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WORLD OF BOB DYLAN: “‘Lame as Hell and a Big Trick’: Dylan’s Comment on Popular Art as Resistance in The Philosophy of Modern Song.”

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“‘Lame as Hell and a Big Trick’: Dylan’s Comment on Popular Art as Resistance in The Philosophy of Modern Song.” World of Bob Dylan 2023, June 2023, Tulsa, OK.

BY Erin C. Callahan, San Jacinto College

 

In Chronicles, Vol. One, when Dylan writes, “I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick,” it’s reasonable that he viewed mainstream culture “lame as hell” because it mindlessly affirmed hegemonic post-industrial values (Dylan 35). The “big trick” of mainstream culture is that those in control of the government, military, and economy in America, the “power elite” as C. Wright Mills designated them, exploit their positions of power and celebrity culture to distract and manipulate mass society. Mills writes, “As each of these domains has coincided with the others, as decisions tend to become total in their consequence, the leading men in each of the three domains of power – the warlords, the corporation chieftains, the political directorate – tend to come together to form an elite power in America” (The Power Elite 9). Particularly, in the post-World War II era when Mills wrote his seminal texts The Power Elite and The Sociological Imagination, he argued that the “pace” at which contemporary society changed exceeded people’s ability to adjust or “orient themselves in accordance with cherished values” (The Sociological Imagination 4). It’s not only that American society was changing, but also the way in and the rate at which those changes occurred that caused a values crisis among Americans who felt their values threatened. Mills continues, “Even when they do not panic, men often sense that older ways of feeling and thinking have collapsed and that newer beginnings are ambiguous to the point of moral stasis” (The Sociological Imagination 4).

 

Dylan echoed Mills’ ideas in Chronicles when he described post-World War II America. He wrote, “The world was being blown apart and chaos was already driving its fist into the face of all new visitors. If you were born around this time or were living and alive, you could feel the old world go and a new one beginning” (Chronicles 28). Part of that change was caused by atomic anxiety and the other was caused by the centralization of power via the power elite. Both led to the conformity of the 1950s, a homogenization of culture and society largely through mass media transmission and consumption. Dylan’s formative years in Hibbing, Minnesota, a town “that looked like every other town out of the 40s and 50s” provided little opportunity for rebellion due to its brutal climate and proximity to the Hull-Rust Mahoning Open Pit (No Direction Home 4:23). However, a radio with a turntable in the basement of his childhood home provided the escape he needed (No Direction Home 4:50). Listening to “Drifting too Far from the Shore,” Dylan describes that “the sound of the record made me feel like I was somebody else” (No Direction Home 3:56). Radio stations streaming from across the country exposed Dylan to songs that weren’t played on mainstream radio stations. These were the songs that opened his mind to possibilities outside of and provided intellectual and artistic resistance against mainstream culture. In Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan states “It’s what a song makes you feel about your own life that’s important” and that “Ricky [Nelson] made rock and roll part of the family… magically transforming the image on a black and white television into the American Dream. But mostly it was the records that did it” (The Philosophy of Modern Song 9, 52). Subsequently, in The Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan also demonstrates how the songs he included and deconstructed, many of which he likely listened to on that radio during his youth, challenge the zeitgeist of their social and cultural moments.

 

There are several ways in which Dylan employs Mills’ theories. First, he does so through an examination of how mass media serves the interests of the power elite. In Mills’ assessment, centralization of corporate media markets through radio, television, and movies diminished the quality of public discourse. As a result, “with the increased means of mass persuasion that are available, the public of public opinion has become the object of efforts to control, manage, manipulate, and increasingly intimidate” (Mills The Power Elite 310). This creates a single national media market that shares fluency in, is influenced by, and responds to the signs, signals, logos, slogans, and jargon of corporations and mass media. The result of this increasing influence, according to Mills, is that it gives people in mass society an “identity,” “aspirations,” technique to fulfill their aspirations, and “an escape” (The Power Elite 314). That ideal reinforced heteronormative, patriarchal, middle-class, consumer culture. It provided a template of how modern men and women should look, act, dress, what jobs they should have and what they should purchase. Mills asserts, “The chief distracting tension is between the wanting and not having of commodities or of women held to be good looking” (The Power Elite 315). Americans aspired to own a home in the suburbs, have a family, own the newest appliances, cars, or clothes based largely on the wave of new media in their lives. Simply stated: to “keep up with the Joneses.” That lifestyle was most successfully achieved through men securing a “good” or “stable” job, while women took care of the children and the house. This led to anxieties and frustrations as people attempted to achieve the ideal, of those who failed to “live up to” it, and alienation of those who failed or refused to conform. Second, by applying Mills’ theories to the songs in The Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan demonstrates how ideas communicated through the songs – nearly all of which achieved success on one or several of Billboard’s charts – provided intellectual resistance to the power elite in plain sight.

 

To start, Dylan’s critique of the power elite centers on their exploitation of individuals and society’s institutions through their monolithic control of American life. He indicts them as “common criminals” in Chapter 10, “Jesse James”: writing “Criminals can wear badges, army uniforms, or even sit in the House of Representatives. They can be billionaires, corporate raiders, or stockbroker analysts. Even medical doctors” (Dylan The Philosophy of Modern Song 47). These figures possess institutional power in which they control laws, justice, the economy, and defense. They also benefit and profit from their relationships with each other and reciprocal protection of the institutions they control (The Philosophy of Modern Song 47). They are the “aristocratic establishment, the upper-class landowners” in Dylan’s chapter on “Pancho and Lefty” (The Philosophy of Modern Song 59). Similarly, Dylan’s analysis of Jimmy Reed’s “Big Boss Man” depicts the bourgeoisie middle-management using Mills’ language – “chieftain” and “overlord.” The boss man overworks his employees and is unphased by “labor unions, uprisings, revolts, empty threats” because he “is above it all.” In Chapter 4, “Take Me from This Garden of Evil,” Dylan again uses Mills’ language to describe the collapse of old values to moral ambiguity. He writes, “this song presses the panic button” and that the “newer beginning … is a garden of corporate lust, sexual greed, gratuitous cruelty, and commonplace insanity” (The Philosophy of Modern Song 17). The “masses of people” Dylan refers to have undoubtedly been “hypnotized” by mass media, consuming it without considering its meaning or the consequences of their mindless consumption (The Philosophy of Modern Song 17). The characters in these songs recognize the ubiquitous influence of the power elite and either reject participation outright or ask to be “delivered” from it.

 

Similarly, throughout The Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan highlights the centralized economic control of corporations in American life. During this period, national chains replaced local small businesses and local ads were replaced by national commercials. This consolidated brand identity, brand recognition, and consumer appetites. Additionally, corporations provided stable employment with opportunities for advancement, benefits, and a retirement plan. Each of the sixty-six chapters includes an aspect of American consumer culture. Dylan uses words like “merchandise” “manufactured,” and “cars” and refers to specific cars associated with affluence like “Cadillac,” designer watches like Rolex, smart phones, Les Paul guitars, record stores, movie theaters, and flat-screen televisions. His descriptions of products and fine clothing are accompanied by corresponding images. The readers’ mass media literacy aids in making those connections between image and word – sign and signified – effective. The title of the book’s first song, “Detroit City,” is paired with a photo of the Ford Motor Company factory that reinforces Dylan’s analysis. The character in the song left his rural hometown to secure employment and the American Dream in the city. Dylan writes “[w]hen this song was written, Detroit was the place to run to; new jobs, new hopes, new opportunities” (The Philosophy of Modern Song 5). However, the singer’s fantasy to “go home” and leave the monotony of his days in the factory and nights at the bar expresses his desire to escape modern life and return to something familiar and comfortable. The singer isn’t really a “dreamer,” but someone who is “caught up in a fantasy of the way things used to be” (Dylan The Philosophy of Modern Song 5). He is Mills’ modern man, the same person Dylan referred to in Chronicles affected by the swift changes in American life. The song “works,” as Dylan writes, because listeners can relate to the anxiety and disillusion expressed in it. This man could easily be Jackson Browne’s “pretender,” a man “who has sold himself for a bit of the American Dream,” whose “life is a broken record” of home and work, of “success depend[ing] on being someone he’s not,” of being “trapped in the lesser world” in which he abandons a life of passion, music, and art (Dylan The Philosophy of Modern Song 61). Dylan describes the pretender’s middle- class life as “single-minded,” a “capitulation”: “buying everything in every window display and … commercial ad” (The Philosophy of Modern Song 63). Dylan’s version of “The Pretender” appears in “Ball of Confusion,” performing a prescribed role described as a “new form of oppression” and every symbol of institutional power is a corrupt failure (The Philosophy of Modern Song 76). In “Big Boss Man,” Dylan describes the overworked employee as “modern man,” “servile,” a hypocritical ass-kisser” a “yes man” who finds escape through movies – movies that reinforce images of who he should be, but who he is not. These figures depict unsatisfying or unfulfilling images of those who have achieved or strive to achieve success in post-industrial middle class America or the American Dream.

 

Conversely, Dylan romanticizes an outlaw’s rejection of mainstream culture and refusal or inability to conform to it as a more honest or authentic existence. His analysis of The Allman Brothers “Midnight Rider” depicts someone who once played a role in civilized society but became a frustrated vigilante. He is “[a] sworn enemy of political bureaucracy, power brokers, election fraud, decadent union leaders, party hacks, corporate parasites, sugar daddies and other bankrollers” (Dylan The Philosophy of Modern Song 173). The midnight rider challenges the accepted order and “wants to return things back to a pre-corporate economic order and wipe the slate clean” (Dylan The Philosophy of Modern Song 173-4). Similarly, Dylan’s other outlaws, Jesse James, Pancho and Lefty, outlaws like them, or those who sing songs about them, “[exploit] their [the middle class’s] false values, materialism, hypocrisy, and insecurities” (The Philosophy of Modern Song 59). They stand alone as figures of rebellion against the power elite and the conformity of the middle class.

 

Further, Dylan’s discussions on war expose the military industrial complex and underscore the connection between history-making events, the decision-makers, and the effects of those events on individuals. His analysis of Webb Pierce’s “There Stands the Glass” focuses on a veteran who wrestles with the “degenerate and demonic things” he’s seen and done that reduced him to “mental bondage” (Dylan The Philosophy of Modern Song 21). Attending a “ritual celebration where he is being honored as a hero,” he feels he is “surrounded by the enemy” (Dylan The Philosophy of Modern Song 22). Dylan notes the veteran has “been betrayed by politicians” and “stabbed in the back by legislators and members of his own government” (Dylan The Philosophy of Modern Song 21). Here, Dylan’s interpretation focuses on the effects politicians’ decisions have on individual men and women who are deployed to the warfront. The veteran experiences a crisis due to his participation in war activities that have allowed him to become “unfaithful to the human spirit” (Dylan The Philosophy of Modern Song 21). Dylan raises the question of whether the veteran would regret or be haunted by his actions if he had been on the winning side. The passage’s opening – “It’s hard to be on the losing end of a lost cause, a lost enterprise, a cause with no object or purpose, unequivocally false from start to finish” – suggests a tenuous relationship between the abstract political decisions made to enter wars and the consequences of those decisions on individual lives (The Philosophy of Modern Song 21).

 

Dylan further develops this analysis in Chapter 43, Edwin Starr’s recording of The Temptations song “War,” which reads like an extension of Mills’ work, drawing a line from World War II to the veteran in “There Stands the Glass,” forward to both gulf wars. Citing a “sequence in the documentary The Fog of War,” Dylan explains how former defense secretary Robert McNamara and General Curtis LeMay would have been “prosecuted as war criminals” if they had lost the war (The Philosophy of Modern Song 214). Dylan notes, “For the rest of his life, McNamara wrestled with the question, “What makes it immoral if you lose, but not if you win?” (The Philosophy of Modern Song 214). This, too, is the question the tortured veteran who “has a lot to answer for” wrestles with in “There Stands the Glass” (The Philosophy of Modern Song 21). The war crimes explained in both songs’ chapters are similar – rape and brutal violence against civilians, including women and children. Dylan juxtaposes war propaganda employed to gain public support against the immoral, yet sanctioned, acts of war justified as the cost of national security.

 

Shifting to both Gulf Wars, waged by the power elite in and administrations of a single family (the Bush family), Dylan stresses the dubious justifications for both wars. Graley Herren’s analysis of Chapter 15’s “Whiffenpoof Song” for the Dylantantes substack illuminates that song’s reference to The Whiffenpoofs, “an independent a cappella group at Yale University” who counted as an early member Prescott Bush, “father of George H.W. Bush” and “grandfather of George W. Bush.” Herren also notes Dylan’s references to the more secretive and exclusive Yale society, Skull and Bones, whose “members are sworn to lifelong secrecy about the group … But: alumni from Skull and Bones have gone on to exert major power in the United States and across the globe.” Similarly, in The Power Elite Mills asserts that the link among the “institutions of modern society” – “families and churches and schools” – provide the basis for and support the centralization of power and that “these hierarchies of state and corporation and army constitute the means of power” (6-7). Giving a bit of cover to George H.W. Bush because Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait prompted the first Gulf War, Dylan focuses on “post-9/11 paranoia” and false claims about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction underlying the 2003 invasion under George W. Bush as more problematic and indicative of the continued consolidation and centralization of power among America’s power elite in the twenty-first century. He concludes by returning to LeMay’s thoughts on war criminals, suggesting that both Bushes would be considered as such. To conclude the chapter, Dylan also indicts Americans as war criminals for supporting war propaganda, not asking questions and, more importantly, not acting to prevent or end the conflicts.

 

Though Dylan is cynical about the purpose of the song, arguing “[i]t’s clear that one answer to the question posited in this song is the bottom line,” and links it to the earlier Motown hit “Money,” he uses this point to make parallels to war-profiteering and the atrocities of war (The Philosophy of Modern Song 213). The analysis includes a reference to Smedley D. Butler whose speech “War Is a Racket” was “written by a Major General in the Marines who was an American military hero, but became disillusioned with the profiteering, propaganda, and injustice of the military-industrial and intelligence-foreign policy establishments, and came to oppose American involvement in foreign wars designed to benefit financial and industrial interests” (Butler 1). Butler “confessed to his own actions on multiple battlefronts that hurt large numbers of people to ensure the profits for a few” (The Philosophy of Modern Song 213). Here, we can imagine Smedley as the celebrated, yet tortured, veteran in “There Stands the Glass.” Dylan then cites labor leader and civil rights leader Asa Philip Randolph who “said in 1925… ‘Make wars unprofitable and you make them impossible’” (The Philosophy of Modern Song 213). However, as long as war remains lucrative, news media, advertising, movies, and television will continue to romanticize it and promote it as necessary to national security.

 

Just as Dylan demonstrates how the songs in The Philosophy of Modern Song point to the adverse effects of media, government, corporations, and the military, he also shows readers the prescription for rebelling against the traps of modern post-industrial consumer society: art, love, and movement. Allusions to, references to, and quotes from poetry, literature, music, and visual arts stand in contrast to the over-commodified kitsch of most “mainstream culture.” His remedy for the “modern man” in “Big Boss Man” is “rivers of poetry and music” (Dylan The Philosophy of Modern Song 259). Poetry written by Poe or Rilke, literature penned by Kerouac or Burroughs, songs in The Great American Songbook, and jazz, blues, salsa, bluegrass, or country music encourage active and thoughtful engagement rather than mindless consumption. The many songs Dylan includes about love and his interspersed commentary on it suggest that love, not love as a legal agreement or social contract, but passionate love, love as connection and not conquest, is a salve. Dylan also gives us songs like “On the Road Again,” “Truckin’” “Keys to the Highway,” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” Images of keeping things new, of movement, of becoming, of being delivered provide an escape route to avoid the stagnancy and stasis of conformity. Being “On the Road Again,” keeps us from being “bogged down by anything,” even the monotony of daily chores like taking out the garbage (The Philosophy of Modern Song 92). Dylan’s analyses repeatedly suggest individual agency and meaningful participation in one’s life as pushback against consumer culture’s artifice.

 

Perhaps this is the philosophy of modern song – the place where the personal – the problems of modern life as they affect individual men and women – becomes the political – identifying and commenting on the issues of society that contribute to or cause the problems of individual people through art. To be sure, Dylan would argue that he’s apolitical. That’s fair. But you can’t ignore his critiques of conformity and of power structures that exploit and control social and cultural institutions. Though mainstream culture is generally a tool of the power elite, passively consumed by the masses without consideration of its effects or consequences, thoughtful analyses, deconstructions, and examinations of it as Dylan has provided in The Philosophy of Modern Song reveal substance that challenges its typical reception. That may be the signal point. Art, even art conceived, produced, and consumed in mainstream popular culture, serves as intellectual and artistic resistance needed to survive the artifice of contemporary society.

 

Works Cited

Butler, Smedley D. “War Is a Racket.” Heritage History. https://www.heritage-

history.com/site/hclass/secret_societies/ebooks/pdf/butler_racket.pdf)

Dylan, Bob. Chronicles. Simon & Schuster, 2004.

—. The Philosophy of Modern Song. Simon & Schuster, 2022.

Herren, Graley. “Come You Whiffenpoofs of War.” Dylantantes, Substack, 22 November 2022.

https://thedylantantes.substack.com/p/come-you-whiffenpoofs-of-war)

Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. Oxford University Press, 1956. With a New Afterword by

Alan Wolfe, 2000.

—. The Sociological Imagination. Oxford University Press, 1959. With a New Afterword by

Todd Gitlin, 2000.

No Direction Home: Bob Dylan. Directed by Martin Scorsese. American Masters. PBS, 2005.

August 26, 2023 by
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WORLD OF BOB DYLAN: “Come Writers and Critics”

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“Come Writers and Critics.” World of Bob Dylan 2023, June 2023, Tulsa, OK.

BY Rebecca Slaman

 

Every Dylan fan has, at some point, had to defend Bob to friends, strangers, and enemies. As the community of fans has intimately connected in the digital age, it can be baffling for us to be reminded of what other people think of our favorite artist. Of course, it’s been well-documented that Bob Dylan has critics. Even before his first musical controversy, certain groups did not embrace Dylan’s voice nor his politics. So what did fans have to say when those politics changed? What made people stay when his voice did, too? With a career as varied as his, there are myriad reasons for people not to like him. But criticism, while sometimes unpleasant, can reveal a lot about the critic and the culture they live in. Likewise, a fandom’s defense mechanisms reveal what they truly value about the artist. I believe the marriage of fandom and criticism is the key to Dylan’s legacy continuing and prospering.

 

The academic discipline of Fan Studies has some terms that describe the relationship and social dynamics of fandom. Bob Dylan is a producer, and fans engage in two ways: affirmationally and transformationally. In his article “Towards a Theory of ‘Appropriate Fandom,’” Mark Stewart, describes these two: “Affirmational fan practice is seen as ‘restating’ the object of fandom, reifying the canon, and by extension, engaging in ways which privilege depth of knowledge and economic engagement. Transformational fan practice, conversely, is more commonly positioned within a productive space; a space of fan fiction, vidding, shipping, and slash; a space where the textual meaning sits in the hands of the fans, rather than the industrial producer.” Affirmational is more often a male fan practice, accepting the canon, more economically productive and therefore encouraged by producers through Fanagement. Transformational is often female-coded, and inherently questioning of the canon. This transformational space can be fraught, controversial. It is the more rebellious engagement.

 

How does this apply to Bob Dylan? To describe our engagement with him personally, it’s like throwing our thinkpieces into a bottomless pit. If you asked Bob, the critics or fans don’t and can’t matter, though we know criticism can sometimes spark creative magic, even with Dylan: Judas comes to mind. I’ll give you some examples of these practices using iconic Dylan-goes-electric moments. The cry of Judas fueled the legendary performance of “Like a Rolling Stone”; we can easily see the cause and effect of critic on artist. To cite this moment is affirmational of the canon of Bob Dylan. The live Newport version of “Maggie’s Farm” is rip roaring and rock ‘n’ roll. We see it as rebellious. But also you can see in the footage of his acoustic set after the infamous reaction tears rolling down his face. This isn’t a widely discussed idea, it doesn’t fit into the canon narrative of Dylan’s attitude, so this is my transformational theory on Bob’s dealings with criticism. These are two different takes: He doesn’t care and it fuels him to be an adversary versus he cares deeply and this trauma forced him to put on that persona. We can’t know why Bob retreated from the spotlight in the late 60s, but threats and boos probably played a role. Beyond that point, he saw that criticism is creative poison, hypocritical.

 

But criticism plays a different role to an artist than to their fans/everyone else. Though Bob isn’t personally managing his image here, there is a (niche) industrial complex. Affirmational practice is kind of what we’re doing here: legitimizing him in the canon and affirming that he deserves a place in history. As we move forward with scholarship, however, it’s going to become more transformational, and in some ways, critical. The world has changed so much since Bob became famous; we can keep studying history within its own context and look at Dylan and his work with fresh perspectives. Since Bob’s not answering or doing any “fanagement” anyway, fans have to make their own answers and meaning, in alignment with the culturally accepted version, or against it. We should ask ourselves, when handling criticism, are we aligning with the more economically productive answers? Are we “selling out?”

 

Fans have also been critics themselves; criticism is necessary for someone with as much power as Dylan. With social media, more diverse fans of music are driving discussions about the reconciliation of someone’s art with their personal beliefs and actions. With Dylan, these conversations include misogyny in The Philosophy of Modern Song, possible theft of Black artists, and relevancy due to Dylan’s age. This certainly aligns with the larger cultural discourse of today.

 

In the early days, his whiteness was not as much in question, but rather his Judaism. You can bet his Jewish identity was held against him in addition to his sympathies with the civil rights movement: he was protested by TACT (“Truth About Civil Turmoil”) and “American Patriots for Freedom.” This group wrote in the New York Times, “It isn’t surprising that John Hammond would be interested in Bob Dylan’s brand of culture for Mr. Hammond, according to official US Government records, has made himself a party to at least seven communist fronts.” Though this is all obviously silly, this critique of Dylan being too political manifested when he was barred from performing “Talkin John Birch Blues” in 1963 on the Ed Sullivan show. Someone else’s fear of critics directly affected Dylan’s ability to convey his music to an audience, and that had to affect him.

 

It’s interesting how this cultural pushback goes from “young commie Jew” to “old irrelevant white man.” Don’t scoff too much at the latter one though, because many people who’d criticize today’s young artists might have had the same idea back in 1965 towards Bob. The criticism of “young people’s music” is equally as farcical as more biased reasons; it has nothing to do with the artist himself. On December 26, 1965, there was a letters to the editor section entirely around the debate on whether Dylan was a poet. It was in response to an article by Thomas Meehan about a young/old divide on the subject. College students called Dylan (24 at the time) their favorite contemporary American writer. As one English professor from the University of Vermont responded, “Anyone who calls Dylan the ‘greatest poet in the United States today’ has rocks in his head. That is such an irresponsible statement as to deserve no attention. Since his appeal (apparently) is to irresponsible teen-agers, I can’t take him seriously. Dylan is for the birds, and the bird-brained.”

 

It’s funny that this same discourse popped up around the Nobel Prize In 2016, interestingly on the other side of the young/old divide… or rather, old and slightly less old. I think the only young people who cared were students roped in by English teachers. Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh said “I’m a Dylan fan, but this is an ill-conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies.” Brutal!

 

This is the kind of criticism that clearly doesn’t hold over large periods of time, no matter who it’s addressed to. If you say something is only for young people, those people grow up, and even the radio Disney anthems of my youth are now played at parties to much acclaim. The fact that I’m writing this today [as a young Dylan scholar] shows that artists can transcend their own initial time and audience.

 

Interestingly, both of these examples are aimed at people who are fans of Dylan. They can be boiled down to one incredibly frustrating word: Overrated. It means that something, to someone, is saturated in the culture past the point of its merit.

 

And whatever merit Bob Dylan had when he was at his first peak, people have acted like it has been taken away at each consequential era. Bob Dylan has been praised for his “authenticity,” though most of us know that doesn’t mean he’s always telling the truth. The emotional and musical truth is what gives him that merit in the first place, and to most of us, that doesn’t go away no matter what genre he’s adopting. But even our beloved scholars have criticized him in this way:

 

Greil Marcus: “For me – and Dylan says this himself, too, somewhere I’m not locating at the moment – the marking point is John Wesley Harding, and every album after that…up until the kinship albums Good As I Been to You, World Gone Wrong, and Time Out of Mind, is some kind of mistake, put-up job, a disguise you could see right through, a lie.”

 

(And this guy’s a keynote speaker!) As I cannot find a source of that “Bob” sentiment, I’m classifying this claim by Mr. Marcus as transformational fan practice.

 

Just as Dylan once blindly called the shot of his Nobel Prize in Hearts of Fire, one critic did this amazing callout in 1988. “The words have become less clear,” says Jerome Rodnitzky. “Finally, Dylan, like Walt Whitman, might turn on his critics and declare: do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.” Pretty incredible stuff we can find in criticism, even when we disagree. Maybe Bob Has listened, who knows?

 

Criticism is constantly transforming its image of Bob. It has to, as time and people change. The issues people have with Bob’s music share consistencies across the eras, though those people become louder depending on the cultural attitudes in general. His voice, for one, was probably more palatable at the initial burst of rock ‘n’ roll when culture was radically new, and artists with unconventional voices had a place. Introducing to young people a smart cutie with a rebel streak made his vocals matter less. Also, people read more back then. But as more and more people discover him and time goes on, culture prefers more polished sounding music, and the criticism grows. It must have reached Bob, for he said “Critics say I can’t sing. I croak. Sound like a frog. Why don’t critics say that same thing about Tom Waits? Critics say my voice is shot. That I have no voice. Why don’t they say those things about Leonard Cohen? Why do I getspecial treatment? Critics say I can’t carry a tune and I talk my way through a song. Really? I’ve never heard that said about Lou Reed. Why does he get to go scot-free?

 

Because Bob, everybody hates the popular girl.

 

In my research, I expected his initial shift to “singing” to elicit more distaste, or at least, some McCartney-esque conspiracy theories. He gets in a motorcycle accident and emerges three years later with a new voice, face, and style? I would say, that’s not the same guy. It turns out, change was still largely welcome. If people called out his “phony, swallowed style of vocal production,” Nashville Skyline was extremely commercially successful. The Beatles got mustaches, Bob got a new voice, everyone grew up. If anything, this transformation helped him escape the label of has-been. On Jan 25, 1976, John Rockwell wrote of Desire: “But can Dylan ever really come back from the position he occupied ten years ago? Is there a place in the grey, workaday 70s for a legendary hero from the mythological 60s?”

 

The answer is yes. At least in the mainstream, Dylan was canonized. This is where affirmational fan practice begins, building up a positive image. Coverage of his musical exploits remained important as reward for being part of a great musical time. He’d earned his place, though of course that leads to backlash. Some felt he was done after a certain point. A scathing profile in Spy Magazine in August 1991 by Joe Queenan called him a pathetic kook, basically hoping he’d die so he’d cement his legacy: “Only now, any hope for the return of Dylan’s sustained wit, intelligence, and passion, may finally, finally have died.” Queenan clarified that does not take away from the great music he made, if anything he thinks it supersedes anything he would do from that point on.

 

Now, on Twitter, I see defenses for the albums he’s referencing and more, based on criticism I didn’t even know existed. I don’t see much new criticism for his art. The only people paying attention really, are us. People barely see him part of the present moment. We, of course, know about Rough and Rowdy Ways and Shadow Kingdom and the tour, but most think of Dylan as a historical figure. Remember when “Murder Most Foul” went #1 like a month into the pandemic? Most people don’t. In fact, it wasn’t two years before people claimed Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well (Taylor’s version),” at 10 minutes, to be the longest #1 ever on the Billboard charts. Regardless, the publication of the Philosophy of Modern Song caused a bit of a resurgence in criticism. John Carvill wrote a now infamous screed in Popmatters against the book that I would call, brave. Commenting on this criticism feels more dangerous having personally witnessed the discourse that followed it. Nonetheless, his is one of the few published, well thought out, criticisms of Dylan’s deification. While Dylan’s defenders engage in affirmational practice of nearly all of Dylan’s work, Carvill went against the mold and offered a transformed image of Dylan as an artist. This image includes the artist’s work he admires, but also a plagiarist, ghostwritten, misogynist, hack. Many disputed the writer’s projection that Dylan was an old ranting grandpa, but that projection is not any less valid than anyone else’s. We have to have a bit of transformation to hold or deify Dylan in our heads.

 

Fans that don’t match Dylan’s demographic do this especially well. If you’ve been on Dylan twitter, you might have seen me and my friends calling him gay, calling him a baby, saying objectively ridiculous things about him. We aren’t being insane, we’re engaging in transformational practice. Our canonizing of him may be playing with the truth in a very Dylan- esque way, but it’s fun, and takes it all less seriously. If we were to engage with Dylan, or any of our artists, critically all the time, it would be a bummer, like we don’t need to do Allen Ginsberg discourse 24/7. It makes sense if you consider the hurdles we already have to cross in terms of access. In some ways, it’s an asset: those who have to transform art to see themselves in it may unlock new, unexpected meanings. But critical conversations are being had online, where spatiality and temporality don’t dictate who can take part. In terms of criticism, I would be remiss to bring up the whole women’s perspective of it all.

 

Misogyny was difficult to research for obvious reasons: very few female Dylan academics have been published, and the male ones are often more sexist than Dylan himself. Though Albert Goldman said of his first published book of lyrics in 1973 that “Dylan’s anger and peculiar vindictiveness toward women are diminished in print,” Laurie Stone printed just this year that “Bob Dylan has never imagined the effect of his lyrics on a woman, or else, you know, the words would not be so sneering, and he would give us a picture of the woman and not just her effect on him. Bob doesn’t address women. He writes to men about women.” I would argue Bob has given us pictures of women, otherwise how would we know their jelly- faces all sneeze? Both of these responses go back to Dylan’s attitude being a huge part of the accepted narrative. They include extra projections about what a “man with attitude” could mean: a brutish misogynist. This is a way the affirmational canon elicits more criticism because who has been allowed to shape it. The inherent biases of the loudest Dylan fans can turn someone off from the joy of an art that doesn’t even reflect those ideas. A different perspective on women’s response to Bob Dylan comes from Mark Beaumont: In his negative article about Dylan’s legacy: he mentions that all his past girlfriends have tried to convert him to fan!

 

This is at the heart of most modern Dylan criticism: it’s us. It comes down to us. Our fandom is loud and ubiquitous. We “overrate” him, pushing people away from the demand of liking him. We are annoying.

 

The upcoming film A Complete Unknown starring Timothée Chalamet is garnering anticipatory criticism, and a fair bit of apprehension. Regardless of its quality as a film, it will undoubtedly draw young people’s gaze toward Dylan. This will create a new transformational fandom if I know anything about Timothée Chalamet and his fans. There are already Bob fan edits and headcanons out there, some created by yours truly, but it is mostly limited to my friends in Bob Nation. A certain following is expected at least for the movie, and I anticipate a new set of critical criteria. When this happens, I ask you to engage with this criticism with an open mind about what fandom can be. Being a fan is supposed to be fun, and criticism can also be fun. Affirmational fandom has been the norm for a long time, but if Dylan’s legacy is going to continue, our engagement will have to transform.

August 26, 2023 by
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INTERVIEW WITH HAPPY TRAUM

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The Dylan Review met with Happy Traum in person, June 4, 2023, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the day after his rousing keynote address at the 2023 World of Bob Dylan conference.

 

Dylan Review: You went to the Woody Guthrie center yesterday and Bob Dylan center today. What are your impressions?

Happy Traum: Oh, I love them both. Woody has a lot of resonance for me, because I grew up on Woody. After hearing Pete Seeger, and Pete Seeger was kind of a natural channel straight to Woody. So I dove into those Dust Bowl ballads, and “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Ya’,” “Hard travelin’.” I learned them all – most of them are three chord songs anyway, so they’re not that hard. But I love his voice and everything else about him, even though it was more than a world away from where I grew up. It was all an education for me to hear Woody. Part of that exhibit was in New York last year, at the Morgan library of all places. That’s something to think about too: Woody Guthrie in J.P. Morgan’s library. It’s a weird world, isn’t it? Because Woody was as far away from J.P. Morgan as you can imagine. And I know the Guthrie family, I know Nora quite well, I know Arlo somewhat. So that was moving to me in the sense that I knew the story well, and the Dylan Center was even more impressive in its size. It’s a bigger place, and just the depth of stuff. A lot of it was nostalgic for me, because the sections I knew best were his 60s stuff. They didn’t have a whole lot from Woodstock. It’s probably a revolving exhibit. I know they have tons of stuff in their archives, but I find it very moving, especially the depth of stuff he’s done since his teenage years. And I saw some pictures that brought me back in time. I enjoyed both immensely.

 

DR: Were there any Dylan artifacts that especially stood out for you?

HT: There was one thing that I was very surprised about, which I had never seen. There was a little part of the exhibit about the interview I did with John Cohen and Sing Out! Magazine in ‘68. They had the magazine there, and then they had a letter from John Cohen to Bob, next to the magazine, talking to Bob about how there was a line in the ending that Bob had taken out, but John thought it should go in, and he mentioned something like “I spoke to Happy about this.” I hadn’t seen that letter, I didn’t know it existed. One thing that struck me was the photographer Ted Russell took these early pictures of Dylan, like ‘62, in his apartment on West Fourth Street. And also, there were a few photos of Gerde’s Folk City. Wonderful photographs. The very first picture was of Dylan and Mark Spoelstra, who was a terrific songwriter, a twelve-string guitar player, and a good friend of mine. They’re playing together in this little space in the basement of Gerde’s, which euphemistically was called the dressing room, but it was really a horrible basement down these rickety stairs. There was nothing nice about it at all. But where that picture was taken was the very spot where Gil Turner taught The New World Singers – Bob Cohen, Delores Dixon, me – “Blowin’ in the Wind” from a sheet of paper that Bob had given to him. And I think my memory is right, we then went upstairs to the stage of Gerde’s and sang the song for the first time. It was in our repertoire from then on, and that picture just rang that memory for me.

 

DR: You mentioned yesterday in your keynote address that you were first to record both “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.” What’s it like to be the first one to put the songs down?

HT: We didn’t know at the time. We were the first ones to do “Blowin’ in the Wind” because Bob gave us the song for us to sing. He liked our group a lot. He used to follow us to different gigs around the city, the Village. He’d show up late night, one in the morning, when there were twelve people in the audience and we’d need to do some songs, some we’d do together. So we knew it was a special song, but we didn’t know how special. We didn’t know, historically, that we’d still be talking about it sixty years later. But with “Don’t Think Twice,” you know, Freewheelin’ hadn’t come out yet. And he taught that song to Gil Turner, and he was the de facto leader of our band, The New World Singers. We learned it, we took it to Atlantic Records while we were making our one and only album for them, and they decided they wanted to put it out as a single. They cut it down to two verses or three verses or something because, until “Like a Rolling Stone,” nobody played on the radio anything longer than two and-a-half minutes. And so we recorded it. We did have a minor hit in the south with it. They were pushing it – Atlantic – but it never got anywhere. And then of course Freewheelin’ came out and everybody and his brother and sister recorded that song. There’s probably a thousand recordings of that song. I don’t think it says in any history books, but ours was definitely the first time it was recorded.

 

DR: How did you get into traditional music? And what were some of your early influences?

HT: Pete Seeger was the conduit right from the start. He was the guy who I heard play banjo, sing folk songs. And the songs he was singing had nothing to do with anything that I ever heard on the radio. Just the fact that somebody could play for himself, sing, and get a big audience – and he was very charismatic, Pete in his younger days. And he got everybody singing. He was always the big cheerleader. Everybody had to sing along with him. So that got me started, going out and buying guitar and then buying a banjo and learning how to play. And it was a process. When you get passionate about something like that, which I did – you know, I have no musical background. I took piano lessons for a few years and, total failure. To this day, I can’t play the piano. But suddenly, there was this kind of music that I could do myself, and I found a cadre of kids at my high school, and also then in Washington Square Park, who also could play three chords and sing a hundred songs. I’d go to the record stores and see what else was out there. There was a record store in New York, it was called Doubleday, part of the Doubleday bookstore on Fifth Avenue. They had listening rooms, where you could take the records, vinyl records, into the listening room and play them to decide if you wanted to buy them or not. We spent hours in there playing records.

 

DR: They never chased you out?

HT: I don’t think so. I don’t know how many records we scratched up. I remember hearing Lead Belly for the first time and it was a little rough for me. I wasn’t sure. There was another store called Sam Goody, and they sold “seconds,” which were records that sometimes didn’t have the covers, and they had a hole punched in the label to show that they were somehow defective or had something wrong with them. Instead of three dollars, you could get them for one dollar. And I have a bunch of records at home to this day that have the hole punched in them. And then I finally got Lead Belly’s Last Sessions and started listening to him and just got immersed, I just could not stop. I didn’t get into the more hardcore blues until a little later, but I got into Josh White, and some of the folk singers of the day. Odetta was just coming on the scene then in the mid 50s. I actually heard her in concert at the Folklore Center, forty people there, folding chairs. And she was standing there singing. Wow. Huge. And people who were down hanging out in the Village we’d run into at various coffee shops, or the Limelight where a lot of the Irish guys would hang out. Liam Clancy was often there, holding forth with some fiddle player. And I got into whaling ballads, Ewan MacColl. Everything I could get my hands on that was folky, I liked.

 

DR: Eventually you took guitar lessons with Brownie McGhee. How did that come about?

HT: I loved his music. I had a record of his that I just played over and over. And eventually, I looked him up. I was going to college, up at NYU’s main campus. This was in the Bronx, not Washington Square where it has now been for a long time. But it was a big open campus with a quad and the library, a beautiful place overlooking the Harlem River. My friend said Brownie lived in New York, and to look him up, so I did. I called him and went down to audition for him in a way. He said, “Let me see what you can do.” I could play a little bit at that point, and he took me on and it was probably two or three years. I went frequently – not every week, but whenever I could or when he was around. He was going on tour at that point a lot with Sonny Terry, who was getting more and more popular on the folk circuit. But Brownie was a very interesting guy. He was the only one of those blues guys that I really got to know pretty well rather than casually saying hello to. I got to know his family, I spent time in his apartment, we took some trips together.

Brownie knew how to navigate the difference between the Black community and white, liberal New York. He came to New York in the 40s, from Kingsport, Tennessee, and then he was in North Carolina, where he met Sonny Terry, and then eventually came to New York and there was a whole milieu of of leftist folkies around – Pete Seeger, the Almanac Singers, Woody Guthrie, Brownie McGhee, Sonny Terry, Josh White – it was this community, most of whom came out of the leftist communist or close to communist world. And I’m not saying that Brownie himself was politically communist at all, but he was in that world. Leadbelly was very much a part of that too, because Alan Lomax was a communist. So these guys created the New York folk scene, really, in the 40s, before my time. Brownie learned a lot from that, and he was very interesting too, because he was very smart. And he could straddle those worlds. He also played electric guitar in an R&B band in Harlem and he once took me to a ballroom where he was playing, and his brother was Stick McGhee who had a big hit called “Drinkin’ Wine Spo- Dee-O-Dee.” So Stick and Brownie, they had a band and Brownie was playing through an amp, I think he was playing his acoustic through an amp, and that was a Black scene, so he straddled those worlds very successfully. That’s why Brownie and Sonny were a big hit on the circuit, because unlike the other blues guys, they knew how to put themselves across in a way that was acceptable to the college kids.

 

DR: How much fusing of folk and the blues was there in that community around Washington Square?

HT: It was very much a part of it. Everybody played some blues guitar, some more than others. Dave Van Ronk, of course, was pretty steeped in blues, and also early jazz. My first year at NYU, there was a guy named Ian Buchanan, and Ian had a depth of knowledge of blues guys I never heard of, and he and I spent a lot of time in his dorm room listening to records and playing together. I learned a lot from him. And interestingly, he left NYU his sophomore year and went to Antioch, and I lost touch with him. At Antioch he met Jorma Kaukonen, and Jorma’s a big blues guy, a big fan of acoustic blues. And Ian taught Jorma a lot of stuff. But there were quite a few really good blues players around the Village in those days. Dave Van Ronk comes to mind first.

 

DR: Did Bob Dylan distinguish himself as a quality blues player?

HT: No, I don’t think so. He picked up from the blue stuff, he listened to a lot of that stuff. “Fixin’ to Die Rag,” all that stuff. He had a lot of that stuff in his repertoire. When he first came to New York, he only played traditional stuff. He was just playing folk stuff. Woody Guthrie songs. “House of the Rising Sun,” which he learned from Dave Van Ronk. Songs like that. If you look at his first album, he had a lot of those bluesy kinds of songs, but nobody would have mistaken him for a blues singer. But he definitely incorporated that in his early style. And then there are two original songs and I remember hearing at Gerde’s Folk City. I remember hearing him sing “Song to Woody,” the first song I ever heard that he wrote, and everybody went, “Whoa, what was that?”

 

DR: Did you know he had written it?

HT: No, I don’t think so. I just heard him singing it, you know “Hey Hey, Woody Guthrie,” and I thought, “wow, that was really cool.”

 

DR: You spoke last night about being arrested in your early days for protesting a compulsory air raid.

HT: In those days, we were very anti-nuke, anti-war, and we were doing demonstrations. I actually met Gil Turner on a peace march in Groton, Connecticut, because they have a submarine base there. And we were demonstrating – fruitlessly, of course, no impact at all – but we had a march down the streets of Groton, Connecticut to the shipyard where they had this nuclear submarine which we were trying to stop from being launched – fat chance. And Gil was on that march. So he and I and Bob Cohen, also from the New World Singers, though I was not in the group at the time: April, I think, 1961. We went to City Hall Park (in New York City), because in those days it was compulsory to take shelter when the sirens went off and there was an air raid drill. When I think about it now it was, what, fifteen, sixteen years after World War Two, so air raids were serious. It was a serious thing. But we were of the mind that these drills made it seem like it was safe to have nuclear war, and we want to make it clear that, no, you can’t talk about nuclear war and safety, you can’t just jump in a building and be safe, or dive in the subway. So we went to City Hall Park, and the police came with a bullhorn. The sirens went off and they said, “If you don’t take shelter, you’ll be under arrest.” And because we had our guitars and banjos and stuff, we were their first targets.

They grab me, they grab Gil Turner, and about fifty others out of something like a thousand people there. They took us all to the tombs which is where, when they arrested you for something like drunk and disorderly, they threw you in the tombs – downtown New York, and the courthouse was there. They broke the fifty of us up into different groups, and I was in a group with maybe ten guys, no women. We were out on bail, fifty dollars or something, and we got a lawyer, a pro bono civil rights lawyer. Nice guy. He said, “Get together fifty dollars. You’ll each pay a fifty dollar fine. It’s not a felony, it’s a misdemeanor. Don’t worry about it.” On the court date, my wife Jane comes down with me to the courthouse. It was my birthday, in May. We’re standing there, and the judge says, “Do you have anything to say?” One guy of the ten of us stands up, his name was Perlman, and he makes a statement. He says, “Yes your Honor. The reason I did this, and the reason I would do it again in the future is because this is unjust.” The judge says, “Anybody else?” So somebody else says something, and somebody else. Then I stand up, and my whole statement is, “We did this non-violently, it was out of respect, we didn’t resist, it was just to make a statement.” And the judge says to me, “And you agree with Mr. Perlman?” And I said, “Yes.” And the judge said, “Those of you who spoke up in court, thirty days. The rest of you, fifty dollar fine.”

 

DR: What were you feeling at the time?

HT: I was in shock. Yeah. I’m this Jewish boy from the Bronx, and my family was mortified. My mother was freaked out. My father had just died the year before. So my mother and my grandmother were like, our family doesn’t do that.

 

DR: There was no part of you that thought “Hey, I’m being martyred here, for a cause”?

HT: Definitely. I was also proud about it. It turned out and there was a group called The War Resisters League that we were connected with, which was a very radical pacifist group in New York. Probably nationwide too. Several members of the War Resisters League refused the fifty dollar fine, in solidarity. In subsequent trials they said, “you have to put us in jail too.” There were maybe ten other guys who ended up on Hart’s Island where I was, and they purposely separated us all out. They wouldn’t let us near each other – different areas of the facility. But we did come together at various times, and one of those guys became a lifelong friend. Wonderful, amazing guy. And those guys helped me. Some of those guys had actually gone to jail for not taking part in World War II – that I couldn’t really get into, but these guys were such strong pacifists. They just said, “I’m not fighting. I’m not killing anybody. I don’t care who they are.” For World War II? That was a little much, but they were fabulous people. They really helped the cause and made me feel pretty strong about being there. And I got letters from people. I was a guitar teacher then and a lot of my guitar students sent letters. I didn’t get them until later. It was tough. It was hard. I got sick. By the time I got out I was running a high fever. It was a serious time.

 

DR: And this was a workhouse on Hart’s Island?

HT: Yes, it’s not a prison anymore. But it’s a potter’s field, for indigent people, when there’s nobody to claim the body. Our job as prisoners was to move bodies around to make room for the new ones, to consolidate. I do think that Bob must’ve known about that when he chose me to sing “I will not go down under the ground / ‘Cause somebody tells me that death’s comin’ ‘round.”

 

DR: You’re thinking in retrospect this may be why he gave “Let Me Die In My Footsteps” to you?

HT: That’s the only thing I can think of. Why pick me to sing that song when Pete Seeger was there, Gil Turner, who he was very close to, was there. I never asked him, but it occurred to me years later: he chose me to sing that song.

 

DR: How did you feel when Dylan “went electric”?

HT: I had mixed feelings about it. I was never one of those guys who would get frayed. First time I ever heard him with The Band was at Carnegie Hall. Bob did the first half solo, acoustic and then he broke these guys out – guys I became really good friends with later, but I didn’t know them at the time – but he broke these guys out and suddenly it was rock ‘n’ roll. It took a while. I didn’t love it. I mean, I didn’t hate it. I wasn’t like, “Oh, my God it’s the end of the world.” But it took me a while to see what he was doing with that. I did catch on pretty quickly. And then I met those guys and got to know them, and they turned out to be one of my all time favorite bands. Music from Big Pink was life changing, for everybody.

 

DR: Did you ever plug in? Were you ever tempted to do so?

HT: In ‘65, ‘66, my brother and I had an electric band, kind of Beatles influenced, called the Children of Paradise. We played around the Village, we went up to Canada, we played in Boston. And I lasted with them for not quite two years. I didn’t like it myself. I just wasn’t comfortable playing electric instruments. I didn’t think I was contributing enough. I just didn’t feel right with it. My brother, Mark Silber, who was the bass player, and Eric Kaz went on to write mammoth songs. But that was a kind of Beatles-ish – striped outfits, really wacky, British mod kind of clothing. So then I moved to Woodstock. A year later, my brother moved to Woodstock too, and we formed a band that did have some electric instruments and drums and stuff like that. We were rocking a little bit, but we were still pretty folky.

 

DR: When you move to Woodstock, you’re in this creative environment where Dylan was right down the street, The Band was nearby, George Harrison was filtering through…

HT: George Harrison was coming through, Paul Butterfield. John Hall and Orleans, Richie Havens. (Jimi) Hendrix’s manager was living there so he was coming through from time to time. It was this fertile ground, like Greenwich Village suddenly all moved up to Woodstock. In the early 70s a lot of folkies came too from the Boston area. Geoff Muldaur, and Maria Muldaur. A whole bunch of people who came over from Cambridge. It was just like a big mishmash of different kinds of musical styles. A lot of really great jazz players came to town.

 

DR: Do you have any favorite material that came out of that time?

HT: My brother was a very creative songwriter, and also a really good guitar player, much better than me. We formed a duo and then we brought around us Eric Kaz. We had a really good bass player and sometimes a drummer came and went. We would bring different people in, and eventually formed a group called the Woodstock Mountains Review, and we made four records. Eric Anderson was part of it, John Sebastian was part of it. It just revolved around great local musicians. So early on, ‘68 and ‘69, through the intercession of Bob Dylan – he put us together with Albert Grossman, as manager. Albert got us on Capitol Records. We made two albums for Capitol, which was big time. We also got to the Newport Folk Festival in ‘68 and ‘69.

 

DR: Was that your first time there?

HT: Yeah. And we did really well there. And then by 1970, we were recording for Capitol and we had a career together for several years after that. And that was a very primal time for me.

 

DR: You spoke last night about recording with Allen Ginsberg and that whole troupe of people for Jelly Roll Blues.

HT: I did get to meet Allen then, and play some of those songs. The (William) Blake songs, and “September on Jessore Road,” that poem he put to music. Also the Jimmy Berman song (“Jimmy Berman (Gay Lib Rag)”). But then Alan took a liking to me and my family. We did a bunch of gigs together. At some point, I don’t know what year, he and Peter Orlovsky went to London, and Jane and I were in London, and they called us. We went out on a kind of punk pub crawl. We went to a place called the Marquee Club, which was one of the centers of the punk rock world. We were trying to get in, it was very crowded. Nobody knew who Allen was. Finally somebody recognized him and Allen spent the next two hours we were there talking to everybody. People were like, “who is this old guy?” Kids with safety pins through their faces, and he’d talk to anybody. That was a really fun night.

 

DR: And then you had a lifelong friendship with Allen Ginsberg?

HT: Pretty much, yeah. I didn’t see him in his last years, and I was sad when I didn’t even know he was sick and dying, because we kind of lost touch a little bit, and we were off to other things. So I didn’t see him before he died, and I was sorry about that, but he would make our house his sort of stopping off place when he came to Woodstock.

 

DR: What was his orientation to Bob Dylan?

HT: He just adored Dylan. He just was in awe, which is kind of amazing when you think, “it’s Allen Ginsberg,” you know? And I think it was somewhat reciprocal, but I don’t know how much Dylan was in awe of Allen. I’m sure he was very fond of him. Allen, especially in his later years, became a very lovable guy. I didn’t know him, of course, when he was younger. I think he was much more hard-edged, from what I’ve heard. And evidently, Alan had psychotic episodes – I never saw any of that. And he never missed a chance to ask, “Have you seen Bob?”

 

DR: What was that special Thanksgiving you mentioned with Bob Dylan, George Harrison, and The Band?

HT: One special moment, in ‘70 or ‘71, Bob invited my brother Artie and me over to his house on Ohayo Mountain and Artie and I and George and Bob spent three hours playing old folk songs together. Playing guitars and playing everything that came to mind. No rock and roll, just folk songs. And George adored Dylan. George was just in awe of Dylan, and Bob, you know, he liked that. He liked the fact that somebody like George Harrison was that enamored. But George was a lovely guy. He was very open. And I’m sorry now I was a little too intimidated – first of all, I never thought to take a picture. I never wanted to be intrusive, but now I regret it. If I had a picture of Bob and George and us and our acoustic guitars, it would’ve been great.

 

DR: It seemed to me last night you still love performing for people.

HT: I do. I feel like it’s the one thing I can do that brings joy to people. And I feel like at my age, I’m still playing pretty well. I can still handle the guitar. I still have my voice – whatever it was, it still is. I do other things, obviously – make instructional videos. Homespun (Music Instruction) has been a big part of our life since we started in ‘67.

One time, in ‘68, ‘69, Bob turned to me – and this is very ironic, because it could’ve been taken as encouragement or a put down; I’m not sure how to take it, because I’m a musician – Bob said, “You know, you ought to go into the mail order business.” Why would you say that to somebody? But in fact, that’s how I ended up making my living. So he was right. I never would’ve made a comfortable living by playing music. It wasn’t because he said that, that we went into the mail order business, but he was right.

Another funny story: I was one of the few people in Woodstock who had Bob’s phone number. There were a few people, but it was highly classified. Like, it’s good Trump didn’t have it. So one day, I got a call at the house from Clive Davis, and Bob was on Columbia at this point. He said, “I’ve lost Bob’s number, could you give it to me, please?” I said, “I’m sorry Clive, I’ll tell Bob you were looking for him, but I can’t give it to you.” I’ll never forget that. He said, “Okay, please tell Bob,” and I called Bob right away and I said “Clive Davis is trying to get in touch with you.” Several years later I ran into Clive and I reminded him of that and we both laughed. I mean, telling Clive Davis, “I’m sorry I can’t give Bob Dylan’s phone number.” What could I do? I don’t know whether Bob wants me to give you his phone number.

 

DR: You could’ve lost your privileges!

HT: I could’ve! That’s right.

 

DR: Do you ever talk to Bob Dylan now?

HT: For some strange reason I haven’t been able to get a hold of him. I mean, I’ve tried very much, but we saw him in 2001. He did a concert at Madison Square Garden, after 9/11, and it was a very moving concert. It was one of the best I’ve ever seen. And he only did songs that he wrote in New York. He made a statement to the audience, which he rarely does anymore. He said, “All the songs I’m doing in this concert I wrote in this city, and this is a great city,” because everybody was still in shock. Through Jeff Rosen’s office, through Bob, Jane and I got backstage passes, and we went to hang out with Bob backstage a little bit. We had a nice conversation, he asked about our kids. I said, “You should come up and see us again. Come by.” And he said “Yeah, I’m sure I could still find your house.” It was all very congenial and nice. And then he said, “Come walk with me to the car,” the underground garage where his SUV was waiting for him. And we walked him to his car, and he was totally friendly and open and said goodbye, and that was the last time I saw him.

 

DR: Twenty-plus years, huh?

HT: Yeah, so I’m grateful for those years that we spent a lot of time with them. There’s still this family connection, strangely enough My oldest daughter, who lives in L.A., is still in touch with his daughter-in-law, Stacy, married to his son Sam. She’s also in touch with Maria, Bob’s oldest daughter. And I’ve seen Jacob a few times. So we still have some family connection, and Jacob knows a little bit of the history, though I think he was too young to remember Woodstock at all. Back when he came to play in Woodstock, maybe ten years ago, I went to hang out with him. He said, “I don’t even know where we lived.” And I said, “I’ll be glad anytime to take you up there and show you,” but I haven’t had that chance.

August 26, 2023 by
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IF YOU SAY HE’S SERIOUS

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If you say he’s serious
BY Justin Hamm

If you say he’s serious
you can be sure he is not.
If you say he is not
you can be sure he will
pry open the liquor cabinet
of the divine
and fill up two shot glasses.
Reach for one. He squints
and tilts his head,
maybe even offers up
the impression of a smile.
Now look back down.
Both glasses are raven’s feathers,
the table a wooden galleon
sailing the constellation night.

August 26, 2023 by
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THE DYLANISTA – Is There a Young Generation of Bob Dylan Scholars?

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I would like to use my column in this issue as a call to action. Warning bells are sounding in Dylan studies, but the field has been late to respond.

Beginnings seem to be multiplying around us. There is the establishment of the Bob Dylan Archive, a kind of engineered fons et origo allowing researchers to approach Dylan studies with utterly new material and with fresh eyes. Similarly, the Bob Dylan Institute at the University of Tulsa, just founded in 2018 as if waiting to be born, has already hosted two significant World of Bob Dylan conferences. Five years ago, Lisa O’Neill Sanders founded this journal, still the only peer-reviewed publication in Dylan studies. Add to these developments the recent flurry of conferences in Europe during the last decade and the explosion of print publications on Dylan since his Nobel Prize in 2016, and you get a distinct sense of pastures new, as if the field of Dylan studies were starting from scratch.

Of course, this is only an illusion, or a half-illusion. The field of Dylan studies is not new, despite the sudden unprecedented opportunities and outlets for research. While the formal institutionalization of Dylan studies might be new, the field itself is sixty years old. Biographers, scholars, reviewers, and all manner of critics have written about Dylan, often providing deeply informative texts regardless of the format of the publication, with or without the use of a consistent scholarly apparatus.

Yet there’s a conflict between the long history of Dylan studies and the new newness. In fact, a crisis has been born, and borne upon us, in the wake of the exciting coherence in our field. And the crisis is best expressed as a paradox: the newly forged wave of research developments in Dylan studies is largely the work of an aging generation of (mostly male, white) scholars, critics, and enthusiasts. Yet, despite the efforts of professors and other Dylan disseminators to the young, the continuation of Dylan studies remains uncertain. Can we say with any confidence that, as the current aging generation disappears, seven new people will be born? Or seventy? Or seven hundred?

The great pitcher Leroy “Satchel” Paige, who played his last Major League Baseball game at 59, supposedly asked the question, “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?” This isn’t a new idea, but Paige’s formulation is catchy. A more common way to express the same idea is “You’re only as old as you feel.” Either way, the bulk of the Dylan community seems to have embraced this sentiment. Most Dylan scholars, enthusiasts, Dylanologists, and even concert audiences are older. Yet, admirably, they don’t let being an aging – and even aged – group of followers slow down their interest and engagement with Dylan. After all, Dylan himself is in his eighties.

But a problem has emerged that is inseparable from the resilience of Dylan’s aging audience. After the recent World of Bob Dylan conference in Tulsa, several people I trust made a point of sounding the alarm about the advancing age of their fellow participants, in effect highlighting a crisis at the center of Bob Dylan studies. According to unscientific estimates, 60 to 70 per cent of the conference participants were males over the age of fifty. This is a perilously lopsided number.

Certainly, there are promising indications of a young generation of Dylan aficionados out there. For example – to start close to home – three of the co-editors of this journal are in their twenties or thirties. Similarly, the Italian branch of Dylan studies boasts recent doctoral graduates who are fast becoming indispensable to the field, having organized a conference on Dylan and the fine arts and produced a volume of essays. The archive librarians at both the Bob Dylan Center and the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa are young scholars who see a future in the field – and, concomitantly, are the future of the field. The TU Bob Dylan Institute, founded and run by Sean Latham, not only hosts the WoBD conferences, but also operates within a university, presumably recruiting and involving undergraduates. My younger colleagues assure me that social media channels bristle with exchanges on our articles with every release of an issue of the Dylan Review. Similarly, Dylan’s tour has generated conversations across an international group of followers. These engagements need not be confined to publication events or concert tours but could be expanded into ongoing projects in more permanent modes, forming a foundation of interest in Dylan studies among younger audiences.

We must help to foster this – those of us who have been cathected onto Dylan since we were young. But how exactly? How can we preserve – let alone expand – engagement with Dylan studies in future generations if our ranks are so homogeneous in age and gender? How can we pass on skills, methods, and energy to a young generation of scholars and critics? I don’t have a pat answer to these crucial questions. But I know that if the times are not a-changin,’ or at least not fast enough, we’d better try to change them. We can do what mentors have done since, well, since Mentor. We can tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it – and, with persistence and luck, instill in those who didn’t live through the epochs of Dylan’s creativity our profound connection to his language and music.

In The Death of Tragedy, George Steiner suggests that John Dryden’s “situation” as a dramatist in the late seventeenth century was “artificial” because “he was required to restore that national tradition of drama which had been broken by the Cromwellian interlude.” The Puritans had closed the London theaters in 1642, and the Interregnum – what Steiner calls the “Cromwellian interlude” – had lasted from 1649 to 1660. So, for approximately twenty years there was a forced hiatus on the stage, cutting off a generation of playwrights and making the revival of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama a near impossibility for Dryden and his contemporaries. This is a complex argument, involving French and neo-classical influences on Dryden, and I won’t go into the nuances here – nor do I think Dryden’s “situation” is a perfect fit for the crisis in Dylan studies. I mention it only to underscore the destructive effect of a generational gap. Dryden was hopelessly hobbled by the lack of continuity from Shakespeare, whom he revered. Steiner calls Dryden “the first of the critic-playwrights,” a term he uses to damn with faint praise. Being a “critic-playwright” indicates the burden of distance from Elizabethan and Jacobean theater, which Steiner characterizes as “innocent of theoretical debate.” This contrast with Restoration dramatists is probably an oversimplification, or an over-polarization of the two theatrical periods. But Steiner’s schematic is valuable for Dylan studies if, for the sake of argument, we accept that the Cromwellian interlude created an unbridgeable gap for English dramatists.

My question then is: Are we heading for the same kind of unbridgeable gap? Will the establishment of Dylan institutions like the Archive, the Bob Dylan Center, and the TU Institute for Bob Dylan Studies mark the last hurrah – a kind of eloquent peroration – of a generation born in Dylan’s heyday?

Or will the outgoing generation manage to seed far-reaching and newly inclusive pastures of plenty with burgeoning Dylan scholars, critics, and serious enthusiasts?

Someone once said that every generation must read Virgil’s Aeneid for itself. The same might be said for every inescapable author from Dante to Shakespeare to Milton, or from Cervantes to Austen to Woolf. This is partly a matter of canonization, partly of fashion, partly of accessibility. Any English speaker can read, inter alia, Charles Dickens or Edna St. Vincent Millay, regardless of whether these authors are the flavor of the month. But few people can (or would) chance Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales without an expert’s help. Because of these obstacles, or despite them, literary fortunes rise and fall, and new interpretations surface to hail or condemn or revise. This is the key to generational renewal in the Republic of Letters.

We should ask ourselves – Turn, turn, turn – and ask of ourselves: Can we embed Dylan in a poetic firmament that continually renews and redefines itself? Can we ensure that every generation will need to hear and interpret Dylan’s songs for itself? Turn to face the rain and the wind.

This is not to dismiss the many stalwart university professors who, over the last decades, pioneered Dylan courses in the curriculum, sometimes over the loud sneers of more conventionally minded faculty. With a few exceptions – Classics, for instance – these courses are usually found in English literature departments, which makes sense, given that Dylan writes in English and won the Nobel Prize in Literature. But relegation to literature departments is a kind of misrepresentation: Dylan is a musician, and we understand his songs best only after experiencing them as performances. Which brings us to the signal differences between poetry and popular music. As much as fashions in poetry have changed, poetic value as a desideratum has remained relatively constant in scholarship and, to a less widespread extent, in society. The same can’t be said for popular music. Even if there were consensus about its value as an art form, musical styles, technology, and its means of preservation make it impossible to compare it to poetry over a long period. While Robert Herrick’s iambic tetrameter poems are obsolete in contemporary practice, they appear in anthologies and are perfectly readable four hundred years later. They’re out of fashion but not out of reach.

The same condition doesn’t apply to popular music. Fashion is the draconian law that applies to all recorded popular music – or at least has done so for the last century. It might be that the internet and YouTube will change this social structure and wrest music from the imperatives of the market. But no one really knows. In the meantime, Dylan studies remains in flux between vibrant research and obsolescence. Only a new generation of Dylan students can prevent the latter and infuse the former with energy.

Much depends on current mentors. But even when, with the most perspicacious pedagogical ambitions, professors inject Dylan’s songs into their curriculum, they encounter a range of obstacles, such as their students’ lack of training in explicating poetry or – precisely because they are literature majors – their understandable inexperience with music. Professors thus find themselves, even though they are usually not trained to do so, teaching the fundamentals of twelve-bar blues and basic rock forms, even as they struggle to shed light on verses laden with classical allusions (“Temporarily Like Achilles”) and topical references (“Positively 4th Street”). Then there is the question of historical perspective: to fathom Montague Street and revolution in the air, students must understand the sixty-year-old cultural milieu from which Dylan’s songs grew.

This is a tall order for any professor, especially in a one-semester course. Think about courses on other literary figures: students who study Elizabeth Gaskell’s novels in one class, for example, are likely to have read, in other classes, some of the shining lights from the same nineteenth-century literary milieu, such as Wollstonecraft, the Romantics, or Dickens. But teaching a rock and roll icon requires more than just a background in mid-twentieth-century literature. It requires that background plus the ability to illuminate the roots of popular music. Again, a tall order for literature professors.

Still, we beat on. But it’s difficult to say how wide a dissemination Dylan-in-school produces, or to identify the exact goal of teaching undergraduate classes on Dylan’s songs. Anthologies very rarely include Dylan’s lyrics among the twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets, which would at least give his oeuvre survey-course parity with Donne, Byron, Moore, Stevens, or Bishop. Current graduate programs are unlikely to encourage dissertations on Dylan, with the perfectly reasonable justification that, as a specialty, Bob Dylan wouldn’t be much use on the job market. But we don’t want that to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The ideal would be for the young ephebes emerging from their undergrad years’ Dylan classes to contemplate the Master not in splendid isolation but to think of him as part of a network, connected with contemporaries such Robert Lowell, Frank O’Hara, or Adrienne Rich, the way we think of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning – and the songs of Robert Burns.

Unfortunately, I don’t see this happening. I don’t see a busy, competitive flow of younger scholars and critics replacing the older generation. A hoped-for revolving legacy (so far) has failed to materialize in Dylan studies, despite the bursts of interest on social media. Discipleship is scarce among contemporary writers and researchers. This is troubling. It’s as if our urgent – and honorable – effort to institutionalize Bob Dylan had somehow overlooked a critical facet of institution building: the nurturing of a new and radically connected cohort.

What should we do? Obviously, just adding Dylan to the curriculum is not enough for the future. Maybe we need to speak about Dylan to our students unapologetically, not along the lines of “here’s why I am including him with other, clearly more established writers”, but as a matter of course, signaling to our students, as well as to ourselves, that this is precisely where he belongs: with the greats of contemporary literature. Let us learn to take him – and Dylan Studies – for granted, as something not dependent on the newest newness, but as something that is here to stay.

 

It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there. The rest is silence.

– RF

August 26, 2023 by
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REVIEW OF WORLD OF BOB DYLAN 2023

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“World of Bob Dylan 2023.” June 1-4, 2023, Hyatt Regency, Tulsa, OK.

REVIEW by Harold Lepidus

 

The second in-person World of Bob Dylan symposium took place over four days at the beginning of June. The first one occurred in late May, 2019. There have been other meetings both physical and virtual in between, but this was similar in scope and presentation to the 2019 gathering, with a couple of significant differences.

 

During the 2019 symposium, there was more to it than just Dylan-related panels and a guest musician – in this case, Roger McGuinn of the Byrds. This was the first real chance for fans to see and hear some examples of the deep, secret archives of the work of Bob Dylan, which were purchased on behalf of the University of Tulsa. The 500 attendees had the privilege of experiencing such never before known treasures as the three-chord outtake version of “New Pony” from 1978’s Street-Legal, unseen rehearsal footage from the New Morning sessions, and unreleased songs from the 1976 Hard Rain Rolling Thunder Revue TV special which were left on the cutting room floor. There was also a demonstration of the restoration of footage from the 1966 tour, which was made a priority by the BDC team. At the time, the Bob Dylan Center had yet to be built.

 

In 2019, it appeared that the Center and the University were working together as one team, but that no longer appears to be the case. Last year, there was the Grand Opening of the Center, with a star-studded pre-Grand Opening celebration for the media. This year, The World of Bob Dylan was part of a separate, multi-cultural event, known as Switchyard, which ran from May 30 to June 4. The Dylan panels only took place from June 1-4.

 

From Tuesday, May 30 through to the morning of Thursday, June 1, there were a dozen panels, mostly addressing various forms of marginalization, persecution, and censorship. Speakers ranged from Maus author Art Spiegelman to Dylan scholar Danny Fingerouth and others exploring the X-Men comic as a metaphor for marginalized people. While I did not arrive in Tulsa in time to attend any of these panels, one can see the connection with Dylan and his socially conscious topical songs.

 

To set the scene for this year’s festivities, all of the Dylan panels took place at the Tulsa Hyatt. There were a few conference rooms on the lower lobby level, and another one on the upper lobby level, where there were also merch tables for Switchyard and Magic City Books. Attendees were given a program and a laminate, with different levels of accessibility, allowing people into certain (or all) events. There was also food and/or refreshments provided there between some of the panels. Each night, there were also shows at the legendary Cain’s Ballroom – “The Home of Bob Wills” – with bus transportation provided to and from the venue. Night one was a great set by Rodney Crowell, with Bob Ickes and Trey Hensley; night two was John Fulbright, who covered “It Takes a Lot To Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry”; and the final night was a doubleheader, with former Dylan sideman Larry Campbell and his wife, Teresa Williams (they covered two Rev. Gary Davis songs, and Dylan’s “Wallflower”), and Robbie Fulks, whose recent “vanity project” is a double album reinterpretation of Dylan’s Street-Legal, titled 16, and he gave “Changing Of The Guard” a rare, and beautifully stripped down, outing.

 

For the symposium, participants were asked to submit proposals in advance, and if chosen, you’d be given a slot at the same time as two or three other panels. One did not have to be a scholar or have a PhD to participate. Some panels featured stray presenters grouped together by category, while others were already submitted as a fixed group with its panelists listed. These panels were sometimes designed as “roundtable” discussions, while the others usually had three or four people giving presentations of about twenty minutes each, with a question and answer section as time allowed.

 

The panels ranged from academic to historical, analytical to irreverent. There were also a few Keynote Speakers – noted authors, critics, and musicians, discussing the works of Bob Dylan. What follows are selected highlights of panels and events I observed, including three presentations I gave while I was there.

 

I participated in one of the first three Dylan panels, at 1pm on Thursday, June 1. I was asked to participate by Danny Fingeroth, author of a biography of Stan Lee of Marvel Comics fame, and the soon to be published biography of Jack Ruby, the man who shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald. This most likely explains why Fingeroth chose as a panel session, Murder Most Foul: Bob Dylan and the JFK Assassination.

 

A couple of weeks before the symposium, the other panelists – Salvatore J. Fallica, Jeff Fallis, Fingeroth, and I – met via Zoom to discuss how we would handle our presentations. Originally planned as a roundtable discussion, it was decided that the most traditional panel of individual essays of about twenty minutes each, usually with visual, and sometimes audio, aids would work best. Mr. Fallis could not attend the early sessions due to a scheduling conflict, so he sent a video presentation instead.

 

To give some idea of what a presentation might be like to experience, here’s what I prepared. I decided to focus on Dylan’s connections to JFK, mostly through quotes, and tie them into a larger context by linking other artists, such as the Beatles, the Byrds, the Beach Boys, Peter, Paul & Mary, and Paul Simon, and how their lives, and art, were affected by the events of November 22, 1963.

 

A highlight of the second day was Rebecca Slaman, with her presentation, “Come Writers and Critics,” part of the Fame and Fandom panel. Slaman (a.k.a. @ithrewtheglass on Twitter) is one of the bright new stars of Dylanology, which is all the more impressive considering she really only got into Dylan during lockdown. Her presentation was a mix of sociological studies of fan behavior, the differences of gender fandom, and how Dylan was perceived critically, with a mixture of expertise, insight, and humor.

 

This was followed by a keynote speech by Cass Sunstein, titled Museums are Vulgar: Bob Dylan and Dishabituation, which was basically a study of busy being born instead of dying. It was about how Dylan regularly changing gears throughout his career led to an increase in his creative juices by exploring different artistic avenues.

 

The next panel I attended was The Philosophy of Modern Song and the Ambi-Modernist Impulse. It featured my future co-panelists Erin C. Callahan (“‘Lame as Hell and a Big Trick’: Dylan’s Comment on the Commodification of Art in The Philosophy of Modern Song”, and Court Carney (“‘The Laws of Time Didn’t Apply To You’: The Philosophy of Modern Song and the Zeitgeist of the Discontent”), as well as Jim Salvucci, host of the Dylantantes podcast. Callahan and Carney, both PhD professors from Houston, gave detailed explorations of the themes of Dylan’s most recent book, while Salvucci explored how Dylan is fascinated by a bygone world – not a perfect world, but one he appears to, if not miss, at least chronicle.

 

The third and final panel that day that I attended was Talking Dylan – The Bob Dylan Podcasters. It featured four Dylan-centric podcast hosts – Craig Danuloff (Dylan.FM a.k.a. “Freak Music Dylan”), Rob Kelly (PodDylan), Laura Tenschert (Definitely Dylan), and Daniel MacKay (Hard Rain and Slow Trains) – all of whom I was familiar with, and I have even appeared on Rob Kelly’s program. Each panelist discussed their own unique format, and Danuloff explained how they were pooling their resources to create their own network.

 

Certainly a highlight was “An Evening with Margo Price – In Conversation with Jeff Slate,” a keynote address. Reminiscent of his 2019 interview with Roger McGuinn, Slate interviewed Price for about fifty minutes before he accompanied her on three songs – her own “Lydia,” then two-and-a-half Dylan covers, “Oh Sister” and “Meet Me in the Morning/Call Letter Blues.” The questions alternated between her love of Dylan’s music, and her own career. When Margo said she was influenced by Dylan, she wasn’t kidding – she even named her daughter Ramona.

 

On Saturday, I was once again part of the day’s first panel. Titled Collaborations, I shared the panel with Scott Bunn of Recliner Notes fame (“Recitations on Waitresses & Art Within Terry Allen’s ‘The Beautiful Waitress’ and Bob Dylan’s ‘Highlands’”); Ray Padgett, with a preview his new book of interviews, – Pledging My Time: Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members; and my presentation, “Dylan & The Dead Reconsidered: Goin’ Down The Road, Feelin’ Rad.”

 

Padgett expertly used audio clips of varying quality to illustrate the contents of the book. While some of these interviews have appeared in his Flagging Down the Double E newsletter, including the hilarious and touching story of drummer Winston Watson, his daughter, and her “Uncle Bob,” many others have not. Having these stories by people ranging from Martin Carthy and Happy Traum (more on him later), to Scarlet Rivera and Regina McCrary, to Jeff Bridges and Larry Campbell, make this a fascinating and illuminating read, and dispels a lot of rumors and assumptions about our Bob.

 

My talk centered around when I attended the first Dylan & the Dead show on July 4, 1987, at Sullivan Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, as a lead-in to discussing the unfairly dismissed 1989 live album of the tour. I gave my interpretation of why Dylan may have chosen the seven songs he did after the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia compiled a much more accessible version, which Dylan rejected.

 

After another coffee break, it was time for a Keynote Presentation by legendary music (and Dylan) critic and journalist, Greil Marcus. Bob Dylan is quoted as saying, “The purpose of art is to stop time,” and Mr. Marcus does this with his presentations. In this current era of the short attention span, he’s not afraid to slowly build his case, beginning without any direct connections to Dylan, giving it breadth and depth and context, and lead us into a world most of us never knew existed.

 

Marcus’ talk was called “The Only Thing Missing Was Gloria Grahame: Noir Tomes in 21st-Century Dylan.” As the title suggests, Marcus explored the connections between the old movies Dylan obviously admires and has always been a source of inspiration in his art, and its connection to Dylan’s most recent works, including not only his art and music, but his promotional videos.

 

The next panel was simply titled Humor. It featured The Daily Show’s Daniel Radosh (“It Takes A Lot To Laugh: Bob Dylan as Humorist”), Harrison Hewitt a.k.a. Harry Hew (“How Long Can We Falsify and Deny What Is Real: Bob Dylan is the Funniest Person Alive, and Why We Need To Talk About It”), and my “Murder Most Foul” co-panelist, Danny Fingeroth (“The Comic Book and Me: Bob Dylan and Comics.”)

 

Radosh focused on Dylan’s funny lyrical content. This left Harrison room to apparently semi-improvise his talk, focusing on other aspects of Dylan’s humor. The basis of Hewitt’s presentation was about how Bob’s sense of humor is completely misunderstood. At the risk of embarrassing him, Harrison’s passionate, insightful, bold, and, well, humorous interpretation of the misinterpretation of Dylan’s international humor (often described as unintentional), was a highlight of the symposium. Harry had everyone in the room in stitches, including Radosh and Greil Marcus.

 

Mr. Hewitt talked about how people used to laugh at the humorous lines in “Desolation Row” until Dylan had his motorcycle accident, and since then, everything was so reverential that the jokes were no longer considered funny. He defended the “sick joke” lines in “Lenny Bruce,” pointing out that of all the lyrics Dylan has changed over the years, those lines were never altered. As Hewitt argued, what could be more appropriate than some sick humor in a song about the “sick comic” Lenny Bruce? Complete with nods to Rodney Dangerfield and even bits of humor from an interview with Dylan’s parents, the whole talk was hilarious.

 

Danny Fingeroth was next, with an entertaining collection of cartoon comics and graphic novels throughout the decades, featuring either Dylan, a Dylanesque character, or a song lyric or title. He also observed something about the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s legendary appearance at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. When they performed “Like A Rolling Stone,” Hendrix introduced it as a song by Bob Dylan, then followed it by saying, “That’s his grandma over there.” I always thought it was just some off-the-cuff remark, but Mr. Fingeroth observed that he was probably looking at bassist Noel Redding and his frizzy afro, and that’s to whom Jimi was referring!

 

During a lull in the Q&A after the presentations, Harrison Hewitt mentioned something about being amazed that someone like Greil Marcus, whose work he had devoured (with a special shout out to his review of Street-Legal), would be sitting there, listening to a “goofball” like him. Marcus was among the first to speak with, and congratulate, Harry after the panel had finished.

 

I caught part of a fascinating panel, Stevan Weine, Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry From Madness – with Holly-George Warren. There was no direct connection to Dylan while I was there, other than the obvious (Dylan and Ginsberg were friends and collaborators), but the documentation about Ginsberg’s family history of mental illness, and the medieval practice of a lobotomy that was suggested for his mother, was as detailed as it was disturbing. Ginsberg was talked into approving it as a way to “cure” what his mother was going through, which had a lingering and damaging effect on his life.

 

The next keynote speaker, Greenwich Village folk legend Happy Traum, charmed the entire auditorium with his talk, “Coming Of Age in the Greenwich Village Folk Revival, 1954-1971.” He began with a mini-concert, playing “Careless Love,” Woody Guthrie’s “I Ain’t Got No Home,” Dylan’s “Farewell,” and “He Was A Friend Of Mine” (all songs Dylan has played at some point), then mesmerized the assembled with tales of the early Greenwich Village folk scene, complete with photographic evidence of everything from old records (and record stores) to the arrests of folkies for the crime of gathering in the park. He talked about how Dylan had asked him to learn to play the bass, then invited him to the 1971 Greatest Hits Vol. 2 sessions. He felt he had disappointed Dylan with his accompaniment on the first song, “Only A Hobo,” since it was not included, although the three Basement Tapes remakes did make the cut. So he was pleasantly surprised to find out that ten years ago, “Only A Hobo” was to be included on The Bootleg Series Vol. 10: Another Self Portrait (1969-1971). And to top it all off, he found a picture of himself with Larry Campbell from about forty years ago, which was not only touching, but appropriate, since we were about to head on over to Cain’s again, and Larry was one of the performers.

 

On Sunday morning, there were two sets of panels left to go. The first one I attended, Infinity On Trial, was chosen because I was particularly interested in hearing what Definitely Dylan’s Laura Tenschert had to say. Also on the panel were Susan Scarberry-Garcia, whose connection to Dylan goes way back, and her presentation, “A Vision of Wheels: Bob Dylan’s Rail Car and Leo Tolstoy’s Bicycle,” using Dylan’s iron sculptures as the point of comparison.

 

Raphael Falco was not able to make it to Tulsa to present his paper, “Unheard Melodies: Ekphrasis and the Possible Gaze in Dylan’s Lyrics,” so it was presented by Tom Palaima, exploring Dylan lyrics through warehouse eyes.

 

Tenschert’s talk explored the evolution of Dylan’s lyrics as updated in his Mondo Scripto (a nonsense term, she noted) series. Tenschert pointed out the irony of Dylan recently saying that the music is just as important as the words, yet here they are presented acapella, so to speak. At one point, she said she didn’t understand why Dylan had drawn a portrait of Barbra Streisand to illustrate the lyrics to his song, “Every Grain of Sand.” My interpretation was that it may have been a play on words – “Every. Grain. Of. Barbra. Strei. Sand.”

 

I participated in one of the final presentations, Roundtable: Where Beauty Goes Unrecognized: Reconsidering Bob Dylan in the 80s, along with Eric Callahan, Court Carney, and Jeff Fallis. During our pre-Tulsa Zoom meeting, it was decided that we would each give a short presentation, and then we’d open the floor for a Q&A period. I placed my essay in the context of the Bizarro World of how the rockers of the 60s and 70s fought to fit into the musical landscape of the 1980s. The decade began with a series of bummers, most significantly to many, the murder of John Lennon in December, 1980, which had a chilling effect on his peers, including Dylan, Neil Young, and the remaining Beatles.

 

There was a heated discussion, with much participation from those in attendance. One example: Laura Tenschert said that to her and her peers, the 80s began not in 1980, but in 1983, with the release of Dylan’s Infidels album. I can understand that, as one could say that in America, the 60s as we (think we) know it, began in February, 1964, when the Beatles landed at JFK.

 

And then it was all over. All in all, a worthwhile trip. It felt like Switchyard is going through some growing pains, trying things out, seeing what works and what doesn’t. From my limited viewpoint, it seemed like the socially conscious part, and the Dylan part, of Switchyard, did not mix particularly well, mostly due to the time allowed. I don’t know why the Dylan Center was not a major part of the festivities, but unveiling even more rarities in future years would certainly add value to the proceedings.

August 26, 2023 by
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REVIEW OF Whole World in an Uproar

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Aaron J. Leonard. Whole World in an Uproar: Music, Rebellion, and Repression 1955-1972. Repeater Books, 2023. 319 pp.

REVIEW BY Evan Sennett, Indiana University

 

A mesh of thumbprints and a gaggle of names: Nina Simone, John Lennon, Jim Morrison, Johnny Cash, and Buffy Sainte-Marie. They come together, on the cover of Aaron J. Leonard’s new book Whole World in an Uproar, to form the distinct outline of Bob Dylan, who, for some, is emblematic of the sixties. But he is not the only emblem of the era. The time period hosted an army of emblems who, in hindsight, each appeared either to stand for or against the status quo – a standard which shifted throughout the decade.

As someone who never experienced the sixties, I find it really difficult to imagine what it must have felt like to relate to those representatives in real-time. To read backwards into the mythology of the sixties is to be confronted with conflict. The decade presented a series of iconoclasts. These were activists and artists who gestured toward the general instability of the time, and were themselves figures of instability.

This is the paradox of the decade, a feeling of whiplash that can be felt by enthusiasts of sixties music, especially by those who were not there to experience it for themselves. Leonard’s new book serves as an apt reminder that these so-called icons released their music into a culture of hostility, and the United States government often surveyed, profiled, and even punished them in response to their radical creations.

In his previous book, Folk Singers and the Bureau (2020), Leonard covers the forties and fiftes, and frames the theme of hostility in much more tangible terms. The FBI considered the folk and blues artists from this period security threats, due to their association with the Communist Party of the United States (CPUS). In Leonard’s new release, a work he affectionately refers to as his “Sixties book,” the story of hostility becomes much more difficult to place (1). This is not to say that hostility wasn’t present at all – quite the contrary. Leonard makes a strong case that sixties music was built from, and often revolved around, a general culture of hostility. But as the music industry made its transition into the new decade, repression quickly became a difficult knot to untie:

Disentangling the impact of personal decisions, tragic events, and repressive initiatives in the decline of the first wave of rock ’n’ roll is near impossible. What is clear is that this musical movement was met with considerable hostility – tolerated only to the degree that it could reap enormous profits. This was a circumstance that would change little in the coming years. (23)

There is no doubt that hostility was a fundamental ingredient to the music of the decade. But putting a finger on where that hostility was at any given time becomes a less straight-forward task. Despite this complexity, Leonard manages to craft an entertaining read-through of the sixties music landscape. While this historical overview may feel a bit too familiar for some connoisseurs, it is still engaging to flip through the greatest hits of the decade – the arrival of the Beatles, the “summer of love,” Woodstock, and so on – played out in the context of “hostility” and repression, which unifies all of these well-known events.

Leonard’s primary method for locating this tension comes from his reading of special documents released by the National Archives and the FBI. These sixty-plus year old files prove that the US government had its eye on many of the sixties music icons previously mentioned.

Scans of these FBI profiles are scattered throughout the pages of the book. At times, I wondered if this could make for an interesting coffee table piece, something that a casual fan might peruse in no particular order: today I feel like skimming through Nat King Cole’s FBI file… But as Leonard admits in his “Appendix” section, the FBI files themselves were difficult to obtain. This is partially a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, which slowed the process of acquiring enough tangible evidence which might have filled a picture book – not that the coffee table was ever Leonard’s intended destination. But this also means that Leonard’s catalog of FBI files only covers 33 different public figures, only some of whom were musical artists. And while the page-count of those files reaches nearly four thousand, some of these files were destroyed or still awaiting release by the time Leonard’s book came out earlier this year.

What we are left with is a relatively slim archive, with many gaps still left to be filled. Nonetheless, Leonard proves a general sense of hostility towards several musical artists from the sixties, and convincingly argues that there was a kind of dialectical bond between these artists and the powers which attempted to repress them. In Leonard’s history of the decade, there are always two “forces” at play: the “forces highly motivated to keep” musicians and activists “out of the public sphere,” and, ironically, “the forces it unintentionally set loose” (6, 7). Each time the FBI profiled an artist, it seemed to fuel the very transgressions the government sought to keep out of hearing distance. And while most of these musicians had no idea they were being tracked by the FBI at the time, the tremors of cultural tension could still be felt by listeners. Conflict became music. For Leonard, this strange dance between opposing forces resulted in “works of wonder” (7).

Leonard illustrates the sixties as a dense period, every moment containing tensions, bursting with hostility, and pregnant with creativity. Perhaps Leonard’s sketch of the decade is a bit too vague at times. His sense of “hostility” becomes a kind of catch-all term which links together disparate events. Leonard even points out that the opening years of the sixties, a time which is generally mythologized under the leadership of John F. Kennedy as “a period of great hope and boundless optimism,” also fits into his narrative of hostility (34). These early years proved to be especially dangerous ones for the nuclear era and ultimately “set the stage” for a complex and hostile decade to come (35).

The book moves chronologically, from a brief overview of the early Cold War, to an entire chapter for each year of the sixties, ultimately gesturing to the early seventies by the end. Along the way, we meet many musical acts who functioned as transgressive forces. Leonard breaks each chapter into manageable chunks, divided into sections typically focusing on only one musical act at a time. Yes, you could read through them all in order, as presented. But I could also see this book functioning quite well as a reference piece, a kind of encyclopedia of sixties music and repression. A reader might easily pick out only the passages that interest them, skimming through the others at will.

That being said, those who do choose to read Whole World in an Uproar cover-to-cover will find a coherent argument to chew on. The mission is to investigate how music managed to make its way “on the FBI’s radar” time and time again (10). This is a mission which is often convincing, but at times a little vague – what is the FBI’s “radar” exactly? Where is it? What counts as being on the “radar” and what does not?

These unanswered questions leave the book with a general vagueness, which has the effect of coming across as paranoid. The FBI is always looking, but we are not always sure where they are, or how closely they are looking at any given artist, at any given time. This is not a completely ungrounded paranoia, as many of Leonard’s extracted profiles prove the presence of the FBI’s surveillance of the music industry, at least for some specific artists. Nor is this to suggest any kind of “grand conspiracy” (229). As Leonard clarifies, this time period was one in which many complex mechanisms were at play:

all of which resulted in the music and the artists producing it contending with both conscious and reflexive reaction. Regardless of the specific tack, the effect was the same: a generalized brake – or worse – on artists trying to bring forward pathbreaking music. (229)

Still, I would have appreciated more specificity here and there. Leonard’s evidence is not always presented in a tangible form. Instead, we get a series of artist profiles that are at times convincing and at other times a bit too loose.

Leonard makes a concerted effort to touch on most of the notable names in the music industry at the time, especially the ones who are well-remembered and celebrated today. Even when artists were not working under direct surveillance, Leonard still attempts to show how they fit within his overarching narrative of hostility. Johnny Cash, for example, is presented to us without reference to any FBI profile. Regardless, he still falls victim to what Leonard calls “background suppression” (98). The idea here is that, even in less radical music acts, hostility was still present. As Leonard argues “there was a multitude of times when those targeted did not even know it was being done to them” (98).

Despite Cash’s public statements about the mistreatment of indigenous people, he does not appear to have experienced any direct forms of censorship as a result of this political stance. Still, Leonard points out that “the fact that he had to” make political statements at all “is revealing of the difficult terrain anyone making stinging socially conscious music would confront” (99, Leonard’s emphasis). Cash’s activism should be noted, but this particular example does not demonstrate “music and repression” because Cash’s message was never repressed. There are several moments like this in the book which come across as attempts to make some of the more recognizable names carry an argument beyond its limits.

Since Cash’s name is on the cover, one would have hoped that he would have played a larger part in describing this “world” of hostility, Leonard’s ultimate narrative goal. Cash’s inclusion here feels motivated by marketing purposes. His name will help sell the book, even if he doesn’t play a significant role in it.

Other names have more clearly earned their spot on the roster. In a section on Harry Belafonte, Leonard exposes a career-spanning relationship with repression. The notable civil rights activist who had ties to Martin Luther King Jr., anti-war protest, and communism confronted the baggage of hostility during the entire decade of the sixties. Even though Belafonte took measures to separate himself from any political party, as Leonard observes, he nevertheless remained a subject “of increased scrutiny by the considerable US intelligence apparatus” (145). In Belafonte’s case, a former financial manager of his had gone on to become a CIA informant, which makes his government profile especially “gossipy” (145). By the end of the decade, Belafonte attempted to continue his activism by airing one of his songs set against footage of police brutality from the Democratic National Convention. The protest film was to air on the “Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” only for the segment to be pulled by the network (171). Belafonte’s work is a prime example of music emerging from a hostile world, met with hostility.

When taken in parts, some of these sections don’t show very strong examples of repression. The picture Leonard attempts to paint ends up being more convincing as a whole. This becomes especially interesting with public figures who have a more ambiguous relationship with authority.

Take, for instance, Leonard’s handling of Bob Dylan. Dylan not only makes the cover of Whole World in an Uproar; he is referenced on more pages of the book than any other single entity, with the exception of the Federal Bureau of Investigation itself. Dylan stands out as a particularly difficult icon to place on a political matrix. This goes beyond Leonard’s “Sixties” project, but I am sure anyone who has spent any amount of time with Dylan’s work has experienced his mystifying qualities – his inability to give straight answers in his music, and certainly in his interviews.

Leonard’s book reveals that the FBI was just as mystified by Dylan as the rest of us. He argues that Dylan “was a subject of a more particular kind of FBI attention” (68). After receiving an award by the Emergency Civil Rights Committee, Dylan’s acceptance speech was met with a roar of boos from his leftist crowd when he made a sympathetic remark about Lee Harvey Oswald (this happened only a few weeks after the JFK assassination). Apparently this remark, along with his girlfriend Suze Rotolo’s association with communism, caught the FBI’s attention.

Dylan’s own FBI file is one of those documents that was not released in time for this book, which forces Leonard to speculate on its contents. All of the negative attention directed toward Dylan from the left and the right, is possibly the reason why he retreated from the public eye during the latter half of the sixties. It also informs much of his more mystifying material for the rest of his career – something Leonard does not focus on at length. But this would have been a worthwhile question: how does the hostility of the sixties continue to inform music now? It might just reveal ways in which we still live with the hostility of the past.

One needs only to look at a recent Dylan LP to see how the sixties still holds a ghostly influence over his music. On the back side of his Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020) is a giant portrait of Kennedy. The dead president carries an ambiguous glimmer in his eye – a complex expression coming from a symbol of authority, which we are invited to look back into. Should we trust him? Admire him? Fear him? If hostility rests behind those monochromatic eyes, Dylan is not paralyzed by it. In fact, hostility only appears to spark more from Dylan. By acknowledging the sixties in such a pronounced way, Dylan might be suggesting that we still live with the consequences of that time, its hostility lingering on. But how bad can hostility be if it generates art? Kennedy, Dylan, and his audience form a tense triad. Our mutual glances are like stakes in a circus tent: if you removed one of us, the whole tent would collapse. But by suspending this gaze with unresolved tension, the tent somehow remains standing and the circus can continue.

Leonard’s book promises a wide-reaching story of music and oppression during a concentrated time of hostility and conflict. This story is supposedly so far-reaching that it had the Whole World in an Uproar. To make good on his title, Leonard touches on many of the important foreign influences from the time: Cuba, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam to name a few. And, of course, the British Invasion marked a transatlantic phenomenon with, among others, the Beatles, the Kinks, and the Rolling Stones. You know the story. At the end of the day, however, Leonard filters all these world powers through the context of the music industry in the United States. And it is through the authority of the US government that this hostility emerges. A better title might have been, Whole Country in an Uproar.

The US was a contentious place for creative people, which ironically sparked further creativity throughout the 1960s. But we should be careful to label this phenomenon correctly. Otherwise, we mythologize the rest of the world as merely in the service of US culture. In that same light, we should be very careful about how we talk about the icons from the sixties. We often forget that those mythological figures who appear to us as icons today were iconoclasts, working against the hostility of the United States. On this point, Leonard manages to treat them like real people, working under real, strenuous conditions. Their stories are familiar in many places, and in others as complex and mystifying as the music that we love.

August 26, 2023 by
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REVIEW OF Bob Dylan’s New York

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Dick Weissman. Bob Dylan’s New York: A Historic Guide. New York: Excelsior Editions, 2022. 154pp.

K. G. Miles. Bob Dylan in the Big Apple: Troubadour Tales of New York. Carmarthen, Wales: McNidder & Grace, 2021.176pp.

REVIEW BY Matthew King

 

Before I can review the latest books in the growing canon of “Dylan in New York” literature, I have to travel directly to the source. To Greenwich Village, the bohemian enclave where a young Robert Zimmerman landed in January 1961, and introduced himself as “Bob Dylan” from “the West” at an open-mic hootenanny. Specifically, I need to visit the apartment- museum of historian Mitch Blank, who holds a copy of Bob Dylan’s New York: A Historic Guide, a new work by folk guitarist, composer, and author Dick Weissman, who was performing in the Village years before Dylan arrived.

“Collecting is a disease,” Blank jokes, shortly after I step into his place one afternoon, his tone infused with a mix of humor and confession. Hidden behind his scruffy mustache is a ready smile, a playful energy. He gestures for me to get comfortable on the living room couch, which wraps around a large coffee table that doubles as a work space.

“There’s been tons of books about Dylan and New York, Dylan and everything. They pop up every year,” he says, shuffling through stacks of boxes. Many of these, I’ll learn, are either on their way out – to the Dylan Center in Tulsa, where Blank is an associate archivist – or newly received and in need of cataloging. “I really wonder what Dick is up to.”

A Village traveler since the 1960s, Blank has amassed a trove of cultural items to rival any small museum. His one-bedroom apartment feels like an archival wonderland, jam-packed with material yet meticulously organized. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves contain labeled binders and folders. Hanging near the kitchen-turned-closet are custom, built-in sliding panels of cassette tape holders. The walls hold countless framed posters and programs and concert tickets, mini-collections of buttons, postage stamps, baseballs. Dylan is his central subject, but the collection’s breadth spans artists and genres, as well as other items that Blank calls “cultural detritus” – political buttons, 45 vinyl adapters, old packs of condoms.

“The neighborhood is always changing,” Blank says at one point. “Back in the 60s and 70s, just a few blocks from here is no place you’d want to go. You don’t want to know what went on there. Today I wake up and it’s the trendy Meatpacking District, with clubs and shops.”

Like many wayward teens, I was drawn to the Village myself over a decade ago. (Dylan hitchhiked from Minneapolis; fifty years later, I flew in from Chicago.) The neighborhood felt like a magical anomaly, a cluster of tree-lined streets within a sprawling metropolis, the ground floors of its prewar tenement buildings offering a kaleidoscopic mix of retail and entertainment to suit any taste. Live comedy, dance clubs, hookah lounges, jazz bars, board game cafes, black box theaters. A paradise of late-night munchies, from falafel and kati rolls to specialty pizzas by the slice and Belgian french fries with dozens of sauces. By now, over half these old haunts are gone or remade, which is a fraction of the change long-time residents like Blank have seen over the course of a half century. Once-iconic coffee houses have been replaced with fast food and pharmacy chains; artistic hideouts turned into sports bars.

Meeting me at the coffee table, Blank sets down the book as well as a couple vinyl records. “This is Dick,” he says, scanning the covers and liner notes, where sure enough Weissman’s name and artist photo are featured. He’s the counterpart to Pat Foster on Documentary Talking Blues (1957), an homage to the spoken verse style that Dylan later employs in Freewheelin’. He’s one of ten young musicians featured in 5-String Banjo Greats (1964), where he plays on “Old Joe Clark” and “Whistle While You Work.”

Years before Dylan arrived in New York, Weissman had established himself as a rising star in the Village folk scene. This connection is featured prominently in the flap copy of Bob Dylan’s New York, which notes that Weissman “walked the same streets, played music in the same venues, and witnessed the growth of the folk music revival from before Dylan became popular to after the height of his impact on the music scene.” Holding one of Weissman’s records brought this point home, but it’s a fact that wasn’t immediately present when reading the book.

Bob Dylan’s New York functions as a kind of annotated bibliography of the bard’s early years in the city. There’s no introduction or preface about Weissman’s backstory (perhaps assuming a certain familiarity on the reader’s part). He doesn’t ground the project in any personal narratives. Rather, his “I” pops up here and there to share an amusing detail or anecdote. The fairly succinct guide, at 156 pages, serves primarily to assemble an index of notable places, people, concerts, facts, albums, collisions, and cultural moments, including those that only an insider like himself might know, and pointing engaged readers towards areas of further exploration.

Altogether, the entries total nearly 100 different sites of interest, and range in length from several paragraphs to a single sentence. Of “The Bagel” at West Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue, he simply notes: “Suze Rotolo reports that she and Bob frequently snacked here.” In longer passages about more significant spots, Weissman does an admirable job marshaling various quotes, texts, and voices to convey the complex character of a space (and often its eccentric proprietor). One memorable passage incorporates stories from Jack Kerouac, Gore Vidal, and Michael Harrington – as well as an album cover by Fred Neil – to paint the scene of the San Remo Café, one of the few gay-friendly bars in the area after World War II.

While it’s illuminating to comb through this exhaustive list, throttling between subjects and characters so frequently, and hopping backwards and forwards in time, can undo forward momentum. But the book pulled me along nonetheless with its wealth of detail, including the several historical gems from Weissman’s own experience that he graciously preserves for us.

He recalls the hunt to find his first East Village apartment, navigating the patronage system of rent-controlled units that eventually earns him a spot at a mere $22 per month, but with a $1,000 payoff to the previous tenant. During visits to the Folklore Center, he remembers Izzy Young would leave the store for spells at a time, trusting his customers to look after the place. In one poignant scene, Weissman describes a late-night set at the Village Gate, where John Coltrane is playing for a handful of people, and the manager has begun flashing the lights, even as Trane keeps on blowing for another twenty minutes. “More commercial parts of town… would have shut down the show for obvious economic reasons,” Weissman writes. “In the Village there were still opportunities for an artist to be an artist. Even if it irritated the light man.”

Bob Dylan’s New York also makes clever use of multimedia formats. Each of the nine main chapters begins with a walking map of a specific block or corridor, dotted with a dozen or so key places. And the written entries are paired with nearly as many photographs, an inspired collection of candid portraits, warm glimpses of street life and backroom jam sessions, and exactly one picture of a young Dick Wesissman – circa 1959, in the front row of a house party where Reverend Gary Davis strums his guitar. This geo-visual tapestry provides a surprisingly rich and tangible sense of the Village, its cramped rooms and lively, zig-zagging streets, its subtly shifting centers of influence.

Weissman’s project looks uptown as well, to the Midtown Manhattan offices that form the commercial music apparatus, through which Dylan’s songwriting catapults him to mainstream artistic and financial success. The penultimate chapter briefly leaves the city to cover Dylan’s years in upstate New York, but not his move back to the city in the early 1970s.

If Bob Dylan’s New York feels more academic in its design and purpose, another new book on the same subject uses a more popular approach, arranging characters, drama, and narrative to draw the general music fan into the magic of a potentially arcane subject.

In his recent Troubadour Tales series, author and curator K. G. Miles has memorialized Dylan’s experiences growing up in Minnesota and navigating major performances across London. A third entry, Bob Dylan in the Big Apple, looks not only at the early Village years, but his relationship to New York throughout his career. Over several decades, even after moving his family to Malibu, Dylan has continued to return to the city, always bouncing back “like a proverbial rubber ball.” The book even brings us to the present day, shedding light on which dive bars fans frequent before and after Dylan’s regular sets at the Beacon Theater.

Big Apple anchors Dylan’s story in a more traditional (and saleable) arc, following him “from young Village troubadour to Broadway Bob.” Each chapter presents a new obstacle or detour along his journey to music-god status, from early gigs at Cafe Wha? and Gerde’s to his tussles with superfan A.J. Weberman, the 1970s casting of the Rolling Thunder Revue (from a booth at The Bitter End), and a mad-scramble TV performance live from Rockefeller Center. Miles foregrounds his memories as a Dylan fan to set the scene for many chapters. This persona story feels just as present, if not more so, to the book than Weissman’s to his guide, despite a much thinner connection to the subject. Big Apple also supplements Miles’ authorship with his own kind of revue, enlisting a variety of contributors who were there with Dylan over the years, and who provide their own oral histories alongside the general narrative.

There’s a conversation with Terri Thal, reflecting on Dylan’s early performances – endearingly clumsy and Chaplinesque – and how he “resisted all attempts by Dave [von Ronk] or me to become more political.” Bret Johnson pens a couple of present-day dispatches from the Washington Square Hotel and the Horse and Kettle, trying to unearth the “salvageable heart” of the old Village, while conceding that, “I can’t promise you’ll find Bob Dylan in a bar, any more than I can promise you will find him in the Grand Canyon at sundown.” In a short interview, violinist Scarlet Rivera recalls the awakening in her strict, Catholic high school, when she first heard “The Times They Are A-Changin’” on the radio like “drops of water to someone dying of thirst in the desert”; she also describes the legendary encounter with Dylan on the street – he in a limousine, her walking with her violin case – when he was casting Rolling Thunder, and she was just another dreamy midwestern transplant enamored by the Village, “a place of fellow adventurers, hippy clothes, head shops, people playing chess on the streets, musicians, artists, freethinking spirits.”

As a reader, I found it much more enjoyable to follow Dylan’s story in real time. We meet his contemporaries as fully developed characters, who enter and exit his life at different stages. The book can feel novelistic, and the sustained narratives allowed me to better synthesize all the key places and characters and events, and how they fit together. It helps that Miles is a stylish writer, with solid narrative pacing, who’s found a way to position this Dylan mythology as fresh and memorable, even if some of the contributions feel clipped. (His chapter with the much-hyped A.J. Weberman runs only a few paragraphs.)

If there’s a downside to Miles’ approach, perhaps it is that readers gain less of a sense for the physical setting of the Village. Big Apple includes a centerfold section with a small map and some photographs, but these are easy to overlook, and they’re not particularly interesting artifacts. The photos primarily show building facades, storefronts, street signs; no faces, no instruments, no performances. Because Miles has included somewhat self-interested contributors, there’s also a tendency for these guest voices to posture, stretching to stake their claim as an essential catalyst in shaping Dylan’s trajectory. That includes Terri Thal, Weberman (“I revived his fucking career!”), and even Peter McKenzie, whose parents hosted Dylan on their couch for a few months during his first summer in New York (“What occurred during that stay is the unknown missing piece… People have been trying to figure out for generations”).

Taken together, both books build a case that Dylan and New York are inseparable. Dinkytown may have inspired a young Bobby Zimmerman, who was no orphan from the west but the product of “a very ordinary, comfortable upbringing in a lovely Jewish family.” But New York possessed the mix of artistic apprenticeship and commercial opportunism that opened the doors – not only to blockbuster success, but something more intangible. “I don’t know how I got to write those songs,” Dylan later said about his nearly unmatched spree of hits in the 60s and 70s. “They were almost like magically written.” The bohemia of the Village provided a space for him to mirror the greats and find his voice, through unending nights of live performances. The ambitious eyes of lurking Midtown agents helped him gain recognition. And, the fact that he arrived just as a historic wave of national and social protest was rising, affording him a potent topical subject matter, was yet another fortunate coincidence.

Reflecting on the Village in the 1960s, Liam of the Clancy Brothers recalls:

It was a certain sort of spontaneous combustion. It’s a thing that happens around the world at different times. It happened in Paris in the Twenties when Hemingway was writing: a mini Renaissance. It moves from place to place, and there are people who try to find out where it’s going to happen next, to follow it. But you can’t control it, you can’t predict it. What was happening at the Village at that time – it was a surprise to find yourself in the middle of it.

The figures of this legendary era, and its scholars like Weissman and Miles, are all well-versed in the practiced folklore. The underground basket houses along MacDougal Street, where audiences began snapping their applause to placate the upstairs neighbors. The first lone guitar player in Washington Square Park, George Margolin, originator of the “Sidewalk Hootenanny,” who inspired Pete Seeger and an entire folk revival movement, then disappeared from history. But there are common elements left out that I was curious to know more about. Why is Dylan’s family almost entirely absent from these histories, and how do they feel about his journey, the way he’s mused that he “maybe [was] not born to the right parents”? Neither book perhaps reflects enough on the wake that Dylan leaves behind him, how while he forged a success story for the ages, so many in the Village folk scene were sliding to the bottom.

It’s nevertheless a beautiful thought that Clancy describes above, and that Weissman and Miles uphold in their respective projects. The seemingly timeless allure of the Village makes me reflect on this relationship between culture and place, especially in today’s hyper-digitized era. Does the next Dylan need to cross a continent to launch their career? What is the unique power of a Washington Square Park or MacDougal Street when everyone has access to the biggest public stage imaginable, right inside their pockets? Today’s aspiring artists across the heartland might not need to uproot their lives to be discovered; they’re doing it from their bedrooms, on YouTube and TikTok and whatever the next platform will be. And while it certainly might help to be in a crowded place, learning to copy the best and rub shoulders with the powerful, does it matter less than it once did?

If there’s any truth to this emerging placelessness of pop music culture, then rooted book-length studies like these become even more valuable, capturing something like an endangered anthropological phenomenon. But perhaps this speculation is premature. One of the most fascinating pages in Weissman’s book is the map that begins its final chapter, “Other Famous Village Inhabitants,” which reveals Dylan as one tiny star in a busy constellation of cultural giants who all lived within those few square miles, from Poe and Twain and Eleanor Roosevelt to Auden, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dos Passos, Lou Reed, and Henry Miller. If it was ever in doubt, Greenwich Village furnishes undeniable evidence of the enduring relationship between geography and culture.

Collecting may be a disease, as Mitch Blank likes to say, but it’s a rare condition that strengthens our social memory. Reading both books renewed in me a certain gratitude for the work of preservation, not just of physical items but of stories, moments, and cultural shifts that are hard to see when looking merely at dates and facts. Whether in nonfiction book form, or the archives of a jam-packed city apartment, these cultural treasures help us re-experience the past, understand the forces that mold a singular figure like Dylan, and observe, in the abundance of ephemera and anecdotes, all that was different, and how much never changes.

August 26, 2023 by
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REVIEW OF 21st-CENTURY DYLAN: LATE AND TIMELY

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21st-Century Dylan: Late and Timely. Edited by Laurence Estanove, Adrian Grafe, Andrew McKeown, and Clare Hélie. New York: Bloomsbury, 2021. 232 pp.

REVIEW BY Nathan Schmidt, Indiana University

 

It is the twenty-first century. Is Bob Dylan still a musician? Or, more accurately, among the masks that Dylan has chosen to wear throughout his career, how relevant is the mask of the troubadour in relation to the others that he has put on over the last two decades? 21st-Century Dylan: Late and Timely raises this provocative question. The fourteen essays in this volume remind the reader just how many different media one can find Dylan in, from art exhibitions to underwear commercials. In this catalog of eclecticism, we encounter the Revisionist Art exhibition, the films No Direction Home and Masked and Anonymous, and, of course, the Nobel acceptance speech, which is placed in delightful juxtaposition with Dylan’s ads for PepsiCo and underpants. As a public figure, Bob Dylan has remained busy in the present century, but it is interesting to note that relatively few of the chapters in 21st-Century Dylan are directly about Dylan’s twenty-first century music, since as of the volume’s publication Dylan had released nine albums in this century, from “Love and Theft” in 2001 to Rough and Rowdy Ways in 2020. Whatever Dylan is saying to us now, he is saying it in many tongues, and the voice, accompanied by the guitar or the piano, is more and more clearly becoming just one among his many modes of expression.

 

The editors produced this volume following a series of papers given at a conference at the Université d’Artois in December of 2018, and it is clear that they designed this edited collection with cross-conversation among the essays in mind. There are a few cases in which the volume wears its adaptation from conference presentations a little too clearly on its sleeve – for all his remarkable contributions to the discipline of Dylan studies, the entry from Christopher Ricks in this particular book is only four pages long and references the conference directly, which comes across a little awkwardly in print – but, as a way of capturing the dynamic shifting of ideas through the space and time of the conference venue, this book provides a snapshot of what was doubtlessly a meaningful and intellectually rigorous series of conversations.

 

The first chapter of Edward Said’s On Late Style, which is also in many ways Said’s love letter to Theodor Adorno, provides the title for the volume, and the figures of Said, Adorno, and Roland Barthes figure prominently throughout the first part of the book. While portions like Nina Goss’s chapter on Revisionist Art offer a close Barthesian interpretation of Dylan’s visual artwork, the genres and disciplines covered in the book range from film criticism (Jim Salvucci’s “Masked, Anonymized, and Chronicled”), to cultural studies (Eric C. Callahan’s “Bringing the Margin to the Center”), and musicology (Julie Manson-Vacquié’s “‘Blowin’ in the Wind’: Creation and Re-Creation”). Those looking for perspectives on Dylan’s twenty-first century albums will for the most part need to look elsewhere; Jean Du Verger’s “‘A-Journeying Over the Shadows and the Rain’: Dylan’s Late Style(s)” is the only essay that thoroughly considers several of Dylan’s records from the 2000s and 2010s; the volume also closes with a coda reviewing Rough and Rowdy Ways. It is interesting to note that the most frequently cited of Dylan’s twenty-first century works in this volume is the 2004 memoir Chronicles: Volume One.

 

A brief introduction by Adrian Grafe outlines four different ways to consider Dylan’s more recent work: praise, predecession, profundity, and persona. Grafe notes that “persona” will be a particularly significant interpretive figure in much that follows. After this, the book is split into two parts: “Honest with Me: Late Dylan’s Performing Personae,” and “Roll on Bob: Late Dylan in Text and Tribute.” Nina Goss’s essay “‘I Make It So Easy for You to Follow Me: Making a Case for Dylan’s Revisionist Art” is a bold opening choice for the volume – even the most dedicated Dylan-watcher might admit that the case for Revisionist Art is not an easy one to make. Goss draws a bit from Said and rather a lot from Barthes to make the case that “phoniness is no obstacle to interpretation” (19); that Dylan’s employment of pop art vacuity in his unsubtly revised magazine covers is “bullshit” (Goss’s term, glossing Harry Frankfurt), but it is bullshit that can teach us a lot about the “violating and erasing principles of inscription and personae” (25).

 

Much of section one draws on Dylan’s film and TV appearances. In “Masked, Anonymized, and Chronicled: Dylan’s Fatal Auto-Mythos for the New Millenium,” Jim Salvucci argues that the 2003 film Masked and Anonymous and the 2004 book Chronicles: Volume One are both “liminal manifestations of the Dylan myth, wedged…between disclosure and deceit” (27). Salvucci argues that both the Jack Fate character in the movie and the narrator of Chronicles are part of Dylan’s “lifelong persona-building project” (27). It is worthwhile to read this account of these two Dylan projects side-by-side. Since critics generally praised Chronicles and panned Masked and Anonymous, Salvucci’s choice to subject both of these pieces to the same level of critique may inspire some readers to adjust their evaluations of these texts. Sara Martínez continues to analyze Dylan’s films, in this case reading both Masked and Anonymous and I’m Not There (2007) as ways to understand Dylan’s performances of masculinity (“Performativity, Subversion, and Mask-ulinity: Dylan on Screen, Dylan as Screen”). In this chapter, Martínez also argues for the ways in which “Dylan’s emergence as a pop music icon coincides with the rise of new kinds of screen subjectivity” (43), drawing from the work of Laura Mulvey, Theodor Adorno, and Steven Cohan. Martínez finds subversions of American masculinities in Dylan’s refusal to be truly present in either film. Charles Bonnot continues to explore Dylan’s filmography in “No Direction Home: When Dylan Does Look Back,” which articulates the relationship between Martin Scorsese’s 2004 documentary No Direction Home and D. A. Pennebaker’s 1967 Dylan film Dont Look Back, focusing mostly on the implicit critiques of media and authenticity expressed in different ways throughout both films.

 

Two of the volume’s strongest essays follow this trilogy of film analysis, and they both take on one of the more perplexing aspects of Dylan’s twenty-first century presence: namely, his willingness to appear in advertisements. Andrew McKeown handles the subject with quizzical good humor in “Dylan Does Adverts. Surely Not? Surely?,” while Erin C. Callahan’s “Bringing the Margin to the Centre: Dylan’s Visible Republic” boldly integrates Dylan’s ad appearances within the rest of his artistic mythos. McKeown uses Dylan’s presence in Super Bowl commercials as an opportunity to discuss the relationship between authenticity and iconicity. Dylan once asked a reporter at Newport in 1965, “Why did you go electric?,” and McKeown artfully suggests that, if we were to ask Dylan why he went commercial, he would turn the question back at us in a similar manner (79). Callahan also compares complaints about Dylan “selling out” to complaints about him going electric decades earlier, but goes a step farther by explicating the ways in which “Dylan’s appearance in commercials is an extended performance providing new avenues of interpretation, thus keeping him relevant in the sixth decade of his career” (94). Readers who may feel perplexed by Dylan’s choices in the realm of advertising will find new and original ways to approach the issue in these essays.

 

The final two essays in the first section are the first to make Dylan’s music a central focus. Julie Mansion-Vaquié’s “Creation and Re-Creation in Dylan’s Performances of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ (1963-2016)” offers a musicological account of Dylan’s performances of his sixties-era hit, replete with charts of stage settings, tempos, instrumental arrangements, and song structures. While this data is usefully comprehensive, this chapter leaves room for further explication; the conclusion that “Dylan’s accomplishment thus brings him to surpass his own creation” (118) is rather adulatory, especially regarding a song that is already held in near-universal critical acclaim. Anne-Marie Mai investigates the presence of melancholia in songs like “Not Dark Yet” and “Red River Shore,” comparing them with his 2010 Brazil Series of paintings and interpolating the work of other famous melancholics like Kierkegaard, Keats, and Lars von Trier. All of the songs in this chapter are from the twentieth century; when twenty-first century Dylan appears, the reader meets him as a painter, not a singer or a musician.

 

Still, whether painter, documentary subject, or artistic prankster, Dylan’s various personae tie the first half of the volume together. The same cannot quite be said for the second half: “Roll on Bob: Late Dylan in Text and Tribute” is more of a catchall description of a smaller selection of essays about Dylan’s albums and lyrics and his Nobel Prize. Jean Du Verger’s “‘A Journeying over the Shadows and the Rain’: Dylan’s Late Style(s)” is, as the title suggests, the volume’s one essay that looks closely at Dylan’s twenty-first century albums in relation to the concept of “late style” that Said and Adorno elucidate. Du Verger actually identifies Time Out of Mind as “the dawn of Dylan’s late style” (145), but leaves no stone unturned—even incorporating Christmas in the Heart—on the journey to show how Dylan’s late work “address[es] lateness,” both in the sunset of a lifelong career and of life itself (146). In “‘The Last Outback at the World’s End’: Dylan’s Sense of an Album’s Ending,” M. Cooper Harriss describes Dylan’s enduring fascination with the album as a format for composing and distributing music, applying Frank Kermode’s theory of the relationship between the end of a story and the end of the world to a handful of Dylan albums, roughly half of which are from the twenty-first century. Readers may finish this chapter with some lingering questions about how the author justifies referring to the album “as, like fiction, a narrative genre” (10); Harriss states that the listener should think of the album as “a narrative genre fed by the significant interplay of words and music within a sequence of songs” (152), but it is not immediately apparent how this definition compares with a definition of narrative fiction.

 

Denis Feignier analyzes Dylan’s reception of various awards in “‘No Success Like Failure’? Dylan’s Awards, from Princeton to the Nobel.” This essay stands out in that it does not focus only on the infamous (and fairly talked-out) Nobel, and that it is also based on the author’s personal experience working with the French Minister of Culture who awarded Dylan a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres. (Bob responded to the award in the most Dylanesque manner possible, which is too good of a story to spoil here.) Feignier makes the case that, even though Dylan may come off as dismissive of honors and awards, it often happens that a Bob Dylan-style expression of humility is taken as aloofness. Simon McAslan’s “‘How Could It Be Any Other Way?’ Dylan’s Editorial Decisions in The Lyrics: 1961-2012” is a delightful investigation of Dylan’s refusal to be nailed down to one lyrical interpretation or another even in an official published edition of the words for his songs. McAslan also offers a very helpful genealogy of official and unofficial published versions of Dylan’s lyrics.

 

Christopher Ricks’s contribution to this volume is a brief evocation of Dylan’s and T.S. Eliot’s Nobel acceptance speeches, and it is followed by Adrian Grafe’s “Dylan Nobelized? Dylan Ricksified?,” which discusses Ricks’s Dylan studies legacy in relation to Dylan’s Nobel prize. The volume ends with a review of Rough and Rowdy Ways – which was released after the conference but before the publication of the book – by Grafe and McKeown. “The more Dylan extends the boundaries of his musical expression,” they say, “the more he wants to be different to his previous avatars and to experiment, as he clearly does here, and the more all the different components of the canvas that he has been painting for over sixty years fall into place” (217). From documentary subject to pop art provocateur to branding experiment for PepsiCo, 21st-Century Dylan showcases that canvas’s eclecticism.

 

Readers who go looking in this volume for versions of Bob Dylan in the twenty-first century will therefore find a dizzying array of avenues to traverse, from filmography to acceptance speeches and beyond. For Dylan scholars who may not have had the resources to travel to France and experience this particular conference, it will doubtlessly prove useful to have a published record of this fascinating series of conversations. It remains telling, however, that the twenty-first century Dylan represented here is not necessarily the Bob Dylan of his twenty-first century albums, but a more complicated and more expansive character. Maybe Bob Dylan still is a musician, but the lesson of the past two decades is that he was never “just” a musician in the first place. And isn’t the hallmark of a great “song and dance man” the ability to keep us guessing what the next step in the dance will be?

August 26, 2023 by
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REVIEW OF The Bootleg Series Vol. 17 – Fragments: Time Out of Mind Sessions (1996 – 1997)

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Bob Dylan. The Bootleg Series Vol. 17 – Fragments: Time Out of Mind Sessions (1996 – 1997.) Columbia, 2023.

REVIEW BY Court Carney, Stephen F. Austin State University

 

“It’s certainly not an album of felicity.”
– Bob Dylan[1]

Time Out of Mind, Bob Dylan’s landmark 1997 album, begins in strangeness. Faint plucking, a tapping boot, the sound of thick air. Then, a staccato organ. These few seconds disorient. “I’m walking,” Bob Dylan intones, “through streets that are dead.” “I’m sick of love…I’m love sick.” An album of death, breakup, love lost, love betrayed – Time Out of Mind has elicited profound commentary on its meaning and significance since its release. The blues runs through this record in form and feeling, but the content betrays a more multifaceted approach. The record slyly resists any easy characterization. An album interested in the liminal spaces connecting, and dividing, characters caught in various narratives. Often called a “midnight album,” it also remains a sunset record – the golden hour rewritten as vicious noir. The production, spearheaded by Daniel Lanois, favors the amber dying light, all flickers and shadows. A formidable record of place and time, of mood and perspective, Time Out of Mind continues to stun a quarter-century after its release.

Hailed as a grand return to form upon its arrival in September 1997, Time Out of Mind endures as a towering collection of songs and serves as a dividing point between mid- and late- period Dylan; Before Time, After Time. Some songs became long-held standards in Dylan’s setlists, and others found a new audience as artists covered them. The record works as an introduction, a continuance, a divider, a collection, and an entity. It remains difficult to overstate the power this record has musically and emotionally, as well as its importance within Dylan’s extensive catalog.

Released as the seventeenth volume of Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series, Fragments: Time Out of Mind Sessions (1996 – 1997) now expands the context of the 1997 record through a new mix, alternative takes, live cuts, and several outtakes. Contradictions define the original record, Dylan’s darkest, yet it contains some of his funniest lines. One of Dylan’s most cohesive records includes some of his most standalone songs. This new collection only reinforces the edgy magnetism of the album. Packaged as a five-CD set (as well as in two-disc, four-LP, and ten-LP configurations) complete with essays by Douglas Brinkley and Stephen Hyden, alternate takes, outtakes, and live cuts, the collection reveals much of how the record came together without completely demystifying the spectral web of songs at the center.

In 1985, Bob Dylan released Biograph, a career retrospective splayed across five LPs, which reoriented his life in music by juxtaposing hits, rarities, and outtakes into a collage free of traditional chronology. This boxset, which helped establish the prestige artist repackaging of the 1980s and 1990s, inaugurated a period of coming to terms with the larger question of his legacy. Six years later, in 1991, Dylan released the first (three) volumes of his ongoing Bootleg Series, of which Fragments is the seventeenth iteration. In conjunction with Biograph, this new boxset uncovered hidden narratives and drafted alternative histories of Dylan’s career. Even as he produced new music throughout the late 1980s, Dylan pushed forward a reconsideration of history and an emphasis on seeking order out of the chaotic past. Despite the critical evaluations of the records he produced during this period, the bridge between Biograph to the Bootleg Series (not to mention the origins of the Never Ending Tour, the Traveling Wilburys, and the two folk records) spans a rich period of revitalization. Dylan’s songs on Time Out of Mind came out of this context as much as any other. “But it is a harsh, honest portrait,” Martin Renzhofer wrote of Time Out of Mind in 1997, “of an artist and poet coming to grips with his past.”[2]

As Douglas Brinkley recounts in his liner notes, Lanois studied records by Charley Patton, Little Walter, Little Willie John, Arthur Alexander, Link Wray, and others “to get across the sound [Dylan] imagined.” Some of these singers, such as Patton, were primal influences on Dylan, predating even Woody Guthrie. These artists and their records became the soundtrack to the pre-recording sessions as Dylan began conceptualizing what the record would look like. During these early conversations, Dylan famously inquired about making a record like Beck, whose Odelay offered a compelling case for the musical bricolage that had defined Dylan’s creative and songwriting interests for decades.[3] Lanois took Dylan to mean that loops and beats should be the foundation of the recordings, which quickly began to grate on Dylan. The blues, in mood, content, vibe, and intent, served as the spiritual mood board for the songs as Dylan worked with Lanois to build the landscape that came to support Time Out of Mind.

An important thread to Time Out of Mind, perhaps less obvious than others, connects to Bob Dylan’s relationship with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead. The story of Dylan and Garcia and their relationship goes a long way to explain and contextualize Dylan’s return to performing and songwriting. In Chronicles, Dylan wrote movingly, mystically, and even magically about Garcia’s remagnetizing of his performing compass. Garcia died of a heart attack in August 1995. “There are a lot of spaces and advances between the Carter family, Buddy Holly and, say, Ornette Coleman, a lot of universes,” Dylan said in his eulogy at Garcia’s funeral, “but he filled them all without being a member of any school.” Garcia’s death, as Brinkley notes, vibrated across the Time Out of Mind sessions. If we draw a circle around the period of 1985, say, and 1991 (roughly from Biograph to the origins of the Bootleg series), as a discrete moment in Dylan’s career where legacy building began to take center stage, then we might also draw a second ring around 1987, when Dylan first connected with the Grateful Dead on stage and 1995, with Garcia’s death. As Dylan began working on Time Out of Mind in 1996 and 1997, this friendship undoubtedly impacted these sessions. On a related note, in the wake of the release of Fragments, Dylan began pulling out an ever-lengthening list of Grateful Dead covers on his tour in Japan and Italy. Garcia’s presence continues to suffuse Dylan’s creative output.

After a preliminary planning meeting in New York, Dylan and Lanois decamped for Teatro, Daniel’s studio in a converted old Mexican movie theater in Oxnard, California. These sessions (from the early fall of 1996) excited Lanois, who perceived his production work as connecting with Dylan’s new songs. Dylan’s comment about Beck had inspired Lanois and his right-hand man, drummer Tony Mangurian, to layer multiple percussion tracks as a bed to the three blues-centered songs on the agenda. In his studio, with control over the emerging sonic landscape, Lanois hoped this record would be a landmark of lyrics and sound. Dylan, however, began to feel otherwise. The songwriter had long experienced unease in recording studios, where his interest in capturing the essence of a song trumped studio experimentation and development. At one point, Dylan just left. He told Lanois that Oxnard and Teatro, thirty miles up the coast from Dylan’s home in Malibu, proved too distracting. Later, he told David Fricke that he was frustrated with Lanois’s polyrhythmic obsessions, which to his mind, failed to “work for knifelike lyrics trying to convey majesty and heroism.”

Despite Dylan’s misgivings – and clearly, tensions existed between him and Lanois, however redefined they became in hindsight – the Teatro recordings included on Fragments are some of the most beautiful vocal performances of his career. The Scottish ballad, “The Water is Wide,” which he had performed back during the Rolling Thunder days, sounds both modern and ancient – bending the past to fit into the contemporary moment. Likewise, “Dreamin’ of You” (an alternative take that appeared on Tell Tale Signs in 2008) features such a beguiling loping beat you wonder who could ever consider this track a dead end; the song, however, would be later reconfigured into another, lyrically superior song, “Standing in the Doorway.” Finally, an entire book could be devoted to a third Teatro recording: “Red River Shore.” Unlike the other two songs, Dylan continued to work on “Red River Shore” after leaving Oxnard. All told, Fragments collects four versions of the song, two previously unreleased. Dylan undoubtedly connected to the music, which seemed as ancient and deep as “The Water is Wide,” “Lakes of Pontchartrain,” or any other ageless ballad. Dylan’s voice shines here as an instrument of potent emotional force. Still, this new collection underscores that these songs do not fit on Time Out of Mind. As gorgeous they are – and rejecting as they do the idea that Teatro was nothing but failed percussion experiments – they would distort the thematic and sonic coherence of the finished record.

After Oxnard, Dylan relocated to Miami, Florida, exchanging the idiosyncratic cool of Teatro with the well-trod history of Criteria Studios. Lanois disliked the move, and the 2,800-mile relocation reoriented the working relationship between producer and artist. Dylan brought in new musicians, including Jim Dickinson, who had a musical training much more in line with the southern take on the blues Dylan had been seeking out in his persistent return to those older records. The tensions between Dylan and Lanois remain as much a part of the Time Out of Mind story as the songwriting and music, and Dickinson’s presence (as seen in John Lewis’s fascinating account, Whirly Gig) only seemed to divide the two men further. These pressures and anxieties helped frame the metanarrative of the finished album, even if listeners would be hard-pressed to hear them in the (digital) grooves. The eleven songs assembled for Time Out of Mind feel like such a coherent piece of music (yes, even with “Make You Feel My Love”) that the backstory clashes seem impossibly distant. Still, as Fragments illustrates, Dylan and Lanois crashed through several (sometimes radically) different iterations of these songs. A song like “Not Dark Yet,” so elemental to the sound of the record, for example, appears in one version on Fragments as an animated swing. It works better than one might initially think, but it lacks the gravitational pull of the released version.

This set allows for a glimpse into the choices made in the studio and afterward as the record came together. Regarding lyrics, Dylan continued tweaking and editing verses between takes, with some versions featuring fundamental reworkings. In some instances, some early songs were jettisoned with lyrics used in different compositions. These outtakes and alternative arrangements, then, In “Dreamin’ of You,” for example, one verse (the “live my life on the square” section) gets reimagined as “Standing in the Doorway.” Regarding tonal and sonic selections, the box collects alternative versions that offer untaken paths. For instance, an early version of “Love Sick” has Dylan drawing out a later excised lyric: “and the air is haaaazzzzy.” An early version of “Not Dark Yet,” has an entirely different upbeat vibe, with a rhythm that unfairly connects the song to Sade. I realize how weird that looks in print, but it can be hard to shake once you get her “By Your Side” in your mind. Scholars will have a field day with these iterations as they trace the vapor trails of one version to the next. The key example is “Mississippi,” which appears in five different studio forms and a live performance from 2001. Dylan ultimately scrapped the song for Time Out of Mind, revisiting it for the follow-up: “Love and Theft.” Each version is distinct in mood and direction: some swing, some drive, some lope, some drift. What’s curious is that Dylan’s singing differs widely in each iteration, but each time he sells it – each vocal performance is present and engaged, even if they offer radically different interpretations. The song clearly had its teeth in him, even if Lanois, as Brinkley notes in his essay, “didn’t think its lyrics were all that special.” Dylan knew what he had. This set offers many such insights and surprises.

A quarter-century later, the high level of songcraft and production stuns. A noted return to form in 1997, the album surpasses even the more significant praise given at the time. The songs come together beautifully, connected in theme, production, and performance. The opener, “Love Sick,” still sounds unlike anything else Dylan has ever pursued. Fragments augments this cut with two alternate takes, which offer shifts in lyrics and instrumentation. The spectral nature of the song is maintained across every version, the combination of haunted pedal steel guitar and a staccato organ continuing to unsettle. 1997? Maybe. 1957? Maybe. Dylan and Lanois had detuned the radio just enough to blur time and space, and “Love Sick” offers a sonic mission statement. Together, the first three tracks (“Love Sick,” “Dirt Road Blues,” and “Standing in the Doorway”) sketch out the meaning and vibe of the record: a record of walking, waiting, shadows, and ghosts. If there is an underrated song on a record filled with minor and major masterpieces, it would be “Standing in the Doorway,” which has aged exceptionally well. The alternate takes included show the musicians driving the song at a bit more of a gallop, but the blues narcotic of the released version sinks into the 3 a.m. mood as the band nears the end of a long gig. There’s still some gas in the tank, but the rhythm section has relaxed into a mellow groove that the band and dancers alike can ride for the rest of the night. The lyrics (at once straightforward and intricately layered) give tips of the hat to Woody Guthrie, Jimmie Rogers, and Big Joe Turner by way of the Rolling Stones.

Two masterworks anchor the middle of the record: “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven” and “Not Dark Yet,” as well as the live standard, “Cold Irons Bound.” This section of the album gives heft to the thematic core of the songs. Much of the gravitational pull of the record sinks in here, with the serious and reflective colliding with the existential and hilarious. The ease with which Dylan combines, juxtaposes, and blurs the dramatic with the comical gives the record its heft – the blues cut with jokes. Real jokes (you picked the wrong time to come) sometimes, glancing jokes elsewhere (I don’t know what “all right” even means), and often jokes that you know will turn sour in their retelling to the point that the storyteller begins to think, was this ever funny? But it was and is and will be again. In “Million Miles,” the narrator is always on the verge of telling a joke or a horror story. So much of Time Out of Mind rests on this enigmatic combination of heaviness and grace. The alternate takes on Fragments hint at the decision-making process (shifts in tones, tempos, and words) but also reinforce what makes the released versions work. The way Dylan draws out “gayyy Paree” in “Not Dark Yet,” for example, strikes such a beautiful balance of a light touch welded to the muted gloom of the rest of the song. These moments impel the listener to return to these songs as meanings shift, every relisten exposing some new truth.

And then there is “Make You Feel My Love.” Long a punching bag for critics, time has been kind to this ballad tucked into the back third of the album. Laura Tenschert has referred to the song “Dylan fans love to hate.”[4] The lyrics may not equal his most inspired work, but his voice is in fine form, and the melodies, particularly in the bridge, are solid. An argument could be made that criticism of this song (and to be fair, there seems to be a bit of growing revisionism here) stems mainly from the middle-of-the-road, lackluster cover versions that flourished in the decade or so since its release.[5] This final third of the record (“Make You Feel My Love,” “Can’t Wait,” and the incomparable “Highlands”) offers a conclusion, maybe, but at least a murmured recapitulation of everything that had come before. Of all the songs on the record, “Can’t Wait” has the most interesting shadow history, and Fragments presents wildly different takes on the song. Finally, as if that word could ever be used to describe this song, “Highlands” brings things to a climax and an ending. At 16 and a half minutes, “Highlands” wanders from stanza to stanza, scene to scene. One of his forever songs (see also: “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” “Desolation Row,” or “Tangled Up in Blue”), “Highlands” could seemingly continue ad infinitum. The narrator could add new tales or different takes on old tales continually without tiring. This performance also provides a summary statement of every aspect of the record: the Charley Patton appropriation in the riff, the Robert Burns pilfer in the lyrics, the modern references crashing into ancient allusions, the darkness and light. The Boston diner scene – some of Dylan’s most remarkable writing matched with some of his most extraordinary singing – is as long as the entirety of “Love Sick,” but it never wears out its welcome. These seven verses could be repeated and rewritten in countless places, yet they always land the same way. “Every day,” Dylan sings, “is the same thing out the door.”

Since the 1980s, touring has given life to the songs. Dylan has repeatedly argued that the songs find their life on the stage. New arrangements come and go, new keys, and sometimes even new lyrics keep the songs fluid and vital. Several of these songs on Time Out of Mind became standards – “Cold Iron Bounds,” certainly – lifting concerts years after other songs drifted away. The producers of Fragments have included a disc of live cuts of every song on the record save “Dirt Road Blues,” which was never played live, spanning 1998 through 2001. The versions offered feature fantastic performances and illustrate how strong Dylan’s band was during this period. At first listen, several live cuts seem like audience tapes or rough soundboard recordings – existing just under the threshold of what would be expected technically from a set like this one. Still, the sound tends to craft its own mood, which works with the material. Immediacy trumps aural perfection, and Dylan’s voice conveys the material’s infinite, ricocheting meanings night after night. Together, these performances (especially the fiery 1998 version of “‘Til I Fell in Love With You” from Buenos Aires) underscore the strength of the bones of these compositions as much as demonstrate Dylan’s argument that the stage remains the true test.

Mostly rave reviews met the release of Time Out of Mind in the early autumn of 1997. The record engendered lots of “Dylan’s best since Oh Mercy” (or Infidels, or Blood on the Tracks, or…). A look at the release schedule of 1997 is instructive. A year dominated by Radiohead’s OK Computer and the early apex of electronic(a) records (The Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, and Spiritualized each released significant records that year) also saw several high- profile legacy acts. Paul McCartney, on the heels of the Beatles Anthology project, released Flaming Pie, garnering his best reviews in fifteen years. In addition, the same week as Time Out of Mind, the Rolling Stones released Bridges to Babylon. This record featured an updated sound courtesy of the Dust Brothers, the production team fresh off Beck’s Odelay. Thus, as Dylan pushed Lanois to consider Beck’s method and ended up with something not Beck-like at all, the Stones grabbed the same production team and ended up with something different and also not like Beck. These three records, however, illustrated the hard road facing “aging” musicians attempting to remain vital 35-plus years into their careers. This consideration of age defined the reception to the Rolling Stones, who had long dealt with “comebacks” and the “too old” wisecracks of critics. McCartney experienced less of this discussion, though he weathered constant comparisons to work decades earlier. Dylan encountered a bit of both. His reviews routinely raised his age (he turned 56 a few months before the record release) and debated how this new collection fit into his oeuvre (with almost uniformly positive acclaim). Then news of his battle with histoplasmosis pericarditis, something he suffered through after the recording sessions ended, gave plenty of critics a new way to frame the record: Dylan had just written (untrue) a masterpiece about his mortality (possibly true, though unconnected).

The news of Dylan’s heart ailment, a much more headline-grabbing idea than the (still very serious) inflammation of the sac around the heart, gave critics the framing necessary to recontextualize the record as a record of impending death and doom. His Buddy Holly comment at the Grammys, then, had added significance. “I just want to say that when I was 16 or 17 years old, I went to see Buddy Holly play at Duluth National Guard Armory and I was three feet away from him,” Dylan noted, “and he looked at me.” “And I just have some sort of feeling,” Dylan continued, “that he was – I don’t know how or why – but I know he was with us all the time we were making this record in some kind of way.” Dylan clearly connected to Holly, who would have only been 61 at the time if he had lived. Still, instead of seeing that memory as a melancholic moment, it could very well serve as a memory of creative inspiration. Seeing Holly zapped Dylan back to the moment of becoming. Perhaps instead of a record of gloom, it was more a record of invention as he placed Holly front and center as a standard bearer of creativity rather than a hero gone too young. Still, death hung over the record in spirit and content, even if disconnected entirely from the specific moments conjured up by critics and reviewers. A key element of the conversation dealt obviously with the lyrics, but the production, too, gave heft to the claims of melancholy. Lanois’s shadowy production offered candlelight cast upon stone: no straight lines, each sound collapsing into the other. “It is a spooky record,” Dylan told David Gates in 1997, “because I feel spooky. I don’t feel in tune with anything.”[6]

The production is such an integral part of this record that it remains challenging to cleave the two apart: the songs from Lanois, Lanois from the songs. Dylan’s presence, of course, is central. If Lanois gets much of the credit (and maybe all of the discredit from those unhappy with the smudged fingerprint-laden tone), it bears repeating that Dylan established the impulse for the sonic continuity of the album. “But there is nothing contemporary about this record,” Dylan told Edna Gunderson. “We went back to the way a primitive record was made, before the advent of technology….And the whole record is live. That adds a certain ambience to everything.” One of the more provocative inclusions on Fragments is a remix of the entire record (without the original mix included). Remixed by Michael H. Brauer, who had worked on previous projects, including the fourth volume of the Bootleg Series (the 1966 Manchester Free Trade Hall performance), the new mix is both subtle and radical. Less a Giles Martin revisionism (a restructuring of the record that deepens the sound while uncovering various aural oddities), Brauer’s remix repositions the instrumental commotion so central to the original record. With multiple pedal steels, guitars, organs, and drums populating most tracks, with much of it bleeding over into the vocal mic, everything crashes into each other. One of the joys of the Lanois mix is this clatter where multiple pedal steel guitars, itself an audacious choice, blur with the other guitars and keyboards. Fretted notes, buzzy reverb, whispered slides: each sound bending into the other and becoming a sound larger than itself. Brauer gives more focus to this roar and allows new ways of listening to particular songs within this reinvention. The producer has alluded to a directive from Dylan’s team to “simplify” the sound (and the production team’s decision to incorporate this new mix shows their commitment to the results). In the remix, each song becomes a detective story: was that organ always in the mix in “Dirt Road Blues”? Listening can become a bit of a thrill. Still, to my ear, nothing surpasses or eclipses the original Lanois production. The new songs have their own shine, but the original murky mix retains its rightful place.

The legacy boxset, a mainstay of artists’ catalogs for at least four decades, is no longer a given. The last couple of years have seen an uptick in conversation about the meaning, sustainability, and need for such pricey retrospectives. Dylan spearheaded the entire concept of these collections back with Biograph in 1985 and the first Bootleg Series six years later. Since then, Dylan and his team have put out fourteen volumes of unreleased material. Ultimately this latest volume is one of the most consistently listenable volumes of the entire bootleg series, working both as a historical document and a coherent record. It combines the strengths of the best previous sets: the inclusion of different sessions that don’t alienate the more casual listener. Volumes such as 2015’s The Cutting Edge, which focused on 1965-1966 sessions, and 2018’s More Blood, More Tracks, focusing on Blood on the Tracks, filled significant historical holes, even if repeated listens often required breaking sessions down into more selective playlists. Fragments, on the other hand, is through and through a stunning achievement that helps explain the origins of the record and provides unique perspectives to understanding the context of the original album. Still the question remains: is there a future for these types of boxsets? Dylan’s career certainly provides ample content: a box on Street Legal, say, the Dylan and the Dead tour, or some new configuration that refracts other fascinating aspects of his past. But is there an audience?

In 2020 and 2021, during the Covid lockdown in the United States, I returned to Time Out of Mind as balm, as a distractor. It seemed to hold a particular resonance, much like, say, REM’s New Adventures in Hi-Fi, another record of movement and stasis, sonic blasts and meditative spaces. For reasons known and unknown, I obsessed over “Highlands,” with its luxuriating pulse and seemingly endless verses. A grand finale of sorts, the song pushes against the dark mortality of the rest of the album. It’s funnier, for one thing, as it careens across the various set pieces. But it also offers the crack that diffuses the darkness. The final lines of “Highlands,” and thus of the entire record, end in sunlight. A different sun for the narrator than before, to be sure, but he also has “new eyes”: a reminder, perhaps, that no matter how much anguish envelops Time Out of Mind, the record would not work without the light. The final lines of the record offer the unclenching fist, And that’s good enough for now. To its credit, Fragments only heightens the contrasts that define the album. Hearing these different takes only complements what makes Time Out of Mind work. Even the remix serves the songs. Historical revisionism in the greatest of ways, Fragments allows a deep dive into what makes the original record work while maintaining the ghostly integrity of the music at the heart of the project. And that’s good enough for now.

 

[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-dec-14-ca-63920-story.html

[2] Salt Lake Tribune, 10/19/1997.

[3] www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/bob-dylan-what-do-you-think-of-this-kid-called-beck/

[4] “Initially dismissed by reviewers as a failure,” Tenschert writes, “it has since grown into a wildly successful pop hit. It’s the song that’s loved by the masses, but hated by Dylan purists.” https://www.definitelydylan.com/listen/2023/3/24/make-you-feel-my-love-the-marmite-of-bob-dylan-songs. See also: https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/dylans-to-make-you-feel-my love-why-so-much-dislike-for-it-on-the-forum.197992/page-3.

[5] Billy Joel’s version (on his third greatest hits compilation) predated Dylan’s release by one month. In his list of “Dylan’s Worst Songs,” critic Alfred Soto notes that “Garth Brooks, Billy Joel, Bryan Ferry are among the artists who have covered a plaint so generic that Garth Brooks, Billy Joel, and Bryan Ferry sing it exactly the same. https://humanizingthevacuum.wordpress.com/2016/05/26/can-you-understand-my-pain-dylans-worst-songs-2/.

[6] https://www.newsweek.com/dylan-revisited-174056.

August 26, 2023 by