REVIEW BY Alessandro Carrera, University of Houston
Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine (New York: Callaway, 2023, 608 pp., $100.00) is the first of the “Treasures” of the Bob Dylan Archive in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The authors and editors are Mark Davidson, curator of the Archive and director of exhibitions at the Bob Dylan Center and the Woody Guthrie Center, and Parker Fishel, archivist, researcher, co-curator of the Bob Dylan Center’s inaugural exhibition and of several volumes of Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series. It is the first official book from the Bob Dylan Archive, but not the first ever that has been made possible by the material archived in Tulsa. That honor goes to Bob Dylan & Like a Rolling Stone: Filologia Composizione Performance (in Italian, Milan: Mimesis, 2021), whose author, Mario Gerolamo Mossa, was my student for a while and for whom I wrote an introduction. If I mention Mossa’s book before discussing Mixing up the Medicine, it is because Bob Dylan & Like a Rolling Stone anticipated all that the archive will offer in the coming years, namely the possibility of plumbing the depths of Dylan’s compositional process by comparing the initial notes, first drafts, quotations, and references jotted down in notebooks and then dropped – all of which contributed, however, to the recorded or printed song. I don’t say the “definitive” song because, as we know, many Dylan songs are not and will never be “finished.” They are not products; they are life forms.
The same can be said of Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine, both for the design and gorgeous visual apparatus curated by Davidson and Fishel and for the choice of essays, selected by Michael Chaiken and Robert Polito. The book is not so much a portrait of a man as the portrait of a life form that mysteriously developed on planet Earth and whose equal we may never see again. Edmondo Berselli, an Italian popular culture scholar who never wrote much on Dylan, wrote just enough to nail the issue: Dylan has no precursors and no successors; he comes from Mars.
Welcome therefore to the visual trip of Dylan’s early years in Duluth, Minnesota, the teenage years in Hibbing, the trip to New York, the pilgrimage to find Woody Guthrie, the contract signed with Columbia after only nine months of apprenticeship in the Village, the meeting with Suze Rotolo, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and all that followed. Few lives are as well documented as Dylan’s. Whether he wanted it or not, the eye of the world was already on him even before he had done anything to deserve a look. For the iconographic apparatus alone, Davidson and Fishel deserve the gratitude of every Dylan fan, who will find every famous picture in this book, perhaps accompanied by a less famous one that complements it and followed by yet another more famous picture. Seeing them collected in one place is enough to convince the most skeptical reader that there was an invisible hand guiding Dylan’s appearance from the very beginning.
The historical novel of Dylan’s life unfolding before our eyes is astonishing in the clarity of its evolution. Newport 1963, Newport 1964, Newport 1965, the British Tour filmed in Dont Look Back, the 1966 World Tour, Woodstock 1967 and the arcadia of the following years, the 1974 Tour, the Rolling Thunder Revue. Minor events are also included, and the reader can enjoy a brief story for each picture, a page or half page impeccably written in small print, while the essays are printed in larger font and on a slightly darker background. The reproductions of Dylan’s manuscripts are additional pictures of Dylan’s mind, capturing an instant just before the relentless creative process renders it obsolete yet no less precious.
In his well-known conversations with Claire Parnet, Gilles Deleuze said that he would like to deliver his lectures in the same way Dylan organizes a song, “producing” it more than writing it, grabbing whatever he can but never setting himself up as either master or judge.[1] Yet if Dylan were to have a philosopher perhaps it would be A.N. Whitehead, for whom all that is real is process and nothing is merely a product of our minds because everything is world, everything is experience, everything is out there.
With the second half of the 1970s, as we know, the Mirror of Narcissus breaks down. We can no longer detect a coherent image in the multiplicity that Dylan has become. We would like to choose what we like and drop the rest, except that with Dylan this cannot be done. With Dylan, we are drawn to what we do not like by a force equal to our willingness to detach ourselves from it. From the mirror of Narcissus, we move on to the mirror of Dionysus, shattered, composed of fragments, with Dylan looking at us from each of them. We can’t help but look back into all the fragments, which are now too many for even the most loyal of followers. Yet Davidson and Fishel forget nothing. Each mirror sliver has its own page, its own caption, its own picture, its own manuscript, a letter Dylan wrote and did not send or a letter someone sent him and who knows if Dylan ever read it.
In addition to Sean Wilentz’s introduction and Douglas Brinkley’s epilogue, the book is divided into nine chronological sections: the first five, which run from 1941 to 1978, are easy to figure out. The others are worth mentioning: “1979-1987: Surviving in a Ruthless World”; “1988-2000: As Natural as Breathing”; “2001-2013: Themes, Dreams, and Schemes”; and “2014 Present: The Here and Now,” including Shadow Kingdom and the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour that will end in 2024. The mirror of Dionysus is finally reassembled; the Titans who broke it (the pressures of the Culture Industry, the changing tastes of the public, the rotation of the planets in the Solar System) could not stop the dismembered Dionysus from putting himself back together. The faithful ones who followed Dylan up to Time Out of Mind and beyond were repaid like the Biblical Job late in life, with an abundance no one would have believed possible. Even that was not enough for Dylan, though. Pages are added on Masked & Anonymous, Theme Time Radio Hour, Dylan the writer, critic, painter, sculptor – not forgetting the whisky maker. There seems to be no day in Dylan’s life when he does not accomplish something. And this something, whatever it is, is immediately read, listened to, photographed, filmed, exhibited – or imbibed. Only the commercials (the Bank of Montreal, Cadillac, Victoria’s Secret) are missing from the book; the rest of his public life is there. If the world does not leave Bob Dylan alone, it is also true that Dylan never leaves the world alone.
Luckily, the twenty-six essays (aside from the introduction and conclusion, which I will discuss later), are as unpredictable as Dylan himself. Lee Ranaldo gives the first salvo with an admission of unbridled fetishism. He wants to see, touch, smell Bob Dylan’s first output, a playlist of rock ’n’ roll and doo-wop songs recorded December 24, 1956 at the Terlinde Music Shop of St. Paul, Minnesota, signed by Larry Kegan, Bob Zimmerman, and Howard Rutman, or rather The Jokers, or rather the Jokerman’s first record. Louie Kemp had it, then Larry Kegan, then Louie again, then it disappeared, perhaps sold at an auction, only to finally resurface at the Bob Dylan Archive. Marvin Karlins tells of the few guitar lessons he gave Bob Dylan in St. Paul (debunking the legend that Dylan never took lessons from anyone except once from Lonnie Johnson in the Village). Greil Marcus listens to the Dylan-Kalb-Chas tape from the fall-winter of 1960, when Dylan was not yet Dylan and sang Jimmie Rodgers better than he sang Woody Guthrie. Barry Olman recounts the joys of being a collector of both Woody and Bob; Clinton Heylin offers a fine portrait of Paul Williams, one of the first Dylan scholars; Jeff Gold analyzes the two records (Blues Fell This Morning and Country Blues: Blind Boy Fuller 1935-1940) that were the basis for Bob Dylan’s first album. Dylan’s copies, now in Gold’s hand, have handwritten notes. The back cover of Blues Fell This Morning reads, “Made for and about Bob Dylan”.
The essays on Dylan’s notebooks and their scattered ideas that later, through a process of accumulation and spoliation, became song lyrics, are among the most interesting readings. Lucy Sante analyzes a 1964 notebook where we find the first ideas of “It Ain’t Me, Babe”; Griffin Ondaatje shows how Joseph Conrad’s Victory is the subtext not only of “Black Diamond Bay” but, ten years earlier, also of “Tombstone Blues” (“faithful slave Pedro” of “Tombstone Blues” may well be the “faithful Pedro” of Conrad’s novel, who is also a slave). And who knows if the Mr. Jones of “Ballad of a Thin Man” is not after all Victory’s Mr. Jones, portrayed in the novel as a “thin man.” It is also intriguing to learn – in “Tombstone Blues” again – that before “John the Baptist” landed on the page there was a “Blacksmith” in his place in the lyrics, and that the “big bouquet of roses” cascading from heaven to earth in “Never Say Goodbye” perhaps describes the cloud generated by dynamite explosions in Hibbing’s Iron Pit. It is also intriguing to learn from Raymond Foye’s “Reflections on Dirge” that while writing that mysterious Planet Waves song Dylan had Leonard Cohen in mind, as he almost certainly had Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Dirge Without Music,” the poem where the expression “time out of mind” can be found. In Richard Hell’s essay on the Blood on the Tracks notebook, we find an almost complete poem; a forgettable first draft except that it may have served as mental preparation for “You’re a Big Girl Now.” Equally important is Alex Ross’s essay on “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” and its many intricate transformations.
Mixing Up the Medicine offers selective enjoyments. See for instance Jeff Slate’s essay on “Band of the Hand (It’s Hell Time, Man!),” a song no one has ever given the slightest importance, yet celebrated here as an unknown masterpiece; or Larry Sloman’s essay on “Handy Dandy,” an exercise in rock philology based not on verse/chord analysis but on the circumstances under which the song originated and was recorded – to show (convincingly) that Mr. Handy is just another Dylan self-portrait. The three essays that connect Dylan to the African American world are worth mentioning too: Gregory Pardlo’s “Huey Digs Dylan” (Huey Newton’s political reading of “Ballad of a Thin Man” would be worth a longer treatment); Greg Tate’s essay on Hendrix and Dylan; and Peter Carey’s essay on the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, which occurred in the same Greenwood District where the Archive now stands.
When we get to Time Out of Mind, we enter the temple of absolute devotion. Dylan can do no wrong, not anymore. If Barack Obama, the French Légion d’honneur, and the Nobel Prize committee found nothing objectionable in Dylan, who are we to do so? It would be useless to point out that Masked & Anonymous is one of the worst movies ever made, that there are prairie houses in the Texas Panhandle that are graced by better looking metal collages than Dylan’s Iron Works, or that Dylan’s painting of the Spanish Stairs (which he, unfortunately, called “When I Paint My Masterpiece”) would not be out of place in a below-average Roman restaurant. This is not the book where we can expect some ponderous critical assessment. We don’t ask for it, nor do we want it. But Sean Wilentz’s introduction and Douglas Brinkley’s conclusion cover that flank, too. Wilentz’s contribution is a tour de force, an introduction to the arc of Dylan’s career as the great American novel that it is, one that has however skipped the American tragedy, the Jay Gatsby side of being American, the madness of the “pure products of America” that Dr. William Carlos Williams diagnosed. Bob Dylan is a pure American who has learned how not to go mad. He came close to the abyss, looked down, pulled back, and did not forget what he saw. Wilentz sums up Dylan’s novel in a way that is both sympathetic and impassive, making us feel the full weight of the catastrophe that could have happened at any moment and did not.[2]
The portrait of Dylan that emerges from Douglas Brinkley’s concluding pages is that of a man of immense intellectual curiosity, not just an American but an “Americanist at heart,” Brinkley says, equally at home with the meanderings of history, the cultures of ethnic minorities, American music in all its facets (of course), and Russian and Western European literature.[3] More than that, Dylan seems to abolish cultural hierarchies every time he opens his mouth, forcing us to face the deep implications of his anti-hierarchical thinking.
When Dylan says that William Blake is one of his landmarks, he shows humility toward history. When he says that no one can be compared to Chuck Berry, he shows humility toward his trade. But when, in the same conversation with Brinkley, he adds that if he must think of another lyricist, his kindred spirit is Shakespeare, then we must hit pause and understand how Dylan’s canon is built and what he thinks about his position in it.
What does it mean that Dylan thinks he can compare himself to Shakespeare but would never think of comparing himself to Chuck Berry? He is not saying that Chuck Berry is greater than Shakespeare. Rather, he is demonstrating how non-hierarchical thinking works. From the time-slanted “plane of immanence” on which William Blake, Chuck Berry, Shakespeare, and Dylan all stand, each one can rise above the others or move down to a lower level according to undetectable variations. There is neither spatial nor temporal distance restraining Dylan’s antihierarchical plane. At any x moment of time space, Chuck Berry can be immensely far away and William Shakespeare immensely close – or vice versa. Any other kind of ostentatious submissiveness would be hypocritical. If poets do not think they can become like Shakespeare (not greater or less great but “like”), why should they bother to write poetry? And if songwriters do not think that Chuck Berry is the pinnacle to reach, why should they take up rock music?
There are hundreds of books written about Shakespeare, Dylan states quietly, and there are hundreds of books written about me.[4] (In Italian alone, there are more than sixty.) As the “Blacksmith / John the Baptist” case demonstrates, Dylan’s songs are made of constant permutations, and we must adopt the same method if we want to understand his positions vis-à-vis Shakespeare. Since a literal equivalence would be absurd, we must picture a metonymic plan of non-mediated substitutions where Blake takes the place of Berry (and vice versa) and Dylan takes the place of Shakespeare (and vice versa). It is not a competition for the top; it is an assessment (obviously subjected to endless reformulation and the participation of other players) of who, at a certain x instant, occupies that specific place.
According to Brinkley, when Dylan received the news of the Nobel Prize he said, “I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.”[5] Actually, Dylan said that to Robert Shelton in a June 20, 1978 interview, published in the “Melody Maker” of July 29. In other circumstances, he said the opposite: I’m not a poet, I don’t want to be confused with poets, I don’t like their company, I’m a musician first, I’m a song and dance man, I’m a trapeze artist. What he wrote in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech was much more to the point: “Songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page.” There is no need to assert or deny that Dylan is the Shakespeare of our times. That would be a case (“Tombstone Blues” again) of “useless and pointless knowledge.” It is enough to know that they are colleagues. That’s neither Bardolatry nor Dylanolatry, and Brinkley’s essay brings it all back home.
[1] Gilles Deleuze, Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, revised edition, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Hammerjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987, 2007), 8.
[2] Sean Wilentz, “Endless Highway,” in Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine, ed. by Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel. (New York: Callaway, 2023), 13-23.
[3] Douglas Brinkley, “Our Wells Are Deep,” in Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine, 583.
[4] “’Just like there are hundreds of books written about Shakespeare’,” he said, waving his hands, ‘the same thing is happening to me. Our wells are deep’.” Brinkley, 584.
[5] Brinkley, 586.
