False Prophet part 7:  A minstrel collecting words

Previously in this series

• Part 1: “The beam that is in thine own eye”
• Part 2: The Dead are from a different world
• Part 3: Right up there in the stratosphere
• Part 4: Sing to me, O Muse, of that man of many troubles
• Part 5: Cut off the head of the owl, it’ll look like a chicken
• Part 6: The gospel of rock ‘n’ roll

by Jochen Markhorst

False Prophet (2020) part 7: A minstrel collecting words

I’m first among equals - second to none
I’m last of the best - you can bury the rest
Bury ‘em naked with their silver and gold
Put ‘em six feet under and then pray for their souls

 Coincidentally or not, the exact same words Tom Paxton chose to describe Dylan in an interview with Richie Unterberger more than 20 years before “False Prophet”. Unterberger, who is collecting material for his two successful books on the history of folk rock (Turn! Turn! Turn! The ‘60s Folk-Rock Revolution, 2002, and Eight Miles High: Folk-Rock’s Flight from Haight-Ashbury to Woodstock, 2003), asks Paxton what it was like back then, in the 1960s in Greenwich Village on MacDougal Street, when the songwriters sat together after closing time at a table in the Kettle of Fish, the bar above The Gaslight Cafe. The image, says Unterberger, is that Dylan held that as a kind of king’s court, and men like you, Phil Ochs, Dave Van Ronk, David Blue and others were waiting their turn to be graciously admitted to the inner circle.

Unterberger: “I’m interested in your memory of the situation, since one of the things my book will be emphasizing is that Dylan was just a part of this mammoth musical movement, albeit a very important one.”
Paxton: “I think that’s astute of you. I think that it really was a question of, as they say in ancient Rome, first among equals.”

Paxton is a great artist who is also highly regarded by Dylan. He records Paxton’s “Annie’s Going To Sing Her Song”, for example (during the Self Portrait sessions in 1970, eventually released on Another Self Portrait in 2013); he uses “Bottle Of Wine” as a template for “Buckets Of Rain”; in Chronicles, the autobiographer recalls how, as a fledgling folk artist, he admired that Paxton wrote his own topical songs (“even though his most famous song, “Last Thing on My Mind,” was a yearning romantic ballad”); and most poetically, Dylan expresses his admiration in the peculiar, under the transparent pseudonym “R. Zimmerman” published poem “An Observation, Revisited” (1976):

I'm making scribblings.
I'm always making scribblings.
A minstrel collecting words
for an eventual song.
In my mind I keep humming Tom Paxton's
"Peace Will Come"

 

A peculiar, long (904 words) and actually quite undylanesque poem, in which the narrator is remarkably similar to Bob Dylan. “An Observation, Revisited” is set up like a Dinggedicht, like a thing poem by Rilke – in this case, the “thing” is a photo exhibition, or more precisely, some of the photographs from that exhibition, which was indeed on view at the Susan Caldwell Gallery in SoHo in those days. At the time, the gallery exhibited 20 photographs of a terminally ill woman, some of which are unmistakably described in “Zimmerman’s” poem. Unlike Rilke, however, this Zimmerman allows himself to stray away from the things to be described, losing himself in biographical, poetic reflections that fit wonderfully well on the person Bob Dylan. As in this example: a minstrel collecting words for an eventual song – Tom Paxton’s words “peace will come” will indeed descend into a Dylan song a year later;

Peace will come
With tranquillity and splendor on the wheels of fire
But will bring us no reward when her false idols fall
And cruel death surrenders with its pale ghost retreating
Between the King and the Queen of Swords

… the prophetic words of the last verse of “Changing Of The Guards”.

Tom Paxton, in short, is an artist whose work and words Dylan appreciates and takes seriously, and who, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, analyses with informed hindsight that Dylan was the first among equals. With substantiation too:

“The thing is that songwriters love good songs. Songwriters love to hear good songs. So it was never hard to get us to like something if it was good. And it really had the effect of spurring us to keep trying to improve our writing, to hear good songs. And it just happened that a lot of the good songs we heard were from Bob.”

As the same reflex to rank, in the famous anecdote Leonard Cohen tells to David Remnick of The New Yorker in 2016, underpins the idea that Dylan in “False Prophet” larded his lyrics with autobiographical glitter. They are in the car together in Los Angeles, Cohen recalls. Dylan is driving.

“One of his songs came on the radio,” Cohen recalled. “I think it was ‘Just Like a Woman’ or something like that. It came to the bridge of the song, and he said, ‘A lot of eighteen-wheelers crossed that bridge.’ Meaning it was a powerful bridge.”

Dylan went on driving. After a while, he told Cohen that a famous songwriter of the day had told him, “O.K., Bob, you’re Number 1, but I’m Number 2.”

Cohen smiled. “Then Dylan says to me, ‘As far as I’m concerned, Leonard, you’re Number 1. I’m Number Zero.’ Meaning, as I understood it at the time—and I was not ready to dispute it—that his work was beyond measure and my work was pretty good.”

Paxton and Cohen, two exceptional songwriters from Dylan’s inner circle who, through word choice and word content, paint the same portrait as Dylan does in the opening line of this fourth verse of “False Prophet”: I’m first among equals – second to none… that Dylan is here adding self-reflections, ironically or otherwise, to his portrait of the Prophet now seems clear.

Which does not make it a self-portrait, of course. This narrator is loud and haughty, has a boastful, manly kind of manner, as Willie Dixon said of Muddy Waters, and that does not at all fit the Dylan we know from public presentations, written outpourings and interviews. It’s more like something like the glimpse of Rembrandt we see behind the backs of the Night Watch (1642), Van Eyk’s distorted reflection behind the backs of the Arnolfini couple (“Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife”, 1434), and like Jan Steen (1626-79), whom we almost always see popping up somewhere among the merry companions in his works. Added by the painter out of a kind of modest pride (Van Eyk even writes a Kilroy-was-here avant la lettre over that tiny self-portrait; “Johannes de eyck fuit hic 1434 – Johannes Van Eyk was here 1434”). For the viewer an amusing detail, but for the expressiveness and power of the snapshot of the night militia, of the portrait for Mr and Mrs Arnolfini, of Steen’s ensemble pieces it makes no further difference.

Dylan’s “self-portraits” in this song are then even more subtle than those Dutch masters – after all, these are portraits made by others, which Dylan then incorporates collage-style into his portrait of the Prophet. But it is unpretentious embellishment, it is unrelated to the message this Revelator one wants to proclaim. “I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else,” says the Prophet. “Songs like Let Me Rest On A Peaceful Mountain or I Saw The Light – that’s my religion.” (Newsweek interview with David Gates, September 1997).

To be continued. Next up False Prophet part 8: They call me the Gris-Gris man

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:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
• Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2^nd Big Bang
• Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
• Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
• Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
• Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
• I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
• Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
• Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
• Bob Dylan’s 1971