Dylan

The same month I heard James Baldwin speak, April 1963, Columbia Records released The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. I bought it immediately and it totally blew my mind. Baldwin and Dylan were two back-to-back karate chops that changed my life forever.

By articulating what I was feeling, Dylan helped me better understand my world and my self. His words helped crystallize my worldview. Three years older than me, it seems he went through the same “periods” before I went through them: politics, drugs, celebration of creativity, rural retreat, spirituality, traumatic breakup, substance abuse, returning to the roots, getting grounded, facing mortality. Throughout, our values have remained much the same and he’s been my guide and mentor.

I know no one who has been as loyal to Dylan as I have. Unlike most of his fans, I never fell away. The form of his expression changed, but the substance remained the same. If he dies before I do, it will break my heart.

Still writing brilliantly, his last album, Tempest, includes rich, complex songs that prompt me to plumb the depths of their meaning like many of his earlier albums did. And his Never-Ending Tour band is incredibly tight, often offering interpretations that give songs a whole new meaning.

As did High Noon, Dylan took his genre to a whole new level with an intensity and realism never seen before. And he did it with lyrics and music that have had a profound influence. As Bruce Springsteen told the audience when Dylan was inducted at the first Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame ceremony, “Bob Dylan did for our minds what Elvis did for our bodies. After ‘Like A Rollin’Stone,’ we could write about anything.”

In his memoir, Chronicles, Dylan explains what led him to write the way he writes. He had been drawn to the blues and traditional folk music by their depth and authenticity. He wanted to face reality, talk about it honestly, and address meaningful matters. “The highest purpose of art is to inspire,” he said in an interview early in his career. Then, after writing some songs in the style of Woody Guthrie, he saw A Three-Penny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil and was moved to write with deep passion as did Brecht, often using narratives to tell stories.

One Brecht song in that musical likely had a strong impact on Dylan, as it has on so many others.  In “Pirate Jenny,” the narrator is a maid scrubbing floors in a hotel in “a crummy Southern town.” Gentlemen gawk at her and boss her around. A mysterious black freighter appears in the harbor and begins to fire its guns, destroying every building except the hotel. Men from the freighter come into town, chain people up, bring them to the maid, and ask her, “Kill them now or later?” The suspense builds. Eventually she replies, “Right now!” Then she boards the ship and leaves town. When Nina Simone, an African-American, sings that song, the passion is palpable. Dylan told himself he wanted to write like that.

In the liner notes for his John Wesley Harding album, Dylan tells a story that reflects his determination to tap deep feelings. Since Frank is “the key” to understanding, the three “jolly” kings ask Frank to “open it up for us” and Frank replies, “And just how far would you like to go in?” The first king replies, “Not too far but just far enough so’s we can say that we’ve been there.” So Frank rips off his shirt, waves it in the air, stamps out a light bulb that falls on the floor, punches his fist through a window, and asks, “Far enough?” The second king says, “Yeah, sure,” and the three kings leave happy. Frank’s wife asks Frank, “Why didn’t you just tell them you were a moderate man and leave it at that instead of goosing yourself all over the room?” Frank replies, “Patience, Vera.”

Like Frank, Dylan wants to take you as deep as you’re able and willing to go, recognizing that “the human mind can only stand so much,”  as he wrote in “Times Have Changed.” But like Frank, Dylan won’t do it in a moderate way. He constantly pushes limits.

Brecht’s influence on Dylan is particularly clear in two songs on Freewheelin’. After indicting the “Masters of War” for numerous crimes, Dylan declares “you ain’t worth the blood that runs in your veins,” “even Jesus would never forgive what you do,” and concludes:

And I hope that you die
And your death’ll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave
’Til I’m sure that you’re dead

That song challenged me. I loved the whole album, but it took me many years to see the symbolism in those lyrics and accept the anger.

The other song on that album that reflects Brecht is “A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall,” widely interpreted as having been prompted by the Cuban Missile Crisis. In that song, the narrator reports on his surreal experiences in a post-apocalyptic world. When asked, “What are you going to do now, my blue-eyed son?”, he declares:

I’m a-goin’ back out ’fore the rain starts a-fallin’
I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest…
And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it
Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’
But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’

That determination to face reality deeply and accept it, including the fact of death, remained a hallmark of his work. But when other artists covered his work, they sometimes left out the strongest lyrics, as did Leon Russell when he recorded “A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall,” and didn’t include the last two lines!

The best expression of Dylan’s worldview may be captured in a long poem, “Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie,” that he recited at a concert in that fateful month of April 1963. It includes the following passages:

When yer head gets twisted and yer mind grows numb
…
And you start gettin' chills and yer jumping from sweat
And you're lookin' for somethin' you ain't quite found yet
…
And there's something on yer mind you wanna be saying
That somebody someplace oughta be hearin'
But it's trapped on yer tongue and sealed in yer head
…
And you say to yourself just what am I doin'
…
Why am I walking, where am I running
What am I saying, what am I knowing
…
Who am I helping, what am I breaking
What am I giving, what am I taking
…
And you know that it's something special you're needin'
…
You need something to open your eyes
You need something to make it known
That it's you and no one else that owns
That spot that yer standing, that space that you're sitting
That the world ain't got you beat
That it ain't got you licked
It can't get you crazy no matter how many
Times you might get kicked
…
And yer trouble is you know it too good
‘Cause you look an' you start getting the chills
…
‘Cause you can't find it on a dollar bill
And it ain't on Macy's window sill
And it ain't on no rich kid's road map
And it ain't in no fat kid's fraternity house
…
And it ain't in the marshmallow noises of the chocolate cake voices
That come knockin' and tappin' in Christmas wrappin'
Sayin' ain't I pretty and ain't I cute and look at my skin
Look at my skin shine, look at my skin glow
Look at my skin laugh, look at my skin cry
When you can't even sense if they got any insides
These people so pretty in their ribbons and bows
…
And you yell to yourself and you throw down yer hat
Sayin', "Christ do I gotta be like that
Ain't there no one here that knows where I'm at
Ain't there no one here that knows how I feel
Good God Almighty
THAT STUFF AIN'T REAL"
…
You gotta look some other place
And where do you look for this hope that yer seekin'
…
And your feet can only walk down two kinds of roads
...
You can either go to the church of your choice
Or you can go to Brooklyn State Hospital
You'll find God in the church of your choice
You'll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital
…
And though it's only my opinion
I may be right or wrong
You'll find them both
In the Grand Canyon
At sundown

Those sentiments have infused all of Dylan’s work and express precisely what I too was feeling in April 1963. When in May of that year TV’s top-rated Ed Sullivan Show refused to let Dylan perform "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues,” which lampooned anti-Communist hysteria, he walked out of the rehearsal and endeared himself to me and countless others even more.

Dylan’s determination to face reality is reflected in a poem for the liner notes to Joan Baez in Concert, Part Two, which was released in 1963. In the poem, which touches on his relationship with Baez, Dylan reports:

Later yet in New York town
On my own terms I said with age
“The only beauty’s in the cracks and curbs
Clothed in robes a dust an’ grime”
…
An’ like a blind lover bold in flight
I shouted from inside my wounds
“The voice t’ speak for me an’ mine
Is the hard filthy gutter sound
For it’s only this that I can touch
An’ the only beauty I can feel.

But suddenly one night in Woodstock he finally accepted the beauty of Baez’ voice and affirmed the value of the immaterial when he decided:

I did not begin t’ touch
‘Til I finally felt what wasn’t there
Oh how feeble foolish small an’ sad
‘F me t’ think that beauty was
Only ugliness and muck
When it’s really jus’ a magic wand…

Though Dylan embraced Baez’ voice, he continued singing in his distinctive style that has irritated so many people. At Ridge House, where I boarded as a student, we had a sound system downstairs with speakers upstairs in the lounge and dining room. Having become a Dylan evangelist, I often played his music though others constantly complained about his voice.

Now that his greatness is widely acknowledged, I’d like to tell those guys, “I told you so.” It’s not the only time that I’ve been ahead of my time.

Though I’m far from certain about it, it is my belief that Dylan chooses to sing the way he sings – because it is more evocative. Rooted in the country blues, it elicits deeper feelings than most voices do. At one concert, Dylan welcomed John Lee Hooker to the stage and introduced him as “the godfather of our music.” When accepting a Grammy, referring to another country blues singer, he once said, “Like Robert Johnson said, ‘Our music will bust your brains.’” Listen to country blues singers and the Appalachian folk singers who influenced Dylan, and you often hear voices that aren’t “pretty.” It’s the “hard filthy gutter sound” Dylan admired. Listen to Tuvan throat singing, and you hear how singers can control their voice in remarkable, guttural ways. And notice how on some songs, Dylan does use a “pretty” voice, even on his last album as his voice is getting more craggy with age. Dylan once said his voice was different on Nashville Skyline because he had stopped smoking. But one can never be sure about anything Dylan tells an interviewer. So I believe Dylan sings the way he sings because he wants to sing that way. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

So I tire of hearing people complain about Dylan’s voice or how they have trouble understanding the lyrics at live performances. In the first place, it’s not necessary to catch the lyrics for a song to have an emotional impact. I love Mexican folk music even though I don’t understand the Spanish. Singers sometimes communicate a pre-verbal experience more strongly by not enunciating the lyric clearly. And when they consider it really important for the lyric to be understood, they make the words clear. So, in my mind, I say to them, “Just relax and feel the music. And listen to the songs at home and then you’ll know the lyrics well enough.”

And it irritates me when people complain when he performs a song with a new melody or in some other way offers a completely different interpretation. If you performed the same song so many times, wouldn’t you get bored doing it exactly the same way each time?

So I don’t take well to criticisms of Mr. Dylan. And I don’t care what he’s like as individual. It’s the art that matters to me, not the artist. I’m willing to admit, as he does, that his work in the 1980s fell off when he was drinking heavily. He even titled one album, Knocked Out Loaded, which probably reflected his condition at the time. But by and large, as far as I’m concerned, Dylan can do no wrong.

Dylan’s explicitly political phase continued in 1964 with his third album, The Times They Are A-Changin’, one of several albums that I rank as among his best. Solo with an acoustic guitar, almost every song presents strong social commentary and there is no surreal comedy to relieve the mood. “The Times They Are A-Changin’” is rightly well known. But all of the other songs are great as well. In “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” a starving farmer kills his wife, five children, and himself. “With God on Our Side” concludes, “You’ll have to decide / Whether Judas Iscariot ‘ Had God on his side… If God’s on our side / He’ll stop the next war.” “North Country Blues” laments a local mine moving to a South American town “where the miners word almost for nothing” because “They complained in the East, / They are paying too high” – long before outsourcing became a major issue. “Only a Pawn in Their Game” reveals how “A South politician preaches to the poor white man, ‘You got more than the blacks, don’t complain.’” In “When the Ship Comes In,” which Dylan and Baez sang at Dr, King’s “I Have a Dream” rally,” the prophetic narrator envisions the time when “And like Pharoah’s tribe, / They’ll be drowned in the tide / And like Goliath, they’ll be conquered.” And “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” draws on a news report of a rich man who killed his maid and received only a six-month sentence (“Now’s the time for your tears.”).

Never has one album contained so many powerful political statements. Someone once told the punk rockers, “You want anger? Check out early Dylan.” Listening to The Times They Are A-Changin’ over and over has deepened my resolve to do what I can to help correct social injustice.

And the liner notes for that album, titled “11 Outlined Epitaphs,” were almost as powerful. He reflects on:

when told t’ learn
what others know
in order to lead a soothin’ life
an’ t’ conquer many a brainwashed dream

He then experiences an epiphany that leads him to

not carin’ no more
what people knew about things
but rather how they felt about things
…
an’ I’m still on that road, Jim
…
where state lines don’t stand
an’ knowledge don’t count
when feelings are hurt
…
where is the party for those kind of feelings?
how’re are the gamblers that wheel and deal an’
shuffle ‘em around gonna be got outa the game?
from here in
beyond this
an’ from now on

Over the years, I’ve read that poem to others countless times, including one roommate who was going off to college.

Later that same year, 1964, Dylan suddenly indicated a major shift with the release of Another Side of Bob Dylan. It includes a wide variety of songs, but only one explicitly political statement, the brilliant “Chimes of Freedom.” But most importantly, with “My Back Pages,” he announced that he would not be a spokesperson for The Movement. Looking back on his past, he reports that he used ideas as his map, screamed lies that life is black and white, dreamed Romantic facts, memorized politics of ancient history, failed to fear that he’d become his own enemy in the instant that he preached, allowed abstract threats to deceive him into thinking he had something to protect, defined good and bad in terms quite clear, and concludes, "But I'm younger than that now," reflecting the wisdom of childhood.

Talk about a song that challenged me! It took me decades before I could fully accept that message. I had to re-read The Rebel by Albert Camus and other work like essays in the Raritan Review that critique “ideology” before I could understand that song. Dylan declared that he was an artist, not a propagandist. Many political activists did not appreciate it. Dave Van Ronk, Dylan’s mentor, said, “We thought he was naïve.” But now Van Ronk says, “We were the ones who were naïve.” But some still don’t get it. Many of the 60’s generation, left and right, remain hung up on black-and-white ideology, rather than a multi-variant perspective that appreciates the value of various points of view. Fortunately, the Millennial Generation is trending toward pragmatic idealism.

Dylan has continued to reveal many sides to his soul with the almost 500 songs posted on his website. But the one song that will always be dearest to me is “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding.”  Some of the stronger lines are:

It’s easy to see without looking too far
That not much is really sacred
...
For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Cultivate their flowers to be
Nothing more than something they invest in
...
While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society’s pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole
That he’s in
But I mean no harm nor put fault
On anyone that lives in a vault
But it’s alright, Ma, if I can’t please him
Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn’t talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony
...
My eyes collide head-on with stuffed
Graveyards, false gods, I scuff
At pettiness which plays so rough
Walk upside-down inside handcuffs
Kick my legs to crash it off
Say okay, I have had enough, what else can you show me?
And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine
But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only

Besides being one of his greatest, that song is dear to me because my mother saw him perform it live in February 1965 on The Les Crane Show. And she loved it!