Further thoughts on Dylan

Regarding the Bob Dylan documentary, a reader writes:

Rock music will never again see the likes of Dylan’s masterpiece trio: Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. They have a musical literature all their own.

Like all great works, they both embody and transcend the era they were written in. Even though Dylan lost me after Blood on the Tracks, I am still, all these years later, in admiration of lines such as this one from It’s All Right, Ma: “Advertising signs they con you into thinking you’re the one who can do what’s never been done who can win what’s never been won meantime life goes on all around you.”

Who writes songs like that today?

One of the great things about listening to Dylan, as a young person, was that he compelled you to explore the world of people and ideas. In either his songs or his liner notes you would find mention of the Bible, Einstein, T.S Eliot, Ezra Pound, Ma Rainey, Barry Goldwater, Beethoven, et al. If you wanted to “understand Dylan” then you had better know something about the larger culture beyond just the moment, beyond just the peripheral. For a high school kid in the mid-1960’s (as I was) this was a pretty profound realization. Dylan, singing the line, “You’ve been through all of F.Scott Fitzgerald’s books,” actually prompted me to read all of F. Scott Fitzgeralds books! I’m sure I’m not alone in this experience. Listening to Dylan made the world larger, richer and more mysterious. That’s not bad for a singer of songs.

A friend of mine once mentioned that he felt that The Times They Are A’ Changin’ album lacked something essential, that it was not complete. Dylan had left out his sense of humor. He was right. Dylan’s humor made him human, accessible and likeable: “I got knocked down and my head was spinnin’ I wound up with the Dean of Women … yippee, I’m poet, I know it, I hope I don’t blow it.” I liked the Scorsese bio for remembering to show this humorous side of Dylan which is easily overlooked if one only knows his topical songs or “hits.”

Anyway, I just wanted to write to say that I was glad you commented on the Dylan bio. I enjoyed reading your impressions of the program.

My reply:

You know, I never consciously had that thought about “The Times they are a changing” album, but last night I did have it about Dylan’s performances from that same period of 1963 when he was doing the civil rights songs. Not exactly a lack of sense of humor, but his performances, his voice, even his physical appearance, were more straight, lacking the electrical, multidimensional quality that is his hallmark. I understand why that was happening, he was participating in a political cause. But clearly it didn’t suit his talent.

And what about that rendition of “Hard Rain” (?) that he and Baez did together at that festival? It was painful to listen to.

However, I devoutly hope that part II tonight does not spend more time on the anger of fans at Dylan’s new musical style and persona at the ‘65 Newport festival. That is very old and very uninteresting history. Who cares that people back in 1965 wanted Dylan to continue being a folkie or a protest singer? He was already completely beyond their expectations, following his own star. Scorsese should stay with that, with Dylan’s creative process, not bore us with a story that’s been told a hundred times and was already boring 30 or 40 years ago.

Another reader writes:

I have the Free Trade Hall concert loaded in my I-pod. Amazing stuff. When I get sick of listening to the Dead, I listen to it. Sonny was right.

Blood on the Tracks is a masterpiece, and Nashville Skyline is pretty good. BD faded away after BOTT, seems to me. BD wrote songs that sound great when other people sing them, not just when he does.

My reply:

Yes, Blood on the Tracks is his great masterpiece apart from his great Sixties period. I consider “Tangled Up in Blue” from that album his greatest, emotionally richest song. But the three albums of the mid seventies, Planet Waves, Blood on the Tracks, and Desire are all terrific, a great comeback.

You should have given Desire (which came out a year after Blood on the Tracks) more of a chance. I didn’t like it at first, but kept listening to it and got into it.

But the time helped. I was staying with friends who lived in Bisbee Arizona, a strange dreamy town on a hill with winding unnamed streets, more southern European than American, and it was the perfect setting for getting into all those song/stories about lost souls in strange or tropical lands like “Black Diamond Bay,” and gypsy songs like “One More Cup of Coffee (The Valley Below)”:

Your sister reads the future
Like your momma and yourself
You’ve never learned to read or write
There’s no books upon your shelf

But your pleasure knows no limits
Your voice is like a meadow lark
But your heart is like an ocean
Mysterious and dark.

And something about these lines from “Hurricane,” also on the Desire album, gets to me, the graphic quality, as though he were turning journalism into poetry (I don’t remember if that’s my thought or something I read in the album’s liner notes by Alan Ginsberg, but I like the lines anyway, partly because I’m from New Jersey):

So Miss Patty calls the cops
And they arrive on the scene
With their red lights flashing
In the hot New Jersey night.

However, to get into Desire, you have to disregard the fact the Hurricane Carter probably really was guilty of murder, and that Joey Gallo in real life was not a poetic Robin Hood but something of a monster. Treat the songs romanticizing these people as fiction not fact and there is beauty in them.

After the mid seventies, the Infidels album in 1983 has marvelous stuff, such as “Jokerman.”

Also, that’s great that you have those outtakes and concert tapes, that greatly enriches the Dylan repertoire. Anyone who knows only the official albums doesn’t really know Dylan.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 27, 2005 05:55 PM | Send