Like A Rolling Stone (1965) part 8: Just like some tragic beat Napoleon

 

by Jochen Markhorst

VIII       Just like some tragic beat Napoleon

You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse
When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal

 Steely Dan’s lyrics, perhaps even more so than Bob Dylan’s, have acquired a reputation for being impenetrable. While retaining poetic power though, so as with Dylan and as with, say, Jethro Tull and King Crimson, they are particularly attractive to masses of fans to discuss at fan forums and symposia. Not coincidentally all songwriters who are outspoken Dylan fans, by the way.

The most explicit and consistent, then, is Donald Fagen, who has over the decades repeatedly expressed his admiration, both in word and deed. “No one in the pop medium had ever used that breadth of subject matter or surrealistic and dream language,” he says in the Wall Street Journal (“Rock’s Reluctant Front Man”, July 8, 2011).

He borrows the title of Steely Dan’s debut album (1972) from Dylan – Can’t Buy A Thrill is the second line of Dylan’s own blues classic “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry”. In 1981, at the beginning of the long Steely Dan hiatus, he applied to join Dylan’s backing band as a pianist. And when, in an unguarded moment, he says unkind things about his hero to reporter Andy Greene (“I’ve been to Bob Dylan shows where I essentially walked out in the middle. I just didn’t like it,” referring to what he sees as an abundance of “minor-key drone tunes with three chords”), he rectifies his comment via a long rebuttal in the Rolling Stone (July 2013):

“Greene brought up Bob Dylan. Because I could tell that Greene loved Dylan as much as I did, I let down my guard, and we started in with the classic fan talk, picking apart his recent work and mourning the fact that his erstwhile astonishing voice has now been reduced to a croak.”

The comments about the quality of recent songs were “jokes”, he says, and suggests it was a “big mistake” that he allowed himself to be critical of Dylan’s “damaged voice”, and tries to repair the damage with a nostalgic anecdote:

For Dylan idolaters, Bob analysis is a real party. We try to mimic his many eccentric vocal styles – folky Bob, psychedelic Bob, post-motorcycle accident Bob, Jesus-freak Bob – it’s fun. In college, we played a Dylan lyrics game:

“Name two items that hung from the head of the mule”.
“Oh c’mon, that’s easy. Jewels and binoculars, of course.”

Fagen is, in short, a real fan. Which then, apart from these fun facts, statements and the admission, “we try to mimic his many eccentric vocal styles”, may also be evident from the lyrics. Subtle and veiled, of course, but still… As in the title track of the superb, (by Steely Dan standards poppy) album Pretzel Logic (1974), the song with Dylanesque lines and references like He said, you must be joking son / Where did you get those shoes? and They say the times are changing but I just don’t know / These things are gone forever. And, more subtly, the third verse:

I have never met Napoleon
But I plan to find the time
I have never met Napoleon
But I plan to find the time, yes I do

Steely Dan – Pretzel Logic:

A Napoleon complex is putting it a bit too strongly, but “Napoleon” is indeed a sort of a motif in Dylan’s early 60s work, as Fagen keenly observes. When the famous Napoleon in rags turns up in “Like A Rolling Stone”, it’s already the third time in three years that we encounter the French emperor: after You need a different kind of man, babe / You need Napoleon Bonaparte in “Hero Blues” (1963) and after Your daddy walks in wearin’ / A Napoleon Bonaparte mask in “On the Road Again”, which Dylan presumably writes in 1964 – so Napoleon comes around once every year.

It triggers debate. There is in any case a considerable faction of eager cryptanalysts among Dylan fans, a usually somewhat overly enthusiastic column of puzzlers with the unfounded belief that Dylan hides existing persons and events behind symbolic masks and cryptic clues. And unsurprisingly, for that faction “Like A Rolling Stone” is a goldmine. Who is Miss Lonely, who are the diplomat and the princess on the steeple, what does Dylan mean by the chrome horse and who is the mystery tramp? The speculations bounce in all directions, from micro (“Edie Sedgwick”), to macro (“the audience”) to metaphysical (“the blues”), polluting the poetic gloss en passant, but oh well, no real harm done and it keeps a man off the streets.

All too likely, however, the scenario is not. Dylan is not a diarist who records his private worries and observations encoded in rhymes – moreover, it denies the essence of artistry in general and Dylan’s exceptional talent in particular. More likely, and also more respectful, is the observation that he is an artist doing what artists do: sketch You a picture of what goes on around here sometimes, tho I don’t understand too well myself what’s really happening, as he puts it himself in the liner notes of Bringing It All Back Home (1965, about three months before he writes “Like A Rolling Stone”). The credo of an impressionist, then, of an artist striving for a subjective representation of reality, and in doing so offering beauty, poignancy, comfort and elucidation.

On a stylistic level alone, Dylan’s self-analysis is quite apt. Neologisms, the use of synesthesias and sensitivity to sound, the baroque profusion of adjectives and adverbs: the Dylan of the mercurial years is a textbook example of a late-nineteenth-century impressionist. And in terms of content, the song offers us a condition humaine, and thus the comforting recognition that a revenge fantasy is an admittedly unattractive but no less universal human deficit.

Napoleon is eminently an appealing image for this particular revenge fantasy. After all, Napoleon Bonaparte’s life story is a fall from grace, the classic rise-and-fall story in extremis – from rising to emperor to ending up as an exiled outcast on a lonely island far away. A Miss Lonely writ large, in other words. Apart from that, the other symbolic connotation of the name Napoleon is right up Dylan’s alley: the Little General is by now located on the borderland of fact and fiction, of identity and illusion, of history and mythology – the favourite habitat of the writer who fills three-quarters of his own autobiography with fiction, of the songwriter who single-handedly filled the biographies of historical figures like John Wesley Hardin, Blind Willie McTell, William Zanzinger and Jimmy Reed with mythology, and who is fascinated by icons like Julius Caesar and Hemingway, Nero and Shakespeare, Jesus and Kennedy, by the inhabitants of that no-man’s-land between fact and fiction.

And just as the third allegorical value of the name Napoleon is a motif in “Like A Rolling Stone” and in Dylan’s oeuvre: dislocation, the perception that you are somewhere else than you are supposed to be. Which, in turn, Fagen’s mate Walter Becker uses quite dylanesquely on his first post-Steely Dan solo record 11 Tracks of Whack (1994), in “My Waterloo”:

I tried my best to hold my ground
I swore I'd never let it be this way
But now I broke my sword, dropped my gun
Just like some tragic beat Napoleon

Walter Becker – My Waterloo:

… a Napoleon sighing that he came a long long way from home, only regretfully to note that now I gotta walk that road again, now I gotta walk that lonely – miserably acknowledging that he has become Miss Lonely.

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To be continued. Next up Like A Rolling Stone part 9: I’m a bit of a textualist

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