False Prophet (2020) part 3: Right up there in the stratosphere

False Prophet (2020) part 3

by Jochen Markhorst

III Right up there in the stratosphere

Hello Mary Lou – Hello Miss Pearl
My fleet footed guides from the underworld
No stars in the sky shine brighter than you
You girls mean business and I do too

He certainly does show hints of some missionary drive. Around the “Sinatra albums” (Shadows In The Night, Fallen Angels and Triplicate, 2015-17), Dylan stresses that he considers the albums already successful when the names of men like Rodgers and Hart, Hammerstein, Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn enter a new generation, and prefers to direct attention to the songs. “What me and my band are basically doing is uncovering them,” Dylan declares while discussing the first album, Shadows In The Night, “lifting them out of the grave and bringing them into the light of day.”

The same sympathetic reflex we see on other fronts over the years. Dylan brings men like Ronnie Hawkins and his forgotten childhood hero Billy Lee Riley on stage; takes his hat off to Link Wray and Chuck Berry and dozens of others; as DJ of Theme Time Radio Hour he seems to make a sport of fishing obscure country and folk artists, blues heroes and song poets from the Waters of Oblivion; in his autobiography Chronicles he elaborates for pages on more and less obscure musicians and songs, and his thousands of setlists are littered with tributes to dusted songs and discarded colleagues. And the apotheosis, of course, is The Philosophy Of Modern Song, Dylan’s exuberant ode to dozens of songs, writers and composers in the form of 66 essays.

Chapter 4 of the essay collection is devoted to the song “Take Me From This Garden Of Evil” from the obscure, fascinating pioneer Jimmy Wages, a ferocious rockabilly song that has been gathering dust under cobwebs and moisture moulds for decades somewhere in the back of Sam Phillips’ Sun Studio archives. Jimmy Wages was an artist who offers everything that thrills a passionate archaeologist like Dylan; Jimmy was Elvis’ neighbourhood kid in Tupelo, went to school with him, and, like Elvis, undertakes the pilgrimage to Sam Phillips in Memphis. But where Elvis is subsequently led to the High Road, Jimmy remains stuck on the Narrow Way: the eight to ten songs that Wages records are not released, and Jimmy plays the club, pub and bar circuit until his death in 1999. He still lives in Tupelo then. Embittered he is not. “I’m just one who tried and didn’t make it,” he says in one of the few interviews conducted with him, “I got a lot of company.”

Dylan’s tribute in 2022, in The Philosophy Of Modern Song, is his most explicit, but not his first homage to Jimmy Wages. Two years before that, we hear a first subtle salute: Hello Mary Lou – Hello Miss Pearl, the opening line of the second verse of “False Prophet”, the second song of Rough And Rowdy Ways nods to Ricky Nelson’s big hit “Hello Mary Lou” and to Jimmy Wages’ “Miss Pearl”, one of those 8 to 10 recordings Jimmy made at the time that were only dusted off decades later to be released on Sun tribute records or compilation albums.

It is the second song from Rough And Rowdy Ways and the second time Dylan salutes old rockabilly heroes – in the same form, at that. In the opening track “I Contain Multitudes”, Dylan opened the fifth verse with Pink pedal pushers, red blue jeans, a similar fusion of two songs. Again an opening line, again from the late 1950s, again one from the Sun Studio, and again the combination of a monumental, immortal world hit with a dusty, forgotten staple. In this case Carl Perkins‘ 1958 flop “Pink Pedal Pushers” and Gene Vincent’s out-of-category milestone “Be Bop A Lula” (Well she’s the girl in the red blue jeans) from 1956, like “Miss Pearl”.

Revealing that Dylan places the source of the other reference, “Hello Mary Lou” and Ricky Nelson, in the same outer category as Gene Vincent. As Elvis even, essay writer Dylan argues in The Philosophy, in which he devotes Chapter 11 to Ricky Nelson’s “Poor Little Fool”:

“There’s an argument to be made that Ricky, even more than Elvis, was the true ambassador of rock and roll. Sure, when Elvis appeared on Ed Sullivan, everybody stopped and took notice, but Ricky was in your house every week.”

Dylan is referring to one of the most successful sitcoms in US television history, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Ricky’s parents’ show in which, starting in 1957 (Fats Domino’s “I’m Walking”), Ricky is allowed to sing the songs that soon made him a teen idol. And made him a rock ‘n’ roll legend, as at least Dylan thinks, which he already argued way before 2022’s The Philosophy. As early as 2004, in Chronicles, the autobiographer Dylan hears Ricky on the radio in the first chapter: “Ricky Nelson was singing his new song, Travelin’ Man”. The flipside of the double A-side with “Hello Mary Lou”, by the way, and the song that gets another nod later on Rough And Rowdy Ways, in “I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You” on Side B (Take me out traveling, you’re a travelin’ man).

Anyway, the memory of that time he heard “Travelin’ Man” on the radio inspires the autobiographer to write a five-hundred-word tribute to Ricky Nelson. “I had been a big fan of Ricky’s and still liked him,” Dylan confesses, devoting especially many words to Ricky’s voice and singing style. “Ricky had a smooth touch,” for example, and “His voice was sort of mysterious and made you fall into a certain mood,” and noteworthy is the effort the fan Dylan takes to express his admiration in original terms: “the tonation of his voice” – Dylan is probably one of the first writers in the twenty-first century to dig up the archaic tonation in order to describe a vocal quality. But despite his trendsetting qualities he hasn’t gained too many followers since.

Ricky Nelson – Hello Mary Lou:

Most explicit then is Dylan’s admiration on his radio show, in which he plays a Ricky Nelson song three times. Apart from “Travelin’ Man” and “Hello Mary Lou”, he also plays “Waitin” In School”, which the DJ announces with:

“Here’s a man who brought rock ‘n’ roll into America’s living room, week after week. You got to remember, there was no MTV, there were no channels showing rock around the clock. You had to figure it out where you could find it. And sometimes it was only a three minutes a week, tucked away on some show like the Ed Sullivan Show. But Ricky Nelson changed all that. As one of the stars of his parents’ TV show Ozzie and Harriet he was given center stage to perform a song just about every week. Alongside Ricky was the magical guitarist James Burton. Ricky gets kind of a bad rap and isn’t considered as high as a rocker as people like Elvis, Gene Vincent and Carl Perkins. But for my money he is right up there, in the stratosphere.”
(DJ Dylan in Theme Time Radio Hour ep. 21: “School”, 20 September 2006)

… in a line-up featuring Elvis, Gene Vincent and Carl Perkins, with the men of “Be Bop A Lula” and “Pink Pedal Pushers” in other words. And since “False Prophet” Jimmy Wages may also join the queue, we may assume.

To be continued. Next up False Prophet part 4: Sing to me, O Muse, of that man of many troubles

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

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