,

Thought/Dreams

Go Back

Other Issues

“Thought/Dreams”

By Michael Gray (2025)

 

“Time brings to his deserted cot
No tidings of his after lot;
But his weal or woe is still the theme
Of my daily thought, and my nightly dream.”
Poor Alice is not proud or coy;
But her heart is with her minstrel boy.

 

This is from the thirty-first stanza of “The Legend of the Haunted Tree” by the early nineteenth century Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, MP and poet Winthrop Mackworth Praed, from his Legends and Tales collection, first published in 1828. But nine years earlier, the Shetland poet Dorothea Primrose Campbell (whose life was a lot tougher than her name suggests) had published these lines, from her poem “Midnight Scene”:

 

She sings of many a gallant tar,

That oft had brav’d the dubious war,

Returning home to greet once more

His lov’d and long-lost native shore,

And fly to her whose image dear

In ev’ry toil had yet been near;

Like some attending angel-pow’r

Had sooth’d him in each fearful hour,

When battle rag’d, or hurtling storm

Howl’d o’er the vessel’s dusky form,

And still had cheer’d with sacred beam

His daily thought and nightly dream.

 

I found these two when I looked for the origin of this highlighted, memorable line after being surprised to find it in the text of Thomas Hardy’s novel The Trumpet-Major – and the reason I was surprised to see it there, and why it leapt out at me from the page, was because I knew it already, and well, from Richard Rabbit Brown’s extraordinary voice singing it in his great 1927 track “James Alley Blues,” the first track he ever recorded:

 

You’re my daily thought and my nightly dream.

 

Now Bob Dylan doesn’t use that line – though I’m surprised he hasn’t – though he had heard of Brown while still a teenager. But he sings other “James Alley Blues” lines at Big Pink in 1967, and he offers a strong reverberation of it in his own song “Mississippi” many decades later. (Both talk of coming from the country and coping with life in town; and both cite a mule.)

 

Brown, “James Alley Blues,” 1927:

I’ve been givin’ you sugar for sugar, let you get salt for salt
I’ll give you sugar for sugar, let you get salt for salt
And if you can’t get ‘long with me well it’s your own fault

 

Dylan, “Crash on the Levee (Down In The Flood),” 1967:

Well, it’s sugar for sugar
And salt for salt
If you go down in the flood
It’s gonna be your own fault.

 

I doubt Rabbit Brown (or any of us) ever read Dorothea Primrose Campbell or Winthrop Mackworth Praed, so I’m wondering: was “daily thought and nightly dream” a common expression in early nineteenth-century England – hence the Thomas Hardy usage (1880) within what was his one historical novel? And if so, did it pass from that common usage into early twentieth-century folk parlance? Or did it arrive there from a poem/lyric containing it having been included in some anthology of nineteenth-century songs? And if so, perhaps it came from there to Rabbit Brown.

 

What suggests that perhaps he did read it there, having perhaps been more literate than we may have assumed, is that not only is it no commonstock line: it occurs in no other pre-war blues track known to me or to the pre-eminent blues historian Tony Russell. And this despite its lengthy begging to be made into a line of popular song.

 

PS. Dylan sings the word “daily” only in the traditional song “Young But Daily Growing,” and “nightly” only in the dire “Neighborhood Bully.”

/by
,

The Philosophy of Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour

Go Back

Other Issues

“The Philosophy of Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour”

By Jack Walters

 

Ironically, the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour was anything but rambunctious. Yet we should haven’t expected anything different – it is the trickster in Dylan.[1] Ignoring the hell-bound blues numbers, including the stop-start Chicago riffs, one of the defining aspects of the tour – especially the spring and fall 2024 legs – was the pared-down arrangements. After the interlude of the boisterous Outlaw Tour in the summer of 2024, Dylan returned to the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour in Europe; the latter half of the fall leg produced, to a certain extent, quieter and sparser arrangements in which silence and space were equally important as the words and the music.

Starting in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on November 2, 2021, the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour reached the Royal Albert Hall, London, on November 14, 2024. Throughout the three years, Dylan stuck with a heavily curated setlist, highlighting his 39th studio album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, a record that pivots around music and art, inspiration and creativity, Greco-Roman and bardic traditions, Eastern and Western religions, divinity and immortality, time and timelessness. Within the live arrangements of the spring and fall legs were pauses and pockets of space, which, in Japanese music, is known as ma, and can be found in Western music, as well.[2] This created an audible lacunae that, paradoxically, filled the compositions. Theoretically, music is embedded into the bedrock of silence; the two are in a symbiotic relationship: music is born into the silence, which, in itself, does not emerge ex nihilo.[3] 

Gisèle Brelet writes in her essay “Music and Silence,” “That silence into which music is born is not pure nothingness: in it dwell an attentiveness and an expectation.”[4] Certainly, attentiveness is crucial when attending a Dylan concert, as he makes the audience come to him, not vice versa. Yet, even to his usual standards, Dylan, in the 2024 spring and fall legs, challenged his audience in a way he hadn’t before: making them attuned to silence. The silence became a counterpoint, a reference, a sound in itself. Donnie Herron, who had been in the band since 2005 on steel guitars, violin, and mandolin, played his final Dylan concert on April 6, 2024.[5] Yet even before the multi-instrumentalist’s exit, Dylan had rendered the sound sparingly.

Silence, in music, can serve as a destructive and constructive force. For example, when we hear a silent interlude we attempt to fill it.[6] Occasionally, Dylan did not finish a lyric, an omission that created a dialectic between what was said and left unsaid. We, the seasoned audience, knew the omitted lyric. “A big part of songwriting, like all writing, is editing – distilling thought down to essentials,“ Dylan writes in 2022’s The Philosophy of Modern Song. “Novice writers often hide behind filigree. In many cases the artistry is in what is unsaid.”[7] Ernest Hemingway writes about the Iceberg theory, or the theory of omission, in Death in the Afternoon (1932):

 

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have the feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.[8]

 

After playing “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” in Liverpool on November 3, 2024, Dylan said, “Well, thank you. I wrote that song at Ernest Hemingway’s house. I think there’s a lot of him in that song. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect it.”[9] Perhaps the first significant use of omission in Dylan’s writing was on John Wesley Harding (1967), which is likely a reference to the English poet and engraver William Blake, who apprehended that usually the potency of a work derives from ellipses.[10] Blake is, of course, referenced in “I Contain Multitudes,” a track that, in part, shares with Blake’s meaning of “eternity,” which, on one level, is all of time – past, present, and future – exists.[11] In the fifth verse, in which he directly cites Blake, Dylan sings, “Everything’s flowin’ all at the same time,” echoing this definition of eternity. Conversely, Blake also saw “eternity” as an atemporal state, existing only in the present moment, an eternal now.[12]

Dylan is never linear and therefore there was a Janus-faced nature to the Rough and Rowdy European fall leg. On the one hand, there were vestiges of the rollicking Outlaw Tour; on the other, it was delicate to the point of stillness. The former aesthetic can partly be attributed to Jim Keltner who, replacing Jerry Pentecost for the Outlaw Tour, stayed on for the European leg. Keltner is a busier drummer than his antecedents Charley Drayton and Pentecost, respectively. Naturally, Dylan, at times, leaned into Keltner’s larger sound, even perhaps selected songs due to Keltner’s inclusion.[13] His forceful drumming could be heard in the live versions of “All Along the Watchtower” and “Desolation Row”; the latter, with the walloping rataplan of tom-toms and Doug Lancio’s pulsive acoustic guitar, echoed the rhythm section of “Series of Dreams.”

The feeling of the Rough and Rowdy European leg being a continuation of the Outlaw Tour is best exemplified on the first night of the Royal Albert Hall concerts, as Ray Padgett discerningly highlighted.[14] But the following night Dylan did a one-eighty: some of the arrangements were rendered bare, with him performing a near a cappella version of “My Own Version of You.” There was a noticeable difference between the two versions, as well as the overall feel of the concerts. Therein lies the question: what did this shift mean? Simply a return to the muted sound first heard in spring and the latter half of fall due to a stylistic preference. However, this choice could have been influenced by theoretical ideas.

In art, silence can have multifarious meanings: salvation or void. Loud or quiet. And a way to represent a character torn from his “true self,” others, or God.[15] Maimonides, a Torah scholar in the Middle Ages, postulated that “God’s essential unknowability means that He has only negative attributes, then the only appropriate way of describing His nature is through silence, known as negative theology.”[16] Due to the inadequacy of language, some writers have interpreted words as ineffectual in articulating the qualia (a quality or property as perceived or experienced by a person). Others, as misrepresenting the subjectivity of human experience.[17] Therefore, in circumspection, they put down their pen; they are, in other words, an “inactive artist.” Of course, an “inactive artist” is not often an active choice. Although Dylan has never been an “inactive artist,” Dylan addresses the idea of reticence in the opening couplet of 1971’s “Watching the River Flow”: “What’s the matter with me / I don’t have much to say.” Preceding the writing of this, Dylan, in just under a year and a half, released Nashville Skyline, Self Portrait, and New Morning. Ergo it was not so much a question of activity as the feeling of having little to say. Or, more accurately, anything new to say artistically. And, thus, Dylan was perhaps enveloped by an artistic silence. Until the European 2024 fall leg, Dylan opened every concert of the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour with “Watching the River Flow.” Deadpan and cool, Dylan delivers the lyrics when he now has a lot to say – in fact, a whole concert of words.

The tension in “My Own Version of You” (Royal Albert Hall night two) was not the words; rather, the extensive pauses between the piano notes and vocals. The style of the rendition echoed its lyrical inspiration: the English novelist Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Drawing directly on Frankenstein, “My Own Version of You” is a metatextual track about the creative process – the narrator is literally building his creation like the young scientist Victor Frankenstein creating a monster:

 

   Looking for the necessary body parts

   Limbs and livers and brains and hearts

   I want to bring someone to life – is what I want to do

   I want to create my own version of you

 

There is a link between silence and creativity. In his book, Silence in Philosophy, Literature, and Art, Steven L. Bindeman writes: 

If the experience of silence can provide us with a charged field of energy, then it would follow that silence also resonates with related issues regarding the origin of life and the animist belief that all things have a soul. Mary Shelley’s novel of Dr. Frankenstein’s dream, to create life out of lifeless matter, is similarly of deep mythological and psychological significance.[18] 

Therefore, with these skeletal arrangements, Dylan reinforced his lyrical ideas through his musical approach. As a performer, Dylan, in theory, on stage is creating out of lifeless matter – a scientific experiment. Known for radically deconstructing his arrangements, Dylan can be seen as a Process artist in which the process of making art is in view. During the Japan leg of spring 2023, Dylan attempted Grateful Dead’s “Brokedown Palace” three times, which included a version on April 16, 2023, that, fittingly, collapsed after one and a half minutes. 

Perhaps no other song on the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour showcased its lyrical content via its live arrangements better than “Key West,” a metaphysical threnody, that echoes the modernist poet T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” (1936-1942), a tetralogy of poems in which mystical silences underpin the collection.[19] Eliot based “Little Gidding,” the first poem of the “Four Quartets,” on the town of Little Gidding, Huntingdonshire, England, after a visit, mesmerized by the supposed timelessness of the village.[20] Seemingly, the unadorned live versions of “Key West” were, through poetic silences, purposefully arranged to draw greater attention to the timelessness and mysticism of the composition. 

The southernmost key, Key West is an island in the Straits of Florida, within the U.S. state of Florida, where the Gulf of Mexico meets the Atlantic Ocean. In the song, Key West is both a place and a place within, capturing the liminality of existence. Both Eliot and Dylan use a real-life location – “Little Gidding” and “Key West” – as a jumping-off point to explore time, salvation, and immortality. These themes became foregrounded on the second night of the Royal Albert Hall concerts when “Key West” oscillated between music and silence, with Dylan distinguishing between the two. Yet, simultaneously, he rendered the opposites obsolete, due to showing that there is music in silence. As established, there is a link between silence and creativity. Through the punctuated silences and the stripped-down arrangements, Dylan married music and lyric; by doing so, he foregrounded the theme of creativity in his concerts. Therefore creativity, through silence, was invoked upon most nights, specifically the spring and fall 2024 legs, as if it was a Greek Muse.

 

[1] For a reading of the role of the trickster in Dylan’s personas/work, see Stephen Scobie, Alias Bob Dylan: Revisited (Red Deer Press, 2003), 31-34.

[2] Murakami, Haruki, & Ozawa, Seiji. Absolutely on Music. Vintage, 2017. 22.

[3] Brelet, Gisèle. “Music and Silence.” Silence in Philosophy, Literature, and Art. Brill, 2017. 31.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Expecting Rain. https://expectingrain.com/dok/who/h/herrondon.shtml, accessed December 22, 2024.

[6] Bindeman, Steven L. Silence in Philosophy, Literature, and Art. Brill, 2017. 32.

[7] Dylan, Bob. The Philosophy of Modern Song. Simon & Schuster, 2022. 55.

[8] Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon, Jonathan Cape, 1958. 183.

[9] Hewitt, Harrison. X (November 04, 2024), https://x.com/harryhew/status/1853495196383953297, accessed December 22, 2024.

[10] Ackroyd, Peter. Blake. Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995. 191. The author made the connection when reading Ackroyd’s analysis of omissions in Blake’s poetry and art.

[11] Higgs, John. William Blake vs the World  Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2021. 278-94

[12] Ibid.

[13] Tenschert, Laura. “Slow coming home”: Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour Finale (with Ray Padgett). Definitely Dylan (November 24, 2024), https://www.definitelydylan.com/listen/2024/11/24/slow-coming-home-rough-and-rowdy-ways-tour-finale-with-ray-padgett, accessed December 22, 2024.

[14] Padgett, Ray. “Last Night at the Royal Albert Hall.” Flagging Down the Double E’s (November 13, 2024), https://www.flaggingdown.com/p/last-night-at-the-royal-albert-hall, accessed December 22, 2024.

[15] Michalski, Przemysław. “The Significance of Silence in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot.” 2017. 73.

[16] Bindeman, Steven L. Silence in Philosophy, Literature, and Art. Brill, 2017. 35.

[17] Michalski, Przemysław. “The Significance of Silence in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot.” 2017. 74.

[18] Bindeman, Steven L. Silence in Philosophy, Literature, and Art. Brill, 2017. 48.

[19] Michalski, Przemysław. “The Significance of Silence in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot.” 75.

[20] González. Pedro Blas. “Time and Permanence in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.” Russell Kirk Center (October 27, 2014), https://kirkcenter.org/essays/time-permanence-eliot-four-quartets/, accessed December 22, 2024.

/by
,

Designing Dylan: Form and Content in Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine

Go Back

Other Issues

Designing Dylan: Form and Content in Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine

BY Jason Grant

 

Books are aesthetic objects. As much as the collected material it documents, Bob Dylan:  Mixing Up the Medicine – the official publication of The Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma  – is a physical design artifact, and the content it holds is just as constructed. Like all aesthetic objects, Mixing Up the Medicine is a product of the choices of its creators, the imprint of its historical moment, and the inextricable link between the two. Following Alessandro Carrera’s review of the book in The Dylan Review’s previous edition[1], our challenge here is understanding what was actually designed, in the sense of consciously created, and what is also routine cultural reflex, born from the systemic, ongoing effects of design and its evasive relational complexity.  

 

Any published account of Dylan’s career is automatically epic due to the mythology of its shape-shifting subject. Mixing Up the Medicine, like many of the earliest literary works, is an adventurer’s log book charting the landmarks of a pioneering explorer’s discoveries. From the very first book, the travails of Gilgamesh, transcribed in cuneiform on clay tablets, to  Chinese Song-dynasty block-printed travel literature, books have long been produced as mythological and historical records of heroic travelers’ adventures.  

 

In their day, the lead-set printed European colonial conquests were a publishing phenomenon. I recently donned white gloves to view the first ever published account of Captain  James Cook’s (ultimately genocidal) journey around the world, and the rarest published work relating to Cook’s Endeavour voyage, a collection of charts of the east coast of Australia and  New Zealand. Until the late 19th century most books did not have illustrated covers, so in the absence of pictures, extravagantly descriptive titles were needed to evoke content and attract readers. Although from a contemporary perspective, reading the whole title almost risks negating the need to read any further. One of the Cook books is titled: Astronomical  observations made in the voyages which were undertaken by order of his present Majesty, for  making discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, and successfully performed by Commodore Byron, Captain Carteret, Captain Wallis, and Captain Cook, in the Dolphin, Tamer, Swallow,  and Endeavour.

 

In contrast, Mixing Up the Medicine’s front cover is all image. The single striking photo without a title, or any text at all, may reveal as much about evolving socio-technical conditions as it does about Dylan’s fame. For centuries, books have been sold in brick-and-mortar stores,  romantic sites that persist in our imagination even as they vanish from our communities  (support your local independent bookstore!). Like the album covers increasingly designed to be viewed as thumbnails on digital streaming platforms, the majority of books are now viewed initially on a screen and sold online (by 2020, over 71.2% of the United States publishing industry’s total revenue was coming from online book sales).[2] As a consequence, covers are becoming simpler, bolder, and in some cases are exaggerating their formal, material qualities in opposition to the intangible ephemerality of digital information. The distillation of visual information on book covers isn’t just down to a new diminished virtual viewing context, but also the ability for less literal images to be accompanied online by descriptive texts. It’s also worth noting that the magnetic, unadorned photo on Mixing Up the Medicine’s cover is by Jerry  Schatzberg from a post-Highway 61 Revisited studio shoot, and prefaces his Blonde on Blonde cover shot, which began a brief, anomalous period (1966–1970) when most of Dylan’s album covers were similarly devoid of title typography. 

 

There are thousands of photographs of Dylan at every age and in every era. However,  reinforcing the archaic characterization of Dylan as a folksinger singing protest songs defaults stubbornly to the 60s. As Dylan himself said in a 1985 interview: “It’s kinda funny… When I  see my name anywhere, it’s (often) ‘the 60s this or the 60s that.’ I can’t figure out sometimes  if people think I’m dead or alive.”[3] As a marketable medium, perhaps an image of iconic 60s  Dylan is highly legible, while Dylan’s older visage is just harder to read. Regardless, the cover image suspends him in amber as some kind of estranged historical subject. A “walking antique”  for the hypnotist collectors. For the cover of a Dylan book published in 2023, at the tail end of an unprecedented seven-decade career, should designers still be searching through mid-century photographic proofs? At the time of writing, Bob Dylan is 83 years old. Can’t this resilience and maturity be visually celebrated, rather than habitually ignored? Give me a portrait of the  old explorer still powerful and relevant: “I can see the history of the whole human race / It’s  all right there – it’s carved into your face.” 

 

The book exists because of its subject, for its subject’s audience. Then again, Dylan, as a popular performer and songwriter, is actually the direct result of the book form – not just as a source of content, or influences (“I read Erica Jong!”) but more fundamentally as a transformative technology. The development of the printed word manifested the possibility of an audience. This is Marshall McLuhan’s idea that books created the phenomenon of a public:  “The old manuscript forms were not sufficiently powerful instruments of technology to create  publics in the sense that print was able to do — unified, homogeneous, reading publics.”[4] One of Dylan’s influences acknowledged in his Nobel lecture, Charles Dickens, caused a riot in  1841, as legend has it, when frenzied readers stormed the New York harbor in anticipation of the British ship arriving with the final installment of his serialized novel, The Old Curiosity Shop.[5] Long before recorded music and film, books manifested fans, not just for a writer, but  for an actor, artist and “song and dance man”: “I see the turning of the page / Curtain risin’ on  a new age.”[6] Gutenberg’s printing press and Dylan’s guitar are playing the same song. 

 

Offering the book’s content as a more broadly accessible online archive would involve obtaining unlikely permissions from rights holders, but who knows, they may yet. Even so, the digital transmission of the written word, for all its convenience, has not replaced traditional print, especially not for longer texts (and not always as a foolproof monetizable commodity).  Popular predictions of prints’ extinction now seem obsolete themselves. The unique sensorial qualities of the printed page, with its ink solvent aromatics, the vanilla and almond notes from a complex organic polymer in the paper called lignin, and the medium’s tactility – as well as the ways in which light is absorbed and reflected from its surface – combine to offer unique haptic, optical and olfactory pleasure. Then there’s the growing body of research showing the reading benefits of a book’s physicality, for example, that print reading can enhance comprehension by up to eight times more than reading on digital devices.[7] And Mixing Up the  Medicine’s hefty 608-page hardcover format is plenty of print, enabling provisional global dissemination of the Dylan museum’s Oklahoma-based collection.  

 

There is a typical limit to the scale of a large format hardcover, that relates to both the economics of conventional publishing efficiencies and the human body itself. To accommodate more of the museum’s collection, Mixing Up the Medicine could have easily been many multiple times its current length. The authors, Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel, claim the book represents just 2% of the Bob Dylan Archive.[8] But it deserves to be read, not just looked at, and that means conforming to some physical constraints. Odds are you’re not reading many of German publisher Taschen’s “Sumo” sized books in bed, for example, some of which are  44 pounds and come with their own custom stands. Mixing Up the Medicine’s own publisher,  Calloway, has titles that include the limited edition “super-deluxe” Sistine Chapel, with a total of 822 pages across three volumes, weighing 75 pounds and costing $25,000.[9]

 

A museum can update and rotate its collection, and a website is a bottomless pit of mutable data, but a book is a fixed and finite codex. This is the printed publication’s simultaneous strength and limitation. Carving something in stone takes nerve – it stays carved,  while history dissolves around it. In a limited exhibition space, as on the bounded pages of a book, the quantity of information is as critical a design decision as choices regarding the nature and presentation of the content. Squeezing too much in can result in missing a lot out. As Mixing Up the Medicine emerges from the 60s and 70s, many entries list awards and industry honors, as if to reassure the reader of the subject’s ongoing cultural relevance. Maybe the aim here is to ground Dylan in the pop-culture context of the day, but traces of hagiographical deification taint the book’s otherwise focused editorial narrative. This is evidenced, not by the celebratory tone, which is arguably unavoidable, but by the omission of shadow, struggle, and failure.  

 

It’s well acknowledged that one of the artist’s most defining qualities is his creative risk-taking, his willingness to chance falling down and failing, and his ability to pick himself up and forge ahead in new directions, just to risk it all again. Not to mention the creative bravery of changing tack just when success is assured. But we can’t have it both ways. Glossing over career missteps, personal misadventures, and creative miscarriages never works out as intended. Rather than elevate the art, it robs it of substance. Can’t we also accept the failure,  the sexism, the appropriation, the reactionary rants, the lingerie peddling, the dud films, the sub-par songs, and more? “Won’t you descend from the throne, from where you sit?” This is the challenge for the creators of a book like Mixing Up the Medicine, as it is for all custodians of cultural legacy: how to honor an artist without selectively airbrushing their art and life. After  all, “To live outside the law, you must be honest.” 

 

The design, by Nicholas Callaway, Jerry Kelly, and Toshiya Masuda, fares best when playing it straight, especially with the texts of the twenty-nine invited writers who contribute essays responding to material in the archives. These are distributed regularly amongst the editorial sections and visually differentiated with a gray background, alternate typography, and more consistent, full-page column widths. The book’s main body text is set in Century  Schoolbook, a highly legible, transitional serif typeface designed for the American Type  Founders by Morris Fuller Benton in 1924. Here again, the design reaches back to the comfort of the past, with the typeface bathing the book in an aura of authoritative nostalgia. Century  Schoolbook was ubiquitous in the first half of the 20th Century in US American textbooks, and will be subconsciously familiar to many US Americans as the typeface they learned to read with. 

 

If reviews mention the book’s form at all, they invariably praise its design:  “immaculately designed compendium”;[10] “the very design of Mixing Up the Medicine may be  its greatest virtue”;[11] “gorgeous and luxurious.”[12] But for all its considerable merit, the book is not quite any of those things. It looks handsome at first glance, but the book’s sensitive typography and compelling images excuse compositional and rhythmic lapses. For example,  with the Newport Folk Festival spread (pages 158-159), the layout gets cramped and cluttered, with too many images, every one a different size and shape, and text in awkward spaces between.  

 

With a dynamic page composition, not unlike songwriting and performing, the appearance of effortlessness belies considerable ingenuity and dexterity. Making it look easy is never easy.  

 

Perhaps a mix of messy scrapbook and grid-conforming template could have worked,  mirroring Dylan’s own inventiveness on albums like Blood on the Tracks. If it’s good enough for Dylan, it’s good enough for a book about Dylan. Here’s Greil Marcus from the infamous  1970 review of Self Portrait: 

 

What matters most is Bob’s singing. He’s been the most amazing singer of the last ten years, creating his language of stress, fitting five words into a line of ten and ten into a line of five, shoving the words around and opening up spaces for noise and silence that through assault or seduction or the gift of good timing made room for expression and emotion. Every vocal was a surprise. You couldn’t predict what it would sound like.  The song itself, the structure of the song, was barely a clue. The limits were there to be evaded.[13]

 

Raymond Foye describes some of this in more formal terms in his essay “Reflections on  Dirge,” where he considers Dylan’s “unique rhythmic sense,” his use of syncopation, as well  as rubato: “borrowing time from one bar while giving it back to the next, without disrupting  the overall rhythmic flow.” From liberated page to unbound song, Dylan himself has made these kinds of direct visual/musical comparisons. Speaking about “Tangled Up in Blue,” Dylan  said: “I guess I was just trying to make it like a painting where you can see the different parts,  but then you can see the whole of it.”[14]

 

Now I’m fantasizing that if Dylan had discovered pioneering modernist designers like  Kurt Schwitters and Paul Renner, instead of Woody Guthrie and Arthur Rimbaud, he might have made an inspired avant-garde editorial designer… 

 

Mixing Up the Medicine compares with other “inside-out biographies” (as Davidson  and Fishel describe the volume in their introduction), such as Nick Cave’s Stranger Than  Kindness, another ephemera-built biography whose material artifacts Cave introduces as a  “wild-eyed and compulsive superstructure… a support system of manic tangential  information.”[15] Designed by Tom Hingston and Rasmus Koch, the “peripheral stuff” is beautifully photographed and controlled on the page. Or something like A History of the World in 100 Objects, based on the BBC’s radio series, in which a “history of humanity” is told with illustrated and interpreted artifacts from the British Museum.[16] To be fair, these are not exactly the same kind of book as Mixing Up the Medicine, the former having far fewer texts and a much smaller archive to draw from, and the latter’s vast collection winnowed by an arbitrary tally, both allowing for a more disciplined sequencing and layout. They do however demonstrate the potential of ensuring the design is equal to the other creative contributions. 

 

The best of the book’s essays use the Archives’ manuscripts and other records for revelatory excavations of Dylan’s work. This great round-up tempts readers to curate their own wish lists: how about Nick Cave, Salman Rushdie, and Haruki Murakami, or Patti Smith,  Stephen King and Molly Ringwald? The texts, accompanied by images of related artifacts,  support a re-evaluation of previously neglected or denigrated periods. Griffin Ondaatje’s investigation of Dylan’s relationship to Joseph Conrad, and the way Conrad’s novel Victory regularly surfaces in Dylan’s songs, is exciting, convincing detective work. Raymond Foye’s reflection on “Dirge” from 1974’s Planet Waves goes to the manuscripts and uncovers Leonard  Cohen as the initial “animating spirit behind the song,” even though the final lyric erases the explicit namecheck. For Foye, the Archive manuscripts also reveal a “long-standing  interpretation of any given album to be diametrically opposed by the drafts in the notebooks.”  With Planet Waves, what he had assumed were songs informed by fond childhood memories  of Dylan’s Minnesota youth were manifestly forged as a “dark lament for a country where  things have gone seriously wrong.” Larry Sloman’s more instinctive, personal take on “Handy  Dandy” from 1990’s Under the Red Sky charts the evolution of the song’s lyrics on pages of painstakingly reworked drafts. Entries such as these are an overdue expansion of Dylan’s popular anthology, illuminating dark corners of his oeuvre. However, many of their accompanying images deserve to be treated with greater respect and sensitivity. For example,  some of the smaller images just don’t work at their reduced scale, and an artificial, overbearing drop shadow has been grafted onto many of the images, clumsily signifying three-dimensionality. This lack of finesse doesn’t do the material justice.  

 

For many readers, the publication’s encyclopaedic, chronological structure will be an invitation to leaf straight to a personal watershed album or period. For this reader, that album was Oh Mercy. Coming out of an eclectic diet of late punk, early hip hop, and top forty radio,  I fell into Dylan’s ocean in the late 80’s when I was 16 or 17 years old. And it was a deep and mysterious abyss to get lost in. But with his last three records being Down in the Groove, Dylan  and the Dead, and Knocked out Loaded, it was also an unflattering period in which he’d been widely written off (“dismissed, derided and misunderstood” as Amanda Petrusich writes in her essay about Tarantula) – when his previous eminence was diminished, and future multi-generational canonization was implausible. Nevertheless, for a hungry teenager in working-class suburbia there were still a couple of decades of potent music to explore, and just a short train ride away, the local library had most of it on cassette. Then one day, while skipping Uni to browse for records, popular music’s past warped into my personal present when I came across a newly released album of Dylan originals at my local record store. Oh Mercy was a revelation and felt like a vindication. The songs were at once sublime and uneasy. Amid late  80s Australian radio dross, I was getting my head around “Most of the time / I can’t even be  sure / If she was ever with me / Or if I was ever with her,” and “There are no mistakes in life  some people say / And it’s true sometimes you can see it that way.” That extraordinary voice  didn’t sound like a cornered “legend,” it sounded like a seething spirit: “Whatever you wanted  / What could it be / Did somebody tell you / That you could get it from me?” 

 

That sustained rejection of conditional acceptance, that endless creative struggle, is part of Dylan’s story, perhaps even the heart of it. Any narrative twisting of Dylan’s art towards infallibility betrays legitimate artistic triumph. There is so much that is remarkable about  Mixing Up the Medicine, yet as a designed object, it could have gone further in mirroring its subject’s creative ambition and inventiveness. The two paradoxical sides to Dylan’s creative process, so powerfully evidenced by the Archive’s manuscripts and recordings, are persistent iteration and inexplicable inspiration – a good method for making books as writing songs.

 

[1] https://thedylanreview.org/2024/02/21/review-of-bob-dylan-mixing-up-the-medicine/

[2] https://wordsrated.com/online-book-sales-statistics

[3] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-11-17-ca-7231-story.html

[4] Marshall McLuhan interview by British literary critic Frank Kermode, on BBC, Monitor, 1965, published as a transcript in Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews. Editors Stephanie McLuhan, David Staines. (McClelland & Stewart, 2003), 59

[5] Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, (HarperCollins, 1990), 319

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcPoZZVm3Dk&t=152s

[7] https://www.uv.es/uvweb/scientific-culture-innovation-unit-chair-scientific-dissemination/en/recent-news/playful-reading-paper-helps-understanding-more-than-if-it-is-done-digital-media-1285899375231/Novetat.htm

[8] https://www.reddit.com/r/bobdylan/comments/17v5dyg/we_are_mark_davidson

[9] https://www.callaway.com/sistinechapel

[10] https://www.bookpage.com/reviews/bob-dylan-mixing-up-the-medicine-book-review

[11] https://www.allaboutjazz.com/bob-dylan-mixing-up-the-medicine

[12] https://thefm.substack.com/p/mixing-up-the-medicine-book-review

[13] Greil Marcus, “Self Portrait No.25” review in Rolling Stone Magazine (#63, July 23, 1970), 14

[14] Bob Dylan, Biograph liner notes. (CBS, 1985), loose leaf

[15] Nick Cave, Stranger Than Kindness. (Canongate Books, 2020), 3

[16] Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects. (Penguin Press, 2010)

/by
,

Bob Dylan and Our Plague Years

Go Back

Other Issues

Bob Dylan and Our Plague Years 

BY Roberta Rakove 

 

On March 19, 2020, California became the first state to issue a stay-at-home order due  to the Covid-19 pandemic. One week later, Bob Dylan sent a midnight message on his website  and social media:  

 

Greetings to my fans and followers with gratitude for all your support and loyalty across  the years. This is an unreleased song we recorded a while back that you might find  interesting. Stay safe, stay observant, and may God be with you. 

 

With that message, Dylan released “Murder Most Foul,” one of the most remarkable songs in  his catalog. None of us, including Dylan, knew that we were entering a period of twenty months  when a pandemic would dramatically constrain our lives. But over that time, he gave us  extraordinary work that included “Murder Most Foul,” a major new album, and a unique  concert stream. Through the surprise of the releases and the startling imagination of its content  and creative use of technology, his art offered a respite from both our fear and our pandemic imposed limitations. During a time of traumatic isolation, Dylan used music to create a sense  of community among millions around the world. 

 

Art and pandemics are not strangers. Dylan is part of a long tradition of using art as a  response to plagues. As Frank Snowden points out in writing about the bubonic plague in  Epidemics and Society, From the Black Death to the Present: 

 

An entire genre of plague literature arose including works by Giovanni Boccaccio,  Daniel Defoe, Alessandro Manzoni, and Albert Camus. It also transformed the  iconography of European painting and sculpture, and it deeply affected architecture  with the construction of major cathedrals and churches dedicated to the redeemer, the  Virgin Mary, and the plague saints Sebastian and Roch… As late as the 20th century the  disease inspired Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film The Seventh Seal. (31-32)

 

Later contagious outbreaks continued to generate art from the cholera outbreak that inspired  Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Masque of the Red Death” to the visual art of the HIV  pandemic that was closely linked to political activism. 

 

While pandemics gave rise to many kinds of art, the role of music is different in its  impact. Music has been credited with unique therapeutic roles in helping individuals and  communities cope with epidemics, but as Remi Chiu notes in Plague and Music in the  Renaissance, “while much research has been conducted on the political, economic, medical,  and even literary and artistic consequences of plague, the connections between pestilence and  music have been comparatively understudied” (5). Chiu’s work catalogs how music was  recorded in plague tracts by Renaissance physicians as a part of a therapeutic regimen “to  counteract the effects of fear with joy… and to distract the mind from vile imaginings” (16).  The phenomenon of plague processions created a communal experience and an appearance of  social order at a time of isolation. Music, including anti-pestilential musical prayers written to  the plague saint Sebastian and others, was central to these processions (118-120). 

 

Dylan was not alone in finding innovative ways to combine music and technology to  ease the isolation and fear of the Covid-19 pandemic. Frontiers in Psychology compiled a list  of over forty articles under the research topic “Social Convergence in Times of Spatial  Distancing: The Role of Music During the Covid-19 Pandemic.” The impact of music during  Covid-19 on both emotions and isolation was similar to its use in plague outbreaks in the  Renaissance. In a December 2020 article in Frontiers of Psychology, Remi Chiu compares the  uses of music in the outbreak of plague in Milan in 1576 and the Covid-19 pandemic noting,  “It is perhaps not surprising that the mood maintenance and social cohesion functions of music  emerge so clearly during epidemics past and present, given the sustained emotional turmoil  and social isolation that result from widespread outbreaks of contagious disease” (“Functions  of Music-Making Under Lockdown”). Examples during Covid-19 included the balcony flash  mobs in Italy singing their national anthem, the citizens of Montreal singing the songs of  Leonard Cohen from their windows, the streaming concerts by musicians from their homes,  Yo-Yo Ma’s songs of comfort on YouTube, the use of Zoom to create choral and instrumental  experiences, and the sharing of curated playlists on Spotify.  

 

But Dylan, as always, was different.  

 

Let’s start with that midnight announcement of “Murder Most Foul.” Dylan’s virtual  audience may not be the size of Taylor Swift’s, but it is significant. His official X/Twitter  account has over 400,000 followers. His YouTube channel following is three times that size, at 1.3 million subscribers. “Murder Most Foul” on YouTube has amassed 5.3 million views.  Dylan’s announcement reached a large community. 

 

At the time of the release of “Murder Most Foul,” the United States had been in  lockdown for just a week. Just a few days before sending out “Murder Most Foul” Dylan had  announced a cancellation of fifteen April concerts in Japan due to the Covid-19 outbreak.  While it is possible that the song’s release was already scheduled, Dylan accompanying it with  a personal message was highly unusual. As anyone who attends his live shows knows, he  famously does not chat to the audience. When he says “thank you,” his audience goes berserk.  If he tells a dad joke during the band introduction, Dylan social media lights up.[1] The fact of  communication is powerful by virtue of its rarity. He is talking to us! In the first sentence,  “Greetings to fans and followers with gratitude for all your support and loyalty across the  years,” he acknowledged his community and reinforced our communal identity. In the second  sentence, “This is an unreleased song we recorded a while back that you might find  interesting,” he shocked us to attention. We might find it interesting? He must know that his  community finds the smallest details about him interesting. An unreleased song, his first new  song since 2012, isn’t interesting. It’s a 7.4 earthquake. In his last sentence, “Stay safe, stay  observant, and may God be with you,” he sent a message of concern. One week into our  isolation, we didn’t know what our lives would be, when we would be able to see our family  and friends, and how we could avoid a frightening new illness. Bob reached out.  

 

The gift he gave us was more than a song. It was a cultural and historical opus, not  meant to soothe but to challenge. As the Renaissance physicians prescribed, the power of the  song gave us something to think about other than our fear. Ian Grant, co-host of the Jokermen and Never Ending Stories podcasts, describes what that moment meant to him. In conversation  with his podcast co-host Evan Laffer, he says: 

 

I still remember where I was the first time I was hearing this song. I was in my kitchen  in my little shoebox fucking apartment on Franklin in Bed Stuy and I was texting you  about it and it was like seven in the morning, and it was several months before the show  ever even started. It was just like I woke up and it was like “Bob Dylan 16 minute song,  listen to this” and we were also like seven days into the shit that’s been going on for the last two and a half years at this point and it just really felt like a flash bulb moment for  me and it just kept going and going and going and I remember the fucking moment it  got to “rub a dub dub” and I just cracked a grin like I was in, I was in… (and in texting  Evan in California) “hey wake up, there’s a 17 minute song from Bob Dylan about the  JFK assassination!” (Jokermen, 11/20/2022) 

 

Grant’s description of the power of “Murder Most Foul” to distract is even more powerful  because at that moment in time, the city he was living in was in crisis as an early global  epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic.  

 

Of all the songs recorded for Rough and Rowdy Ways, the complexity of “Murder Most  Foul” allowed it to transport us out of obsessing about the virus and into a shared experience.  Simon Vozick-Levinson was right when he wrote in Rolling Stone on March 27, 2020, “Murder  Most Foul Is The Bob Dylan Song We Need Right Now,” but not for the reason he states:  “Murder Most Foul is really about the ways that music can comfort us in our national trauma.”  There is a lot going on in the song, but comfort is not at the top of the list. The song’s power  came from the fact that you couldn’t stop listening to it, couldn’t stop thinking about it, and  couldn’t stop analyzing it. As Anne Margaret Daniel notes reviewing the song in the summer  2020 issue of the Dylan Review, “From that first seventeen minutes to subsequent quarter-hours  plus, one does not so much listen to ‘Murder Most Foul’ as be washed over by it… ‘Tempest’  may be his song about the Titanic but ‘Murder Most Foul’ is titanic.” Immediately, reviews,  news reports, and podcasts appeared. NPR had a curated setlist of all the songs mentioned in  “Murder Most Foul” up within hours of the release. Parodies were posted and arguments broke  out. It became the first of Dylan’s songs to reach number one on the Billboard chart. On the 60th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination in 2023, fans continued to share the song on social  media. It is unimaginable that any other songwriter could create a work that would produce  this reaction.  

 

“Murder Most Foul” was the musical remedy prescribed by the Renaissance physicians  during their plague. We stopped thinking about washing our groceries and sanitizing our hands.  Instead, we thought about Wolfman Jack and the history of American music, the triple  underpass, and the last thoughts of a martyred president. We shared our thoughts through  technology within our community, restoring some social cohesion. 

 

“Murder Most Foul” was quickly followed by the releases of “I Contain Multitudes”  on April 17 and “False Prophet” on May 7. It became apparent that something was indeed happening here, creating a sense of anticipation that led up to the release of Rough and Rowdy Ways on June 19. 

 

At the time Rough and Rowdy Ways was released, the United States was in the middle  of another shockwave. On May 25, a white police officer murdered George Floyd, a Black man  living in Minneapolis, while three other officers looked on. A shocking video of the murder  went public. Large protests broke out in Minneapolis and spread to hundreds of cities and towns  across the United States with estimates of between 15 and 26 million people taking to the streets  (Buchanan, Bui, Patel New York Times July 3, 2020). There was widespread speculation and  hope that perhaps this largest and most diverse demonstration in the history of the country  would lead to historic change. 

 

Bob Dylan was aware of these events. In a June 12, 2020, interview with Dylan in the  New York Times the historian Douglas Brinkley wrote:

 

I had a brief follow up with Dylan, 79, one day after Floyd was killed in Minneapolis.  Clearly shaken by the horror that had occurred in his home state, he sounded depressed.  “It sickened me no end to see George tortured to death like that,” he said. “It was beyond  ugly. Let’s hope that justice comes swift for the Floyd family and for the nation.” 

 

But Dylan did not comment musically at the time nor since. That lack of comment was certainly  not due to a failure of commitment or insight from someone who has written and performed a  long list of songs related to racial injustice for decades, many of which already addressed the  issues raised by the George Floyd murder.  

 

Added to the social upheaval of the reaction to George Floyd’s murder was the ongoing  impact of a pandemic that had grown in geography, numbers, and mortality. The U.S. Centers  for Disease Control (CDC) created a timeline of the pandemic, noting of May, 2020: “The  unemployment rate in the U.S. is 14.7% – the highest since the Great Depression with 20.5  million people out of work” (https://www.cdc.gov/museum/timeline/covid19.html). By the end  of the month, the recorded death toll from Covid-19 in the U.S. surpassed 100,000. By early  June, the number of confirmed cases in the country exceeded 2 million. Vaccines were being  developed but not yet in sight. The President was at war with the public health establishment.  We were exhausted and uncertain. 

 

Fortuitously, Rough and Rowdy Ways had been recorded just weeks before all activity  shut down in March of 2020. Its arrival in June was definitely welcomed. In his June 15, 2020 Rolling Stone review Rob Sheffield captured the intersection of Dylan’s music and the moment  in time in which it was released: 

 

Another apocalypse; another side of Bob Dylan. The man really knows how to pick his  moments. Dylan has brilliantly timed his new masterwork for a summer when the hard  rain is falling all over the nation: a plague, a quarantine, revolutionary action in the  streets, cities on fire, phones out of order. Rough and Rowdy Ways is his first batch of  new songs in 8 years, and it’s an absolute classic – it has the bleak majesty of latter-day  Dylan albums like Modern Times and Tempest, yet it goes beyond them, tapping even  deeper into cosmic American mysteries.  

 

In other words, a masterwork that was just what the Renaissance doctors ordered, distracting  us in perilous times with compelling music. But in July of 2021, Dylan had another surprise up  his sleeve, this one created specifically for a pandemic release and reflecting our response to it  in its staging: the unexpected streaming concert film, Shadow Kingdom. Like the passion plays  written and performed in Oberammergau and the anti-pestilential musical prayers used in  religious processions during bubonic plague outbreaks, our 21st century pandemic was a central  part of the production of Shadow Kingdom. The creation of the songs from Dylan’s “early”  period obviously preceded the pandemic by decades, but the film’s art direction and  distribution were dictated by and reflected precautions and restrictions imposed by Covid-19.  Rather than being constrained by these limitations, Dylan and his director, Israeli-American  filmmaker Alma Har’el, used them to liberate the viewers from their isolation.  

 

The announcement of the streaming event was a surprise. What it would actually be  was unknown to everyone, including the owners of the livestreaming platform Veeps that  would broadcast Shadow Kingdom. The media and the Dylan fans around the world bought  tickets for what they were told would be 48 hours of access to …something. Viewers got their  money’s worth both in the music and the production. In his review of the album release of the Shadow Kingdom music, Michaelangelo Matos writing in Rolling Stone on June 1, 2023 called  Dylan’s reinterpretation of his earlier songs on the Shadow Kingdom album a triumph. But  beyond the music, Shadow Kingdom offered an experience that challenged the pandemic limitations we had experienced for sixteen months.

 

In certain ways, the stream of Shadow Kingdom provided many of the features of  attending a live concert. Viewers would have a limited number of hours to view it, although  that time was extended. Just like a live Dylan concert, the bootleggers were ready to capture it and play a cat and mouse game with Dylan Inc., keeping videos up on YouTube. Importantly,  the stream also allowed a form of audience engagement that moved the viewing of Shadow Kingdom from an individual experience to a communal one. Opening the concert site early  with a worldwide chat room allowed viewers to not only gather in a virtual venue but to speak  to each other, identifying their locations and sharing their excitement and hopes for what they were about to see. This type of virtual communication in a period of isolation is no small thing.  In a study from Frontiers of Psychology on successful audience engagement with Covid-19- era YouTube music broadcasts, the authors identify five themes: interaction, unity, resilience,  identity, and emotion (Fraser, Crooke, Davidson). The online messaging that preceded the start  of Shadow Kingdom certainly allowed for most if not all of these.

 

Streaming concerts were commonplace during the pandemic. These were usually cozy  events from an artist’s living room or an empty performance space. Of course they were  enjoyable, but at the same time their settings were visual reminders of our inability to have a communal live concert experience. In Shadow Kingdom, Dylan and Har’el effectively removed  the conventions of time and space to distance the viewers from pandemic physical restrictions.  The Shadow Kingdom audiences in the different locations in the film seem to be from multiple  eras and places. Are we in the Bon Bon Club in Marseille that is thanked in the final credits?  Are some of the performances happening in an indeterminate year before smoking was banned? Are we in a Western saloon? Is this taking place before color film existed? Have we landed in  the barroom with the jukebox on the cover of Rough and Rowdy Ways? As Kitty Empire noted in her five-star review of the Shadow Kingdom stream in The Guardian on July 24, “there is  no drummer to keep time because that would be too definite, and we are in a realm where it  could be the 20s or the 40s, night or day.” Through the visual clues in the different venues in  which Dylan was performing, the film took us traveling across countries and decades. 

 

This does not mean that Shadow Kingdom ignores the disorientation caused by the  Covid-19 pandemic. As Nathan Schmidt notes in his review of Shadow Kingdom in Dylan Review 3.2, the juxtaposition of “masked band and unmasked audience members signify the  duality of the way things are and the way they used to be.” By presenting both, Dylan and  Har’el acknowledge the present but do not restrict the viewers to it. The film does not offer a  vision of a post Covid-19 future, but it effectively recalls a past of live performances that may yet come again. 

 

Other forms of shared communication among Dylan fans, beyond those related directly  to Dylan’s musical output, grew virtually during Covid-19. The growth of podcast listeners  during Covid-19 has been well documented and Dylan devotees have certainly had a wide choice. Craig Danuloff, the founder of the FM Podcast Network, identified fourteen Dylan  podcasts in his panel on Dylan podcasting at World of Bob Dylan 2023 in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  Of these, three were launched during Covid-19, including The Bobcats, Jokermen, and The Dylantantes. London-based podcast host Laura Tenschert utilized her influential Definitely Dylan program to create a virtual international group of subscribers who continue to meet  monthly over Zoom. As a proxy indicator for the popularity of these podcasts, Definitely Dylan has almost 9,000 followers on X/Twitter and close to 20,000 on Instagram. Jokermen has close  to 12,000 followers on X/Twitter and 8,000 on Instagram. Music writer Ray Padgett’s Dylan Substack e-newsletter, Flagging Down the Double E’s, launched two months before the March  2020 shutdown, has over 12,000 subscribers. When the University of Tulsa Institute of Bob Dylan Studies was forced to move its second symposium, Dylan at 80, online in 2021, the sold out attendance was almost double that of its initial and highly successful first in-person World of Bob Dylan in 2019. Dylan at 80 drew an international sold-out enrollment of close to 1,000, and presentations from Italy and Denmark.  

 

By the fall of 2021, a combination of effective vaccines, physical and electronic evidence of vaccination, and ready supplies of high-quality masks made the possibility of live  indoor performances of music once again available. Dylan was among the first performers to  respond to this opportunity. On September 26, 2021, his website and Twitter account published  the message: “Bob Dylan’s Fall U.S. tour dates have been announced. The first dates go on  sale starting Friday, October 1.” Perhaps even more optimistic was the attachment of the poster  for the tour with the message “Bob Dylan Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour 2021- 2024.” When an 80-year-old man announces a three-year worldwide tour and invites us to join  him, who are we to think we don’t have a future? Concerts commenced in November, 2021,  many including meetups of followers who had first engaged online during the pandemic. When  he completed the last concert of his triumphant 2024 American spring tour in Austin on April 6, 2024 he had performed 202 concerts in North America, Asia, and Europe over a period of  thirty months, something that seemed unthinkable when society shut down in March of 2020.  

 

It is not always clear when pandemics end. Though the World Health Organization  called an end to Covid-19 as a public health emergency in May, 2023, 10,000 people died of  the virus that December. It is even more difficult to understand the effect of pandemics on  society until we have the perspective of distance. But unquestionably, Covid-19 has been a  traumatic event. Music was not a cure for that trauma, but there is evidence that it helped relieve  stress and isolation. The music that Dylan provided and his use of technology to make it  available achieved both of these outcomes. As Dylan noted in his interview with Jeff Slate in December 2022, “Technology can nurture us, or it can shut us out.” At the height of our  isolation, he merged his art and technology to nurture us. In the same interview, Slate asked  Dylan why, in The Philosophy of Modern Song, does he thank the crew from Dunkin’ Donuts. Dylan responded, “Because they were compassionate, supportive and they went the extra mile.” During our plague years, so did he. 

 

 

[1] The Dylan site Expecting Rain has an ongoing list of Dylan’s dad jokes which generally appear  during band introductions such as this painful one about drummer David Kemper: “He once  swallowed a roll of film, we’ll see what develops.” (www.expectingrain.com/jokes.html)

 

Works Cited 

Brinkley, Douglas. “Bob Dylan Has a Lot on His Mind,” New York Times, June 12, 2020. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/arts/music/bob-dylan-rough-and-rowdy ways.html 

Buchanan, Larry; Bui, Quoctrung; Patel, Jugal K. “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest 

Movement in U.S, History.” New York Times, July 3, 2020.  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd size.html 

Centers for Disease Prevention Museum. “CDC Covid-19 Timeline.”  

https://www.cdc.gov/museum/timeline/covid19.html

Chiu, Remi “Functions of Music Making Under Lockdown: A Trans-Historical Perspective 

Across Two Pandemics,” Frontiers in Psychology, December 16, 2020, Sec. Cultural  Psychology, Volume 11-2020.  

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.616499/ full 

Chiu, Remi. Plague and Music in the Renaissance. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press,  2017. 

Daniel, Anne Margaret. “Murder Most Foul.” Dylan Review, Vol. 2.1. Summer 2020.

— “Functions of Music Making Under Lockdown: A Trans-Historical Perspective Across  Two Pandemics. Frontiers in Psychology, December 17, 2020, Sec. Cultural  Psychology. Volume 11 – 2020 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.616499 

Empire, Kitty. “Bob Dylan Shadow Kingdom Live Stream Review: Dylan’s Juke Joint of 

Dreams.” The Guardian, July 24, 2021.  

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/jul/24/bob-dylan-shadow-kingdom-live stream-review 

—. “Bob Dylan the Jokerman.” Expecting Rain. https://www.expectingrain.com/jokes.html

Fraser, Trisnasari; Crooke, Alexander Hew Dale; Davidson, Jane W. “Music Has No  Borders:

An Exploratory Study of Audience Engagement With YouTube Music  Broadcasts During Covid-19 Lockdown, 2020,” Frontiers in Psychology, July 8,  2021, Sec. Cultural Psychology, Volume 12 – 2021.  https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.643893 

Gensler, Andy. “Veeps’ Joel Madden On Bob Dylan’s Shadow Kingdom Livestream: “We’re  on

the Edge of Our Seats Like Everyone Else.”  

https://news.pollstar.com/2021/07/07/veeps-joel-madden-on-bob-dylans-shadow kingdom-livestream-were-on-the-edge-of-our-seats-like-everyone-else/

Grant, Ian and Laffer, Evan. “Bob Dylan: Murder Most Foul,” Jokermen, November 22,  2023. 

Matos, Michaelangelo. “Bob Dylan Makes His Classic Songs Seem Stunningly Brand-New on

Shadow Kingdom,” Rolling Stone, June 1, 2023. 

Schmidt, Nathan. “Shadow Kingdom: The Early Songs of Bob Dylan.” 

Sheffield, Rob. “Bob Dylan has Given Us One of His Most Timely Albums Ever

With Rough  and Rowdy Ways.” Rolling Stone, June 15, 2020.  

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/bob-dylan-rough-rowdy ways-1015086/ 

Slate, Jeff. “Bob Dylan Q&A About The Philosophy of Modern Song.” December 20, 2022. 

https://www.bobdylan.com/news/bob-dylan-interviewed-by-wall-street-journals-jeff slate/ 

Snowden, Frank M. Epidemics and Society From the Black Death to the Present. New Haven and

London: Yale University Press, 2020. 

Vozick-Levinson, Simon. “ ‘Murder Most Foul’ Is The Bob Dylan Song We Need Right  Now,’ ”

Rolling Stone, March 27, 2020.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music features/bob-dylan-murder-most-foul-974108/ 

/by
,

The Loveliest and the Best: The Tapestry of Influence of Omar Khayyám’s Rubáiyat on the Works of Bob Dylan

Go Back

Other Issues

The Loveliest and the Best: The Tapestry of Influence of Omar Khayyám’s Rubáiyat on the Works of Bob Dylan

By John M. Radosta

 

When Omar Khayyám began writing quatrains, called rubáiyát in his native Persian, it was perhaps to escape from his extensive work on algebra and astronomy.[1] He could not have had any idea that his poetry would become the first link in a chain of collaboration that stretched ten centuries or more into the future. Among the most prominent luminaries who have come under Khayyám’s spell are T.S. Eliot and Woody Guthrie. But one of the most important links, one that encompasses both Eliot and Guthrie, is Bob Dylan. From the “Persian drunkard” in “Absolutely Sweet Marie” to the many direct allusions on the 2012 album Tempest, and culminating on 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan has filled his cup with Omar’s views and fermented them into his own poetic transformations. Both of these artists have fomented change through long term impacts on society, and in conversation across millennia they continue to decant their ideas in ever-fresh vintages.

 

On first listen “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” from the 1966 double album Blonde on Blonde, is a fun crash of non sequiturs, set to a rollicking tune. Here and there, odd turns of phrase reveal themselves to be, as often happens in a Dylan song, allusions to many other poetic performances. For example, the line “when I was half sick,” which comes from Part II of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shallot.” These allusions add to the fun of the song, but it’s the “Persian drunkard” that follows the singer who garners the most interest here. The drunkard has long been recognized as Omar Khayyám, the tenth-century Persian author of a collection of quatrains known in their English translation as The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám by Edward FitzGerald. The cameo appearance in “Absolutely Sweet Marie” may have simply been part of a package of combined lines he’d picked up in a collection of English poetry, and Dylan probably didn’t know that Tennyson and Khayyám’s translator Edward FitzGerald had been close friends. It’s also likely that he didn’t know much about FitzGerald’s own brand of recasting other writers’ work for his own purposes, but that streak of recombining has been an important part of Dylan’s writing throughout his career. In this essay, I will unravel that thread, exploring Dylan’s use of Omar Khayyám’s poetry both at the start and in the most recent releases of his career.

 

FitzGerald’s Translation Takes the English-Speaking World by Storm

Omar Khayyám was born in Persia, now Iran, in 1048 CE. His last name suggests that he or an ancestor had been a tentmaker.[2] He wrote on a broad range of topics, mainly algebra and astronomy, two disciplines whose roots reach deep in Persia. His chosen poetic form was the four-line rubai‘i (plural rubáiyát). Similar in its mediative tone to the Japanese haiku, Omar Khayyám’s rubáiyát exude an attitude of free thinking and a suspicion of authority, not to mention a deep enjoyment of wine. Because of the hedonism and religious heterodoxy they evince, Khayyám’s poems circulated only among friends, and many other poets copied the style and used his name as a pseudonym in order to share their own nonconformist, and possibly heretical, views.[3] For that reason, it is uncertain which of the many quatrains that exist from this time are actually his. Anyone can be just like him, obviously.

 

The first edition of Edward FitzGerald’s translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, published in 1859, sold poorly. But once it was discovered by the pre-rafaelites, [4] it became a hugely popular poem, published in four ever-growing editions. For this discussion I will refer to the fourth, which appeared in 1879 and contains 101 quatrains. FitzGerald’s knowledge of Persian was recent so, at best, merely adequate to the task.[5] However, the published result is greater than the sum of its parts: his Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is every bit his own vision, an idiosyncratic rendering of Omar Khayyám’ original that reflects FitzGerald’s views as influenced by and contrary to Victorian mores. In this way, FitzGerald’s introduction to the Persian quatrains was as impactful on English poetry as the discovery of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music was on Dylan’s musical career and the culture as a whole. While each original text or collection – Omar’s and Smith’s carried its own artistic merit, the subsequent translations far exceeded the originals’ ability to reach and speak to new audiences.

 

Perhaps the best known of the rubáiyát is XII, in which the poet espouses the joys of simple, earthly pleasures:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness—

Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow![6]

Here Khayyám, as he does elsewhere, rejects religious rewards as symbolized in “Paradise” for the more immediate rewards of poetry and his beloved’s singing. The “Wilderness” is not the desolate space of scripture, but the uncultivated land beyond the settled habitations.[7] Its collection of images – a book of poetry; simple, symbolic sustenance; a song let loose on the landscape – provide details for a number of Dylan’s songs.

 

Almost as well-known, and more representative of Khayyám’s philosophy, is rubai‘i LXXI. It highlights the carpe diem ideology that suffuses the collection, a reminder that that Bird flies in only one direction:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.[8]

The written word – or the recorded song – is more lasting than an individual’s life, and the only permanence we can achieve.

 

By the middle of the twentieth century, though, the popularity of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám was on the wane. It still retained enough recognition that allusions were common, and the rhyming four-line pattern made it attractive for ballad singers. Woody Guthrie first read the Rubáiyát in the 1930s,[9] and wrote in one of his songbooks: “Omar Khayyám seems to have been sorta of a hillbilly hisself, because he took the words right out of my mouth. And he knew how to put down in a very few words just what it takes for a day’s run.”[10] Allusions to FitzGerald can be found in several of Woody’s songs. For example, “Pastures of Plenty,” in keeping with Woody’s idea that Omar Khayyám was a hillbilly like many migrants, features the line “We come with the dust and we go with the wind,”[11] which is an echo of FitzGerald’s line from XXVIII, “I came like water and like wind I go.”[12] In one notebook held in the Woody Guthrie Archives, entitled “Rubyatts” and dated “6-10-43,” he wrote, in precise cursive, sixteen original rubáiyát about labor unions. The poem clearly had a firm hold on him, as he later went on to rewrite more than sixty of FitzGerald’s quatrains in his own Okie voice, recording them with Cisco Houston in about 1947.[13] Except for a short fragment in 1998, these recordings have not been released. 

 

Young Bob Dylan never heard Woody’s Rubáiyát, but there was no avoiding “Pastures of Plenty.” By coincidence, then, the line “I came like water and like wind I go” also echoes in Dylan’s “Song to Woody”:

Here’s to Cisco an’ Sonny an’ Leadbelly too

An’ to all the good people that traveled with you

Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men

That come with the dust and are gone with the wind.[14]

In this stanza, the connection between FitzGerald and Khayyám extends through Woody and on to Dylan, who reshapes the line to encompass not only Woody’s musical collaborators, but all of the poets and workers in this chain. He couldn’t have known about the Rubáiyát tapes at the time, so his inclusion of Cisco here is serendipitous. It is the clue, the first end of a thread that ties, much like a tentmaker’s material, the earliest elements of his body of work to those of the present day.

 

Dylan picked up the other end of that thread in 2012 when he released Tempest. Much was made of the similarity of Dylan’s title to Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage, The Tempest. Dylan downplayed that association, pedantically asserting, “Shakespeare’s last play was called The Tempest. It wasn’t called just plain Tempest. The name of my record is just plain Tempest. It’s two different titles.”[15] Indeed, the album, as did “Absolutely Sweet Marie” on a smaller scale, alludes to far more than Shakespeare, making liberal use of classical, biblical, and cinematic references, most notably in the epic song “Tempest,” which uses the film Titanic as much as it does the legend and lore of the great ship itself.

 

But Omar Khayyám makes a brief appearance in that song too. In the forty-second stanza of the titanic ballad, the phrase “the loveliest and the best,”[16] used to describe the extraordinary number of victims who went down with the ship, is an allusion to ruba‘i XXII:

For some we loved, the loveliest and the best

That from his Vintage rolling Time hath prest,

Have drunk their Cup a round or two before,

And one by one crept silently to rest.[17]

Dylan makes the same “best/rest” rhyme, condensing Khayyám’s quatrain into its most salient image, while retaining the meditation on death. The previous stanza incorporates the “cup” image as well, filling the captain’s with tears. It’s likely that Dylan would have consulted Lord’s classic description of the sinking of the maritime disaster, A Night to Remember, and so would have known that the great ship went down carrying a hand made, jewel-encrusted copy of the Rubáiyát that was auctioned in 1912 for £405, or, in today’s dollars, about $58,000.[18]

 

In “Narrow Way,” though, Dylan makes the most use of the Rubáiyát. But instead of harping on the carpe diem aspects of FitzGerald’s collection, he instead follows the mordant truths of humanity’s descent into death. The pastoral joys of ruba‘i XII are cruelly cast aside:

You went and lost your lovely head

For a drink of wine and a crust of bread[19]

Instead, he reminds us of the futility of enjoying oneself by quoting ruba‘i LXXI:

Been dark all night, but now it’s dawn

The moving finger is moving on.[20]

All around him, the imagery of enemies and emptiness, not Omar’s convivial wine and gardens, are in control.

 

In FitzGerald’s ordering of the stanzas, there is a run of quatrains from XXV to XL in which the speaker makes an arcane metaphor that describes the cycle of the body’s corruption back into clay, which is then used by a potter to make cups that miraculously retain a person’s consciousness. In XXXV, the reincarnated cup tells the narrator to “Drink—for once dead, you never shall return.”[21] In XXXVII, he hears another cup in the process of being made ask the potter to work “Gently, Brother, gently, pray!”[22] And in XL, the narrator warns us all to live devoutly, until “Heaven / to Earth invert you—Like an empty Cup.”[23] Each of these show up in “Narrow Way,” though transformed for his own use, much as FitzGerald did with Khayyám’s original. For example, the entirety of the cycle appears in the second stanza, starting with a phrase from ruba‘i XL:

I saw you drinking from an empty cup

I saw you buried and I saw you dug up.[24]

Omar’s exhortation to drink because we cannot return as ourselves from death is changed to “We’ve been to the West and we going back again,”[25] where “West” is in fact the land of the dead, a land from whence the narrator has somehow escaped, but to which he – and we – shall return. To reinforce the idea, in the same stanza, Dylan uses the voice of the incipient cup: “Be gentle brother, be gentle and pray,” but instead of using “pray” in FitzGerald’s sense, as a synonym for “please,” Dylan turns it into a verb, an act of the desperation that inhabits the song like a ghost.

 

Of course, Tempest wasn’t Dylan’s farewell to his craft. After eight years and three cover albums, 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways appeared. As with many other Dylan albums, Rough and Rowdy Ways encompasses a number of influences, all woven together into a unified whole. The last song, “Murder Most Foul,” undeniably named for a Shakespearean line, ostensibly retells the story of the Kennedy assassination, but is also a catalog of songs, many of which appear again in Dylan’s recent book, The Philosophy of Modern Song. The similarity in references suggests that in the intervening time from Tempest, Dylan’s interests have drifted away from films, biblical allusions, and classical poetry. In fact, in The Philosophy of Modern Song, he even seems to reject Khayyám, writing, “While Ivy League graduates talk about love in a rush of quatrains detailing abstract qualities and gossamer attributes, folks from Trinidad to Atlanta, Georgia, sing of the benefits of making an ugly woman your wife and the cold hard facts of life.”[26] Despite the protestations, though, the fact that he even mentions the quatrains shows that they are still not very far from his thoughts. 

 

“Crossing the Rubicon” is a song steeped in ancient images, much as the Rubicon itself is steeped in iron deposits that provide its reddish hue and name. Throughout the song, Dylan scatters a number of images, such as cups and a concern with time and fate, that might be common with Khayyám, or simply common. But the start of the second of the four line stanzas entwines with The Rubáiyát:

The Rubicon is the Red River, going gently as she flows

Redder than your ruby lips and the blood that flows from the rose.[27]

The meditation on the color red, the literal name of the river, continues through the use of “ruby” and “blood” and “rose.” Similarly, ruba’i XIX is also a discourse on rubicundity, with all of the same images:

I sometimes think that never blows so red

The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled.[28]

FitzGerald’s tying together of “Rose,” and “Caesar bled” is pulled taut by Dylan’s single “Rubicon,” which contains within it Caesar’s resolve and bloody death.

 

“Goodbye Jimmy Reed,” is, like “Song to Woody,” an homage to a musical hero, but it also depicts Dylan’s true religion to be music itself. Indeed, the blues singer addressed throughout seems to be more of a stand-in for music in general, just as “Murder Most Foul” braids history and music. The first stanza announces through many images, including a single line that brings all three Mosaic religions together as one. The confluence of music and religion, an age-old pair, courses through the rest of the song. When Dylan sings, “Give me that old time religion, it’s just what I need,” he doesn’t mean scripture, he means song. That’s why, among the great religions he names, he also allows in the voice of the agnostic tentmaker. 

 

Works Cited

Aleahmad, Mana. “The Effect of Ideology on the Form and Content of Edward FitzGerald’s

Translation of Khayyam’s Rubaiyat.” Linglit Journal, Vol. 2, No. 2, 24 June 2021. DOI:

https://doi.org/10.33258/linglit.v2i2.461. Accessed 11 Sept. 2022. 

Browne, Edward G. A Literary History of Persia, Vol. 2 of 4. Cambridge UP. 1956.

Cadbury, William. “Fitzgerald’s Rubáiyát as a Poem.” ELH, Dec., 1967, Vol. 34, No. 4

(Dec., 1967), pp. 541-563. JSTOR. Accessed 25 Oct. 2022.

Decker, Christopher. ed. Edward FitzGerald: Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám,

A Critical Edition. UVAP, 1997.

D’Ambrosio, Vinnie-Marie. Eliot Possessed: T.S. Eliot and Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat. NYUP. 1991.

Dylan, Bob. “Absolutely Sweet Marie.” Blonde on Blonde. 1965. Columbia. Compact disc.

—-. “Crossing the Rubicon.” Rough and Rowdy Ways. 2020. Sony. Compact disc.

—-. “Desolation Row.” Highway 61 Revisited. 1965. Columbia. Compact disc.

—-. “Goodbye Jimmy Reed.” Rough and Rowdy Ways. 2020. Sony. Compact disc.

—-. “Narrow Way.” Tempest. 2012. Sony. Compact disc.

—-. The Philosophy of Modern Song. Simon and Schuster. 2022.

—-. “Song To Woody.” Bob Dylan. 1962. Columbia. Compact disc.

—-. “Subterranean Homesick Blues” Bringing It all Back Home. 1965. Columbia. Compact Disc.

—-. “Tempest.” Tempest. 2012. Sony. Compact disc.

Guthrie, Woody. “Pastures of Plenty.” Woodyguthrie.org.

https://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Pastures_Of_Plenty.htm. Accessed 12 June 2023.

Lord, Walter. A Night to Remember. Bantam, 1955.

Ollman, Barry. Zoom conversation. 22 June 2023.

Place, Jeff. Email to John Radosta. 4 October 2022.

“Lost on Titanic: The Legendary Jeweled Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.” Regency.com.

https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Regency.c m+https://www.regencyantiquebooks.com/19th-century/omar-khayyam-rubaiyat-titanic/&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF-8. Accessed 12 June 2023.

Ricks, Christopher, ed. T.S. Eliot: Inventions of the March Hare. Harcourt. 1996.

 

[1] Decker xiv.

[2] FitzGerald 91.

[3] Browne 109.

[4] Sayed-Gohrab 1; Decker xxxiv; D’Ambrosio 48

[5] Aleahmad.

[6]FitzGerald 97.

[7] Cadbury 549.

[8] FitzGerald 106.

[9] Place, Liner notes

[10] Klein 108.

[11] Woodguthrie.org, https://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Pastures_Of_Plenty.htm. 

[12] Decker 100

[13] A fragment of these recordings can be found on The Asch Recordings, Vol. 3. The complete recordings, which are in no clear order and are all too unpolished to be released, remain in the Smithsonian Folkways archive. I am indebted to Jeff Place for his insights and to the rest of the Folkways team, including Greg Adams, Dave Walker, and Cecilia Peterson for making these tapes available to me.

[14] Bobdylan.com: https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/song-woody/.

[15] Mikel Gilmore, “Bob Dylan on His New Dark Album, ‘Tempest.’ ” Rolling Stone, 1 Aug 2012. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/bob–dylan–on–his–dark–new–album–tempest–20120801.

[16] Bobdylan.com: https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/tempest/

[17] FitzGerald 99.

[18] Lord xi; Regency.com

[19] Bobdylan.com: https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/narrow-way/

[20] ibid.

[21] FitzGerald 101.

[22] ibid.

[23] ibid.

[24] ibid.

[25] Bobdylan.com: https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/narrow-way/

[26] Dylan, Philosophy, 117.

[27] Bobdylan.com: http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/crossing-the-rubicon/

[28] FitzGerald 98

/by
,

MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS: JOKERMAN REFLECTS ON DYLAN – SONG CORNER

Go BackOther Issues

BY Walter Raubicheck, Pace University

 

Infidels (1983) remains one of Bob Dylan’s strongest post-60s albums. The album was Dylan’s first since the “Born Again” trio from his explicitly Christian period. Artistically, fans and critics considered the album as an advance over its predecessor, Shot of Love (1981), though they still scrutinized the album for evidence that Dylan was either still evangelizing or else had returned to making secular music. Fairly quickly a third thesis about the record arose due to the number of references to the Hebrew Scriptures and because “Neighborhood Bully” was clearly a song about Israel: Dylan had abandoned Christianity and returned to Judaism. With the passage of time it became clear that, on Infidels and beyond, Dylan had not renounced his Christian identity at all but had integrated many of the apocalyptic elements within Judaism into his worldview. Infidels is particularly remarkable for its opening track, “Jokerman,” which uses biblical imagery along with Dylan’s own brand of symbolic language. Dylan also, in “Jokerman,” addresses the persona that he adopted at the height of his mid-60s fame, making the song unique in Dylan’s canon.

 

Dylan has not often performed the song in the past two decades, but he did so earlier on several memorable occasions: on the David Letterman show on March 22, 1984, not long after Infidels was released, and at Woodstock 94 as part of a summer tour during which “Jokerman” served as the opening number. Meanwhile an earlier version of the song, with a number of alternative lyrics, appears on the recent release The Bootleg Series Vol. 16: Springtime in New York 1980-1985.

 

The very ambivalence that the imagery exhibits towards its subject has made this song subject to “almost endless interpretations” (Williamson 195). Terry Gans, in his authoritative account of the recording of Infidels, Surviving in a Ruthless World (Dylan’s original title for the album), says “the song practically sits up and begs to be taken as autobiographical” before acknowledging that the Jokerman could also be Christ or the Antichrist (80). Is it about his return to Judaism? Clinton Heylin calls it “the self-portrait of a gnostic” (556). Daniel Mark Epstein observes that “[t]he singer addresses a character central to his iconography, the Joker, the trickster who creates illusion and is himself a victim of his own trickery.…One might say that the song [is] deconstructing the myth of the hero; the joker is a figure for all men and gods, embodying good and evil, darkness and light” (270). Seth Rogovoy, in his study of the Jewish influence on Dylan’s work, after commenting on the difficulty of giving the song “a unified, coherent reading,” suggests that the figure strongly resembles the biblical King David:

 

Dylan overtly refers to David in the lines ‘Michelangelo indeed could’ve carved out your features,’ and various other phrases suit David – and Dylan – to a t. ‘Shedding off one more layer of skin / Keeping one step ahead of the persecutor within,’ he sings, with great insight into both his and David’s ever-changing personality and evasive maneuvers in their (mostly failed attempts) to avoid temptation in the form of the yetzer hara, the evil urge (237).

 

In “Jokerman” the composer/poet assesses the moral attitudes of the Bob Dylan who created the masterpieces of 1965-1966, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde On Blonde. Looked at from this perspective, the imagery of “Jokerman” is patterned and consistent, not ambiguous or contradictory. The key line is the last one of the first verse: “Freedom just around the corner for you / But with the truth so far off, what good would it do?” These lines can be seen as a devout Christian’s challenge to his younger self, whose most famous songs celebrated various kinds of freedoms, particularly from society’s expectations and commandments. But the Dylan of 1983 proposes that these freedoms are ineffectual if they are not backed up by the Truth – which for Dylan is now the biblical heritage that all people in the western world do have access to. In other words, freedom untethered from the truth of religion is ultimately unproductive, even fraudulent. As Christian thought has always insisted, truth assures authenticity; freedom and truth are meant to be synthesized, not regarded as a dichotomy. So much for existentialism – one of the –isms often applied to Dylan in the 60s, the most popular brand of which boasted that freedom in and of itself is the guarantor of an authentic life. “Jokerman” insists that freedom without truth leads to moral indifference (“Friend to the martyr, a friend to the woman of shame”) and an obliviousness to evil (“You’re going to Sodom and Gomorrah/ But what do you care? Ain’t nobody there would want to marry your sister.”) Satan, the prince of this world in the biblical view, has free reign in such a world of ethical relativism (“He’ll put the priest in his pocket, put the blade to the heat/ Take the motherless children of the street and place them at the feet of a harlot.”)

 

The mid-60s Dylan, the one that still has its hold on the popular conception of “Dylan,” is the Beat poet who don’t look back, the anarchist who wants another cigarette, the finger-pointer who would expel Mr. Jones from the room. The refrain “Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune” recalls John Keats’s famous “Ode” and links the Jokerman to the British Romantic tradition that produced the earlier poet, a clear indication that Dylan himself regarded his mid-60s persona as a Romantic poet, just as the Beats conceived of themselves as the inheritors of the Whitmanic tradition. But the Dylan of the 80s, unlike his Jokerman self, does look back, and he sees his earlier Romantic attitude towards life and art as constricted.

 

By 1983 there was little of the Beat poet remaining in Dylan: That figure had given way to the biblical prophet. Infidels, and “Jokerman” in particular, initiates and contains all the themes that Dylan will explore over the next eight years, through Under the Red Sky (1990): The world as it stands is subject to the power of Satanic forces, and thus ongoing strife and war are inevitable; redemption will come only with the arrival of the Messiah. (The cover photo of Under the Red Sky beautifully conveys the artist’s position in his unredeemed world: Dylan is crouching in a wasteland observing the aridity of the desert landscape.) What distinctly marks the speaker’s description of the Jokerman is that the images are alternately positive and negative in their depiction of his behavior and attitudes. His artistic function in society is admirable (“Standing on the waters casting your bread”) but spiritually bankrupt (“While the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing.”) Carrying a satanic snake in both fists, the Jokerman is doomed to a futile existence: Both “fools” and “angels” dread their futures, but the Jokerman is without one. It’s “only a matter of time ‘til night comes steppin’ in” the speaker tells us, but the Jokerman, for all his charm and power, is evidently too preoccupied with the “nightingale tune” to come to this awareness.

 

Yet the chorus constantly reminds us that his earlier self, despite his spiritual sterility, does have the essence of a true poet. He dances to the “nightingale tune” as the bird flies into the heavens by moonlight, a traditional symbol of beauty, like both Keats’s nightingale and Shelley’s “Skylark.” He also does manage to keep “one step ahead of the persecutor within,” presumably because he is familiar with the laws and the rituals of Judaism contained in the Books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and because through experience he has learned how to survive in the jungle and on the sea. Yet he has had no other teachers, so he has not learned about the Messianic truth.

 

Several images in the song refer to the influence of 60s Dylan on his followers. He’s a “man of the mountains” who can “walk on the clouds”; he’s a “manipulator of crowds” and a “dream twister.” The speaker is aware of the reverence with which the pre-conversion Dylan was treated: “Michelangelo indeed could’ve carved out your features.” But the speaker also knows that morally the Jokerman has always been insensitive to evil: he knows what the prince in scarlet wants, but he doesn’t “show any response.”

 

With the release of Springtime in New York, we now have access to an alternate set of lyrics for “Jokerman,” some of them remarkable indeed, and all supporting the Messianic theme. Once again they present an ambivalent view of the title character as he vacillates between virtue and vice. On the one hand he lets “the wicked walk right into a trap,” but on the other hand “You give away all the good things that fall in your lap.” And then there is the contradiction between the Jokerman’s world fame and the emptiness in his personal life: “You’re a king among nations, you’re a stranger at home.” The song consistently implies that this state of contradiction will persist if the Jokerman goes on living with freedom but without truth.

 

Perhaps the most interesting lyrical change concerns the list of weapons of destruction. In the Infidels version, these weapons are waiting “behind every curtain.” In the Springtime version they are unable to drown out the sermon of the preacherman: a sermon about the “deaf and the dumb/ And a world to come that’s already been pre-determined.” “The World to Come” (HaOlam HaBa) is the Judaic term for the paradise God intends to establish with the coming of the Messiah. But before that paradise exists, and until the Messiah arrives, Satan will ensure that violence and war rule the day, culminating in the battle of Armageddon. One of scripture’s recurring symbols for evil is the wolf (i.e., “in sheep’s clothing”), and in unused lyrics for the song that Gans highlights, the wolf figures prominently: “a friend to the wolf”; “the secrets of the wolf”; the wolf will “divide your house”; and the woman in the final verse gives birth to a “wolf” today (81). In “the shadowy world” that “Jokerman” envisions, the wolf reigns, though after the coming of the Messiah, the wolf will lie down with the lamb (Isaiah) in the kingdom that the Messiah will establish.

 

The Dylan of the 80s, though, never ceased to be a poet as well as a prophet. Beginning with two songs he cut for the Shot of Love album but did not release at the time – “Angelina” and “Caribbean Wind” – Dylan began to move beyond biblical paraphrase to incorporate his own distinct lyrical gift. “Jokerman” continues this trend. “Resting in the fields, far from the turbulent space/ Half asleep near the stars with a small dog licking your face” shows Dylan has retained his ability to convey an indelible mood – here the mood of respite from turmoil – with just a few wellchosen images. And his list of violent perpetrators and weapons is reminiscent of his streams of language such as those in “Subterranean Homesick Blues”: Here we have “Well the rifleman’s stalking the sick and the lame/ Preacherman seeks the same, who’ll get there first is uncertain/ Nightsticks and water cannons, tear gas, padlocks/ Molotov cocktails and rocks behind every curtain.” Of course, the idea he is implying is not that we need peace but that we will never have peace until the end of this world and the start of the new one, the Messianic age, his continual message between 1983 and 1990. As Dylan told Rolling Stone in 1984, a few months after the release of Infidels, when asked if he hoped for peace in the world: “There’s not going to be any peace…It’s just gonna be a false peace. You can reload your rifle, and that moment you’re reloading it, that’s peace. It may last for a few years.” In other words, until Armageddon (which in the same interview Dylan expects to arrive in a few hundred years), there will be “Molotov cocktails and rocks behind every curtain.”

 

The other songs on Infidels convey similar messages about the state of the world. “Sweetheart Like You” describes it as “a dump like this,” and claims that to be here “you have to have done some evil deed.” “Neighborhood Bully” decries the violent hostility permanently directed towards Israel, the original Promised Land. “License to Kill” blames the human egotism (especially of the male variety) that forgets about God in the urge to violence and destruction: “Now he worships at an altar of a stagnant pool/ And when he sees his reflection, he’s fulfilled” (what an amazing couplet!). “Man of Peace” continues the theme that there will BE no peace in this age of the world since it is Satan who often lies behind the mask of the peacemaker. “Union Sundown” decries the oppression caused by globalist economics and the failure of the United States to combat it. (In the same Rolling Stone interview Dylan describes globalism, with its refusal to value local identities, as a symptom of the end according to the Book of Revelation). “I and I” again reasserts the need to acknowledge God as the unseen but all-powerful ruler of the universe, while “Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight” describes the world as lacking any refuge from evil: “You know, the streets are filled with vipers/ Who’ve lost all ray of hope/ You know it ain’t even safe no more/ In the palace of the Pope,” referencing the then recent attack on John Paul II, the pope Dylan would perform for fourteen years later in 1997. Infidels presents a consistent vision of what human life is like once faith in God and the world to come have disappeared from the modern human consciousness.

 

“Jokerman,” then, is a key song in the Dylan canon because, if one regards its message as autobiographical, it marks the first time that Dylan the artist directly reflects on his own image, influence, and world view during the first decade of his career, the one when he exerted his greatest influence on the culture. It also signals the beginning of a new phase of his songwriting, one that departs from the explicitly evangelical Christianity of the so-called Born Again period – one partially derived from his fascination with Hal Lindsay’s The Late Great Planet Earth as well as his studies in 1979 at the Christian Vineyard Fellowship and instead stresses a theme that Christianity shares with Judaism, one he labeled “the Messianic complex” in a 1985 interview: the current world in which Satan has free reign will be followed by the period of the rule of the Antichrist, finally leading to the coming of the Messiah, after which the dead will rise and Satan will be destroyed. Both traditional Judaism and Christianity believe the scriptures (Isiah, Daniel, Paul) that insist upon the resurrection of bodies, to be reunited with their souls when the Messiah returns. Thus Dylan sings that he hears “another drum / beating for the dead that rise” in “Dark Eyes” and “In a twinkling of an eye, when the last trumpet blows / The dead will arise and burst out of your cloths / And ye shall be changed” in the song of that title. Though both religions, following Plato, have in their popular sermons and hymns stressed the immortality of the soul, the Talmudic traditions of Judaism and the Pauline traditions of Christianity are characterized by the idea that body and soul were intended by God to be reunited in the world to come, a transformed earth, though they are separated in this age by physical death. And before the end times the souls of the righteous dead do exist in a paradise corresponding to the popular conception of heaven. Dylan’s songs show that once again he found common ground between the two religions in their eschatological beliefs.

 

When Dylan studied with the Lubavitch community in Brooklyn in the early 80s, he presumably came to a deeper understanding of the union of Christianity and Judaism regarding the end times. So it was not that he abandoned Christianity for Judaism; rather, he had come to see that the two religions share the same vision about the meaning and goal of human life. Infidels is the record most deeply informed by this vision. Personally he had not abandoned Christianity, as some believed at the time, as his many Christian references in his later songs attest to. Dylan had used numerous Christian allusions throughout his songwriting career, but now prophetically he saw his religious beliefs within a larger, Messianic vision in which Judaism and Christianity both participate – as “Jokerman” and the entire Infidels album emphasize. Confident in his faith, he can now see that to “dance beneath the diamond sky” – or as he puts it in “Jokerman,” to “dance to the nightingale tune” – might be sufficient for poetic inspiration, but such a dance needs the music of the Lord to lead also to personal salvation.

 

Works Cited

Dylan, Bob. Interview, Rolling Stone, June 1984.

Dylan, Bob. Interview, Spin, December 1985.

Epstein, Daniel Mark. The Ballad of Bob Dylan. Harper, 2011.

Gans, Terry. Surviving in a Ruthless World. Red Planet, 2020.

Heylin, Clinton. Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited. William Morrow, 2001.

Lindsay, Hal, with Carole C. Carlson. The Late Great Planet Earth. Zondervan, 1970.

Rogovoy, Seth. Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet. Scribner, 2009.

Williamson, Nigel. The Rough Guide to Bob Dylan, 2nd edition. Penguin, 2006.

/by
,

“I AND I”: BOB DYLAN AND SHAKESPEARE’S KING RICHARD III – SONG CORNER

Go BackOther Issues

Christopher Star, Middlebury College

“I and I”: Bob Dylan and William Shakespeare’s King Richard III

With the release of The Bootleg Series Volume 16: Springtime in New York 1980-1985, I’ve been revisiting tracks from my favorite album from that period, 1983’s Infidels. I’ve always thought that the song “I and I” is one of the record’s strongest. I’m not alone in that assessment. Rolling Stone classifies “I and I” as one of Bob Dylan’s best songs from the 1980s.[1] Dylan has performed this song more times than any other from Infidels: 204 times from May 28, 1984 to November 10, 1999, according to his website.[2] The title phrase, repeated several times in the song’s chorus, has long fascinated me as a pithy statement of the complexity of selfhood and individuality. How can we unpack the modalities of “I and I” both in terms of the phrase itself and the song as a whole?

The phrase “I and I” has several possible levels of significance. It is a key part of Rastafarian vocabulary. The sociologist Ernest Cashmore states that Rastafarianism’s “acknowledgement of the inherence of God in man” came to be expressed “in the principle of ‘I and I’ the unity of all people” (Cashmore 1979: 26). The song’s genesis and recording have strong connections to the Caribbean Islands. The liner notes to Springtime in New York cite several interviews from the time of Infidels’ release: “‘That was one of them Caribbean songs,’ Dylan told interviewer Paul Zollo about ‘I and I.’ ‘One year, a bunch of songs came to me hanging around down in the islands. . .’ Talking to Kurt Loder in 1984, he named ‘Jokerman’ another. ‘It’s very mystical: the shapes there, and the shadows, seem to be so ancient.’”[3] The song has something of a reggae feel and the personnel involved with the album’s recording furthers the Caribbean connection. The legendary Jamaican duo of Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare play drums and bass respectively on all of the album’s tracks. It is plausible that Dylan was aware of the significance of “I and I” for the Rastafarian community. Yet this connection simply treats “I and I” alone and does not seem to me to address the complexity of the song, which is focused less on unity and more on self-division. There may be another level of significance to the title that better links up with the song’s themes of sleep, dreams, justice and self-division that may be traced back, paradoxically, to the namesake of the track’s bassist.

In an album that is largely a jeremiad on the direction of US and international politics and society, the penultimate song, “I and I,” might initially appear to be the record’s most personal track. As the title suggests, the song is an investigation of the nature of selfhood (Riley 1992: 271-2). Yet the song does more than simply offer a contrast between a false public and a pure private self, especially, if, as I believe, one of this song’s key intertexts is Shakespeare’s King Richard III. In this drama, the Duke of Gloucester and later king of England is a master at playing different roles. Throughout the play he presents one face, often of kindness, purity and concern, to other characters, while revealing his true, violent intentions in a conspiracy with himself and the audience. The possible links between Richard and the speaker of “I and I” problematize any easy notions that a purity of intentions automatically comes from listening to one’s heart. “No man sees my face and lives,” sings Dylan in the chorus. Indeed, throughout the play, seeing Richard’s true face leads to death. By the end of the play, when Richard finally confronts himself, when his criminal self and his guilty conscience come together, he too is destined to die. The justice served in this play is like the justice the speaker has learned in “I and I:” “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” This version of justice is applied to Richard when, for example, he is cursed by his mother, “bloody thou art; bloody will be thy end” (4.4.195) and by the ghosts of his victims (5.3.154-5).

William Shakespeare’s arch-villain, King Richard III, uses the phrase “I and I” in one of his most famous soliloquies after a night of horrifying dreams before his defeat and death at the Battle of Bosworth Field (August 1485). The speech comes in act 5.3, after the ghosts of Richard’s victims appear to him. Each promises that he will die in battle and that his adversary, the Earl of Richmond, the future King Henry VII, will be victorious. Richard, awaking in great fear and confusion, cries out:

Give me another horse! Bind up my wounds!

Have mercy, Jesu!—Soft, I did but dream.

O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!

The lights burn blue; it is now dead midnight.

What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by;

Richard loves Richard, that is, I and I.

Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am!

Then fly. What, from myself?

(5.3.178-86)

Antony Hammond comments on the significance of “I and I” in this passage: “Richard . . . is distinguishing between aspects of his personality: the clever, witty, self-reliant villain, and the conscience-smitten coward he is just now discovering. He is Legion, devil-in-man; and now the fearful self . . . surfaces and stands beside the willful Vice-demon self that rules Richard’s conscious mind” (Hammond 1981: 340). In other words, “I and I” in this play does not signify unity, either of self or between self and other. Rather, the phrase is part of Richard’s recognition of the other within the self. This recognition leads to condemnation, judgment and death.

In addition to this lexical connection, the opening of Dylan’s song “I and I” gives an ironic twist to the setting in Shakespeare’s play: “Been so long since a strange woman has slept in my bed / Look how sweet she sleeps, how free must be her dreams.” If we take the play as our starting place, the theme of self-division is already apparent. While Richard responds to his own nightmares, the narrator in the song looks at the “strange woman” and imagines that she is sleeping sweetly with “free dreams.” Of course, the narrator cannot know this about his partner, and can only guess about the interior life of another. In Shakespeare’s play, peaceful repose is granted to Richmond, who declares after Richard’s fearful monologue: “The sweetest sleep and fairest-boding dreams / That ever entered in a drowsy head / Have I since your departure had, my lords” (5.3.227-9).

The narrator of the song imagines that his “strange woman” must have been a queen in the past: “In another lifetime she must have owned the world, or been faithfully wed / To some righteous king who wrote psalms beside moonlit streams.” The “righteous king” writing psalms is likely a reference to King David, who according to tradition, had several wives and concubines and was the author of the Biblical Psalms. Dylan’s song may initially seem to set up a key contrast between two visions of kingship: the righteous King David who composes songs peacefully in the moonlight, and the iniquitous King Richard who is awoken by nightmares and engages in monologues of self-division. Yet the Biblical portrayal of King David is ambiguous. God grants David success in battle (2 Samuel 8:6, 8:14) and David rules with “equity and justice” (2 Samuel 8:15). Nevertheless, David’s familial relationships lead to crises throughout his reign. These problems begin when he has sexual relations with Bathsheba while she is still married to Uriah the Hittite. David has Uriah killed in battle, so that he may marry Bathsheba. She laments the loss of her husband (2 Samuel 11:27) and God punishes David with the death of their son, who was conceived out of wedlock. Later David becomes embroiled in a civil war with his son, Absalom. When Absalom is eventually killed, David laments bitterly (2 Samuel 18:23). While David generally has a reputation as an ideal king, his story in the Bible also presents his reign as troubled due to his relationship with Bathsheba while she was another man’s wife (“a strange woman”). This dichotomy also serves as background to the opening verses of “I and I.”

To return to the Shakespearean connections, before his soliloquy, “a strange woman” visits Richard III. The ghost of his wife Queen Anne appears as the penultimate of his victims (5.3.160-67). Anne was not “faithfully wed” to Richard. In the opening of the play Anne condemns Richard for killing her husband and his father, King Henry VI. But through his rhetorical abilities and confessions of love, Richard succeeds in convincing Anne to marry him, even as she is following the funeral cortege of her dead father-in-law (1.2). Once they are married, Anne never enjoys peaceful sleep, but is always wakened by Richard’s nightmares: “For never yet one hour in his bed / Did I enjoy the golden dew of sleep, / But with his timorous dreams was still awaked” (4.1.82-4, see also 5.3.160). Once Richard is king he starts a rumor “that Anne, my Queen, is sick and like to die” (4.2.57). Richard feels that her death is necessary. The sons of his brother Clarence must also die so that he can marry their sister, his niece, Elizabeth (4.2.60-3). Richard tells the murderer of his nephews, James Tyrrel, that the boys are “two deep enemies / foes to my rest, my sweet sleep’s disturbers” (4.2.71-2).

“I and I” also brings together several key ideas that run through Dylan’s corpus. In other writings, Dylan explores the multifaceted nature of the “I.” He does this humorously, playing on the homophony between “I” and “eye” at the end of the liner notes to Highway 61 Revisited: “I cannot say the word eye anymore….when I speak this word eye, it is as if I am speaking of somebody’s eye that I faintly remember….” Writing decades later, at the end of Chronicles, Vol. One about his early influences, such as Robert Johnson and Bertolt Brecht’s “Pirate Jenny,” Dylan notes the importance of Suze Rotolo’s introducing him to Arthur Rimbaud. Dylan writes, “That was a big deal, too. I came across one of his letters called ‘Je suis un autre,’ which translates into ‘I is someone else.’ When I read those words bells went off. It made perfect sense. I wished someone would have mentioned that to me earlier” (Dylan 2004: 288).

His repositioning and reimagining of Shakespeare is well known, from writing of the bard “in the alley / With his pointed shoes and his bells” in “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” (1966), to Desdemona giving Othello “poison wine” in “Po’boy” (2001), to “Murder Most Foul” (2020, see Hamlet 1.5.27-8).[4] “I and I” goes deep into questions of selfhood, self-dialogue, authenticity, and masks. Dylan’s polyvalent personae do not need recounting here. Already early in his career, he could joke to the audience in the Philharmonic Hall Concert on Halloween, 1964, that he was wearing his “Bob Dylan mask.” Shakespeare’s Richard III, too, is a master dissembler. In order to fulfill his plans to become king, he stages himself praying with two priests and pretends that he does not want the crown (3.7).

While I haven’t come across any direct evidence that Dylan was reading Richard III when he was writing “I and I,” in recent years, he has made his interest in the play apparent. In a 2008 interview with Eurozine, Christopher Ricks describes his meeting with Dylan in which the two discussed King Richard III:

Shortly before the concert I received word to come backstage, so my wife and I went half an hour before the show. And Dylan said, “Mr Ricks, we meet at last.” My reply was, “Have you read any good books lately.” . . . And he said, “Richard III.” . . . But Dylan wasn’t at all surprised by my question and he really did want to talk about Richard III. I think it was partly because there had been some films of it and partly because I’d mentioned Richard III in something I’d written about his song “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”[5]  

In Dylan’s Visions of Sin, Ricks identifies traces of Richard’s opening monologue not only in “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” (Ricks 2003: 226, 229), but also in “Seven Curses” (Ricks 2003: 236). More recently, Dylan has slightly reworked the opening words of the play, “Now is the winter of our discontent” (1.1.1) in “My Own Version of You” (2020 “Well, it must be the winter of my discontent”). Here Shakespeare/Richard III meets Shelley/Dr. Frankenstein. This recent reference to King Richard III brings out issues of bodily integrity and deformity in the play that only remain latent in “I and I.” A central aspect of Shakespeare’s play is the conviction that bodily appearance reveals moral character. Thus, Richard III is hunchbacked, has a withered arm and a limp, the last of which may have been Shakespeare’s invention (Siemon 2009: 3). Richard himself declares that his body will not allow him to enjoy the current time of peace and so he must be a villain (1.1.14-31). Throughout the play, characters draw attention to Richard’s body, as when his future wife, Anne, calls him “thou foul lump of deformity” (1.2.57). Thus, if we connect the mysterious and bodiless speaker of “I and I” with Richard III, it is important to keep in mind the appearance of Shakespeare’s character.

The song “I and I” might seem like a simple exploration of private vs. public persona, or of the words that one says in public vs. the reality of one’s true self within. This reading might be made especially clear in the line, “Someone else is speakin’ with my mouth, but I’m listening only to my heart.” Yet the connection I have been trying to establish between this song and King Richard III troubles any simple expression of pure internal self that remains hidden behind public words. Richard III’s famous soliloquies represent a “sinister interiority” (Maus 1995: 40) that displays his desire for power, mastery of rhetoric, hypocrisy, ruthless violence, and self-referential dark humor. Richard’s dramatic self-reference and self-reliance can be traced back to Roman drama, both comedy and tragedy. Terence’s comedy Andria has a speaker declare “I myself am nearest to myself” (proxumus sum egomet mihi, 635).[6] A closer parallel to King Richard III can be found in Seneca’s tragedies, which also contain examples of similar declarations of self-reliance as well as self-division. For example, in order to punish Jason for his faithlessness, Seneca’s Medea takes her own self as a model, but also is afflicted with visions of the Furies and of her murdered brother (893-977).[7]

As his soliloquy continues, Richard brings himself before his own internal court and speaks the opposing arguments:

I am a villain. Yet I lie; I am not.

Fool, of thyself speak well. Fool, do not flatter.

My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,

And every tongue brings in a several tale,

And every tale condemns me for a villain.

Perjury, perjury, in the highest degree;

Murder, stern murder, in the direst degree;

All several sins, all used in each degree,

Throng to the bar, crying all, “Guilty, guilty!”

(5.3.191-99)

Richard’s “court of the self” can be traced back to the ancient philosophical practice of submitting one’s conscience before a judge each evening in order to investigate and correct the wrongs one has committed throughout the day. Here again Seneca, this time in his philosophical work, On Anger, provides the paradigmatic example: “Anger will stop and become more moderate if it knows that it must come before a judge each day.” Seneca notes that he uses this technique of self-judgment each night after his wife has fallen asleep. The sleep that follows is “tranquil . . . deep and free” (On Anger 3.36.2-3).[8]

Dylan’s song explores this idea of self-dialogue and self-judgment. In addition to the violent exchange between “I and I” (“one says to the other, no man sees my face and lives”), the chorus of Dylan’s song focuses on justice: “I and I / In creation where one’s nature neither honors nor forgives.” The third stanza points out the centrality of the lex talionis: “Took a stranger to teach me, to look into justice’s beautiful face / And to see an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” On one level, we can note an echo of Dylan’s earlier playful interest in the homophony between “I” and “eye.” On another level, the vision of justice in the song can be traced back to the Law Code of Hammurabi. “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth” also appears numerous times in the Pentateuch (Exodus 21:24, Leviticus 24:19-21, Deuteronomy 19:21). Dylan’s song makes a significant change, however. While the ancient law codes enjoined retaliation against another, the phrase “I and I” suggests a mode of self-judgment and self-punishment.[9]

There remains, however, a major objection to my argument. If you look at the most accessible version of the play at Shakespeare.mit.edu, you come to the line under investigation and read, “Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.”[10] If you pull a copy of the play off your shelf or from your local library, it is likely that you will read the same phrase: not “I and I,” but “I am I.” And so it would seem that my entire argument about the key connection between the song and the Shakespearean soliloquy “stands on brittle glass” (4.2.61). In order to address this issue, at times this exploration must enter upon the arcana of textual variants in Shakespeare’s plays that are reminiscent of those explored by Oedipa Maas in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. The reading “I and I” is found only in the first Quarto (Q1) of the play, which was printed in 1597. When the second Quarto (Q2) was printed in the following year, the passage read “I am I.” Every subsequent Quarto (Q3-Q8) and the Folios of the complete works adopted “I am I,” and so it was for modern editions until the late twentieth century. At this point, some scholars began to believe that the reading of Q1 was correct. In 1976, G. Blakemore Evans argued that the reading was mistakenly changed in Q2 due to a typesetter’s “eye skip” (Evans 1976: 46). In other words, Evans surmised that while assembling the type for the end of line 184 (“I and I”) the setter’s eye “skipped” down to the similar end of the next line (“I am” 185) and erroneously changed the “and” to “am.” And so the error remained for centuries until the reading of Q1 was adopted with a lengthy note of justification by Antony Hammond in his second series Arden edition of 1981 (Hammond 1981: 340).[11] Thus the then-new, standard scholarly edition of Richard III was published right around the time that Dylan wrote “I and I” for 1983’s Infidels.[12] Is it too much to think that Dylan got a hold of this text soon after it was released? Was Dylan reading the then-new scholarly edition of King Richard III while writing his “Caribbean songs,” and was he struck by the return of Shakespeare’s startlingly bold description of the self as “I and I”? Admittedly, these possibilities are a stretch. Nevertheless, it is striking that this song shares this phrase.

But what if Shakespeare “really” wrote “I am I”? The scholarly debate concerning these three words from King Richard III continues today. Hammond’s restoration of the reading of Q1 was subsequently adopted by John Jowett in his edition of the play for the Oxford series (2000). Nevertheless, the reading of the later Quartos and the Folios has been adopted by James Siemon in the third series of the Arden edition of King Richard III (2009). In his note (Siemon 2009: 397), Siemon acknowledges the reading of Q1 and of his predecessors, but he does not accept the theory that “I and I” is correct and that the error possibly originated in an eye skip down to the end of the next line (“I am”) by the typesetter of Q2. He dutifully draws attention to other passages that are similar to “I am I” in the Shakespearean corpus, as well as God’s self-definition “I am that I am” in the Bible (Exodus 3.14).[13]

A crucial parallel passage for Siemon is Richard’s earlier “claim to singularity” at the conclusion of Henry VI, Part Three: “I am myself alone” (5.6.83). Yet Siemon misses a key point in the development of Richard from his murder of King Henry VI to his final impending death in his eponymous play. Richard may have fulfilled his determination “to prove a villain,” but in doing so, he eventually realizes that he cannot live up to the declaration of undivided “singularity” that he made at the conclusion of Henry VI, Part 3. Richard’s “I and I” deconstructs the divine ideal of tautological unity (“I am I”) implied by his earlier declaration “I am myself alone” to reveal the self-division and self-judgment that lies at the core of humanity. At the end of his play, Richard is not himself alone, as is implied by the reading “I am I.” Rather, in addition to being joined and judged by the ghosts of his victims, including King Henry VI, Richard is feeling the division inside of him produced by his guilty conscience. This recognition of self-division is best expressed by “I and I.” The tenets of contemporary scholarship and the often unquestioned expectation that print books offer the definitive text may make us feel that we have to choose one version over the other as being correct and genuinely authored by Shakespeare. Nevertheless, Dylan’s own composition and performance method reminds us that we need not accept one version as authoritative to the exclusion of the other.

In his acceptance speech for the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, Dylan compared his method of composition to that of Shakespeare (See analysis of Thomas 2017: 304-10). Questions of meter, music, rhythm, how a passage or line might work when performed matter more to both authors than questions of whether they were composing “literature.” The printed corpus of Dylan’s works is nevertheless very different from that of Shakespeare. We have his notebooks, we have his archives, and we can go to his website to find the copyrighted texts of his songs. We do not have any autograph copies of Shakespeare’s works. The earliest surviving print texts are individual Quarto editions of several of his plays. King Richard III has a particularly long history of eight Quarto editions, which continued to be published even after the 1623 First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s complete works. There are often great differences in the texts of the Quartos and that of the First Folio. These printed editions were likely in part put together from actors’ memories of their performances. Herein lies the problem with relying on one text as providing the “definitive” version of Shakespeare’s plays. They first lived multiple times in performance. Lines and entire scenes were added and removed from performance to performance. Sometimes we can gain a faint view of this practice when we compare different early print editions. Yet we cannot discount the fact that in some early performances the actor playing Richard III said “I and I” and in others said “I am I.” Judging from the number of Quartos produced, King Richard III was a very popular play. Performances could have varied drastically from night to night. Despite the time and effort I have spent researching and writing this piece, I find it doubtful that Shakespeare himself would have cared much whether his actor said “I and I” one night and “I am I” another. He might not have decided which version to use and might have reveled in the richness of both possibilities. In delivering the line in the middle of such a heightened and emotional soliloquy, Shakespeare’s actors themselves might not have been able to remember what exactly they said after their performance. Different members of the audience may have heard different versions during the same performance, if they were able to accurately hear the actors’ words at all. The difference of a couple of consonants likely would not have concerned Shakespeare as much as the overall effect of the play—and how full the theater was.

Herein lies the connection between Shakespeare and Dylan.[14] While we may have the official versions of Dylan’s lyrics, this does not stop Dylan the performer from changing them in concert, either intentionally or unintentionally. Sometimes, these changes are major but “authorized,” such as the versions of “Tangled Up in Blue” from Blood on the Tracks and from Real Live and More Blood, More Tracks, or of “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You” from Nashville Skyline and from the live version during the Rolling Thunder Revue. In some cases I feel that the printed version of a Dylan song does not match what he sings on the album. The controversy over “I and I” further shows how Shakespeare and Dylan are closely related when it comes to scholarly questions of performance and printed text.

It serves as testament to Dylan’s songwriting artistry that a brief song from a largely overlooked period can take us on such a wide-ranging intellectual journey. According to my reading of “I and I,” this journey takes us not only to Shakespeare’s King Richard III, but also to scholarly debates about the text of the play, to themes that run through Dylan’s oeuvre, to questions about his reading and song-writing process while in the Caribbean, to Rastafarianism, as well as to the Bible, and ancient drama and philosophy. The themes of self-division and self-judgment in the song are reminiscent of Richard III’s (or Rimbaud’s) realization that the self is an other. “I and I” contains multitudes.

 

Bibliography

Cashmore, E. 1979. Rastaman: The Rastafarian Movement in England. London.

Dylan, B. 1983. “I and I.” Infidels. Columbia 38819, released November, 1983. 

_____. 2004. Chronicles Volume 1. New York.

Evans, G. B. 1976. “Shakespeare Restored – once again!” in A. Lancashire, ed. Editing Renaissance Dramatic Texts. New York. 39-56.

Hammond, A. 1981. King Richard III. London.

Love, D. 2021. Liner notes to Bob Dylan. Springtime in New York: The Bootleg Series Vol. 16 1980-1985. Columbia/Legacy19439865802.

Maus, K. 1995. Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance. Chicago.

Miola, R. 1994. Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Plautus and Terence. Oxford.

Muir, A. 2019. Bob Dylan and William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It. Cornwall, UK.

Perry, C. 2021. Shakespeare and Senecan Tragedy. Cambridge.

Ricks, C. 2004. Dylan’s Visions of Sin. London.

Riley, T. 1992. Hard Rain: A Dylan Commentary. New York.

Siemon, J. 2009. King Richard III. London.

Thomas, R. 2007. “The Streets of Rome: The Classical Dylan.” Oral Tradition. 22: 30-56.

_____. 2017. Why Bob Dylan Matters. New York.

 

[1] Bob Dylan’s Greatest Songs of the 1980s – Rolling Stone

[2] I and I | The Official Bob Dylan Site

[3] Love 2021: 19.

[4] See Muir 2019.

[5] A lesson in Dylan appreciation | Eurozine. See also Muir 2019: 165.

[6] This connection is made by Hammond 1981: 340. The translation is my own. On Shakespeare and Roman comedy, see Miola 1994.

[7] On King Richard III and Senecan tragedy, see Perry 2021: 37-72.

[8] See Siemon 2009: 398 on Richard’s “imaginary courtroom,” and Maus 1995 on the theme of inwardness in Renaissance drama.

[9] In the Gospel of Matthew (5:38-48), Jesus critiques the law of retaliation.

[10] Richard III: Entire Play (mit.edu)

[11] Evans, who along with J. J. M. Tobin, served as general editor of The Riverside Shakespeare. In the second edition (Boston 1997), the line reads “I [am] I.” The New Pelican Text of Shakespeare’s complete works (S. Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, general editors, London, 2002), prints “I and I.”

[12] The 1983 BBC production of King Richard III also uses “I and I.”

[13] Simeon 2009: 397 cites the following Shakespearean parallels in support of Richard’s “I am I”: King John 1.1.175, As You Like It 4.3.134-6, Twelfth Night 3.1.142 and Othello 1.1.64.

[14] On Dylan’s links with Homeric composition, see Thomas 2007: 48-54.

/by
,

RESURRECTING DYING VOICES IN “EVERY GRAIN OF SAND” – SONG CORNER

Go BackOther Issues

Graley Herren, Xavier University

Resurrecting Dying Voices in “Every Grain of Sand”

On November 5, 2021, at the end of the third concert of his Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour, Bob Dylan surprised and delighted the Cleveland audience by closing with “Every Grain of Sand.” He had not played the song since 2013, but from November 5th onward he concluded each show with poignant performances of the album closer from 1981’s Shot of Love. In the midst of the global pandemic, it took a shot of vaccine to get into the venue for Dylan’s first concerts since COVID-19 forced an end to the Never Ending Tour. For many fans lucky enough to nab a ticket, and for thousands more following the shows online through almost instantaneous bootleg recordings, the sublime tour provided the medicine we desperately needed, as did the album Rough and Rowdy Ways (released in summer 2020) which formed the backbone of the concert setlists. For other listeners tuned into a different frequency, “Every Grain of Sand” is a more somber reminder that our individual and collective fates are still very much “hanging in the balance,” as the singer puts it, and the scales could tip either way—toward salvation or damnation. No one knows the ingredients of the skeleton’s syringe on the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour poster [see Figure 1 below], but it sure doesn’t look like a shot of love.

“There’s a dying voice within me reaching out somewhere,” sings Dylan in the opening verse of “Every Grain of Sand.” It’s difficult not to hear this line as self-referential in 2021, as if the forty-year-old Dylan who wrote the song half a lifetime ago is speaking again through the medium of the eighty-year-old performer, crossing time and space and reaching out across the footlights to communicate with audiences in a very different historical moment. “Every Grain of Sand” meant one thing (well, several things) in the context of Dylan’s art and spiritual journey in 1981; it assumes additional layers of meaning in the context of 2021, and more specifically within the context of the tour’s setlist. The present article will raise more questions than it answers, but they all stem from two initial curiosities: Why did Dylan resurrect “Every Grain of Sand”? And what impact does it have on listeners in 2021?

Following closely on the heels of Slow Train Coming (1979) and Saved (1980), Shot of Love (1981) is generally viewed as the final installment in Dylan’s Christian trilogy. The initial reception of Shot of Love was mixed, though its stature has steadily risen over the intervening years.

Figure 1: Poster for Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour

 A treasure trove of songs from the recording sessions have since been released, and it now seems that Dylan had a great album in the master tapes even if that’s not what made it into record stores. The one song from Shot of Love that was instantly hailed as a masterpiece was “Every Grain of Sand.” Even Paul Nelson, in his otherwise scathing two-star review for Rolling Stone, paused his evisceration long enough to spare one vital organ: “‘Every Grain of Sand’ is something special: the ‘Chimes of Freedom’ and ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ of Bob Dylan’s Christian period. . . . For a moment or two, he touches you, and the gates of heaven dissolve into a universality that has nothing to do with most of the LP” (Nelson). Wordsmiths like me tend to focus disproportionately on lyrics, but it’s important to note that much of the song’s appeal has always been musical. Nelson was an avowed apostate when it came to Dylan’s born-again songs, but he was sonically enraptured by “Every Grain of Sand”: “Dylan’s beautifully idiosyncratic harmonica playing has metamorphosed into an archetype that pierces the heart and moistens the eye” (Nelson). Likewise, for Paul Williams, the most sensitive and perceptive commentator on Dylan’s Christian music, the magic of “Every Grain of Sand” comes primarily through the music. Unlocking the song’s power in the second volume of his Performing Artist series, Williams writes, “The key to the performance is its motion: it moves like the sea, forth and back and forth and back, filled with a quality of restfulness but never resting” (205). The rhythms of those motions have shifted over time—from the official release on Shot of Love (1981), to the demo on The Bootleg Series, Volumes 1-3 (1991), to the rehearsal version on Trouble No More, The Bootleg Series, Vol. 13 (2017), to the most recent live incarnations in 2021. But the musical power of “Every Grain of Sand” to enthrall listeners has continued undiminished for generations.  I love the touching story Laura Tenschert tells about “Every Grain of Sand” in the first season of her fantastic Definitely Dylan radio show and podcast. She recalls growing up in Switzerland and singing in a church choir. When she was sixteen her music teacher decided to have the group perform some of Dylan’s Christian songs, so he gave her Shot of Love and recommended she learn “Every Grain of Sand.” She had never heard the song at that point, and she admits to having a general aversion to Christian rock. Nevertheless, she recounts,

I took that cassette tape [. . .] and I listened to it at home—and it completely blew me away! I’m not even sure whether my English was good enough at the time to completely understand all the lyrics. But I remember that I was completely spellbound by the song and its imagery. Who knew that a harmonica could sound like that—you know, like actually good and expressive and melodic, instead of just shrill. I don’t want to be corny and say “the rest is history.” But let’s just say that there is a very direct line that leads from that moment of me hearing “Every Grain of Sand” to me being here on the radio talking about Bob Dylan every week. In the words of “What Can I Do for You?” this song “Every Grain of Sand” “opened up a door that couldn’t be shut and it opened it up so wide.” (Tenschert)

Before playing it on air, she introduces “Every Grain of Sand” as “the song that made me a Dylan fan.” The song has been winning fans and captivating listeners for four decades now, and it is sure to convert more devotees on the 2021 tour.

Apparently the first person caught in the song’s spell was Dylan himself. In a discussion with Bill Flanagan about the craft of songwriting, Dylan singles out “Every Grain of Sand” as a mystery that simply arrived from nowhere. His job was to remain receptive and committed long enough for the song to finish writing itself. He told Flanagan,

Sometimes you’ll write a song where you’ll just stick with it and get it done. You’ll feel that it’s not coming from anyplace, but it’s for you to do. There’s nothing to base it on. You’re in an area where there isn’t anybody there and never was. So you just have to be real sensitive to where you’re walking at the time. Not try to go one way or the other, just stay balanced and finish it. “Every Grain of Sand” is a song like that. Writing that song was like, “This is something that I’m going to have to stay steady with.” Otherwise it could get out of hand. You must keep it balanced. And there’s no footnotes around. It’s the kind of area where there’s no precedent for it. (831)

Dylan doesn’t often praise his own songs in such exalted fashion, so he clearly finds something extraordinary about “Every Grain of Sand.” He stresses the unprecedented nature of the piece, springing from “an area where there isn’t anybody there and never was,” covering a subject for which “there’s no footnotes around.” But critics have traced several footprints behind “Every Grain of Sand” and provided footnotes leading back chiefly to the Bible and William Blake.

In his short but influential book The Bible in the Lyrics of Bob Dylan, Bert Cartwright identifies numerous scriptural allusions in “Every Grain of Sand.” Michael Gray builds upon Cartwright’s work and extends well beyond it in Song & Dance Man III, devoting an entire chapter to explicating “Every Grain of Sand” and teasing out the eclectic threads of its rich intertextual tapestry. In the first refrain the singer declares: “In the fury of the moment I can see the Master’s hand / In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand.” The second refrain offers this variation: “That every hair is numbered like every grain of sand.” And the final refrain offers a third set of similes: “Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand.” Within the context of Shot of Love, “the Master” unmistakably refers to God, and the imagery comes from the Gospels. Matthew reports Jesus as saying: “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore” (10:29-31). The scriptural antecedent for the title image comes from David in Psalms: “How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! How great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand” (139:17-18). So far, so good: the song would appear to fit squarely within Dylan’s Christian oeuvre, espousing faith in God’s omnipotence and omniscience.

However, the song owes just as many lyrical debts to William Blake, who uses the scriptures as leaping-off points into the mystic. Blake inspired the Beats with his visionary poetics, and Dylan’s initial exposure probably came from Allen Ginsberg. “Every Grain of Sand” reflects noticeable influence from Blake’s shorter lyrics and self-described “songs.” The most direct echo comes from Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence,” which begins:

To see the World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour. (Blake 209)

Blake’s focus is less on divine power than on the powerful potential of human perception. Michael Gray makes a compelling argument that “it is William Blake who, re-writing the Bible in his own unique way, hovers all around Bob Dylan’s song in relation to its themes, its language and the rhythms of that language.” Gray further observes, “Blake’s interest in taking biblical text and flying it to mystical heights is evident everywhere in his work, as is Bob Dylan’s interest in that work by his mystic predecessor; and never more so than around the texts behind ‘Every Grain of Sand’” (412). The song is no mere scriptural pastiche or restatement of pious platitudes. Like Blake, Dylan strains against the boundaries of conventional morality. And unlike Dylan’s earlier proselytizing work, which sometimes pushed listeners away with its judgmental sermonizing or zealous proclamations of righteousness, “Every Grain of Sand” is a humble, vulnerable, conflicted, ambivalent description of spiritual crisis. The singer is haunted by his past, his present strength is flagging, his future pathway is uncertain, and God’s grace and mercy do not seem guaranteed at all.

The dramatic conflict in “Every Grain of Sand” hinges upon a tension between looking back and moving forward. The singer begins with his eyes fixed toward the past and filled with tears of shame and regret: “In the time of my confession, in the hour of my deepest need / When the pool of tears beneath my feet flood every newborn seed.” What a vivid image! The singer has much to confess, and the memory of his prodigious sins makes him cry so much it’s as if he’s standing in a puddle of his own tears. He invokes familiar Christian imagery and tenets of belief, but he applies them in unorthodox ways. Pools typically have positive Christian associations with baptism, but a pool of tears troubles the waters. Similarly, confession and repentance are supposed to be crucial first steps in moving forward on the righteous path toward God. In this song, however, confession seems oriented backwards, functioning more as an impediment than a catalyst for personal progress. The singer’s excessive tears threaten to wash away his seeds along with his sins, inhibiting his growth by making rejuvenation impossible. He concedes as much in the second verse: “Don’t have the inclination to look back on any mistake.” Don’t look back. The song suggests that dwelling too long or obsessively upon the past prevents one from moving forward. The time of confession, it would seem, is coming to an end. In retrospect, Dylan appears to be signaling a pivot in his spiritual and artistic journey. “Every Grain of Sand” was the last song on the last album of his Christian trilogy. Before recording Shot of Love in spring 1981, he had already embarked upon “A Musical Retrospective Tour” in fall 1980, where he began reintegrating secular music into his setlists. Religious themes, imagery, and warnings continued to preoccupy him on Infidels (1983) and have periodically resurfaced ever since, but this song seems to mark an important milestone and turning point in Dylan’s road.

“Every Grain of Sand” is not a metaphysical battle with God so much as a civil war between opposed selves. The singer reports, “There’s a dying voice within me reaching out somewhere / Toiling in the danger and in the morals of despair.” Dylan the Gemini has made numerous references over the years to his struggle with adversarial alter-egos. For instance, the line “I fought with my twin, that enemy within” in “Where Are You Tonight? (Journey through Dark Heat)”; or “Keeping one step ahead of the persecutor within” in “Jokerman”; or “I and I / One says to the other no man sees my face and lives” in “I and I.” Given the theme of dueling dual selves, and given the knowing games Dylan sometimes plays with acronyms (cf. BOB, JWH, TOOM), I wonder if he was conscious of the fact that the initials for “Every Grain of Sand” is EGOS. I and I indeed! “Every Grain of Sand” stages an internal battle for the soul of the singer, a “psychomachia” where the singer’s Good Angel struggles against his Bad Angel. It is not clear which of these figures is represented by the “dying voice within me.” The song raises a slew of essential questions with life-altering stakes: Does the dying voice emanate from the “good” self or the “bad,” from Cain or Abel? Will he confess and dwell upon his former sins? Will he backslide and return to committing those sins [cf. “I gaze into the doorway of temptation’s angry flame / And every time I pass that way I always hear my name”]? Is the dying voice better left for dead? Or is the dead voice in need of resuscitation, heeding the vocation of his true calling? “Every Grain of Sand” implies so many fundamental questions, but definitive answers elude the listener and interpreter just as surely as they elude the singer himself. Yet the singer must pursue them. Everything hinges upon the decisions he makes at this pivotal moment and the pathway he chooses. The fate of his soul hangs in the balance.

For a song poised upon a fulcrum point, it seems telling that Dylan has been torn over how to end the song. On Shot of Love he sings, “I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man / Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand.” I’m frankly not sure what that first line is supposed to mean, but it is the copyrighted lyric posted on his official website. The sentiment is clearer in the demo version of the song released on The Bootleg Series, Volumes 1-3, as well as the rehearsal version on Trouble No More, where he sings, “I am hanging in the balance of a perfect finished plan.” He retains this lyrical variation for the 2021 tour. The invocation of “a perfect finished plan” is more readily recognizable as an expression of faith in God’s divine plan, the belief that, no matter how bad things get, everything happens for a reason and ultimately serves a higher holy purpose. That said, we should not pay so much attention to the affirmative “perfect finished plan” that we forget the outcome is still irresolutely “hanging in the balance.” Gray wisely guides us back to the full context of that sparrow reference in Matthew. In this passage Jesus commands confession and obedience—or else:

Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows. Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven. But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven. Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace but a sword. (10:31-34).

Gray comments, “Far from throwing God’s infinite care over every tiny creature in his universe, as the early part of his speech might imply, it’s a severe and conditional vision: it mentions the sparrows only to devalue them in the comparison with men and it excludes from God’s care all but true Christian believers” (405). In “Every Grain of Sand” the singer may be trying to obey God’s commandments, at least some of the time, and he pledges faith in the Master’s “perfect finished plan.” He just doesn’t know if that plan will end up with him on the saved or damned side of the ledger sheet. It could still go either way, for the singer and by extension for his listeners, in 1981 and in 2021.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the deliberate dramaturgy of Dylan’s setlists. The prompting came first from Erin Callahan and Court Carney, who are editing a forthcoming collection of essays on the subject. There have also been a lot of discussions on this topic led by Laura Tenschert on Definitely Dylan and her affiliated Patreon group. In particular, her treatment of “When I Paint My Masterpiece” and “Baby Blue” as bookends for Shadow Kingdom (listen to the podcast “Shadow Kingdom: A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) has helped to clarify my thoughts about Dylan’s setlists on the fall 2021 leg of Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour. The reintroduction of “Every Grain of Sand” is no coincidence. The song is highly compatible with the Rough and Rowdy Ways-centric setlist, and it serves a pivotal function as culmination of and release from the theatrical experience Dylan and crew deliver each night.

Figure 2: Title Page for Songs of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake (1826 edition)

What summoned the song up from the depths of Dylan’s deep back catalogue? In part it must have been auguries of experience from William Blake. After decades of unnamed influence, and following a direct allusion to Blake’s “The Tyger’” in Tempest’s closing song “Roll on John,” Blake finally earns a public shout-out by name in “I Contain Multitudes,” the opening track on Rough and Rowdy Ways, and the first song from the album played in each of the 2021 concerts. The title “I Contain Multitudes” is taken from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” and a number of other influences across the cultural spectrum get named in the song. He numbers Blake among the multitudes: “I sing the songs of experience like William Blake / I have no apologies to make.” Two things are interesting about this allusion. The first is that he hacks off half of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience [see Figure 2 above]. Dylan is long past innocence at this point, and so are his audiences. In fact, Rough and Rowdy Ways might just as well have been titled Songs of Experience. The other interesting thing is that second line: “I have no apologies to make.” This might seem at first like a non sequitur, but it is not. “I have no apologies to make” is a paradoxical echo of the opening of Dylan’s most Blakean song, “Every Grain of Sand”: “In the time of my confession.” From confession in 1981 to no apologies in 2021. Except that Dylan’s dramaturgical sequencing of the setlist actually reverses the trajectory, going from the braggadocio of “I have no apologies to make” early in the show to the contrite “In the time of my confession” by the end. Dylan’s individual songs function as scenes within the dramatic arc of his live performances. The songs build upon and respond to one another—reinforcing and refuting, complementing and complicating—working in tandem to create a holistic theatrical experience for each show. “Every Grain of Sand” means one thing considered in isolation, it means something different reconsidered in context with the other songs on Shot of Love, and it sends new and distinct signals in live performance as epilogue for the 2021 concerts.

In “Thunder on the Mountain” (a staple of Dylan’s tours in recent years, but absent from the 2021 shows) he declares, “I’ve already confessed—no need to confess again.” But the hour of his (and our) deepest need seems to have returned with a vengeance since 2020, and accordingly an impulse for confession has crept back into Dylan’s most recent work. Two other Rough and Rowdy Ways songs in the setlist explicitly use the word. The magisterial “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”—the anchor of the 2021 shows—foregrounds confession from the start: “McKinley hollered—McKinley squalled / Doctor said McKinley—death is on the wall / Say it to me if you got something to confess.” The setlist moves from deathbed confession to a raunchier roadhouse variation in “Goodbye Jimmy Reed,” the song that immediately precedes “Every Grain of Sand” in concert. There the singer leers at a “Transparent woman in a transparent dress / It suits you well—I must confess.” Feeling an urge to confess again, the time is ripe for a revival of “Every Grain of Sand.”

Dylan could have placed “Every Grain of Sand” anywhere in the setlist, so why give it pride of place as the concert’s closer? He probably doesn’t overthink these things. It felt right: good enough for him. Ah, the hours we readers and contributors to the Dylan Review could save if that were simply good enough for us! But it’s not, obviously, and it never will be. Dylan creates; Dylanologists review. His intuitive calculus may have been primarily musical. He described the song as a “mood piece” to Flanagan (832), so maybe it simply fit the mood he wanted to end the show with. Whether he arrived at this decision intellectually or instinctively (one assumes the latter), he must have sensed what a compatible bookend “Every Grain of Sand” as closer makes with the tour’s regular opener, “Watching the River Flow.”

Many common lyrical elements run through both songs. First let’s dig into the sand. Alongside associations with God’s particularized knowledge discussed earlier, sand is also associated very closely with time, as measured by sand falling through an hour-glass. The most overt reference to time in “Every Grain of Sand” comes in the line: “The sun beat down upon the steps of time to light the way.” Really, though, the entire song is a meditation upon the ravages of time, and the competing impulses to return to the past or move ahead into the future. The sands of time play a crucial part in “Watching the River Flow,” too. This song also features a singer who is stuck between his current life and his next life. He dreams of returning to the city and reuniting with his distant love. The song is rollicking and upbeat, and the lyrics contain lots of movement: trucks roll, birds fly, winds blow, and the river ceaselessly flows. But not the singer. He is a stone gathering moss. He makes his way from a café to the riverside, but that’s as much get-up-and-go as he’s got. Instead, as he repeatedly declares, “I’ll sit down on this bank of sand / And watch the river flow.” This water song is no “Proud Mary” “rollin’ down the river,” but rather “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” resituated on a sandy riverbank. In a sense the concert travels a great distance only to return full circle where it began: from the sandy riverbank of “Watching the River Flow” to the sandy seashore of “Every Grain of Sand.” No dancing beneath a diamond sky on circus sands here. These bookend songs feature characters whose hour-glasses are clogged.

Yet “Every Grain of Sand” has more forward momentum than “Watching the River Flow,” even if moving forward does not necessarily equate to hopeful progress. Lines like “every time I pass that way” and “onward in my journey” suggest a character who has gotten off his knees and has begun to walk again, even if he’s not yet sure where he’s going. The final verse of “Every Grain of Sand” begins, “I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea / Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me.” Many listeners, myself included, immediately think of the kitschy poem “Footprints in the Sand” when hearing these lines. Such an association presupposes that the entity following the singer is a supportive Lord. However, given the moral ambivalence and uncertainty surrounding the singer’s fate, listeners shouldn’t take salvation for granted. Those ancient footsteps behind him might just as well be hellhounds on his trail. Or is time catching up with him? At this point in the concert, maybe we should hear an echo in the “ancient footsteps” of “Every Grain of Sand” back to the “ancient footprints” in an earlier song (and exact contemporary with “Watching the River Flow”), “When I Paint My Masterpiece”: “Oh the streets of Rome are filled with rubble / Ancient footprints are everywhere.” Time eventually reduces all human constructions to rubble; give it some more time and the rubble will erode into sand (ask Ozymandias). Or maybe those foreboding footfalls come from time’s enforcer, the Man in the Long Black Coat, the Grim Reaper himself; better known in this concert as Black Rider: “Black Rider Black Rider all dressed in black / I’m walking away and you try to make me look back.” [Hint: don’t look back]. This reading resonates with the tour poster, which adapts the cover for The Shadow #96, featuring dapper Death calling to collect his next victim [see Figure 3 below]. In 2020 this same modified image was used for the cover of the “False Prophet” single, another song filled with Blakean references as Bob Jope shows in his piece for the website Untold Dylan.

Figure 3: Cover for The Shadow #96 (July 15, 1942) by Maxwell Grant

Speaking of shadows, those footprints in the sand might just as well come from the adversarial shadow self, since doppelgängers always crave to track down their doubles. After all, the precise phrasing in “Every Grain of Sand” is “Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me.” Is the dying voice within now externalized in the form of a stalking alter-ego, shadowing the singer and gaining on him from behind? “You could almost think that you’re seeing double.” Rob Reginio drew my attention to another Blake allusion from “My Spectre,” encompassing the shadow self as well as the dying voice and pool of tears:

My Spectre around me night & day

Like a Wild beast guards my way

My Emanation far within

Weeps incessantly for my Sin. (Blake 195)

The spectral shadow self also intermingles suggestively with the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Tour poster, where the creepy skeleton in the foreground is rendered even more menacing by his silhouette shaped like a hanged man [see Figure 1]. How’s that for hanging in the balance? Musically, even without Dylan’s beautiful harmonica in 2021, “Every Grain of Sand” is so serene, viscerally imparting a sense of calm tranquility. Lyrically, however, it elicits starkly different sensations, dramatizing a singer who might be escaping on the run or might be stumbling into an ambush.

Confession: I think too much about Dylan’s words. If this is a sin, my punishment is that I couldn’t be content with my initial elation as I walked out of the Aronoff Center into downtown Cincinnati after seeing Dylan in concert on November 9, 2021. I felt what others felt—what a gift! My immediate sensation after hearing the final song was like I had just received a fast-acting inoculation against danger, bitterness, despair, and loneliness. I walked away feeling healed by “Every Grain of Sand,” which is exactly the power Paul Williams ascribes to the song: “‘Healing’ is an appropriate word. The song is intensely personal, for listener and singer both; the intimacy of confession, the honest sharing of a sense of sinfulness and despair, creates a possibility of genuine assurance. ‘Every Grain of Sand’ cuts through doctrine and proselytizing and speaks directly to the listener’s need” (205). The listener’s need: I suppose I heard what I needed to hear. As we’re all learning, however, vaccines (including shots of love?) begin to lose some of their efficacy over time. I haven’t lost the magic of that night’s performance; if anything, in listening to subsequent concerts I have become increasingly awed by the time-defying, life-renewing power of Bob Dylan as a live performer. Nevertheless, my understanding of “Every Grain of Sand” has become more complicated and shaded the longer and deeper I’ve contemplated what it says, and what it doesn’t say.

“Every Grain of Sand” actually doesn’t say that everything is going to be okay, certainly not for everyone. Describing the effect of “Every Grain of Sand” on the first night at the Beacon Theatre (November 19, 2021), Anne Margaret Daniel writes, “His performance of it now is something beyond, and above, elegy: a goodbye that has its original meaning of God be with you” (Daniel). God will certainly be with us, according to the song, but we might not like what God does with us. Dylan evidently believes firmly in God, believes in a divine plan, and believes that individual and collective fates are governed by the Master’s hand. But that Master has a right hand and a left: he has a plan that saves some and damns others. One doesn’t have to interpret the song within the strict Christian framework in which it was written to hear its contemporary relevance. Things might be all right. They might be getting better. Or they might be getting worse. As Andrew Muir recently reminded me, “Every Grain of Sand” echoes not only the Bible and Blake, but also Hamlet’s moment of acceptance, when he recognizes he can neither predict nor fully control his destiny: “There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now; yet it will come. The readiness is all” (Shakespeare 5.2.197-200).

A full appreciation of “Every Grain of Sand” means acknowledging both its exquisite, uplifting beauty and its irresolute, unsettling uncertainty. These same Janus-faced qualities and animating tensions are on forceful display throughout Dylan’s recent recordings and live performances. The title Rough and Rowdy Ways sounds to me like a road sign at another Dylan crossroads: the rough road of righteousness heading one direction, the rowdy road of iniquity heading the other. It’s the location and condition of some of Dylan’s greatest work, including “Every Grain of Sand,” in both its nascent form from the evangelical period and its resurrected form by an octogenarian who has apparently been gulping from the fountain of youth. Listeners may or may not share Dylan’s theological framing of the problem, but by this point in the pandemic—to name only the most immediate and pervasive of our shared threats—we all know what life lived “hanging in the balance” feels like. We know the steady accumulation of troubles like grains of sand into a heap, as Clov describes it at the beginning of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame: “Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. [Pause.] Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there’s a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap. [Pause.] I can’t be punished any more” (93). Dylan cannot cure all that troubles us, but he sure has been a welcome, reliable, generous, sure-footed guide “in the sorrow of the night.”

 Those dangers still await audiences as they exit the auditorium and return to the world outside. But inside the world he crafts for us in the theater, Dylan gives us a light to take with us back out into the darkness. Ultimately, I find myself as a listener thinking about “Every Grain of Sand” in much the same way Dylan described it as the songwriter: “‘What’s this like?’ Well, it’s not like anything. ‘What does it represent?’ Well, you don’t even know. All you know is that it’s a mood piece, and you try to hold onto the mood and finish. Or not even finish, but just get it to a place where you can let it go” (Flanagan 832). Dylan conjures the mood, finishes the performance, then lets us go, leaving us to meditate upon what we’ve experienced, and releasing him to rev up the tour bus and head down the road to dispense his musical potions again.

 

Works Cited

Beckett, Samuel. Endgame. The Complete Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett. Faber and Faber, 1986, pp. 89-134.

Blake, William. “Auguries of Innocence.” Blake’s Poetry and Designs, Norton Critical Edition, edited by Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant, W. W. Norton, 1979, pp. 209-12.

—. “My Spectre.” Blake’s Poetry and Designs, Norton Critical Edition, edited by Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant, W. W. Norton, 1979, pp. 195-96.

Cartwright, Bert. The Bible in the Lyrics of Bob Dylan. Wanted Man, 1985.

Daniel, Anne Margaret. “A Triumphant Bob Dylan Comes Home to New York City.” Hot Press (20 November 2021), https://www.hotpress.com/music/a-triumphant-bob-dylan-comes-home-to-new-york-city-22881777, accessed 26 November 2021.

Dylan, Bob. “Black Rider.” The Official Bob Dylan Website, http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/black-rider/, accessed 27 November 2021.

—. “Every Grain of Sand.” The Official Bob Dylan Website, http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/every-grain-sand/, accessed 25 November 2021.

—. “Goodbye Jimmy Reed.” The Official Bob Dylan Website, http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/goodbye-jimmy-reed/, accessed 27 November 2021.

—. “I and I.” The Official Bob Dylan Website, http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/i-and-i/, accessed 25 November 2021.

—. “I Contain Multitudes.” The Official Bob Dylan Website, http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/i-contain-multitudes/, accessed 26 November 2021.

—. “Jokerman.” The Official Bob Dylan Website, http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/jokerman/, accessed 25 November 2021.

—. “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” The Official Bob Dylan Website, http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/key-west-philosopher-pirate/, accessed 27 November 2021.

—. “Watching the River Flow.” The Official Bob Dylan Website, http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/watching-river-flow/, accessed 25 November 2021.

—. “What Can I Do for You?” The Official Bob Dylan Website, http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/what-can-i-do-you/, accessed 25 November 2021.

—. “When I Paint My Masterpiece.” The Official Bob Dylan Website, http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/when-i-paint-my-masterpiece/, accessed 25 November 2021.

—. “Where Are You Tonight? (Journey through Dark Heat).” The Official Bob Dylan Website, http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/where-are-you-tonight-journey-through-dark-heat/, accessed 25 November 2021.

Flanagan, Bill. Interview with Bob Dylan (March 1985). Every Mind Polluting Word: Assorted Bob Dylan Utterances, edited by Artur Jarosinski, Don’t Ya Tell Henry, 2006, pp. 831-40.

Gray, Michael. Song & Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan. Cassell, 2000.

The Holy Bible. King James Version.

Jope, Bob. “False Prophet: ‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?’” Untold Dylan (2 October 2020), https://bob-dylan.org.uk/archives/16858, accessed 20 December 2021.

Muir, Andrew. Personal correspondence with the author (5 December 2021).

Nelson, Paul. Shot of Love Album Review. Rolling Stone (15 October 1981), https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/shot-of-love-102769/, accessed 25 November 2021.

Reginio, Robert. Personal correspondence with the author (6 December 2021).

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Second Quarto, 1604-05. Arden Shakespeare Third Series, eds. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, Bloomsbury, 2006.

Tenschert, Laura. “Season 1, Episode 12: Easter Special.” Definitely Dylan (1 April 2018), https://www.definitelydylan.com/listen?offset=1523203200527, accessed 26 November 2021.

—. “Shadow Kingdom: A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Definitely Dylan (14 September 2021), https://www.definitelydylan.com/listen/2021/9/14/shadow-kingdom-a-midsummer-nights-dream, accessed 26 November 2021.

Williams, Paul. Bob Dylan, Performing Artist, 1974-1986: The Middle Years. Omnibus, 2004.

/by
,

Dylan Review Vol. 3.1, Summer 2021- SONG CORNER

Go BackOther Issues

SONG CORNER BY Sarah Gates, St. Lawrence University

“The Truth Just Twists”: Psychedelic Irony in “The Gates of Eden”

“The Gates of Eden” must be one of Bob Dylan’s more opaque songs, since there is so little commentary on it, and that little only addresses the lyrics—and not all of those. For example, Michael Gray discusses only two of the song’s nine verses to claim that it is about “balances of opposites” (62-63), while Nick Smart and Steven Heine look only at its refrain, calling its Eden “a vision of paradise” (186) and “the locus of non-dual truths” (126), respectively. To me, such readings do not capture the haunting, ominous quality of the song, when it is apprehended as a whole. Here, I will explore all the verses and the music, the whole song, in order to describe a tone and mode that Dylan uses so effectively in works throughout his career, but which he honed especially well in this early period. I like to call this mode “psychedelic irony” for its blend of imagery that invites and escapes rational analysis with an accompaniment built on an ironic musical sleight of hand.

  

The Kingdoms of Experience: Psychedelia

When I use the term “psychedelic” as a way to describe the particularly cryptic effect created by lyrics of songs like “The Gates of Eden,” I mean first that Dylan does verbally something akin to the sensory effects brought on by ingesting a psychedelic substance. The images and vignettes in these songs seem to me to perform a swirling, shape-shifting intertwinement not just of visual phenomena, but also of phenomena from the other senses, of ideas, figures, scenes, and of phrases from other songs and literary works. Other commentators have noticed Dylan’s intertextuality. Rona Cran calls his style “collagesque” and connects his work to that of modernist poets and visual artists (187), while Alex Ross refers to his “magpie mode of writing” (309). Christophe LeBold sums it up when he writes, “Basically, Dylan does to the great American Songbook what T. S. Eliot did to the Western literary canon” (133). These characterizations very smartly get at the way Dylan layers his songs with bits from all over the blues masters, ballads from the British Isles and Appalachia, cowboy songs, sea shanties, American standards — roots music, as we now call these forms — and those who identify them enlighten us helpfully about where the contents of these song-conglomerates come from. However, with the term “psychedelic,” I want to get at effect as well as content.

For a brief example of what I mean by this psychedelic effect, I’d like to consider one of my favorite lines from another song, and another kind of song, “Visions of Johanna”: “The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face.”  Now, I don’t know what that means.  I am not sure I even know what it might represent metaphorically. What is the “ghost of electricity”? And whatever it is or represents, what does “howling” mean that it’s doing “in the bones of her face”? However, I do know how vivid the image is: I know what it looks like, what it sounds like, how it feels. That bony, hollow face glows and pulses and aches; it’s starkly lit and shadowed; she’s inspired, or angry, or agonized, or ecstatic — or all of these — or the singer sees all of these in a projection onto her face of his own feeling. The full couplet suggests such an entanglement of identities: “The ghost of ’lectricity howls in the bones of her face / Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place.” So, while I may not know what it means, I believe pinning it down to a specific meaning is not the point. We do not need to know what it “means”; we can see it, hear it, feel it. This flickering of an image among referents and sensations, like an optical illusion, is what I mean by the “psychedelic” aesthetic effect.     

In 1965, too, important psychological and spiritual dimensions accompanied the perceptual dimension of psychedelic experiences. The word “psychedelic” was coined in the 1950s not by Timothy Leary or Aldous Huxley, but by British psychiatrist Dr. Humphry Osmond, who was at the time researching the treatment of schizophrenia. He noticed a similarity between adrenaline and mescaline molecules, which led him to theorize that schizophrenia might primarily be caused by distortions of perception from “intoxication caused by one’s own body” (“Humphry”). Since some alcoholics seemed able to give up drinking only after experiencing delirium tremens, he observed, perhaps inducing a similar condition with hallucinogens would lead to a cure. His ensuing experiments with hallucinogens on himself and as treatment for schizophrenic patients revealed to him the mind-expanding and mystical experiences such substances could induce, and it was he who guided Aldous Huxley through the mescaline trip that led to Huxley’s 1954 book The Doors of Perception.

Osmond coined the term “psychedelic” from two Greek words: “psyche” (which the Oxford English Dictionary tells us means “mind” and anima mundi, the animating principle of the universe) and “delon” (which the OED translates as “make manifest, reveal”). So literally, “to reveal the mind,” “to make manifest the mind of the cosmos.” In correspondence with Dr. Osmond, Aldous Huxley proposed his own coinage in a rhyme: “To make this trivial world sublime, take half a gram of phanerothyme” (from thymos: “spirited”). Osmond retorted with his own rhyme, in better rhythm and fuller understanding of hallucinatory range: “To fathom Hell or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic” (qtd. in “Humphry”). As I use this term, then, I want to suggest an aesthetic influence that includes this metaphysical suggestion. And I think it is safe to say that the psychedelic effect of “The Gates of Eden” is not one of “soaring angelic” (despite its cowboy angel) but rather one of “fathom[ing] Hell.”  

The song unfolds a ghastly world of absurdity, neglect, decadence, torment — and longing gazes toward “Eden.” In the seventh verse, we see the abdication of responsibility, as “the princess and the prince discuss what’s real and what is not” with rotting “precious” windiness, while paupers scrabble for each other’s possessions, “each one wishing for what the other has got.” The third verse shows a “savage soldier,” head in the sand, complaining to a “shoeless hunter who’s gone deaf” — two figures that seem to have withdrawn from the world and their roles in it (blinded, head in the sand, deaf to complaint). The same might be said for the wish-purveyors of the fourth verse, “Aladdin and his lamp” and the “utopian hermit monks,” who make “promises of paradise” from their “side-saddle” perch on that false idol “the Golden Calf,” pointing the way with a “time-rusted compass blade.” The fifth verse shows “those who are condemned to act” according to “relationships of ownership” that “whisper in the wings” — enslavement from behind the scene.

Still, the most hellishly haunting psychedelia come in the two verses whose figures that entangle human with machine or human with beast and object perpetrate the most horrifying abuses. In verse two, an iron-clawed lamp-post cop with his “shadowed metal badge” and forbiddingly “folded arms” looms over “holes where babies wail” in a frightening display of state power over the most helpless victims of urban decay. The sixth verse brings us the part-woman, part-machine “motorcycle black Madonna two-wheeled gypsy queen” and “silver-studded phantom,” figures that shift among Madonna with Holy Spirit, gypsy queen with spirit familiar, and two-wheeled dominatrix in black silver-studded Phantom motorcycle jacket.  She/they torment a softly helpless “gray flannel dwarf” with his “bread-crumb sins” who “screams” and “weeps.”     

Both Michael Gray and Seth Rogovoy consider these bread-crumb sins an allusion to the tashlich atonement ritual of Rosh Hashana in which the sinners cast the bread-crumbs that have accumulated in their pockets into a body of water in order symbolically to shed their sins—a ritual that responds to Ecclesiastes 11:1: “Cast your bread forth upon the waters, for after many days you will find it” (Gray 482, Rogovoy 84). Like his tormenters, however, the gray flannel dwarf also appears as a shifting composite figure. He is as much the innocent Hansel as he is the guilty sinner. In the tale, Hansel leaves a trail of bread-crumbs in order to find the way home, but the birds eat them, leaving him and Gretel lost in the forest. Here, “wicked birds of prey” “pick up on” (that is, notice and reveal), “pick up” (that is, retrieve), and “pick upon” (that is, tear at) the bread-crumb sins in a nightmare of humiliation, lost-ness, and predation such as Prometheus endures, chained on the mountain, his liver eaten over and over by the eagle.     

Yet, every vignette concludes with a pronouncement about “Eden,” the songworld’s lost paradise. Sometimes ills plaguing the songworld are said to have no place in Eden (kings, sins, trials); sometimes desired things lacking in the songworld appear there (trees, a laugh, the truth). Yet for all the confidence with which such conditions are projected into this paradise, the performance of the refrains feels as unsettling as the verses they close. In his reading of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Christopher Ricks notes in passing that “The trees of Eden are haunting, frightening trees” (144), and Nelson Hilton claims that Dylan’s Eden owes a debt to eighteenth-century poet William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (110). (I would note that it could as easily have come via Huxley’s book: “the doors of perception” is a phrase taken from this Blake text.) However, we do not need to know William Blake to feel what’s “haunting and frightening” about the songworld’s Eden. Dylan performs it in the music.

 

You Will Not Hear a Laugh: Irony

Certainly, local ironies appear in the individual scenes: the soldier may be “savage,” but he is also plaintive and cowardly; the deaf “shoeless hunter” can hear neither his companion’s complaints nor his prey; the “time-rusted compass blade” will not point in the needful direction; “friends” are “other strangers.” These local ironic twists contribute to the ways the scenes and figures invite and resist interpretation and so intensify the phantasmagoric feeling of the songworld. But the song’s main structural irony plays out in its harmonic movements.     

How do we perceive irony in the non-semantic language of music, whose “meaning” resides in pure sound and the feelings it provokes? Harmonic music creates feeling by establishing a “home” (or “root” or “key”) and then moving away from and back to this “home.” In more complex music, the harmony can lead away from one home and establish a new one—or move into and out of several such homes. Such movements create the patterns of tension and resolution that constitute the “meaning” of music.

The simplest folk and rock songs play out a home-away-home gesture in their three or four chords, sounding some variation of tonic-subdominant-dominant-tonic. In “The Gates of Eden,” G major is the established tonic home, but the chords that lead away from and back to it are not always the ones we expect to hear in that key. Instead, Dylan colors or inflects that journey with sonorities from the Dorian mode — a scale and family of chords that fall between major and minor keys. Minor keys have three flatted notes, which gives them their somber sound. Major keys have no flatted notes and so feel brighter. However, Dorian mode has two flatted notes, which is why it is “between” major and minor, although it is closer to the “somberness” of minor. It thus produces a scale that sounds unresolved, even uncanny, to our modern harmonically-trained ears because it does not follow the patterns of whole- and half-steps found in the major and minor scales that we are so used to hearing. The Dorian scale sounds like it ends on the second degree of the scale instead of the first; it feels unresolved and uncanny, as though it is hovering in mid-air. To us — or to me, at any rate — it is an unsettled and unsettling mode.

This Dorian coloration provides the unheimlich sonority established in the first two lines of the verses in “The Gates of Eden.” The first four chords (G major – D minor – F major – C major), as they are voiced on the guitar, outline in their highest pitches a descending Dorian scale: G – F natural – F natural – E natural, or do – te – te – la. The chord progression itself also gets Dorian coloration from the use of a minor dominant (d minor, or v) leading to two major subdominants (F major—a bVII instead of the usual vii—and C major, or IV), which return home to the tonic via plagal cadence. The sequence we are used to hearing (tonic to subdominant of various kinds to dominant to tonic) is reversed: the dominant gives way to the subdominants, which then shift directly back to the tonic in a plagal cadence. On top of this unsettling progression, Dylan sings a pentatonic melody whose highest note sounds in repeated emphasis, as peak moments in the melodic shape, the flatted seventh-degree te: “Of war and peace the truth just twists.” Put all this together, and we get a combination of sonorities that creates the uncanny, portentous sound characterizing the songworld.

However, the third melodic line, the one that leads into the refrain about Eden, feels different. Its harmony moves comfortingly toward resolution as it approaches the refrain through a standard progression from tonic through subdominants to the major dominant: G major (I) – B minor (iii) – A minor (ii) – G major (I) – A minor (ii) – C major (IV) – D major (V). That D major chord jumps into prominence after the lyrics of the line have finished, as a full-measure fill in the guitar, so its bright F#, or ti, sounding at the top of the texture, provides the strongest possible leading tone towards resolution, like a promise to take us not just home but Home—to Paradise. Then, during the refrain itself, when for example the “ships with tattooed sails” are “heading for the gates of Eden” in a melody that pushes through an insistent repetition of the “home” note G, the harmony shifts behind those notes, beginning with a brief, disquieting Dorian inflection in the transitional chord that comes halfway through that line. I want to call it a Bb7sus4, but whatever it is, it includes all three notes, the F natural (te), Bb (me), and E natural (la), of the Dorian scale. It sounds only briefly, but it takes us not to the D major chord that promised to take us Home via authentic cadence, as in the third line, but back to the C major subdominant (IV) that has been circling us around in the songworld in the first two lines. With the harmony shifting the ground below them in this way, those repeated G notes in the melody draw us unrelentingly to a place where the first syllable of the very word “Eden” is sung on that same flatted te (in the lower octave): “Heading for the gates of Eden”: te do. It is like waking from a bad dream only to find that you are still dreaming. This is the irony sounded in the music: Eden is not a better Other Place but in fact is part of the songworld and its nightmares.     

In this kind of irony, one thought — the acknowledgement of a reality — is clothed in another thought — a wish expressed in the surface utterance. It is the voicing of disillusionment: the ironic utterance banishes the wish in the very act of saying it, even as the wish’s sweetness makes acknowledging the reality bitter. Oedipus wishes to be the righteous king who restores the fertility of his people and their lands and cattle by punishing the criminal whose unnatural actions have caused their desolation. But the unnatural criminal he seeks is in fact himself. The words in the refrains voice a wish: Eden holds original innocence and the Tree of Life—no sins, no kings, no trials, no crashing but meaningless blows. The compass will point the way, the ships will reach the gates, we will laugh in joy when we return. But the music hollows laughter into derision: “And on their promises of paradise you will not hear a laugh / All except inside the gates of Eden [te–do],” where they know better than to listen to promises of paradise (or make them). The “curfew gull” and “cowboy angel,” wafting up from Eden’s trees on “four-legged forest clouds” with “candle lit into the sun,” bear a wish: the time has come to return where truth glows bright. But the curfew gull “just glides,” the glow is “waxed in black.” Within the wish comes bitter reality: Eden also holds that other Tree, the one with the forbidden fruit, the knowledge of good and evil: we have always already fallen. The song turns on this irony, just as it turns on the refrain that wishfully cycles around at the end of each verse: Eden world is songworld.

 

No Words but These to Tell What’s True

Lyrics and music are of course delivered in a performance, and this song is performed for and addressed to listeners by a first-person singer/speaker. This singer has enough in common with the cowboy angel that I’m tempted to consider that angel his Eden-world avatar. Both bring portentous news, both come accompanied by birds — the “curfew gull,” the “lonesome sparrow” — both have what seems an alienated relation to the “foreign sun,” which “waxes” the cowboy angel’s candle-glow “in black” and “squints upon” the singer’s bed that is never his own.

However, the cowboy angel bears “the truth,” and in this song, whether the bearer of “the truth” is Eden’s cowboy angel, the state’s lamp-post cop, the church’s motorcycle black Madonna, the capitalist’s whisperer in the wings, or philosophy’s arbiters of what is real and what is not, “the truth just twists.” How can our singer bring us a true message and how can we hear it in such a world? The final verse gives us a “glimpse”:     

At dawn my lover comes to me and tells me of her dreams

With no attempts to shovel the glimpse into the ditch of what each one means

At times I think there are no words but these to tell what’s true

Telling the dreams provides the words that tell what’s true. Attempts to shovel these glimpses “into the ditch of what each one means” just twist their truth.

We so often approach poems as though what a poem “means” is something other than what it “tells.” But with dreams and much poetry and certainly songs composed in this psychedelic-ironic mode, we need to listen in the state of receptivity that poet John Keats calls “Negative Capability”: the capacity to rest in “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (109). Our singer, keeping himself (like his lover) in this state of negative capability, speaks through art, not exegesis. If we attend to what he tells instead of irritably reaching after what he means, at times we might see and hear and feel what’s true, especially in a world where the truth just twists.

 

Works Cited

Cran, Rona. Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, and Culture. Taylor and Francis, 2014. Ebook.

Dylan, Bob. “The Gates of Eden.” Bringing It All Back Home, Columbia Records, 1965.  

——-.  “Visions of Johanna.”  Blonde on Blonde, Columbia Records, 1966. 

Gray, Michael.  Song and Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan.  2nd ed. Continuum, 2000.  

Hartman, Charles O. “Dylan’s Bridges.” New Literary History, vol. 46, no. 3, 2015, pp. 737-57.

Heine, Steven.  Bargainin’ for Salvation: Bob Dylan, a Zen Master? Continuum, 2009.

Hilton, Nelson. “Waxed in Blake.” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 3, 2009-10, pp. 110-11.

“Humphry Osmond.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 23 March, 2017. Accessed 13 May, 2017.

Keats, John. Letter to George and Tom Keats, 21 (27?) December, 1817.  John Keats’s Poetry and Prose. Selected and edited by Jeffrey N. Cox.  W. W. Norton, 2009, pp. 107-09.  

LeBold, Christophe. “I’ve Got the Judas Complex and the Recycling Blues: Bob Dylan as Cultural Theft.” Ranam, vol. 43, 2010, pp. 127-35.

Ricks, Christopher. Dylan’s Visions of Sin. HarperCollins, 2004. 

Rogovoy, Seth. Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic Poet. Scribner, 2009. 

Ross, Alex. “The Wanderer.” The New Yorker May 10, 1999, pp. 56-65.  Rpt. Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader. Ed. Benjamin Hedin. W. W. Norton, 2004, 291-312. 

Smart, Nick. “Nothing but Affection for All Those Who’ve Sailed with Me: Bob Dylan from Place to Place.” Popular Music and Society, vol. 32, no. 2, 2009, pp. 179-197.

/by
,

“All the Songs: Dylan’s Songbook Sale” ​

Go BackOther Issues

SONG CORNER BY Bob Keyes

​Rob Stoner thinks the handwringing and conjecture over Bob Dylan’s decision to sell his publishing catalog is nothing more than mixed-up confusion.

​Too many people, all too hard to please.

“This is strictly a business deal. This is all about the numbers, cut and dry. It’s not surprising, and I don’t understand the controversy,” said Stoner, who played bass and was bandleader during the Rolling Thunder Revue, and toured and recorded with Dylan later. “Bob is no dummy. Do you think he is going to make a stupid deal? He’s always had his ducks in a row. He’s always had the best advice, the best lawyers, the best accountants that money can buy.”

Stoner’s advice to fans: Calm down. Everything is going to be okay.

Dylan’s decision to sell his entire publishing catalog of more than six hundred songs, up through Rough and Rowdy Ways, to Universal Music Publishing Group for what Billboard now says is between $375 million and $400 million reflects the unprecedented value of Dylan’s catalog because of the near-ubiquitous nature of music streaming. It’s the right deal at the right time, observers say, the confluence of opportunity and convenience for both sides in the landmark deal.​

For fans, the sale likely means a lot more Dylan music will begin appearing in commercials and across mass media, as Universal recoups its investment by licensing as many songs as often as possible—and we can only hope with respect to the integrity of the collection. More significantly, it does not mean Dylan will stop recording, stop touring, or begin concentrating only on making paintings and sculpture. If he does, it almost certainly will be for reasons unrelated to the publishing deal.

Indeed, within a few days of the report of the sale to Universal in the New York Times, the Dylan camp announced the upcoming release of the new Dylan/George Harrison box set, following up a limited release of a special-edition collection issued primarily to extend copyrights. Both products suggest it will be business as usual in terms of curated, bootleg-style releases.

For Dylan, the Universal deal is about cashing out at high value and walking away with the ability to continue to do whatever he wants to do, still with control of his masters but without the headache of administering a song catalog that grows more complicated with time, shielding his heirs from the hassles and complexities of evolving entertainment and business law.​

“Now Universal will do all the administration, and Bob doesn’t have to deal with it,” Stoner said.

For Universal, it’s about gaining control over the most valuable and culturally significant collection of contemporary songs ever written, the jewel-in-the-crown of twentieth-century American art.

Dylan’s deal is the latest and most intriguing among the so-called evergreen generation of songwriters and recording artists, who generate huge revenue on streaming services because of the size, popularity, and sustaining nature of their song catalogs. Each time a Dylan song is sold, broadcast, or streamed—or placed in an ad, movie, or TV show—Universal will earn back its investment.

In addition to signing over his publishing royalties, Dylan also sold the copyrights to his songs, according to multiple reports. That means Universal will earn money each time a Dylan song is covered by another artist, and Dylan will have no say in how his previously recorded songs are used or how much Universal can charge to license them.

George Howard, an associate professor of music business at Berklee College of Music, said the sale of the underlying copyright (“the whole kit and caboodle,” he told Business Insider) “almost never happens,” which makes this deal unique. “That explains the valuation.”

It’s a safe investment for Universal because streaming services have made music revenue predictable, which makes music catalogs attractive to investors. That is why so many artists have sold their catalogs, from Stevie Nicks to Taylor Swift. “The way streaming services are growing, this will be the gift that keeps on giving, in terms of royalties,” Howard said of the Dylan deal.

Tim Riley, a longtime Dylan observer, music critic, and associate professor at Emerson College in Boston, called the deal a slam-dunk for Universal and said the initial report in The New York Times of the sale being worth $300 million “struck me as a small number.” He said Universal would earn back its investment in a few years’ time.

He wasn’t surprised by the news—nothing about Dylan surprises him anymore—but he was surprised how much attention the sale received and how much Dylan was criticized. It’s easy to criticize wealthy rock stars, Riley said, “but we will never understand the air they breathe. They make a lot of decisions that may seem weird to us.”

He agreed with Stoner that this deal is about timing and convenience. “The idea that you could sell it for a lump sum and never deal with it again—‘just get it off my plate’—that becomes very attractive after you have had to manage it all these years,” Riley said. “If he spends four hours a week administering his catalog on the phone with his team, it’s probably the worst four hours of his week.”

People who are upset with Dylan for making his music available for commercial purposes have had plenty of time to resolve those conflicts. Dylan has licensed his music for ads for more than a quarter-century, sometimes successfully and with artistic flair, sometimes less so. He filmed an ad for the “ladies’ garments” company Victoria’s Secret in 2007, using his song “Love Sick,” and appeared without music in another for IBM. “Forever Young,” it seems has ageless appeal among advertisers. The list is long. As Dylan himself said, money doesn’t talk, it swears.​

“There is punditry that you now will start to see Bob’s songs everywhere, and you might,” Howard said. “But he’s not like Radiohead or Neil Young, who have never licensed their work. Maybe you’ll notice a bit more, maybe a bit less, but the average consumer probably won’t notice much. Dylan already licenses his music for such weird things. Not much he does would surprise me.”

I’ve been listening to Dylan since the ‘60s, I’ve been a fan since the ‘70s, and I’ve attended eighty-plus shows all across the country. This year, 2020, will be the first since 1986 that I have not seen at least one Dylan concert. And yet, I have never appreciated his music more, with a tantalizing new record and the convenience of streaming music during my walks in the Maine woods that have carried me through the pandemic. When people ask what I did during the pandemic, I will tell them I listened to a lot of Dylan.

The use of his songs in TV ads in no way diminishes my connection to his music or my desire to see him again in concert. I sometimes wish he hadn’t sold this or sold that, but who am I to judge his motives?

As Tim Riley said, we will never understand the air he breathes.

I appreciate the ads for their quirky mystery. I see the Chrysler Super Bowl ad, with “Things Have Changed” lingering in the background, as an extension of one of his road songs, a travelogue, and an homage to American adventure with at least one great line: “Because we believe in the zoom, the roar, and the thrust.”

Richard Thomas, the Harvard classics professor who wrote the book Why Bob Dylan Matters, said the worst-case scenario of the Universal deal is that Dylan’s music shows up in ads we don’t approve of, that perhaps degrade the integrity of the song. But he’s not too worried. “I don’t buy Victoria’s Secret, and that didn’t bother me. I quite liked that ad. I thought the Cadillac ad was pretty good too,” he said.

As a researcher who has worked with Dylan’s team to secure permission to reproduce song lyrics, Thomas understands the work involved in dealing with those requests. He called it “a level of micromanaging” that Dylan and his management “are not enamored of.” He said Dylan’s team has always been cooperative, and he hopes Universal is equally responsive and open to allowing writers to quote Dylan’s lyrics.

Further, Thomas said he does not read anything into the deal as the end of one phase or the beginning of another. It’s nothing more than a business deal, timed to coincide with the high value of Dylan’s catalog at this historic moment in the music business.

“Any new material is not included in the deal, so the implication is there could be new material, new song material as well as other things he is working on,” Thomas said. “I sure hope he is writing another album, since the last one we got is so terrific. Dylan will keep doing what Dylan is doing, which is continuing to produce his songs, paintings, and sculpture. And I think he will tour again. I sure hope he does. I think touring is something that means a lot to him, and it means a lot to us.”

Stoner said Dylan became savvy in business from fighting with Albert Grossman, his early manager who suffered an inglorious separation from Dylan in 1970. “Bob didn’t want to let Grossman have a penny for his songs, so he retained his own rights and administered his own publishing through his own employees,” Stoner said. “The people who ran his business office back in the 1970s were the people he poached from Grossman’s office. When Bob split with Grossman, he replicated the same operation with the same employees a few blocks away.”

The deal with Universal is the same kind of thing, only this time civil, and with higher stakes and rewards. With Dylan turning eighty in the spring, who can blame him?

“It’s a huge chunk of change,” Stoner said, “and now his heirs don’t have to fight about it.”

/0 Comments/by