Reflections in the mirror: suddenly Visions of Johanna conquers my mind

• No Nobel Prize for Music: How Dylan turned the strophic form into something new
• The Dylan Concert Index: August 1971

By Tony Attwood

Some 17 years ago, in June 2008 the Guardian (a liberal-facing English daily newspaper, which is still with us, and rather unusually has a website that makes all its articles available free of charge) published an article by the Australian writer Germaine Greer under the headline, “Why do people think Bob Dylan was a great lyricist? That creep couldn’t even write doggerel.”

Greer, in case you missed her career, is an Australian writer known for her feminist writings and indeed is I think still recognised as one of the major voices of feminism in the 1960s to 1980.  I am far from being competent to write on that subject, but I am told she was part of the “secondwave feminism” movement.

In academic terms she was quite highly regarded in England and the USA, holding various university posts, including one at Cambridge University.  

Her article criticising Dylan  is still online if you want to read it in full, but to give you the flavour of it, it opens saying, “I battled students who wanted me to teach Bob Dylan rather than Donne or Yeats. Ever since, I have had screeds of stuff sent to me by people who thought that rhyme equalled reason, to whom I had gently to explain that their agonised posturings wouldn’t pass for poetry. I blame Dylan. In my eyes, he wasn’t fit to tie Woody Guthrie’s shoelaces. I have never forgiven him for keeping his fans waiting at the Isle of Wight festival in 1969 for three hours, from 9 o’clock till midnight, before he would sing a word. Creeps sometimes make good poets, but Bob Zimmerman isn’t one of them.”

Now in reading that one is perhaps justified in calling it a “rant”, in that it puts passion first and logic later (if anywhere at all), while expressing lots of anger.   For here one can see immediately that the writer is using the technique of confuscation by bringing different issues together which are not necessarily, and certainly not obviously, linked.  That Bob kept his audience waiting has nothing to do with whether Woodie Guthrie was a better songwriter, nor indeed with whether Bob is or was a good poet.  Or indeed whose fault it was that Dylan appeared late.  Reports from the time suggest there were serious technical problems, and that Dylan himself became very agitated about the delays.  I don’t know of a definitive account but either Greer hasn’t done her homework and just wants to imply it was Bob’s fault, or she couldn’t care less for accuracy.

And indeed perhaps I might go on from here to say that most of the time Dylan has not portrayed himself as a poet.  Yes Tarantula has poetry in it, but that’s not why we know Bob, any more than writing out the lyrics of “Visions of Johanna” gives us the full feeling of the piece.   It is a song.   He is a songwriter.  He doesn’t pretend to be a poet; he’s written poems, I’ve written poems, my children have written poems, but none of us call ourselves poets.

So let’s take a look at the article, and what we can make of it now.   What Ms Greer said of Dylan’s work….

“Fustian of this ilk crosses my desk every week. It’s not verse, not even doggerel. Nor is it prose, because it doesn’t make sense. Its combination of pretentiousness and illiteracy isn’t surprising, which would be something; it’s just annoying. God knows why the texts put to 20th-century music began to be called lyrics rather than words. Words is fine with me. Historically, a lyric is a poem in song form, and poets from Wyatt and Surrey to Heaney have been very good at writing them. Many of our best lyrics were written for music, some of them dittied – that is, written to be sung to a pre-existing tune. Others are songs that carry their music within them. Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience is his undisputed masterpiece, and five minutes with this tiny sample will show why:”

O rose, thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

Now if we go back to Ms Greer’s initial statement, “It’s not verse, not even doggerel. Nor is it prose, because it doesn’t make sense,” we have something that is quite interesting, in that it is a set of statements without any justification or logical argument.   It is really little more than, “I don’t like this because it is not what I am used to,” combined with a touch of “this is the definition of this word that I like, and anyone who disagrees with me is of lower intellect.”

I am more taken by Andy Gill quoted in the wiki article, whose view of the song is that it is “forever teetering on the brink of lucidity, yet remaining impervious to strict decipherment”.    And reading that line again I find myself thinking “Yes, yes, yes”.

But I do so while at the same moment recognising that having had this song in my life all this time since the release of the album, it still means something to me.   It may well be a sad reflection on myself and my thought patterns, but yes even after all these years I can still find thoughts troubling me.

Now an old man I sometimes ponder what I have done with my life, I ask myself if I should not have done more, written more, written different things, taken more risks, taken fewer risks, pursued this lady with more vigour, run faster from that lady who was pursuing me with more ardour than I wanted, been more forceful in trying to get my songs recognised instead of giving up on songwriting when money started arriving in response to my prose, spent so much time supporting my football team….  Probably all of that, and a lot more.

But these are internals – the worries and thoughts and memories of an old-ish man – and yet still the song is as relevant as it was when I bought the album as a teenager.

So was Ms Greer completely wrong to attack Bob and his lyrics?   Yes in one particular way, I think she was.  Because she was then, and probably is now, stuck in the view that there is a hierarchy of poetry and song lyrics which allows us to say that one work of art is greater than another.

Shakespeare was a genius because now lots of people say so.   But he wasn’t in his day.  His works were performed by The King’s Men, and got good receptions, and clearly King James I liked them.   But when in 1599 he left the company and moved back to live in Stratford, he stopped writing.  As far as we know, no one came banging on his door, asking him to produce more plays and sonnets.  Indeed it was another 150 years before the reputation that Shakespeare has today was openly being expressed.

So my point is, opinions change, and art is created within varying contexts, appreciated by different people in different ways a different times.

Thus when Ms Greer states that, “Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet” is a statement without any justification or logical argument, it is perfectly reasonable to reply, “Does it matter?”   For we can also move into discussions about how different people value different art at different times.

So my answer would be no, that doesn’t matter at all, because I find now (as I found when I first heard the line in 1966) it means something to me.   It speaks of nights when troubled by thoughts I would rather not have, I have laid awake in bed, my mind swirling into improbabilities and flittering half-thoughts and worries that I could not sweep aside.  It told me, when I heard that line, that I was not alone in having trouble getting to sleep, after coming home late in the night.   I wondered how my girlfriend could go straight to sleep and I couldn’t.  I was puzzled and worried.  Was I a freak in some way not being able to go to sleep?

In short, that one opening line spoke to me, and here I become ever more puzzled by the critic’s comments, for she says, that is one of the two key aspects of lyrics is “its mystery”.

So yes maybe, to quote Greer’s words, “The theme of love and death that permeates our entire literary tradition lies coiled upon itself in this tiny poem, capable at any moment of setting off a chain reaction in the mind.”

But then I might say for me that, “The theme of pondering what other people think also permeates our entire literary tradition and lies coiled upon itself in this one song, capable at any moment of setting off a chain reaction in the mind.”

Would I be wrong in that statement in relation to “Visions of Johanna”?  Ms Greer wrote that “When Morrissey sings a Morrissey song, he knows exactly what colour every part of every word is meant to be, and whether it crosses the rhythm to build up tension, or cannons into it to gain emphasis.”

But we really do need to remember that a Dylan song like “Visions of Johanna” is quite different because it is a song of uncertainty, of tricks, of denying reality, of temptation, of not having enough money to keep the heat and light running, of background music that is nothing more than, as its name says, background,  of not having the lover that one craves, of a mysterious “other” out there, in the shadows, of being trapped by the past….

Yes I think it does not harm to remember sometimes what a song is about.  As long as we have the wit to understand.