Why Bob Dylan Matters Read online

  Throughout December 1974, as my first semester as a Ph.D. student was drawing to a close, I regularly stopped in at the local record store on campus to pick up Dylan’s new album, Blood on the Tracks, unaware that Columbia Records had held up its release. My pilgrimages to the record store became part of the rhythm of life, and I made some friends in the process, leading to late nights throughout my Ann Arbor years with music and revolution in the air at a blues club called the Blind Pig, or the Del Rio, which offered free jazz on Sunday evenings. The Ann Arbor Blues Festival had debuted a few years before I got to campus, in the fall of 1969, and featured artists like Muddy Waters, B. B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Son House, and Lightnin’ Hopkins. There were funding issues and by 1974 the festival had finished its run, but there was still good music from local bands and musicians attracted to that town’s entertainment market of more than thirty thousand students.

  As fans would later discover, Blood on the Tracks was delayed because Dylan had gone back to Minnesota, where he rerecorded some of the songs. But in due course Blood on the Tracks turned up in January 1975 and soon took its place right up there with Blonde on Blonde, a new classic for a new decade. The characters of that earlier album had been mysterious and lovely: Louise and Johanna in “Visions of Johanna,” the sad-eyed lady in “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” The first girlfriend of my imagination had bits of each even before she materialized. After those eight years, things had changed with the romantic visions of Blood on the Tracks: “Situations have ended sad / Relationships have all been bad,” Dylan sang on “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” He later denied that the album was about getting divorced from Sara Dylan. Sara Lownds had married Dylan on November 22, 1965, and their divorce would come almost three years after the songs were written. But there is no denying that with Blood on the Tracks, the art and the beauty seem to come more from a sense of hurt and loss, and seldom is experience not an ingredient of art, as Dylan himself has said. All these years later, the emotion in those songs is as palpable as ever, in the studio versions and thousands of versions recorded in concert. That is what literature, song, and the way they work on memory and experience conspire to give us. Poetry and music are compensations for the pain that comes along with the human condition, and they are what can help us along. That’s what Virgil’s words on the Nobel medal mean, honoring those “who enriched our lives with the newfound arts they forged.”

  The music that Dylan produced in the eight years between these two great albums indicates anything other than decline. But it’s hard to articulate the disappointment back through those years that the particular sound of Blonde on Blonde had gone away, never to return. The music he made between that album and Blood on the Tracks was all part of Dylan’s continuing evolution, particularly in mid-1967 as he worked with members of the Band, in seclusion in upstate New York. Some of this material was released on The Basement Tapes in 1975, and much of the rest was long available on unofficial bootleg versions, eventually to be released in 2014 in a six-CD set. Then came the relative simplicity of language on the 1967 album John Wesley Harding, with its biblical engagement and old-school feel. Here Dylan sang with a more spare accompaniment, turning away from the hip, mod sixties to a sound that seemed rooted in nineteenth-century Americana, a return to a new, creative version of the folk traditions that had always been in his blood. Eighteen months later, with the 1969 release of Nashville Skyline, Dylan seemed to be creating a new genre, now inventing country rock, as he had invented folk rock a few years earlier. The next year saw release of his album Self Portrait, and then New Morning. Self Portrait was hit particularly hard by critics, including by music historian Greil Marcus, who famously opened his Rolling Stone review with the words “What is this shit?” It wasn’t until 2013, when Dylan put out The Bootleg Series Volume 10: Another Self Portrait, with alternate, live, and overdub-free versions, that the brilliance of this period truly came to light, as Marcus himself would eventually acknowledge.

  But the fact is that in 1975, when Dylan put out Blood on the Tracks, the world changed for those who cared about his music, maybe in part because of the sublimation of life experience into art, which is the essence of the album. Gone for now was the “old, weird America,” as Marcus had so well described it, of the songs Dylan was laying down with the Band. Gone were the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century worlds of bootlegging, hoboing, and minstrel boys on Self Portrait, gone too the country pie of Nashville Skyline. And gone was the white picket fence that New Morning had tried to build around Bob and Sara Dylan and their four children, against the odds.

  Many of the songs on Blood on the Tracks were constructed through the principles and practice of painting, a skill and insight he picked up from Norman Raeben, a painting teacher in New York City, in early 1974. To be sure, Dylan attributed to Raeben the very comeback that the album represented.

  I was convinced I wasn’t going to do anything else, and I had the good fortune to meet a man in New York City who taught me how to see. He put my mind and my hand and my eye together in a way that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt . . . when I started doing it the first album I made was Blood on the Tracks.

  Dylan is characteristically vague on the actual methods or techniques, and one could claim that a song like “Visions of Johanna” from 1966 already seemed to reveal painterly qualities, but it is true that the vivid narrative technique in a song like “Simple Twist of Fate” from the new album gave it new effects that catch what he is talking about:

  A saxophone someplace far off played

  As she was walkin’ by the arcade

  As the light bust through a beat-up shade where he was wakin’ up

  She dropped a coin into the cup of a blind man at the gate

  And forgot about a simple twist of fate

  In a radio interview with folksinger Mary Travers in April 1975, Dylan said of Blood on the Tracks, “A lot of people tell me they enjoy that album. It’s hard for me to relate to that. I mean, it, you know, people enjoying the type of pain, you know?” That’s the point, as Dylan, here deliberately disingenuous, well knew. His artistic genius—in his words, music, and voice—create pain, but precisely because of the brilliance of his art on this album, these songs produce recompense for the loss of love and the memory of what had once been. This is the quite intentional goal of songs like “Simple Twist of Fate,” “Idiot Wind,” or “If You See Her, Say Hello.” These songs also hold the trace of a hope that all might not be lost: in “Simple Twist of Fate” the man “Hunts her down by the waterfront docks where the sailors all come in / Maybe she’ll pick him out again,” this also giving the point of view of the character in the song; or the switch at the end of “Idiot Wind” from “You’re an idiot, babe” to “We’re idiots, babe.” Sharing the blame; or at the end of “If You See Her, Say Hello,” “Tell her she can look me up, if she’s got the time”—though in other versions, any hope is pretty remote, as we’ll see. To have lived through more than forty years with all of the music and poetry of these songs, from the album and in performance, is a source of good fortune and of genuine pleasure and deep contentment, even—or especially—with the pain the album so exquisitely expresses.

  Much of the album focuses on nighttime, the time of day when the relationships in its songs seem to fall apart, perhaps also the case with Dylan’s real-life relationships. The first line of the first song of the album, “Tangled Up in Blue,” seems to start on a bright note: “Early one mornin’ the sun was shinin’ / I was layin’ in bed,” but within a moment that feeling is illusory, as the relationship is suddenly no more: “Wonderin’ if she’d changed at all / if her hair was still red.” The singer’s early- morning memory eventually gets back to the evening breakup, after driving out west in a car that the couple abandons as they “Split up on a dark sad night / Both agreeing it was best.” The next song, “Simple Twist of Fate,” begins with a twilight encounter, now in third-person narration: “They sat together in the park
/ As the evening sky grew dark.” After a one-night stand that could in the narrator’s mind have led to something, in the morning he finds that she’s gone: “He woke up, the room was bare / He didn’t see her anywhere.” In “Meet Me in the Morning,” morning and night frame the song, which begins with “Meet me in the morning, 56th and Wabasha,” and ends with the “sun sinkin’ like a ship,” and in between “They say the darkest hour is right before the dawn.” The year after Bob and Sara Dylan’s divorce, finalized on June 29, 1977, Dylan seemed to recall this aspect of the album’s songs: “I don’t have anything but darkness to lose. I’m way beyond that.” A good deal of the melancholic and painful power of this album, whatever the realities of Dylan’s personal situation, comes from these moments, all shadows in the night, a time of day that would continue to be the temporal setting and condition for the best of Dylan’s song.

  In the beautiful “If You See Her, Say Hello,” the narrator’s memories of what has been lost in the relationship also come as night falls, in the second verse: “But to think of how she left that night, it still brings me a chill,” and then again in the final verse: “Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past.” I single out this song for its intense lyric qualities, and not so much for the painterly qualities so apparent elsewhere on the album. The gift of lyric poetry resides in its ability to precisely capture the condition of individuals in their sorrows, joys, loves and losses, desires, hatreds and jealousies. Such poetry is intimately connected to song—again, lyric from lyre, the guitar of the Greeks and Romans. Like song, it enables us to read ourselves into the situations that the poetic voice creates in aesthetically compelling modes. “If You See Her, Say Hello” is another such lyric song-poem. Its five verses are an elaboration of the title, a request by the singer for someone to say hello to a woman who walked out on him, its first verse closing with the rawness of the singer’s feelings: “She might think that I’ve forgotten her, don’t tell it isn’t so.”

  This song actually exists in two versions, and in performance with many variations. The first version that Dylan released, on Blood on the Tracks, as quoted above, was actually recorded on December 30, 1974, effectively revising and for many years canceling out an earlier version, which was recorded in September 1974 and eventually released in 1991 on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3. In this version, the messenger was a rival, at least in the singer’s imagination: “If you’re makin’ love to her, kiss her for the kid.” The change makes a world of difference, as the element of jealousy complicates things and makes it a different song, as do multiple other changes in yet other versions, including the first known live performance, at Lakeland, Florida, on April 18, 1976, during the second Rolling Thunder Revue, as the Dylans’ marriage was falling apart: “If you’re making love to her, watch it from the rear / You’ll never know when I’ll be back, or liable to appear.” Other parts of the song change in different performances over the years, replaced by brilliant absurdist lines, “Her eyes were blue, her hair was too, her voice was sort of soft,” or a brutal closing to the song in concert in 2002: “If she’s passing back this way, and it couldn’t be too quick / Please don’t mention her name to me, you mention her name it just make me sick.” And the third stanza is gone altogether, absent from official collections of Dylan’s lyrics. But what I heard all those years ago in Ann Arbor was the pure, lyrical version from the 1975 album, and that’s the one that has stayed with me over the years: “Tell her she can look me up if she’s got the time.”

  LEAVING AND COMING BACK TO DYLAN

  In the fall of 1977, I left Ann Arbor for Cambridge, Massachusetts, to begin teaching in the green pastures of Harvard University, about fifteen years after Dylan met folksinger Eric Von Schmidt in those same pastures. By then my Dylan collection had been topped up. Dylan’s Muse also seemed to have returned in what looked somewhat like a second classic phase, matching the first from a decade earlier. In early 1976, he had released Desire—not quite up to Blood on the Tracks, but fine enough. With Dylan’s next album, Street Legal, appearing in 1978, the winds of change were again beginning to shift in his music. The opening lines of its first song, “Changing of the Guards,” are vivid and allusive: “Sixteen years / Sixteen banners united over the fields,” inviting the listener to look back those sixteen years to the beginning of Dylan’s career, and take stock of how far he’d come and think in the apocalyptic lyrics of the song about where he might be headed: “But Eden is burning, either brace yourself for elimination / Or else your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards.” There are some good songs on this album, chiefly for me “Is Your Love in Vain,” but the album as a whole was flawed, as Dylan clearly felt by the best index available: only one song, “Señor,” truly entered the repertoire of Dylan performances, and most he didn’t play after 1978.

  For the most devoted Dylan fans who have followed his music through each new stage, his songs and all they evoke become a part of us, with each new album adding another layer. For other fans, he effectively disappeared at various points, starting in 1964 or 1965, quitting their world of folk and protest songs to create a different kind of art. To these fans, Dylan had sold out to a hipster look, and had traded acoustic for electric, with all that connoted for the causes with which they had identified him. But what he gave them in those first two years endured, along with the bittersweet memory of what he had been to them, kept alive by new covers of those particular songs by generations of folksingers who came after. Some disappointed fans stuck around through 1966, hoping that Dylan’s sound, which alternated in performances of that year between solo acoustic and electric with supporting musicians, would return to the former. When it didn’t, these people booed at his concerts, and eventually either came to see what was happening there and found something in it that made sense, or decided to leave for good.

  The next crop of Dylan fans to take their leave did so for different reasons, in 1979, when the changing of the guards had come to pass as he started writing and singing Christian songs, often preaching from the stage about hellfire and damnation before launching into his performance. That version of Dylan just didn’t fit in with where they were in their lives or what they believed, or didn’t believe in, or with the Dylan they thought they knew from 1966 or 1975 or some other moment. And so it has continued with Dylan’s constant evolution through the decades, with some fans disembarking and others coming back on board, and newer, younger ones signing up for the first time. It is an essential part of Dylan’s genius that he is constantly evolving as an artist. This is not true of the artists of similar longevity, say Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Van Morrison, or Bruce Springsteen. Inevitably that constant evolving creates periods of experimentation and exploration, some less successful than others, but always moving restlessly toward something, and with the music of the last twenty years now having reached, and sustained, a third classic period.

  Dylan’s art works in elemental ways, not just through his words and music and voice, but also through his look and appearance. This is also part of his art, from his look of youthful, potent frailty in his early twenties, to his hip and sexualized look on the 1966 tour, through to the powerful maturity of his middle years. His look during the Rolling Thunder Revue tours of 1975–76, which you can see on YouTube and in the 1976 TV movie Hard Rain, is part of the appeal of those performances: 1970s hipster in his mid-thirties, dressed in denim and leather, sometimes sporting a bandana or turban, sometimes with an ornate floral arrangement in his hatband, frequently with white face paint, or with a straggly beard. And into recent years with his elegant, expressive, weather-beaten face, and his scrupulous attention to costume: outfits and hats that at times turn him into a Civil War officer, at times a cowboy, at times the vaudeville performer. In all of these evolutions there is an enigmatic presence that can’t quite be comprehended or described. With Dylan, everything is performance, and all aspects of performance—the words, the music, the voice, the bands, and the look—coming
together to create the unique phenomenon that is Bob Dylan.

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  DYLAN AND ANCIENT ROME: “THAT’S WHERE I WAS BORN”

  GOIN’ BACK TO ROME / THAT’S WHERE I WAS BORN.

  —BOB DYLAN, “GOING BACK TO ROME,” 1963

  IF YOU WERE BORN AROUND THIS TIME OR WERE LIVING AND ALIVE, YOU COULD FEEL THE OLD WORLD GO AND THE NEW ONE BEGINNING. IT WAS LIKE PUTTING THE CLOCK BACK TO WHEN BC BECAME AD.

  —BOB DYLAN, CHRONICLES: VOLUME ONE, P. 28

  In March 2007, I traveled to the University of Minnesota for a symposium in Bob Dylan’s home state titled Highway 61 Revisited: Dylan’s Road from Minnesota to the World. The conference was designed to coincide with the exhibition Bob Dylan’s American Journey, 1956–66, concurrently taking place at the university’s Weisman Art Museum. Many of the best-known Dylan scholars were in attendance: Michael Gray, C. P. Lee, Greil Marcus, Christopher Ricks, Stephen Scobie. The symposium was evidence that Dylan had become part of the academic mainstream. But that fact alone was not what drew me to the north woods along with the other Dylanologists. It was something more: the opportunity to come together to discuss Dylan in this place where his genius had first come into being, at the university where Bob Zimmerman was technically enrolled in 1959–60, just a few blocks from Dinkytown and the coffeehouses where he began in earnest to practice and perfect the art he would take out into the world.