‘Twas in another lifetime

Here is a good YouTube audio of Bob Dylan’s “Shelter from the Storm,” from Blood on the Tracks, 1975. I listened to it the other night for the first time in many years, and it struck me as being more sensitive and poetic than ever. The sound quality of the recording is so rich, you’d think it’s a whole production, but then you realize it’s just an accoustic guitar, a bass guitar accompaniment, and Dylan’s voice. When this song came out, someone I knew felt it was based on D.H. Lawrence’s short story, “The Man Who Died,” a decidedly non-orthodox treatment of Jesus’ experiences after he is resurrected.

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From: Jeff in England
Subj.: DON’T LOOK (so far) BACK

Is there any chance in the world that you could post a link to tracks that Dylan sang after 1984…it’s like you are glued to the past and cannot recognise anything of worth from Dylan in the last 25 years!

Perhaps it symbolises your general tendency to believe the past was better and that there is nothing worth preserving from recent times.

Blood on the Tracks has been played to bits by Dylan admirers. How about something from Oh Mercy or Time Out of Mind or Modern Times. C’mon Larry, you can do it! Break that addiction!!

LA replies:

There are younger readers who wouldn’t know that song and recording. And I hadn’t heard it myself in at least 15 years. So it hasn’t been played to death by me.

Besides, isn’t it rather tyrannical to expect people to like things that they don’t like, just because you like them?

James M2 writes:

I am one of those younger readers. Thanks for posting this.

Adela G. writes:

Just for Jeff in England, so that instead of having to look (so far) back, he can look inward.

Mike Berman writes:

I am the anti-Jeff. As someone who has followed Dylan from his maiden album and saw him perform many times in the early to mid ’60s, it is my conviction that Dylan created his great work in the ’60s. Dylan himself even admitted in a recent interview shown on TV that he cannot write on that level any longer. “I have no idea of how I accomplished that back then but I can do other things though,” was his solace.

Look, Einstein and Newton accomplished their important work when they were in their 20s. We lose an average of 50,000 brain cells a day after reaching adulthood. Daniel Seligman claims we lose a standard deviation in IQ and lose six percent of our brain’s weight as we age from 21 to 65 (A Question of Intelligence, Pg. 65). What more can I say.

LA replies:

“I have no idea of how I accomplished that back then.” [Italics added.]

This comment (and I’ve seen other comments by Dylan in recent years that are similar to it ) puts the Dylan mystery in a new light. Dylan has, very frustratingly, never given any idea of the experiences and thoughts that gave rise to his great songs of the 1960s. Was this because of his famous elusive privacy; or because he felt that the experiences could not be conveyed without being distorted by other people; or because, as suggested by the above remark, he himself has no idea of where his own songs came from? I think it’s the latter. I think his great songs came from some inspiration that he did not understand, and then the inspiration stopped. He did not know where the inspiration for his songs came from, and he did not know where it vanished to. Dylan was the instrument—almost, it seems, the unconscious instrument—of a genius (i.e., a guiding spirit) moving through him. The genius was not his own. It came from outside him. This is why he has never had anything of the slightest interest to say about his own songs.

Here’s an example of the kinds of “explanation” he offers of his work: on the subject of what “Mr. Tambourine Man” was about, he said in his book Chronicles that at the time he wrote the song he knew a musician who played a big tambourine. I no longer believe that this kind of off-puttingly empty remark, in which “nothing is revealed,” is just Dylan playing his usual games. I believe that he himself has no idea where the song came from, and, further, that he’s not even interested in where the song came from.

If we see Dylan, not as a genius, but as the instrument of a genius that moved through him for a while, much about him that is mysterious and irritatingly incomprehensible begins to make sense.

As he himself put it in “Up to Me,” written in the mid-1970s:

We both heard voices for a while
Now the rest is history.

Mike Berman replies:

I couldn’t agree more with your reply. Reading you is like putting glasses on my brain. It may have been in the Scorsese Dylan documentary where someone was interviewed who had worked in the early recording sessions. He said that what we were witnessing had nothing at all to do with Dylan, except that Dylan had somehow been touched by G-d.

Mike Berman continues:

I would just add that I have met a number of musicians who personally worked with Dylan or knew others who did. The common impression I picked up was that they had the highest regard for Dylan the talent but did not even like Dylan the man. I must have instinctively formed the same opinion of him because on the occasions where we stood next to each other (there were about a half dozen and even one when we were the only ones in the room) I never ventured to start a conversation.

Dylan fan, Ben Stein, recently said in an interview that Dylan lies about everything and that his biography is just a pack of lies. Stein went on to talk about how poorly Dylan treats his audiences. Yup. Why Dylan, the man, was picked is as great a mystery as why Moses was.

LA replies:

“… that Dylan lies about everything …”

I agree.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 17, 2008 12:13 PM | Send