My Own Version Of You (2020) part 1: Keys t’unlock my mind

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by Jochen Markhorst

I           Keys t’unlock my mind

 Parables are so useless, writes Kafka in the autumn of 1922. The wise always talk merely in parables, which are of no use in everyday life. For example, the sage says, “Go to the other side,” but then doesn’t mean to go to the other side of the street or something, he means some fabulous yonder, which he then cannot explain more precisely either. All these parables really just want to say that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible and that we already knew. “Why do you resist that?” someone asks. “If you’d follow the parables, you’d become a parable yourself and you would be freed from your daily worries.’

Another said: “I bet that is also a parable.”
The first said: “You have won.”
The second said: “But unfortunately only in parable.”
The first said: “No, in reality: in parable you have lost.”

(Kafka, Von den Gleichnissen – “On Parables”, published 1931)

Side A of Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020) features three songs, and “My Own Version Of You” concludes the trio. An overarching theme that began to emerge on track 2, “False Prophet”, now seems to be confirmed: artistry. Or, a bit more fitting: Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns, the words with which the blind bard Homer opens the Odyssey, the words also that Dylan reads on his Nobel Prize almost three thousand years later and with which he then concludes his acceptance speech (albeit translated slightly differently: “Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story”).

After the opening track “I Contain Multitudes”, which defines the who, the being of the artist, and the following song “False Prophet”, which thematises the what, the mission of the artist, we now arrive at the how, the work of the artist: “My Own Version Of You” seems to be the poetic manual for the creation of a song. And the form Dylan chooses is the parable, the long-winding metaphor explaining an idea – or an allegorical parable actually; a me-person, the artist apparently, speaking to a personified work of art (“you”), explaining how he is going to create his own version of “you”.

It is – quite undylanesque – not too veiled. Not, as Kafka laments, something incomprehensible expressed incomprehensibly. In words and writing, Dylan has been explaining for decades how he comes to the creation of many of his songs. In the 11 Outlined Epitaphs (written in 1963) we already read the unashamed confession:

Yes, I am a thief of thoughts
not, I pray, a stealer of souls
I have built an’ rebuilt
upon what is waitin’
for the sand on the beaches
carves many castles
on what has been opened
before my time
a word, a tune, a story, a line
keys in the wind t’ unlock my mind

… in which the very young upcoming Nobel laureate makes a creating self thus already confessing to being an idea thief, explaining how he crafts his songs, “building and rebuilding on what is already there”, and revealing where he finds his inspiration: words, tunes, stories, lines are all keys to “unlock his mind”.

In interviews, he is no less clear. Sometimes more assertive than other times (“Wussies and pussies complain about that stuff,” Rolling Stone 2012), but the thrust has been the same for over sixty years: “You make everything yours. We all do it.” In 2003, Dylan even illustrates his method with an appealing example:

“I’ll be playing Bob Nolan’s ‘Tumbling Tumbleweeds,’ for instance, in my head constantly — while I’m driving a car or talking to a person or sitting around or whatever. People will think they are talking to me and I’m talking back, but I’m not. I’m listening to the song in my head. At a certain point, some of the words will change and I’ll start writing a song.”

Bob Nolan – Tumbling Tumbleweeds

… with the now famous “Bob Nolan method”. By then, it had long since become a sport in fan circles to find the sources of words, lines, tunes and stories in Dylan’s songs, led by Albuquerque’s Supreme Source Finder, Scott Warmuth. Fascinating enough, as it provides insight into the creative process of one of the greatest artists of the past 100 years, but in itself not surprising. Nevertheless, the noisy Plagiarism-Of-Inspiration discussion that flares up at the turn of the century is rather polluted by a perceived “gotcha” sentiment. Polluting because, after all, Dylan has been quite forward on how he constructs his songs since 1963. So the decision to call the album he released around that time (2001) “Love And Theft” seems like a good-natured nod to all that ill-informed and acted indignation.

In 2020, the process then inspires Dylan to fill an entire album side around the theme. We just heard, in the song before, the result of a tune “unlocking my mind” – after all, “False Prophet” was written using the “Bob Nolan method”. In this case, Billy ‘The Kid’ Emersons plays “If Lovin’ Is Believin’” in Dylan’s head, and at a certain point, some of the words will change and I’ll start writing a song. The method, incidentally, which he applies even more rigorously when he listens to Boz Scaggs‘ version of you, to Boz Scaggs’ cover of Jimmy Reed’s “Down In Virginia”, which Dylan has his band virtually replay note-for-note on Side B of Rough And Rowdy Ways, in order to sing changed words, to sing “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” over it.

And before “False Prophet”, we have heard what happens when a line “unlocks the mind”, since the opening song sprung from a single line of poetry by Walt Whitman, from I contain multitudes from Whitman’s long poem “Song For Myself”. Which Dylan explained less poetically, but in the same spirit as in 1963, to Douglas Brinkley of the New York Times in 2020: “In that particular song, the last few verses came first. So that’s where the song was going all along. Obviously, the catalyst for the song is the title line.”

Not a one-off method, as we have long known. A word, a tune, a story, a line. A line that opens “I Contain Multitudes”, a tune creating “False Prophet”, and the key to “My Own Version Of You” was obviously a story, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). But Jeff Slate still wants to hear it again. In 2022, that is, when Dylan has already been explaining for 60 years now how he cobbles together his oeuvre. When you listen to a song, Slate asks in the Wall Street Journal interview in December 2022, do you always keep your ears open for “potential inspiration”?

“That’s exactly what I do,” zegt Dylan. “I listen for fragments, riffs, chords, even lyrics. Anything that sounds promising.”

He listens for keys t’unlock my mind, as it were.

To be continued. Next up My Own Version Of You part 2: Take the head off of him and sew it onto this guy

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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:

• 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
• Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door