Questions on Masculinity – The Dylan Review

“Who Is That Man?: Identities, Space, and the Dylan Legacy”

By Andrew Fehribach, Radboud University

Introduction

Bob Dylan’s legacy never seems to close. With every shift in genre or glanced over album by more casual listeners, Dylan manages to surprise the world with what he offers to his audience. His lasting appearance in cultural consciousness encourages people to determine what he represents to each generation that discovers him. The foundations of his celebrity identity continue to be the topic of study and intrigue, as most recently seen with the December 2024 release of the film in the United States covering Dylan’s rise to stardom in the 1960s called A Complete Unknown starring Timothée Chalamet. Following this long held celebrity identity, his legacy more recently expanded into the age of Dylan as laureate. Since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, Dylan’s identity as a celebrity singer-songwriter intersects with this new identity. Reconciling the relationship of these two identities furthers the process of establishing Dylan’s legacy for future fans and critics.

Contemporary interpretations of Dylan’s legacy post-2016 include the 2022 public opening of the Bob Dylan Center museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma; the 2021 publication of the essay collection The World of Bob Dylan; and the 2023 publication of initial research into the archives with Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine. Each of these interpretations aim to promote and shape a particular narrative for Dylan’s legacy, showing a vibrant discourse looking back at Dylan and his significance moving forward. Including the laureate identity in the Dylan legacy involves reflecting on the celebrity identity because of the importance of the 1960s on both his writing and his renown in popular culture.

In the case of this essay, I am interested in connecting these identities to the spaces that Dylan occupied during this time period and interpreting the impact of masculinity to the formation of the laureate and celebrity identities. To make this connection, I examine the gender dynamics of two influential spaces on Dylan’s identities in the 1960s: the Beat Generation and the New York City folk scene. The spaces Dylan occupied between roughly 1962-1966 are particularly important to examine. Not only are these the years that Dylan achieved stardom, but this is also the time period that Nobel Prize committee cited by referencing his 1966 album, Blonde on Blonde, as a significant reason for him receiving the prize: “[Blonde on Blonde is] an extraordinary example of his brilliant way of rhyming and putting together refrains and his pictorial thinking.”[1] Studying these spaces as masculine explores how Dylan’s own masculinity relates to the connection of the celebrity and laureate identities that his legacy simultaneously occupies. This in turn begins to interpret the direction the Dylan legacy could go as these two identities coexist while interpreting the consequences of historic masculine space on contemporary literature. For this essay, I use “celebrity” to signify Dylan’s rise to popular cultural prominence and “laureate” to signify the eventual validation of his work at this time as literature by the Nobel Prize committee.

The Beat Generation

The Beat Generation praised the art of performance: fleeting moments of experience that romantically capture revelations for those on stage and in the audience. The opening lines of “Mr. Tambourine Man” recognize the intoxication and unsustainability of these occasions: “I know that evening’s empire has returned into sand / Vanished from my hand.”[2] People recall and retell of the “empire” that Dylan references in their own lives, creating the foundations for a literary movement that aggrandizes adrenaline as the muse. The Beat Generation weaves such momentous performances into their history. Studying gender in relation to those who performed and the impact of those performances on recollections of the Beat Generation shows how people reify these spaces in their retellings, which maintains not only the literary tradition, but also the masculine space. This process of reification then perpetuates to this masculine space that Dylan developed artistically from, tying masculinity to both of his identities.

Allen Ginsberg performing “Howl” at the 1955 Six Gallery reading in San Francisco became one of these storied performances. Six poets performed that night: Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Philip Lamantia, Philip Whalen, and the master of ceremonies Kenneth Rexroth.[3] The website for the Beat Museum in San Francisco cites McClure as remembering that “when Allen read ‘Howl,’ we all knew a line had been crossed.” Their website continues, “the impact of that first reading was so momentous that a re-creation of the event was organized in March of the following year.”[4] In his 1958 semi-autobiographical novel, The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac recalls the conversations that night as relating “anarchistic ideas about how Americans don’t know how to live.”[5] To honor the famous event, a plaque sits outside the former venue, placed there in 2005. It states: “Presented to San Francisco on the 50th Anniversary of the first full-length public reading of HOWL at Six Gallery.”[6] The recreation of the reading, Kerouac’s account of the original reading, and the commemorative plaque of the event show that this event quickly and lastingly became a part of the history of the Beat Generation. Ginsberg himself unabashedly hyperbolizes and dramatizes the 1955 event in an essay from 1957, showing how its significance evidently grew with nostalgia and pride:

A group of six unknown poets in San Francisco, in a moment of drunken enthusiasm, decided to defy the system of academic poetry, official reviews, New York publishing machinery, national sobriety and generally accepted standards to good taste, by giving a free reading of their poetry in a run down second rate experimental art gallery… The audience, expecting some Bohemian stupidity, was left stunned, and the poets were left with the realization that they were fated to make a permanent change in the literary firmament of the States.[7]

This quote signifies that moments like these are revelatory and lasting. People regenerate this space by telling these stories of profundity and triumph, which reinforces the conventions of the space from that time. This is not to suggest that the creation and perpetuation of masculine space was entirely exclusionary (more on that regarding Diane di Prima shortly), rather that this socialization indicates how space encouraged men disproportionately to women when cementing themselves in the literary traditions of the Beat Generation.

To better understand the role of masculine space in the Beat Generation, especially in the context of this event, On The Road by Jack Kerouac from 1957 details how gender factored into this community of writers. Considering this book is important when interpreting the Beat Generation because Kerouac earned an idolized reputation in the community for this novel, with Ginsberg even projecting the Walt Whitman poem called “Poets To Come” onto Kerouac, describing him as the “orator” that the poem predicts.[8] But Kerouac’s representation of women in On The Road considers them as secondary in the masculine space that the novel exhibits, signified by the relationship he presents between the characters Sal Paradise (Kerouac’s persona), and Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady). This masculine space is evident in such instances as an arrangement made by Sal and Dean to have Dean’s partner, Marylou, “switch to [Sal] in Frisco.” Sal understood that “Dean would go back to Camille [Dean’s wife] in Frisco” and that would allow Sal to “have an affair with Marylou.” Kerouac even acknowledges that he did not really know how Marylou felt about all of this: “What was on Marylou’s mind I don’t know.”[9]

Beat writer Diane di Prima likewise recalls this type of masculine space in her 1969 book Memoirs of a Beatnik. Brenda Knight in her 1996 book Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution notes that di Prima’s book is a work of erotica that interested a major publishing house before her poetry did, further signifying the positionality of women in the Beat Generation as signifying sexuality more than poetic seriousness at this time.[10] Speaking from her own perspective of being a woman among the Beat Generation with multiple sexual partners, di Prima reflects positively on “being a chick to three men,” stating that she “found it is usually a good thing to be the woman of many men at once.”[11] Reflecting on the potential of this space, she considers a culture with a “social structure” of free and self-sufficient women and that this freedom alongside men signifies “one of the wildest magics this planet has ever witnessed.”[12] This shows that while the masculine space for Kerouac focuses on how men use women, di Prima is an example of a woman using the space for her own agency: “Live with one man, and you begin to have a claim on him. Live with five, and have the same claim, but it is spread out, ambiguous, undefined.”[13] Di Prima suggests here that masculine space is not indicative of complete containment for women, rather that the space can be wielded for one’s own benefits within that dominant space to communal and even literary success. This affirms the space as masculine without negating the agency that women managed to exercise within it. Such representations of this masculine space indicates the type of environment that Ginsberg performed “Howl” in for the Six Gallery reading.

In Women of the Beat Generation, Knight confirms this agency within masculine space as it pertains to Beat literature: “The women of the Beat Generation, with rare exception, escaped the eye of the camera; they stayed underground, writing. They were instrumental in the literary legacy of the Beat Generation, however.”[14] As with di Prima, Knight acknowledges that women engaged the space despite the lesser coverage of their work: “In many ways, women of the Beat were cut from the same cloth as the men: fearless, angry, high risk, too smart, restless, highly irregular. They took chances, made mistakes, made poetry, made love, made history. Women of the Beat weren’t afraid to get dirty.”[15] It is the stifled presence of women as literary figures in this community as a result of masculine space, however, that relates to the importance of this masculine space to Dylan’s identities when interpreting his masculinity. Despite establishing a masculinity of challenging and reshaping conventions, so the story goes, the performers of Six Gallery and the Beat Generation community more broadly were less groundbreaking regarding gender roles in their spaces. No women performed at Six Gallery. Although Dylan was not involved in this particular performance, he certainly engaged with these traditions in his own time.

Steven Belletto remarks in his essay for The World of Bob Dylan called “The Beats” that “Dylan adapted the older writers’ social postures and attitudes toward literary tradition to help him forge his own idiosyncratic vision.”[16] Belletto continues, citing Sean Wilentz’s 2010 book, Dylan in America, as saying that “Dylan’s involvement with the writings of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and the rest of the Beat Generation is nearly as essential to Dylan’s biography as his immersion in rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and then Woody Guthrie.”[17] The 2019 documentary film directed by Martin Scorsese, Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, shows footage of Dylan and Ginsberg visiting Jack Kerouac’s grave in Lowell, Massachusetts. They read lines from Kerouac’s book Mexico City Blues with Dylan mentioning that he first received the book in 1959 and that “it just blew a hole in [his] mind.”[18] “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” tie in heavily with the respective Ginsberg poems “Howl” and “America,” further indicating the influence of the Beat Generation on Dylan’s writing in the 1960s. Belletto observes the stream of questions that “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “America” share and also the phrase “I saw” appearing in “Howl” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”[19] In the 2005 documentary also directed by Scorsese, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, Ginsberg commented that “Hard Rain” signifies “that the torch has been passed to another generation.”[20]

There are several other examples in Dylan’s recordings to showcase what he adapted from his time with the Beat Generation. For instance, Raymond Foye in his essay for Mixing Up the Medicine called “Reflections on ‘Dirge’” states: “Although the album title Planet Waves has always been considered an allusion to Ginsberg’s 1968 City Lights book Planet News, I couldn’t help but think what was really on Dylan’s mind was Ginsberg’s next book, The Fall of America: Poems of These States, 1965-1971.”[21] Another instance of Dylan drawing from the Beat Generation for his albums is his decision to keep the opening sounds of laughter on the studio recording for “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” playing into the focus on performance that the Beat Generation admired.[22] In the context of Dylan growing as a lyricist, Belletto observes and Ginsberg confirms that Dylan earned recognition for his work alongside the Beat Generation. This community significantly shaped who he was as a lyricist, with Dylan even referencing them in his first post-Nobel Prize album of original material, Rough and Rowdy Ways, on the song “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”: “I was born on the wrong side of the railroad tracks / Like Ginsberg, Corso, and Kerouac.”[23] With such influence on Dylan’s identities, interpreting representations of the masculine space of the Beat Generation explores the effects of such a space on its inhabitants.

An interpretation of the effects of the Beat Generation environment shows up in the 2007 movie I’m Not There. The character of Robbie (this version of Dylan is played by Heath Ledger) represents a family version of Dylan who is married and has children. Claire, representing Dylan’s wife at the time, argues with Robbie about a remark he made to one of their friends about believing in the possibility of real social change being connected to femininity. He continues by saying that women “can never be poets” and lists off “Whitman, Rimbaud, [and] Shakespeare” as examples to dismiss Emily Dickinson.[24] Although likely hyperbolized for effect and not necessarily representing a genuine belief that Dylan held, this scene is an effective reminder of a version of Dylan’s legacy in the masculine spaces that the Beat Generation helped cultivate as seen in part through the Six Gallery reading and in On The Road.

Dylan’s lyrics during his time in the 1960s come at least in part from the world of the Beat Generation. As the celebrity identity developed in this space, so too did an eventual laureate identity develop. Another masculine space where such development occurred around this time for Dylan was the New York City folk scene.

The New York City Folk Scene

The New York City folk scene of the 1960s similarly represents a masculine space that Dylan developed his laureate and celebrity identities in. Like the Beat Generation’s literary community, the folk scene had gendered spaces that situated women differently from men. Even Joan Baez, who represents an acclaimed woman in this space, became a supporting character in the Dylan chronology once his celebrity reached new heights throughout the 1960s. As with the Beat Generation, examining this masculine space and the relationship Dylan himself had with it reveals how masculinity influenced his artistic development, which eventually earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature. Also similar to the Beat Generation, the folk scene shows women with agency in masculine spaces. Dylan’s own memoir, Chronicles, Volume One, Martin Scorsese’s documentary No Direction Home, and the Coen Brothers’ film Inside Llewyn Davis each convey representations of this masculine space. Other sources then confirm these representations.

Chronicles, published in 2004, gives us an account directly from Dylan of his perspective on his time in the New York City folk scene forty years later. It’s a collection of names and faces that present new ways of living and thinking to Dylan during this time, introduced to him by Suze Rotolo. “New York City,” Dylan writes, “the city that would come to shape my destiny.”[25] He describes the iconic venue called the Gaslight as “a closed drawn circle that an unknown couldn’t break into. There weren’t any auditions. It was a club I wanted to play, needed to.” He continues: “I kept my sights on the Gaslight. How could I not? Compared to it, the rest of the places on the street were nameless and miserable, low-level basket houses or small coffeehouses where the performer passed the hat. But I began to play as many as I could. I had no choice.”[26] The environment drew Dylan in and its acceptance of him provided him ample space to develop his craft. Looking back, Dylan still understands the people and music that made up that time in his life as irrevocably a part of his career.

The perspectives men had of women relate to Dylan with his reflection in Chronicles that having a woman on stage was a “trick” to bring in more money. In describing a waitress “who was good to the eye” that he’d have “take up collection,” Dylan writes that she would “wear a funny little bonnet, heavy black mascara, low laced blouse – looked almost naked from the waist up under a capelike coat. I’d split the money with her later, but it was too much of a hassle to do it all the time. I still made more when she was with me than when I was working on my own.”[27] Chronicles, while not being a reliable source of strict facts, does serve as an effective glimpse into Dylan’s relationship with this space. The significance of this space to Dylan’s identities then explains how masculinity relates to his legacy.

Corroborating Dylan’s account is My Greenwich Village: Dave, Bob, and Me by Terri Thal from 2023, a memoir that explores the New York City folk scene at this time with firsthand accounts. Freddy Cristóbal Dominguez wrote a review of this book for the Dylan Review where he cites Thal as representing that “she was not an ‘object’ as so many women were… her story, which culminates with her arrival on the folk scene, is also a testament to the ways the strictures of patriarchy mitigate or partly subvert agency.” Dominguez continues, noting that Thal insists that the folk scene was not infected with the grossest forms of misogyny – she says it was not a ‘sexist scene.’” Despite indicating that the scene was not sexist, Thal does recognize that it was a masculine space. Dominguez cites another line from the book: “‘there was sort of an assumption that there were factors distinguishing the female folk singers from one another in ways that were never considered for the men.’” He then adds: “Unlike male performers, women (Carolyn Hester, Judy Collins, Joan Baez) had to be pitted against each other.” Thal also recounts a “personal experience about an encounter with Clarence Hood – a manager of The Gaslight – who had asked her ‘to have a sexual interlude.’”[28] Such a masculine space of men sexualizing Thal is further written about by Suze Rotolo in her own memoir from 2008 called A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties. “There were not many females hanging out at their [Dave Van Ronk and Thal] flat,” Rotolo writes, “it was mainly guys… who came and went, casually taking in Terri in her white underwear as she offered them things to eat or drink, and then sat down on the couch to join the conversation.”[29] This review of Thal’s book as a memoir of the folk scene that Dylan learned from and Rotolo’s own account of spending time with Thal supports Dylan’s account in Chronicles of this masculine space.

The influence of this space on Dylan during his rise situates its importance when interpreting the relationship of his two identities with each other. In No Direction Home, Dylan says he identified with the Woody Guthrie book, Bound For Glory, “more than [he] even did with On The Road.” When speaking on folk music records, especially those recorded by Guthrie, Dylan describes himself as a “musical expeditionary” who would “just would have to immerse [himself] in them.”[30] Even post-1960s tracks such as “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven” (1997) and “Brownsville Girl” (1986) (previously titled “New Danville Girl” as labeled on the 2021 Springtime in New York bootleg series album) feature references to songs by Guthrie, showing the direct and lasting lyrical influence Guthrie had on Dylan: “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad” (a lifted line for Dylan’s song) and “Danville Girl” respectively.

Taking in the New York City folk scene in the early 1960s, Dylan says in No Direction Home that “there was something in their eyes that would say ‘I know something you don’t know’ and I wanted to be that kind of performer.”[31] This sentiment is evident with his development as a songwriter by him using melodies and lyrics he learned at this time, which became a staple of his referential writing style. “Blowin’ In The Wind,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” and “Chimes Of Freedom” to name a few songs that came from folk songs he likely heard and performed in connection to the New York City clubs: “No More Auction Block,” “Who’s Gonna Buy You Ribbons,” and “Chimes Of Trinity” respectively. Suze Roloto also writes in A Freewheelin’ Time about how Dave Van Ronk was “well known and well respected in the downtown music scene” and that those years were

formative … and Dave did a lot of the forming and teaching. It was amazing how much that man knew … The Van Ronk apartment at 190 Waverly quickly became the living room of the new generation of bohemians … [Dylan] was intent on having me get to know the people he had become close to since coming to the city that winter, telling me how great they were and how much he wanted me to meet them.[32]

Dylan’s association with the folk scene developed him artistically similar to his development from his ties with the Beat Generation.

With the impact on Dylan as an eventual laureate clear, the added dynamics of masculinity in this space becomes relevant. The 2013 film, Inside Llewyn Davis, the screenplay of which comes from Dave Van Ronk’s 2005 memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street, follows the titular character Llewyn Davis through the New York City folk scene of the early 1960s. The film presents this scene as the environment that built the image of Dylan as an intellectual while maintaining shallow impressions on women. These representations reflect well the type of space that Dylan described in Chronicles.

In the film, Davis performs countless times in the Gaslight, meets Albert Grossman, but never finds his way as a folk singer. The end of the film features an actor portraying Bob Dylan from the early 1960s performing on the same stage. Men treat the women who appear on the stage in the movie with similar unserious indifference as the men in Kerouac’s books treat women. One example of this is how men in the film discuss the character Jean Berkey, who is a woman featured performing during the movie. The club owner talks to Davis about the struggles of the folk music scene and that the biggest crowds they draw for performances are from men sexualizing Jean.[33] This film portrays gender on stage in this space as sexualizing and demeaning towards women and a type of misunderstood intellectualism among men.

The characters Jim Berkey and Al Cody prepare to perform a song with Davis called “Please Mr. Kennedy” that he does not respect, refusing royalties in favor of a $200 session fee in part out of desperation for money. Even the man who appears to be the producer said that the song was “not the most serious music we’ve recorded at this studio.”[34] Later in the film, characters representing wealth and a higher social class mention hearing the song, calling it “hysterical” and that it would be “a hit.” They continue by saying “I wish I was in your business. I mean, one hit could fix you up.”[35]

By concluding the film with Dylan performing as part of the folk scene, and with the film’s viewers knowing Dylan’s eventual career, it suggests that it was Dylan who changed the perception of folk music and who began to bring in crowds from his talent and intellect. The Coen Brothers’ depiction of this cultural shift effectively explores how gender related to this shift by presenting Dylan as simply another performer in contrast to the women and men before him. This representation matches the accounts of gender dynamics that Dylan provides in Chronicles. Masculinity within the film is about artistic integrity and assuming a Dean Moriarty-esque image of drifting around and traveling West, as invoked through the character Johnny Five, who Davis drives with to Chicago, as is the opening destination of Sal in On The Road.[36] Bob Dylan represents that folk singer ideal fulfilled, something that the film recognizes as occurring in a masculine space.

As with the Beat Generation, the New York City folk scene connects to Dylan’s identities as both a celebrity and a laureate. This connection then provides insight into how masculinity relates to these identities. The significance of this past masculine space on the contemporary laureate identity emerges with the reification of this space in the act of writing literature.

Conclusion

Masculine spaces such as those cultivated by the Beat Generation and by the New York City folk scene are important to understand in order to better contextualize Dylan’s Nobel Prize win alongside his masculinity and his legacy. This is because neglecting to consider such influences produces uncritical narratives that maintain the authority of the male dominance of these spaces over time. One such narrative appears in the 2023 book by Jann Wenner, co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine, called The Masters: Conversations with Bono, Dylan, Garcia, Jagger, Lennon, Springsteen, Townshend. Wenner’s book is a compilation of interviews that he previously conducted with each of these musicians at different points in their respective careers. It is the title, the introduction, and the all-male selection of artists in particular that suggest the continuation of masculine spaces infiltrating contemporary discourse. In the introduction for the book, Wenner writes: “To us, the artists were the moral compass of society, the gatekeepers of truth … I quoted the Lovin’ Spoonful, saying that the magazine was for anyone who believed that rock and roll was ‘the magic that can set you free.’”[37]

This act of honoring individuals by definitively ranking them recalls an idea that Virginia Woolf mentions in A Room of One’s Own published in 1929: “That deep-seated desire,” Woolf writes, “not so much that SHE shall be inferior as that HE shall be superior.”[38] The Masters exhibiting this need to be superior through the term “masters” then advertises the Dylan legacy in terms of his artistic mastery and cultural influence. This framing of Dylan alongside the other men in the title indicates that the masculine spaces in the past reverberate into the representations of legacy in the future. Such a reinforcement of masculine space is evidence of the lasting effects of this space on artistic expression. Woolf explores this temporality pertaining to space and its significance further in her essay collection.

I reference Woolf in relation to The Masters because she writes in A Room of One’s Own how the reverberations of spaces in the past affect the establishment of legacy in literature. This then, she argues, impacts who is likely to create literature in the future. For instance, Woolf references the end of the 18^th century as a time when women began writing more, which enabled future writers to produce masterpieces of literature:

Without those forerunners,” Woolf contends, “Jane Austen and the Brontës and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind in a single voice.[39]

Jessica Gildersleeve, who wrote the introduction to the 2021 edition of A Room of One’s Own, argues that having a room of one’s own “signifies the feminist reimagination of the domestic space” because “men occupied the public sphere while women were confined to the private. They were expected to serve the interests of their home and family rather than their individual needs or desires.”[40] This spatial reimagination that Gildersleeve interprets from Woolf regarding domestic space also applies when retrospectively considering masculine spaces. The reimagination of past masculine spaces is possible because, as seen through accounts including di Prima, Thal, and Dylan himself, women occupied these spaces. Wenner’s use of the term “masters” and his assertion that these musicians were “the moral compass of society” ranks and divides artists without this reimagination of the spaces and contexts that influenced their work. As Woolf indicates, this creates a tradition that encourages certain groups to continue “thinking in common” while limiting other groups to produce work as “solitary births.” After explaining in an interview why he didn’t include artists such as Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder in his book, Wenner says that they didn’t meet “that same historic standard.”[41] Wenner later apologized “wholeheartedly” for these remarks.[42] Nevertheless, the sentiment from his original statement of needing to meet a “historic standard” further reinforces Woolf’s notion of “solitary births” when interpreting the structure of his book. Reading The Masters through A Room of One’s Own problematizes how Wenner develops a legacy for Dylan because Woolf shows that Wenner’s book perpetuates the masculine space of the Beat Generation and the New York City folk scene. The celebrity identity in these spaces that greatly influenced Dylan’s 1960s catalogue then significantly relates to how his masculinity connects to him as a laureate.

Examining the gendered relationships in these spaces recognizes the celebrity identity as being intertwined with the laureate identity. In relation to Dylan’s masculinity, the connection between these identities signifies how the effects of space resonate through time and subsequently direct both his legacy and the eventual literary validation of his work by the Nobel Prize committee. This connection also scrutinizes the significance of the Nobel Prize win, which itself signifies perhaps the most dramatic shift in creating Dylan biographies and categorizing him since his rejection of being considered a “legacy artist,” as evidenced by the success of Time Out Of Mind in 1997. As the Bob Dylan legacy changes in the context of his Nobel Prize for Literature award, it is important to emphasize the reasons he earned it, from the value of his writing itself to the spaces that encouraged an eventual laureate.

[1] Sara Danius, “Announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2016,” October 13, 2016, The Swedish Academy, video, 11:46, 9:47.

[2] Bob Dylan, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” recorded January 1965, track 8 on Bringing It All Back Home, Columbia, Spotify.

[3] “October 7 – Anniversary of the Six Gallery Reading,” The Allen Ginsberg Project online, October 7, 2015, https://allenginsberg.org/2015/10/october-7-anniversary-of-the-six-gallery-reading/.

[4] “The Earliest ‘Howl’ Recordings,” The Beat Museum online, October 5, 2020, https://www.kerouac.com/the-earliest-howl-recordings/.

[5] Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, (United States: Viking, 2008), 149.

[6] “The Former Six Gallery, San Francisco,” Retracing Jack Kerouac online, September 23, 2011, https://retracingjackkerouac.com/2011/09/23/the-former-six-gallery-san-francsico/.

[7] Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays, 1952-1995, (United Kingdom: Penguin, 2000), 239-240.

[8] Ibid 287

[9] Jack Kerouac, On The Road, (New York: Penguin Group, 1991), 129-135.

[10] Brenda Knight, Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution, (United States: Conari Press, 1996), 2.

[11] Diane di Prima, Memoirs of a Beatnik, (United Kingdom: Marion Boyars, 2002), 77.

[12] Ibid 78.

[13] Ibid 79.

[14] Brenda Knight, Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution, (United States: Conari Press, 1996), 1.

[15] Ibid 3.

[16] Steven Belletto, “The Beats,” The World of Bob Dylan, edited by Sean Latham, (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 170.

[17] Ibid 170.

[18] Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, directed by Martin Scorsese, (2019; White Plains, NY: Grey Water Park Productions), Netflix, 01:05:33

[19] Steven Belletto, “The Beats,” The World of Bob Dylan, edited by Sean Latham, (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 173.

[20] No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, directed by Martin Scorsese, (2005; Los Angeles, CA: Paramount Pictures), Netflix, 01:21:27

[21] Raymond Foye, “Reflections on ‘Dirge,’” Mark Davidson, Parker Fishel, Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine, (United States: Callaway Editions, Incorporated, 2023). 290.

[22] Bob Dylan, “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” recorded January 1965, track 7 on Bringing It All Back Home, Columbia, Spotify.

[23] Bob Dylan, “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” recorded January 2020, track 9 on Rough and Rowdy Ways, Columbia, Spotify.

[24] I’m Not There, directed by Todd Haynes, (2008; Los Angeles, CA: Paramount Pictures), Amazon Prime.

[25] Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (United Kingdom: Simon & Schuster UK, 2005), 9.

[26] Ibid 16.

[27] Ibid 17.

[28] Freddy Cristóbal Dominguez, “Review of My Greenwich Village: Dave, Bob, and Me,” The Dylan Review, vol 5.2 Fall/Winter 2023-2024, https://thedylanreview.org/2024/02/21/review-of-my-greenwich-village-dave-bob-and-me/.

[29] Suze Rotolo, A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties, (United Kingdom: Crown, 2008), 114.

[30] No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, directed by Martin Scorsese, (2005; Los Angeles, CA: Paramount Pictures), Netflix, 00:29:38.

[31] Ibid 00:51:51.

[32] Suze Rotolo, A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties, (United Kingdom: Crown, 2008), 112-113.

[33] Inside Llewyn Davis, directed by Ethan and Joel Cohen, (2013; Issy-les-Moulineaux, France: StudioCanal), Paramount+, 01:28:40.

[34] Ibid 00:29:43.

[35] Ibid 01:32:12.

[36] Ibid 00:47:55.

[37] Jann Wenner, The Masters: Conversations with Bono, Dylan, Garcia, Jagger, Lennon, Springsteen, Townshend, (United States: Little, Brown, 2023), X.

[38] Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own: The Feminist Classic (United Kingdom: Capstone, 2021), 80.

[39] Ibid 97.

[40] Ibid xi.

[41] David Marchese, “Jann Wenner Defends His Legacy, and His Generation’s,” The New York Times, last modified September 19, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/15/arts/jann-wenner-the-masters-interview.html.

[42] Edward Helmore, “Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner apologizes for disparaging Black and female artists,” The Guardian, last modified September 18, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/18/jann-wenner -rolling-stone-apology-black-female-artists-interview

March 2, 2025/by Nicole Font

Questions on Masculinity – Dylan and the Divine Feminine

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“Dylan and the Divine Feminine”

By Rebecca Slaman

The Divine Feminine is a buzzword today, used to invoke a “secret power” women possess, one that has been lost under the patriarchy. It’s been mostly appropriated into our hyper-individualist media landscape from non-Christian traditions under the embrace of white liberal feminism. But the Divine Feminine is actually an ancient concept that has been rekindled and reformed throughout many cultures and poetic traditions. Bob Dylan’s songs often rely on a strong relationship to this powerful muse, informed by his songwriting, cultural, and personal influences. In turn, his relationship to this powerful divine muse can tell us of his own insecurities and identities as a songwriter and a man. In looking at this relationship, a few stock characters emerge: (1) magical, mystical women, (2) mythical women, and (3) religious (mostly Christian) women.

How can we find and define the divine feminine in Dylan’s songs? Defining “the Divine Feminine” is tricky; we tend to think in binaries. The qualities of femininity have been contentious: we want to create a substantial definition of it and avoid Simone du Beauvoir’s ire by not saying “anything other than man.” But the qualities of contemporary divine femininity tend to be seen as sweet, soft, motherly, caring. This is just a version of western ideal womanhood: the wife, the mother, under another name. What one lacks, the other has. Dylan does tap into this definition a bit, but where he’s coming from when speaking of these women is a more ancient context, as well as the context of his time.

Dylan came of age during Second-wave feminism, a period when these ideals of womanhood broadened. In this movement, “witchy” women represented a rejection of these ideals of beauty, of power, of relation to men. As Robin Morgan writes in her 1978 memoir, Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist,

In the late 1960s feminist political activists in the United States began to employ the witch as a symbol of frightening and “deviant” womanhood.Halloween 1968 marked the beginning of WITCH, an acronym for Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. A group of New York women dressed up as witches and launched a full day’s programme of dramatic political action at sites including the Federal Reserve Treasury, the New York Stock Exchange. One Chase Manhattan Plaza, massage parlours, a beauty parlour, a men-only bar, arestaurant frequented by sixties “beautiful people.” (Morgan 1978:71-77)

They occupied a space that traditionally only men were allowed, or where women of a certain beauty standard were permitted only as accessories. WITCH was chosen as the group’s name for its symbolic value: it grabbed people’s attention and offered theatrical opportunities for protest activities.

It must be clarified: “The women were not interested in witchcraft for religious reasons, and performed rituals only as public performances because of the crowd-pulling attention they brought to political protests” (Rountree 1). Though they were not religious, this same movement did eventually birth the religious movement Wicca. The political became religious in the same way Dylan himself eventually did.

These political ideals were certainly being talked about in the circles Dylan ran in. The women in his life would have been influenced by this imagery and perhaps participated in its reclamation. Similarly “Goddess feminism,” coming about in the late 60s, marked a difference between Dylan and his folk heroes, making him more contemporary to the social trends of the time. “Consciousness-raising” social events, where women would gather and debate the role of feminism in society going forward, employed these symbols of female power. Though perhaps idealistic, they needed these goddess figures as role models for women to feel comfortable taking power in work and relationships. This similarly turned into its own religious practice: priestesses of goddess feminism worshiped their own patron goddesses. In time, Dylan became a priestess himself.

For Dylan, a clearly foundational text – so foundational in fact that he lists it on his website – is The White Goddess by Robert Graves. Dylan mentions the book in Chronicles, Volume One when describing his first winter in New York: “Invoking the poetic muse was something I didn’t know about yet. Didn’t know enough to start trouble with it, anyway. In a few years’ time I would meet Robert Graves himself in London … I wanted to ask him about some of the things in his book, but I couldn’t remember much about it” (41). Dylan may be downplaying his engagement with the book, as many people cited him carrying it around everywhere like it was a religious text. It’s the basis for more than just his relationship with women, but his identity as a songwriter.

The book is an exploration into the divine female muse as a longstanding figure in mostly Celtic cultures. Graves emphasizes the genuine magic of ancient poetry that has a relationship with the White Goddess, and thus, why it was suppressed by the patriarchal religions. According to him, “the reason why the hairs stand on end, the eyes water, the throat is constricted, the skin crawls and a shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem, is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright and lust – the female spider or the queen-bee whose embrace is death” (Graves 20). The female muse’s power is paramount to her, and she can be represented by any woman – Graves uses examples of John Keats: Fanny Brawne was a human inspiration to project the muse, but there was also a metaphorical inspiration, the threat of death Keats wrote under. Christian and classical tradition squashed the divine female muse in favor of patriarchy. Graves makes a distinction between poets who subscribe to patriarchy and those who rightly address the muse’s power. “The Classical poet, however gifted and industrious, fails to pass the test because he claims to be the Goddess’s master – she is his mistress only in the derogatory sense of one who lives in coquettish ease under his protection” (Graves 21).

This idea directly influences the muse in Dylan’s early songs. In his famous 60 Minutes interview in 2004, Dylan says “Those songs were almost magically written.” Dylan romanticizes his own early songwriting by entering himself into this canon of “true” poets. He makes a similar distinction to Graves: “It’s not a Siegfried and Roy kind of magic, it’s a different kind of penetrating magic.” It’s not something constructed by humans, but something beyond. Both Dylan and Graves are talking about something real. Whether the muse was moving through him in a literal or metaphorical way, we do see his relationship with women change throughout his career. With this, he goes through phases of suppressing the muse. His songwriting moves from living in fear of her, to attempting to claim power over her. Eventually, the muse is under the power of the masculine God through the vessel of Dylan.

Take “My Back Pages” as an example of this early influence:

Girls’ faces formed the forward path

From phony jealousy

To memorizing politics of ancient history

Flung down by corpse evangelists unthought of though, somehow

In this autobiographical song, Dylan is talking about his personal history of how he’s come to love the humanities. He was motivated to impress girls, and his method was to seem smart. In the context of the song, he’s admonishing himself for being foolish, dismissing the reason for him wanting to learn as childish. However, we do see women and love of history linked. He compares women in his orbit to historical women in a positive light. We can also think of tales of women, Helen of Troy, for example, being a catalyst for major events in history, and the personal drama of the gods being the explanation for historical events. This is the history of storytelling. He implicates himself in this history by being a songwriter himself, and he often references the classics.

In other cases, Dylan uses the Divine Feminine in a positive context, saying a woman is like the muse. Notice the purely positive connotations: “And your saintlike face and ghostlike soul”; “Bow down to her on Sunday”; “You remind me of something that used to be / Somethin’ crossed over from another century”; “You got me under your wing, the way you walk and the way you talk, I feel I could almost sing”; and lastly, about from Chronicles about Joan Baez: “she looked like a religious icon, like somebody you’d sacrifice yourself for and she sang in a voice straight to God.”

In the contemporary religious sphere, the theme of sacrifice invokes Jesus, or the messiah. But Dylan is talking about sacrifice as an ancient religious rite. Bob is like the priestess of goddess feminism. “When I Paint my Masterpiece” likewise, is a great example of this: a mortal woman who represents the conduit for the muse. She’ll be with him when he paints his masterpiece. Dylan associates her with a historical symbolism. In one version of the song, he uses the character of Botticelli’s niece, another personal connection to ancient history.

Dylan doesn’t always embrace this power the muse has over him. As he continues to write, the muse’s power becomes a complicated feeling for him as a man. When he describes her in these examples, the power is simply a fact he’s stating as the storyteller, like he is the victim of a spell could love or hate and it wouldn’t matter. In “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You,” Dylan sings:

Is it really any wonder the love a stranger might receive

You cast your spell and I went under

I find it so difficult to leave

It doesn’t sound like he particularly wants to leave, but the witch casting her spell would have ensnared him even if he did. He is like a willing servant to her.

In “Isis,” Dylan plays with the power dynamic and seems to be in denial over the power he did have in the relationship. Throughout the epic story, he switches back and forth between claiming any fault in the relationship. At first, “I could not hold on to her very long” suggests her free will, more powerful than his. Then as we go on, we see it may have been his truancy that led her to leave, not her power over him. “She thought I was so reckless” suggests his flightiness, therefore his own free will. “What drives me to you is what drives me insane” suggests forces even bigger than this literal goddess, such as the force of love itself. In playing with these ideas, Dylan no longer follows the literary pattern set by Graves. He takes the poetic tools that Graves has given him, and context that society has given him, and internalizes those to make mythic art about his experience in relationships with real human women.

When Bob Dylan converts to Born-Again Christianity, we see gender dynamics change from more Eastern and Celtic origin, as in the White Goddess, to Abrahamic, Patriarchal, and Classical. The shift in the female muse begins within “Wedding Song.” First, the speaker aligns with the goddess figure:

You breathed on me and made my life a richer one to live

When I was deep in poverty you taught me how to give

Dried the tears up from my dreams and pulled me from the hole

Quenched my thirst and satisfied the burning in my soul

She has bestowed good fortune upon him; she has saved him. This idea of salvation intermingles the Abrahamic religions with this Celtic/Eastern concept of the goddess. But then, the speaker subverts her power later in the song when he begins talking about a higher power commanding them to be together.

Oh, can’t you see that you were born to stand by my side

And I was born to be with you, you were born to be my bride

The hands of fate or a higher power are in charge, not this all-knowing goddess who can save him. Dylan has consistently given up the idea that he has power in these relationships, but now he insists that neither does she.

We can find many interesting parallels between the first half of “Wedding Song” and the concept of salvation in “Shelter from the Storm.” Dylan mentions his “crown of thorns,” the adornment that society has given him that is a burden to him. The thorns constitute his earthly struggles, but although he is invoking the Jesus metaphor for himself, she is the one who gives him salvation. She is an equal to God. In performance, his delivery of “lethal dose” has a cheeky tone to it, as if the goddess is so powerful she doesn’t know her own strength.

When we get into the Christian era, we don’t totally leave these ideas of divine womanhood behind. One of the most fire-and-brimstone songs is also a love song that invokes the Divine Feminine muse. “Precious Angel” describes a woman who delivers him to the grace of God. The speaker specifies this is a fate he wouldn’t be able to come to himself. Interestingly, he uses witch imagery to admonish his non-Christian pals who has spent time with up until this point. “My so-called friends have fallen under a spell / They look me squarely in the eye and they say, ‘All is well’. Curiously, the speaker doesn’t claim he’s not also under a spell, since he credits the addressee of the song as swaying him in the right direction. He also calls her a divine being, an “angel,” which harkens back to “You Angel You” from Planet Waves, though the content of the song is different. Even when turning from any non-Christian mythology or religion, Dylan can’t let go of the essence of the White Goddess.

Dylan leaves divine women behind after the Christian era. As the preaching fades, women take on much more earthly features. It seems the magical facade is really gone this time, with songs such as “Seeing the Real You at Last.” It’s hard to find anything positive about women for a period, let alone divine ones. This is until “Under Your Spell” on Knocked out Loaded. It’s tricky to parse what happens in the song, which may be because it’s co-written with Carole Bayer Sager. But it’s back to basics with the power struggle with Dylan’s speaker and the muse. He seems tired of the fact that this struggle is something he hasn’t escaped, and maybe never will. The song describes the speaker as stuck in purgatory after a run-in with his lover.

I’d like to help you but I’m in a bit of a jam

I’ll call you tomorrow if there’s phones where I am

Baby, caught between heaven and hell

But I will be back, I will survive

You’ll never get rid of me as long as you’re alive

The “fault” of the troubled relationship goes back and forth between the speaker and the subject, as in “Isis.” If she’s the one casting the spell, why does she need to get rid of him? It seems the speaker wants to seek vengeance on the deity that controls him in any way possible. This dynamic is representative of the vibes towards female subjects in this post-gospel era.

When Dylan starts looking back on his life and career in Rough and Rowdy Ways, the presence of women and the muse must have loomed large. When he returns to the muse, he has no more fight left in him. Rather than running or being unwillingly commanded, Dylan embraces the muse and addresses her directly. He speaks to her as a force, rather than in the form of a woman. In doing so, he gives up the one power that he ever claimed to have, which was storytelling. In “Mother of Muses,” Dylan sings,

Show me your wisdom – tell me my fate

Put me upright – make me walk straight

Forge my identity from the inside out

He could tell their stories all day, but he asks the Muse to do it for him. She’s bigger than the storyteller– she’s the driving force of his whole life and identity. He lists the great men who have been influenced by her: Elvis, Martin Luther King Jr., historic military generals, and he does so with respect and acceptance of her power. The muse moves through their lives and then through himself to tell those stories.

Works Cited

Dylan, Bob. Chronicles Vol. 1. Simon & Schuster, 2004.

Graves, Robert. The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. Edited by Grevel Lindop, Faber and Faber, 1999.

Rountree, Kathryn. “THE POLITICS OF THE GODDESS: Feminist Spirituality and the Essentialism Debate.” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, vol. 43, no. 2, 1999, pp. 138–65. JSTOR http://www.jstor.org/stable/23166525. Accessed 8 Sept. 2024.

Morgan, R. Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist. New York, Vintage Books. 1978.

March 2, 2025/by Nicole Font

Dylan Review Vol. 6.2, Fall/Winter 2024-2025, Questions on Masculinity

Questions on Masculinity – Mixing Up the Medicine

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“Mixing Up the Medicine: Bob Dylan’s Basement Carnival and Homosocial Masculinity”

By Erin C. Callahan, San Jacinto College

After returning from his grueling eighteen-month world tour in 1966, Bob Dylan used his motorcycle accident as an opportunity for a self-imposed hiatus from many of his professional responsibilities. In fact, in 1984, Dylan told Kurt Loder, “Then I had that motorcycle accident, which put me outta commission. Then, when I woke up and caught my senses, I realized I was just workin’ for all these leeches. And I didn’t want to do that. Plus, I had a family, and I just wanted to see my kids.” Dylan’s use of the word “leeches” does a lot of work here. It reveals that he felt both burnt out by the demands of fame and the conventions of the recording industry and that he perceived the people in it as parasitic. Prior to the motorcycle accident, Dylan’s workload and productivity underscored a masculine identity characterized by mid-century industrial capitalism.

However, the period between the motorcycle accident and Dylan recording John Wesley Harding in Nashville signals a break from that performance of this wage earner identity. Paul Williams argues, “The first year of silence was the most dramatic, because it followed a period of fecundity” and that “the motorcycle accident was certainly more than an excuse. It was a turning point” (220). Because Dylan was adjusting to his new role as father and head of a growing family, being “put out of commission” allowed for an evolution of his gender performance. With a new wife and two young children, Dylan redirected his focus from the public sphere to the domestic sphere at his home in Bearsville, near Woodstock. While there, Dylan enjoyed the simplicity of fatherhood and domestic life and, in sequestration, seemed freed from what Greil Marcus called the “prison of his own career” (xv). However, to fulfill his lingering professional obligations, Dylan worked closely with members of the Band in a carnivalesque atmosphere in which they recorded The Basement Tapes. The homosocial bonds Dylan developed with Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson helped spark Dylan’s creative growth during this period. This fraternity and Dylan’s liberty are borne out sonically and lyrically on the bootlegs and, ultimately, the released album. More so, the time he spent convalescing and writing and recording with the Band was regenerative. It allowed him the time, space, and companionship he needed to reconnect with American roots music to redefine and renew his commitment to his recording career.

Prior to retreating to Woodstock for a brief respite before embarking on his fall 1966 tour, Dylan’s gender performance could best be understood through the framework of industrial capitalist masculinity. Introduced by Ǿ. G. Holter in his chapter “Family Theory Reconsidered” from Labour of Love: Beyond the Self-Evidence of Everyday Life, this categorization of masculinity creates “an expression of the whole relationship between production and reproduction. Industrial capitalism itself ‘engendered’ its opposite, the world of domesticity as against the world of wage work, and women as the other of men” (102). R. W. Connell further explains, “Holter’s ‘social forms analysis’ gives an account of gender, masculinity and femininity, as historically specific features of social life in modernity. They arise not from a timeless dichotomy of bodies but from the specific course of development of the large-scale structures of society” (22). Because mid-twentieth century America was arranged in a patriarchal gender schema, the binary of masculine associated with industry and wages and feminine with domesticity was the status quo. Under contract with Columbia Records, Dylan earned “wages” based on sales of his albums, ticket sales for live performances, or licensing his songs to other artists to record. From the time he arrived in New York City in January of 1961 through the accident in July of 1966, Dylan recorded seven albums, performed nearly two-hundred concerts, and sat for countless interviews and press conferences. This is the “period of fecundity” Williams refers to (220). Regardless of the shifts in performed identity Dylan engendered during the early stages of his career, he maintained a close connection to the creative process and modes of production of his work – composing, recording, and touring.

Early in his marriage to Sara, Dylan maintained his impressive workload and continued to perform within this schema. In July 1965, Dylan and Sara purchased their home in Bearsville. They moved into it in the late summer where Sara nested as Dylan continued to work. Prior to their November 22, 1965, wedding, Dylan played 51 shows, including one on November 21, and released Bringing It All Back Home in March and Highway 61 Revisited in August. Continuing this pace, Dylan returned to the studio in October to begin recording his seventh studio album, Blonde on Blonde. After taking only five days off, one of which was his wedding day, Dylan headed back out on the road. He then played thirteen shows from November 26 through December 19. In January 1966, Dylan took a brief break during which Sara gave birth to Jesse and he finalized Blonde on Blonde. He embarked on a world tour that began on February 4 in Louisville, Kentucky, traveled westward across the United States, around the world to Australia and New Zealand before ending in London on May 27, 1966. In this way, the Dylans performed traditional patriarchal gender roles: Sara tended to the children and the home, while Dylan went to work to provide financial support for the family.

After the accident, however, Dylan’s hiatus from recording and touring alienated him from the labor process of creating and producing his work. Rather than actively recording new music and touring, Dylan was exclusively living off royalties for the first time in his career. Though he still provided the primary financial support for his family, he began to blur lines between work and what Holter recognized as the world of domesticity or the feminine in opposition to the world of work or the masculine (102). This is the period in which Dylan fully assimilated to his paternal role: meeting Maria at the school bus stop, going to parties, and attending to the children. Of that time, Dylan wrote,

My family was my light and I was going to protect that light at all cost. That was where my dedication was, first, last and everything in between … For the public eye, I went into the bucolic and mundane as far as possible. In my real life, I got to do the things I loved best and that was all that mattered – the Little League games, birthday parties, taking my kids to school, camping trips, boating, rafting, canoeing … I was living on record royalties. (Dylan 123)

Domestic life with Sara and the children provided Dylan a break from the unrealistic pace and demands of his early career, but his contractual obligations required that he regularly submit new compositions.

As a result of Dylan’s break from the recording studio, the year during which he wrote and recorded songs with the Band at Big Pink created a second life or Bakhtinian carnival separate from his previous work. This period of Dylan’s career created a “temporary suspension,” resulting in what Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin argued as, “[t]his temporary suspension, both ideal and real, of hierarchical rank created during carnival time a special type of communication impossible in everyday life” (687). The first significant change or inversion occurred when Dylan began living off royalties of sales from his previous work and from publishing rights. This came after the “period of fecundity” noted above which alienated Dylan from the modes of production of his creative work (Williams 220). The second inversion occurred in the freedom Dylan experienced in this period in his day-to-day life, his approach to work, and the relationships he formed with his family and friends. In Invisible Republic, Greil Marcus recalls Robbie Robertson telling him, “We went in with a sense of humor … It was all a goof. We were playing with absolute freedom” (xiv). The levity and ease with which Dylan and the Band approached the sessions translated to them capturing an unexpected sound and new pathway forward in their respective careers.

The sound they created – the simultaneous dissolving and expanding of musical genres – could only be realized through the six men’s trust in and love for one another. The members of the Band shared a history and relationships that predated their association with Dylan. However, being on tour with each other from September 1965 through May 1966 laid the foundation for Dylan’s and the members of the Band’s fellowship and collaboration in Big Pink. In Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, Eve Sedgwick argues intimate homosocial male relationships promote the interests of men and support heteronormative gender schemas. Williams puts forth that working with the Band helped Dylan “rediscover[…] the joys of music – old songs, improvised songs, crafted songs, they all provided him with evident satisfaction and pleasure as he performed them” (225). Through these sessions, Dylan recovered from his injuries and from his professional and creative burn out. Renewing his “satisfaction” and pleasure” of writing, playing, and performing brought Dylan closer to returning to the studio or actively working as a “wage earner.”

However, Sedgwick’s theory also contends that it’s challenging to understand Dylan’s relationships with the members of the Band without considering his domestic relationship with Sara and how his identity is a product of it and in resistance to it (25). As much as we see a shift in Dylan’s performance of his masculine identity, his relationship with Sara and her role in their heterosexual patriarchal marriage is key to fully understanding Dylan’s progress. Sedgwick contends, “Heidi Hartman’s definition of patriarchy in terms of ‘relationships between men … , in making power relationships between men and women appear to be dependent on the power relationships between men and men, suggests large-scale social structures are congruent with male-male-female erotic triangles … ’” (25). She continues, “We can go a step further than that to say that in any male-dominated society, there is a special relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desire and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power: a relationship founded on an inherent and potentially active structural congruence” (Sedgwick 25). Initially, Sara created the domestic sphere and a family for Dylan where he could retreat and convalesce while he provided financial stability for her. In terms of reproduction, Sara giving birth to four children in four years mirrored the creative fertility of Dylan’s early career. This maintained a traditional heteronormative patriarchal schema. However, Dylan recognized the toll domestic life took on his creative life. In Chronicles, he writes,

My outer image would have to be something a bit more confusing, a bit more humdrum. It’s hard to live like this. It takes all your effort. The first thing that has to go is any form of artistic self-expression that’s dear to you. Art is unimportant next to life, and you have no choice. Creativity has much to do with experience, observation, and imagination, and if any one of those key elements is missing, it doesn’t work. It was impossible now for me to observe anything without being observed. (Dylan 121)

For Dylan, his home represented the space he had to escape when he went to the masculine or homosocial environment of Big Pink. While Sara was essential in this arrangement, it was also Sara and domestic life that he had to push back against to renew his connection to his creative work.

While Dylan was healing from his injuries, his contract with Columbia expired but he was still obligated to submit demos to music publisher Witmark through his manager Albert Grossman. To comply, he composed and recorded demos with the Band. Initially, they recorded in the Red Room of Dylan’s Bearsville home, but by late spring, they removed themselves from Dylan’s house and permanently moved to Big Pink in West Saugerties. In a 2014 article for Rolling Stone, interviewer David Browne spoke to Garth Hudson about the Basement Tapes. Brown writes, “But soon it became clear that they needed a place apart from Dylan’s wife and children: “It was his house,” Hudson says…It was only natural they gravitated to the cellar in Big Pink, where Dylan availed himself of the Hawks’ gear.” Calling the house, Big Pink, a “bachelor palace,” Robbie Robertson is quoted in Sid Griffin’s Million Dollar Bash: Bob Dylan, The Band, and the Basement Tapes, saying: “So Dylan would just come over, and it was like the clubhouse. Rick and Richard and Garth and later Levon all lived there. At one time, that is. Garth, Rick, and Richard moved into Big Pink but I moved to a different place because I had a girlfriend – and I didn’t want her to see what happens” (69). The all-boys “clubhouse” in the basement at Big Pink provided a physical space for Dylan to escape domestic life. It is also where he developed intimate fraternal bonds with the members of the Band. The trust built through these kinship relationships provided a foundation for the men’s creative growth and experimentation. Commenting on this, Sid Griffin writes, “These five – Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, and Robbie Robertson – become not Dylan’s backup but his musical allies, his partners in crime” (79). Their collaboration led to one of the most productive writing and recording periods in Dylan’s career, laying down nearly 150 songs, the majority of which were originals, and the rest covers of Dylan’s favorite American roots music.

As a result of recording together, Dylan and the Band created something that transcended collaboration. Williams noted, “The Sound of the Basement Tapes songs is the sound of the unconscious (musical, verbal) mind brought forward into the world of conscious, touchable reality in a very calm, aware, marvelously unselfconscious fashion with more than a touch of the collective unconscious – the group mind – thrown in to sweeten the sauce” (Williams 223). That sound, “the group mind,” was the tangible, audible manifestation of the fraternal bonds the six men developed as they spent time, composed, played, and recorded together day in and day out. Not only were they “killing time” during the sessions, Robertson also notes Dylan gave them an education on traditional folk music (Marcus xiv). As a result of the collaboration born out of that mentorship Dylan and the Band discovered a “new idiom which to perform” (Griffin 82). Dylan would write the lyrics and then they’d all go down into the basement and compose the music together.

The unstructured and freewheeling sessions delineated a break from traditional or formal recording practices resulting in the carnivalesque sonic and lyrical atmosphere of the tracks. Of these sessions, Sid Griffin writes in Million Dollar Bash: Bob Dylan, The Band, and the Basement Tapes, “The informality of recording at Big Pink proved to be an antidote to the tense scheduling, the required formality, and the constant clock watching that came with recording at a major studio” (129). Free from schedules, budgets, and corporate demands, Dylan, Robertson, Helm, Danko, Manuel, and Hudson were free to experiment with roots music and innovate expressions of it through their play. The casual environment also shifted power dynamics within the group. The Band, who were on Dylan’s payroll, were his employees. However, homosocial bonds of fraternal love transcended that. This forced Dylan out of the dominant position as boss. Everything flattened and equalized in the basement. Williams argues that one of Dylan’s ambitions in the Basement Tapes was to “amuse and impress and be accepted by his new companions” (225). Dylan’s vulnerability while they recorded The Basement Tapes sessions allowed him to learn from the band as much as they learned from him. In this environment Dylan experienced a sense of liberation from the corporate vices of the record industry and, in his basement hootenanny, created what Clinton Heylin describes as “perhaps his greatest collection of songs” (273).

What makes this collection of songs so “great” is precisely the aspect of carnival that separates it from everyday life and Dylan’s studio work and affords Dylan a sense of liberation in his creative process. Of the sessions, Williams explains, “Dylan apparently would come over in the afternoon – every afternoon, week after week – and he and the Band would sit around making music together, and when the spirit moved them they’d record some of what they were doing” (222). Later in his analysis, Williams remarks, “The open-endedness of the Basement Tapes songs, this sense that Dylan isn’t necessarily singing to anyone but the people he’s performing with … , so there’s a purposefulness and freedom from purpose in his communication somewhat different than anything he’d done before” (229). This speaks to the experience of carnival which Bakhtin argues was, “opposed to all that was ready-made and completed, to all pretense and immutability, sought a dynamic expression; it demanded ever changing, playful, and undefined forms” (687). The Basement Tapes – free-form writing and collaborations, visions and revisions of the lyrics and music, both traditional songs and new compositions, and the camaraderie Dylan experienced with the members of the Band – allows Dylan to find his voice again. Further, the music Dylan and The Band played was a celebration of the abject, a representation of American culture. Dylan called them “[s]ongs about debauched bootleggers, mothers that drowned their own children … , floods, union hall fires, darkness and cadavers at the bottom of rivers” (Chronicles 35) and Marcus presented them as “deep, fluid, perverse, and conflicted” (Trager 35). In this folk tradition, the carnival of Dylan’s environment translates to the lyrics and music, most specifically with a focus on corporal elements of excess, laughter, and rebirth. The characters are fat-gutted, pus-filled, and sleep-deprived. They are lost, drunk, and violent, but they are generally having fun. The characters’ celebration of the abject does not simply degrade or destroy. It signals a renewal or rebirth within and beyond the space of that “second life.”

Bakhtinian carnival is also associated with a renewed or reinvented marketplace that created free and direct interaction and communication between Dylan or Dylan’s music and the people who listen to it. The Basement Tapes achieves this in several ways. The first was the marketplace of ideas shared between Dylan and the Band. A new marketplace was also created through what the liner notes to Dylan’s Bootleg Series, Volume 11 called “the first bootleg of the modern rock’n’roll age” (Griffin). Lastly, not only did the sessions produce the first bootleg, they also created an entire “underground industry” that subverted conventions of record sales. In Million Dollar Bash: Bob Dylan, The Band, and the Basement Tapes, Sid Griffin notes, “no one knew until the bootleg tapes of the Great White Wonder LP bootleg hit the shops of Los Angeles that Dylan was going through this creative purple patch. But the Basement Tapes Era will probably go down as Dylan’s most powerful period of sustained songwriting greatness” (64). The underground bootleg industry, though frustrating to Dylan and the Band, bypassed traditional distribution, allowing for direct distribution of the bootlegs or direct communication between the music and the people. When Dylan recorded John Wesley Harding in Nashville in October 1967, he renewed his previous performance of masculinity. Griffin calls John Wesley Harding Dylan’s “belated return to the marketplace,” language that reinforces Dylan as a wage earner (217).

Dylan’s early career was fueled by ambition and a working-class work ethic aligned with patriarchal industrial capitalist masculinity. His self-imposed hiatus after his motorcycle accident through the recording of John Wesley Harding created a Bakhtinian “second life” or an “extraterritorial space” in his career. This shifted him out of his previous gender performance and into a more passive, domestic role. Through intimate homosocial bonds with members of the Band and the process of writing and recording The Basement Tapes, Dylan renewed his connection to his performance of patriarchal industrial capitalist masculinity. He returned to the recording studio and, eventually, returned to touring. The Bakhtinian extraterritorial space in Dylan’s career enabled him to redefine his gender identity performance. He did so through an assertion of agency and power over the processes and modes of production and performance of his work. The legacy of The Basement Tapes sessions exists in Dylan’s commitment to the folk idiom of preserving and renewing American roots music and history through the albums he’s released from John Wesley Harding through Rough and Rowdy Ways. It’s also evident in the bootleg series of outtakes and unreleased music Dylan periodically issues, self-produced Jack Frost albums, and his seemingly never-ending touring. Ultimately, the motorcycle accident and Dylan’s withdrawal from public life after it allowed him the circumstances to redefine his gender identity performance that has guided the remainder of his career.

Works Cited

Browne, David. “Bob Dylan’s Secret Masterpiece: The Untold Story of ‘The Basement Tapes.’” Rolling Stone, 5 Nov. 2014, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/the-untold-story-of-bob-dylans-basement-tapes-inside-the-new-issue-44611/. Accessed 31 Oct. 2023.

Connell, R W. The Men and the Boys. University of California Press, 2000.

Griffin, Sid. Million Dollar Bash: Bob Dylan, the Band, and the Basement Tapes. Jawbone, 2015.

Holter, Ǿ. G. “Family Theory Reconsidered.” Labour of Love: Beyond the Self-Evidence of Everyday Life. eds. T. Borchgrevink and Ǿ. G Holter. Avebury Ashgate Publishing, 1995.

Loder, Kurt. “The Rolling Stone Interview: Bob Dylan.” Rolling Stone, 21 June 1984, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/the-rolling-stone-interview-bob-dylan-43446/. Accessed 13 Nov. 2023.

Marcus, Greil. Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. Henry Holt and Company, 1997.

Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan. “Mikhail Bakhtin: Rabalais and His World.” Literary Theory: An Anthology, Second ed., Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 2004, pp. 686–692.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Columbia University Press, 2016.

Trager, Oliver. Keys to the Rain: The Definitive Bob Dylan Encyclopedia. Billboard Books, 2004.

Williams, Paul. Bob Dylan: Performing Artist, 1960-1973: The Early Years. Omnibus ; Music Sales Corporation, Distributor, 2004.

March 2, 2025/by Nicole Font

Dylan Review Vol. 6.2, Fall/Winter 2024-2025, Questions on Masculinity

Questions on Masculinity – Wanted Men: Bob Dylan and the Vulnerability of Brotherhood

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“Wanted Men: Bob Dylan and the Vulnerability of Brotherhood”

By Court Carney, Stephen F. Austin State University

In June 2023, in a concert in Barcelona, Spain, Bob Dylan deviated from his established setlist. Right before what has become the closing salvo of the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour of “Mother of Muses,” “Goodbye Jimmy Reed,” and “Every Grain of Sand,” Dylan inserted the Grateful Dead’s “Stella Blue.” The song stayed in regular rotation throughout the end of the tour, with twenty-five performances between Spain and Buffalo, New York, in September 2024. The song, written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, dates to the early 1970s. The Grateful Dead first played it on stage at the Hollywood Bowl in June 1972, which also happened to coincide with Ron “Pigpen” McKernan leaving the band. Soon after its introduction, “Stella Blue” became a mainstay of the deep second set for the band: a late “Jerry Ballad” respite among the cosmic storm-cloud denouement. A song tinged in sadness about never quite matching one’s potential, “Stella Blue” vacillated between mournful and blissed out. “Stella Blue” meant something to Garcia and, decades later, clearly signified something to Dylan.

In 2023, when Dylan brought it into his own, the song was over fifty years old, making it a larger time gap between origin and performance than many of the “traditional” songs that he recorded for his debut record in late 1961.^[1] Although the song tends not to unveil its narrative secrets, the lyrics allude to a workaday musician, far from fame, who continues to step up to the microphone. A life defined by cheap hotels and rusted strings. In tone and sentiment, “Stella Blue” relates closely to another song that Dylan brought into the Rough and Rowdy stage: Merle Haggard’s “Footlights.” I saw Dylan sing this song in Port Chester, NY, in 2023 (one of the two times he played the song). At that moment, I was struck by Haggard’s line of a 41-year-old singer hiding his age as he climbs back onto the stage as sung by Dylan, then 82, twice as old as the song’s composer. Haggard’s song chronicles a musician past their popular prime who is coiling their energy to perform for another audience who “goes nearly wild.” The title relates to the singer threatening to “kick the footlights again,” a reference at least in part to Johnny Cash’s infamous destruction of the stage lights at the Grand Ole Opry (which led to a temporary ban from that stage). However, Haggard strikes an ambiguous tone, and the kicking out of the footlights reads both as an act of rebellion and frustration and a hint of being expected to play out the iconoclasm of youth.

Dylan’s trajectory, of course, far exceeds the working bar-band melancholy of either “Stella Blue” or “Footlights.” Still, there remains a suggestion that life on the road plays out in similar emotional ways regardless of success. The inclusion of “Stella Blue” (and, however briefly, “Footlights”) into his generally static setlists of this past tour points to a fascinating undercurrent of vulnerability. The emotional openness of these songs is often fused with Dylan’s idiosyncratic take on masculinity, which I was considering historically when I first heard of this proposed conference. I have thought a lot about vulnerability within the context of Dylan and, relatedly, within the context of listening to Dylan as I try to decode the complicated ways emotion fuses the musician to the listener. The announcement of the theme of this meeting prompted an immediate and profound reflection on the significance of vulnerability and masculinity within the context of music and memory. Initially, I envisioned a discussion centered on brotherhood and the connections between influential male artists such as Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, and Garcia. This exploration aimed to illuminate themes of manhood, masculinity, and the bonds of brotherhood through selected songs and pivotal moments. However, I soon realized that my interest extended beyond these concepts. As I transitioned between projects – specifically, my ongoing work on Civil War memory – I recognized a desire to explore Bob Dylan’s music and its significance to me within the context of my life.

The thorny notion of masculinity plays a role here, too, especially as it pertains to Dylan’s perpetually fluid play on manliness. As much as Dylan can use the mask of masculinity to create distance between himself and others (personally or professionally), we should also consider it less as a signifier of machismo – ironic or otherwise – but perhaps more as an avenue of vulnerability. A look, then, at his male relationships could provide a counterpoint to any superficial read on these connections. A strong thread within the narrative of Bob Dylan’s career relates to perceptions of cruelty within his romantic and platonic relationships. Friends and acquaintances get tossed aside, especially in the reckless early New York City years, which bridged anonymity and fame. One gets, perhaps uncharitably depending on the source, the impression of a challenging artist magpieing through concentric circles of friend groups reaching for that next rung. And yet, looking back on his early career from the vantage point of longevity and endurance, another theme develops out of the thorns: male friendship, however defined, and a sense of vulnerability.

At the center of this conversation stand Johnny Cash and Jerry Garcia, two men who have intersected with Dylan off and on throughout his career (sometimes openly, sometimes quietly). These relationships also intersect with significant times in Dylan’s career: Cash, when Dylan had drifted away from the spotlight in the late 1960s; Garcia, when Dylan had lost the map in the mid-1980s. More generally, Dylan’s relationship with men remains a particularly neglected topic, and this paper places these masculine friendships at the center of a more extensive discussion of how manhood and masculinity inform Dylan’s music and career. The idea of vulnerability, a quality often so foreign to the Dylan conversation, if not his music, especially for someone who invented the modern conception of masking within a pop context and whose early career was nothing if not a highly choreographed dance of put-ons, abstractions, inventions, half-truths, non-truths, anti-truths.^[2] By focusing on Dylan’s relationships with men like Jerry Garcia and Johnny Cash (as well as his larger fraternal circle of friends and associates), I argue that a new, under-explored narrative of male vulnerability and openness emerges.

I began carving out this essay by trying to determine a taxonomy of brotherhood, which quickly became a fool’s errand. The questions tended to devolve and unravel rapidly. Who counts as a brother? How are we defining brother? What about a mentor? Can a mentor be a brother? What about a peer? Interestingly, Dylan’s own brother is a bit of an asterisk here. He plays several vital roles within the Dylan narrative, especially in the 1970s, at perhaps Bob’s most openly vulnerable moments. I want to be clear that the concept of “brother” is purposefully vague and has much more to do with drawing circles around various relationships to clarify larger groups of connections rather than creating some dogmatic series of diagrams. I am less interested, in other words, in the pedantic restructuring of fraternities than I am in how Dylan responds so clearly and so profoundly to certain specific men at various times in his life. At the heart of this discussion lies the more significant idea that Dylan resonates primally with people like Johnny Cash and Jerry Garcia because of a shared sense of historicism. The vulnerability we see, feel, and respond to is rooted in this historical understanding. In other words, with people like Johnny Cash and (especially) Jerry Garcia, there is a shared understanding of how history is rooted in music.

Thus, an invented map of brotherhood in terms of the early years of Dylan’s career:

It all breaks down, of course, as individuals drift through categories. Still, I think this map does ultimately serve a few purposes, especially in terms of ages and timelines; not least is the fact that everyone has passed on, except for Ramblin’ Jack and David – a mapping of friendship, mentorship, and brotherhood in Dylan’s career.

The connection between Dylan and Cash is at once public and enigmatic. Dylan knew and revered Cash’s singles for Sun Records, and Cash openly praised Dylan’s Freewheelin’ record. The two men corresponded sporadically, and Cash, for his part, wrote a letter to the influential magazine BROADSIDE defending Dylan against the attacks made by several key folk music writers who were dismayed with the young songwriter’s lack of allegiance to various folk dogmas. Dylan and Cash met at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964 and remained in touch throughout the decade. The public aspect of their relationship culminated in a series of joint appearances in 1969 when Cash guested on Dylan’s Nashville Skyline, and Dylan performed on Cash’s television show. Their relationship afterward is sketchier, but within this Nashville moment, a legitimate friendship materializes.

One song that came out of these Tennessee sessions that I want to comment on here is “Wanted Man,” a Dylan song that Cash admired. The song is a travelogue, an outlaw’s tale, a hustler’s beat. I keep returning to this song, title, image, and performance – especially the humor and camaraderie of the outtakes. The directions go west (naturally), east, midwest, southeast, and southwest. “Wherever you look tonight,” Cash sings, “you might see this wanted man.” But each verse features these wonderful deep bits as the singer dips past the surface tension of Western pastiche to dwell in the deeper waters of wants and needs. “But I’ve had all that I’ve wanted of a lot of things I had,” he sings, “and a lot more than I needed of some things that turned out bad.” Dylan’s complex use of wanted works exceedingly well here. At first glance, an outlaw is on the run, but then something much more enigmatic transpires. We are in the west–California or Cheyenne–and the song is all a blatant setup. But then, the meaning shifts, and it is wanted, as in chosen and desired by Lucy Watson, Jeannie Brown, Nellie Johnson (later Juanita). The names of the women change, but they also all sound the same: Lucy/Jeannie/Nellie, Watson/Johnson, and then Juanita, with a nice internal rhyme with “wanted.” The singer is everywhere and then nowhere – a vapor. But at the same time, he is made physical and sought after, desired, tracked, followed, and pursued. Later, as sung by Johnny Cash to prisoners at San Quentin, it is a song about being on the lam.^[3] But in an earlier, spontaneous moment, right at the moment when the song is being called into existence, Cash adlibs truth into the fiction. Cash is following Dylan’s lead, learning the words and the tune. Still, he insists on bringing the two singers into the song by rattling off the towns and places of their childhoods: Duluth, Hibbing, Dyess. They are, Cash implies, the actors in the song, too.

Returning to the recurrent theme of transitional mentors, we have Jerry Garcia. The connection between Dylan and Garcia seems at once evident and weighty, with two of the most historically minded singers also saturated in the reverberations of American music.^[4] From their first meeting at a Grateful Dead show in 1972 until Garcia died in 1995, their paths crisscrossed on stage and off. The connection to Garcia (and the Grateful Dead, more generally) had deep emotional resonance for Dylan. Dylan famously writes about this transformative experience in Chronicles, Volume One. Dylan joins the band at their rehearsal space in San Rafael, CA, but soon feels uncomfortable with his own material. “I had no feelings for any of those songs,” Dylan writes, “and didn’t know how I could sing them with any intent.” Feeling like a “goon,” Dylan bolted. He starts walking in the rain and enters a jazz club where a small combo is playing standards. “All of a sudden,” Dylan writes of hearing the jazz singer, “I understood something faster than I ever did before.” He returns to the Dead “as if nothing had happened” and begins to sing his older songs within this post-epiphanic haze. “[N]ow I knew,” Dylan writes, “I could perform any of these songs without them having to be restricted to the world of words.” Of course, what on the surface seems straightforward – working with the Grateful Dead led Dylan to reexamine his connection with his own material – actually emerges as murkier and more mysterious upon closer reading. Dylan’s written tale is both vague and otherworldly. And yet the anecdote, we must assume, contains some truth.^[5]

A parallel to the left turn(s) of John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline, two folk records bridge the tumult of the 80s with the Time Out of Mind 1990s. Dylan released the first one, Good as I Been to You, in late 1992, marking a comeback of sorts in Dylan’s never-ending comeback narrative. The second “traditional” record, World Gone Wrong, came out a year later and offered a darker, more fascinating clutch of songs. Buried in the middle of Side Two sits “Two Soldiers,” a 19^th-century ballad often alleged to date to the early years of the American Civil War. The song focuses on two northern soldiers who promise each other to write their respective loved ones before a big battle. Spoiler: the letters are never sent.

This song represents a connection with Garcia. As Dylan notes in the liner notes, “Jerry Garcia showed me TWO SOLDIERS (Hazel & Alice do it pretty similar) a battle song extraordinaire.”^[6] The Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard parenthetical aside refers to their self-titled record released on Rounder in 1973, which featured the song. Gerrard, a singer and scholar of bluegrass and old-time music, had married Mike Seeger in 1970. Seeger (one of our brothers mentioned above), in turn, had recorded a version of “Two Soldiers” back in 1964, and this record is centered partly on this performance; Dylan would go on to play the song two dozen times in concert. In his liner notes, Dylan summarizes his discussion of the song: “learning to go forward by turning back the clock, stopping the mind from thinking in hours, firing a few random shots at the face of time.” In Dylan’s hands, “Delia” emerges as a Civil War ballad turned cosmic harbinger of the death of meaning itself.

The nexus of “Wanted Man” and “Two Soldiers” provides a glimpse into how these men impacted Dylan, and ultimately, we can look at Cash and Garcia and their relationship to Dylan as analogs in various ways. Cash, steeped in music history and the living embodiment of so much of the beauty and terror framed by the first decades of what became known as country music, connected with Dylan on a musical level and in a much more emotionally reflective way. Cash covers a lot of musical ground, but he also represents the fraught duality of family and escape. As Dylan sought refuge in Woodstock away from fame, pills, and touring, what Cash represented (in life, in song) seemed to offer a way out. Just carve out another path, Cash’s music proposed, until escape instinctively calls again. Similarly, Jerry Garcia offered Dylan another form of escape: a tethered rope to the past, this time via folk music and bluegrass. During a period of deadening confusion in the early 1980s, Dylan saw a way out of musical stagnation. Cash and Garcia stood as history-obsessed, history-soaked musicians using the past to create some future sound, something already very much in Dylan’s purview. One of the foundational stories in Dylan’s memoir relates to the young singer reading Civil War-era newspapers in the New York public library, absorbing the language, stories, and people that defined the central conflict of American history. Cash, with his fundamental connection to the origins of country music, Garcia, with his scholarly understanding of the roots of folk music, represented to Dylan brotherhood, perhaps on one level, but also iterations of what music and history could provide. This music refashioned the past into a template, as fate, as rumor, as something to defend, something to defile. But there remains a brotherly vulnerability here that reaches out across the few stories we have.

On August 9, 1995, Jerry Garcia died from a heart attack while staying in a rehabilitation center in California. Dylan attended his funeral four days later, but two public pronouncements helped illustrate his feelings for his departed friend. On September 21^st, Rolling Stone published Dylan’s eulogy for Garcia, which, in a few sentences, seems to sum up the deep connection between the two men. “He’s the very spirit personified of whatever is Muddy River country at its core and screams up into the spheres,” Dylan remarked. “He really had no equal.” Curiously, Dylan argues that the younger Garcia “was more like a big brother who taught and showed me more than he’ll ever know.” The tribute turned toward the infinite as he compared Garcia to the country, rock ‘n’ roll, and modern jazz impulses that fueled both men. “There’s a lot of spaces and advances between The Carter Family, Buddy Holly and, say, Ornette Coleman,” Dylan writes, “a lot of universes, but he filled them all without being a member of any school.” Dylan concludes, “There’s no way to convey the loss. It just digs down really deep.”^[7]

Two days later, on the 23^rd, Dylan began the fall leg of his tour in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. The entire show was filled with cover songs (he opens with Van Morrison’s “Real Real Gone”) and one-off arrangements. The second song of the evening, however, was the Grateful Dead’s “Friend of the Devil,” followed later by “West L.A. Fadeaway.” He ended the main set with a rare cover of “Key to the Highway,” the second and last time he played this song made popular by Big Bill Broonzy. Garcia had played this song various times in his career, and it does not seem like too much of a stretch that the song with lines like “I got the key to the highway / And I’m billed out and bound to go” would serve as a statement of purpose for Dylan. Redolent of “Stella Blue” (and “Footlights), this song speaks to the commitment of the working musician obligated to continue playing on their version of the never-ending tour; another stage awaits. Eight years later, on September 12, 2003, Johnny Cash passed away, having lost his wife of thirty-five years, June Carter, just a handful of months earlier. As with Garcia, the death seemed to shake something loose in Dylan. “I was asked to give a statement on Johnny’s passing,” Dylan writes, “and thought about writing a piece instead called ‘Cash Is King,’ because that is the way I really feel.” Returning to the spectral as he had with Garcia, Dylan referred back to the early 1960s when Cash advocated publicly for the younger songwriter:

There wasn’t much music media in the early Sixties, and Sing Out! was the magazine covering all things folk in character. The editors had published a letter chastising me for the direction my music was going. Johnny wrote the magazine back an open letter telling the editors to shut up and let me sing, that I knew what I was doing. This was before I had ever met him, and the letter meant the world to me. I’ve kept the magazine to this day.

The entire eulogy is a remarkable piece. Dylan moves from describing how “I Walk the Line” works as a composition to saying that “we can’t define him anymore than we can define a fountain of truth, light and beauty.” In tandem, the power of these two eulogies underscore both the interconnectedness of these men to Dylan as well as the vibrant sense of vulnerability Dylan tends to show in these remarks.^[8]

A postscript emerged in 2023, decades after Cash and Garcia’s deaths, as Dylan returned to his brothers during his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour. As we have seen, “Stella Blue” appeared, but throughout his spring 2023 jag through Japan, Dylan populated his setlists with various other Grateful Dead covers. “Truckin’” appeared in Tokyo on April 12, sticking around for seven shows. A few nights later, “Brokedown Palace” had a similar arc. He also brought back “Not Fade Away,” which brings his affection for Garcia and Buddy Holly together. Garcia and the Grateful Dead gave shape to this row of concerts and sparked a great deal of commentary from Dylan’s online followers. Then, in March 2024, Dylan brought out Cash’s “Big River,” a song he had played as early as the Basement Tapes but had only been sporadically performed live (three times between 1988 and 2000). Across fourteen concerts, Dylan dug into the song with vigor and drive. Dylan writes about “Big River” in The Philosophy of Modern Song, where he notes that “the key element to this song is the chain-gang thump of the acoustic rhythm guitar. You can’t really cover this song properly leaving that behind.”^[9] In concert, Dylan, ever the contrarian, drops the rhythm altogether, leaving behind the acoustic guitar, and bases the song around his piano. The song became a late-show highlight couched between “I’ve Made up My Mind to Give Myself to You” and “Mother of Muses.” With “Big River” cresting once more and “Stella Blue” drifting into focus, the twin auras of Cash and Garcia underscore the power and depth of Bob Dylan’s live performances.

I would like to end at the beginning – the inspiration for this essay and what compelled me to frame this talk around the rather ahistorical concept of vulnerability in the first place. On June 15, 1995, Dylan opened for the Grateful Dead in Highgate, Vermont. These shows were not particularly strong concerts for the Dead, and attendees have generally noted that Garcia seemed tired and unwell. Dylan, on the other hand, performed a series of high-energy shows that summer. Coming off stage in Vermont, Dylan approached Garcia, standing in the wings. In the two photos of this moment, Dylan approaches Garcia (with his wife, Deborah Koons, and Mickey Hart looking on). The first image shows a beaming Garcia going in for a hug as Dylan raises his arms, his face half-hidden, though one can intuit a smile. The photo telegraphs warmth. The second photo features Garcia bear hugging Dylan with both hands pressed into his back. We cannot see Dylan’s face at all, his dark hair blurring into the darkness of the photo. These two photos project a vulnerability often dismissed or ignored in conversations about these two friends and performers. They transmit a tableau of brotherly affection – two soldiers amid one final charge – and a heaviness only deepened by the loss of Garcia a few weeks later. “In the end,” Garcia and Dylan sing in “Stella Blue,” “there’s just a song.”

[1]Most of his traditional songs are based on records from the early half of the twentieth century. They might date back much further, of course, but their recorded versions mostly came from earlier in the twentieth century.

[2]My point here relates to the framing of Dylan more than his actual music. Dylan, the songwriter, wrote a number of key songs during this early period that showcased acute sensitivity and awareness. It is present in his first major piece of writing, “Song to Woody,” appears even at his most surrealistic and experimental, “Visions of Johanna,” and culminates (in the first half of his career at least) with Blood on the Tracks. I am arguing here not that Dylan rejects vulnerability but that the conventional narrative/historiography of his work tends to shy away from this emotional framework.

[3]We also have wanted as “wanting,” as in less than insufficient. This definition takes us to another pairing with Bob and Cash: “Belshazzar.” One of Cash’s first songwriting attempts, “Belshazzar” was the last single Sun Records released after Cash left for Columbia Records, relying on lightly syncopated verses surrounding a biblical chorus warning: “he was weighed in the balance and found wanting.” Borrowing the song’s basic structure, Dylan transformed “Belshazzar” during the Basement sessions into a musical guidepost outlining his journey into symbolism and allegory: Woodstock and modern America via the Book of Daniel. Belshazzar’s “Paradise” is sung just like in “Frankie Lee and Judas Priest.” A mirror, an echo.

[4]Tyler Wilcox provides a good overview of their friendship: https://doomandgloomfromthetomb.tumblr.com/post/177555446892/the-ballad-of-spike-jerry-bob-dylan-jerry.

[5]Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 149-151.

[6]“Liner Notes,” Bob Dylan, World Gone Wrong (Columbia Records, 1993)

[7]Bob Dylan, “Bob Dylan Remembers Jerry Garcia,” Rolling Stone, September 21, 1995.

[8]Matt Diehl, “Remembering Johnny,” Rolling Stone, October 16, 2003.

[9]“Johnny Cash is a gospel singer, or he thinks of himself as one. Somewhere along the line, he turns into Gargantua, Finn MacCool, Jigger Jones all in one. He could climb across rivers. He could lay track and take down greenhorns. He’s a teller of tall tales—parts the clouds and drinks nitro. This is the real Johnny Cash, and “Big River” is his theme song.” Bob Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2022), 218.

March 2, 2025/by Nicole Font

Dylan Review Vol. 6.2, Fall/Winter 2024-2025, Questions on Masculinity

Questions on Masculinity – Gender Performance in Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song

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“Gender Performance in Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song”

By Graley Herren, Xavier University

The Philosophy of Modern Song chronicles how young Bobby Zimmerman used music and pop culture to transform himself into Bob Dylan. The novelist Ralph Ellison pointed out that “while one can do nothing about choosing one’s relatives, one can, as an artist, choose one’s ‘ancestors’” (140). Dylan’s book is a tribute to his chosen ancestors. He assembles an eclectic group of 66 songs and imagines his way into them through idiosyncratic riffs and commentaries. The book’s title implies that if you listen to these songs and read Dylan’s reflections, you’ll get a mosaic self-portrait of his “philosophy of modern song.” In the process, you can also learn a lot about his philosophy of masculinity and gender performance. The Philosophy of Modern Song chronicles his education from several groundbreaking artists in the 1950s. These mentors and chosen ancestors taught him to question, resist, and reimagine gender, rejecting a rigid, narrow, stable essence of masculinity in favor of shifting performances across a spectrum.

You couldn’t find a better image for communicating these concerns than the cover photo. Pictured on the left is pioneering rocker and queer icon Little Richard; in the middle is Alis Leslie, nicknamed “the female Elvis”; and on the right is rockabilly star Eddie Cochran. Think of the cover like a radio dial of gender, with Dylan at the knob, moving back and forth from station to station throughout the book. In this article I’d like to tune into some of the strongest frequencies for young Bobby in the fifties, as rebroadcast by old Dylan in 2022.

Marlon Brando & James Dean

In her book The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private, feminist philosopher Susan Bordo recalls Dylan’s influence on the young men of her generation.

Among popular entertainers, the only one whose style of masculinity they consciously emulated was that of folk singer Bob Dylan, who combined poetry, domestic rebellion, and anti-establishment passion with lousy posture, a Salvation Army wardrobe, a voice that defied convention, and a sense of indifference to his audience, even when bellowing lyrics of protest. My friends slouched like Dylan, they mumbled like Dylan, they scoured the Newark thrift stores in search of Dylan-like clothing. (132)

Bordo points out that Dylan’s 60s persona was an amalgamation of 50s trailblazers: “What most of them didn’t know, however, was that young Robert Zimmerman, and many other singers and public politicos of the sixties, just slightly older than the boys I knew, had gotten their inspiration from two movie stars of the fifties: Marlon Brando and James Dean” (132).

Brando first achieved recognition in 1947 for his brutish but irresistible performance as Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire. But it was his volcanic eruption in Elia Kazan’s 1951 film adaptation that turned Brando into a celebrity. Two years later, in his starring role as Johnny Strabler in The Wild One, the leather-clad Brando astride his Triumph motorcycle became the face, voice, pouting lips, and rippling chest of youth rebellion. In his commentary on The Who’s “My Generation” for The Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan credits Brando with sounding a clarion call for his generation:

Marlon Brando, like Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and the first wave of rockers, fell somewhere between the greatest generation ever and the baby boomers; too young to fight against the Nazis, too old to go to Woodstock. Yet when Brando replied, “Whaddaya got?” when a local girl asked him what he was rebelling against in the movie The Wild One, it set the stage for the sixties and the rebellion against the picture-perfect prefab communities the boys came home from the war to build. (43-44)

It wasn’t just the communities that were picture-perfect and prefabricated, it was the boys themselves. One of the main things Brando rebelled against was the era’s smothering codification of correct masculinity.

In his book Rebel Males: Clift, Brando and Dean, Graham McCann observes, “Brando’s character [in The Wild One] epitomized an entire subculture that was fast spreading in America at that time – the drifting gang. Johnny inspired many young men in search of a role model, including Dylan, Presley and Dean. The cool, self-confident pose adopted by Johnny disguises a person who is actually profoundly insecure and confused” (106). The insecurity behind the tough-guy front would later become a hallmark of Dylan’s songs and performances, as it was for Brando, who combined irrepressible sexual vitality with the neediness and fragility of a child. In the case of Brando’s Johnny, the character’s rebellion and confusion wasn’t just existential: it was also gendered. Graham McCann asserts, “From his first appearance, leading the swarm of motorcycles, this man/boy lone ranger is established as a figure of considerable force. Johnny appeals to men and women alike, and while this is never openly expressed by the character himself, there are unmistakable signs that he needs the adoration of both sexes” (106). Though young Bobby Zimmerman could scarcely have imagined it when he was hanging with his gang at Camp Herzl or playing sparsely attended gigs with the Golden Chords, Dylan would soon find himself surrounded by an adoring entourage and exalted as an object of obsessive adoration like Johnny, and like Brando himself.

One man who obsessively adored Brando was James Dean. He only appeared in three films before his life was cut short by a car crash at age 24, but his performances in East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, and Giant, the latter two released after his death, were enough to secure his mythological status for Bobby Zimmerman’s generation. The screen icon’s influence was readily apparent in Dylan’s mannerisms, mumbles, and clothing, later immortalized by Don McLean in his verse about Dylan for “American Pie”: “The jester sang for the king and queen / In a coat he borrowed from James Dean / And a voice that came from you and me.” Dean broke just like a little boy, and that raw emotion spoke urgently to fifties teens like Bobby Zimmerman. The predominant gender training of post-WWII America stressed physical strength, psychological toughness, and emotional repression as the pillars of proper masculinity. Dean offered an alternate model of gender non-conformity, like some beautiful and vulnerable combination of his Rebel co-stars Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo.

Dylan’s most extensive treatment of Dean in The Philosophy of Modern Song comes in the chapter on Vic Damone’s “On the Street Where You Live.” He writes of Dean’s heartbreak when Pier Angeli, the love of his life, suddenly dumped him to marry Vic Damone. Dylan describes Dean stalking his ex after their breakup, including a story “that he waited across the street on his motorcycle on Pier Angeli’s wedding day” (135). The passage conjures up images of Johnny Strabler, inviting comparison to Dean’s other abiding obsession for Brando. In a published 1957 conversation with Truman Capote, Brando complained about being stalked by Dean, who mimicked his every move, followed him around, and repeatedly left messages with his answering service. Brando eventually confronted Dean, told him he was sick, and recommended professional help. In essence, go away from my window, it ain’t me you’re lookin’ for, babe. Brando told Capote that Dean was no hero but “a very lost boy trying to find himself” (qtd. Colavito).

Dylan includes pictures of Dean and Angeli in The Philosophy of Modern Song, but in the present context I’m more intrigued by the few available photos of Dean and Brando. For instance, navigate your way to Pinterest and check out their meeting, arranged by director Elia Kazan, on the set of East of Eden.^[1] While you’re browsing Pinterest, fetch your eyes on the party photo where Dean has Angeli on his arm but only has eyes for Brando.^[2] Patricia Quinn claims that Dylan felt the same way about Brando. Quinn, who dated both men, said in an interview that Dylan “‘adored, idolized [and] was terribly attracted to Marlon’” (qtd. Bordo 133). Point your browser away from Pinterest and toward Reddit, and you can find the gaze redirected from Brando to Dylan in their photo with Patricia Quinn.^[3] The plot thickens, and the web of interconnections becomes more tangled, when you factor in the rumored sexual encounter between Dylan and Brando in the mid-sixties.^[4]

I’ve written elsewhere about Dylan’s signature approach in The Philosophy of Modern Song as “the art of the unsaid,” and the “On the Street Where You Live” chapter provides yet another example.^[5] Overtly, Dylan writes about Dean’s adoration of Pier Angeli. But between the lines and behind the pictures, he gestures toward other obsessions, implying the love that dare not speak its name from the celluloid closet of fifties America.

Little Richard

In his book Sissy Insurgencies: A Racial Anatomy of Unfit Manliness, Marlon B. Ross studies men of color who infiltrated white heteronormative society and challenged predominant attitudes toward masculinity. According to Ross, “Little Richard’s snarling, popping, screeching erotic noise announces the arrival of the black sissy not exactly as a credit to the race, but as a flaunting presence whose racialized homoeroticism cannot be totally shamed or purged” (214). The pink-tinted book cover features Little Richard in all his magnificence, with hair, makeup, and clothes all perfectly on point. “Little Richard’s marcelled hairstyle goes a couple of steps beyond the style worn by black men of the time. The ring of curls sits atop his head like a crown, and his carefully groomed eyebrows and moustache emphasize his self-presentation as a pretty, sissified man, one not afraid to broadcast it to the world” (Ross 214). Bobby Zimmerman’s pompadour in high school wasn’t quite as wild, but it was probably as close as he could get away with at Hibbing High in 1959. Remember that his yearbook also declared his post-graduation aspiration “to join Little Richard.”

Little Richard gained notoriety following several chart-topping hits in the mid-fifties. He first cultivated his talent for titillating audiences in carnivals, revival meetings, and even minstrel shows. As he told biographer Charles White, “Sugarfoot Sam from Alabam was a minstrel show – the old vaudeville type of show. It was quite something. That was the first time I performed in a dress. One of the girls was missing one night and they put me in a red evening gown. I was the biggest mess you ever saw. They called me Princess Lavonne” (24). Although his background in drag was not widely known among his white teen fan base, it was obvious that Little Richard’s gender ambiguity was as subversive as it was sexy. The performer told his biographer, “We were breaking through the racial barrier. The white kids had to hide my records cos they daren’t let their parents know they had them in the house. We decided that my image should be crazy and way-out so that the adults would think I was harmless” (White 65-66).

Dylan devotes two chapters of The Philosophy of Modern Song to his hero, beginning with “Tutti Frutti.” He identifies Little Richard’s gospel roots as the source of his powerful singing: “A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boom. Little Richard was speaking in tongues across the airwaves long before anybody knew what was happening. He took speaking in tongues right out of the sweaty canvas tent and put it on the mainstream radio, even screamed it like a holy preacher – which is what he was” (29). Dylan returns to this point at the end of the entry: “Little Richard was anything but little. He’s saying that something is happening. The world’s gonna fall apart. He’s a preacher. ‘Tutti Frutti’ is sounding the alarm” (30). Voices and bodies long relegated to the shadows were coming out into the spotlight and would no longer be ignored.

Dylan offers an interesting queer reading of “Tutti Frutti”: “Little Richard is a master of the double entendre. ‘Tutti Frutti’ is a good example. A fruit, a male homosexual, and ‘tutti frutti’ is ‘all fruit’” (29). He supplements this interpretation with a full-page photo of Carmen Miranda (28). The image illustrates her burlesque performance of exaggerated sexuality. Even better is the 1962 photo he includes of Jet Harris, Little Richard, Gene Vincent, and Sam Cooke, taken during a UK tour. Flip your copy of the book open to page 31 and give that photo a good long look. I love Little Richard’s exaggerated wink. Here’s a dude who knows just what to do and is eager to prove it. You know something’s happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you, Jet Harris? Then check out Gene Vincent and Sam Cooke. Cooke is one cool daddy, a total charmer, the king of soul, down for whatever with whomever – bring it on home to me! This photo captures so much about the transgressive, crossover appeal of early rock & roll to its largest audience of white middle-class consumers like Bobby Zimmerman. The new music is hip, dangerous, alluring, and liberating. It’s an initiation and an exodus, out of bourgeois repression and conformity, into taboo realms of sexual freedom.

Ironically, the shortest entry of the book is the one-paragraph chapter on “Long Tall Sally” by Little Richard. Dylan makes some ludicrous connections between the title character and the giants of Samaria and Nephilim described in the Bible. You think the whole entry is going to be no more than a piss-take – and there are plenty of those in this often irreverent book – but then Dylan closes with a razor-sharp observation: “Little Richard is a giant of a different kind, but so as not to freak anybody out he refers to himself as little, so as not to scare anybody” (263). We know from Little Richard’s own comments to his biographer that this diagnosis is spot on.

Since Dylan opts out of commenting on the lyrics to “Long Tall Sally,” I’ll let Rip Lhamon fill in some gaps. In his book Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Lhamon decodes several references. “Traditional black folk figures scamper through this song in scandalous antics. Uncle John is a stock figure in black lore from the ‘John cycle’ of tales about a slave who outwits the authorities” (95). And what about the title figure? “It’s Long Tall Sally, ‘built for speed,’ who ‘got everything that Uncle John need.’ But where did Sally come from? Nightmare to every Aunt Mary, Sally is the newly noticed, old, subtraditional freak. Not only long, tall, and speedy, she’s ‘bald-headed’” (95). Lhamon adds this drag reading of Sally:

In the transvestite shows of Little Richard’s apprenticeship, baldheadedness was preparation for one’s wigs. Clearly Sally is a freak, the same term the singer had applied to his own incarnation as Princess Lavonne. Long Tall Sally, in addition to her other meanings, is therefore a transvestite fantasy figure slipping and sliding through life’s niches. […] She bears variant and deviant fantasies. She is as new as rock ’n’ roll. She is as old as the oral tradition. (95)

As for Dylan, he lets his accompanying picture do most of the interpretive work. Get a load of the striking vintage comic from the fifties on the facing page of the “Long Tall Sally” entry. Three couples pair off, wearing generic wardrobe from the era, walking down the street in white-bred bliss. A solitary woman towers over them all, gazing with envy and shedding a tear. Her thought bubble reads: “How lucky those girls are! I’ll never know the meaning of romance! Men don’t like women who tower over them…as I do!” (262). It’s a blatant example of the rigidity of gender expectations and the cruel consequences of failing to conform to them. On one hand, this old-fashioned picture of a vanilla world seems hilariously out of place in contrast to the raunchy exuberance of “Long Tall Sally.” On the other hand, there’s more than one way to feel like a freak.

This is a perfect illustration for the chapter, because it shows how someone from the fifties white middle class – the tall woman in the picture, or a Jewish kid from Hibbing, Minnesota – might identify with Little Richard as a misfit and outcast. Shortly after Little Richard’s death, Dylan offered this tribute to his chosen ancestor:

He was my shining star and guiding light back when I was only a little boy. His was the original spirit that moved me to do everything I would do. I played some shows with him in Europe in the early nineties and got to hang out in his dressing room a lot. […] In his presence he was always the same Little Richard that I first heard and was awed by growing up and I always was the same little boy. Of course, he’ll live forever. But it’s like a part of your life is gone. (Bob Dylan Facebook post, 9 May 2020)

Early rock music was liberating for listeners like Bobby Zimmerman who didn’t fit into the society they were inheriting. Swishing, border-crossing performers like Little Richard offered an alternative by celebrating the rebellious, the freakish, and the queer, turning social stigmas into badges of honor, pride, and solidarity.

Elvis Presley

The first face you see on the cover of The Philosophy of Modern Song is Little Richard from 1957, when Bobby Zimmerman was a 16-year-old high school sophomore. Then you open the book, and the first figure you encounter is a full-length Elvis Presley, also from 1957. Elvis is in a record store staring at an album display, and if you look closely you can see albums by Elvis, Little Richard, and even James Dean. For Bobby Zimmerman in the fifties, the record store was a sacred space. The picture is a sort of analogue for Dylan’s book: both are repositories of song, archives of the preserved and curated past, warehouses of the mind, memory palaces.

More 1950s songs are included in The Philosophy of Modern Song than any other decade by far, and Elvis is the most frequently referenced musician in the book. If you want further confirmation of Elvis’s exalted importance to young Bobby Zimmerman, consider his testimonial in US Magazine commemorating the tenth anniversary of Presley’s death:

When I first heard Elvis’s voice I just knew that I wasn’t going to work for anybody; and nobody was going to be my boss. He is the deity supreme of rock & roll religion as it exists in today’s form. Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail. I think for a long time that freedom to me was Elvis singing “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” I thank God for Elvis. (1046)

It is difficult for those of us who didn’t live through the fifties to appreciate just what a radical effect Elvis had on young people back then – and what a threat he posed to the older gatekeepers of morality, conventional gender roles, and racial segregation. Whatever “Elvis the Pelvis” had going down below his waist was deemed so dangerous that the TV public had to be shielded from it, as when “The Ed Sullivan Show” famously decided to only frame Elvis from the waist up. When he appeared for the first and last time on the Grand Ole Opry stage in 1954, the audience was more shocked by Elvis from the neck up, with his coifed hair and makeup. In her book Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing & Cultural Anxiety,^[6] Marjorie Garber offers this vivid description of Elvis’s subversive appeal:

Race, class, and gender: Elvis’s appearance violated or disrupted them all. His created “identity” as the boy who crossed over, who could take a song like “Hound Dog” from Big Mama Thornton or the onstage raving – and the pompadour, mascara, and pink and black clothing – from Little Richard, made of Elvis, in the popular imagination, a cultural mulatto, the oxymoronic “Hillbilly Cat,” a living category crisis. (367)

That’s pretty good: Elvis as “living category crisis.” Or, we could distill it down further, using Little Richard’s preferred term, and simply say that Elvis was a freak.

In his memoir Chronicles: Volume One and the documentary No Direction Home, Dylan talks about the lasting impression traveling circuses made on him as a child, and in his mid-sixties rock trilogy he makes several references to carnivals and freak shows. The best example is “Ballad of a Thin Man” on the album Highway 61 Revisited:

You hand in your ticket
And you go watch the geek
Who immediately walks up to you
When he hears you speak
And says, “How does it feel
To be such a freak?”
And you say, “Impossible!”
As he hands you a bone
Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

The freaks in this song are the Long Tall Sally variety, as Dylan makes clear in this thinly veiled reference to a blowjob from a drag queen:

Well, the sword swallower, he comes up to you
And then he kneels
He crosses himself
And then he clicks his high heels
And without further notice
He asks you how it feels
And he says, “Here is your throat back
Thanks for the loan”
And you know something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

The freaks control the world of this song, and for once it’s the button-down square who feels confused and out of place. Freak shows could be a place for egregious exploitation by unscrupulous profiteers, yes, but these spaces also functioned as playgrounds for taboo behavior. They served as sanctuaries and communities for the marginalized and demonized.

I stress this carnivalesque context because Dylan himself makes an extended circus analogy in his commentary on Elvis’s “Viva Las Vegas”:

Among a certain cadre of fans, Colonel Tom Parker is equally reviled for squandering Elvis’s talents in increasingly substandard movies and holding him in stasis in Las Vegas by allowing the Hilton a sweetheart deal to help offset the manager’s staggering gambling debt. Famously, Elvis’s health and performance spiraled downward but still, he was paraded out night after night. The spectacle began to resemble something out of P. T. Barnum, who would promote a star attraction well past their prime as a curiosity just to get people into the tent. In this case Elvis was that curiosity and the tent was Vegas, and if people were ultimately disappointed by the star’s dissolution there were plenty of other distractions to take their minds off it. And to take their money. All lessons the Colonel learned somewhere between the Netherlands of his birth and the carnivals where he was truly born. (309)

Parker as Barnum and Elvis as circus freak is one thing. But in depicting Elvis as a carnal commodity to be auctioned off to pay his boss’s debts, and by referencing the other distractions notoriously available in Vegas, as well as the Netherlands of Parker’s youth (think of the bordellos and burlesque shows in Amsterdam’s red-light district), Dylan is also implying that Parker was Elvis’s pimp.

Dylan relates personally to these various subversive forms of gender performance: the freak, the stripper, the prostitute. He had a greedy and manipulative Colonel Parker of his own, Albert Grossman, who drove him so hard in the mid-sixties that it nearly killed him. But Dylan’s sense of being in the burlesque business extends well beyond the Grossman years. In his 1997 Newsweek interview, he told David Gates: “I don’t think of myself in the high falutin’ area. I’m in the burlesque area” (1196). That same year at a London press conference, he observed: “Performing’s all the same. When you’re up on stage, and you’re looking at a crowd and you see them looking back at you, you can’t help but feel like you’re in a burlesque show” (1201). He was still singing this tune at the 2001 Rome press conference, but by then he was stressing not only exploitation but also the thrill of burlesque: “The stage is the only place where I’m happy. It’s the only place you can be what you want to be. When you’re up there and you look at the audience and they look back then you have the feeling of being in a burlesque. But there’s a certain part of you that becomes addicted to a live performance” (1259). Start searching for subversive forms of gender performance in Dylan and you’ll find them everywhere, beginning in the fifties and stretching forward into his most recent work.

Cher

My favorite expression of Dylan’s identification with burlesque, and one of his most intriguing gender performances, appears in The Philosophy of Modern Song in his chapter about Cher’s “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves.” In this song she assumes the role of a young woman born on the road. Her mother is a stripper, and her father is part revival tent preacher and part medicine show charlatan. The implication is that the father pimps out his wife on the side, and his daughter is eventually drafted into the family business. At the age of sixteen, she gets pregnant by an older man who soon abandons her. Like her mother before her, she becomes a sex worker to support her young daughter, repeating the generational cycle. As they roam from place to place, these carnies are denounced by the townsfolk as “gypsies, tramps and thieves”; but come nightfall, the local men slink into the tent to indulge forbidden desires.

“This song takes place on the dividing line between the old culture and the new,” writes Dylan (235). It takes place on the old dividing line of binary genders, too, and Dylan crosses over. He imagines his way into the experience of this young burlesque performer. He dances in her heels and sees through her eye shadow. Using the pronoun “you,” located in the shadowland between I and they, Dylan conjures the scene under the tent: “Strip yourself bare and dance the sword dance, buck naked inside of a canvas tent, fenced in, where the town royalty, the top brass and leading citizens, bald as eggs throw their money down, sometimes their entire bankroll” (232). This is Dylan in drag, channeling his inner Cher and passing as Princess Lavonne. This is Dylan as stone-cold diva and charcoal maiden strutting his feathers well.

Dylan identifies closely with this burlesque dancer, seeing his own reflection when he looks into her mirror. Describing her relationship with the audience, he observes, “you know how to make them see wonderful things, and you can make music that drives them mad. You’ve got the character of Saturn and the spirit of Venus. Passion and desire, you give it to them under the counter” (232). Dylan shares the dancer’s wanderlust, waking up every day with a chance to reinvent yourself on stage every night. She is his twin sister: “Your philosophy of life is wait and see. You make anybody who sets their eyes on you feel like they’re falling in love, you’ve got a long lineage – and you go everywhere at all times. This-a-way, that-a-way, over the hill, around the mountain, up the road and down the road, can you go past the cutoff point – sure, go where you like” (233). Dylan can relate to being a commodified sex object who is sold to line the pockets of greedy profiteers and bought to feed the audience’s desires. But he also relates to the paradoxical freedoms and pleasures afforded by life on the road, unencumbered by the drudgery that chain normies like us to our mundane lives. Her home and her identity are unfixed: she performs herself into existence over and over again.

I’ll close with an interesting comment from Dylan in a 1986 radio interview in Australia. Reflecting upon his most formative decade, he recalled,

The ’50s were rough. Everybody romanticizes the ’50s but that was a very rough time. … The only thing I remember that kept everybody going that I know in the ’50s was maybe a few films that Marlon Brando made, or James Dean, or the rockabilly music, and rhythm and blues, and that was it. That music, it called out to you, and very few people were onto it. And it was almost like a life raft thrown to people who were different back then. (EON-FM 936)

Bobby Zimmerman never made it out of Minnesota, but Bob Dylan did. He climbed aboard that life raft and fled the restrictive values that defined and confined him in 1950s America. He sailed that life raft to New York and performed new selves into existence in the decades that followed. In The Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan reconstructs the escape route on his journey to freedom and self-expression. He celebrates the artists, revolutionaries, and chosen ancestors who taught him a new philosophy, showing him a different way to create and survive.

Works Cited

Bordo, Susan. The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.

Colavito, Jason. “No, James Dean Was Not Marlon Brando’s Sex Slave.” Culture & Curiosities (14 April 2023), https://jasoncolavito.substack.com/p/no-james-dean-was-not-marlon-brandos.

Dylan, Bob. “Ballad of a Thin Man.” Highway 61 Revisited. Columbia Records, 1965.

—. London Press Conference, Metropolitan Hotel (4 October 1997). Every Mind Polluting Word: Assorted Bob Dylan Utterances, ed. Artur Jarosinski (Don’t Ya Tell Henry, 2006), 1197-1213.

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

—. Post on the death of Little Richard. Bob Dylan’s Facebook Page (9 May 2020), https://www.facebook.com/bobdylan/posts/i-just-heard-the-news-about-little-richard-and-im-so-grieved-he-was-my-shining-s/10163359789960696/.

—. Rome Press Conference, De la Ville Inter-Continental Roma Hotel (23 July 2002). Every Mind Polluting Word: Assorted Bob Dylan Utterances, ed. Artur Jarosinski (Don’t Ya Tell Henry, 2006), 1259-63.

Ellison, Ralph. “The World and the Jug.” Shadow and Act, 1964, 107-43.

EON-FM Radio Interview with Bob Dylan. Melbourne, Australia (21 February 1986). Every Mind Polluting Word: Assorted Bob Dylan Utterances, edited by Artur Jarosinski, Don’t Ya Tell Henry, 2006, 936-37.

Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing & Cultural Anxiety. Routledge, 1992.

Gates, David. “Dylan Revisited.” Newsweek (5 October 1997), https://www.newsweek.com/dylan-revisited-174056.

Herren, Graley. Shadow Chasing. https://shadowchasing.substack.com/.

Lhamon, Jr., W. T. Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s. Smithsonian Institution, 1990.

McCann, Graham. Rebel Males: Clift, Brando and Dean. Rutgers University Press, 1993.

McLean, Don. “American Pie.” American Pie. United Artists, 1971.

Ross, Marlon B. Sissy Insurgencies: A Racial Anatomy of Unfit Manliness. Duke University Press, 2022.

Swingin’ Pig. “Bob Dylan on Marlon Brando & Phil Spector (1965 Interview by Allen Ginsberg). YouTube (6 April 2019), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtVgAnH_ucM.

US Magazine Feature on Tenth Anniversary of the Death of Elvis Presley. Every Mind Polluting Word: Assorted Bob Dylan Utterances, edited by Artur Jarosinski, Don’t Ya Tell Henry, 2006, 1046.

White, Charles. The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Quasar of Rock, updated edition. Da Capo, 1994

^[1] See photo of Marlon Brando with James Dean on the set of East of Eden (1954), posted by Metek09 on Pinterest, https://www.pinterest.com/pin/379780181074869901/.

^[2] See photo of Brando, Dean, and Angeli at a party in 1955, posted by Verena Carelle on Pinterest, https://www.pinterest.com/pin/275704808416690053/.

^[3] See photo of Brando, Quinn, and Dylan in 1966, posted by naveargenta on the r/bobdylan Reddit page, https://www.reddit.com/r/bobdylan/comments/15s0wwi/marlon_brando_patricia_quinn_and_bob_1966/.

^[4] I had never heard this rumor until Laura Tenschert brought it up at the Odense symposium. The evidence stems from a recorded conversation between Dylan and Allen Ginsberg in 1965. Listen and judge for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtVgAnH_ucM.

^[5] For example, see my article “The Art of the Unsaid in Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song” on my Substack newsletter Shadow Chasing. There I have additional profiles on other fifties icons who influenced Dylan’s views on gender performance, including Johnnie Ray, Ricky Nelson, and Gorgeous George.

^[6] My thanks to Rob Reginio for suggesting this source. Rob’s paper from the 2016 Comparative Drama Conference, “No Prophet’s Son: Bob Dylan’s Musical Fathers,” was an early inspiration for my Odense paper.

March 2, 2025/by Nicole Font

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