LIKE A REBEL WILD

A study of BOB DYLANs art

by Jon P. Hooper

LIKE A REBEL WILD

A study of BOB DYLANs art
by Jon P. Hooper

Manly Duckling
2007

Text copyright 2007 by Jon P. Hooper.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form
or by electronic or mechanical means, including information storage or
retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author, except
by a reviewer who may quote brief passages.
Lyrics to Bob Dylans songs have been quoted only as necessary in the
context of critical analysis, and are believed to be covered by Fair Use
policy. If, however, any copyright infringement has occurred, the author
will be pleased to rectify the situation at the earliest opportunity.
This book is dedicated to Miss Potter.

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

t is January 17th, 1998, in Palo Alto, California, and academics and

rock music fans are gathered at Stanford University to debate the
merits of studying a twentieth century musical icon. It proves to be
an opportunity for the taking of sides. For the guardians of high culture,
the trend towards the study of pop culture in universities is indicative of a
slump in critical quality control. John Ellis, secretary of the Association
of Literary Scholars and Critics, sees it as part of a context of
disparagement of higher culture current in the academic world.1 On the
other side of the fence, exponents of cultural studies like Charles M.
Brown are eager to argue the validity of subjecting popular culture to the
rigours of intellectual analysis. What is worthy of note is that merit,
literary or otherwise, seldom enters the discussion.
No doubt the subject of all this would not care either way. No matter
if, in the course of the debate, the writer of Desolation Row and
Visions of Johanna finds himself grouped together with Madonna or
the Spice Girls. The real battle for many in the academic world is
between high and low culture. On the one side there are Shakespeare,
Tennyson, Joyce and the giants of the western literary canon; on the
other side Dylan and disposable consumer culture, the world of the Top
40 hit record and the plastic revolution, inseparable from Dylans
surrealist lyrics in that all are opposed to serious art. Behind this prejudice
is the lingering ghost of a literary conservatism that once sought to
exclude the likes of Dickens from the canon simply because of his
enormous popularity.
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Like A Rebel Wild

There are numerous reasons for wanting to do the same with Dylan.
Academics seek to preserve the purity of literary language in the age of
mass communication. Pop music is consumed by millions and offers
escapist entertainment. It often uses street language, vulgar idioms and
innuendo, or else sentimental clichs. The prejudice against popular
culture is comparatively recent, going back to the Romantic period, when
there was a new emphasis on the idea of the artist as remote from the
ordinary world, beholden only to his genius, understood by a handful of
elite, the literati. In the modern world, the guardianship of high culture is
under threat, because the children of the counter culture, offspring of a
cultural revolution that liberated a generation from the staid values of the
40s and 50s, are taking charge of academic institutions. Where does Bob
Dylan fit in?
Bob Dylan is not Madonna. Despite her immense popularity,
Madonna does not proclaim the end times in language that echoes the
Old Testament prophets. She does not sing about death and the frailty of
human existence, about personal truth and integrity in a world of
deception. Dylan does, and despite the fears of conservative academia it
is now apparent that Dylan is as remote from mass consumer taste as the
Romantic poets themselves. Though one can study the cultural
importance of anyone - Madonna, Robbie Williams, Michael Jackson
included - in order to better understand the times, Dylans cultural
significance is only part of the picture. Once the spokesman of his
generation, he no longer represents the hopes, fears and discontentment
of a mass public. Despite the high regard in which he is held, and the
recent upsurge in his popularity, he now holds a position that is almost
unique in modern popular music. Unlike the majority of his
contemporaries, and whereas for a considerable length of time he seemed
uninterested in trying to recapture the flame of youth, he now appears
completely reinvigorated and committed to producing works of
significance even this late in his career. The obvious parallel is with the
great blues singers, who worked in an art form that valued maturity and
did not view age as a barrier to creativity. We do not know whether
Dylan will endure long after Madonna, or continue to speak to successive
generations. But we do know that his words set him apart from the
majority of popular music writers. Forget about the exponents of modern
pop music - you will not find the same level of high seriousness in The
Beatles, The Rolling Stones, or Bruce Springsteen.
8

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

Like A Rebel Wild

as pure poetry; Gates of Eden versus Paradise Lost. Once we accept
that the division of song and poetry is fairly recent, we may also come to
accept that much in the Western canon was written as literature, and
intended to be read in isolation, therefore being better suited to a more
thoughtful, contemplative approach. The high style we admire in older
poetry is now so remote from us that it is difficult to imagine that it too
was once common currency, oral literature shared in the exchange
between bard and audience. If we compare Dylan with the Romantics,
we should realise that there are different paradigms in operation; it is easy
to disparage Dylan by placing his work next to a Milton or an Alexander
Pope, especially since Dylan frequently uses idioms and diction derived
from blues and folk song, often using ungrammatical forms, whereas
these Classical Poets use a more elevated form of diction that has, to our
ears, a higher tone, a sense of grandeur.
However, if one approaches his work as another mode of literature,
as songs with poetic content, their greatness becomes apparent. Dylan is
a serious artist at work in a popular oral art form, whose songs explore
Classical literary themes. He can be as philosophical as Eliot and as much
a prophet as Blake; in his way he is as learned as Milton (if one counts a
knowledge of obscure Scottish ballads and wailing Delta bluesmen the
equal of Classical history). In fact, if you listen intently enough, there is
insight in Dylans lyrics to match the great writers of the past, as well as
frequently deft use of language. Still, it seems that those who do not get
the music will never come round to recognising Dylans skill with words.
As one fan said at the Stanford University debate, Its impossible to
study this man without rock and roll in your soul.2 Dylans apologists
have been faced with the same problem whenever the question of
Dylans literary significance has been raised. Dylans critics form their
opinions as soon as they hear the nasal voice and rock and roll beat; their
ears and minds are closed from the beginning. This appreciation of his
art, therefore, is directed at those who already know how it feels; the
ragged clowns and mystery tramps who have already made the deal.

10

CHAPTER ONE
THE WOODY GUTHRIE JUKEBOX
BOB DYLAN AND EARLY SONGS

y the time Bob Dylan arrived in New York in January 1961, he

had already assumed the persona of a rambling folk singer. The
reasons for his adoption of this identity lay not so much in a
desire to reject his Jewish, middle-class background, as in a willingness to
embrace a tradition with which he strongly identified. This tradition was
of the itinerant, rootless bard, the Depression-era drifter who sang of the
plight of the outcast, the underdog, the marginalised and dispossessed.
The roots of his adoption of a persona can be traced to his
childhood. It was a childhood spent in the relative isolation of Hibbing,
Minnesota, an Iron Range town that had once flourished due to its vast
open iron-ore mine, but which had since slipped into decline. Growing
up in such a place, a boy with Dylans imagination needed an outlet, and
that came in several forms. First, there was the attraction of outlaw
figures, like the rebels played by Marlon Brando and James Dean in
movies like The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause, and his later
identification with rootless drifters can be seen as an extension of this
early fascination with these romantic individuals. Then there was outlaw
music the music of angst and rebellion, the early rock and roll of Elvis
Presley and Little Richard, which had such a liberating effect on a whole
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Like A Rebel Wild

generation of American teenagers. These were the formative years of
post-war youth, and rock and roll allowed the young to forge an identity
through rebellion against the staid values of the 50s. Dylan was just one
dreamer amongst many. While still in high school, he played in rock and
roll bands and made pilgrimages to Minneapolis and St.Paul, sometimes
posing as a recording star and laying claim to recordings he and friend
John Bucklen heard on the radio. In his high school yearbook, he gave
his ambition as wanting to join Little Richard.
Dylans identification with romantic outsiders was not remarkable in
the youth of his generation. So too, he was not alone in adopting an
image or pseudonym (rock and rollers and blues singers before him had
done so). What is intriguing, however, is the extent to which he
immersed himself into the character of Bob Dylan, cultivating an image
and identity that fooled even some veterans of the folk community.
When he established himself as a folk singer, he invented experiences,
allowing him to speak with authority in both his own songs and his
performances of folk material. He wanted to sing in the voice of an older
man, invariably rootless and facing death. Clearly he fell in love with the
romance of hard travelling, and wanted to be that sort of performer
(though stopping short of living the life). Such image cultivation was only
the beginning. In the years since, Dylan has continued to evolve from
persona to persona, adopting a series of masks that individually or
collectively give us our conception of who Bob Dylan is.
In the early 60s, folk music was undergoing a major revival. Dylan
had first encountered the folk music cultural scene as a freshman in the
coffee houses of Dinkytown, the bohemian quarter near the University of
Minnesota. The coffee houses were the meeting places of the old and
new Left, the hipsters and beatniks, the places where students gravitated
to listen to folk performers. This was new, underground music, the
alternative to the slick pop of the day, and it was growing in popularity.
The founding father of this music, at least in its modern American
form, was Woody Guthrie. Woody Guthrie was a dust bowl balladeer, a
Depression-era drifter who had set down the lives of working-class
people in song. His songs documented the plight of those marginalized
by mainstream culture: the migrant farmers who had populated John
Steinbecks The Grapes of Wrath, the immigrant workers who crossed the
Mexican border, the outlaws and the impoverished. Through friends,
Dylan discovered Guthries music and, perhaps equally importantly, his
autobiography, Bound for Glory, an evocative account of his rambling days
12

The Woody Guthrie Jukebox

that had fast become the bible of the folk set. His interest in academia
waning, Dylan began to mould himself into a folk singer, eschewing the
polished professionalism of the handful of crossover acts in favour of a
rough cut style that was close to Woodys own. At the time, Bob Dylan
was a persona in transition; it seems clear, from the accounts of
Dinkytown friends, that he gradually cultivated his singing voice until it
approximated the harsh, nasal tone and earthy quality of his idol.
Furthermore, his contemporaries in Dinkytown were for the most part
aware of his middle-class background, and he was not able to truly adopt
the persona until they had been left behind and he had established
himself in a city where he was completely anonymous.
The Dinkytown scene was a small-scale version of the one emerging
in Greenwich Village at that time, and so it is perhaps natural that Dylan
eventually headed east, towards the hub of a rising counterculture of
which folk music was an integral part. The unpolished folk singer who
arrived in New York was not just a Woody Guthrie imitator; he seemed
to genuinely believe that he was a descendent of the drifters of Guthries
day. Clearly, he desperately wanted to partake of the rambling lifestyle,
and spun tales that even the more seasoned members of the Greenwich
Village community generously accepted. A concert programme from his
first professional concert (later published in Lyrics 1962-1985 and entitled
My Life in a Stolen Moment) is a kind of compendium of the stories
he told back then, ranging from the claim that he had repeatedly run
away from home, worked in a circus (an experience narrated in the
unreleased song Dusty Old Fairgrounds) and travelled the length and
breadth of the country like Guthries contemporaries and heirs. So many
tall tales did Dylan spin that, even as late as the early 90s, Dylan scholars
were shocked to discover that he really had played piano in Bobby Vees
band, a story previously dismissed as one of his more outrageous claims.
The embryonic folk revival that was underway in the coffee houses of
Greenwich Village nurtured many talents, but above all it was an
egalitarian environment. The commercial, competitive, individualistic
world of rock and roll was anathema to its sense of community spirit.
The fact that Dylan was imitating Guthrie was not sneered upon, since
folk music was built upon sharing and embracing a tradition. As a rule,
songs were not jealously guarded, and neither were singing styles and
musical techniques. Thus, when he first wrote Blowin in the Wind, Gil
Turner was able to play the song for the Gerdes Folk City crowd as soon
as hed heard Dylan sing it.3 There was simply no question of storing up
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Like A Rebel Wild

songs, with a view to selling them to artists, in the manner of commercial
pop songwriters, or of the writers recording them themselves. The fate of
any new song, once it had passed the popularity test in the coffee houses,
was to become part of the repertoire of just about every performer in the
Village circuit. It was also a perfectly natural thing to adapt melodies
from older folk songs, as Dylan did when he began to write his own
material. More than anything, the stance towards authorship on display in
the folk community approximated pre-Romantic attitudes; the adulation
of genius and an emphasis on originality were out: everyone was a link in
the chain.
Some of the first Dylan songs recount, in deadpan style, his arrival in
New York; others romanticize the hard travelling lifestyle; a few more
express social issues, early attempts at topical songs. These latter
stemmed from Dylans contact with people more informed about current
issues than himself, individuals like Suze Rotolo, his then girlfriend, a
civil rights activist and member of CORE (the Congress for Racial
Equality). Dylan got noticed, but more importantly, making him the
exception to the rule among the coffee house crowd, he got a record
contract.
Dylans Columbia contract came about primarily because of John
Hammonds patronage. Legendarily, Hammond signed him without
hearing him sing, and without the assurance that he had any original
material to offer. Dylans self-confidence and charisma might have
convinced Hammond of his latent talent, but still his confidence is hard
to explain. Robert Shelton, a music critic who held a position of esteem
among the folk community, also recognized something remarkable in
Dylan that is not really perceptible in the recordings of his early
performances. Shelton was known to be a figure of integrity who could
not be bought, and therefore his New York Times article about Dylan
(Bob Dylan: A Distinctive Stylist), giving an unprecedented amount of
coverage to an unknown who also happened to be performing in a
support slot, was an important publicity coup for the young performer.
What can be detected in the early performances is that he had an
edge, a raw, natural quality, even if there are few indications of the sort of
talent that Hammond and Shelton perceived. In his coffee house
performances, he also cultivated a Chaplin-like stage manner, shifting
between comedy and seriousness in a way that would grab the attention
of patrons. It must have been a strange mixture: the sound of a rambling
14

The Woody Guthrie Jukebox

folk singer staring death in the face, and the youthful looks, the deadpan
comic, with his poised and expertly timed awkwardness.
The first album, Bob Dylan, was performed in a style polished up from
his Village routine. Rootless wandering and a sense of mortality
predominate, yet the face staring out from behind the Huck Finn cap on
the albums cover is beguilingly youthful, a kid dressed up in drifters
clothes. Dylan sings in the voice of an experienced bluesman, singing of
where he has been and what he has seen. Here was a young man, barely
out of his teens, sounding like he had lived a life of struggle, pretending
to be dying when hed hardly been born. While Dylan cannot convince us
that he truly is old, we are nevertheless convinced by the feeling behind
the songs. What we respond to is not so much the verisimilitude of the
performance but the integrity and degree of identification in the young
singer. He convincingly projects himself into the position of a dying
drifter; he believes, and therefore we believe also.
The songs are preoccupied with rambling and the approach of death.
Although the roots of some of them are older, they often evoke the
precariousness of the dust bowl days. Among the most engaging
performances are a delightful, playful Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,
which Dylan would transform so completely on the 1966 tour, a yearning
Man of Constant Sorrow, and House of the Rising Sun, the
arrangement of which was later lifted by The Animals and turned into a
mega hit.
There was a five-month delay between Dylans recording of the
songs and the release of the finished album, leaving him frustrated, but
also, given his rapid growth, persuading him that the album was out-ofdate by the time it finally appeared. But while the protest songs that
emerged slightly later dealt with more contemporary social concerns,
some of the chief themes that have sustained Dylans writing are here.
Long after his interest in protest ideology had died, Dylan would
continue to drift through an unfriendly world, expressing his sense of
aloneness, haunted by an awareness of mortality.
There are just two original compositions on the debut. One, Song to
Woody, sees Dylan putting himself into Guthries shoes, and paying
sincere homage to his idol (who by then was in the advanced stages of
Huntingtons Correa, a hereditary illness that would claim him at about
the time Dylan was retreating into the backwoods of Woodstock). Song
to Woody is Dylans pledge to follow Woodys lifestyle of hard
travelling. Woody had travelled with the Midwest farmers (or Okies)
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Like A Rebel Wild

who became the subject of Steinbecks The Grapes of Wrath. He had spent
time in the migrant camps and had an intimate knowledge of the
Oklahoma farmers who had travelled more than a thousand miles in
search of work. The Great Depression widened the gap between the rich
and poor, demarcating society into extremes of poverty and wealth. It
was a cataclysmic time, as indeed was Dylans own. In the song, Dylan is
declaring that he too is walking the same road, and seeing the same things
as Woody has seen, down to the eternal gulf between paupers and
peasants and princes and kings.
Fittingly for a gesture of homage, the song borrows extensively from
the Guthrie canon, taking its tune from 1913 Massacre and drawing
imagery from such songs as Pastures of Plenty. It communicates the
sort of simple, heartfelt truths, gleaned through experience, espoused in
Bound for Glory. Though the America of Dylans day is not the same as it
was during the Depression, Dylan can see that little has changed.
Through Dylans (and Guthries) eyes, the world is personified as
suffering, like the people who inhabit it. In one of the songs most
striking images, the world seems to embody the characteristics of one of
the hungry Oklahoma families, and particularly their children: Seems
sick an its hungry, its tired an its torn / It looks like its a-dyin an its
hardly been born.
Dylan pays tribute to Guthries contemporaries too, particularly
Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly, another legendary figure of
folk and blues who often shared the limelight with Guthrie when the
latters impact came under discussion. Although he evokes the sort of
lifestyle experienced by the migrants, who came out of the dust storms of
the Midwest and left their farms to the winds, he is also commenting
more generally on lifes transience, which the lifestyle of the rootless
traveller makes more perceptible: Heres to the hearts and the hands of
the men / That come with the dust and are gone with the wind. These
ramblers are not blind to the fact that life is fleeting; in fact, they embrace
such knowledge. These are people whom Dylan defines by their hearts
and hands, in other words who are notable for their sincerity and toil,
and who face life without the illusion of material comforts. Dylan,
declaring himself on the verge of leaving and thus beginning a lifetime
habit, sees the ramblers sudden appearance and disappearance as a
metaphor for lifes transience, their extreme life a mirror of lifes
extremes. Instead of rejecting difficult truths, he lays himself open to
fate. His expression of humility (The very last thing that Id want to do
16

The Woody Guthrie Jukebox

/ Is to say Ive been hittin some hard travellin too) foreshadows the
expression of inadequacy in the refrain of another great homage song,
Blind Willie McTell, in which he bemoaned his inability to carry on the
tradition of the great blues singers while simultaneously delivering a
performance marking him out as their heir. Similarly, Song to Woody
finds him pleading humility while at the same time matching the music of
his inspiration. Dylan did not have any direct experience of the rambling
life, though he did hitchhike to New York, relying on the kindness of
strangers, and yet when he wrote the song he was busy fostering the
impression that he had had such experiences. He sings Song to Woody
with all the conviction of one who really has spent a lifetime on the road,
or at least who sincerely feels what Woody Guthrie felt when he wrote
his dust bowl ballads.
Bob Dylan features one other original composition, Talkin New
York, a talking blues recounting, to comic effect, the arrival of a hillbilly
narrator in what is rustically referred to as New York Town. There are
autobiographical elements, such as the account of the snowfall that Dylan
faced for real during his first days in the city, described by the New York
Times as the coldest winter in seventeen years. Throughout, Dylan tells
his story in a voice of mock innocence, a device he would later master in
such songs as With God on Our Side and Talkin John Birch
Paranoid Blues. Through a liberal use of antithetical prepositions, Dylan
conveys the frenetic movement of the city, leaving us with the sense that
we, like the narrator, are tugged this way and that. The following lines
express, in the narrators wide-eyed tone, the march of capitalism at the
expense of the ordinary man; the way technology and progress are
accelerated at the expense of people: Thought Id seen some ups and
downs, / Til I come into New York town. / People goin down to the
ground, / Buildings goin up to the sky. The song is full of the sort of
humour that typifies certain early Dylan songs, but it also highlights the
difficulty Dylan faced in starting at the bottom as a folk musician,
working for only a little money (a dollar a day indeed).
The album Bob Dylan made little impact at the time and Dylan was
quickly dubbed Hammonds Folly in the Columbia offices. The
executives, remote from the burgeoning folk scene, could not see, as
Shelton and Hammond obviously did, the latent talent in the young
writer and performer; though to be fair this first album gives little
indication of who Bob Dylan was shortly to become.
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Like A Rebel Wild

There are several other important early songs, many of which were
sanctioned for official release on The Bootleg Series Vols. 1-3 box set. The
dominant themes are again rambling and death, but some of them also
display the emerging social conscience and championing of communal
values that would become such a dominant part of Dylans early subject
matter. Throughout these songs, Dylan champions the truth of ordinary
experience as it is transmitted through songs and other forms of oral
culture, in opposition to the distortion of the media and the lies of
propaganda.
Songs like Hard Times in New York Town begin with a call to
attention, a standard feature of poems in oral culture for thousands of
years, but no doubt familiar to Dylan from Guthries Pretty Boy Floyd,
or the traditional Jim Jones. When Dylan sings, Come you ladies and
you gentlemen, a-listen to my song, / Ill sing it to you right but you
might think its wrong, the effect is to get our attention and to draw us
close to him, like a medieval bard inviting his listeners to the hearthside
(many medieval English poems begin in this way). This opening also
draws attention to the need to establish the authenticity of the story
about to be told, again an extremely ancient practice in oral storytelling.
The song is put forward as a statement of fact, of truth, authenticity
being particularly important in a social atmosphere of lies and
propaganda. Then, as today, people were at the mercy of controlled
information, access to which was regulated by the government or by
individuals or corporations with distinct political bias. In the songs that
Dylan wrote over the next year, his satire of controlled information
becomes more marked. Dylan, therefore, is increasingly concerned with
sincerity, as indeed were the protest movement and organizations like the
Broadside Press, as a way of countering the distortion occurring in the
dissemination of news by the Establishment. The truth about the way
things really are is something attainable by the common man, and the
authority of oral storytelling is emphasized over the power of the media.
Like rock and roll, folk became a sort of secret language, through which
the real story of mid-century America could be told.
References to the authority of the peoples word accumulate through
these early songs, and while they champion the verity and power of folk
tales, with their hyperbole and exaggeration, they contain an essential
core of truth. Rambling Gambling Willie, for instance, mentions an
all-night poker game, lasted about a week / Nine hundred miners had
laid their money down. Such a thing could not really have happened,
18

The Woody Guthrie Jukebox

just as the narrator of Talkin New York could not have literally froze
right to the bone. But behind the exaggeration, essential truths about the
precariousness of miners lives, and the harsh conditions for the man on
the street, are being conveyed. In the former song, Willie is another
Pretty Boy Floyd or John Wesley Harding; in other words a working class
outlaw with a heart of gold, and this exaggerated incident simply
expresses the sort of reverence in which figures like Willie were held.
The Man on the Street in the song of the same name would be
forgotten, were it not for Dylans eulogising to set things right. To start
with, he is given the same kind of mythologizing as Willie (an old man
who never done wrong), but in this case he is anonymous, and it is the
song that will preserve his memory. Nobody can say how this man died,
but the song makes the cause obvious: poverty. It is a distressing tale:
when he dies, the man is treated like a dead dog, loaded in a wagon and
carted off. The singers declaration that the song, aint very long and its
title (simply, Man on the Street) ironically refer to the ostensible
insignificance of the mans life, a man about whom no information is
known (like the Deportees in the Guthrie poem, the media carries no
information about who he was). The song works by drawing power from
what is not said, without hyperbole. The statement about the songs short
length is loaded with irony; by drawing our attention to its brevity, Dylan
highlights a correspondence with the scant space such a tragedy would
take up in the newspaper and the minds of people, reducing a life to a
sentence or two, and stripping it of detail, of humanity, like the farm
labourers who became deportees in the newspaper notice.
Dylans identification with the working classes is an important feature
of these early songs, something that is typical of the folk movement, a
movement spearheaded by middle class intellectuals disillusioned with
Establishment values. In their language, these songs often assume a mock
innocence that is meant to rebound back on the so-called educated
classes, deflating their sense of superiority; it is never a learned
perspective, but there is wit and insight behind the lines. What is
common is a genuine trust in the goodness of ordinary men, in the spirit
of goodness and not its letter. And it is because of this faith in the
goodness of men that such tales can accommodate more unpleasant
aspects. In Rambling Gambling Willie, for example, the
disenfranchisement of the card games losers is never an issue: He
owned the whole damn town, we are told, and cant help but smile.
Legal systems and official histories are not as powerful, or honest, as
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Like A Rebel Wild

peoples words. Never mind that he is an outlaw; like Desires Joey Gallo,
Willie is at heart a man of the people. What are we to make of the
legitimacy of legal systems anyway, when they function as they do in
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll or The Death of Emmett
Till? Songs, on the other hand, as vehicles of oral culture and messages
of truth, have the capacity to set the record straight and to right wrongs.
Willies death, his tragic fate, is common to outlaw figures, and it is also
the means by which immortality is achieved. At the end of the song, we
have an interesting moral, a little reproachful, but ultimately vindicating
the sort of reckless but good-hearted figure Willie was: make your
money while you can. Gambling therefore joins rambling as a metaphor
for life. There is the same sense in Standing on the Highway, an
awareness of lifes precariousness, when Dylan says: One roads goin to
the bright lights, the others goin down to my grave.
The hobo lifestyle is also full of gambles, but of course with little
chance of reward. Poor Boy Blues evokes the world of boxcar riding
and vagrancy, two staples of life in the Depression. Roads and tracks,
rambling, trains and hobos and riding the rails, all take their place in
Dylans lexicon because of his early immersion in Guthries songs and
autobiography. Tracks sometimes lead to new places, or they sometimes
lead to death. In Ballad for a Friend, it is the latter, as the tragic news is
heard on the grapevine: Something happened to him that day, / I
thought I heard a stranger say. The song commences with the narrator
sitting on the railway track, symbol of lifes transience, and ends with the
train bound for the graveyard. For the hobo, trains could literally bring
death, since they sometimes met their deaths riding the rails.
These and other songs testify to Dylans imitation of Guthrie, just
like his singing voice and image did, in the early Village days. When Elliot
Mintz interviewed him for the television documentary about Guthrie and
Leadbelly, Dylan had this to say about his visits to Guthrie in hospital: I
knew all his songs and I went there to sing him his songshed always
liked the songs and hed asked for certain ones. I knew them all. I was
like a Woody Guthrie jukebox, ya know.4 He also began writing topical
songs, again following Guthries lead. Peter Yarrow has noted how much
Dylan immersed himself into the Guthrie character, but the thing to
remember, according to Yarrow, is that he and others were not looked
upon as imitators. To the folk crowd, Dylan was embracing the
tradition.5 Folk music retained something that was present in pre20

The Woody Guthrie Jukebox

Romantic literature: the insignificance of original ideas next to the
authority of the source material and the weight of tradition.
While Dylan sent ripples through the folk community, there were
those who thought that his talent, raw and less slick than many of the
other folk singers on the coffeehouse circuit, did not warrant a record
contract, much less the patronage of John Hammond. It initially seemed
that their doubts would be vindicated: Bob Dylan did not sell well, shifting
only about four thousand copies. Dylan himself was unhappy with the
fact that it was slow to appear, because by this time he had moved on.
His writing developed immensely in the time between the first albums
recording and release, and he started to show mastery in one form in
particular, the topical or protest song. With the first album finally
released, Dylan entered a phase of extraordinarily rapid development as a
writer, proceeding in a few giant leaps from student to master. It was just
a matter of months before the imitator would pen his first masterwork
and graduate from the Guthrie school. Blowin in the Wind, its genesis
cloaked in legend, was the work of a genius.

21

Like A Rebel Wild

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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Like A Rebel Wild

times, but was general enough to apply to any times. The battle for civil
rights was at a turning point mid century, but mans struggle to be free is
timeless. Dylan, despite his youth, understands that the missiles and Abombs of today are the cannonballs of yesterday.
The genesis of Blowin in the Wind is well documented and yet at
the same time mysterious. According to Dylan, the song came out of a
long discussion in the Commons, a coffee house in the Village. The
subject of the discussion was civil rights, and the failure to get things
done. Early Dylan biographer Anthony Scaduto gives the following
account: The conversation finally petered out and everyone was quietly
staring into their beer. An idea flashed your silence betrays you. Dylan
made some notes on a scrap of paper and, after finishing his drink, went
home and began to write.7 Dylan, at this early stage still willing to talk
about the sources of his inspiration, said: The idea came to me that you
were betrayed by your silence. Betrayed by the silence of the people in
power. They refuse to look at what is happening. And the others, they
ride the subways and read The Times, but they dont understand. They
dont know. They dont even care, thats the worst of it.8 One cannot
imagine Dylan being the most articulate speaker when it came to political
discussions. First and foremost he is an artist, though that is not to say he
was not able to think for himself when it came to politics. But
importantly, this feeling, an awareness of injustice and the struggle for
human rights, political talk, disgust at the racism allowed to fester in the
South, impatience with the governments failure to act, optimism and
belief that the world could change for the better, all of this was in the air;
talk of these great causes filled the Village coffee houses and fired up the
protest singers, who preached the folk gospel to the relatively small,
serious crowds. When folk music hit Top 40 radio and became, for a few
short, pregnant years, the new rock and roll, the balance shifted civil
rights protest, to the accompaniment of folk music, entered the world
stage. They had their spiritual father in Woody Guthrie and their political
leader in Martin Luther King; the fate of the world was in the hands of
the young. Bob Dylan became the spokesman of his own increasingly
affluent, but socially concerned generation, like Woody had been the
spokesman of the common man in his own time. He was, famously, like
a sponge, absorbing ideas and influences from all around, and giving
voice to this great political movement, still in the process of being born,
that wanted to change the world. Dylan channelled all of this, and his
music did help bring about change.
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Finger-Pointing Songs
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
25

Like A Rebel Wild

launch missiles at each other; the choice, in fact, is ours. The series of
questions thus reminds us that mankind is able to take charge of its own
destiny, if it wakes up to the fact. The answer isnt beyond the clouds,
Dylan appears to be saying; it isnt in the mind of a creator who made
good and evil, making man suffer without explanation: it is within the
grasp of the people themselves.
As the opening question of Blowin in the Wind poses, How
many roads must a man walk down / Before you call him a man? This
was, after all, a predominantly youthful movement that Dylan found
himself at the centre of, and as its influence became more widespread
Dylan and others realised that it was the young who would have to
change things. Their parents were part of the Establishment; the old
didnt ask questions, their silence was deafening. But the young well,
here was the rock and roll generation, but a generation that had become
aware that the music of youth rebellion, the very music that had freed
them from the Establishment, was slowly becoming Establishment itself.
Although folk music wasnt traditionally associated with the young, it had
never been tainted by big business. It could carry weight and articulate
political statements, unlike rock and roll. So it became the music of a
new, politically motivated youth that expressed disenchantment with
parental and social values. It was a new kind of freedom call, not a call to
be like the heroes of Dylans youth, the Deans and Brandos who had
cultivated an outsider consciousness and followed a path of inarticulate
rebellion, but a call to reform an oppressive and unjust social system.
Dylan, sensing it was a time when the Establishment and even parents
would be judged, used apocalyptic language to startling effect. His
preachy words perfectly complimented the stark quality of acoustic folk
music made popular by Woody Guthrie. Modern oppressors, the new
Pharaohs tribe, would be drowned in the swiftly-changing tide; those
complicit in oppression through their refusal to act were told not to
stand in the doorway or block up the hall. There was, as Dylan wrote
later, revolution in the air, and Blowin in the Wind was the first
herald of the promised apocalypse.
Things started to change fast for the protest-era Dylan. If he had
already outgrown his rambling folk singer persona by the time of the first
albums release, his rapid maturing during the protest era was startling.
Those who remembered him from his pre-New York days had been
amazed by how much he had grown; now he outdid himself by evolving
into the major creative force of the new folk music. Just as the
26

Finger-Pointing Songs
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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Like A Rebel Wild

reputation. Now new songs were needed, and even the purists couldnt
wait around long enough to test their worth as folk songs.
In Greenwich Village, there was an atmosphere of sharing, and
contemporary ballads became a major part of the repertoire of every selfrespecting folk singer. Often melodies were borrowed and adapted, taken
as something to hang new words on. Joan Baez, the queen of the folk
revival, sang true folk songs, not contemporary ballads, but after
hearing Dylan she too was caught up in the tidal wave that was folk
protest.
For a few years, Dylan was the tidal wave. In Renaldo & Clara, David
Blue remembered the night Dylan played Blowin in the Wind for Gil
Turner at Gerdes folk city; Turner reportedly said: Jesus Christ, Ive
never heard anything like that in my entire life! Thats the most incredible
song! Straightaway, Turner went up on stage and sang the song for the
Gerdes audience and they too were blown away.10 Such a response
would have been an incredible boost to Dylans confidence, to his
creativity, and indeed topical songs started pouring from his pen, doing
the rounds in the coffee houses to unanimous acclaim. The Ballad of
Donald White, The Death of Emmett Till and Let Me Die in My
Footsteps were among his trademark broadsides. Invariably they were
finger-pointing songs, bitter polemics against injustice. His
apprenticeship as a singer in the coffeehouses was effectively over; from
hereon he was in demand as a writer and a performer of his own songs.
Finger-pointing songs werent the only ones he was writing, but they
were the ones that made his name.
His second album, which would be a startling reflection of his
progress as a writer, was recorded between April 1962 and April 1963.
The Freewheelin Bob Dylan became famous for its protest songs, but several
of the topical songs Dylan wrote in this period did not appear, finding
fame through the Broadside Press (a New York publishing house
committed to civil rights causes) and through interpretations by other
folk singers. The Death of Emmett Till would have hit a nerve in such
politically conscious times. The story of the sadistic murder of a black
Chicago teenager by white men and their subsequent acquittal, it is the
sort of indictment of injustice that Dylan would make his own. However,
it is not hard to understand why Dylan later disowned the song: the
murder itself is recounted in a little too much detail, and the cry for
action in the last verse is somewhat heavy-handed, coming across as little
more than political oratory. The author of With God on Our Side must
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Finger-Pointing Songs
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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Like A Rebel Wild

His voice, in the movie clip, is incredibly nasal and lacking in warmth;
here, amongst people he had written about in songs like The Ballad of
Hollis Brown, Dylan sounds truly authentic, his performance a far cry
from the popular protest of the Kingston Trio or Peter, Paul and Mary.
Only a Pawn in Their Game, about the recent murder of civil rights
worker Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi, is a song that brings us
closer to the daily struggle of poor whites than it does to poor blacks. Its
a surprising perspective on an incident that most of his contemporaries
would have polarised into black and white. The song refuses to demonise
the white assassin who killed Evers, or to demonise the poor whites who
put on ghost robes. Rather, it demonises poverty itself (the hoof beats
pound in his brain, especially, seems expressive of the demon that
possesses the assassin, corrupting his mind, driving him to commit
extreme acts, like Hollis Brown, whose childrens crying pounds on his
brain) and the system that creates poverty. Dylan sees that racial hatred
stems from ignorance, from lack of education and deprivation, not from
an inherent propensity to do evil.
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll was rightly praised by
contemporaries like Joan Baez: it is a tremendously affecting ballad,
based again on a real life incident, where Maryland socialite William
Zanzingers unprovoked attack on a black serving maid, during a
Baltimore party, resulted in the death of the fifty-one-year-old woman.
The song contrasts the simple working and domestic life of a poor, aged
servant woman with the affluence and decadence of a rich young society
gentleman, one black, the other white, and ennobles the former by
building up a picture of humility. Hattie Carroll is sympathetically
portrayed, even though Dylans ultimate aim is of course the justice
system, and the victim his means of reaching a denouement where he can
condemn the abuse of the system. The rich socialites youth and
inexperience, his dependency on his rich parents and his liking for
material comforts (the cane is a prop in both senses of the word), is
negatively contrasted to Hattie Carroll; Zanzinger, with his diamond
ring finger (expressive of his scrubbed, respectable surface appearance,
hands that have never seen a days work) and high office relations,
seems false and superficial; he is well connected and born privileged, one
who is provided for. Conversely, Hattie Carroll gets her hands dirty (she
emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level), and she is a provider
(obviously, as the mother of so many children). Indeed, while Zanzinger
is characterised chiefly by what he owns, what he wears or bears, and
30

Finger-Pointing Songs
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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Like A Rebel Wild

threat of nuclear holocaust. This was a time when mutant monster
movies played on fears caused by the bomb and children were taught
what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. Dylans response in Let Me
Die in My Footsteps strips the nuclear threat of its power to instil fear
of apocalypse and a blinkered hatred of Americas enemies, its usefulness
as a patriotic tool: I will not go down under the ground, he declares,
refusing to conform to such thinking. His account of how the song was
inspired - apparently he witnessed some men digging a fall out shelter sounds apocryphal, but there can be no doubt that Dylan, as a teenager
during the first madness of the Cold War, would have been well aware of
some of the more extreme reactions to imminent nuclear attack.
Propagandist tool or not, the threat nearly became a reality in 1963,
when missile bases were detected in Cuba and President Kennedy went
head to head with Russian president Khrushchev. The world held its
breath, and the crisis was averted. But the ensuing hours of fear
apparently put Dylan in the apocalyptic mindset that gave rise to A
Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall (even if, as he asserted in a radio interview to
Studs Terkel, the rain referred to is not atomic rain11). The apocalypse
envisaged in the song is closer to a Biblical apocalypse, but in the context
of the times it couldnt help but make listeners think of the threat of
nuclear holocaust.
The five verses of A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall begin with a
paraphrase of the Scottish ballad Lord Randall, and feature a dialogue
between a mother and son, her darling young one, though the mothers
role is reduced to questions that prompt the sons visionary account, the
real content of the song. The world the son reports to his mother is a
strange, hostile, murderous place, threatened with destruction. Dylan had
appropriated Biblical language before but perhaps never so effectively,
never with such force and resonance. Given the nature of the visions,
their frequent allegorical or parabolic character, the son comes across as
some kind of Biblical prophet, his visions as startling as Isaiahs or
Daniels or Saint Johns. Because of this, the mothers way of addressing
him as my blue-eyed son and my darling young one, her warm,
maternal tones contrasting sharply with the nightmarish tone of his
visions, cannot help but sound patronising. Here, the mother figure is
guardian of the home and the hearth, a figure that will occur again and
again in Dylans lyrics as the woman who offers shelter from the storm,
harbour from the hostile outside world, but she is also a symbol, if we
consider the gulf that existed between parents and teenagers mid-century,
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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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Like A Rebel Wild

Equally as powerful as the images of a haunted, ravaged landscape
are the surreal, nightmarish images displaying a visionary quality never
attempted in popular song up to that time. Some of these images are
more easily interpreted than others. The picture of a newborn baby with
wild wolves all around it, for example, readily brings to mind the
predicament of the young in a predatory world, a world where innocence
is ultimately devoured. If there is beauty in this world, it is beauty that
goes unrecognised, as in the highway of diamonds with nobody on it
and the song of a poet who died in the gutter. Yet more of the images,
however, are obscure yet greatly suggestive, like the black branch with
blood that kept drippin. Images such as this one express chaos, the
natural and civilised order overturned, and a sort of return to primitivism.
Throughout, Dylan skilfully employs the devices of contrast, setting the
black branch and the black dog against the white ladder and the white
man, paradox, as in ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all
broken, and also establishing correspondences that echo through the
song: the blood dripping from the branch is matched by the bleeding
hammers; ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard chimes with
ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken.
Throughout, we are never able to forget the threat of apocalypse, at
one point what could be a Biblical Flood, presaged by a warning of
thunder and the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world,
although it may also evoke an image of nuclear detonation. In the last
verse, there is an indicator, ever so subtly, of Dylans restlessness, his call
to exile, as the son is drawn back out before the Flood waters begin, to
return to the world he has so powerfully described, because it is the
world to which he belongs, the world bequeathed to him. Besides, the
hearth cannot keep him: it doesnt matter if the world is on the brink of
destruction, that it is such a hostile place - to remain with the mother
would mean hiding from the reality of contemporary society, remaining
in the false comfort of the domestic sphere. This last verse is the longest,
and the extra length serves to make the narrators point more forcefully,
making one final assault on the senses, letting the images pile up on one
another in one extraordinary chain of suggestive power. The final lines
are a declaration of the poets intent, and a signal that Dylan recognises
he is the modern inheritor of the role of prophet and bard. The Biblical
concept of prophet, particularly, is of one who is able not to predict the
future so much as glimpse truths that are outside historical time, the
reality behind appearance. It is the role of the oral storyteller to use the
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Finger-Pointing Songs
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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Like A Rebel Wild

about the evils of war in general, and particularly those who profit from
war, but the fact that it does not refer directly to actual battles gives it
relevance outside of its immediate context. At the same time, however,
though it is clearly a superior work to The Death of Emmett Till or
John Brown, it belongs in the crop of opinionated, polemical fingerpointing songs that Dylan produced in his first two or three years as a
songwriter, and lacks the complexity of language that A Hard Rains AGonna Fall started to exhibit. There is no subtlety here, only a cathartic
attack on the war makers and profiteers. Its very much an us and
them song, displaying the kind of polarity that Dylan would shortly
disavow. That is not to say it follows the template of the 60s protest
song too closely. The final verse is an astonishing avocation of Old
Testament vengeance, with Dylan delivering the kind of hex that must
have upset legions of polite protest singers: And I hope that you die /
And your deathll come soon / I will follow your casket / In the pale
afternoon / And Ill watch while youre lowered / Down to your
deathbed / And Ill stand oer your grave / Til Im sure that youre
dead. Only Elvis Costello, many years later in his anti-Thatcher protest
song Tramp the Dirt Down, had the gall to attempt such a direct
statement of vengeance (though admittedly, Costello balked at delivering
the death wish, asking instead that he merely be a spectator at her
funeral).13
Dylans song still suffers from short-sightedness, from oversimplification of the machinery of war. It gives us shadowy figures upon
which we can pin our anger, abstract figures of evil, addressing villains
that are not the least bit human (in both senses of the word). These warmakers are anti-life, and contrasted to symbols of human life and
potential, namely children, babies, and young people. There is no room
to consider whether the canonised young might turn out to be the warmakers of tomorrow, so sharp is the demarcation between youth and age.
The Times They Are A-Changin is more successful; as an anthem
it stands alongside Blowin in the Wind. It begins, like Talkin New
York, by inviting the listeners closer: Come gather round people is
another variation on a standard folk song device that, as we have seen,
links the song to a tradition of oral storytelling of immense age. The
Times They Are A-Changin has something in the nature of a sermon,
so confident is it in didacticism, so assured in its preachiness. A common
feature of sermonising is to stress the corruption of the contemporary
world, and apocalyptic sermons often assaulted the listeners with a list of
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Finger-Pointing Songs
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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Like A Rebel Wild

changing times (the chance wont come again) seem especially
pertinent. As Dylan said later, revolution was in the air.
The image of Fortunes Wheel is common in medieval literature and
sermons. The wheel selects who will thrive and who will perish, quite
arbitrarily naming or selecting whom to favour and whom to condemn.
In medieval times it was used to explain the sudden twists of fate that
could turn prosperity into poverty. The overturning of the old order is
expressed in the Biblical language of the Sermon on the Mount: For the
loser now / Will be later to win and the first one now / Will later be
last. This Biblical paraphrase does more than put Dylan on the side of
the underdog, the oppressed, it further marks him out as a prophet of
change.
The second specific group of people to be addressed in the song is
the politicians. They are entreated to heed the call rather than oppose
change. Its interesting that Dylan does not condemn them as
instruments of the old political system, acknowledging rather that they
have the choice to join the cause or oppose it; implicitly, there is the
realisation that there has to be a governing body, and that even
senators and congressmen have an important role to play in the new
world order. They are emphatically inside, in the stuffy corridors of
power, and therefore havent kept themselves aware of the forces that are
moving through the outside world, shaking the windows and rattling the
walls of political strongholds like an earthquake, as the impact of the 60s
generation would do. The battle, the forces of revolution, Dylan predicts,
will enter through the doorway and penetrate even the halls of power.
Next to be addressed are the mothers and fathers, perhaps the most
basic instruments of the Establishment, and it is for these that Dylan
reserves the harshest criticism in the sermon: dont criticize / What you
cant understand / Your sons and your daughters / Are beyond your
command. Rarely have those words seemed more relevant since, even if
the parent-teenager gulf has widened. Somehow, the schism was more
important then. Parents, the main critics of their sons and daughters, are
admonished for doing so; the traditional authority of parents, based on
the Biblical commandment, is overthrown in a statement of revolution
that echoes Christs own revolutionary character; it was Christ, after all,
who declared that he had come to bring strife and conflict into families;
not to bring peace but a sword.
The last verse shifts the focus from the subjects to the coming
change itself. The present now will later be past may seem like an
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Finger-Pointing Songs
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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Like A Rebel Wild

with the ideals of the 60s generation. The song survives, but with a
different kind of power. Even so, for some it has taken on a quaintness
which dates it even more than some of Dylans more specific fingerpointing songs.
Another major song that concerns itself with the relationship
between the youthful movement and the older Establishment is With
God on Our Side, which deals specifically with Americas view of its
past. Among the various authorities the new counterculture attacked was
history as taught in the high schools. History is written by the victors, so
the maxim runs, but in the twentieth century the cultural theory
movement managed to undermine the authority of the history books;
history, like the literary canon, was a construct of the western white male,
obsessed with battles and politics. History was recognised as narrative, in
other words as storytelling, determined by politics and beliefs, never free
of bias; thus a truly objective history could not be written. Instead, there
was a recognition that history has always been in the service of
nationalist, political, propagandist causes. Dylans With God on Our
Side is perhaps the most eloquent of the broadsides fired in the 60s
against the manipulation of history and the use of the past to justify
atrocities in the present.
The song is all the more effective because Dylan feigns the speech of
a nave patriot in order to attack the exploitation of history and patriotic
fervour in the service of selfish ends. While still at school, we are instilled
with a sense of national pride, making us recognise our countrys grand
climb towards progress. America had always liked to think it had God on
its side, that its heroes and founders acted according to some kind of
divine scheme, but Dylan rejects this notion. From the opening Oh my
name it is nothing / My age it means less, Dylan is emphatically refusing
to recognise his place in a grand tradition of patriots (a privilege that the
propagandist would ascribe to all Americans by simple birthright). He
disavows nationalism, saying The country I come from / Is called the
Midwest, and goes on to attack the nationalist drive of the education
system, and the narrow patriotism of his social upbringing, by saying Is
taught and brought up there / The laws to abide / And that land that I
live in / Has God on its side. Dylan is undermining the notion of moral
teaching leading to a blind respect for all forms of authority, which thus
extends to an unthinking and uncritical patriotic service, especially during
wartime. With such a history of shame dressed up as victory, can the
40

Finger-Pointing Songs
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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Like A Rebel Wild

million, is perhaps understandably bitter coming from the descendent of
European Jews, but its main function is to point to the hypocrisy of
foreign policies. Put simply, we choose our allies for selfish nationalist
reasons, as we do our enemies. No moral imperative guides us in our
appetite for war, and such choices are made from political expediency
rather than moral convictions; because of this an enemy may soon
become an ally and vice versa, as exemplified again and again in the case
of Russia, Japan or even Germany itself during the twentieth century.
Finally we return, with the reference to the Russians, to the backdrop
of anti-communist propaganda, which spread like a disease through the
American mid-century. The ordinary citizens basic prejudices are
manipulated, he is taught to hate them and fear them. Strengthening
the conviction that enemies and allies are chosen independently of just
causes, Dylan says of the Russians, If another war starts / Its them we
must fight. The Cold War also instilled the fear of weapons of
chemical dust; the pro-nuclear argument (If fire them were forced to /
Then fire them we must) of course absurd in the face of the
consequences Dylan so bluntly describes: One push of the button /
And a shot the world wide. And you never ask questions, Dylan
asserts. Luckily the young were beginning to do just that. The songs
argument, finally, is given weight by an allusion to the betrayal of
Christ by Judas Iscariot. Dylan wants us to think about whether God
plans everything. The paradox is that Jesus was betrayed by a kiss,
symbol of love and brotherhood. Therefore, we have to consider
whether evil acts are justified by their end results, and whether it all
balances out in the long run. The final statement is powerful: If Gods
on our side / Hell stop the next war.
When the Ship Comes In depicts another apocalypse, this time a
hurricane that sweeps over the world to put paid to the old social order.
The seas rise, pharaohs tribes are swept away, the goliaths of this world
conquered, meaning of course the old Establishment and the corrupt
men in power. The fascination with the vengeful God that Dylan holds is
perhaps natural to a Jewish sensibility. He doesnt mention God, of
course, because the apocalypse happens to let the young inherit the earth,
but the appropriation of Biblical language is revealing if we want to
understand his motivation. It would be hypocritical to attack the old
social order of In God We Trust by invoking the very same God that
the elder generation venerates, but there is no better way to depict such
dramatic changing of the times than with apocalyptic imagery; the same
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Finger-Pointing Songs
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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Like A Rebel Wild

have the girl as he remembers her, and he asks the listener to see for me
if her hair hangs long because thats the way I remember her best.
The truth, of course, is that time has probably changed all that he
remembers, but that is precisely why he is asking this third party for
reassurance. Just as the snows put an end to the summer, so time erases
everything that had once seemed unchangeable, and it is this knowledge,
that time and distance erode human relationships, along with a sense of
the sadness of change, that underpins the song and gives it its pervading
melancholy. On the flipside, the fact that the girl is remote, both in the
far away North Country and in the distant past, means that memory can
conquer time. Expressing the power of memory to fix a figure from the
past in an idealized way, the song suggests that the mediator is important
in conquering time and change in both directions, for the singer and the
subject both; hence, remember me to one who lives there. One
particularly striking thing about a song of such obvious greatness is that,
given that the subject is permanence, the song itself achieves a kind of
immortality that it seeks for the girl.
A close cousin to Girl from the North Country, and surely a
contender for Dylans finest love song, is Boots of Spanish Leather,
which deals directly with change and the ending of love. The song grew
out of his feelings of separation from his girlfriend Suze Rotolo, who
broke off their relationship just as he was enjoying his first taste of major
success by moving to Italy to study art. The song is constructed as an
epistolary dialogue between two lovers, one of whom is sailing to a
foreign country (Suze chose Italy, but Dylan curiously found Spain a
more romantic choice of place, or else his choice was dictated by his
attraction to the folksong motif of boots of Spanish leather, which
appears in the traditional Black Jack Davey). In his letters, the lover
who has been left behind addresses his sweetheart in terms of affection
(his term of choice is my own true love, which the departing lover
employs herself, though it is only once that she uses this or any other
term of endearment, at the songs very beginning). The dialogue then
proceeds towards what is essentially a lack of like feeling between the two
lovers, with the departed lover becoming increasingly evasive. The
abandoned lover expresses a desire for nothing, no gift except the safe
return of the lover herself. The girl, on the other hand, repeatedly offers
to send some sort of material gift in lieu of her presence. It becomes
obvious to us that the gift is not so much a gift of absence but a parting
gift, one that might be silver or of golden, possessing material worth
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Finger-Pointing Songs
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
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Like A Rebel Wild

anyone else in contemporary folk, was able to articulate their thoughts
and feelings in song. However, the final song on The Times They Are AChangin, Restless Farewell, hinted at a need to move on. Considered in
hindsight, it can be seen as an only-partially veiled statement of Dylans
restlessness and his dissatisfaction with the constraints the protest
movement sought to impose upon him. He declares, like a man writing
his epitaph: (Ill) bid farewell and not give a damn.

46

CHAPTER THREE
IF MY THOUGHT-DREAMS COULD
BE SEEN
ANOTHER SIDE OF BOB DYLAN AND
BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME

h but in such an ugly time the true protest is beauty. So

said Phil Ochs, who might have been talking about Dylans
post-protest output, in 1967. Moving away from so-called
topical songs, Dylans art branched out in startling new directions. One
avenue he explored was the development of the visionary, poetic, lyrically
dense kind of song he first attempted with A Hard Rains A-Gonna
Fall. Another avenue was the relationship song, a form of which Dylan
had already shown himself a master, but would now explore from a more
cynical viewpoint.
Just as he had broken the mould and cultivated a new language for
folk protest, he now began to write a new kind of love song with few if
any antecedents. This has sometimes been characterised as the anti-love
song, though it may be more accurate to note that such a song takes a
more cynical, less romantic look at relationships, and does not reject love
altogether. Dont Think Twice, Its All Right, as we have seen,
explored similar ground, but the new songs Dylan began writing were
simultaneously more knowing, more cynical, and much wittier than
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Like A Rebel Wild

before. However, this time his audience were slower to accept the
advancement.
His next album would lean heavily on both relationship songs and a
new kind of surreal epic. Dylan recorded Another Side of Bob Dylan on a
single wine-fuelled summer evening in 1964 (Shelton, however, has it that
the album took two days to record).15 Even though the album was
acoustic, Dylan was already captured by the exciting new sounds of
British pop music. America had embraced The Beatles, and Britain,
ironically, was about to embrace the Dylan of protest, just as he was
starting to tire of the image. There is a palpable sense on this album that
Dylan is hearing rock and roll music in his head but is not yet ready to
break away from folk. Nevertheless, and despite the acoustic setting, the
album was controversial because Dylan did not include a single example
of the sort of straightforward finger-pointing songs hed made his name
with. He called the poems that accompanied the album, Some Other
Kinds of Songs. He was hinting, of course, at the changes that were
apparent on the record itself.
You can hear the change straight away in Dylans voice. His tongue
seems loosened by wine for a start, and when he sings it is without the
sober conviction that had invested the songs on the last album with such
solemn meaning. Whereas the words of The Times They Are A-Changin
were sung as if they were a sacred text, Dylan here seems to have
regained something of his earlier playful side, a mock humour that had
characterised his early performances and songs like Talking Bear
Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues and Talkin John Birch Paranoid
Blues.
These were subjective songs, as critics of Dylans new material were
keen to point out. But subjective or otherwise, even when they were love
songs they were not merely frivolous. They were among the first popular
songs to deal with romance and relationships in a more sophisticated
way. In most cases, Dylan is out to explode romantic myths, to absolutely
deny the myth of eternal loyalty, self-sacrifice and devotion. Along with
his disavowal of protest causes, he was also setting out to disavow
romantic love. The opening All I Really Want to Do was as much a
statement of intent as anything else, with Dylan well aware that listeners
expecting more of the gravity of his earlier topical songs would be
immediately surprised. Its as if hes saying, Ive lightened up. Can we be
more honest and intimate now?
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If My Thought-Dreams Could Be Seen

I Dont Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met) is one of
Dylans characteristic lesson songs, in which a character learns something
through bitter experience. This one presents the aftermath of a love
affair, or what might even be a casual liaison between two people, from
the disappointed perspective of a innocent lover, a poor soul with
romantic ideals only now beginning to learn the rules of modern love,
which insist on discretion and anonymity. The woman of whom he has
constructed a romanticized image and with whom he has apparently
shared at least one night of passionate love (if his claims are to be
believed) now casually pretends that nothing happened, and treats him
like a stranger. There is marked bathos in the way Though we kissed
through the wild blazing nighttime (an expression that perfectly conveys
the intense, headlong tumble of new love) is followed by the refrain of
she just acts like we never have met, the switch from romantic imagery
to street smart idiomatic language doing much to achieve this bathetic
effect. His image of the nighttime woman, whose mouth was watery and
wet, is markedly different from the daytime woman who now rejects
him, and much of the humour comes from the naivety of his original
romantic image of her. By the end of the song, he has learned, at least, to
play the game the same way she does, which means ignoring her
existence. The song deals with the casual way a lover is able to end his or
her relationships in the 60s climate, and the way love has grown
anonymous. Of course, it need not necessarily be assumed that this kind
of emotionless cast-off is an index of free love. On the contrary, such a
denial of intimacy belongs more to a kind of ruthless self-preservation,
something Dylan is a master of, than casual sex.
In It Aint Me, Babe, which Joan Baez jokingly described as an
anti-marriage song, Dylan delineates the limitations of romantic love
with its empty, debased courtship rituals.16 The speaker in this
monologue is not callous; he is not trying simply to cast off a lover he has
outgrown. Rather, he is no longer fulfilled by the rituals of romance, and
feels constrained by having to play the role of lover. Dylan is suggesting
that love should involve deeper connections between people. His lover
needs to be made to feel secure; she cannot stand alone but needs her
lover as a prop. She wants him to gather flowers constantly, to be there
for her always, and to promise never to part. Clearly, it is not a
relationship based on genuine love and sacrifice, but on need and
emotional insecurity; in many ways therefore it resembles a childs
dependency on a parent. In asking for loyalty and promises, furthermore,
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Like A Rebel Wild

it clearly puts the speaker in a position of having to be dishonest. This
kind of possessive love is reductive, restricting the possibilities of growth
for both parties; indeed, it does not allow for two independent but
mutually co-existent selves, and will result in the effacement of one of the
lovers. This is a particularly jaundiced view of traditional relationships to
which the free love generation soon subscribed. According to Dylan at
this stage, romantic love equals marriage, and marriage equals
conformity. The line a lover for your life an nothing more turns the
romantic ideal on its head; quite simply, traditional romantic love is an
obstacle to self-discovery for both men and women. According to the
myth of romantic love, aimed at men but especially at women, a partner
for life was supposed to be the ultimate goal, and salvation through love
the only alternative to a lonely life of bachelorhood or spinsterhood.
Speaking for his generation, Dylan wants more.
The protest crowd, who were themselves like a lover Dylan had
outgrown, demanding fidelity and expecting Dylan to go on gathering
flowers for them (read, writing protest songs), were unaware of just how
topical Dylan had become. Here, he really was beginning to speak for his
whole generation, who would soon espouse free love as one of the paths
to self-discovery. Songs like these, as well as the beautiful To Ramona
on the same album, and Love Minus Zero/No Limit on the next,
showed just how closely Dylan was able to mirror, and even to predict,
the temper of the times.
In A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall, Dylan had explored poetic,
symbolist language. Chimes of Freedom and My Back Pages, on
Another Side of Bob Dylan, have him further exploring the possibilities of
bringing complex literary language to popular song. Though they have
come to be overshadowed by the breakthroughs he would achieve over
the next year, they nevertheless show a considerable advance in Dylans
lyrical gift.
As Dylan was becoming more subjective, and beginning to turn
inward, his use of language was becoming on the one hand vague and
more ambiguous (Joan Baez, on her 1975 song Diamonds and Rust,
commented on Dylans knack for keeping things vague17), but on the
other hand more suggestive and powerful. To those who wanted perfect
clarity and desired no more than straightforward polemics, it seemed that
he had begun to muddy his waters. Chimes of Freedom had lines like
the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail and Through the
wild cathedral evening the rain unravelled tales. Words like these,
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If My Thought-Dreams Could Be Seen

especially when set to rock music, would eventually expand the
possibilities of popular song, and point the way forward for a generation
who were beginning to tire of the simplistic sentiments of rock and roll.
But for the moment the protest sect was his judge, and they were
suspicious.
Dylan was mining for a language that could express the complexity of
his generations experience, even if the generation didnt yet know it. In
fact, he created a consciousness for the 60s generation simply by wanting
more, and having the audacity to grasp for it. Before Dylan, pop was
relatively barren: the songs, usually production line fodder put together at
Tin Pan Alley, the hit factory where much of the chart hits originated,
were sometimes pleasant but ultimately disposable. Even during his
alignment with the protest crowd, when the popularity of folk meant that
kids were exposed to more meaningful lyrics, the only alternative was the
bubblegum pop of the early Beatles. Becoming restless with protest
because it offered no further possibilities for growth, Dylan searched
inwardly for a way to satisfy his creative muse, using drugs to help him
(LSD was relatively new, and the insights it offered had never been
tapped by mainstream pop artists; moreover, amphetamines offered no
loss of clarity and a greatly increased rate of output, something which
particularly attracted Dylan). He also began to openly attest to the
influence of Beat writers like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. As he
moved towards a greater lyrical complexity, the primitive pulse of pop
simultaneously seduced him. Part of his genius was to realise that rock
music could accommodate the complexity of the Beats and the innersearching that drugs inspired.
Despite this tendency towards self-exploration, Chimes of
Freedom is a song that looks outwards. It can, in one sense, be seen as
an attempt to appease the protest crowd, but was dismissed as too
general; there were no specific issues to latch on to. In fact, Dylan is
saying all there is to say about social issues in this broad, allencompassing song. On the narrative level it is an account of an evening
spent sheltering from an electrical storm. During the storm, the thunder
and the lightning seem to give rise to a visionary state in the narrator, and
the sounds and lights of the storm become freedom bells. At the core of
the song is a list of those for whom the freedom bells toll: the
mistreated, mateless mother, the outcast, the luckless, the
abandoned, and finally every hung-up person in the whole wide
universe; now, at last, there is no black and white, no us and them or
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Like A Rebel Wild

Establishment enemies to oppose; Dylan has transcended protest, he has
embraced a kind of Keatsian negative capability. Receptivity to the
natural music, something Dylan would more fully explore in Lay Down
Your Weary Tune, is in evidence: Through the mad mystic hammering
of the wild ripping hail / The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder.
He has clearly experienced some kind of mental liberation, and has
lost interest in simplistic issues of political and social freedom. The
visionary state is an unlocking of the consciousness. The Protean power
of the images, shifting and transforming through the senses, is the real
liberating power for all the worlds victims of oppression. The song is
about a visionary glimpse of freedom for all of mankind, contained in the
bell-like chiming of a single evening, of which the protagonist receives a
glimpse.
Lay Down Your Weary Tune, dating from roughly the same
period, deals with a similar kind of visionary state. Approximately fifteen
years before his conversion to Christianity, and inspired by the beautiful
setting of Joan Baezs cottage in Carmel, California, Dylan was thinking
about the presence of God in nature.18 Its astonishing that such an
important work could remain unavailable to the public until the release,
with much critical fanfare, of Biograph in 1985.
Although there are some similarities between the songs mystical
epiphanies and Chimes of Freedom, Mr Tambourine Man, and also
the later Every Grain of Sand, Lay Down Your Weary Tune
somehow does not seem intimately connected with anything else in
Dylans canon. Its about the divine chord in nature, about music as a
force infusing the natural world. Its also a song about transcendence,
and tuning into this supernatural music, while at the same time cultivating
a totally humble and receptive state of consciousness.
The medieval mind thought that music was an expression of the
order of the created universe, and that Gods music could be heard in the
movement of the spheres. To the medieval thinker, all human music was
in imitation of this divine harmony. However, there is an earlier, pagan
understanding of the music of nature as expression of the consciousness
of gods. This song, then, is about submission to this overpowering
natural music. As human music has the ability to overpower us, the more
so does the divine music of nature. Both the tune and the words are
hymn-like, and there is a definite echo of a psalm about the piece. Dylan,
the psalmist, is suggesting that we allow ourselves to be guided by the
music of the natural world. In a heightened state of consciousness, with
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If My Thought-Dreams Could Be Seen

his inner ear (like the inner eye that receives visions in other songs) tuned
in to the divine chord, he is able to discern the natural orchestra, the
morning breeze like a bugle, the drums of dawn, the crashin waves
like cymbals. The human musician can only stand unwound, like a
stringed instrument that has been detuned, before this music. It does not
ask for or expect appreciation; like the hoot owl of Blind Willie
McTell, for which the stars above the barren trees are the only
audience, there is the same sense here that these natural instruments are
playing for the benefit of each other, and in harmony with one another,
because man has forgotten how to listen: The branches bare like a banjo
played / To the winds that listened best. This beauty is barely
perceptible to our neglectful human ears; in other words, it speaks like
silence. It gives rest, it restoreth the soul, as the psalm says. The pilgrim
of the 23rd Psalm lies down in green pastures, and is led beside still
waters (the sense is that one can rest, away from the chaos and adversity
of the world) and here too the subject comes to rest next to a still river
(so still, in fact, that the water resembles a mirror). This is a hymn, not
about God especially but about the divine power of nature, and thus
natural musics power, to soothe and comfort the weary soul, and
especially the soul who, like Dylan, had come to resent the pressures of
his success. No doubt his time at Carmel gave him such comfort. He
might have wanted to remind himself of exactly why he was interested in
music in the first place.
Moreover, the song is further proof that Dylans genius at
songwriting came from his ability to tune into a music and a language
that was pre-existent. The answer to questions like where do your songs
come from should have been obvious. They came from his
environment, from the music of the rails. In his sleeve notes to Joan Baez
in Concert, Part 2, he had written: An I sung my song like a demon
childAn Id judge beauty with these rules / An accept it only f it was
ugly. The roots of Dylans own music were uglier than Joans, the
beauty in his songs of an entirely different kind (One could very well ask
the question, just whose voice is the more natural, Joans or Bobs?). In
the sleeve notes, he writes about the transformational effect hearing Joan
Baezs voice had on him, and it seems that here is the germ for Lay
Down Your Weary Tune, and also the key to the shift in his response to
beauty. He berates himself for thinking that beauty was only ugliness an
muck, and credits Joans voice with giving him a new concept of beauty
as something beyond dissection or explanation, a sound that held hymns
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Like A Rebel Wild

f mystery. The imagery of a music that he cannot pick apart directly
echoes Lay Down Your Weary Tune, such as in the sounds a
streams, the weakest winds that blow and gypsy drums.19
The music Dylan hears in Lay Down Your Weary Tune similarly
cannot be understood or picked apart (indeed, the best listeners are the
winds themselves, not human ears). Dylan had clearly found an
inexplicable beauty in Joan Baezs voice, and in Carmel, he found equal
submission to the music of nature. It was not from his own past
experience, as one who had heard the iron ore train sing; it was the
advent of a new vision that would come to fruition in Mr Tambourine
Man. We see the beginning of change in Dylan, in this song, from the
peoples prophet of Hard Rain, who will tell it and think it and speak
it and breathe it / And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see
it, to the artist who, in 1966, announced I accept chaos. In this
context, the images from the liner notes of a young Dylan yankin up
the grass by its roots, and hurling a rock across the tracks, represents a
Dylan with a will to ask questions, a subversive rebel with the impulse to
change things; here, however, we see an acceptance of beauty, a kind of
passive acceptance of mystery which is also the perspective in Mr
Tambourine Man. It may be stated that the attraction to Dylan stems
from the fact that he never did stand unwound beneath the skies, and
that most of his admirers have always preferred him to sing his song like
a demon child. We do not generally admire Bob for his passivity, for his
tendency to stand in awe of beauty, and his defiance has always been
more interesting. Nevertheless, these songs of submission before the
mystery are among his most striking.
My Back Pages is a disavowal of protest causes, and an expression
of their restrictive nature, which Dylan thinks makes us old before our
time; its chorus is the celebrated line I was so much older then, / Im
younger than that now. Here, Dylan is not seeking freedom for the
whole universe but personal freedom, and rejecting lies that life is black
and white. In truth, the folk protest crowd had been tremendously
earnest (too grim for words according to Joan Baez20), old and grey
beyond their years. Dylans rediscovery of pop song, sweeping across the
Atlantic from Britain, must have returned him to that first thrill of
hearing Little Richard. Appropriately, the Dylan of the mid-60s rock
albums is younger looking than the craggy, stone-faced Dylan of The
Times They Are A-Changin. On Another Side of Bob Dylan, Dylan sounds
younger too.
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If My Thought-Dreams Could Be Seen

The next major song from this era to be considered, and one of the
very greatest songs written in the last century, is Mr Tambourine Man.
Dylan wrote Mr Tambourine Man after a visit to the New Orleans
Mardi Gras. Within the next year, he would pen a number of lengthy,
hallucinatory songs that gave a new breadth of expression to popular
song, particularly in terms of the words, building upon Chimes of
Freedom and A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall but taking things to even
greater extremes. Although plugging in at the Newport Folk Festival
would mark the decisive break with the folkies, it is clear from the
acoustic songs he was beginning to write that his mind had left topical
songs far behind. If Another Side of Bob Dylan had seen him deal with
sexual politics, the acoustic songs that date from the period immediately
afterwards, and which eventually appeared on Bringing It All Back Home,
find him delving deep inside his own consciousness, with the help of
mind-altering substances, and in doing so providing a lexicon for a new
generation that was ready to move beyond the simplistic, though
liberating, expressions of a Chuck Berry lyric, and beyond the stoicism of
the new folk movement.
Mr Tambourine Man was a quantum leap forward for Dylan and
for popular music, even before The Byrds married it to The Beatles
sound. The long runs of words, as Allen Ginsberg put it, are what
Dylan learned from the Beats; Dylan opens our eyes, and heightens our
senses with these astonishing chains of flashing images, visionary
glimpses of a world frozen in the spell of ancient music, like the ancient
bardic music of a William Blake poem, the music of the Tambourine
Man, Dylans mysterious muse.
It is inadequate to call Mr Tambourine Man a drug song. Drugs, of
course, may have helped Dylan open up his mind somewhat and be more
receptive to visionary inspiration, but they are not the author of the song.
It is interesting to note that scientists recently found traces of cocaine in
pipes unearthed near Shakespeares garden, yet nobody is about to call
Hamlet a drug play, or a sonnet like Sonnet 27, with its reference to a
journey in his head, of which Dylans smoke rings of my mind is
strongly reminiscent, drug induced.21 This is not the rambling of the
stoners mind, and if drugs helped at all, it was to open the doors of
perception and freeze the glimpse given therein. This is a song about a
visionary experience, and the term drug song goes little way towards
explaining its effectiveness.
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The Tambourine Man has echoes of the Pied Piper, whose music led
mortal children to a place beyond or outside of time, a place which in
one sense could mean death, but in another means timelessness and the
undying. So too in Yeats, we find another form of mythical trickster, the
fairies of Irish legend, whose music and magical dances lead human
children away from the mortal world in the poem The Stolen Child.
Mr Tambourine Man deals with just such a figure, one that is able to
transport the listener to a realm of timelessness; not to be permanently
out of the world, but for a time to be free of the sort of living death it
embodies.
The chorus serves to summon the Tambourine Man, and in a sense
this invocation of the ancient muse gives the singer the freedom to
wander, for verse after verse, through landscapes of the mind, following
the elusive minstrel, whose very name seems to invoke a visionary,
timeless state, and whose music seems to transform the ordinary
landscape into something alive with symbolist power. Time, the evenins
empire, has once again run through the speakers fingers like sand, as it
must do irretrievably in the end, just as everything we accumulate,
whether memories or material things, must eventually turn to sand on
times shore. The Tambourine Mans music, however, has the ability to
take him outside of time. Relieved of responsibilities, branded to the
spot, the speakers attention is led away from the barrenness of
civilisation (the ancient empty street not intending to evoke a sense of
immortal civilisation but rather decay and the great weight of
accumulated days and years), and he becomes one with the dance; his
body, that thing that must itself return to dust, is frozen where it stands,
while his mind and spirit travel upon the Tambourine Mans magic
swirlin ship, a vessel much like the fairy ships of folklore. Freed from
the finite prison of the senses, he is able to enter into the parade of his
own mind, to begin a dance like the fairy dances of Irish myth, tuned to
the ancient chord. The music of the tambourine is like a spell; it is a
music that is also the music of words, of poetry (skippin reels of
rhyme), the one indistinguishable from the other. This parade, this
dance, represents freedom, and it takes place all around the hearer of the
ancient music. The ragged clown, the Tambourine Man, is lord of the
dance, and it has to be said that if Dylans image of the poet comes from
Ginsberg, it is little wonder he calls him a ragged clown.
The final verse effects an elimination of self, and a negation of time;
we are journeying, with this ancient music, away from mortal realms (the
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If My Thought-Dreams Could Be Seen

foggy ruins of time expresses how finite, and how insubstantial, times
works are), past the frozen leaves of haunted, frightened trees, those
long-lived witnesses to so much of times works that have become
ghosts, to a place of pure mind and spirit. The destination, the beach
which puts us beyond the sorrow of generations, is beneath a diamond
sky (unchanging, a reflection of the sand on the shore, the eternal state of
all things); we have become shadows, smoke rings, our form silhouetted
by the sea (note how everything, reflecting everything else, becomes one).
The sea has swallowed memories and fate (fate being the individuals
entrapment within time), and it ironic that music, a most temporal art
form, has effected this change. The final line of the last verse comes
across as a surprising wish - let me forget about today until tomorrow but of course Dylan is going beyond the mere wish to live for today; he
is attempting an effacement of time itself and evoking a sense of true
timelessness.
Farewell Angelina is a song that, until the appearance of The Bootleg
Series, was not thought to have been recorded by Dylan; therefore, most
fans only became acquainted with it through the recording by Joan Baez.
It belongs, in theme and expression, with the songs on the second side of
Bringing It All Back Home. Behind the absurd, out of joint logic of its
verses, there is again a stress on music and dance, which is contrasted
with the human world, now viewed through some kind of nightmarish
looking glass, turned upside down and inside out. Grotesque images of
bandits, elves and cross-eyed pirates (a clever amalgam of the eyepatched pirate and skull and crossbones) represent our own, frighteningly
normal world in pantomime clothes, the poets role, being, of course, to
defamiliarise the ordinary and commonplace.
In the first verse, the speaker announces his need to follow the sound
of bells, like the pipers reed or the tambourine; here, however, the music
is from the crown of bells on the jesters hat. The jacks and the queens,
the suites of cards, may be taken to represent the men of power, the
Establishment or the ruling class, and the gypsies the counter culture
who have started to invade their palaces. The metaphor of a card game is
appropriate for this tactical struggle for power, and it extends into the
penultimate line, with the deft pun the sky is folding. The cross-eyed
pirates, who shoot tin cans while perched in the sun, may be white trash
Americans in disguise; citizens, then, much like the citizen in Joyces
Ulysses, whose vision was blinkered and whose blood boiled with selfrighteous nationalist fervour. Behind the absurdist logic of King Kong
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Like A Rebel Wild

and little elves dancing tangos on the rooftops there is something of our
penchant for ridiculous fantasy, while we try to hide from the bitter
truths that, once accepted, might liberate us (Shut the eyes of the dead /
Not to embarrass anyone). It seems that everything and everyone
conspires against us (puppets heave rocks sums up the manipulation of
men to fight in unjust wars), even time is booby trapped, in the
remarkable line fiends nail time bombs / To the hands of the clocks
(indeed, in our world of responsibilities, our time is organized and
demarcated to such an extent that it often appears to be so). And in the
recorded version, there is this striking line: What cannot be imitated
perfect must die. This seems a wonderfully concise encapsulation of the
theme of a poem by Ruth Ellison, Jealousy, which runs:
I put out my hand and plucked a rose,
A red satin rose with a velvet scent,
And chaliced its loveliness in reverent palms,
Knowing that it was perfect.
Then, because I could not make the rose,
And because I could not paint the rose,
Nor carve it, nor mould it,
Nor even draw its beauty in my words,
I slowly closed my fingers over it
And crushed it.22
Gates of Eden is among the most significant of these visionary
songs. It is, like Farewell Angelina, concerned with the need to find
truth in a world that needs to see its own nightmarishness in the glass.
Truth, in wartime and in peace time, twists and is twisted; even in times
of so-called peace the curfew gull, like Noahs dove, or the white dove
of Blowin in the Wind, cannot find dry land because there is no lasting
truce. The grotesque, distorted image of the cowboy angel, perhaps
representing the American patriot, is a twisted vision who, because so
inflated, rides on the clouds, and who, Prometheus-like, is audacious
enough to take his fire from the sun, of which the glow gives no light but
only blackness. Here is an angel with a candle that does not illuminate.
The verse introduces the idea of truths impossibility in our world; the
glow of the candle, however, is not black when beneath the trees of
Eden, meaning that truth exists and can be grasped there. The street
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If My Thought-Dreams Could Be Seen

scene, as I shall call it, with the lamppost that seems a kind of
transformed policeman, is full of jagged physicality and crashing
consonants, and is contrasted with the silence of the Gates of Eden. In
the next verse, there is a savage soldier, whose self-imposed blindness is
matched by the deafness of the shoeless hunter, the latter perhaps gone
deaf as a result of the formers complaints; both reside on the beach, deaf
and mute witnesses to the arrival of threatening ships (thus, then, no
witnesses at all, for the hound dogs alone raise the alarm). The collection
of characters in the next verse seems to represent religion, or the clergy,
just as the previous verses characters represented men of battle. The
compass blade, which is evidently used to point them to paradise, has
become rusted through time; all appear seekers after their own distorted
view of Eden (God or paradise), and Dylan terms them Utopian hermit
monks, lumping them with Aladdin, whose genies promise of wishes is
equally exaggerated and fantastical. Nonetheless, as Dylan well knows,
their empty promises of paradise are taken seriously, everywhere except
inside the Gates of Eden.
In the next verse we learn, unsurprisingly, that there are no kings
inside the Gates of Eden. Even relationships facilitate their own kind of
kingship, and all are in any case forms of ownership, and symbolise the
suppression of the individuals will (those condemned to act accordingly
may be slaves or self-created slaves, in that they willingly submit to
others). There are no sins inside the Gates of Eden, whereas in this world
there are enough people to pick up bread crumb sins, as if they need to
hear what, to them, is immoral; thus the grey flannel dwarf (dwarf is
perhaps less about size here than importance) is made to weep for the
sins of the black Madonna and silver-studded phantom. The wind, at
least, is precious, because it rots the kingdoms of Experience; in the
decay of time, we are all paupers, who desire what others have but can
own nothing; meanwhile, the princess and the prince are the ones who,
because their wealth is so exhaustive that they have nothing more to
desire, have the luxury to discuss the nature of reality, instead of simply
getting on with the business of living. What is real or unreal, another trap
of untruth, doesnt matter inside the Gates of Eden. The speaker can
never own even the bed he lies on; friends are strangers. Dylan advises
us, in the last verse, not to shovel these insights into a ditch of meaning,
so that the words lose their power; these words, and the absurd, illogical
images they paint, are the only true ones in a world that is patently so
absurd despite appearances. Only inside Eden are there truths. So what,
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then, does Dylan mean by Eden? The world is full of false Edens, and
people who try to impose their own restricted or false vision of absolute
truth on others; but Eden itself, the paradisiacal state of mind, lies in the
avoidance of such traps. If we do not concern ourselves with sin, with
the pursuit of paradise and absolute truth, and if we do not make
ourselves into kings or warriors to seek or uphold these absolute terms,
we may indeed be in Eden Eden, Dylan is saying, is a state of mind;
it is inside us.
The songs on the second side of Bringing It All Back Home were
recorded, astonishingly, in a single session, with Dylan warning the
technicians not to make any mistakes. It is amazing, then, to consider
that a song like Its Alright, Ma (Im Only Bleeding) should be nailed in
one take, given the sheer weight of words that come pounding out of
Dylans mouth. The focus he was capable of achieving in these early days
is startling.
Its Alright, Ma is in part a rejection of the naive values of the
protest movement, putting modern American life on the x-ray plate. The
only escape is to constantly remake the self: he not busy being born / Is
busy dying. The world is a place of human gods, motivated to kill for
private reasons, whilst capitalism makes the sacred into the profane in the
pursuit of money (flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark). Nothing
much has changed; goodness still hides behind its gates. Advertising
makes us believe we can achieve the impossible, and whenever we think
we can hide, people discover who we are, and seek to own us. The
dehumanising working life is summed up by For them that must obey
authority / That they do not respect in any degree / Who despise their
jobs, their destinies. Society, life in the rat race, bends us out of shape. It
is an extremely nihilistic song (Obscenity, who really cares /
propaganda, all is phony) in which the only honesty, other than the
honesty of death, is truth to oneself.
Its All Over Now, Baby Blue can be seen as a song sung to a past
lover, or to a movement, or to the poet himself: like the follower of the
Tambourine Man the speaker must leave his old self behind, he must
move onward to a highway for gamblers (a familiar life metaphor in
Dylan and the blues). To keep moving is to survive, and this is as much a
song of survival and rebirth as it is a song about endings.
If the second side of Bringing It All Back Home saw Dylans lyricism
advancing in leaps and bounds, the first side contained the greatest
surprises. Just in case the folk set were in any doubt where his loyalties
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If My Thought-Dreams Could Be Seen

lay, here was a whole side full of songs with electric backing. Dylan
would shortly appear at the Newport Folk Festival with the Paul
Butterfield Blues Band to truly bring the truth home. Subterranean
Homesick Blues and Maggies Farm were Dylans first experiments in
marrying a rhythm and blues sound to his surrealist lyrics. He was now
making the hippest sounds on the planet.
Subterranean Homesick Blues, the most celebrated of the electric
songs, is a kind of Baedeker guide to modern urban living, a survival kit
for the young. It is a song of nightmarish commitments, of prisons, of
enslavement and control. She Belongs to Me, in contrast, features a
subject who is nobodys child, whom the law cannot touch. The theme
that increasingly emerges, then, is that of two extremes, those who are
free, and those who are enslaved, and thus victims of society. Maggies
Farm is another song of enslavement, and Dylans refusal to serve, to do
his duty, can be taken any number of ways. It can be taken as a refusal to
serve a corrupt society, another anti-Establishment song, or even an
expression of Dylans divorce from protest.
The reaction to Dylans hijacking of Newport was one of betrayal.
The folk crowd, finally unable to deny that their messiah had switched
allegiances, were ready to crucify him, though even then some still held
on to their hope as long as Dylan held an acoustic guitar. After he was
roundly booed for playing a short electric set, the hostility of the crowd
was notably subdued when he was persuaded to return, tearful, for an
acoustic encore. Most famously, the electric portion of his Newport set
incensed Pete Seeger so much that he quite literally attempted to take
matters into his own hands by severing the power cables with an axe (this
story has been variously disputed but some still insist on its veracity).
Dylans encore at Newport can be seen as a bitter farewell to the
deification that the folk movement had sought for him.
On Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan embraced freedom. He blended
the complexity of literary language with rock, and began to create the
decades most vital popular music. He seemed to be driven to break new
ground, his nature mercurial, the archetypal Gemini, fleeing from the safe
and the comfortable, and from any system that tried to control him.
After helping to bring the folk revival to a mass audience, and at the
moment when it seemed the protest movement would facilitate even
greater social change through the countrys youth, Dylan revolted. He
ditched the old politics and adopted the role of rock icon. What his
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critics of the time did not know was that his music and his attitude would
bring about greater revolutionary change, at least for a short time.

62

CHAPTER FOUR
OTHER FORMS OF PSYCHIC
EXPLOSION
HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED AND BLONDE
ON BLONDE

s the new voice of rock music, Dylan embarked on a tour of

America, Europe and Australia, with a seasoned bar band wellaccustomed to hard knocks, the Hawks (later to become The
Band). The folk audience (particularly in Europe) still clung to the old
Dylan, and heckled through the tension-charged electric sets. They were
less inclined to cause a disturbance during the acoustic half of the show,
despite the fact that Dylan had long ditched anything resembling a
protest song. It was as if the fans had drawn a line beyond which their
idol could not step, and that line represented amplified instruments and a
pop group. To the folkies, pop music represented a commercial sell out.
These were not just concerts, they were a battle for the soul of a
generations spokesman.
A most interesting historical note is that, in the months after
recording Bringing It All Back Home, when he was in the midst of his last
solo tour in Europe, Dylan had apparently considered abandoning music
all together. His first foray into electric music had not satisfied him one
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presumes that he was not able to replicate the sounds inside his mind,
while his continuing acoustic tour obviously left him feeling unfulfilled. It
took Like a Rolling Stone, originating as a stream of consciousness
truth attack, a long-piece of vomit as he put it, to return him to the
fray.
The legend that Like a Rolling Stone was recorded in one,
spontaneous take was exploded on the release of The Bootleg Series Vols. 13. Nevertheless, it remains one of the best rock songs ever recorded, and
the first truly successful marriage of Dylans verbose power with exciting,
blues-based electric music.
It begins with that stock fairy tale opening, Once upon a time,
appropriately, because it deals with the fairy tale lifestyle of a high society
girl, a woman who has been perfectly secure and complacent, but now
has to learn to survive when she loses everything. This woman threw
the bums a dime, even though we presume she was in the position to
offer much more. She used to ride a chrome horse as the escort to a
diplomat, and obviously behind this lies the idea of her being on her high
horse. She has to come down off it.
Overwhelmingly, Like a Rolling Stone tells us that the street is
where its at. On one level, of course, the story may be about a high
society girl who loses everything and becomes homeless, but on another
this is Dylan saying that the street is where the hipsters are, where
experience is gained, where it is still possible to feel. In this context, the
mystery tramp takes on a similar aspect to the Tambourine Man, the
Ginsberg-like ragged clown or minstrel. Miss Lonely (as Dylan calls her,
alluding not to her present aloneness perhaps but her previous state of
loneliness, though in the midst of society) has to compromise, to make a
deal with him, in order to learn how to feel. Dylan is making her
acknowledge not just what she has lost (though there is a lot of
vindictiveness in the verses), but what she has to gain. She is invisible,
free, without the illusions and comforts she used to have, without the
alibis that her lifestyle provided her as a way of escaping real life and
genuine feeling. The mystery tramp is not selling alibis, hes selling the
real thing.
Like a Rolling Stone sees Dylan at his most verbally inventive,
brilliantly in control of language, rhyming words with real deftness,
mastering a conversational, hip style and marrying the words to
wonderfully optimistic, triumphant rock and roll music. It is a freedom
cry, addressed simultaneously to the privileged classes, to the
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Other Forms of Psychic Explosion

Establishment and the guardians of high culture, and to the hipsters who
know how it feels and enjoy the catharsis that the song offers.
Tombstone Blues displays similar long runs of words, breathlessly
delivered; again the Establishment are put through the ringer. Here, the
cast of characters from history and myth, thrown together in an absurd
universe, is a dry run for Desolation Row, the epic that closes the
album. American myth and Biblical myth coexist, and the song
showcases some of Dylans finest verbal gymnastics: The geometry of
innocence flesh on the bone / Causes Galileos math book to get thrown
/ At Delilah who sits worthlessly alone / But the tears on her cheeks are
from laughter.
Highway 61 Revisited begins with Abraham the patriarch, and
there is a sense that Dylans thoughts are returning to his Hibbing
upbringing, and to the Jehovah-like father figure who would sacrifice his
son on the altar of smalltown life. God the Father, Jehovah, the vengeful
Old Testament God and the patriarchs who serve him are all present in
the early songs, and may be representations of Abraham Zimmerman.
Living in Hibbing, Dylan clearly felt restricted by the lifestyle that was
being planned for him: like Abraham, his father was willing to sacrifice
his first-born to ritual conformity (note, too, that the Biblical Isaac was
the father of Jakob, the name Dylan gave to his own son). His expected
fate was to follow in his fathers footsteps: to take over the running of
the family store, to raise a family, to become a respectable part of the
Hibbing Jewish community. Yet even the Hibbing Jews, whilst proud of
their heritage from one point of view, felt the need to fit in: to adopt the
lifestyle of the gentiles, of the middle-classes, their relative prosperity
affording them a place in the community despite religious differences. As
today, religious life could be accommodated, and religious traditions
upkept, without intruding too much in the daily life of middle-class
affluence.
The opening lines of Highway 61 Revisited cannot fail to clarify
Dylans near escape at the hands of his father. Was this Jewish patriarch
so terrible? By all accounts, Abe Zimmerman was not an overbearing
father, and both parents were relatively tolerant of their son. Nor was
Bob the archetypal rebel: he did get a motorbike and adopt the Brando
image from The Wild One, but he was far from a teenage delinquent. But
perhaps it hardly matters that the Hibbing experience was not painful in
itself: Dylan was obviously the kind of vagrant spirit who could not
survive in a town like Hibbing. He had to take to the road. So when he
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Like A Rebel Wild

creates the image of the bloodthirsty Jehovah, voice booming out for
infant blood, he is perhaps railing at an idea: at the premonitory image of
himself as he might have been, his individuality sacrificed at the altar of
conformity. He was afraid, one can argue, of ending up like his decent,
tolerant, ordinary middle-class parents. Ironic, therefore, that Dylan was
soon to conform to the ideal of marital bliss by marrying and raising a
family in Woodstock.
Highway 61 itself is the great highway up which music from the
South found its way to the teenage Bob Dylan. The song has a large cast:
as well as Abraham the patriarch, there are two hobos, Georgia Sam and
Poor Howard, for whom the highway may mean deliverance; there is also
a salesman, with his patriotic shoestrings and faulty telephones, who is
told to peddle his wares out on the highway. In one verse, Dylan plays
with numbers, the names of the fifth daughter, first father, second
mother and so on sounding like the overcrowded cast of a play. War is
seen as entertainment to be promoted (foreshadowing Foot of Prides
businessman who sells tickets to a plane crash), and the third world
war is to be held, like some great concert, on Highway 61. The highway
is, it seems, the place where all fates wait, and to which everyone is
eventually drawn, as Dylan himself was when he wished to escape
Hibbing and Abraham.
Desolation Row belongs in the same category as the four acoustic
songs on Bringing It All Back Home. It has been described as Dylans Waste
Land. Like the promoter of the third world war in Highway 61
Revisited, there are people in Dylans apocalyptic landscape here who
profit from misery, in this case by selling postcards of a hanging. The
narrators announcement that the circus is in town is entirely
appropriate, since this is a carnival of freaks, but it also evokes the
travelling shows of Americas past, and the dusty old fairgrounds of
Dylans self-myth making. The commissioner, blind and in a trance, is
just another puppet performer for the mysterious they of the first two
lines, who are probably powerful authority figures; the riot squad in
search of a riot, meanwhile, is evidently the Establishments instrument
for enforcing the laws; the use of such draconian methods being more
than familiar in the America of the post-war era. The narrator, with Lady
by his side (the capital suggesting some representative figure), enters the
song at this point, in Desolation Row itself, a witness, as it were, from the
heart of the show.
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Other Forms of Psychic Explosion

Cinderella, here sexually liberated and attainable, not the faithful and
virginal sweetheart of a prince, is urbane enough to mimic the
mannerisms of Bette Davis, while Romeo, with his lovesick moans and
expressions of love as ownership, has clearly wandered in from a more
romantic age and is therefore banished. The sound of ambulances
accompanying Romeos departure hints at a grim fate for the idealistic
lover; furthermore, the sight of Cinderella sweeping up suggests the
aftermath of a theatrical performance, be it Shakespeare or pantomime,
which says a lot about Dylans view of modern love.
The enigmatic quality of Dylans image in the next verse helps to
create a mysterious, even threatening atmosphere; the fortune telling lady,
who takes her things inside, as well as the backdrop, looks ahead to the
very striking visual scene in Blind Willie McTell, with the hoot owl
moaning as they were taking down the tents. There, as here, we are
near the end of our times, and on the brink of apocalypse. Desolation
Row is, in a sense, a last stop before the deluge. The people are expecting
rain (suggestive both of the arrival of a Biblical Flood, which, however,
was unexpected to all except Noahs kin, and Eliots The Waste Land, with
its need for a more spiritual kind of rain). Just as Cinderella was far from
innocent, the Good Samaritan is also a disingenuous performer, getting
ready for the carnival, where, perhaps, he will put on a show of charity.
The world is a succession of masks, a performance, Dylan seems to be
saying.
The next to appear, Ophelia, seems herself to be a physical
embodiment of the kind of sterility Eliot was talking about (On her
twenty-second birthday / She already is an old maid) - clearly she is not
busy being born but busy dying. She has a romance going on with death,
evoking Pre-Raphaelite images of a perfect, doomed Ophelia as bride for
Death; her iron vest is her armour against touch, and she seems to view
virginity as a religion; curiously, her loyalties are divided between Noahs
rainbow (Gods promise that he would not flood the world again; there is
a another Flood coming, a Biblical apocalypse, but Ophelia places her
faith in Gods promise) and clandestine glimpses of Desolation Row. She
is looking, therefore, at some place beyond the deluge, her heaven or
deliverance, but cannot stop herself from being a part of this world, this
carnival. Appropriately, the rainbow was seen after the worlds drowning,
a cleansing, a rebirth. This recalls Eliots Death by Water, with its image
of the drowned god born anew. Ophelia is largely a figure who stands for
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Like A Rebel Wild

outmoded virtues, Victorian values one might say, particularly of chastity,
who is nevertheless drawn to worldly matters.
Einstein disguised as Robin Hood is a most ridiculous carnival figure,
a masked man who carries his memories round with him in a trunk; his
madness, if it is madness, of sniffing drainpipes and reciting the alphabet
belies the fact that he was once, long ago, famous for playing electric
violin on Desolation Row. What sort of figure would carry his memories,
as old baggage, round with him, as if they could be lost? One perhaps
who has been dispossessed, like the Jews fleeing Europe, whose suitcases
contained the mementos of their old lives (Robin Hood, of course, was
also stripped of his lands and his possessions). The idea of sterility we
previously saw in Ophelia and the people waiting for rain returns now in
the reference to Dr Filths sexless patients; Dr Filths senses are so
narrowed that he can keep his world inside a leather cup, as Einstein was
able to lock away his memories in a trunk; it is distressing that we reduce
our lives to such small dimensions. His assistant, a nurse who is
described as some local loser, has the laughable task of being in charge
of the cyanide hole and yet to also be the dispenser of mercy, through
cards that read Have Mercy on His Soul.
Across Dylans carnival street, the curtains are nailed up (like the
trunk and the world in a cup, private lives are jealously guarded). There is
to be a feast, and more figures appear on the stage - The Phantom of the
Opera dressed as a priest, Casanova, manipulated, spoon fed and then
destroyed by inflated self-confidence; like Romeo, these are romantic
lovers. Casanova, in the end, is a victim figure. Dylan is, of course,
writing about contemporary society, and the debasement of romantic
love. Modern sentimental romance literature, and indeed romantic pop
songs, spoon feed the young and impressionable minds that listen to
them, boosting their confidence, until, faced with the more difficult
reality of relationships, this confidence in the simplicity of attraction leads
to painful romantic deaths. Such is the gap between saccharine romantic
myths and the reality of modern love (essayed in the songs on Another
Side of Bob Dylan) that these words are a kind of poison, killing Casanova
with disappointments.
The next lines are as pertinent as ever: Now at midnight all the
agents / And the superhuman crew / Come out and round up everyone
/ That knows more than they do. When Dylan was writing this, the
McCarthy era witchhunts were a recent memory. The fate, for these
victims, is to be strapped to heart attack machines and covered with
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Other Forms of Psychic Explosion

kerosene. Desolation Row becomes a place to escape to; it is, arguably, a
place of refuge from the ordinary madness, though the perspective in the
song changes, so that we are never quite sure whether we are seeing
glimpses of Desolation Row from the inside or the outside, or whether it
is a place to escape to (the knowledge of desolation can be liberating,
perhaps; it is better to be conscious of the general collapse than to be a
victim), or to escape from.
The awaited Flood finally comes, and the Titanic sets sails upon it
(not very auspicious for the fate of mankind) in the songs most
celebrated verse; the black humour here is that the crew and passengers
are divided, and perhaps even beginning to set upon each other; the
demand, Which Side Are You On? must have appeared oppressive to
Dylan, who had rejected the black and white ideologies of the civil rights
movement. The Titanic is both the literary Establishment, doomed to lie
on the bottom of the ocean, and the Establishment broadly speaking;
two great American poets fight it out in the captains tower while their
ship goes to its doom. The street is where its at, the place where integrity
can be found these high cultural figures are mocked by calypso singers,
who have more cultural relevance, while fishermen hold flowers, symbols
of beauty, and mermaids flow beneath the sea; the lines here consciously
seem to echo lines from Eliots The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. . .
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.23
The fate of the Titanic is to rot away on the ocean bottom, where its
passengers and crew will not have to think too much about Desolation
Row.
The final verse gives the hint that the characters we have met were
people the narrator knows, people mentioned in a letter, but who have
been transformed into the songs grotesque caricatures. The last few lines
warn the sender of the letter not to write further, unless the letters are
from Desolation Row, lending weight to the interpretation that
Desolation Row is the real state of contemporary society, but that the
majority of people cannot see the true condition of things. Dylan is
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Like A Rebel Wild

therefore writing about a society blind to its own imminent destruction;
modern America is the Titanic indeed. To look out from Desolation Row
is to reach the point of realisation where one recognises the state were
in, and is liberated by the knowledge. The narrator, thus, only welcomes
letters written from that same place.
Highway 61 Revisited took rock to new heights. The contemporary
work by The Beatles and The Beach Boys seemed nave by comparison.
Dylan was more knowing, more caustic, and more inspired than anyone
else. By this time, he had no real peers, and the competitiveness that fired
his rivals did not affect him. As a rock poet and visionary opening new
windows of thought and experience, Dylan was all alone. In terms of the
music, he was never in a position to compete with the studio-bound
experimentalism that The Beatles and The Beach Boys were shortly to
embark on, nor perhaps was he interested in trying. Still, the sounds he
was producing were revolutionary, and it is important to remember that
his pioneering work on this album and its predecessor predate the age of
sonic experimentalism.
It is odd to think that the follow-up, Blonde on Blonde, was recorded in
Nashville, the conservative home of country music. The album has an
extraordinary sound which Dylan termed thin wild mercury. According
to him, Blonde on Blonde came closest to the sounds he was hearing in his
head at this time. Indeed, there is a warmth to the bands playing that
seems to caress the listener, an internal harmony and logic to the music
that is quite at odds with the chaos of Dylans touring lifestyle at this
time. Stoned it is, but the album represents a particular calm within the
storm musically and lyrically. Despite glimpses of the turbulence, there
seems to be real tenderness here, glimmerings of redemption, a long way
from Desolation Row.
Rainy Day Women 12 & 35, the demented brass band opening, is
delightfully playful, a parody of straightness, a shambling, stoned march
on which the musicians exchanged instruments to maintain a loose feel.
Its a world away from the shout for attention of Like a Rolling Stone.
The ambiguous lyric, with its play on the two meanings of getting stoned,
foreshadows the hostile reception Dylan would get in Britain. The song
sounds like a prank, as if a bunch of naughty schoolchildren have
hijacked the recording studio; nevertheless it is a measure of Dylans
confidence, and an indication of the strength of the material he had
stored up in the recording sessions, that he chose to open in such a lighthearted style. The essential message of Rainy Day Women 12 & 35
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Other Forms of Psychic Explosion

seems to be that no matter how life sucks sometimes, take comfort in the
fact that you are not alone. It is a warm gesture, and there is more
warmth to be found on this record.
The languid blues of Pledging My Time opens with a worrying
glimpse into Dylans mental state, and the pressures that must have been
pulling him this way and that; sleeping hardly at all, fuelled by speed pills,
he must indeed have had a poison headache from morning till night. But
there is a kinship in his pledge to the songs subject, who, it seems, is
living through the same experience.
Visions of Johanna was voted Dylans greatest ever song in a poll
by readers of Dylan fanzine The Telegraph. Until the 90s, its history of live
performances was a famished one, and perhaps this contributed to its
enduring appeal somewhat. It is a spellbinding song, a much calmer,
more dreamlike prospect than Desolation Row. It is as if Dylan had
learned how to capture in sound and music the state of paradoxically
restless stillness he achieved lyrically in Mr Tambourine Man. Fans
who have lived with the song for years will know that, whilst it is difficult
to pin down some of its meanings, the songs total effect is
overwhelming; you are never in any doubt, on a subconscious and
emotional level, about what Dylan is communicating. It is a feeling, the
feeling between dream and waking, where time seems to have been
cheated.
We can imagine that the inspiration for the song came from Dylans
experience of the road, and it is easy to picture him mellowing out after
playing a concert, coming down from an amphetamine trip, which is
when the visions come. Stranded in a hotel room, he gets the thought
that we are all stranded, that nobody is really going anywhere. But the
night plays tricks, it has the power to induce visions, to perform magic.
There is a long history of like enchantment in literature. Under the
moonlight, the lovers and mechanicals of Shakespeares A Midsummer
Nights Dream found themselves bewitched and transformed. In Dylans
midsummer night spell, the first of the visions defies logic, but, our
perspective changed, we know it is true: Louise does hold rain in her
hand; our powers of reason, our logic, which Dylan rejects as a form of
controlled reality, cannot defy what we see. The heat pipes,
anthropomorphized, cough politely in the background as Louise and her
lover become one, so entwined. Ladies indulge in night time games out
in the empty parking lot, and all-night girls speak of the romance of the
rails. What is being evoked here is a striking sense of place, an urban
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landscape transformed by the night, where lost boys and all-night girls
live out their fantasies, and where the night watchman, symbol of
ordinary folk, catches only fleeting glimpses of these nocturnal
happenings, his flashlight being symbolic of his restricted vision. Louise
may be the singers lover, but he dreams of another, Johanna. The
second verse encapsulates the maxim, If you cant be with the one you
love, love the one youre with. However, the narrator cannot banish the
visions of Johanna, and Louise seems like a mirror, too close perhaps,
able to do nothing but reflect the narrator back to him, as a person
without a very developed sense of self; she is not the distant, moon lover
Johanna is. In fact, Louise cannot help but remind the narrator of the
obvious: that Johanna is absent. Louise, too, seems to be conquered by
visions of Johanna: The ghost of lectricity howls in the bones of her
face, in Dylans great phrasing - she is just too real, too much flesh and
bone and nerve endings, not like the absent dream woman.
Little boy lost may be indicative of the stranded state of mankind; his
position, however, seems a pose, and he too is haunted by Johanna, and
Johannas intimacy with the narrator. The reference to the museums,
where Infinity goes up on trial, indicates Dylans view of a civilisation
that is obsessed with recording its own decay (you imagine that there is
no place Dylan would less rather be than in a museum). He compares it
with the idea of salvation, the religious state of mind, another species of
decay or mental slavery. It is much the same in the art galleries: Mona
Lisas secret smile reveals that she must have had some experience of the
highway, of the hipsters life, despite the fact that her portrait has been
appropriated by the conservative art establishment and is hanging in
another place of lifelessness. Life, then, is set at odds with death; the
living world of the highway is contrasted with the dead world of staid
cultural values, just as the visionary Johanna is contrasted with Louise,
who is just too mortal, tainted with decay. It seems that we are still in the
museums or galleries when we come to the jelly-faced women, the
primitive wallflower, and the obscure jewels and binoculars hang from
the head of the mule. There is the sense that the narrator has wandered
into some city art gallery, staring at works that once stemmed from the
same vital source as outlaw music and the blues, though now they are left
to rot.
Pretence, role playing, hollow values and expectations, all come to
the fore in the last verse: a countess plays at being charitable to a peddler,
Madonna is absent, her cage still empty, where she had performed in her
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stage clothes. The fiddler returns to the highway, and we end with the
image of skeleton keys and the rain, encapsulating the songs main
symbols (the phrase returns us to the bones of Louises face, the key
chain, and the rain Louise holds in her hand). The key is a symbol of
escape, the key to the highway, to cars or trains that will offer escape
from ordinary life; the skeleton a symbol of decay and mortality: like the
museums, full of works that have decayed, people are decaying too,
becoming hollow bones. As for rain, it serves the same symbolic purpose
it served in Eliots The Waste Land. It quenches spiritual and mortal thirst,
and for Dylan it is something that, at this stage of his life, women seemed
to be able to offer him. We should remember, too, that this is the city on
a stiflingly hot summer night, so hot that the heat pipes in the room gasp
for air, and rain is sorely needed.
One of Us Must Know is one of those twisted relationship songs
Dylan was becoming master at, and its chorus aims for, but does not
achieve, the same kind of release Like a Rolling Stone offered.
Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat (even the title cries to be noticed, and
nearly topples over in excess) is a parody of fashion crazes, in which the
object of desire appears to be less a woman than a piece of headwear. It
continues in the spirit of Rainy Day Women 12 & 35, and is one of
Dylans most amusing and grotesque songs. Obviously Five Believers
and Temporary Like Achilles hark back to the blues records Dylan is
obviously so enamoured of, but whereas the structure is familiar, the hip
lyrics and warm interweaving of instruments with Dylans voice and
harmonica elevate the songs to a much higher plane. Fourth Time
Around is perhaps the albums least characteristic song, largely because
it is a Beatles parody, echoing Norwegian Wood (itself allegedly written
about Joan Baez).
Sad-Eyed Lady of The Lowlands is another of the albums
masterworks, a song written for Dylans muse, his new bride Sara
Lowndes (or so the 1975 song Sara asserts). There is some
resemblance between its structure and Ginsbergs Kaddish, attempting,
and ultimately failing, to encompass the subjects every nuance, her spirit,
in verse (like Kaddish, the present song is essentially a long list). The
narrators muse figure is defined, repeatedly, by her exoticness, her
alienness, her refusal to go with the flow or be categorised. She exists in
all times, and at all places. She is pagan in the time of Christianity (your
mercury mouth in the missionary times, pagan messenger in an
emerging world of Christian evangelism). In fact, everything about her is
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strange, other, her very actions effecting protean changes on the world of
matter, transforming the everyday. What strikes us about her is her
otherness in a world which Dylan delineates as terrifyingly conformist yet
deceiving, a world of disguises where hope has been lost. Dylans words
often distort, themselves bringing about a protean change, so that reality
is unmasked. The muse figure of this song does that by her very
presence, and by her movements. To paraphrase Leonard Cohen, she
stems from the place where poetry stems from, she has the same ability
to transform reality.24
The lowlands is where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man
comes, a landscape without hope for redemption, without a messiah.
For Dylan at this point, the messiah is, without exaggeration, woman.
My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums, / Should I leave them by your
gate seems to be Dylan saying, although I am not worthy, may I serve
you?. Her geranium kiss is further proof that Dylan has been reading
Eliot, and indeed there is much in the quality of the images, in their
conciseness and evocativeness, that reminds us of Portrait of a Lady or
certain stanzas of The Waste Land. There are some remarkable images,
such as the childhood flames on your midnight rug, and there are also
glimpses of autobiographical detail for Sara (your magazine-husband
who one day just had to go). This is perhaps the prime example of
Dylans muse as mystical woman, alluring and otherwordly, the muse of
One More Cup of Coffee and countless other songs.
For Dylan, before the late 70s at least, women were saviours. In the
early 60s they offered temporary refuge from a life of travelling, to be
forsaken in the morning when the freedom of the road beckoned once
more. When Sara came into his life and he retreated to Woodstock,
woman became a permanent refuge. She was the dutiful wife, almost the
domestic madonna, though still in possession of her sexual charms. At
the time of his meeting Sara, and in the mid 70s especially, Dylans
women were mysterious, divine or semi-divine, the intercessors between
man and god or even divine beings themselves. In one case the goddess
Isis becomes Dylans bride, in whom he finds comfort when the search
for material gain proves fruitless. They were like the priestesses of
Apollo, sibylline, possessors of esoteric knowledge. The writer Albert
Holl uses the term God-filled woman to describe the sibyls who had
the monopoly on divine knowledge.25 These women were not simply
intercessors between people and gods: some of their gods divinity
obviously rubbed off on them. Divine women held the key to the
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worship of the mother goddess - the earth mother, goddess of fertility,
like Ceres in Greece and Isis in Egypt. The New Testaments Mary
became the model of virtuous womanhood, less mystical at first, but
eventually attaining her own kind of divinity through the years in the
Catholic tradition. Mary was the ideal of womanhood for the medieval
troubadours, and it is these bards, as well as more ancient ones, that
addressed women in the kind of pseudo-religious terms that would so
greatly influence later generations, and to whom Dylan owes his
allegiance in Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. The women these
troubadours addressed were usually married and out of reach, and
therefore their courtly love was invariably platonic. Dylan is hardly being
platonic, but his sad-eyed lady does come across as divine, someone on a
higher plane than ordinary folk.
We should note, before moving on, that Dylan also depicts woman as
a daughter of Eve, an agent of temptation, and that therefore there are a
number of femme fatales, divine-demonic women in his songs. The
conception of a madonna of the hearthside, rooted in Victorian values,
desexualized and therefore removed of her demonic qualities, is no less
misogynistic a concept than her demonic counterpart. Thus there are
certain feminine attributes that are constant throughout art, allowing us
to break down the delineation of women into binary poles. We have
purity, sanctity, maternity (the mother-virgin-madonna pole), but we also
have sexuality and appetite, witchcraft and mysticism, temptation (the
whore-witch-Lilith pole). Divinity in Dylans women figures may
encompass both.
If Sara is such a divine-demonic woman, a sibylline priestess with
prayers like rhymes, offering prophecies straight from the Gods
mouth, she is also depicted as a chaste, virtuous woman, perhaps a nun,
with silver cross, one who rings the hollow chimes. She combines
the two kinds of woman, the madonna and the witch, the divine and the
demonic. The sad-eyed lady seems to be a woman made up of all kinds
of different women; she embodies all the women who have gone before
her, and she exists within and yet outside of time. She is the eternal
feminine, and this song is Dylans prayer to her.
Elsewhere on Blonde On Blonde, Dylans wit is, at times, a joy to
behold, as in Well, the hobo jumped up, / He came down naturlly and
And if it dont work out, / Youll be the first to know. Dylan has his
eye fixed sardonically on the harshness of urban existence, and his
humour breathes new life into the old blues ideology about lifes cruelty:
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Well, they sent for the ambulance / And one was sent. / Somebody got
lucky / But it was an accident. His urban wit is in evidence in One of
Us Must Know, where he says: I didnt mean to treat you so bad / You
shouldnt take it so personal (callous, or simply far ahead of its time, and
still far more honest than many of todays songs). The song sounds like a
confession and a defence, with the narrator able to see things from both
sides at once. Thus: You just did what youre supposed to do and I
really did try to get close to you. Dylan proves himself a master of irony
and comic inflation: An I told you, as you clawed out my eyes / That I
never really meant to do you any harm. Just who is the victim here? In
real relationships, it is not easy to tell. Its songs like these that make the
album such a pleasure, and with the exception of Sad-eyed Lady of the
Lowlands, Stuck Inside of Mobile and perhaps Visions of Johanna
it is clear that Dylan is already moving beyond the writing of long, grave,
wordy epics.
Soon after the recording of Blonde on Blonde, Dylan took his new stage
act to Europe and played some of the most legendary concerts in rock
history. The concerts were a clash between fans of the so-called protest
Dylan and the new rock Dylan, who some viewed as a sell-out to
commercial pop music. It was as if the booing and cat-calling were a part
of the act. Dylans reaction was one of courageous self-belief and
defiance. The tears of Newport were far behind him; he sang his new
electric songs with rage and sarcasm, sometimes responding to hecklers,
taking part in a kind of interactive gladiatorial theatre, where the prize
was individual freedom. Most famously, he responded to a cry of Judas
in Manchester (the word the perfect conduit for the surging feelings of
anger the folk crowd harboured for his new music) with a snarling: I
dont believe you! Youre a liar! The ensuing version of Like a Rolling
Stone, captured on a bootleg for years wrongly labelled The Royal
Albert Hall Concert, left no doubt about his position and his feelings
he was angry, certainly, but he also felt that he had something to teach his
audience.
The 1966 European tour was just part of a much longer concert tour
that Dylans manager Albert Grossman had planned. However, it all
came to an abrupt halt when Dylan returned to Woodstock and suffered
a motorcycle accident. He was left with a broken neck vertebrae, and it
has long been speculated that the period of extended convalescence
saved his life.
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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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love movement started a pilgrimage to the West Coast; flower power
took hold of the nation, and Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band became
the soundtrack to hedonistic excess. Even the cries of the protest crowd
had subsided. This was the summer of the beautiful people, the
movement Dylan had helped create, and it was no wonder he went into
hiding.
According to Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane, the new lyrical
sophistication in rock had come about as a kind of spontaneous eating of
paradises apple, and was not the result of Dylans transgressive genius.26
In truth though, songwriters only felt the freedom to mine their inner
consciousness because Dylan had given it to them in the first place.
During this time, the generation gap was a new concept, and sons and
daughters moved beyond their parents command. There was a
desperation, not a calm, behind these expressions of peace and love, an
anxiety behind the cool. Round the corner lay Manson, Altamont, and
the end of the hippy dream.
Dylan went to ground, holed up in Woodstock, strapping himself to a
tree with roots. He had to find himself again, learn to do consciously
what he used to do unconsciously. For a time, it looked as if he had
abandoned music altogether, but eventually it came to light that he had
been writing and recording songs with members of The Band in the
basement of a house known as Big Pink. The quality was relatively poor,
the recording equipment being a low-grade reel-to-reel tape recorder, but
the informal nature of the sessions, and the relaxed, playful performances
more than compensate. The first the public got to hear of these songs
was on an acetate, recorded for demo purposes with the intention that
other artists could record the songs. When illegally pressed into vinyl, this
became known as The Basement Tape, widely regarded as the first
bootleg recording. This, it turns out, was merely the tip of the iceberg, for
dozens of other recordings were made of traditional numbers, blues,
spirituals, rock and roll, and original pieces whose most characteristic
feature was their playfulness and absurd, sometimes child-like lyrics. The
Basement Tapes, as they came to be called, provided the bridge between
Blonde on Blondes astonishing acid rock, and John Wesley Hardings equally
astonishing ascetic, mythical songs.
The only version of The Basement Tapes that has been officially
available all these years is the Columbia double disc set overseen by The
Bands Robbie Robertson, and released in 1975. This has been rightly
criticized by fans because it offers a rather distorted and incomplete
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Drifters Escape
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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other original numbers. While This Wheels on Fire is apocalyptic in
tone, Tears of Rage, a tale of family hardship, displays a new maturity
and tenderness in Dylans writing that perhaps could only have come
from the experience of fatherhood and becoming a family man.
Songs like You Aint Going Nowhere and Too Much of
Nothing are more characteristic of the light-heartedness on display at
Big Pink; both contain absurd lyrics and nonsense rhymes. The sense one
gets when listening to these recordings is that Dylan is blissfully free of
the weight of expectation that must have been such a burden through the
most turbulent years of his early stardom. He sounds as if he can say
anything, because no ones listening, much like Ginsberg claims to have
felt before developing his own distinctive style of first thought, best
thought. These are games, of course, but the really telling thing is that
Dylans pranks are priceless: he was able to create art of significance out
of absurd material.
The Basement Tapes would not see official release for several years,
adding mystique to the Big Pink recordings; because of this, John Wesley
Harding, when it appeared at the end of 1967, seemed an astonishing
change of direction. On this record, Dylan was so straight he was hip.
Where Highway 61 Revisited had had the chaos of the previous two years
of Dylans life etched into its grooves, John Wesley Harding was calm, stoic,
traditional, rural music. It was a bold step. The album was born out of
Dylan and The Bands immersion in pre-Woody Guthrie folk music, as
well as their identification with western outlaw myths. The fact that
Dylan was mining The Bible for material is also obvious from the
number of Biblical references and even Biblical characters that crop up.
While album covers from the period are generally bursting with
colour, the cover of John Wesley Harding, with its sepia picture of Dylan
surrounded by the Bauls of Bengal, like figures out of another time, is
strikingly stark and monochrome; this extends to the music too. It was an
album which bewildered many at first, but nevertheless went on to
become hugely influential, starting a minimalist, roots-driven craze (The
Beatles, too, stripped down their sound on The White Album, the cover of
which is as monochrome as it comes, while The Rolling Stones retreated
from the excess of Their Satanic Majesties to make the rootsy Beggars
Banquet). Especially when Jimi Hendrix turned up the apocalyptic volume
on his version of All Along the Watchtower, the importance of the
album was felt.
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Drifters Escape
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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west and imagined what the landscape had been like before it changed.
The fact that John Wesley Harding was never known / To hurt a honest
man crystallises the kind of heroic myth that John Wayne stood for in
the movies of John Ford; a formidable executor of justice, but always on
the side of right, even if the law didnt always see it that way. The men
who are gunned down in the western films of Dylans youth are
invariably deserving of their fate; good men are never killed by mistake,
at least not by the hero. There is a contradiction between the friend of
the poor and the gunslinger, but the contradiction is there intact in
countless western films, and Dylan is merely highlighting this, without
ironic intention, by juxtaposing the two images in the first verse. In the
landscape of the mythic west, it is indeed impossible to serve justice by
any means other than the gun.
Stories, myths, tend to accompany such figures, and Dylan refers to
one in particular, an incident in Chaynee County, though we are not
given any details, and the outcome is expressed in the vaguest terms.
Why does he do this? It could be that the songs brevity does not allow
for detailed exegesis. More likely, he wants this to stand as broadly
representative of Hardings just actions. Still, the lines soon the situation
there / Was all but straightened out is terrific understatement. Western
stories do not tend to be about pacifist actions, or acts of mediation.
They are about duels, gunfights, absolute good and bad. Dylan is
obviously reducing the violence quotient, which means that we have to
admit to a certain unresolved tension in the song between the brutal
reality of the western outlaw and the romanticised myth. The fact that
Harding takes a stand with his sweetheart beside him has been seen as
evidence that Dylan is keen to deconstruct the outlaw; surely Gary
Cooper or John Wayne would not have allowed their sweethearts to
stand beside them whilst the guns were blazing? But Dylan has already
been talking in very broad terms. There is no specific locus, no scene
which we are offered where we can imagine Harding facing his accusers
with his girl clinging to his arm. Rather, we are to imagine the kind of
romantic image one would see on a western film poster, where the girl
invariably is clinging to the arm of the hero, sometimes even whilst he
wields his gun against his enemies. Again, Dylan is not concerned with
the reality, but the myth. The song has a minimum of realistic detail, and
that is true of this verse especially. He spares us the bloody bits - like an
old western, the opponents fall with a minimum of fuss, the important
thing being that things are straightened out, justice is done.
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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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falsehood and frivolous talk, it is necessary to realise that life is not a
joke, and to talk truthfully, as Dylan had been doing.
The backdrop to many of the songs was the uncharted landscapes of
frontier America, where the settlers brought their Calvinist beliefs, and
legends were formed. The vastness of the Midwest deserts, and the harsh
measures taken to survive, reminded these pilgrims of Biblical figures and
their struggle for existence in hostile gentile lands. The peasants of Judah
had tilled the land for foreign overlords, and would have identified with
the Joker of All Along the Watchtower, who complains Businessmen,
they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth. The settlers, too, had had
their fair share of hardship at the hands of foreign oppressors.
God and his servants seem ever present on this album. There is the
eponymous subject of The Wicked Messenger, whose tongue contorts
the truth, and also no less a figure than St. Augustine, one of the
Churchs most influential thinkers, who appears as the subject of Dylans
dream vision in I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine. The story of the
drifter in Drifters Escape, meanwhile, matches point for point the
passion of Christ, Christ who effected that greatest of great escapes by
vanishing from the grave. God appears in person in I Pity the Poor
Immigrant, looking down with pity on man, whose visions in the final
end / Must shatter like the glass, and he is the addressee in Dear
Landlord, implored to consider the narrators case when judgement
comes.
Dylans marriage to Sara, and the quiet family life he enjoyed in
Woodstock, obviously provided the stability needed to produce an album
like this, but, for the moment, there was no loss in artistic quality;
complacency had not yet set in. The last two songs on the album, Down
Along the Cove and Ill Be Your Baby Tonight offered a foretaste of
what was to come: lightweight love songs, sentimental country rock,
though to be fair these tracks are more palatable than some of the more
clichd moments of Nashville Skyline, and in no way impair the albums
impact.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can look back on John Wesley
Harding as the last great work of Dylans most productive period. After
this, as he learned to do consciously what he had once done
unconsciously, something was lost. True, his genius would return in full
strength for Blood on the Tracks and fleetingly on tracks like Every Grain
of Sand, Blind Willie McTell, and Ring Them Bells. But no longer
would he be infallible; no longer would he teach us the way to see.
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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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disappointingly straight progression from the previous album, but with a
high quota of cover versions. Perhaps the title upset people, with its
promise of a personal statement from such a major artist, and selfpainted cover. In the context of Dylans whole career, and with the
hindsight that he was to rediscover his genius four years later, the album
is not that bad, but there is hardly enough of quality to justify a double
album. The best songs are cover versions (Copper Kettle, Belle Isle);
even the opening All the Tired Horses, which sounds repetitive for the
first few plays, becomes endearing. The interest in the roots of American
folk music that produced The Basement Tapes is evident here, but the edge
has gone. The sort of beauty Dylan claimed to have first recognised in
the voice of Joan Baez (attested in the liner notes to Joan Baez in Concert,
Volume 2) is what he is pursuing here; it is more wholesome, homespun
and safe than his previous flirtations. Of course, with the knowledge that
he was eventually to return to the wilderness and rekindle his artistic
fires, Self Portrait is charmingly innocuous and, taken at the right time,
hugely enjoyable. The problem at the end of the decade was that it
seemed like this was all there really would be, the end of a journey, not a
stopping-off point (much the same as with the music of the Christian
conversion). This kind of stuff is, unfortunately, the sum of many
popular artists careers. For Dylan, book-ended by John Wesley Harding
and Blood on the Tracks, the country phase grows by virtue of its context in
the larger body of work. You come to accept it as you get older for what
it is.
The record that followed, New Morning, was initially received as a
triumphant return to form by some, and then mostly forgotten about. It
was a relief, at least, to get an album of Dylan compositions again, and
the writing was better than anything since John Wesley Harding. But it is a
minor work, with more expressions of rural harmony and blissful
idleness (though this was the time that he moved his family back to New
York). There is a nostalgia in evidence, too, for past years, that would
fully surface on Planet Waves. If Not for You, the opener, is startlingly
naive when considered next to the awareness displayed in love songs like
All I Really Want to Do. Yet it is too harsh to consider it a pose: one
would have to be hard hearted not to identify with the sentiment of
Time Passes Slowly and Sign on the Window. The language is
simple, but direct, not dishonest, expressing sincere wishes: Build me a
cabin in Utah, / Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout / Have a bunch of
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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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This was also the period when his Columbia recording contract
expired, bringing him to the doors of David Geffens Asylum label. A
new studio album, Planet Waves, and a concert album, Before the Flood, were
released on the new label, while Columbia retaliated spitefully by
releasing a second rate collection of leftovers from the Self Portrait and
New Morning sessions, which they sarcastically titled Dylan. Since Dylan
did not sanction its release, it is perhaps better to ignore it altogether,
though it does contain a couple of passable versions of songs associated
with Elvis.
Despite the thinness of Dylans recorded output, his legend grew and
grew. His return to New York only stirred up trouble for his family when
an obsessed fan, A.J. Weberman, started turning up outside his home and
accusing him of selling out; driven by conspiracy theories, and convinced
that Dylans lyrics contained a secret code that confessed to his selling
out to the Establishment and a dependency on narcotics, Weberman also
began sifting through Dylans garbage for clues, inventing garbology in
the process. Dylan and Weberman eventually had some hostile
confrontations, with Dylan even going so far as to offer Weberman a job,
apparently sincerely, but the garbologist would not be placated. On
Dylans 30th birthday, Weberman organised a protest outside the Dylans
family home. It must have become clear to Dylan that he could not go
back to living like he had in the early days of the Village; retreating to
Malibu and his own private Xanadu, he cut ties with the old village crowd
for good, the Rolling Thunder Revue excepted.
The concert tour reunion with The Band marked the first signs that
he was restless, that domestic ties could not keep him much longer.
When advertisements were placed in the press for the national tour, there
were a record number of ticket applications. Though he later described it
as an emotionless trip, it proved, at least, that his legend had in no way
suffered from the silence and the inadequacies of his recent albums. The
souvenir album, Before the Flood, however, sees Dylan and The Band going
through the motions, without any of the real brilliance of their tour of
Europe and Australia in 1966.
Planet Waves, his studio album recorded with The Band, contained
subtle indications that all was not well with his domestic life. Another
minor work, though marginally better than New Morning, it has songs that
hark back wistfully to his early years in Hibbing and Duluth (rather
stylized, if the truth be told; the outtake Nobody Cept You was a more
honest, suggestive evocation of childhood years). Dylan, in fact, has
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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.

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90

CHAPTER SIX
WHAT THE BROKEN GLASS
REFLECTS
BLOOD ON THE TRACKS TO STREET
LEGAL

n 1974, Dylan heard about a man called Norman Raeben.28 A

Russian emigrant, Raeben taught painting, and in the spring of 1974
Dylan visited the artists studio and began a period of apprenticeship
under him. Although elusive about Raebens identity, Dylan has claimed
(during interviews he gave to promote Renaldo & Clara) that the painter
changed him, to the extent that afterwards his wife no longer understood
him. After struggling to call on the artistic gifts that previously had come
so easily, it was Raeben who helped unlock the door:
He put my mind and my hand and my eye together, in a way
that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt.29
Though it may have been simple coincidence that brought Dylan into
contact with someone who held the key to his artistic rebirth, it seems
highly likely that Dylan himself had wrought the change, and was
consciously seeking an opportunity to express himself away from the
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comforts of the home. At the core of this change was the concept of no
time. Dylan told Jonathan Cott:
Youve got yesterday, today and tomorrow all in the same room,
and theres very little that you cant imagine happening.30
In the key Blood on the Tracks songs, particularly the longer, wordier
epics, persons and events dissolve into one another; the past, present and
future flow into one. Dylan intended that listening to the album should
be like looking at a painting. Of Tangled Up in Blue, he said:
I was just trying to make it like a painting where you can see the
different parts but then you also see the whole of it. With that
particular song, thats what I was trying to do . . . with the
concept of time, and the way the characters change from the first
person to the third person, and youre never quite sure if the third
person is talking or the first person is talking. But as you look at
the whole thing, it really doesnt matter.31
Dylan is not the first artist who has tried to push their art beyond normal
concepts of time. The modernists tried to escape the nightmare of
history by retreating to the long perspective of myth, the attraction of
mythic time being the truth of archetypes and cyclic repetition. Samuel
Beckett christened the concept of no time in plays like Waiting for
Godot. For William Blake, it was necessary for the artist-prophet to see
beyond the veil of finite things, and into the immutable realm of eternity.
Dylan, however, wants to change our perspective of ordinary human
experience; to help us understand that time itself is illusory. From the
first song on Blood on the Tracks, he presents us with the tangled skein of
past, present and future and human relationships, all of which make up a
life.
In the 60s, Dylan had thrived on conflict. The impetus for Blood on
the Tracks appeared to be the conflict between the need to maintain the
life of a husband and father, and the need to return to the road, to be a
musician again. Clearly, something began to give when, for the 1974 tour,
he once again put on the mantle of rock superstar. The subject of the
new songs became the dissolution of his marriage, and the antagonism
between the romance of the road and the comforts of the hearthside,
shelter versus exile, a subject which had interested him from the
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What the Broken Glass Reflects

beginning. On Blood on the Tracks, Dylans mood went through jarring
shifts; he sounded tender, caustic, desperate. He wanted to take refuge in
the past and flee from it at the same time. The songs displayed new
breakthroughs in Dylans language: it was sharper, more concise, intimate
and yet infinitely suggestive. The long drought was over.
Just as Like a Rolling Stone begins with the stock storytelling
phrase Once upon a time, so Tangled Up in Blue begins with
another, only marginally less common phrase: Early one mornin. It is
ironically apt that Dylan should choose to begin two of his most
revolutionary, forward-glancing songs with such well-worn phrases. The
song begins with a character remembering the past he shared with a
woman he has now lost; from here, we apparently plunge into the flow of
the characters memories. In concert, Dylan has tirelessly reworked the
song, sometimes under the auspices that he didnt record it right in the
first place; this version, however, remains the definite one to most. In
performance, he plays around with the pronouns, and changes the details
of the memories; the result, for one who has access to the tapes, is that
this song especially does not exist in memory in a single fixed form, but
rather in all its different forms at once, resisting closure, achieving the
kind of picture quality that Raeben had taught him. Its fluid nature, the
way scenes and people dissolve and re-emerge, reminds one of the
unreliability of memory. The female remains as slippery, as out of reach
as the memories. At times it seems that the narrator and the woman
recognise each other as past lovers, at other times it seems they are
meeting for the first time; there is also the sense that the narrator and the
protagonist are the same person, the one who has the relationship with
the woman/women; whereas later they seem distinct from each other, as
we are forced constantly to change our perspective. The narrator seems
to step outside of himself, so to speak, as if his story belonged to
another. The obvious parallel, of course, are the identity games of Renaldo
& Clara.
Scores of interpreters have sifted the lyrics of Blood on the Tracks for
allusions to Dylans marital situation. Tangled Up in Blue is clearly an
autobiographical song up to a point, but Dylan has concealed, in concert
especially, some of the personal material behind third person pronouns.
The songs beginning, with the narrator contemplating whether time has
changed a woman he knew, puts us on familiar enough ground Dylans
narrators have a habit of pondering former lovers in song, always from
some point further down the road. The song then shifts to the beginning
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of their relationship (though it has to be admitted that even this is not
clear, since any of the subsequent meetings between the narrator and the
woman could claim to be the starting point), and goes on to chart the
growth of their lives together and apart, the way their fates intertwine,
the way they are repeatedly drawn together and pushed apart by the
forces of destiny. At times it seems that there is not one woman involved
but many, and by extension there may not even be only one protagonist;
but in another sense they are all one, all the same archetype.
There are autobiographical flashes: the journey the character makes
to the East Coast, the fact that he has to pay his dues; the girl in the song,
like Sara, was married previously. The communal, romantic, charged
political atmosphere of Greenwich Village is evoked (music in the cafes
at night / And revolution in the air). Obviously, as autobiography, the
events do not follow the actual sequence of events in Dylans life, since
he met Sara later than his journey east. Nevertheless, the image of him
standin on the side of the road, rain fallin on my shoes reminds us
of the fact that when Dylan headed for New York he had no place to
stay, relying on his charm and his dream of becoming a folksinger. The
images of poverty at the beginning of the song, conversely, lead us away
from an autobiographical interpretation, but there is enough here to get a
sense of his migration, the Greenwich Village folk scene, and his
marriage to Sara. Fast forward to the break up, the events coming in no
obvious linear, temporal sequence: the car that the lovers abandon in the
west may symbolize the marriage itself, just as the road is a traditional
symbol of lifes journey (and of course they did move out west after
leaving New York, to California). The parting is mutual (Both agreeing
it was best always a loaded statement in the context of marriage and
divorce; such amicable splits are rare), and they go their separate ways, to
be joined again at some further point. As a symbol, then, it is appropriate
to a marriage, because, in the modern world, sooner or later, there is a
parting of ways, when love can take them no further along the road
together. The enticement that they will, one day, meet again on the
avenue suggests that the relationship will begin all over again, on the
more domestic-sounding avenue, far from the lonely stretches of the
highway (avenue perhaps also alludes to the avenues of New York). By
the same token, the womans well meet again someday might be a
prediction, since they are bound by fate to meet again as strangers. On
the other hand, if the highway is the mythical place of dreams and
youthful promise, as it appears in Springsteens songs, the avenue may
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What the Broken Glass Reflects

stand for the domestic comforts of maturity and old age. Perhaps these
two old lovers will meet again when they are ready for each other. The
highway - our dreams - can only get us so far; responsibility, and the
demands of every day life, some day take over, and so the protagonist
turns to work to sustain him, though none of the jobs can hold him
down (the great north woods / axe just fell pun is admirable). All the
time, the girl is still on his mind. The line I seen a lot of women / But
she never escaped my mind can be taken two ways: perhaps no other
woman could compare, or perhaps she is an ideal, and he has sought her,
or at least an echo of her, in every subsequent lover.
The next meeting with the woman is in a strip joint (perhaps she too
has to use the resources available to her to sustain her; Sara Dylan,
incidentally, was an ex-Playboy bunny). Although there is a moment of
recognition, they are apparently meeting for the first time. She studied
the lines on my face suggests that she realises how much he has aged,
even though they are supposedly strangers. The fact that she bends down
to tie his shoelaces shows that he has suffered from lack of female
comforts, of mothering (the tying of shoelaces may also be a symbolic
act, for she is effectively binding their fates together, as if that needed
doing). A later scene finds them at her apartment, with an invitation to
domestic comforts (the burner, the pipe). What she says now lends
weight to the idea that they do not know each other (You look like the
silent type). As we have seen, however, the lovers in every scene are
both strangers and old flames; they are archetypal lovers, and the
womans opening the book of poems and offering it to the narrator is a
key image pointing to the songs ideal of womanhood: the Italian poet is
likely to be Dante, who yearned for his Beatrice, and who would, in
church, stare longingly at another woman instead of looking directly at
her, as if his senses could not bear to look upon the ideal woman, only
her shadow in others. The book of poems is written in the soul,
corresponding to his own experience, perhaps even to the soul that is
outside of time.
The Montague Street basement, the revolutionary atmosphere, and a
woman who deals with slaves, all evoke the Greenwich Village
environment which was Dylans starting point. He may be eluding to the
end of his relationship with Suze Rotolo, or with Joan Baez, or Sara, or
any number of past lovers, with the state of emotional frigidity the girl
now enters: she freezes up inside, and the narrator becomes withdrawn
from the situation, and realises he has to move on. This is just one
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Like A Rebel Wild

ending among the songs many parting scenes; in the cyclic conception of
time and relationships, the pattern is always the same.
The narrator finishes with the declaration that he is going back again
(expressive of the songs concept of time moving in circles, as the man
and the woman meet in each verse and are cleft apart again) to find her:
the original lover, his own Beatrice, she being the only constant, the
centre of all this flux, whatever form she takes, whilst all other people
have become illusions - dealers in rational, abstract concepts
(mathematicians) and frauds, women who would claim intimacy with
the unknowable (carpenters wives). The narrator cannot identify with
them (I dont know what theyre doin with their lives); his place is on
the road, the exiles life, knowing that every shelter is illusory. We always
did feel the same, / We just saw it from a different point of view is both
a key to the recurring break-up and a key to the songs methods, the
multiple, shifting perspective - emotion to intellectual comprehension of
emotion. Dylan did indeed find himself on the road again, shortly
afterwards, on the Rolling Thunder tour.
Tangled Up in Blue, then, is about the tangle of memory, and the
way the will is frustrated by time and the complexities of responsibilities,
but it is also about the way souls in time continually repeat patterns of
experience. The song recognises the need to unravel these complexities,
to seek the Beatrice figure (and to continue to seek her) in spite of the
mesh of forces that get in the way. It is a song about movement, and the
desire to search for what is real in life and in love.
In his study Song and Dance Man, Michael Gray identifies Dylans
tendency, in the mid 70s, to identify himself with Christ, something
which is particularly evident in two other key works from the album,
Shelter from the Storm and Idiot Wind.32 The concern of the former
is salvation through woman, in a world of persecution in which the
narrators trials are compared with those of Christ. Whether Dylan really
does intend us to view him as a type of Christ is debatable, but he
certainly seems to identify with the figure of the suffering servant, and no
matter how self-pitying the impulse behind it, he makes us realise that we
too feel this way. The sense of betrayal, sprouting from a broken
relationship, but extending much further, finds expression in Christ
metaphors, from the soldiers at the foot of the cross casting lots for
Christs clothes, to the messiahs journey in the wilderness. At the same
time, we have a development of the woman as saviour, the merciful
figure at the hearth that has been present from the beginning of Dylans
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What the Broken Glass Reflects

writing. The theme, to be returned to again and again, especially on
Changing of the Guards, is of the saving grace of women. The mother
figure of Hard Rain also suggests such comforts, but the artist, intent
on carrying out his prophet duty, knows he has to return to the ruthless
outdoors. The song does not suggest that the wanderer can find
permanent home; implicitly, all woman can now offer is shelter, not
salvation, and the ability to share the narrators pain (She walked up to
me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns).
Dylan makes explicit reference to coming in from the wilderness (the
backdrop to Christs temptation, and the domain of the prophets), and
the innocence of the Lamb (I offered up my innocence and got repaid
with scorn). The sense of suffering, of bearing ones cross and
remaining true to oneself (and to higher truths, such as the truths of the
imagination) are central to Dylans work; so too is the place of women as
ambiguous salvation figures. Even as far back as Positively 4th Street,
Dylan was aware that there were people willing enough to crucify him (.
. .youd rather see me paralyzed). To speak the truth is a dangerous
business, just as it was for Christ (. . .theyd probably put my head in a
guillotine, he declared in Its Alright, Ma). Shelter from the Storm is
characteristic of Dylans apparent martyr-complex; it depicts the world as
a hostile place from which the artist needs to find salvation, and for
which he suffers as a martyr does. As if often the case, woman provides
the means to deliverance.
The song begins by evoking an earlier reality in which the speaker
existed (another lifetime suggesting both that the singer has been
reborn, and that the song alludes to some kind of ancient
Christian/Biblical landscape of toil and blood). At the same time,
Dylan seems to be referring to the early days of Greenwich Village,
another lifetime indeed, a time of the struggle for civil rights (When
blackness was a virtue). The phrase steel-eyed death is a superb image
of hostility, one of Dylans very finest. It certainly appears to be Sara to
whom Dylan is referring when he says: Not a word was spoke between
us, there was little risk involved - a clear echo of Love Minus Zero,
also written for Sara, in which she was the muse who speaks like
silence. What better way could one find of expressing Dylans wasted
state during the chaos of stardom, and the salvation he sought in
domestic happiness, than the fourth verses I was burned out from
exhaustion, buried in the hail, / Poisoned in the bushes an blown out on
the trail, / Hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn?
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Like A Rebel Wild

The relationship songs are the core of Blood on the Tracks, and, as we
have seen, seem to comment, to varying degrees, on the events of his
personal life. Therefore, while If You See Her, Say Hello seems,
despite the masterly use of restraint to suggest a deep vein of pain under
the surface, a pretty bare expression of the singers state of mind, Simple
Twist of Fate, especially in its various concert versions, plays the same
pronoun game as Tangled Up in Blue to distance us from its
autobiographical source, to turn subjective experience into objective art.
The subtle characterisations and minute attention to detail (She looked
at him and he felt a spark tingle to his bones) elevate Dylans art to new
heights; even in the great love songs of the 60s, he had never been so
exact, so precise in his recording of human experience. How many must
have sought comfort from their own experience of broken relationships
in these songs, with their dedication to human truths. Even the
survivalist rhetoric of Idiot Wind and Shelter from the Storm is
painfully honest in its way, truthful to the defensive state of mind, the
walls that go up, when relationships start to break down. Idiot Wind is
not given balance by the calmer perspective of experience; it is true to the
moment, and its bitterness, though uncomfortable, is honest bitterness,
cathartic for the singer and listener both. Sometimes we feel like this.
Idiot Wind is about the difficulty of maintaining stable
relationships, marital or otherwise, in a world where we are tossed to and
fro by unseen, chaotic forces, distorting what we mean to say, driving us
to actions that are reckless or even doomed. Dylan evokes the winds of
fate that blow through our lives, mocking all our endeavours, bringing
luck and ruin more or less arbitrarily. We begin with the winds of
rumour, the newsmens bluster, paralleled in Joyces Ulysses with the wind
god Aeolus. Luck and ill-luck move about like winds themselves, beyond
our control (She inherited a million bucks and when she died it came to
me. / I cant help it if Im lucky). An idiot wind seems to puff up our
ideas too (images and distorted facts), altering our perception of
strangers and even those we should know (even you, yesterday you had
to remind me where it was at). Like a spin on the old chaos theory
clich about the beat of a butterflys wings giving rise to storms and tidal
waves, the things we say, the breath that comes out of our mouths, blows
up to the strength of a hurricane wind, a gale moving across the
landscape, the gossip or rumours becoming distorted along the way. We
are powerless to control these chaotic forces that are both external and
internal; every time we move our teeth, an idiot wind starts blowing. The
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What the Broken Glass Reflects

fortune teller adds to our sense of helplessness, the sense that we cannot
control these arbitrary, chaotic forces that blow through the world
(beware of lightning that might strike), her very words adding to the
winds themselves. Even Christ, it would appear, is subject to these
forces, the lone soldier who had apparently lost the battle but went on to
win the war, thanks to the winds of rumour that followed him; we can
imagine the words of the evangelists, the rumours of resurrection, as a
wind blowing west towards Rome and the future Christendom. Nothing
is predictable in life, Dylan seems to be saying, and therefore what can
two people in a relationship expect? One possible source of Dylans use
of the idiot wind metaphor for lifes unpredictability seems to be
Shakespeares Macbeth, as has been noted elsewhere: Lifesa tale /
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.
If You See Her, Say Hello is one of Dylans finest love songs,
though of course it is about the end of a love affair. The greatness of the
song resides in how much it holds back, and the tension that exists
between the swell of emotion that the singer is (just barely) managing to
keep in check, and the way he feigns detachment; we know its there,
under the surface, all this pain of separation, but the fact that it is kept
back gives the song its extraordinary subtlety and restraint. The song
constantly hints at unspoken things, until it manages to communicate so
much more by not saying things that the singer obviously feels. The tune
is restrained too, and the overall feeling is of a kind of numb acceptance
of what has happened, but a consciously forced one.
Perhaps encouraged by the commercial and critical success of Blood
on the Tracks, despite the emotional turmoil in which that album had its
genesis, Dylan moved quickly to record again, seeking old cohorts and
new collaborators. The Rolling Thunder Revue included many of his
contemporaries from Greenwich Village, but there were new faces too:
Scarlett Rivera, or Miss Scarlett as he referred to her on tour, on violin;
Emmylou Harris on backing vocals on the studio recordings, and, most
notably, a songwriting partner on several of the new tracks, Jacques Levy.
The resulting album, Desire, saw Dylan most definitely back in the
marketplace, and with renewed commercial credibility: the album reached
number one on both sides of the Atlantic. The leading single also saw
him return to protest for the first time since the George Jackson single;
Hurricane was a long, breathless indictment of the corrupt legal system
that had framed middleweight boxer Rubin Hurricane Carter for a
barroom murder. Incarcerated, Carter had courted publicity to prove his
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innocence and had written a biography, which found its way into Dylans
hands. To more cynical commentators, it seemed that the shrewd,
showman-like Carter was seeking to hook celebrities into supporting his
cause, and Dylan took the bait. Nonetheless, the case against the boxer
was full of holes and Dylan made full use of these facts in the song.
Dylans contribution to the cause was to write his most committed
protest song in years, the fantastic Hurricane. He was obviously
refreshed by having something contemporary to say, and a new focus
other than the too personal subject of his imploding marriage.
Hurricane has a very filmic quality, especially in the opening lines,
which read like the script from a Hollywood movie, complete with stage
directions; appropriately enough, since the events in New Jersey that led
to Carters incarceration seemed to be as artfully plotted as any detective
thriller. There are breathless visuals, character sketches that come alive in
just a few words (The wounded man looks up through his one dyin
eye), and a real flair for street language. In fact, Dylan had to tread
carefully in recounting the details, and an earlier version of the song was
laid aside because of its potentially libellous lyrics. The account of the
trial includes some of Dylans strongest indictments of American
institutional injustice (of which he has shown a healthy cynicism, from
Seven Curses through Percys Song). The song is as direct and black
and white as possible, Dylan hitting us over the head with the message.
We are a long way from the subtlety and ambiguity of Dylans greatest
protest songs, in fact, but the song works; there are echoes, in lines like
To see him obviously framed / Couldnt help but make me feel
ashamed to live in a land / Where justice is a game of the naivety of
early protest songs like The Death of Emmett Till and Youve Been
Hidin Too Long, but Hurricane works on a much higher level and
transcends any minor flaws like these.
The marriage song, Isis, went on to become the most memorable,
intense performance in Renaldo & Clara; it is again a song about a
mystical woman, a goddess, as is One More Cup of Coffee. The gypsy
woman in the latter is markedly different from the women of Nashville
Skyline and New Morning. She is distant, unfathomable, no longer loyal to
the narrator but magnetic because of her mystery. Even though he knows
that he has return to the valley, to the responsibilities of ordinary life, he
is reluctant to leave her (coffee, of course, is just an excuse to stay). She
knows the secrets of astrology (your loyalty is not to me / But to the
stars above) and can foretell the future (your sister sees the future /
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Like your mama and yourself). Her wisdom is instinctual, and that is
part of the attraction (youve never learned to read or write). Far from
understanding this gypsy woman, the speaker is aware that her heart is
impossible to understand. The songs power derives not just from its
depiction of this mysterious figure but from the way it is sung: the
extraordinary cantillation, the perfect marriage of theme and expression.
That women are a mystery is nothing new, but their otherness here is
captivating (associated with the stars and the sea, they do not belong, as
the narrator does, to the constant earth, but to the changing elements: to
the stars, which move according to precession, and the sea, which,
because of the moons gravity, is subject to the motion of the tides - an
apt, though admittedly traditional, metaphor for their shifting emotions).
Nor do they embody the intellect - this is the domain of men - but
instinct.
Desire and Street Legal are the albums where Dylan seems most
captivated with the mysterious, divine quality of women. With his
marriage under strain, Dylan needed a saviour and at times it seemed that
he was readily deifying Sara or a substitute. By the time of Street Legal, the
marriage was over, but he was still obsessed with the idea of a goddess.
Eventually god-filled woman, to use Adolf Holls phrase, would
become God-fearing woman (Gonna Change My Way of Thinking),
through his meeting Mary Alice Artes.
Oh Sister is a song which stirred Joan Baez to respond with her
own Oh Brother (how in the name of the father and the son did I
come to be your sister, Baez rejoins, rather uncharitably, given that the
Dylan song is a kind of sweet-natured rewrite of Andrew Marvells To
His Coy Mistress). The second side of the album, meanwhile, has its
share of epic songs, not all of them successful. The problem with Joey
is that, in defending and romanticising the life of gangster Joey Gallo,
Dylan does not invite faith in the credence of the other cause song on
the album, Hurricane. Better is Romance in Durango, set in a
Mexican landscape that derives from Dylans experiences filming Pat
Garrett and Billy The Kid. Black Diamond Bay is among the most
successful of the albums songs, a long story song and close relative of
Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts from the last album. Although it
resembles theatre, with so many sudden entrances and exits that it
reminds one of a farce, and an exotic cast of characters, it is really a
comment on the distancing and desensitising of the media; a critique of
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the mentality that turns places into postcard locations (And I never did
plan to go anyway / To Black Diamond Bay).
The albums final song is Sara, the most direct on the album,
perhaps the most direct in his whole canon (though less indiscreet than
Ballad in Plain D). A plea to his estranged wife, and sung directly to
her in the studio and live, it was a romanticised, yearning expression of
his need for her; not totally convincing as a statement of love, as
exaggerated as anything else on an album that dwells on myths and
romanticism, however sincere in feeling. Are we to take the
autobiographical details at face value? Dylan, surely, most know the
mythical resonance of the songs most tantalising lines: Stayin up for
days in the Chelsea Hotel, / Writing Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands
for you. It seems he has his audience in mind as much as his wife; this is
not some private love letter, after all, but one of Dylans most celebrated
songs, and public property. And yet, in saying this, he is exercising his
power: he seems to be saying, look what I did for you, I wrote this song,
which is so prized by many, but I wrote it only for you. There are
references to taking the cure (possibly referring to his going cold turkey
after the accident) and to her role in his salvation (in a live version of the
song he sings: sleeping in the woods, by a fire in the night, / Where you
fought for my soul and went up against the odds). She gave him a map
and a key to her door (not necessarily a sexual reference, as some have
claimed), and she obviously saved him.
An unreleased song (until Biograph), Abandoned Love, is also highly
autobiographical, and again about Sara. Its feelings about love are more
ambiguous, and it seems to contain some acceptance of the inevitability
of their parting, along with a desire, honestly expressed, to be received
one more time before giving up on the marriage. The album could be
named after this song, expressing as it does a knowledge of the
constricting nature of desire (I wear the ball and chain, I march in the
parade of liberty / But as long as I love you Im not free). Dylan was
torn between his need to keep things stable, to remain a husband and
father, and to return to the fray as a major performer. Though he chose
the latter, it seems that unhappiness from the fall-out of his marriage, and
perhaps financial worries from the alimony suit, dogged him throughout
the rest of the decade.
After the failure of his experimental movie Renaldo & Clara, in which
hed brought the concept of no time to an art form usually dependent
on traditional narrative structure, he took to the road. The 1978 tour saw
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an entertainer who betrayed no signs of discontent; indeed, the mood of
the concerts was celebratory as he ran through the sixteen years of Bob
Dylan as a recording artist. 1978s Street Legal told a different story. The
songs on the record were the real pointer to Dylans emotional state,
even if the last verse of the last song did proclaim I cant believe Im
alive. The fact that Dylan was reaching out for help puts a different tint
on our interpretation of the 1978 concerts: in Renaldo & Clara and on the
Rolling Thunder tour he had presented us with the masked entertainer,
and in the film especially, had proceeded to strip away the layers of the
mask, until the naked human being was revealed in the intimate scenes
between Renaldo and Clara (thus distancing himself from the name Bob
Dylan and the image that comes with it). But in the 1978 tour he
betrayed no such awareness of the performers mask; indeed, he
appeared the unselfconscious entertainer, with the feigned sincerity of a
Neil Diamond or Vegas Elvis.
Street Legal opens with the reflective (and self-reflexive) Sixteen
years, Dylan looking back on the past as if he wants to close the book
on the pages and the text and write a new one. From our perspective, it
is easy to conclude that the album foreshadows the Christian conversion.
There are Biblical references aplenty, beginning with the allusion to the
good shepherd in the first verse. This was obviously a period of
profound self-reflection for Dylan, scanning not just his career but his
marriage to Sara and retreat from stardom, first in the Catskill Mountains
and later in Malibu. He was at a crossroads, just as when, in 1966, he had
tumbled from his motorcycle and, through the intervention of
providence, turned his life around. He had created Bob Dylan, but Bob
Dylan was an alias (Bob Dylan, in the sense that he was a construct of
the fans, had in effect been alive for sixteen years). The man in need of
help here is Robert Zimmerman, the real Renaldo, the real Bob Dylan
(later, in Gotta Serve Somebody, he would draw attention to the idea
of masks and the contrast with the real self, which has to serve God or
the devil: you may call me Bobby. . .)
Changing of the Guards serves as a kind of autobiography of
Dylan the artist and Robert Zimmerman the creator of the image. The
first of the songs strange, shifting, allegorical backdrops is a field of
sixteen banners united; a scene of celebration that at first suggests a
victorious army, but in fact turns out to be an army of desperate, divided
men and women, whose captain is distracted and has been drawn away
from the encampment by his love for a woman. Strangely, the fields are
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where the good shepherd (which, in the light of what happened to
Dylan in the following year, must refer to Christ), grieves, presumably for
his lost sheep; Dylans metaphor is familiar from the Vision of Piers
Ploughman, by the medieval poet William Langland, which envisions the
world as a field where the populace are divided against each other. It is
highly likely that Dylan is writing here about his own generation, the civil
rights protesters and flower children, and acknowledging, perhaps, that
he is their captain, but a captain who has retreated from the battlefield
because of his love for a woman.
Dylan describes his own rise to fame in the following terms: Fortune
calls and he steps forth from the shadows (as well as describing the
move out of obscurity, the image is of a performer walking onto a stage).
As Dylan soon found out when he achieved fame, the music industry
really was a marketplace inhabited by merchants and thieves, with all
subject to the fickleness of trends in taste (the marketplace as a symbol of
the music scene occurs also in Tough Mamas I aint a-haulin any of
my lambs to the marketplace anymore fitting, then, that Dylan should
begin this song with the image of a grieving good shepherd and the idea,
at least, of lost sheep). The maid who next enters the scene, who is
smelling sweet like the meadows where she was born, / On
midsummers eve, near the tower, is another poetic analogue of Sara,
again offering the means to salvation. The sweet smell of her rural
domain presumably comes as a relief after the smells of the marketplace,
where Dylan has been plying his trade.
Some of the backdrops in this song have a kind of Tennysonian
Lady of Shalott quality - they are like the idealized, static scenes of a
medieval manuscript painter: the field is, as I have suggested, a common
medieval metaphor, as is the tower, which is often a symbol of protection
or sometimes treachery, and frequently the home of a maiden (who may
embody either). This medieval landscape, the landscape of illuminators
more than medieval poets, was appropriated by Victorians like Tennyson;
indeed, The Lady of Shalott features a tower in which the lady is
imprisoned, to live a vicarious existence. In the poem, Camelot is the
centre of trade, the place to which the barges sail loaded with
merchandise; in other words, it is the marketplace, to be contrasted with
the fields of barley and rye.
The concept of no time, and the dissolving of one narrative voice
into another, best explains why we move from Dylans first person
perspective in the opening lines, to the captain glimpsed from outside;
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Dylan, the captain of the encamped army, as the spokesman of his
generation, had united the counter culture, but retreated, under such high
expectations, to a beloved maid; indeed, this maids ebony face is
beyond communication, recalling his depiction of Sara as one who
knows too much to argue or to judge. The song is built on a series of
contrasts and correspondences, like the ebony face and cold-blooded
moon, the united banners and the divided men and women, the
marketplace and the sweet-smelling meadows, Jupiter and Apollo. The
fact that the captain communicates with the beloved maid by sending
his thoughts reminds us that Sara seemed to respond to Dylans plea for
help, in the mid 60s, on some deeper level; Dylan says, later on this
album: I couldnt tell her what my private thoughts were but she had
some way of finding them out.
There are further echoes of the song Love Minus Zero in the
black nightingale, a cousin of that songs raven. . . with a broken
wing. The lifting of the veil may be a reference to the fact that Dylan
married Sara in 1966; from there he proceeded, after the turbulent 1966
concerts, to extract himself from the Village scene (I rode past
destruction in the ditches). Michael Gray has pointed out that the
flowers of the fifth verse in effect stand for the songs Dylan wrote for
Sara, and that became public property.33
Changing of the Guards is a striking example of an intertext, in
post-structuralist terms, in that there are numerous echoes of earlier
Dylan lyrics. The empty rooms where her memory is protected, /
Where the angels voices whisper to the souls of previous times recalls
Dirges hollow place where martyrs weep and angels play with sin;
the endless road and the wailing of chimes brings to mind, from a
world-weary, cynical perspective, Chimes of Freedom. But more than
intertext, the song is, as I have said, autobiographical, and is about
salvation from the marketplace of the pop scene through womans
love; the sun is breaking suggests new hope and a new beginning. The
songs subject finds that his chains have broken when she wakes him
up, a reference to the impossible expectations Dylans fans had placed
upon him. Dylan abdicated from his position as spokesman, first from
the folk crowd and later from the folk rock set, as is aptly expressed here:
Gentlemen, he said, / I dont need your organisation, Ive shined your
shoes, / Ive moved your mountains and marked your cards. Dylan
realises that change is needed, that the hippy dream has ended Eden is
burning, as he puts it and there is a clear indication that he realises the
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change must come from within himself. Perhaps he is one of the false
idols that must fall when the current order is overturned. What is
imaginatively true (the Gates of Eden) no longer matters; there are bigger
events at hand.
In hindsight, it is possible to trace the lines of thought in Street Legal
that mark Bob Dylan out as a man in need of help. He was going
through a very costly divorce, and coming to terms with the failure of his
movie, and the loss of revenues because of it. Several of the songs on the
album simply do not work; it is a testament to Dylans artistic standing in
Britain at the time that such a minor, untypical song like Baby Stop
Crying became a hit. Even a long, verbose song like No Time to
Think falls short of greatness because of its repetitive tune. Is Your
Love in Vain and True Love Tends to Forget both sound like a pose,
a sort of dry run for the formula writing of Empire Burlesque and some of
Infidels.
The songs that clearly do look ahead to the Christian conversion,
however, are the albums most successful. On one level, Senor (Tales of
Yankee Power) is about immigration and the persecution of those
seeking asylum. However, it is also an expression of spiritual need, with
references to Jesus overturning of tables in the temple courtyard. How
long must I keep my eyes glued to the door / Will there be any comfort
there, senor seems like an oblique reference to the Biblical promise:
whoever knocks on the door will be received by Christ. Another notable
thing about the song, of course, is that it is addressed to a man (perhaps
to the Man), indicating that the subject of salvation is no longer feminine.
Something of the humility and self-doubt later explored on Every Grain
of Sand is present as the immigrant, at the border between countries or
between flesh and spirit, strips and kneels so that he may be deemed
worthy to pass.
Where Are You Tonight? also looks forward to the conversion
ahead, the long distance train obviously a precursor of the next years
Slow Train. The narrator has clearly lost his faith in women, or has
realised that a specific woman can no longer save him (Theres a woman
I long to touch and I miss her so much but shes drifting like a satellite).
The scene shifts to what is apparently a strip joint, where a dancer peals
off her clothes, but on another, symbolic, level, Dylan is concerned with
matters of the spirit (the womans beauty fades, appropriately for a man
who had seemingly lost his faith in his mystical women, and she turns the
pages of a book that nobody can write - perhaps time, or history, or
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the Book of God itself, the woman becoming some kind of agent of fate
or fortune). With characteristic Dylan ambiguity, and perhaps in honour
of the Song of Solomon tradition, it is not clear whether the subject of the
song is a saviour or a woman. Nevertheless, there is surety that the song
expresses the impossibility of ever holding onto someone we love; we
drift apart, beauty is temporary. The narrator fights with his twin (his
conscience, his good and bad sides in opposition), and, interestingly, both
fall. This is another way of saying that man cannot save himself; his good
side cannot defeat his worse self without assistance from a higher power.
As so often in Dylan, the road is clearly a metaphor for ones journey
through life, a journey which, ultimately, leads one to the necessity of
Christian sacrifice. Appropriately, one of the guides on his journey
becomes St. John. The sense of absolute truth, and the necessity of dying
a spiritual death, is expressed in: The truth was obscure, too profound
and too pure, to live it you have to explode). Images of betrayal and
exploitation abound, echoing Blood on the Tracks: Horseplay and disease
is killing me by degrees while the law looks the other way, and: Your
partners in crime hit me up for nickels and dimes. The narrator admits
that he has tasted forbidden fruit, that he has been scarred in pursuit of
an earthly paradise; after all this, the final verse is a call of triumph, a
statement that the journey through a symbolic night has ended and dawn
has arrived, to his own disbelief. His cry of I cant believe Im alive
foreshadows Saving Graces similar statement of thankful survival. The
dawn, so close now, would be Jesus, as his fans would shortly discover.

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CHAPTER SEVEN
HANGING ON TO A SOLID ROCK
SLOW TRAIN COMING TO SHOT OF
LOVE

ylans propensity for change, his uncanny ability to remake

himself and to act contrary to expectations, had always been a
strength. Nothing, however, not even his switch to electric
music or his embrace of country and western, could have prepared his
fans for the change that was to come in 1979. Rumours started to filter
through that seemed improbable: Dylan had become a born-again
Christian and had enrolled in Bible school. Earlier in the decade, there
had been rumours that Dylan had been exploring his Jewish roots, but
since he didnt go public on this, the matter never really troubled his fans.
When, however, he released the album Slow Train Coming, and played a
series of concerts at the Warfield theatre in San Francisco, he was already
openly proclaiming his Christian faith.
This newfound frankness was disarming to those who had watched
him build up a mystique throughout the 60s and 70s, defying
categorisation, denying affiliation with causes and ideologies. Renaldo &
Clara had attempted to expose the naked person behind the star image,
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but up there, on the Warfield stage, Dylan was really shattering the image
for good.
Gotta Serve Somebody, the opening track of the album and our
first acquaintance with his Christian stance, is a great levelling song. It is a
song about identity, about masks. Whoever we claim to be, whether we
are Bob Dylan or president, we cannot hide our naked selves from God.
The only real variable is the state of the soul, whom we serve, be it God
or the devil, and everything else - choices, preferences, titles, possessions
- is a mere illusion that blinds us to the one thing that really matters which side we are on. All those other things that supposedly make up the
individual are of no consequence. There is an equality beneath the
surface of things - who you are is simply decided by the god whom you
serve. Dylan, here, is not celebrating the great multiplicity of life. He
seems to have lost his humanism. For the bulk of his followers, it was a
bitter pill to swallow.
The Warfield concerts, and the tour that followed, continuing on
until 1980, showed that Dylan wanted to make a clean break from the
past. He played nothing prior to 1979. Audiences were offered sermons
between songs, and the shows opened with a Christian story and gospel
songs from the all-girl backing group. The performances were, on the
whole, sensational, with Dylan singing his heart out. Despite the slick
Muscle Shoals sound of the album, Dylans artistic triumphs of 1979 and
1980 were in concert.
The catalyst for this change had been Mary Alice Artes, a black
actress who had converted to Christianity and preached to him during
their relationship. She is the subject of Covenant Woman and
Precious Angel, and at one point Dylan is believed to have bought her
an engagement ring. The Vineyard Fellowship, a Californian Christian
group with a focus on close study of The Bible, became his spiritual
advisors. With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to enjoy Dylans
Christian phase for the passionate performances and focused songwriting
it produced. At the time though, it was a burning question whether Dylan
would ever acknowledge his past again, or adopt a less radical stance.
Slow Train Coming, musically at least, is one of Dylans most accessible
albums. In terms of its sound, it finds Dylan most willing to compromise,
to reach out to his audience, and it is no wonder it garnered radio play.
Once the curiosity had died down, however, it became apparent that
Dylans commercial standing would never recover. He had, after all,
played to the largest ever UK concert audience at that point at
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Blackbushe. The softening of the born-again stance on Infidels and his
pairing with acts like Tom Pettys Heartbreakers and The Grateful Dead
ensured that he would play to stadium capacity crowds until the late 80s.
But then, with the beginning of the Never-Ending Tour, the venues
became inexorably smaller, and the advocates increasingly became voices
crying in the wilderness. The Christian phase was partly responsible - by
submitting to God he sacrificed his godlike cool.
Many of his old fans had a problem with the verse from Precious
Angel beginning My so-called friends have fallen under a spell. . .
because it offered the most severe and uncompromising expression of his
beliefs. The reference to a future time, When men will beg God to kill
them and they wont be able to die, has its source in St. Johns
Apocalypse. What amazes us is how completely Dylan seemed to absorb
all the new teaching - the songs on the album remind one of the way
literary tradition used to put emphasis on the citing of authorities,
whether scriptural or classical; what mattered most was not originality but
the referencing of reliable sources of information, examples tried and
tested to be true, which could be handed down from generation to
generation. For medieval and Renaissance writers, it wasnt important to
be groundbreaking (though they often were) but to be accurate, to have
textual integrity. And, of course, the greatest textual integrity was to be
found in the Bible. Dylan uses his sources with similar reverence.
Several of Dylans earlier songs had dealt with the meeting point
between the amorous and the divine, especially his tendency to address
women in religious terms. The fusion of these two impulses is, in Dylan,
found in the veneration of woman. Precious Angel, despite being
written in the first fervour of his conversion, carries on this habit. On the
one hand, Dylan is emphatic that his earthly angel is only a mediator
between him and God; she is not a semi-divine creature but simply a
spiritual guide. On the other hand, though, he cannot avoid seeing her in
divine terms because such things are built in to the language he is using.
Lines like youre the lamp of my soul manage to invest her with some
traces of divine mystery, but the song is chiefly about kinship, an
expression both of thanks and of companionship. The speaker
comments on their shared history of enslavement (our forefathers were
slaves), he as the descendent of Abraham, she as the descendent of
blacks shipped from Africa into slavery. Both their histories are fused in
the following line, describing the exodus of the Jews as the Christians see
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it, and their kinship with the Africans: On the way out of Egypt,
through Ethiopia, to the judgment hall of Christ.
However, the tendency to imagine woman in divine terms, which as I
have said plays a part in much of Dylans work, creates a tension between
the flesh and the spirit which is not quite resolved: Dylan calls her the
queen of my flesh and my womanmy delight (alluding, surely, to a
physical relationship) and also, in the same verse, the lamp of my soul
(a spiritual relationship), meaning that she plays a dual role: as spiritual
companion, or guide, and as marital one. It is not surprising, then, that he
bought her an engagement ring. So much does she embody divinity that
she is an angel under the sun; she negates the problem, so prevalent in
the world, of spiritual warfare and flesh and blood breaking down - the
theme of spirit vs. flesh one of Dylans great themes and sources of
conflict. If figures such as Isis appeared to resolve this conflict, it is
apparent by now that these were false goddesses; here is the real thing.
The gulf between the born-again state, guided by the lamp of the soul
that this angel carries, and Dylans old self, is expressed by the series of
contrasts upon which the song is built (blinded, deceived, weak,
flesh, unbelief, darkness, and night are matched on the other
pole by spiritual, faith, truth, lamp, and soul). The angel of the
song does two things: she provides a bridge over this gulf, and she
reconciles the spirit and the flesh, offering a solution to spiritual warfare.
Covenant Woman, the other song he wrote for Mary Alice Artes,
written just after the first batch of religious songs and eventually to
appear on Saved, follows a similar pattern, and again suggests that their
relationship is physical as well as spiritual: I do intend / To stay closer
than any friend / For making your prayers known / Unto heaven for
me. This is extraordinary from the point of view that it suggests a kind
of sexual intimacy that is founded on a spiritual debt. The fusion of the
amorous and the divine is present, yet again: do we know if Dylan is
talking about sex or the spirit when he says: those most secret things of
me that are hidden from the world? Even the womans special
relationship with the creator sounds pseudo-sexual: got a contract with
the Lord (marriage contract?) / Way up yonder, great will be her reward
(for marital fidelity?). Of course, the Bible itself had always married
these two; witness the Song of Songs, and most memorably, Christs
description of himself as the bridegroom. To conceive of a spiritual
relationship, it was necessary to draw a comparison between that most
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intimate relationship in human life, the sexual relationship between two
people, preferably husband and wife.
The idea that they are both strangers in a land were passing
through echoes the exodus image from Precious Angel, and countless
such images of exile in Dylans earlier work. The overwhelming
suggestion, from the evidence of these two songs, is indeed that Dylan
intended to marry his precious angel, his woman of the covenant. It
didnt happen that way.34
Given that the woman in these songs seems to embody sexual and
spiritual aspects, we should not be surprised that a song like I Believe in
You is also a kind of love song that conceives of God in human,
physical terms. Dylan would continue in this vein right up to Where
Teardrops Fall and beyond. The speaker claims that others have cast
doubt on whether his love is real; his defence is that his love of God
stops him from feeling alone, even when in exile. Its hard not to think of
a marital relationship, where fidelity is put to the test while out on the
road (as indeed Dylan had been for much of the late 70s), with spouse
and hearthside far away from him. His fidelity sets him apart, just as a
faithful married man would have been set apart amidst the debauchery of
the rock and roll touring lifestyle. On another level entirely, there is
present here the spiritual theme of exile, of being in the world and yet
not belonging to it: to be in the world and yet not of the world, as The
Bible says. The closer the speaker feels to heaven, the more estranged he
becomes in the mortal realm. Quite simply, the world of the flesh, the
physical and material world, and the world of the spirit, are at odds.
There are echoes, albeit faint, of the Gnostic concept of spirit and its
need to be reconciled with the divine. The whole of creation is against
the captive soul (the created world, what Blake calls the vegetable
universe, wars against the spirit, until the spirit finally finds release and is
reconciled with its native element); the speaker is forsaken by friends, he
is shaken by the earth and by the driving rain. There is, incidentally, in
the line they show me to the door, a reference to the rejection of Mary
and Joseph by the innkeepers, when Mary was indeed god-filled,
carrying the divine seed in her womb.
Precious Angel and I Believe in You are what we can term the
love songs on Slow Train Coming. Slow Train, Gonna Change My
Way of Thinking, Do Right to Me, Baby (Do Unto Others) and
When You Gonna Wake Up? are more straightforward expressions of
Dylans new doctrine. One song that takes a comparatively lighter
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approach is Man Gave Names to All the Animals. This latter has the
flavour of a nursery rhyme, and as such looks ahead to Under the Red Sky,
but the source is Biblical: Adams naming of the beasts in Eden, finishing
up with the snake, which will be the vessel of Satans tempting of Eve.
The finest song on the album, however, and one we cannot so easily
categorise, is When He Returns. It is not addressed to the creator in
the second person, and hence lacks the intimacy of a song like I Believe
in You or Saving Grace. Rather, Dylan is testifying to non-converts
his unshakable belief in the Second Coming. He doesnt have to refer to
He by name (though a mighty God comes close). The song is
concerned with Time and the illusions of human progress. Like the fallen
Ozymandias of the Shelley poem, human kings and kingdoms will fall,
their plans will come to nothing; the only real plan is Gods to set up His
kingdom on earth. The song admits the difficulty of remaining faithful,
the repeated question, How long, suggesting that we have only a finite
amount of time before Christ returns. Mankind is ever the exile, denying
the truth and putting on masks, but the omniscient creator sees and
knows all (he sees your deeds, / He knows your needs even before you
ask, a Biblical allusion later to be wryly echoed in Angelinas if you
can read my mind, why must I speak). The line For all those who have
eyes and all those who have ears echoes Revelations warning of the
Beast, but behind it is an awareness that people increasingly do not see or
hear the truth, and construct their own false realities. Humility, total
subjugation to Christ, is the only way (surrender your crown on this
blood-stained ground). The greatness of the song lies in Dylans soaring,
spiritual melody lines, brought out best in concert (the performance from
Toronto, April 20th, is exhilarating). In the song, God accelerates the
effects of Time or Change to destroy mans works (The strongest wall
will crumble and fall to a mighty God - the strongest wall, literally, is the
fortified wall of a city, but may also be, metaphorically, the defences we
construct to keep the truth, and God Himself, out.) Other images
function on both the literal and metaphorical level: the crown is both the
crown of a king or emperor of ancient times and also an inflated sense of
self worth, while the wilderness can also be literal or spiritual. The real
difference, of course, between Gods actions and Times is that unlike
Shelleys Ozymandias, Gods actions are dissimilar to Times, which work
to gradually erode humankinds vanities, because they are swift; the
manifestations of Gods power appear suddenly and unexpectedly (He
unleashed His power at an unknown hour) - the last such abrupt divine
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justice being the Second Coming itself. Without being explicit, the lines
evoke kings and empires that were decimated by Gods swift justice,
from the wall of an ancient kingdom to the crown of the many kings
of the past. The image of a crown falling onto blood-stained ground
reminds one of the sudden, brutal usurping of such figures as Herod or
Julius Caesar, and the crumbling walls suggest Pompeii, Rome or
Jerusalem itself. Dylan is offering an analogue between ancient and
modern times, for today also has its kings and powerful empires, which
will perish just as suddenly as those in ancient times did when Christ
appears, or else, in the fullness of years, disappear just as completely. In
using the wilderness as a metaphor for the modern condition, Dylan
also recalls Eliots The Waste Land, which depicted the ruin of Rome
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria. The song is concerned with what is and
what is not real - earthly plans, kingdoms, crowns, are fleeting and
ultimately illusory, but the soul and the souls submission to God are real,
permanent things.
Dylan followed Slow Train Coming with Saved, another
uncompromising Christian album. Saved remains one of his strongest
albums of the 80s, though the majority of Dylan fans seem to find it less
satisfying than its predecessor. While it is true that the versions of the
Saved songs debuted on the concert tour of 1979 and 1980 are superior in
most respects to their recorded counterparts, particularly in the level of
passion and commitment Dylan brings to their performance, Saved
nevertheless succeeds as a devotional work and reveals Dylan more than
ever immersed in the born-again consciousness and turning the material
of his Bible studies into art.
In the Garden is one of the most uncompromising songs in
Dylans gospel canon, and one he has chosen to revisit in concert more
than any other song from Saved. The song makes repeated reference to
Christs missionary activities, the acts that, for the people of the time,
should have offered proof that he was the messiah. The question set
before us is: did the people around Jesus understand what they were
witnessing? In other words, did they act as they did with the knowledge
of his divinity? There were obvious signs: the wisdom of his sayings, the
miracles he performed. Dylans question, of course, is rhetorical, because
they did see and hear; the disciples that were with him in Gethsemane
knew he was the messiah. Yet still they denied him when the price passed
to their heads as well. The key to understanding the song is in
understanding what it has to say about the nature of faith, which does
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not rely on the senses. The senses are limited by temporality; we see what
is in front of our eyes at the exact moment of perception. Visual data
enters through the organs of sight, aural data through the organs of
hearing. Limited, as Descartes understood, by our senses, we base our
understanding on sensory data, which can be notoriously unreliable. We
pass from the senses to understanding, to knowledge. Did the witnesses
in the garden know, after witnessing miracles through sensory
perception, that he was Lord? If the people of Christs time did not
believe, when the Messiah was in their midst, what hope have we, since
we have none of the evidence before us?
Christ was crucified. His disciples abandoned him, and his enemies
put him to death. Despite everything they had seen and heard, despite the
fact that they should have known that he was God, they did not believe
at that crucial hour. For me He was rejected by a world that He
created, is the way Dylan puts it elsewhere. All of these things happened
in the space of two or three years; they had the time to witness these
things but they still crucified him. The final verse, which asks did they
believe, is different because we are not in the temporal realm any more.
Belief based on faith is not limited by empirical experience. It is
important to understand that, whilst Dylan refers to the event itself
(When He rose from the dead), thus continuing to place us in the
temporal realm, he then shifts focus in concert recordings to the
continuing and immutable reality of the risen Lord (We did believe),
and to those alive today who testify to this truth. Dylan, and the Vineyard
Fellowship Church, did not witness these things with eyes and ears. At
the same time, he is asking us, do we believe now? If we had been among
those witnesses, we too might have rejected the evidence of our senses,
and refused to acknowledge the fact that he was the messiah; we might
have been men of little faith. Now, in the present moment, is our chance
to acknowledge the reality of Christ, now that He is beyond time, beyond
the material world, everlasting. We did believe the backing singers say
in concert, in answer. It is no longer a rhetorical question: it has to be
affirmed.
In his booklet Dylan: What Happened?, Paul Williams, writing about
the first songs to come out of Dylans born-again experience, pondered
where Dylan would go in the future.35 To him, Dylans Christian stance
seemed like a lifetime commitment. At the time, nobody really knew. The
secular image on the front cover of Shot of Love, showing what is
presumably an exploding bullet, was bewildering coming after the cover
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painting of Saved. On the back sleeve there was a quote from the Gospel
of Matthew, and a picture of Dylan holding a rose; the tension and
paradox was to be found on the album itself. Here was Dylan saluting
Lenny Bruce, whilst at the same time confirming that he was still the
property of Jesus.
Dylan, though, had obviously experienced a change of feeling; not
exactly a change of heart, because the songs still expressed Christian
sentiments, but a weakening of commitment. Perhaps he had realised
that he could not go on writing and performing gospel songs forever; it
was just not him to stick with any one particular style or move in the
same musical direction for long. The gospel-only tours had gradually
incorporated older material into the set lists, to the delight of the fans.
His decision to perform only the new songs when his born-again
experience was still recent was understandable; in the past, when he
found a new way of expressing himself, he had shown an obvious
impatience with the old stuff. Also, the Christian conversion demanded a
clean break with the past, with the person he used to be, including Dylan
the rock and roller. But the intensity that had made him lecture the
audience on apocalyptic matters seemed to have lessened on Shot of Love.
In its place, there is desperation: the title track sounds like the cry of a
man who needs help, who needs the medicine of Gods love to get him
through a world that is obviously ailing and sick. Here, at least, the
apocalyptic is still in evidence; I seen the kingdoms of the world and its
makin me feel afraid is not far away from some of the comments Dylan
made in Toronto about the armies of Russia and China. This is a man
still sure we are living in the end times, with the most powerful nations of
the world going to war, calling down a Biblical apocalypse. Hes a marked
man, a man on the run from persecution, like the disciples who fled for
their lives when Jesus was crucified: What I got aint painful, its just
bound to kill me dead / Like the men who followed Jesus when they put
a price upon his head. Why does Dylan need heavenly medicine?
Presumably he had some sort of experience around 1978 which led to his
receiving what believers term the comforter; the Holy Spirit entered him
as a result of his conversion. Christians were known to become vessels of
the Spirit numerous times after their initial conversion, though some
ceased to receive the gift after a while, perhaps because they relapsed to
their old ways. The shot of love Dylan asks for may be the Holy Spirit,
which would mean that the doctor of the first verse is Jesus; at any
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rate, he plays with the doctor-medicine-sickness metaphors throughout as
a way of exploring what appears to be a personal spiritual crisis.
Dylan, as ever, is the exile, the outsider. Only Jesus, or the Holy
Spirit, can make him kneel; thus he shows defiance to the world itself.
Nothing the world can offer him can make things any better; all of the
cures that men seek to ease the pain of living, the pain of marriages
breaking up, of having to watch scenes of war on the news every day, are
false cures. Heroin only leads to addiction and death, films and books
only lead to discontent, they lead us to ask more and more questions
without satisfying us: It dont satisfy the hurt inside nor the habit that it
feeds. During the aforementioned 1980 Toronto concert, Dylan had
spoken about his dabblings into the works of the philosophers, and
stressed that he had not found any satisfaction in what they had offered
him (I never found any truth in any of them, if you want to know the
truth, is the way he put it). The fruit of knowledge, in his book, leads to
original sin. The wise and prudent, the educated who seek the truth, are
denied the true revelations that are given to the innocent, those who do
not delve in philosophy. Reception of the Holy Spirit is an experience
that is felt, it cannot be intellectualized. Advocates of natural religion are
therefore wrong, for we cannot find God through observation of the
natural world, or through intellectual inquiry. Faith is the key.
Its clear that Dylan is talking about spiritual thirst when he says that
his sickness, the disease for which he wants a cure, will kill him like the
disciples of Jesus. In the end, loyalty to Jesus, the pursuit of spiritual
goals, killed the disciples. Dylans tendency to think of God in amorous
terms, discussed above, resurfaces in the next verse: I dont need no
alibi when Im spending time with you / Ive heard all of them rumors
and you have heard em too. Of course, this may simply be a reference
to a human relationship; it is unlikely that he is trying to justify a physical
relationship with a woman, in the knowledge that the Church would be
likely to chastise him for it, but then again the relationship need not be
physical; he might be simultaneously justifying his spending time with a
woman, with the implication that nothing amorous is taking place, and at
the same time addressing his saviour. In other words, he doesnt need to
justify his devotion to the Lord, to provide his old fans with alibis. Jesus
will not feed him fantasies but tell him the truth, the one thing that can
satisfy the hurt inside. The question Why would I want to take your
life? is chilling when one first hears it; just who is Dylan addressing here,
one has the right to ask. Is he perhaps refuting the Biblical concept of an
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eye for an eye? Perhaps not, because what follows is clear evidence that
the speaker does have every reason to ask for blood: Youve only
murdered my father, raped his wife / Tattooed my babies with a poison
pen / Mocked my God, humiliated my friends. It doesnt sound like a
Christian sentiment; one can almost hear the words of Hebrew law
demanding repayment of a debt. Dylan, though, is making it clear that he
has the right to want revenge, even if he doesnt carry it through (the
motivation of revenge for his fathers death appears also on the recent
Aint Talkin from Modern Times). He is singing about oppression, not
speaking personally but as a representative of Christians (or Jews) who
have suffered at the hands of modern day Herods or Pharaohs. There is a
possible echo of the Holocaust in these lines, though its impossible to
say for sure whether Dylan intended this; images are conjured up of
concentration camps, where fathers would indeed have been murdered
and wives raped, and all, including children, stamped with a number of
identification (effectively being tattooed with a poison pen). Dylans
heritage is Jewish and his race did suffer the kind of atrocities he is
describing here, even if his actual parents did not experience it. As a Jew
he would still feel these things very deeply, the Christian conversion in no
way altering his feelings. Ultimately we have a rejection of the notion of
revenge, of the idea that it itself can offer any kind of solution to past
wrong deeds; violence breeds violence, it perpetuates, it is addictive like
the heroin of the first verse; the writers of the revenge tragedies of the
Jacobean era recognised this essential truth, and so does Dylan.
Paul Williams has argued that Dylan, sometime in the late 70s, lost
his faith in womans ability to save him.36 Here he offers: Dont wanna
be with nobody tonight, rejecting another of the worlds promised
cures. Women no longer bring comfort, they do not have the right
medicine to satisfy his inner hurt. The man who is swift, smooth and
near is the enemy all right, but is he the devil, or is he Dylan himself,
and particularly his weaker side which would succumb to sin? In the final
verse, Dylan seems like a man trapped; he cannot cross the street, or
escape in his car - God has him nailed. The admission, My conscience is
beginning to bother me today, is fascinating because it makes us ponder
the question of whether Dylan was starting to stray from the fold, that he
was experiencing conflict and had already taken some steps to remove
himself from the grip of evangelical Christianity. On the other hand,
Christianity places great emphasis on the conscience as a moral guide.
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Searching ones conscience is a prelude to confession and absolution,
even for one who is already saved.
What exactly is the sickness, the complaint of which Dylan sings? We
know that a cure is a shot of love, the word of truth, infusion by the Holy
Spirit, a cure different to worldly solutions in that it does not create a
habit, and does not ultimately leave us empty and hungry for more (such
are heroin and revenge and sexual relations). The sickness is spiritual
need, the absence of the Holy Spirit, the void that can only be filled by
Gods comfort, the hollow that earthly fulfilment leaves. Nothing can
satisfy except God.
The heart is also prone to sickness; indeed love is a kind of sickness.
Like whiskey or heroin, it feeds a habit, and Heart of Mine is about the
dangers of physical love, the danger of giving in to desire. Submitting to
love is like playing with fire, and our heart makes us wander or roam
from the one true path; passion causes blindness, it turns men into fools.
Dylan, however, cant help admitting that he does feel the pull of physical
attraction towards women, that its hard for him, even though he knows
its wrong: Dont let her hear you want her / Dont let her know shes
so fine, in the printed version (though in the recorded version it sounds
as if hes singing Dont push yourself over the line, which is even more
appropriate). Here, and on Need a Woman, a song written at the same
time but left over for The Bootleg Series, he admits that the shelter women
provide is still a strong attraction, but ultimately, you know that shell
never be true. The only true person is still Jesus Christ. Women, the
daughters of Eve, are there to tempt us. Saint Paul says, in I Corinthians,
7.1, It is good for a man not to touch a woman. Even though Dylan
believes that the flesh brings corruption, however, you get a sense that he
is in conflict with himself, that the desire he is feeling is not exactly
condemned on Heart of Mine - the light, breezy tune certainly
contributes to the impression. The separation from Sara still rubs him, as
far as one can tell, and women in general are not to be trusted (compare:
Shell only give to others the love she has gotten from you with
Youre a Big Girl Nows I know where I can find you / In
somebodys room / Its a price I have to pay). The heart is so
malicious and so full of guile; desire is a snare.
The core of Watered-Down Love is a paraphrase of Saint Pauls
Epistle on the nature of charity; the theme again is love, but not the love
of Heart of Mine, which of course is really sexual desire (you can play
with fire but youll get the bill); it is an eternal flame, quietly burning.
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Dylan wants to tell us about the love of God, and its human equivalent,
charity, especially how it contrasts with other, false kinds of love. The
pure love Dylan is evoking is the very opposite of the false loves he lists,
the love that will sneak up into your room, tall, dark and handsome
(especially youthful sexual fantasy), or deceive you or lead you to
transgression (lust); it is not jealous love or envious love, and will not
capture the heart and hold it to ransom (selfish, one-sided, possessive
love). This love never needs to be proud; it is humble before God,
negating the ego. Unlike human love, it doesnt keep us waiting, it doesnt
make us envious of others, doesnt spring from the accidental meeting of
two people who are attracted to each other. Dylan says that this love is
always on time. The problem, and Dylan knows this, is that most
people dont want a pure love in the first place; they want a corruption of
it, a perverted form, a watered-down love.
The first two songs on the album pair off pretty well: Heart of
Mine deals with (but does not quite manage to exorcise) the temptations
of the flesh, Shot of Love is about real, fulfilling love, felt in the
relationship with Jesus Christ, a love that satisfies the craving that it
creates. Watered-Down Love is another variation on the same theme,
and In the Summertime, about a very private encounter between a man
and his creator, is recounted almost like the beginning of a love affair.
Love is a major theme, then, as is the apocalyptic (The outtake The
Grooms Still Waiting at the Altar, later added to the CD version of the
album perhaps as a concession to its popularity with fans, is the track
most concerned with the end times). Property of Jesus and Lenny
Bruce, meanwhile, are both about the persecution one faces when one
speaks the truth. Taken like this, the album seems to have unity and an
inner-cohesion that it does not seem to have to the listener; the music,
perhaps, is where the lack of focus lies.
Both In the Summertime and Every Grain of Sand are songs
that use amorous imagery to talk about the singers personal relationship
with Jesus. In the Summertime details the born-again experience,
where the recipient, during the moment of conversion, seems to be
outside of time (I was in your presence for an hour or so / Or was it a
day? I truly dont know). The place in which the singer finds himself is a
place where the sun never sets, some sort of heaven on earth, perhaps a
revelation of paradise. A state of innocence is evoked, when man was in
harmony with nature, reminiscent of Van Morrisons childhood reveries
in Astral Weeks. After the world of Trouble, and the wind blowing
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through Shot of Love, this state of peace, of spiritual contentment, is
welcome. Dylan writes about a flood / That set everybody free,
alluding not simply to the Old Testament Flood but to a future time of
apocalypse and judgement, and offers an image of times degeneration,
echoing the dream of Nebuchadnezzar: We cut through iron and we cut
through mud. The dream of a man of metals was interpreted as
representing the ages of the world, commencing with the golden age and
degenerating to clay, or mud, signifying the last age. Did you respect me
for what I did / Or for what I didnt do, Dylan sings, making us wonder
whether he is addressing man or God. He defines his close relationship
with Jesus, something that sustained him in a world of fools who would
make a mockery of sin: you were closer to me than my next of kin.
Thus, the relationship one has with the creator is the only real
relationship, Jesus Himself having said that he had come to set family
members against one another. Dylan is still in possession of the gift of
salvation; he is still ready to declare that he has been saved, that nothing
has really changed.
Every Grain of Sand is the albums one unreserved masterpiece.
The sessions for Shot of Love produced other great songs, but they
obviously didnt fit his scheme: The Grooms Still Waiting at the Altar,
Angelina and Caribbean Wind would have bolstered the album
immeasurably, but Dylan passed them over. But we do, at least, get
Every Grain of Sand, a deeply affecting confessional song, expressing
doubts about the reality of God but ultimately serving as an affirmation
of faith. Its Dylan at his most naked, writing about the time of
confession, when he feels a deep need to repent. He feels despair, his
tears preventing any seed of hope from taking root. The cry of the
penitent is heard, and the humble person is given a revelation (I can see
the Masters hand / In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand).
The song conveys the difficulties of overcoming temptation (I gaze into
the doorway of temptations angry flame contrasted with the eternal
flame, quietly burning of Watered-Down Love), and, even more
worryingly, the moment when we doubt whether God is really with us (I
hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea / Sometimes I turn,
theres someone there, other times its only me). Dylan comes to an
awareness of the eternal, immutable nature of the creator; he sees order
and purpose in everything (every hair is numbered), and knows that
nobody is left to die alone (Like every sparrow falling derives from
Christs Sermon on the Mount). The song also recalls Blakes Auguries of
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Innocence, with its revelations of seeing a world in a grain of sand and a
heaven in a wildflower.
Every Grain of Sand is a confession song, a confession
characterised by humility and doubt. It is not a song of religious fervour,
yet it may be the most convincing defence Dylan has ever offered of his
beliefs. The frame of reference is very old: we are reminded of the
Psalms, of medieval sermon literature, as the listener takes the role of the
confessor, audience to the penitents most private thoughts, hearing his
doubts but ultimately faced with an affirmation of belief. The song begins
with a confession of the penitents emotional state, which, gravely, is one
of despair. Miltons paradise was able to cure every ailment except
despair, and it is in this, the gravest sin, that man most identifies with the
devil. However, though the confession is born out of apparent despair, it
is not a permanent state: depression has led the penitent to his hour of
deepest need, that is, to the brink of hopelessness, but the act of
confessing will allow him to recover from this state of mind. What causes
his inclination to confess, then, is not merely a penchant to submit to
temptation but something more challenging. The newborn seed of
hope is not allowed to sprout because the penitents tears, brought on by
doubt in the existence of a creator, drown it. Nevertheless there is
something inside the penitent that saves him in his hour of need, an inner
voice, like the voice of a desperate, dying man, which calls out and is
heard (reaching out somewhere) - a cry for help, a voice directed at
heaven. Its sound is like a bell, simultaneously waking the penitent from
his self-absorption, tolling amidst the danger of his depressed state,
returning him from the morals of despair. He acknowledges that he
doesnt have the inclination to look back on his past errors, so that
guilt may steer him away from repeating these lapses - it is a grave
characteristic, and one so true of Dylan, that he is not reflective in this
way. But, if reflection on past sins is not an option, the self may be
caught in an escalation of deeds that lead to damnation; Cains only hope
was to break the chain of events that the murder of Abel had set into
motion, but he, lacking the necessary guilt, was unable to do so. Dylans
despair therefore has a twofold cause: doubts about his belief in God,
and the penchant for sin.
It is the chorus itself that effectively breaks the chain, because in the
fury of the moment the penitent is able to see a ray of hope - like an
advocate of the theological argument based on design, he is able to see
the Masters hand in a leaf, or in a grain of sand; the stamp of the
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creator, like a fingerprint, is left on the things He has created (the
Englishman William Paley had put forward the argument that the
universe bears the imprint of its creator, using the famous analogy of a
watch and watchmaker). The chorus here has echoes of Blakes
Auguries of Innocence, though Blake was passionately opposed to
natural religion and its insistence that the natural world was ultimately
explicable in scientific terms. Dylan himself, as a Romantic, would not be
an advocate of this Enlightenment credo, but rather he is suggesting that
the invisible world is in some sense visible through the veil of the created
world, and that contemplation of finite things (Blakes vegetable
universe) can lead to an understanding of the infinite, and of God. Thus
the penitent is lifted outside of time, from the time and hour and
chain of events of the flawed, finite world, which leads to despair, and
into a timeless realm of truth: this is the true achievement of the prophet,
as Blake understood: not to foretell the future, which any way is simply
an easily predictable chain of events, but to grasp the infinite. For Blake
this meant cleansing the doors of perception - the portals of the senses,
the misleading gates onto the vegetable universe that impairs those
who do not have threefold vision. Similarly, Dylan is able to discover the
eternal truth of God just when he needs it most.
The second verse returns us to the physical world and its
temptations; there grow the flowers of indulgence, symbols of vanity,
pride and excess which can snare the penitent, and perhaps more
revealingly, the weeds of yesteryear, which given Dylans insistence on
not looking back, can strangle any flower of hope. These weeds, like the
chain of events that began with the sin of Cain (and indeed with the sin
of Adam and Eve), are the ugly flowerings of past sins which we all
inherit, and drive the penitent to despair of ever transcending such a
state. It is these things which, like criminals, have choked the breath of
conscience and good cheer. Temptation is a place of angry flame, the
doorway to which attracts the penitent, whose name is called whenever
he passes. But then there is the saving grace, the knowledge of the divine,
that delivers him after he has moved on from the doorway of temptation:
the knowledge of Gods careful planning of everything in the world,
divine foresight and order: when the Bible says that every hair is
numbered, it means that everything does indeed have a purpose and a
value after all.
The final verse contains a personal allusion to Dylans rise from
unknown to superstar, not that this success is viewed with any pride,
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because his position is still one of loneliness: the rags to riches
progression takes place in the sorrow of the night and in the violence
of a summers dream. It is not altogether clear what Dylan means by
this latter image, but it appears to be a reference to the achievement of
success, a dream born of false hopes finally realised, until it ends in the
chill of a wintry light, an image of despair and loneliness. Essentially,
Dylan is dissecting the stardom myth and attesting that its pursuit of ego
and vanity are ultimately unfulfilling and hollow: thus we come to the
bitter dance of loneliness, the understanding that the fame trip is a kind
of dance, the unreal assumption of a role. Forgotten faces from this
pursuit display a broken mirror of innocence; in stardom, as in life, this
progression is a sobering process, leading to the same kind of despair.
The verses key image, the line that encapsulates the doubt the penitent is
seeking to express, comes next: I hear the ancient footsteps like the
motion of the sea / Sometimes I turn, theres someone there, other times
its only me. Indeed, it seems on times that there is nothing other than
ourselves, no God and no purpose to existence. This doubt about
religious matters, and the humility expressed, raise the song to a higher
plane; this, ultimately, is the penitents confession more than his despair
about ever breaking the chain of original sin, or resisting the flame of
temptation, it is the suspicion that there is no higher power that troubles
him. The contemplation of the infinite, through the veil of finite things,
is thankfully able to dispel it. The final image of the chorus expresses a
duality, this precarious state of mankind, caught between a knowledge of
the finite nature of the natural world and infinite nature of God: the
sound we hear behind our backs may be the footsteps of the creator but
equally it may simply be the wash of the tide; the image of the Christian
pilgrim on a sandy beach, who, when he glances behind him, sees the
footsteps of Jesus who has been with him on his journey, is recalled, but
here there is the possibility that the pilgrim was alone all the while. The
lyric change in Dylans other recorded version of the song is also
significant: the reality of man is replaced with the perfect finished
plan, where every irrational event that would lead to doubt has been
explained and is finally explicable. Finally, the Bible is the source again for
the knowledge that delivers the penitent from doubt: every sparrow
falling echoes Jesus claim that not even a single sparrow can fall from
the sky without God being aware of the fact.
The song stands out from the rest of his Christian songs for one
important reason: the absence of Christ and the more fundamental
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invocation of a creator, a father, who is the divine presence. Whereas
before Christ was the mediator between man and God, and his promise
of salvation never in doubt, his presence dispelling any despair with the
way the world is, here the penitents condition is a much more alienated
one; he does not have Christ to lead him through life, to answer his
questions. The God of Every Grain of Sand, like the god of the deists,
appears hidden behind his handiwork, not unreachable perhaps but
certainly in the background; it is meditation on divine things, perception
of the imprint of the divine in time, that finally lifts the despair, not the
intervention of God. The song, indeed, can be singled out because it does
not assume the presence of an interventionist God. There is a link,
perhaps, with the post-Christian songs of Infidels, but the God of this
song at least does not seem to have reverted back to the severe, revengeadvocating Yahweh of I and I. Nevertheless he is the Father and not
the Son, and he does seem to be distressingly absent from the world he
has created.
One may say that Shot of Love is Dylans answer to his critics. When
he first went electric, unveiling his new sound to the stupefied audience
at the Newport Folk Festival, he was reportedly close to tears as he was
coaxed back for an acoustic encore. It was the last time he would lower
his guard; the electric bard of the 1966 tour seemed to thrive on the
hostility that greeted him from dissenters in the audience. Even the
Judas heckler only threw him for a moment, and his answer to the
heckler, indeed to all the die-hards who had accused him of selling out,
could be heard in the defiant version of Like a Rolling Stone, his voice
dripping with condescension for those who could not follow on the path
to personal and artistic liberation. Both Rolling Stone and Positively
4th Street sounded like an answer to those critics - I am right in what I
am doing, Dylan seemed to be saying; you will never know what it feels
like to be me. He must have expected hostility towards the Christian
songs, anticipating his audiences reaction in the verses of I Believe in
You. He knew, from the moment he began to translate his born-again
feeling into art, that they would attack him. I thank thee, O Father, Lord
of heaven and earth, because thou hast hidden these things from the wise
and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. The quote on the
sleeve of the Shot of Love album says it all: Dylan is not just quoting
Matthew to express his thanks for being saved; he is answering all the
critics who questioned his born-again stance - these things are hidden
from you, you wouldnt understand. Dylan sounds like hes being
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oppressed; we can only guess to what degree he faced criticism in his
personal life. If Property of Jesus is any indication, he was suffering for
his beliefs. Bob Dylan is well aware of the kind of reactions his
conversion provoked. To some, he was a tool, a puppet of the
evangelicals, seduced by the lies that life is black and white. In Property
of Jesus he retaliates: When the whip thats keeping you in line doesnt
make him jump. Dylan thinks its the unbelievers who are slaves, slaves
to the system, to their families, to their jobs. In Trouble in Mind,
which Paul Williams sees as one of the most revealing of his early gospel
songs, Dylan says of unbelievers (he calls them his brothers): They selfinflict punishment on their own broken lives, / Put their faith in their
possessions, in their jobs or their wives. Unbelievers who laugh at
salvation, who think that after we die we return to nothingness, are what
Saint Paul calls corruptible seed. In contrast, the man who belongs to
Jesus cannot be exploited by superstition, he cant be bribed or bought;
he doesnt pay tribute to worldly kings or exploit others for his own gain.
Through this song, Dylan damns his accusers, those who have mocked
him for being a Christian. Its extremely bitter, a long way from Christian
charity and forgiveness with its sarcastic tone and mocking suggestions;
Dylan is effectively getting his revenge on all those who mocked him.
There is no doubt who is damned and who is free.
The first book of Corinthians (IV: 9-10) says this: For we are made a
spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to man. We are fools for
Christs sake. In a sense, then, every Christian enacts what Christ did by
taking up his cross and enduring persecution. Dylan obviously felt he had
had his fair share. Nonetheless, there is a sense that, like his electrified
rebel persona of the 1966 tour, he thrived on the experience. Dylans
nature is contrary; he likes to be in the role of the outsider, to stand in
the shoes of the outlaw. Lines on Slow Train Coming suggest this (my socalled friends, they dont want me around, because I believe in you.)
Still, Shot of Love sees Dylan in a particularly hostile and defensive mood,
as if the animosity really did get to him this time. The 1966 tour must
have been chaos, an amphetamine haze, and when he finally looked out
from his hospital bed the world had caught up with him; the hoots and
catcalls of the folkies had subsided to a murmur; the world was waiting
for Bob Dylan to recover, waiting to see where he would take them. The
man who had thrived as an outlaw had never really been out there on his
own; new fans had followed, even as the old ones were left behind. But
with the Christian phase, even though, paradoxically, he had found a
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harbour in Christ that sheltered him in the stormy aftermath of a broken
marriage and the fallout after the hostile reception to Renaldo & Clara, the
role of follower of Christ really was the role of an exile. The shelter
Christ offered may have been in his heart, but it was also in another
world; this world was a particularly dangerous place to be. On Slow Train
Coming and Saved, the hostility of friends and family is par for the course;
Dylan expects there to be resistance and positively welcomes it. Denying
personal relationships, shrugging off criticism, was one way of expressing
his commitment to Jesus. But, three years later, especially on Property
of Jesus, Dead Man, Dead Man and Watered-Down Love, Dylan
does not turn the other cheek, he slugs back.
In stark contrast to the songs that seek to justify his born-again
stance is Lenny Bruce. One might very well ask why Dylan felt
compelled to write a song about one of Americas most liberal and
controversial comedians. The song depicts Lenny Bruce as an outlaw, a
rebel who shook up the Establishment; a man who shone a light on the
vices of the men in power. Bruce might seem an unlikely hero for a bornagain Christian, that is until we listen closely to what Dylan is saying
about him. Its a strangely moving song, admittedly a minor work, and
the singers identification with the comedian, his empathy with someone
who spoke up for his own version of the truth and weathered the storms
of controversy, is real enough. Bruce was a man notorious for his
outspoken criticism of the corrupt, hypocritical Establishment, who
fought a war (not on the battlefield of the spirit, but on a very real
battlefield nonetheless, in a battle for honesty in a hypocritical country).
Bruce was persecuted and silenced, just like another of Dylans heroes.
He was a speaker of the truth, and as a result he suffered for it. Bruces
ghost is living on and on - not simply the ghost of the man, the spirit of
his biting, subversive comedy. Dylan obviously thought that Lenny
Bruce, despite his fall, had encouraged others to be more frank. He
doesnt see Bruce as immoral; rather, the society Bruce rapped about is
immoral. Dylan makes Bruce sound almost Christ-like: He just showed
the wise men of his day to be nothing more than fools.
The remaining songs, Dead Man, Dead Man and Trouble, are
among the albums weakest; the former is about the sort of corrupt, blind
individual who cannot recognise the truth Dylan is attesting to. The
ghetto that you built for me is the one you end up in, he declares,
evoking persecution of the Jewish race. Trouble has a repetitive tune
but the lyrics are worthy of some attention: the idea is that man is cursed
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to suffer, that all over the world we cannot escape conflicts in every
sphere, be it political, national, social, inter-personal and personal. The
propensity towards conflict is unavoidable in human life; unlike Blowin
in the Wind, there is no question of mankind taking control of its own
destiny. The only solution to the troubled state of the world is
apocalypse, the intervention of Jesus.
Shot of Love is not a great album. Dylan tends to give his all when he
really believes in what he is doing, and here he seems only halfcommitted. Its interesting how few Dylan fans favour Saved over Shot of
Love; though the energy that had driven him to write great gospel songs
like Solid Rock and In the Garden was at low ebb when the former
was recorded, the songs themselves have Dylan one-hundred per-cent
focused on his work, committed to what he is trying to say. But the songs
on Shot of Love find Dylan unsure of what he wants to impart. Curious,
then, that Dylan should say in the Biograph notes of Bumps Blackwell,
who produced the title track: of all the producers I ever used, he was the
best, the most knowledgeable and he had the best instincts.37 Dylan has
declared his fondness for the album on several occasions. He obviously
believed hed made a breakthrough. Its not in evidence, at least not to
these ears.
He must have been disappointed when the album failed to sell. It
must also have occurred to him that his evangelical phase had harmed his
public and critical reputation. So much of the hostility directed at nonbelievers is standard evangelical stuff, a way of affirming loyalty to Christ
and rejection of worldly things. Shot of Love contains a certain amount of
resentment towards his critics. At the same time, in the songs In the
Summertime and Every Grain of Sand, we find the key to his faith,
the reason why he believed in the first place: the personal, intimate
relationship with God which the outer world cannot touch.
One easy way to separate the smitten Dylan fan from the more
detached admirer is to mention the three Christian albums. Faced with
antagonism from the musically ignorant, the devotee can at least rely on
informed friends to support his theories about Dylans importance, and is
likely to feel confident enough to tackle the Dylan haters head on (most
of these can only offer up weak arguments about the lack of beauty in
Dylans voice, how they dont mind the songs if theyre sung by other
artists but couldnt stomach a whole album of Dylans whine). When he
tries to sing the praises of the Christian trio of albums, however, the
devotee swiftly finds himself in a standoff alone and outnumbered; like
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Gary Cooper in High Noon he goes into battle alone, his supporters
having made their excuses. The trouble with these songs for most people
is the unforgiving stance of born-again Bob, railing against the Arabs and
the Buddhists, reducing life to a set of black and white lies in which the
gate to paradise is disturbingly narrow, and the blinding light of the devil
likely to impair the vision of any but the true Christian. Whilst it may be
hard to construct a defence for the majority of Dylans Christian lyrics,
against those who cannot accept the singleness of purpose of his religious
art, it is a shame that more people do not recognise the beauty of the
music itself.

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CHAPTER EIGHT
SURVIVING IN THE RUTHLESS
WORLD
INFIDELS AND EMPIRE BURLESQUE

ylan in 1983 seemed less concerned with evangelism, and Infidels,

released in November, apparently bore out rumours that he was
investigating his Jewish heritage once more. Fans and critics
speculated whether the born-again phase had really ended, and though
the new album did contain a heavy quota of Biblical references, the
majority of them seemed to have their source in the Old Testament.
There was no overt preaching, and signs of a conscious effort to sound
contemporary. Because of this, Americans in particular embraced Infidels
as a return to form.
The album eventually became infamous, however, for the amount of
great songs written for it but rejected, apparently against the advice of
producer Mark Knopfler. This is not quite true - a glance at the recording
sessions lists reveals that there is not nearly so much of substance as
during the Shot Of Love sessions, which produced three major unreleased
songs (The Grooms Still Waiting at the Altar, Caribbean Wind and
Angelina). But Infidels did suffer from the absence of one major song,
perhaps the greatest of Dylans mature songwriting, Blind Willie
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McTell, which will be discussed shortly. Even so, the album does
manage to offer a handful of interesting minor songs and two major
ones. The foremost of the major songs is Jokerman, which Dylan
chose to open the album.
The central, enigmatic figure of the Jokerman has prompted theories
that fix him as either Christ, the Jungian trickster-hero, the Tarot fool,
and many others besides. The song is addressed to him, and seems to be
full of reproach, for he sets himself up as a superhuman figure, a god in
his own mind. In the opening image he is standing Christ-like upon the
water, casting bread in the manner of the Passover ritual, while,
elsewhere, an idol made of metal stands with burning eyes, the pagan
graven image of a deity. He is associated, then, with a human image of
god, a false idol, and indeed this is his role throughout the song. The
presence of the idol evokes some sort of ancient cult, and it seems that
man is engaged in carving out images of a god or playing the role of god.
Michael Gray has taken the image of being born with a snake in both of
your fists while a hurricane was blowing to be a reference to Hercules or
Heracles, who, as an infant, wrestled a snake in his cradle.38 It is an image
of the superhuman, of the human as god; Hercules, half-immortal, was
the son of a god but not the son of God. More generally, this image
suggests mastery over natural forces (and perhaps over evil, as the snake
is traditionally a symbol of Satan). To be born while a hurricane is
blowing would be superhuman enough, but to be born holding two
snakes is something else - a miraculous birth indeed, certainly suggestive
of eastern cults. Yet it is the very opposite of the humble birth of Christ,
the son of God. Indeed, the Jokerman does not embody truth at all; as a
representative of mankind he has freedom within his grasp but truth
itself is far off; the position, I suspect, Dylan thinks we are in the modern
age - the sole ideal has become freedom, not truth. Ironic to think, then,
that Dylans reputation partly rests on his championing of freedom in the
60s. References to the superhuman abound: Michelangelo is the prime
example of an artist who dedicated himself to sculpting God-filled men,
superheroes of the Old Testament, and there is a clear parallel with the
makers of the pagan idols and the maker of Christian ones, because both
seek to render the saintly or immortal in pigment or stone. There is also
the scarlet prince, superhuman because he controls the world, both
secular and religious, a representation of the antichrist.
There is a sense that the Jokerman is Dylan himself. At times the
subject appears to be man in his loftiest state, or the artist in general, but
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at the same time Dylan appears to be looking within, looking back on his
semi-mythic past, and exploring the potential of the artist to be a Christlike impostor. With this in mind, the opening image may recall the poetprophet of A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall, who announced his intention
to stand on the ocean until I start sinking. The speaker may indeed be
referring to the artists messianic function, and to his own appropriation
of the role of messiah (Dylan, the messianic rock star, certainly did cast
breadcrumbs of wisdom to his disciples in the 60s; what has changed in
the present, apart from the dwindling of those disciples, is his awareness
of the iniquities of the modern world, the Babylonish cities with their
idols of iron and steel). Dylan looks back on his youthful ideals, and his
generations lofty ambitions, when he refers to the distant ship sailing
off in the mist; this is a reversal of the positive image of When the Ship
Comes In, with its Goliath-conquering ideals, and an admission of his
generations failure to change things. The Herculean birth is an aptly
chosen image that plays up to the mythologizing of the rock star, but
Dylan undercuts it by presenting a comically excessive portrait: to be
born with a snake in both fists stretches credulity, but to be born in the
midst of a hurricane topples things over. The time when the hurricane
began was, if we remember, also the time when the ship came in, the
hurricane image referring to swift, apocalyptic change anticipated by the
socially conscious young. The younger Dylan had sung about freedom, in
Chimes of Freedom especially, as if it was the most important goal of
all: in the 60s it became the watchword and the cause to end all causes.
The Dylan of Jokerman is mature enough to recognise that freedom is
not enough without truth, so this is an example of the older, supposedly
wiser Dylan looking back on his younger self with reproach. The artist
recognises that he has sold a false dream, that he has played Christ. The
truth is that life is brief, and you better try to discover what truth really is
because the sun is setting. In the end, we really do rise up and say
goodbye to no one.
The address to his younger self continues: what more appropriate
allusion could there be to Dylans ability to reinvent himself than
Shedding off one more layer of skin? The earlier version of
Jokerman offers some elaboration on the prophetic, Christ-like abilities
the artist possesses: No crystal ball do you need on your shelf. There is
no need for fortune telling, presumably because the artist, in the words of
Blake, prophetic sees the past, present and future to begin with, or has
the audacity to believe so.
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The self-reflection is severely critical of the tendency to play Christ to
the masses: Youre a man of the mountains, you can walk on the clouds
/ Manipulator of crowds, youre a dream twister. What greater analytical
deconstruction of his own myth can we expect? As we have seen, Dylan,
in the mid 70s, drew parallels between his own experience and that of
Christ; Jokerman punctures the self-inflation. How much larger than
life this figure seems, a man as tall as the mountains, floating on his own
myth. His values are as changeable as his image: Friend to the martyr, a
friend to the woman of shame (the context in which these remarks
appear make the Christ parallel obvious). Likewise, his learning has come
from the Old Testament books that concern themselves with law and
ritual (Leviticus and Deuteronomy) and from the law of the jungle. It
would be difficult to come up with more conflicting sets of values than
this coupling of the Darwinian idea of the survival of the fittest with the
canon of Biblical law, yet to say that they are ones only teachers
suggests adherence to a consistent set of imparted principles. Dylans
awareness of his own photogenic image, his sculpted look, as Michael
Gray has noted, lurks behind the reference that Michelangelo indeed
couldve carved out your features.39 No doubt, this worse self which
Dylan is deconstructing would readily like to see himself placed next to
Biblical figures like David (a man of the mountains, the statue being
twice human height) in the Michelangelo canon. And what better way to
mount the statue of a hero than on a horse to give him that extra bit of
lift? There is again a Christ-echo in resting in the fields, far from the
turbulent space, a hint of his refuge of Gethsemane, far from the
turbulent space of Calvary and the obligations of history. In this
marvellous image there is at least something of Dylans own retreat from
the rock circus to which he had nearly fallen victim, and a sense that his
own history is being mapped out.
As ever with his post-Christian output, there is reference to the
degeneration of the modern world; now we are whisked away from these
images of the artist and deposited in the apocalyptic present, the present
of nightsticks and water cannons, tear gas, padlocks, the ruthless world
Dylan now finds himself surviving in. The image of False-hearted judges
dying in the webs that they spin is a memorable comparison between
judicial corruption and, in the words of W.B. Yeats, a spider smothered
by its own web, conveying the idea of a web of deceit that ultimately
proves the spinners undoing. Just as he insists that the sun swiftly sets,
Dylan stresses that night will shortly come steppin in, personified like
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a theatrical villain. And sure enough, the final verse unmasks the villain of
the song, the prototype of the singers own worse self in his capacity to
twist dreams and manipulate the masses, his tendency to play the
messiah: the arrival of night marks the entrance of the scarlet prince,
approximating the antichrist of Revelations, who will put the priest in
his pocket (control the church, in other words), put the blade to the
heat (the ghastly image of a red-hot knife returns us to theatrical,
especially Jacobean territory) and Take the motherless children off the
streets / And place them at the feet of a harlot - a corruption of Christs
acts, an image reminiscent of the Biblical whore of Babylon.
The time, again, is the end times, and what better time to finally listen
to that persecutor within whom the Jokerman is constantly fleeing, the
conscience, and to submit to God. One of the extraordinary things about
the depiction of the hostile modern world in the penultimate verse is the
intimation that even the clergy have succumbed to the general duplicity:
it is not just the rifleman who is stalking the sick and the lame but the
preacher also. Indeed, as another Infidels song claims, not even the
Vatican is safe from the general corruption. The world is a world of
masks, appearances concealing deadly realities (behind every curtain there
are nightsticks and water cannons and so on; the judges who spin webs
are really corrupt individuals hiding behind the mask of their authority the metaphor is appropriate, the spiders web, apparently a thing of
beauty, being essentially a trap). Truth is far off, and in such a world, it
will be easy for the arch-Jokerman, the devil or antichrist, to rise to
power. For that is the link between the songs depiction of the messianic
complex and the final unmasking of the antichrist: when we play at being
Christ we do not, in fact, imitate Christ, the most humble of men; rather
we are types of the antichrist, seduced by power and driven to
corruption.
Infidels does offer some indications that Dylan is trying to remain
relevant by writing political songs; Union Sundown, however, is a
failure musically and lyrically, though somewhere, buried beneath the lazy
writing, there is a valid point about the hidden machinery of exploitation
behind the bright face of capitalism. Neighborhood Bully is rather
more successful, despite its low estimate by many Dylan fans, and
however misguided in its politics. Most listeners find the pro-Zionist
message unpalatable, but there is a residue of the kind of paranoid,
vitriolic performance he gave on Idiot Wind; the images of the
Diaspora Jew seem to me especially strong, as does the reference to the
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fall of the empires that have oppressed Jerusalem. Dylan knows his
Jewish history, and the song, whilst being a kind of obstinate defence and
whitewash of this, evokes the long tradition of being the outcasts of the
world. So, while this may not be especially sharp writing, it does
constitute an interesting defence of his heritage. What Neighborhood
Bully does suggest is that Dylan was once again interested in his Jewish
roots, and felt the need to defend his heritage rather than his evangelical
beliefs. It joins the long list of Dylan defensive songs.
The album has its share of minor songs, but even among these there
are lines that stand out. Dont Fall Apart on Me Tonight has the
following: I wish Id have been a doctor, / Maybe Id have saved some
life that had been lost, / Maybe Id have done some good in the world /
Stead of burning every bridge I crossed. On the face of it, this is Dylan
as the Jokerman; we do not really take him seriously, it smells like false
modesty. But the lines are more aware than that. Both medicine and art
are under the patronage of Apollo. John Keats, with whom Dylan is
certainly familiar, trained as a surgeon before turning to poetry; Keats
came to view poetry as itself a medicine, and the poet as a physician
whose words could be a salve in a world full of suffering. Broadly
speaking, the world of Infidels is rather like the vale of tears Keats feared,
finally rejecting the ideal of the vale of soul making. In such a world (a
world where the only safe home would be one made out of stainless
steel), a world of illusions, duplicity and hypocrisy, the domain of
Jokermen and thieves, Dylan wants us to ponder whether there really is
anything constant and sincere. Perhaps the doctor, by simply saving life,
can avoid corruption, whereas the poet, himself working with the
processes of illusion, cannot. So we come to another nineteenth century
poet: Matthew Arnold, whose Dover Beach expressed the same
sentiment as Dylan airs here: Love, let us be true to one another.
Dylans, in the modern idiom, is Dont fall apart on me tonight. Like
Arnolds receding sea of faith, Dylans world is equally precarious:
Yesterdays just a memory / Tomorrow is never what its supposed to
be. In Arnolds poem, the loss of faith, the absence of anything to
believe in, drove the poet to believe in the constancy of human
relationships. Dylans world of lies is different. According to G.K.
Chesterton, Father Browns curse says that when people stop believing in
something, they do not believe in nothing; they believe in anything. This
is the world of Infidels. Ultimately, Dylan is more pessimistic than Arnold,
because he makes it clear in the last verse that, even if relationships are
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the last truth we have left, he cannot communicate; he is trapped inside
himself.
Dealing with the devil and the disguises he puts on to entrap the
human soul, Man Of Peace returns us to the theme of duplicity and
masks. License to Kill tells how lies are propagated during our
upbringing, and we are effectively groomed for life, led away from the
truth, until, as an actor in a plot constructed by others, we see the error
of our ways. Mans narcissistic self-delusion, his tendency to fabricate a
fiction and to tell lies to himself, is encapsulated in these lines: he
worships at an altar of a stagnant pool / And when he sees his reflection,
hes fulfilled. Even the boss of Sweetheart Like You has fallen victim
to some kind of vanity; the woman to whom the song is addressed, like
the woman who appears in the chorus of License to Kill and Dont
Fall Apart on Me Tonight, may offer some kind of constancy and truth
in the midst of illusion, but still the sense is that even here the recipient
of the singers affections is merely a reflection of a woman he used to
know; just like long years ago, his Johanna is out of reach. The kiss of the
third verse is in itself a kind of deception, because behind the affection
there lurks violence (Just how much abuse will you be able to take?).
Dylan insists that success and power are contingent on how well you play
the game, using every underhand method at your disposal (In order to
deal in this game, got to make the queen disappear, / Its done with a
flick of the wrist). Like the illusionist, the manipulator of crowds, the
survivor in this ruthless world is he who learns how to deceive, who
learns the law of the jungle. In a world of masks and illusions, the only
thing that may still embody some kind of truth is women, and even they
aint what they used to be.
The finest of the songs recorded for Infidels was Blind Willie
McTell, a blues based on the standard Saint James Infirmary, and an
example of how Dylan can take pre-existing elements and make
something particularly relevant to his own experience and to the times. It
is a work dealing with a specific kind of anxiety, what the critic Harold
Bloom called the Anxiety of Influence: Dylan is haunted by the past, by
the ghosts of old blues voices, and feels that he himself is inadequate to
the task at hand: to sing a blues to mourn the passing of another age of
the world, perhaps the last age; it must be a blues worthy of the tradition
he is working in and the practitioners whom he obviously venerates,
towering blues singers like Blind Willie McTell, but such greats are long
gone. However, each artist, especially an artist of Dylans magnitude,
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must carve out their own space, referencing the past but at the same time
transcending it, creating something new and wholly individual. Little
wonder then that on Blind Willie McTell Dylan sings the blues in a
voice that wouldnt shame the finest of the Delta bluesmen. It is a superb
performance and a major song, a song in which the past haunts the
present in much the same way as it had done in Every Grain of Sand.
Ironic, given the songs concern with modesty, that he chose not to
release it until the Bootleg Series Vols. 1 3.
Dylan followed Infidels with Empire Burlesque in 1985. When he played
a tape of the new album to his friend, poet Allen Ginsberg, the latter was
struck by the solo Dark Eyes, but complained that he could not hear
the words on the rest of the album. Perhaps because of this, he judged
Empire Burlesque an appropriate title.40 Ginsbergs instincts were right: the
words, the soul of Bob Dylan, are buried in the mix.
Empire Burlesque is the desperate sound of Dylan in compromise,
trying to fit in with the sterile 80s pop scene. To make the sound more
contemporary, disco producer Arthur Baker was drafted in. It was not as
if, to reverse the idiom, he made a sows ear out of a silk purse. Dylan
was already stooping to undignified acts of compromise in the writing of
the songs; some of them were re-worked from the Infidels sessions to
begin with, and marred, rather than improved by the touching up. Thus,
the perfectly fine Someones Got a Hold of My Heart from 1983 is
transformed into the flabby, insincere Tight Connection to My Heart,
with its ugly soul chorus. The integrity Dylan had always stood for was
lost in a new kind of Tin Pan Alley songwriting, as if he were imitating
the worst kind of freelance songwriters from the Brill Building era. Even
the title of the opening track reeks of production line varnish. More than
anything, Empire Burlesque sounds like the music of a man who has lost
confidence in his own artistic judgement and is relying on the advice of
others. Dylan could no longer go forward, he could no longer pretend to
be contemporary, and when he did, it was embarrassing to see him
stooping to the level of musicians and composers who didnt deserve to
share a studio with him. The answer, the road forward and the place
where Dylans return to dignified recordings could be found, was in the
past.
And yet there is interest here, though ones attention is caught only
sporadically amidst the ghastly, mechanical pop settings. A significant
proportion of the lines in the songs were lifted from old movies,
suggesting that Dylan had spent too much time sitting idle in front of
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cable TV; such borrowings have always been part of the game. There
are also interesting pointers to Dylans spiritual state, post-evangelism,
especially in Seeing the Real You At Last, which seems to be about
emerging from the darkness of evangelism into some kind of temperate,
yet still spiritual, light; at one point, he even casts himself as a kind of
Christianized Odysseus, asking Didnt I sail through the storm, strapped
to the mast?, plainly referring to his religious phase. When the Night
Comes Falling from the Sky, an Infidels outtake, doesnt quite come off,
but its brooding, apocalyptic landscape, which, fifteen years earlier, he
evoked with pithy resonance in All Along the Watchtower, is
characteristically Dylan, if a little too much like typical Dylan to be
genuine; it as if Barry McGuire, the author of Eve of Destruction, had
decided on a comeback, once again casting himself as a harbinger of the
apocalypse.
The worst thing about Empire Burlesque is its attempt to pander to the
AOR penchant for slick ballads, as if Bob Dylan were expected to stoop
so low. Ill Remember You and Emotionally Yours are barren,
written to the rigid formula of the Brill Building songwriting rulebook;
unsurprisingly the latter became a hit for the popular group The OJays.
One can only wonder how a writer who had such mastery of the true
symmetry of the ballad form, and was so aware of its deep, common
root, of its mystery, could turn out such dross. In fact, there are
moments, in Ill Remember You, where the artifice cracks and the
rural, folk music sources that had nourished some of Dylans finest early
songs emerge: the wind blows through the piny woods and Dylan reaches
the end of the trail. The refrain, however, returns us to the gloss once
more.
There are two notable exceptions. Somethings Burning, Baby,
while not entirely free of the flaws of the others, is offbeat enough to
stand out, and provides evidence that Dylan still has his cold, cynical eye
turned to the artifice all around him, a la Infidels; charity is supposed to
cover up a multitude of sins is an interesting twist on the words of St.
Paul. Its apocalyptic, once again, but there is an anxiety, a self-doubt, at
its centre that seems sincere, elevating it above the rest. The other
notable exception, Dark Eyes, stands out partly because of the absence
of embellishment, though there is more to recommend in the song.
The title of Dark Eyes again comes from The Bible, which asserts
that The eye is the lamp of the body. So if your eye is sound, your whole
body will be full of light; but if your eye is not sound, your whole body
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will be full of darkness.41 This is one of those notable Dylan songs that
he has seemingly written from the brink of despair. The tune is quiet,
calm but melancholy, and its arrival comes as a strange peace descending
on the landscape of mechanical artifice, expressing resignation, brimming
with a knowledge of beauty and yet despair at the world. Its a song that
could have been written in the Garden of Gethsemane, while the imperial
powers seethed below and history beckoned, or like the prayer of one
who has spent too long in the madness, and needs to distance himself.
Ill go along with the charade / Until I can think my way out, Dylan
had said earlier, as if commenting on his intentions in this album. Now
he needs repose.
As the song begins, it is late at night by the waterfront, and the moon
is reflecting on the river; a party seems to be winding down, last orders
have been called, and the gentlemen guests are making to leave. The
speaker, in any case, feels disconnected from the scene. It is time for him
to leave too; though he could go with the others, he is out of time and
place: I live in another world where life and death are memorized.
Existence for him has become a memory, no longer something directly
experienced. Such is his sense of disconnectedness that, in a world strung
with lovers pearls, of beauty for the rich that dazzles the eyes, dark eyes
are all he sees. The eyes, those lamps of the soul, reflect the spiritual state
of man, which from his perspective is darkness. It is no wonder he is
unable to be a part of the world of leisure, and does not allow himself to
be taken in by man-made ornament. In the earlier version of Tight
Connection he had written: They say eat, drink and be merry / Take
the bull by the horns... Everything looks a little far away to me. The
same remote, detached perspective is given here. In the next verse, there
are echoes of New Testament scenes, beginning with Peters denial of
Christ Dylan describes a soldier deep in prayer (an image somehow
strange, perhaps illogically so, though our thoughts turn to the centurion
whose faith made him proclaim Jesus the Son of God); here, then, is the
centurion who has lost his faith in empire and found faith in a new
religion, the representative of the Gentiles who would ultimately accept
the message of the apostles. Here too is Peter (not named, his presence
implied by the reference to the cock-crow), for the moment at least
representative of the Jews who would reject Jesus, the multitude who had
lain palm fronds before his feet on the entry into Jerusalem and later
dipped their hands in his blood. And here, of course, is Jesus: the
mothers child who has gone astray echoes the missing Christ child,
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whose mother couldnt find him anywhere when he was gone about his
fathers business, as he most emphatically did in those last hours; as
Christian or Christ (because both are operational here) he is lost to his
family but found by God. Out of the loss, the dedication to God, the
refusal to be a part of the family or of the larger social family, or the state
(represented here by empire) is another dedication - dedication to
spiritual ideals, to what one believes. And though Jesus certainly strayed
from family comforts when he brought himself into the hands of the
Romans, the ultimate result is his Ascension to Godhead and the
judgement of the world: I can hear another drum beating for the dead
that rise; the drum that keeps us in line, that makes us belong, to family
or country, is ultimately unimportant. Therefore, in the next verse, it is
the same silent, conformist drum we are expected to march to in our
actions, to be discreet, to take revenge (the mainstay of Jewish theology
in the eyes of some, ignoring the codes of forgiveness). This is a song
about individual perspective, of how the way we look at the world is
absolute to us and yet ultimately relative to our own experience. I think
that perhaps Dylan is commenting on his own experiences of evangelism
here; he, in a sense, is the mothers child gone astray, who has drifted
from the religion of his forefathers (and thus he reminds us that it was
the Gentile soldier who expressed faith and the Jewish disciple who
lapsed). From where he stands, things are different; to him, the doctrine
of others is a game, to him, beauty is more important than ritual or law
or the systems of the world (a logical extension of his mid 60s insights).
Behind the lovers pearls are dark eyes, behind it all are heat and flame.
The French Girl, a song Dylan had recorded in the basement of
Big Pink during his Woodstock years, is taken as a metaphor for beauty
long departed (shes in paradise), the beauty the young Dylan had
recognised in the traditional song; now, a drunken man is at the wheel,
like the twin captains of the Titanic in Desolation Row, he is steering
us towards disaster. The bare facts are laid down, and boy were they ever
true: Hunger pays a heavy price to the falling gods of speed and steel.
There is not a sense, however, that we can change anything. Dylans faith
is in another world, the world beyond time, after the Last Judgement,
when mortal life and death will be nothing more than memories. As
Dylan has increasingly told us, time is short (the days are sweet is no
praise, from where Dylan stands); all are slaves to passion without
conscience, emotion without temperance. The last line is particularly
striking, conjuring up an image of Dylan the artist, on the stages of a
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thousand concert halls around the world, singing as the idol of
thousands; all he sees are dark eyes, eyes that do not shine with life but
with spiritual blackness. It is as striking a rebuke as any. Dont place your
faith in passion, or revenge, or discretion, or anything else, Dylan is
saying, and especially not in me.
Dark Eyes is a song, then, about the new Roman empire, about not
compromising, on an album that clearly does compromise; in fact, the
gulf, the distance of perspective which is the theme of Dark Eyes is
present on the album itself, between the songs where Dylan clearly does
try to take the bull by the horns (at least in so far as to play the pop
game) and where he withdraws to what he knows is true. In the first nine
songs we hear the bluster of the gentlemen talking, and their empty
conversation; in the tenth, Dylan has withdrawn to his secret place, his
Gethsemane, to see things his way. He would have to wait for America,
the modern Roman Empire, to finish with its 80s concerns, to become
relevant again. Most interestingly, the album seems to display some kind
of postmodern awareness of the charade, the game, which Dylan is being
forced to play, but then finds release from it at the end.

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CHAPTER NINE
DIGNITY
KNOCKED OUT LOADED TO UNDER
THE RED SKY

nd so we enter the wilderness years, where the real

deconstructing of myth takes place. In the mid 60s, in an
incident recorded for posterity on Dont Look Back, Dylan is seen
to refuse a couple of awards for best folk album and best newcomer. The
proper thing to have done, of course, would have been to accept them
gratefully, to play along with the star game. In accepting the Grammy for
Gotta Serve Somebody, Dylan had shown himself more willing to fit in
with the rituals of celebrity self-congratulation. But his controversial
comments from the Live Aid stage, pricking the mass ego of crowd and
participants, proved that he was still some distance from the professional
attitude of a Phil Collins or Eric Clapton. The fact that he had the cheek
to try to shift the rigid focus of the event away from third world famine,
to draw comparisons between the starving Africans and the US farmers,
as much as the shambolic performance with the usual suspects, Ron
Wood and Keith Richards, was a blow to some peoples idea of Bob
Dylan as a figure of integrity. To those people, it seemed that he had
finally lost his sense. How could this person, once a peerless leader of his
generation, be so out of step?
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Celebrity charity events aside, the music Dylan was making in the mid
80s plumped, at times, to such depths that it seemed he had lost his
artistic sense. In concert, he seemed to draw energy from Tom Petty and
the Heartbreakers, but in the studio there was no such dynamism. On
Knocked out Loaded Dylan obviously doesnt care a damn. Its impossible
to stomach the take on Kris Kristoffersons They Killed Him, with its
childrens choir, or to try to make sense of the muddle that is Got My
Mind Made Up. Could anyone imagine a more sloppy, unfocused, less
gripping opening than You Wanna Ramble? The singer sounds like he
would rather be somewhere else; he seems to be mouthing the words in
haste, literally ready to ramble. It sounds like what it is: a studio jam,
recorded by an artist with no credo.
It is worth contemplating the artistic drive it must have taken to
record masterpieces like Blonde on Blonde and Blood on the Tracks: the
commitment, mingled with instinctive genius but independent of it, that
pushed Dylan to get it right, to keep absolutely focused on what he was
doing, whether writing the songs or recording them, and remaining one
hundred per cent committed until the work was done. In the mid 80s, he
had obviously lost that commitment to his art, and was shying away from
labour. Sometimes it gets so hard to care, Dylan had written on Blonde
on Blondes Most Likely You Go Your Way, in an act of self-prophecy.
But in that case, why record? The inspiration has to be there to begin
with, of course. In Dylans case, as an instinctive, primitive artist, he has
to find the spark first that will lead him to the construction of a song. But
writing itself takes effort. In a Greenwich Village coffee shop, when he
was at his most inspired, he might have been able to make up a song on
the spot, with little conscious effort; he claimed that he later had to learn
to do consciously what he used to do unconsciously. But writing and
performing still require will, the conscious effort to get the song down on
paper, to follow it through until completion, to get it right and finish it.
His songs seemed to come from nowhere, but he had to care to make
them more than just a brilliant idea, flashing brightly for a moment and
then gone. Imagine if this lack of will had affected him the moment he
had the inspiration for Just Like a Woman or Visions of Johanna. If
he had backed away, if he had not seized the moment, the songs would
not exist. On Knocked out Loaded, he obviously doesnt care.
It is troubling, too, that Dylan felt himself in need of the
collaboration of a Tin Pan Alley-style songwriter, in this case Carol Bayer
Sager, a woman whose slick craft is no match for Dylans rough-edged,
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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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Sylvio, inexplicably, has been played hundreds of times in concert,
though it is perfunctory at best. The music of Death is Not the End is
leaden, and the lyric, obviously cut of finer cloth than the rest of the
albums originals, cannot save it. Only at the end do we have some
respite, though nothing remarkable like Brownsville Girl to awaken us
to what might have been; Ninety Miles an Hour Down a Dead End
Street and Rank Strangers to Me sound more natural, open, and
honest, the latter especially treating a subject very close to Dylans heart:
being in the world and yet not of the world.
The album is another where Dylan feels the need to work with
collaborators, this time The Grateful Dead, and its lyricist, Robert
Hunter. The results are shameful, and the same can be said for Dylans
next collaboration with The Dead, the appallingly shoddy live album
Dylan and the Dead. Dylan, apparently, is to blame for the selections on
this dreadful album, it being he who decided on the track listing from
tapes the Dead had sent him. Fluffed lyrics, muffled lines, and the sound
of a great artist tossing off his great works as if he no longer has any
affection for them at all, while the Dead just plod on regardless. With
Dylans commercial and critical standing at its lowest ebb, it was time for
a miracle, for a whole album of focused Dylan writing, to restore him to
favour, but few expected it.
Dylan released Oh Mercy within twelve months of Dylan and the Dead,
and the contrast between the two, in terms of quality and Dylans
commitment to his art, could not be more distinct. Oh Mercy was quickly
hailed, mainly by the casual Dylan audience, and especially by critics who
were aware of his stature but had not really paid attention to him in
recent years, as his best since Blood on the Tracks. The acclaim conveniently
bracketed major works like Desire, Street Legal, Slow Train Coming and the
best moments of Infidels with detritus from the lost years like Empire
Burlesque and Down in the Groove. Once more, Dylan had awakened the
public interest; like countless times in his past, he had done something
interesting enough to remind the public of his existence, drawing their
eye away from contemporary trends until they felt sufficiently vindicated
for recognising his greatness to leave him to the diehards once again. The
follow-up to Oh Mercy, Under the Red Sky, did not fit the fashion of the
moment, with its exploration of nursery rhymes, and so once again he
was forgotten about. This dance of attraction and repulsion, this twostep, has continued throughout the latter part of Dylans career;
occasionally mainstream critics will notice him long enough to proclaim a
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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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making any really insightful statements here, but the one he does make
(that we have lost touch with our values and the really meaningful things)
is expressed well enough.
Where Teardrops Fall belongs in a very old tradition of love song
in which the subject seems to shift between human and divine love, as we
have seen earlier. God is imagined in human terms and vice versa; the
ambiguity is not resolved. Everything is Broken, another list song, is a
sequel to Political World, in that it maps out the state of things, its
narrator apparently unable to see anything in the world that is pure and
untainted. The idea stems from the story of The Fall of Man, and the
division that entered the created universe, leaving everything flawed and
ultimately finite; the idea still persists, in some shape or form, in modern
sciences theory of entropy. Leonard Cohen was to trawl similar murky
waters in the song Anthem, from The Future, but to him the flaw was
not bad after all: There is a crack in everything / Thats how the light
gets in, he wrote, as if responding to Dylans pessimism. Clearly, and
despite rumours to the contrary, Cohen is the sort of person for whom
the glass is half full, and Dylan the sort for whom the glass is half empty.
The idea holds up at least until you listen to The Futures title track, in any
case. Taken in the context of Dylans post-evangelical work, the
unwritten text hiding behind the song is Biblical: everything will continue
to be broken until God puts things together again. Similarly, Political
World points the same way, however implicitly, in ending with the
reference to the maker, who will purge the world of politics once and for
all: You climb into the flame and shout Gods name / But youre not
even sure what it is.
The first major song on Oh Mercy, the first song that can stand
comparison with the best of the songs culled from the Infidels and Shot of
Love sessions, is Ring Them Bells, a melancholy but, contrastingly,
hopeful list of the people for whom the bell tolls, in which Bert
Cartwright claimed to discover Dylans specific cynicism and melancholy
in the post-gospel years.44 This is not the case, but, granted, Dylan does
not sound a particularly convincing messenger of hope; his perspective is
tainted. And time is running backwards / And so is the bride, Dylan
declares with a double sense: that history is not progressing towards a
more noble state of mankind, and that man himself is fleeing from the
offer of salvation.
The song begins by calling on the heathen, representative of the
savages, the unenlightened ones, to toll the bells; we may very well ask
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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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patron of the innocent; from a fortress at the top of the world (symbolic,
perhaps, of the walls that are by necessity constructed against the world
by the Christian soul, and also of Gods new Jerusalem, which will
descend from the clouds) she rings the bells for the lilies of the field, the
innocent and pure who cannot provide for themselves, and for whom
God must provide. The last line in the song is perceptive: in a world that
has given up believing in absolutes, it would seem that the gulf between
right and wrong, so marked in the ancient world, has narrowed to the
extent that it is difficult to know whether we are doing right. In the
entanglements of a political world, good intentions can be evil, as Dylan
has said elsewhere. We need the tolling of the bells to return us to the
reality behind reality, so to speak; to remind us of the last judgement and
paradise to come.
The songs landscape is viewed from the wide perspective of an
observer who is able to see the whole panorama of the world, perhaps
from some ascetic height or god-trodden peak, and yet who is able to see
suffering as if he is down amongst the afflicted. The songs tune has a
doleful quality, and our spirits are not lifted; if the music is meant to be in
any way a reflection of the sound of the bells, these are not the bells of
celebration. And yet the song is strangely uplifting. Its the same paradox
that we find in the Infidels outtake, Death is Not the End: an uplifting
lyric married to a tune that seems plagued by doubt. Why, then, does it
work here and not in the earlier song? To begin with, the tune in this
song is more yearningly beautiful, for all its melancholy. And further, if
Dylan were asking us simply to rejoice in the tolling of the bells because
Jesus is the saviour we would be back in the narrow fervour of Saved.
The song manages to contain the contrast: the suffering of the world, the
certain knowledge that God will intervene to curtail the suffering, but the
weary longing for this time to come soon. Dylans voice seems to contain
an exhausting sense of the weight of the suffering of these righteous
victims; he empathises but, in addition, his voice also echoes the sound
of the bells themselves. He is between man and God, mediating; like
Jonah, he is petitioning God to listen to the suffering of people. In Old
Testament times, prayer was as much to remind God of the suffering of
mankind as it was a kind of confession. Therefore, more than just letting
the good news of Gods new kingdom speak through him, and comfort
the subjects of the song, he is acting as the mouthpiece of man, speaking
on behalf of these weary subjects to petition God to hurry up and
intervene. This is precisely why we hear so much weight in his voice, and
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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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mask, hiding some kind of deeper darkness within. We do not even exist
enough to control our fate; in life there are no mistakes: our fate is
already written.
Most of the Time is hinged on the will to face lifes difficulties, the
slings and arrows of everyday problems, and the doubt that makes such
will pointless. Hamlets dilemma is implicit here, but the moments when
the speaker pauses, and lapses from strength, are occasional. It is a song
about survival, about walking on the edge of an abyss and, for the most
part, having the strength to continue. Implicitly, the speaker is also
talking about the times when he does not have the strength to face his
difficulties; indeed, the implicit reference to these moments of frailty
overshadows the avowal of confidence in the verses. What Good Am I
stoops further towards doubt. The conditional constructions a list of
frailties and foibles that strip the self of worth make it clear just what is
required to be a good person, but the rhetorical refrain leaves us with a
lasting note of doubt; behind a mask of goodness, a goodness we can
attain by doing the right actions, what value the self? Are we really valued
by God as anything more than the sum of our actions? The rest are
minor works Disease of Conceit sees mans inflated self-image in the
metaphor of an infectious sickness, the metaphor stretched out to fill a
songs worth of verses; What Was It You Wanted is a question that
never seems to get answered, perhaps because it deals with the limitless
demands placed on an icon of Dylans status.
It has become something of a tradition to end a Dylan album with an
allusion to the end times, and Shooting Star continues the trend. The
song may be addressed to a past friend or a lover, perhaps a woman (is it
too much to suggest that the subject might be someone like Mary Alice
Artes?); if so, it is clear that Dylan is now on the other side of the line,
and far away from her. I always kind of wondered / If you ever made it
through he asks; and later, If I was still the same / If I ever became
what you wanted me to be. The shooting star itself is another kind of
omen, as we get our last chance to hear the Sermon on the Mount, and
our last experience of temptation. But it is also too late to go back;
regrets are pointless, there is no way of making things different.
If Oh Mercy returned Dylan to the publics gaze, Under the Red Sky
quickly yanked him out again. It was considered just the wrong side of
eccentric to start an album with a song called Wiggle Wiggle, as if were
an affront to the people who had been reminded of how good he was,
and those who had been arguing his case all along. It sounded like a joke,
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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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and become adults. Dylan seems to follow the traditional interpretation
of the Eden story as a fable of the awakening consciousness. The song
says, essentially, move dont think; it wants to take us back to the time of
not knowing, before the snake appears and reminds us of ourselves and
what has been lost. Critics have found the words, and the title phrase
particularly, an insult to their intelligence. Dylan is trying, rather, to avoid
such awareness altogether, so such criticism rather misses the point. We
should also consider that Dylan may be calling to mind the movement of
an infant; quite simply, babies wiggle when they take their first steps.
This is the first of the albums nursery rhymes. If, as Dylan apologists
like Michael Gray and Paul Williams have pointed out, the album is an
exploration of the poetry of nursery rhymes, Wiggle Wiggle makes
perfect sense; its like the game that opens the classroom lesson, the
warm up. For the adults, the message is Check your egos at the door,
but perhaps Dylan was asking too much from critics in the music press,
for whom attitude and cool are prerequisites.
Under the Red Sky itself is more overtly constructed from nursery
rhyme imagery, but imagery that is used to tell a sober tale; the loss of
innocence, with two children born into a dangerous world (apparently
they are orphans, and therefore stock figures in fairy stories). However,
Dylan mixes the familiar images of fables with vagrant images from
other, more urbane tales, giving a sense that this is in fact the modern
world. The little boy and girl are not born in a cottage, a la Hansel and
Gretel, but in an alley, beneath a portentous red sky. The man in the
moon comes along and, with tricks played in moonlight, tells the little girl
that she will one day be rich, that their poverty will end. He tells her a tale
which, in other words, is designed to take her mind off their wretched
plight. In folklore, the moon is frequently associated with reflected, not
true light, and with the arts of illusion, and that is precisely the role Dylan
has chosen for him here. Drawing upon the nursery rhyme Sing a Song
of Sixpence, the song says that the two children were baked in a pie, a
nursery rhyme way of saying that they met with some terrible fate - born
in an alley, and dead before they are grown. The wind of fate blows high
and low, capriciously, and we are led through life like the blind horse in
the childrens game. Eventually, of course, illusion comes to an end and
hope with it - the man in the moon, who stands for our parents or any
authority that tells us life will get better, goes home and the river dries up
(a life symbol, and symbol of rebirth, like the Jordans waters). Fairy tales
and nursery rhymes are ways of encoding wisdom unpalatable for
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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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appearance, this time allegorized; in the previous song it was the blind
horse, now its a tale (apparently a fiction, something everyone knows is
not true, but in its essence more true than the tales we are told and more
readily accept, returning us to the theme of truth and illusion that so
obsesses Dylan) about a man without eyes who is lied to by all the ladies
of the land, and whose heart bleeds because of it; it is our condition that
is being written about. Dylan manages a splendid put-down of the
superficial culture of today, where surface has replaced substance, a
world of simulacra, the postmodern world: its interchangeable, so
delightful to see. Deadened by habit, like the tramps in Becketts Waiting
for Godot, we hardly have time to think our way out of these illusions, as
we are told, turn your back, wash your hands. Finally, it may be
unbelievable that it would go down this way but it has; the world has
sunk about as low as it can go.
In setting TV Talkin Song in Hyde Park, Dylan may be looking
back to one of his recent visits to London; the Hammersmith concerts in
early 1990 place him there at about the right time. The song apparently
recounts a real incident at Speakers Corner, when Dylan stopped to
listen to a soapbox preacher ranting about the evils of television. It puts
Dylan in familiar territory, and repeats the theme of lies and illusion, this
time effected by the TV, that is the albums overriding concern. Children
raised in front of the TV are being sacrificed to it while lullabies are
being sung. Lullabies is well chosen, whether for comparison or
contrast; they are not truths, of course, and they soothe babes in the crib
with comforting words, leaving out all the unpleasant stuff, just like TV
does. On the other hand, lullabies are like nursery rhymes in that they
encode deeper truth. There are some sharp observations here: the fact
that the narrators thoughts begin to wander just as the sermon is getting
heated reveals, in advance of the punchline, that his attention span has
been shortened due to too much TV. The anecdote ends in a riot (the
fact that it is in itself a tall tale links it to the other songs in the album)
that, in the last moment of irony, the narrator watches on TV. The really
postmodern question is whether the narrators tale is just that, a tale, and
whether the sermon embedded within it is also a tale, a form of mind
control just like the TV. If our mind is our temple, we should keep it
free, the preacher says. Whoever heard of a temple without a god inside,
who doesnt have his own story to tell us? The reference to babies being
sacrificed is a deft link in this way; whereas babies were sacrificed at
temple altars, and Isaac was the intended sacrifice of his father Abraham,
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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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not admit to being a creature of flesh and blood (You say, What are
you made of? - he pretends not to have heard). According to his tall
claims, he is afraid of nothing living or dead; he cries poor (a stick in his
hand and a pocketful of money) and he surrounds himself with beautiful
people, sycophants who are there to tell him sweet lies, to corroborate in
his fantasies of immortality (You got all the time in the world, honey).
He lives on a mountain in a fortress that cannot be broken into, away
from the suffering of the world; like the prince in Poes Masque of the Red
Death he thinks he can cheat the greatest thieves of them all, time and
death (the fortress, incidentally, has no doors or windows and it keeps
out the light as well as the robbers). It is little surprise that he feels
lethargic, lounging in his garden, a place reminiscent of the secret gardens
shared by courtly lovers in medieval literature, those private Edens which
are invariably lost. Unsurprisingly, such retreat from the world results in a
kind of indolent nihilism (you want a gun, Ill give you one). The
surface is polished and pretty (it is, in fact, sugar and candy) but
underneath there is despair: Hes got a basket of flowers and a bag full
of sorrow (the idea of keeping sorrows in a bag is striking, however, as
if he can tie up the bag and forget about them). Ultimately, his is a life of
routine, without purpose: Okay, boys, Ill see you tomorrow, is his way
of signing off each day.
There is a possibility that, like Jokerman, Dylan is looking at
himself in Handy Dandy with ironic detachment, sending up his own
excesses and paranoia. He has never had an all girl orchestra, but he has
had a choir of backing singers. His own fortress is the domed mansion in
Malibu; he has been all around the world and is, perhaps, hounded by
something in the moonlight still. Personal assistants are just the sort of
sycophants who might fill the stars ears with flattery. It is hard to
believe, however, that Dylan would view himself as having a stick in his
hand and a pocketful of money (note, though, that this is precisely the
image he chose for himself in the video of Blood in My Eyes, strolling
through London with cane in hand, and in the photo shoot for the World
Gone Wrong album). Dylan is aware, of course, that the criticism could be
levelled at him, and he is singing only in part about an aspect of himself,
and in part about all rock stars and gentlemen of the world.
The albums closing song, and perhaps its finest, brings us to the end
of time more obliquely, but also more effectively, than Shooting Star
did on Oh Mercy. Cats in the Well, like many a good nursery rhyme and
beast fable, is filled with animals that stand for types of humanity. The
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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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lessons, dressed up in a childs language, move aside for the more direct
statement, May the lord have mercy on us all. Its odd to imagine a
father, telling a bedtime story to his sleepy child, and having conveyed so
much knowledge about the ills of the world in the language of fairy tales,
waiting for the child to slumber before making a statement that the child
will one day learn to understand: May the lord have mercy on us all.
For seven years, these words were the last original ones Dylan offered us.
Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. . .

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CHAPTER TEN
MY HEART IS NOT WEARY
GOOD AS I BEEN TO YOU TO LOVE
AND THEFT

ith the failure of Under the Red Sky to sustain a fully-fledged

Dylan comeback, Dylan continued touring throughout the
90s, without any extended layoffs. Even after his
hospitalisation in the late 90s, the period of recovery was relatively short,
and the road soon beckoned. The Never-Ending tour meant that Dylan
was always visible, at least to those willing to buy a concert ticket, his
decline, for some, painfully evident. He also seemed to lose his interest in
writing, meaning that no new songs appeared between 1991 and 1997,
except a couple of minor collaborations. It was the longest creative
drought in Dylans history thus far.
In concert, Dylan had taken to performing stark acoustic versions of
traditional songs, and this reawakened interest in roots resulted in the
two acoustic albums of the mid 90s. The first, Good As I Been to You, was
a somewhat motley collection of traditional folk and blues, Dylan
following the Appalachian Trail back to its origins in the folk songs of
the British Isles. There were some worthy renditions of songs like Jim
Jones, Arthur McBride, Diamond Joe and others, sounding
hundreds of years old, completely out of step with anything else that was
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going on in mainstream music. It was as if Dylan was reacting against
attempts, in the 80s and early 90s, to make him a viable contemporary
artist. These were necessary recordings, the fact that they no longer
contained the masterly nuances of his early folk recordings
notwithstanding; on record, it was as if Dylan was bowing out of the rock
arena altogether, and reminding people of his connections with a much
older tradition. In this context, Dylan becomes a great singer and a major
interpreter of folk songs. His voice, by this time croaky and cracked, is
the perfect instrument for songs that do not rely, in Robert Sheltons
phrase, on surface glitter and slickness. In some sense, he was doing
what he does best, but for the time being, he was not writing.
World Gone Wrong, more than its predecessor, was a record that used
old songs to express the artists state of mind. The title track is a
noteworthy example of how Dylan can take an old tune and inhabit it,
make it sound like a Bob Dylan song, with sentiments that are very
Dylanesque. So too Lone Pilgrim, Delia, Blood in My Eyes - if you
didnt know the originals, you might comment on how they were
particularly characteristic of him, with their sense of not belonging to the
world, and their awareness of moral degeneration, of the loneliness of
death. Dylan was making the same sort of statements that he made on his
first album, but now they were more convincing, the impulses that made
him identify with Woody Guthrie long fermented in the vat of
experience.
Surprising, then, that Dylan should bow to contemporary trends and
record the Unplugged album for MTV. Forgetting how vital the original
unplugged music was, of which he was part in Greenwich Village, he
delivered a safe, predictable, ultimately boring set. The purveyors of this
fad seemed to have forgotten that acoustic music could be as radical,
intense, and engaging as rock and roll, and sometimes more so, given its
tendency to make stark political statements. Sadly, the majority of rock
stars conformed to the Unplugged format, thinking that true acoustic
music was supposed to be stately and laid-back. Even Neil Young, who
in concert during the Freedom tour had wielded his acoustic guitar like a
machine gun, stalking the stage, was talked into sitting down and
revisiting his vital back catalogue as if it were a sacred text. This acoustic
music had no bite. Typically, Dylan had already produced a much better
performance, in an aborted attempt to record a set for MTV, a year
earlier, at the Supper Club. The fact that the Unplugged album did not
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include any of the songs from his recent acoustic albums was further
evidence that Dylan was capitulating.
What else did the 90s offer for Dylan watchers? He seemed happy to
look back for once, to allow his past to be repacked and re-released, like
the Bootleg Series 1-3 and subsequent volumes in the series. The initial box
set was vital because it made major lost Dylan compositions like
Farewell Angelina, Shes Your Lover Now and Blind Willie
McTell widely available for the first time. No-one, not even Springsteen,
had discarded such treasures. A convincing case could be made that if
these songs were the only ones we had, Dylan would still be the major
writer of his generation. For the fourth volume in the series, the Royal
Albert Hall concert finally saw the light of day in pristine stereo. For
some it was a chance to revisit the most famous concert in bootleg
history, the last confrontation between Dylan and the purists, culminating
in that notorious cry of Judas that left Dylan stunned and defensive;
for others, it was a first glimpse of a secret history, a window onto a
landscape of legend. Here, in Manchester, folk and rock clashed like
gladiators in the eyes of many, while Dylan heard only their strange
harmony, felt their embrace.
If in the early 90s it had sometimes seemed that Dylan was trying to
sabotage his standing with the record-buying public, the late 90s were a
period of extended rehabilitation, beginning with the widespread
outpouring of concern that accompanied the news that he had been
hospitalised for a rare heart condition. For those who had long ceased to
care, this reportedly near-death experience was a reminder of his
importance. He recovered soon enough and returned to touring, but for
a short time Dylan fans had held a collective breath, fearing that the end
had come. The album that followed might have been a direct comment
on this brush with mortality (not that Dylan had ever shied away from
such things), were it not for his assertion that the songs had been written
earlier.
Time out of Mind was his first album of original songs in over half a
decade. Coming in the wake of his hospitalisation, it couldnt have been
more timely from the point of view of sales, because the public were
reminded of how much Dylan meant, or rather, had meant. Not that he
was reaching a substantial new audience of young people; he was,
however, being welcomed into the mainstream again. The album won the
Grammy, and a later track, Things Have Changed, a close cousin to its
songs, won him the Academy Award for best song.
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Exactly why Time out of Mind was so heartily embraced has
confounded some. It seemed to fly in the face of the prevailing wind,
which, after the dust had settled on grunge, was once again positivist and
self-assuring. The record was characteristically bleak, apparently written
from the debris of a collapsed love affair, with Dylan still coming from
the same place, still asserting, like the Yeats poem, that things fall
apart. Somehow, the public were able to enjoy it. Perhaps the truth was
that they were happy to take a tour down Dylans dark paths once in a
while, spurred by nostalgia. Undoubtedly, if Dylan had gone on to record
a series of albums as raw, embittered and paranoid as Time out of Mind, the
public wouldnt have stuck around for long. It was all about the timing,
with perhaps just a touch of Millennium madness.
In the middle of the Clinton administration, at a time when the
relationship between truth and lies was once again about to be put before
the American public, Dylan made Im walking through streets that are
dead his opening statement. Clintons smiling endorsement at the
Inauguration Gala seems ironic; here, Dylan was mapping out another
America, once more charting a modern waste land. Love Sick seems to
be written from a dangerously narrowed perspective, almost a suicidal
one; it appears the weariness of the post conversion albums has given
way to despair. The impossibility of expressing innocence and purity of
heart (the childs voice cultivated by Blake) is asserted: I spoke like a
child; you destroyed me with a smile. The corruption and duplicity of
the world, where even a smile can kill, is evident, and the perspective is
of an outcast from love, whose inability to conform to the modern mores
of love mean that he is also a social outcast. In classical and medieval
literature, stemming from Ovid onwards, love was imagined as a kind of
sickness, a disease of the spirit for which only the lady in question had
the cure. Here, Dylan is not asking for a shot of love to cure his disease.
Love itself is the disease, and the loved one part of it, leaving him exiled
from happiness, suffering and sick. The weeping clouds, in an example of
the pathetic fallacy, seem to echo his state of mind. He no longer knows
what the truth is, and asks, Did I hear someone tell a lie? However, he
admits that nevertheless he is in the thick of love; love sick can be
taken too ways: sick of love or sick for love, and we get the sense that
both here apply. As an exile, he is on the margins of love, hanging on to
the shadow of lovers obviously in the early stages of a relationship,
before things start to darken. His sense of time is slowed down, and he
yearns for a moment when his pain will be ended (I hear the clock
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tick). The perspective he has is dangerously distorted (The silence can
be like thunder) and there is the temptation to become the perpetrator
rather than the victim, to take to the road and plunder. The problem
seems to lie in trust, and Dylan doesnt have enough to be sure.
Time out of Mind has its minor songs, among them Dirt Road Blues,
Million Miles, Till I Fell in Love With You and others. The writing is
often sloppy, tired, but nevertheless there are sparks of greatness
scattered amongst them, characteristically Dylanesque lines like Reality
has always had too many heads and I know God is my shield / And he
wont lead me astray. The major songs, apart from Love Sick, are
Standing in the Doorway, Trying to Get to Heaven, Not Dark
Yet, and, perhaps best of all, Highlands. Standing in the Doorway is
the sort of love ballad that can easily lapse into clich, but Dylan elevates
it to a higher plane. The stars are cherry red while Dylan is strumming
on his gay guitar - so resolutely at odds with the current romantic love
song lexicon that it immediately puts us in touch with an older, purer
tradition. It is also against the grain of the modern love song, but very
much in the spirit of older ones, for the lover to ask for Gods mercy.
Dylan is again writing about a love that has ended, with him as the
victim, left in the dark land of the sun (his perspective turns everything
black, even the sun, the source of all light). Rejection creates a kind of
ascetic survivalism, as in his claim that he will eat when Im hungry,
drink when Im dry (there are echoes here of Moonshiner, which he
had recorded in his early years). In the context of a world without mercy,
his statement, Even if the flesh falls off my face / I know someone will
be there to care, can only be taken as ironic. The song leaves the singer
with the Blues wrapped around my head, like a noose, perhaps,
offering black, gallows humour at the end, though it does not feel like a
joke.
Tryin to Get to Heaven is another restless song about wandering
and about love; it also sounds like an approximation of a characteristically
Dylanesque title, as if an imitator had knocked it up. For an example of
the way Dylans singing can evoke much more than countless sweeter
voices, take note of the way he sings the lines, I was riding in a buggy
with Miss Mary-Jane / Miss Mary-Jane she come from Baltimore; the
image, given life by the sound of his voice, conjures up a vision of a lost
American South, of courting couples before the advent of the motor
vehicle (incidentally, Tim Hardins Lady Came from Baltimore is a
song Dylan had covered). Elsewhere, the Mississippi boat rides of Mark
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Twain are evoked in economical language. The song seems to suggest
that, after love has proven to be a closed door, only God, and paradise, is
left. It is the sort of song that only someone steeped in traditional
balladry could write. To Dylan, everything seems hollow; he is perhaps
commenting on the contemporary rock scene in saying some trades
dont pull no gamblers, no midnight ramblers like they did before. There
is even the pull of autobiographical details: Ive been to Sugar Town, I
shook the sugar down. Ive done it all, he seems to be saying. The only
road left to take is towards heaven and salvation, or else down into the
loneliness of the grave.
The favourite track for many was Not Dark Yet, and indeed it
ranks as one of Dylans finest late-period ballads. Its a song which
charts, once again, the narrators embittered survival in an apocalyptic
time. Feel like my soul has turned into steel, he announces, voicing
what a lot of people have felt about his contemporary outlook, that he
has hardened his heart and no longer trusts to hope. Beauty, too, is not
the comforter it was in this vale of tears, the capacity for beauty to heal
the scars of living having passed (The sun didnt heal). The despair
seems to deepen: My sense of humanity has gone down the drain,
shows that he has no faith in mankind or in himself as a member of the
human race. He has travelled all over, seen it all, followed every literal
and metaphorical river to its end without finding any hope. The world is
like that of Infidels, and he has had his fill of lies; therefore he doesnt look
for a spark of fellow feeling in the eyes of anyone he meets, taking us
even deeper into pessimism than he dared go in the mid-80s. I was
born here and Ill die here against my will he announces, adding that he
is standing still, feeling like a statue. A prayer for his passing is not
heard on anyones lips, and even the comfort of the past is lost, for
memory is failing. The impending darkness is of course death, and
perhaps apocalypse; we are nearly at the end of things.
Highlands came as the biggest surprise on Time out of Mind, not
least because of its sheer length, closing the album in the spirit, but
without quite the lyrical genius and melodic beauty, of Sad-Eyed Lady
of the Lowlands. Its a long, sustained mixture of lyricism and narrative,
with at its heart a deftly-written anecdote about an encounter with a
waitress in a restaurant, where a misunderstanding outlines Dylans sense
that he cannot communicate, and sexual innuendo predominates. In the
midst of songs with loose structures, Dylans main achievement here is to
finish something so long and focused, rather like a revisit to Brownsville
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Girl. As some have noted, the song is directly autobiographical, and the
closest we have come to stepping into Dylans shoes, seeing the world
through his eyes. Its like discovering a portal into Dylans head (or at
least it seems that way, though of course he may simply be playing up to
our idea of who he is). The Highlands themselves are not the Scottish
Highlands, but a kind of imagined, utopian place, an Elysian fields where
the wanderer can find rest. Away from the non-communication and
misunderstandings that pass for social encounters, illustrated in the
restaurant scene, the narrator lets his mind drift towards a brighter place
where he can be at peace. The album ends, then, on its single optimistic
note, though we should mark that he doesnt actually reach the place of
rest by the songs end, and that its very existence is open to question.
Another song, Things Have Changed, was written some time later,
Dylans first recording of the new millennium, but seemed very much of
the spirit of this album. Without the Daniel Lanois production, but with
the same kind of broken, fragmentary writing, the song once again
explores feelings of deep weariness and despair, but here shot through
with a kind of postmodern humour, helped along by the sprightly tune.
Characteristic of this humour is the postmodern in-joke, in the last verse,
in which Dylan declares the next sixty seconds could be like an
eternity. There are, in fact, sixty seconds of the track left. Such attention
to detail should remind us that it must have been Dylan who, long ago,
requested that the John Wesley Harding album cover include hidden
pictures of The Beatles. At moments like this, we get the sense that there
is a secret code that Dylan uses, and that he is still supremely aware, and
in control of his art, even taking the time to play games with his audience,
precisely because he knows they will sift through everything he records
and utters for hidden significance. It is, as much as anything else,
evidence that his mind is still flashing brilliantly. A similar postmodern
moment in relation to Things Have Changed occurred when Dylan,
beamed by satellite from Australia, sang to the assembled Greek theatre
audience on Oscar night the line, Im in the wrong town, I should be in
Hollywood.
Dylan seemed in no hurry to follow up Time out of Mind. When a
new album did appear, some Americans were unable to give it their
fullest attention for a simple reason: its launch date coincided with the
terrorist attack on the Twin Towers - September 11th 2001. When people
did find themselves able to turn again to such things, it became
immediately apparent that he had lost none of the momentum gained
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with its predecessor. Here was another album with Dylan completely
focused, writing songs that many felt deserved comparison with his
vintage work. Love and Theft, though, was far from being a sequel to
Time out of Mind; it was, for a start, a much less harrowing work, with its
fair share of playful lyrics and upbeat music. There were even jokes, of
the sort Dylan had recently taken to telling from the concert stage
corny jokes, like Im sitting on my watch, so I can be on time, or
Politicians got on his jogging shoes / He must be running for office,
got no time to lose. The real joke, of course, was that Dylan, whose
reputation was scarcely less dour than Leonard Cohens, should be
cracking jokes in front of an audience that still, forty years on, treated
him as some sort of prophet. If we think back to Dylans 60s albums,
however, it might not seem so surprising: there is no shortage of wit on
his early albums, from the talking blues songs of the protest era to the
caustic wit of the mid-60s electric albums and press conferences. He
used to be funny, remember?
Love and Theft may be said to stand in relation to Time out of Mind
as Blonde on Blonde stands to Highway 61 Revisited. It is a much warmer,
more musically diverse offering, drawing on a considerable variety of
lyrical and musical sources. Quite apart from other pleasures, the album
gives listeners with an awareness of the history of American popular
music (and to a lesser extent literature) the chance to engage with its
creators extensive knowledge of the idioms in which he works; one can
play the recognition game and spot countless references to other songs,
from Streets of Laredo to I Walk the Line and Tweedle Dee. Lines
by Scott Fitzgerald, Shakespeare and John Donne are also stitched into
the fabric. On quite another level, there are even lines lifted (uncredited,
until someone spotted it months later) from an obscure Japanese
potboiler, Confessions of a Yakuza. Once, at the beginning of his career,
Dylan had been accused of stealing one of his songs (Blowin in the
Wind actually) from another songwriter. Here, in his twilight years, he
seems intent on proving the adage that lesser artists borrow, great artists
steal. The real point, of course, is not what you borrow, but what you do
with it, and like Eliot with The Waste Land, Dylan assembles works of art
from existing materials, ending with something that is wholly his own.
The albums title is therefore particularly revealing: this is more than
simply a patchwork of influences, a homage or purloined parody of the
many musical styles that have made Dylan and American music for more
than a century. Rather, it is a work of originality that seems uniquely
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Dylan, while at the same time displaying his great love for his musical
roots.
The opening song, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum recalls, in
title at least, Under the Red Skys preoccupation with nursery rhyme
characters. Numerous attempts have been made to establish the identity
of the two protagonists, who are variously described as two big bags of
dead mans bones, the managers of a brick and tile company, and men
important enough to be escorted by the police. Some have suggested
George W. Bush and his father, but just like Mr. Jones or Miss Lonely it
is impossible to go beyond speculation. What is more suggestive is that
these mismatched twins set upon each other, one declaring, Ive had too
much of your company. In this light, we are perhaps encouraged to
think of them as archetypes of humanity, Cain and Abel figures who
cannot live together in happy harmony. On another level the two seem to
slot into one of the albums two main themes: music itself. As a glance at
the Oxford Dictionary attests, to tweedle is to play on a high pitched
instrument or sing in a succession of shrill notes. Tweedledum and
Tweedledee, furthermore, are stock names for rival groups of musicians.
They cannot help but conjure up a pair of hapless musical clones:
modern pop stars, perhaps, who toil at the grindstones of factory
produced pop. In the current climate of overnight success stories,
opportunity knocks for such big bags of dead mans bones (in a sense
these are skeleton artists, stitched together, Frankenstein-like, from the
materials of past greats). Such artists have no respect for tradition,
figuratively throwing knives into the tree, and would be best advised to
make hay while the sun shines, given the limited shelf-life of such
music.
Mississippi, the albums standout, existed as an outtake from the
sessions for Time out of Mind, and was recorded by Sheryl Crow, but
Dylans version turns what had seemed a minor song, characteristically
Dylanesque lyrics accepted, into something stately and magnificent, an
epic of survival given one of his most seasoned and heartfelt vocals of
recent years. Got nothing for you, I had nothing before, / Dont even
have anything for myself any more, Dylan tells us candidly, though he
should know by now that nobody is buying this particular claim. This is
indeed a survivors testament, and when he sings, But my heart is not
weary it is impossible to doubt his commitment to his art, even though,
after so many years and after having seen so much, he has every reason
to be weary of it all. If Time out of Mind had suggested cynicism and
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exhaustion, as brilliant as it was as an expression of such sentiments,
Love and Theft, while not exactly negating that image, sees Dylan finding
unexpected reserves of strength and renewed hope. The world is as it is,
maybe nothing matters and no hope exists, but hes already picked
himself up and is going to carry on regardless.
There is real optimism, real playfulness, in tracks like Summer
Days, with its triumphant: She says, You cant repeat the past. I say,
You cant? / What do you mean, you cant? Of course you can. Nor is
he above self-mockery, as in The girls all say, Youre a worn-out star.
Once, in the 80s and early 90s, this would have been uncomfortably
near the truth. So confident is this new music that he can place tongue
firmly in cheek and play with the traditional image of the ageing rocker.
Summer Days sounds as if it could have come over the airwaves when
he was a teenager; musically, this is the kind of triumphant celebration of
youth that Buddy Holly might have sung when Dylan saw him play in
Duluth Armoury. The lyric also deals with cultivating a youthful
consciousness, even though our summer days might be long in the past.
Its how you feel; as Dylan says elsewhere, age doesnt carry weight.
A further delight of the album is hearing Dylan try his hand at
swing in lighter, jazzier numbers like Bye and Bye and Moonlight.
Van Morrison has mined such material for several years, but whereas
Vans readings (and his compositional efforts in the genre) have been
relatively straight, Dylans approach is more complex. Although he starts
out with the usual platitudes, leaving no clich left unturned, he invariably
turns them on their head, or brings things into sharp relief by an abrupt
shift of tone, from light to dark and back. Here is a lover who can sing
sugar-coated rhymes one minute, and turn devastatingly apocalyptic the
next: Im going to baptize you with fire so you can sin no more / Im
going to establish my rule through civil war. Married to a shuffling beat,
such lines sound doubly sinister, and by their proximity to the dark,
apocalyptic language, romantic statements also sound duplicitous.
The more up-tempo songs on the album would furnish Dylan with
rockers for his live set to stand alongside his classics: Lonesome Day
Blues, Honest With Me, Cry a While and the aforementioned
Summer Days often became exhilarating in live performance; indeed,
Dylan seemed so comfortable with the new songs that he allowed them
to stand alongside vintage material, often using them to close the main
set. Some sort of rebirth was going on here; he was being funny, rocking
out, delivering sharp, witty lines. Certain songs, too, made heavy
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reference, both lyrically and musically, to his legacy, suggesting that he
had finally grown comfortable with his public image. One of these,
High Water (For Charley Patton), is another in the grand tradition of
Dylan songs about a flood, and in terms of the music it certainly recalls
some of his apocalyptic moments of the past.
The media response to Love and Theft was overwhelmingly
positive; if it did not quite garner the statues as Time out of Mind did, it
certainly won its share of admirers both within and outside the Dylan
community. Some, like Dylan critic Michael Gray, were quick to elevate it
to masterpiece status. While it would perhaps be going a little too far to
claim that it rivalled his best work, it was indeed gratifying to see Dylan
committed to his art once more. Certainly one of the most striking things
about the record is the way Dylan has of making his songwriting once
more seem effortless. So immersed has he become in the various idioms
of American song that he can seemingly roll off compositions like
Lonesome Day Blues and Cry a While in his sleep (this is not to
suggest that these songs sound knocked-up). The really impressive thing
is that they do not seem mere pastiche: in one sense they seem wholly to
belong to the era that inspired them, and in another they could not have
been written by anyone else, and speak directly to our times. They are, in
other words, at once perfect imitations and yet at the same time
inimitable.

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172

EPILOGUE
DO NOT GO GENTLE
MASKED & ANONYMOUS TO MODERN
TIMES

he old adage with Dylan used to be expect the unexpected. As

we have moved into the new Millennium, this has proved true as
it has scarcely done so before; we have witnessed some of the
greatest surprises, the most unexpected turns of events, since the gospel
years. Broadly speaking, there have been highs and lows. It appears, for
example, that after a period where his live performances reached a level
of renewed passion and commitment thanks in part to the addition of
virtuoso guitarist Freddy Koella, he seems once again seems to be settling
for tardiness and mediocrity in concert. Fans spend hours on Internet
sites discussing the minutiae of Dylan performances, such as the
notorious way he has of stressing the ending of a line, christened
upsinging, or the deep-throated growl that has come to be termed his
Wolfman voice. Frequent sloppy, half-hearted performances do
nothing to endear his legend to a younger audience, and one wonders
how many recent converts go away from a Dylan concert feeling severely
let down.
One of the more troubling developments has been his tendency to go
to places which his younger self would never have contemplated, such as
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appearing on TV sitcoms (Dharma and Greg), apparently plagiarising a
little-known Japanese writer and a relatively obscure Civil War poet, and
licensing some of his compositions for commercials (a trend which began
with his agreeing to let the accountancy firm Coopers and Lybrand use
The Times They Are A-Changin). Worse than this, he even made an
appearance in a Victorias Secret ad and agreed to their use of Love
Sick. Add to the list his request to appear as a judge on American Idol
(mercifully declined), and his licensing of the unreleased Gaslight
performances to coffeehouse chain Starbucks (he is aware of the irony of
this, surely), and one starts to wonder whether Dylans attitude to himself
and to his role has changed dramatically since he railed against the use of
music in commercials on the Biograph notes. Its not, of course, as if
countless other stars have not done or do not continue to do the same;
the frustrating thing is that for a long time, for the best part of his
professional career, Dylan steadfastly avoided such crass commercialism.
The debate among fans continues, but there seems no getting away from
the fact that Dylans integrity is open to question, his motives not what
they used to be.
Despite all this, his artistic standing continues to be at a steady high,
following the success of Love and Theft, for the most part ecstatically
received, and a string of high profile releases like the latest volumes in
The Bootleg Series. In the last few years, we have witnessed a movie in
which Dylan starred, and for which he co-wrote the screenplay, Masked
& Anonymous, a documentary about his mid-60s rise to fame, No Direction
Home, and even the first volume of his autobiography, Chronicles, which
did little to lessen the enigma of who Bob Dylan is, despite reaching
bestseller status.
Dylan wrote Masked & Anonymous with Larry Charles, one time writer
on the TV series Seinfeld. They were both billed under pseudonyms
(Dylan as Sergei Petrov, Charles as Rene Fontaine), a fact that actress
Jessica Lange managed to leak during the press conference, perhaps at
Dylans request. Like Hearts of Fire before it, it has Dylan again playing a
veteran rock star, this time named Jack Fate. The cast of bizarre
characters, including the brilliantly named Uncle Sweetheart, reads like a
list from one of his classic 60s songs. The film did not do well
financially; it certainly would leave a mainstream audience baffled, but
unfortunately it seems art house audiences were equally perplexed. For
fans, though, the film is fascinating, because rather than trying to tell a
linear story it constantly references Dylans life, and affords us a glimpse
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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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The new high profile continued when it was announced that Martin
Scorsese would be directing a documentary about the years leading up to
his Woodstock sojourn. For some veteran fans Scorsese was
appropriating the title of Robert Sheltons Dylan biography in calling the
doc No Direction Home, but of course the phrase always belonged to Dylan
and was there for the taking. Of all the documentaries that have been
produced on Dylan during his forty-odd year career, this may indeed be
the best; it is certainly the most thorough in detailing the effect he had on
60s culture. Some contributors, like Suze Rotolo and Bobby Neuwirth,
had shied away from lending their voices to documentaries before, and
their presence here is most welcome. Scorseses building the case for
Dylans enormous influence on those times is important because it
thrusts Dylan centre stage into the public consciousness, which has
always had a rather blinkered, Beatles-centric view of the era. His
position as the pre-eminent songwriter of protest, and his subsequent
abandonment of his responsibilities, as electric music beckoned, is
detailed more than in any previous documentary. The film is structured
so that songs from the electric half of Dylans 1966 tour are interspersed
throughout the narrative, constantly emphasizing the sense of hostility
and betrayal that emerged as old fans met the new Dylan.
As a result of recent releases such as these, the current perception of
Dylans historical importance seems to be at an unprecedented high. He
seems unquestionably to have come to some sort of acceptance of his
legacy. At the same time, he no longer seems slow to exploit that legacy:
recent months have seen a Bob Dylan scrapbook, something that to this
writer would have seemed crassly commercial in an earlier era and to a
different incarnation of Dylans many selves, remasters of his old albums,
and a mammoth digital collection of Dylan tracks on the i-tunes music
website.
When, in 2006, a new album was rumoured, it seemed to bode well
that one of his most recent songwriting efforts, the Civil War-set ballad
Cross the Green Mountain, written for the film Gods and Generals, was
one of his finest efforts in years. On release, Modern Times, his 32nd studio
album, secured him a place in the record books as the oldest person to
have an album debut at number one on the Billboard chart. Despite the
title and the neon lights of the cover photograph, it proved to be an
album firmly rooted in tradition, brimful of blues and old-time balladry;
quite simply, there was nothing modern about it, Dylans analysis of the
current state of the world accepted. It seems a safe bet that his attitude to
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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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as phrases from older songs; in this light, his adaptation of Memphis
Minnies When the Levee Breaks as The Levees Gonna Break, his
use of the 30s standard Red Sails in the Sunset for Beyond the
Horizon, and his lifting of the Muddy Waters arrangement of the old
blues standard Rollin and Tumblin should not come as a major
surprise. It is worth remembering, before going any further with the issue
of intellectual theft, the title that Dylan chose for the album on which he
started this practice in such a degree. Obviously, Dylan intended to call
attention to his use of influences, to his stealing. There seems to be a
very definite attitude on his part towards the process of composition, a
reaction against the cultivation of an original voice, stemming perhaps
from a belief that there is nothing left to say, and nothing new under the
sun. Thus he is content to piece songs together from scraps of things he
has remembered and words and melodies he grew up on. One can
perhaps regret that he no longer mines for a language that can reflect the
times, that he has decided to lift old fragments wholesale rather than to
absorb influences as he once did; postmodern Bob, then, rather than
modernist Bob, prevails. But, surely, one cannot suggest that Dylan is
attempting to get away with passing off someone elses tunes or words as
his own, which must lie at the heart of any accusation of plagiarism. Not
only has he called attention to his borrowings in the very titles of songs
and albums, but he has made such overt use of this material, much of it
well known not only to musicologists, that he appears to be wearing his
heart on his sleeve: this, then, is his admission that he is simply a modern
bluesman or folk musician, adapting and changing, setting little value on
supposed originality. The Romantic concept of genius no longer seems to
matter to him. Given all this, calling the album Modern Times seems
intentionally ironic.
In terms of what it tells us about Dylans current state of mind,
Modern Times seems to indicate that he is, as ever, adrift in an uncaring,
apocalyptic world, but that his sense of its absurdity, more than its
essential tragedy, prevails. Though there are indications of the sort of
despair that drove the Time out of Mind narratives (on the last track
particularly, with its depiction of the earth as a fallen paradise from which
the gardener-creator has long departed), for the most part the mood is
closer to the postmodern playfulness of Love and Theft; even the images
of thunder on the mountain, fires on the moon, and the imminent
arrival of the sun/Son in the opening track do not especially darken
things. The contrast between doom-laden imagery and light, romantic
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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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Like A Rebel Wild

repeated playing; it is Dylans third great album in a row (or fifth if one
counts Under the Red Sky and Oh Mercy), and we have reason to be
thankful that he has once again set himself the highest standards in
contemporary music.
One can only wonder, given the strength of Dylans recent material,
whether the public perception of him will continue as it has done since
Time out of Mind, or whether he will once more fall beneath the radar at
least as a currently viable artist. A lot will depend on whether he sees fit
to change his current songwriting method, for it is surely likely that
another album in the same vein as his last two will dampen the
enthusiasm of even the most ardent of his admirers. It is not that the
quality of his recent work can be called into question; it is merely a matter
of him being Dylanesque, of exploring fresh ground. After all, had he
continued to make albums of list songs in the manner of Oh Mercy, his
artistic standing would not be at the current high. For more than forty
years, Dylan has stood still for only the briefest periods, and it would be a
shame if he continued to offer variations on the Love and Theft formula
for the remainder of his career.
Its been a long journey, and one hopes that Dylan will keep on
keepin on, that the road he has been following will continue to take him
and his art through new and unexpected territory. One can also be
forgiven for hoping that Dylan will continue, despite recent lapses, to
treat his legacy with the respect it deserves by eschewing crass
commercialism. He has never turned a blind eye to human nature; he has
hauled his lambs through the marketplace with great reluctance; long may
it continue to be so.

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181

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182

NOTES

reported by Paul Slambrouck, Staff writer of the Christian Science

Monitor.
2
Ibid
3
Paul Williams, Performing Artist 1960-1973, London: Xanadu, p.43.
4
From a transcript of an interview in TWM, No. 1396 (4064), 23rd of
August 1998. Collected in Every Mind Polluting Word: Assorted Bob Dylan
Utterances, downloaded 5th of December 2006.
5
From an interview broadcast in the BBC documentary Dancing in the
Street.
6
Cynthia Gooding interview, WBAI FM Radio, New York City, NY, 11th
of March 1962.
7
Anthony Scaduto, Bob Dylan, London: Abacus, 1972, pp.117-118.
8
Ibid.
9
From a 1964 interview quoted in Chris Williams, Bob Dylan In His Own
Words, London: Omnibus Press, 1993, pp. 31- 32
10
Quoted in Paul Williams, Performing Artist 1960-1973, London: Xanadu,
1991, p.43
11
Studs Terkels Wax Museum, WFMT Radio, recorded 26th April 1963.
12
Joan Baez, Diamonds and Rust, Diamonds and Rust, 1975.
13
Elvis Costello, Tramp the Dirt Down, Spike 1989.
14
Robert Shelton, No Direction Home, London: Penguin Books, 1986,
p.156.
15
Ibid, p.219.
183

Like A Rebel Wild

16

From a concert clip aired in an episode of the BBC documentary

Dancing in the Street.
17
Joan Baez: Diamonds and Rust, Diamonds and Rust, 1975.
18
Robert Shelton, No Direction Home, London: Penguin Books, 1986,
p.185.
19
Liner notes to Joan Baez in Concert, Part 2.
20
From an interview broadcast in the BBC documentary Dancing in the
Street.
21
From an article in CNN.com/world, Drugs Clue to Shakespeares
Genius, accessed online on 14th April 2007, 2.16 a.m.
22
Printed in the poetry anthology Every Man Will Shout, eds. Mansfield
and Armstrong, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964, p.95.
23
T.S. Eliot: Selected Poems (Faber and Faber).
24
From an interview in the BBC documentary Songs from the Life of Leonard
Cohen.
25
Albert Holl, The Left-hand of God, London: Bantam Books, p.63.
26
From an interview in Rolling Stone Presents Twenty Years of Rock and Roll
(1987).
27
cf. Michael Gray, Song and Dance Man III, London and New York:
Cassell, 2000, p.33ff.
28
Bert Cartwright, The Mysterious Norman Raeben in John Bauldie,
ed., Wanted Man: In Search of Bob Dylan, London: Black Spring Press, 1990,
p.85
29
Ibid, p.87.
30
Ibid, p.88
31
Ibid, p.89
32
Michael Gray, Song and Dance Man III, London and New York: Cassell,
2000, p.211.
33
Ibid, p.220.
34
The revelation that Dylan did in fact marry at this time, though not to
Mary Alice Artes, was made public in Howard Sounes Dylan biography
Down the Highway, a couple of years after this chapter was written.
35
Paul Williams: Dylan: What Happened?. Reprinted in Watching the
River Flow: Observations of his Art in Progress, London: Omnibus Press, 1996.
36
Ibid, p.101ff.
37
Interview with Cameron Crowe, Biograph, CBS/Columbia, 1985.
38
Michael Gray, Song and Dance Man III, London and New York: Cassell,
2000, p.488.
184

Notes and Select Bibliography

39

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

Like A Rebel Wild

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

Notes and Select Bibliography

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.
187

Like A Rebel Wild

Humphries, Patrick: The Complete Guide to the Music of Bob Dylan. Omnibus
Press, 1995.
Humphries, Patrick and Bauldie, John. Oh No! Not Another Bob Dylan
Book. Square One, 1991.
Kramer, Daniel. Bob Dylan: A Portrait of the Artists Early Years. Plexus,
1991.
Landy, Elliott. Woodstock Dream. teNeues, 2000.
Lee, C P. Like the Night: Bob Dylan and the Road to the Manchester Free Trade
Hall. Helter Skelter, 1998.
Marcus, Greil: Invisible Republic. Picador, 1997.
Marshall, Scott M. & Ford, Marcia. Restless Pilgrim: The Spiritual Journey of
Bob Dylan. Relevant Books, 2002.
McGregor, Craig (ed.). Bob Dylan; a Retrospective, Pan Books, 1975.
Williams, Chris. Bob Dylan, In His Own Words, Omnibus Press, 1993.
Ricks, Christopher. Dylans Visions Of Sin. Viking, 2003.
Scaduto, Anthony. Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography, Abacus, 1972.
Shelton, Robert. No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan.
Penguin Books, 1987.
Shepard, Sam. Rolling Thunder Logbook. Limelight Editions, 1987.
Sounes, Howard. Down The Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan. Doubleday,
2001.
Spitz, Bob. Dylan: A Biography. Joseph, 1989.
Stein, Georg. Temples In Flames. Palmyra, 1989.
Thomson, Elizabeth M, and Gutman, David (eds). The Dylan Companion.
Macmillan, 1990.
Williams, Paul. Bob Dylan: Performing Artist: Book One, 1960-1973. Xanadu,
1991.
Williams, Paul. Bob Dylan: Performing Artist: the Middle Years, 1974-1986.
Omnibus Press, 1994.
Williams, Paul. Watching the River Flow: Observations on Bob Dylans Art-inProgress, 1966-1995. Omnibus Press, 1996.
Williams, Richard. Dylan: a Man Called Alias. Bloomsbury, 1992.

188

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189