An unexpectedly misleading line in the early Dylan oeuvre is “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” If it refers to literal weather-forecasting, then yes, one might be able to hold a finger in the air to determine the wind’s direction rather than check the radio or television. But if, as seems built into the line, the weatherman represents a stand-in for a prophet, with the weather his portent, then the line is paradoxical and even disingenuous. It might also be one of the most misunderstood moments in the popular anthropology of 60s culture. If the so-called “Judas” moment of Dylan-goes-electric has been analyzed into hammered gold and gold enameling (or digested to pulp), the “You don’t need a weatherman” line, which became a cultural topos, has received comparatively little challenge or critical tooth-gnashing. While it might seem unfair to compare an action on stage to a single lyric, through no fault of Dylan’s, an offshoot of the Students for a Democratic Society appropriated Dylan’s “weatherman” line for their social activism, thus augmenting it into a kind of action in itself.[1]
The line deserves a closer look – though maybe not quite the hammering of Grecian goldsmiths – but not because of its distortion by self-styled revolutionaries. It deserves attention because, from one perspective, it marks a reinvestment by Dylan as profoundly altering as going electric or bringing it all back home. With the merciless x-ray vision of hindsight, we can now see that a weatherman was exactly what Dylan’s hungry listeners needed, exactly the kind of visionary authority they were looking for. And – also with hindsight – we can see that Dylan was advertising himself as that Necessary-Unnecessary Weatherman.
The “weatherman” line indicates a crisis moment. It captures Dylan’s voice and lyric in the paradoxical act of prophetic demurral. When Dylan demurs, he rejects an overt prophetic stance. Instead, he creates a negative space – like a photo negative – of the performative and lyrical posture he struck in his back pages. This posture characterizes virtually all his later work: my term for it is the Weatherman Paradox, not only because it emerges with “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” but especially because, by masking his prophetic authority, Dylan refashions his Whitmanian (or Mosaic) voice into a more discreet cultural barometer – a “weatherman” whose predictions contain no advocacy. As the defensive/aggressive speaker of “False Prophet” says, “I ain’t no false prophet – I just know what I know / I go where only the lonely can go,” adding, to underscore the point, “I ain’t no false prophet – I just said what I said / I’m here to bring vengeance on somebody’s head.” The warring verb tenses – the present tense of “I ain’t no false prophet” and the past tense of “I just said what I said” – are a temptation to commit the misdemeanor of biographical interpretation. We remember how often Dylan claimed not to be anyone’s prophet, not to speak for anyone beside himself. We remember that Another Side, though not Dylan’s preferred title, was an album turning away from the fiery protests of earlier times. The ambiguity in “False Prophet” seems to straddle the “sides” of Bob Dylan luring us to ask when the speaker “said what [he] said” and to wonder if the current aim “to bring vengeance on somebody’s head” harks back to when he had biblical style foes, before he recognized, and regretted, the self-ordained professor’s voice.
As everyone knows, Dylan’s angry alter-ego started out shouting from the bow, “Your days are numbered,” in “When the Ship Comes In,” and urging Woody-esque social change in scores of harshly prophetic verses (“The line it is drawn / The curse it is cast … The first one now will later be last”). But after Bringing It All Back Home that vocal posture goes underground – “subterranean” – and Dylan refashions himself as a pressure gauge of cultural conditions. Except for the anomalous Christian period, when an unrecognizable Bob Dylan preached from stage between songs, the prophetic voice of the anthems appears only in demurral.
“Señor, señor,” he asks on Street Legal, “do you know where we’re headin’? / Lincoln County Road or Armageddon?” In Spanish, the word “Señor” can be a euphemism for the Christian God: in fact, Michael Gray sees the song as evidence of Dylan’s “unfailing sense of the need for moral clarity,” and he refers to Señor as “the wise peasant Christ.”[2] At the same time, the word “Señor” can be simply a term of address to an anonymous stranger. Steven Scobie seems to take it this way when he characterizes the song’s narrator as a “Mexican hired gun” addressing his “surrogate father.”[3]
The song’s governing rhetorical figure is antithesis. Dylan’s speaker offers the classic choices about existence in his question: Señor, señor, are you the “Señor”? If so, answer me this: are we bound to the earth (Lincoln County Road) or is there afterlife awaiting us? If the latter, Señor, señor, will there be pastoral peace or endless punishment (Armageddon)? Or, “Señor,” are you just another human being goin’ down the road feeling bad?
One thing seems certain: the subject of “Señor” isn’t Yankee power – or not only that. Allow me to suggest instead that the tenor of the lyric is prophecy itself, making the song’s combination of antitheses and interrogatives an exercise in demurral. There are nine questions in “Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)” just as there are nine famous questions in “Blowin’ in the Wind” – coincidence? In fact, in the later song, “There’s a wicked wind still blowin’ on that upper deck,” and one is tempted to wonder if that’s the same wind and if it’s the upper deck of the ship the young Dylan (who was older then) was waiting for to “come in.” The last question in “Señor” is “Can you tell me what we’re waiting for, señor?” We might also ask ourselves if they’re still waiting for their ship to come in, still waiting to watch their enemies “like Pharaoh’s tribe … drownded in the tide.” In any case, ambiguity has entered the world and the certainties of the speaker’s (and everyone else’s) back pages end in prophetic demurral.
But justifiably, one could voice robust objections to the idea of any kind of prophecy in the later Dylan, demurred or not. By the time Dylan sang that “weatherman” line in “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” he had already sung “I aimed my hand / At the mongrel dogs who teach / Fearing not that I’d become my enemy / In the instant that I preach” in “My Back Pages.” The line seems to refer to the “preaching” of his anthem period when, in his protest songs, “good and bad [he] defined those terms quite clear no doubt somehow.” So it might be presumptuous – not to say heretical under prevailing Dylan canon law – to suggest that the shuffled-off preaching of the young Jeremiah had evolved into a new kind of sermon delivered from the pulpit.
Yet Bringing It All Back Home reveals itself as a workshop of portentous verse. The album is remarkable for its range of vocal attitudes. The diversity of speakers runs from the gentle to the resigned to the flamboyantly associative and the indignantly contemptuous. “Subterranean Homesick Blues” is almost too telegraphic to pinpoint, although Dylan flings his “weatherman” line with the hint of a “Positively 4th Street” sneer:
Look out kid
Don’t matter what you did
Walk on your tiptoes
Don’t try “No-Doz”
Better stay away from those
That carry around a fire hose
Keep a clean nose
Watch the plain clothes
You don’t need a weatherman
To know which way the wind blows
The passage starts out as a warning, as if the speaker were on the same side as the “kid,” watching out for the “kid” and the audience too. There’s a sense of an experienced voice offering urgent practical advice: walk on your tiptoes (don’t call attention to yourself?), don’t try “No-Doz” (a long-forgotten over-the-counter upper), keep a clean nose, etc. But that practical advice ends abruptly with “You don’t need a weatherman / To know which way the wind blows.” Suddenly, the chummy life coach, familiar with survival on the mean streets, had morphed into the prophet pontificating from the mountaintop.
This is not pure prophecy, however. The speaker’s patronizing tone negates its own prophetic authority by announcing what the kid doesn’t need. But the negativity of the statement reinforces the gravity of the voice, the unavoidable importance of the weatherman “you [supposedly] don’t need.”
This technique of demurral has a long history in English poetry (though I’m not suggesting the 23 year-old Dylan knew the poetic tradition). The seventeenth-century poet Ben Jonson begins his epideictic country-house poem “To Penshurst” by describing precisely what is absent from and unneeded by Penshurst Place (a mansion in Kent, England):
Thou art not, Penshurst, built for envious show,
Of touch, or marble, nor canst boast a row
Of polished pillars, or a roof of gold;
Thou hast no lantern, whereof tales are told,
Or stair, or courts.
This five-line list of negatives turns out to be a form of demurred praise, for, while Penshurst might not be constructed of marble or have polished pillars and a golden roof, it “stand’st an ancient pile, / And, these grudged at, art reverenced the while.” Jonson is not indulging a prophetic tone in the poem, but instead using the parvenu architectural atrocities near Penshurst to provide a photo negative of the “ancient pile” which is “reverenced” for its dignity and antiquity. By underlining what is absent, by using negatives, Jonson enforces the presence and the permanence of his object of praise (which, incidentally, was the birthplace of fellow poet Sir Philip Sidney).
In a loftier vein, John Milton pays tribute to Shakespeare by eschewing the very idea of a material tomb for him. “What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,” he asks, “The labor of an age in pilèd stones, / Or that his hallowed relics should be hid / Under a starypointing pyramid?” No pile of stones, built over an age like a pointed pyramid, should hide Shakespeare’s remains. A constructed tomb would constitute unnecessary commemoration because “Dear son of Memory, great heir of fame … Thou in our wonder and astonishment / Hast built thyself a live-long monument.”
Printed as one of the introductory poems to the Second Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, Milton’s poem declares the Bard’s works by themselves to be tomb enough, the site of “unvalued” (impossible to put a value on) achievement and the envy of kings who’d like to have a tomb as long lasting as his “easy numbers,” his effortless verses: “thou … sepúlchred in such pomp dost lie, / That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.” Notably, by pronouncing Shakespeare’s tomb unnecessary but nevertheless ever present and enduring, Milton manages to give his own voice vatic resonance – a characteristically Miltonic gesture.
I don’t want to be accused of comparing great things to small. Nevertheless, while Dylan may not be reaching (exceeding his youthful grasp) for a Miltonic voice in “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” his repudiated weatherman fulfills the same need as Shakespeare’s unneeded tomb. And, like Milton, Dylan’s speaker accrues prophetic authority in the instant that he rejects the need for a weatherman. It may be that this demurral of overt portentousness prevents the speaker from hating himself in the instant that he preaches. Demurral conceals the preaching and in effect ensures that this song’s speaker – and all Dylan’s speakers – can avoid being charged as false prophets.
The Weatherman Paradox suffuses the language of the songs and supplies an excuse for hearing portent without embracing, or even identifying, the prophet. Who better, for instance, than a paradoxically hidden weatherman to warn that there’s “High water risin’ – risin’ night and day … It’s rough out there / High water everywhere”? Or to give the maritime report from “Mississippi”?
Well my ship’s been split to splinters and it’s sinking fast
I’m drownin’ in the poison, got no future, got no past
But my heart is not weary, it’s light and it’s free
I’ve got nothin’ but affection for all those who’ve sailed with me
Or who else, sticking with the portentous maritime theme, could have delivered the stunning first stanza of “Jokerman”:
Standing on the waters casting your bread
While the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing
Distant ships sailing into the mist
You were born with a snake in both of your fists while a hurricane was blowing
Freedom just around the corner for you
But with the truth so far off, what good will it do?
The speaker of the song is spellbound, it would seem, effusing, “Jokerman, dance to the nightingale tune / Bird fly high by the light of the moon / Oh, oh, oh, Jokerman.” And while the Jokerman himself seems to have numinous (and cryptic) authority, in fact the speaker – and the performed vocal – carry the demurral that inflects the Jokerman, and “Jokerman,” with portentousness.
Yet are the Weatherman and the Jokerman interchangeable in terms of prophetic demurral? Can we speak of the Jokerman Paradox too? Perhaps. But Dylan’s songs contain many more nameless prophets-in demurral than we can give names to. Who is speaking the last lines of “All Along the Watchtower,” laden as they are with eerie portentousness: “Two riders were approaching / A wildcat did howl.” I won’t spill yet more ink on who the riders might be or what the wildcat means. The ominousness of the lines and the abruptness of the song’s ending contain a sort of visionary reticence, another prophetic demurral. And that last word “howl” resonates irresistibly with Allen Ginsberg’s darkly Whitmanian poem Howl.
Like any other longtime listener, indeed, like any Dylanista, I could multiply examples of the Weatherman Paradox. But maybe it is enough to recognize this as a lyrical and performative phenomenon, and, with that, to understand how Dylan manages not to be our prophet. He creates a negative space from which he can “tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it / And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it.” But the mountain has melted back into the night and all that remains is the sound of prophetic demurral. But there’s nothing, really nothing to turn off.
–RF
[1] The group, later known as the Weather Underground, moved from the nonviolence of SDS to violent means of fostering social change. See Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground.
[2] Michael Gray, Song and Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan (London: Continuum, 2000), 208; 435.
[3] Steven Scobie, Alias Bob Dylan Revisited (Calgary, Canada: Red Deer Press, 2003), 164. See also, John Hinchey, Like a Complete Unknown (Ann Arbor, MI: Stealing Home Press, 2002), 133: Hinchey characterizes the Señor as a Blakean “emanation,” and “an antagonistic alter-ego and/or friend.”
