“Wanted Men: Bob Dylan and the Vulnerability of Brotherhood”
By Court Carney, Stephen F. Austin State University
In June 2023, in a concert in Barcelona, Spain, Bob Dylan deviated from his established setlist. Right before what has become the closing salvo of the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour of “Mother of Muses,” “Goodbye Jimmy Reed,” and “Every Grain of Sand,” Dylan inserted the Grateful Dead’s “Stella Blue.” The song stayed in regular rotation throughout the end of the tour, with twenty-five performances between Spain and Buffalo, New York, in September 2024. The song, written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, dates to the early 1970s. The Grateful Dead first played it on stage at the Hollywood Bowl in June 1972, which also happened to coincide with Ron “Pigpen” McKernan leaving the band. Soon after its introduction, “Stella Blue” became a mainstay of the deep second set for the band: a late “Jerry Ballad” respite among the cosmic storm-cloud denouement. A song tinged in sadness about never quite matching one’s potential, “Stella Blue” vacillated between mournful and blissed out. “Stella Blue” meant something to Garcia and, decades later, clearly signified something to Dylan.
In 2023, when Dylan brought it into his own, the song was over fifty years old, making it a larger time gap between origin and performance than many of the “traditional” songs that he recorded for his debut record in late 1961.[1] Although the song tends not to unveil its narrative secrets, the lyrics allude to a workaday musician, far from fame, who continues to step up to the microphone. A life defined by cheap hotels and rusted strings. In tone and sentiment, “Stella Blue” relates closely to another song that Dylan brought into the Rough and Rowdy stage: Merle Haggard’s “Footlights.” I saw Dylan sing this song in Port Chester, NY, in 2023 (one of the two times he played the song). At that moment, I was struck by Haggard’s line of a 41-year-old singer hiding his age as he climbs back onto the stage as sung by Dylan, then 82, twice as old as the song’s composer. Haggard’s song chronicles a musician past their popular prime who is coiling their energy to perform for another audience who “goes nearly wild.” The title relates to the singer threatening to “kick the footlights again,” a reference at least in part to Johnny Cash’s infamous destruction of the stage lights at the Grand Ole Opry (which led to a temporary ban from that stage). However, Haggard strikes an ambiguous tone, and the kicking out of the footlights reads both as an act of rebellion and frustration and a hint of being expected to play out the iconoclasm of youth.
Dylan’s trajectory, of course, far exceeds the working bar-band melancholy of either “Stella Blue” or “Footlights.” Still, there remains a suggestion that life on the road plays out in similar emotional ways regardless of success. The inclusion of “Stella Blue” (and, however briefly, “Footlights”) into his generally static setlists of this past tour points to a fascinating undercurrent of vulnerability. The emotional openness of these songs is often fused with Dylan’s idiosyncratic take on masculinity, which I was considering historically when I first heard of this proposed conference. I have thought a lot about vulnerability within the context of Dylan and, relatedly, within the context of listening to Dylan as I try to decode the complicated ways emotion fuses the musician to the listener. The announcement of the theme of this meeting prompted an immediate and profound reflection on the significance of vulnerability and masculinity within the context of music and memory. Initially, I envisioned a discussion centered on brotherhood and the connections between influential male artists such as Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, and Garcia. This exploration aimed to illuminate themes of manhood, masculinity, and the bonds of brotherhood through selected songs and pivotal moments. However, I soon realized that my interest extended beyond these concepts. As I transitioned between projects – specifically, my ongoing work on Civil War memory – I recognized a desire to explore Bob Dylan’s music and its significance to me within the context of my life.
The thorny notion of masculinity plays a role here, too, especially as it pertains to Dylan’s perpetually fluid play on manliness. As much as Dylan can use the mask of masculinity to create distance between himself and others (personally or professionally), we should also consider it less as a signifier of machismo – ironic or otherwise – but perhaps more as an avenue of vulnerability. A look, then, at his male relationships could provide a counterpoint to any superficial read on these connections. A strong thread within the narrative of Bob Dylan’s career relates to perceptions of cruelty within his romantic and platonic relationships. Friends and acquaintances get tossed aside, especially in the reckless early New York City years, which bridged anonymity and fame. One gets, perhaps uncharitably depending on the source, the impression of a challenging artist magpieing through concentric circles of friend groups reaching for that next rung. And yet, looking back on his early career from the vantage point of longevity and endurance, another theme develops out of the thorns: male friendship, however defined, and a sense of vulnerability.
At the center of this conversation stand Johnny Cash and Jerry Garcia, two men who have intersected with Dylan off and on throughout his career (sometimes openly, sometimes quietly). These relationships also intersect with significant times in Dylan’s career: Cash, when Dylan had drifted away from the spotlight in the late 1960s; Garcia, when Dylan had lost the map in the mid-1980s. More generally, Dylan’s relationship with men remains a particularly neglected topic, and this paper places these masculine friendships at the center of a more extensive discussion of how manhood and masculinity inform Dylan’s music and career. The idea of vulnerability, a quality often so foreign to the Dylan conversation, if not his music, especially for someone who invented the modern conception of masking within a pop context and whose early career was nothing if not a highly choreographed dance of put-ons, abstractions, inventions, half-truths, non-truths, anti-truths.[2] By focusing on Dylan’s relationships with men like Jerry Garcia and Johnny Cash (as well as his larger fraternal circle of friends and associates), I argue that a new, under-explored narrative of male vulnerability and openness emerges.
I began carving out this essay by trying to determine a taxonomy of brotherhood, which quickly became a fool’s errand. The questions tended to devolve and unravel rapidly. Who counts as a brother? How are we defining brother? What about a mentor? Can a mentor be a brother? What about a peer? Interestingly, Dylan’s own brother is a bit of an asterisk here. He plays several vital roles within the Dylan narrative, especially in the 1970s, at perhaps Bob’s most openly vulnerable moments. I want to be clear that the concept of “brother” is purposefully vague and has much more to do with drawing circles around various relationships to clarify larger groups of connections rather than creating some dogmatic series of diagrams. I am less interested, in other words, in the pedantic restructuring of fraternities than I am in how Dylan responds so clearly and so profoundly to certain specific men at various times in his life. At the heart of this discussion lies the more significant idea that Dylan resonates primally with people like Johnny Cash and Jerry Garcia because of a shared sense of historicism. The vulnerability we see, feel, and respond to is rooted in this historical understanding. In other words, with people like Johnny Cash and (especially) Jerry Garcia, there is a shared understanding of how history is rooted in music.
Thus, an invented map of brotherhood in terms of the early years of Dylan’s career:
It all breaks down, of course, as individuals drift through categories. Still, I think this map does ultimately serve a few purposes, especially in terms of ages and timelines; not least is the fact that everyone has passed on, except for Ramblin’ Jack and David – a mapping of friendship, mentorship, and brotherhood in Dylan’s career.
The connection between Dylan and Cash is at once public and enigmatic. Dylan knew and revered Cash’s singles for Sun Records, and Cash openly praised Dylan’s Freewheelin’ record. The two men corresponded sporadically, and Cash, for his part, wrote a letter to the influential magazine BROADSIDE defending Dylan against the attacks made by several key folk music writers who were dismayed with the young songwriter’s lack of allegiance to various folk dogmas. Dylan and Cash met at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964 and remained in touch throughout the decade. The public aspect of their relationship culminated in a series of joint appearances in 1969 when Cash guested on Dylan’s Nashville Skyline, and Dylan performed on Cash’s television show. Their relationship afterward is sketchier, but within this Nashville moment, a legitimate friendship materializes.
One song that came out of these Tennessee sessions that I want to comment on here is “Wanted Man,” a Dylan song that Cash admired. The song is a travelogue, an outlaw’s tale, a hustler’s beat. I keep returning to this song, title, image, and performance – especially the humor and camaraderie of the outtakes. The directions go west (naturally), east, midwest, southeast, and southwest. “Wherever you look tonight,” Cash sings, “you might see this wanted man.” But each verse features these wonderful deep bits as the singer dips past the surface tension of Western pastiche to dwell in the deeper waters of wants and needs. “But I’ve had all that I’ve wanted of a lot of things I had,” he sings, “and a lot more than I needed of some things that turned out bad.” Dylan’s complex use of wanted works exceedingly well here. At first glance, an outlaw is on the run, but then something much more enigmatic transpires. We are in the west–California or Cheyenne–and the song is all a blatant setup. But then, the meaning shifts, and it is wanted, as in chosen and desired by Lucy Watson, Jeannie Brown, Nellie Johnson (later Juanita). The names of the women change, but they also all sound the same: Lucy/Jeannie/Nellie, Watson/Johnson, and then Juanita, with a nice internal rhyme with “wanted.” The singer is everywhere and then nowhere – a vapor. But at the same time, he is made physical and sought after, desired, tracked, followed, and pursued. Later, as sung by Johnny Cash to prisoners at San Quentin, it is a song about being on the lam.[3] But in an earlier, spontaneous moment, right at the moment when the song is being called into existence, Cash adlibs truth into the fiction. Cash is following Dylan’s lead, learning the words and the tune. Still, he insists on bringing the two singers into the song by rattling off the towns and places of their childhoods: Duluth, Hibbing, Dyess. They are, Cash implies, the actors in the song, too.
Returning to the recurrent theme of transitional mentors, we have Jerry Garcia. The connection between Dylan and Garcia seems at once evident and weighty, with two of the most historically minded singers also saturated in the reverberations of American music.[4] From their first meeting at a Grateful Dead show in 1972 until Garcia died in 1995, their paths crisscrossed on stage and off. The connection to Garcia (and the Grateful Dead, more generally) had deep emotional resonance for Dylan. Dylan famously writes about this transformative experience in Chronicles, Volume One. Dylan joins the band at their rehearsal space in San Rafael, CA, but soon feels uncomfortable with his own material. “I had no feelings for any of those songs,” Dylan writes, “and didn’t know how I could sing them with any intent.” Feeling like a “goon,” Dylan bolted. He starts walking in the rain and enters a jazz club where a small combo is playing standards. “All of a sudden,” Dylan writes of hearing the jazz singer, “I understood something faster than I ever did before.” He returns to the Dead “as if nothing had happened” and begins to sing his older songs within this post-epiphanic haze. “[N]ow I knew,” Dylan writes, “I could perform any of these songs without them having to be restricted to the world of words.” Of course, what on the surface seems straightforward – working with the Grateful Dead led Dylan to reexamine his connection with his own material – actually emerges as murkier and more mysterious upon closer reading. Dylan’s written tale is both vague and otherworldly. And yet the anecdote, we must assume, contains some truth.[5]
A parallel to the left turn(s) of John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline, two folk records bridge the tumult of the 80s with the Time Out of Mind 1990s. Dylan released the first one, Good as I Been to You, in late 1992, marking a comeback of sorts in Dylan’s never-ending comeback narrative. The second “traditional” record, World Gone Wrong, came out a year later and offered a darker, more fascinating clutch of songs. Buried in the middle of Side Two sits “Two Soldiers,” a 19th-century ballad often alleged to date to the early years of the American Civil War. The song focuses on two northern soldiers who promise each other to write their respective loved ones before a big battle. Spoiler: the letters are never sent.
This song represents a connection with Garcia. As Dylan notes in the liner notes, “Jerry Garcia showed me TWO SOLDIERS (Hazel & Alice do it pretty similar) a battle song extraordinaire.”[6] The Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard parenthetical aside refers to their self-titled record released on Rounder in 1973, which featured the song. Gerrard, a singer and scholar of bluegrass and old-time music, had married Mike Seeger in 1970. Seeger (one of our brothers mentioned above), in turn, had recorded a version of “Two Soldiers” back in 1964, and this record is centered partly on this performance; Dylan would go on to play the song two dozen times in concert. In his liner notes, Dylan summarizes his discussion of the song: “learning to go forward by turning back the clock, stopping the mind from thinking in hours, firing a few random shots at the face of time.” In Dylan’s hands, “Delia” emerges as a Civil War ballad turned cosmic harbinger of the death of meaning itself.
The nexus of “Wanted Man” and “Two Soldiers” provides a glimpse into how these men impacted Dylan, and ultimately, we can look at Cash and Garcia and their relationship to Dylan as analogs in various ways. Cash, steeped in music history and the living embodiment of so much of the beauty and terror framed by the first decades of what became known as country music, connected with Dylan on a musical level and in a much more emotionally reflective way. Cash covers a lot of musical ground, but he also represents the fraught duality of family and escape. As Dylan sought refuge in Woodstock away from fame, pills, and touring, what Cash represented (in life, in song) seemed to offer a way out. Just carve out another path, Cash’s music proposed, until escape instinctively calls again. Similarly, Jerry Garcia offered Dylan another form of escape: a tethered rope to the past, this time via folk music and bluegrass. During a period of deadening confusion in the early 1980s, Dylan saw a way out of musical stagnation. Cash and Garcia stood as history-obsessed, history-soaked musicians using the past to create some future sound, something already very much in Dylan’s purview. One of the foundational stories in Dylan’s memoir relates to the young singer reading Civil War-era newspapers in the New York public library, absorbing the language, stories, and people that defined the central conflict of American history. Cash, with his fundamental connection to the origins of country music, Garcia, with his scholarly understanding of the roots of folk music, represented to Dylan brotherhood, perhaps on one level, but also iterations of what music and history could provide. This music refashioned the past into a template, as fate, as rumor, as something to defend, something to defile. But there remains a brotherly vulnerability here that reaches out across the few stories we have.
On August 9, 1995, Jerry Garcia died from a heart attack while staying in a rehabilitation center in California. Dylan attended his funeral four days later, but two public pronouncements helped illustrate his feelings for his departed friend. On September 21st, Rolling Stone published Dylan’s eulogy for Garcia, which, in a few sentences, seems to sum up the deep connection between the two men. “He’s the very spirit personified of whatever is Muddy River country at its core and screams up into the spheres,” Dylan remarked. “He really had no equal.” Curiously, Dylan argues that the younger Garcia “was more like a big brother who taught and showed me more than he’ll ever know.” The tribute turned toward the infinite as he compared Garcia to the country, rock ‘n’ roll, and modern jazz impulses that fueled both men. “There’s a lot of spaces and advances between The Carter Family, Buddy Holly and, say, Ornette Coleman,” Dylan writes, “a lot of universes, but he filled them all without being a member of any school.” Dylan concludes, “There’s no way to convey the loss. It just digs down really deep.”[7]
Two days later, on the 23rd, Dylan began the fall leg of his tour in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. The entire show was filled with cover songs (he opens with Van Morrison’s “Real Real Gone”) and one-off arrangements. The second song of the evening, however, was the Grateful Dead’s “Friend of the Devil,” followed later by “West L.A. Fadeaway.” He ended the main set with a rare cover of “Key to the Highway,” the second and last time he played this song made popular by Big Bill Broonzy. Garcia had played this song various times in his career, and it does not seem like too much of a stretch that the song with lines like “I got the key to the highway / And I’m billed out and bound to go” would serve as a statement of purpose for Dylan. Redolent of “Stella Blue” (and “Footlights), this song speaks to the commitment of the working musician obligated to continue playing on their version of the never-ending tour; another stage awaits. Eight years later, on September 12, 2003, Johnny Cash passed away, having lost his wife of thirty-five years, June Carter, just a handful of months earlier. As with Garcia, the death seemed to shake something loose in Dylan. “I was asked to give a statement on Johnny’s passing,” Dylan writes, “and thought about writing a piece instead called ‘Cash Is King,’ because that is the way I really feel.” Returning to the spectral as he had with Garcia, Dylan referred back to the early 1960s when Cash advocated publicly for the younger songwriter:
There wasn’t much music media in the early Sixties, and Sing Out! was the magazine covering all things folk in character. The editors had published a letter chastising me for the direction my music was going. Johnny wrote the magazine back an open letter telling the editors to shut up and let me sing, that I knew what I was doing. This was before I had ever met him, and the letter meant the world to me. I’ve kept the magazine to this day.
The entire eulogy is a remarkable piece. Dylan moves from describing how “I Walk the Line” works as a composition to saying that “we can’t define him anymore than we can define a fountain of truth, light and beauty.” In tandem, the power of these two eulogies underscore both the interconnectedness of these men to Dylan as well as the vibrant sense of vulnerability Dylan tends to show in these remarks.[8]
A postscript emerged in 2023, decades after Cash and Garcia’s deaths, as Dylan returned to his brothers during his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour. As we have seen, “Stella Blue” appeared, but throughout his spring 2023 jag through Japan, Dylan populated his setlists with various other Grateful Dead covers. “Truckin’” appeared in Tokyo on April 12, sticking around for seven shows. A few nights later, “Brokedown Palace” had a similar arc. He also brought back “Not Fade Away,” which brings his affection for Garcia and Buddy Holly together. Garcia and the Grateful Dead gave shape to this row of concerts and sparked a great deal of commentary from Dylan’s online followers. Then, in March 2024, Dylan brought out Cash’s “Big River,” a song he had played as early as the Basement Tapes but had only been sporadically performed live (three times between 1988 and 2000). Across fourteen concerts, Dylan dug into the song with vigor and drive. Dylan writes about “Big River” in The Philosophy of Modern Song, where he notes that “the key element to this song is the chain-gang thump of the acoustic rhythm guitar. You can’t really cover this song properly leaving that behind.”[9] In concert, Dylan, ever the contrarian, drops the rhythm altogether, leaving behind the acoustic guitar, and bases the song around his piano. The song became a late-show highlight couched between “I’ve Made up My Mind to Give Myself to You” and “Mother of Muses.” With “Big River” cresting once more and “Stella Blue” drifting into focus, the twin auras of Cash and Garcia underscore the power and depth of Bob Dylan’s live performances.
I would like to end at the beginning – the inspiration for this essay and what compelled me to frame this talk around the rather ahistorical concept of vulnerability in the first place. On June 15, 1995, Dylan opened for the Grateful Dead in Highgate, Vermont. These shows were not particularly strong concerts for the Dead, and attendees have generally noted that Garcia seemed tired and unwell. Dylan, on the other hand, performed a series of high-energy shows that summer. Coming off stage in Vermont, Dylan approached Garcia, standing in the wings. In the two photos of this moment, Dylan approaches Garcia (with his wife, Deborah Koons, and Mickey Hart looking on). The first image shows a beaming Garcia going in for a hug as Dylan raises his arms, his face half-hidden, though one can intuit a smile. The photo telegraphs warmth. The second photo features Garcia bear hugging Dylan with both hands pressed into his back. We cannot see Dylan’s face at all, his dark hair blurring into the darkness of the photo. These two photos project a vulnerability often dismissed or ignored in conversations about these two friends and performers. They transmit a tableau of brotherly affection – two soldiers amid one final charge – and a heaviness only deepened by the loss of Garcia a few weeks later. “In the end,” Garcia and Dylan sing in “Stella Blue,” “there’s just a song.”
[1]Most of his traditional songs are based on records from the early half of the twentieth century. They might date back much further, of course, but their recorded versions mostly came from earlier in the twentieth century.
[2]My point here relates to the framing of Dylan more than his actual music. Dylan, the songwriter, wrote a number of key songs during this early period that showcased acute sensitivity and awareness. It is present in his first major piece of writing, “Song to Woody,” appears even at his most surrealistic and experimental, “Visions of Johanna,” and culminates (in the first half of his career at least) with Blood on the Tracks. I am arguing here not that Dylan rejects vulnerability but that the conventional narrative/historiography of his work tends to shy away from this emotional framework.
[3]We also have wanted as “wanting,” as in less than insufficient. This definition takes us to another pairing with Bob and Cash: “Belshazzar.” One of Cash’s first songwriting attempts, “Belshazzar” was the last single Sun Records released after Cash left for Columbia Records, relying on lightly syncopated verses surrounding a biblical chorus warning: “he was weighed in the balance and found wanting.” Borrowing the song’s basic structure, Dylan transformed “Belshazzar” during the Basement sessions into a musical guidepost outlining his journey into symbolism and allegory: Woodstock and modern America via the Book of Daniel. Belshazzar’s “Paradise” is sung just like in “Frankie Lee and Judas Priest.” A mirror, an echo.
[4]Tyler Wilcox provides a good overview of their friendship: https://doomandgloomfromthetomb.tumblr.com/post/177555446892/the-ballad-of-spike-jerry-bob-dylan-jerry.
[5]Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 149-151.
[6]“Liner Notes,” Bob Dylan, World Gone Wrong (Columbia Records, 1993)
[7]Bob Dylan, “Bob Dylan Remembers Jerry Garcia,” Rolling Stone, September 21, 1995.
[8]Matt Diehl, “Remembering Johnny,” Rolling Stone, October 16, 2003.
[9]“Johnny Cash is a gospel singer, or he thinks of himself as one. Somewhere along the line, he turns into Gargantua, Finn MacCool, Jigger Jones all in one. He could climb across rivers. He could lay track and take down greenhorns. He’s a teller of tall tales—parts the clouds and drinks nitro. This is the real Johnny Cash, and “Big River” is his theme song.” Bob Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2022), 218.
