,

REVIEW OF About Man & God & Law: The Spiritual Wisdom of Bob Dylan

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Stephen Daniel Arnoff. About Man & God & Law: The Spiritual Wisdom of Bob Dylan. New York: Morgan James, 2022. 231 pp.

REVIEW BY Kathryn Lofton, Yale University

 

Scholars can sort studies of Bob Dylan’s relationship to religion into several piles. Some assume that Dylan is a significant religious figure within American culture. Such works – like Christopher Ricks’s Dylan’s Visions of Sin (2004) – extract theological commentary from his lyrics and do so without regard for his religious biography. Other authors perceive a particular religious perspective in Dylan’s oeuvre and reconstruct that specific outlook from his broad canon. For example, Steven Heine’s Bargainin’ for Salvation: Bob Dylan, Zen Master? (2009) argues that Dylan’s songbook offers a coherent sectarian vision: to Heine, Dylan is a denominational voice cloaked in the distracting guise of a secular rock star. In partial contrast, Mike Marqusee’s Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the 1960s (2005) characterizes Dylan as an unresolved religious actor who is best understood as a spiritual seeker. While readings like Ricks’s considering Dylan a significant religious figure provide extraordinary exegeses of Dylan’s work, most historians and rock critics have deferred to seeing Dylan as Marqusee does. As one scholar explained, “The conventional wisdom has long tagged Dylan as unknowable when it comes to music, politics and, especially, religion.”[1]

 

Unconventionally then, About Man & God & Law: The Spiritual Wisdom of Bob Dylan offers an interpretation that shows what is religiously knowable from Dylan’s songs. As church attendance declines in the US, one assumption of Arnoff’s book is that Dylan’s songs offer people an alternative source of wisdom. Dylan’s lyrics, through Arnoff’s commentary, present an inspired account of how humans struggle with social life and supernatural questions. Through Dylan, Arnoff meditates on salvation, faith, death, memory, and America, among many other themes he discerns in Dylan’s catalog. These readings intend to “release power embedded in art” through interpretation (180). Arnoff’s special knack is pulling a classical voice – Virgil, say – together with Dylan’s to dramatize the depth of Dylan’s intertextual practice. Many readers of Dylan have identified his ranging citations of classical and modern sources. Arnoff suggests that, through his connection of such sources, Dylan equals them in wisdom and perception. Arnoff isn’t unearthing Dylan’s footnotes. Rather, he’s arguing Dylan belongs in the canon of great religious thinkers. Dylan constructs his “musical roadmap for the soul” from a series of riddles, “keeping his listeners asking more questions, transcending and producing and reproducing esoteric truths within the traditions upon which our culture is based” (215).

 

Religious scholars agree with Arnoff that popular music offers a porthole through which spiritual seekers discover “the possibilities of their own depths while also embracing something greater than themselves” (5). Popular culture, especially as expressed by fan investment, connects people who affirm song. “Popular music is about creating intimacy with the masses by sharing intimacy with the masses,” writes Arnoff (55, Arnoff’s italics). United by that listening, they establish community. One word for such community is religion.

 

This book is lively, written in an accessible, engaging style by a scholar who loves to spin a Dylan record and is also a deep humanist. One of the best attributes of About Man & God & Law is how its analytical voice sounds like that of a hype fan connecting the dots as they listen for the nine hundredth time to the same track, discovering as they do what is the big idea in the lyrical particulars. Arnoff’s fandom isn’t possessive but opening, showing in paragraph after paragraph how Dylan reflects the best ideas in thinkers as diverse as medieval Italian poet Dante and contemporary Belgian-American relationship expert Esther Perel. It isn’t that Dylan always takes directly from existing canonical thought, but that, as Arnoff shows, Dylan implicates himself as representative of the best thought history records. Strong evidence for Arnoff’s case is how Dylan’s canon integrates such a vast number of different “musical threads revealing patterns and dialogues” (180). In the Dylan musicology, a sense of devotional entanglement to precedent is a given: he was always trying to cite other genres in his songwriting, deploying tones and tempos that remind listeners of infrequently visited folkways and bygone bards. The resulting “classical symposium” offers a relentlessly intriguing set of images and ideas to reckon with and reconcile. “Bob Dylan is a scavenger, a collector of shards,” Arnoff observes, echoing many previous critical listeners (112). Arnoff shares this famous magpie attribute, bringing to this brisk volume a superabundance of connections to illuminate what he thinks Dylan argues as a preacher of God and life.

 

The question for this reader is whether Dylan possesses the “spiritual wisdom” Arnoff’s title enshrines. Sam Cooke reportedly said that, after Dylan, it didn’t matter how good a singer’s voice was. What mattered was believing that the voice singing told the truth (10). This suggests Dylan’s infamous nasal tone possessed alongside its apparent unloveliness a bracing frankness. Yet as Arnoff and other biographers repeatedly point out, Dylan prevaricated on his way to making the figure he thought would lead fans to believe his truth. “It was Dylan who concocted Dylan, inventing himself and his self-creation story in a mode familiar to students of religion and myth,” Arnoff writes (30). Dylan’s letters to a Minnesota friend reveal that he chose a new last name for himself because “having a name like Zimmerman attracted exactly the wrong kind of attention in show business” (88). From the beginning, Dylan sought to convey himself as a secular subject, a person without a particular religious attachment. He did this to render himself universal, someone to whom people of all religions could attach. 

 

I first heard of Stephen Arnoff when I read Scott M. Marshall’s Bob Dylan: A Spiritual Life (2017). Marshall describes hearing Arnoff give a lecture representing early thought on this book. In that talk, Arnoff explained how, despite the variety of styles and masks Dylan tried, thinking about religion is the one consistent thing he did.[2] Arnoff is right that religion is a powerful palette for Dylan. It is grist for the empowerment of his individual authorship and not a communal form to which his voice ever subordinates. Arnoff says Dylan’s lyrics explain that “how we love, learn, and die are the essential acts of our being,” and he also suggests Dylan follows an “outlaw code” that “is completely sui generis” (112, 186). Can an outlaw be a moral teacher? “Bob is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake,” Arnoff quotes Joni Mitchell as saying. “Everything about Bob is a deception” (126). How can a person whose self-invention is so elaborate be a source for truth? How can someone who faked a lot of people out with his mythologizing offer “reverence and awe” or teach people about “living a meaningful life” (xvi)?

 

In a 2006 article in The Nation, Richard Goldstein observed that Dylan was “cruising toward sainthood” and his acclaim existed irrespective of the quality of the music.[3] Goldstein finds the admiration of Dylan’s fans a problem in the same way many critics of religion find devotedly religious believers worrisome. For those who seek to evade any indication of devotional excess – people who sociologist of religion Joseph Blankholm finds sometimes self-describe as secular – a surplus of belief diminishes rational sensibility. Throughout his career, Dylan’s fandom, the most avid of whom David Kinney describes in his 2015 book, The Dylanologists, have faced criticism because their cultic regard for Dylan seemed to diminish their ability to perceive his failings. Arnoff, meanwhile, is a Dylanologist who reflects the positive value of loving an author so much. Consider, for example, this passage:

The central figure in Bob Dylan’s body of work has always been a solitary seeker narrating a life-stroll through the United States of Pompeii. His songs are glimpses into a journey through gaps between what has been upended, what is otherwise frozen in time, and what needs to be explained. While Dylan’s role as an artist reflects the archetypal task of the poet as personified by the figure of Simonides, the memory system Dylan employs is not as rigid as that of his forebear, who captured in his mind only the images of the elite  faces around the table at a rich man’s feast.

 

This is one of many riffs where Arnoff elegantly seeks to capture the heart of Dylan’s practice. Arnoff reiterates how Dylan’s personal sovereignty mirrors that of the wandering minstrel whose weary witness of this world makes him a morally perceptive everyman. Dylan emerges from About Man & God & Law as an iconoclastic seeker whose “public dream of identity encourages more dreamers to dream their own selves” (32). The best teachers “ensure that you do” (83). Dylan is a great teacher because he cuts a type, the singer who writes their own songs, whose very occupation offered a form by which others can do as he did. Dylan’s lead inspired a whole host of singer-songwriters whose insights emerged by speaking from their solo stance. Arnoff exposes the wisdom a fan can find in the Dylan songbook, whether in the artistic model he sets or the sageness of his lyrics.

 

Arnoff doesn’t demonstrate that Dylan thinks such profundity is his purpose. As a part of the 2015 launch of Watson, a computer system developed by IBM, Dylan was told in a television commercial that spectral AI had metabolized all his songs and concluded: “Your major themes are that time passes and love fades.” “That sounds about right,” Dylan replied. We learn he did so “with a smile” (33). When Richard F. Thomas explored Why Bob Dylan Matters (2017), he argued that one of the reasons Bob Dylan matters is the “ability to capture with compelling artistry the universal human emotion that comes with absence, and with memory of a place lost.”[4] To quote Dylan, “Everything passes, everything changes.” In Dylan’s songs the speaker often wishes things didn’t change, but remains unable to stop them from doing so. Dylan’s lyrics often invoke the memory of good love, but little hope for love. Arnoff says, “Love, then, is a holy mystery, which requires us to invite into our intimacies something greater than ourselves in order for us to feel and be something greater” (54). Though this is a true idea with which many can agree, I’m not sure it’s Dylan, as opposed to Arnoff, who is singing such truth into being.

 

“Dylan does not seek that kind of comfort,” Arnoff writes. “He doesn’t want to be swallowed up by anyone or anything. In a practical way, he simply keeps moving” (157). What Arnoff doesn’t resolve is how someone like Dylan, so resistant to getting lost in the mystery, or to giving himself over to something greater than himself, offers words of truth about love. Perhaps it isn’t that Dylan gives such wisdom. Maybe, instead, he inspires others to name it in their process of resolving the riddles Dylan tells.

 

[1] Christine McCarthy McMorris, “The Varieties of Dylan’s Religious Experience”, Religion in the News 14:2 (Fall 2012), 26.

[2] Scott M. Marshall’s Bob Dylan: A Spiritual Life (Washington, DC: WND Books, 2017), 239-242.

[3] Quoted in Ian Bell, Time out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (New York: Pegasus, 2013), 486.

[4] Richard F. Thomas, Why Bob Dylan Matters (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2017), 191.

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REVIEW OF My Greenwich Village: Dave, Bob, and Me

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Terri Thal, My Greenwich Village: Dave, Bob, and Me, McNidder & Grace (2023), 272 pp.

REVIEW BY Freddy Cristóbal Dominguez, University of Arkansas

 

We’re told “don’t judge a book by its cover,” but that’s where we start, it’s where meaning begins.

 

The one for Terri Thal’s My Greenwich Village: Dave, Bob, and Me is telling. On it, we see three people walking down a Greenwich Village street. Their expressions reveal a semblance of naturalism, betraying different levels of bemusement. Smack center and in the foreground, head tilted down, with what might be the beginnings of a smirk: Bob Dylan. Behind him, and to the right, Dave Van Ronk looks like he is giggly or at the tail end of a good laugh. Behind them both and to the left Terri Thal looks to the side, maybe saying something, or at least conveying something to an absent other – in this case Suze Rotolo who has been cropped out of the original picture. After a quick look, the viewer might assume that the book is about the central figure displayed here – Dylan – certainly not Thal who seems to recede and blur.

 

I don’t know what inspired this choice of cover, but at least part of the logic must have been commercial: Dylan sells books. This logic must have also been behind the book’s title, which boasts his name prominently, even if he – unlike Van Ronk – is not really a central figure. By sharing title space with two men and through the marginalization of Thal’s image, the author appears somewhat diminished.

 

Crass commercialism aside, the cover also foreshadows a tension throughout the book. Although Thal self-assesses as an independent, tough woman it’s often hard to see her separate from her many attachments. This is clear from the start. Chapter 1 (“Where I Came From”) begins with a quote she attributes to John Wynn: “‘you were the first woman we knew who had balls’” (1). Wynn’s comments were, as Thal tells us, a testament to her singularity in the 50s and 60s folk scene: she was not an “object” as so many women were, “but a participant in a world of music, excitement, political passion, and fun.” This is a testament to an undoubtedly forceful personality and unrepentant individualism, but her story, which culminates with her arrival on the folk scene, is also a testament to the ways the strictures of patriarchy mitigate or partly subvert agency. In almost the same breath as her initial introduction, she explains that after meeting Van Ronk, she struggled to carve out her independence, having invested her “personal self into Dave’s career.” This was a core problem that, it would seem, she never completely overcame. Although she was at times the breadwinner, Thal’s career trajectory was initially tied to him – she got her start as his manager before she went on to manage other folk acts. Moreover, Van Ronk appears at various points as her protector. In a sexist village scene, it was helpful to have Van Ronk’s “tacit assumption that I should be included anywhere I wanted to be.” (93).

 

Of course, this is a memoir and as such the author expects the reader to care about her most. She starts with her earliest days in Brooklyn where she seems to have had a relatively stable, more-or-less loving household. However, she is forthright about tensions with her mother: she doesn’t remember receiving a maternal hug, or being told “I love you.” Moreover, Thal seems to have initially assimilated some of her mother’s pessimism. She recalls how her mother had never wanted to have a girl because “being a woman stinks.” She believed they always ended up being screwed (93). Thal reveals more than once how she herself did not want to be thought of as a woman, how, at first, her desire for being thought of as a man frayed relationships with other women, and even how, at least once, her will to reject feminine stereotypes ensured she would make a bad business decision. Although her publishing company, Obscure Music, held the copyright over some of Van Ronk’s music, she did not seek to collect royalties after they divorced because she wanted to establish her independence at all costs.

 

She might have achieved independence, but Thal’s book is about belonging. In her late teens she started to explore her identity by becoming immersed in social causes, first with her participation in the Young Socialist League and then with so many acronyms to come. In an interesting section, she reveals that she had been surveilled by the local police force and even the FBI. She tells of a day in 1957 when FBI officers stopped her, presumably to get information about other socialists. She was spooked by the fact that they knew information about her sister and her family and was scared when they threatened to tell her parents about her left-wing activities. In 1960, when she was part of the American Committee for the Fourth International (later the Workers League), her phone was tapped. There were further incidents such as this until the 1980s.

 

Despite challenges, Thal was not, and is not, deterred from activist movements. She has consistently believed in and has been insistent on various socialist ideologies, which revolved around a simple philosophy: “every man, woman, and child on this planet should have enough food, water, shelter, healthcare and basic amenities to live comfortably.” But these objectives were most fulfilling and most practical in complex social settings, in structured collectives. And thus the quasi-trauma of separation from the Trotskyist Workers League, which had become restrictive and singularly dogmatic: “Without an organization, even though I still had the Marxist tool, I felt lonely and politically insecure” (162).

 

Much of Thal’s book unfolds relationally. Her story is as much about whom she knew as who she is. Perhaps most bizarrely, in a sort of appendix, she simply provides a list of people she knew in the ‘50s and ‘60s (189-194). Aside from this (long) list, we have other more narrative lists describing the kids she taught during a stint as a substitute teacher, neighborhood friends, and, of course, all those she hung out with during her years in the folk scene – clients, performers, and house guests.

 

The Village folk-scene comes off as tight knit. Pushing back against the Coen Brothers’ representation of the period in their Inside Llewyn Davis, Thal rejects the notion that the Village was unpleasant and cutthroat. “Both before and while there were places to work in New York, the folk music world was professionally and personally supportive” (86). There was an aura of respect among fellow-travelers manifest in clubs where performances were held in almost rapt silence (mostly) out of an unwritten code of etiquette and respect. The sites of these performances, especially the coffee houses “really were a community” (92).

 

How did women fit into this community? Thal insists that the folk scene was not infected with the grossest forms of misogyny – she says it was not a “sexist scene” (86). Elsewhere she says that there was no “discrimination” against women. At the same time, however, she notes how the few women who were part of that folk movement were thought of differently. For example, “there was sort of an assumption that there were factors distinguishing the female folk singers from one another in ways that were never considered for the men” (101). Unlike male performers, women (Carolyn Hester, Judy Collins, Joan Baez) had to be pitted against each other, a dynamic that I wish Thal had described further.

 

Thal explains that, unlike what people might assume or believe, sexual exchanges were not the ways to climb up the ladder. Still, just beneath the surface there might have been a form of harassment (as we would call it today) that was part of the scene. She tells us that Carolyn Hester told her many stories about how other performers insistently propositioned her. She also speaks from personal experience about an encounter with Clarence Hood – a manager of The Gaslight – who had asked her “to have a sexual interlude.” Though she refused, he was insistent. She eventually ran away in horror, telling Van Ronk “the fucker tried to get me to go down on him” (96). She insists, though, that it was not a professional exchange, or that it did not imply a possibility of professional benefit; he was so forward “because he was drunk and he happened to be there and I was sexually appealing” (96).

 

There are moments where Thal reveals how segregated things could be. This is most obvious in the severe gender imbalance she mentions almost in passing. But in other, perhaps less profound ways, she describes a fair share of exclusive petulance. Thal recalls how she and Van Ronk would occasionally go to the American Youth Hostel to make some music, but looked snidely upon those outdoorsy, square dancing folks. Van Ronk called them “Wee people” (50). The East-West divide was also part of that culture as Thal recalls that Van Ronk hated the idea of California, “woo woo land,” though he eventually had to head there to make some cash. Funnily – though I don’t think this was the intent – Thal reveals that they didn’t restrict themselves to the Village, but she remembers that there was not much need to go to midtown or uptown Manhattan, a distance that apparently seemed like an excursion in those days. Less amusing is the fact that the folk scene was complicit in restructuring and, arguably, destroying a former way of life as clubs marginalized and even excised the Italian-American community that had once populated the Village.

 

Out of the many, Thal shines a (brief chapter-long) spotlight on Bob Dylan. Overall, he comes across as a creature both immured in and resistant to the culture he plopped into after his Minnesota years. He sought friendship from Van Ronk and Thal, but he never warmed to their political slant – though they tried. He was earnest in his musical interests, but sometimes seemed aloof.

 

Thal rehearses some well-known stories about Dylan that (to this reader) function as reminders that the folk world could be less than respectful and more cutthroat. There are, predictably, thefts: Van Ronk’s arrangement of “House of the Rising Sun” for his first record and Paul Clayton’s (copyrighted) “Who’s Gonna Buy Your Ribbons (When I’m Gone)” for Dylan’s own “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.” In the same column of jerkish behaviors, Thal speculates about the Dylan-Ochs sometimes-nasty rivalry, which she concludes (following Van Ronk’s analysis) was “less about who was a better songwriter than about who was going to become rich and famous” (136).

 

In what is ultimately a splotchy set of reminiscences, perhaps the most interesting and compelling bit has to do with managing Dylan. She explains how hard it was – at the very start at least – for people to take Dylan seriously. When she went to Manny Rubin, owner of the Second Fret in Philadelphia, he asked “‘Why should I hire a Jack Elliott imitation?’” (139). When she went to Club 47 in Cambridge, they said “‘He’s too freaky for a folk music audience’” (140). Thal scrambled and did get him gigs, sometimes to uninspiring results. But even amid relative failures, she oversaw a period during which Dylan honed his craft before being “discovered” by John Hammond of Columbia records.

 

Perhaps most important for the history books, during this hustling period, she was the one who recorded the famous Gaslight demo, which later became a coveted bootleg.

 

In the end, Thal avoids sentimentalities. Dylan, after his first record contract, told her he was going to be managed by Albert Grossman, something she had mixed feelings about, but supported. (Dylan had not told her that he had gotten a contract with Columbia at the time). She reflects on how Dylan increasingly lost touch with the Village gang, how some have accused him of being ungrateful. Thal disagrees. When someone moves from one job to another, colleagues seldom stay in touch. That’s just how it goes.

 

Ultimately, Dylan barely matters, what matters is Thal’s important place in the Village folk scene during its most vital phase. Still, her story seems underdone. Her descriptions of the times are surface-level, often in the form of, as mentioned before, lists or quick anecdotes. At some points the book feels like a resume of jobs completed. To be sure, there are moments of bracing honesty: her brief discussion of geriatric sex, for example, and her to-the-point assessment of various situations. But overall, I closed the book thinking that there was probably more to it.

 

This memoir is a valuable historical document. It is a first-hand account of Thal’s experiences at a pivotal moment in American history; it is, more broadly, a chronicle of a life well-lived. But historical documents need not conform to the highest ideals of their specific genres; all that matters is that they exist.

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REVIEW OF The Complete Budokan 1978

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

REVIEW BY Erin C. Callahan, San Jacinto College 

 

“Someday I Will Be Back to Reclaim It”

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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REVIEW OF Pledging My Time

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

REVIEW BY Eyolf Østrem

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Planned Chaos

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

The Film Director

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

The Encyclopedia

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

The Book

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

The Biography

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

 

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

 

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

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REVIEW OF Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine

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

REVIEW BY Alessandro Carrera, University of Houston

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

[5] Brinkley, 586.

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