Bob Dylan disguised as Henry Rollins

February 13, 2011 marks the 50th birthday of Henry Rollins. The reason I know the date of his birth is that 2.13.61, the day he was born, is the name of his publishing company and a number of his books sit on one of my shelves, all in a row. I see the repetition of that number every time I glance at the spines of the books on that shelf.

I suppose there will be a slew of articles regarding Rollins hitting the half-century mark, and this would be the place to run the boilerplate description of what he's done in his career. I won't burden you with another rehash. I imagine that not one of those articles will include anything regarding the aspect of his work that I find particularly interesting.

The shelf I keep my Henry Rollins books on is one that is reserved for titles that it seems likely that Bob Dylan both read and incorporated elements from into his lyrics. There are a lot of books on that shelf, and there are more Rollins titles, and more dog-eared pages within those books, than of any other author. The influence of the writing of Rollins on the late work of Dylan is huge and unrecognized. Many of my favorite lines in Dylan's songs since the late '90s, ones that resonate with me the most, seem to have roots in the work of Rollins. Some of Dylan's most elaborate word games center around Rollins as well.

I've written before that I think of Dylan as a magician, and that recognizing that illusions are being performed and finding the components and building blocks of those illusions are just the first steps when it comes to understanding his work. A number of recent books on Dylan fail miserably when it comes to recognizing the illusions. The range and depth of what Dylan has been up to has barely been tapped, and the tone and tenor of much of what I have read regarding the late work of Dylan leaves much to be desired. The real work is still being done. In a 2008 essay for The New Yorker titled "The Real Work: Modern magic and the meaning of life" Adam Gopnick sums this concept up very well. Regarding magicians he writes, "What they call 'the real work' isn’t the method, which anyone can learn from a book (and, anyway, all decent magicians know roughly how most tricks are done), but the whole of the handling and timing and theatrics of the effect, which are passed along from magician to magician and from generation to generation. The real work is the complete activity, the accumulated practice, the total summing up of tradition and ideas. The real work is what makes a magic effect magical."

In magic the effects fall into a very small range of categories, with transformation being one of the major ones. You don't have to look far to find descriptions of Dylan as a shape-shifter. One of the most astounding transformations that Dylan has undertaken is turning himself into Henry Rollins mid-song, and doing so in an almost imperceptible manner. The song "Highlands" closes Dylan's 1997 album Time Out of Mind. The song is over sixteen minutes long and a lot goes down in that time.

Here is the key verse regarding the transformation:
I see people in the park forgetting their troubles and woes
They're drinking and dancing, wearing bright-colored clothes
All the young men with their young women looking so good

Well, I'd trade places with any of them
In a minute, if I could

Did you see it? Dylan just became Henry Rollins, he traded places with him. OK, maybe you didn't see it. I didn't catch it the first couple of hundred times that I listened to the song either. Let me fill you in.

Here's a passage from the book High Adventure in the Great Outdoors by Henry Rollins, from page 50:

I was running on the strand down near the Hermosa Beach Pier. It was a clear day. Everybody was outside. I saw all these people in shorts and bikinis, having beers, playing volleyball on the sand, running around, laughing, calling out to each other, cooking hamburgers on hibachis, playing ZZ Top, fooling around on skate boards. Beautiful girls, all tanned and slim, smiling and talking with guys. People getting drunk, talking loud and laughing like a bunch of hyenas. Might have been nice to have been part of it.

I saw this guy walking down the street with this girl. They were both smiling, they were holding hands. You know she was one of those blondes, and she had these nice clothes on, and they were laughing and talking just walking down the street, probably going to eat dinner and then go to a movie or a play...I would have traded places with the guy in a second.

The similarities in those tales regarding wanting to trade places are no coincidence. Much of Time Out of Mind is constructed as a reflection of Rollins. Other passages within pages of that portion of High Adventure in the Great Outdoors are loaded with lines and phrases that also show up on Time Out of Mind.

The strongest example regards a line in the song "Tryin' to Get To Heaven". In that song Dylan sings, "When you think that you lost everything/You find out you can always lose a little more". This coming from the guy who famously sang, "When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose" is a quite an about-face. It is Dylan as Rollins.

High Adventure in the Great Outdoors by Henry Rollins, pp. 45 - 46:

I am a fool. Every night I want to die. I think how great it would be to be torn limb from limb by their greedy little hands, to be kicked into the grave by their dirty feet. Torn to bits. When they destroy me, they destroy themselves. I'm easier! So let it be! I like it, I love it! When you kill yourself, you're loving me. When you kill me, you'll die a thousand times. That's the only reason that I'm here, for your love. I revel in my stupidity. I wallow in my mortality. The cowards of the world come to me for pro tips! I'm the king of fools with nothing to prove, and everything to lose. Now if you think you lost it all, you're wrong. You can always lose a little more. So come on, get on up, rise up! Hey girls, hey! Come on down and lose. Right here, right here in the here and now. We're naked in the eyes of time so come on. Wrap your mind around mine. Look into my eyes and lie a thousand times and die a thousand more. If a coward dies a thousand times, then I have never lived. I'm too busy dying to even breathe.

Flip through the pages in that section of the book and you'll notice that the first lines of a couple of poems show up in the Time Out of Mind songs "Cold Irons Bound" and "'Til I Fell in Love with You". You can see where the sparks flew as Dylan read the book.

After Dylan makes his transformation into Henry Rollins in "Highlands" he walks around in his shoes for a while. The next verse includes a very peculiar couplet. Dylan sings, "I think what I need might be a full-length leather coat/Somebody just asked me if I registered to vote".

Dylan seems to have turned to two different books by Rollins to construct that part of the song. The first part appears in the book Now Watch Him Die, from page 146:

10.31.92 Indianapolis, IN: Happy Halloween. The crowd looked the same as always. Kicked it as hard as I could. Now I am the hole. After the show I sat shivering in a corner and shook my head no when they came to interrogate me. They take and take. They can't get me all the way. You finish playing your guts out and you're sitting there steaming and they will come up immediately and start in with the questions. I get sick of my mouth. I get sick of answering endless questions, some nights it's all I do. Scratch, pry, dig, scrape. Sign this. Wring his bones until there's no juice left. No. You won't get me. The radio guy comes out of nowhere and tells me he has some people he wants me to meet. I tell him that after shows all I want to do is kill people. He goes away. They have no idea. You work with people for years and they have no idea what's going on with you. You just go on talking hoping that somewhere someone gets it halfway the way you meant it. Wince when they don't, run and cover when they do. Some Nation of Islam guys were here tonight. They were an intense crew to say the least. Immaculately dressed with bow ties and full-length leather coats.

The full-length leather coat ties together Dylan's Halloween costume. To find the rhyme Dylan seems to have turned to this passage from Rollins' book Art To Choke Hearts:

I was walking into the Lucky Market on Lincoln Blvd. in Santa Monica the other day. This guy is out front with a clip board. He comes up to me and says, "Are you registered to vote?" I say "Hell no." He asks me why not and I tell him "None of the guys on the ballot ever say anything about killing cops, you know pigs. I want to see pig blood man!" I start making all these shotgun sounds and spit is flying out of my mouth and the guy is staring at me like I don't know what. I tell him that I want to vote for the guy that wants to totally annihilate eradicate and destroy pigs, I want to see a mountain of dead pigs and that guy will get my vote and until that I don't want to vote for shit. He looks at me and says, "I think you're going to be waiting a long time for that." Fuck man, I'll tell you, I think he's right.

Dylan's use of the writing of Rollins includes much more than what I've presented above. There is more of Time Out of Mind to discuss. Songs on Dylan's 2001 album "Love and Theft" also include numerous nods to Rollins and there is more beyond that. I'll elaborate on this material in the future; it is quite a rich vein.

Thanks to Edward Cook, who was generous enough to share with me some striking similarities that he found between a passage in Rollins' book Black Coffee Blues and Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One back in 2009. Without that I wouldn't have thought to look that closely at the work of Rollins. Cook's ability to recognize the importance of a small scrap of text is especially fine-tuned. That he was one of the editors of The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation is testament to that. When he suggests something to me I pay attention. And thanks also to Henry Rollins, for both his role in inspiring some of Dylan's most interesting music, and for taking the time to respond to my emails regarding some of my research. Happy birthday to you.