing things that are against normal codes of behaviour, of
refusing to stand up straight and tall (which is perhaps what wiggle wiggle
means; that we should all bend our mind a little, and learn to stoop: to go
forth as a child goes). Thus we can dress all in green, we can drop to the
floor like a ton of led (an image that reminds us of those huge weights
that fall from the sky in silent comedies), we can move around on our
hands and knees like an infant; and, being thus liberated, anything is
possible: face to face with the man in the moon, raising the dead like
Christ, vomiting fire like a dragon. We end with a rattle and a snake
appears, a creature whose sinuous movement we have been reminded of
all along. It is not an arbitrary last image, for as the album ends at the end
of time, with the apocalyptic nursery rhyme Cats in the Well, so it must
begin at the beginning: Eden, and the serpents temptation of Eve. If the
song is about freedom from all constraint, about innocence and
cultivating a childs consciousness, for whom anything seems possible
(you got nothing to lose), it is also about the moment when that
freedom will be lost, when we are thrown out of the garden of pleasure
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Dignity
children, of turning fate, death, evil, and suffering into monsters that can
be seen, fled from, or defeated. Dylan spins a tale of misery as allegory,
and abides by the rules of fairy tale. A song like Under the Red Sky,
taken on its own terms, is therefore easily comprehensible and more than
worthy of our attention.
Mankind is also blown about by fate in Unbelievable, and the same
kind of wish-fulfilment stories are told to the young and nave. We are
cursed, our doom fixed by the stars, and we can do nothing to transcend
our condition. The truth is sometimes unbelievable (the real truth, not
the reality they teach you) and only the right kind of language can express
it. Dylan, previously, drew on surreal imagery to make us see more clearly
(there are no words but these to tell whats true); now, the language of
nursery rhyme, in Dylans estimation, can afford the same result. The
fantasist and staunch critic of modern society, C.S. Lewis, argued as
much in his essay Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best Whats To Be
Said, and Dylan here takes his lead. Deadened by illusions, we think
ourselves invulnerable; it seems inconceivable that fate and judgment
could ever catch up with us. But we arent in control. We are told what to
think; the story they tell us says the same, but the paradigms shift: the
land of milk and honey, the land of money, whatever best fits. Like the
little girl, we are all ready to listen to the man in the moon, and his
promise of a diamond as big as our shoe. The irony in the line Its
unbelievable you can get this rich this quick is relished; it really is just a
tale we are told, but we swallow the bait like a hooked fish. The song,
then, is about the tall truths we are told and the ones we tell ourselves. In
the bridge, Dylan pierces the masks, the illusions, of a world where
every head is so dignified, every moon is so sanctified, knowing just
how vulnerable we are. Each day, we are tempted to deny God, to eat the
apple, as Eve was in paradise by that arch-tale spinner, the devil, the teller
of stories so unbelievable they must be true: All the silver, all the gold,
all the sweethearts that you can hold / That dont come back with stories
untold, are hanging on a tree (the lines neatly compounding the old
money grows on trees idea with the promises contained in the fruit of
Genesis). The stories we are told are indeed like a lead balloon; a neat idea,
because a lead balloon is often what we are being sold, and we are
plunged to earth when we discover the lie. And yet we are constant
victims because whenever we start to see through the old tricks, new
tricks are brought in to replace them, making it, as Dylan says,
impossible to learn the tune. The motif of blindness makes another
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Dignity
the TV has become the new way of putting the blade to the young, a way
of controlling their mind so that when they grow up they will be eager
cannon fodder, easy victims of government propaganda.
The preponderance of list songs in Dylans late 80s and early 90s
work is symptomatic of his unwillingness to put too much effort into
songwriting, and 10,000 Men, with its title derived from The Grand
Old Duke of York, is another such song in the vein of Everything is
Broken and Political World. With inspiration hard to come by, it
seems that Dylan falls back on the comfortingly self-writing structures of
such songs, needing a framework to help get him from start to end. On
Time out of Mind and Love and Theft he seemed frequently to abandon
even such rudimentary structure, the songs becoming a series of
impressions strung together, vivid lines notwithstanding. The theme of
the present song seems to be mass mentalities, the extinguishing of
individuality. These clean shaven masses, whose actions wouldnt invite
the disapproval of anyones mama (especially a mama like John Browns),
are the armies who go to war, who dig for silver and gold; more than
anything here, Dylan seems numbed by sheer numbers. More numbers
follow in 2 X 2, with Dylan doing his multiplication sums but giving us
the sense that it doesnt really add up to much. God Knows is a song
held over from the Oh Mercy sessions, a fine enough song, in which the
exclamation, God Knows, is invested with its original meaning, which
is to say, not no-one knows but God alone knows all these things. God
can see beyond pretence and illusion, knows the secrets of your heart /
Hell tell them to you when youre asleep. Its also a song about
uncertainty, and a rebuke to the idea that we are adrift on the winds of
chance, so prominent elsewhere; as if he is refuting the idea that the
world emerged by chance, Dylan stresses that there is a purpose, that
there is a reason, out of sight or not, behind every thing. It is ironic, then,
that Dylan chooses God Knows, because in the modern lexicon this
has become an expression of just how random and unknowable life is. In
Dylans use, the meaning bends back to its original shape, and as it
progresses the song becomes hopeful, the music becoming more
forceful, pushing us forward as the idea of a purpose, a plan, becomes
stronger.
Handy Dandy, a song as steeped in nursery rhyme imagery as
anything on the album, is about a man who thinks himself infallible, a
sort of lighter take on Jokerman, with a main character who wont
admit to weakness, who commands an orchestra of women and who will
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Dignity
most obvious source for the cat is Ding dong bell, pussys in the well,
whereas the wolf comes from countless fairy tales and fables. The
predatory figure of the latter, looking down at the trapped cat from the
top of the well, is also a malevolent, satanic one; his hunting of the cat is
made all the more easy by the fact that it is carried out while the gentle
lady is asleep. Presumably, as the woman of the farmhouse, the gentle
lady should be responsible for the cats protection, but she is in no
position to hear its cries. A possible allegorical interpretation of the scene
is that this evening at the farmyard represents the world almost at an end:
if we take the cat to represent man, stumbled into the well through error,
and the wolf the devil, then it is probable that the gentle lady stands for
the Church, who no longer shepherds her flock, but leaves them to
flounder. In his Pilgrims Regress, the Christian apologist C.S. Lewis
assigned a similar allegorical role to the Church, though his depiction was
much more complimentary. As in Ring Them Bells, Dylan seems to be
suggesting that organized religion has neglected its true calling.
Other allegorical figures that put in an appearance include Grief
personified, the world as a slaughtered beast, and Back Alley Sally riding a
horse (an image with obvious sexual connotations). The latter is also a
depiction of the way people are oblivious to the tragedies around them,
and the risk to their own soul; a similar role is played by pappa, too
concerned with distant, world events to see the poverty under his own
nose. Finally there is the bull, filling up the whole barn, an image of
swollen appetite. These are the inhabitants of the world as farmyard, a
world oblivious to the peril that will come with the dawn, where the night
seems long and the table is full to abundance. The world, a slave to
appetite, or to indolence or complacency (as in the case of the gentle
lady) pays no heed to the slaughter of innocence. Nor does it heed the
knocking of the servant at the door. Doubtless Dylan has in mind not
just a farm servant but the Biblical figure of the suffering servant, in
other words Christ, who stands at the door and knocks. He is ignored, or
else the farm folk are too caught up in their own pursuits to hear his
knocking. With the traditional image of the end of the season, and also
with the arrival of night, the end of time approaches; the preoccupied
father, and the sleeping gentle lady, have left the animals free to do as
they please all evening, but eventually night must come stepping in, and
the servant must return as lord of the farmyard. Dylan ends this bedtime
story by wishing us goodnight, but dispenses, in the very last line, with
allegory and nursery rhyme language altogether. Nothing is veiled; the
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CHAPTER TEN
MY HEART IS NOT WEARY
GOOD AS I BEEN TO YOU TO LOVE
AND THEFT
171
172
EPILOGUE
DO NOT GO GENTLE
MASKED & ANONYMOUS TO MODERN
TIMES
Do Not Go Gentle
inside his head every bit as revealing as the one Highlands offered.
Ostensibly set within some fictional South American country run by a
dictator, this is contemporary America, a place where there is no longer
anything to believe in and no revolutions left untainted. Dylan music
aplenty plays on the soundtrack, from live performances with his touring
band (mercifully not the current one) to studio recordings like Blind
Willie McTell, which sets a haunting backdrop to scenes of vagrants
sleeping on waste-strewn streets. This land is condemned, Dylan is
once more telling us, that the dreams and ambitions of his generation
have been lost or sold. At the end, as Jack Fate returns to prison, he
makes the statement that the only thing left to him in the world is his
own subjective response to beauty. Truth, it seems, is too far off.
If the film had been a financial disappointment, the same cannot be
said for Chronicles, an autobiography that, in true Dylan style, dispenses
with a traditional chronological or even linear structure. After several
years in the rumour mill, a relatively slim volume finally did appear,
amounting to a series of impressions and recollections from certain
periods in Dylans life. Some of these were crucial to his development as
a performer and musician (like the chapters on Greenwich Village, and
his retreat from the public gaze in the aftermath of the crash); other
chapters, like the one on Oh Mercy, seem like slightly odd diversions.
Before the books appearance, fans had eagerly debated the approach
Dylan would take: would he continue in the vein of his World Gone Wrong
liner notes, offering stream-of-consciousness impressions and filling it
with obscure references to literary and musical figures? Or, perish the
thought, would he approach it as an exercise in the sort of writing he had
practiced for book blurbs, the kind of journalistic clich he had indulged
in for Greil Marcuss study of the Basement Tapes? It turned out to be
neither, but included something of both. At times it seemed that Dylan
was trying his hand at being a journalist; at other times the stream-ofconsciousness tendency won out, without ever becoming needlessly
obscure. The thing one remembers about Chronicles is the lists long lists
of names, pop cultural references, all kinds of musical, television, literary
references, acquaintances, friends; in fact, the book ended up giving us a
snapshot of certain times in Dylans life through his eyes, which is to say
that he describes who and what was all around him, rather than his inner
feelings. His mind seems to be encyclopaedic, and unsurprisingly critics
and readers belonging to his generation found the book fascinating.
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Do Not Go Gentle
modern music, to the ebb and flow of current fashions, reveals a distain
for the notion that anything really new is possible, or that one should shy
away from repeating the past. When one gets beneath the surface glitter
things are the same as they have always been.
From the outset, it was apparent that with Modern Times Dylan had set
out to revisit similar territory to Love and Theft: the opening Thunder
on the Mountain was just the kind of up-tempo, rollicking number that
Summer Days had been on the latter: boogie woogie blended with
gallows humour and Bible-references aplenty. There were echoes of Bye
and Bye and Moonlight in the long but oddly lightweight Spirit on
the Water, of Cry a While on the Muddy Waters inspired Rollin and
Tumblin; and it was not just Love and Theft either: one of the albums
standouts, the atmospheric Nettie Moore, seemed a close cousin, in
mood and atmosphere, of the superior Cross the Green Mountain.
While the press embraced the album from the first, most journalists eager
to join the chorus of praise for Dylans continued artistic vitality, many
within the Dylan fan base expressed disappointment that the album did
not signal a change in direction, as most Dylan albums had done in the
past; to some, in fact, it sounded like it had been culled from outtakes
from its predecessor. The chorus of dissent was quickly added to by
another, more worrying complaint: Dylan, more than ever before, was
adapting old material, often with minimal changes. The songs were
stitched together from old blues songs, spirituals and standards, the
choruses in particular often replicated verbatim, and likewise whole lines
of lyric appeared to be lifted from various literary sources, all of them
apparently in the public domain this time, which put Dylan beyond
anything but moral reproach. One Albuquerque deejay was quick to
notice similarities between several lines and the works of the Civil War
poet Henry Timrod, a fact that opened a furious debate over the
legitimacy of Dylans methods. Was he, as it seemed to some, straying
dangerously close to plagiarism in using sources such as Timrod as a way
of patching up the gaps in the songs, or was it simply a matter of
unconscious influence?
In fact, the practice of borrowing had already reached new heights on
Love and Theft : like Eliot in The Waste Land, Dylans method of
composition had become a patchwork technique, a splicing together of
fragments from traditional sources. There was nothing new, of course, in
Dylan borrowing tunes, granted that on the whole he had tended to
adapt old folk melodies more frequently than pre-war blues tunes, as well
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Do Not Go Gentle
balladry found in Bye and Bye reappears on When the Deal Goes
Down, mixing as it does stock clichs of a lovers veneration of an
angelic woman with lines that point to a meaningless existence (We live
and we die, we know not why) and the struggle to live (In this earthly
domain, full of disappointment and pain / Youll never see me frown).
There is tenderness, too, on Workingmans Blues #2, in which the
subject is assured that she is dearer to me than myself, and on Nettie
Moore, where wistful nostalgia for a past lover offers the only glimmer
of respite in a world that has otherwise gone black before my eyes.
One thing that emerges is that Dylan is not as certain of redemption
as he once was. On Aint Talkin he says, Im a-trying to love my
neighbour and do good unto others / But oh, mother, things aint going
well. In this tainted paradise, it is increasingly difficult even for the
pious, well-intentioned soul to rise to the aspirations of an earlier, more
devout age; charity is in short supply, and the overriding emotions are a
desire for vengeance and a sense of endless suffering. Beyond the
Horizon, in particular, concerns itself with this theme. The repetition of
the title phrase is markedly ambiguous. It may indeed be the place we
aspire to, the region where the just get their reward, but it is also a way of
defining what this world is not: beyond the horizon, in a less imperfect
world, it may be easy to love; here, on the other hand, it is far from
being the case. All things may be possible in some far off idealists
paradise, but in this vale of tears, we can do little more than wish things
were otherwise.
Another aspect of Dylans writing that has come to the fore is his use
of imagery drawn from the Civil War, perhaps sparked by the writing of
Cross the Green Mountain and his absorption of the work of Henry
Timrod. In Workingmans Blues #2 the speaker finds his barn burned
down and his horse stolen, calling to mind marauders like the Kansas
Red Legs that were vilified in Hollywood films like Clint Eastwoods The
Outlaw Josey Wales. Phrases like slash you with steel are very much in the
vein of Civil War imagery; even though the speakers weapons have been
put on the shelf, there is a very real temptation for him to turn outlaw,
to allow himself to be forced into a life of continual crime. The mix of
piety and violent apocalypticism particular to the Civil War mindset is
something Dylan obviously feels at home with.
Modern Times, while perhaps less immediately satisfying that its
predecessors, and lacking the great standout tracks that elevated Time out
of Mind from the merely good to the majestic, nevertheless repays
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180
Do Not Go Gentle
181
182
NOTES
Ibid, p.502
Raymond Foye, The Night Bob Came Round, in John Bauldie, ed.,
Wanted Man: In Search of Bob Dylan, London: Black Spring Press, 1990,
p.143ff.
41
Bert Cartwright, The Bible in the Lyrics of Bob Dylan, in Telegraph
38.
42
When this chapter was written, the latest Dylan album was Time out of
Mind and we had ever reason to expect that he would continue to evade
the mainstream critical gaze for years at a time. To a large extent, this has
not happened; his subsequent recordings, if not his live performances,
have received almost unanimous praise.
43
Interview with Cameron Crowe, Biograph, CBS/Columbia, 1985.
44
Bert Cartwright, The Bible in the Lyrics of Bob Dylan, in Telegraph
38.
45
Ibid.
40
OTHER SOURCES
Fanzines:
The following were invaluable sources of Dylan info, in the
days before the Web.
The Telegraph. Now defunct British fanzine edited by the late
John Bauldie. Published articles by some of the leading Dylan
scholars of the day.
ISIS. A less scholarly approach than the above, but an essential
source of Dylan news and trivia.
185
Web sites:
bobdylan.com
Includes a searchable database of all his lyrics.
expectingrain.com
The best source for Dylan news.
bobdates.com
Tour news and concert reviews.
bobsboots.com
The Bob Dylan bootleg museum.
Downloads:
Every Mind Polluting Word: Assorted Bob Dylan Utterances
(Edited by Artur, Dont Ya Tell Henry Publications)
A collection of Dylan interviews.
186
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books by Bob Dylan used in the preparation of the text:
Chronicles Volume 1. Simon and Schuster, 2004.
Lyrics 1962-1985. Jonathan Cape, 1988.
Tarantula. Panther, 1973.
Works on Dylan:
Barker, Derek (ed.). Bob Dylan Anthology Volume 2. 20 Years of Isis. Chrome
Dreams, 2005.
Bauldie, John, and Gray, Michael (eds). 1987. All Across The Telegraph: A
Book Dylan Handbook. London: Sidgwick & Jackson.
Bauldie, John (ed.). 1990. Wanted Man: In Search of Bob Dylan. London:
Black Spring Press.
Corcoran, Neil (ed.). 2002. Do You, Mr. Jones?: Bob Dylan with the Poets and
Professors. London: Chatto & Windus.
Flanagan, Bill. 1985. Written in My Soul. Chicago: Contemporary.
Gray, Michael. 2000. Song and Dance Man III. London and New York:
Cassell.
Gray, Michael. The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia. Continuum, 2006.
Gross, Michael. 1978. Bob Dylan: An Illustrated History. London: Book
Club Associates.
Heylin, Clinton. 1991. Bob Dylan Behind the Shades: A Biography. London:
Viking.
Holt, Sid. 1989. The Rolling Stone Interviews: The 1980s. Saint Martins Press.
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