dylanarticle

What Was It We Wanted?
or Bob Dylan’s Biographia Literaria

by Martyn Smith

Simplistic notions about the imagination float through popular culture. In the recent movie Finding Neverland J.M. Barrie is shown watching young boys jumping on their beds and then loosed of gravity as their bounds get higher and they leap right out into the London night. We are meant to conclude that Barrie has taken a scene from life and, exaggerated it, and set it down in his new play, Peter Pan. The imagination as a pinch of pixie dust. By the end of the film, when the play is performed, the inspiration for the characters and the plot is transparent to the audience—a transparency I think we rather like, or are at least comfortable with. We might be tempted to think that every play or novel, were we to know the private life of the author, would become as sensible.

The obvious complaint about Bob Dylan’s memoir Chronicles—one echoed often in reviews—is that Dylan conceals as much as he reveals, cagily focusing on the least interesting periods of his career. That most mysterious of events, the motorcycle accident of 1968, is mentioned only to be dismissed and never brought back: “I had been in a motorcycle accident and I’d been hurt, but I recovered.” Instead of satisfying our itch to know the story of his music from the sixties, or even from his Christian period, he develops in detail periods of time about which no one asks.

A prime instance of this is tendency is his chapter on the late 80’s album Oh Mercy. Why does he spend so much time on this album? Dylan’s implicit answer, I think, is that this was a crucial period in his creative growth. After describing his time in New Orleans recording Oh Mercy, Dylan gives a brief nod to the future: “Danny and I would see each other again in ten years and we’d work together once more… We’d make a record and start it all over, pick up where we left off.” The reference is clearly to 1997—roughly ten years later—when he recorded Time Out of Mind with Daniel Lanois (who was also the producer of Oh Mercy). While reviewers might be more interested in his late 90’s output and wish for information from that time, Dylan is providing us with a portrait of the creative revitalization that made that later work possible. In this same chapter Dylan described the other significant creative development from the 90’s—the bold reworking of his own standards for use in constant touring. This development is couched in confusing talk about triplets and the number three. (This leads to one of the most amusing pronouncements of the book: “I’m not a numerologist. I don’t know why the number 3 is more metaphysically powerful that the number 2, but it is.” —I should think that anyone who believes the number 3 is metaphysically powerful is ipso facto a numerologist.) The method is obscure, but the result is clear. With the help of these triplets it is possible to “drag endless skeletons from the closet”—that is, to put new energy into his classic songs. We owe his engaged and powerful concert presence of the past few years to creative discoveries he was making back in the late 80’s.

His choice of Oh Mercy, then, results not only from an ability to avoid talking about what others want to hear, but from his own sense that many of his most important steps as an artist have taken place during what look like fallow periods to critics and fans. Chronicles reveals much more than we might have expected when it comes to illuminating his creative growth. Dylan provides us with meditations on what it means to be a creative artist. The imagination turns out to be much more than an exaggerating bit of pixie dust added to life.

Dylan spends much of Chronicles mentioning his influences, musical and otherwise. If one agrees with a statement by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria—his own chronicle of intellectual growth—that “I regard and ever have regarded the obligations of intellect among the most sacred of the claims of gratitude”, then one will have no hesitancy in following Dylan as he wanders through the songs, texts, and personalities that shaped him.

Robert Johnson turns out to be one of the most interesting of these many influences, since he is turns up in a revealing scene near the close of the book. The important character in the scene, besides Dylan, is Dave Van Ronk, the early folk player who was clearly a powerful presence during Dylan’s New York years. Van Ronk enters the book surrounded by mystery and authority. The young unknown Dylan watches him move past:

Once on a cold winter day near Thompson and 3rd, in a flurry of light snow when the feeble sun was filtering through the haze, I saw him walking towards me in a frosty silence. It was like the wind was blowing him my way. I wanted to talk to him, but something was off. I watched him go by, saw the flash in his eye.

That is from the first chapter, but by the end the tables have subtly turned. Dylan, newly signed at Columbia Records, has acquired a record by Robert Johnson, and runs excitedly to Van Ronk’s apartment. They put the album on a record player and Dylan recalls their differing responses. Dylan is ecstatic: “When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor. I immediately differentiated between him and anyone else I had ever heard.” That is to say, the young Dylan has no place to put this new voice, and hears a pure originality. It is a vision of the pure imagination that Yeats once put into words: “Things out of perfection sail/ And all their swelling canvas wear…”

The young Dylan’s enthusiasm is met by that of the walking musical encyclopedia Van Ronk.

He didn’t think Johnson was very original… Dave later played some sides by Leroy Carr and Skip James and Henry Thomas, and said, ‘See what I mean?’ I did see what he meant, but Woody had taken a lot of old Carter Family songs and put his own spin on them, too, so I didn’t think much of whatever it meant. Dave thought Johnson was okay, that the guy was powerful but that it was all derivative.

What could be more damning? Van Ronk listens to Robert Johnson and is so caught up in the importance of precedence that he cannot hear an original voice when it sings out loud and clearly in his own living room. From our vantage point, long after Robert Johnson has been canonized, Van Ronk looks the loser, and the young Dylan, yet to cut a record, the one who has ears to hear the true creative voice.

Dylan does not stop there, with this portrait of Robert Johnson as either purely original or derivative. He shows us the attention that he gave to learning the ins and outs of the music recorded by this blues master. “Over the next few weeks I listened to it repeatedly, cut after cut, one song after another, sitting staring at the record player.” He progresses even further: “I copied Johnson’s words down on scraps of paper so I could more closely examine the lyrics and patterns, the construction of his old-style lines and the free association that he used.”

This is a picture of the young Dylan that is repeated over and over again in Chronicles—Dylan entering into an intense discipleship with an established musician. In this same chapter Dylan recounts his tutelage under the music of Woody Guthrie. “I said to myself I was going to be Guthrie’s greatest disciple.” When his performances become all Guthrie all the time, he is confronted by a “folk music purist enthusiast” who says: “What do you think you’re doing? You’re singing nothing but Guthrie songs.” Once in New York Dylan repeats the pattern with Jack Elliott and Van Ronk. “Later, when I would record my first album, half the cuts on it were renditions of songs that Van Ronk did. It’s not like I planned that, it just happened. Unconsciously I trusted his stuff more than I did mine.”

If one were to fit Dylan himself into the pattern established by the two responses to Robert Johnson, he would be dismissed as derivative. Dylan shows us nothing that is original in himself, but only a hall of portraits which one after another he styles himself after. For someone trying to find pure originality—that pure ship sailing out of perfection—, Dylan had nothing to offer. He was going to be no darling of the musicologist.

Dylan’s final strategy is to critique the very notion of creative originality. The young Dylan could hear only pure originality in Robert Johnson—the same thing he had heard previously in Guthrie. The older Dylan who is writing Chronicles circles back to reconsider Johnson. He brings up the tale of Johnson selling his soul to the devil at a crossroads, only to dismiss it with more sober historical reconstruction:

The ones who knew him told a different tale and that was that he had hung around some older blues players in rural parts of Mississippi, played harmonica, was rejected as a bothersome kid, that he went off and learned how to play guitar from a farmhand named Ike Zimmerman… Those who knew said that Ike showed Robert the rudiments of how to play like just about anybody and that Johnson did the rest on his own, that he mainly listened to records and got all his approaches off those records.

The message is clear enough: Johnson was just like the young Dylan, becoming a disciple and ripping off everything within earshot.

Dylan could easily have offered up a portrait of his creative development that conforms to popular notions about the working of the imagination. He could have written that after an initial discipleship he stepped into his own pure creative space; he could have under written the diverse influences on his own style, to his credit he gives us a complex portrait of the interaction between an individual talent and the tradition of songs. Nothing proves so deadening to the imagination as to search for a pure creative output—the spirit that creates the musicologist. The creative artist listens and imitates and collects and finally learns to sing a song that is his own.

Coleridge uses a vivid analogy as he attempts to come to grips with the working of the poetic imagination:

Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion.

Throughout Chronicles Dylan writes about himself in those periods of passive floating with the current of the stream and proceeds to explain how he found the creative fulcrum that propelled him into a more fruitful period. The richness of the book comes from the variety of blocks to the imagination that he must overcome, spanning his life. Each chapter can be read as a unit addressing a particular impediment to the imagination.

The third chapter, New Morning, got a lot of attention when Newsweek ran a pre-publication excerpt from it. The excerpt comes as close as anything to scratching the general popular itch about Dylan and his transformations in the sixties. His complaint is that he has been made into a prophet or messiah for a movement that he never believed in. “I wasn’t a preacher performing miracles”—that is one version of the complaint. “Reporters would shoot questions at me and I would tell them repeatedly that I was not a spokesman for anything or anybody and that I was only a musician”—that is another version. “I wasn’t the toastmaster for any generation”—yet another. If Dylan ever starts to feel petulant in Chronicles it is here.

The result of this false role, Dylan asserts, was a period of personal and creative crisis. “It’s hard to live like this. It takes all your effort. The first thing that has to go is any form of artistic self-expression that’s dear to you…” The antidote to this creative crisis was a period of dashing expectations. Dylan interprets his late 60’s albums as conscious attempts to throw off the yoke of expectations. Whether we want to dismiss an album as rich as Nashville Skyline as mere strategic positioning is another question. Even Blood on the Tracks, generally considered one of his finest albums, is given a reductive summary: “Eventually I would even record an entire album based on Chekhov short stories—critics thought it was autobiographical—that was fine.”

Obviously, he can be cavalier when commenting on his own work, but the broader point is worth noting. One barrier to creative work proved to be his sense of being placed in a false role by the media and popular culture. His way out of the dilemma was to shatter that image and create a space to continue with what he does—write songs.

This excerpt is framed by the story of his courtship by the poet Archibald MacLeish, who wanted him to write songs for a new play. The invitation from MacLeish gains emotional weight at the start of the chapter when it is connected with Dylan’s return from the funeral of his father. The topic of his father is clearly a sensitive one.

Growing up, the cultural and generational differences had been insurmountable—nothing but the sound of voices, colorless unnatural speech. My father, who was plain speaking and straight talking had said, “isn’t an artist a fellow who paints?” when told by one of my teachers that his son had the nature of an artist.

Dylan continues and finally sets down the relationship in an achingly clear sentence: “…my father was the best man in the world and probably worth a hundred of me, but he didn’t understand me.”

In his meeting with MacLeish, Dylan finds his dream father. “MacLeish tells me that he considers me a serious poet…” In contrast to the exploding world of the late 60’s, MacLeish inhabits a pastoral home within a “quaint village on a mountain laurel road.” Photos in his home show him at the head of his class at Harvard or as a captain in the artillery in World War I. MacLeish is a benevolent presence, ready to accept the young rock-poet, but once again Dylan has to say no to his idea.

That “no” adds a final layer to the chapter. Dylan rejects not only the swelling tide of his generation, calling out to him to step forward as their prophet, but also the still calm authoritative voice of MacLeish, and further back, the voice of his own father. From every side there is a call to stand in some particular place, to be a different person than the one he is. He refuses everyone, and turns to describe how his next album—New Morning—got cobbled together. He also points the way forward:

…the album itself had no specific resonance to the shackles and bolts that were strapping the country down, nothing to threaten the status quo. All this was in what critics would later refer to as my “middle period” and in many camps this record was referred to as a comeback album—and it was. It would be the first of many.

Like the water-insect, after floating passively on a stream Dylan has found his fulcrum for a further propulsion. He is creatively back on track.

The penalty for getting it wrong are clear in the enigmatic final sentence of the chapter: “The MacLeish play Scratch opened on Broadway at the St. James Theatre on May 6, 1971 , and closed two days later on May 8.” There is no comment at all, and one wonders whether we are meant to hear Dylan breathe a sigh of relief that he had not gotten involved—that would have been no comeback album. Or are we to hear Dylan counting the cost of his own success and taking a rare look back at the individuals that had to be left behind in order to let his imagination loose. If the latter is the case then MacLeish stands in for an entire radical generation, which also faced a disastrously quick opening and closing in the late 60’s and early 70’s.

Chronicles offers a unique standpoint from which to judge another recent contribution to writing on Dylan: Dylan’s Visions of Sin by Christopher Ricks. My problem begins with the title itself, which promises some kind of look at Dylan’s treatment of sin. If one were to pick up a book entitled “Milton’s Visions of Sin”, one would expect an examination of how Milton views sin—something, say, a little closer to How Milton Works by Stanley Fish. Instead we get a book, the premise for which is nonchalantly dismissed in the opening chapter: “The claim in this book isn’t that most of Dylan’s songs, or even most of the best ones, are bent on sin. Simply that (for the present venture in criticism) handling sin may be the right way to take hold of the bundle.” In other words, the concept of sin is a useful way to arrange the various songs and what he has to say about them, but expect nothing in the way of an underlying view of sin in Dylan.

Equally arbitrary was the decision to organize all the songs under the seven cardinal sins, along with the four virtues and three heavenly graces—fourteen categories in all. These categories are established after a distracting fireworks display of instances in which Dylan mentions sin in his songs or interviews, but at no time is it shown that these Medieval Catholic categories of sin and virtue influence Dylan or form the template by which he views the world. The template is completely of Ricks’ own making, and serves only as a convenient way to arrange his readings of Dylan lyrics.

No one, of course, should gainsay the fundamental assertion of Dylan’s Visions of Sin: Dylan is an artist who deserves to be taken seriously and whose work can sustain careful reading. In the introduction Ricks provides an example where a later Dylan song (“Maybe Someday”) seems to be working from a T.S. Eliot poem (“The Journey of the Magi”), but most of the time he shies away from asserting any kind of direct influence—i.e. “Dylan must have read this.” He is content to let references to English poets such as Swinburne, Donne, or Tennyson illustrate the movements of Dylan’s songs, not explain them.

After Chronicles the question of literary influence in Dylan will take a new turn. The second chapter begins in, and continually returns to, a single apartment, that of Ray Gooch and Chloe Kiel. Throughout the chapter we follow the pattern of a bildungsroman—the novel of education. Even when Dylan jumps back to his youth, it is always with the goal of giving us a picture of the sounds and stories that formed his real education. “I was always fishing for something on the radio. Just like trains and bells, it was part of the soundtrack of my life.” When he returns in the narrative to the apartment in New York he is surrounded by shelves of books, and he commences to give a snapshot of his reading. “I read the poetry books, mostly. Byron and Shelley and Longfellow and Poe. I memorized Poe’s poem ‘The Bells’ and strummed it to a melody on my guitar.” His reading also turns out to have included the “authentic American prophet” Joseph Smith and The White Goddess by Robert Graves—just two among many names that turn up.

I found myself suspecting that the room was simply a convenient fiction that allowed him to set down a host of influences that suddenly loomed when he reached New York . The apartment is the symbolic egg out of which Dylan would emerge. The most interesting hints are about what led him to leave behind simple folk song structure and evolve toward songs such as “Desolation Row” and “Sweet Lady of the Lowlands .” We might have guessed the answer to be Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, and Dylan shows he was familiar with their work. But we can now add some new influences: “I read all of Lord Byron’s Don Juan, and concentrated fully from start to finish. Also, Coleridge’s Kubla Khan.” Since Don Juan runs to about 550 pages in the Penguin edition, we can be skeptical about his steady concentration through the whole work, but that Byron’s mixture of high and low styles, lame rhymes, surreal imagery, and steadily moving narrative could have been an important influence on Dylan’s evolving style certainly appears plausible. Likewise the style of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, with its society grotesques, could have been foundational for his newfound electric voice. These are the new angles for critical inquiry that Chronicles opens up, and nothing like this found its way into Ricks’ book.

The biggest winner in this chapter is Greil Marcus. Dylan writes: “Greil Marcus, the music historian, would some thirty years later call it 'the invisible republic.'" He is referring to the world of music which first attracted him. Not the world of 45 singles, but of LPs which “had covers, back and front, that you could stare at for hours.” That was the home for songs “about debauched bootleggers, mothers that drowned their own children, Cadillacs that only got five miles to the gallon, floods, union hall fires, darkness and cadavers at the bottom of rivers.” This weird non-commercial musical terrain Greil Marcus, in a book about Dylan and the Basement Tapes, called the Invisible Republic or The Old Weird America. Not just in this chapter, but throughout Chronicles, Dylan is engaged in painting this alternative America that reigns in songs—his own and the ones to which he was drawn.

Dylan describes his immersion into this non-commercial invisible republic often. Sometimes it is with a revealing phrase: “With folk songs embedded in my mind…” Most powerfully: “I felt right at home in this mythical realm made up not with individuals so much as archetypes… each rugged soul filled with natural knowing and inner wisdom… I could believe in the full spectrum of it and sing about it. It was so real, so more true to life than life itself.” Dylan’s world was music, and he has come as close as possible to channeling that old weird America of song.

This points up yet another problem in Ricks’ approach to Dylan: he does not come close to taking seriously Dylan’s immersion into the world of the folk tradition. For every allusion in Dylan’s work to T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, there are hundreds to the words of the blues and folk tradition. These are present throughout his career, even in song titles, from “Song to Woody” to “High Water (for Charley Patton).” When one looks to the index of Ricks’ book, though, one notices that he is ill-prepared to deal with the world of texts that we know actually influenced Dylan. For all the references to John Berryman, Samuel Beckett, Philip Larkin, and Alexander Pope, there is not one reference to Charley Patton, Elvis Presley.. and the list goes on: the Mississippi Sheiks, Darby and Tarlton, Hank Williams, Roy Orbison… Those are the names that Dylan bleeds whenever he talks or writes, and theirs are the songs that he covers. One could say, then, that it was a noble enterprise to bring Dylan into the fold of close textual analysis, but one cannot bring just Dylan into this fold, the great cloud of fellow “song and dance” men must also be included. Ricks does not appear to be ready for that.

Here is an example. In 2001 a tribute album—that rock version of homage—came out dedicated to Sun Records, connected to the documentary Good Rockin’ Tonight: The Legacy of Sun Records. Dylan contributed “Red Cadillac and a Black Moustache” to the album, and it should be no surprise, especially after reading Chronicles. Dylan sets out in no uncertain terms his admiration for Sun Records and Sam Phillips:

I’d always thought that Sun Records and Sam Phillips himself had created the most crucial, uplifting and powerful records ever made. Next to Sam’s records, all the rest sounded fruity. On Sun Records the artists were singing for their lives and sounded like they were coming from the most mysterious place on the planet.

The tribute album came out in the same year as Dylan’s “Love and Theft”. In fact, as one listens to “Red Cadillac and a Black Moustache” it seems to belong on “Love and Theft”. Compare the following lyrics, the first stanza from “Red Cadillac” and the second from Dylan’s “Summer Days”:

Somebody saw you at the break of day
Dining and a-dancing in the cabaret
He was long and tall, he had plenty of cash
He had a red cadillac and a black moustache
He held your hand and he sang you a song
Who you been lovin' since I been gone
Who you been lovin' since I been gone

Well I’m drivin’ in the flats in a Cadillac car
The girls all say, “You’re a worn out star”
My pockets are loaded and I’m spending every dime
How can you say you love someone else when you know it’s me all the time?

Here is where some close reading would really be useful, and this is only the barest beginning. I had been perplexed as to Dylan’s favored live treatment of “Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum” (also from “Love and Theft”), but when I heard Elvis’ early live version of “Tweedlee Dee” I understood—Dylan has creatively reworked an early rockabilly song, infusing the early innocence with a sense of loss. Dylan is not hiding any of his sources or inspirations, they are present wherever one looks.

It is important, I think, to grasp the fact that Dylan is not merely throwing in these allusions as “local color”, but rather because these are the words and the tunes that course through his blood. We knew that without Chronicles—we knew that from his two albums in the nineties filled with covers of old time songs, and we knew it from the endless stream of covers generated during Dylan’s Neverending Tour (listen to the nine disc bootleg The Genuine Neverending Tour Covers Collection 1988-2000)—, but with Chronicles in hand we can see clearly how deeply immersed Dylan is in this alternative world.

Now Ricks, as one can immediately tell by looking at the “by the same author” list at the front of his book, is equally immersed in another tradition—a literary one. When one approaches a book such as Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, with its references to Pindar, Chaucer, Dante, Milton, etc., the background possessed by Ricks is clearly important. Where to someone ignorant of the great European tradition, the book must be a bewildering experience, to Ricks it is filled with references to authors admired and loved. That same background comes in handy when working on modern heirs of this tradition—like T.S. Eliot or Philip Larkin.

With Dylan we encounter someone who has only tangential connection to this literary tradition, who sprinkles references to Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting in the captain’s tower, but little else. The real touchstones are no longer the familiar literary ones, but the progenitors of a new tradition—the tradition of American popular recorded music. What Dylan has gotten from the greats of this tradition— such as Robert Johnson—is a language, a code, and that is how he describes it in Chronicles:

If I hadn’t heard the Robert Johnson record when I did, there probably would have been hundreds of lines of mine that would have been shut down—that I wouldn’t have felt free enough or upraised enough to write…

He then comes round to noting that “Highway 61” was influenced by Robert Johnson, and writes: “Robert Johnson’s code of language was like nothing I’d heard before or since.” That “code of language” shows up continually, as soon as one starts to think about the literal references in Dylan’s music. Who believes that Dylan is out hopping trains, yet one of his strongest songs from 1997’s Time Out of Mind is “Cold Irons Bound.”

Despite the strength of his later output, Dylan’s sixties work stands out to himself, as well as to casual listeners, as his most creative period. Having finished the section about Robert Johnson and his influence, Dylan breaks off and looks to the future: “In a few years time, I’d write and sing songs like ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),’ ‘Mr. Tambourine Man,’ ‘Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,’ ‘Who Killed Davey Moore,’ ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game,’ ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ and some others like that.” All of which were written in the space of a few years during the 60’s.

When Dylan later describes the recording sessions with Daniel Lanois, these same songs come up again, allowing us to see just how they haunt Dylan and provide both a forward and backward reference point throughout Chronicles.

Off and on during the time we were cutting “Series of Dreams,” he’d say to me something like, “We need songs like ‘Masters of War,’ ‘Girl from the North Country ,’ or ‘With God on our Side.’” He began nagging at me, just about every other day, that we could sure use some songs like those. I nodded. I knew we could, but I felt like growling. I didn’t have anything like those songs.

And that is the note that endures after reading Chronicles. Dylan’s goal is not to construct a heroic creative presence, but to give a realistic portrayal of his creative growth and its necessary changes—and losses. In the course of describing the genesis of Oh Mercy, Dylan makes the curious decision to report some of his discarded stanzas, as if he is doing his best to prove that he is no genius, but someone who fails as often as he hits.

Lanois, in seeking songs like the old ones, stands in for many a critic and fan, and Dylan seems almost frail in his answer:

I would have liked to been able to give him the kinds of songs that he wanted, like “Masters of War,” “Hard Rain,” “Gates of Eden,” but those kinds of songs were written under different circumstances, and circumstances never repeat themselves. Not exactly. I couldn’t get to those kinds of songs for him or anyone else.

“What was it you wanted?” Dylan seems to ask, almost admitting that he has not delivered. “Did somebody tell you that you could get it from me?”

Instead of dwelling too long on failure, Dylan looks to the future and comes close to prophesying the coming of a new singer: “Someone would come along eventually who would have it again—someone who could see into things, the truth of things… see it for what it was with hard words and vicious insight.” He will be no reincarnation of Elvis Presley. “He wouldn’t be swinging his hips and staring at the lassies. He’d be doing it with hard words and he’d be working eighteen hours a day.” The message and tone of the passage is straight from Deuteronomy 18, where Moses delivers a farewell address to the Israelites and repeats a promise from the lord: “I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their own people; I will put my words in the mouth of the prophet, who shall speak to them everything that I command.” But that was not for Moses, and it is not for Dylan either.