False Prophet part 15 (final): No, people never see me as a prophet

by Jochen Markhorst

Previous articles in this series…

XV No, people never see me as a prophet

In August 1991, fifty-year-old Dylan spent a week in Brazil for five concerts. The last night is in Rio, before that he has played in Sao Paolo and in Bela Horizonte, and the opening of the Brazilian leg of the 1991 Tour of South America was in Porto Alegre. There, prior to the first concert, is also the only opportunity for the Brazilian press to ask a few questions; Dylan allows five minutes to two journalists each time. The ephemeral nature of this sparse set-up is reflected in the results; the various publications consist mainly of empty answers to clichéd questions. Dylan endures the “interviews” reluctantly, apparently:

Q: Are you going to be playing any songs from your last album, Under The Red Sky?
BD: Maybe.

Or:

Q: Taking a trip down memory lane, what are the most significant moments in your career?
BD: I don’t look back.

Hardly uplifting, all in all. With one exception: Dylan’s answer to the first question. Equally dismissive and sparse, but an eyebrow-raiser in terms of content:

Q: Do you think that your public see you as a kind of prophet, as a musician with messages?
BD: No, people never see me in that way.

This is 1991 and a blatant lie. For almost 30 years now, Dylan has been annoyed and pestered by people who see him as a prophet. Certainly from the mid-1960s you can’t find an article about Dylan without the word prophet – “protest prophet,” “prophet-haired poet of protest,” “Dylan the prophet of the Doomsday Poems,” “prophet in a motorcycle jacket,” “visionary prophet”, and these are just a few of many examples. Just as often, Dylan resists it: “I don’t think anybody’s a prophet” (Chicago Daily News, 27 November 1965), “I’m not a prophet” (Copenhagen press conference 1 May 1966), culminating in Chronicles, his 2004 autobiography:

Legend, Icon, Enigma (Buddha in European Clothes was my favorite) — stuff like that, but that was all right. These titles were placid and harmless, threadbare, easy to get around with them. Prophet, Messiah, Savior — those are tough ones.

After which, in the promotional interviews surrounding the publication of Chronicles, Dylan underlines that very distaste for “prophet”:

EB: What was the toughest part for you personally?
BD: It was like being in an Edgar Allan Poe story. And you’re just not that person everybody thinks you are, though they call you that all the time. ‘You’re the prophet.’ ‘You’re the savior.’ I never wanted to be a prophet or savior. Elvis maybe. I could easily see myself becoming him. But prophet? No.
(Ed Bradley interview for CBS “60 Minutes” special, 19 November 2004)

None of it helps. Even the Pope helps to keep the fire burning. In the book Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, writes about the last guy, John Paul II (John Paul II, My Beloved Predecessor, 2007), he denounces the fact that his beloved predecessor invited artists like Dylan: “There was reason to be sceptical, — I was, and in a certain sense I still am, — to doubt if it was really right to let these types of prophets intervene.”

So, in short, autobiographical alarm bells do go off when Dylan in 2020 has a first-person in one of his new songs declare “I am not a false prophet”. And Dylan hears those bells too, of course. Being the bell ringer himself, after all.

On the other hand: just as persistent as Dylan’s opposition to being labelled a “prophet” is his aversion to autobiographical interpretation of his songs. He has been insisting, again since the mid-1960s, that je est un autre, that the first-person characters in his songs are not “me, Bob Dylan”, and admits still frustrated that he has let himself be known on one occasion – in “Ballad In Plain D” (1964), for which he expressed regret in 1985 (“Of all the songs I’ve written, maybe I could have left that alone”).

Which does not take away the somewhat banal fact that biographical facts, images and faces no doubt penetrate a Dylan song often enough – as with any artist. The fictional character simply cannot describe a sunset if his spiritual father has never seen a sunset, cannot articulate jealousy if the artist has never felt it, cannot sit in an underground car if the poet has never taken the subway – facts, images and faces from Dylan’s own life penetrate his art. “You can’t help it,” as McCartney says, “whatever’s important to you finds its way in” (Conversations with Paul du Noyer, 2015).

Still, that does not make it autobiographical. Recognisable set pieces or reducible feelings do not suddenly transform a work of art into an ego document, into a life story – they are only auxiliary pieces, accessories that give colour to the narrative or to the poetry of the – in Dylan’s case – lyrics. Something similar applies to anecdotal songs, those that are built on an event in the creator’s life. “Smoke On The Water”, “The Ballad Of John And Yoko”, “Day Of The Locusts”. Anecdotes do not make the lyrics autobiographical, “telling one’s own life” or “portraying one’s own personality” either. Very few songs are like that anyway. Neil Diamond’s “Brooklyn Roads”, Jimi’s “Castles Made of Sand” to a certain extent, Neil Young’s “Don’t Be Denied”… it is rather an exception when a song poet pours his own life story into lyrics.

However: as soon as the poet models the I-personality after his own reflection and curriculum, the lyrics, narrative or poetry do acquire autobiographical weight: it becomes confessional literature, it becomes a text in which the author clearly expresses his own feelings, experiences and opinions.

“I was twenty-one years when I wrote this song / I’m twenty-two now, but I won’t be for long,” Paul Simon sings a few months before his 23rd birthday (“Leaves That Are Green”, 1964), raising the expectation that we will hear a passage from his diary, that the song is confessional, that we will be allowed access into intimate private thoughts and innermost feelings of the poet himself. “I Am… I Said”, Bob Forrest’s touching, disconcerting “Cereal Song” (The Bicycle Thief, from the masterpiece You Come And Go Like A Pop Song, 1999)… songs in which the songwriter emphatically weaves biographical facts and thereby suggests that the described feelings, experiences and views of the first-person are autobiographical, we know plenty. Not so much from Dylan, though.

Which brings us to “False Prophet”. Dylan opts for a first-person who repeatedly (three times) declares “I ain’t no false prophet.” An identification so specific and unusual, and so remarkably close to the mirror image and curriculum of Dylan himself, that it sort of forces us to pick up the key: this is a confessional text. Having resisted the label “prophet” for more than half a century, Dylan now then confesses: well alright, I am a prophet. Not a false one, a real one. And let me show you the way to the Light: Ricky Nelson and Jimmy Wages, Billy ‘The Kid’ Emerson and Roy Orbison, your guides from the underworld. Songs, songs of love and songs of betrayal are the Holy Grail, in the songs you will find Truth.

Granted, not very profound, but: honest. And no empty words either: the prophet Dylan practices what he preaches, has been tirelessly proclaiming his teachings for more than 60 years now, spreading his and others’ gospel across the planet, inspiring us again on this album in song after song to follow the light of Jimmy Reed, the Rolling Stones, Jacques Offenbach, Little Walter and Sinatra. Culminating in the closing sermon “Murder Most Foul”, in which our pastor has us opening his Book of Psalms and Hymns on no less than 74 pages. From Beethoven to Tom Jones, Cole Porter to The Who and Charlie Parker to Tom Dooley: Prophet Dylan rewrites the Egyptian Book of the Dead into the Book Of Life.

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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:

One comment

Rupert DeBare says:

October 28, 2024 at 10:26 am

Remember his comment about having abandoned a prophet role :
“I never sold out in the dollar sense – more in the Don’t-die-by-the-hacksaw sense.” (The prophet Isaiah is said in folklore to have been sawn asunder in a tree trunk)
The Jokerman video is perhaps also relevant. As he sings, “See the rich man without any name”, we see Bosch’s visualization of the “Musician’s Hell”. I think Dylan – or some sort of relentless divine coincidence- is centering on the eternal punishment that awaits a rich man/musician who abdicates his destiny.

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