Bob Dylan, truth and fiction from 1963 to 1995. The Restless Farewell.

By Tony Attwood

Western societies seem to me to have a mixed, not to say utterly confused view of truth and fiction. Parents tell children not to lie, but at the same time watch fictional tales on TV and maybe occasionally help children distinguish real life from fantasy, but not always accurately.  Conspiracy theorists create explanations for what we can and can’t see around us, without evidence to back up their “facts”, and seemingly a lot of people believe the theories.  And quite a few don’t.  Fairy stories as entertainment for children, remain popular.   So does science fiction for adults.

Now most of us do seem to get through life knowing how to distinguish fact from fiction most of the time, although it can be annoying when others get it wrong.  I can still recall playing a song I’d written in my teens, in a folk club, and announcing that it was a piece I’d written, and being told later that my girlfriend who had been in the audience, that she heard the people next to her say, “I don’t believe he wrote that.”   I was frustrated, and it took a while to realise actually, there was not only no way I could prove that I had written the piece but also no need to.  If they’d been seriously interested they could have searched for another folk song just like mine, and which predated it (although I don’t think there was one).  But without that proof, it was their word against mine.

So does it matter what is and isn’t true?  It’s a question that seems relevant about Dylan, given that at one stage in his career, he was telling everyone who asked that Zimmerman wasn’t his real name, he hadn’t seen his parents in decades etc etc, when in fact they had recently been to a concert to see him perform.

Of course for many of us, what is true and what isn’t seems to matter quite a lot.  But why should it matter to us if what is true and what is not, doesn’t matter to Bob?  Or should we take his comments as a way of challenging us to think about truth?

Over the years I’ve obviously come to learn that some people do tell the truth and some don’t, and I reach the conclusion that I prefer the company of people who tell the truth because the truth seems important to me.  Mind you I also hate people who play practical jokes, and in one way Dylan’s tales about his past were at one stage (for me) little more than a pack of lies most people sought to excuse.

But (finally to get to my real point) does any of this really matter too much, especially when it comes to writing songs?  And if it does matter, where is the dividing line?

If Bob writes a song which opens “While riding on a train going west I fell asleep for to take my rest” does it matter if that is not true?   I guess for almost all of us, no, it doesn’t matter.  But does it matter if “Restless Farewell” was written by a person unknown, or adapted from a song by someone else, or written by someone else, and then claimed for authorship by Bob Dylan?

To a degree, I would say yes it does, because there is money to be made from the song, but back in the days when travelling minstrels played songs in different villages presumably it didn’t matter who wrote it, or who claimed to write it.  In fact does the truth matter as to who wrote a particular song matter at all?

That’s a question I find a bit troubling because I know that if someone ever took one of my songs and recorded it and made lot of money out of the song, I would primarily like some recognition and then secondly, some of the money, even though I have to admit that I don’t actually need either.  My pals seem to think I am a decent enough guy, and I know I have enough money to live on.

Bob as we know, took a lot of songs that he had heard elsewhere, reworked them a bit, and then played them in concerts and later often recorded them.   And as we have seen looking back through the songs in his early career he (or maybe it was the record company acting on his behalf) sometimes claimed his rights to be asserted as that of the songwriter, meaning he would get a royalty payment for each time the song was recorded and the record sold, each time it was played on the radio, and so forth.

But what took this all a bit further was an interview with Andrea Svedberg in 1963 in which Bob said he didn’t know his parents but knew his name was not Robert Zimmerman.   This approach of telling downright lies continued, off and on, for a few years.

Quite why Bob has often been mysterious about his own history is not clear, at least to me, but it most certainly does go back to the days in the 1960s when he was first developing his career.  And maybe it came from nothing more than a blurring of the lines as to who wrote what in relation to traditional folk songs and what rights a contemporary performer had over that song.

This is a conundrum which can affect all artists no matter what their stature.  Try writing a song about life, a man, a woman, a strange situation or anything else like that, and you will most likely find your friends believe that you are writing about the world as you see it.  No matter how many times you tell them this is not the truth, it is just a song you’ve written, just like some people write short stories, they still won’t believe you.  I certainly have had the very unfortunate experience of a lady of whom I was fond, hearing one of my songs about a totally mythical woman, and then saying “so that’s what you really think of me,” and ending the relationship, despite my having told her a dozen times the characters in my songs as an amateur songwriter are as fictional as the characters in my novels (who no one ever seems to find real!)

Which leads to a problem.  While most of us are able to accept fiction as fiction on TV or in novels or in the cinema, with a song, and indeed with statements made to the media about our parents and our past, people expect the truth.    When the critics start saying, “X claims that these songs are about no one in particular, but if you listen closely you can see that….” that is what people start to believe.  How many songs have you come across where someone has said, “This is about his ex-girlfriend,” without any serious evidence to back that up?

In short, the songwriter tends not to be believed in the way that the dramatist or film-maker can, when she or he says, what a work of art is or is not about.

Heylin touches on this in relation to Restless Farewell, where he claims that “this is one instance where narrator and writer are one and the same”.  Which brings us right up to the problem of the people who write about poets and songwriters with utter assertions and precious little evidence.

Heylin in Revolution In The Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan: Volume One calls Restless Farewell “a memorable declaration of independence from ‘unknowin eyes’, signalling a desire to write only ‘for myself’. Never again would he knowingly expose himself to anyone looking to bury him in ‘the dust of rumors’.”

Maybe that is right, maybe not, or just maybe it is only the start: a desire by Dylan to write for himself without any concern about where the ideas, music and lyrics come from; in short without any worries about copyright.

Of course, as others have said it could also be a song about “all the misgivings he feels about the direction of his life, his work and his career, which, in this song, brim over ‘into a wistful adieu to his former friends and foes”.  (Gill, 1998, “Classic Bob Dylan: My Back Pages””.)

The point is that evidence from various sources can be used to promote multiple different points of view not only as to what individual songs are about, but also why Bob wrote them, why he wrote them as he did, and why he chose to keep one song and not another, or one arrangement and not another.  And why he chose to keep performing the song.  Or not.

So when Shelton points out in relation to the album, “The singer realises that his times are also changing, and if he can go on to quote “Oh a false clock tries to tick out my time” maybe many want to believe that – whatever interpretation they want to put on that highly enigmatic phrase.

But, and really this is my key issue, we can’t be sure, and with a person like Dylan who seems to love false trails, as well as regularly changing his mind, there is no proof.  We don’t know if Bob wrote about sons and daughters being beyond your command, or if he was speaking of the world as he saw it, or using some words that fitted the musical line that he had created perfectly, or just telling us what we want to hear at the time.   (Just as I as a teenager most certainly wanted to hear “your sons and daughters are beyond your command).

Which brings us back to the point: what did Bob mean when he wrote…

Oh, a false clock tries to tick out my time
To disgrace, distract, and bother me
And the dirt of gossip blows into my face
And the dust of rumors covers me
But if the arrow is straight
And the point is slick
It can pierce through dust no matter how thick
So I'll make my stand
And remain as I am
And bid farewell and not give a damn

Because he is a songwriter do we have to believe that he meant this?  In which case do we have to accept that he meant everything he wrote?  Which then asks the question, why can’t song writers write fiction, like novelists and short story writers? The lines may seem to fit our vision of how he must have felt at the time with so much interest in his work being expressed, and such a rapid rise to fame, but that does not mean that he meant it.  Maybe he thought he’d give the media something else to think about.  Maybe he just wrote it.

However, I would also argue that it doesn’t matter, because what matters to me, as a member of the audience, is that the lines mean a lot to me., personally  And in songwriting as in poetry that is what matters.

But if it doesn’t matter what Bob meant (if anything at all) when he wrote the lines then what do we now say about the connection between this song and “The Parting Glass” on which it is based? In “The Parting Glass” the song speaks of leaving home.  Perhaps, as some argue, “Restless Farewell” is about leaving one’s identity behind and creating for oneself something new.   Or maybe not.

However, at this point I do pause because this is a concept that many people find frightening.  Our whole notion of personality and the “self” is based on consistency of observation.  “You can never trust X,” is said because we believe that a person will carry on being the same in all situations so we can make judgements and talk about personality.  “That’s so unlike her,” is said because we can and do have expectations about how “she” will behave and we are troubled when she doesn’t accord to our set view.

As a result, if “Restless Farewell” is about leaving one’s personality or identity behind and becoming a new person, this suddenly becomes one of the most radical songs ever.  Dylan in parting is not leaving his family, or his friends, or even starting up a new life in terms of playing music in a new way.  He is leaving his old world behind totally.  He is walking away from all that had gone before.  He is walking away from himself.  And that is frightening.

And here’s another strange thing.   Dylan only performed this song once, as you probably know.   It was the live performance as part of the Sinatra: 80 Years My Way television programme.  We are told Frank Sinatra specifically asked for that song.

Ever since that moment, I have been puzzling on why such an eminant singer should make that specific request for a performance of one of the more obscure Dylan compositions.  It is a wonderful song, which is one good reason, but was it also that the title reflected Sinatra at that moment of his departure from the stage.  Or was there something deeper?