By Tony Attwood
Previously
What did you hear: the music of Bob Dylan
“I heard Dylan tell me I was right”
I have now finished reading “What Did You Hear? The Music of Bob Dylan” by Steven Rings, and I have some grave concerns. Of course, they are just my concerns, and you might well feel that it’s a fine book that gives you a lot of information and helps you understand Bob’s work better. I don’t feel that, and I am going to try and explain why.
Right at the end, Rings, says that Bob’s music is “A fidelity to a flawed life, both personal and social – n constant flux…. If there is a perfection in this, perhaps it is an aspirational perfection, reaching for ideals that remain always just out of reach.”
And then he adds, “So many Dylan’s lyrics in fact work in this way, turning on questions that open toward uncertainty…”
Put another way, Dylan, he suggests, is singing about his country, and how it has failed in reaching its ideals and the aspirations of those who founded the country. Which is a perfectly reasonable position to take for an enquiry.
But he says, “there is always utopian potential in a music that refuses to sit still…” And this is a way of explaining why Bob constantly changes both his own approach to songwriting and his personal interpretation of his own songs.
And yes, I can go along with that, but I am not sure it is a complete explanation, and the fact that I am quoting from page 315 of the book suggests that maybe a lot of other stuff has been shuffled out of the way first.
In fact, what the author seems to want to do is to find within the music, and the way the songs change so regularly, views of the world that might inspire us, and show us a way forward. And I stress the author seems to be finding these views in the music as such, as well as the lyrics. It is the way the songs are constructed and performed, even down to details of such things as the rhythm of three notes being changed, that takes up a lot of the book.
And yet, although the author constantly comes back to “Blowin’ in the Wind” as one of his reference points, he doesn’t seem to want to take up the most obvious issue that “the answer is blowing in the wind.” Which is to say that there are answers to all the questions in life, and they are out there (blowing in the wind) but we can’t always grab them or understand them. But at the same time he seems to find clues in the musical re-arrangements Bob creates, which he feels tell us what position or thought Bob is striving toward.
Hence he finds Bob travelling in mutliple directions, sometimes tirelesly reworking his approach to a single song (“Tambourine Man” is a favourite example, although the author doesn’t really explain why this should be the example, given that there are a dozen Dylan songs that the composer has performed more often), seeking new meanings, new inspriations, or maybe new something else, from the song as he re-arranges it each tour, or even each night of each tour.
Dylan is, of course, an exceptional composer, both in terms of the number of songs he has composed and released and the way he has rewritten these songs over the years, sometimes day by day on a tour. Quite how many songs are involved is something that is argued over, because of this propensity for rewriting songs, which may or may not then be classified as new. But 600 seems a number a lot of people go for. Which of course is a huge number, but even so, still just a third of the total that Irving Berlin wrote, including “White Christmas”, “God Bless America,” “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “Blue Skies,” etc etc. So yes, of course, I think Bob is a fantastic creative force in contemporary music, but I would also say, let us not get carried away. There are other songwriters, and they have worked in other ways.
But for Rings this is not enough. He wants to find more within the songs, and ways of understanding why, having written a song, “Dylan is restlessly inventive in his phrasing, approaching the song with freedom…” And of course this is why we continue to go to the concerts where (at least until of late) everything can change every night.
And of course we must agree, there is a huge amount in Dylan’s performances to love – as when the author highlight’s Bob’s “ability to sound not only comfort, or outrage, or determination, or fear, but all of them at once.” Well, maybe not all of them at once, but I get the point.
All this I can go with, and if that were what this book was about, I’d recommend it as a read to every Dylan fan. But no, the author has another point to make, which seems to overtake that earlier point, and is that Bob is following specific ideas as ways of using sound to express ideas. Now that is an interesting concept, but it is something that is unprovable, unless one could sit down with Bob and get him to talk about such matters, which I don’t think he has ever done.
My thought is different. I hear Bob as a person who has the ability to create lyrics, melodies and chordal accompaniments, often with ease, and to make the result songs that appeal to many of us. Sometimes the live performances and re-arrangements work, and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes Bob perseveres and improves the arrangements, sometimes he doesn’t, sometimes he just stops singing the song.
And indeed (and this is an issue that I don’t think Steven Rings touches on at all), having written and recorded a song, Bob then might never perform it on tour. Now I think the issue of why some songs suffer this fate is particularly interesting, but unless I missed it (and I do think I read the book rather carefully), Rings doesn’t delve into this.
Which is where I think we have a problem. He seems to see Dylan undertaking various experiments to explore tiny details and find ways of making the music express an idea that he has. My experience with other songwriters and with my own amateur writing is that ideas appear and evolve in ways wholly different from the way in which Rings describes Bob’s songs developing. My feeling is that Bob sometimes sits with the guitar or at the keyboard and begins to play, and from here some music emerges. At other times, he scribbles down words, and the music is added later. The ceaseless manipulation of songs to incorporate more and more extra nuances that express the lyrics is not how it goes.
Now of course, when Bob wrote “Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet?” he did not set that to the melody of a gig or a jaunty musical hall melody. The lyrics, of course, give us an indication of what the music has to sound like. But the detail of the music, the melody, the chord changes, and the subsequent lyrics all flow from that opening line. And even if that single line of lyrics changes later, the flow of the song is now maintained.
Of course, there are melodic changes to be added in subsequent lines, and here again these are influenced by the lyrics and also by the melody and rhythm that has gone before, but the ebb and flow of the song is already settled from that first line.
So the opening line does influence what comes later – but that does not mean there is no room for Dylan’s genius to jump in. The drop in the melody at the end of lines such as”Like flicker from the opposite loft” gives us the feeling of the light fading, and the world slipping away from the singer, preparing us for the country music station playing softly.
Which then in turn takes us back up to “Louise and her lover”, and then down again to the fact that the ultimate dark sadness of, “these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind.”
In short, I think Rings is so entranced by the technicalities and the minor modifications of the songs as Dylan performs them night after night, he gets lost in the intricacies that Dylan never contemplated.
So in essence, we have two contrasting views here. I think Dylan creates the songs as an ebb and flow of melody, chords and lyrics, and then adds twists and turns in performance as he feels them, not as he plans them. I get the view that Rings sees Dylan as plotting and planning subtle nuances all the time, with clear ends in mind. But for me, I think he sometimes just starts playing a song differently, lets the band join in, and then either says, “yes that is how we’ll do it” or just stops the run-through and tries something else.
Of course, I can’t prove my vision of how Bob works on a song, and I doubt that Rings can either. It is just that all the attention to tiny musical detail that Rings portrays just doesn’t feel right to me as I listen to the music.
Obviously, nothing I am writing is going to persuade to read or not read the book. It is just that if you do, maybe you might find it beneficial at the end to think, does Bob really think his way through the impact of all these minor musical nuances?