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REVIEW OF The Complete Budokan 1978

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Bob Dylan. The Complete Budokan 1978, Columbia Legacy, 2023.

REVIEW BY Erin C. Callahan, San Jacinto College 

 

“Someday I Will Be Back to Reclaim It”

Bob Dylan’s liner notes in both the 1978 and the 2023 releases of his concerts at Budokan set the tone for listeners. Dylan writes:

The more I think about it, the more I realize what I left behind in Japan – my soul, my music, and that sweet girl in the geisha house. I wonder does she remember me? If the people of Japan wish to know about me, they can hear this record – also they can hear my heart still beating in Kyoto at the Zen Rock Garden – Someday I will be back to reclaim it.[1]

Here, Dylan shows us that he can best be understood in this period through emotion. Of course, that seems reasonable considering the hook of his most iconic song asks us “How does it feel?” rather than what do you think?[2] His reference to a “sweet geisha” draws our attention to women who have made a lasting imprint but are lost to him. Both factor into Dylan’s desire to revisit and reclaim his early songs. Just as he did in 2021 on Shadow Kingdom, Dylan reimagined some of his earlier songs as a later-stage act of agency and renewal. Of the twenty-eight songs on the setlist, nineteen were first written and recorded before 1967. A decade later, Dylan launched his 1978 world tour as he moved forward through a confluence of personal and professional disappointments.

 

When released in Japan in November 1978, and subsequently worldwide in April 1979, Bob Dylan at Budokan stoked the ire of many critics and fans – purists who felt affronted by Dylan’s revamping of iconic songs from his catalog. At the time, the album stood in contrast to his previous live offerings. Dylan’s first live album, Before the Flood, recorded on tour with The Band and released in 1974, established the standard for subsequent releases. Paul Williams lauded it as “an excellent representation of the tour, given the time limits of an LP record.” [3] Two years later, the release of Hard Rain coincided with a televised concert of the same name. Despite some of its issues, according to Williams, “the selection and sequencing of songs is masterful. There’s a consistent mood in the performances, the lyric content of the nine songs seems almost consciously designed to tell a story.”[4] As his third live album in five years, the release of Bob Dylan at Budokan was disappointing based on the precedent Dylan had set. After the successes of the previous two albums, many critics and fans objected to the lackluster lounge act arrangements and the spectacle of the performance, including Dylan’s costuming. Williams observed, “This idea – Bob Dylan marketing himself like a Las Vegas crooner, packaged music and showmanship for the mentally middle-aged – is so repellant to the average Dylan fan that the critical and public backlash that resulted is not surprising, and one wonders at Dylan’s failure to anticipate it.”[5] To be sure, the 1978 release of Bob Dylan at Budokan did not represent the zenith of Dylan’s career as a performing artist, but it didn’t reflect its nadir, either. 

 

The Complete Budokan challenges the mediocre distinction of its predecessor. The arrangements, vocalizations, and overall performances have not changed or been altered in production. Instead, they are presented in the original setlist order. Forty-five years on, listening to the entirety of the concerts recorded on February 28 and March 1, 1978 helps reframe this pair of shows within the many shifts, renewals, and rebirths Dylan has undertaken throughout the arc of his career. In this case, hindsight provides a fresh interpretation. As Edna Gunderson writes in her liner notes, “Bob Dylan at Budokan could be considered a late bloomer. Polarizing in its time, the third live release in Dylan’s catalogue has undergone a sober reappraisal over the decades as consumers and critics grew to admire its adventurous arrangements and provocative performances.”[6] In short, the audience has finally caught up with Dylan to understand more comprehensively what he was working on and through during this tour. As a result, the power of Dylan’s performances in these shows is borne from his vulnerability. After the contentious dissolution of his marriage, the failure of Renaldo and Clara, and the deaths of Phil Ochs and Elvis, Dylan found himself at another crossroads. At times he seems detached, working to find his way through the arrangements, the lyrical changes, and the phrasing of the songs. At other times, he is wired in with clear phrasing and, based on the stage banter, energy, and commitment to the performance, having fun. Clearly, he is in transition, simultaneously defying expectations, deconstructing his myth, and working toward some artistic and, perhaps, personal path forward.

 

One of the main criticisms of Bob Dylan at Budokan is that the band struggled through the arrangements. Dylan was joined by Rolling Thunder Review veterans Rob Stoner, Dave Mansfield, and Steven Soles. Rounding out the crowded stage of musicians was Ian Wallace on drums, Alan Pasqua on keyboards, Steve Douglas on saxophone and flute, Billy Cross on guitar, Bobbye Hall on percussion, and the trio of backing vocalists Helena Springs, Jo Ann Harris, and Debi Dye. Together the band seems unable to find their stride and unsure of how to accompany Dylan, who is notoriously stingy in his direction. The newness of this ensemble leads to messiness on some of the tracks, as Dylan himself alluded to during the performance on February 28. In between “Like a Rolling Stone” and “I Shall Be Released,” he thanked the audience for their applause and said, “It must sound better out there than it does up here.” The consensus among Dylan critics is that a recording from the later leg of the tour, like one of the European shows, would have better exemplified the band realizing their potential. That’s fair, but it wouldn’t have captured Dylan’s first trip to Japan, which was the original intent of the project. So, we sit here stranded with uneven tracks that at times sound like Dylan is backed by a high school marching band, and at others settle into a groove that show glimpses of the magic of the later tour dates.

 

Some aspects of the recordings, such as Dylan’s questionable introductions of the backup singers, did not age well. Our post-#MeToo era reconsiderations allow for an interpretation that highlights their underlying and contemporaneously unnoticed misogyny. It’s probable Dylan was being facetious, as his humor is often misunderstood or unrecognized. Undeniably, his jovial tone and the jokes he made about the other members of the orchestra suggest that he was attempting humor. Across the footlights, the audience’s perfectly timed laughter signals they understood this intent. However, when compared to the introductions of their male counterparts, the difference is remarkable. On February 28, Dylan presents two of the singers, Helena Springs and Debi Dye, as ghosts of past and future relationships, reducing them and their contributions to objectified love interests, mere relational identities, even if they’re in on the joke. Of accomplished percussionist Bobbye Hall, Dylan jokes they share the same hometown, though she is Detroit born. Singer Jo Ann Harris is the lone woman to elicit Dylan’s respect for her accomplishments and potential as an equal. That’s part of the problem. Unquestionably, the men are presented on equal footing, while only one of the women is. During the March 1 performance, the introductions are considerably shorter than those of the previous night. There is no joke about Bobbye Hall’s hometown and, rather than saying he met the backup singers at a “disc jockey convention,” he tells the audience he met these “beautiful ladies” when “[he] first heard [them] singing in a department store.” Again, he objectifies the women, focusing on their appearance and calling attention to their attractiveness, which further diminishes them as professionals. In contrast, on both nights, Dylan emphasizes the male musicians’ impressive resumés, invites them to highlight their skills in focused solos, and encourages additional audience applause. From a twenty-first century sensibility, the disparity is unmistakable, and Dylan’s humor is outdated. 

 

Other aspects of the shows provide depth to understand Dylan within this moment in time as an artist grappling with personal and professional failures. He is at a low point in his life and his career. Gunderson writes, “as disco stormed the charts and bands like the Sex Pistols and The Ramones blasted into the mainstream, rock titans of the 1960s were increasingly mocked as tedious, old, and out of touch.”[7] Bob Dylan at Budokan certainly gave punk rockers reason to aim their derision. Douglas’s intrusive saxophone on songs like “Oh, Sister,” the musical theater reggae version of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” and the cacophony of sound on songs like “Just Like a Woman” certainly invite those critiques. Gunderson continues that Dylan escaped their ridicule. Indeed, Dylan seems unassailable because he has historically been on the forefront of artistic trends, with everyone else racing to keep up. His resistance is his reluctance to capitulate to mainstream appetites. In the late 1960s, when Dylan’s contemporaries shifted toward psychedelic and heavily produced music, Dylan turned toward country in the pared-down minimalism of John Wesley Harding. The Budokan concerts reflect a similar reluctance. Rather than perform as a legacy act or a jukebox, affirming the audience’s expectations of him, he reclaimed his earlier songs through restructured arrangements that suit Dylan as a 36-year-old artist and man. The slower tempo of “I Want You” sounds like a lament for a lost love, perhaps a wife, rather than the exuberant desire at a relationship’s beginning. Similarly, Dylan’s phrasing and voice, including his harmonica playing, on “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” are delicate and vulnerable. The accelerated tempo suggests he is trying to rush through the song to avoid feeling it as deeply as the slower version allowed. Though most of these songs were written by a younger Dylan, he doesn’t perform them that way. Rather, he reinvigorates them and embodies them through the sensibility of an artist changed by age and time.

 

In mid-December, 1977, Dylan expressed a desire to get back on the road after the failure of Renaldo and Clara. He told Rolling Stone’s Jonathan Cott, “I have to get back to playing music, because, unless I do, I don’t really feel alive. … I have to play in front of people just to keep going.”[8] For Dylan, playing live music is regenerative and sustaining. At this pivotal point in his life, it seemed logical that he would return to the road for that purpose. This interview with Cott coincided with Dylan’s announcement of his upcoming tour, which would take him out of the United States for the first time in twelve years, and on his first ever trip to Japan. Heckel Sugano, an executive with Sony in Japan, understood the importance of this tour and focused his efforts on capturing it in a live recording. As he explains in his liner notes, the negotiations with Dylan’s people came together on February 19 with the dates for recording set for February 28 and March 1. After recording the shows was complete, Sugano and engineer Tom Suzuki began work on the album. Sugano concedes, “the most challenging aspect was selecting the songs” due to “the standard duration of a single side of an LP record” of twenty minutes.[9] The songs included on Bob Dylan at Budokan were curated from the two shows by Sugano and Suzuki who omitted many and arranged them in a way that attempted, but largely failed, to capture the essence of the complete performances. As a result, this limitation ultimately affected the composition of the album. Throughout the spring and summer, Sugano worked closely with Dylan to complete the project, showing him the final cut in June 1978. To date, the double-LP remains the only official live recording of Dylan’s 1978 world tour, an achievement of honor for Sugano and the team who worked on it. 

 

Nearly thirty years later, in 2006, when Sony Japan executive Tetsuya Shiroki inquired about the master tapes of the recorded Budokan shows, he learned they had been pristinely preserved and were kept at the Shizuoka factory’s master tape vault. From that point, he dedicated himself to commemorating Dylan’s first trip to Japan through the release of a collector’s edition box set of the complete performances. In his liner notes, Shiroki writes that he “reunited three key individuals involved in the 1978 concerts to help tell the story of The Complete Budokan 1978; Heckel Sugano, Product Manager at CBS Sony; Tomoo (Tom) Suzuki, the engineer who recorded and mix the music at Budokan on-site; and Terushia Tajima, the creative force behind the package design of the album.”[10] Assembling the original team members from Bob Dylan at Budokan ensured continuity and fidelity between the two projects. Together, they envisioned recreating Dylan’s February 28 and March 1 concerts at Budokan as a return to the ephemeral experience for those who attended the concerts, and as a glimpse of what the experience was like for those who did not. 

 

During the early stages of production, one of the tracks Shiroki and the team listened to was “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” Dylan’s opener for both shows that did not make the final cut of the original release. Including “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” on The Complete Budokan does more than restore the concerts’ full setlist in its proper order. The opening drum beat of the shows is reminiscent of the initial drum beat in “Like a Rolling Stone,” the shot that changed popular music in 1965. Aided by Al Kooper’s play on the B2 organ and Dylan’s backing band, the carnival of sound that followed that single strike of a snare drum announced Dylan’s departure from folk music. As an artist and a performer, Dylan had simply moved on. By 1978, Dylan had evolved several times in his career – from folk to rock and roll, to country, to roots music – each of which signaled a period of artistic growth.

 

The drum beat and the subsequent drum riff at the start of this arrangement of “A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall” have a similar effect. They also announced to concertgoers in 1978 and to listeners in 2023 a departure from what Dylan had previously done and who he had previously been as an artist and performer. Not only did the song serve as the show’s overture, what follows is an upbeat arrangement of one of Dylan’s iconic songs about human depravity, frailty, and apocalypse. This arrangement significantly alters the tone of the song. Each member of what Dylan refers to as his “orchestra” takes the lead, replacing Dylan’s vocal, eliminating the lyrics altogether. The dissonance between the music and the missing lyrics that the audience is certain to be familiar with signals a sense something new is about to unfold. Without lyrics or vocals, we are forced to focus on the arrangement as we grasp for a recognizable melody. Indeed, the absence of Dylan’s voice and words – two of his most powerful tools – is another signal that this experience will be something different. Here, Dylan is not standing at the ocean, though he may certainly be sinking. Instead, he has physically crossed an ocean to perform on this tour, but he is silent. Perhaps he doesn’t know his song well enough or cannot find the “right” voice to start singing. His vocal silence until the second song of the set signals the struggle he is working through on stage.

 

The audience first hears Dylan’s voice on “Repossession Blues” on the first night and “Love Her with a Feeling” on the second, both of which may point to Dylan reconciling his divorce. Playing these songs brings Dylan’s voice, but not his words, into the performance. In “Repossession Blues,” originally sung by Sun Records’ Billy Lee Riley, Dylan assumes the persona of a man who “ain’t got no money,” and tells us, “I’m gonna lose everything I own,” arguably a tongue-in-cheek reference to his recent costly divorce settlement. The sultry blues song, “Love Her with a Feeling” is a reminder that if you don’t love your woman while she’s yours, someone else will. Once again, this song choice can be read as an opaque reference to his marriage ending. These two songs establish the tone for many others in the set about lost love. The fourth song, Nashville Skyline’s “I Threw It All Away,” is both lament and confessional. Dylan’s phrasing reaches for something he can’t quite access. Further, Billy Cross’s lead guitar guides us through the song’s prelude to crescendo before crashing back to Dylan’s mournful lead vocal. “Going, Going, Gone” gets one of the most regrettable reworkings. The overblown and chaotic arrangement of Dylan’s 1974 song off Planet Waves loses its weight as a song of regret and loss. 

 

“Mr. Tambourine Man” stands out as one of the highlights in both nights’ shows. Even when the band’s play becomes murky, it is still largely a successful interpretation. It’s one of the songs in Dylan’s catalog perfectly suited for the stylistic revisions he performs on this tour. In its original version, “Mr. Tambourine Man” invites us into its wonderland through smoke rings of fantastical imagery. This up-tempo reimagining turns Dylan’s symbolist lyrics into a kaleidoscope of sound. Douglas’s flute and Pasqua’s keyboards provide the foundation for Dylan’s vocal, which positions him as the pied piper leading listeners through the fairy tale world of the song.

 

In this transitional period for Dylan, post-divorce and pre-conversion, a single word change in the lyrics shifts our perspective of the spectacle we are listening to or witnessing. In “Shelter from the Storm,” played fifth on February 28 and sixth on March 1, Dylan changed the lyric from “In a world of steel-eyed death and men who are fighting to be warm” to “men who are fighting to be born.” It’s possible that, as Michael Gray put forth in his interview with Craig Danuloff, Dylan’s work in this period clearly presages his evangelical conversion as Dylan identifies with Christ in the song.[11] In search of salvation, he sees himself as someone who has been persecuted and sacrificed. More poignantly, the lyric change suggests that rather than being cold and competing for warmth, in the form of love, shelter, or salvation, he is “fighting to be born” against the ever-present threat of death. When taken into consideration with the lyric “He not being busy born is busy dying” from “It’s Alright, Ma, (I’m Only Bleeding)” performed later in the set, we see that Dylan is, in fact, trying to be reborn artistically on stage. He’s doing so within the safety of a community of musicians, as he had done when he took the stage at Newport in July 1965, on tour with The Band, and with the Rolling Thunder Revue. However, mortality – through his brush with death in his motorcycle accident or through the deaths of his father, Woody Guthrie, Phil Ochs, and Elvis – hangs in the balance with Dylan fighting for refuge or rebirth.

 

Another important connection is that Elvis Presley’s death in August 1977, six months before the start of the 1978 tour, weighed heavily on Dylan. It arguably did not have the effect of Woody Guthrie’s death in 1967, Jerry Garcia’s in 1995, or George Harrison’s in 2001, but Elvis’s death shocked Dylan into an accounting of his life. Dylan’s performances on this leg of the tour were initially interpreted as tributes to Elvis. To be sure, interviews Dylan gave in 1977 and throughout 1978 reveal its presence in his mind. When Elvis died, Dylan told Robert Shelton, “I went over my whole life. I went over my whole childhood. I didn’t talk to anyone for a week … If it wasn’t for Elvis and Hank Williams, I wouldn’t be doing what I do today.”[12] Elvis’s formative influence on Dylan’s life and career is unmistakable. Further, he told Ron Rosenblum of Playboy that Elvis inspired him just as much as he did everyone else in the 1950s. As the first breakthrough rock star, Elvis provided the road map for the younger generation who followed him. His death meant there was no one to go before them as an aging rock and roller. But for Dylan, Elvis transcended this role. Not only was Elvis an idol for Dylan in his youth, at the time of Elvis’s death, he was also a peer as a cultural icon, an experience few artists shared. As the new figurehead for middle-aged musicians, Dylan undoubtedly felt the pressure of defining the path forward into the middle and late stages of their careers, if one even existed.

 

The theme of loss continues throughout the set as Dylan works to reclaim his voice. Throughout both shows, most of the songs are love songs or anti-love songs focused on or addressed to women. Here, Dylan’s liner note reference to the “sweet girl” he left behind at the Geisha house resonates through the women in the songs, many penned more than a decade earlier and based on women from his past. “Tomorrow is a Long Time” turns into a production with Douglas’s misplaced saxophone and the chorus of backing harmonies. Dylan’s lead vocal is the most compelling part of the performance. It comes through as a desperate ache for the woman in the song compared to the quiet longing of the original. Dylan’s melancholy tone and phrasing on “Girl from the North Country” express a deep yearning for the girl he left behind. A preview from 1978’s Street Legal, “Is Your Love in Vain” shows Dylan in a vulnerable moment, asking “do you understand my pain?” In this lyric, it’s empathetic, not rational, understanding Dylan seeks. These are songs he feels his way through, emotionally, vocally, and musically, asking listeners to do the same. 

 

The penultimate song in the set before the closer and encore, “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” loses the driving urgency and acerbic critique of society’s moral failings. In exchange, the extravagant production with violin, saxophone, and backing vocals adds pageantry, evoking a collective celebration of human turpitude rather than a singularly voiced condemnation. Matching the crescendos and diminuendos of the musical arrangement, Dylan’s voice rises and falls, ebbs and crashes, to punctuate the end of each verse and the chorus. The audience feels Dylan’s struggle against internal and external threats as he assures the “Ma” figure, “It’s alright.” Dylan follows this affirmation with “Forever Young,” in a church choir performance that feels like a hymn or prayer.

 

The coda to both performances, “The Times They Are a-Changin’” serves as an apt conclusion to the shows. Superficially, it conjures nostalgia for Dylan’s 1960s folk identity. His lead vocal is reminiscent of this earlier version of himself. It would arguably leave the audience satisfied he hadn’t omitted it from this set. However, played in context of this setlist, in these performances, and at this point in his life, it signals that just like the times, he, too, is changing. The performance begins with a minimal accompaniment from the orchestra that crescendos at the line “better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone” with the background singers and saxophone joining in the chorus before returning to Dylan’s single voice to start the next verse. The lyrics, clearly articulated here, recall those absent from the “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” show’s opener, “I’ll stand at the ocean until I start sinking.” Additionally, the rise and fall of the music and his voice mirrors the similar pattern in the Budokan arrangement of “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” Sonically, both songs roll like waves, crashing and retreating as we gather ourselves while Dylan attempts the same. As a closer, it bookends the show with hope. Where Dylan started the show in silence, allowing the musicians on stage to play in place of his voice, he ended in community with them, carefully finding his way.

 

One of the highlights of this box set is its design. As soon as it was released, unboxing videos flooded social media. The anticipation and excitement provided a fraction of what fans feel before a Dylan concert, but the effect was profound. Cutting through the protective cellophane outer casing felt akin to cutting a ceremonial ribbon. The outer box, a laminated cardboard case, is reminiscent of the original LP with a medium shot of Dylan in profile on the front and a shot from behind Dylan on the back. Dylan’s distance in the front cover photo, contrasted with his close-up in profile on the cover of Bob Dylan at Budokan, reminds us of the forty-five-year distance between the tour and the complete performances’ release. The photo also depicts a complete Dylan rather than a fragment, signifying the difference between the two Budokan albums. 

 

What lies inside delighted fans through the unity of its vision. If the first step to recreating the audience’s experience was to present the full audio of the concerts, the components of the box set completed the task. Terushia Tajima’s artistic concept achieves Shiroki’s overarching vision of replicating the experience of Dylan’s 1978 tour. His delicate and thoughtful design of the box set’s packaging and its contents captures the scope of Dylan’s time in Japan through artwork, photographs, and reproduced ephemera. Traditional Japanese woodblock paintings of birds and landscapes throughout the booklets and on the CDs evoke Dylan’s appreciation for Japanese nature and remind us of his spiritual connection to the Kyoto Gardens. Photographs of Dylan and his band – from arrival at the airport, in performance, and throughout Japan – provided by Joel Bernstein, Hirosuke Katsuyama, and Koh Hasebe allow us to follow Dylan in staged and candid moments. The cover artwork for the liner notes book depicts stylized versions of iconic Japanese figures – Mt. Fuji, a camphor tree, and the bullet train – with a rendering of Dylan in the bottom right of the composition standing at the water’s edge. Visually, this takes us back to the instrumental “A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall,” linking the visual elements with the concerts. The liner notes are complemented by a box of memorabilia, which maintains the theme with a lone camphor tree on its cover. It contains a collection of reproduced ephemera that Dylan fans who attended the concerts would immediately recognize or, for the obsessives among us, would have kept or collected. It is not intended for casual Dylan fans. Enclosed are two replica concert tickets, a tour program printed in Japanese with discography and photograph biography, tour photos, a tour poster, and advertisements. Also included is a replica of the 24 inch x 33 inch poster enclosed with the 1978 release. Lastly, there is a hardcover bifold encasing the four CDs or eight LPs that replicates the cover for the original two-LP set. The components work interdependently to achieve the complete Budokan experience.

 

Overall, The Complete Budokan is a complicated album because the performances were largely unrefined. Some of the arrangements are successful and find their groove. Others are less so and simply don’t, even after reconsideration. One of the strengths of this box set is having the complete performances in their proper setlist order. That allows listeners to recognize Dylan’s vulnerability as he reworks his songs and, by extension, himself as an artist through performance after the failures, deaths, and losses he’d recently experienced. In 1978, Dylan told Jonathan Cott, “The Seventies I see as a period of reconstruction after the Sixties, that’s all. That’s why people say: well, it’s boring, nothing’s really happening, and that’s because wounds are healing.”[13] Ultimately, The Complete Budokan heals old wounds for those of us returning to them and understanding them as a middle and transitional point in Dylan’s career. Listening to these tracks on repeat as I have done for weeks now, I’m left wondering, in the simplest terms, if it matters that the Budokan shows are messy. For me, messy Dylan is one of the most interesting Dylans. It humanizes him after the superhuman feats of quickly writing and recording Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde and then returning to that well for Blood on the Tracks. It shows us how artists fail and work to renew inspiration and, in Dylan’s case, continue to do so. 

 

[1] Dylan, Bob. Liner Notes: Bob Dylan The Complete Budokan 1978. 4

[2] Special thanks to Jason Nodler for sharing the seeds of this idea in conversation.

[3] Williams, Paul. Bob Dylan: Performing Artist 1974-1986. The Middle Years. Omnibus Press, 1974. 3.

[4] Williams, Paul. Bob Dylan: Performing Artist 1974-1986. The Middle Years. Omnibus Press, 1974. 82.

[5] Williams, Paul. Bob Dylan: Performing Artist 1974-1986. The Middle Years. Omnibus Press, 1974. 111.

[6] Gunderson, Edna. Liner Notes: Bob Dylan The Complete Budokan 1978. 27.

[7] Gunderson, Edna. Liner Notes: Bob Dylan The Complete Budokan 1978. 27.

[8] Cott, Jonathan. “Interview with Jonathan Cott, Rolling Stone. January 26, 1978.” Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews. Warner Media, 2006. 192.

[9] Saguno, Heckel. Liner Notes: Bob Dylan The Complete Budokan 1978. 12.

[10] Shiroki, Tetsuya. Liner Notes: Bob Dylan The Complete Budokan 1978. 48.

[11] Danuloff, Craig. “The Street to Slow Train – Song and Dance Man Vol. 2 Ch. 1 with Michael Gray.” FM Dylan Podcast. Episode 19, November 24, 2023.

[12] Shelton, Robert. The Fiddler Now Upspoke. London. 451.

[13] Cott, Jonathan. “Interview with Jonathan Cott, Rolling Stone. January 26, 1978.” Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews. Warner Media, 2006. 186.

February 21, 2024 by
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REVIEW OF Pledging My Time

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Ray Padgett. Pledging My Time: Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members, Burlington, Vermont: EWP Press, 2023, 453 pp.

REVIEW BY Eyolf Østrem

 

The greatest riddle when it comes to Bob Dylan is this: here is a guy whose name is synonymous with a nasal, whining voice and muted strings on out-of-tune guitars, and who made the two-note plonk-plonk solo (in)famous. Why, then, is it that a huge number of the greatest musicians of the past sixty years are all in awe when they get the chance to play with him – not because of his divine status as a cultural icon, but precisely because of what they unanimously refer to as his tremendous musical ability? Why is it that they all say the same: playing with Dylan is a blessing and an experience that stays with you for the rest of your life?

 

One thinks: no! it can’t be like that; it can’t be such a thrill to be playing three-chord dad-rock accompaniment to a mediocre soloist night after night. But that’s what they all say, those who have had the pleasure and the privilege.

 

The closest thing to an answer can be found in Ray Padgett’s Pledging My Time, a collection of interviews with musicians who have played with Bob Dylan over the years, and whose tongues the author has miraculously managed to loosen. In this review, I will try to approach that riddle from a number of different angles that all come to the fore in the book.

 

Pledging My Time covers more or less Dylan’s entire career, with interviews in more or less chronological order. Since many of the interviewees have been with Dylan for a very long time, the span is wider than what appears. The first interview in the book is with Noel Peter Stookey from Peter, Paul and Mary, but the earliest interview goes back to Dylan’s childhood friend Louie Kemp, who was enrolled as a producer for the Rolling Thunder tours in 1975 and 1976. Duke Robillard, who is the last musician among those interviewed to have joined the band – and left it after a mysteriously short stint in 2013 – is not the last interview in the book. That position is held by Benmont Tench, who has a history with Dylan that stretches from 1986 to 2020.

 

Between these outposts, most of the bases are covered. The interviews include an impressive range of musicians, from the legends (Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Richard Thompson, Scarlet Rivera, Jeff Bridges) over the band giants (Larry Campbell, Jim Keltner, David Mansfield, Winston Watson, as well as many of the musicians from his Gospel period band), to what is perhaps the most interesting and amusing group: the one-offs, those who happened to run into Dylan and found themselves standing on stage with him the next day.

 

There is Paul Jones, whose stage life with Dylan started when Dylan sat in with him, but who later got to play with Dylan as well. There is Xanthe Littlemore, a cocky, 22-year-old musician who got to open for Dylan in Adelaide, Australia without his having heard a single note of her music (“But are you any good?” Dylan asks. “Would I be here talking to you if I wasn’t?” was the self confident reply). And there is Bobby Valentino, who, with no preparation whatsoever, played violin on one song (“Lenny Bruce”) at one of the Wembley shows in 1987 (“I’m pretty good at winging things”).

 

There are two reasons why these stories are so interesting. One is that they give short glimpses into the turmoil that must be a Dylan tour. Valentino expresses it excellently: “One of the nights, I was sitting quietly in the VIP section next to the stage watching the Heartbreakers deal with the strangeness that is Bob Dylan.”

 

Planned Chaos

The other and main reason also goes to the core of the riddle: in their different ways, each interview is an illustration of that peculiar art of Dylan that could be called “Planned Chaos.” His art form depends on the illusion of immediacy, of the perception of a direct, spontaneous expression of genius, but how can that illusion be created and maintained in a medium – live music – which requires planning, rehearsal, and coordination? This has been one of the most persistent tales about Dylan as a band musician: that he constantly changes keys and arrangements, that his phrasing is unpredictable, that musicians rarely have a clue what they are going to play before he starts, and that they somehow have to watch the back of his hands on guitar neck to follow along. Winston Watson’s account of his first concert with Dylan, in front of an audience of 80,000 – which was also the first time he ever met Dylan himself – catches it perfectly: “Tony [Garnier, bassist and bandleader] just said, ‘Watch me, and watch him. It’ll unveil itself to you.’”

 

The most picture-perfect instance of this method is the Letterman performance in 1983. Everything about it seems chaotic, both to the audience and to the musicians. In the end, they actually play well rehearsed versions of the songs they had in fact spent the most time playing in the run-up to the show – it’s just that nobody knew. One account of this process is documented in the book, in the form of a lengthy interview with the bass player, Tony Marsico.

 

Revealed here are some of Dylan’s methods for achieving that rawness necessary for the immediacy that is a hallmark of his art: it is supposed to seem as if the performance grows spontaneously out of the inspiration of the moment. Dylan knows that is not possible; the second best is what he does: set certain conditions and thereby create the impression of immediacy. 

 

When Dylan invites people on stage  without preparation, or expects his musicians to play in impossible keys and stay away from the higher strings, it is a strong display of trust – both in the musicians themselves and in the ability of the group of all those involved to find their footing, no matter what. But it is also a sign of Dylan’s willingness to submit himself to unknown conditions, including the possibility of a flat faced fall. That those falls are so rare is a clear sign that his method is working, and to follow the development of this method is one of the great themes of the book.

 

The Film Director

One other aspect of Dylan’s art becomes abundantly clear in a way that, perhaps more than anything else, comes close to answering the original question: what is it about Dylan that makes it worthwhile to play with him? The answer is: because of his total control of his works and his arrangements, and not least because of the way he “plays” with his musicians. Reading through the various stories, the picture becomes clear of a band leader who picks musicians according to what musical direction he is after at the moment, much like a movie director chooses actors.

 

This is perhaps an obvious reflection, but I’ll make it anyway. For the fans who follow Dylan’s tours and receive each new line-up change with eager discussion, lamenting the one who has left and celebrating their own knowledge of the newcomer, the result of the change will only eventually become evident as the next tour progresses, and until then, the reason for the change will also be blurry.

 

To everyone else but Dylan, that is. What becomes clear from reading the interviews in the book, especially those from the Never Ending Tour years, is to what extent the entire touring project is one big continuous work of art, where changes in personnel, changes in arrangements, changes in Dylan’s attitude towards arrangements, changes in his attitude towards the setlist, the composition of the show, all work together. This continuity does not only apply to stylistic developments over the years, with the turn towards a country sound upon the advent of Larry Campbell as the most prominent example (whether the shift happened because of Campbell, or Campbell was recruited in order to implement the shift).

 

This is not to say that there is one all-encompassing master-plan behind the entire Never Ending Tour. But the shifts that become apparent in hindsight seem planned, in ways that become easier to see when they are confirmed by several independent stories.

 

One of those recurring stories is that nobody gets any instructions beforehand or feedback afterwards. Another is that the recruitment process is unconventional. Many of the musicians talk of periods of jamming loosely, but they are rarely given anything resembling a “you’re hired!” handshake; rather, they are expected to turn up at the beginning of the next tour leg. That these two peculiarities are two sides of the same coin becomes clear through the interviews: the jam sessions are in fact auditions, and instructions are not needed, because the musicians are picked not because of their ability to play as instructed, but because of what they do in fact play.

 

The Encyclopedia

A third strand of recurring stories also has to do with the audition process. Larry Campbell describes it precisely: “I showed up at the studio, and I met Bob, and we started playing. It was about three days of playing together. Mostly what we were playing was old rock and roll and country tunes. We’d do a few of his tunes, but it was mostly just running through like Hank Williams and Buddy Holly songs. It was a lot of fun. I guess Bob was absorbing what I was putting out. After that third day, [Dylan’s manager] Kramer called and said, ‘Okay, so we’re going on tour next week. You coming?’ I said, ‘Well, yeah, I guess I am’” (373).

 

Rob Stoner’s “audition” was very similar: “Every so often, Dylan and I would pick up guitars, and he would try to stump me regarding obscure bluegrass tunes, since he’d seen me play with this bluegrass group. Bob, being a student of these kinds of tunes, would say, ‘Hey, you know this one?’ thinking that he could find one I didn’t know. But I knew all these tunes, ‘cause I loved them too. Not only did I know the [music], but I knew the words, so I could harmonize with him. I knew at that time, this guy’s auditioning [me] for some future thing” (155).

 

What these two stories – and several others – have in common is the value Dylan places on knowing the repertoire. His great love for the old traditions is well known, and so is his uncanny ability to remember. Martin Carthy for example debunks a rumor from the early days, that Dylan was cheating – that he had people in the audiences at other folk artist’s concerts, recording them so that  Dylan could play their songs later. “No, he didn’t,” Carthy says. “He had a fabulous memory. If he heard something that he liked, he would go back to the hotel and he would try and write down what he could remember. He did it with all sorts of songs” (24).

 

But what also becomes clear from the interviews is that repertory knowledge is not merely a point of identification or a mark of excellence and good taste in Dylan’s book, but just as much a musical baseline: that having a musician in the band who knows obscure bluegrass tunes becomes a warrant that Dylan will be able to produce music in a certain direction with this musician. That direction does not have to be bluegrass at all. Rather, the knowledge itself becomes yet another of those background elements that ensure that the “planned chaos” method will work.

 

The Book

When Pledging My Time is able to illuminate these three core aspects of Dylan’s music, it is thanks to the interviewees themselves. Padgett has managed to get all these musicians to talk, and many of the stories have never been told previously. As the interviews have been completed, Padgett has built a reputation for himself among the musicians, that his project is serious and worth opening up to. Several of the interviewees refer to previous interviews as the reason why they agreed to be interviewed.

 

There are at least three reasons for this goodwill. One is that Padgett is clearly a good interviewer, technically and personally. He is able to strike a tone with the interviewees on a personal level and make them loosen up and talk freely. That in itself is no small task, in a field where tight-lipped-ness has been the rule, whether out of respect for Dylan, or out of fear of the possible consequences of revealing too much.

 

Secondly, Padgett is always well prepared, to the extent that he usually knows more about the various performances than the musicians themselves do. They were there, of course, but Padgett’s background knowledge usually dwarfs theirs. He is therefore also able to pick up on things the interviewee says and drill further into those parts of what is being said that will lead down the most interesting side tracks.

 

Lastly, and most importantly, he never gets lost in anecdotes and chit chat. Pledging My Time is a highly music-centered collection of interviews, and Padgett is focused on the things that a musician would be interested in talking about: the music making aspect of playing with Dylan. So even though the book is definitely also a cornucopia of anecdotes and trivia, Padgett always manages to get the interview back on track again – on the main track, that is: What is it like to play with Dylan? What were the conditions? How did the collaboration start? How did it end? What was the music making like? How were the rehearsals? What was it like to be thrown on stage with hardly any planning? But also the nitty-gritty details: What key did you play this or that song in? Who made the arrangements?

 

This insistent focus on the music making aspect of spending time with Dylan is one of the book’s major selling points: interesting as the anecdotes may be, it is a delight every time one of those side tracks is not followed.

 

The Biography

In that sense, this is the most musical book about Dylan since Paul Williams’ Performing Artist series. Thanks to the wide span of musicians Padgett has managed to talk to, the book has actually become the most interesting Dylan biography I’ve ever read, because it always remains a book about the music, not a collection of juicy tales about the musician.

 

An artist biography can be of three kinds with three different focuses: on the person, on the product, or on the process. There is an abundance of the Great Lives kind of personcentered biographies about Dylan. From an artistic perspective, a focus on the product is more interesting – regarding the artist’s life as something distinct from the biographical facts of the person. But in Dylan’s case, the product may not even necessarily be the most interesting thing. What sets Dylan apart from virtually everyone else in his field is the constant flux, the refusal to settle down, whether on one version of the songs, on one format of the show, on one style. What is the product of, say “Tangled Up in Blue”? The album version is a product. Paul Williams ended up regarding every version of every song as individual works of art – which is a valid conclusion, but a simpler and musically more illuminating one is probably to regard the process of constant development and re interpretation. And in that process, the musicians around Dylan are essential participants. What becomes clear in this book is that Dylan is simply incapable of doing a drawing by-numbers greatest hits show, and that the musicians that he hires are an essential part of his music making.

 

*

Last but not least: Pledging My Time is also aesthetically pleasing, with a clear layout, almost without errors, misprints, apostrophes turning the wrong way, etc. The best thing is that the book is not the end – there are still more interviews coming through on Ray Padgett’s Substack newsletter, Flagging Down the Double E’s.

February 21, 2024 by
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REVIEW OF Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine

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Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine, ed. by Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel. New York: Callaway, 2023, 608 pp.

REVIEW BY Alessandro Carrera, University of Houston

 

Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine (New York: Callaway, 2023, 608 pp., $100.00) is the first of the “Treasures” of the Bob Dylan Archive in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The authors and editors are Mark Davidson, curator of the Archive and director of exhibitions at the Bob Dylan Center and the Woody Guthrie Center, and Parker Fishel, archivist, researcher, co-curator of the Bob Dylan Center’s inaugural exhibition and of several volumes of Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series. It is the first official book from the Bob Dylan Archive, but not the first ever that has been made possible by the material archived in Tulsa. That honor goes to Bob Dylan & Like a Rolling Stone: Filologia Composizione Performance (in Italian, Milan: Mimesis, 2021), whose author, Mario Gerolamo Mossa, was my student for a while and for whom I wrote an introduction. If I mention Mossa’s book before discussing Mixing up the Medicine, it is because Bob Dylan & Like a Rolling Stone anticipated all that the archive will offer in the coming years, namely the possibility of plumbing the depths of Dylan’s compositional process by comparing the initial notes, first drafts, quotations, and references jotted down in notebooks and then dropped – all of which contributed, however, to the recorded or printed song. I don’t say the “definitive” song because, as we know, many Dylan songs are not and will never be “finished.” They are not products; they are life forms.

 

The same can be said of Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine, both for the design and gorgeous visual apparatus curated by Davidson and Fishel and for the choice of essays, selected by Michael Chaiken and Robert Polito. The book is not so much a portrait of a man as the portrait of a life form that mysteriously developed on planet Earth and whose equal we may never see again. Edmondo Berselli, an Italian popular culture scholar who never wrote much on Dylan, wrote just enough to nail the issue: Dylan has no precursors and no successors; he comes from Mars.

 

Welcome therefore to the visual trip of Dylan’s early years in Duluth, Minnesota, the teenage years in Hibbing, the trip to New York, the pilgrimage to find Woody Guthrie, the contract signed with Columbia after only nine months of apprenticeship in the Village, the meeting with Suze Rotolo, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and all that followed. Few lives are as well documented as Dylan’s. Whether he wanted it or not, the eye of the world was already on him even before he had done anything to deserve a look. For the iconographic apparatus alone, Davidson and Fishel deserve the gratitude of every Dylan fan, who will find every famous picture in this book, perhaps accompanied by a less famous one that complements it and followed by yet another more famous picture. Seeing them collected in one place is enough to convince the most skeptical reader that there was an invisible hand guiding Dylan’s appearance from the very beginning.

 

The historical novel of Dylan’s life unfolding before our eyes is astonishing in the clarity of its evolution. Newport 1963, Newport 1964, Newport 1965, the British Tour filmed in Dont Look Back, the 1966 World Tour, Woodstock 1967 and the arcadia of the following years, the 1974 Tour, the Rolling Thunder Revue. Minor events are also included, and the reader can enjoy a brief story for each picture, a page or half page impeccably written in small print, while the essays are printed in larger font and on a slightly darker background. The reproductions of Dylan’s manuscripts are additional pictures of Dylan’s mind, capturing an instant just before the relentless creative process renders it obsolete yet no less precious.

 

In his well-known conversations with Claire Parnet, Gilles Deleuze said that he would like to deliver his lectures in the same way Dylan organizes a song, “producing” it more than writing it, grabbing whatever he can but never setting himself up as either master or judge.[1] Yet if Dylan were to have a philosopher perhaps it would be A.N. Whitehead, for whom all that is real is process and nothing is merely a product of our minds because everything is world, everything is experience, everything is out there.

 

With the second half of the 1970s, as we know, the Mirror of Narcissus breaks down. We can no longer detect a coherent image in the multiplicity that Dylan has become. We would like to choose what we like and drop the rest, except that with Dylan this cannot be done. With Dylan, we are drawn to what we do not like by a force equal to our willingness to detach ourselves from it. From the mirror of Narcissus, we move on to the mirror of Dionysus, shattered, composed of fragments, with Dylan looking at us from each of them. We can’t help but look back into all the fragments, which are now too many for even the most loyal of followers. Yet Davidson and Fishel forget nothing. Each mirror sliver has its own page, its own caption, its own picture, its own manuscript, a letter Dylan wrote and did not send or a letter someone sent him and who knows if Dylan ever read it. 

 

In addition to Sean Wilentz’s introduction and Douglas Brinkley’s epilogue, the book is divided into nine chronological sections: the first five, which run from 1941 to 1978, are easy to figure out. The others are worth mentioning: “1979-1987: Surviving in a Ruthless World”; “1988-2000: As Natural as Breathing”; “2001-2013: Themes, Dreams, and Schemes”; and “2014 Present: The Here and Now,” including Shadow Kingdom and the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour that will end in 2024. The mirror of Dionysus is finally reassembled; the Titans who broke it (the pressures of the Culture Industry, the changing tastes of the public, the rotation of the planets in the Solar System) could not stop the dismembered Dionysus from putting himself back together. The faithful ones who followed Dylan up to Time Out of Mind and beyond were repaid like the Biblical Job late in life, with an abundance no one would have believed possible. Even that was not enough for Dylan, though. Pages are added on Masked & Anonymous, Theme Time Radio Hour, Dylan the writer, critic, painter, sculptor – not forgetting the whisky maker. There seems to be no day in Dylan’s life when he does not accomplish something. And this something, whatever it is, is immediately read, listened to, photographed, filmed, exhibited – or imbibed. Only the commercials (the Bank of Montreal, Cadillac, Victoria’s Secret) are missing from the book; the rest of his public life is there. If the world does not leave Bob Dylan alone, it is also true that Dylan never leaves the world alone.

 

Luckily, the twenty-six essays (aside from the introduction and conclusion, which I will discuss later), are as unpredictable as Dylan himself. Lee Ranaldo gives the first salvo with an admission of unbridled fetishism. He wants to see, touch, smell Bob Dylan’s first output, a playlist of rock ’n’ roll and doo-wop songs recorded December 24, 1956 at the Terlinde Music Shop of St. Paul, Minnesota, signed by Larry Kegan, Bob Zimmerman, and Howard Rutman, or rather The Jokers, or rather the Jokerman’s first record. Louie Kemp had it, then Larry Kegan, then Louie again, then it disappeared, perhaps sold at an auction, only to finally resurface at the Bob Dylan Archive. Marvin Karlins tells of the few guitar lessons he gave Bob Dylan in St. Paul (debunking the legend that Dylan never took lessons from anyone except once from Lonnie Johnson in the Village). Greil Marcus listens to the Dylan-Kalb-Chas tape from the fall-winter of 1960, when Dylan was not yet Dylan and sang Jimmie Rodgers better than he sang Woody Guthrie. Barry Olman recounts the joys of being a collector of both Woody and Bob; Clinton Heylin offers a fine portrait of Paul Williams, one of the first Dylan scholars; Jeff Gold analyzes the two records (Blues Fell This Morning and Country Blues: Blind Boy Fuller 1935-1940) that were the basis for Bob Dylan’s first album. Dylan’s copies, now in Gold’s hand, have handwritten notes. The back cover of Blues Fell This Morning reads, “Made for and about Bob Dylan”.

 

The essays on Dylan’s notebooks and their scattered ideas that later, through a process of accumulation and spoliation, became song lyrics, are among the most interesting readings. Lucy Sante analyzes a 1964 notebook where we find the first ideas of “It Ain’t Me, Babe”; Griffin Ondaatje shows how Joseph Conrad’s Victory is the subtext not only of “Black Diamond Bay” but, ten years earlier, also of “Tombstone Blues” (“faithful slave Pedro” of “Tombstone Blues” may well be the “faithful Pedro” of Conrad’s novel, who is also a slave). And who knows if the Mr. Jones of “Ballad of a Thin Man” is not after all Victory’s Mr. Jones, portrayed in the novel as a “thin man.” It is also intriguing to learn – in “Tombstone Blues” again – that before “John the Baptist” landed on the page there was a “Blacksmith” in his place in the lyrics, and that the “big bouquet of roses” cascading from heaven to earth in “Never Say Goodbye” perhaps describes the cloud generated by dynamite explosions in Hibbing’s Iron Pit. It is also intriguing to learn from Raymond Foye’s “Reflections on Dirge” that while writing that mysterious Planet Waves song Dylan had Leonard Cohen in mind, as he almost certainly had Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Dirge Without Music,” the poem where the expression “time out of mind” can be found. In Richard Hell’s essay on the Blood on the Tracks notebook, we find an almost complete poem; a forgettable first draft except that it may have served as mental preparation for “You’re a Big Girl Now.” Equally important is Alex Ross’s essay on “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” and its many intricate transformations.

 

Mixing Up the Medicine offers selective enjoyments. See for instance Jeff Slate’s essay on “Band of the Hand (It’s Hell Time, Man!),” a song no one has ever given the slightest importance, yet celebrated here as an unknown masterpiece; or Larry Sloman’s essay on “Handy Dandy,” an exercise in rock philology based not on verse/chord analysis but on the circumstances under which the song originated and was recorded – to show (convincingly) that Mr. Handy is just another Dylan self-portrait. The three essays that connect Dylan to the African American world are worth mentioning too: Gregory Pardlo’s “Huey Digs Dylan” (Huey Newton’s political reading of “Ballad of a Thin Man” would be worth a longer treatment); Greg Tate’s essay on Hendrix and Dylan; and Peter Carey’s essay on the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, which occurred in the same Greenwood District where the Archive now stands.

 

When we get to Time Out of Mind, we enter the temple of absolute devotion. Dylan can do no wrong, not anymore. If Barack Obama, the French Légion d’honneur, and the Nobel Prize committee found nothing objectionable in Dylan, who are we to do so? It would be useless to point out that Masked & Anonymous is one of the worst movies ever made, that there are prairie houses in the Texas Panhandle that are graced by better looking metal collages than Dylan’s Iron Works, or that Dylan’s painting of the Spanish Stairs (which he, unfortunately, called “When I Paint My Masterpiece”) would not be out of place in a below-average Roman restaurant. This is not the book where we can expect some ponderous critical assessment. We don’t ask for it, nor do we want it. But Sean Wilentz’s introduction and Douglas Brinkley’s conclusion cover that flank, too. Wilentz’s contribution is a tour de force, an introduction to the arc of Dylan’s career as the great American novel that it is, one that has however skipped the American tragedy, the Jay Gatsby side of being American, the madness of the “pure products of America” that Dr. William Carlos Williams diagnosed. Bob Dylan is a pure American who has learned how not to go mad. He came close to the abyss, looked down, pulled back, and did not forget what he saw. Wilentz sums up Dylan’s novel in a way that is both sympathetic and impassive, making us feel the full weight of the catastrophe that could have happened at any moment and did not.[2]

 

The portrait of Dylan that emerges from Douglas Brinkley’s concluding pages is that of a man of immense intellectual curiosity, not just an American but an “Americanist at heart,” Brinkley says, equally at home with the meanderings of history, the cultures of ethnic minorities, American music in all its facets (of course), and Russian and Western European literature.[3] More than that, Dylan seems to abolish cultural hierarchies every time he opens his mouth, forcing us to face the deep implications of his anti-hierarchical thinking.

 

When Dylan says that William Blake is one of his landmarks, he shows humility toward history. When he says that no one can be compared to Chuck Berry, he shows humility toward his trade. But when, in the same conversation with Brinkley, he adds that if he must think of another lyricist, his kindred spirit is Shakespeare, then we must hit pause and understand how Dylan’s canon is built and what he thinks about his position in it.

 

What does it mean that Dylan thinks he can compare himself to Shakespeare but would never think of comparing himself to Chuck Berry? He is not saying that Chuck Berry is greater than Shakespeare. Rather, he is demonstrating how non-hierarchical thinking works. From the time-slanted “plane of immanence” on which William Blake, Chuck Berry, Shakespeare, and Dylan all stand, each one can rise above the others or move down to a lower level according to undetectable variations. There is neither spatial nor temporal distance restraining Dylan’s antihierarchical plane. At any x moment of time space, Chuck Berry can be immensely far away and William Shakespeare immensely close – or vice versa. Any other kind of ostentatious submissiveness would be hypocritical. If poets do not think they can become like Shakespeare (not greater or less great but “like”), why should they bother to write poetry? And if songwriters do not think that Chuck Berry is the pinnacle to reach, why should they take up rock music?

 

There are hundreds of books written about Shakespeare, Dylan states quietly, and there are hundreds of books written about me.[4] (In Italian alone, there are more than sixty.) As the “Blacksmith / John the Baptist” case demonstrates, Dylan’s songs are made of constant permutations, and we must adopt the same method if we want to understand his positions vis-à-vis Shakespeare. Since a literal equivalence would be absurd, we must picture a metonymic plan of non-mediated substitutions where Blake takes the place of Berry (and vice versa) and Dylan takes the place of Shakespeare (and vice versa). It is not a competition for the top; it is an assessment (obviously subjected to endless reformulation and the participation of other players) of who, at a certain x instant, occupies that specific place.

 

According to Brinkley, when Dylan received the news of the Nobel Prize he said, “I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.”[5] Actually, Dylan said that to Robert Shelton in a June 20, 1978 interview, published in the “Melody Maker” of July 29. In other circumstances, he said the opposite: I’m not a poet, I don’t want to be confused with poets, I don’t like their company, I’m a musician first, I’m a song and dance man, I’m a trapeze artist. What he wrote in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech was much more to the point: “Songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page.” There is no need to assert or deny that Dylan is the Shakespeare of our times. That would be a case (“Tombstone Blues” again) of “useless and pointless knowledge.” It is enough to know that they are colleagues. That’s neither Bardolatry nor Dylanolatry, and Brinkley’s essay brings it all back home.

 

[1] Gilles Deleuze, Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, revised edition, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Hammerjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987, 2007), 8.

[2] Sean Wilentz, “Endless Highway,” in Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine, ed. by Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel. (New York: Callaway, 2023), 13-23.

[3] Douglas Brinkley, “Our Wells Are Deep,” in Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine, 583.

[4] “’Just like there are hundreds of books written about Shakespeare’,” he said, waving his hands, ‘the same thing is happening to me. Our wells are deep’.” Brinkley, 584.

[5] Brinkley, 586.

February 21, 2024 by

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS – MARKETING COORDINATOR FOR THE DYLAN REVIEW

The Dylan Review is seeking a Marketing Coordinator to work with the editors in all aspects of marketing the journal. Responsibilities include increasing our social media presence, monitoring and maintaining our accounts on Facebook and Twitter/X, finding outlets for advertisements, and placing and updating ads. The editors expect the Marketing Coordinator to develop further marketing opportunities and to implement them effectively, in concert with the Dylan Review’s agreed best practices for augmenting the journal’s footprint. This position – as with all Dylan Review positions – is unpaid. The ideal candidate will possess a working knowledge of both Bob Dylan studies and the social media landscape. The Dylan Review is an equal opportunity non-profit organization, and we invite applications from any person interested in the position, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.

To apply, please send a brief cover letter in the body of an email to editors@dylanreview.org detailing your interest, along with a resume or c.v. We’ll begin reviewing applications on March 1, and beyond that on a rolling basis.

January 28, 2024 by
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Dylan Review Vol. 5.1, Spring/Summer 2023 – BOB DYLAN LYRICS, COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

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Ain’t Talkin’. Copyright © 2006 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved.

Angelina. Copyright © 1981 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved.

Blowin’ in the Wind. Copyright © 1962 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1990 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved.

Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream. Copyright © 1965 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved.

Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight. Copyright © 1983 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved.

Fourth Time Around. Copyright © 1966 by Dwarf Music; renewed 1994 by Dwarf Music. All rights reserved.

A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall. Copyright © 1963 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved.

Highway 61 Revisited. Copyright © 1965 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved.

I Shall Be Free No. 10. Copyright © 1971 by Special Rider Music; renewed 1999 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved.

I Want You. Copyright © 1966 by Dwarf Music; renewed 1994 by Dwarf Music. All rights
reserved.

It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding). Copyright © 1965 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved.

Jokerman. Copyright © 1983 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved.

Just like A Woman. Copyright © 1966 by Dwarf Music; renewed 1994 by Dwarf Music. All rights reserved.

Like a Rolling Stone. Copyright © 1965 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved.

The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll. Copyright © 1964, 1966 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1992, 1994 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved.

Maggie’s Farm. Copyright © 1965 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved.

Masters of War. Copyright © 1963 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved.

Nettie Moore. Copyright © 2006 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved.

North Country Blues. Copyright © 1963, 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991, 1992 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved.

One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below). Copyright © 1975, 1976 by Ram’s Horn Music; renewed 2003, 2004 by Ram’s Horn Music. All rights reserved.

One of us Must Know (Sooner or Later). Copyright © 1966 by Dwarf Music; renewed 1994 by Dwarf Music. All rights reserved.

Only a Pawn in Their Game. Copyright © 1963, 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991, 1992 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved.

Oxford Town. Copyright © 1963 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1992 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved.

Pay In Blood. Copyright © 2012 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved.

Red River Shore. Copyright © 1997 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved.

Rollin’ and Tumblin’. Copyright © 2006 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved.

Someday Baby. Copyright © 2006 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved.

Spirit on the Water. Copyright © 2006 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved.

Thunder on the Mountain. Copyright © 2006 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved.

The Times They Are A-Changin’. Copyright © 1963, 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991, 1992 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved.

Visions of Johanna. Copyright © 1966 by Dwarf Music; renewed 1994 by Dwarf Music. All rights reserved.

You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go. Copyright © 1974 by Ram’s Horn Music; renewed 2002 by Ram’s Horn Music. All rights reserved.

 

All songs written by Bob Dylan.

August 26, 2023 by
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Dylan Review Vol. 5.1, Spring/Summer 2023 – BOOKS RECEIVED

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Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel, editors. Bob Dylan: Mixing up the Medicine. Callaway Editions, 2023.

François Guillez, Bob Dylan in the 2020s: Rough and Rowdy Ways, Shadow Kingdom, and All That Philosophy. Tangible Press, 2023.

John Lewis, Whirly Gig: Inside Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind Sessions. Cambridge, Maryland: Dorchester Power and Light, 2022.

Ray Padgett, Pledging My Time: Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members. EWP Press, 2022.

August 26, 2023 by
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Dylan Review Vol. 5.1, Spring/Summer 2023 – CONTRIBUTORS

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Owen Boynton works at Collegiate School in NYC. He earned a PhD in English from Cornell University in 2013, with a dissertation focusing on Victorian poetry and the experience of time.

Erin C. Callahan is Professor of English at San Jacinto College in Houston, Texas. She has published on gender in the Star Wars Saga, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Charles Schulz’s Peanuts and contributed an essay to 21st Century Dylan: Late and Timely.

Court Carney is Professor of History at Stephen F. Austin State University. He is the co-editor of a collection of essays on Bob Dylan’s setlists entitled The Politics and Power of Bob Dylan’s Live Performances: “Play a Song for Me,” published with Routledge later this year.

Justin Hamm is the author of four collections of poetry – Drinking Guinness With the Dead, American Ephemeral, and Lessons in Ruin. A 2022 Woody Guthrie Poet, his work has appeared in Nimrod, Southern Indiana Review, and a host of other publications.

Christine Hand Jones is Assistant Professor of English at Dallas Baptist University, where she teaches writing, literature, and songwriting courses. She has a PhD in literary studies from the University of Texas at Dallas, earned largely by writing about Bob Dylan.

Graley Herren is Professor of English at Xavier University in Cincinnati. He is the author of books on Samuel Beckett, Don DeLillo, and Bob Dylan. He writes a newsletter on Dylan called Shadow Chasing and serves on the editorial board of the Dylan Review.

Harrison Hewitt is a writer from Canada. He’s been a Bob Dylan fan since he was a boy.

Matthew King is a freelance journalist and essayist based in New York. His writing on culture and technology has appeared in The Atlantic and the Boston Globe Magazine, among other publications. In a past life, he studied jazz and folk music as an aspiring saxophonist.

Jeffrey S. Lamp is Professor of New Testament and Instructor of Environmental Science at Oral Roberts University, Tulsa. His primary interests are in the ecotheology and Bob Dylan Studies. He was a translator and editor for the Modern English Version of the Bible.

Jon Lasser is University Distinguished Professor and Regents’ Professor in the School Psychology Program at Texas State University. He holds a doctorate in School Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin.

Harold Lepidus is the author of Friends and Other Strangers: Bob Dylan Examined. His writing has been referenced in Rolling Stone, Uncut, and American Songwriter, and he hosts The Boston Harold podcast.

Christopher Mitchell teaches composition and literature. He has written about Marshall McLuhan, Herman Melville, Nathanial Hawthorne, and Elvis Presley. In 2019 he spoke at the World of Bob Dylan about The Waste Land and “Desolation Row.”

Jim Salvucci is an English professor by training and taught a course on Dylan for many years. His writing is published in 21st-Century Dylan and The Politics and Power of Bob Dylan’s Live Performances: Play a Song for Me. He is also the founder of The Dylantantes.

Nathan Schmidt is currently pursuing a PhD in American literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. His work has appeared in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review and the Indiana University blog Conversations in Science. He has played guitar since he was nine years old.

Evan Sennett a graduate student at Indiana University specializing in American literature. His interests include American Transcendentalism as well as twentieth century Kentucky authors Wendell Berry and Harlan Hubbard.

Rebecca Slaman is a freelance writer and editor. She has a BA from Fordham University in English and Classics. Her writing specializes in fan communities on social media, particularly Twitter. She has presented at University of Tulsa and Florida International University.

Stevan M. Weine is a psychiatrist, researcher, and author. He is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois College of Medicine. His most recent book is Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness (Fordham University Press, 2023).

Bernard Wills is Professor of Humanities at Grenfell Campus Memorial University. He is a poet and scholar who has on Cohen, Blake, Davies as well as on Ancient, Medieval and Modern philosophy. He currently resides in Corner Brook Newfoundland and Labrador.

August 26, 2023 by
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WORLD OF BOB DYLAN: “‘Unheard Melodies’: Ekphrasis and Possible Gaze in Dylan’s Lyrics.”

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“‘Unheard Melodies’: Ekphrasis and Possible Gaze in Dylan’s Lyrics.” World of Bob Dylan 2023, June 2023, Tulsa, OK.

BY Raphael Falco, University of Maryland

 

In recent decades, Dylan has exhibited his painting and sculpture at major venues around the world. But this efflorescence of artistic production shouldn’t come as a surprise. The 1973 publication of Writings and Drawings indicated that he’d always sketched, and by Dylan’s own assessment, his painting lessons with Norman Raeben in 1974 had a significant influence on his songwriting. The intensity – and success – with which Dylan “performs” in the visual arts should encourage us, in turn, to focus on passages in his songs where he describes or discusses works of visual art.

 

These passages – which, in critical terminology, would be called ekphrases – are often brief, but they inevitably reveal a valuable relationship between the work of art and the observer. That relationship is based on what I will refer to in this paper as “possible gaze” – specifically, Dylan’s lyrical awareness in describing visual artifacts that every description is an interpretation and every interpretation is conditional, inevitably to be superseded by the next one.

 

The term ekphrasis has a long history as a rhetorical figure. During the Greco-Roman period ekphrasis referred to any sort of discrete description of things appearing within different forms of discourse, from narrative poetry to formal argument. Renaissance authors inherited this broad definition of ekphrasis and, gradually, the notion of “verbal pictorialism” developed from it. Christopher Johnson explains the use of the term this way:

 

An “ornamental digression that refuses to be merely ornamental,” ekphrasis often provides a “rival narrative” that sets image and word at odds, partially because the static, spatial nature of the image tends to forestall the passage of narrative time…The mimesis of a mimesis, ekphrasis generally suspends narrative time and flow, as the reader’s attention is redirected towards a physical object, whose connection with the narrative, at first glance, is only ornamental.[1]

 

If we think of ekphrasis as what Johnson calls a “mimesis of a mimesis,” then the idea of an ornamental digression inevitably expands into something much more than simply a rhetorical ornament.

 

In fact, “things have changed.” In today’s literary-critical terminology the term ekphrasis refers almost exclusively to descriptions of art in poetry or prose. The term is best understood as a set piece within a large work, an automatically problematized ornamental digression, such as Homer’s description of Achilles’s shield – which is the foundational model of all ekphrasis in western literature – or Virgil’s description of the Trojan wars on the walls of Juno’s Temple, Enobarbus’s description of Cleopatra’s barge in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Milton’s description of Satan’s shield, or Ludovico Ariosto’s description of the terrestrial palace in the Orlando Furioso. Here is Gustave Doré’s engraving inspired by the passage, which constitutes an illustration of an ekphrasis. The translation is by A.S. Kline:

 

Black and white image of a figure riding a winged animal through an ancient town

Gustave Doré, Orlando Furioso, 34: 51-52

 

There, on the heights, a palace, with its towers,
Uprose, to which some living flame had lent,
It seemed, such splendour, a glow so bright
That, beyond mortal fashion, shone its light.
It covered more than thirty miles around,
And towards it Astolfo turned his steed,
Moving slowly, at his ease, o’er the ground,
(All, to his gaze, seemed beautiful indeed)
And thought that all that down below was found
In wrath Heaven and Nature had decreed;
Brutish and ugly, this sad world we face,
So sweet and clear and happy was that place.
(Orlando Furioso, 34: 51-52)

 

As with most ekphrases, Ariosto’s description of the palace serves as a structural mirror – a mise en abyme – in which the palatial architecture represents the poem’s structure as well as the journey toward heavenly grace. Leave your stepping stones behind, mount your hippogriff, and fly toward the moon.

 

Dylan has no extended passage of ekphrasis to match Ariosto or other epic poets. His ekphrastic phrases are much briefer, tucked into a line or two, yet it nevertheless makes sense to analyze his allusions and references to art in ekphrastic terms. Claire Preston distinguishes what she calls “iconic, referential ekphrasis” from longer “fully enumerated” descriptions.[2] The former type would apply to Dylan, while the latter might apply to Homer and Shakespeare, or, for example, to John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” one of the most famous “enumerated” ekphrastic meditations in English.

 

Keats’s poem offers a kind of clinic in ekphrastic perspectives. As you might recall, the poem’s narrator stares at a scene painted on an ancient piece of pottery and remarks “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter.” The unheard melodies in the ode amount to the narrator’s speculations – or fantasies – about the “leaf-fringed legend” of shepherds and coy shepherdesses dallying “In Tempe or the dales of Arcady.” The image of a priest with his sacrificial heifer inspires the question – “To what green altar, O mysterious priest, / Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies”? In fact, the whole poem is a question, a speculation on what’s going on in the urn’s pastoral scene – “Cold Pastoral,” the narrator calls it, because the painted figures lack the heat of living flesh.

 

The poem in its entirety is an ekphrasis, a description of a work of plastic art. But, at the same time, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is more than merely a description: it is an open-ended interrogation of visual representations. And, like most ekphrastic passages, Keats’s poem asks a double question: First – how should the narrator inside the poem interpret the different images on the urn? And – second – how should the reader interpret the narrator’s interpretation of the visual images?

 

This doubleness is a good starting place to understand how Dylan uses his referential ekphrastic passages to destabilize the idea of the gaze. In his most familiar ekphrasis, Dylan chooses to give a highly normative slant to his narrator’s interpretation of arguably the most renowned portrait in the world. Here are the famous lines from “Visions of Johanna”:

 

Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles
See the primitive wallflower freeze
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze
Hear the one with the mustache say, “Jeeze
I can’t find my knees”…
(“Visions of Johanna,” my emphasis)

 

Mona Lisa, by Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo Da Vinci, Mona Lisa (1503)

 

a cultural icon and an art historical topos when Dylan wrests it away from the academic critics and places it firmly in a genealogical line with Cisco and Sonny and Lead Belly too. Moreover, the self-consciously anachronistic “highway blues” highlights how personally tailored the speaker’s interpretation is, how tenuous, and how different an interpretation the gaze of the “jelly-faced women” – and all the rest of us who haven’t done any hard travelin’ – might produce.

 

In a brilliant analysis, Stephen Scobie reads the word “f-r-e-e-z-e” as “f-r-i-e-z-e,” which he defines as “a horizontal band of painting or decoration on a wall.” In this reading, Scobie awards Dylan another ekphrastic line to follow those pertaining to the portrait. According to Scobie, “These two senses [of freeze/frieze] coexist in the line, neither one canceling out the other. What we are asked to ‘see’ is something we can only hear: the indeterminacy of the freeze/frieze pun. Both senses convey an image of delicacy and fragility – the wallflower frozen out at the dance, the frieze preserved in the museum – which stands in stark contrast to the grossness of the image that immediately follows – the ‘jelly-faced women.’”[3] Scobie’s “two senses” are a perfect model of the instability of the gaze–both theoretically and in terms of an individual viewer. They mirror each other as versions of ekphrastic perspective and, at the same time, as evidence of an alternating possible gaze. Moreover, the homonymic pun doubles up Johnson’s notion of a mimesis of a mimesis, adding an extra layer of ekphrastic complexity to the Mona Lisa passage.

 

But there’s more to the pun than just this added complexity or mimetic ornamentation. And perhaps this is the place to recall that the working title of “Visions of Johanna,” after all, was “Seems Like a Freeze-Out.” While it might be true that neither sense of “freeze/frieze” can cancel out the other as long as we’re listening to the lyrics and not reading them, more than delicacy and fragility are conveyed by the double image. Linking a human wallflower with a wallflower mural enforces the idea that art is somehow tantamount to being trapped by social neglect or personal ineptness. This ekphrastic re-interpretation connects the narrator’s skeptical, tendentious observations about the Mona Lisa’s smile with the beginning of the stanza: just as the primitive wallflower – in both senses of “freeze” – is trapped, Infinity itself is trapped and judged inside the museums.

 

The theme of entrapment in connection with the plastic arts recurs in “Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight” from Infidels. This is perhaps Dylan’s most radical, and puzzling, image of possible gaze. The speaker in the song finds himself trapped, not only inside a museum, but also inside a painting, and maybe even inside his own self-portrait:

 

it’s like I’m stuck inside a painting
That’s hanging in the Louvre
My throat start[s] to tickle and my nose itches
But I know that I can’t move

 

The “Louvre-move” rhyme superbly posits opposite ideas. It captures a mirror image: on one side there’s the museum as a straitjacket for art and artist alike, a place where the wallflowers freeze and Infinity goes up on trial. Reflected on the other side of the mirror, in the word “move,” there’s the opposite image: physical freedom and, just possibly, freedom from self portraiture. Heard as ekphrasis, this passage is a kind of parody of indeterminacy and plausible interpretations – the art object itself has a perspective and, cartoonishly, is coming to life as the song’s speaker starts to sneeze. A museum-goer (or a jelly-faced woman) might be fooled by convention into thinking that the work of art was static and observable, when in fact the painting is alive and trying to escape the entrapment of the paint, the frame, and the Louvre museum.

 

The song “Jokerman,” also from Infidels, contains two brief ekphrastic passages. In the first Dylan might well be playing on Claire Preston’s idea of an “iconic” ekphrasis by describing a literal idol:

 

Standing on the waters casting your bread
While the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing
(“Jokerman”)

 

Dylan uses the ekphrastic line to introduce a possible, or alternative, gaze on religion. The two images of religious figures abut in the passage, one standing on the waters, the other with glowing eyes. On an album called Infidels the irony is thick. Which of the two religious figures, the Christlike one casting bread or the iron-headed sculpture, do non-believers worship?

 

In the MTV video of “Jokerman” George Lois, a well-known Madison Avenue advertising figure, compiled a collage of lyrics and still images. For the first ekphrastic passage he inserted the following image:

 

Photo of a statue with large eyes. The text on the image reads "While the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing"

Sumerian Idol (2700 BCE)

 

Unfortunately, the image preempts the interpretative quandary suggested by the ekphrastic passage.

 

Lois’s image for the second ekphrastic passage in the song is less preeemptive, though somewhat less readable. The lines are:

 

In the smoke of the twilight on a milk-white steed
Michelangelo indeed could’ve carved out your features

 

A close-up of the right hand of Michelangelo’s David statue

Michelangelo, David (1504)

 

The image in the video is a detail of Michelangelo’s David showing a close-up of the right hand, although you’d probably have to be Irwin Panofsky to identify the sculpture’s fleeting appearance on the screen. Most importantly, however, the passing image cannot capture the conditional tense of Dylan’s verb in the lyric. To say that Michelangelo could have carved out the Jokerman’s features places the action in an unseeable context, a timeless imaginary. The name Michelangelo becomes a kind of metonymy for the artist – otherwise the Jokerman would have had to live in the sixteenth century. As a result of this metonymic naming, we can hear Dylan’s ekphrastic passage as the consummate embodiment of a possible gaze – only “possible” because the ekphrastic model in fact does not exist. There is no Michelangelo artistry. The ekphrasis is simultaneously a pseudo-ekphrasis and a proto-interpretation of a yet-to-be-sculpted Jokerman statue.

 

In an interview conducted by Mitch Blank (and available on expectingrain.com), Larry Sloman claims that he and George Lois – who is usually credited as the sole producer of the video – decided that “we would use great artworks to illuminate [Dylan’s] art.” Sloman has it backwards, however. The images in the MTV video, which, along with those already shown, include a Henry Turner landscape, a Blake painting, and the famous Milton Glaser poster, illustrate the ekphrastic passages in “Jokerman.” They don’t illuminate them – in fact, the video images are often a distraction, undermining the lyrics with a distracting and incoherent visual narrative. Dylan’s ekphrastic passages are swallowed up in this irrelevant narrative. Lois interpolates what purport to be matching images for Dylan’s ekphrases, and, but, ironically, this is a case of illustration, not ekphrasis: “Jokerman” supplies the description that Lois later uses for his image.

 

Another example of a conditional predicate in an ekphrastic passage occurs in “Angelina,” from The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3.

 

His eyes were two slits that would make a snake proud
With a face that any painter would paint as he walked through the crowd
Worshipping a god with the body of a woman well endowed
And the head of a hyena
(“Angelina” The Bootleg Series, Vol. 1-3)

 

The conditional verb “would paint” again, as in “Jokerman,” confounds time: it is impossible to determine the occasion of the observer’s description. And again, this is an example of ekphrasis produced by a possible gaze, a possible sighting of the “eyes with two slits” and the Jokerman’s face. But the speaker’s observation – which is also an interpretation of the facial features – is inevitably tenuous and impermanent, a stopgap until the painter, or the next observer, sees the face. The indeterminacy of the ekphrastic moment in “Angelina” seems resonantly to confirm what I suggested at the beginning of this paper – that Dylan is “lyrically aware” of a possible, indeterminate gaze when describing visual artifacts.

 

In conclusion, I’d like to note that, ironically, there is no truly ekphrastic passage in “When I Paint My Masterpiece.” But maybe there’s a reason for this. Maybe there’s no space for indeterminacy or possible gaze in a masterpiece. Maybe – at least in the streets of Rome – a masterpiece is a fixed commodity, always already complete and, for that reason, already in ruins. The possible gaze in the song cannot be found in ekphrastic passages but in the very elusiveness of the masterpiece itself. The entire song suggests a kind of future conditional context – an ekphrasis yet to come.

 

 

Raphael Falco is Founding Editor of the Dylan Review. Although it is normally our policy not to publish articles by our editors, Falco contributed this paper to the World of Bob Dylan 2023, and we felt it appropriate to reproduce it for this special section.

 

[1] Christopher Johnson, “Appropriating Troy: Ekphrasis in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece.” in Fantasies of Troy: Classical Tales and the Social Imaginary in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Edited by Alan Shepard and Stephen D. Powell (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2004), 193-212.

[2] Claire Preston, “Ekphrasis: Painting in Words,” in Renaissance Figures of Speech (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), 115.

[3]Stephen Scobie, Alias Bob Dylan Revisited, (Calgary Alberta Canada: Red Deer Press, 2003), 267-68.

August 26, 2023 by
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WORLD OF BOB DYLAN: “‘Blood on Your Saddle’: Bob Dylan’s Homicidal Voices.”

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“‘Blood on Your Saddle’: Bob Dylan’s Homicidal Voices.” World of Bob Dylan 2023,  June 2023, Tulsa, OK.
BY Paul Haney, Emerson College

 

On May 8, 2020, amid the uncertain early days of Covid, Bob Dylan released the third and final single from his latest album, Rough and Rowdy Ways. That single, “False Prophet” – which takes its arrangement nearly wholesale from Billy “The Kid” Emerson’s 1954 Sun Records single, “If Lovin’ Is Believing” – seems to confront the decades old notion that Bob Dylan himself is some kind of prophet, a speaker of unbounding truth, a proclaimer of God’s will. Dylan toys with this notion, which goes all the way back to the folkniks in the early 60s who proclaimed “he speaks for us!”; runs through the late 60s hippies who were prone to centering Dylan and his self-proclaimed “vision music” in their cosmic hallucinations; became all too literal in the “Dylan-as-prophet” gospel era; and persist even today in a strain of Dylanology that holds Dylan as some kind of codemaster whose writings we can decipher for deeper truths.

“I ain’t no false prophet,” Dylan declares in that 2020 single, which would become the album’s second track. “I just know what I know / I go where only the lonely can go.” The declaration leaves open the possibility that Dylan, or his lyric speaker, the voice of his song, could be a true prophet, confirming all of those timeworn suspicions – though it seems more likely the speaker, as sinister as he is reverential, perceives himself to be no prophet at all. No matter what he is, though, or what he fashions himself to be, this speaker is powerful, passionate, fierce – an entity which cannot be ignored.

The next verse after that first “false prophet” refrain rumbles with pomposity, braggadocio, and contempt: “I’m first among equals, second to none / Last of the best, you can bury the rest.” Soon the speaker claims to have “climbed the mountain of swords on my bare feet,” reveals his “ghostly appearance,” and by the end of the second refrain divulges, “I’m just here to bring vengeance on somebody’s head.” Who that somebody is – or who the speaker is even speaking to – seems to shift around with each verse, if not couplet. To one subject he beckons, “open your mouth / I’ll stuff it with gold.” Then there’s a “poor devil” looking upon the “City of God”; a “stranger” who “ruled the land” and who might be one in the same as the “lusty old mule” with the “poison brain,” the one whom the speaker promises to “marry … to a ball and chain.”

The subjects shift as readily as the speaker’s tone, approach, agenda. Behind Dylan’s weathered yet elastic growl, and the band’s borrowed blues, the song encompasses everything and nothing at once, congealing behind the song’s shape-shifting persona, a persona equal parts reflective and flattering, philosophical and funny, bombastic and homicidal. It’s the homicidal part that I find most interesting as a lyrical mode, a rhetorical device, a facet of Dylan’s songwriting identity that has been there from the beginning, finding its roots perhaps in the murder ballads Dylan performed on the streets and in the clubs of Dinkytown, Greenwich Village, and elsewhere. This murderous voice bleeds into Dylan’s “finger-pointin’ songs” of the early 60s and rears its head occasionally in the decades to follow before becoming a cornerstone of Dylan’s twenty-first century songwriting, increasing in scope and intensity with each new record.

These homicidal voices, strung through Dylan’s lyrics, challenge the listener to take Dylan’s side, or face his wrath, or both. Aesthetically, they imbue Dylan’s music with a hard edge that gives him swagger and poise, like a boxer in the ring, a hitman in a hollywood noir, a fugitive outlaw trying to stay alive, or simply a strongman responding to an insult, whether personal or political, real or perceived. These voices sometimes parody the violent masculinity they enact; other times the bloody threat lands square on the nose. Combative, biblical, and fundamentally patriarchal, Dylan’s murderous threats provide an oppositional guise within his catalog of faces as he builds and rebuilds his multifaceted persona.

Before Dylan began writing and performing his own murderous songs, he was learning and singing murder ballads. Laura Tenschert is currently in the midst of a two-part series on Bob Dylan’s murder ballads double episode on her show, Definitely Dylan. In that first episode, Tenschert digs into folk ballads like “Omie Wise” and “Pretty Polly” from Dylan’s early repertoire, when he was singing about betrayed and jilted lovers exacting their revenges, all to grab the attention of listeners filtering through the coffeehouses and city streets of Greenwich Village. When Dylan started writing and performing his own songs, those themes of death and devastation melded with the social consciousness of the folk movement to create, as Tenschert points out, such sophisticated songs as “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” and “Ballad of Hollis Brown.” In the first, a wealthy southerner whacks a server with his cane, killing her, while in the second the conditions of poverty in South Dakota lead to the murder-suicide – a kind of mercy killing – of a farmer and his family. In both cases, Dylan recounts the deadly scenes from a distant perspective; while he does engage in second-person moralizing (“You who philosophize disgrace…”), he never slips into the first-person “I.”

More germane to my purposes, though, are two other early Dylan folk songs that harness the murdering impulse from a first-person perspective. The existence of a first-person speaker – one a singular “I,” the other a plural “we” – allows Dylan to sing these songs with even more venom and invective. The first is “Masters of War,” containing arguably Dylan’s most brutal proclamation: “I’ll stand o’er your grave ‘til I’m sure that you’re dead.” This promise, coming on just his second album, harnesses a youthful disgust post-World War II, and the Korean War, at the start of the Vietnam War, but also takes its aim at all the bloodthirsty warmongers past, present, and future. One might imagine the folkies in their legions of knit caps and corduroy pants peering contentedly over Dylan’s shoulder at the warhawks in their graves. Likewise, “When the Ship Comes In” constructs a watery grave for the speaker’s foes who will “jerk from their beds and think they’re dreamin’ / But they’ll pinch themselves and squeal / And they’ll know that it’s for real.” When that crew tries to surrender, however, a collective “we” emerges, Dylan promising “we’ll shout from the bow ‘your days are numbered’.” Whereas the Masters of War are buried in the earth, these transgressors are “drowned’ed in the tide.”

A zeal for this brand of retribution through social reform circulated through the folk revival, and Dylan harnessed this sentiment in song. After he expanded as an artist beyond folk music, however, that brand of righteous anger seemed to flag. Sure, Dylan harnessed hostility in “Positively 4th Street,” intoning, “you’ve got a lotta nerve to say you are my friend.” He wasn’t so kind to Miss Lonely in “Like a Rolling Stone,” and he argued Mr. Jones should be stripped of his senses and made illegal, but these are less self-righteous proclamations with the weight of social history behind them than the complaints of a young hipster who’s made it on the scene, who’s made his own scene, one filled with flashing Beat images, jokey surrealism, the whole complex drama of young love and scorn. Save for some risible taunts to Cassius Clay, later Muhammed Ali, in “I Shall Be Free No. 10”: “14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, Gonna knock him clean right outta his spleen,” it would be many years, and many albums, until direct threats, or at least prognostications of death, would reappear in Dylan’s lyrics.

In one song from the mid-70s, Dylan reprises the deadly voice. “You hurt the ones that I love best / And cover up the truth with lies” Dylan sings in the fourth verse of “Idiot Wind,” a venomous side-one track from 1975’s Blood on the Tracks. “One day you’ll be in the ditch / Flies buzzin’ around your eyes / Blood on your saddle.” Here the I-speaker seems not to threaten as much as predict that the “idiot, babe” second person of the song will find her fatal end, most likely due to her own idiocy. Eight verses, four choruses, and nearly eight minutes long, the snarling, driving rock tune drips with resentment and disdain, the speaker informing the subject “your corrupt ways have finally made you blind” and musing, “it’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe,” even while he calls her “sweet lady” and points out her “ragin’ glory” and her “holiness.” Now, I’m not here to tell you Dylan based “Idiot Wind” on his marital separation, and that he had a real person in mind for his descriptors and invectives. That kind of biographical reading is superficial at best. We have to take the song for what it is, beyond the biography. But Dylan himself told an interviewer, Bill Flanagan, in 1985, “I thought I might have gone a little bit too far with ‘Idiot Wind.’ … I didn’t feel that one was too personal, but I felt it seemed too personal. … ‘Cause usually with those kinds of things, if you think you’re too close to something, you’re giving away too much of your feelings, well, your feelings are going to change a month later and you’re going to look back and say, ‘What did I do that for?’”

So, what did Dylan do that for? Self-expression? Poetic effect? Simply to get the song across? Whatever the case, he seemed to have discovered a danger inherent in embodying the voice of masculine rage – namely that it can put people off, make people uncomfortable, especially if they can imagine the person behind the castigations. And though “Idiot Wind” still stands as one of Dylan’s most powerful tracks, perhaps Dylan scared himself, because going forward through the 70s and 80’s, he rarely used the first person in such a menacing way. “Go get my pistol, babe,” he commands in “Baby Stop Crying” from 1978’s Street Legal: “Honey, I can’t tell right from wrong.” But here the speaker isn’t threatening to shoot the woman, but protect her, avenge her honor, if she would only stop crying. “Why would I want to take your life?” he asks on 1981’s “Shot of Love”: “You’ve only murdered my father, raped his wife / Tattooed my babies with a poison pen / Mocked my God, humiliated my friends.” Here at the far end of Dylan’s gospel era, he seems to have synthesized his truculent religiosity into one verse. In fact, in 1983 Dylan called “Shot of Love “my most perfect song. It defines where I am spiritually, musically, romantically and whatever else. It shows where my sympathies lie.” From this view, Dylan has landed on a rationale for righteous condemnation that ends in bloodshed, framing such behavior as a mandate from God, yet that mandate, chilling as it is, fades into the background for the rest of the decade. Dylan, again, seems to have said his piece and moved on.

In 1990, however, midway through Dylan’s album Under the Red Sky, the jumpin’ blues number “10,000 Men” begins with the kernel of a lyrical style Dylan would go on to leverage with great success in what we now refer to as his late era. “Ten thousand men on a hill,” Dylan relays. “Some of ’m goin’ down, some of ’m gonna get killed.” This suggestion of some epic battle ever-unfolding lends the song historic depth, the glory and agony of warfare, even as he belted out “Masters of War” just five months later at the Grammys while accepting his Lifetime Achievement Award. The twin facets of Dylan’s bellicose late-era songwriting – the personally affronted, the historically aggrieved – appears briefly on Dylan’s subsequent album of originals, 1997’s Time Out of Mind. “I don’t know if I saw you / If I would kiss you or kill you,” Dylan sings. “It probably wouldn’t matter to you anyhow.” One would think it would matter if one were to be kissed or killed – that nothing could matter more – though the line goes by breezily, almost like a smoky tune from the song’s “jukebox playin’ low.”

Of course, between 1990’s Under the Red Sky and 1997’s Time Out of Mind, in order to fulfill a contract with Columbia Records, Dylan reached back into the folk canon and interpreted two albums of old British and American folk songs and, tellingly, murder ballads. Those two albums, Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong contain such haunting and pointedly vengeful songs as “Frankie and Albert,” “Delia,” “Stack a Lee,” and my personal favorite, the leering and lecherous “Blood in My Eyes.” Accepted wisdom goes that this roots return helped reconnect Dylan to some ancient inspiration he’d been lacking for a decade or more, and it does seem clear the 90s saw a broadening of Dylan’s aesthetic range. He met the twenty-first century with the jaunty film single, “Things Have Changed,” and the stylistically diverse album, “Love and Theft”, expanding his musical persona into even more genres of American music, and various forms of lyrical expression.

In the span of Dylan’s discography, 2001’s “Love and Theft” is as colorful and eccentric as any other release. Characters spring forth, like Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum, the one who is a “low down, sorry old man,” the other who “will stab you where you stand.” More significantly, that first-person speaker reigns over the proceedings with humor, emotion, and yes, homicidal rage. From the broad, epic view, that speaker claims in “Bye and Bye” that, “I’m gonna establish my rule through civil war.” Juxtaposed with his “lover’s sigh” and jokes like “I’m sittin’ on my watch so I can be on time,” though, this civil war threat actually falls in service to proving “how loyal and true a man can be.” Similarly, in “Honest with Me,” Dylan claims “I’m here to create the new imperial empire / I’m gonna do whatever circumstances require.” In this song, however, the speaker concedes some of his power, moaning, “I’m glad I fought / I only wish we’d won.”

But don’t take Dylan too lightly, either. “I might need a good lawyer,” he hypothesizes in “Cry a While”: “Could be your funeral, my trial.” Meanwhile in “Floater (Too Much to Ask),” he warns, “If you ever try to interfere with me or cross my path again / you do so at the peril of your life / I’m not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound.” Part of these lines Dylan cribbed from John Bester’s English translation of Junichi Saga’s Confessions of a Yakuza, and it does seem that oftentimes when Dylan mines other texts for lyric material, he gravitates toward the gruesome and the deadly. The same holds true on Modern Times, which features darker tones, denser sounds than its predecessor, even as it continues its romp through American musical forms. From within its thick blues and spare ballads spring lines like:

Gonna raise me an army, some tough sons of bitches
I’ll recruit my army from the orphanages (“Thunder on the Mountain”)

I can’t go back to paradise no more
I killed a man back there (“Spirit on the Water”)

Sooner or later you too shall burn (“Rollin’ and Tumblin’”)

I’m going to make you come to grips with fate
When I’m through with you, you’ll learn to keep your business straight (“Nettie
Moore”)

Gonna get myself together, I’m gonna wring your neck
When all else fails I’ll make it a matter of self respect (“Someday Baby”)

If I catch my opponents ever sleepin’
I’ll just slaughter them where they lie
I’ll avenge my father’s death and then I’ll step back (“Ain’t Talkin’”)

Some of the lines have antecedents in earlier songs, poems, and Shakespeare plays, and others don’t. As is widely known, on Modern Times Dylan borrows lines not just from old blues and lounge singers, but writers such as the so-called Poet of the Confederacy, Henry Timrod, and notably, the ancient Roman poet, Ovid. While the most murderous lines seem to belong to Dylan himself, these notions of both the Civil War and of Ovid’s exile to the barren and desolate Black Sea infuse the album with both belligerence and yearning. Akin to Ovid, Dylan himself has claimed, “I was born very far from where I’m supposed to be, and so I’m on my way home.” On Modern Times, Dylan’s and Ovid’s voices intertwine, deepening the historical valence of Dylan’s own voice, proving Dylan’s grievance with this world is nothing new. And since he’s not actually a murderer, as far as we know, it’s through his lyrics that he exacts his revenge.

Released just two years later, Together Through Life is an aberration in this rising tide of bloody voices. Yes, on “My Wife’s Hometown,” Dylan sings, “One of these days, I’ll end up on the run / I’m pretty sure she’ll make me kill someone.” In Jolene, “I’ve got a Saturday night special, I’m back again.” And on “It’s All Good,” Dylan threatens, “I’ll pluck off your beard and blow it in your face / This time tomorrow I’ll be rolling in your place.” But that’s all the violence Dylan dispenses for the entire album, and this tameness we can safely attribute to Dylan’s lyrical collaboration with Robert Hunter of the Grateful Dead. With 2012’s Tempest, however, the rampage returns. The sweet, melodious “Soon After Midnight” finds that “they” – whoever “they” are – “chirp and chatter,” but “what does it matter / They’re lying there in their blood.” As for “Two Timing Slim,” Dylan will “drag his corpse through the mud.” The threats are then directed outward on “Narrow Way,” the speaker “armed to the hilt and struggling hard / You won’t get out of here unscarred.” For “Early Roman Kings,” the speaker will “strip you of life, strip you of breath / Ship you down to the house of death.” And right in the middle of this snarling, gravelly album, perhaps the bloodiest Dylan song of all, one he relished during live shows up until the pandemic, “Pay in Blood” operates on a double meaning. “I pay in blood / But not my own.” Whose blood is the speaker paying with as he “could stone you to death for the wrongs that you done?” Is it the listener’s? Jesus’s? With cagey confidence, Dylan observes, “Sooner or later you’ll make a mistake / I’ll put you in a chain that you never can break / Legs and arms and body and bone.” These words are tactile, visceral, all the more so because they spill blood as they unfold. “I got something in my pocket make your eyeballs swim / I got dogs could tear you limb from limb.” This is not someone you’d want to meet in a dark alley, or sit next to on a train. In fact, murdering seems to be this speaker’s reason for living:

This is how I spend my days
I came to bury, not to praise
I’ll drink my fill and sleep alone
I pay in blood, but not my own

Floating on the surface here is Marc Antony’s burial speech from Shakespeare’s Julius Ceasar. “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears,” Antony begins, “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.” In lifting and trimming this line, Dylan invites us to read on: “The evil that men do lives after them; / The good is oft interred with their bones.” If evil lives on, then it’s through evil, not good, that Dylan’s lyrical personas will succeed him. No wonder his work becomes more violent by the year.

Given the bloody trajectory of Dylan’s late-era albums, it’s no surprise that Dylan’s latest album, 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, wields this rhetoric of violence to enhance his patchwork of historical episodes and moody vignettes. The first single released, before the album was even announced, was “Murder Most Foul,” the epic, groaning ballad about, to cite Dylan’s own allusion, “a day that will live on in infamy.” On her recent podcast episode Laura Tenschert says “It would take Bob Dylan over 56 years to release a murder ballad based on the story of JFK’s assassination, and even that song still seems to struggle to make sense of it.” In the voice of JFK’s killers, Dylan threatens, “You got unpaid debts and we’ve come to collect / We’re gon’ kill you with hatred and without any respect.” Later, the third-person narrator observes, “They mutilated his body and took out his brain / What more could they do, they piled on the pain.” The sense Dylan can make of this pivotal U.S. American tragedy lies in the murder itself, along with the equally bloody post-mortem exam. The meaning’s in the violence, a topic he’s long been exploring.

Elsewhere on the album, Dylan asks “Can you look in my face with your sightless eye / Can you cross your heart and hope to die?” Here he’s playing Dr. Frankenstein, but he still invokes the listener with a second-person “you,” commanding, “Show me your ribs – I’ll stick in the knife” before resuming character: “I’m gonna jump start my creation to life.” In “Black Rider,” the speaker seems to be speaking to the titular character himself. “Go home to your wife stop visiting mine” he says before warning, “One of these days I’ll forget to be kind.” Later, the speaker admits, “My soul is distressed my mind is at war.” But don’t try to comfort him, either: “Don’t hug me – don’t flatter me – don’t turn on the charm / I’ll take out a sword and have to hack off your arm.” Likewise, in “Crossing the Rubicon,” a vulnerable position makes the speaker defensive as he can “feel the bones beneath my skin and they’re tremblin’ with rage / I’ll make your wife a widow – you’ll never see old age.” The threats create distance between the speaker in his moments of weakness and any sort of sympathy. “Others can be tolerant,” the speaker says, “others can be good / I’ll cut you up with a crooked knife and I’ll miss you when you’re gone.”

What does all of this violence, warfaring, and cold murder add up to? Is Dylan just cranky and dishing out idle threats? Grouchy? Hangry? In a mood? These lines I’ve enumerated certainly do create a mood, one that contrasts and enhances many of the other moods characteristic of Dylan’s late-era songwriting: the romantic, the historic, the sublime. Of late, Dylan’s songwriting has not only reanimated the past, but it has embodied the virtual jumble of voices that typify contemporary existence. After all, we live in a digital era where messages stream at light speed, where all music is available at all times, where information is cheap and always at the ready. Or, as Dylan told Jeff Slate in a recent interview, “We seem to be in a vacuum. Everything’s become too smooth and painless. We jumped into the mainstream, the big river, with all the industrial waste, chemical debris, rocks, and mudflow, along with Brian Wilson and his brothers, Soupy Sales, and Tennessee Ernie Ford. The earth could vomit up its dead, and it could be raining blood, and we’d shrug it off, cool as cucumbers.” In this age of oversaturation, Dylan’s own music has doubled down on a polyvocal, multifarious quality. In other words, as the first track of Rough and Rowdy Ways claims, paraphrasing Whitman, Dylan contains multitudes, and even that song finds Dylan fighting blood feuds, carrying “four pistols and two large knives,” showing his heart, “but not all of it – only the hateful part,” selling you down the river, putting a price on your head, sleeping “with life and death in the same bed.” Dylan, as much as any other major artist, has managed to pack his persona with a multitude of voices that reflect our twenty-first century reality. The murderous impulse – whether in the personal or historical sense – is only one facet of that protean persona, but it’s the one snarling, sneering face that often catches your attention and lingers in your mind. It’s the face of mortality that reminds you you’re alive.

 

Paul Haney is Editor of the Dylan Review. Although it is normally our policy not to publish articles by our editors, Haney contributed this paper to the World of Bob Dylan 2023, and we felt it appropriate to reproduce it for this special section.

August 26, 2023 by
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WORLD OF BOB DYLAN: “I AND I”

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“I and I.” World of Bob Dylan 2023, June 2023, Tulsa, OK.

BY Bernard Wills, Grenfell Campus Memorial University

 

“I and I” is a track on Dylan’s 1983 album Infidels. The title, of course, refers to the phrase “I and I” used by Rastafarians to assert a logic of identity rather like the Fichtean A=A. Unlike in German idealism however, this is an experiential not a logical proposition. “I and I” states the experience that God and humanity are one: that I in my subjectivity and self-hood am the divine subjectivity. The human and divine I are distinguished to be identified. This knowledge is a revolutionary act of appropriating dignity, the dignity of I itself, to myself, in my fallen and oppressed condition and is the condition of any assertion of freedom and decolonization. Indeed, with the division of the world into subject and object (not “I and I” but “I and it”) other human subjects are reduced to “objects” to be used and exploited.[1] In the Rasta world all is “I” not “you and I” which entails division and subordination. As Bunny Wailer puts it, “In the beginning there was one concept” that of I. (“Armagideon,” 1976) Division emerges (the problem in all Gnostic type systems) through the arch nemesis “Apollyon” or “Satan” who first enunciates the sentence “you and I,” thus dividing the unity of I into subject and object. This is how, in one of his accounts at least, Plotinus accounts for the emergence of mind from the simplicity of the one: an act of “daring” that breaks the original unity and introduces the possibility of evil (1991; 5, 1, 1). What, however, does Dylan make of all this from a Judaic perspective for which God utterly transcends the human so that “his thoughts are not our thoughts”? In this essay I will explore this question by explicating the lyric for “I and I.” As we shall see, Dylan (perhaps unconsciously, perhaps not) has evoked some of the most fundamental problems about the divine and human identity-in difference. It is perhaps not usual to bring German idealism into one’s consideration of Dylan as I did above. Nor is it usual to bring in the beliefs of the Rastafarians. Yet to crack the complexity of what Dylan has done in this song we shall have to do both as occasion serves.[2]

 

Dylan, notoriously, had a period of intense immersion in Evangelical Christianity. This period seemingly ended with the release of Infidels and on this and later records Christian and Judaic imagery seem poised against each other in what we might call a dialectical way. Though Dylan is, before all else, mercurial, I think I can say with some confidence that these later explorations of Judaism reflect a dissatisfaction with strict Evangelical theology. This is because it is a theology of rupture. The fissure between the old self and the new, nature and grace, the saved and the unregenerate is posited as absolute. This fissure is dramatized in Dylan’s trilogy of gospel albums: Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love. On these records the divine has entered history, radically, in the person of Christ. This moment of revelation forces an absolute choice: “You either got faith or you got unbelief/there ain’t no neutral ground” (“Precious Angel,” 1979). The divine drama unfolds in a moment of pure crisis where the will must give itself unreservedly to the standpoint of faith or remain divided: “No time to prepare for the victim that’s there / no time to suffer or blink / and no time to think” (“No Time to Think,” 1978). This crisis presents a binary option, an either/or. At its most radical it entails the logic of the early heresiarch Marcion, with his absolute division of nature and grace and his absolute separation of the Christ of the Gospels from the Torah. In many ways, this Gnosticism, as Harold Bloom points out, lies at the heart of American Protestantism, especially in its popular modes (1992; 21-23). A radical separation is sought from what is simply given in nature or history. The self is radically transformed, reborn in redemptive suffering. This new Christian self is in the most basic sense a revolutionary self, a radical recreation, and we should give the word “revolutionary” its full resonance for an American context.

 

Dylan, though, is a poet of continuity as well as rupture. Transformation and recreation of the self is a reaching back as well as a looking forward: looking forward to a redeemed self and back to an ahistorical point of origin: deep in the soul there is no past (see Day, 1988; 118). What propels us forward is an effort to recapture the integrity of the beginning through a recovery of the past. As another poet, T.S. Eliot, put it “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time” (1971; 145). The beginning point is always present; Jewish experience, to be specific, does not disappear from Christianity. The legitimacy of the new faith is predicated on the old[3] (John 5.45 46). Dylan seems to want to explore this fact to a far greater degree than Evangelical Protestantism would readily countenance. One might say that for him, Judaism and Christianity align insofar as both are religions of expectation and insofar as the object of this expectation is one and the same. How he would work this relation out is difficult to say; however, it must be emphasized that such discursive tasks are not typically for poets. What they utter in their divine madness the reader must turn into prosaic commentary. We will, then, consider the lyrics of “I and I” and consider how they manage (linguistically) the complex task of rendering a space within and somehow beyond the contested boundaries of Hebrew and Christian tradition.

 

The song is in one way very simple. A man goes out for a walk to avoid talking to a dreaming woman. The “walk” however is clearly a metaphor for another type of experience: the mystical experience of a realm outside time, change, and even language. As the chorus indicates, this is an encounter with the transcendent creator of the Hebrew Bible. Dylan’s source here is Exodus 33 vs. 19-23 in which Moses encounters the living God and receives a glimpse of divine glory. This is the principle of absolute beauty and justice before which creation is reduced to nothingness: “No man sees my face and lives.” This is the principle which “neither honors nor forgives” (i.e. in “creation” we are not honored or forgiven if we do not honor and forgive).[4] The paradox of the song revolves around the mediation between the creature and this absolute principle. The Rasta phrase “I and I” adverted to above immediately evokes an encounter between an “I” and another “I” or (presumably) two subjectivities. Yet the phrase yokes these subjectivities together such that each “I” can see the other “I” as “I,” as itself rather than another. Difference and unity are evoked at the same time and in the same respect: that of the “I.” Earlier in Exodus 33 it says “and the Lord spoke unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend.” Paradoxically, the self can attain union with that which it cannot behold and live. This may seem a naked contradiction, but Dylan is purposefully honing a paradoxical discourse which tests the limits of finite reason. Readers unable or unwilling to distinguish between a sloppy contradiction and a fruitful paradox should probably avoid Dylan and the Hebrew Bible! At any rate, this paradoxical union/disunion is enacted by the mediation of the word which speaks its own ineffability: “One says to the other.” At the very limit of communication consciousness is saturated with what is too intimately present to be divided discursively by a “Mind that multiplies the smallest matter” (“The Wicked Messenger,” 1967).

 

This points to another possible interpretation of the phrase “I and I.” “I and I” could be read as a circumlocution for God’s name “I am who I am” in which, despite the assertion of identity, the “I” is taken twice. Yet the very fact that the “I” must be duplicated for God to speak his name suggests that this assertion of absolute unity slides into difference, even duality, even as it is spoken. One can take this further. “I and I” may be attributing the reflexivity of consciousness to the one God: the “I” knowing itself as another “I” which, if one takes the copula binding “I and I” as a third element, would anticipate the Christian (though not Plotinian) Trinity.[5] On this reading we have an assertion of identity and difference packed in the ambiguity of Dylan’s terse phrases. Somehow the mystical identity of the soul with the one beyond comprehension, the identity with what is absolutely different, is grounded in the possibility of the one being different from itself in the word which mediates its transcendence: the “I” can saturate and suffuse another “I.” It can be “I” in another “I.” Thus, Moses can speak face to face with He whom no man can look upon. Even in the gap, the distance opened up between “I” and “Thou,” the “I” can encounter another “I” as its own most intimate self.[6] The boundaries erected by ordinary object-consciousness and discursive logic may, after all, not apply in the heightened state of poetic, and indeed prophetic, inspiration. Here the poet/prophet/visionary may be as much God as not God and vice versa.

 

This suggestion seems to lie behind the third verse, a mysterious conflation of Ecclesiastes 1, 9-11 and Timothy 2, 15-16. The Ecclesiastes text laments the power of time and chance over all human endeavor while the Pauline text enjoins Christians to avoid vain and foolish babbling and to rightly “divide” the word of truth. The way Dylan joins these two texts (one Hebrew and one Greek and Christian), they carry the sense that he who divides rightly the word of truth shall gain the goal which strength, wisdom, speed, and cunning cannot attain: salvation from time and chance. Most striking is the notion that a “division” of truth as truth, traditionally, is one. The phrase “the word of truth” implies that the one truth can be spoken in the dividedness of language. To divide the word of truth rightly would be to properly split up the one truth into many words. There is another kind of proper division consequent on this: the proper division of honor into equal portions through justice, hence the next two lines. Here there is not only divine unity but “just” division and “just” speaking. Language breaks up the unity of the one into discourse as nature breaks up God into creation and indeed, as human society “divides” the unity of justice into “equal shares.” One might almost think of the “breaking” of the vessels of light in the imagery of the Kabbalah. These lines attribute to a “stranger” the teaching of the true character of justice. In a brilliant play on words Dylan (the speaker) learns to “see an I for an I,” the absolute equality of one subject with another, and is hence placed under the law which demands an eye for an eye, which this equality entails. If one sees an “I for an I,” one must also see an eye for an eye and “a tooth for a tooth.” This is learned from beholding justice in the face of a “stranger.” We cannot see justice in ourselves but only in the face of the other. Exodus says to honor the stranger among us (22-21), so the primary meaning here is that the measure of our justice is how we treat the stranger for nature itself inclines us to be kind to our own kin but to fear and hate the other.

 

This image also suggests the traditional representation of justice as a blindfolded woman holding a pair of scales. To look into her face would be to see the beautiful countenance of justice and justice, after all, may be something to which all us fallen humans are a stranger. This, a visible icon of justice, may be the face we can look into and live, or look into and die, depending on what is in our hearts. Here one is tempted to sum up all these strands of meaning by pointing out that in Christian discourse it is Christ (the stranger among us in John, he who is not of this world but sent from the Father) who is the visible icon of justice. Thus, we have the assertion that truth and justice can be mediated by words and images, just as we can be one with that which no eye (or I) can look upon and live through the speaking of the word. This meaning, if we accept it, links beautifully with the first for it is through the face of the stranger, the face of the other, that we see the face of Christ: “Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matthew 25:40). It would be fruitful, though beyond the scope of this paper, to consider this focus on the stranger as the icon of justice in relation to the “face of the other” which for Levinas constitutes the sphere of the ethical.

 

The final verse presents this result as the conclusion of the speaker’s journey. Language (“talk”) which the speaker had sought to escape in the second verse is here reaffirmed. The journey has continued past the night: the natural alteration of light and dark has been suspended by a deeper darkness. A “darkness at noon” that outshines the natural sun. The speaker, pushing himself through this darkness at noon (the totalitarian horrors of the 20th Century as in Arthur Koestler? The “divine darkness” of negative theology? Both at once?) must force himself forward yet cannot stumble or stay put into the narrow lanes of quotidian existence.[7] Freedom and compulsion seem to exist at once. In this state, the speaker experiences something of the infinity of the divine itself: “Into the narrow lanes I can’t stumble or stay put.” Dylan divides this line with a scoff, the divine scoff at the constraints of the finitude which cannot contain it. One can almost hear the voice of God here taking over the speaker’s voice. Indeed, this is what is described in the very next line: “Someone else is speaking with my mouth”. This seems to mean two things: a. the divine is speaking in me as in prophecy; and b. I, God, am speaking through another. Exactly as in Rastafarianism the divine and human interchange pronouns in a division without confusion. As the speaker (presumably the human “I”) focuses on the sound of his own heartbeat, the word is delivered: “I’ve made shoes for everyone, even you, while I still go barefoot.” Shoes may here stand for images or artifacts, perhaps even words or (for the human speaker Dylan) songs. The word of the divine is that no image can contain him; though a maker of shoes he is himself not shod. The God beyond words can speak of his wordlessness and this speech cannot be exhausted because it cannot exhaust him. The word of ineffability saves speaking itself from its own exhaustion.

 

This brings us to the figure of the woman mentioned in the first, second, and fourth verses. The woman sleeps throughout the song wrapped in the dreams of her past. She is the power who evokes speech, perhaps she is language herself or, to use Ginsberg’s phrase from the liner notes to Desire, “Lady Language Creator.” Her speech, however, is focused on the past, on “whatever was.” Perhaps then she is memory as well. Her sleep seems a sleep of exhaustion as if satiated with her own fullness. Indeed, there is an air of unreality about her dream state: she would sleep through the end of the world if it occurred. This exhaustion or fullness invokes weariness and disgust reminiscent, again, of Ecclesiastes 1, 9.: “there is no new thing under the sun.” It is from this state of world weariness that the speaker ascends to other realms, realms beyond memory and decay. In the process he is raised from the silence of self-satisfied dreams to speak a deeper silence. This is possible for God can reveal himself to creation. The power whose glance would consume the world can, through its ineffable condescension, maintain the creature in relation to itself. It is its very nature to mediate itself to what is other. Thus, one can be intimate to the point of identity with what is other to a degree which can neither be imagined or comprehended. This identity is not only the core of Christian mysticism but of Neo-Platonic henosis as well. It is also core to the Islamic Sufi tradition (rarely, to my knowledge, explicitly evoked by Dylan) which speaks of fana or loss of conscious self-hood in the divine ecstasy.[8] Indeed, the mystic al Hallaj uttered the phrase “I am the truth” in one of his ecstasies: his “I” was, in that moment, the divine “I” and one might say that “I and I” was almost what he uttered were it not that he proclaimed the distinction of the I’s annulled. Does “I and I” leave a shadow of difference in its assertion of identity?

 

Divine power, we are told, will soon fill and renew all creation in an eternal spring which will come “smoking down the track” as the “two men on a train platform” wait for the “gospel train” to appear. It was once suggested to me that these men are a Christian and a Jew and this seems to me plausible as in Dylan’s mind this is who would be waiting for the “Slow Train Coming”: the two religions of eschatological hope join in waiting for the same consummation (as does Islam but that does not seem to be on Dylan’s radar at least here). One might take this song as poised teasingly between Christian and Jewish standpoints on speaking and silence, God and creation, image and what cannot be imaged. This would certainly mark an advance (if this word applies to poets and artists) over Dylan’s more nakedly confessional records of the late 70’s (though these are in their own way compelling). Christianity leavened with a Jewish sense of paradox and “negative capability” seems no worse for wear to me and Dylan certainly weaves as much into this “Judeo-Christian” lyric as a lyric can contain. Poetry of this sort might even seem to some even overloaded, an unusual criticism for a pop song to be sure. Still, Dylan has difficult things to say and such things cannot always be said in a simple manner. Moreover, he has difficult things to say about the most difficult things. Indeed, he here performs one of the poet’s most important tasks, bending the resources of language to say what cannot, after all, be said. With apologies to Wittgenstein, it is the poets who face the task of speaking of that “whereof one cannot speak.” It is their task to push language to the point of failure and beyond.

 

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold American Religion (New York, Simon and Shuster, 1992).

Day, Aiden Jokerman (Cambridge Mass Basil Blackwell ltd, 1988)

Dylan, Bob Blonde on Blonde (New, York, Columbia Records, 1966)

Dylan, Bob Infidels (New, York, Columbia Records, 1983)

Dylan, Bob John Wesley Harding (New York, Columbia Records, 1967)

Dylan, Bob Slow Train Coming (New York, Columbia Records, 1979)

Dylan, Bob Street-Legal (New York, Columbia Records, 1978)

Eliot, T.S. The Complete Poems and Plays (New York, Harcourt Brace and World, 1971)

Hegel, G.W.F. The Science of Logic trans. A.V. Miller (N.J., Humanities Press

International, 1969)

Ricks, Christopher Dylan’s Visions of Sin (London, Harper Collins, 2003)

Plotinus, Enneads trans. S. MacKenna (London, Penguin Books, 1991)

Schelling, F.J.W. System of Transcendental Idealism trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville,

University of Virginia Press, 1978)

The Wailers Burnin’ (New York, Island Records, 1971)

Wailer, Bunny Blackheart Man (New York, Island Records, 1976)

 

[1] Dylan is, of course, making a gesture, perhaps critical, to Martin Buber’s formulation of “I and Thou.” The human I encounters the divine in the form of thou, an otherness not reducible to the condition of the ordinary object world. This “thou” is irreducibly personal as irreducibly numinous. It overflows the category of thinghood and presents itself as an object of address not as an empirical object or notional category. It is to “thou” that one says, with Abraham (and with Leonard Cohen!) “hineni” or “here I am.” Understood this way, the formula “I and I” is an intensification of Buber’s “I and Thou.” It asserts a fusion and identity (as in mysticism) whereas Buber’s “I and Thou” emphasizes a dyadic encounter (where neither term is reduced or assimilated to the other). Of course, the ultimate limit of the assertion of “I and I” is the identity of human and divine in Christ. Is this what is being evoked through the appropriation of Rasta discourse for which, as Peter Tosh sings “Almighty God is a living man” (“Get Up, Stand Up,” 1971)?

[2] Aiden Day, in his study of Dylan Jokerman: Reading the Lyrics of Bob Dylan, invokes Dionysius and Eckhardt and in general the tradition of “negative mysticism” as a way of approaching Dylan’s lyrics (1988; 110). In the early modern period this Christian tradition absorbed a good deal of Jewish Cabbalism through figures like Jacob Boehme and Athanasius Kircher. This tradition, in turn, marked the tradition of German idealism through Schelling, Baader and, ultimately, Hegel. This is why convergences between Dylan and German Idealism, though indirect as far as I know, are not as surprising as they would seem at first blush. Western esoteric thinking (which might get by any number of routes to Dylan and, indeed, the early Rastas) has already blended Jewish and Christian themes in just the way we shall see “I and I” does. Fans of Dylan might be surprised what they find in Schelling’s essay Of Human Freedom!

[3] Dylan’s biblical references are to the Authorized Version so that is what I employ here. Dylan, after all, is an English poet, steeped in the tradition of that language, and English poetry, consciously or not, is haunted by the phrasing and cadence of the King James translators. What’s more, Dylan’s precise word play cannot be replicated using more modern translations.

[4] Citations from “I and I” are from the version on Infidels (1983).

[5] Considering the mystery of the name of God in Exodus would take us far afield. God names himself as “being” in Greek and Latin translation and as something not exactly “being” in Hebrew. I will not enter into the philological question here as it is outside my competence. I will note, though, that even in its tautological identity the divine name retains a triadic structure: pronoun, copula, pronoun. As Schelling says, even in the form of the law of identity, A=A, the A is taken twice (1978; 30). Its identity is constituted out of a moment of internal difference with the equal sign functioning as the copula or logical link. Identity, even in its most immediate universality, is also triadic procession and ordering.

[6] In Visions of Sin Christopher Ricks makes a number of indirect references to “I and I,” though he does not treat it directly. Dylan, he notes, plays constantly with pronouns and indeed the “I,” whether in “I and I,” “I and you” or “I and they” (2003; 344-36). Day makes the same observation (131-132) citing Dylan himself. The referent of this “I” is indeterminate, wavering between the divine I and the human self, or perhaps even the poetic mask. This fluidity may remind us of what Coleridge held about the creativity of the human I as an image of the divine self-hood and absolute, self-positing freedom. At any rate, we might say that for Dylan, pronouns are entangled and that the binary drawn in discursive language between “I and Thou” or “I and I” may readily, indeed dramatically, collapse. This is as much as to say that binaries are constituted in inner identities and inner identities constituted as external binaries as in Hegel’s Science of Logic (see Chapter 2 ‘On Determinate Being’ for an extended account). This is manifested in the instability of fixed, over-determinate linguistic categories, pronouns included.

[7] From Boehme to Schelling to Buber there has been a tradition of conceiving of the divine as manifesting a light/dark polarity. Of this Aiden Day says: “There is an honest and fearful consistency in the brooding apprehension of absoluteness in “I and I.” The lyric grasps profoundly that to approach the synthesis of the absolute may be to venture beyond the very structures that enable distinctions between contraries to be made. Admitting neither division nor condition the absolute may exclude or, equally, may include neither the light nor the dark, neither the positive nor the negative” (130). Day gives Isaiah 59,10 as a possible source for the image of darkness at noon (130).

[8] Dylan mentions the “Persian drunkard” Omar Khayyam on Blonde on Blonde. Others have found links to Rumi in Dylan’s lyrics and this is, at very least, not implausible. Certainly, Dylan seems aware of this tradition but I am not prepared to say how deep this influence may go.

 

August 26, 2023 by