I offer this as a humble footnote to the excellent series by Mike Johnson on the NET performances (Kia Ora, Mr. Kiwipoet!). Just a footnote because it doesn’t bring an overview of certain topics or musical motives within given legs of the Tour. Instead, it is a fistful of reflections on just one concert, and a very special one it was. For me, obviously. Apparently it was so for Bob Dylan, too. At least that’s what its local promoter told me years later.
The event took place on July 17, 1994, in the former Polish capital Kraków (Cracow). It was the first ever live appearance by Bob Dylan on the Polish soil, part of the Still On The Road 1994: Europe Summer Tour.
It was Europe, it was summer ’94, and Dylan was still on the road. But few, if anyone, expected what would happen during a concert that was supposed to be just one of many, in a country that nobody within the Dylan camp cared about much.
Dylan was to give two concerts in Poland that summer – the first in Cracow at the sports club Cracovia football (soccer) stadium, and the second in Warsaw, at the Sala Kongresowa (Congress Hall), a renowned if a bit too official location, with red-padding seats and a neo-classical decorative finish (Soviet-style, actually).
Although I’d been to splendid concerts at my home town’s Sala Kongresowa, by numerous jazz acts, by Bob Geldof et al., I opted for the plein air experience. I thought it to be much more suitable and doing more justice to my hero’s art.
The photos attached are courtesy of a Cracovia avid fan nicknamed Craco who frequented each and every event at his beloved stadium, and published his recollections on the Cracovia fans’ website terazpasy.pl.
I arrived in Cracow in the afternoon just in time to make myself comfortable on the stadium grounds, located on Józef Kałuża street. Józef Kałuża was one of the best Polish pre-WWII footballers. Ironically, his last name means ‘puddle’.
But when I was entering the premises the sky was clear albeit not sunny.
The concert started a bit later than announced. The support was Kasia Kowalska, young Polish rock singer. She played for about 20 minutes and then – more waiting.
When Dylan entered the stage, it was already dark. He began with Jokerman, his regular starter on that tour, I believe. Around the second song, Just like a Woman, the rain started falling. By the third, All along the Watchtower, it turned into a torrential storm, thunders were clashing.
Then came I Don’t Believe You and Tangled Up in Blue. Everybody on the stadium grounds were soaked to the bone. The area had turned into a huge kałuża (puddle) just as at the Woodstock festival. It was all watery and wet, muddy and dark. And the soundtrack was unbelievable.
And then – I checked the setlists for that leg and the song would not appear in other locations – Dylan changed the tune and ordered his band to play Shelter from the Storm. It was a gift to us from the guy who saw us, the 4-thousand strong audience, standing by him in spite of the cataclysm.
There were only 4,000 of us, rainy day women & men, because:
Bob Dylan AD 1994 was no longer a superstar that he’d used to be,
That same day Brazil was playing World Cup final against Italy on the Pasadena Rose Bowl stadium.
But still, four thousand throats and eight thousand hands is quite an army. And Bob Dylan saw it, and he knew that it was good. But of course there was little he could against the weather. It virtually made impossible for his band to perform the way they intended to. After Shelter, there was a longer break, after which the musicians returned equipped with acoustic gear. Tony Garnier had double bass, there were acoustic axes as the sound waves collided, Winston Watson played subdued percussion.
Three more songs – Love Minus Zero/No Limit, Masters of War and The Times They Are a-Changin’. And then Bob Dylan and his band were literally ordered by the tour manager to walk off the stage. The concert lasted just an hour.
Andrzej Marzec, the Polish concert promoter, told me later that Dylan had turned to him just after the gig and said: “I’ve just played my very best concert for the very best audience”. On other occasions, he apparently alluded to the event as a “metaphysical experience”.
Sure it was one for us. Never before nor after have I experienced such a spectacle where art and nature collaborated fully. When Dylan sings “you that build all the bombs” you can hear a loud crack as if to illustrate the lyrics. It was just another thunder that caused some short circuit within the amplification. Everybody had goose bumps, everyone was thrilled. No one could have orchestrated it better. There are at least two bootlegs from the concert, recorded by two English-speaking fans who travelled to that tour gigs around Europe. Their voices can be heard between the songs. They were seated on a tree and thus the sound is quite excellent, with not too much audience chat.
So I cherish the memory of that concert for several reasons.
First, it was Dylan’s first concert appearance in Poland.
Second, it was maybe not be intended to be that special, but it surely turned it out to be.
And this, his vocal delivery was extraordinary. There is strength and conviction in the performance. And the storm ‘n’ rain added to the experience. He somehow must have seen and felt that for those people it is really worth doing something extra. Hence the Shelter bonus, hence the three acoustic songs despite the flood. Hence the fierceness and passion.
I was ready to stand there and absorb his songs for much longer, of course. It didn’t matter that I was completely soaked. He sang about me that evening. “Tonight as I stand inside the rain”… “Rain falling on my shoes”… “I’ll give ya shelter from the storm”… “This is no place to hide”… “The night blows rainy”… “You better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone”. It all fitted. It all seemed so well timed.
You can check the music for yourselves here:
But none of these and nothing else can touch the beauty of just being there.
I did not attend the Warsaw concert two days later, of course. I would not spoil everything I had felt with a pedestrian show given in comfortable conditions.
Releasing his first album in six years (Time Out of Mind) in 1997 did not mean that Dylan made radical changes to his set lists or song arrangements. His tendency with new albums is to slip a few new songs in here and there, providing a sense of continuity with past years. Some of the older standbys, like ‘I and I’, begin to fade, others are brought forward, and some, like ‘Tangled Up in Blue’, never go away.
While his 1997 performances confirmed the tendency to move away from lengthy epics, this does not apply to ‘Tangled…’, so we kick off this post with yet another eleven minute version of the song. While Dylan tended to leave his harmonica at home in 1997, that also does not apply to ‘Tangled’, much to the delight of the audience.
While I have been pretty circumspect in my assessment of Dylan’s lead guitar playing, I have to note here how effective it is in pushing the tempo of the song. He may only be playing two or three notes, but how wonderfully they act as a driver. I think this is Mr Guitar Man at his best, not trying anything too fancy, just hammering that song along.
Tangled up in Blue
One of the enduring qualities of Dylan’s performances is their roughness and rawness. Dylan never sounds smooth, slick and accomplished. There is always an edginess. This is made more so in these audience recordings, which many prefer to the studio versions for just that reason. These audience recordings are very much live, and even when Dylan sings a softer, more intimate song, like ‘You’re a Big Girl Now’, his emotional rawness still comes across. While full of bitterness and regret, ‘You’re a Big Girl Now’ never becomes a smaltzy tear jerker. Along the very edge of pain, there is a kind of resistance to pain. Whatever happens in life, well, that’s a price you have to pay… (This one from Tokyo 10th Feb)
You’re a big girl
From the same concert, we get a quietly paced ‘Shelter From the Storm’. This is another from Dylan’s regular stable of songs, and I’m glad of it. A sophisticated love song full of wry humour, it shows how love nourishes and protects even in a world where ‘it’s doom alone that counts’. As with “You’re a Big Girl’, it has that same rough tenderness.
Shelter from the Storm
By this time ‘I and I’, another song we’ve been following, is on the wane. It was only performed a couple of times in 1997, then once in 1998 and once in 1999. For my reckoning, the song reached its peak in 1993. The commitment is still there, but you get the sense that Dylan has nowhere new to take the song. For him, the magic was beginning to fade. For all that it remains a powerful, dramatic song in which he finds he’s ‘still pushing myself along the road/the darkest part.’ He’s the poet who listens only to his heart.
I and I
Now for a rather sumptuous performance of ‘Shooting Star’. I’ve always thought that the ‘shooting star’ of the song refers to a lot more than just an old love affair. It’s all our hopes for redemption, our fears. The shooting star is a portent, with a cosmic significance. Doom is never far off:
‘Listen to the engine listen to the bell
As the last fire truck from hell goes rolling by
All good people are praying
It's the last temptation the last account
The last time you might hear the sermon on the mount
The last radio is playing.’
Shooting Star
Digging back into the 1960s now, we discover some more regulars. Here’s a rocking performance of ‘It Takes a Lot to Laugh’ from Highway 61 Revisited (1965). Blues always sounds better rough-edged. While this was stadium rock in that it was performed to a large audience, it has a blues club feel to it, rough and ready and forever 12 bars. (18th Dec)
It takes a lot to laugh
‘One Too Many Mornings,’ with its old before its time feel, also suits that rough-edged voice; Dylan doesn’t have to pretend to sound old. We’ve slipped back to the Tokyo concert to pick this one up. At 7 minutes it’s creeping up towards an epic. I loved the stark simplicity of the original album performance (The Times They Are A-Changing, 1964), but this slow, thoughtful version works just fine. Voice nicely upfront.
One too many mornings
‘Don’t Think Twice’ is another early song that has survived the test of time. It has a nice bouncy rhythm that is somewhat belied by the sadness of the lyrics. Some things were just never meant to be. Here Dylan gives it a bit of a country twist, especially in the instrumental. It wouldn’t go astray at a country dance.
Don’t think twice
Over the past couple of years we have been treated to some solid performances of ‘Queen Jane Approximately’. This is one song that Dylan can’t resist turning into an epic, and we have a ten minute version of it here. This is achieved mainly by Dylan slowing the song down to about as slow as it could go and still hold together. Again, I feel that the world weariness evident in the song is well suited to Dylan’s Time Out of Mind voice. If anything, the song is a plea for friendship, comradeship in the face of the relentless demands of the world.
The live performances of this song have been particularly good, and this is no exception.
Queen Jane Approximately
Because of the depth and seriousness of most Dylan songs, it’s easy enough for us to overlook the comic element in his art. His humour can be overt or sly. We find it perhaps most clearly in the early Dylan, those talking songs like ‘Talking World War 3 Blues’ and ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’, where the intention is satirical and the lyrics lean towards the absurd.
Absurdism is not always funny, although always surprising. A song like ‘You Ain’t Going Nowhere’, is absurd, and leans towards that particular kind of humour called nonsense rhymes.
Nonsense rhymes are an ancient if neglected tradition in poetry. The idea is that such rhymes should just be sheer fun, and a play with the sounds of words. They tend to be found in nursery rhymes and children’s writers such as Edward Lear and AA Milne. The Britannica describes them as ‘humorous or whimsical verse that differs from other comic verse in its resistance to any rational or allegorical interpretation.’
Here’s a part of a poem by Edward Lear (1812 – 1888) that reminds me a little of Dylan’s ‘You Ain’t Going Nowhere’
‘On the Coast of Coromandel,
Where the early pumpkins blow,
In the middle of the woods
Lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.
Two old chairs, and half a candle
One old jug without a handle
These were all his worldly goods:
In the middle of the woods,’
Arguably, you can make more sense of that if you’re trying hard (poverty?) than this from Dylan:
‘Buy me some rings and a gun that sings
A flute that toots and a bee that stings
A sky that cries and a bird that flies
A fish that walks and a dog that talks’
Having said all that, the song is clearly celebratory. ‘Tomorrow’s the day my bride’s a-gonna come…’ suggests a crazy and buoyant anticipation. Nothing makes sense because it doesn’t have to. It’s an expression of sheer exuberance.
In the meantime, let’s listen to a fun and energetic performance of the song by Dylan. This nicely captures the countrified happy-go-lucky spirit of the original Basement Tapes version.
You ain’t going nowhere
‘Tombstone Blues’ is also absurdist, but the lyrics are sharper and the edge satirical. The effect is of strangeness, but it is not funny.
‘The king of the Philistines his soldiers to save
Puts jawbones on their tombstones and flatters their graves
Puts the pied pipers in prison and fattens the slaves
Then sends them out to the jungle’
The actions of the ‘king of Philistines’ don’t make that much sense, but there is a vague atmosphere of threat and the abuse of power. Certainly something is going on beyond our everyday expectations. Narratives themselves can be absurd, or flirt with absurdity:
‘The hysterical bride in the penny arcade
Screaming she moans, "I've just been made"
Then sends out for the doctor, who pulls down the shade
And says, "My advice is to not let the boys in"
Now, the medicine man comes and he shuffles inside
He walks with a swagger and he says to the bride
"Stop all this weeping, swallow your pride
You will not die, it's not poison"’
What has happened to the hysterical bride? We’re not told, but it doesn’t sound too nice. Compare those lyrics with these from Highway 61:
‘Now, the fifth daughter on the twelfth night
Told the first father that things weren't right
"My complexion", she says, "Is much too white"
He said, "Come here and step into the light"
He says, "Hmm, you're right"
"Let me tell the second mother, this has been done"’
The elusiveness of this kind of absurdity is the point, I think. We have to imagine what might have happened to the hysterical bride and the fifth daughter.
This is a great performance of the song which rattles along in fine 1997 style. Fans of Dylan’s harp, like me, will be glad to hear a few brief blasts from that little instrument here, but the last few choruses of instrumentals don’t seem to go anywhere (18th of April):
Tombstone Blues
‘Maggie’s Farm’ is another song that uses absurdist humour to make its point. One method in comedy is to exaggerate to comic effect. Here Dylan is able to make fun of an intolerable situation in a family from hell by comic exaggeration:
‘I ain't gonna work for Maggie's pa no more
No, I ain't gonna work for Maggie's pa no more
Well, he puts his cigar out in your face, just for kicks
His bedroom window, it is made out of bricks
The National Guard stands around his door’
Maggie’s Farm
I love the minimal trenchant arrangement of this performance, one of the best of many in my opinion. For me, the backing has been too rowdy on many of the performances in previous years. This one just seems to hit the spot. (the 3rd of August)
We’ll leave Bob there, slaving away on Maggie’s farm until next time when we’ll finish off 1997. See you then.
In the alliterative poem – partially quoted beneath -, Thomas Hardy laments the passing of a loved one, and with it any hope he had of a caring Universe – Charles Darwin, he ain’t helping:
I thought her behind my back
Yea, her I long had learned to lack
And I said: "I am sure you are standing behind me ..."
I would not turn my head to discover
That there was nothing in my belief
(Thomas Hardy: The Shadow And The Stone)
A sentiment of sorrowful regret expressed in the following alliterative song lyrics:
As I walked out tonight in the mystic garden
The wounded flowers were dangling from the vine
I was passing by yon cool crystal fountain
Someone hit me from behind
Ain't talking, just walking
Though this weary world of woe
(Bob Dylan: Ain't Talking)
As the lyrics below indicate, as least to the author thereof, the optimistic outlook of life-everlasting, a characteristic theme of the Romantic Transcendentalist poets, fades away in these modern times, the focus of which is on science and technology:
That I could think trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed hope, whereof of he knew
But I was unaware
(Thomas Hardy: The Darkling Thrush)
The image of shadows of stones echoes in the following sardonic song lyrics, alliteration abounding:
There's nothing to see
Just a cool breeze that's encircling me
Let's go for a walk in the garden
So far and so wide
We can sit in the shade by the fountain-side
(Bob Dylan: False Prophet)
The alliterative lines beneath reveal that Fredrich Nietzsche’s lament that “God is dead” just won’t go away:
But since I was framed in your first despair
The doing without me has no play
In the minds of men where shadows scare
And now that I dwindle day by day
(Thomas Hardy: A Plaint Of Man)
Akin to the view that the singer/songwriter quite consistently holds to ; rhymed be ~ ‘play’/’day’ above; ~ ‘day’/’away’ below:
We are living in the shadows of a fading past
Trapped in the fires of time ...
One more day is another day away
From the girl from the Red River shore
(Bob Dylan: Red River Shore)
This is part 2 of a much-expanded version of a talk presented at the World of Bob Dylan International Symposium, May 30 to June 2, 2019, at the University of Tulsa’s Institute for Bob Dylan Studies.
While not his predominate mode throughout his career, Dylan’s responses to societal injustice and oppression have reappeared in a number of his songs up to the present. Dylan’s lyrics from works in the 80s continue to reference social injustice or masters of war.
In 1981 in the title song from the album “Shot of Love” he says, “I seen the kingdoms of this world and it’s making me feel afraid,”[19] warning of the dangers of empires, large or small. “License to Kill” from “Infidels” in 1983 includes the lines, “Man thinks ’cause he rules the earth he can do with it as he please/ And if things don’t change soon, he will. … Now, he’s hell-bent for destruction, he’s afraid and confused/ And his brain has been mismanaged with great skill/ All he believes are his eyes/ And his eyes, they just tell him lies.”
Dylan warns that people have been controlled to foster destruction, through war and environmental degradation. The chorus includes a neighbor’s plea to end unfettered murder, “There’s a woman on my block, Sitting there in a cold chill, She say who gonna take away his license to kill?”
The song “Clean Cut Kid” from 1985 in “Empire Burlesque” has the chorus, “He was a clean-cut kid/ But they made a killer out of him/ That’s what they did.” The song includes the lines, “They said, ‘Listen boy, you’re just a pup’/ They sent him to a napalm health spa to shape up.” Here Dylan protests the lasting impacts of U.S. involvement in the disastrous, failed Vietnam War on its veterans. In 1989 “Political World” from “Oh Mercy” begins, “We live in a political world/ Love don’t have any place/ We’re living in times where men commit crimes/ And crime don’t have a face.” Dylan equates politics with hidden, faceless criminality. Later in the song is the line, “Life is in mirrors, death disappears/ Up the steps into the nearest bank.” The perpetrators of injustice and the masters of war are continuously profiteering from their cruelty and misdeeds.
Dylan’s album “Under the Red Sky” came out in 1990, seven years after U2’s album “Under a Blood Red Sky,” which included “Sunday Bloody Sunday” about British troops shooting and killing unarmed civil rights protesters in Ireland in 1972, and “New Year’s Day” about the Polish Solidarity movement.
Dylan’s “Under the Red Sky” was mostly scorned critically for simplistic lyrics supposedly unworthy of Dylan.[20] However, many of the songs in this album have the feel of nursery rhymes, often seen traditionally as harboring hidden political meaning. For example, “Baa Baa Black Sheep is about the medieval wool tax, imposed in the 13th Century by King Edward I”; “Mary, Mary Quite Contrary may be about Bloody Mary, daughter of King Henry VIII and concerns the torture and murder of Protestants”; and Pop Goes The Weasel is an apparently nonsensical rhyme that, upon subsequent inspection, reveals itself to in fact be about poverty, pawnbroking, the minimum wage.”[21]
Even when not traceable to historical contexts, nursery rhymes often have dark, sinister climaxes. In the title song “Under the Red Sky,” Dylan sings that “One day the little boy and the little girl were both baked in a pie,” reminiscent of Hansel and Gretel from the Brothers Grimm, but with a bad ending.
At least a couple of the songs in “Under the Red Sky” directly echo the concerns of “Masters of War.” The song “Unbelievable” includes the following lines:
It’s undeniable what they’d have you to think
It’s indescribable, it can drive you to drink
They said it was the land of milk and honey
Now they say it’s the land of money
Who ever thought they could ever make that stick
It’s unbelievable you can get this rich this quick
Following up on “Political World,” this song highlights the ubiquitous nature of the cynical, mercenary manipulations that society’s masters use to control ordinary people. The last song on “Under the Red Sky” is the highly foreboding “Cat’s in the Well” including the lines:
The cat’s in the well and grief is showing its face
The world’s being slaughtered and it’s such a bloody disgrace
Endless wars have been unrelenting throughout the world since the Vietnam War, as persistent as Dylan’s never-ending tour. Dylan offers a lament, an acknowledgement of grief in the face of bloody disgrace.
The cat’s in the well, the horse is going bumpety bump
The cat’s in the well, and the horse is going bumpety bump
Back alley Sally is doing the American jump
Dylan doesn’t shy away from the U.S. responsibility, citing “the American jump.” This conjures up Mustang Sally and the other kids on the American bandstand, forced to jump to the tunes of the masters of war, and perhaps also recalling parachute jumps by U.S. secret ops throughout non-privileged countries.
The cat’s in the well and the servant is at the door
The drinks are ready and the dogs are going to war
The servants proceed, drunk with the promise of spoils of war.
The cat’s in the well, the leaves are starting to fall
The cat’s in the well, leaves are starting to fall
Goodnight, my love, may the Lord have mercy on us all
Dylan does not call for marching in the street in protest. But he grieves over the workings of the masters of war, and he pleads for Oh Mercy.
Masked and Anonymous, and Imperial Cruelty
In 2003 the fascinating film “Masked and Anonymous” was released, written by and starring Bob Dylan as Jack Fate, a rock singer just released from prison. It depicts a cruel, corrupt American empire amid widespread urban poverty and a threat of revolution, along with police brutality and martial law.
Interspersed with fine performances of Dylan songs, a fundraising concert featuring Jack Fate is being organized, supposedly to encourage peace and reconciliation. With a stellar cast, and amid family rivalries and palace intrigue, the fall and rise of empires persists. In the closing scene Jack Fate, Dylan himself with grim stoic demeanor, rides back to prison in the back of a bus.
Theme Time Radio and Subversive Songs in Hiding
From May 2006 to April 2009 Bob Dylan served as Disc Jockey and commentator for the excellent weekly Theme Time Radio Hour show, with selections of songs fitting into a wide range of colorful themes.[22]
Dylan proves his great expertise as a musicologist of the history of American popular music. He had also done so with his many albums of cover songs, from his debut “Bob Dylan” in 1962 with all of its masterful versions of blues songs, through the highly under-appreciated “Self Portrait” in 1970, to “Good as I Been to You” and “World Gone Wrong” in 1992 and 1993, to the recent “Shadows in the Night”, “Fallen Angels”, and “Triplicate” in 2015, 2016, and 2017, with standards previously covered by Frank Sinatra. In his Theme Time Radio Hour commentaries Dylan also disarmingly expressed aspects of his own personality, with wise-cracks, anecdotes about musicians he had encountered, bad puns, and occasional personal foibles.
In his Theme Time Radio Hour show, season 1, episode 45, the Trains episode, broadcast around 2007, Dylan reveals his later approach to exposing injustices. Dylan includes in the episode an Anti-Vietnam War song. I was active myself in the movement against the ruinous Vietnam War, including being arrested in the week-long Columbia University building occupations as a student in 1968. I thought I knew all the Vietnam protest songs, but Dylan mentions one I did not know about. Dylan introduces the song with the striking declaration, “I’ve always believed that the first rule of being subversive is not to let anybody know you’re being subversive.” In other words, the best protest songs are the ones that are not explicit, like most of Dylan’s recent subversive songs. Of course, in his early 60s folk songs he was not trying to obscure his protest perspective.
Dylan continues on the Theme Time Trains episode, “Here’s a song that became number One in 1966. According to the authors they wrote it as a protest to the Vietnam War. They had to disguise that fact to get it recorded and on the radio, but they say it’s about a guy that gets drafted and goes to fight in the war. The train is taking him to an army base, and he knows he may die in Vietnam. At the end of the song he sings ‘And I don’t know if I’m ever coming home.’” Then Dylan introduces the familiar Monkees song, “Last Train to Clarksville.”
https://youtu.be/ZcXpKiY2MXE
How many people ever knew that the Monkees did an anti-war song?[23] How many people realize how much of Dylan’s original songwriting of the past twenty years are subversive social critiques?
Dylan’s Recent Protest Songs and the Roman Empire
A couple of Dylan’s recent protest or subversive songs are continuations of the message of “Masters of War,” specifically, “Workingman’s Blues #2” from “Modern Times” in 2006, and “Early Roman Kings” from “Tempest” in 2012. The latter song exemplifies Dylan’s use of the Classical realm to portray indirectly modern inequities.
Dylan’s longtime connection to the Roman world goes¯ back to Robert Zimmerman in the Hibbing High School Latin Club. His early interest in Rome and classic culture proceeded through Dylan’s early 60s visits to Rome, to the 1971 song “When I Paint My Masterpiece” that opens on the streets of Rome, and Dylan noted this interest in his book Chronicles. Dylan speaks in Chronicles of the maturing and decay of classic societies, of appreciating Thucydides, of reading about Alexander’s conquests, and he compares Virginia slave plantations and Cuban sugar plantations to elite rule in the Roman Republic.[24] Dylan has even said that if he had to do it all over again he would “probably teach Roman history or theology.”[25] ¯
Richard Thomas delineates various occasional references to Rome and Roman poets throughout Dylan’s career, then masterfully details the special importance of classical references in Dylan’s brilliant series of works starting with “Time Out of Mind” in 1997, continuing through “Love and Theft,” “Modern Times,” “Together Through Life,” and “Tempest.”
This includes specific lines and themes Dylan takes from Virgil, Ovid, and Homer. Thomas explicates how Dylan’s references to Roman history depict the current American empire as echoing the period under Augustus Caesar when Rome morphed into an empire with the power of Augustus absolute, despite retaining the pretense of a republic.[26]
Dylan’s “Lonesome Day Blues” from “Love and Theft” in 2001 includes references from Virgil that correlate Roman civil wars with the Vietnam War. Via lines from a novel about a yakuza gangster the song also references Japanese imperial soldiers from World War II, and via references from Mark Twain the American Civil War as well. In an interview about “Love and Theft” Dylan said that, “the album deals with power, wealth, knowledge and salvation. … [ideals] across the ages.”
Dylan has long had a particular interest and affinity for the American Civil War, and nineteenth century America in general. In “Honest with Me,” also from “Love and Theft” Dylan sings sardonically, speaking as one of the warmongers, “I’m here to create the new imperial empire/ I’m going to do whatever circumstances require.”[27] Throughout these lyrics and images, Dylan traces and explores much of the long history and dynamics of imperialism and militarism, the background of the masters of war in his own time.
A lot is happening in the songs from this period. Some of them continue the concerns of “Masters of War” and Dylan’s other related songs of social criticism. As in numbers of his earlier songs, in recent albums especially Dylan speaks alternately in first person or third person from differing point of view, both as oppressed victim and gangster brutalizer. This is part of how the subversive aspects of these songs may not be apparent for those not fully paying attention.
[20] See: https://ultimateclassicrock.com/bob-dylan-under-the-red-sky/; and https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/under-the-red-sky-194817/.
[23] For the Theme Time Radio Hour Trains episode, see: http://www.themetimeradio.com/episode-45-trains/. “Last Train to Clarksville” was written by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart.
[24] Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), pp. 35, 36, 37, 85, 89.
[25] Thomas, Why Bob Dylan Matters, p. 52.
[26] Thomas, Why Bob Dylan Matters, pp. 4, 56-57.
[27] All the foregoing on “Love and Theft” are from Thomas, Why Bob Dylan Matters, pp. 195-203.
To commemorate Bob’s 80th birthday, I have just finished the promo video of the radio mix of our song “Bob Dylan – Our Prodigal Son” that a number of people, including Michael Gray likes
The song title Our Prodigal Son is of course from the Bible (Luke 15), a book Dylan himself has heavily drawn from during his career.
The song starts by mentioning twins, or duality, Dylan is ‘Dylan the artist’ when he has to be, as he has said, and is Robert as many say he likes to be called, the family man. The Biblical parable is about 2 brothers and “Prodigal” means being wastefully extravagant. In this story the man’s son recklessly and wastefully spends his inheritance. In fact after he has been given his inheritance by his father he goes off and wastes it all but his father (God) welcomes him back into the fold with open arms.
In the context of this famous parable, the prodigal son has also come to mean someone who is spiritually lost and someone who has returned after an absence. One of the main precepts running through the Bible is that God wants us to repent, and if you know or have watched the documentary, Eat The Document, the last scene features a tired and perhaps high Dylan in the back of a limousine in 66 saying to the camera, saying to us, ‘I’m sorry for all that I’ve done and I hope to remedy it soon’! After this Dylan would withdraw from the public gaze for some years.
Anyway, that’s something that the song is about that I also tried to capture Dylan’s career journey from then to now.
But, going back to Bowling Alley Blues we, ‘Les Paul’s’ (The Paul’s) have now found time to start working on more part Dylan written lyrics and have just finished what was originally 2 sets of lyrics called “Bowling Alley Blues” that we have split into 2 sets of lyrics, the 1st we have named “Sugar Daddy Blues” (the 2nd to be called ‘Phone Operator Blues’ will hopefully be one of the next to be recorded)
Sugar Daddy Blues
I got your letter today
I’m glad you say you’re doing fine
I see you still got your habit
I’m so glad to hear it isn’t mine
I read your name in the papers again
Says you’re going out with Mister-so-and-so
So the news is out and you can’t pretend
In case you didn’t know
You didn’t want me
You said that I was poor
Says your sugar daddy feeds your need
Says ‘You’ll never want for more’
Says ‘You’ll never want for more’
Sugar daddy blues
Maybe tomorrow morning
You’ll wake up and find
That your sweet sugar daddy got fed up
And has gone and left you behind
Oh why wait for tomorrow
When you can find this out today?
Here read the paper, he’s gone back to his wife
All that glitters wasn’t gold, you’re wasting your life
You’re wasting your life
If you want babe, I’ll take you back
I’ll give you all I got to give
Just remove all that lipstick and make-up
And you can really start to live
Then you can really, really start to live, yeah
Sugar daddy blues
Sugar daddy blues
You got them Sugar daddy blues
Oh why wait for tomorrow
When you can find this out today?
Here read the paper, he’s gone back to his wife
All that glitters wasn’t gold, you’re wasting your time
All that glitters wasn’t gold, you’re wasting your life
Lyrics: Bob Dylan/Paul Robert Thomas; Music: Paul Odiase
P.S. the idea for the song lyrics came to me as I suddenly realized that Dylan will soon be 80 and I had last seen him perform at Hyde Park in London a couple of years ago on the same bill as Neil Young and I thought he looked frail and it made me realize that he will be sorely missed when he passes on! Some people have criticized me for daring to think about the possibility that Dylan won’t be with us some time in the future but that is life, sadly we are all born to die!
The motorcycle black Madonna / two wheeled gypsy queen
An her silver studded phantom cause the grey flannel dwarf t scream
As he weeps t wicked birds of prey, who pick up his bread crumb sins
There are no sins once in the gates of Eden ____
Granted, Dylan seems to have a more stable mindset, but in a bleak scenario, without the motorbike accident and Woodstock retreat, his career would have turned out like Skip Spence’s tragic life.
Alexander ‘Skip’ Spence did not have the luck of such an emergency stop, soon hit the harder stuff and lost himself and his talent in heroin, LSD and cocaine. After splintering a hotel door with an axe in Greenwich Village 1968, at the Hotel Albert, and threatening fellow Moby Grapes Jerry Miller and Don Stevenson, the decline is complete. He is admitted to Bellevue Hospital, comes out again six months later in pyjamas, records his own John Wesley Harding in Nashville, the psychedelic folk gem Oar (with the uncanny “Broken Heart”, Skype’s country shuffle adaptation of “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine”), and drifts off again into clouds of intoxication under marmalade skies. He lives on Desolation Row for another thirty years and dies in 1999, aged 52, of lung cancer; the American version of crazy diamond Syd Barrett, all in all.
Still, his contributions to Moby Grape, though few in number, are irresistible highlights. “Omaha”, “Seeing”, “Indifference”… beautiful songs. As is one of the cheerful highlights of Moby Grape’s second record, Wow (1968): “Motorcycle Irene”. Dylan’s influence is unmistakable in the lyrics anyway;
The Hunchback, the Cripple, the Horseman and the Fool
Prayer books and candles and carpets, cloaks and jewels
Knowing all the answers, breaking all the rules
Stark naked, unsacred Motorcycle Irene
…in that parade of supporting characters, set pieces and one-liners plucked straight from “Desolation Row”, “Ballad Of A Thin Man”, from Highway 61 Revisited altogether. But the influence is most apparent in the choice of protagonist. The Motorcycle Mama does not make an appearance in pop music until 1965, here in Dylan’s “Gates Of Eden” (fifth verse of the manuscript, sixth verse of the final album version). Maybe inspired by Alberto Vargas’ biker girl pin-ups, maybe by the original Batwoman Kathy Kane, who swings into Detective Comics #233 on a motorbike in 1956, but female bikers are still completely uncommon in 1964, when Dylan introduces his motorcycle black Madonna.
Allen Ginsberg, by the way, connects these very lines to Kerouac:
“(Dylan) pulled Mexico City Blues from my hand and started reading it and I said, ‘What do you know about that?’ He said, ‘Somebody handed it to me in ’59 in St. Paul and it blew my mind.’ So I said ‘Why?’ He said, ‘It was the first poetry that spoke to me in my own language.’ So those chains of flashing images you get in Dylan, like the motorcycle black Madonna two-wheeled gypsy queen and her silver studded phantom lover, they’re influenced by Kerouac’s chains of flashing images and spontaneous writing, and that spreads out into the people”.
Michael Schumacher – First Thought: Conversations with Allen Ginsberg (2017).
Ginsberg’s quotation is not entirely correct (he adds this lover), but his point is clear – and can be followed. In this verse Dylan seems to let go of the suggestion of unity, both stylistically and in terms of content; the rhyme (queen – scream – sins) is no longer pure, only the opening line is a fourteener, and a candidate for a leitmotiv (motorbike – phantom) is abandoned after the second line. From the third line onwards, it indeed seems to be a chain of flashing, hardly related images, which Ginsberg thus attributes to the overwhelming impact of Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues.
The Beat Poet is, of course, both a Kerouac and a Dylan connoisseur of the first category, and moreover a long-standing intimate friend of both, so he has a right to speak. But here he seems to have missed the many echoes from Burroughs’ The Soft Machine; “phantom rider’, “grey flannel”, “silver” and even “dwarf” are terms and word combinations from Brother Bill, but are nowhere to be found in Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues.
Not too important, obviously. More remarkable is the echo that Dylan’s song itself seems to generate – most strikingly, the introduction of a Motorcycle Mama into pop culture.
Coincidence, perhaps, but within a year of the release of “Gates Of Eden” with the motorcycle black Madonna, the female motorbike angels do thunder into the cinema. Leading the way is The Wild Angels (1966) with Peter Fonda and a very tough Nancy Sinatra (as “Mike”), but especially with the wicked Momma Monahan (Joan Shawlee).
The cult film opens the gates to a subgenre. The Hellcats, The Mini-Skirt Mob with the infernal shrew Diane McBain and with Harry Dean Stanton, She-Devils On Wheels, and the most beautiful of all: The Girl On A Motorcycle (1968) with a spectacular Marianne Faithfull in leather jumpsuit, who leaves her solid husband during honeymoon, jumps on her chopper and rushes to her lover Alain Delon. Many psychedelic and soft-erotic scenes, but basically a cinematographic representation of the age-old folk classic “Black Jack Davey”.
The appearance of all those she-bikers and black Madonnas in songs after Bringing It All Back Home will be less of a coincidence. The devout Dylan disciples of the Grateful Dead sing a black Madonna in “New Potato Caboose” (1968), one-hit wonder Sailcat scores with “Motorcycle Mama”, on Neil Young’s Comes A Time a song of the same name is a much-covered highlight and in “Unknown Legend” (1992) Neil again puts a wild lady on a Harley, The choice of a silver-black phantom bike in Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out Of Hell” is no surprise either, but the most straightforward Dylan reverence comes from old brother in arms Robbie Robertson:
Benedictine, sister to Isis and the black Madonna
Mistress of magic, mm, and goddess of the Nile
She could read the stars, knew the secrets of the dead
And could see what kind of madness
Was stirring around in your head
The opening lines of “How To Become Clairvoyant”, the title track of Robertson’s 2011 musical memoir of sorts, or self-analysis. Where he looks back on the break-up with The Band in “This Is Where I Get Off”, on the ideals of his youth in “When The Night Was Young” and on the struggle with – presumably – his own addiction in “He Don’t Live Here No More”. And where he seems to be addressing old travelling companions in this “How To Become Clairvoyant”. Addressing Dylan, after that opening stanza, a second time:
King poet the holy fool
Apostle of self-destruction
I tried it your way but I couldn't sleep
There's too much construction
… although without too much wriggling it could also be understood as being about Richard Manuel or Syd Barrett. Or Skip Spence, of course.
Robbie Robertson – How To Become Clairvoyant:
To be continued. Next up: Gates Of Eden part VIII: When everyone’s super… no one will be
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:
This series takes live performances of Bob Dylan, in which he has re-worked one of his songs to give it a new direction or new meaning, or simply a new sound or feel.
Each article normally covers three songs with links to a video of each new performance that is highlighted, with notes on why we think it is of particular interest
As we know, Bob Dylan has sold the rights to his entire song catalog to Universal Music Group (UMG).
It happened at the end of last year and the contract was announced as one of Universal’s largest in history, and it ensured that the company can receive all potential revenue from the veteran’s songs.
Apparently the contract contained both Dylan’s current songwriter earnings and his ownership of each song’s copyright.
And the publicity surrounding the deal talked of “About 600 tracks from a six-decade career” being acquired by Universal.
The deal’s terms were not revealed, but the estimated amount was set to be between $200 million and $450 million, a great amount for any Highroller Casino player.
But here’s the thing. What about the songs we’ve been discovering since we first started this blog back in 2008? Some of these don’t seem to have any publisher assignment at all.
And what about the songs like “I once knew a man” which suddenly turned up in 1984, got one performance and was never heard again and which is about to be discussed yet again in the next episode of “All Directions at Once”. A song that isn’t listed in the catalogues or lists of recordings, except on this site. A song which, if it was written by someone else, no one can find in any recording or any mention of anywhere. A song which is not (as some would have it) a throw-away 12 bar blues, but a song with a rhythmic content that has never been found anywhere else.
A song which if not written by Dylan, then by whom?
So what if someone picks up on “I once knew a man” and plays it, and puts it on an album. Who gets the royalties from that? We know that all future earnings from Dylan’s massive catalog of songs will now go to Universal Music. The company will receive a royalties payment any time “Just Like A Woman” or “Make You Feel My Love” is played on the radio, licensed to a film, or covered by another artist. They’ll also have a say on which films or advertisements use Dylan’s music in the future.
But what about the songs we have found and for which readers of this site have created their own music? Those songs that turn up in our Showcase. Songs where Bob wrote the lyrics but for which the music is composed by members of the Elite Untold Squad.
Dylan accepted a lump sum payment estimated to be worth between $200 million and $450 million (£150 million to £340 million). The purchase price was not disclosed by either Universal or Dylan’s team, but the upper end of those figures is reasonable.
What if someone takes a song written by Bob Dylan and with new music added by an Untolder. Does Universal pay up?
What if a band takes that oh so rough recording of “I once knew a man” and it starts being played. Who gets those royalties?
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the selling of song catalogs has become a booming industry, with investors seeing music as a relatively stable commodity in an otherwise volatile market. Blondie, Barry Manilow, John Lennon, and Kurt Cobain’s estates have all sold the rights to their songs in recent years.
So Bob is following in the footsteps of Bruce Springsteen, Kendrick Lamar, Billie Eilish, and Post Malone.
Outside of the United States, Sony/ATV Music Publishing says it will continue to manage Dylan’s catalog until their contract expires in a few years. Sony Music owns the rights to his recordings as well.
But who represents those of us who gave life to the previously unfinished songs, which even now might be playing on the speakers of some artist somewhere, looking for a new sound, looking for a new song?
When UMG CEO Sir Lucian Grainge announced the offer, he said it was with “enormous pride” that he welcomed Dylan to the family. The Hipgnosis SongsFund, based in London, has invested more than $1 billion (£750 million) on Rihanna, Beyonce, and Justin Timberlake hits, with the Church of England among the investors sharing royalties.
“It’s no secret that the art of songwriting is the fundamental key to all great music, nor is it a secret that Bob is one of the very greatest practitioners of that art,” said Lucian. “Brilliant and moving, inspiring and beautiful, insightful and provocative, his songs are timeless – whether they were written more than half a century ago or yesterday.”
He added that it was “no exaggeration to say that his vast body of work has captured the love and admiration of billions of people all around the world. I have no doubt that decades, even centuries from now, the words and music of Bob Dylan will continue to be sung and played- and cherished -everywhere.”
To which the valiant songwriters of Untold added, “And don’t forget the little people.”
In case you missed it:
Dylan in Depth – songs analysed in more depth than you might have imagined.
If you’d like to write for Untold Dylan, please email Tony@schools.co.uk
As well as a novel placed in the time of Napoleon Bonaparte, Thomas Hardy pens a long play about the Napoleonic Wars:
A horrible dream has gripped me - horrible
(Thomas Hardy: The Dynasts, Act VII, sc. vi)
Bob Dylan writes songs about the later American Civil War:
I dreamt a monstrous dream
(Bob Dylan: ‘Cross The Green Mountain)
Prior to the Civil War, a number of slaves escape to Canada by means of the ‘underground railroad’ – giving rise to the song below:
No more auction block for me
No more, no more
No more auction block for me
Many thousands gone
(Bob Dylan: No More Auction Block ~ traditional)
Elsewhere, the singer/songwriter mentions the Napoleonic Wars – The United States sides with Napoleon, and attacks Canada (British North America); Britain retailiates by setting the White House in Washington aflame – the American endeavour to conquer all of North America fails:
Ever since the British burned the White House down
There's been a bleeding wound in the heart of town
(Bob Dylan: Narrow Way)
The above image akin to the bloody image depicted beneath:
The oblong white ceiling with this scarlet blot in the midst
had the appearance of a gigantic Ace of Hearts
(Thomas Hardy: Tess Of The d'Urbervilles, Chapter LVI)
As the following lyrics indicate, the despotic French general becomes an archetype in regards to love affairs:
You used to be amused
At Napoleon in rags, and the language that he used
Go to him now he calls you, you can't refuse
(Bob Dylan: Like A Rolling Stone)
On the subject of love and love, the singer/songwriter, like Hardy in his day, draws upon writers living at the time:
Idiot wind, blowing through the dust upon our shelves
We're idiots, babe
It's a wonder that we can even feed ourselves
(Bob Dylan: Idiot Wind)
A tribute paid to the author of the following prose:
Strange, how we manage to feed the world, and not
learn to feed ourselves
(Henry Miller: The Air-Conditioned Nightmare)
This is a much-expanded version of a talk presented at the World of Bob Dylan International Symposium, May 30 to June 2, 2019, at the University of Tulsa’s Institute for Bob Dylan Studies.
Bob Dylan’s period of writing protest songs has been relegated conventionally to the early 1960s before he went electric. But actually, Dylan has continued to invoke ongoing concern and moral indignation against oppression throughout his career. He has movingly engaged a remarkably wide variety of themes and genres in his music and poetry. However, his critiques of social injustice, including his opposition to war and militarism, have persisted within his work right up to the present.
Dylan’s later critiques of social injustice have often been missed, as he intentionally has obscured the subversive nature of his songs in his recent approaches. He reveals this explicitly in one of his Theme Time Radio Hour episodes in the mid 2000s. A prime example of Dylan’s indirect commentary is his increasing use in recent years of his long-time interest, going back to high school, of Roman history and culture. In the albums “Modern Times” and “Tempest,” the Roman Empire serves as an analogue for the transgressions of the modern American empire.
Dylan’s Early Protest Songs
Dylan’s numerous famous 1960s protest songs that explicitly call out systemic injustice and oppression include “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” and a bit later “George Jackson” in 1971 and “Hurricane” in 1975, among many others. These songs highlight economic exploitation, inequality, and racism.
“A Pawn in their Game” tells of the manipulation of the prejudices of poor whites by self-serving politicians. The song “Hollis Brown” depicts the tragedy of agribusiness destroying family farms, leading the desperate Hollis Brown to shoot and kill his family and himself. “Hattie Carroll” describes the casual cruelty of a murderous young man with political connections, and the so-called justice system that awards him a mere six-month sentence. William Zantzinger went on to a life as a harsh slumlord. But his true sentence was the infamy based on Dylan’s song that followed him the rest of his life, including in his 2009 obituary, for example, “William Zantzinger, convicted of killing Hattie Carroll and denounced in Bob Dylan song, dies at 69.”[1]
Masters of War
In considering Dylan’s ongoing social protest, I will focus on “Masters of War,” which remains the strongest anti-war song ever written, just as relevant today as when Dylan wrote it. Recalling some key lines, the song begins:
Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
The powerful weapons industry was behind the scenes of national politics when Dylan wrote this. But it is much less hidden now, celebrated openly by our government with strong influence over military and foreign policy. Our most recent former president’s first official foreign trip was to Saudi Arabia for the avowed purpose of selling American weapons systems to their dictatorship. Saudi Arabia’s ongoing genocidal bombing against Yemen could not continue without United States weapons profiteers.
A little further Dylan sings:
You’ve thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
This is a current issue, as massive climate breakdown as well as endless wars with increased nuclear proliferation and threats, along with the Covid pandemic and possible future pandemics endanger the possibility of any human futures. Economic challenges for many, with massive student debt, continues to encourage the birth rate to fall among Americans. With the threat to the global future, many young people are deciding not to have children.
The song closes:
And I hope that you die
And your death’ll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave
’Til I’m sure that you’re dead.[2]
With all of Dylan’s put-down songs, this must be his most damning line, openly hoping for death for the war merchants who strongly encourage the global increase of new wars with deadlier weapons.
Voices of the Prophets
Bob Dylan’s songs responding to social injustice often function like the words of Old Testament prophets. Abraham Heschel says about these prophets, “The prophet is not only a prophet. He is also a poet, preacher, patriot, statesman, social critic, moralist.”[3]
For Dylan we must also add, this prophet is a song and dance man. All of Dylan’s prophetic songs of social criticism are complex and multifaceted. Heschel discusses how the prophets speak against pride, arrogance, cruelty, and violence, and support the humble. The prophets especially opposed masters of war. “The prophets were the first men in history to regard a nation’s reliance upon force as evil. Hosea condemned militarism as idolatrous.”[4] Beyond the cruelties that occur in peace, “Noise, fury, tumult are usually associated with battles of war, when nation seeks to destroy nation. … To the ear of the prophet, … Woe to him who builds a town with blood, and founds a city on iniquity.”[5]
Dylan borrows this line in “I Pity the Poor Immigrant” in “John Wesley Harding.” Heschel adds, “The denunciation of violence committed by private individuals applied a millionfold to the brutal wars of aggression waged by insatiable and arrogant empires.”[6] Bob Dylan’s ongoing opposition to the masters of war and to the oppression of empires fully expresses the tradition and teachings of the Old Testament prophets, and exemplifies Dylan’s persona as a prophet.
Eisenhower’s Warning, JFK Responses, and Dylan’s Tom Paine Speech
Dylan first performed “Masters of War” in February 1963, just two years and three weeks after President Eisenhower’s warning speech about the military industrial complex at the end of his presidency. Eisenhower warned that, “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new to the American experience. The total influence–economic, political, even spiritual—is felt [everywhere]. . . . [in] the very structure of our society. In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”[7] This was the context in which Bob Dylan sang presciently against the weapons merchants and warmongers. Eisenhower gave his speech the very week that young Bob Dylan first arrived in New York City.[8]
JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, was authored by James Douglass, a Catholic Worker who speaks sympathetically of John Kennedy’s Catholic social morality and his growing courage facing the militarists.[9]
Douglass documents meticulously and thoroughly how some of the hardline warmongers in Kennedy’s administration, Dylan’s masters of war, considered JFK a traitor for not allowing them to wage nuclear war against Russia during the Cuban missile crisis. They were further enraged that Kennedy thereafter publicly campaigned for peace and an end to the Cold War, notably starting with his speech at American University in June 1963.
Kennedy’s peace campaign was gaining popular support at the time of his assassination. Douglass further asserts, with detailed documentation, that JFK was planning to withdraw troops from Vietnam upon returning from Dallas; that he had been working with Russian Premier Khrushchev to end the cold war, secretly from militarist hard-liners on both sides; and that members of the U.S. military establishment were directly involved in the conspiracy that assassinated Kennedy.[10] All of this is worth noting in connection with Bob Dylan in relation to Dylan’s infamous speech December 13, 1963, exactly three weeks after Kennedy’s assassination, upon his receiving the Tom Paine award from the Emergency Civil Liberties Union.[11]
The Biblical prophets were willing to say or do anything to get their points across. Dylan’s Tom Paine speech is often considered a drunken ramble and was vigorously booed because of Dylan’s sympathetic mention of Lee Harvey Oswald. Reading the speech now and Dylan’s undated follow-up letter to the Emergency Civil Liberties Union, they seem eloquent and illuminating.
Dylan spoke in the talk about the integrity of the young, and especially in the follow-up letter about not wanting to be controlled by the expectations of others, a familiar complaint from Dylan about not being labeled, either as solely a protest singer or otherwise. In his talk Dylan mocked all the old bald heads in the audience and especially extolled the young people who had gone to Cuba, despite travel bans. Ironically, according to extensive documentation from Douglass, at the moment of Kennedy’s assassination a French correspondent who was an unofficial envoy from Kennedy was having lunch together with Fidel Castro in Cuba, with JFK’s death terminating days of informal negotiations.[12]
In Dylan’s speech, after saying he accepted the award on behalf of young friends who went to Cuba, he said, “I have to be honest, I just got to be, as I got to admit that the man who shot President Kennedy, Lee Oswald, … I saw some of myself in him.” Loud booing and hissing ensued.
In his follow-up letter Dylan added that he had intended to refute the claim that we are always all to blame, as he took on personal empathy for Oswald.[13] Dylan conveyed his personal connection with all downtrodden beings, a theme he expressed eloquently in his song first performed five months later, “Chimes of Freedom” honoring every hung-up person in the whole wide universe. It happened that the FBI had a file on Bob Dylan, partly because of the travel to Cuba and leftist associations of Dylan’s girlfriend Suze Rotolo, but also with FBI references to Dylan’s comments in this speech to the Emergency Civil Liberties Union.[14]
The Pied Pipers in Prison
Even after Dylan went electric and started writing complex symbolist lyrics rather than overt songs of protest, the new material included elements of societal critique, along with comments on interpersonal conflict and injustice.
His highly celebrated album “Highway 61 Revisited” from 1965 has many examples. In the title song a bored drunken gambler wants to create our next world war, and a promoter says it could be very easily done. In “Tombstone Blues” Dylan sings about Jack the Ripper sitting at the head of the chamber of commerce. The bombastic commander-in-chief sneers at John the Baptist that “the sun’s not yellow, it’s chicken,” heralding ongoing aggressions. The king of the Philistines “puts the pied pipers in prison,” presumably those preaching peace and love, then fattens the slaves and sends them out to the jungle, an obvious reference to Vietnam. Further, “the National Bank at a profit sells road maps for the soul to the old folks’ home and the college” as all institutions serve profiteers propagandizing old and young alike.
“Desolation Row” begins “They’re selling postcards of the hanging,” a reference to the open celebration of the lynching of black people in the Minnesota of Dylan’s youth. Along with mentions of the blind commissioner and the riot squad are colorful scenes of a range of hypocrisies and oppression, such as the insurance men who round up everyone who know more than they do, and make sure that nobody can escape from Desolation Row.
West Point, Unwinnable Wars, and the Threat of Catastrophe
Dylan’s deep concern with the effects of the masters of war has clearly persisted throughout his career. He has performed the song 884 times, performing only fourteen songs more frequently. He sang it most recently, as I write, in October 2016.[15] In October 1990, Dylan even performed “Masters of War” at West Point, at the Eisenhower Hall Theater.
The “Rolling Stone” magazine review of that concert said, “He was exceptionally comfortable on this stage, smiling and dancing and singing even his angriest songs with no hint of irony or contempt. … Dylan has become so willfully perverse, so completely unreadable, that even playing ‘Masters of War’ may have been a coincidence (although the fact that he opened his next show, at New York City’s Beacon Theater, with a quick, instrumental version of ‘The Marines’ Hymn’ might indicate that he knew exactly what he was doing).”[16] Four months later at the Grammy Awards in February 1991, Dylan accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award and performed “Masters of War”; it was during the first Gulf War.
“Masters of War” is still highly relevant, with major current influence on the United States government and media from the large weapons manufacturers. The United States has many hundreds of military bases all around the world, many more outside its borders than all other countries put together. Our military budget is massive, estimated at a trillion dollars a year, with bi-partisan support for sixty percent of the U.S. budget going to the military-industrial complex.
The Pentagon Papers documented that several presidential administrations and their generals knew the Vietnam War was unwinnable and lied about it. The recent Afghanistan Papers from the Washington Post has confirmed the same about the two decades Afghanistan War that has brought massive devastation to the whole Mideast region. This war secretly was known to be unwinnable by administrations from both parties.[17]
Moreover, we are now proceeding with a new nuclear arms race, more expensive and much more dangerous than in the Cold War around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and Dylan’s 1963 “Talking World War III Blues.”
In his 2017 book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg says, “For over fifty years, all-out thermonuclear war—an irreversible, unprecedented, and almost unimaginable calamity for civilization and most life on earth—has been, like the disasters of Chernobyl, Katrina, the Gulf oil spill, Fukushima Daiichi, and before these, World War I, a catastrophe waiting to happen, on a scale infinitely greater than any of these. And that is still true today. No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral. And insane.”[18]
[1] In the L.A. Times. https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-zantzinger10-2009jan10-story.html.
[2] All lyrics of Bob Dylan songs are from: http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/, unless otherwise specified.
[3] Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (New York: HarperPerennial, 2001; first published Harper & Row, 1962), p. xxii.
[4] Heschel, The Prophets, p. 212.
[5] Habakkuk, 2:11-12.
[6] Heschel, The Prophets, pp. 205-206. See also Seth Rogovoy, Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet (New York: Scribner, 2012).
[7] James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (New York: Touchstone, A division of Simon & Schuster, 2008), pp. 136-137.
[8] Richard F. Thomas, Why Bob Dylan Matters (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2017), pp. 318-319.
[9] Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable.
[10] Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable. Just reading through Douglass’s introductory Chronology, pp. xxi-xxxi is quite compelling and persuasive.
[14] “FBI Tracking of Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo Foreshadowed Future Abuses,” https://truthout.org/articles/fbi-tracking-of-bob-dylan-and-suze-rotolo-foreshadowed-future-abuses/
Dylan’s birthday: Dylan hits 80. It’s not dark yet…
By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)
He has always been there. Telling me things. Explaining things. Probing the mysteries of heart and soul. Making me uncomfortable with that voice, that wah-wah voice.
When I was young, impressionable and idealistic, in the early sixties, he was there, sounding the battle charge although he said he wasn’t. His rhythms were in our heads as we marched against the Vietnam War. We all gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing. The times would always be a-changing, and in our direction. He was, and still is, the spokesman of his generation, although he said he wasn’t. He was the king of protest, and the masters of war were breathing down our necks. And that voice, thin and plaintive. Insistent.
A little bit older, when the worlds of certainty dissolved into an intoxicated haze, he was there again, guiding us through the subterranean world of his circus, the queasy, unsteady world of surrealist nightmares and attendant craziness. I can’t tell the number of times I saw the ghost of ‘lectricity howling in the bones of her face, or felt trapped inside of the frozen traffic. It didn’t matter where you lived, everywhere was Desolation Row.
When the reckoning came and everything got stripped back, he was there again with a sloppy grin saying howdy and singing country songs, sounding a bit like Johnny Cry Ray. He was there, on the other side of the Baroque. For a moment we thought he’d thrown his suitcase out the window. A decade had slipped by.
A little further down the track, in the mid seventies, when things got emotionally tangled and we had relationships going to pack, and children, and histories, he was there again with his pain and his resilience. Through his pain and desire we came to know our own.
And when that all came crashing down and we had to face issues of faith and belief, he was there again, like a prophet from the old testament, reminding us that we had to serve somebody, that the world was as full of hypocrisy and madness as it had always been, but there was hope, maybe even salvation, and that being in your forties wasn’t the end of the world. We didn’t have to subscribe to his religious beliefs to know that the jig was up and it was time to feed the soul. Besides, another decade had gone by.
When our strongly held beliefs began to fade into the grey years he was there again, reminding us of our despair. A place where we could cope with the world most of the time, and smile in the face of mankind, but we knew the shooting star of faith had passed and that love could always be a lie. We hardly noticed that another decade had gone by.
Then he wasn’t there. For six years in the nineties he had only his old songs to sing us. We all thought the man in the moon had finally gone home. That there would be no more guiding voice. Then he was back, with a vengeance, but there was little comfort to be found in this latest confrontation with mortality. The old resilience was there but sorely tested. Time leaves us all standing in the doorway, crying. We can envy youth as we stroll through the lonely graveyards of our minds, but we can’t get any younger. We were past the consolations of religion by then, and that voice left us nothing to hang onto but a shadow.
But we did have the past, the glorious past of music, magic and myth. We relearned how to love and steal, how to transform ourselves into ancient warriors of the spirit. Sword in hand, we could walk through the cities of the plague untouched. And always the hour of our departure grew nearer. Our Virgil, our guide, our voice, then took us through tempests and killing floors where our sense of identity and being became split and entangled, but always returned to the altar of love. And another decade or two slipped by between his back pages.
Throughout my life the voice of Bob Dylan has never been far away. Dylan has been my spirit guide, my uncanny echo, growing old with me, showing the way and giving voice to everything that would otherwise remain voiceless. He opened his voice to let the world come through.
And now he is eighty, maybe three miles north of Purgatory and one step from the great beyond. And I’m not too far behind. What’s a few years here or there? There’s no getting off the hell-bound train. It may not be dark yet, and it will certainly get there. But please, not just yet. And maybe you could keep writing those songs as the darkness gathers. The world’s in need of them. As ever.
Let there be more birthdays. More songs. After all, it’s not over until that darkness finally falls, and that open door closes behind you.
That Dylan remained vital, before covid ended the Never Ending Tour, is evident in this wonderful performance of ‘It’s Not Dark Yet’ from 2019. On the 24th of May I will play this song. Maybe twice.
With a time-rusted compass blade, Alladin and his lamp
Sits with Utopian hermit monks side saddle on the Golden Calf
An on their promises of paradice, you will not hear a laugh
excpt inside the gates of Eden ____
It’s August 1756 and Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the genial and appalling protagonist of Patrick Süskind’s brilliant, filmed million-seller The Perfume (1985), leaves Paris for the first time in his eighteen-year life. His goal is Grasse, the perfume metropolis in the south, but he soon forgets his goal. For the first time in his eighteen years he breathes air, no, smells air without the scent of people. He is ecstatic. He takes ever greater detours around cities, avoiding villages, oncoming travellers, farmers in the fields… his nose leads him further and further away from people, towards ever cleaner air. Finally, he stands on the top of the Plomb du Cantal, in the Auvergne mountains. He cannot get any further from civilisation. He hesitates.
“Everywhere, in every direction, there was the same distance from people, and at the same time, every step in every direction would have meant greater proximity to people. The compass circled. It no longer gave any orientation. Grenouille had reached his destination.”
Süskind uses the compass metaphor in the same way that poets, literators and songwriters usually use it: to express how an infatuation, or any other state of mind, guides the actions of the protagonist. David Crosby in “Compass”, for example;
But like a compass seeking North
There lives in me a still sure spirit part
Clouds of doubt are cut asunder
By the lightning and the thunder
Shining from the compass of my heart
… or REM in “Green Grow The Rushes Go” (The compass points the workers home), or like Cliff Richard in “Miss You Nights” (Looking moonward for my compass), but of course Dylan enjoys singing along with his hero George Jones the most:
There's a shore of happiness that somehow we have missed
And now you've drifted off to someone new
But I haunt the lonely sea with a crew of memories
For the compass of my heart still points to you.
("Sea Between Our Hearts", 1965)
https://youtu.be/vfnrmyyybGk
And just as often, the compass metaphor serves to express the opposite; wildly spinning compass needles that represent how much the narrator is confused, how much he is stuck, or searching for the Way of Life. As in Süskind’s example, as Kerouac in Desolation Angels (“I closed down all my shutters to all four points of the compass”), Poe in Eleonora (‘They penetrate, however, rudderless or compassless into the vast ocean of the ‘light ineffable’”), as Kipling in The Ballad Of Bolivar (“Watched the compass chase its tail like a cat at play”).
Dylan shakes off rather original variant thereof. His compass blade does not point in the right direction, nor does it spin desperately, but points rigidly, time-rusted, in the wrong direction. The inspiration to choose the unusual blade, by the way, instead of the more common needle, is probably due to the poetic instinct that (still) wants to maintain the fourteener, the fourteen syllables of this verse. Although it is noticeable that only singer/songwriters who are in Dylan’s corner sometimes choose “blade” instead of “needle”. The phenomenon Joe Henry links it to songwriting, in an interview with the LA Times (6 June 2014):
“Sometimes songs want a bigger parade and more confetti in the air. Sometimes they want to be much more minimal and intimate. I try to treat a batch of songs like a compass blade and just walk in the direction they point me”
… and the only other song to feature that unusual compass blade is Billy Bragg’s “Your Name On My Tongue” (2013):
Grief was my companion
It pushed me like a sea
Compass blade at my throat
Pointing up to the sun
None of it not too relevant, all in all, regarding the turn the poet Dylan seems to have taken from the third verse onwards; away from something as topical as nuclear misery, towards universal, timeless themes, towards an “It’s Alright, Ma”-like confetti mosaic painting a condition humaine.
As in the previous stanzas, this one too has a leitmotif – and still it seems very much as if the young poet is creating such a poetic inner structure purely by intuition. After “metal” in the second stanza and “predator” in the third stanza, we now see something like “Eldorado” as the leitmotiv. Aladdin’s lamp, Utopia, the Golden Calf, promise of paradise… and in the chorus line, all that is laughed at by an entity that is actually in that Eldorado, by something or someone who actually is inside the Gates Of Eden.
For the analysts who like to celebrate Dylan as Prince of Protest, as Spokesman of a Generation, it is not so difficult to discern in this something like social criticism, something like commentary on political structures. “Those in power who so falsely prophecy a better world are otherworldly hermit monks, guided by outdated values and ideas, sailing on a fixed compass, telling fairy tales and comfortable sitting on the Golden Calf, on big money.” Something like that, anyway.
But them again; just as conclusive are interpretations that want to understand such a stanza as – for example – an attack on church institutions, on the fake preachers who promise paradise but in the meantime are riding the golden calf themselves. Or, why not, a reckoning with the dogmatic part of the folk community, with the misguided and unworldly part of it. Metaphors like “Aladdin”, “Utopian hermit monks” and even “Golden Calf” are, in the song catalogue, and in poetry at all, quite fresh and not yet burdened with inescapable connotations (like “mushroom cloud” or “pied piper”), and are thus available for a wide range of interpretations.
For what it’s worth: the author’s intentions do not point towards social criticism. In the interviews of these months, Dylan already opposes with increasing assertiveness the “voice-of-a-generation” label, and decades later, in his autobiography Chronicles (2004), he repeats his unease with similar weariness and indignation as he recalls the words with which he was awarded his honorary doctorate at Princeton (1970). To his horror, the speaker calls him the authentic expression of the disturbed and concerned conscience of Young America;
“Oh Sweet Jesus! It was like a jolt. I shuddered and trembled but remained expressionless. The disturbed conscience of Young America! There it was again. I couldn’t believe it! Tricked once more.”
It is not the only place in the book where Dylan expresses his displeasure. Most poetically in Chapter 2, New Morning:
“The big bugs in the press kept promoting me as the mouthpiece, spokesman, or even conscience of a generation. That was funny. All I’d ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. […] Being true to yourself, that was the thing. I was more a cowpuncher than a Pied Piper.”
His compass, says the poet, points to himself.
To be continued. Next up: Gates Of Eden part VII:
———–
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:
I stumbled across the Untold Dylan site around 3 years ago during an extended hospital stay. I immediately was drawn in to both the idea and execution. I loved the idea of reviewing each and every song, and Tony’s writing was both entertaining and informative.
My initial involvement was purely in finding songs for Tony to review. That very first day I found the site, I sent Tony copies of “Steel Bars” and “King Of Kings”. Within a day the review for Steel Bars appeared and I couldn’t believe how detailed and entertaining the review was. A day later the “King of Kings” review was published. It was then I knew I’d found a community of like minded fans, where I could continue to submit suggestions and, maybe one day, contribute an article or two.
That’s what I love about Dylan’s career. His discography is so vast, it’s almost impossible to find the end, and it seems to grow every day. I love being able to present his music, be they originals, covers by himself or covers by other so that everyone can hear it – love it or hate it. It’s great to be able to let others hear songs that might have passed them by, like On, Wisconsin or Touchy Situation.
That’s why I love Dylan’s music and this site so much, whenever I hear a new piece of music, or read a new article or discover a new cover version it’s like unwrapping a birthday present every day.
Over the years I’ve had so much fun here on this site, great memories including a great back and forth with Tony and Larry and myself as we worked out the lyrics for Gone But Not Forgotten.
Then came the idea to ask the readers to put music to some Dylan lyrics that previously had none. Man, I loved receiving and listening to every single one of the submissions. From Rob Beretta’s version of Don’t Let Anyone Write Your Story to Chris Sheridan with his Listen Robert Moses. Just take a listen to Nick Juno’s recording of Dope Fiend Robber.
None of this would have happened without Bob and his music. I am eternally grateful for that. And that’s what Bob means to me…sharing, community, collaboration, fun times and great memories.
So, happy birthday Bob. I hope you have a great day! And Lang may yer lum reek!!
As previously noted, forerunners of the characters in the narrative song “Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts” by Bob Dylan include:
Jim the miner; Edward the businessman; Rosemary the singer
Jack the rum-runner; young Lily; Louis the Lug
Aholah; Aholibah; prophet Ezekiel
As in the song mentioned above, playing cards are used as symbols in “Tess Of The d’Ubervilles”, a novel by Thomas Hardy.
There’s the alliterative depiction of two sisters:
…..a dark virago, Car Day, dubbed Queen of Spades, till lately a favourite of d’Urberville’s;
Nancy, her sister, nicknamed the Queen of Diamonds ….
And the image of the blood drops:
The oblong white ceiling with the scarlet blot in the midst had the appearance of a gigantic Ace of Hearts
In the novel, Thomas Hardy works in quotes from the purplish and overly-alliterative works of a contemporary Decadent poet:
Behold, when they face is made bare, he that loved there shall hate
They face shall be no more fair at the fall of thy fate
For thy life shall fall as a leaf, and be shed as the rain
(Charles Swinburne: Not As With Sundering Of The Earth)
It be Angel, Alec, and Tess in the novel; in the Dylan song, the main characters are Rosemary and Lily; Jim and Jack – the Swinburnean alliterative phrasing toned down a bit :
She fluttered her false eyelashes, and whispered in his ear
"I'm sorry, darling, that I'm late", but he didn't seem to hear
He was staring into space, over at the Jack of Hearts
"I know I've seen that face before", Big Jim was thinking
to himself
(Bob Dylan: Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack of Hearts)
Cited below is another verse by the Decadent:
Thou wert fair in the fearless old fashion
And thy limbs as melodies yet
And move to the music of passion
With lithe and lascivious regret
What ailed us O God to desert you
(Charles Swinburne: Delores)
Akin in sentiment and style is the song beneath:
With your mercury mouth in the missionary times
And your eyes like smoke, and your prayers like rhymes
And your silver cross, and your voice like chimes
Oh, who among them do they think could bury you
(Bob Dylan: Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands)
Of course there are always literary critics:
In short, is a flower, Rosemary
Or Lily, dead or alive, worth
The excrement of one sea-bird
Is it worth a solitary candle drip
(Arthur Rimbaud: On The Subject Of Flowers)
Footnotes:
In case you missed it:
Bob Dylan and Friends: a series on the musicians that Bob has played with and musicians he clearly likes.
If you’d like to write for Untold Dylan, please email Tony@schools.co.uk
One of the great things about Untold is that there are no rules – or at least not many. We create series, we publish one-offs, some of us write lots of articles, some people write one or two, lots of people say nice things about the site, some people tell us we are idiots for not understanding a song in a particular way – or indeed not understanding Dylan in a particular way.
That’s how it goes, and as long as the negative posts are not abusive, we don’t mind. True, with some of the caustic comments we do send the lads round occasionally, but really, it’s just a gesture – something to show that we do read everything that is sent in.
Anyway our brief is that we are allowed to do pretty much anything Dylan-ish so today here’s some fun, just in case you haven’t seen and heard it before. If you have, well, watch it and listen to it again. It’s wonderful.
The Rolling Ramshackle Revue is a one-off project featuring Naomi Bedford, Nancy Kerr, Ben Walker, Alasdair Roberts, Robert Vincent, Justin Currie from Del Amitri, Paul and Swill from The Men They Couldn’t Hang along with other folk and roots artists.
Together and less together they’ve recorded a version of ‘Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts’ to raise money for the homeless, food banks, people in need and causes that the campaigning organisation We Shall Overcome supports.
Twelve singers, six players, one laptop and a small dog, all recording from within their own homes during lockdown. What could possibly go wrong?
English roots singer Naomi Bedford commented,
‘I’d often talked about covering this song with my partner, musician Paul Simmonds (TMTCH). Then, in lockdown, we were stuck at home alongside my son Noah who had just finished his Music Technology course at college. It seemed like the perfect time to do it and bring people together in a good cause. I’ve always got by on chancing it and cheek to an extent and fortunately all these amazing artists said yes. And it is a lot of people’s favourite Bob Dylan song!’
All this and a unique cover by celebrated cartoonist and illustrator Chris Riddell !
The Rolling Ramshackle Revue: they deserve an article all unto themselves.
The Cast
Singers:
Naomi Bedford
Justin Currie (Del Amitri) Phil Odgers
Jess Silk
Joe Solo
Carol Hodge
Boss Caine ( Daniel Lucas)
Ben Webb (Bird in the Belly)
Robert Vincent
Aladsdair Roberts
Cathy Jordan (Dervish)
Players
Paul Simmonds: Gtr/Mandolin/BV
Ben Walker: Gtr/Mandolin
Phil Jones: Bass/Tambourine
Scott Smith: Harmonica/Banjo/Pedal Steel
Nancy Kerr: Violin
Joe Lancaster: Horns
Noah Bramley: Kick Drum/Production
With a time-rusted compass blade, Alladin and his lamp
Sits with Utopian hermit monks side saddle on the Golden Calf
An on their promises of paradice, you will not hear a laugh
excpt inside the gates of Eden ____
“One of the greatest torch songs ever written,” says none other than Sinatra about Jimmy Webb’s “By The Time I Get To Phoenix” – and Ol’ Blue Eyes should know, of course. It’s no fluke; Jimmy Webb writes a lot of great songs. The classic “Wichita Lineman” for Glen Cambell, Dylan sings “Let’s Begin” with Clydie King in 1981 and the country supergroup The Highwaymen (Cash, Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson) name themselves after Webbs “The Highwayman”.
Towering above them all is one of Jimmy Webb’s most ambitious songs: “MacArthur Park” – a titanic song, indeed. Still, the lyrics are sometimes laughed at. Especially the verse
MacArthur's Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet green icing flowing down
Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don't think that I can take it
'Cause it took so long to bake it
And I'll never have that recipe again
Webb has always maintained that it’s all non-fiction, that the text merely words observations from his surroundings (“The old men playing checkers by the tree, there’s the yellow cotton dress… I’d seen birthday cakes left out in the park. I didn’t have to make anything up”), and, as if to make a point, then stresses that implausible background story by naming both a compilation album, And Someone Left The Cake Out In The Rain… (1998) and his autobiography: The Cake and the Rain: A Memoir (2017) after this soaked pie.
It is dubious. The image is just a bit too absurd to be categorised under “everyday observations”, and moreover: it is a bit all too coincidental. Jimmy Webb wrote his song in 1967 in Los Angeles, the same months when W.H. Auden was living in the same city with Christopher Isherwood for a while. And a few weeks before Webb makes that alleged cake observation in the park, W.H. Auden’s brilliant, self-deprecating description of his own appearance is circulating, made at a party in honour of Auden’s sixtieth birthday (21 February 1967) at Isherwood’s home. One of the topics of discussion is Auden’s face.
“His face”, said Isherwood, “really belongs in the British Museum.” Auden’s friends were indeed beginning to compete with each other for ways of describing his face’s extraordinary creases and deep wrinkles. The poet James Merrill called it tunnelled and seamed; the philosopher Hannah Arendt, a New York friend of Auden’s, said it was as though “life itself had delineated a kind of face-scape to make manifest the heart’s invisible tunes’’. But the most graphic description came from Auden himself. “Your cameraman might enjoy himself,” he remarked to a reporter, “because my face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.”
(Humphrey Carpenter – W.H.Auden A Biography, 1981, p. 463)
The witty one-liner makes the papers, and it is quite likely that the well-read, educated Webb does find the wet cake there. Incidentally, Wystan Hugh Auden’s wit is perhaps equalled by his compatriot, the painter David Hockney, who rivals him in visual power: “If that’s his face, what must his scrotum look like?”
Of course, Webb has absolutely no need to be embarrassed when caught quoting or paraphrasing Auden. Even the greatest succumb to it, as quite a lot places in Dylan’s oeuvre show. Songs on John Wesley Harding (1967) like “As I Went Out One Morning” and “The Wicked Messenger” and poetic weaving on Street-Legal (1978) like “True Love Tends To Forget” at the very least reveal an artistic blood brotherhood, but above all suggest that Dylan regularly uses an Auden poem as a template.
With “Gates Of Eden”, this suspicion arises no later than this fourth verse. And not so much by copying one of Auden’s unique experiments with form (as “The Wicked Messenger” copies Auden’s “In Schrafft’s”), but mainly thematically and in terms of content – and remarkable idioms like “Aladdin”, “Eden” and “Utopian” are the trigger.
Auden himself was ashamed of his famous “September 1, 1939”, with its touching, much quoted oneliner We must love one another or die and its scathing analysis of the 1930s, “a low dishonest decade”, and soon distanced himself from it. With almost the same words – I loathe that poem – as those with which Paul Simon distances himself from his “59th Street Bridge Song”, by the way. He prevents its inclusion in anthologies and in his own Collected Poetry (1945), and in later life only permits it on rare occasions. Penguin Books, for instance, may eventually include the poem, and four other early works, in an anthology, but must include the commentary: “Mr. W. H. Auden considers these five poems to be trash which he is ashamed to have written.”
When compiling his Collected Poetry, Auden has instead placed his much less admired but similar “New Year Letter (January 1, 1940)”. This is a long (1707 lines), three-part work, which attempts to articulate the human condition of Europe in the first months of the Second World War. Auden registers the failure of civilisation, slaloms past all the great poets from Dante to Rilke and from Catullus to Baudelaire, and deduces that, “No words men write / can stop the war”. The long slalom takes him both past personal, “small” observations and past timeless pillars of culture such as Greek mythology, Kipling, Voltaire and Darwin, is full of paraphrases and inimitable associations, presents both archetypes and historical figures with alienating additions (“Blake shouted insults, Rousseau wept”) and lacks anything like an inner logic, a recognisable structure or even the suggestion of composition.
It is, in short, a dizzying kaleidoscopic mosaic like Dylan’s “It’s Alright, Ma” or like “No Time To Think” – or, indeed, like “Gates Of Eden”.
Especially the idiom in “Gates Of Eden”, however, suggests that Dylan not only has just leafed through Burroughs’’ The Soft Machine, but through Auden’s Collected Poetry as well, and that “New Year Letter” struck a chord. A trigger, of course, is the choice of “Eden”, which Auden uses a couple of times (Shut out of Eden by the bar), after the Dylan bells have already gone off a couple of times before, due to Auden’s preoccupation with “war”, “peace”, “Time” and especially “Truth”. Those Dylan bells are consolidated by dozens of smaller, in itself meaningless parallels (like “the cold serpent on the poisonous tree was l’esprit de géométrie” involuntarily reminds of Dylan’s claim to write “mathematical music”), but it is the many similarities in unusual vocabulary and metaphors that confirm that Auden’s Letter is a source.
“Utopian”, for example, comes up twice, “ownership”, “cowboy”, “angel”, “dwarf”, “experience”, “soldier”, “Madonna”… with Burroughs’ cut-up technique, a patient, precise word clipper could cut three quarters of Dylan’s song from Auden’s poem. Already Dylan’s opening line with the twisting truth is to be found. In Auden’s excursion to Kafka:
The path that twists away from the
Near-distant Castle they can see,
The Truth where they will be denied
Permission ever to reside
… as images from this fourth verse of Dylan’s song come along as well. The image of the jammed compass, for example (Though compasses and stars cannot / Direct to that magnetic spot), and that striking guest role for Aladdin and his lamp:
So, hidden in his hocus-pocus
There lies the gift of double focus,
That magic lamp which looks so dull
And utterly impractical
Yet, if Aladdin use it right
Can be a sesame to light.
Dylan’s spelling error (in the manuscript Alladin) demonstrates that the bard does not have Auden’s work opened on his desk, but that he apparently incorporates echoes from an earlier reading session into his own lyrics. And that the echoes continue into “It’s Alright, Ma”, by the way:
The ruined showering with honors
The blind Christs and the mad Madonnas,
The Gnostics in the brothels treating
The flesh as secular and fleeting
… one of many examples demonstrating why one is called “the W.H. Auden of the 1960s” and the other “the Dylan of the 1930s”. Never “the Jimmy Webb of the 1930s” though, oddly enough.
To be continued. Next up: Gates Of Eden part VI: The cowpuncher and the Golden Calf
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:
Thomas Hardy sprinkles his novels with quotes from songs and poems; Bob Dylan sprinkles his musical song lyrics with quotes from songs and poems.
Whether from his direct reading thereof, or it’s through the cultural milieu surrounding him (Carl Jung would say through the ‘collective unconscious’), the singer/songwriter reveals, in his song lyrics beneath, the influence of the “Late Victorian” writer Thomas Hardy:
Your daddy walks in wearing
A Napoleon Bonaparte mask
Then you ask me why I don't live here
Honey, do you have to ask
(Bob Dylan: On The Road Again)
Thomas Hardy’s writings often have a ‘social’ Darwinist twist to them. In the poem below, depicted be that the development of mankind’s socio-economic environment becomes more and more industrialized; there’s some hope – symbolized by the singing of the thrush – that the urbanized environment will not destroy the human ‘soul’:
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small
ln blast-beruffled plume
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom
(Thomas Hardy: The Darkling Thrush)
“Darkling” too be Tom’s blues below:
Sweet Melinda
The peasants call her the goddess of gloom
She speaks good English
And she invites you up into her room
(Bob Dylan: Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues)
Pessimism strikes deep into Hardy’s heart:
Yet is it that, though whiling
The time somehow
In walking, talking, smiling
I live not now
(Tom Hardy: The Dead Man Walking)
Very much like the dark sentiment expressed in the following song lyrics:
Ain't talking, just a-walking
Though this weary world of woe
Heart burning, still yearning
No one on earth will ever know
(Bob Dylan: Ain't Talking)
Poet WH Auden be very much under the influence of Thomas Hardy’s referencing ballads of yore, and of the Victorian’s social ‘Darwinist’ slant in his novels and poems. Hallmarks revealed in the works of both writers.
Taken it can be that wife-killer Victor, a religious bank clerk (in the poem below) is unable to adapt to the values of the bourgeois social environment; thinks Anna, his flirty wife, is cheating on him:
It wasn't the Jack of Diamonds
Nor the Joker she drew first
It wasn't the King or Queen of Hearts
But the Ace of Spades reversed
Victor stood in the doorway
He didn't utter a word
She said "What's the matter, darling?"
He behaved as if he hadn't heard
(WH Auden: Victor)
In the song lyrics beneath, it’s the two-timing, aristocratic-acting ‘nouveau riche’ Big Jim who doesn’t survive the repainting of the times:
She fluttered her false eyelashes, and whispered in his ear
"Sorry, darling, that I'm late", but he didn't seem to hear
He was staring into space over at the Jack of Hearts
(Bob Dylan: Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts)
Footnotes:
In case you missed it: The Bob Dylan album artwork. The art work that has appeared on around 35 Dylan albums – how it was created, where it came from. A unique series.
If you’d like to write for Untold Dylan, please email Tony@schools.co.uk
“All directions at once” is a series which looks at Bob Dylan’s writing as it evolves over time, rather than focusing entirely on individual songs or albums. The index of all articles is here. The index has been updated and has section headings added which may make this mega series easier to follow. I think it’s worth a look, but then I would. I wrote it.
Anyway… moving on…
We have reached the early 1980s…. The last article in the series was “Dylan post Angelina” and took us as far as the writing of “Dead man, dead man”. The Christian era is over, and the extraordinarily brilliant transition era from “Every Grain of Sand” through to “Angelina”, has delivered a stunning array of works of genius, and now once more Bob seemed somewhat unsure where to go next.
But the period of 1982/3 in terms of Dylan’s writing is weird. Not weird in the sense that each of the 17 songs composed is individually weird, but weird in that they seem to be coming from and heading out in all sorts of different directions. It is in fact, the absolute “all direction at once” era.
And yet I do recognise it is possible to argue otherwise because there is a certain cohesion about the meanings within the songs.
In the build up we had the purely Christian songs of 1979, then the move into songs that do not always seem religious in nature, but which can be interpreted that way (from “Every Grain” onto “Making a Liar” etc) in 1980, and then in 1981 works of genius such as “Angelina”, songs which divide opinion such as “Lenny Bruce,” (which are clearly not religious), and then after that a song such as “Jesus is the one” – one of a number of songs that are not particularly well remembered.
And now we have a variety of offerings. Jokerman, the first composition of this period, has the feel in part of Caribbean Wind – and indeed Dylan has said it was indeed written in the Caribbean. Although we might well feel that this is another song about the end of all things, the message is more about the futility of mankind’s ways than it is about the utter certainty of how it will all pan out.
Yes there is some Biblical input in the songs but it is combined with a style of writing that leads to an uncertainty of meaning. And when one thinks about it, these two notions are poles apart. With a religion such as Christianity, the fundamentals are certain. We know what happened in the past with Jesus Christ, and we know what will happen in the future with Armageddon and the Second Coming.
But the “Caribbean Wind” style of writing removes the certainty of meaning and seems to take us to the opposite end of the spectrum. Which is why I and I (again written in the Caribbean period) is interesting: it appears at one level to be trying to balance the two – the religious feel and the uncertainty. But then, maybe, uncertainty wins and Dylan travels in other directions indeed.
However Clean Cut Kid (written at this time, but held back in terms of an album release) and Union Sundown (again from this period) take on other directions – the latter returning to Dylan’s earlier concerns about America’s poor; a theme expressed so often across the years.
But still he doesn’t settle for next out of this mixed mixed bag of compositions we get the universally acclaimed Blind Willie McTell. This is indeed a hard song to decipher because the music of Dylan’s song has no relationship with McTell’s own work. I don’t mean the song should sound like a McTell piece, but it just seems to have no link to his work at all.
What’s more it doesn’t have any relationship with the next song (Don’t fall apart on me tonight) either – nor indeed with very much else around this time. It just stands out alone, an absolute monument looking down on (almost) everything else that Dylan composed across these two years. And the simple fact that we have at the very least 35 cover versions of it suggests its universal appeal.
As we know McTell came out in two versions – the acoustic and the electric – and each tells a different tale of a blues singer who reached far greater fame through this song than he ever achieved as a composer and singer. We get no sense of McTell as the great 12 string slide guitarist, of the man with so many different names it is hard to keep track of them. What we get is the man whose music was rediscovered many years after his passing (he died in 1959 aged 61).
The arrival of this song with no clear build up that we can hear in Dylan’s music, and no references back to it after, is one of the great mysteries for anyone who wants to understand Dylan’s method of writing at this time. Although maybe it is just possible to see Jokerman as the opposite of Willie McTell – the Jokerman telling us what isn’t true, Willie McTell telling it really as it is. But…
https://youtu.be/ds1xVHsXm7Y
But… I fear I am stretching the point here for if I am going down this route then Man of Peace like Jokerman is a “false prophet” song since Blind Willie is the only one who tells it true, the other’s don’t. But I’m not sure if that adds much to our understanding or indeed if that isn’t stretching everything in this curious year, one step too far.
My own view, for what it is worth, is that Dylan was once more finding he could write in all sorts of different ways and he was most certainly enjoying the experience. Especially as he realised that he could write about more or less anything he wanted and both record company and fans would accept it. Sweetheart like you goes one way Someone’s got a hold of my heart goes another, then there is Neighbourhood Bully off doing its own thing again, and then Tell Me is utterly different again – an experiment in writing a song of (possibly) unrequited love. You want “all directions” this is it.
Here is the sequence of songs in the order they were written….
… and I simply can’t see connections between many of these songs. They really are exploring here, there and everywhere – and there is nothing wrong with that. But to have so many directions in such a short space of time is very, very unusual in an artist. It is as if he Bob really did want to throw aside the shackles of the year or two of Christian songs, and just go anywhere and everywhere else.
And I do think it is worth listening to “Tell Me” and considering that “Neighbourhood Bully” was the song written before it, and then noting that the song that Bob composed after was “Foot of Pride”. Which is really where this whole meandering episode is going.
The multiple recordings of “Foot of Pride” that we are told were made at this time (it was probably the Dylan song that was recorded more times by the composer than any other) have not been made available. In fact we only have two versions: the one from the 1983 recordings (which isn’t available for reproduction here, but if you have Spotify you can play it and it is on the Bootleg series 1-3), and the Lou Reed version.
Here’s Lou Reed…
As to what are we to make of it, consider…
Hear ya got a brother named James, don’t forget faces or names
Sunken cheeks and his blood is mixed
He looked straight into the sun and said revenge is mine
But he drinks, and drinks can be fixed
Sing me one more song, about ya love me to the moon and the stranger
And your fall-by-the sword love affair with Errol Flynn
In these times of compassion when conformity’s in fashion
Say one more stupid thing to me before the final nail is driven in
I’m not ready to try and explain that. But the theme of the corruption of the Christian church is there for all to hear
Yeah, from the stage they’ll be tryin’ to get water outa rocks
A whore will pass the hat, collect a hundred grand and say thanks
They like to take all this money from sin,
build big universities to study in
Sing “Amazing Grace” all the way to the Swiss banks
And it does seem like this is the end of times…
Ain’t nothin’ left here partner, just the dust of a plague
that has left this whole town afraid
In the end, as I have listened to this extraordinary piece of music over and over across the years, I always come back to the same point: if you create something of merit – no matter how spectacular or how simple – you have done it, and there really is nothing wrong with being proud of that. But that is no cause to stop. You can’t undo the past, and you can’t live in the past. There ain’t no going back; take pleasure in what you have achieved, move on.
Or put another way, “Don’t let them bring you down,” – ‘them’ of course being the critics.
And that was the way I came to grasp an understanding of this year and this almighty, staggering, brilliant, overwhelming song. Bob had been brought under the influence of Christianity, but ultimately had found the preaching and teaching and rule-making too much for him. And now in Foot of Pride, this amazing and yet mostly forgotten masterpiece, he was simply saying “no”. The world we live in has nothing to do with the image that he had in his mind during his Christian period. Bob had had that Christian period, but we move on.
Psalm 36:11 proclaims “Let not the foot of pride come against me, and let not the hand of the wicked remove me”. The general interpretation is “Let me not be trampled under foot by proud oppressors, nor driven from my home by wicked violence.” It is a plea that one should stay safe, and not suffer unjustly, but it is not (as is sometimes suggested) that one should not be guilty of the sin of pride. It is a simple desire to stay safe.
And what makes “Foot of Pride” such a fascinating composition is not just that it is such a stunning and challenging musical work, but that it was written just after “Neighbourhood Bully”, which may be about Israel, and “Julius and Ethel” which is about the Rosenburgs who were alleged to have given US atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.
In short: the past is done; move forward; there ain’t no going back.
And there is also one little footnote to Foot of Pride that I must throw in. Heylin notes that Dylan said that he had difficulty keeping the time in this song, and that it always speeds up, which is a major reason why Bob recorded it so many times. Heylin, always wanting to point out Bob’s mistakes, confusions and deliberate misleads, suggests that this is completely untrue on the recording we have.
Now I’ve always known that Heylin knows nothing of music, and if you want proof just listen. The one recording we have been allowed to listen to speeds up and up. And I don’t say that as a special criticism of Bob and the gang – it is a problem with many songs, but most particularly this one because of the very nature of the music. He would have needed a conductor in the studio directing him to overcome the problem. And that is almost certainly why it was never released.
Nothing at all, not a single thing, prepares us for “Foot of Pride”. And nothing in Foot of Pride prepares us for those subsequent songs, the unique “Julius and Ethel” and two final returns to religious thoughts – “Lord Protect my child” and Death is not the end”
This really is a year of Bob going in all directions as he searches for themes and ideas. And what gifts he gave us along the way!
If I ever met Bob and had five seconds to say something, I’d say, “Thank you for Foot of Pride”.
What’s on Untold Dylan
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Prompted by Tony Attwood’s post Bob – it’s not quite your birthday but…, specifically by his encouraging words near the end: “if you’d like to offer your good wishes to Bob on his 80th through an article of your own, please do so” – here I am.
I’d considered several ways to celebrate the 24th day of May (in a drizzlin’ rain or otherwise). I thought of videotaping my own Polish versions of some of your more obscure songs – just to get away from the obvious. I thought of writing a letter to you, of videotaping myself reading it and then upload it on my YT channel.
But it would be all too self-indulgent and focused on myself rather than on you, Mr. Dylan or Bob, however you’d like me to call you. So, Tony’s words were a minor revelation: how could I find a better place to bow down and do hats-off than this self-proclaimed and yet so relevant scholar space.
My puff piece is likely to be short and unrevealing, if we take into consideration the supreme master-levelled writers contributing to the Untold Dylan free University.
But I need to say this:
Mr. Dylan, Bob –
There are plenty of reasons I admire and love your work. It’s your voice. It’s your overall presence throughout your career spanning 60 years now. It’s your ability to change skin before everyone expects you to, and yet to remain consistent. It’s your seriousness. It’s your sense of humour.
It’s your constant creative fervour when each and every artist with a body of creative output equalling perhaps a quarter of what you’ve done – and being still in the business! – would be willing to take a rest and just reap the benefits counting the royalties dripping.
But of course, it’s your songs. Without them, there wouldn’t be Untold Dylan, there wouldn’t be the world as we know it. And there wouldn’t be me the way as I am, studying, translating and singing your songs for over four decades now.
Once, just after that day in October 2016, some journalist asked me, as a local Polish Bob Dylan expert, why did I think Bob Dylan were so important. I pondered a little and then said: “Just try and imagine a world where Bob Dylan didn’t exist. A world where only Robert Allen Zimmerman lived, having some more or less interesting job up there in a little Minnesota town or anywhere else. It would be highly probable that there would not be these songs that provoke us to think. There would not be this whole part of the popular culture that gave us Joni Mitchell, Lou Reed, David Byrne, Patti Smith, Joe Strummer, Suzanne Vega, PJ Harvey, Nick Cave and Tom Waits. Who knows – there would not be rap music as a global cultural and business phenomenon – because the industry wouldn’t be sensitive to music that speaks”.
What I’d like to thank you especially deeply, Bob, is your way of treating a song as a vehicle not only for emotions and rhythms but for reflections and worries too. I wish we could experience your coming in Poland back in the early Sixties the way you affected the Western society.
And I thank you also for the way you refer to the tradition. In a world where so many groundbreaking artists (and peculiarly those less talented too) try to convince their audience they epitomize a revolution and that the whole music has changed radically with their coming – you started a conservative revolution of sorts. You were never ashamed of maintaining a close watch on what had preceded you in music and poetry. You’ve always known your place within this chain of artistic events. It requires a sublime consciousness and a sublime humility. Being who you are, it’s absolutely amazing. You’re a teacher who hasn’t stopped to be a disciple.
Thank you for that. And for these 600+ songs and all that Tony has already mentioned in his admirable piece. We’re blessed with being able to listen to your songs and allowed to wait for more to come.
it’s iron claws
The lamppost stands with folded arms / pretends to be ^ attached
t the curbs neath wailing babies - tho it’s shadow’s metal badge /
All in all, can only fall, with a crashing but meaningless blow
No sound comes from the depths of Eden
The deletions and rewrites of the opening line are not too spectacular; the poet evidently feels that the chilly, heartless aura of the lamppost gains undercurrent aggression by replacing “pretends to be attached” with “its iron claws attached”. And so it does, of course. It’s still fourteen syllables, the rhyme word stays and the iambic metre is maintained, so technically it doesn’t matter. Much the same goes for the next line, “t the curbs neath wailing babies”, which four months later, at the time of recording, has been changed to “to curbs ‘neath holes where babies wail”; it seems mainly an action to save the iambic. At the expense of semantics, admittedly (“curbs beneath holes”? or “the lamppost beneath holes”?), but who cares. Deconstruction, and all.
All of it less interesting, in any case, than the last words: “from the depths of Eden”.
It illustrates that, for the time being, the poet still relies on the course of his stream of consciousness – and that the strong, evocative metaphor gates of Eden has not been the trigger of his poetic flash. In this first draft (we are now two stanzas including two François Villon-like refrain lines into the journey), the word gates has still not bubbled up from the stream. Maybe it’s even a shame that those gates will pop up a little later and displace the depths. “Depths of Eden” is more threatening anyway, but actually also more fascinating than “Gates of Eden”. The gates represent the lost paradise, the price we have paid for disobedience, barring access to the Tree of Life – it is, in any case, a fairly unambiguous image.
“Depths of Eden”, on the other hand, is an unfamiliar, even alienating image. In general, Biblical depths are the opposite of paradise. They depict despair (Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord, Psalm 130), or something like “far, lonely and lost” (usually depths of the sea and depths of the waters), or the literal opposite of paradisiacal Eden, hell (the depths of hell, Proverbs 9; the depths of Satan, Revelation 2:24). “Depths of Eden” is thus a catachrese, a contradiction almost, inviting associations like the serpent lurking in the depths of Eden, or perhaps the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, its roots reaching deep into the depths of Eden – something like that, or a multitude of other possibilities of association, of course.
You may be a deconstruction worker
But the poet’s wildly swirling stream of consciousness has now carved out a riverbed and the waves are calming down; the third couplet is the first couplet without deletion or addition, and on a technical level perfect:
the savage soldier sticks his head in sand and then complains
unto the shoeless hunter / who’s gone deaf but still remains
upon the beach where hound dogs bay at ships with tattoed sails
heading for the gates of Eden ________
… three perfect fourteeners, suddenly a rhyme scheme AAAB, tightly iambic – the poet’s instinct apparently pushes him towards an antique, tried and tested, though extinct form, a form like the walking music encyclopaedia Dylan knows from the primal versions of folk classics like “John Henry” and “Stagolee”. Just as effortlessly, so it seems, larded with unobtrusive wordplay such as deaf but still, alliterations (savage-soldier-sticks-sand) and mirroring (beach-bay and head in – heading), about which he doesn’t even seem to think twice – as if he was just taking dictation.
In terms of content, a kind of unity also emerges. Not a unity that covers the whole song, but a stanza-internal unity. The second verse already hinted vaguely at a leitmotif, at “metal” as a silver thread (iron – metal – crash), which might have been registered by the associative writing poet, but is not elaborated on further. Presumably just as instinctively, the fast poet builds this third stanza around the leitmotif “predator” (soldier – hunter – hound dog), with the sub-theme “failing communication”; the soldier complains while being inaudible, the hunter is deaf and the hounds bark from the beach helplessly and uselessly at passing ships – where the hounds are undoubtedly just as inaudible as the fierce soldier with his head in the sand.
With that, the bard seems to slowly let go of his original approach, an apocalyptic mosaic à la “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” around a nuclear Holocaust scenario. With some pacing, the images of the second stanza can still be fitted therein, in such a dystopian overview tableau, but that becomes more difficult in this third stanza. We‘re starting to get more on the track of “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”; a confetti rain of human shortcomings, the condition humaine and the Signs of Time.
On a level below, the real find for the poet himself – or so it appears – is the third variation with “Eden”. After the trees of Eden in the opening couplet and the depths of Eden in the second couplet, now “gates of Eden” bubbles up, which will prove to be a joy. Chosen for playfulness’s sake only, presumably. The novice Beat Poet seeks cut-up-like word combinations, like shoeless hunter and tattooed sails, he seeks a catachresis. So, the ships won’t be heading for New York’s City harbor, or their eternal home, the scrapyard, the rocks, Panama or disaster, nor will they be heading for the Mediterranean, dock, the East Coast, the City of Gold or, for that matter, the Port of Eden. No, thinks the deconstructing poet: they’ll be heading for, let’s see… gates. “The Gates of Eden”…. yes, sounds good.
To be continued. Next up: Gates Of Eden part V: A wedding-cake left out in the rain
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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:
Take what you have gathered from coincidence. Seems Bob Dylan is aware at least somewhat of the works of the “Late Victorian” writer Thomas Hardy – keep in mind that most of Hardy’s novels are first published in a weekly or monthly serialized format.
In “Two On A Tower” by Thomas Hardy, the following passage is befitting of the emotional Lady Constantine’s love/lust for astronomer Swithin rather than for her Lord’s showy false love:
Weren't aught to me I bore the canopy
With my extern the outward honouring
Or I laid great bases for eternity
Which prove more short than waste or ruin
(William Shakespeare: Sonnet CXXV)
In the song lyrics below, William Shakespeare and Charles Darwin are fighting in the Captain’s Tower – William in his pointed shoes and bells from the days when “love” and “move” rhyme:
She' everything I need and love
But I can't be swayed by that
It frightens me, the awful truth
Of how sweet life can be
But she ain't a-gonna make a move
I guess it must be up to me
(Bob Dylan: Up To Me)
In Hardy’s story, Lady Constantine, who married into her title, is left alone by her husband who’s off hunting lions. She becomes sexually attracted to a handsome young man who aspires to become a professional astronomer; he observes the stars from a tower on the Lord’s estate.
The Lady buys Swithin a new telescope, and thinking her husband dead in Africa, puts the moves on the young astronomer who’s interested more in science than in sex. They secretly wed, and after a while the Lady becomes pregnant.
Swithin inherits some money on condition that he remain single until he becomes a professional; he abandons Lady Constantine. Her Lord husband, two-timing in Africa, commits suicide; to save face, the Lady marries the local Bishop. Alas, the Bishop soon passes away.
Swithin returns, and out of duty asks the the Lady for her hand in marriage; she, prematurely ‘aging’, drops dead on the spot.
Things end up okay, however – Swithin has got another gal lined up, and she’s younger than he is.
In “Two On A Tower”, when the Bishop, the Lady, and Swithin are together, the author describes the scene as follows:
(F)rom the repose of his stable figure it was like an evangelized
King of Spades come to have it out with the Knave of Hearts.
Reminds of the song lyrics beneath:
It was known all around that Lily had Big Jim's ring
And nothing would ever come between Lily and the King
No nothing ever would except maybe the Jack of Hearts
(Bob Dylan: Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts).
But still, four thousand throats and eight thousand hands is quite an army. And Bob Dylan saw it, and he knew that it was good. But of course there was little he could against the weather. It virtually made impossible for his band to perform the way they intended to. After Shelter, there was a longer break, after which the musicians returned equipped with acoustic gear. Tony Garnier had double bass, there were acoustic axes as the sound waves collided, Winston Watson played subdued percussion.
