I was delighted when Bob Dylan received the Nobel Prize for Literature last month.
Some writers continue to question the Swedish Academy’s choice but Mark
Ford, in his New York Review of Books
piece, “Why He Deserves It,” makes a strong case for Dylan’s worthiness. And Joyce
Carol Oates, Bernard-Henri Levy, Salman Rushdie and Billy Collins, among
others, agree with Ford.
“Most song lyrics don’t hold up without
the music and they aren’t supposed to,” Collins says in an interview. “Bob
Dylan is in the ‘2% club’ of songwriters whose lyrics are interesting on the
page even without the harmonica and guitar and his very distinctive voice.”
Allen Ginsberg always
embraced Dylan as a poet. “I heard
‘Hard Rain’ and I wept,” he tells interviewer Jeff Rosen in Martin Scorsese’s
2005 documentary, NO DIRECTION HOME. “Because
it seemed like the torch had been passed to another generation of Beat
illumination… I was knocked out by the
eloquence of ‘I’ll know my song well before
I start singing.’”
Jonathan
Lethem, whose 2006 Rolling Stone
interview might be the best piece of Dylan journalism to date, says in the
October 2016 issue of Vulture:
“…(H)e’s the bard of the age so I didn’t find it either to be a shock or objectionable. It was almost like, Let’s graduate him to the highest award we can think of and be done with it.
“…(H)e’s the bard of the age so I didn’t find it either to be a shock or objectionable. It was almost like, Let’s graduate him to the highest award we can think of and be done with it.
“If I could quibble,” he continues, “it
would be with the Nobel committee’s specific citation of him as a ‘poet.’”
Disagreeing with Collins (about terminology but not Dylan’s merit), he
continues, “A lot of Dylan’s writing
dies on the page (but) that’s beside the point…
He’s in the oral tradition. His
work isn’t meant to look like a Wallace Stevens poem. But I like the fact he’s
kicked up a controversy again, because controversy is intrinsic in his identity
and his accomplishments.”
I like it too. But in my view, the controversy is a tempest
in a teapot. The Nobel Literature
Committee honored Dylan, in their words, for “having created new poetic
expressions within the American song tradition.” In NO DIRECTION HOME, Dylan
recalls influences from that tradition: Hank Williams, Johnny Ray, Odetta and
the astonishing John Jacob Niles (crying and playing Appalachian
dulcimer.) Muddy Waters, Peter LaFarge,
Dave Van Ronk, Cisco Huston. And Woody
Guthrie!
Pablo Picasso’s assertion that “good
artists borrow, great artists steal” surely applies to Dylan as he absorbs
Guthrie’s tone -- his stance and his themes -- or as he reworks Niles’ “Go ’way
From my Window” into “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” Lethem, in “The Ecstasy of Influence,” shows that purloining previous
works to create new ones is quite natural. And for nerdy fans like me, awareness
of these “thefts” is delightful. There’s pleasure in hearing musical allusion –
Fats Domino’s impact on McCartney’s “Lady Madonna” vocals, say, or Mendelssohn’s
presence in John Williams STAR WARS score – just as awareness of literary
allusion entertains good readers. With
Dylan the influences are manifold and, therefore, even more fun to catch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpaAeqBhwrM
For
Lethem, again, Dylan’s genius isn’t about the words literally on the page: “The
action is in the almost theatrical power of his embodiment of his language. Not in poetry per se.” For the vocal compositions to have their full
impact you have to see and hear them performed.
The
physical beauty of the songs -- listening to them
performed live without yet seeing them
played and sung -- was my first supercharged experience of Bob Dylan.
Barely 13 years old, standing outside Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in August 1965, I was puzzled when those inside booed “Like a Rolling Stone.” It was one of only two Dylan tunes I knew, and I loved it. Not only was it the number 1 song on my favorite AM station, this anthemic rant against the poverty of privilege made me move and groove, blissfully unaware of Dylan’s roots in a more orthodox folk world that was shocked by his latest electrified incarnation.
Barely 13 years old, standing outside Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in August 1965, I was puzzled when those inside booed “Like a Rolling Stone.” It was one of only two Dylan tunes I knew, and I loved it. Not only was it the number 1 song on my favorite AM station, this anthemic rant against the poverty of privilege made me move and groove, blissfully unaware of Dylan’s roots in a more orthodox folk world that was shocked by his latest electrified incarnation.
The other Dylan song of
which I was aware was “Positively Fourth Street.” I won the record in a WMCA “name it and claim
it” contest and I played the grooves off it.
The rock that I knew and loved at the time was about holding hands,
never dancing with another and, when really complex, falling for leaders of
gangs. Now, here was a song about betrayal -- damned if I even knew what that
was at 13 – which made the angry tone of Dylan’s vocals stand out. But Al Kooper’s lilting organ fills were
downright gleeful, or at least they made me
feel that way. What an amazing contrast!
Devouring this embodied rock and roll, setting
my hi-fi on replay or listening to Dylan on my transistor radio (after all, the
songs “had a beat we could dance to”) happily coincided with eighth grade
English classes covering rhyme and meter. That made the songs even more powerful
for me. I connected them to poetry. I even discovered that
both singles were written in second person, a rare voice in rock lyrics.
And
encouragement from English teachers – not the maudlin, sanctimonious kind going
on about “rock poems” in Frederick Weisman’s HIGH SCHOOL, but really cool ones
– led me back in time to the pre-electric Bob Dylan. That Dylan wrote and performed "protest” songs, classical ballads
such as “Boots of Spanish Leather” (featured since 1996 in the Norton Anthology
of Poetry) and imagist confessional lyrics.
I already knew the giddiness of dancing “’neath the diamond sky with one hand waving
free” from The Byrds “folk rock” cover of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” But eating
trail mix with my pals Ricky Newman and Harriet Moss, in Harriet’s basement
after school one day, I discovered “Chimes of Freedom.”
Tolling for the rebel, tolling for
the rake
Tolling for the luckless, the abandoned an' forsake’d Tolling for the outcast, burnin'
constantly at stake
An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom
flashing.
LBJ
had barely begun his relentless bombing of Vietnam as we memorized “Masters of
War.”
Come you masters of war
You that build the big
guns
You that build the
death planes
You that build all the
bombs
You that hide behind
walls
You that hide behind
desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your
masks
And this is where the “new poetic
expression within the songwriting tradition” begins to take shape. Bob Neuwirth observes on the DONT LOOK BACK
commentary track: “No one had heard these
kinds of (political) songs outside of union halls and labor rallies. But there they were.”
As soon as I do look back and discover the Dylan of protest songs, however, he
astonishes again with the miracle of Blonde
on Blonde. The first double album ever, as far as I know, stays ahead of a
nascent counterculture with “Rainy Day Women” from which my pre-teen buddies and I discover that we
“must get stoned.”
When
I hear “Visions of Johanna,” I can actually see
“jewels and binoculars hang(ing) from the
head of a mule” – probably at the same time my parents inadvertently
introduce me to Dada during trips to the Museum of Modern Art. “To live outside the law you must be honest,”
from “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” becomes a motto.
And “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” the first song ever to take up an
entire album side, opens me to the truth -- later affirmed by Leonard Cohen --
that the deepest romantic love, especially Chelsea Hotel romance, is in 6/8.
I follow Dylan in the gossip columns (Rolling Stone had yet to publish its
first edition), where it’s rumored that he’s been in a motorcycle accident. Then John
Wesley Harding is released and I discover Western outlaw heroes, St.
Augustine, lonesome hobos, escaping drifters, and watchtowers from which you
couldn’t even see Jimi Hendrix on the horizon.
For me, at this point, Dylan isn’t (in
what I think is Lethem’s sense) embodied
yet. I haven’t completely felt his
theatrical power. But that changes on February 24, 1968: I sneak into a Carnegie Hall side entrance and
watch a sold-out Woody Guthrie Memorial concert. The gods and goddesses of folk
are there – Pete Seeger, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Odetta, Richie Havens, Judy Collins,
Arlo… And Dylan appears, with The Band.
He’s the headliner on a show without
one. He tears through “Grand Coulee Dam,” “I Ain’t Got No Home” and “Mrs.
Roosevelt” as though Guthrie wrote rock’n’roll. The music is mesmerizing.
But, really, it’s the way Dylan stands. He’s a reverse image of Woody, his hero.
Where the Oklahoman’s guitar neck points to the sky, the Minnesotan’s points to
the ground. Like a divining rod. As though he uses it to find life-giving
water.
It’s also the way Dylan approaches the mic
to belt into it… like a jungle cat ready to strike. His own body’s electricity makes his eyes
twitch as he wails. The energy is so powerful the lyrics lose their meaning; I
can’t take my eyes off of him.
A few months before the concert, DONT LOOK
BACK opens at the 34th Street East Theatre. If memory serves, it’s still playing as I jones
for another look at Dylan weeks after the show.
And there it is again in grainy 16mm black and white, almost as
hyper-real as Dylan in the flesh: his handheld image, lithe, twitching, androgynous,
divining and divine; I get my fix of Dylan in a cinema verite documentary as fresh as the music itself.
A year later the ever-transforming bard
appears on television, on Johnny
Cash’s variety show, to promote Nashville
Skyline. Now he’s a crooner! He
sings “Girl from the North Country” with Cash, another hero of his, and it’s a
rare gem of a performance.
After that, time, for the true fan, passes
slowly. I’m off to college more than a year later and, finally, New Morning is released. On a cold slushy day in Ithaca, I walk past the ghost of Richard Farina and the living
spirit of Thomas Pynchon to a record store on Eddy Street, and discover still
another side of Bob Dylan.
Track One, “If Not for You,” is the first Dylan song covered by a
Beatle. The title track, “New Morning,”
like the “weatherman” lyric in “Subterranean Blues,” becomes part of the
Weather Underground’s lexicon. “The Man
in Me” later becomes the first Dylan song in a Coen Brothers film, sonically
synonymous with THE BIG LEBOWSKY’s Dude.
“Day of the Locusts,” finally, seems most
resonant today; it helps explain why the winner of 2016’s Nobel Prize for
Literature was loath to attend the December 10th ceremony in
Stockholm. The song is about Dylan
receiving an honorary Ph.D. from Princeton in 1970. Its lyrics suggest that Dr. Dylan, whose
commencement companion is David Crosby, took some sacramental medicine to
celebrate: “The man standin’ next to me,
his head was exploding/I was prayin’ the pieces wouldn’t fall on me.” In the next verse, Dylan sums up his
Princeton experience: “I sure was glad to
get out of there alive.” Yes, he
writes, “…the locusts sang and they were
singing for me.” But were these
creatures benign, like the song’s “birdies
flying from tree to tree,” or deadly like Nathaniel West’s and Yahweh’s?
The lesson of Princeton is don’t go to
events where you have so little in common with your fellows that, “There (is) little to say, there (is) no
conversation.”
Over the years, Bob Dylan attends Grammy
presentations and Kennedy Center gatherings – where he can consort with
musicians and perform instead of speaking about his music - but not the Academy
Awards. (He’s in absentia when he
wins an Oscar, in 2001, for “Things Have Changed,” his song in Curtis Hanson’s
WONDER BOYS.)
Of course, there may be more to it.
“Masters of War” is still in Dylan’s repertoire on The Never Ending Tour. It’s
hard to imagine a poet who will “stand
over (war-makers’) graves ‘til (he’s) sure that they’re dead” traveling to
Sweden to get a prize, no matter how lofty, named after the inventor of
dynamite. But he doesn’t turn down the award, after all, as Jean-Paul
Sartre did in 1964; that might seem disrespectful to its many worthy recipients and
suggest false modesty. Instead, he sends Patti Smith to the ceremony, where she
performs “Hard Rain:”
As I look back over the 46 years from
Dylan’s Nobel Prize to his Princeton Ph.D., his prolificacy during the first
decade in which he writes staggers me. The magnitude
of his body of groundbreaking work seems as significant as his personal
embodiment of it. So does its diversity. Back in 1971, while Dylan’s still in
the first fifth of his career, he
provides another cinematic delight. His music for Sam Peckinpah’s PAT GARRETT AND
BILLY THE KID not only contains the classic (yet ever-changing) “Knockin’ on
Heaven’s Door,” it underscores his own performance in the film as an enigmatic
character named Alias.
On August 1st that same year, I
see Dylan, embodied again, at the Concert for Bangladesh in Madison Square
Garden. He performs “Hard Rain” and
“Times… Changing.” Then he teases and
delights, playing the intro to “If Not for You” to ease not into that song but
into “”Love Minus Zero/No Limit.” Identical chords for different aspects of
romance! So physical! So musical! And
Dylan, in a denim jacket and jeans, flanked by George Harrison and Leon
Russell, is radiant. As Woody Allen once said, “I’m vibrating like a tuning
fork.”
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x558aoa
In early fall, still 1971, Dylan releases
“George Jackson,” his elegy to Black Panther Jackson, who was shot dead by a
San Quentin Prison guard. It’s an inspiring reminder of Dylan’s unabated and
often revolutionary iconoclasm. Light years, it seems to a 19 year-old, from
his “protest” period, yet further to the left than anything he’s done.
And
the hits keep on coming! Street Legal features “Changing of the
Guard,” a song that will become Patti Smith’s best Dylan cover. Blood on the Tracks contains Dylan’s most
evocative narrative verse songs yet, “Tangled Up in Blue” and “Lily, Rosemary
and the Jack of Hearts.” Desire
features the saga of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter and an ode to New York mobster
Joey Gallo, along with a couple of the most tender love songs he’s written.
Just before Desire’s release I see the embodied Dylan anew, at his Rolling
Thunder Review’s “Night of the Hurricane,” a benefit concert to get unjustly
convicted middleweight Carter out of prison. Again, we’re in Madison Square Garden. The band is stellar – Joan Baez, Roger
McGuinn, Scarlet Rivera, Neuwirth, Ginsberg, T-Bone Burnett (later of Coen
brothers fame) and a host of studio musicians. Dylan’s vocals are crisp. The
show abounds in theatricality, with its star in whiteface make-up.
And then, as if in a dream, I meet
him. Still with a penchant for gatecrashing,
I get into the Felt Forum after-party by reading the guest list upside down and
claiming to be Michael Ochs, Phil’s brother. (Sorry Michael, I hope you got in,
too.) The room is filled with heroes: McGuinn, Joni Mitchell, Richie Havens,
Baez, Sam Shepherd, members of The Band, assorted New York literati. There’s an
overabundance of charisma. Yet when Dylan enters, time stands still, all goes
quiet.
I lose my idol in the crowd, then, to my
amazement, find him standing next to me at a buffet table. It’s a moment I’ve
fantasized many times. We make eye contact. I say, with remarkable ease, “That
was a great show!” And Dylan responds with his signature Iron Range rasp: “Thanks, man. I love playin’ New York. Because audiences are honest. If you’re not good they let you know it. But if you are they let you know that, too.
And, yeah, they did seem to like it
tonight.”
He was so authentic, so present. I, on the other hand, wasn’t ready for a
connection. So my response must have
seemed like Ralph Kramden getting caught by Alice doing something really harebrained;
“Homina-homina-homina-homina,” I think I said.
Over
the next four decades, the hits continue.
“Jokerman,” “Unbelievable” and “Things Have Changed” stand out for me
among the literally hundreds of unique, genuine and even groundbreaking songs the
Nobel laureate writes between our brief encounter and the present. There will
no doubt be more.
I continue to be
deeply moved as Dylan embodies his music. The concerts I attend -- a MILLER’S CROSSING
post-production crew outing to Jones Beach, a show in Anaheim, one in Toronto,
another at the Hollywood Palladium – are grand moments. Yes, of late, he sits
at a piano for much of the show and sometimes
his voice tires after a few numbers. But he’s still electrifying. It’s still
theatre. And he continues to:
…build
a ladder to the sky and climb on every rung/ (and he stays) forever
young.
