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LIKE A REBEL WILD

A study of ’s art

by Jon P. Hooper

LIKE A REBEL WILD

A study of BOB DYLAN’s 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 Dylan’s 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 “DRIFTER’S 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 fans are gathered at Stanford University to debate the I 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 “” and “” finds himself grouped together with or the . 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 Dylan’s 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.

7 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 clichés. 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, , included - in order to better understand the times, Dylan’s 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 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 , , or .

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 , 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 Dylan’s 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 “” or “Knockin’ on Heaven’s 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 audience’s 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 ” 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 Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s skill with words. As one fan said at the Stanford University debate, “It’s impossible to study this man without rock and roll in your soul.”2 Dylan’s apologists have been faced with the same problem whenever the question of Dylan’s literary significance has been raised. Dylan’s 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 B 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 Dylan’s 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 and , which had such a liberating effect on a whole 11 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. Dylan’s 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, 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 Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, the immigrant workers who crossed the Mexican border, the outlaws and the impoverished. Through friends, Dylan discovered Guthrie’s 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 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 Woody’s 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 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 Guthrie’s 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 Guthrie’s 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 ’s 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 Gerde’s Folk City crowd as soon as he’d heard Dylan sing it.3 There was simply no question of storing up 13 Like A Rebel Wild songs, with a view to selling them to artists, in the manner of commercial pop , 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 Dylan’s contact with people more informed about current issues than himself, individuals like , 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. Dylan’s Columbia contract came about primarily because of John Hammond’s patronage. Legendarily, Hammond signed him without hearing him sing, and without the assurance that he had any original material to offer. Dylan’s self-confidence and charisma might have convinced Hammond of his latent talent, but still his confidence is hard to explain. , 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 album’s cover is beguilingly youthful, a kid dressed up in drifter’s 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 he’d 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 “,” 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 Dylan’s 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-of- date 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 Dylan’s 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, “,” sees Dylan putting himself into Guthrie’s shoes, and paying sincere homage to his idol (who by then was in the advanced stages of Huntington’s Correa, a hereditary illness that would claim him at about the time Dylan was retreating into the backwoods of ). “Song to Woody” is Dylan’s pledge to follow Woody’s lifestyle of hard travelling. Woody had travelled with the Midwest farmers (or “Okies”) 15 Like A Rebel Wild who became the subject of Steinbeck’s 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 Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s day is not the same as it was during the Depression, Dylan can see that little has changed. Through Dylan’s (and Guthrie’s) eyes, the world is personified as suffering, like the people who inhabit it. In one of the song’s most striking images, the world seems to embody the characteristics of one of the hungry Oklahoma families, and particularly their children: “Seems sick an’ it’s hungry, it’s tired an’ it’s torn / It looks like it’s a-dyin’ an’ it’s hardly been born.” Dylan pays tribute to Guthrie’s 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 latter’s 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 life’s transience, which the lifestyle of the rootless traveller makes more perceptible: “Here’s 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 rambler’s sudden appearance and disappearance as a metaphor for life’s transience, their extreme life a mirror of life’s extremes. Instead of rejecting difficult truths, he lays himself open to fate. His expression of humility (“The very last thing that I’d want to do 16 The Woody Guthrie Jukebox

/ Is to say I’ve 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 narrator’s 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 I’d 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 “Hammond’s 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.

17 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 Dylan’s 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 Guthrie’s “Pretty Boy Floyd,” or the traditional “Jim Jones”. When Dylan sings, “Come you ladies and you gentlemen, a-listen to my song, / I’ll sing it to you right but you might think it’s 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 people’s 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 miner’s 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 ; 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 Dylan’s 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 singer’s declaration that the “song, ain’t very long” and its title (simply, “Man on the Street”) ironically refer to the ostensible insignificance of the man’s 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 song’s 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. Dylan’s 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 game’s losers is never an issue: “He owned the whole damn town,” we are told, and can’t help but smile. Legal systems and official histories are not as powerful, or honest, as 19 Like A Rebel Wild people’s words. Never mind that he is an outlaw; like Desire’s 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 “”? 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. Willie’s 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 life’s precariousness, when Dylan says: “One road’s goin’ to the bright lights, the other’s 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 Dylan’s lexicon because of his early immersion in Guthrie’s 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 life’s 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 Dylan’s 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 songs…he’d always liked the songs and he’d 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 Guthrie’s 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 pre-

20 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 album’s 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 W 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 Folksinger’s Choice, a show on New York’s WBAI radio, enthusing about how the song didn’t 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 all- purpose anthem to stand alongside Guthrie’s “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 23 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 man’s struggle to be free is timeless. Dylan, despite his youth, understands that the missiles and A- bombs 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 don’t understand. They don’t know. They don’t even care, that’s 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 government’s 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. 24 Finger-Pointing Songs

“Blowin’ in the Wind” expressed and expresses sentiments greater than the personal, and that is because in Dylan’s world at this time causes were more important than “selfish” individual quests. It became the anthem of ‘60s’ protest, passing out of its creator’s 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 America’s 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 mankind’s 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 slavery’s 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 what’s 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 don’t have to stay silent, we don’t 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 isn’t beyond the clouds, Dylan appears to be saying; it isn’t 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 didn’t 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 wasn’t 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 Dylan’s 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 Pharaoh’s 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 album’s 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 Mary’s 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 I’d say, ‘Yeah, what’s bad, pick out something bad, like segregation, OK here we go,’ and I’d pick one of the thousand million little points I can pick and explode it, some of them which I didn’t 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 didn’t 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 Dylan’s 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 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 27 Like A Rebel Wild reputation. Now new songs were needed, and even the purists couldn’t 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 self- respecting folk singer. Often melodies were borrowed and adapted, as something to hang new words on. , 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, remembered the night Dylan played “Blowin’ in the Wind” for Gil Turner at Gerde’s folk city; Turner reportedly said: “ Christ, I’ve never heard anything like that in my entire life! That’s the most incredible song!” Straightaway, Turner went up on stage and sang the song for the Gerde’s audience and they too were blown away.10 Such a response would have been an incredible boost to Dylan’s 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 weren’t 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 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 28 Finger-Pointing Songs have been embarrassed by the song’s 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 “You’ve 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: “don’t talk to me ‘bout your patriotism / When you throw the Southern black boy in prison.” Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s most memorable songs of a particular incident, “”. Dylan sketches the incident with sharp conciseness: “Oxford town around the bend / He come in to the door, he couldn’t 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”). Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s 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 Don’t Look Back. 29 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 ,” 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. It’s 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 children’s 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 Zanzinger’s 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 Dylan’s 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 socialite’s 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 day’s 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 servant’s 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 / That…came 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 doesn’t 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 Dylan’s 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 anti- communist 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 public’s fears. In the early ‘60s, American artists from various fields were still shaken by the communist witch- hunts instigated by Senator Joseph McCarthy. The folk singer 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 31 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. Dylan’s 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 America’s 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 Rain’s 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 couldn’t help but make listeners think of the threat of nuclear holocaust. The five verses of “A Hard Rain’s 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 mother’s role is reduced to questions that prompt the son’s 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 Isaiah’s or Daniel’s or Saint John’s. Because of this, the mother’s 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 Dylan’s lyrics as the woman who offers , 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, 32 Finger-Pointing Songs the fact that they each spoke a different language, of the older generation in Dylan’s time. Dylan’s 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, Dylan’s 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 son’s 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. “I’ve 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 poison…flooding their waters”, here suggesting the sort of environmental disaster that would haunt later generations in place of the bomb. The young man’s 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.

33 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 Dylan’s 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 doesn’t 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 narrator’s 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 poet’s 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 34 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 Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” was meant to be the beginning of another song, and it is in this that the song’s 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 , and thus to other female martyrs? Does the image of the ten- thousand 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 Rain’s 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 government’s control over the youth, a reminder that despite Dylan’s declaration, the times weren’t 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 America’s 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. “” is 35 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 finger- pointing songs that Dylan produced in his first two or three years as a songwriter, and lacks the complexity of language that “A Hard Rain’s A- Gonna Fall” started to exhibit. There is no subtlety here, only a cathartic attack on the war makers and profiteers. It’s 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 death’ll come soon / I will follow your casket / In the pale afternoon / And I’ll watch while you’re lowered / Down to your deathbed / And I’ll stand o’er your grave / ‘Til I’m sure that you’re 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 Dylan’s song still suffers from short-sightedness, from over- simplification 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 war- makers 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 war- makers 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 36 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 Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” with rising flood waters, Fortune’s 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 you’ll 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 song’s 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

37 Like A Rebel Wild changing times (“the chance won’t come again”) seem especially pertinent. As Dylan said later, “revolution was in the air”. The image of Fortune’s 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. It’s 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 haven’t 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: “don’t criticize / What you can’t 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 Christ’s 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 38 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: Dylan’s 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 Noah’s, 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 children’s march towards emancipation; they are berated for criticising what is beyond their understanding - their children’s 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 39 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 Dylan’s more specific finger- pointing 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 America’s 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. Dylan’s “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 naïve 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 country’s 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 “I’s 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 Dylan’s 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 man’s 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 41 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 citizen’s 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 / It’s them we must fight”. The Cold War also instilled the fear of “weapons of chemical dust”; the pro-nuclear argument (“If fire them we’re 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 song’s “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 God’s on our side / He’ll stop the next war”. “” depicts another apocalypse, this time a hurricane that sweeps over the world to put paid to the old social order. The seas rise, pharaoh’s 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 doesn’t 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 42 Finger-Pointing Songs kind of imagery, drawn from The Bible’s 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 Dylan’s free adaptation of the folk ballad “Scarborough Fair”. It is an exquisite love song, evidence of Dylan’s precocious genius. The language of the song does not express the times, it isn’t 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, Dylan’s childhood home, provided a convenient model. Near the Canadian border, the Hibbing of Dylan’s youth is a place where “the winds hit heavy” and “the rivers freeze”. Biographers have suggested that Dylan’s 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 summer’s ending. The bard would 43 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 “that’s 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 Dylan’s finest love song, is “,” 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 song’s very beginning). The dialogue then proceeds towards what is essentially a lack of like feeling between the two lovers, with 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 44 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 “Don’t Think Twice, It’s 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. It’s 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 Dylan’s 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 , Robert Shelton recounted how he inspired the line “I once loved a woman, a child I’m 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 speaker’s dismissive, “You just kinda wasted my precious time,” a masterly put-down characteristic of Dylan, written a full twenty-five years before R.E.M. were to attempt something similar with “The One I Love”. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and The Times They Are A-Changin’ were albums that satisfied the public need for contemporary protest ballads, and earned Dylan the title of spokesman for the protest movement. Fellow folk artists like Joan Baez publicly admitted that Dylan, more than 45 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 A- Changin’, “,” hinted at a need to move on. Considered in hindsight, it can be seen as an only-partially veiled statement of Dylan’s restlessness and his dissatisfaction with the constraints the protest movement sought to impose upon him. He declares, like a man writing his epitaph: “(I’ll) 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 Dylan’s “A post-protest output, in 1967. Moving away from so-called topical songs, Dylan’s 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 Rain’s 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. “Don’t Think Twice, It’s 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

47 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 he’d 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 Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s 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 “” 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. It’s as if he’s saying, “I’ve lightened up. Can we be more honest and intimate now?”

48 If My Thought-Dreams Could Be Seen

“I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)” is one of Dylan’s 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 Ain’t 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 child’s dependency on a parent. In asking for loyalty and promises, furthermore, 49 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 “” 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 Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” Dylan had explored poetic, symbolist language. “Chimes of Freedom” and “,” 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 Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s knack for “keeping things vague”17), 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, 50 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 generation’s experience, even if the generation didn’t 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 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 inner- searching 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, all- encompassing 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 51 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 “,” 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 world’s 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 Baez’s cottage in Carmel, California, Dylan was thinking about the presence of God in nature.18 It’s 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 song’s mystical epiphanies and “Chimes of Freedom”, “Mr Tambourine Man,” and also the later “,” “Lay Down Your Weary Tune” somehow does not seem intimately connected with anything else in Dylan’s canon. It’s about the divine chord in nature, about music as a force infusing the natural world. It’s 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 God’s 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 52 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 music’s 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 Dylan’s 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 child…An’ I’d judge beauty with these rules / An’ accept it only ‘f it was ugly”. The roots of Dylan’s own music were uglier than Joan’s, the beauty in his songs of an entirely different kind (One could very well ask the question, just whose voice is the more natural, Joan’s or Bob’s?). In the sleeve notes, he writes about the transformational effect hearing Joan Baez’s 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 Joan’s voice with giving him a new concept of beauty as something beyond dissection or explanation, a sound that “held hymns 53 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 Baez’s 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 people’s 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, / I’m 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. Dylan’s 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. 54 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 Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” but taking things to even greater extremes. Although plugging in at the 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, Dylan’s 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 Shakespeare’s 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 Dylan’s “smoke rings of my mind” is strongly reminiscent, drug induced.21 This is not the rambling of the stoner’s mind, and if drugs helped at all, it was to open 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.

55 Like A Rebel Wild

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 “evenin’s empire,” has once again run through the speaker’s 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 time’s shore. The Tambourine Man’s music, however, has the ability to take him outside of time. Relieved of responsibilities, “branded” to the spot, the speaker’s 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 Man’s “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 Dylan’s 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 56 If My Thought-Dreams Could Be Seen foggy ruins of time” expresses how finite, and how insubstantial, time’s works are), past the “frozen leaves” of “haunted, frightened trees,” those long-lived witnesses to so much of time’s 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 individual’s 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 eye- patched pirate and skull and crossbones) represent our own, frighteningly normal world in pantomime clothes, the poet’s 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 piper’s reed or the tambourine; here, however, the music is from the crown of bells on the jester’s 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 Joyce’s Ulysses, whose vision was blinkered and whose blood boiled with self- righteous nationalist fervour. Behind the absurdist logic of King Kong 57 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 Noah’s 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 truth’s 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 58 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 former’s 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 verse’s 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 genie’s 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 individual’s 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, doesn’t 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, 59 Like A Rebel Wild 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 “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” should be nailed in one take, given the sheer weight of words that come pounding out of Dylan’s mouth. The focus he was capable of achieving in these early days is startling. “It’s 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. “It’s 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 ). 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 Dylan’s 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 60 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 “Maggie’s Farm” were Dylan’s 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. “,” in contrast, features a subject who is “nobody’s 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. “Maggie’s Farm” is another song of enslavement, and Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s divorce from protest. The reaction to Dylan’s 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). Dylan’s 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 decade’s 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 country’s youth, Dylan revolted. He ditched the old politics and adopted the role of rock icon. What his

61 Like A Rebel Wild 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

s the new voice of rock music, Dylan embarked on a tour of America, Europe and Australia, with a seasoned bar band well- A accustomed to hard knocks, the Hawks (later to become ). 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 generation’s 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 63 Like A Rebel Wild 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 “,” 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. 1- 3. Nevertheless, it remains one of the best rock songs ever recorded, and the first truly successful marriage of Dylan’s 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 it’s 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,” he’s 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 64 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. “” 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 Dylan’s finest verbal gymnastics: “The geometry of innocence flesh on the bone / Causes Galileo’s math book to get thrown / At Delilah who sits worthlessly alone / But the tears on her cheeks are from laughter”. “” begins with Abraham the patriarch, and there is a sense that Dylan’s 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 father’s 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 Dylan’s 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 65 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 Pride”’s 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 Dylan’s Waste Land. Like the promoter of the third world war in “Highway 61 Revisited,” there are people in Dylan’s apocalyptic landscape here who profit from misery, in this case by selling postcards of a hanging. The narrator’s 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 America’s past, and the “dusty old fairgrounds” of Dylan’s 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 Establishment’s 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”.

66 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 Romeo’s 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 Dylan’s view of modern love. The enigmatic quality of Dylan’s 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 Noah’s kin, and Eliot’s 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 Noah’s rainbow (God’s promise that he would not flood the world again; there is a another Flood coming, a Biblical apocalypse, but Ophelia places her faith in God’s 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 world’s drowning, a cleansing, a rebirth. This recalls Eliot’s Death by Water, with its image of the drowned god born anew. Ophelia is largely a figure who stands for

67 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 Filth’s sexless patients; Dr Filth’s 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 Dylan’s 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 68 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 song’s 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 captain’s tower while their ship goes to its doom. The street is where it’s 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 Eliot’s “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 song’s 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 69 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 we’re 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 naïve 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 . 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 band’s playing that seems to caress the listener, an internal harmony and logic to the music that is quite at odds with the chaos of Dylan’s 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. It’s 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 Dylan’s 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 light- hearted style. The essential message of “Rainy Day Women 12 & 35” 70 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 “” opens with a worrying glimpse into Dylan’s 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 song’s subject, who, it seems, is living through the same experience. “Visions of Johanna” was voted Dylan’s 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 song’s 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 Dylan’s 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 Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream found themselves bewitched and transformed. In Dylan’s 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 71 Like A Rebel Wild 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 singer’s lover, but he dreams of another, Johanna. The second verse encapsulates the maxim, “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re 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 Dylan’s 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 Johanna’s intimacy with the narrator. The reference to the museums, where “Infinity goes up on trial,” indicates Dylan’s 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 Lisa’s 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 72 Other Forms of Psychic Explosion stage clothes. The fiddler returns to the highway, and we end with the image of skeleton keys and the rain, encapsulating the song’s main symbols (the phrase returns us to the bones of Louise’s 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 Eliot’s 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 Dylan’s most amusing and grotesque songs. “Obviously Five Believers” and “” 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 Dylan’s voice and harmonica elevate the songs to a much higher plane. “Fourth Time Around” is perhaps the album’s 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 album’s masterworks, a song written for Dylan’s muse, his new bride Sara Lowndes (or so the 1975 song “Sara” asserts). There is some resemblance between its structure and Ginsberg’s “Kaddish,” attempting, and ultimately failing, to encompass the subject’s every nuance, her spirit, in verse (like “Kaddish,” the present song is essentially a long list). The narrator’s 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 73 Like A Rebel Wild 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. Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s 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, Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s 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 god’s divinity obviously rubbed off on them. Divine women held the key to the 74 Other Forms of Psychic Explosion worship of the mother goddess - the earth mother, goddess of fertility, like Ceres in Greece and Isis in Egypt. The New Testament’s 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 Dylan’s 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 God’s 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 Dylan’s prayer to her. Elsewhere on Blonde On Blonde, Dylan’s wit is, at times, a joy to behold, as in “Well, the hobo jumped up, / He came down natur’lly” and “And if it don’t work out, / You’ll 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 life’s cruelty: 75 Like A Rebel Wild

“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 didn’t mean to treat you so bad / You shouldn’t take it so personal” (callous, or simply far ahead of its time, and still far more honest than many of today’s 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 you’re 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. It’s 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. Dylan’s 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 (the word the perfect conduit for the surging feelings of anger the folk crowd harboured for his new music) with a snarling: “I don’t believe you! You’re a liar!” The ensuing version of “Like a Rolling Stone,” captured on a bootleg for years wrongly labelled “The 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 Dylan’s manager 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

“DRIFTER’S ESCAPE”

THE BASEMENT TAPES TO

rom the latter part of 1966 through 1967, Dylan disappeared from public view. His absence only added to his legendary status, and Fgave 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 Dylan’s 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 America’s foreign policy in Vietnam. The impossibly naïve peace and 77 Like A Rebel Wild love movement started a pilgrimage to the West Coast; flower power took hold of the nation, and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s 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 paradise’s apple, and was not the result of Dylan’s 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 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. , as they came to be called, provided the bridge between Blonde on Blonde’s astonishing acid rock, and John Wesley Harding’s 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 Band’s , and released in 1975. This has been rightly criticized by fans because it offers a rather distorted and incomplete 78 Drifter’s 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, . There are also two songs not included on the belated album release that number amongst Dylan’s most successful compositions, at least commercially: “Quinn the Eskimo” (based on an Anthony Quinn picture and popularised by Manfred Mann) and “,” the latter displaying an economy of language that marks some of Dylan’s most universal, all-encompassing works. There were other nuggets, too, particularly two major compositions that were left unfinished, the haunting, melancholy “I’m 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 “”. These display the more serious side of Dylan and The Band’s songwriting in comparison to the light-hearted nature of much of the 79 Like A Rebel Wild 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 Dylan’s writing that perhaps could only have come from the experience of fatherhood and becoming a family man. Songs like “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” and “” 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 one’s 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 Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s 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 Band’s 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 Beggar’s Banquet). Especially when turned up the apocalyptic volume on his version of “,” the importance of the album was felt.

80 Drifter’s 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 Dylan’s 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 God’s 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 Guthrie’s 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 ev’ry 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 one’s head, it is also necessary to have a gun in every hand. It’s a myth, but an attractive one, and importantly, it is a national myth. In the Woodstock countryside, Dylan might have looked 81 Like A Rebel Wild 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 didn’t always see it that way. The men who are gunned down in the western films of Dylan’s 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 song’s brevity does not allow for detailed exegesis. More likely, he wants this to stand as broadly representative of Harding’s 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. 82 Drifter’s Escape

Fame of such outlaws, of course, spreads (“All across the telegraph / His name it did resound”), and so does the reward money, but, most important, and unusual for the kind of outlaw we are being asked to imagine, there is nothing to pin him on. This may be taken as an admission of Harding’s 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”.) It’s 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 outlaw’s 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 “” and went on to write Hurricane Carter’s 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 83 Like A Rebel Wild 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 “,” whose tongue contorts the truth, and also no less a figure than St. Augustine, one of the Church’s most influential thinkers, who appears as the subject of Dylan’s dream vision in “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine”. The story of the drifter in “Drifter’s 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 narrator’s case when judgement comes. Dylan’s 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, “” and “I’ll 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 clichéd moments of , and in no way impair the album’s impact. With the benefit of hindsight, we can look back on John Wesley Harding as the last great work of Dylan’s 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 and fleetingly on tracks like “Every Grain of Sand,” “Blind Willie McTell,” and “”. But no longer would he be infallible; no longer would he teach us the way to see. 84 Drifter’s Escape

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, Dylan’s 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 there’s 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 clichés 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 Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s ‘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 “” (“Love is all there is,” Dylan sings with the conviction of a man at peace) and the fine “Tonight I’ll 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 85 Like A Rebel Wild 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 self- painted cover. In the context of Dylan’s 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 (“,” “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, , 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. “,” 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

86 Drifter’s Escape kids who call me “Pa,” / That must be what it’s all about” - not a pose, then, but an idealistic fantasy. Unfortunately the calm wouldn’t last. “Went to See the Gypsy” is an account of a meeting with Elvis Presley, Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s 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 Heaven’s Door,” an anthem that went on to become Dylan’s most celebrated popular song of the ‘70s). Dylan, arguably, had first dipped his toes into thespian waters on Don’t Look Back and , 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 Kristofferson’s 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 “,” 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.

87 Like A Rebel Wild

This was also the period when his Columbia recording contract expired, bringing him to the doors of David Geffen’s 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 Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s lyrics contained a secret code that confessed to his selling out to the Establishment and a dependency on narcotics, Weberman also began sifting through Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s 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 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 88 Drifter’s Escape never been very convincing when writing about his early life; the lovely “Bob Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s mature masterwork followed it so closely. Nevertheless, it is an enjoyable album, the first to have sleeve notes for a good long while. The language was still awkward at times (“a-hotter than a crotch” springs to mind) but there was a hint, at least, of what was to come.

89 Like A Rebel Wild

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 I Dylan visited the artist’s studio and began a period of apprenticeship under him. Although elusive about Raeben’s 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 91 Like A Rebel Wild comforts of the home. At the core of this change was the concept of “no time”. Dylan told Jonathan Cott:

“You’ve got yesterday, today and tomorrow all in the same room, and there’s very little that you can’t 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 “,” 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, that’s 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 you’re 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 doesn’t 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 92 What the Broken Glass Reflects beginning. On Blood on the Tracks, Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s 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 character’s memories. In concert, Dylan has tirelessly reworked the song, sometimes under the auspices that he didn’t 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 Dylan’s 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 song’s beginning, with the narrator contemplating whether time has changed a woman he knew, puts us on familiar enough ground – Dylan’s 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 93 Like A Rebel Wild 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 Dylan’s 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 life’s 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 woman’s “we’ll 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 Springsteen’s songs, the avenue may 94 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; , 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 woman’s opening the book of poems and offering it to the narrator is a key image pointing to the song’s 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 Dylan’s 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 95 Like A Rebel Wild ending among the song’s 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 song’s 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 (“carpenter’s wives”). The narrator cannot identify with them (“I don’t know what they’re doin’ with their lives”); his place is on the road, the exile’s 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 song’s 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 Dylan’s 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 “”.32 The concern of the former is salvation through woman, in a world of persecution in which the narrator’s 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 Christ’s clothes, to the messiah’s 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 Dylan’s 96 What the Broken Glass Reflects writing. The theme, to be returned to again and again, especially on “,” 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 narrator’s 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 Christ’s 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 one’s cross and remaining true to oneself (and to higher truths, such as the truths of the imagination) are central to Dylan’s work; so too is the place of women as ambiguous salvation figures. Even as far back as “,” Dylan was aware that there were people willing enough to crucify him (“. . .you’d rather see me paralyzed”). To speak the truth is a dangerous business, just as it was for Christ (“. . .they’d probably put my head in a guillotine,” he declared in “It’s Alright, Ma”). “Shelter from the Storm” is characteristic of Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s wasted state during the chaos of stardom, and the salvation he sought in domestic happiness, than the fourth verse’s “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”? 97 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 singer’s state of mind, “,” 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 Dylan’s 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 newsmen’s bluster, paralleled in Joyce’s 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 can’t help it if I’m 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 cliché about the beat of a butterfly’s 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 98 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 Dylan’s use of the idiot wind metaphor for life’s unpredictability seems to be Shakespeare’s Macbeth, as has been noted elsewhere: “Life’s…a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” “If You See Her, Say Hello” is one of Dylan’s 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 it’s 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, . 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 99 Like A Rebel Wild innocence and had written a biography, which found its way into Dylan’s 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. Dylan’s 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 Carter’s 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 Dylan’s strongest indictments of American institutional injustice (of which he has shown a healthy cynicism, from “Seven Curses” through “Percy’s 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 Dylan’s greatest protest songs, in fact, but the song works; there are echoes, in lines like “To see him obviously framed / Couldn’t 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 “You’ve 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 / 100 What the Broken Glass Reflects

Like your mama and yourself”). Her wisdom is instinctual, and that is part of the attraction (“you’ve never learned to read or write”). Far from understanding this gypsy woman, the speaker is aware that her heart is impossible to understand. The song’s 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 moon’s 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 Holl’s 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 Marvell’s “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 Dylan’s experiences filming Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid. “Black Diamond Bay” is among the most successful of the album’s 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

101 Like A Rebel Wild the mentality that turns places into postcard locations (“And I never did plan to go anyway / To Black Diamond Bay”). The album’s final song is “Sara,” the most direct on the album, perhaps the most direct in his whole canon (though less indiscreet than “”). 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 song’s 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 Dylan’s 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), “,” 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 I’m 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 he’d 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 102 What the Broken Glass Reflects 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. 1978’s Street Legal told a different story. The songs on the record were the real pointer to Dylan’s emotional state, even if the last verse of the last song did proclaim “I can’t believe I’m 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 (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 performer’s 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 “”, 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 song’s 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 103 Like A Rebel Wild 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; Dylan’s 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 Mama”s “I ain’t 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 midsummer’s 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 Dylan’s first person perspective in the opening lines, to the captain glimpsed from outside; 104 What the Broken Glass Reflects

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 maid’s 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 Dylan’s plea for help, in the mid ‘60s, on some deeper level; Dylan says, later on this album: “I couldn’t 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 song’s “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 “Dirge”’s “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 woman’s love; “the sun is breaking” suggests new hope and a new beginning. The song’s subject finds that his chains have broken when “she” wakes him up, a reference to the impossible expectations Dylan’s fans had placed upon him. Dylan abdicated from his position as spokesman, first from the folk crowd and later from the set, as is aptly expressed here: “Gentlemen, he said, / I don’t need your organisation, I’ve shined your shoes, / I’ve 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 105 Like A Rebel Wild 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 Dylan’s 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 album’s 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 year’s Slow Train. The narrator has clearly lost his faith in women, or has realised that a specific woman can no longer save him (“There’s a woman I long to touch and I miss her so much but she’s 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 woman’s 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 106 What the Broken Glass Reflects 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 one’s 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 can’t believe I’m alive” foreshadows “Saving Grace”’s 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

ylan’s propensity for change, his uncanny ability to remake himself and to act contrary to expectations, had always been a D 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 didn’t go public on this, the matter never really troubled his fans. When, however, he released the album , 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,

109 Like A Rebel Wild 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, Dylan’s 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 “”, 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 Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s commercial standing would never recover. He had, after all, played to the largest ever UK concert audience at that point at 110 Hanging on to a Solid Rock

Blackbushe. The softening of the born-again stance on Infidels and his pairing with acts like ’s Heartbreakers and The 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 won’t be able to die”, has its source in St. John’s 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 wasn’t 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 Dylan’s 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 “you’re 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

111 Like A Rebel Wild 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 Dylan’s 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 woman…my 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 Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s 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 woman’s 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, Christ’s description of himself as the bridegroom. To conceive of a spiritual relationship, it was necessary to draw a comparison between that most

112 Hanging on to a Solid Rock 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 we’re passing through” echoes the exodus image from “Precious Angel”, and countless such images of exile in Dylan’s 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 didn’t 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. It’s 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 Dylan’s new doctrine. One song that takes a comparatively lighter 113 Like A Rebel Wild approach is “Man Gave Names to All the Animals”. This latter has the flavour of a nursery rhyme, and as such looks ahead to , but the source is Biblical: Adam’s naming of the beasts in Eden, finishing up with the snake, which will be the vessel of Satan’s tempting of Eve. The finest song on the album, however, and one we cannot so easily categorise, is “”. 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 doesn’t 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 God’s 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 “Angelina”’s “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 Revelation’s 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 Dylan’s soaring, spiritual melody lines, brought out best in concert (the performance from , April 20th, is exhilarating). In the song, God accelerates the effects of Time or Change to destroy man’s 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 God’s actions and Time’s is that unlike Shelley’s Ozymandias, God’s actions are dissimilar to Time’s, which work to gradually erode humankind’s vanities, because they are swift; the manifestations of God’s power appear suddenly and unexpectedly (“He unleashed His power at an unknown hour”) - the last such abrupt divine 114 Hanging on to a Solid Rock justice being the Second Coming itself. Without being explicit, the lines evoke kings and empires that were decimated by God’s 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 Eliot’s 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 soul’s 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 Dylan’s gospel canon, and one he has chosen to revisit in concert more than any other song from Saved. The song makes repeated reference to Christ’s 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. Dylan’s 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 115 Like A Rebel Wild 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 Christ’s 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 Dylan’s born-again experience, pondered where Dylan would go in the future.35 To him, Dylan’s 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 116 Hanging on to a Solid Rock 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 God’s 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 it’s 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. He’s 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 ain’t painful, it’s 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

117 Like A Rebel Wild 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 don’t 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. It’s 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. Dylan’s tendency to think of God in amorous terms, discussed above, resurfaces in the next verse: “I don’t need no alibi when I’m spending time with you / I’ve 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 doesn’t 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 118 Hanging on to a Solid Rock eye for an eye? Perhaps not, because what follows is clear evidence that the speaker does have every reason to ask for blood: “You’ve only murdered my father, raped his wife / Tattooed my babies with a poison pen / Mocked my God, humiliated my friends”. It doesn’t 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 doesn’t carry it through (the motivation of revenge for his father’s death appears also on the recent “Ain’t 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 it’s 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). Dylan’s 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 woman’s ability to save him.36 Here he offers: “Don’t wanna be with nobody tonight,” rejecting another of the world’s 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 one’s 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 God’s 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, can’t help admitting that he does feel the pull of physical attraction towards women, that it’s hard for him, even though he knows it’s wrong: “Don’t let her hear you want her / Don’t let her know she’s so fine,” in the printed version (though in the recorded version it sounds as if he’s singing “Don’t 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 she’ll 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: “She’ll only give to others the love she has gotten from you” with “You’re a Big Girl Now”’s “I know where I can find you… / In somebody’s room / It’s 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 Paul’s 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 you’ll get the bill”); it is “an eternal flame, quietly burning”. 120 Hanging on to a Solid Rock

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 doesn’t keep us waiting, it doesn’t make us envious of others, doesn’t 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 don’t 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 Groom’s 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 singer’s 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 don’t 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 Morrison’s childhood reveries in Astral Weeks. After the world of “Trouble”, and the wind blowing 121 Like A Rebel Wild 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 time’s 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 didn’t 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 album’s one unreserved masterpiece. The sessions for Shot of Love produced other great songs, but they obviously didn’t fit his scheme: “The Groom’s 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. It’s 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 Master’s 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 temptation’s 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, there’s someone there, other times it’s 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 Christ’s Sermon on the Mount). The song also recalls Blake’s “Auguries of 122 Hanging on to a Solid Rock

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 penitent’s most private thoughts, hearing his doubts but ultimately faced with an affirmation of belief. The song begins with a confession of the penitent’s emotional state, which, gravely, is one of despair. Milton’s 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 penitent’s 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 doesn’t 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; Cain’s 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. Dylan’s 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 Master’s hand” in a leaf, or in a grain of sand; the stamp of the 123 Like A Rebel Wild 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 Blake’s “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 (Blake’s “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 Dylan’s 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 God’s 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 Dylan’s rise from unknown to superstar, not that this success is viewed with any pride, 124 Hanging on to a Solid Rock 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 summer’s 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 verse’s 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, there’s someone there, other times it’s 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 penitent’s 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 Dylan’s 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 125 Like A Rebel Wild 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 penitent’s 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, revenge- advocating 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 Dylan’s 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 audience’s 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 wouldn’t understand. Dylan sounds like he’s being 126 Hanging on to a Solid Rock 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 that’s keeping you in line doesn’t make him jump”. Dylan thinks it’s 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 self- inflict 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 can’t be bribed or bought; he doesn’t 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. It’s 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 Christ’s 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. Dylan’s 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 so- called friends”, “they don’t 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 127 Like A Rebel Wild 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 America’s 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 born- again Christian, that is until we listen closely to what Dylan is saying about him. It’s a strangely moving song, admittedly a minor work, and the singer’s 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 Dylan’s heroes. He was a speaker of the truth, and as a result he suffered for it. Bruce’s 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 doesn’t 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 album’s 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 128 Hanging on to a Solid Rock 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 half- committed. It’s 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 he’d made a breakthrough. It’s 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 non- believers 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 Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s voice, how they don’t mind the songs if they’re sung by other artists but couldn’t stomach a whole album of Dylan’s 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 129 Like A Rebel Wild

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 Dylan’s 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 D 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 . 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 Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar,” “Caribbean Wind” and “Angelina”). But Infidels did suffer from the absence of one major song, perhaps the greatest of Dylan’s mature songwriting, “Blind Willie 131 Like A Rebel Wild

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 Dylan’s 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 132 Surving in the Ruthless World 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 Christ- like impostor. With this in mind, the opening image may recall the poet- prophet of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” who announced his intention to “stand on the ocean until I start sinking”. The speaker may indeed be referring to the artist’s 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 generation’s 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 generation’s 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 Dylan’s 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. 133 Like A Rebel Wild

The self-reflection is severely critical of the tendency to play Christ to the masses: “You’re a man of the mountains, you can walk on the clouds / Manipulator of crowds, you’re 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 one’s “only teachers” suggests adherence to a consistent set of imparted principles. Dylan’s awareness of his own photogenic image, his sculpted look, as Michael Gray has noted, lurks behind the reference that “Michelangelo indeed could’ve 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 Dylan’s 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 spinner’s undoing. Just as he insists that the sun swiftly sets, Dylan stresses that night will shortly come “steppin’ in,” personified like 134 Surving in the Ruthless World a theatrical villain. And sure enough, the final verse unmasks the villain of the song, the prototype of the singer’s 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 Christ’s 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 spider’s 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 song’s 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 135 Like A Rebel Wild 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. “Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight” has the following: “I wish I’d have been a doctor, / Maybe I’d have saved some life that had been lost, / Maybe I’d 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”. Dylan’s, in the modern idiom, is “Don’t fall apart on me tonight”. Like Arnold’s receding “sea of faith,” Dylan’s world is equally precarious: “Yesterday’s just a memory / Tomorrow is never what it’s supposed to be”. In Arnold’s poem, the loss of faith, the absence of anything to believe in, drove the poet to believe in the constancy of human relationships. Dylan’s world of lies is different. According to G.K. Chesterton, Father Brown’s 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 136 Surving in the Ruthless World 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. Man’s 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, he’s fulfilled”. Even the boss of “” 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 “Don’t 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 singer’s 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, / It’s 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 ain’t 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 Dylan’s magnitude, 137 Like A Rebel Wild 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 wouldn’t 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 song’s 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 Ginsberg’s 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 sow’s 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 “Someone’s 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 didn’t deserve to share a studio with him. The answer, the road forward and the place where Dylan’s return to dignified recordings could be found, was in the past. And yet there is interest here, though one’s 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 138 Surving in the Ruthless World cable TV; such “borrowings” have always been part of the game. There are also interesting pointers to Dylan’s 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 “Didn’t 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, doesn’t 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. “I’ll 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 O’Jays. 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 “I’ll Remember You,” where the artifice cracks and the rural, folk music sources that had nourished some of Dylan’s 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. “Something’s 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. It’s 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 139 Like A Rebel Wild 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. It’s 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. “I’ll 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 lover’s 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 Peter’s 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 mother’s child who has gone astray echoes the missing Christ child, 140 Surving in the Ruthless World whose mother couldn’t find him anywhere when he was gone about his father’s 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 mother’s 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 (“she’s 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. Dylan’s 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 141 Like A Rebel Wild 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. Don’t 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 A incident recorded for posterity on Don’t 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 stage, pricking the mass ego of crowd and participants, proved that he was still some distance from the professional attitude of a or . 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 people’s 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? 143 Like A Rebel Wild

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 doesn’t care a damn. It’s impossible to stomach the take on Kris Kristofferson’s “They Killed Him,” with its children’s 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 Blonde’s “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 Dylan’s 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 “” 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 doesn’t 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 Dylan’s rough-edged, 144 Dignity original genius. “Under Your Spell,” one of their collective efforts, contains an inkling of characteristic Dylan writing, but for the most part it is restricted by the formula writing of his co-writer. The really infuriating thing about Knocked out Loaded, in a sense, is that in the middle of such second rate material Dylan delivers one long, completely focused, perfectly enunciated, deftly-written narrative, “,” 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 it’s 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. It’s 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 wasn’t 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, “Let’s Stick Together,” a pro-marriage song which had sounded somehow lascivious when crooned by , 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. 145 Like A Rebel Wild

“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 album’s 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 Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s 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 within twelve months of Dylan and the Dead, and the contrast between the two, in terms of quality and Dylan’s 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 two- step, has continued throughout the latter part of Dylan’s career; occasionally mainstream critics will notice him long enough to proclaim a 146 Dignity concert or recent album his best in years; the long-term fans, wary of such caprice, know better than to listen to them.42 Every few years or so, you would be forgiven for thinking that Dylan has suddenly woken from long slumber, and rediscovered his genius in exile. The catalyst in this latest rehabilitation of Dylan’s reputation was Daniel Lanois, producer of, amongst others, 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 song’s spirit, he began recording under Lanois’s 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 latter’s to withhold the two best songs from the final cut. Lanois, in fact, is on record as saying that he had wanted “” 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 O’Brien, the moment had passed. Oh Mercy is nevertheless a strong album, his best since Infidels. “” is a striking minimalist opening, the groove building up, repetitive, circular, restricted but bristling with energy. The lyrics also expose a new weakness in Dylan’s 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 147 Like A Rebel Wild 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. “,” 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 science’s 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 / That’s how the light gets in,” he wrote, as if responding to Dylan’s 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 Future’s title track, in any case. Taken in the context of Dylan’s 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 God’s name / But you’re 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 Dylan’s 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 148 Dignity why, precisely, Dylan includes such a people. However, the scope of the song is panoramic, stretching from the wretched to the saints, and curiously enough Dylan elects to make the first group one of the messengers of God. The sound of the bells they toll is “deep” and “wide,” like the shape of the valley through which they resound; they are tolled by an iron hand (the bell ringer, heathen or no, is godlike in tolling God’s 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 God’s kingdom to the world’s people. In these lines, Dylan compounds Biblical imagery, recalling Revelation’s 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 Dylan’s 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 God’s 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 world’s powers while they testified their spiritual belief. St. Catherine is presented as a 149 Like A Rebel Wild 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 God’s 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 song’s 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 song’s 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. It’s 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. Dylan’s 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 God’s 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 150 Dignity a melancholy that belies the good news of what, superficially, his message seems to be. The bells are rung on behalf of man, and we hope that their sound reaches heaven. Therefore we have a change of perspective to the evangelical songs. There, he was counting himself among the saved, those already with their feet in another world, and who did not feel the need to complain of their suffering; now, there is more empathy for “all of us who are left,” no longer such a subject-object dichotomy. Still, the people in the song are chiefly the pious, those who are waiting for their just rewards. His role, then, is to petition on behalf of the righteous awaiting God’s 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 / There’s 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 nature’s 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 Laughton’s 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 preacher’s view of human nature is unremittingly bleak: “every man’s 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 preacher’s face is a 151 Like A Rebel Wild 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. “” is hinged on the will to face life’s difficulties, the slings and arrows of everyday problems, and the doubt that makes such will pointless. Hamlet’s 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 man’s inflated self-image in the metaphor of an infectious sickness, the metaphor stretched out to fill a song’s 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 Dylan’s 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 public’s 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, 152 Dignity a ruse to puncture the image of the serious artist, the prophet of the end times, a complete u turn. Dylan had opened Oh Mercy with the declaration that we live in a world without love; here his opening gambit was “Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a gypsy queen”. You were not supposed to say these things in rock. We are adrift in the waters of nonsense. Where could it have come from? The same kind of nonsense, words free of embarrassment, had been set playfully loose in the basement of Big Pink, and before that, Dylan had come across in his apprenticeship as a folk singer, and had learned some of the numerous children’s 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 Dylan’s 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 child’s 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. It’s 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 serpent’s temptation of Eve. If the song is about freedom from all constraint, about innocence and cultivating a child’s 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 153 Like A Rebel Wild 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 don’t 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 album’s 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; it’s 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 children’s 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 Jordan’s waters). Fairy tales and nursery rhymes are ways of encoding wisdom unpalatable for 154 Dignity children, of turning fate, death, evil, and suffering into monsters that can be seen, fled from, or defeated. Dylan spins a tale of misery as allegory, and abides by the rules of fairy tale. A song like “Under the Red Sky,” taken on its own terms, is therefore easily comprehensible and more than worthy of our attention. Mankind is also blown about by fate in “Unbelievable,” and the same kind of wish-fulfilment stories are told to the young and naïve. 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 what’s true”); now, the language of nursery rhyme, in Dylan’s 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 What’s 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 aren’t 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 “It’s 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 don’t 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 155 Like A Rebel Wild appearance, this time allegorized; in the previous song it was the blind horse, now it’s 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: “it’s interchangeable, so delightful to see”. Deadened by habit, like the tramps in Beckett’s 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 ; the Hammersmith concerts in early 1990 place him there at about the right time. The song apparently recounts a real incident at Speaker’s 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 album’s 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 narrator’s 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 narrator’s 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 doesn’t 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, 156 Dignity the TV has become the new way of putting the blade to the young, a way of controlling their mind so that when they grow up they will be eager cannon fodder, easy victims of government propaganda. The preponderance of list songs in Dylan’s 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 wouldn’t invite the disapproval of anyone’s mama (especially a mama like John Brown’s), 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 doesn’t 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 / He’ll tell them to you when you’re asleep”. It’s 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 Dylan’s 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 won’t admit to weakness, who commands an orchestra of women and who will 157 Like A Rebel Wild 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 Poe’s 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, I’ll give you one”). The surface is polished and pretty (it is, in fact, “sugar and candy”) but underneath there is despair: “He’s 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, I’ll 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 star’s 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 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 album’s 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 158 Dignity most obvious source for the cat is “Ding dong bell, pussy’s 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 cat’s 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 Pilgrim’s 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 159 Like A Rebel Wild lessons, dressed up in a child’s language, move aside for the more direct statement, “May the lord have mercy on us all”. It’s 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. . .

160

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 W ‘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 Dylan’s 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, , 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 161 Like A Rebel Wild 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 Shelton’s 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 artist’s 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 didn’t 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 , 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

162 My Heart Is Not Weary 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,” “She’s 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 couldn’t 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, “,” a close cousin to its songs, won him the Academy Award for best song. 163 Like A Rebel Wild

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 Dylan’s 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 wouldn’t 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 “I’m walking through streets that are dead” his opening statement. Clinton’s 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 child’s 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 164 My Heart Is Not Weary 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 doesn’t 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 won’t lead me astray”. The major songs, apart from “Love Sick,” are “,” “Trying to Get to Heaven,” “,” and, perhaps best of all, “Highlands”. “Standing in the Doorway” is the sort of love ballad that can easily lapse into cliché, 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 God’s 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 I’m hungry, drink when I’m 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 Dylan’s 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 Hardin’s “Lady Came from Baltimore” is a song Dylan had covered). Elsewhere, the Mississippi boat rides of Mark 165 Like A Rebel Wild

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 don’t pull no gamblers, no midnight ramblers like they did before”. There is even the pull of autobiographical details: “I’ve been to Sugar Town, I shook the sugar down”. I’ve 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 Dylan’s finest late-period ballads. It’s a song which charts, once again, the narrator’s 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 didn’t 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 doesn’t 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 I’ll 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 anyone’s 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”. It’s 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 Dylan’s sense that he cannot communicate, and sexual innuendo predominates. In the midst of songs with loose structures, Dylan’s main achievement here is to finish something so long and focused, rather like a revisit to “Brownsville 166 My Heart Is Not Weary

Girl”. As some have noted, the song is directly autobiographical, and the closest we have come to stepping into Dylan’s shoes, seeing the world through his eyes. It’s like discovering a portal into Dylan’s 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 doesn’t actually reach the place of rest by the song’s end, and that its very existence is open to question. Another song, “Things Have Changed,” was written some time later, Dylan’s 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, “I’m 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 167 Like A Rebel Wild 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 “I’m sitting on my watch, so I can be on time,” or “Politician’s 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 Cohen’s, 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 Dylan’s ‘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 creator’s 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 album’s 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 168 My Heart Is Not Weary

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 Sky’s 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 man’s 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, “I’ve 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 album’s 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 man’s 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 album’s standout, existed as an outtake from the sessions for Time out of Mind, and was recorded by Sheryl Crow, but Dylan’s 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, / Don’t 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 survivor’s 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 169 Like A Rebel Wild 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 he’s 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 can’t repeat the past.” I say, “You can’t? / What do you mean, you can’t? Of course you can””. Nor is he above self-mockery, as in “The girls all say, “You’re 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 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. It’s how you feel; as Dylan says elsewhere, age doesn’t carry weight. A further delight of the album is hearing Dylan try his hand at swing in lighter, jazzier numbers like “” and “Moonlight”. Van Morrison has mined such material for several years, but whereas Van’s readings (and his compositional efforts in the genre) have been relatively straight, Dylan’s approach is more complex. Although he starts out with the usual platitudes, leaving no cliché 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: “I’m going to baptize you with fire so you can sin no more / I’m 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: “,” “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 170 My Heart Is Not Weary 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.

171 Like A Rebel Wild

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 T 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 173 Like A Rebel Wild 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 Victoria’s 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 Dylan’s attitude to himself and to his role has changed dramatically since he railed against the use of music in commercials on the Biograph notes. It’s 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 Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s life, and affords us a glimpse 174 Do Not Go Gentle… inside his head every bit as revealing as the one “Highlands” offered. Ostensibly set within some fictional South American country run by a dictator, this is contemporary America, a place where there is no longer anything to believe in and no revolutions left untainted. Dylan music aplenty plays on the soundtrack, from live performances with his touring band (mercifully not the current one) to studio recordings like “Blind Willie McTell,” which sets a haunting backdrop to scenes of vagrants sleeping on waste-strewn streets. “This land is condemned,” Dylan is once more telling us, that the dreams and ambitions of his generation have been lost or sold. At the end, as Jack Fate returns to prison, he makes the statement that the only thing left to him in the world is his own subjective response to beauty. Truth, it seems, is too far off. If the film had been a financial disappointment, the same cannot be said for Chronicles, an autobiography that, in true Dylan style, dispenses with a traditional chronological or even linear structure. After several years in the rumour mill, a relatively slim volume finally did appear, amounting to a series of impressions and recollections from certain periods in Dylan’s 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 book’s 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 cliché he had indulged in for Greil Marcus’s 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-of- consciousness 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 Dylan’s 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 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 Shelton’s 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. Scorsese’s building the case for Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s 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, Dylan’s analysis of the current state of the world accepted. It seems a safe bet that his attitude to 176 Do Not Go Gentle… modern music, to the ebb and flow of current fashions, reveals a distain for the notion that anything really new is possible, or that one should shy away from repeating the past. When one gets beneath the surface glitter things are the same as they have always been. From the outset, it was apparent that with Modern Times Dylan had set out to revisit similar territory to “Love and Theft”: the opening “” 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 “,” of “Cry a While” on the Muddy Waters inspired “Rollin’ and Tumblin’”; and it was not just “Love and Theft” either: one of the album’s 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 Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s 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, Dylan’s 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 177 Like A Rebel Wild as phrases from older songs; in this light, his adaptation of Memphis Minnie’s “When the Levee Breaks” as “The Levee’s 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 else’s 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 Dylan’s 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 178 Do Not Go Gentle… balladry found in “Bye and Bye” reappears on “,” mixing as it does stock clichés of a lover’s 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 / You’ll never see me frown”). There is tenderness, too, on “Workingman’s 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 “Ain’t Talkin’” he says, “I’m a-trying to love my neighbour and do good unto others / But oh, mother, things ain’t 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 Dylan’s 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 “Workingman’s 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 Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey . Phrases like “slash you with steel” are very much in the vein of Civil War imagery; even though the speaker’s 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 179 Like A Rebel Wild repeated playing; it is Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s 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. It’s 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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NOTES

1 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 Terkel’s 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.

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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 Shakespeare’s 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 ’ Dylan biography Down the Highway, a couple of years after this chapter was written. 35 Paul Williams: “Dylan: What Happened?”. Reprinted in : 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 40 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.

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.

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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 Martin’s 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 Artist’s 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. Dylan’s 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 Dylan’s Art-in- Progress, 1966-1995. Omnibus Press, 1996. Williams, Richard. Dylan: a Man Called Alias. Bloomsbury, 1992.

188 Notes and Select Bibliography

189