By Tony Attwood
Editorial note: I regret to say I have had a major problem with the computers that run Untold Dylan, which means that, among other things, I am not receiving or able to send emails at the moment. I am hoping that service might be restored within the next few days, and that then I will be able to answer emails and publish articles I have missed.
In the meantime, I have found a way to write and publish another piece about Dylan’s work as a life-changing experience, and so that is what I can offer.
Previously in this series about Dylan songs that have changed my life, I wrote about
And now…
When I first heard “Foot of Pride” I remember thinking that if anyone had the right to be proud of his work as a songwriter, surely it was Bob Dylan. So what was he worrying about pride for?
(In fact, I answered that question some time later by coming to the conclusion that Bob has retained his ability to be critical about his own work and not just think that because he wrote it, it is good. But that leads to a different point, and I’ll come back to that another time.)
But when I first herd “Foot of Pride” I was immediately taken by it as at that time I was starting to believe in myself as a writer, for I was by then earning money from my writing and feeling rather proud about some of the books I had written, and indeed (since I worked for many years as a copywriter) some of the advertisements I had created.
And so I started to reflect on whether there is anything wrong with me feeling proud that I have written an advertisement or a book that has worked particularly well.
Thus, in trying to puzzle this out, I have sometimes wondered about “pride” and what it means. And I’ll continue giving myself as an example, since at least in this regard, I can give a real-life example of pride in one’s work. So what follows is a personal story – if you only want to read about Dylan, rather than how Dylan has affected me, you might want to move on to another piece.
While I was trying to develop my career as a writer, in order to survive financially, I taught music in secondary schools in London. Music was a compulsory subject up to the age of 14 for all pupils at that time, and as you might imagine, or even recall, the interest of most 11 to 14 year olds was not music of the classical, romantic tradition of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, but what was in the charts at the moment, or at that time in the case of children from West Indian backgrounds, the latest reggae songs that appealed to them.
There being a shortage of music teachers at the time, and the school being rather grateful they actually had managed to capture one, I was given the freedom to experiment a bit with my teaching, so I decided to try and teach teenagers how to write pop, rock and reggae songs. It worked fairly well, so I had the idea of writing my approach up as a school textbook. But realising my approach was rather unusual, I sent the result off to a small publisher of school music books.
And for the one and only time in my career as a I writer, I got back not just a standard rejection note (along the lines “not right for us but wish you well fin inding a publisher”) but a personal letter full of vitirol saying that I should not be wasting publishers valuable time with such rubbish, but should go into schools and see what msuic lessons were all about.
That was a bit upsetting, but I persevered, and instead of sending the manuscript to another small publisher, I sent it to the bigger publisher of school music books in my country – Oxford University Press – and within a week they wrote back saying, “This is the book we have been looking for”. After the fifth edition was published a couple of years later, I was invited along to open their new book warehouse as their “highest selling author” of the year. The income was pretty useful too.
Now that was many decades ago, but the memory remains, as a reminder that we are, of course, all entitled to our opinions, but they remain our opinions, nothing more.
And I have often thought of that turning point in my own life, in relation to Dylan’s “Foot of Pride” in the sense that one should never allow one’s prejudices to overwhelm one’s judgement, or indeed one’s sense of adventure. Of course, the small publisher had every right to reject my work, but he did not have the right to tell me to “do some research” before “wasting the publisher’s valuable time”.
That publisher was proud of being a publisher while feeling he knew what was going on in schools, but in terms of knowing what teachers might want he was wrong. He was being self-centred, in terms of simply believing his own views, which is exactly what Dylan’s song is about. For as soon as we believe our view is totally correct, we stop discussing, debating, and exchanging ideas.
My own view (which is only relevant here because I am writing about the impact this song had on me) is that religions would be fine if they didn’t try to convince me that they are right, and that I, in my atheism, am wrong. After all, I don’t bother those who believe, so why do they bother me?
But what really has affected me in relation to this song by Dylan is that it seemed so angry about the notion of “pride” in the sense of feeling that one is right and everyone else is wrong.
Now I know, obviously, that I spend a lot of time writing about Dylan songs and giving my personal view about his work, but that does not mean I can’t listen to and read other people’s views, and indeed sometimes change my own views. Likewise, I am proud of some of the books I have written, although on occasion I look back at some of my work and wonder why exactly I took a particular approach.
And really, I don’t feel angry about religious groups as long as they don’t try to tell me I will suffer if I don’t believe what they believe. And in this song, I felt that Bob really was addressing this point.
In my country (the UK) Sunday is by law a different day from the rest of the week. It is not just that Christian churches have their services on this day, but also that we have some laws which are Sunday specific. Not as many now as there were when I was a child, but still some. The justification is that I live in a Christian country, so there are some Christian-related rules and laws.
Now in England, we have a census every ten years, which it is compulsory to complete and in the last census, under half of the population (27.5 million people) described themselves as “Christian”. What was particularly interesting was that this was down by over 13% on the previous census ten years earlier.
37.2% of the respondents said “no religion”, as I did, which was 12% higher than those saying “no religion” ten years before. We are as a nation moving away from belief in religions, but we still have a state church, and specific rules about what may happen on a Sunday.
Meanwhile I find that Bob is definitely fired up here, with most of his anger being directed against religious hypocrites and those who use religion as a shield for their crimes. Maybe he was frustrated with the religious group he had got to know at the time and so he is engaged in questioning his own beliefs and the way others seek to impose their beliefs, and as we can hear in this song, Bob is getting rather angry.
We all think we know things, but quite often we don’t. My appreciation of the song is not to do with the lyrics, although I really do love the music; it is to do with the concept of pride. The concept of feeling so strongly that one knows about “it” whatever “it” is that one can dismiss anything else instantly without even thinking.
My series of books for Oxford University Press not only earned me a fair amount of money, enabling me to pay off my debts, but also gave me confidence that just because one person says my writing was rubbish, that does not mean the next person will say the same.
Since then, I have had the privilege to meet many artists in many different fields of art, and the knowledge I have gained from them has resolved itself into the four lines below. Some are incredibly generous with their time and very unassuming about their creativity. They have helped me keep my pride under control, at least to some degree.
Maybe to some degree I have managed to turn away from having too much pride in my own work. Or as Bob says, “ Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me. I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand.” That is, I think, the answer to the problems brought by pride.