Judas!

Hello again folks and welcome to issue 7. Seasons come and seasons go, years pass,

decades even; a millennium date change has even happened by and still the not-to-be-

called-never-ending-tour, never ending tour rolls by. When this issue hits your door-

mats Bob will be mid-European tour. We at Judas! central are off to see two shows in

Sweden and participate in the Stockholm convention - and hope to see as many of you

there as possible - before the UK tour starts, a set of dates made much more attractive

by the later additions of Hammersmith and Brixton. Ah, what memories to be rekindled

and hopefully new ones to savour too.

Inside these pages we bring you another collection of articles that we trust you will

enjoy. Again we have aimed for a balance between well known names and newcomers or

relative newcomers. This is something we can only maintain if new writers keep coming

forward. There’s a plea elsewhere in these pages for photographs, the same goes for new

material. A few out there (you know who you are) have started articles, please keep at

them, the more new writing blood in the Dylan fanzine world the better as far as I am

concerned.

Issue Eight will hopefully feature one or more of these, plus articles by established

names. Manuel Vardavas’s bootleg column will be back again (presuming something

worthy of discussion is released, that is) and it is quite likely we will be taking an in-

depth look at SACD and bootleg DVDs from a ‘technology-and-its-impact-on-your-

Dylan-entertainment’ standpoint. In addition the (just arrived here) book Chimes Of

Freedom by Mike Marqusee looks like it is going to be worthy of a detailed review and

interview with the author. Even a chapter or so into it I feel I can wholeheartedly recom-

mend it already. Go to www.judasmagazine.com for more about it.

That’s all for the future, however, for now enjoy Michael Gray on Christopher

Ricks’s Dylan’s Visions of Sin, enjoy the fruits of Nick Hawthorne’s labour on Dylan and

Marlon Brando (incidentally Nick says that he wants to ‘thank Raymond Landry, Peter

Vincent and our esteemed editor for their invaluable.assistance on this one’) and all our

other contributors for whom I give my own thanks for their sparkling offerings to this

latest issue.

Enjoy your Bob, wherever you are; if you happen to be in Europe perhaps we’ll meet

somewhere on the road.

Andrew Muir

from Inside A Prune

ContentsNumberSeven

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‘Tangled Up In Blue’: Getting It Togetherby John Hinchey

‘I’ll Know My Song Well Before I Start Singing’by Toby Richards-Carpenter

The Ghosts Of Minneapolisby Leonard Scott

Sense of Humantity...by D. A. Carpenter

Expecting All The Gifts That Wise Men Bring by John Doran

Female Rambling Sailorby Stephen Scobie

Masked & Anonymous - A Personal Viewby Stephen Scobie

Philosophical Observationsby Martin Van Hees

Christopher Ricks’ Dylan’s Visions Of Sinby Michael Gray

Judas! Interview With Penguin Books’ Tony Laceyconducted by Andrew Muir

Bob Dylan And ‘The Nature Of Gothic’by Alan Davis

Holding A Mirror Up To Nature...by Nick Hawthorne

Photo Credits: Front cover Duncan Hume, Paris April 2002; Back cover John

Hume, Newcastle 1984; Inside back cover Jon Blishen, Afflecks

Place, Manchester

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At the beginning of the 1970s, Dylan’s star seemed to be fading fast. SelfPortrait, an often charmingly off-the-wall collection of folk and pop covers andDylan’s own scraps, may or may not, as Dylan later claimed, have been contrivedto puncture the myth of his invincibility, but it certainly had that effect. NewMorning, with its bracing restlessness, restored some of his lost luster, but as asongwriter Dylan still seemed more than a little lost, grasping every which way atstraws of inspiration and purpose. Then, after four years of virtual silence, PlanetWaves (1974) broke genuinely new ground. Dylan’s voice had changed, not somuch in the way it sounded as in the way it registered. There was a quaking in it,almost impalpable yet omnipresent, something rooted in the way the lyrics, intheir diction and in their movement, seemed always to be reaching beyond theirown capacity to sustain, as if recklessly crossing boundaries, or even floutingtaboo.

Then in early 1975, Blood on the Tracks arrived. I put the needle down on thefirst track, and suddenly, the way it always does when summoned by great art, thewhole world seemed to align itself with the moment of listening:

Early one mornin’ the sun was shinin’,I was layin’ in bedWond’rin’ if she’d changed at allIf her hair was still red.Her folks they said our lives togetherSure was gonna be roughThey never did like Mama’s homemade dressPapa’s bankbook wasn’t big enough.I was standin’ on the side of the roadRain fallin’ on my shoesHeading out for the old East CoastLord knows I’ve paid some dues gettin’ through,Tangled up in blue.

‘Tangled Up in Blue’:Getting It Together

by John Hinchey

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Here was the same quaking I heard inthe lyrics of Planet Waves, except now itwas a delicate shudder, and now, mostastonishingly, Dylan’s voice was fullyequal to it. Indeed, it was hard to believe,even as I was listening to them, that theircould be any words to sustain the shud-dering rush of that voice.

But there are, and we are listening tothem. The first thing I noticed is that justas Dylan’s voice sounded different thanany voice of his I had heard before, so didthese words sound different than thewords in earlier Dylan songs. These wordsare carried forward on a wave of soundand sense that is at once more articulate -more minutely articulated - and somehowmore present, or more alive, than everbefore.

IIThe key to the unique sound of the

songs on Blood on the Tracks derives fromthe combined effect of two things. First,the caesuras - the hitches in cadence thatdivide the lines into two parts - are unusu-ally strong and unusually regular in theirplacement: there is rarely any enjamb-ment. The result is a relentless regularityin rhythmic bedding of the lyric thatleaves a singer little wiggle room. Indeed,in singing this song, Dylan has never beenable to find a way to inflect its mood withany variety of feeling except by quickeningor slowing the tempo or, tellingly, as inperformances during the latter part of theAmerican leg of his 1978 world tour, byinterpolating additional verbal phrasesthat opened up the rhythmic possibilitiesof the second half of several lines.

The other strikingly unDylanesquefeature in the sound of this lyric is itsquietness, its sweetness even. Dylan’ssignature sound is a rhythmic vigorhammered out by the clatter and clamorof strong consonants. But the consonantalvigor that lent his most characteristic 60’ssongs their edge gives way here to a deli-cate, shimmering tracery of vowel pattern-ings, patternings far subtler and richer -and again, less willfully insistent - than theassonances Dylan favored in the 60s.

Consider, for example, the first twopairs of half lines that commence ‘TangledUp in Blue.’ A good deal of the feelingthese lines convey is tied up in the verbalmelody created by the patterning of theirlong vowels (morning, shining, I, laying,changed). This pattern largely coincideswith the patterning of stressed vowels inthe meter - half-line trimeters with anoften barely perceptible iambic base -resulting in what approaches a kind ofquantitative verse, one based, that is, asmuch on vowel lengths as on stress.

This sort of lyric has more air, morebreathing space in its sound than Dylan’sprevious work, and along with that, less -or more subtly managed - body English.That is, the consonants are either almostvestigial, felt mainly as modulations of themusic of the vowels, like the soft conso-nants (r, s, l, m, n, etc.) that predominatein the opening verse of ‘Tangled’ quotedabove; or when the old consonantal clatterreappears, it resurfaces as a kind ofbullying (‘Papa’s bank book wasn’t bigenough’), or a brittle impatience (‘I used alittle too much force’), or some othermalignancy. Or we can get, at the begin-

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ning of the fourth verse, the wonderfullynuanced syllabic music whose mostprominent features include the centralmetamorphic series that runs from‘topless’ to ‘stopped’ to ‘spotlight,’ themenacing echoing of ‘was working’ by themore insistent ‘kept looking,’ and the way‘clear’ gives the lie to its rhyme, ‘beer,’which is a transparent (if unconscious)dodge, even in its sound, since ‘peer’ is thephoneme the song’s verbal music is clearlylooking for.

This is a verbal music that is moredirectly introspective - more ‘sensitive,’ inthe jargon of the era - than Dylan’s writingin the 60s, where self-awareness waslargely and most effectively rendered indi-rectly, through engagement with ‘you,’ hisaudience. I think this change derives ulti-mately from a change in his relation to themythic ‘you’ at the core of his imagination- a matter I will address later - but I wouldfirst note that Dylan has always seemedsomewhat uncomfortable with the verbalmusic - and concomitant mood - he cameup with for Blood on the Tracks. Dylanrarely tinkers with the lyrics of his bestsongs after he releases them on record, butfrom the start he has almost constantlyrewritten ‘Tangled’ and other Blood on theTracks songs when performing them live,and he almost always rewrote them inways that shook them up and made themsound more like his ‘normal’ self. As indi-cated above, the 1978 rewrites took oneapproach to restoring the rhythmic varietyand edge his singing likes to hang itselfonto, and the massive 1984 rewrite of‘Tangled’ achieved the same end via adifferent means: a number of entirely new

lines restored much of the old consonantalclatter in their sound even as they restoredmuch of his discomfiting propheticthunder in their sense. The result in bothcases was to make the song more spiritedand willful - the essence of the Dylanesque- and less soulful and emotional.

IIIThe mood of ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ is

the heart and soul of the song, and it isprofoundly self-contradictory. On the onehand, the entire lyric is a tissue of imagesof desire as an irreparable wounding. Thatis, as every listener must know, the song isall about emotional vulnerability. Yet, atthe same time, the entire song - at leastuntil the final verse - is a reverie, one thatrepossesses wounded desire within its ownenchantments, so that desire is felt insome way as its own and only fulfillment.My own experience is that the contradic-toriness of this mood is initially perceivednot simultaneously but successively, as anoscillation, or as I figured it above, a shud-dering. The lyric moves so fast that it’simpossible to tell where the woundingends and the reverie begins, or vice versa.

Furthermore, the speed of the lyric -which even the languorous tempo ofDylan’s 1978 torch-song arrangementcould not undo - is driven by bothelements of its complex mood. Hungrydesire propels the self forward, engen-dering change and time, while the mind inreverie - the creative force that shapes thesong - chases time down with its peremp-tory healing power. Even as it is hurtledthrough time, the singer’s consciousnesssees itself reflected with equal fullness

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every moment along the way. This double-edged sense of time - as a sundering and aripening, a curse and a blessing - is themost distinguishing feature of Blood on theTracks.

These effects are easiest to examine inthe opening verse, where the movementthrough time is at its most breathtakinglyprecipitous. It begins like the opening of amovie, a straightforward shot - of amorning sky brightening with the sun -that zooms in, as through a window, tothe narrator lying in bed. This line alsoreads like a pastoral revision of the formu-laic ‘woke up this morning’ that opens somany blues. Dylan’s line stretches out thecharacteristic blues cadence - as in the‘woke up this morning, feel ‘round for myshoes’ that opens Robert Johnson’s‘Walkin’ Blues’ - replacing the urgency ofthe blues with a contemplative languor.(Opening the song with ‘early onemorning’ rather than ‘early this morning’contributes to the same effect.)

This navel-gazing complacencydoesn’t last long. The second line beginswith a slight tensing, as ‘wond’ring’ bothdescribes what we might read on thenarrator’s face as the camera closes in on itand takes us inside his mind, where thepace of change abruptly quickens.Suddenly there’s an unidentified ‘she,’ andthen the first real shudder occurs on thatword ‘changed,’ a shudder that’s partlyabsorbed and partly extended by ‘at all.’The word ‘changed’ leaps out in part as asonic alarm - an explosive cap to what hadbeen a quietly accelerating intensity of themetrically long vowels - but it’s the veryidea of change that sustains this shudder.

It’s an idea that both threatens the sanc-tuary of the reverie and aptly identifies theunderlying flavor that will characterize it,a brisk succession of cinematic shotsdissolving one into the other. Change isboth friend and enemy, the agent of lossand of restitution.

The reverie renews itself, as it will overand over throughout the song, paradoxi-cally absorbing and even nourishing itselfwith its very disruptions and dislocations.The second half of the second line thusevokes both the memory of a girlunchanged, her hair still red, and by wayof the archetypal association of red hairwith the wild and untamable, theinevitability of change. (There’s also aquietly joking acknowledgment thatwomen are always changing the color oftheir hair.) This hint is picked up in thenext couplet, where her parents’ dissatis-faction with his pedigree lends theircommitment to each other a romanticallyheroic aura that augurs its doom. The nextcouplet absorbs this tension in the imageof the narrator standing by the roadside,presumably thumbing a ride, the rainfilling his shoes and fueling his urge tomove on. This scene may be set after thebreakup of the narrator’s relationshipwith her, or long before it, perhaps evenbefore he had ever met her. It doesn’tmatter: The narrator seems always to havepossessed ‘her’ (whoever she is) as amemory, but as a moving memory thatkeeps him moving, in search of her. Heseems always both to have lost her and tobe unable to get away from her.

This realization - that he has alwayspossessed and been possessed by her -

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dawns upon us right about here, with thisimage of the singer standing in the rain,‘heading out for the old East Coast,’presumably in quixotic pursuit of her.That is why this couplet strikes a note notjust of pathos but also of the numinous,carrying the sense that he is never morewith her, nor she with him, than just here,in such circumstances, on the road inpursuit of her. Indeed, it is almost unbear-ably numinous, for its sublimity cannot beseparated from the very pathos that cloudsit. The shudder of this double conscious-ness seems for to catch up with thenarrator the first time in a mixed cry ofpain and pride - ‘Lord knows I’ve paidsome dues’ - whose residual tension isfully absorbed only in the double echo ofthe final rhyme - ‘gettin’ through/Tangledup in blue’ - that concludes the verse.

Dylan seems to have invented thisclimactic prosodic flourish right here,almost involuntarily, even as in the verse’sfinal phrase he found the unsurpassablename not just of his song but of the innerweather his song is discovering, or perhapsinventing. ‘Entangled in Blue,’ forinstance, just wouldn’t get it done. Theplacement of ‘up,’ exactly where it is, isrequired to tinge ‘blue’ with the color ofthe sky and as well of the blues. Thesinger’s mood is inextricably both upliftedinto the aether and down in the dumps, atonce transcendent and doomed.

IVThe rest of the song can be seen as a

ripening of the implications of the firstverse, tracing the singer’s double pursuitof ‘her’ and of his own mind, which ‘she’

has at once somehow both stolen andshaped.

‘She’ is the figure Dylan’s poetrypursues as ‘you,’ the imagined listener.With Dylan, as I argued in Like a CompleteUnknown, this listener is variously andoften simultaneously his public audienceand a private female, or, more properly, hisfictions of them both. Dylan’s poetic rela-tionship to this figure is different in the 70sthan it was in the 60s because his relation toboth his public and his private muse haschanged. He is no longer in a position tocourt - or retreat from - either of them. Theyare a part of him now. His private muse -who may or may not be Sara Dylan - hasbeen a wife since the last two songs on JohnWesley Harding. His public muse, mean-while, had been languishing in a creativelimbo, a ghostly presence that wouldn’t goaway but couldn’t make itself felt either.Thus the retreat, from Nashville Skylinethrough Planet Waves, to a smaller, moreexclusively private voice and the uncharac-teristic uncertainty of tone whenever Dylanreached for something larger.

Dylan returned to the stage at the begin-ning of 1974, following an almost eight-year sabbatical, for a commerciallytriumphant cross-country comeback tourwith the Band. Dylan sounded determinedbut dazed, as if he really did have what helater called ‘amnesia.’ [fn 1] But his audi-ence greeted him with open arms, as if hewere an errant spouse or lost sibling at longlast come home. His public audience, too,was now, willy-nilly, both wife and sister.Suddenly, he was not the Kid anymore, buta man with a past - even if he couldn’tremember it!

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Blood on the Tracks was written afterDylan had had a few months to absorb allthis, and listening even just to the firstverse of ‘Tangled,’ it’s apparent he wasgoing to make the most of it. The ‘she’who appears at the outset of his reverie ishis muse, in both her private and publicaspects, as an intimate presence in his ownconsciousness, as wife or sister, or as thesister-wife Dylan himself, a year later onDesire, explicitly invokes in ‘Oh Sister’ andnames in ‘Isis.’ And in so positioning hismuse, Dylan implicitly assumes the voiceof her brother-husband Osiris, theEgyptian god who precedes Christ (inhistory as in Dylan’s poetry) as a divineconqueror of time.

The figures of Isis and Osiris shadow anumber of Blood on the Tracks songs, but‘Tangled Up in Blue’ is the only one thataddresses the myth of their uncanny inti-macy. It is a myth of resurrection, of theattainment of eternal life; that is, of lifeoutside of time. The core of this myth isthe complementary role that both Isis andOsiris play, through the use of wordmagic, in resurrecting Osiris’s spiritualbody, first after his death at the hands oftheir jealous brother Set and then againafter his dismemberment by an enragedSet.

I don’t think Dylan has any interest inthis tale as a myth of the afterlife, which isthe role it played in Egyptian religion.Certainly that is not an issue in ‘Tangled.’Rather, Dylan exploits it as a myth of spir-itual regeneration through the mastery ofmemory and desire.

Desire is Isis, or, in the language of thissong, ‘she.’ This ‘she’ is another of Dylan’s

aboriginal pronouns, a ‘she’ whose puta-tively antecedent proper nouns are in factderivative; in the literal sense, merenominal identities. Many of the songs onBlood on the Tracks feel like they areaddressed to Sara Dylan, the Isis ofDylan’s real life, but the narrative that‘Tangled’ sketches has always struck me aspolyamorous. ‘She’ is one, but her avatarsare many. This remains essentially trueeven if we decide the song is in fact aboutone woman. No woman, after all, is reallyjust one person, any more than a man is.But this is a man’s song, and a man, like awoman, is always singular in his ownmind, so here as in any man’s song aboutthe working out of the Isis myth in his life,the story is always as William CarlosWilliams formulated it: one man, manywomen. [fn 2].

My own experience is that the mostsatisfying way to take the song is toassume that ‘she’ is a different woman ineach scene and absorb the narrative underthe spell of that assumption. Then, whenyou’ve finished, pretend someone were toreveal to you that ‘she’ is always the samewoman. Then listen to the song while thatdouble sense of it is fresh in your mind.

‘She’ makes her presence felt in‘Tangled’ in two ways, which looselycorrespond - rather surprisingly - to thetwo ways Isis acts in the myth, first brieflyreviving Osiris (and conceiving their sonHorus by him) and then regathering thir-teen (all but the penis) of the fourteenpieces into which an angry Set had subse-quently torn his body. In the song, ‘she’keeps the singer coming and going, andyet she pulls him back together, too. In

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each of the remembered fragments of hislife that constitute the song’s narrative, herpresence (or her absence) both draws himin and propels him forward - in paradox-ical pursuit of her. Yet, his sense of hisconnection to her - of her presence orabsence - is what enables him to recognizethe person in each of these scenes ashimself. She recalls him to himself.

Re-calling him to himself is, in fact,literally what she does in the song. Sheinhabits the song merely as a figment ofthe singer’s anxieties until the end of thesecond verse, where, as they are ‘splittingup’ - apparently for the first time - hehears her ‘call over my shoulder/‘We’llmeet again someday.’’ He doesn’trespond, but there’s a sense of fatality inthe air; his doom is living with the echo ofher promise in his heart. The third versetells of his efforts to escape it - in the GreatNorth Woods, in Delacroix - but ‘shenever ‘scaped my mind.’ The underlyingsense, of course, is that he could notescape his memory of and abiding desirefor her, but the overt sense is true as well:‘She’ is a treasure he both possesses and ispossessed by.

Next we find him on that ‘someday,’where he comes across her, apparentlyonstage, in a ‘topless place.’ Or does he?He ‘keeps lookin’ at the side of her face,’just as later in the same verse she ‘studiedthe lines on my face.’ They seem not torecognize each other, and her question tohim - ‘don’t I know your name?’ (not even‘don’t I know you?’) - suggests she thinksshe might know only who he is. Of course,she might just be teasing him - ‘don’t Iknow your name?’ then would be the

equivalent of the playful ‘hello, stranger.’But however we novelize this poeticfiction, the very obliquity with which herquestion grazes those that surely haunt hismind - ‘are you really the one who knowsme’ and if she is, ‘am I the one you know’- can only exacerbate the tensed anxietywith which he withholds himself from hergreeting, ‘mutter[ing] something under-neath my breath.’ Finally she makes a realmove:

I must admit I felt a little uneasyWhen she bent down to tie the laces of my shoe,Tangled up in blue.

The singer’s anxiety seems to be that,‘when she went down,’ she might bemaking some sexual advance. But hisanxiety (and pent-up sexual energy) istransformed into a kind of spiritualecstasy whose force is revealed in the semi-orgasmic cry that extends the word ‘laces’across the caesura. (Thus his ‘uneasiness’could also reflect an anxiety, once herecognizes what she is doing, over whetherhe will be equal to such a sublimemoment.) She reveals herself here as theMagdalene in Isis, tending his feet as MaryMagdalene did Christ’s, and indeed herethe singer is something of a Christ,redeeming the whore from the fleshpots ofsin. But he is still also - and primarily - anOsiris, spiritually revived by the graces ofthis notwhore, rescued not so much fromenslavement to desire as from weakeningof his faith - in himself as well as in her.

The girl in the topless place may ormay not be the same woman who ‘lit aburner on the stove and offered me a pipe’in the next verse, but this verse feels like

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the immediate imaginative aftermath ofher self-revelation as Isis/Magdalene. Theflavor of this scene - the climax of the song- is both post-coital and coital. It is thespiritual intercourse possibly only whensex has been left behind. (Isis retrieveseverything of Osiris, remember, except thepenis, which is no longer needed.) Thescene is climactic because this time shesucceeds in fully recalling him to himself,handing this ‘silent type’ a ‘book ofpoems’ that awakens his own voice:

And every one of them words rang trueAnd glowed like burnin’ coalPourin’ off of every pageLike it was written in my soul from me to you,Tangled up in blue.

The ‘dying embers,’ as Shelley termedthem, of words on the page are revived as‘burning coals’ by the creative act ofreading them. But the creativity of readingreaches fruition only when his voice itselfbecomes a burning coal, as it does in star-tling shift to direct address: ‘from me toyou.’

This, as I argued in my earlier book, isthe quintessential Dylan move, but thereis something new about it here. In the 60s,when Dylan’s singer shifted from third-person narrative to direct address, heseemed to be entering his own narrative,so that the shift to direct address seemedto announce his discovery of a place forhis spirit in his world - and that place wasin ‘you.’ Here the singer’s voice seems toleap out of a remembered scene he hadsilently been inhabiting. That is, ‘from meto you’ does not strike us as something thesinger is remembering having said to her

in this scene from the past, or even some-thing that he, the singer, is saying to us, hislisteners, right now. No, it’s as if thatremembered self - that dead self - isspeaking these words to us right now.

The singer’s past and present selvesmingle and merge, or even switch places.I’ve described the illusion as that of thepast self turning from the woman to thepresent self’s listener, but you could aseasily say that the singer at this momentstops telling his story - speaking to uslisteners - and speaks directly - across time- to her. In this climactic moment Dylan’ssinger has truly overthrown time anddissolved space.

But such an ecstasy seems less to sanc-tify the scene that has engendered it thanto desolate it. Our attention is not drawnto any experience of mutual recognition -which is nonetheless taken for granted, assomething that goes without saying - butto a residual hunger for some final revela-tion, for the physical body to dissolvewholly into the spiritual body. For thesinger, as both lover and performer, theecstasy of this climax seems to be balanced- if not in fact overshadowed - by itsimplicit disappointments, still ‘tangled upin blue.’

In the next verse, the singer, in hisguise as remembered lover, seems to havecollapsed under the strain of this tension.The narrative shifts here into the thirdperson, so that it might take us a while torealize that the ‘he’ who ‘started intodealing with slaves’ is an alter-ego of the ‘I’who ‘became withdrawn.’ This was morereadily apparent in the original version ofthe song - one take of which was released

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on the Bootleg Series, Vol. 1-3. There thefirst three verses are presented in the thirdperson, and the protagonist does notemerge as ‘I’ until the central two verses inwhich she draws him out. Thus, in thisearly version of the lyric, when ‘he’ reap-pears in the sixth verse, we are more likelyto recognize him.

I would identify this ‘he,’ mythologi-cally, as Set, the evil twin brother whomurdered Osiris. The ‘something inside ofhim [that] died’ is his better self, Dylan’s‘I,’ whose withdrawal into himself later inthe verse is a kind of interment. And itshould be noted that this ‘he’ has shad-owed both the song’s ‘I’ throughout thesong. In the first three verses, Osiris andSet, I and he, were entangled in each other- that’s why Dylan could write (and stillsometimes sings) these verses in the thirdperson. When the song begins, both in thesinger and in his remembered self, vulner-ability mixes with anxiety, desire with self-absorption. The same self-absorbedimpatience - a reflection of his lack of realfaith either in her or himself - that findshim ‘dealing in slaves’ in verse six was alsoevinced - in a milder form - in the ‘littletoo much force’ with which in verse twohe/I hastened along her divorce and ‘drovethat car as far as we could.’ (Three guesseswho did all the driving!) Indeed, the moodin which his reverie itself begins is danger-ously close to solipsism. Its aim seems tobe to tame her as a private possession - asa slave - of his memory. In the beginningof the song, the singer is still an innocent,a moral child who does not realize that thewoman of his dreams is not simply a crea-ture of those dreams. That is the realiza-

tion that fully hit him at the end of thefifth verse and that underwrites the pathosof his cry, ‘from me to you.’

As I said, his consciousness seemsinitially to collapse under the weight ofthat realization, but ‘she’ revives him oncemore. The song’s last verse - set finally inthe present, the reverie dissolved - findshim ‘going on back again,’ resuming hisendless quest (‘goin’ on) for what healready has (‘back again’). There is noguarantee that when he finds her, he won’tbetray her again, but he does seem tounderstand that their encounters willalways be partial and fleeting - at ‘anotherjoint’ - and that the best he can hope for isnot to get but to ‘get to’ an Isis who willforever remain at least partially veiledfrom him. All he needs to do is to find away to meet her in good faith.

Easier said than done.

VThis spiritual drama, which involves

the centrality of faith to human relation-ships, looms large not only in ‘Tangled Upin Blue’ but in Dylan’s poetry throughoutthe 70s, from New Morning throughSaved. This drama takes place, oftensimultaneously, on two axes: the singer’sfidelity with his implied listener - the ‘Iand you’ nexus that dominated Dylan’spoetry in the 60s and whose presence in‘Tangled Up in Blue’ I have been exam-ining - and the singer’s fidelity to himself -something, to borrow the title of the 1983song, we might call the ‘I and I’ nexus. Sofar I’ve largely ignored this element in‘Tangled,’ but it’s even more central to thesong’s uncanny power and unique flavour

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than the ‘shaggy dog story’ [fn 3] of hisrelationship to Isis. So I turn now to thequestion of what Dylan’s Osiris does forhimself. This is the aspect of the songDylan himself emphasized when, in aseries of 1978 interviews, he spoke ofhaving found a way, on Blood on theTracks, to write songs that ‘stop time.’

We’ve already come across thiselement of the song in the startling transi-tion to direct address at the end of the fifthverse. But this moment is the climax of thelyric only because it brings to the surfaceelements implicit in the narrative allalong. At the simplest level, the narrativedissolves time in the way it collapsestogether the singer’s sense of himself inthe past and in the present. For instance,nothing in the narrative enables us todetermine if his judgment, in the secondstanza, that he ‘used a little too muchforce’ is a remembrance of how he felt oran expression of how he feels now - orboth. The same could be said about hisawareness of (‘I must admit’) his uneasi-ness about the topless dancer’s advances,or his realization that ‘every one of themwords rang true.’ Indeed, in the song’sopening line, the song’s narrator, in hisnarrating, is ‘laying’ [sic] here‘wondering,’ even as he inform us he waslaying there doing the same thing on thatmorning he is now contemplating.

This is not the main fashion in whichthe collapse of time makes itself felt.Indeed, such overt temporal indetermi-nacy is relatively rare in the lyric. Thenarrator is indeed ‘the silent type;’ heshow his hand sparingly. But the dissolu-tion of temporal categories is subtler and

more pervasive than these instances. It isembedded in the very texture of the narra-tive, in its freewheeling fictiveness.

‘Tangled’ is not necessarily an autobio-graphical song - its persona may be partly oreven largely constructed out of the lives ofpeople Dylan knew or simply imagined.Indeed, I often find myself hearing it as anarchetypal coming-of-age tale of the 60sgeneration. Nonetheless, most listeners -myself included - instinctively (andnaively) regard it as some sort of autobiog-raphy. Yet we are not at all surprised thatnone of the incidents reported in the song -except in incidental detail (e.g., ‘soon to bedivorced’) - turn up in any of Dylan’s biog-raphies. We can tell by the feel of it thatDylan - or his fictitious singer - is making itup: real life is never this casually resonant.The song is a spiritual autobiography inwhich the facts of personal history havebeen replaced by a fiction that illuminatesthat history. The agency of memory of is notreportorial but creative, or re-creative.

What this means is that although noneof the song’s images - ‘her folks,’ ‘that car,’‘a topless place,’ or even the elusive ‘poetof the 13th century’ - are necessarilyfactual, they are all ‘true.’ What is true in‘Tangled Up in Blue’ is, to return tolanguage of the song’s climactic epiphany,whatever rings true, whatever establishes aconnection between this and that - specif-ically, whatever connects present and pastselves. The narrative becomes a tissue ofrecognitions. The conditions of timewither and disappear, exposed as thedismembered corpse of a here-and-nowthe singer recovers in making his songrecollect not who he was but who he is.

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Several commentators, most notablyAidan Day, [fn 4] have noted the way thesong’s narrative dislocates the sense ofchronology upon which, as narrative, itnecessarily depends. But this is not the halfof it. The song’s narrative structure doesnot dislocate our sense of temporal orderso much as it subverts any sense of thetemporality of experience. This is nogarden variety cubism, the sort thataffords essentially spatial perspectives ontime without challenging the essentialtemporality of all narrative. The narrative‘Tangled’ rehearses is not presented as asuccession of events - not even a fracturedsuccession of events - but as an associativeseries of pulsations.

This is true not only of the felt rela-tionship between its discrete episodes but,more startlingly, in the narrative flavor ofthe longer episodes. Listen again to thefourth verse:

She was workin’ in a topless placeAnd I stopped in for a beer,I just kept lookin’ at the side of her faceIn the spotlight so clear.And later on as the crowd thinned outI’s just about to do the same,She was standing there in back of mychairSaid to me, ‘Don’t I know your name?’I muttered somethin’ underneath mybreath,She studied the lines in my face.I must admit I felt a little uneasy When she bent down to tie the laces ofmy shoe,Tangled up in blue.

Technically, this episode is recounted inchronological order, but it is a chronology

purged of the dynamic texture of time. Thesinger either visited the topless placeknowing he would find her there, or he justhappened to stumble onto her. But the‘and’ - substituting for a ‘so’ or a ‘where’ -which connects him and her blithelyfinesses these questions of motivation. Theremainder of the verse proceeds in a similarfashion, so that the incident it recountsseems not so much to unfold in time asunveil itself in all its multifacetedness. Oursense of cause and effect is at best vestigial.That ‘later on’ is a paradoxically detempor-alizing marker of time; it dissolves ratherthan articulates the psychological transi-tion between what precedes and whatfollows it. The singer’s (remembered)present makes itself felt not as a momentsuspended between where it’s coming fromand where it’s heading - between past andfuture - but as a moment complete in itself -and thus a moment out of time.

The more closely we listen to this song,the less driven - and the less resistant to theharrying of time - the singer sounds. Webegin to hear the sound of a man simplydigging himself. Time, in short, is graduallydisclosed as an illusion, one that forevershadows our truest sense of ourselves, butan illusion nonetheless. Masquerading as atime-bound narrative, ‘Tangled Up in Blue’is at bottom a Whitmanesque catalogue of amanifold ‘I am’ recouping itself from itsdivisions in time.

VIIn discussing the final verse of

‘Tangled Up in Blue’ earlier, I addressed itin terms of the way it resolves - by leavingin a state of permanent irresolution - the

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merry-go-round romance that providesthe song with its overt subject. Now I wantto look at it in the context of the aspect ofthe song I am now examining, the singer’sstruggle to recover himself. This verse ismy favorite in the song: it never fails togive me an exhilarating kick, and eventhough I know it’s coming, the exhilara-tion of it almost always catches me bysurprise.

Before going any further, I would notethat this verse seems to do the same thingfor Dylan. In live performance, Dylanoften sleepwalks through this lyric - notthat it matters all that much; the tensionbetween the rush of time and the clari-fying stillness of the mind is so deeplyembedded in the verbal DNA of the lyricthat the song sometimes seems to singitself. But he always - OK, almost always -wakes up for the final verse. Even theharmonica or guitar choruses he invari-ably sandwiches around his vocal arerarely less than inspired.

This verse has this effect, on bothsinger and listener, because it is an awak-ening cry. ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ is thesignature song of Dylan’s work of the 70s,and like its 60s counterpart, it resolvesitself in an ecstatic ‘now.’ The ‘now’ thatresolves ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ is aprospective reality, an opportunitythrown out for Miss Lonely to embrace,but the ‘now’ that kicks off this final verseannounces the singer’s arrival as himself.This ‘now,’ which has been gathering itselfthroughout the long six-verse reverie, is arecovery of the past as a thing of thepresent. ‘Goin’ on’ [fn 5] picks up the‘keepin’ on’ that concludes that reverie,

even as it translates it from past (‘was tokeep on keepin’ on’) to present tense. And‘back again’ implicitly acknowledges thatthe plenipotentiary present of this ‘now’ isa re-creation from the past, even as that‘now’ is soon - as soon in fact as the singerfalls silent - to become itself in turn a thingof the past that, along with all the otherparts of himself abandoned in the courseof time, must be rolled back up to re-create ‘now’ again. Dylan’s ‘now’ is in thissense literally a transience, a coming-and-going that sustains itself only in neverceasing to change.

But he is here now, and he fills the longmoment this verse sustains with the full-ness of his sense of himself. In dismissingthe ‘people we used to know’ as ‘illusionsto me now,’ the singer both trumpets hisown self-recovery (‘me now’) and slylyquestions whether ‘she’ (the other half ofthat ‘we’) has also returned herself fromher past. And while ‘she’ is mainly felt inthis song as a woman, or series of women,here I think our sense of ‘her’ as a figurefor the singer’s love affair with his audi-ence comes to the fore. ‘I’m here nowsinging,’ he seems to be saying, ‘but areyou here now listening, or are you still justthe person you used to be when I was theguy you used to know?’

But whether his audience is here ornot, the singer is forced to acknowledgethat although he knows something aboutthem, he doesn’t (yet) know them - ‘Idon’t know what they’re doing with theirlives’ - and that, in one sense, he does notknow himself either: ‘I don’t know how itall got started’ - or, it is implied, where it’sall heading. This recognition proves

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profoundly humbling, and the ‘me’ thatopens the next line - ‘Me, I’m still on theroad’ - is somehow achingly, if glancingly,poignant, and funny, too. ‘It’s just little oleme,’ the god Osiris observes, ‘just one ofthe guys.’

But wait. Since when was there morethan one guy in this song, or the world ofpossibility it projects? The singer’s sense ofhimself and of his relations is undergoinga profound metamorphosis, one that atlast raises both him and her out of theunderworld of memory and desire inwhich until now his consciousness - likehis song - has held them both captive. Andit does so even as it insists that the oldunderworld of memory and desire persistsas the vital link that connects them. Thistransformation reaches culmination in thesecond and final invocation of ‘we’ thatcloses the song.

But me, I’m still on the roadHeadin’ for another jointWe always did feel the same,We just saw it from a different pointof view,Tangled up in blue.Here he seems to be addressing ‘her’

(and/or his audience) not only as thebeloved Isis but also - and even primarily -as a fellow quester for love, as an Osiris.He suddenly imagines himself singing forher as well as too her, telling a story (of theendless quest for the beloved) andenacting a struggle (of self-mastery) that isher story and her struggle, too. [fn 6]

In the last analysis, then, ‘she’ is notIsis but, like the singer, one of the guys.(Or one of the girls, take your pick; sex ismoot here.) This discovery of companion-

ability seems to take the song by surprise,and it certainly feels more than a littletenuous, as if the singer were getting aheadof himself. The singer’s orientation -toward his listener, toward himself -changes so quickly that you slightlydistrust your own ears - and wonder if heeven notices what is happening himself.

But this companionability, I wouldsuggest, is paradoxically the deepest formof his fidelity to himself: the circle ofcompanionship is the human form of ‘Iand I.’ And as surprising as it may seemand tenuous as it may be, this enrichedsense of self affords the singer’s voice itsbreathing space within the alternatingcurrent of ecstasy and desolation thatsustains his life, where he remains ‘tangledup in blue.’

1-he later called ‘amnesia.’ Dylan first offered thisself-assessment in a series of remarkable 1978 inter-views, including a 2-part Rolling Stone (January 26 &November 16) interview with Jonathan Cott andinterviews with journalists Karen Hughes and MattDamsker reprinted in 1984 in Gavin Diddle’s Talkin’Bob Dylan ... 1978. Anyone familiar with these inter-views will recognize that I have pillaged them forsome of the key analytic concepts I use in this essay:time as an illusion, the power of art to ‘stop time,’and the transformation of unconscious creativeprocesses into conscious ones. But while I appro-priate some of Dylan’s vocabulary, I can’t say withany confidence that I appropriate his meanings, forthe simple reason that I’m not always sure what hemeans. Dylan’s critical pronouncements - and notjust on his own work - commonly possess an orac-ular opacity that is penetrable only if you alreadyknow what he means. In this case, I think I mightknow, but I wouldn’t put any money on that.Moreover, these interviews were undertaken as partof Dylan’s effort to promote his commercially ill-fated film, Renaldo and Clara, and frankly, his obser-vations about Blood on the Tracks strike me as rathermore on-target with respect to the film than to thealbum.

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2-one man, many women. The reference is toWilliams’s epic poem Paterson, in which the pairingof ‘only one man, like a city’ with ‘innumerablewomen, each like a flower’ is a major motif.3-‘shaggy dog story’ Robert Christgau used this termin his ‘Consumer Guide’ blurb for Greatest Hits. Vol.3, which is archived online at:robertchristgau.com/get_artist.phpname=bob+dylan4-most notably Aidan Day Aidan Day, Jokerman:Reading the Lyrics of Bob Dylan (Blackwell, 1988), pp.51-66.5-‘Goin’ on’ The original lyric is ‘Goin’ back again,’but Dylan changed it to ‘goin’ on back again’ whenhe first began performing the song live during theRolling Thunder Revue in the fall of 1975, and he hassung it that way ever since.

6-her struggle, too. The 1984 rewrite of this songchanges ‘we just saw it from a different point of view’to ‘we just saw her from a different point of view.’This change strikes me as unfortunate because itexcludes the fruitful ambivalence of the original, andit does so in two ways. It removes the possibility thatthis final we includes a private address to ‘her’ as wellas a public address to his audience, and it eliminatesthe possibility that he is addressing this ‘we’ as a loveras well as a friend. On the other hand, I must admit Ihave my own nagging doubts about whether thoseambivalences are anything more than my own hallu-cination. But every time I decide to ignore them, thesong whacks me upside the head and insists I takethem seriously.

TROUBADOURby Andrew MuirTroubadour is a mixture of brand newessays and updated versions of articles thathave appeared in a variety of fanzines.These latter have all been reworked for thebook. Their changes ranging from correc-tions and revisions to the completely re-written, like the restructured chapter on“Love And Theft”; unrecognizable andsome five times larger than the reviewsalready published.352 pages, Paperback only, 234x156mm

UK...£18.50 Europe...£19.50 USA/Canada...$40.00 Rest of World...£25.50. All costs

include postage. Available by post from Woodstock Publications,

8 Laxton Grange, Bluntisham, Cambridgeshire PE28 3XU United Kingdom or

order online at: www.judasmagazine.com

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Earlier this afternoon, I was driving along with a compilation tape of Bob’s1995 European tour playing on the car stereo. I was enjoying the notes washingover me, but wasn’t paying them any great attention. But my ears pricked upwhen I heard Bob pick up the harp during the intro to ‘If You See Her Say Hello’.It was the version from Brixton, 30 March 1995, and it caught my attentionbecause the harmonica intro reminded me strongly of the version I heard live,and have since revisited on countless occasions, at Augusta, Maine on 4 August2002.

If Bob plays a good harmonica intro to a song, it can build the anticipation forthe first sung line, often to unbearable levels, and this was the effect at Augustawith ‘If You See Her Say Hello’. The harmonica soared and swirled, envelopingthe audience until the crowd’s raucousness deferred to close attention. The firstline, when Bob finally arrived there, felt like an anti-climax. The ‘If you see her sayhel...’ bit was fine, but then came the vault skywards with the ‘...lo’, anotherexample of the vocal mannerism so tediously characteristic of many of the mid-2002 acoustic performances. On this occasion he fooled me; far from it being ananti-climax Bob turned in a magnificent performance, full of simmering passionand occasional release, making full emotional sense of the vocal vaulting tech-nique. No matter. The point is that, while I was listening to the intro of theBrixton ’95 performance, I was mentally replaying the Augusta 2002 version ofwhich it seemed so reminiscent, and waiting for the point at which the two woulddiverge.

‘I’ll Know My Song WellBefore I Start Singing’:

Bob Dylan, Paul McCartneyand the Ownership of Song

by Toby Richards-Carpenter

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That point came with the ‘...lo’ towhich I just referred, the final syllable ofthe first line. In Brixton Bob followed theword through dead-pan, with no gymnas-tics, though perhaps with a slight down-turn that hinted at the sombre nature ofthe forthcoming vocal. The effect, throughthis differing nuance of a single syllable,was that this ‘If You See Her Say Hello’suddenly seemed a very different song tothe one I heard at Augusta in 2002. It wasnow being sung differently, and itsmeaning had become different too. This iswhen a fairly obvious point came back tome in stark clarity. Bob Dylan owns thesesongs. Let me explain.

The performance of ‘If You See HerSay Hello’ from Brixton 30 March 1995does not doff its cap to any previousversion; it stands alone. More specifically,it is not indebted to the original recordedversion that appeared on Blood on theTracks in 1975. The Brixton performanceunfolds in the moment; it could go in anyone of a thousand different ways, and Bobchose its course according to his mood atthe time. I emphasise this because it repre-sents such a fundamental differencebetween Bob Dylan and almost any otherrecording artist you care to name.

Albums, not live performances,become icons; they become sacred. Bloodon the Tracks is as good an example as any.But even though he revisits its songsdozens of times each year, Bob Dylan isnot a slave to this album, nor to theperformances on it. Paul McCartney, bycontrast, is a slave to the original studiorecording of ‘Hey Jude’. Every time heplays it live, the arrangement, the vocal

mannerisms, the piano parts and every-thing must at least make reference to, orperhaps even imitate, the version herecorded with the Beatles. It’s what theaudience expects, and now people feelthat’s what the song deserves. McCartneycould never give it a radical re-arrange-ment, or strip it down and take out the‘Na Na Na’ sing-along ending, forexample. It probably wouldn’t occur tohim to do so.

When this happens to a piece of worklike ‘Hey Jude’, in a sense the song itselfceases to exist. A song, unlike a novel, doesnot exist on the page - it only exists in themoment of performance. So if a songstops being available for re-interpretation,and it stops being a vehicle for expression,it stops being a song. All that exists is aversion of a song – in this case the versionMcCartney recorded with The Beatles-and that version can be repeated andcopied and re-iterated every night, but itwill no longer be a song. The proof of thisis that when someone mentions ‘HeyJude’ to you, you instantly think not of thesong as an independent entity, but only ofthe Beatles’ version of it. It has becomesimply a set-piece, like a painting. There’sonly one Mona Lisa, though thousands ofprints exist that look exactly the same, andthere’s only one ‘Hey Jude’, and manycopies of that exist too. But unlike apainting, a song should not remain thesame; it is there to be re-drawn, re-sung,renewed as many times as it is performed.

Rather than owning ‘Hey Jude’ as asong and doing as he pleases with it, PaulMcCartney has himself come to be ownedby its original recorded version. Bob

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Dylan, on the other hand, owns his songs.The proof of this is that, if you mention ‘IfYou See Her Say Hello’ to me, I mightindeed think of the version from Blood onthe Tracks... but I might not. I mightinstead think of the version from Brixton30 March 1995, or from Augusta 4 August2002, or any one of maybe twenty versionsthat at some point have impacted on me.This is because the moment Bob calls on asong such as ‘If You See Her Say Hello’,the song is going to work for him; Bob iscalling the tune, and he won’t dance to anyexisting demands the song might make ofhim. The songs are his tools and he willuse them as he likes. Paul McCartney, onthe other hand, is the tool that ‘Hey Jude’uses in order to get heard.

The audacity, the bloody-mindedness,the creative inspiration, call it what you

will, that Bob brings to his songs is his gift.Of course, you already know this; you’rereading a Dylan fanzine after all. It’s acentral point, and maybe I should havetaken for granted that you understood it.But sometimes it’s important to bereminded of the central points, so thatwhen we’re rummaging around amongstall the set-lists and band changes andvenues and upgrades and trades, andnewsgroups and lyric fluffs and early andlate sets and bootlegs and incense and newarrangements, and all the other baggageand detail that comes with being a fan ofBob Dylan’s art, we never lose sight of whywe’re doing all this in the first place.Today I was reminded, unexpectedly,though a harmonica break and a down-turned syllable, of Bob’s genius. So Ithought I’d remind you too.

Your Magazine Needs You!

Duncan Hume’s sterling efforts as staff photographer and John

Hume’s generous contributions notwithstanding, Judas! is always

in need of good quality, high resolution Dylan photographs. Old and

new, from any decade, all are welcome. We are as keen to bring you

more photographs as you all are to see them – it is getting our hands

on the pesky critters that is proving the stumbling block – so please

help if you can!

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Minneapolis.The word alone carries undeniable

weight with Dylan fans.Dinkytown.The 10 O’Clock Scholar.The Purple Onion.Those familiar with the city, or long-

time residents, may feel nothing specialwhen they walk along University Avenueor drive down (Positively) 4th Street.

But Dylan fans know better.I know better.In less than a year around the

University of Minnesota, Dylan got hisperforming sea legs at the 10 O’ClockScholar in Dinkytown, lived in a variety ofapartments on and near campus, andventured out to the twin city of St. Paul toplay at The Purple Onion.

Thanks to the Internet, plotting acourse of action during my first visitdidn’t require as much guessing andinvestigation as it would have a decadeago.

There’s no map at the hotel lobby, orGrayline bus, that can take you on a‘Dylan on Campus’ tour.

That’s where Mapquest.com comes inhandy.

The destinations are easily plotted.One-point-three miles from the hotel

to Dylan’s apartment on FifteenthAvenue.

One-point-one miles from the hotel tothe old Gray’s Drugstore, above whichDylan lived for a short while.

Seven-point-two miles into St. Paul toGinkgo’s Coffeeshop, previously knownas The Purple Onion.

It all seemed so finite, mathematicalalmost, and error-free. But once out ofCyberspace and on the ground, it becomessomething else entirely.

It’s hard, at times, to imagine whatMinneapolis looked like when Dylanarrived in the fall of 1959.

There are the obvious changes.The modern architecture. The parking

lots. The Starbucks.But what used to be?For that you have to dig out the 30-

year-old biographies - and a sense ofdirection.

It doesn’t take long to find yourselfgoing back in time. Just a few feet away fromthe hotel, walking toward the heart ofDinkytown, the architecture begins to lookfamiliar from pictures and descriptions.

The Ghosts ofMinneapolis

by Leonard Scott

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The fraternity houses, academic build-ings, and crumbling bungalows all werecertainly around 45 years ago.

Did Dylan walk these streets?What was he thinking?The first stop, in the 700 block of North

Fifteenth Avenue, is an apartment Dylanshared with Hugh Brown and Dirty Max.

Depending on which source youbelieve, Dylan either lived on 711 (TobyThompson’s Positively Main Street) or 714(Robert Shelton’s No Direction Home).

Along the way, the odds of successfullyfinding the old home place seem high.

There are rows and rows of dilapidatedhomes, many converted into apartments.All look like conceivable crash pads.

The pace quickens as the addresses getcloser to the target. Fourteenth Street,Fifteenth Street, Fifth, Sixth, and thenfinally Seventh Street.

His block. Dylan lived on this block.But where’s the house? 703 is there and so is 707 and 709.No 711.It’s gone (if it were ever there) replaced

by a football field.All hope is not lost. There, across the

street, stands 714. A gray row house, it fits

the description in Thompson’s book.Could it have been Dylan’s house? Absenta confirming source, it’s hard to know forsure.

The next stop is more certain.The 10 O’Clock Scholar is long gone,

that much is fact.It burned down in 1969 and was

replaced by a Burger King, which had adate with a bulldozer about 10 years ago.Now a Hollywood Video stands on the lot.

So there’s low expectations.From where his apartment used to be,

the Scholar is only a few blocks awaytoward campus. Easily walkable. It’sbetween Fourth and Fifth on University.

To Dylan fans the 10 O’Clock Scholaris a historic place.

It was there, as the story goes, that hefirst introduced himself as, and scoredbilling under the name, Dylan. He readWoody Guthrie’s “Bound for Glory”there, and probably dreamed of followingin his early idol’s footsteps.

He honed his craft at the Scholar. Hehung out there.

It was the place to see Dylan beforeGerde’s, before Greenwich Village, beforeanything.

Now it’s a video store.There’s no historic marker, no bits of

rubble, nothing that would give anyoneeven a hint of what used to be.

But the careful observer can still getgoose bumps.

Standing across the street, outside aused bookstore hawking its wares on thesidewalk, you can imagine the chubby kidfrom Hibbing passing his time withfriends at the Scholar.

714N. 15th Ave

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You can see him heading a block downand across the street to his apartmentabove Gray’s Drugstore. He lived there inthe winter of 1960.

The drugstore is gone. But unlike theScholar, it hasn’t been razed. Instead it’sbeen converted to a pasta bar.

Thankfully the drugstore sign wassalvaged, as were the upstairs brickwindows out of which Dylan could haveseen the Scholar, McCosh’s bookstore(now a coffeeshop called, confusingly, ThePurple Onion) and the university campus.

Channeling the ghosts in Dinkytowntakes effort and energy.

Not so with the original Purple Onion.On Snelling Avenue in St. Paul, the

traffic screams by at a dizzying pace. Arecord store on the right; a sewing store onthe left.

At first hidden, it then appears -Ginkgo Coffeehouse.

Previously known as The PurpleOnion.

You have to want to get there to see it,but it’s worth the effort. About sevenmiles from Dinkytown in St. Paul,

Ginkgo’s looks a lot like it probably didwhen Dylan played there.

The wood floor, with its three-inchwide slats, may have been painted a coupleof times the past four decades, but that’sabout it.

The tin ceiling, with exposedplumbing, has a similar sandy tan shade.

It’s big for a coffeehouse. There are 10tables, two booths and two couches, withplenty of room for even more.

A circular sale rack hawking gift cardsand a couple displays of kitschy nick-knacks monopolize floor space.

All the requisite coffees - espresso,latte, mocha - are available, along withsmoothies, root beer floats and sand-wiches.

No pizza though. When Dylan playedhere that was what The Purple Oniondished out of the kitchen, not veggiewraps or bran muffins.

It’s a forgivable change.Windows run along the front reveal

Snelling’s traffic.Performers stand with their backs to

the windows, facing the audience.

10 O’Clock Scholar

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23

There’s a piano and a stool, butnothing else.

It’s hard to imagine a more prototyp-ical coffeehouse.

In No Direction Home, Gretel Hoffman,the wife of David Whitaker, described thePurple Onion in 1960 like this: ‘(It was) aCalypso sort of place that was just like everyother restaurant in St. Paul.’

Now it’s totally unlike any otherrestaurant in St. Paul, thanks to a fewmonths in 1960 and a young kid until onlyrecently known as Dylan.

Dylan earned $5 to $6 a night playinghere, in the shadow of HamlineUniversity.

It’s easy to imagine Dylan setting up,tuning his guitar, adjusting his cap, andentertaining the regulars.

People probably a lot like the crowd onthis August night.

There’s the student with her notes andtextbooks, the single guy reading a paper-back on a couch, a couple sitting on aloveseat sharing the local paper, and anemployee on break chatting with herboyfriend.

What would the reaction have been tothe unwashed Dylan here 43 years ago?Did they listen? Did they care? How did itfeel?

It’s hard to know for sure. KarenWallace and her sister talked about seeingDylan at the Onion regularly in the springand into the summer of 1960 and greatlyenjoying his songs. Unfortunately, notapes survive capturing Dylan on thatstage.

One uncirculating recording thatreportedly comes from either the Onionor another bar called The Bastille includessuch standards as ‘House of the RisingSun’ and ‘Man of Constant Sorrow.’

Just Dylan and his acoustic guitar, noharmonica. Unpolished, certainly, but onhis way.

Like all the other spots around town,there is no visible reference to Dylananywhere in Ginkgo’s/The Purple Onion.No plaque, no pictures, nothing.

Maybe because he spent so little timein the city - less than a year - it makessense there’s so little official recognition ofthe historic spots.

It’s not like he returned toMinneapolis in any significant sense later,either physically or artistically. He didn’tbecome famous here. That happened inNew York. He didn’t leave his heart here,he didn’t build his Graceland here, hedoesn’t come back to shop at the Mall ofAmerica.

Dylan’s a long time gone fromMinneapolis, as are many of the placesthat played key roles in his career beforehe took the Herculean leaps in Gotham.

But walking the streets of the TwinCities, using a little imagination, you canignore the McDonald’s, Starbucks andHollywood Videos and still feel the ghosts.

It’s electric.Purple Onion

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Judas!

I. Dylan Among the Poets

You’ve been through all ofF. Scott Fitzgerald’s booksYou’re very well readIt’s well known (Ballad of a Thin Man 46-49).

There’s no doubt that he has been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s booksand then some. Bob Dylan’s lyrics have demonstrated an extensive literary influ-ence since the very beginning of his career. But, even though Dylan has provenhimself time and again to be a master lyricist and has remained at the forefrontas an important modern poet, his work has yet to be truly accepted as a part ofthe American literary tradition.

Shadows of literary masters are constantly silhouetted in the background ofhis lyrics. Whether these shadows are extremely obvious or they just flicker in thelyrics, they are never contrived and always handled with a delicacy and masterythat parallels the likes of Eliot. The American tradition maintained throughouthis nearly forty year career echoes ideas found in Whitman, and his lyricalprowess and sense of imagery is painted with the same romantic paintbrush asKeats and Wordsworth. While Dylan has brought sophistication to Americanpopular culture through song much in the same way that Shakespeare gave thelower classes a glimpse of unparalleled drama, he has still been excluded frommodern literature studies. This raises a question as to why this is so. The mostcommon answer is that because his words are set to music. Except for very earlyexamples of poetics, traditionally literature has been considered a completelydifferent medium to lyrics combined with music.

Sense of Humanity: The Intertexuality of ‘Not Dark Yet’

by D. A. Carpenter

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If there has ever been a case to combatthis belief it is Bob Dylan. In Dylan thereis a transcendence of these clear cutmediums; he was the first person to reallypush the lyric genre, and has continued todo so with his extensive literary andculturally driven writing. Dylanologistsand prominent literary critics who’vejumped on the Dylan band wagon oftentake note of Dylan’s poetic achievements,some considering him as ‘valid as Keats,’but they often shy away from questions asto Dylan’s validity in the academic realm.It seems that difficulties arise when peopleattempt to assess Dylan’s work in a purelyacademic way. Most often, comparisonsare made of Dylan and past literarymasters, but are never deeply exploredand take the place of serious attention tothe lyrics. Hannah Betts also cites this as aproblem in an article written on the occa-sion of Dylan’s sixtieth birthday:

[T]oo much of the ‘Dylan themaster poet’ school relies upon theestablishment of an entirely meaning-less system of analogy - a trainspotter’scritique in which this bit of Bob isrelated to that bit of Eng. Lit., and theentire song is found to be artfully remi-niscent of some minor aestheticmoment (1).

This type of critiquing can pose aproblem when trying to prove validity foracceptance of Dylan into the literary canon,for it does place Dylan among the poets butdoes not explicitly state why. Surely hislyrics have more value and quality thanwhat could be considered literary name-dropping. No one would base appreciationof Eliot solely on his ability to allude to past

works, nor should anyone do the same withDylan. It is important, still, to recognize theintertexuality of Dylan’s lyrics, not tomerely name drop, but to recognize howthe lyrics work in relation to the wholeexisting order of literature. This is an ideaexpressed in Eliot’s essay ‘Tradition and theIndividual Talent’:

No poet, no artist of any art, has hiscomplete meaning alone. His signifi-cance, his appreciation is the apprecia-tion of his relation to the dead poetsand artists. You cannot value himalone; you must set him, for contrastand comparison, among the dead(1093).

In this way, it is inevitable to drawcomparisons between past literary mastersand the well-read Dylan, but many stop atsuperficial comparisons. This is most likelydue to the fact that Dylan works in a seem-ingly different medium than Literature.There are rarely any protestations inexploring how Dylan works with pastmusical traditions, but when discussioncrosses the medium into Literature peoplebecome apprehensive and sometimesindignant. Apprehensive, because they findit exhaustingly difficult to successfullytread the gray waters of Dylan’s classifica-tions of both poet and singer-songwriter.Indignant, because some feel that a purelyliterary approach destroys the essence ofDylan’s work, applying, knowingly or not,Wordsworth’s familiar phrase ‘murder todissect.’ These two views are valid to acertain point. What is needed is a way toappreciate both the literary and musicalqualities, without hindering but insteadcombining the two.

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II. ‘Curtain Risin’ On a New Stage’

Dylan has claimed himself to be a poetat one instance and nothing of the sort inanother. It is clear that first and foremosthe thinks of himself as a musician, but thisdoes not mean that he cannot be viewed asa poet. To fully appreciate the depth ofDylan’s work a new approach must betaken. The approach I will be taking some-what hinges upon what Dylan says of theinterplay of sound and words in a 1977interview with Playboy magazine:

Yeah, it’s the sound and the words.Words don’t interfere with it. They-they-punctuate it. You know, they giveit purpose. [Pause] And all the ideas formy songs, all the influences, all comeout of that. All the influences, all thefeelings, all the ideas come from that.I’m not doing it to see how good I cansound, or how perfect the melody canbe, or how intricate the details can bewoven or how perfectly written some-thing can be. I don’t care about thosethings (Rosenbaum).

A song may not be consideredLiterature because it is part of a differentmedium, but maybe the technologicalaccomplishments made in the twentiethcentury make it time to reassess what istruly literary. Dylan’s work demonstratesthat words and music can work harmo-niously to add depth to interpretation andmake it possible for writing to becomeeven more recursive than it had been inthe past. His songs have constantly beenreworked musically and lyrically, showinghow the author can be given more of avoice than he or she has ever had before.

In Dylan’s own words above he acknowl-edges that it is both the words and musicwhich create the meaning and feeling he istrying to express. French opera criticCatherine Clement, as pointed out byStephen Scobie, has explored the harmo-nious duality of lyric and music. In AliasBob Dylan Scobie quotes Clement:

A double, inseparable scene: thewords give rise to the music and themusic develops the language, gives itdialect, envelops it, thwarts or rein-forces it. Conscious and unconscious:the words are aligned with the legiblerational side of a conscious discourse,and the music is the unconscious of thetext, that which gives it depth of fieldand relief, that which attributes a pastto the text, a memory, one perceptiblenot to the listener’s consciousness but tohis enchanted unconsciousness (qtd. inScobie 5).

Because Dylan has the means to adddimension to his words with the aid ofmusic, or conversely his music with theaid of words, he is able to employ both theconscious and unconscious in his work.His songs could be compared to Literatureas sculptures to paintings or photos; it isthe same principle of dimensionality. Thisis not to say that Dylan’s lyrics cannotstand triumphantly on their own withoutthe aid of music, because they mostcertainly can, but they would be missing adimension. Literature has its own aspectsof conscious and unconscious realms,especially when viewing it in terms of itsintertexuality, something that Dylan’swork certainly demonstrates. What isbeing suggested is that a new literary genre

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has come to the surface, in which, becauseof recording technology, a new dimensioncan be added to Literature. This is to saythat the sound sense of the music andwords working together can be preservedby the artist in a way which brings the earinto play and conveys a deeper look intothe work as a whole, conscious andunconscious. A new stage has been built,it’s time for everyone to turn their heads,open their eyes, and their ears.

III. ‘My trip hasn’t been a pleasantone And my time it isn’t long...’

A song is spatial; it occupies a spaceand Time. The concept of Time has beensomething prevalent in Dylan’s work. AsRobert Forryan suggests, ‘Dylan appearsto be a Time-obsessed or Time-hauntedman; at least, if we can judge this from hislyrics’ (51). Dylan’s treatment of Time hasevolved over the years. The young Dylanaddressed Time with rebellious indigna-tion, exemplified in ‘Restless Farewell,’from his 1964 album The Times They AreA-Changin’.

Oh a false clock tries to tick out mytimeTo disgrace, distract and bother me.And the dirt of gossip blows into my face,And the dust of rumors covers me.But if the arrow is straight,And the point is slick,It can pierce through dust no matterhow thick.So I’ll make my standAnd remain as I amAnd bid farewell and not give a damn

(Restless Farewell 40-49).

The young Dylan is taking a standagainst decaying Time and its appendages.This contrasts what Time has become to thefifty-six year old Dylan in 1997. The matureDylan has seen it all, and perhaps realizesthat Time’s course is unalterable; Death isthe inevitable destination no matter whatdetour anyone takes. It seems Dylan is nowconcerned with the journey that takes placewhen that no-longer-false clock doesindeed tick out his time. As he states:

I been all around the world, boysNow I’m trying to get to heaven beforethey close the door

(Tryin’ to Get to Heaven 31-32).This brings us to the subject of Dylan’s

‘Not Dark Yet’, and its seeming resigna-tion to the course Time dictates for exis-tence. For the purposes of explicating thismasterpiece the literary qualities andprosody of the song will be primarilyfocused upon, because it is the intertexu-ality of the song which places Dylanamong the poets and, as Eliot said, ‘sethim, for contrast and comparison, amongthe dead.’ The actual sound of Dylan’svocal performance and the song’s musicalarrangement will also be called into playwhen appropriate, because the idea ofTime in ‘Not Dark Yet’ is expressed byboth the lyrics and music. In this case theofficially released version of the song onDylan’s 1997 album Time Out of Mind willbe considered.

‘Not Dark Yet’ is a song so it could beconsidered as a lyric poem. Because thelyric is a performed song, the only way todo it justice is to consider it as having aquantitative meter. The music underneaththe lyrics provides a rhythmic beat, which

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is the actual meter of the song. Dylan’svocals also suggest this because of theemphasis put on certain words withprolonged or shortened vowel sounds.They work with and against the constantmeter of the music to accentuate wordswhich strengthen the theme of the song.For instance, sustaining the long vowelsounds of the last word of every line signi-fies the progression of Time. And it is timethat is the essence of this song.

The song opens by placing the speakeralone in the shadow of late afternoon:

Shadows are falling and I’ve been hereall day It’s too hot to sleep and time is runningaway

On the surface it seems that thespeaker has been in one place for theentire day, uncomfortably so, due to theheat. The concept of time is immediatelyinvoked by placing the narrator in a ‘day’and further referring to Time itself. Aninteresting fact recognized by ChristopherRicks is that there are twenty-four lines tothis song, which symbolizes the twenty-four hour time period of day. It becomesapparent from the beginning that Timewill play an important role in theunfolding of the song. The placid musicalaccompaniment at the opening of thesong, which continues at nearly the samepace throughout, seems to suggest thespeaker is in a mood of contemplation,with an air of resignation. Dylan’s vocalsplace a caesura approximately at thehalfway point of every line, which demon-strates the mood of contemplation. At thesame time these aural effects reinforce afeeling that time is passing at its own pace,

out of the speaker’s control. For thespeaker ‘time is running away,’ ‘tickingout his time.’ Forryan points out the simi-larity of Dylan’s opening lines andMarvell’s:

But at my back I alwaies hearTime’s winged Charriot hurrying near:And yonder all before us lye Deserts of vast Eternity (52).

These lines are strikingly similar; eventhough time is ‘running away’ in Dylan’sand ‘hurrying near’ in Marvell’s, theyexpress the same idea of time coming toan end, an idea which can be seen in evengreater detail as the song progresses. Atfirst glance it appears that the speaker ismerely contemplating his life, but,although it remains on the individuallevel, the song starts to hint at somethingon a much grander scale in the next threelines.

Feel like my soul has turned into steelI’ve still got the scars that the sun didn’thealThere’s not even room enough to beanywhere

The internal rhyme of ‘feel’ and ‘steel’ inline 3 isolates the speaker’s soul, which hashardened to steel, perhaps to life’s pleasuresor failures. This effect identifies the speakeras feeling alienated from the rest of thehumanity he mentions in the followingverse. At this point the focus is still on theindividual. The same technique of internalrhyme can be seen in line 5, where ‘room’ isboxed in by ‘there’ and ‘anywhere,’ whichalso conveys isolation while at the sametime showing the helplessness of thespeaker to move or act upon whatever hesees as impending. Also, the phrase ‘not

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even room enough’ suggests that there isnot ‘time enough;’ it appears that thespeaker is immanently close to some fore-gone conclusion. Both lines 3 and 5 buildwith observation and a slight tempo changein the music and vocal emphasis, as if thespeaker believes he has a way to maybeunderstand and break free from the situa-tion, but inevitably he fails. He is broughtback to reality with lines 4 and 6, where therhythm returns to normal and he concedesin defeat. This technique occurs in all fourverses, constantly reminding the speakerthat he is indeed trapped. In line 4 he seesthat he is still hindered by his past, or ‘scars’and cannot possibly change. Line 6 defeatsall hope due to its inevitability:

It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting thereThis line is the refrain of the song and

comes at the end of each verse. Althoughit is a refrain, it has more meaning to itthan just a usual characteristic of a song. Itsays the end isn’t here, but it IS coming.The fact that this line reoccurs after everyverse emphasizes the fact that it WILL getthere. This is what is truly plaguing thespeaker and what propels his thoughts,just as it propels the song and representsthe constancy of Time.

The word ‘scars’ in line 4 opensanother door to interpretation that is builtupon in the following verses. Dylan hasused the word ‘scars’ five different timesin other songs, four of which embody analienation similar to that of the speaker’s.In one instance Dylan writes:

If you don’t believe there’s a price forthis sweet paradise, remind me to showyou the scars

(Where Are You Tonight? 32)

Using this line as a reference we cansee a biblical allusion come to surface inline 4, since ‘paradise’ alludes to theGarden of Eden and is associated with‘scars’ in ‘Where Are You Tonight?’ Manbeing expelled from Eden certainly callsinto play the speaker’s feeling of isolationand the dejection which is apparent in thenext verse. Also, ‘the sun’ did not heal his‘scars.’ Punning on ‘sun’ with ‘Son’ carriesthis allusion even further, where Jesus wasnot able to fully heal the ‘scars’ or sinfulnature of mankind. With the beginning ofthe next verse we see that the speaker isnot merely implicating himself in histhoughts. Humanity comes into consider-ation:

Well my sense of humanity has gonedown the drainBehind every beautiful thing there’sbeen some kind of pain

Indeed, humanity does become impli-cated in his contemplation, but in terms ofhis own view of humanity. It is apparentthat this is not a flattering view, after allhis sense or feelings of humanity havegone down the drain. Once again alien-ation is felt in the speaker’s tone becausehe is setting himself apart from humanitywith his statement. The speaker continuesin line 8, seemingly indicting humanityfor having a darker side, which is coveredup by beautiful things. This parallels thespeaker’s soul turning into steel, becausehumanity’s covering up of pain seems tosuggest that humanity’s soul has alsobecome hardened or corrupted. Thecontrast between pain and beauty can befelt in the speaker’s tone, for he is a part ofthe humanity he is indicting. This line can

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be considered an aphorism, making iteven more relevant in calling into ques-tion the state of humanity, since an apho-rism is usually considered to be a generaltruth. Even though a shift from the indi-vidual to the human race can be seen, thenext two lines are ambiguously distantfrom the preceding lines due to the intro-duction of another individual.

She wrote me a letter and she wrote it sokindShe put down in writing what was inher mind

On the surface it is apparent that ‘she’is someone who has disappointed or hurtthe speaker, possibly setting in train thisnihilistic thought process where he seespain behind ‘every beautiful thing.’ Eventhough the speaker seems hurt he does nothave any hard feelings towards thiswoman. He recognizes that what shewrote was kind, and absolves her fromblame because all she did was write ‘whatwas in her mind.’ Perhaps we have an Eveto consider with the Adam-like speaker.Interpretation in this matter would makethe lines thematically fit a bit more intothe scheme of humanity. In the first versewe are introduced to a man, who in thesecond verse is accompanied by a woman,with the backdrop of all humanity.Speculation as to what the letter saysbecomes irrelevant primarily becausethere are no clues and the speaker himselfstates in the next two lines:

I just don’t see why I should even careIt’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there

The letter means nothing, the speakerdoesn’t see why he should even carebecause ‘It’s not dark yet but it’s getting

there.’ There is something much moreforeboding for the speaker, which over-shadows any importance of the letter. It isapparent that the speaker sees himself, thewoman, and humanity heading for a fall, ajudgment that pales everything incomparison. As is seen in the next verse itis the past actions of individuals, includingthe speaker’s, which become important,but it is the speaker that embodies thisindividual emphasis for others:

Well I’ve been to London and I’ve beento Gay PareeI’ve followed the river and I got to theseaI’ve been down on the bottom of aworld full of liesI ain’t looking for nothing in anyone’seyes

Here the speaker’s past experiences arementioned, but they move from a small tolarge perspective. Lines 13 and 14 suggestmovement or traveling, but the morespecific destinations of London and Parisprogress to the less specific route of anunnamed river traveled to the destinationof an unnamed sea. Line 15 further widensthe scope, as the speaker states that he’sbeen ‘down on the bottom of a world fullof lies.’ At this point in the song there is afeeling that, even though the speaker isprimarily speaking in first person, thereare larger implications for the state andfuture of humanity, which is representedby the ‘world full of lies.’

In fact, every line in the third versecontains ‘I,’ as if the individual is some-what representing the whole, which couldbe considered an example of synecdoche,although it is important to remember that

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the speaker is setting himself apart fromthe whole because he is an observer.Interestingly, these ‘I’s’ correspond with‘lies’ and ‘eyes,’ where the subjective ‘I’s’become part of the whole since ‘eyes’ and‘lies’ refer to other people. It is obviousthat the speaker has seen and done manythings, but refuses to look for approvalfrom anyone, especially in a world full oflies. An almost righteous tone begins tomake its way into the song. The speakerbasically states this himself in the next twolines:

Sometimes my burden is more than Ican bearIt’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there

It seems the ‘burden’ the speaker must‘bear’ is his observations and the right-eousness he feels when making theseobservations. There were hints of this tonein the previous verses, but now it becomesmore apparent, especially considering theobvious biblical source for the words inthe third verse. We are reminded onceagain in line 18 that time is progressingand that there is an end in sight for thespeaker. In terms of the biblical allusion, itis the setting of the sun, humanity’s finaljudgment, which is the end.

The biblical source for these wordscomes from chapter one of Ecclesiastes,which could be considered the mainsource for the song. There were hints ofthis tone in the previous verses, but now itbecomes more apparent, especiallyconsidering the obvious biblical deriva-tion of the words in the third verse. Line14 corresponds to:

All rivers run into the sea; yet the seais not full; unto the place from whence

the rivers come thither (The BibleEccles. 1:7).

And lines 15 and 16 correspond to:All things are full of labour; mancannot utter it: the eye is not satisfiedwith seeing, nor the ear filled withseeing (The Bible Eccles. 1:8).

Both of these lines are observationsmuch like those made by the speaker whofeels burdened by them, which also corre-sponds to the speaker of the biblicalpassage who has done his own observa-tions:

And I gave my heart to seek and searchout by wisdom concerning all thingsthat are done under heaven: this soretravail hath God given to the sons ofman to be exercised therewith.I have seen all the works that are doneunder the sun; and behold, all is vanityand vexation of spirit (The Bible Eccles.1:13-14).

And finally we see the pain of theburden on the speaker as is expressed inEcclesiastes:

For in much wisdom is much grief: andhe that increaseth knowledge increasethsorrow (The Bible Eccles. 1:18).

The fact that ‘sun’ is used in verse oneof ‘Not Dark Yet’ also reinforces the allu-sion to Ecclesiastes:

The sun also ariseth, and the sun goethdown, and hasteth to his place where hearose (The Bible Eccles. 1:5)

This quote also embodies what we cannow see as the speaker’s conception oftime. It continues with or without him,which is something that pains him tounderstand. This is why ‘it’s not dark yet,’but the speaker acknowledges that it will

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‘get there.’ He will die at some point andthere is nothing he can do about it. Theidea of time continuing without him issymbolized after this verse by approxi-mately a full minute of instrumental inter-lude. What’s important is to notice thatthe rhythm of the music does not changeand follows the same chord progression;Time merely continuing at its own pacewithout the presence of the speaker. Thisis not the end, yet. The speaker steps backinto time for one more verse:

I was born here and I’ll die here againstmy willI know it looks like I’m moving, but I’mstanding stillEvery nerve in my body is so vacant andnumbI can’t even remember what it was Icame here to get away from

It seems the speaker has finally come toterms with the inevitability of his death. Herealizes that he is unable to progress. In fact,the entire song has shown the speaker instasis. The only movements have been inthe past. His senses have numbed as if theyall went down the drain along withhumanity, and his memory has left him. Heis left alone trapped in the present, just as hissoul was in the first verse. The extremelength, as compared to the length of all theother lines of the song, of line 22, ‘I can’teven remember what it was I came here toget away from’ suggests the passage of timeand the inevitability of the speaker’s lifebecause no matter how long the line is hecannot ‘get away’ from it. This line alsoparallels a line in Ecclesiastes:

There is no remembrance of formerthings; neither shall there be any

remembrance of things that are to comewith those that shall come after (TheBible Eccles. 1:11).

Another religious allusion comes tothe surface in this last verse, but it is notChristian, but Jewish. The allusion is fromthe Talmud, Pirke Avot (Ethics of theFathers) 4:29, which the line ‘I was bornhere and I’ll die here against my will’parallels very closely:

And not let your evil inclination assureyou that the grave will be a place of refuge for you - for against yourwill you were created, against your will you were born, againstyour will you live, against your will you die, and against your willyou are destined to give an account before the Supreme King ofKings, the Holy One Blessed be He (qtd. in Ølstrem).

In the last verse final judgment is athand for the speaker. However, it is notjust the speaker who is implicated, buthumanity. This can be considered becausethere have been allusions from twodifferent religions, which seemingly lumpstogether everyone, no matter what theirfaith is. The final lines of the song suggestthat a very bad end is in store forhumanity:

Don’t even hear the murmur of aprayerIt’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.

The speaker cannot hear any repen-tance from mankind, much less a‘murmur of a prayer.’ He could be makinga statement on the loss of religious beliefor simply stating that people are ignorantof the path that has been taken by

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humanity. They see that it is not dark, butdo not look further to realize that an endwill come. For the speaker there is an end,or perhaps the end has come in thespeaker’s world. This is signified by theperiod following the last line. It is the onlyperiod in the entire song. The words of thespeaker have ceased and the finality ofmankind is fittingly represented by a meredot on a page. Even though the wordshave stopped Time rolls on with the placidconstancy of the musical accompaniment,much like the interlude between versesthree and four. Again the music goesuninterrupted for approximately aminute, but this time the speaker does notstep back into time. He is gone.

The track on the album may stop after aminute, but there is a feeling that the musicstill continues whether we hear it or notbecause, as it is said in Ecclesiastes, ‘neithershall there be any remembrance of thingsthat are to come with those that shall comeafter.’ The music/Time is always there butthe new speaker who will take the place ofthe last will not have any remembrance of ituntil the end. One final structural note tothe song is its progressive rhyme scheme.This scheme progresses by rhymingcouplets, of which none are repeated exceptfor the final two lines of each verse. Thissignifies once again the passage of time.Once one rhyming pair has expired it is nomore; the song continues to progresswithout any thought to this. The rhymethat does reoccur aids in reminding us that‘it’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.’ Thereoccurring rhyme parallels the effect thatthe reoccurring line at the end of each versecreates.

IV. ‘He examines the nightingale’scode...’

Christopher Ricks does not go into anin depth explication of ‘Not Dark Yet,’but, during a radio program celebratingDylan’s sixtieth birthday, points out thesimilarities the song shares with Keats’‘Ode to a Nightingale’. Ricks has been along time Dylan admirer and sparked thedebate over Keats vs. Dylan approximatelythirty years ago. While Ricks doesn’tbelieve that Keats’ ode is expressivelyalluded to he does believe ‘Not Dark Yet’shows remnants of the ode:

I believe that Dylan who’s ‘very wellread it’s well known,’ knows the famousanthology piece and that he had it inmind, even if not consciously in mindwhen he created his own re-creation ofso much of it. After all he did oncerhyme the line ‘he examines thenightingale’s code’ with ‘owed.’

Ricks goes on further to point outthe similarities in rhyme and phrases.There are approximately twentyinstances of word related similaritybetween the two. Three of the moreprominent ones are:

Keats: ‘My heart aches, and a drowsynumbness pains/ My sense’ (1-2)Dylan: ‘Every nerve in my body is sovacant and numb’ (21)Keats: ‘Shadows numberless’ (9)Dylan: ‘Shadows are falling’ (1)Keats: ‘Over the still stream’ (76) and‘One minute past and Lethe-wards hadsunk:’(4)Dylan: ‘I followed the river and I got tothe sea’ (14)

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The last similarity shown above isinteresting when considering Dylan’s useof ‘river’ and Keats’ ‘Lethe-wards.’Reading Dylan’s ‘river’ in light of Keatsadds even more foreboding of death to‘Not Dark Yet’ and can also work with thefact that Dylan’s speaker cannotremember what he was trying to get awayfrom, since the River Lethe causesmemory loss.

While these are striking similaritiesbetween the words, there are also similari-ties between Keats’ style and Dylan’s in‘Not Dark Yet.’ Keats’ idea of ‘negativecapability’ is demonstrated in this song.This terms is defined by Keats as:

That is when man is capable of being inuncertainties, Mysteries, doubts,without any irritable reaching after fact& reason (889)

‘Not Dark Yet’ demonstrates a veryobjective poet in Dylan. While the speakerof the song is making his observations, hedoes so unforcingly. The witness is nottold what to think by Dylan. The speakerisn’t even forcing his views on us, he evensays to himself ‘I just don’t see why Ishould even care.’ Dylan is in the midst ofthe ultimate ‘Mystery’ in the song, yet hedoes not appear irritable in searching forreason. Even the music suggests a type ofserenity in the face of such a large ques-tion. It’s as if the older Dylan is as indif-ferent as the pre-Born Again Dylan whosaid:

If dogs run free, then what must be,Must be, and that is all. (If Dogs RunFree 17-18)

To Keats this type of indifference, thisstepping away from the work, not letting

the writer’s thoughts and feelings hinderthe work is what makes a true poet. It istrue that Dylan does include much of hispersonal life and beliefs in his work but itrarely interferes with the work itself, itstrengthens it. One last interesting thingRicks points out is that ‘Ode to aNightingale’ begins with the phrase ‘Myheart aches,’ which is uncannily fore-boding of the heart disease that struckDylan after the release of Time Out OfMind.

V. ‘I got new eyes...’

‘Not Dark Yet’ has been played liveapproximately 102 times since its releasein 1997. When looking at Dylan’s workfrom a critical view we must rememberthat we are only looking at one representa-tion of the work. Not only does Dylanrevamp the musical arrangement of everysong night after night, but he also changesthe structure and sometimes words of theactual lyrics. His text is ever changing,which means interpretation can alsochange. It is important though not to feelas though we cannot proceed in anacademic interpretation of his work. Ofthe 102 performances, it is most likely thatevery one is available in one form oranother. The opportunities for study areendless. My Interpretation of ‘Not DarkYet’ is only a part of what can be studied inregards to this song, and only a minisculepiece of a puzzle that should be scruti-nized not just by loyal fans but everyone,including the academic realm. ‘Not DarkYet’ is one of Dylan’s masterpieces, butthere are so many more. It would be hard

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to deny that these works are deserving ofconsideration when, just looking at thisparticular song, a wealth of meaningfulinterpretation can arise. It would bewrong to deny this interpretation on thebasis that the work is of a medium otherthan literature. Forms of literature havechanged drastically over the years. Why

not consider Dylan’s unique form of liter-ature as part of this tradition. To put it inKeatsian terms:

‘Literature is music, music literature,’- that is allYe know on earth, and all ye need toknow.

Works CitedAbrams, M. H., ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2. 7th ed.

New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2000.Keats, John. ‘Ode to a Nightingale.’ Abrams 849-51.Keats, John. ‘To George and Thomas Keats.’ Abrams 889-90.Betts, Hannah. ‘Dylan at 60 - Is he Verse or Worse?’ The Times (London) 19 May 2001:

Features.‘Dylan Among the Poets.’ The Sunday Feature. Host Christopher Ricks. BBC

Broadcasting House. BBC Radio 3, London. 11 Feb. 2001.Dylan, Bob. ‘Ballad of a Thin Man.’ Highway 61. New York: Special Rider Music,

1965.Dylan, Bob. ‘If Dogs Run Free.’ New Morning. New York: Special Rider Music, 1970.Dylan, Bob. ‘Restless Farewell.’ The Times They Are A-Changin’. New York: Special

Rider Music, 1964.Dylan, Bob. Time Out Of Mind. New York: Special Rider Music, 1997.‘Tryin to Get to Heaven.’ Track 5.‘Not Dark Yet.’ Track 7.Dylan, Bob. ‘Where Are You Tonight?’ Street Legal. New York: Special Rider Music,

1978.Forryan, Robert. ‘Time.’ Freewheelin’ Quarterly 22 (Jan 2002): 51-58.Leitch, Vincent B., ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W. W.

Norton & Company, Inc. 2001.Eliot, T. S. ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent.’ Leitch 1092-98.Ølstrem, Eyolf. My Back Pages. ‘Not Dark Yet.’ http://www.dylanchords.com.Rosenbaum, Ron. ‘Bob Dylan: A candid conversation with the visionary whose songs

changed the times.’ Playboy March 1978: http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/ play78.htm.

Scobie, Stephen. Alias Bob Dylan. Alberta: Red Deer College Press, 1991.The Holy Bible. New York: The Gideons International. 1982.

Liepzig12th April 2002

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My last Never Ending Tour concert was nearly two years ago - Kilkenny15.07.01. I didn’t enjoy it all that much. I was there with some family and friends,of whom some had never seen Bob before and some hadn’t seen him for years.They all thought it was great. On the way out of the concert I was complaining toone of my friends (who had last seen Bob on the ’86 tour with Tom Petty and theHeartbreakers) about the song selection – the most recent song he played was‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’. Apart from that song everything was from thesixties - ‘a greatest hits collection’ I said with disdain. This was unusual - normallyBob played a much greater cross-section of material. I was annoyed. My friendwondered what I was complaining about. Bob was singing really well, the songswere great songs, the band was great - what was my problem?

Later another friend remarked on how she really loved the version he did of‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’. Now, if you’re familiar only with the version of that song thatBob recorded in 1964, the version that’s on Greatest Hits, then I can imagine thatyou might well be in Kilkenny that night and be amazed at the rearrangement ofthe song - it really is true what they say, Dylan never does a song the same waytwice! On the other hand if you’ve heard lots and lots of live versions of that songover decades of performance, and loved many of them, and you know that thisNET arrangement of the song reached its peak years ago, then on that night inJuly 2001 you would probably sigh at this performance - I did. I thought it was onthe mediocre side, routine at best.

That night in Kilkenny listening to my friends talking about the gig it hit mewith some force (and not for the first time) that Bob really was not playing theseNET concerts for the likes of me. He was playing it for them, the casual fans, andI wouldn’t blame him. Not an original thought - I know. But it made me sigh tomyself. Driving home later ‘I Want You’ came on the radio. Then the DJ came on:‘well it never was about the singing, really, was it?’ she said, smugly. ‘Oh God’ Isaid, turning off the radio. I sighed again. That’s a lot of sighing for one night.Does the NET make you sigh a lot too?

EExxppeeccttiinngg AAllll tthhee GGiiffttssTThhaatt WWiissee MMeenn BBrriinngg

by John Doran

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So much of the NET is ordinary. Andsome of it is truly wonderful. But it takesso much time to keep up with it. (Itremains an ambition of mine to get everyshow on CD. To listen to them all?Wouldn’t that be mad? Wouldn’t it?That’s more than 3000 CDs!) And is itreally worth keeping up with it? You askyourself that question, although you knowthere’s no point because you’re going tokeep on collecting the discs.

What is an NET show like? Someshows are mundane. Occasionally a showis outstanding, those nights where Bobreally engages and almost every song risesabove the ordinary. But the average showhas one or two, maybe three, notableperformances, not necessarily brilliantperformances, but notable ones. And thenit has lots of songs where the performanceis forgettable and some that you really feellike you don’t want to hear anymore. Solistening to the average show is prettyfrustrating. Something great may happensoon - but the chances aren’t good. And ifsomething great does happen then you’llbe moving on to the next show soonanyway and you may not be back to thisone - there just isn’t time. Eventually youget around to realising that you’d betterstart making a note of those songperformances that are worth coming backto. So I started making notes whenlistening to shows.

The idea (another unoriginal thought)was to compile the best of the NET - john’sfavourite never ending tour performancesvols. 1... - that would build into my owndefinitive document of the NET.Something that I could always turn to,

where every performance was unforget-table. Something to listen to when youdidn’t want your listening to have anelement of work or duty associated with it.Something that I could give to Sonyrecords and say ‘here is what you need foryour multi-CD box set retrospective of theNever Ending Tour. Prepared with love,hard work and excellent taste’.

My initial method of track selection isflawed, naturally - noting down the tracksthat stand out as special on first listen.Some shows you listen to a lot more thanonce, perhaps because of some particularrecommendation that made you lookmore closely. Perhaps because there was atime when you didn’t have that big acollection and you listened to the samediscs over and over. Perhaps because yougot stranded somewhere (like on holi-days) with a small selection of discs andyou got to find things that you wouldn’thave found on first listen, or perhaps,most significantly of all, you were presentat a particular show and your memory ofthe event makes you listen over and overto see if you can make what’s on the discsmatch with your memory of the show.This last one happens a lot. But mostlyyou listen just once or twice and probably,therefore, miss a lot of good things. Soafter selecting a lengthy list of perform-ances, compiling them, and listening tothem over and over I’ve shortened the listdown to a double CD’s worth. Here it is:

Disc One1. This World Can’t Stand Long -

Omiya 25th February 2001 2. Hallelujah - Montreal 1st August 1988 3. Señor - Innsbruck 23rd April 2002

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4. Has Anybody Seen My Love - New York 17th November 1993

5. Mr. Tambourine Man - Dublin 11th April 1995

6. It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue -Marseilles 29th June 1993

7. The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll -Marseilles 29th June 1993

8. Born in Time - Toulouse 30th June 1993 9. Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door -

Cardiff 6th May 200210. A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall -

New York 19th November 200111. If Dogs Run Free -

Münster 1st October 2000 12. Trying To Get To Heaven -

Bournemouth 25th September 2000Disc Two

1. Song to Woody - Santa Cruz 16th March 2000

2. San Francisco Bay Blues - Berkeley 10th June 1988

3. One Too Many Mornings - Stratford Upon Avon 14th July 1995

4. I’m Not Supposed To Care - Anaheim 23rd May 1998

5. Po’ Boy - Grand Rapids 6th November 2001

6. Highlands - Santa Cruz 16th March 2000

7. Drifter’s Escape - Santa Cruz 15th March 2000

8. Queen Jane Approximately - New York 16th November 1993

9. Desolation Row - Birmingham 2nd April 1995

10. Summer Days - Fairfax 22nd November 2002

11. A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall - Nara 22nd May 1994

The final paragraph of RobertShelton’s No Direction Home has stuck inmy mind. I read it in 1987, a year after itwas published. Speaking of Bob in 1986,Shelton said:

He may get off the plateau he’s on, or hemay not... he may follow Yeats’s routeof more seeking and more finding andeven greater creativity toward old age.1

At the time it seemed to me unlikelythat Bob would go on to find even greatercreativity toward old age than he hadfound earlier in life. But the commentabout Yeats has stayed on in my mind.Now it’s sixteen years later. Bob is movingfairly close to old age. In those sixteenyears his major artistic artefact is the NET.What does it amount to?

Many critics have complained aboutthe NET, their complaints often focussingon the bands that Bob has used. It is truethat Bob has used his bands on the NET ina different way to before. He hasn’t letthem have the same expressive freedom.This has been at the expense of the music,and you could say that it is a denial by Bobof one of his own greatest performancegifts - that of being somehow able to playhis band as an extension of himself. Butwhat he has really done here is not simplydeny this ability, but control it, be moresparing with it.

Bob has been quoted as saying that hehad a realisation, a moment of clarity,when he could see that he had to believe inthe music again and see where it took him.This realisation came to him in 1987 inLocarno, Switzerland:

It’s almost like I heard it as a voice. Itwasn’t like it was even me thinking it.

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‘I’m determined to stand, whether Godwill deliver me or not.’ And all of asudden everything just exploded... Afterthat is when I sort of knew: I’ve got to goout and play these songs. That’s justwhat I must do.2

So Bob went on the road - made it away of life. Isn’t that what he’s alwayswanted? He’ll play night after night insmall halls or medium sized halls, or foot-ball stadiums, whatever. Isn’t that what hisheroes did? The bluesmen. The trouba-dours. Woody Guthrie. BB King still doesit. They went from town to town. Thatwas their way of life, and now he’ll make ithis. And so the NET started.

It’s not as if the idea of going on the roadwas new to Bob. But he must have realisedthat if he wanted to sustain it as a way of lifeas he approached old age he would have todo something differently to before. Bouts ofintensive touring in the past had taken atoll. After the 1965-66 touring, which liter-ally almost killed him, he went into years ofsemi-seclusion. His marriage didn’t survivethe 74-76 touring. The marathon touring of1978 was followed by another dramaticupheaval in his life - the born againChristian period. Then the period of gospeltouring from late 79-81 was followed by adrought of activity. The pattern here ispretty clear. When you go on the road andcommit to performance in the way that Bobhad done on most of the above tours it takesa toll on your life. Changes it in a pretty bigway. And all of that activity led to Bob in theeighties, tired, lacking in inspiration,energy, confidence.

So on the NET Bob realised that hecouldn’t push himself in the way he had

before. He couldn’t have a band on stagewith him pushing him too much either.Now, Bob knows better than anyone whatit takes to make a great band performance,but he had to be more measured. Don’t letthe musicians loose. Well let them loosenow and then. Maybe once or twice anight. Maybe all night some nights, whenthe mood hits - that should be sustainable.

What about the reputation? It’s intatters anyway.

What about the audience? You’redoing this for you. But you’ll keep it a littlefresh for them with changes. Not dramaticchanges - had enough of those - but smallchanges, like new arrangements and newsongs.

How will it stand up to the past? Whatabout the past? - what about the future?

So maybe Bob made a decision toapproach live performance differently, tosacrifice something in favour of longevity.I wouldn’t suggest that Bob did thisconsciously right at the start of the NET,but that this general approach came aboutquite quickly over a year or two.

So we have to be reasonable whenapproaching the NET. Give the guy abreak. He’s given us a few, and he keepson doing it. OK, so you’re fed up hearing‘Tangled Up in Blue’. OK so you reach inpanic for the forward button on your CDplayer when the latest live version of ‘Likea Rolling Stone’ starts up. It seems like adisaster, but it’s not really.

Given the amount of pre-NET mate-rial, and the extraordinary quality andvariety of so much of it, I am constantlystruck by the amount of time I devote tolistening to the NET these days and how

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relatively little to the pre-NET stuff. Why?Because it’s relatively easy to keep a steadystream of NET discs flowing through yourletter box? Because you’re afraid thatsomething is happening and you don’tknow what it is? Because you’ve investedso much time in it that you can’t stopnow? Because it’s good for your knowl-edge of geography? Because you need reas-surance? Reassurance that Bob can still doit? Don’t stop too long to think about whatit means that you need these reassurancesso badly. (I picture myself at some time inthe future having a breakthrough in obses-sion therapy... ‘Yes. I see clearly now. Bobhas lost it. He can no longer do it. God,this is refreshing. I feel like a great weighthas lifted. Let’s face it, Bob is shit. Hasbeen for a long time really. Oh God, whydidn’t I do this years ago.’) Because thereis absolutely nobody else like Bob. Youhave searched, hard, and you’ve foundthat nobody comes close, even when Bob’son a bad night, or a bad year. PaulWilliams, has put his finger on it (as usual)in issue 4 of Judas!:

Because something happens... atmoments during the shows that onecan’t get enough of, something that isworth chasing after... River of music.River of human (and holy) creativeenergy.3

So after lots of chasing these moments Imade my purely-for-pleasure compilationof some of them. A live album of the NET.What would you want from such a thing?There will be such a thing some day andsurely it will be the thing that sums up a bigsection of Bob’s career for the vast majorityof people out there, so it’s important. Do

you want it to be representative of the NET?Definitely not - then it would probably have‘Tangled Up in Blue’ on it and ‘Rainy DayWomen’. Surely it would be better topresent the best of the tour even if it werecompletely unrepresentative. Then youcould use it to convince the doubters, andyourself, that the body of work representedby the NET really did stand up to compar-ison with earlier parts of Bob’s career.Genius does not need to be sustained, itmerely need appear occasionally. Tocompare a typical full NET show with atypical full show from 1964 or 1966 or 1975or 1976 or 1979-80 is not reasonable. Thosestandards are just too high. Let’s notconcentrate on the mediocre stuff that iscertainly there. Let’s accentuate the posi-tive. Wouldn’t Bob agree with that - well hewould have once.

The SongsLeonard Cohen said in 1985:

Dylan, to my way of thinking is thePicasso of song. People came up to mewhen he put out his Christian recordand said this guy’s finished - he can’tspeak to us anymore... When you’retalking about a man like Dylan, you cannever write him off. He’s always going tocome up with something beautiful.4

Sincerely, L. Cohen. ‘The Picasso ofsong’ - I love that phrase. Over the years inconversation I’ve found that it has sent somany critics of Bob’s singing into reverse.I’d just say ‘well, people who think BobDylan can’t sing are the type of personwho thinks Picasso couldn’t paint’.Somehow people are very nervous aboutdismissing Picasso. Even if they don’t ‘get’his painting, or like it, they tend to be

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nervous about being seen to dismiss him.It is curious that they feel much saferdismissing Bob’s singing.

Some of the great examples of hisPicassoesque singing are on certain coverversions. There’s two here from 1988 -Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ and JesseFuller’s ‘San Francisco Bay Blues’. Theperformance of both of these songs is justunbelievably good and they are bothquintessential Bob Dylan performances.So many people have done versions of‘Hallelujah’, and some of them are prettygood. But you could never imagineanybody else performing the song in theway Bob does here, in this first of the twotimes he performed the song. He sings itwith the snarling, urgent, voice he had in1988. He bends the words and themelody in a way that is so characteristicof him and yet so fresh, no matter howoften you listen to it. The singing is asgood as you’ll hear, reaching a peak in theway he sings the repeated word‘hallelujah’ in the third chorus. He sings‘hallelujah’, meaning ‘praise Jehovah’,with a voice that’s filled with anguish,and maybe some joy. He gets inside thesong in a way that is hard to write about.This performance illuminates the phrase‘interpretation of song’ better thananything I know; to take a song ofimmense beauty and depth and to showus what it can become. Bob chooses thesongs that he lives in with care. One cansay similar things about the ‘SanFrancisco Bay Blues’ performance. Thebacking is a driving acoustic guitar,simply strummed, but the singing issublime. It was always about the singing.

In some of the less rewarding sectionsof the NET cover versions have played animportant role. This is certainly true forthe serious listener who may trawlthrough many uninspired discs andsuddenly find a cover version to makethings interesting. These cover versionsmust also be very important for Bob. Takean example - Madison, 5th November1991. The opening section of this showstrikes me as being very poor indeed. Bobseems to be way off form. Then he playsthe traditional ‘Trail of the Buffalo’ andit’s an absolutely amazing transformation.Suddenly there is a performer withpurpose and confidence doing a fantasticversion of this song. Before that there wasa performer who didn’t seem to be playingwith much purpose, who didn’t reallyknow exactly what he wanted to do withthe songs that he’s played so often before.He was short on inspiration. The very factof throwing in a new cover version or anold traditional meant that he had someidea about what he wanted to do with thesong. He was inspired by it to somedegree, in a way that he was not by hisown songs. After ‘Trail of the Buffalo’ thelevel of the whole show went up a fewnotches. The cover version was an impor-tant catalyst in the overall performance.

Neither ‘Hallelujah’ nor ‘SanFrancisco Bay Blues’ falls into that cate-gory - they both come from good showson the first great stretch of the NET. Theperformance of Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘I’mNot Supposed To Care’ is from a yearwhich is just okay, the competent but dull1998. It’s a nice song with an openingsection that reminds me of John Lennon.

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Bob’s performance of it is tender andgentle. It’s as if he views the song as abeautiful but delicate creature and he’staking great care with it.

I was at a concert in Great Woods,Mansfield, Massachusetts on 8th July 1986.At some point during the concert Bob saidto the crowd (I’m paraphrasing frommemory since I haven’t managed to get acopy of that show) ‘Hey, just to let youknow, I’m not going to play ‘Mr.Tambourine Man’ tonight’. The crowdgroaned. Bob laughed and said ‘well ifyou’d played it a thousand times youwouldn’t want to play it either.’ I’m gladhe changed his mind about that. Imagineif we didn’t have those recordings of thesong from the European spring tour of1995.

I tell myself that it is silly to try to writeabout the spring 1995 performances ofthis song. They speak so powerfully forthemselves. Some of my friends told methat I was silly to go to all of the UK andIreland dates on that tour. I’m glad I did.The song is so fresh, so unbelievably fresh.It’s like a new song. At the time of hearingthese performances live I found it hard tobelieve that such a definitive version of‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ was coming at thislate date. Hard to believe that themasterful performances of this song fromEngland 1966 were being matched, againin England, nearly twenty years later.These performances are the best livemoments that I’ve found in concert. It wasspellbinding.

What about the singing, the phrasing?It is tender, incredibly strong, effortless. Avoice filled with experience, love and

regret. A lifetime of singing and experi-ence was necessary to make this singingpossible. I love the way his voice tremblesslightly in the final word of each line ‘free’,‘me’, ‘waves’. And the harmonica playingis powerful. The pied piper has thrownaway his pipe and got a harmonica. Thereis such a sense here of Bob as the piedpiper. Calm. The audience in his hand. Iwould have followed him anywhere. Iremember the security staff in the BrixtonAcademy. They were completely indif-ferent to Bob most of the time, but eachnight they were transfixed by this song.Such an unusual set of performances. Bobwithout his guitar, holding the micro-phone in one hand and the microphonecord in the other hand, stroking thesmoky air on the stage. Doing shadow-boxing moves: it’s a shadow you’re seeingthat he’s chasing.

All the performances of this song thatI’ve heard from this tour are superb, but Ichose the performance from Dublin. Thissong, this year, is a great reinterpretationby Bob of one of his own songs. The tuneis only subtly altered from the famousoriginal version, but the real magic is theway the timing is altered. The ends of thelines are speeded up. This night as theIrish audience sing along they are caughtout. Forced to listen. Bob reacts to theaudience. He realizes that the song theyhave in their head is slightly different tothe one he’s singing. He enjoys it, and itpushes him just that tiny fraction further.

‘Mr Tambourine Man’ is about lettinggo of the things that we know. Being opento the possibility of things that we don’tknow yet, but may have sensed. And this

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meaning is felt in the song as much asimplied in the lyrics. ‘Take me disap-pearing through the smoke rings of mymind’. In these performances, as he mostnotably did in 1966, Dylan opens himselfto his own song’s meaning, allows himselfto be taken somewhere. And he brings hisaudience with him. ‘A trip upon a magicswirling ship’. Really this song is anextraordinary invocation of the value ofsong itself. A thing which can transform,for a moment, the reality of the listener, aswell as that of the singer. Of course, onlythe great singers can do this. It is whatmakes them great. This is the supremesong. Song is the supreme fiction.

One of the things that’s interestingabout these performances of ‘Mr.Tambourine Man’ in early 1995 is thatBob didn’t play guitar. Bob’s guitarplaying has been a curious feature ofrecent years. Over the years of the NET hehas brought his own ‘lead’ guitar playingto a much more prominent positionwithin the sound of the band, in both theelectric and acoustic sections of the shows.The results have ranged from the trulyeffective (occasionally) to the strange(more often). I wonder if he has beendriven to some extent to create an identi-fiable ‘lead’ guitar style of his own in theway that Neil Young has. ‘Mr.Tambourine Man’ in early 1995 benefitedfrom not having his acoustic guitarplaying on it. J.J. Jackson’s acoustic guitarand Bucky Baxter’s dobro were just right.

Later in the year, in America, heslowed this song down about by 20% fromthe European performances and it didn’twork nearly as well. But everything in

those early 1995 shows was great, espe-cially in the three song acoustic section inthe middle of the shows. The performanceof ‘Desolation Row’ from Birmingham istypical of the controlled, energetic and yettender playing that our songster and bandwere churning out at that time.Sometimes listening to the recording of aperformance afterwards can be a disap-pointment compared to the live experi-ence. This is one where that did nothappen for me.

When Michael Gray gave his BobDylan and the History of Rock & Roll talkin Dublin last year I went along. I chattedbriefly with him afterwards and asked himwhat was the best Dylan gig he’d been to.Without hesitation he said ‘Liverpool1966.’ ‘Naturally,’ I replied, ‘dumb ques-tion.’ So I asked ‘has any other time you’veseen him even come close?’ ‘Well not interms of impact’ he said, ‘in terms ofnothing being the same again afterwards,’‘What about musically?’ I persisted. ‘Ohyes’ he said, ‘the Hammersmith run of1993 was great, taken as a whole, and of1990.’

I was delighted to hear him saying thisabout 1993. To me it was a really goodyear of the NET, one of the best. It’s thesummer of that year that stands out forme most. People have tended to be nega-tive about this year, particularly the verylong versions of songs with long instru-mental passages that didn’t seem to goanywhere. That is true for some of theperformances, but there are also someextraordinary performances. Take ‘It’s AllOver Now, Baby Blue’ and ‘The LonesomeDeath of Hattie Carroll’, both from

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Marseilles, 29 June. Bob’s singing in thesummer of ’93 is not very good in thenormal sense. His voice was relativelyweak (two years later his voice was muchstronger) but he used it to great effect.These performances have a floating,dreamlike quality that is common to somuch of Bob’s best live work. Perhapsbecause of his voice being weak, there is avery strong focus on the music as opposedto the singing. There is somehow a lot ofspace in the music, and this space is filledsequentially by guitar, harmonica,mandolin on ‘Baby Blue’ and dobro on‘Hattie Carroll’. There is a magicalmoment at 6:53 of ‘Hattie Carroll’ whereBob is 82 seconds into a harmonica soloand Bucky decides to come in on thedobro. A little burst of harmonica comesfrom Bob to let him know that he’s notfinished. Bucky backs down gracefully andthey carry on. This is purposeful music.The performances are each over nineminutes long. It’s a pity they had to end sosoon.

The very next night in Toulouse Bobhit again with ‘Born in Time’. This is oneof Bob’s great NET era songs. It’s a pity hehasn’t played it more often live. There is acurious contrast between some of Bob’slater songs and ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’. In‘Tambourine Man’ he sang of: ‘the ancientempty streets too dead for dreaming’, ‘mysenses have been stripped’, ‘my toes toonumb to step’. There is a sense of being ina state that is slightly removed from thenormal, and it is a good thing. Contrastthose lyrics with: ‘I’m walking throughstreets that are dead’, ‘The air is gettinghotter... I’ve been wading through the

high muddy water, with the heat rising inmy eyes’, ‘I’ve been walking through themiddle of nowhere’, all from Time Out OfMind, and with ‘I’ll walk along throughthe shaky street, listening to my heart beat,in the record breaking heat, where we wereborn in time’ (as sung in 1993). Theancient empty street has become a shakystreet, and it is usually uncomfortably hot.The dreamlike state is still there but it’s adifferent dream.

The playing of summer 1993 suited‘Born in Time’ very well. The openingplucked notes of this performance and thesoupy steel guitar that punctuates evokethat dream. This is an example of whereBob’s guitar playing is crucial to aperformance. You start to notice hiscurious little runs of notes after aboutthree minutes. Soon the performancealmost unravels but Bob rescues it bysinging the next verse. The real magic ofthis performance starts to build at around5:00 minutes. John Jackson’s smoothguitar and Bob’s characteristic guitar runs(not smooth) play exquisitely against eachother. Clinton Heylin in his book TheGreat White Wonders says:

Bootleg punters are looking for some-thing that is locked into the wellspringof inspiration, and the beauty of themusical interplay that rock musicallows is that such a moment can sneakup on you real quick and unexpected -and just as quickly be gone.5

The passage of play between 5:00 and at7:19 (song’s end) draws deeply from thiswellspring. Bob’s guitar playing makes a lotof sense here, as it does in the performanceof ‘One Too Many Mornings’ from

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summer 1995. A delicious repeated guitarslide, and an example of the delights thatcan show up unexpectedly in the middleof an otherwise dull show.

So 1993 was an excellent year, and tocrown it Bob played the Supper Club gigsin November, one of the highlights of theNET. I’d always liked ‘Has Anybody SeenMy Love’ but didn’t realise how good itwas until I heard this performance fromthe final of the four Supper Club shows. Itbristles. His singing is so energised inthese shows. He must have been actuallyhurting his voice when he sang ‘QueenJane Approximately’ in the first gig, espe-cially when he sings ‘…convince you ofyour pain’, but it sounds great. A smoul-dering performance which gets its powerfrom the way he sings the six wordsremain/jane/pain/jane/complain/jane.

A few weeks ago I was at one of the NeilYoung solo Greendale gigs. The openinghour and fifty minutes were Neil playingnew, unheard, songs from the upcomingGreendale album, with long between-songmonologues about the fictitious charactersof the songs. It was risky, and brave. Thenew songs sounded pretty good to me andNeil’s acoustic guitar playing was superband he was almost three hours on stage byhimself. I couldn’t help wishing that Bobwould also do something risky, really chal-lenge his audience.

At one point, in 2000, I thought therewas just a slight flicker of hope that hewould start doing a complete show ofjazzy rewrites of his own songs (it was justthe slightest flicker!). Just his choosing toplay the most unlikely ‘If Dogs Run Free’seemed to signify that he might be looking

to freshen things up after twelve years ofthe NET. The band sounded good playingthis jazzy song. I love the delight you canhear in the crowd in Münster when theyrealise what he’s playing, the debut of thissong after thirty years. On the same tourthere was the somewhat jazzy arrange-ment of ‘Tryin’ To Get To Heaven’.Robert Forryan in Judas! 4 says, whilediscussing the lyrics of ‘To Ramona’:

I don’t believe you if you tell me that inanother 30 years many people will bequoting lyrics from, say, Time Out OfMind with such easy familiarity.6

No, but that’s not because the latersongs don’t contain brilliant lines, butbecause Bob is never going to be aspopular as he was thirty years ago. I lovethe contrast between this old voice, filledwith regret and resignation, as he sings‘when you think you’ve lost everything,you find out you can always lose a littlemore’ from ‘Tryin’ To Get To Heaven’ inBournemouth with the young sneeringvoice singing ‘when you got nothing, yougot nothing to lose’ from ‘Like a RollingStone’. Anyway the jazz revival didn’thappen, a pity.

Sometimes great performances are justthat. There’s not that much to say aboutthem. Like the straightforward ‘ThisWorld Can’t Stand Long’ from Omiya2001 or ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’from Cardiff 2002 which is good becauseof the harmony singing by the band. Orthe simple yet stately ‘Song to Woody’from Santa Cruz 2000 or ‘Po’ Boy’ fromGrand Rapids 2001, just because it’s sucha fantastic song, or ‘Señor’ fromInnsbruck 2002. There is probably a lot

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that can be said about any performance of‘Highlands’, but the performance fromSanta Cruz 2000 is memorable becauseBob is obviously having so much fun withit, as he was with everything that night.The humour in this song about the diffi-culty of proper communication betweenman and woman or between artist andaudience is communicated most effec-tively by Bob’s singing. The ‘restaurantscene’ is the highlight of this song and ofthis performance. What a good band Bobhad in these later years of the NET. Theydo the simple things so well. Like on‘Drifter’s Escape’, also from Santa Cruz2000. I love Charlie Sexton’s playing, bothacoustic and electric. There’s somethingabout the way he strums. He sets up apulsing guitar sound that has been thebasis of many fine performances,including this one.

Undoubtedly the highlights of theNET have been the acoustic performances,which have been more down-tempo thanthe electric sections of the shows. Theshows over the years have always beenbalanced in terms of up-tempo and down-tempo songs. The up-tempo songs, whileusually great in concert, have lacked thehigh quality of the slower acousticperformances. There aren’t really all thatmany songs that have acted as rave-upnumbers. I haven’t done analysis on it butit strikes me that he has relied heavily on‘Highway 61 Revisited’, ‘TombstoneBlues’, ‘Watching The River Flow’, ‘Silvio’,and for a while ‘Everything Is Broken’ and‘Cat’s in the Well’. A lot of Bob’s NET erasongs have been an attempt to generatemore up-tempo candidates. ‘Million

Miles’, ‘Can’t Wait’, ‘Cold Irons Bound’and ‘ ‘Til I Fell In Love With You’ were theweaker songs on Time Out Of Mind andhad some limited success in concert. “LoveAnd Theft” was more successful in thisrespect, as in all other respects, with ‘CryAwhile’, ‘Lonesome Day Blues’ and‘Honest With Me’. But the big success was‘Summer Days’, especially in late 2002.What a set of shows from the USA inautumn! ‘High Water’, Warren Zevon’s‘Mutineer’ and ‘Summer Days’ were apurple patch at these shows and a purplepatch of the NET. Bob at piano in thisperformance of ‘Summer Days’ fromFairfax must have felt like he was playingwith The Golden Chords again or at theHibbing High’s Jacket Jamboree TalentFestival in 1958.

It’s interesting to look how the majorBob Dylan songs have fared in the NETyears. Certain major pre-NET songs havenot fared well at all. ‘Tangled Up in Blue’is surely one of them. I’m not saying thatthere have been no good performances ofthis song on the NET, but overall it’s beena drag. The same is true of ‘Like a RollingStone’. So often the performance of bothof these songs sounds perfunctory andthey frequently don’t inspire Bob. TheNET has brought little new from thesesongs. Others, like ‘Don’t Think Twice,It’s Alright’, ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’, ‘It’s AllOver Now, Baby Blue’, ‘Love MinusZero/No Limit’ and many more have faredspectacularly well at times, while some-times becoming stale. The two songs thathave been consistently impressive are ‘Mr.Tambourine Man’ and ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’. Performances of these songs

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are always worth hearing. ‘A Hard Rain’sA-Gonna Fall’ seems to be an inex-haustible source of inspiration for Bob,year after year. The performance fromNew York 2001 is typical of recent years.The music is deceptively simple. A pulsingrhythm like gentle waves washing over thelistener, each carrying a fragment of theapocalyptic vision. The voice has becomeragged but is used to great effect in thesinging, especially in the verses.

Some would say that the Great MusicExperience in Nara, Japan in 1994 was nota part of the NET at all. That doesn’t makesense to me, but it doesn’t really matter.What can one say about the performanceof ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ on 22May 1994? One could talk about theinspired spine-tingling singing, which (inthe final verse and chorus especially) is thebest you will ever hear, ever. One couldtalk about the unique circumstances ofBob being backed by an orchestra. But itwould be easier to simply ask: Don’t youfind this an utterly beautiful performance?If not, please listen to it again.

Of course even a collection of yourfavourite NET performances on CDdoesn’t come anywhere close to being at aconcert, even an ordinary one. What aprivilege to be around to attend some ofthese shows. OK, so there are many showsthat are mostly ordinary. OK, so lookingfor the truly memorable performancesmight seem like being in a world of fibre-glass searching for a gem, or like lookingfor a diamond in a mountain of rocks (ohsorry, that’s a Meatloaf quote, not a Bobquote). But Bob has managed to tourconsistently for fifteen years and most of it

has been pretty good. Some of it has beenextraordinary. Has he followed ‘Yeats’sroute of more seeking and more findingand even greater creativity toward oldage’? Absolutely, and he’s done it in amanner that he can sustain. Even greatercreativity than when he was younger? Inperformance, maybe. Some of theperformances I’ve mentioned here hecould never have done in his younger life.So there haven’t been all that many showswhere an extraordinary level of perform-ance was maintained throughout - sowhat. That would be to expect too much.That would be to be like the banker’snieces, seeking perfection, expecting allthe gifts that wise men bring.

1 Robert Shelton, No Direction Home - The Life andMusic of Bob Dylan, p.581 (Ballantine, 1987)2 Andrew Muir, Razor’s Edge p. 22 (Helter Skelter,2001)3 Paul Williams, Judas! No. 4, p.89 (2003)4 John Bauldie (ed.) Wanted Man - In Search of BobDylan, p. 155 (Penguin, 1992)5 Clinton Heylin, The Great White Wonders (AHistory of Rock Bootlegs) p.411 (Viking, 1994)6 Robert Forryan, Judas! No. 4, p.44 (2003)

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In 1992, in one of his rare responses torequests from the crowd, Bob Dylan toldan audience: ‘This one’s got all that stuff init. You’ll see - all that and more!’ But what‘this one’ turned out to be was not one ofhis own songs, but a traditional balladcalled ‘Golden Vanity.’ And ‘all that stuff’was pure emotion - love, death, betrayal,sacrifice - and pure poetry.

Throughout the 1990s, Dylan sprin-kled his concerts with other people’s songs- ballads, blues, gospel, bluegrass -providing his fans with a veritable historyof musical tradition. Back in the 60s, hehad himself done more than any otherperformer to change the image of the‘folksinger’ from someone who performedtraditional songs to someone who feltobliged to write his own compositions: the‘singer-songwriter.’ In the 90s, Dylanseemed intent on righting that balance.

Among the traditional broadsideballads, Dylan in the early 90s showed asmall but marked interest in the sub-genreoften referred to as ‘trouser songs’: that is,ballads about women who dress up as menand go off to sea, often to follow theirlovers. (For a scholarly study, see DianneDugaw, Warrior Women and PopularBalladry, 1650-1850. University of

Chicago Press, 1996.) Songs of this typeshow up on both the albums of traditionalsongs which Dylan issued at this time:‘Canadee-i-o’ on Good As I Been To You(1992) and ‘Jack-A-Roe’ on World GoneWrong (1993). But perhaps the most inter-esting of these trouser songs is ‘FemaleRambling Sailor,’ which Dylan performedsix times in concert in 1992, but has neverrecorded.

‘Female Rambling Sailor’ is of Britishorigin. The place names - Gravesend, theRiver Thames - seem to be English,though Dianne Dugaw speculates that thesong may in fact come from Ireland.There is a surviving broadside text fromthe 1820s, which even features a ‘before-and-after’ illustration of the femalerambling sailor. The song has also beencollected in Australia, and it may well bethere that Dylan learned it.

Most trouser songs work towards ahappy ending. In ‘Jack-A-Roe,’ the youngwoman successfully disguises herself,follows her departed lover, finds himwounded in a battle, heals him, andmarries him. In ‘Canadee-i-o,’ the womanis abandoned by the man she originallyfollowed, but ends up married to theship’s captain instead!

FFeemmaallee

RRaammbblliinngg

SSaaii lloorr

by Stephen Scobie

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‘Female Rambling Sailor,’ however,briskly dismisses any such possibility:

Her true love he was pressed awayAnd drownded in some foreign seaWhich caused this fair maid to sayI’ll be a rambling sailor

The lover is killed off at the begin-ning of the song; there is never any ques-tion of her finding him and bringing himback. Indeed, it is the knowledge of hisdeath which causes this woman to go tosea. It is the sea itself, the life of a sailor,which becomes her ‘heart’s delight.’ (Asopposed to the lover who was ‘pressedaway’: that is, he was an involuntaryconscript, not someone who chose to bea sailor.) The song repeatedly stresses hercourage, and her competence: ‘No sailorthere could her excel.’ The romanticplot, which normally works to recu-perate the protagonist back into aconventional woman’s role, is here veryfirmly refused.

She does die, however. The song can’tquite let such a drastic transgression ofgender propriety go unpunished. She diesby accident, in a fall, and we are then givena nicely comic recognition scene:

When her lily white breast in sight itcameIt appeared to be a female’s frameRebecca Young it was the nameOf the female rambling sailor

Given Bob Dylan’s whole fascinationwith the proper name and the alias, it willcome as no surprise when I say that“Rebecca Young” interests me greatly, andthat I suspect that at some level Dylan alsowas taken by this detail (as well as by thesong’s lovely and intricate tune).

Most obviously, what is going on hereis the recuperation of the heroine into aproperly female role. The ‘lily whitebreast’ and the name go together; both aresignals of traditional gender. In death, thewoman is returned to her female body,and to her ‘proper’ name. The name is thegrounding of the woman’s reality whichshe had attempted to escape but by whichshe is now reclaimed.

But the song continues to subvert thisrecuperation. For one thing, the nameitself, in its improper sense, restores her tolife and vigour: young. Perhaps even‘forever young.’ And having given us theproper name, just this once, the songproceeds to ignore it: in all the succeedingverses, up to and including the last line ofthe song, the protagonist is again referredto only as ‘female rambling sailor.’ This is,after all, the name she has chosen forherself. Her identity. Her alias.

Note: I am indebted to Eric Debeck for his diligentresearch on this song. This brief article is excerptedfrom my forthcoming book, Alias Bob DylanRevisited, which will be published by Red Deer Pressin November 2003.

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I went to a midday show at a multiplex cinema in Vancouver. I was, quiteliterally, the only person in the audience. Big screen, big sound. (A few scratches,already, on the print: bugs on the windshield.) Nothing to interfere, here: just meand Bob, one on one. Would I have preferred to see it with a general audience?Or would I have been too defensive against their (inevitable) derision? (Even if in-built defence against derision is not a leading feature in the film itself.)

It wasn't quite as bad as I'd feared, but it was pretty bad. Good things first: themusic is great, and the footage of Dylan and his band in concert is, hopefully,preserved somewhere in full, unedited form. For this is the best visual record inyears of what late Dylan looks like on stage. And it is just priceless to see this kindof documentation of what a weird physical character Dylan has become. The wayhe walks is so odd, yet somehow endearing. He has never succeeded (at least oncamera) in looking at home in his own body. The face no longer even attemptsexpression. (In the one scene in which he is required to weep, you can almost seethe eye-dropper being applied before the shot begins.) The camera is not quite theenemy, but it's not yet a friend.

And I certainly don't agree with criticisms that the film is disjointed, inco-herent, or too ‘experimental.’ My problem is quite the opposite: it isn't nearlydisjointed, incoherent, or experimental enough! It's as if Renaldo and Clara hadbeen re-edited into a coherent narrative: who the fuck wants that?! Because narra-tive always normalizes: and ideas which may achieve unique expression in Dylan'ssongs often seem merely banal in the melodramatic plot contexts of ‘M&A’.

Take, as one example, the long speech delivered by the Animal Wrangler(played by Val Kilmer). It is arbitrary, isolated, in no way related to the plot of themovie, completely irrelevant, a featured ‘turn’ for a famous guest-star. None ofwhich I would object to at all, as long as the speech actually had anything originalor interesting to say about animals. But it doesn't. Nothing in the speech hasanything to say about animals that hasn't been said a thousand times before. Theapparent ‘unconventionality’ of having a long speech from a minor character whohas nothing to do with the plot relapses into the utter conventionality of what heactually says. And none of the quirky mannerisms of Kilmer's performance cantranscend the banality of the writing.

Masked & AnonymousA Personal View

by Stephen Scobie

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If - and I repeat, ‘if’ - one is tempted tosee the film as a realist narrative, theimplausibilities abound. The so-called‘charity benefit’ never achieves anysemblance of an audience. Charisma is,ahem, missing in action. The idea that this‘Jack Fate’ could generate millions ofdollars is, to put it mildly, unresoved. Soall kinds of ideas are introduced, and thenleft hanging, undeveloped. There is a goodjoke in having Fate's concert supported byactors representing Pope Jean-Paul and

Gandhi, but nothing is done with this ideabeyond their mere presence. (Neither oneis given a line of dialogue.)

Centrally, what seems to be at stake isthe tension between ‘Jack Fate’ as afictional character and ‘Bob Dylan’ as afigure in cultural history. This tensionworks splendidly in Renaldo and Clara, inwhich be pays lip servive, but very littlemore, to the identity of Renaldo and Bob.You always see the identity betweenRenaldo and Bob, yet the discrepancy is

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always available as a narrative strategy. In‘M&A,’ the same ideas fall flat and uncon-vincing, as in the excruciating scene inwhich a young child sings for ‘Jack’ a note-perfect but somehow lifeless version of‘Times They Are a-Changin', andJack/Bob has nothing at all to say inresponse. This incongruity could just haveworked in the multiple juxtapositions ofRenaldo and Clara; here, in the enforcedcontinuities of ‘M&A,’ it seems merelyembarrassing. Again, the film is not daringenough. What should have been a produc-tively ambiguous tension between actorand character, between the career of thereal-life Bob Dylan and that of thefictional Jack Fate, falls flat. All of thefilm's many comments on Jack Fate as afailure, a has-been artist whom no oneremembers, someone fit to inhabit thehotel room in which Nixon wrote his ‘youwon't have me to kick around any more’speech: all this remains unproductive. In away that it wasn't in Renaldo and Clara.

In so many ways, ’M&A’ is the terriblefilm that ‘R&C’ might have been butwasn't. The radical editing style of ‘R&C’retained an edge to that film which ‘M&A’always loses through its misguidedattempts to achieve narrative coherence.The narrative contrivances merely detractfrom the film, giving it a spurious unity.

Yet, at the same time, there is toomuch unity: a unity of tone which turnsfrom scepticism into nihilism, an ultimatestatement that nothing makes sense, thatall political claims resolve into the ideo-logical assertion of naked power, that a‘world gone wrong’ is simply unre-deeemable. Is this a responsible political

position, or is it just the sour grapes of anirascible old man? At what point does theprophet begin preaching only to himself?

At this stage, it's interesting tocompare the released version of ‘M&A’with the version of the script leaked ontothe internet many months ago. Interestingto see that the script fails to anticipate themarvellous musical versions of ‘DiamondJoe’ and ‘Dixie.’ (Imagine the apoplecticfury of 1963 Civil Rights fans of Bob Dylanever even conceivably imagining himsinging ‘Dixie’!) I miss some of the sharperjokes on the script version, yet I am glad tosee omitted the gratuitous attack onMapplethorpe. The long speech on Freud,perhaps the most interesting section of theoriginal script, is also missing from thereleased version. I was utterly dismayed bythe script when I read it, yet, goingthrough it again after seeing the releasedversion, I think that many of the bestportions have been omitted.

Again, the released film seems to pullits punches. The problem with ‘M&A’ isnot that it's too outrageous, but that it'snot nearly outrageous enough. ‘R&C’ was,in its editing style, a serious challenge tothe norms of cinema; ‘M&A’ challengesnothing. All it gives us is some wonderfulfootage of Dylan in concert, and somewonderful line readings by an actor insome badly written scenes. ‘All’!! Isn't thatenough??!! ‘M&A’ is a total mess, but it'sstill more interesting and compelling thanany of the more accomplished releases inthe past twenty years - since, that is,Renaldo and Clara.PS: I reserve the right to change my mindcompletely when I see the film again!

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‘Ballad of a Thin Man’: ReducingComplexities

‘In your first interviews always indi-cate that your work resists classification orcomparisons, state that it is unique andadamantly refuse to let it be pigeonholedor stereotyped in the usual ways.’ If therewere a manual for the beginning artist,this piece of advice would surely be in it.But although it is such a cliché, itundoubtedly is a heartfelt truth for manyartists. Why is this so? Why does an artist,or for that matter, almost any humanbeing, refuse to allow his work or himselfto be categorised?

One answer is to say that any classifi-cation, definition, or comparison entails apartial reduction and distortion of reality.A physician making a diagnosis of apatient is certainly doing a useful thing,but by labelling the pains, the shivers, thechills, the anxieties and the feelings ofhelplessness of the patient as ‘the flu’ 1 hereduces a complex state of being of aparticular individual to a trivial phenom-enon. In other words, by applying our

concepts and definitions, we arrive atsome understanding of that world, andthe human beings in it, but that under-standing has its price: it ignores or distortsimportant aspects of reality.

Indeed, some philosophers havetherefore argued that we should try todrop our analytical modes of thinking andgo back to what we might call our ‘pre-reflective’ or ‘a-theoretic’ understandingof the world. This sounds awfully vague,and it is. This vagueness is howeverinevitable: we cannot explain what thatunderstanding exactly amounts to - itwould not only contradict the positionitself but may in fact undermine thatunderstanding. It is like trying to say inwords what makes a novel of Coetzee sogripping, a song of Dylan so exhilaratingor a movie of Tarantino so unsettling.Such attempts inevitably entail the dangerof losing the quality that made the work sospecial and so overwhelming the first timeyou read, heard or saw it.

Be this as it may, it need not be theentire answer to the question as to why weresist categorisations. A second reason has

PhilosophicalReflections

by Martin van Hees

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to do with a rejection of the reasons whypeople sometimes feel the need to reducecomplexities. A complex state of affairscan be frightening and intimidating notbecause it is frightening or intimidatingbut only because its complexity make itseem so. Like a tourist clinging on to hisroad-map, we try to break down thebarriers of fear that the unknown elicits inus, by resorting to the usual devices ofexplanation, definition or description:removing the uncertainty surrounding usmakes the world less frightening. Now thismay still be seen as a rather innocentdistortion of reality. After all, just like thetourist who is reducing the unfamiliarsurroundings to the little marks on hismap, we often do simply want to feel morecomfortable. However, it can become aquite harmful attitude, especially when weapply the methods of reduction to otherhuman beings. When other human beingsare no longer seen as people like ourselvesbut are reduced to stereotypes or objects,we deny that they exist in the same way aswe do.

If it’s thus fear indeed that forms theunderlying motive, then the resistance tocategorisation and explanation may wellbe a form of contempt. Contempt forthose who are too weak (that is, too afraid)to see things as they are. ‘Ballad of a ThinMan’ obviously is an expression of suchcontempt. (Incidentally, it is a misnomerto talk about the ‘hate-songs’ of Dylan.They are songs of contempt rather thanhate.) However, the song is true to its owntheme in that it does not describe orexplain but makes us feel - pre-reflectivelyas it were - the effects of any such reduc-

tion. Moreover, it makes us feel and sharethe scorn that the singer expresses towardsJones, that is, we share the singer’scontempt for Jones’s fruitless attempts(‘pencil in your hands’) to get a grasp onreality. Thus the song is a genuine testi-mony to what art can do and what philos-ophy seems incapable of doing: to makeclear at the level of the pre-reflective thatwe should abandon our quest for categori-sations.

But if this were all, it would not yetmake the song the classic that it is. Apartfrom making us feel the contempt forexplanatory reductions based on fear, italso makes us experience the strength ofthe drive towards such reductions. Again,it is doing so on a pre-reflective level - weunknowingly glide into it. By sharing thejudgement about Jones and by sharing thenarrator’s contempt, we are doing whatwe condemn Jones for: we reduce thecomplexity of our world by viewinganother person as a stereotype and anabstract category. Indeed, by seeing him asan object rather than a human being, wedrift into the dangerous mechanisms towhich such reductions can lead (andexpress for instance that ‘there ought to bea law against you coming around’). Thus,in the end, we not only reject the Mr.Joneses of the world, but have ourselvesbecome one. It is for this reason that thetitle of the song is so aptly ambiguous: itnot only is a ballad about a thin man, butalso from a thin man.

I.Influenza in 1918 killed more people than the entireFirst World War! Flu is not trivial. Maybe ‘a headcold’?

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For years there was very little critical writing on Bob Dylan’s work, and whenyou found some, you seized upon it gratefully and with relish - if you could seethe point of criticism at all.

Things have changed. Now there is a huge amount of it, and some of it wellworth reading, even if I no longer seize upon it so much as advance toward it asinto a hole that may contain fresh water or may be a pit of snakes. Where there iscriticism there is often much hissing and venom. Worse, poor critical writing isplentiful and can strangle up your mind.

I still feel gratitude for the good stuff, and this magazine seems to be shapingup as one of the places you might expect to find it. Issue 6 ran a fine piece byyoung Alan Davis (I assume he’s young, and mention it, because his main fault isbeing a bit wide-eyed: easily forgiven in the young, even as it discomforts the restof us by rebuke); and there was a scarily good reworked lecture by John Gibbens- a piece so alert and sensitive to the nuance and detail of poetic effect that Ialmost wanted to give up using words myself, on the page or the public platform.

And now - at long last, it must be said, and after almost as many delays asRobert Shelton’s No Direction Home - the real heavyweight lit.crit. professor stepsinto the ring, 69-year-old Christopher Ricks (yes, another British critic on thisAmerican artist), with Dylan’s Visions of Sin.

The surprise is that this is Ricks’ fattest critical work. I’d expected a slimmervolume than he has accorded Tennyson, Milton, or T.S.Eliot. His first book wasMilton’s Grand Style, 1963; among others there has also been Keats andEmbarrassment, 1974; T.S. Eliot and Prejudice, 1988; Tennyson, 1989; and morerecently Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917, described by the NewYorker as ‘the best book ever written on T.S. Eliot’. What does it tell us that Ricksdevotes more pages to Bob Dylan than any of the rest?

Christopher Ricks’ Dylan’s Visions of SinPenguin Books, 25 September 2003

by Michael Gray

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If your hunch is that it means he hasfinally come out and writ large his convic-tion that Dylan is up there, you’re right -though it’s one of the many attractions ofthe book that he rarely makes those value-judgments we’re so easily tempted into,most of us, as to how great an artist A is, orhow much better than B. So there’s no‘Dylan is better than Browning’; there’sonly the playful reference to Shakespeareas Dylanesque.

Before elaborating on the book’s otherattractions, I have to say that its amplitudeis not entirely a blessing. Ricks indulges asnever before in his remorseless, grindingwordplay, and his eminence precludesanyone else having taken to it the editorialred pencil he might have been expected touse himself.

You can hardly read beyond the firsttwo pages without wishing he’d ease up onthe compulsive punning - and after anhour’s immersion you find yourselfhaving to resist the same bad habit ofmind. In this sense it’s like reading OscarWilde: before long you find yourselfreaching for aphorisms every time youopen your mouth. The difference beingthat Oscar’s aphorisms beguile and last,and Ricks’ puns besmirch and aggravate:

‘“True Love Tends to Forget”, awarethat rhyming depends on memory, has“forget” begin in the arms of regret, andend, far out, in “Tibet”. The Dylai Lama.’Later, Bob’s ‘Dyligent’. Discussingwhether Dylan’s songs end, as he onceclaimed, by wishing you good luck, Rickswrites of ‘Positively 4th Street’ that it doesnot end ‘with “Good Luck” to its inter-luckitor.’ On ‘Lay Lady Lay’ wordplay on

OED definitions of ‘lalia’ runs via ‘eroto-lalia’ into ‘Try erotolayladylaylia. Thechatter might be just the thing for achatter-up of someone.’ I wouldn’t bet onit.

In the middle of discussing, brilliantly,‘Like a Rolling Stone’, Ricks can’t resistsnatching ‘pawn’ from the lyric and,regurgitating its use in another song,writing ‘That word “pawn” may hold agrudge, yes, but then if you were a grudge,wouldn’t you like to be held?’ Or, using‘Highlands’ as his platform: ‘if you fail torecognize that you are in Robert Burnscountry you must be a sad-eared laddy ofthe lowlands.’

There is much else you may find ill-judged. A couplet is footnoted like this:‘Samuel Butler, “Hudibras”, since youask.’ Does he think no-one else hasthought of this fey, ‘cheeky’ snappishness?They’ve thought better of it. Quotinganother’s adverse comment on him, Ricksretorts: ‘I bridle slightly at that“fetishizing-a-recording” bit. (What, me?All the world knows that it is women’sshoes that I am into.)’ Another bad egomoment, followed by a particularly weari-some bout of punning, consumes‘Country Pie’.

My point here is not to invite awincing at the worst bits but to deplorethe way this irksome parade of its owncleverness recurs so often through thebook. Where is the restraint with wordsthat Ricks so admires in Dylan?

Perhaps I tire easily, but I tire also ofprose about Dylan that reprocesses hisown lines and phrases. Anyone can resortto it, and many do, yet what could be

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more subject to the law of diminishingreturns? In Dylan’s Visions of Sin I’dalready had too much of it by the time Ireached, on page 28 of the typed manu-script: ‘Nor do I think of myself as at alldenying Dylan’s license to expand hissongs. (Who’s going to take away hislicense to expand?)’ Certainly no Penguineditor took away Ricks’.

There are at least a hundred currentlyfashionable, sub-Adam Phillips sentenceslike this, which may have something to saybut mostly want to say Look At Me: ‘Weshouldn’t take this from Dylan unless wetake it as seizing a double-take.’ See howyou feel when you’ve encountered theother 99.

Further, there is the false note soundedsometimes when Ricks aims to express inprose what he believes is the thrust of aDylan lyric. Here is Ricks’ imaginaryblokeish chat, supposedly relaying thesentiments of ‘All the Tired Horses’:

‘…the second line… is nothing but afatigued remonstration. “How’m I s’posedto get any riding done”. I ask you. Not thatyou need take the trouble to answer. It isin vain for any of us to kick against thepricks - and anyway kicking would bemore of an effort than I’m prepared tomake, I don’t mind telling you. Forget it.But don’t forget the song, even thoughLyrics does.’

Claiming to echo the lyric’s meaning,he wholly misrepresents its tone - andsince we know from another eminentprofessor that style is inseparable fromcontent, this is to misrepresent the song’smeaning too. Yet this is offered as theculminating flash bang wallop of four

pages of this most catherine-wheel-minded critic’s radiant rap about two anda half lines of lyric.

At times like these, and there are manyof them, you feel that here is a book aboutan English critic and his compulsivebrainy wordgames, and while it vividlyevokes his distinguished yet intellectuallyplayful milieu - Cambridge, Boston, Eng.Lit. student precocity - it barely seems tobe looking at Bob Dylan at all.

All this is trebly wasteful. First, Ricks isbetter qualified than most to know howvaluable - how economical and revealing- an alert, apposite pun can be; he knows,similarly, how serious, useful and concen-trating can be the sparing use of wordplay.In writing about Dylan, the same goes forthrowing in reprocessed quotes from thesongs.

Second, Ricks pins down his ownailment. In the section on ‘Like a RollingStone’ he refers to ‘the vacuum that is flip-pancy’ and later gives his own verdict onextravagance of self-regard: ‘This is likekissing yourself in the mirror, full on thelips, the only place you can kiss yourself inthe mirror, and yet somehow not as satis-fying as one had hoped, don’t you find?’

Since you ask, I find myself remem-bering what F.R. Leavis said of C.P.Snow’s lecture on ‘the Two Cultures’: ‘Thepeculiar quality of [his] assuranceexpresses itself in a pervasive tone: a toneof which one can say that, while onlygenius could justify it, one cannot readilythink of genius adopting it.’

But the most provoking, the mostdamaging, upshot of Ricks’ self-indul-gence is that it so gets in the way of the

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incomparable light his gifts can and some-times still do shine on the work of theincomparable Bob Dylan.

How bright a light can he shine, and onwhat aspects of Dylan’s work? I’ve heard itsuggested, from several sources, that Ricksconcentrates too exlusively on the lyricsand says virtually nothing about music,performance, politics or the times Dylanhas been writing about. I don’t agree. Earlyon, he contributes cogently to the weighingof ‘straight’ literary criticism as against ‘say,music criticism or art criticism’, and of theartist and how conscious he is of ‘all thesubtle effects of wording and timing’; theciting of Philip Larkin’s feelings about themerits of reading poetry on the page and theinherent faults with reading it aloud leadsinto a fine discussion of Dylan’s re-performances and what is gained and lost.Similarly a very attentive critique ofLarkin’s poem ‘Love Songs In Age’ returnsus, over several pages, to the discussion ofprint v. performance. He often mentionsthe effects achieved by the voice; hementions, if not regularly, effects too madeby specifics on guitar or harmonica. And forme, anyway, it’s refreshing to find songsfrom Oh Mercy and Time Out Of Minddiscussed without mention of Lanois or hisatmospherics. Yet the book ends not withsome summation of the literary side of lifebut with rumination on Dylan’s dilemmasas a performer.

Ricks also has the courage andcuriosity to raise the rarely discussed butsignificant question of ‘Faith in Dylan…Was that weird wording of his a slip of thelip or was it his speaking in tongues? Didhe make a dextrous move, or am I - when

I exclaim at how intriguing some turn ofphrase is - just going through the criticalmotions? The choice can be stark.’

But it is the words that Ricks can bestilluminate, and there is plenty here tostimulate and to teach. There’s someterrific stuff on ‘Blind Willie McTell’, toldwith a direct enthusiasm, and where allu-sions are real bricks on the path, notdistractions or confessions of distracted-ness: especially the discussion of blindnessthat takes us from McTell, via DylanThomas, and ends up illuminatingspecifics in ‘Under the Red Sky’ and ‘HighWater (For Charley Patton)’.

He’s good on putting ‘Lay Down YourWeary Tune’ and ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’alongside each other, and at his most alertbest in pinning down, here, what we maynever quite have noticed for ourselves butimmediately recognise that we have felt:that the ‘Yes,’ in ‘Yes, to dance beneath thediamond sky…’ is in itself exultant.Similarly, he’s very acute on ‘Boots ofSpanish Leather’, and never more so thanshowing how, here, Dylan’s repeated ‘No’is affirmative - is hanging on to the idealsof love - while only at the end, when hesings that ‘yes’ (‘And yes, there’s some-thing you can send back to me’) is hebeing negative, negating something larger.

Ricks on ‘Hattie Carroll’ remainswondrously good - it raises itself above therest as Ricks argues that Dylan’s song does.He’s riveting, unbeatable, on ‘SevenCurses’ (where the pun about the judge’seyes, ‘Bed-rheumy eyes’, works - there’s apoint to it - and where it is almost the onlypun in the essay, which is all the better forits plain speaking).

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He achieves elegant, thoughtfulwriting about songs to God, the eye andthe ear, the achievement of humilitywithout falsity or archness, while scrutin-ising ‘Saving Grace’, starting with a mostrewarding scrutiny of the phrase ‘savinggrace’ itself. There’s a fine, very differentpiece on the darkness of ‘What Was It YouWanted?’ and - ironically - he’s veryhuman, within it, on the power of word-lessness, as against Dylan’s getting in, withthis song, ‘the first word, the last word,and every word along the way.’ He’s excel-lent too on ‘One Too Many Mornings’and (when he gets down to it) on ‘Only aPawn in Their Game’.

He’s better still on ‘Like a RollingStone’: a major piece to fit a major song,from micro to macro comment. Giving usa savvy observation in a pungent phrase,he quotes ‘Threw the bums a dime, inyour prime’ and notes ‘its evocation ofsmall-minded largesse’, while in dealingwith the song’s whole sweep he arguesadeptly that it is the lyric’s ‘misgivings’that save it from being ‘- in all its vituper-ative exhilaration - even more damnablyproud than the person it damns.’ And hisexposition of why it is exultant, notgloating, and how it carries, by its end,greater recognition of ‘her’ feelings than itseemed aware of at its outset, its recogni-tion that there are mixed feelings as well asmore feelings at stake: all this is great crit-ical work.

I feel this too: it’s an attractive featureof the book that Ricks seems so at easewith the entire Dylan oeuvre, not least bybringing in frequently (surprisingly so fora critic so insistent on the artist being

unbeholden to the man) many interviewanswers from Dylan from across thewhole stretch of decades, from 2001 aswell as 1966, quotes from 1963 and 1997alike, and a healthy drawing uponTarantula.

I like, equally, the readiness to bring inGerard Manley Hopkins, Tennyson, Eliot,Milton, Matthew Arnold, Keats andLarkin (if I were Ricks I’d have to saythere’s an awful lot of Larkin about), andthat his capacious readiness to do so is oneof his great strengths when writing aboutDylan. Not because it elevates Dylan whenhe’s put in their company - for the truth isthat he puts himself there, by his work -but because the reader is thus recurrentlyrubbed up against pithy, rigorous-mindedcomment and eloquence (pertinently, too:his quoting of Eliot on Goldsmith,allowing another’s critical light to shineon Bob, helps say something of what’s fineabout ‘One Too Many Mornings’). Thisrigour, this assemblage of great minds,does Dylan more favours than he usuallygets within the narrow walls of rockwriting, where perspectives on his workrarely roam further than from WoodyGuthrie to the Rolling Stones.

In the end, then, what to say?Hardboiled Michael Gray says: pity tohave over-egged a fine pudding.

© Michael Gray, 2003

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AM: Tell us about yourself in your role asa book editor and your ‘Dylan history’.

TL: My Dylan history pre-datesChristopher Ricks’s if Bryan Appleyard’sprofile of Ricks is to be believed. I wasgiven the first album as a 13 or 14 year oldat the beginning of the 60s and fell in lovewith it immediately. I’ve bought everycommercially available album since - yes,even Knocked Out Loaded - and haveabout 30 or 40 bootlegs. Which means, Isuppose, that I’m a true believer but not acompulsive collector. I tend to go to acouple of concerts every time he comes tothe UK, which means I’ve notched upquite a number over the years, but I’venever seen him abroad. I’m most proud ofthe fact that my two kids (in their 20s) arealmost as keen as I am.

Professionally, I’ve published ClintonHeylin’s biography (two editions), hisbook on the recording sessions, JohnBauldie’s collection of essays and now ofcourse Christopher Ricks’s critical appre-ciation. During my (long) time at Penguin

we’ve also published a few other Dylan orDylan-related titles (Robert Shelton, ofcourse, and Sam Shepard’s RollingThunder Logbook) but I wasn’t personallyinvolved in them. I’ve actually become abit wary of Dylan books - I feel I’ve donemy share now and somebody else can takeup the baton. Having said that, it’s apublishing cliché that no Dylan book everentirely fails. And of course I’d love topublish the Complete Lyrics. And thenthere’s the Autobiography...

AM: You must have found a markeddifference in dealing with Clinton Heylinand Christopher Ricks? Before getting onto Ricks’s book, tell us more about yourrole in Behind The Shades.

TL: About Behind the Shades: Clintonoriginally wrote to me out of the blueproposing a new biography. We had theShelton on the list at that time, but, excel-lent though it is in many ways, there wasobviously room for a book which coveredthe later years fully. I was a subscriber toThe Telegraph so I knew a bit about

Judas! Interview WithPenguin Books’ Editor

Tony Lacey

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Clinton’s work but I’d never met him. Wedid meet then, and I took the book on. Itwas quite a success - we sold US rights toSummit, part of Simon and Schuster,for example.

Over the next decadeI did a few more books with Clinton,

including his extremely useful book onDylan’s recording sessions, then he hadthe idea of doing a second edition of thebiography to coincide with Dylan’s 60thbirthday. Again, quite a success - HarperCollins this time the US publishers.Dealing with him is pretty easy becausehe’s a very conscientious writer - alwaysmeets his deadline for example, despitethe enormous length of the books. Andvery good about backing up the writingwith evidence - tapes of interviews etc. Hisknowledge is remarkable: I remember

once showing him as a potential coverwhat I thought was an obscure photo (ieI’d never seen it) of Dylan on stage, andClinton immediately identified the dateand venue - and the time of day toobecause it was clearly a sound check! Ithink he won’t mind my saying that theonly difficulties we have are when dealingwith the lawyers. He fights tooth and nailnot to change anything. In my experiencemost authors are so intimidated by theUK’s ludicrously severe libel laws thatthey’ll go along with all legal suggestions.Not Clinton! We’ve had our run-ins overthe years...

AM: The Ricks’s book has been a bit of aholy grail amongst Dylan fans - longrumoured but never appearing (much aswe expect the Chronicles saga to develop)yet here it now is after about two decadesworth of rumours, postponements anddisappointments. How did you pull itoff?

TL: The publishing story of ChristopherRicks’ book is that I contracted it in themid 80s. No money passed hands becauseeven then he wasn’t sure when he’d beable to get down to it: the signing of thecontract was more a declaration of intenton both sides, I suppose. Christopher hadtaught me at Bristol so of course I knew ofhis interest in Dylan, and I’d attended acouple of lectures he’d given there and atCambridge on ‘The Lonesome Death ofHattie Carroll’. He didn’t write the book,but we didn’t bother to cancel the contractbecause there was no pressure from himto do so, and I had a vague hope that oneday he might still do it. In all truth though,

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I’d more or less given up on it when Ibumped into a friend, Paul Keegan, thepoetry editor at Faber, at a party in spring2002 who told me that he’d seenChristopher in Boston recently, and itseemed likely that he was now going towrite the Dylan book. So much had I putthe book to the back of my mind that Isaid ‘For whom?’ ‘For you, I think,’ said aplainly bemused Keegan. Sure enough, afew weeks later Christopher rang to saythat he was in London and could we meet.He’d come up with a structure (sins andvirtues) and produced a small list of songsthat he might write about. In the summerof 2002 he showed me some early pieces ofwriting, but the real work was done whenhe got back to the States - through theautumn and winter of 2002/3. The bookfinished up much longer than I had antic-ipated in the summer: more songs werewritten about than originally planned.Though never enough of course - onelongs to read Ricks on ‘Jokerman’ and‘Sweetheart Like You’ and ‘Visions ofJohanna’.

AM: What are your own impressions ofthe book?

TL: The book is a tour de force. It’s filledwith those detailed analyses of effectswhich Ricks does so brilliantly. You canknow a song extremely well, appreciate itsbeauty, and still be amazed by somethingRicks points out to you which then seemsglaringly obvious. He’s so good on someof the less well-known songs too - like‘Handy Dandy’ and ‘Day of the Locusts’.And of course the range of reference isformidable: the book had the slightly

unexpected effect on me of not onlymaking me want to go back to hear thesongs again - though certainly that - but toread other things too. I never thought I’dwant to read Swinburne again but thepiece on ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’led me back to him. I suppose the greatthing about Ricks is that he’s an enthusiastat heart.

AM: Many thanks for your time andinsights.

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What I’m attempting in this article is odd enough to need some explanationof how it came about. I don’t often work on two writing projects at the same time,but a few months ago it happened that I was doing just that. I was preparing apaper on John Ruskin’s architectural etchings for a conference on NineteenthCentury Venice, and during the same period I was working on the article ‘Seriesof Dreams’, now published in Judas! Issue 6. During the same day I often workedon both of them, one after the other, so that Dylan was often hovering around atthe back of my mind while I was writing the Ruskin paper, and vice-versa.

Now the gist of my Ruskin paper was this: that some of the key principles thatRuskin describes in his writings about Gothic Architecture could be appliedequally well to the abstract qualities of his own etchings - etchings which he’dmade specifically to illustrate the architecture (see Appendix). In other words, thecritical principles he was developing were more wide-ranging and helpful thanone might expect: intended to help his reader understand the truth and power offine architecture, they turn out to be equally illuminating when applied to his ownetchings, and go a long way towards explaining why his etchings are so successfulas works of art in their own right. I started to wonder whether, if these ideas ofRuskin’s can help us to enjoy and understand not just architecture but etchings aswell, they might also be helpful when applied to other art forms. In my paper Itried tentatively to show how they might be applied to certain types of 20thcentury abstract art, but what began to strike me quite resoundingly was thepossibility that they might - yes I know it sounds absurd - produce a helpful wayof looking at the performance art of Bob Dylan. Before you dismiss the idea asdaft, just think about it: think how fascinating it would be to examine the criticalwritings of the greatest art critic of the nineteenth century, and discover that theyare still valid today; to show that they were of value not just in their time, butrested on principles which are of significance so universal that they can illuminatethe art of Bob Dylan a hundred and fifty years later. Knowing from past experi-ence how helpful some of Ruskin’s ideas have been to me in so many differentareas, I couldn’t resist trying to see if it would work.

Bob Dylan and

‘The Nature of Gothic’by Alan Davis

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The bit of Ruskin’s critical writing Iwant to use for my experiment is one ofhis most famous: it’s the central chapter ofThe Stones of Venice (published in threevolumes between 1851 and 1853) and it’scalled ‘The Nature of Gothic’.1 Its fame isdeserved: William Morris called it ‘one ofthe very few necessary and inevitableutterances of the century’, and it’s hard toargue with him. As so often with Ruskin,you start by supposing that you’re readingabout one thing, only to discover that theroad has many more diverging paths thanyou supposed; and, true to type, thischapter about architecture turns out reallyto be about a vision of society. However,for the present we really are concernedwith architecture, specifically Gothicarchitecture, and with Ruskin’s identifica-tion of ‘the characteristic or moralelements of Gothic’. There are six of them,and he lists them as follows:

1. Savageness2. Changefulness3. Naturalism4. Grotesqueness5. Rigidity6. Redundance

The last two of these won’t concern us.It’s hard to see how they can be applied toanything other than architecture -‘Rigidity’ referring to the implied elas-ticity, energy and strength in the structureof Gothic vaults and traceries, and‘Redundance’ referring to the effect whichmultiplicity of ornament has on an archi-tectural scale. But the first four are defi-nitely worth a look.

SavagenessRuskin defines the first characteristic

of Gothic architecture as ‘savageness’, andinsists that ‘the rudeness or imperfectionwhich at first rendered the term ‘Gothic’one of reproach is indeed, when rightlyunderstood, one of the most noble char-acters of Christian architecture, and notonly a noble but an essential one’. Thismay seem strange. Why should we expectroughness and imperfection to be attrib-utes of the finest architecture? Ruskincontinues his explanation with a powerfulinsight into the nature of art, and in doingso he challenges our preconceptionsabout what art is: ‘the demand for perfec-tion is always a sign of a misunderstandingof the ends of art’. In Ruskin’s scheme ofthings, great art is made by great artists;and the truly great artist will alwaysstretch his art to its limits: ‘no great manever stops working till he has reached hispoint of failure’, he writes. And therefore‘neither architecture nor any other noblework of man can be good unless it beimperfect’.

The true artist, then, must accept theinevitability of a certain kind of failurealmost from the outset, because it’sinherent in the nature of the activity he’sengaged in. The abstract painter PierreSoulage made a similarly penetrating andhelpful comment when he spoke of thedifference between the artist and thecraftsman:

The artist is looking for something. Hedoesn’t know what path will lead himto his goal. The artisan takes the pathhe knows, to reach a goal which he alsoknows.2

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And Bob Dylan? If ever there were anartist with failure fused into his workingmethods at a fundamental level, it mustsurely be Dylan. We all know the risks heruns in performance. Here, for example, isa description I wrote of a Dylan perform-ance long before I ever considered anypossible link with Ruskin’s ideas.3 It was atNewcastle, England, in 2000, and it illus-trates, as well as anything else I can thinkof, the ‘savageness’ principle in action at aDylan show. I was listening to a prettypoor performance of ‘Tangled up in Blue’that, thankfully, was coming to an end:

I was in the process of trying to guess whatsong would come next when I noticed an

excited agitation among the people closeto the stage. Dylan was choosing aharmonica. Oh no, give it up, Bob, Ithought. The song is dead in the water, letit just die and move on. Start again witha new song. But no.Crouching in a semi-foetal position atthe back of the stage, almost out of sightbehind a speaker from where I wassitting, Dylan began to play a simpleseries of very unpromising notes, quietly,over and over again, making slightchanges as though searching for some-thing. It seemed to be going nowhere; Iwas even beginning to feel a little embar-rassed for him, when something indefin-able changed. It was a small thing at first- but the band, ever sensitive, picked itup, and responded; and Dylan caughtthe moment, responded yet again; andsomething astonishing - somethingcompletely outside anything in my expe-rience - grew and grew until the wholeworld dissolved into a tremendouscrescendo of wailing harmonica andblazing guitars. I sat utterly transfixed,the hair prickling on the back of my neck,knowing that to be here, now, witnessingthis, was simply the most importantthing that I could be doing at thismoment. And this trying, and failing,and nearly giving up, but trying againwith all the odds stacked against him;and his willingness to do this here, now,sharing the high risk of disaster and theslim chance of triumph with all of us; andhis finally succeeding in creating, for amoment, something which seems totranscend our expectations of whatmusic is and can do; these are the signs of

Figure 1

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a rare genius, probing at the limits ofhuman experience.

I expect that everyone reading this willhave similar examples they could recountof Dylan-on-the-edge; of Dylanperforming on the brink of failure, withno guarantee of a successful outcome. Inone sense success was impossible in thecase of the Newcastle ‘Tangled up in Blue’.The song was already a wreck long beforehe reached for the harmonica, but it wasan inspiring performance nonetheless;remember, ‘the demand for perfection isalways a sign of a misunderstanding of theends of art’.

And after all, it’s worth rememberingthat we are talking about the performanceart of the man who wrote:

…there’s no success like failureand … failure’s no success at all.

ChangefulnessThe second characteristic of Gothic

architecture is ‘changefulness’, or variety,which Ruskin opposes to repetition, ororder:

The vital principle is not the love ofKnowledge, but the love of Change. It isthat strange disquietude of the Gothicspirit that is its greatness.

Don’t let’s fall into the trap, Ruskinwrites, of thinking ‘that love of order islove of art’. Great art ‘does not say thesame thing over and over again’. It isn’tpredictable, or repeatable. There’s noformula.

This concept fits Dylan like a glove. Ittypifies his natural attitude in therecording studio (remember EmmylouHarris’s discomfiture at realising that ‘you

just don’t overdub on a Dylan album’, asshe recalled that ‘we did most of [thesongs on Desire] in one or two takes’.4).And of course it’s central to Dylan’s wholeapproach to live performance. As he saidhimself in 1989:

There’s always new things to discoverwhen you’re playing live. No two showsare the same. It might be the same song,but you find different things to dowithin that song which you didn’t thinkabout the night before.5

And again, ten years later:Once the architecture is in place, a songcan be done in an endless amount ofways. That’s what keeps my current liveshows unadulterated. 6

‘Changefulness’, then, is unquestion-ably one of the defining characteristics ofBob Dylan’s art.

NaturalismBy ‘Naturalism’, Ruskin refers to that

‘tendency of the Gothic to the expressionof vegetative life’. Similar comments arefound almost everywhere in Ruskin’s writ-ings. In The Seven Lamps of Architecture:‘whatever is in architecture fair or beau-tiful, is imitated from natural forms’.Again, in The Two Paths: ‘The law which ithas been my effort chiefly to illustrate isthe dependence of all noble design, in anykind, on the sculpture or painting ofOrganic Form’.

At first I felt that this term couldn’t beapplied to Dylan’s art, simply because I’venever detected any sign that Dylan’s musicwas imitating or inspired by naturalsounds. But then I realised that I wasfollowing the letter of Ruskin’s thought

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rather than its spirit. Ruskin’s point is thatnatural forms exhibit certain unifying anduniversal principles of ‘design’ that arealso found in the greatest art. There is apre-existing, vital organicism in Naturewhich the artist can draw inspirationfrom, and the degree to which he does sowill be a critical factor determining thepower of his art.

If the curves, shapes, textures andcolours of the natural world are the funda-mental source of the finest visual, sculp-tural, and architectural designs, thenwhat’s the equivalent for the art of song?Not, surely, the twittering of birds, or thebleating of sheep. I think the closest equiv-alent is the folk tradition. Folk song isorganic, growing like a tree with ever-diverging branches down through thecenturies, fed from a deep and vital tap-root. Folk song is so multi-authored thatit’s effectively authorless: ‘it’s like nobodyreally wrote those songs. They just getpassed down’.7 The folk tradition presentsan ever-changing, ever-vital source ofinspiration to the would-be songwriter.It’s already there, waiting for the song-writer/performer to draw upon it just asthe natural world is constantly there asinspirational background for the architector painter.

If this equivalence is acceptable (andI’m aware that I may not carry everyonewith me in this), then Bob Dylan’s art,insofar as it’s steeped in the folk tradition,could be described as ‘naturalistic’ in thespirit of Ruskin’s use of the term. Dylanknows it keeps him on track: ‘My influ-ences have not changed - and any timethey have done, the music goes off to a

wrong place’.8 ‘If you can sing those [folk]songs, if you can understand those songsand can perform them well, then there’snowhere you can’t go’.9

Grotesqueness The fourth of the characteristics of the

Gothic imagination is ‘the tendency todelight in fantastic and ludicrous, as wellas in sublime, images’. Apart fromdefining it, Ruskin has little to say aboutgrotesqueness in ‘The Nature of Gothic’,choosing instead to devote an entirechapter to the subject in the third volumeof The Stones of Venice. Associating theterm with both playfulness and fear, he

Figure 2

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draws a sharp distinction between ‘noble’and ‘ignoble’ grotesque:

The master of the noble grotesqueknows the depth of all at which he seeksto mock, and would feel it at anothertime, or feel it in a certain undercurrentof thought even while he jests with it;but the workman of the ignoblegrotesque can feel and understandnothing, and mocks at all things withthe laughter of the idiot and the cretin.

For the true master of the grotesque,it’s ‘because the dreadfulness of theuniverse around him weighs upon hisheart that his work is wild’, and Ruskinbelieves that to some extent the grotesqueor sublime images that present themselvesto him are ungovernable. They have‘something of the character of dreams; sothat the vision, of whatever kind, comesuncalled, and will not submit itself to theseer, but conquers him, and forces him tospeak as a prophet’.

There are so many ways in which thiscan be seen as an accurate description ofDylan’s art that it’s hard to know where tobegin to document it. Grotesque imagesabound in his work, from the ludicrous:

Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood; and the playful:

Yes I received your letter yesterday(About the time the doorknob broke);

to the terrible:They’re selling postcards of the hanging;

and the mocking:Because something is happening hereBut you don’t know what it isDo you, Mister Jones?

Finally, Dylan’s grotesque is unques-tionably ‘noble’, in Ruskin’s sense. Is there

a performer/writer with a stronger senseof ‘the dreadfulness of the universearound him’ than Bob Dylan? I doubt it.His vision ‘comes uncalled, and will notsubmit itself to the seer’ (‘Series ofDreams’) ‘but conquers him, and forceshim to speak as a prophet’ (‘Ring ThemBells’).

‘Savageness’, ‘Changefulness’,‘Naturalism’, and ‘Grotesqueness’: allidentified by Ruskin as essential character-istics of Gothic architecture, and all clearlydiscernible as essential characteristics ofthe art of Bob Dylan. So what? Is it just anintellectual curiosity, mildly interestingbut ultimately of little importance? I don’tthink so. But to appreciate its significanceI think we need to look at the context inwhich Ruskin makes his remarks aboutthe Nature of Gothic. He isn’t discussingGothic in isolation; everywhere he’scontrasting it with Renaissance architec-ture whose basis lies in classicism. He’sengaging in a debate which is centuriesold, and which in its broadest manifesta-tions permeates the whole of humanthought. Where Ruskin’s Gothic artistdraws inspiration from nature, theClassicist imposes order upon it. For theGothic artist, beauty and truth lie inimperfect but natural forms, curves,shapes and lines: his designs are inspiredinstinctively by the arcing branch of a tree,the sweep of a bird’s wing, or the flow-lineof water over a fall. The Classicist bases hisconcept of beauty on perfection andorder: on geometry, mathematics, andproportion. In the Greek temple and thePalladian Villa, the Golden Section rules.

It’s surely enormously significant that

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everywhere you look in the developmentof human thought you tend to find thesame kind of bifurcation. In the East, theTaoist goes with the natural flow of things,the Tao - the ‘Way’ - in contrast withConfucianism which stresses the need foran orderly structure of rules underpinningsociety. William Blake’s prophetic poemsmythologise the difference, with his arche-typal figure ‘Los’, who personifies theimagination, contrasting with ‘Urizen’ -the rigid, order-imposing law-maker. Ifyou like, we can bring in the ideas of theright and left brains: instinct contrastingwith logic. We’re dealing with a funda-mental division here.

So in discovering that Bob Dylan’s artfits in so well with Ruskin’s suggestedcharacteristics of great Gothic art, we’rereally reminding ourselves that Dylanstands very strongly on one side of a fencethat has divided human thought for aslong as you care to trace it back. Savage,changeful, naturalistic and grotesque, theessential character of Bob Dylan’s art is alot older than we might think.

AcknowledgementsMy thanks to Daphne for her help withthis.

Notes1. In the Ruskin literature, quotations areusually referred to the 39-volume LibraryEdition of his works which readers ofJudas! are unlikely to have readily to hand,and since there are so many differenteditions of The Stones of Venice, it’s quitepointless to give page references other-wise. I’ve decided, therefore, not to refer-

ence each quotation, since nearly all ofthem are easily found within a few pagesof each other either in the chapters ‘TheNature of Gothic’ (volume II) or‘Grotesque Renaissance’ (volume III).2. Dan Franck, The Bohemians (London:Wedenfield & Nicholson, 2001), p.xiii.3. Alan Davis, ‘A Tangled Tale’, Isis 95(February-March 2001), pp.32-33.4. Clinton Heylin, Behind the Shades,Take 2 (London: Viking, 2000), p.4025. Ibid. p.6826. Ibid. p.6827. Ibid. p.6738. Ibid. p.6709. Ibid. p.671

AppendixThose unfamiliar with Ruskin’s architec-tural etchings in The Seven Lamps ofArchitecture may find in Figures 1 and 2 aninteresting visual parallel between Ruskinand Dylan. Figure 1 is Ruskin’s etching ofa gothic capital, full of dark vigour and awonderful example, itself, of ‘savageness’in a work of art. These etchings were badlyreceived when published in 1849, and forthe second edition of the book in 1855they were replaced by copies made by aprofessional engraver (see figure 2). Theresult is much more neat and tidy, butlacks all the savage power of Ruskin’s orig-inal. It’s like comparing Peter, Paul andMary’s version of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’with Dylan’s. You could say that no oneetches Ruskin like Ruskin…

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Marlon Brando - No actor of my generation possesses greater natural gifts; but noneother has transported intellectual falsity to higher levels of hilarious pretension.Except, perhaps, Bob Dylan: sophisticated musical con-man pretending to be asimple-hearted revolutionary but sentimental hillbilly.

- Truman Capote

I have only met a few people who have real magic. And I can name them: MarlonBrando, James Dean and Bob Dylan. They are the only men I have met who canmake people be quiet just by walking into a room, and if they go to the next room,everyone follows. Marlon Brando, James Dean and Bob Dylan

- Dennis Hopper

Comparisons are generally useless things and often provide nothing morethan an easy escape for a lazy mind. Certainly when it comes to Bob Dylan, notonly is there really no need to compare him with any of his contemporaries, theresimply aren’t many people to compare Dylan with. Comparison with Dylan isodious because Bob Dylan is, to quote ‘Po’ Boy’, ‘up on another level’. Call itgenius if you will.

But there is one contemporary artist that can justifiably be compared toDylan. If you were looking to use that kind of tag, the person that can becompared to Bob Dylan, in terms of artistic approach and achievement, and interms of true heart and soul, is Marlon Brando.

In many ways Bob Dylan was very much ‘the new Brando’, or ‘the MarlonBrando of music’. Brando, like Dylan, works on a different level. He possesses thatotherworldly quality that is so captivating, and the careers and lives of the twomen have remarkable and fascinating similarities as a result. Here we have twomen worthy of comparison, in terms of how they revolutionised their art, and interms of how they coped with their advancing age in the shadow of the great artthey left in their wake.

Holding A Mirror UpTo Nature: Bob Dylanand Marlon Brando

by Nick Hawthorne

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Before we really delve into things havea look at the two quotes at the start of thisarticle, and keep them in mind as you readon. These two legendary men standaccused of bringing their art to the heightof fake pretension on one hand, and ofbeing two of the most magical souls imag-inable on the other. Of course, it would bepossible to be both these things. Aren’tcon men indeed charming and captivatingby their very nature? But behind thosequotes are two accusations of extremes.One accuses them of fakery, of conningtheir audience, and the other declaresthem absolutely real. Which is it? And whydo they draw such polarised opinions?

To make things personal for a moment,I can tell you that Dylan was not a slowburner for me. I suspect that is true for thevast majority of people reading this. Dylanhit me square between the eyes when I firstheard his voice. I had never heard anythinglike it, and the sound of the voice, and thewords that the voice was singing, justfloored me, like a jolt of electricity surgingthrough me. It literally made me giddy.Bruce Springsteen expressed this betterthan anyone when he said:

The first time I heard Bob Dylan, I wasin a car with my mother and we werelistening to, I think, WMCA, and oncame that snare shot that sounded likesomebody had kicked open the door toyour mind... ‘Like a Rolling Stone’.

Clichéd as it might seem, it is the truth(that’s what makes clichés clichés afterall). It was like someone kicking open thedoor to my mind.

The next time I experienced thatdegree of feeling, that instant knowledge

that I was experiencing something so veryspecial, was the first time I saw MarlonBrando act. I could not keep my eyes offhim. I had never seen another actor likehim, never witnessed anyone that had thatkind of presence. Never seen any man sobeautiful, captivating and powerful. It islike tunnel vision, art and the artist is allthat surrounds you.

Marlon Brando and Bob Dylan. Therewas something about the two of them,without knowing anything really of theirbackgrounds, history and careers at thatpoint, that had reeled me in, and somethingin the two of them which reminded me ofeach other. It was an abstract feeling, afeeling of senses and emotion, but I was sureI was drawn to two men cut from the samecloth with more in common than simplymy attraction to them both (after all I loveTony Hancock and Diego Maradona, andthey don’t have that much in common).And what a magnificent cloth it was, multi-coloured, finely textured and denselywoven. If they were taking their respectiveart forms to the heights of pretension andpulling off some masterly con trick, thenthey sure had done their homework andfooled me. Both of them.

And I was not the only one that wasknocked over by Marlon Brando andfooled by him, if he is indeed a fake.Growing up, Brando made a huge impacton the young Robert Zimmerman thatcannot be dismissed when looking atDylan’s influences, and the images thatshaped him during his formative years. Inan interview from 1986, the power ofBrando in the 1950’s was still very vivid toDylan:

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The only thing I remember that kepteverybody going, that I know, in the 50swas maybe a few films that MarlonBrando made.

As so often, Dylan’s choice of words iswhat immediately draws the attention.‘The only thing... that kept everybodygoing’. Dylan clearly believed in the filmshe is speaking about, and I would suggestthat they were landmark films such as AStreetcar Named Desire, On TheWaterfront, Viva Zapata and The WildOne. The influences of Dylan’s youth arewell documented, people such as HankWilliams, Woody Guthrie, Buddy Holly,Little Richard and Elvis Presley. AndMarlon Brando and James Dean were thefigures that were affecting the youth ofAmerica and the world at the time. Itcannot be over-stressed just how powerfulthese images of American manhood andfreedom were. Brando, with films such asA Streetcar Named Desire and The WildOne, and James Dean, with East of Eden,had a devastating impact on disaffectedyouth.

The time was right, post-war, and theimage was right. These men representedsomething tremendously exciting, some-thing that teenagers and younger peoplewould later hear in Bob Dylan songs like‘The Times They Are A-Changin’. Thesefilms were speaking straight to them. Theyweren’t playing by the rules, because therules were changing. These films werequestioning everything that had beentaught, everything that had been consid-ered as normal. Dean would be dead bythe time his next film Rebel Without aCause was released, heightening the whole

‘live fast, die young’ rebellious image thatwas sweeping America. An image thatboth Dean and to a lesser extent Brandohad, unwittingly maybe, perpetrated. Inthe Cameron Crowe interviews that madeup the extensive notes for the ‘Biograph’collection, Dylan demonstrated howlasting these cultural images of his youthhad been:

People like to talk about the new imageof America but to me it’s still the old one- Marlon Brando, James Dean, MarilynMonroe, it’s not computers, cocaine andDavid Letterman.

Dylan has on many occasions made hisfeelings perfectly clear on exactly howhighly he regards Brando, such as in thisquote from the Murray Engleheart inter-view from 1998:

Q: Is Brando one of those people withwhom you have felt some affinity,throughout the years? Dylan: Oh yes, of course. I think that heis a brave man, intrepid, somebody thatis not afraid. Totally. He is one of themodern heroes.

Interesting choices of words againfrom Dylan there, ‘brave’, ‘intrepid’, a‘modern hero’. And to ‘feel affinity’ withsomeone, you surely see something ofyourself in them and vice-versa.Somebody worthy of comparison. Dylanhas said that Bruce Springsteen is ‘like abrother to me’. But with Brando he feelsaffinity. Someone to believe in you wouldthink. Someone to put your money on.

There is a notion that the idea of imageover substance is something new, some-thing unique to today’s society, but backthen, it was much the same. Just look at

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the world of film and the exploitativemusic industry. The fakes always seemedto prosper over the real deals. But whenimage and substance combined you hadsomething hugely powerful, almost revo-lutionary, socially revolutionary certainly.I find it impossible to watch Brando inThe Wild One and not immediately thinkof that image of Dylan, cooler than cool,from the front cover of Highway 61Revisited. Watching Brando spit out hisfamous retort to the question ‘What areyou rebelling against?’, ‘Whaddaya Got?’,my mind automatically spins to‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and ‘TheTimes They Are A-Changin’ and allDylan’s anti-authority teenage calls toarms. By the time Highway 61 Revisitedwas released, Dylan was a hero and villainin many senses and to many people.

The folk purist lefties felt betrayed andthought Dylan a sell-out, felt conned, felthe had turned out as just another letdown, another faker. A Judas. But there isno doubt that he had written key anthemsthat young people identified with,building on the release the fifties offered,the post war explosion of rock ‘n’ roll andMarlon Brando and James Dean and anti-authoritarian feeling. It was Dylan thathad become the 60s disaffected youth defacto leader, delighting them with linessuch as:

Don’t follow leaders and...

Come mothers and fathers throughoutthe land/And don’t criticize what youcan’t understand/Your sons and yourdaughters are beyond yourcommand/The old road is rapidly

agin’/Please get out of the new one ifyou can’t lend your hand/For the timesthey are a’ changin’

and How does it feel?

and so on. But Dylan moved too fast.As with Brando, people were usuallycatching up to him as he was leaving town.You had to be quick or end up severalsteps behind. And it is clear that afterDylan began to move on from his heavilyGuthrie stylised reverent folk/blues periodto the mid 60s drug fuelled whirlwind ofdazzling language and dazzling cool theinfluence of Brando was still loominglarge. Dylan had neither the time nor theinclination to sit down and explain whathe was doing to his audiences, he had todo it his way and hoped people got it. Heknew, I suspect, that he was creatingsomething that would stand the test oftime, so people would have time to work itout later.

Brando was the same. Brando’sperformances in the fifties were remark-able, inherently exciting, earthy andbrutal. A real physical presence. I alwaysthink you can feel Brando when you arewatching him, just as you can feel Dylanwhen you listen to him. The early parts oftheir careers are remarkably similar as are,in many ways, their upbringings.Separated by a generation, they are bothfrom the mid-west, both seemed closer totheir mothers than their fathers, both lefttheir homes for Greenwich Village, NewYork, in search of success in their calling.

After a successful stint on Broadway inthe late forties, particularly in theBroadway production of A Streetcar

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Named Desire, Brando turned his atten-tion to Hollywood, seeking fame andfortune in film, and made his debut in1950 in The Men. It appears a somewhatold-fashioned film now, and certainly wasno more than a prelude to the havocBrando was about to wreak on film, but itshowed him immersed in The Method,cast as a wheelchair-bound serviceman. Itwas a performance full of study, talent andpotential. The Method is a fascinatingthing when considering Brando’s career,but we’ll come back to that and TheMethod versus technique later on. Brandothen went on to reprise his Broadway partof Stanley in Tennessee Williams’s AStreetcar Named Desire. The film versionsaw him alongside an equally brilliant cast.Vivian Leigh was perfect as Blanche andthe film continues to be one of the mostmemorable to come out of the fifties.Brando’s performance was devastating,and things were destined to never be quitethe same again.

He went on to star in a string of hugelysuccessful landmark films, The Wild One,Julius Caesar, Viva Zapata and On TheWaterfront. In these films Brando had hitafter hit, critically and commercially, andchanged the direction of film actingforever. Never before had such a leadingman been seen. On screen he was not onlyphysically captivating (and not just in ahandsome, or pretty boy slick way, à laLeonardo DiCaprio), he dominated thescreen with his presence. You couldn’ttake your eyes off him, you daren’t. Hewas totally brilliant. The range in his partswas awesome, from the savage bruteStanley in Streetcar to Mark Anthony to

his devastating Oscar-winning portrayalof Terry Malloy in On The Waterfront.

In his style of acting, his presence, theway he made you feel when you saw him,he opened the door for hundreds of filmactors that were to follow him. He influ-enced a generation of young actors andbeyond. He was aped and imitated,mocked and derided, but never bettered.He was an innovator. A genius in his fieldbecause he found his way to that elusiveelement in all art, profound truth.

The similarities here with Dylan’s earlycareer are remarkable. Bob Dylan releasedhis self-titled first album in 1962. He had,like Brando, been honing his craft for acouple of years before he was opened up toa wider audience, and like Brando hisdebut now seems a little dated, an albumof its time certainly, a debut that was aprecursor of what was to come. An albumthat makes much more sense now than itprobably did at the time.

Listening to it I get the same feeling asI do when I watch The Men. The excite-ment of watching/hearing a buddingtalent, just setting his suitcase down beforehe went to work. And with this under hisbelt, and his position a little more assured,Dylan, like Brando before him, unleasheda string of masterpieces, a collection ofwork in such a short space of time thatchanged the course of music history forever. Dylan matched Streetcar, Waterfront,Julius Caesar, Zapata and The Wild Onewith Freewheelin’, Another Side, Bringing ItAll Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited andBlonde on Blonde. These two men had,between them, changed the course of the20th century’s two most popular art

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forms, film and music, before they were30.

So then what? Did the brilliant fire ofyouth burn out, leaving them to wrestlewith the demons and failures of middleage? Is genius, that true creative fire,confined only to youth? Dylan’s brillianceis always charted up until his mythicmotorcycle accident in 1966. He hadreleased some of music’s most enduring,original and dazzling work. However, it ispure folly to end with the motorcycle acci-dent. It creates an edit point of conven-ience and is just lazy. The accident is agood story and very useful as a cut-offpoint to say, ‘Bob was great, then he hadthe crash, then he went into hiding andwas never as good again’.

I am being facetious, of course, but forgood reason as that is still an opiniontrotted out by people who don’t know thetruth, and a myth perpetuated by themedia. After the accident he made TheBasement Tapes which are utterly brilliant,full of his characteristic visionary writing,unfettered by publicity or the weight ofexpectation. With songs such as ‘Tears ofRage’, ‘This Wheel’s on Fire’ and ‘I’m NotThere (1956)’ his creative muse was firingvery much on all cylinders. And his firstreleased album after the accident wasanother masterwork, in the shape of JohnWesley Harding.

After this Dylan did begin to react tohis career and life to date and the thingshis genius had brought him, introducingvast changes in style and approach, self-deprecating, mocking, a step away fromthe intensity of genius. Although the acci-dent is when it happened in public

perception, it was at this point that Dylanbegan to slip into a more perceivablecommercial and artistic decline, certainlya decline in perceivable credibility, in‘cool’, something both men, much prob-ably to their joint eternal chagrin, haddone much to invent,

For Brando, again things aren’t clearcut. He made films such as Desiree,Sayonara, Teahouse of the August Moonand Guys and Dolls in the 1950s, amongthe universally accepted ‘great’ works. Allhad a degree of success and popularity andall continued to demonstrate his versa-tility as an actor, although they werewatered down Brando, films of littlesubstance. His earlier performances hadshown us a man burning with demons,with the potential for performances ofhuge dramatic magnitude, and that iswhat we craved.

But there was no reason with thesefilms to think the slide had begun. Brandowas the hottest property in Hollywood.However, after The Young Lions, and as hemoved into the 1960s, Brando starred in astring of unremarkable films, dogged byproblems and long since forgotten bymost. He too lost his ‘cool’, his credibility.The audience moved on, found someonenew. His impact seemingly made, he wasfloundering somewhat and lost in anincreasing contempt for how he made hisliving.

Films such as The Ugly American andBedtime Story (which also starred FrancineYork, who was later to appear with BobDylan in Love, Theft and Poker, the promovideo for Dylan’s “Love And Theft” albumin 2001) were competent enough, one

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overly serious, self-important and dull, theother frothy and light and without a greatdeal of merit, but Brando had alreadyslipped into a period of underachieve-ment. He had created a body of work inthe early 1950s that cast a huge shadowover him, one that he could not move onfrom.

Testament to this is the great work hedid produce in what are seen, by the worldat large, to be fallow years. Films such asThe Chase and my own personal favouriteBrando film of all time, Reflection in aGolden Eye, in which his portrayal of arepressed homosexual US army major isdevastating in its realism. But these greatworks seem to count for nothing, ifsurrounded by poorer work, if notafforded either critical or commercialsuccess in the widest sense. And this issomething that all genius must face, andmust wrestle with, and may be the verything that makes the vast majority of themsuch unsettled and unsatisfied people. Ithink it was Rod Steiger who commentedon Brando that:

Marlon could have done anything hewanted to, but he chose to do nothing

and this is a widely held conception aboutBrando, that he simply wasted his genius.Whilst writing a review for NME ofDylan’s concert at Stirling Castle inScotland in 2001, Paul McNameeobserved:

It is said that Marlon Brando got fatbecause he got bored. There wasnothing that could stretch him so helaid down and set about making anunrecognisable monster of himself,attempting to challenge conventional

wisdom of how great men should be.And so it was for Bob Dylan. Socomplete and utter was his influenceand so complete were his songs, that formore than two decades he toured theworld deconstructing his tracks to thepoint where they were renderedunrecognisable.

And this sums up the crux of thematter very well. Can genius fire for a life-time? And if so, does it depend on howlong that lifetime is? Dean died in hisyouth and is forever preserved as thatfigure from Rebel Without a Cause, forevercool. The same can be said for the dozensof musical idols that fell by the waysideyears before they reached middle or oldage, from Hank Williams to Jimi Hendrix,Jim Morrison to Gram Parsons and KurtCobain.

Not for Brando or Dylan, though.These two men, who had such a massiveimpact and created such peerless art, livedon past middle age and into old age. Andwhat happens if the muse dries up? Or ifyou can’t allow yourself, for the sake ofyour own survival, to surrender to itanymore? If you start to re-createconsciously what once you did uncon-sciously, if technique and craft replace thenatural spontaneity of pure genius? Ialways hear the opening lines in Dylan’s2001, bitter, unsettling song ‘Sugar Baby’as describing the feeling of standing in theshadow of a greatness of your owncreation:

I’ve got my back to the sun cause’ thelight is too intenseI can see what everybody in the world isup against

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It also connects up in my mind with aline from the Bruce Springsteen song ‘It’sHard To Be A Saint In The City’:

I’m gonna walk like Brando right intothe sun

and a comment made about Brando by afilm producer:

I’m sure that if Marlon Brando walkedin front of the sun....he would not castany shadow

when pressed as to what exactly he meansby this, he explains, even more mysteri-ously:

I mean...I’m not sure there is anybodythere

I am not saying that this is the onlyinterpretation of those lines from ‘SugarBaby’, or even the most obvious one, butnevertheless it is one I heard the very firsttime I heard the song. Aside from the useof one of Dylan’s favourite puns onSun/Son, I have always thought that the‘Sun’ in this instance could represent thepower of Dylan’s own muse, his owngenius, of all the great work he created atsuch a young age, that was to bind him asmuch as it was to free him, especiallywhen we consider the next lines from‘Sugar Baby’:

Can’t turn back, you can’t come back Sometimes you push too far One day, we’ll open up our eyes and We’ll see where we are

and later on:Some of these memories you can learnto live with And some of ‘em you can’t

Then again, this is on the same albumas the song ‘Summer Days’, in whichDylan gleefully declares:

She says, ‘You can’t repeat the past’. Isay, ‘You can’t? What do you mean,you can’t? Of course you can.’

What we can be sure of is that onalbums such as “Love And Theft” and TimeOut Of Mind, Dylan deals with the themesof ‘the past’ and ‘memory’ and the regretand pain that go along with getting older.And what we also know is that these twoalbums are written in a totally differentway than his work in the 60’s and 70’s. ForDylan and Brando, the weight of theirgenius has appeared heavy at times, some-thing Dylan has acknowledged in one wayor another many times over. Dylan andBrando both had to turn their backs to thesun, and stand in the shadows of them-selves and their creations. Dylan alsoopened his 1997 masterpiece ‘Not DarkYet’, the ultimate song of getting older andthe terrifying culmination of thesethemes, with the line:

Shadows are falling...In what is a song of reflection, dissatis-

faction, regret and despair, those openingthree words are telling. And this is wherethe major similarities and differencesbetween Brando and Dylan becomecrystal clear to us, in terms of how theycoped with their staggering success, andtheir own otherworldly talent. With whatthey did in the shadows. Brando hadquickly become utterly dismissive of whathe did for a living. He would becomeknown for it. He said that acting was themost contemptible profession in theworld. It was witness of the self loathingthat would go some way to destroyinghim. He did not regard acting as an art,simply a job, a trade. It came naturally to

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him. He was a gifted liar and mimic, andthis was all acting amounted to. It broughthim fame and riches beyond his wildestdreams, and therefore was the easiest wayfor him to make a living.

Something must have been drivinghim, some demon spirit pushing thiscontrary man forward, but he only everadmitted to working for money. His placein history was confirmed with his firstunforgettable burst of genius, but some-thing drove him back to the top and in theearly 70’s he rose like a phoenix to chal-lenge his past, to challenge his own placein history. Two years later Bob Dylan didsomething similar. Likewise his place inhistory was safe and sound. His storycould have ended in 1972, petering out.But these are not ordinary men we aredealing with here. Dylan had enjoyed afew much-heralded returns to form, suchas New Morning, which has aged very welland is a fine album, and Planet Waves,recorded with The Band. That album gaveme a sense of Dylan going through themotions a little (and I know many of youwill be screaming at me at this point!) Thealbum has much to admire, certainly, butlacked something, as did the hugelysuccessful US tour of 1974, also with TheBand.

This smacked of Dylan serving upwhat was expected of him, taking the easyoption. His appeal had not diminished,but could he truly match the work he hadcreated in the early to mid 60s? Could hecreate something truly new and vibrant torival that work? Yes he could. Dylan, froma point where he had been written off afterreleasing work such as Self Portrait,

released a collection of songs that wouldultimately stand as his very best. Blood onthe Tracks was hugely acclaimed. Themusic world had its poet genius back, buton another level, again in a form thathadn’t been seen before. It was a remark-able achievement, to come out of theshadow of his early work, to negotiatethrough a period of uncertainty, re-assess-ment and re-finding his confidence, andthrow the gauntlet firmly down again.

He went on to cement this new dawnwith the wonderful Rolling Thunder tour,a piece of creative theatre unlike anythingelse he would do in his entire career, intotal contrast to the tour of 74, and withRenaldo and Clara, a challenging, inven-tive and daring masterpiece, a four-hourfilm that explored his life’s themes. Dylanwas rolling again. But he had to lookinside himself, inside his mercurial spirit,his own enigma to get there. He wasalready challenging his own myth. Bloodon the Tracks was an album of such rawhonesty, of such confrontation withinhimself. He was working in a place thatwasn’t comfortable and thus it was a hugerisk. It did not have a commercial sound,it was something quite new. The RollingThunder tour continued Dylan’s trip intothe unknown, into himself. It had brilliantartistic results as he scaled new peaks, butwhat effect would it have on the rest of hiscareer?

Dylan went to great pains to challengepeople’s interpretation of Blood on theTracks as an autobiographical work, but itis very hard, in fact impossible, to separatethose songs from the demons that werepursuing Dylan in his personal life. In

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Hollywood, Brando was known by thebeginning of the 1970’s as ‘burned outBrando’. His latest film Burn! had been amassive flop, even though Brando main-tains that it is his personal favourite of allthe films he appeared in, and that in whichhe produced his best acting. He may justbe right, and the reaction this filmreceived added to his hatred of a businesshe saw as just that, a business, orches-trated by people who wouldn’t know agood film if it slapped them across theface.

Brando also had appeared in embar-rassing films such as Candy (fine book,shame about the film), Night of theFollowing Day and The Nightcomers,directed by Michael Winner. There is trulylittle merit in these films or Brando’sperformances in them, and theyconfirmed in the public’s eye, and in theeye of the people running the Hollywoodfilm industry, that Brando was a spentforce. He was, seemingly, finished, inca-pable of matching his heyday perform-ances. The opposite of everything he usedto represent, people were left to rememberwhat he had been like in those halcyondays of the early fifties. And then, circum-stance presented the ageing star with acomeback of epic proportions.

Despite huge opposition, and againstthe odds, he landed the lead role in TheGodfather, surrounded by such wannabeesas James Caan and Al Pacino, and won hissecond Oscar (the first was for On TheWaterfront, 18 or so years earlier). Theperformance was a masterful lesson incharacter acting and in truly inhabiting acharacter. Brando was back, and he didn’t

stop there, the world was his oyster interms of film. He could pick and choose,he could string another series of master-piece performances together to rival hiswork in the early 50’s. But he had alreadycommitted to a project that would totallychange the destiny of his career. His nextfilm took him to that place Dylan was tovisit on Blood on the Tracks. The darkestreaches of his own soul, face to face withhis genius.

Last Tango in Paris was a film thatwould effectively be the centre point onwhich Brando’s career would revolve.Think of his career as a see-saw with LastTango in the middle. The pivot. It was afilm in which he was challenged by thedirector, Bernardo Bertolucci, to impro-vise greatly, to effectively be himself. Thecharacter was called ‘Paul’ but it may aswell have been called ‘Marlon’, becausethat is what Bertolucci was looking for.

During Brando’s spellbindingperformance, his mask slips for the firsttime in his career. We actually get to seeglimpses of the real man, a part of the realman. Through tragically sad recollectionsof his childhood, to a heartbreakingmonologue at the open coffin of his deadwife (who has recently committed suicide)that is full of rage and utter despair, thefilm has a hopelessness runningthroughout it. Brando reaches deep withinhimself and his ‘performance’ is the bestof his remarkable career.

Blood on the Tracks and Last Tango inParis are comparable works. For me theyshare many similarities. They both mark,to a degree, the rebirth of their protago-nists, and they both took the art of the

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men responsible to new heights. And to doit, they had to use themselves, their ownexperiences, mirror what was happeningin their own lives, confront their geniusand muse and merge that with reality. Theworlds of artistic invention and the brutal-ities of everyday life, of living, rubbeduncomfortably against each other. And itmystified them both. When people talkedof ‘enjoying’ Blood on the Tracks Dylanfamously responded:

It’s hard for me to relate to that. Imean, you know, people enjoying thetype of pain, you know

Even the repeated ‘you knows’ tell usthat Dylan feels extremely uncomfortableabout this. And Brando’s pain in LastTango flowed off of the screen. Like aprimal scream. Brando’s pain in LastTango..., like Dylan’s in Blood on theTracks, is so tangible that it is impossiblefor us to simply view it as art, as thirdperson. We know this is autobiographical,we know this is happening to them. Theoutcome however of their phoenix-likereturn to form was to be very different.Both reacted to it, certainly. After RollingThunder, Dylan took some time toconsider what he might do next. Hismarriage had fallen apart, he wasadvancing in years towards his forties, hewas at another crossroads.

Maybe due to the amount of himselfhe had expended over recent years, whenhe reappeared with a new album and tourin 1978 the sound and act were quitedifferent once again. He had reinventedhimself to survive. In Blood on the TracksDylan’s mask, like Brando’s in Last Tango,had truly slipped. Which is why it was all

the more interesting that when heappeared in public on the RollingThunder tour he wore white face paint alot of the time. Already perhaps trying toretreat again into his own enigma,conscious that he may have shown toomuch of himself to the public, and by1978, the mask was back on. A new shtick,a new act, one that didn’t visit the depthsthat he had probed with Blood on theTracks, Renaldo and Clara, RollingThunder and subsequently Desire.

As for Brando, Last Tango in Paris hada huge effect on the acting giant. For thefirst time, seemingly, what he liked to referto as his craft had worked its way inside ofhim, and he was not happy about it. Hewas furious. He made his feelings clear tohis director, the man who had beenresponsible, after the film had wrapped:

I will never make a film like this oneagain. I don’t like being an actor at thebest of times but it’s never been this bad.I felt violated from the beginning to theend, every day and at every moment. Ifelt that my whole life, my most inti-mate feelings and even my children hadbeen torn from within me

Years later, when Brando penned hisfascinating autobiography, he wouldexpand even further:

‘Last Tango’ left me depleted andexhausted, perhaps in part because I’ddone what Bernardo asked and some ofthe pain I was experiencing was my veryown. Thereafter I decided to make myliving in a way that was less devastatingemotionally. In subsequent pictures Istopped trying to experience theemotions of my characters as I had

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always done before, and simply to act(sic) the part in a technical way.

Technique. And that is acting after allis it not? The opposite of The Method? Itreminds me of that great story from the setof Marathon Man. Observing DustinHoffman running himself into the groundand going to the most extraordinarylengths to try to inhabit the part he wasplaying, Lawrence Olivier said somethingalong the lines of:

Have you ever thought of acting, dearboy?

The Method is a great paradox to me.On the one hand it is supposed to be atotal integration in the character, to theextent of actually becoming that person,doing things they would have done, livinghow they would have lived etc. On theother hand it is supposed to result in theultimate in natural performance, so thatthere is total believability. Here we havethe natural and the stylised knockingagainst each other. Does every performerhave a ‘method’?

Brando certainly was true to his word.He turned his back on what had comenaturally to him, on what he did uncon-sciously. After Last Tango in 1972, MarlonBrando, the greatest actor of his genera-tion, and one of the finest actors who everlived, was only 48 years old. To date he hasonly made 12 further films. In 30 years.Many of these feature a part so small as tobe hardly worth calling an appearance atall. The next time we saw him on screenafter Last Tango was four years later in TheMissouri Breaks. A fine film, immenselyenjoyable and Brando is glorious, but notin terms of depth or real power. The

performance is technique, just acting.Hugely enjoyable, but a part he can sleep-walk through at no emotional expense tohimself whatsoever. It is the same in manyother films he has made recently, such asFree Money and The Freshman.

Only in Apocalypse Now, directed byFrancis Ford Coppola (as was TheGodfather) does Brando challenge himselfin any real way. Here he plays the crucialrole of Colonel Kurtz to great dramaticeffect, demonstrating his vast physicalpresence and, through his ramblingmonologues, his ability to hold your eyeand your nerve completely. It was a greatperformance but all technique. And afterthis it was all downhill. Superman was awalk-through take the money and runcameo role, A Dry White Season anothercameo role (albeit the best acting he hasdone since Last Tango), ChristopherColumbus yet another (and the worstacting of his career). Some films hadlarger parts but were so embarrassing itdefies belief (The Island of DoctorMoreau).

The vast majority of these films hadone thing in common. They required 1%of the great man’s vast talent. They wereparts of little depth and no real emotionalresonance whatsoever. The last film hemade, in 2001, saw him paired withRobert De Niro for the first time. Masterand pupil together on screen at last (afteruniquely winning Oscars for playing thesame part). Wow! What potential, achance for Brando to go out on a high! Achance for us to be able to put a full stopon his career with some pride, at 77 yearsold!

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Well... sadly not. They shouldn’t havebothered. The film is an utterly forgettablewaste of time and talent. At least in 1999’sFree Money you saw Brando having a balland hamming it up for all he was worthand dominating the screen time. It maynot have been On The Waterfront but itwas better than The Score. Whether thatwill stand as Brando’s last ever filmremains to be seen. But even if it does not,a return to the Brando of Last Tango orbefore seems impossible. Once studiedtechnique has replaced the muse of truegenius, can you ever return? Can youindeed repeat the past, or give a very goodimitation at best? What is clear is that theterribly personal experience Brandosuffered during the making of Last Tangoin Paris drove him to effectively give upacting, or at least the kind of acting hespecialised in, in which he inhabited everynuance of his character. He had to go deepwithin himself and he didn’t like it. It wasjust too much.

Brando has always made it clear thathe despised acting and actors, films andfilmmakers. He takes every opportunity torun it into the ground. Dylan has neverexactly gone to those lengths, but it hasnever been an easy road for him either. Hehas often said that he has no choice aboutwhat he does. That he feels compelled todo it. After his experiences with Blood onthe Tracks, Renaldo and Clara and theRolling Thunder Revue, where life and artwere imitating each other, Dylan couldhave reacted in the way Brando did, and toan extent I believe he did. I certainly thinkthere was a change of approach. After themass activity of that mid 70s period, and

Dylan’s divorce, his next album and toursaw him put on a different mask again.

On stage, it was far removed from boththe drama and ragged glory that RollingThunder gave us. In 1978, Dylan gave us atongue-in-cheek act, all smiles, introduc-tions and big band arrangements. Theaudience was placed firmly back where itbelonged. But the music was too impor-tant to him. He evolved. He did what hehad to do to survive. The mask hadslipped, so he looked for a new one thatwould enable him to carry on with whathe needed to do. That tour in 1978 wassomething of a fake as he was finding hisfeet again. He had released a partly excel-lent new album in Street-Legal, in whichhe took the opportunity of the openingsong, ‘Changing of the Guards’, to lookback and acknowledge the very need to bea chameleon, to adapt and change tosurvive:

‘Gentlemen’ he said ‘I don’t need yourorganisation, I’ve shined your shoesI’ve moved your mountains andmarked your cardsBut Eden is burning, either get ready foreliminationOr else your heart must have thecourage of the changing of the guards’

This, one of Dylan’s most memorableand powerful verses, clearly sets out thesituation post Blood on the Tracks, postRenaldo and Clara and post RollingThunder. Change to survive. Dylan wenton to have a born-again Christian experi-ence, which took his career to a mostunexpected but creatively rich area thatyielded great albums and great tours alike,but again with a specific agenda. His

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lexicon here was not the songs, so much asthe message. The path from the darkestreaches of his soul, from the ultimatepoint of submitting to his genius muse,that led Brando to turn his back, had ledDylan to Christ. He needed saving, or felthe did, and found solace in belief in JesusChrist as his own true saviour. Throughhis gifts as a writer and performer, he setout to communicate that to his audience.He was doing God’s work.

In 1981, as Dylan had begun to seem-ingly question his new found faith, heended a triumphant year of concerttouring. It must have seemed like a whirl-wind through all those years. But when hestarted touring again in 1984, he seemedvery different. He seemed to have adopteda technique to some extent, in the sameway Brando had done in latter film roles,to repeat what he once did naturally. The‘84 tour had a Dylan that soundeddifferent, that only had flashes of thegenius that used to blaze away.

Both Marlon Brando and Bob Dylanare control freaks. They have both beendogged by negative comments about theirtreatment of others and their ability toform normal human relations. They bothhave had disastrous relationships withwomen, unable to remain faithful to anyone woman at any one time. They bothhave many children and have been subjectto the rumour and accusation of furtherchildren by different women. For both ofthem, in the early to mid 70s theymomentarily lost the control that theyfeed off. In their attempts to climb back tothe top of the mountain on which theyonce proudly stood, their only option was

to surrender to their muse. They were nolonger dictating events, and it had a hugeimpact on them.

Because Dylan had no choice aboutwhat he does, luckily for us he hasmanaged to keep a degree of his museintact. Not to the extent it was up until1976 certainly. But there are flashes ofgenius. The 1979-80 Christian tours hadDylan taking the control to the extreme,preaching to audiences. What better wayto be in control than to firmly believe in aborn-again Christian dogma and to go outand preach it to your bemused audience?After this his albums have been patchy. Heis still capable of great, great writing. Inthe 1980s songs such as ‘Angelina’, ‘BlindWillie McTell’, ‘Jokerman’, ‘Foot ofPride’, ‘Every Grain of Sand’ and ‘TheGroom’s Still Waiting At The Altar’ stoodalongside any of his greatest composi-tions.

But Dylan was a suspicious and para-noid man by this point. Many of hisgreatest songs were left off of albums. Itwas as though he didn’t want to revealhimself to his audience, so we had to putup with a lot of lightweight, inferior songsand performances. It was OK, but nothingto compare to the heart and soul material.Like the hollow films Brando was making.I think we can consider ourselves luckythat Dylan did not end up the way Brandohas in a career sense. Dylan was in for thelong haul, and I for one cannot everimagine him finishing. Not until he isdead.

He has released superb albums inrecent years, albeit of a totally differentnature to his work between 62-66 and 74-

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76, such as Oh Mercy, the brilliant TimeOut Of Mind and “Love And Theft”. Theseare works of craft, of effort, of submittingto his lexicon of music history, of turningto creating patchworks of music and lyric,references to his own past and music pastthat are so numerous they make you dizzy.Is this genius? Are TOOM and L&T worksof genius?

I would say not. I would say they aresuperbly crafted albums from a man whoknows that he now has his back to the sun,rather than standing staring straight intoit. He is now lauded critically, and hasdiscovered a new audience and that rever-ential sense of ‘cool’ that falls on someelder statesmen. He survived long enoughand was gifted enough to reap the rewards.These are gifts we dare not have hoped for.That in his late fifties and early sixties heshould be emotionally and physicallycapable of such work is a marvel. And nowat approaching 62 he seems firmly incontrol again, and with his creative musefiring on, if not all cylinders, then as closeto it as we could dare imagine. He iswriting great songs (“Love And Theft”,‘`Cross The Green Mountain’), has justfinished a tour of the US in Autumn 2002which was full of wit and inventiondemonstrating his peerless talent as aninterpreter of song, and we have therelease of a new film to look forward tothis year.

Ironically, it has the title Masked andAnonymous. It sounds dreadful, but ohhow appropriate! Ironic on so manylevels. Ironic that Dylan should be riskinghis newly found total idolatry and can-do-no-wrong public opinion with another

film (he hasn’t a great track record inBrando’s field of expertise... Hearts of Firebeing the last debacle in 1986, but that’snot the point, he isn’t an actor in thatsense). Ironic that it should have a titlethat could sum up the whole of Dylan’scareer. He has been the masked man, theenigma for decades. Only not in 74-76where he was laid bare.

So what is this? The ultimate powertrip? The ultimate up yours to his audi-ence? To the world? Or the final key to allthat has gone before? Or a genuineattempt to explore his life’s work in adifferent way? Or just a way to pass thetime? We shall see. Dylan’s career hassurvived because he is a chameleon. Hechanges to survive. Brando has a verysimilar nature in his heart. He adapts andcan wear many masks. He is an expert liarand con man. But he has a self loathingthat Dylan doesn’t seem to have. Brandohas retreated to the security of hismansion home, retreating from the realworld almost entirely, losing himself in hiseccentricity. Dylan seeks solace in hisseemingly never ending tour schedule.You get the feeling neither is content. Twomen in late life in two self-inflictedprisons.

So where is Brando now? What is hedoing at the age of 79? He seems to havebecome increasingly eccentric, anothertrait he shares with Dylan. Both arepainfully private men, both very serious,gruff at times, yet both enjoy a childlikesense of humour, of stupid cracker gagsand practical jokes. And both seem to viewthe world with the same weary scepticism.Well, earlier this year Brando started a

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project called ‘Lying For A Living’,another very appropriate title! What hasemerged from this latest mad venturecouldn’t be made up. Apparently Brandowas giving acting masterclasses to the likesof Leonard DiCaprio, Elizabeth Taylor,Nick Nolte, Sean Penn, Michael Jackson,Jon Voigt, the list is endless. The classeswere filmed by American History XDirector Tony Kaye for a documentaryfilm entitled Conversations with MarlonBrando that would debut at a film festivallater this year.

Reports from the classes were wild.Brando turning up in drag or dressed as amonk, then fighting with Tony Kaye andthrowing him out of the production. TonyKaye said of Brando:

Marlon Brando should be with theTaliban. I think he’d be very comfort-able in that world, with a hundredwives, 14,000 children, no music and noone’s allowed to speak

Brando himself offers little in defence,he has never been the kind of man todefend himself. Neither has Dylan. Butamongst the wit and the outrageouscomment, Brando utters a few words thatperhaps get to the centre of his art, andDylan’s as well for that matter. Afterdismissing his profession for theumpteenth time:

Acting is the dumbest profession in theworld

he goes on as he often does, in a verbalvomit of words and language, like atornado. He moves to Shakespeare, andBrando is obsessed with Shakespeare,quoting huge passages in just about anyinterview you read:

There’s a speech from ‘Hamlet’ thatapplies to all artists... ‘To hold, as‘twere, the mirror up to nature.’ To benatural.

He then goes on to recite the entiresoliloquy, Act III, Scene 2, from memory:

Let your own discretion be your tutor.Suit the action to the word, the word tothe action, with this special observance,that you o’erstep not the modesty ofnature. For anything so overdone isfrom the purpose of playing, whose end,both at the first and now, was and is tohold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature.

Not a bad memory for a 78-year-oldman. I checked the quote and it is wordfor word spot on. And this sums upartistic expression so wonderfully well. Tohold a mirror up, not to oneself, or to theaudience, or to the world, but to natureitself. It is what Bob Dylan has managedfor a lifetime. It is what Brando did fleet-ingly, before he found it a burden toobothersome to continue with in public.Bob Dylan sang:

Sometimes my burden is more than Ican bear

But somehow he has remained a slaveto it and managed to continue to carry it.Somehow he found a technique to almostmatch the genius. Brando didn’t. He fellback on a technique that just got himthrough when it had to. He left early.

Reading interviews with Brando orarticles about him is a joy because he issuch an interesting man. The way he hasof speaking, of expressing ideas, and theactual things he says are so veryDylanesque. Read the liner notes to WorldGone Wrong, and an interview with

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Brando in 1996 in French Magazine LeStudio, and you could be reading wordsfrom the same man. The detachment frommodern life, from what might be consid-ered normal life. The dismissal of modernculture, the longing for the past in oneform or another, and not the recent past,but centuries gone by.

And watching Brando in the brilliantmid-60s short docu-film Meet MarlonBrando (an essential watch) is a verysimilar experience to watching Dylan inDont Look Back. The images of the menare quite different. Dylan is young, cock-sure, brash, confident, the waspish fop.Brando is older, the suave devil. But themanner in which they captivate you as youwatch, in which they totally disarm theirwould-be interviewers, is uncannilysimilar. You cannot take your eyes offthem.

Which takes us back to DennisHopper’s quote at the beginning of thisessay. The aura around them, the magic, isremarkable, and there are not too manypeople around who have command of suchan aura. So what does Truman Capoteknow? Are these careers nothing more thanpretences? These are surely two easy targetsto accuse of pretension, because theydragged their respective fields into an areamore challenging, less fearful, and weren’tafraid to show their genius for the world tosee. Brando’s use of The Method was oftenderided, but in watching his performances,such derision can rarely be substantiated.Watch him in, say, Apocalypse Now and acase for pretension can be made, but notsustained, and other than that Capote’squote cannot be justified.

As for Dylan, again, the term ‘con-man’ is unjustifiable. Whom did he con,and how? Capote liked to pigeonhole. Hisdismissing of people who operated onanother level is notable. After all, he saidof Jack Kerouac - ‘That’s not writing,that’s typing’. Of course I don’t agree withhim, but they are accusations which havebeen levelled against both men manytimes. Those of pretension, false intellec-tualism. Phoney heights of pretension. Butit is others who have lifted Dylan andBrando to a place where they can standaccused of such things. And the criticshave played a big part in this, fearful ofdealing with film and music in academia.

Both men play down the impact theyhave had. Brando rubbishes his work.Dylan remains ever elusive, never one toblow his own trumpet until fairly recently.So Capote has this one wrong. Both menhave challenged the very notion of intel-lectualism. Of academia. They took theirrespective arts in the search of truth. Theytook their audiences to where they hadnever been before. They truly held amirror up to nature. Their work will standas the reflection.

As a footnote, what have these twogreat men said of each other? Well, Dylanhas had only praise for Brando, evenduring their meeting in 1965 concerningPat Quinn. He was an idol for Dylan andhe always referred to him as such. As forBrando, he is outspoken on many things,and the comments he made with regard toDylan I think arose from Brando’s dislikeof anything that had come out of Americain the past 150 years. He reveresShakespeare, and historical figures he feels

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made a genuine contribution to the world.As for artists, the last was Picasso. It is allpart of the self-loathing he has alwayswallowed in. In the marvellousConversations With Brando that LawrenceGrobel conducted in 1978, Brando saidwhen asked about Dylan’s merits as anartist:

There are people who aspire to beartists, but I don’t think they are worthyof the calling...To some people BobDylan is a literary genius and he’s everybit and more what Dylan Thomaswas...

But when considering all of this it isprobably best to remember Brando’s veryDylanesque advice to Truman Capote:

Don’t pay too much attention toanything I say. I may feel differentlytomorrow.

Which is wonderfully Dylanesque.Maybe the best quote to remember fromBrando on Dylan is his most famous one:

The two loudest things I ever heard inmy life were a freight train going by andBob Dylan and The Band.

Maybe the truest thing that willconnect Brando and Dylan after they diewill be the wind. The wind has been sucha big part of Dylan’s career. The word‘wind’ carries with it a thousand memoriesand implications for Dylan. He started hiscareer telling us ‘the answer, my friend, isblowing in the wind’ and by 2001, nearly40 years later, he could hear the windwhispering and was desperately trying tohear its secrets. In the intervening years hehad offered up the image of the wind inmany guises, and all the time it seemed tocontain and withhold the very essence of

truth, a truth that has proved elusive all ofhis life. As for Brando, Peter Mansoconcludes his 1994 biography by offeringus the following magnificentShakespearean image of Marlon Brando at70:

One afternoon...during a freak after-noon thunderstorm, a friend of theactor was standing outside watching thelightning crack over the valley belowMulholland. He was surprised to seeBrando emerge and stand barefoot, hisarms across his chest, the wild windblowing through his hair and whippinghis kimono about his legs. The actorthen walked into the storm, like Lear onthe heath, and shouted above thethunder, ‘I Love the wind! When I die,I’m going to be part of it!’. And as a boltof lightning splintered the air, he turnedand vanished into the house.

What a powerful image! And one thatteases me, as seeing Brando play Lear issomething I also dreamed of, but now willnever see. Brando and Dylan are greatcreative men, and history will rightlypreserve their work as a testament to that.Dylan’s quote on Brando applies equallywell to himself:

I think that he is a brave man, intrepid,somebody that is not afraid. Totally. Heis one of the modern heroes.

Both are brave and intrepid men. Bothmodern heroes. Artistic heroes certainly,because they showed the world theirtalent, their artistic ‘genius’ for want of abetter word, weathered the backlash andthen came face to face with it. They thenspent the rest of their lives dealing with it,and that, to me, is heroic indeed.