Goon Talk

Bob Dylan One, Two and Three: Mingus, Hemingway and Blavatsky

2012-01-16T15:05:00.004-07:00

I noticed Austin Kleon, author of the forthcoming book Steal Like an Artist, recently tweeted about my 2010 post "The Strange Case of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell & Michael Stipe," which regards allegations of plagiarism directed at Dylan by Mitchell. He suggests, "...maybe Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, two friends and peer songwriters, give us two models of the artist, or at least two ends of a spectrum: the artist who gleefully thieves and borrows influence and the artist who tries to avoid thievery at all all costs in the quest for personal authenticity."

Kleon presents a lot of good ideas on art and theft. I particularly like, "The secret: do good work and put it where people can see it." That is a rule that I can abide by. My post also turned up on jonimitchell.com with the disclaimer "Copyrighted material on this website is used in accordance with 'Fair Use', for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis, and will be removed at the request of the copyright owner(s)." I'm all for fair use.

Most of the responses to Joni Mitchell's comments that I read were fairly ugly in nature, but one email I received did stand out, as it was not the typical knee-jerk reaction. A friend commented, "I am now of the opinion that she is in on all of these veiled devices & like some kind of earthly Athena or even more appropriately, like Saraswati, using radical speech to awaken the lethargic population." I dig his sunny disposition; I think that Mitchell just might have been having a bad day. Maybe it was the Mingus.

The exploration into the range and extent of how Bob Dylan uses material from other sources in his recent work has just barely begun. There is a richness that has not been properly appreciated. My essay in the Summer 2010 issue of New Haven Review, a publication that aims to "resuscitate the art of the book review,” demonstrates, among other things, how Dylan used a step-by-step guide on how to be a charlatan that appears in Robert Greene's bestseller The 48 Laws of Power to construct a section of his memoir Chronicles: Volume One.

The January/February 2012 issue of American Songwriter features the cover story "The Reawakening of Bob Dylan" by Stephen Deusner and I suggest that parts of it seem informed by my essay, especially the passages regarding Bono and the birthplace of America. Deusner is clumsy, for instance, he writes, “But 2001’s 'Love and Theft' and 2006’s Modern Times further refine Dylan’s modular approach to songwriting and borrow phrases and occasionally entire lines from a wide range of sources: an obscure Civil War poet, a contemporary business best-seller, a largely forgotten jump-blues number." I have to assume that the "contemporary business best-seller" that he refers has got to be The 48 Laws of Power. While Dylan does use material from Greene's book numerous times in Chronicles: Volume One he did not use it as source material for song lyrics. Deusner and his editors are not paying attention and I prefer people who don’t plunder so poorly.

One element that I mentioned in passing in my New Haven Review essay is Dylan's use of material from the writing of composer and musician Charles Mingus. If I had known at the time that Joni Mitchell had such strong views regarding Dylan I might have expanded upon it more, in that both Dylan and Mitchell have used material from the same Mingus work, albeit in very different ways.

Joni Mitchell's 1979 collaboration with Charles Mingus, the album titled Mingus, includes the song "God Must Be A Boogie Man." Mitchell constructed the lyrics of the song out of material from the opening pages of Mingus' 1971 autobiography Beneath The Underdog. The book begins with Mingus in the middle of a conversation with his psychologist:

'In other words I am three. One man stands forever in the middle, unconcerned, unmoved, watching, waiting to be allowed to express what he sees to the other two. The second man is like a frightened animal that attacks for fear of being attacked. Then there's an over-loving gentle person who lets people into the uttermost sacred temple of his being and he'll take insults and be trusting and sign contracts without reading them and get talked down to working cheap or for nothing, and when he realizes what's been done to him he feels like killing and destroying everything around him including himself for being so stupid. But he can't - he goes back inside himself.'
'Which one is real?'
'They're all real.'
''The man who watches and waits, the man who attacks because he's afraid, and the man who wants to trust and love but retreats each time he finds himself betrayed. Mingus One, Two and Three. Which is the image you want the world to see?'

That opening, with those questions of identity, sets the tenor for the entire book. Mingus lets you know that even though many of the tales that he is about to tell are apocryphal, full of intentional button-pushing and wild braggadocio, at their core they are all real, in regards to what they reveal about the man and his many sides. It case one didn't catch that Mingus was tipping you off to this approach the publisher hammers the point home by including, "Some names in this work have been changed and some of the characters and incidents are fictitious."

Bob Dylan read the opening paragraphs from Beneath The Underdog before playing Mingus' "Eat That Chicken" on an episode of his radio show Theme Time Radio Hour. He called the book "riveting reading." A close look at how Dylan opens Chronicles: Volume One reveals him doing some literary jamming with Mingus. Dylan essentially tells you that some of the characters and incidents in his book are fictitious as well, that we are dealing with Dylan One, Two and Three, by his use of material from Mingus' book on the first page of his own book.

Chronicles: Volume One begins with this passage:

LOU LEVY, top man of Leeds Music Publishing company, took me up in a taxi to the Pythian Temple on West 70th Street to show me the pocket sized recording studio where Bill Haley and His Comets had recorded ‘Rock Around the Clock’ — then down to Jack Dempsey's restaurant on 58th and Broadway, where we sat down in a red leather upholstered booth facing the front window.
Lou introduced me to Jack Dempsey, the great boxer. Jack shook his fist at me.
‘You look too light for a heavyweight kid, you'll have to put on a few pounds. You're gonna have to dress a little finer, look a little sharper-not that you'll need much in the way of clothes when you're in the ring--don't be afraid of hitting somebody too hard.’

It is nearly invisible, but what Dylan seems to be doing here is asking the reader to consider his book in the same manner that one would consider Mingus' book. Jack Dempsey is actually Charles Mingus in disguise. To use material from the first page of Mingus' book on the first page of his own book would have been too obvious, so Dylan appears to have delved a bit deeper. Mingus' book exists in a couple of different editions and they are paginated in different ways. In one of them the following passage from chapter 17 appears on facing pages. In this section of the book Mingus, trying on his pimp persona, practices being intentionally cruel to a woman. The passage begins with Cindy responding to Mingus.

Beneath The Underdog, pp. 104-105:

'Here, you chilly bastard. You got a pocket-sized air conditioner stuck up your butt. Take it, it's money.'
'This hundred don't impress me none too much. They print fives and thousands too. . . That's better, bitch. Ha! I'll be back.'
'You'd be back if I didn't have a dime. Wouldn't you?'
'That's right, baby. Because you're wonderful. A beautiful, lady-style woman.'

'Hey, Timothy, did you say this bitch was rich?'
'She is, man, but she's tired of having cats take her bread and cut out.'
'She gave me a hundred when I sounded about smokes. Then she flashed this five-C note when I told her I wasn't impressed.'
'Let me see it, Ming. . . . Yeah, it's good. Keep it. Keep it all, and think about bigger ones to come. Don't look around, she just held up a fistful and gave me the wink. I'll tell her you're waiting outside in her car. But we gotta get back on the stand in about ten minutes, c.p. time. Love her up a little. Take her purse and take every penny for flashin' like that.'
'Take everything? What if she needs gas or something?'
'Man, don't go for that schitt. You can bet she's got a few bills in her stocking or up her ass. Take it all. You can strip a woman buck naked, take her belongings and lock her in the room, and when you come back she'll be wrapped in ermine and the walls all lined gold.'
'Okay, send her on out, Timothy. But what I got here is enough. I feel self-conscious. I ain't got that cold act down yet'
'You will. Don't forget the stocking top.'
'Later, Timmy.'

This bitch talking about she ain't got no money? Big white convertible, white top, white sidewall tires - damn! - white leather upholstery! White sable coat, white satin shoes, that platinum hair — a pure-dee white woman — except for those blue veins and green eyes. I definitely got me a white woman. Schitt! Where is that bitch?
'Timmy said you wanted me.'
'That's right, baby. Get in. Crazy car.'
'Uh huh, and you can't have it.'
'I wouldn't want it. Too light for a heavyweight like Mingus. Next I'm going Lincoln Continental. On my own.'
'Are you really, you big, sweet bastard!'
'You crazy white bitch! Yeah! Love me!'

It appears that Dylan has used three elements from this passage in the beginning of his own book - "pocket sized," the leather upholstery and the part about being "too light for a heavyweight." Dylan flips the meaning of “too light for a heavyweight” and may be playing with the notion that while he might not look like a heavyweight, he actually is – just not in the ring.

Dylan employs this method of phrases lifted from other works hundreds of times throughout Chronicles: Volume One, including very similar instances of creating dialogue out of passages from another jazzbo autobiography, Mezz Mezzrow's Really The Blues. By using the material from Beneath The Underdog in the very first sentence of his memoir it seems that he might be letting the careful reader know that while many of the tales he is about to tell are lifted directly from other writers that essentially they are all real as well, just like tales Mingus told.

In his book Mingus writes about how when he was a young boy he would bring pieces of broken pottery to Simon Rodia, who was building the Watts Towers at the time, essentially casting Rodia as a mirror image of himself. As I mentioned above, Mingus' book famously begins with the sentence, "In other words, I am three." The portion of the book regarding Rodia and the Watts Towers begins with, "At that time in Watts there was an Italian man, named Simon Rodia - though some people said his name was Sabatino Rodella, and his neighbors called him Sam." Three names - in other words, Rodia is three as well.

Mingus recognized the similarities in the ways that they each approached assemblage and structured improvisation. The Watts Towers are jazz and indeed have a little bit of Mingus in them. Dylan paints himself as Mingus through assemblage; he is therefore incorporating a little bit of Rodia by default. In an odd twist Dylan and Rodia appear side by side in one of the most iconic pop assemblages of the 20th century - the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Robert Duncan's poem "Nel Mezzo Del Cammin Di Nostra Vita" celebrates the Watts Towers, and considering Duncan's "grand collage" concept of poetry it is easy to see why. Approaching Chronicles: Volume One with Duncan in mind can be useful. In her essay “Robert Duncan and the Question of Law: Ernst Kantorowicz and the Poet's Two Bodies” Graça Capinha suggests that Duncan, "...works toward a language capable of dealing with complexity and with multiple and superimposed layers of meaning — the Blakean struggle of contraries." and adds that, "The poet used the jigsaw puzzle and the mobile as metaphors to define his project of the grand collage. He saw his poetry as an act of participation in a major grand collage of all the possible wisdoms, of all the possible knowledges within languages, within societies, within galaxies, within the universe — in motion."

Duncan, like alchemist Harry Smith, was raised by Theosophists and he had an interesting take on the major works of Helena Blavatsky. It is a viewpoint that is worth exploring, in that Dylan uses passages from Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled in Chronicles: Volume One. Here are some examples of how Dylan used her work.

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 219:

Somebody different was bound to come along sooner or later who would know that world, been born and raised with it ... be all of it and more. Someone with a chopped topped head and a power in the community. He'd be able to balance himself on one leg on a tightrope that stretched across the universe and you'd know him when he came-there'd be only one like him. The audience would go that way, and I couldn't blame them.

Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, Vol II - Theology by Helena Blavatsky, p. 3:

Since the day when modern science gave what may be considered the death-blow to dogmatic theology by assuming the ground that religion was full of mystery, and mystery is unscientific, the mental state of the educated class has presented a curious aspect. Society seems from that time to have been ever balancing itself upon one leg on an unseen tight-rope stretched from our visible universe into the invisible one; uncertain whether the end hooked on faith in the latter might not suddenly break and hurl it into final annihilation.

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 220:

You live with what life deals you. We have to make things fit. The voice on the record was never going to be the voice of the martyred man of constant sorrow, and I think in the beginning, Danny had to come to terms with that, and when he gave that notion up, that's when things started to work.

Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, Vol II - Theology by Helena Blavatsky, pp. 8-9:

When dying on the cross, the martyred Man of Sorrows forgave his enemies. His last words were a prayer in their behalf. He taught his disciples to curse not, but to bless, even their foes. But the heirs of St. Peter, the self-constituted representatives on earth of that same meek Jesus, unhesitatingly curse whoever resists their despotic will.

Note that Dylan plays with “Man of Constant Sorrow,” a song he recorded on his first album, in his reworking of the material from Blavatsky, an interesting touch.

An important thing to grasp here is that both Chronicles: Volume One and Isis Unveiled are elaborate works of collage, incorporating lots of uncredited material from the works of others. The book A Modern Priestess of Isis by Vsevolod Sergyeevich Solovyoff, from 1895, includes an interesting appendix titled "The Sources of Madame Blavatsky's Writings" by William Emmette Coleman. Here are the first two paragraphs:

During the past three years I have made a more or less exhaustive analysis of the contents of the writings of Madame H. P. Blavatsky; and I have traced the sources whence she derived - and mostly without credit being given - nearly the whole of their subject-matter. The presentation, in detail, of the evidences of this derivation would constitute a volume; but the limitations of this paper will admit only of a brief summary of the results attained by my analysis of these writings. The detailed proofs and evidence of every assertion herein are now partly in print and partly in manuscript; and they will be embodied in full in a work I am preparing for publication, - an exposé of theosophy as a whole. So far as pertains to Isis Unveiled, Madame Blavatsky’s first work, the proofs of its wholesale plagiarisms have been in print two years, and no attempt has been made to deny or discredit any of the data therein contained. In that portion of my work which is already in print, as well as that as yet in manuscript, many parallel passages are given from the two sets of writings, - the works of Madame Blavatsky, and the books whence she copied the plagiarised passages; they also contain complete lists of the passages plagiarised, giving in each case the page of Madame Blavatsky’s work in which the passage is found, and the page and name of the book whence she copied it. Any one can, therefore, easily test the accuracy of my statements.

In Isis Unveiled, published in 1877, I discovered some 2000 passages copied from other books without proper credit. By careful analysis I found that in compiling Isis about 100 books were used. About 1400 books are quoted from and referred to in this work; but, from the 100 books which its author possessed, she copied everything in Isis taken from and relating to the other 1300. There are in Isis about 2100 quotations from and references to books that were copied, at second-hand, from books other than the originals; and of this number only about 140 are credited to the books from which Madame Blavatsky copied them at second-hand. The others are quoted in such a manner as to lead the reader to think that Madame Blavatsky had read and utilised the original works, and had quoted from them at first-hand, - the truth being that these originals had evidently never been read by Madame Blavatsky. By this means many readers of Isis, and subsequently those of her Secret Doctrine and Theosophical Glossary, have been misled into thinking Madame Blavatsky an enormous reader, possessed of vast erudition; while the fact is her reading was very limited, and her ignorance was profound in all branches of knowledge.

I can relate to the exhaustive analysis aspects of Coleman's work, but his approach leaves me cold. In the 1952 book Plagiarism and Originality Alexander Lindey discusses the vices inherent in the method that Coleman took, what Jack London called the "deadly parallel" approach in a letter defending his own use of other writer’s material. Lindey suggests that, "Parallel-hunters do not, as a rule, set out to be truthful and impartial. They are hell-bent on proving a point." This does not always have to be the case, I believe that one can look for parallels without a set agenda, but Coleman clearly had an ax to grind.

Lindey also states, "A double-column analysis is a dissection. An autopsy will reveal a great deal about a cadaver, but very little about the spirit of the man who once inhabited it." I suggest that in the case of Dylan’s memoir very often the opposite is at play. Frequently what Dylan is saying on the surface is false, with many tales that are clearly not based in reality and through the dissection one can sometimes catch the occasional soupçon of the spirit of the man.

Robert Duncan had a much different take on Blavatsky's use of the material of others. Consider this passage from the book Contextual Practice: Assemblage and the Erotic in Postwar Poetry and Art by Stephen Fredman:

'In the mess of astrology, alchemy, numerology, magic orders, neo-Platonic, kabbalistic, and Vedic systems, combined, confused, and explained, queered evolution and wishful geology, transposed heads,' Blavatsky discovered, Duncan claims, 'the collagist’s art.' The elements of collage he discerns in Blavatsky include a 'charged fascination' with the material being composed, an obedience to unknown but compelling feelings, and a new respect for discarded phenomena: 'Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine, midden heaps that they are of unreasonable sources, are midden heaps where, beyond the dictates of reason, as in the collagist’s art, from what has been disregarded or fallen into disregard, genres are mixed, exchanges are made, mutations begun from scraps and excerpts from different pictures…to form the figures of a new composition.'

The collagist’s art forming the figures of a new composition is a great way to approach Chronicles: Volume One. In The H.D. Book Duncan writes that, "...in Blavatsky’s theosophy the individual psyche inhabits every place and time..." Dylan constantly plays with place and time in Chronicles: Volume One. He very often has one character inhabit multiple places and times, if you look closely at how they have been constructed.

A good example of this is Billy the Butcher, someone Dylan writes about encountering at the Café Wha?. In my New Haven Review essay I show how he is, in part, a disguised version of the 19th century scoundrel William "Bill the Butcher" Poole. At the very same time he is also one of the characters from the Hemingway short story "The Killers." Dylan writes, “The Butcher wore an overcoat that was too small for him, buttoned tight across the chest."

"The Killers":

He wore a derby hat and a black overcoat buttoned across the chest. His face was small and white and he had tight lips. He wore a silk muffler and gloves.
'Give me bacon and eggs,' said the other man. He was about the same size as Al. Their faces were different, but they were dressed like twins. Both wore overcoats too tight for them.

Why would Dylan have a character from "The Killers" playing the Café Wha?? I believe that the answer has to do with vaudeville. Hemingway writes, "In their tight overcoats and derby hats they looked like a vaudeville team." Dylan returns to "The Killers" later on in the book, when he partners with artist Robyn Whitlaw and does a vaudeville routine.

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 66:

One of them, Robyn Whitlaw, the outlaw artist walked by in a motion like a slow dance. I said to her, 'What's happening?' 'I'm here to eat the big dinner', she responded.

"The Killers":

'What do they do here nights?' Al asked.
'They eat the dinner," his friend said. 'They all come here and eat the big dinner.'

Dylan also incorporates an element from one of Hemingway's letters regarding "The Killers" into Chronicles: Volume One, and lines from many other Hemingway stories appear throughout the book.

Regarding Billy the Butcher Dylan writes, “…sometime in the past he'd been in a straitjacket in Bellevue…” and that just might be another flash of Mingus, because Mingus in a straitjacket in Bellevue is a pivotal moment in Beneath The Underdog.

One character, in just a few sentences, zips through space and time. Many other characters do this as well. A close look at the description of John Hammond on page five of Chronicles: Volume One reveals a nod to The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. This playing with time is a scheme that is used throughout the book, one of many that deserve a closer look.

Combining the diligence of William Emmette Coleman in uncovering the source material with the approach suggested by Robert Duncan may be a path to a better understanding what Dylan was up to regarding his extensive use of the material of others. When it comes to Blavatsky it is especially worth exploring the view of her as a charlatan, considering the way that charlatanism plays a key role in the hidden subtext of Chronicles: Volume One. In 2003 A.O. Scott wrote an interesting review of Dylan’s film Masked and Anonymous for The New York Times. He commented, “His lifelong foraging in the overgrown pastures of American popular culture has taught him that the true prophet is often indistinguishable from the snake-oil salesman, and his gaunt, weathered frame contains both personas.” That snake-oil salesman mask intrigues me, and there is a lot to learn about that persona if one takes the time to look at the rough ore that Dylan stamped with his own die.

Deciphering The Asia Series: Courtier Bob with Churchill's Sheep in Dullsville

2011-10-15T16:16:00.000-06:00

Courtiers are like magicians: They deceptively play with appearances, only letting those around them see what they want them to see. With so much deception and manipulation afoot, it is essential to keep people from seeing your tricks and glimpsing your sleight of hand. - Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power

Open confidences are being made every day, and it remains for the eye to train itself to see them without prejudice or restraint. - Man Ray, "The Age of Light"

A way to gain some insight into what Bob Dylan might have had in mind with his controversial Gagosian Gallery show The Asia Series is to examine the clues that he has planted in the interview that appears in the catalog. I've covered a few of these in my two previous posts and there are still many more to consider.

In the interview Dylan states, "Winston Churchill made a lot of paintings, mostly landscapes and cottages. Nobody compares his artistry with his diplomacy. He said that he knew of nothing else that more completely occupied the mind without exhausting the body. That's probably a clue to why people paint."

Dylan flat out tells you that this is a clue. He also just told you that black is white; Churchill's artistry and his diplomacy are intertwined and Dylan is quite aware of this. In his memoir Chronicles: Volume One Dylan uses elements from a section of Robert Greene's The 48 Laws of Power titled “The Science of Charlatanism, or How to Create a Cult in Five Easy Steps" in a most intriguing way. I explore this in my 2010 New Haven Review essay "Bob Charlatan." In Greene's book Law 24 is "Play The Perfect Courtier" and I suggest that Courtier Bob is referencing this example given by Greene:

Scene XI
Winston Churchill was an amateur artist, and after World War II his paintings became collector's items. The American publisher Henry Luce, in fact, creator of Time and Life magazines, kept one of Churchill's landscapes hanging in his private office in New York. On a tour through the United States once, Churchill visited Luce in his office, and the two men looked at the painting together. The publisher remarked, "It's a good picture, but I think it needs something in the foreground — a sheep, perhaps.” Much to Luce's horror, Churchill's secretary called the publisher the next day and asked him to have the painting sent to England. Luce did so, mortified that he had perhaps offended the former prime minister. A few days later, however, the painting was shipped back, but slightly altered: a single sheep now grazed peacefully in the foreground.

Interpretation
In stature and fame, Churchill stood head and shoulders above Luce, but Luce was certainly a man of power, so let us imagine a slight equality between them. Still, what did Churchill have to fear from an American publisher? Why bow to the criticism of a dilettante? A court—in this case the entire world of diplomats and international statesmen, and also of the journalists who court them—is a place of mutual dependence. It is unwise to insult or offend the taste of people of power, even if they are below or equal to you. If a man like Churchill can swallow the criticisms of a man like Luce, he proves himself a courtier without peer. (Perhaps his correction of the painting implied a certain condescension as well, but he did it so subtly that Luce did not perceive any slight.) Imitate Churchill: Put in the sheep. It is always beneficial to play the obliging courtier, even when you are not serving a master.

Other elements from this section of Greene's book show up in Chronicles: Volume One. Regarding Fred Neil at The Café Wha? Dylan writes, "He was the emperor of the place, even had his own harem, his devotees. You couldn't touch him. Everything revolved around him." That is right out of Scene II in the "Play The Perfect Courtier" chapter. There Greene writes, "The Chinese emperor was considered more than a man—he was a force of nature. His kingdom was the center of the universe, and everything revolved around him."

Dylan balances his portrait of Fred Neil with some interesting nuances. Not only is Neil part Chinese emperor, but Dylan also has painted him with colors drawn from Sax Rohmer's description of Dr. Fu-Manchu's slave girl Kâramanèh. (I owe the Rohmer observation to Ed Cook.)

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 10:

Freddy had the flow, dressed conservatively, sullen and brooding, with an enigmatical gaze, peachlike complexion, hair splashed with curls and an angry and powerful baritone voice that struck blue notes and blasted them to the rafters with or without a mike.

The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer:

What eyes she had!—of that blackly lustrous sort nearly always associated with unusually dark complexions; but Kâramanèh's complexion was peachlike, or rather of an exquisite and delicate fairness which reminded me of the petal of a rose. By some I have been accused of romancing about this girl's beauty, but only by those who had not met her; for indeed she was astonishingly lovely.

At last her eyes fell, the long lashes drooped upon her cheeks. She turned and walked slowly to the chair in which Fu-Manchu had sat. Placing the keys upon the table amid the scientific litter, she rested one dimpled elbow upon the yellow page of the book, and with her chin in her palm, again directed upon me that enigmatical gaze.

In a review of the Dylan show that appeared in The New York Times yesterday Holland Cotter writes, "It’s just dull, and in the context of the present pervasive dullness and unoriginality of a lot of painting in New York, it fits in all too well." Context is critical when considering what Dylan is doing. It is easy to just place Dylan's work in a boring context and label it boring as well, but Cotter does more. He hints that there might be something else going on, hedging his bet by noting, "...unless there’s some Duchampian gesture afoot here..." in his review. I pointed out such a Duchampian gesture in my post "Dylan, Duchamp and the Letter from Woody" two weeks ago.

I suggest that the editors at The New York Times give staff enigmatologist Will Shortz a crack at The Asia Series. He is better equipped to recognize the schemes that are afoot in the puzzles that surround the paintings. He might have a view that plunges past "remarkably dull."

Dylan makes a game out of being labeled dull by critics in Chronicles: Volume One. When writing about hearing Roy Orbison on the radio he notes, "I'd listen and wait for another song, but next to Roy the playlist was strictly dullsville . . . gutless and flabby." One of the things that Dylan is doing there is referencing a review of one of his concerts that appeared in Variety. The headline was "BOB DYLAN DESTROYS HIS LEGEND IN MELBOURNE: CONCERT STRICTLY DULLSVILLE." That review was published on April 27, 1966. Nearly half a century later some recent headlines might as well have read "BOB DYLAN DESTROYS HIS LEGEND IN NEW YORK: PAINTINGS STRICTLY DULLSVILLE." Dylan's dullsville dispatches deserve a deeper dive.

Deciphering The Asia Series: Dylan and The Pied Piper of Tucson

2011-10-08T15:43:00.000-06:00

"They hadn't been on ship but about two weeks, I'm sure it was not three/When she espied his cloven hoof and wept most bitterly" - "The House Carpenter"

The processes used by Bob Dylan in his art are fascinating and in John Elderfield's introduction to his interview with Dylan that appears in the catalog for The Asia Series he gives a bit of background on the collaborative process they used to craft it. He writes, "It developed in the precise sequence in which it is printed, our conversations continuing—such is Dylan's focus on getting things right—until it reached what Marcel Duchamp would call a 'definitively incomplete' state at the end of June."

I find Dylan's use of the interview as art form, that "focus on getting things right," to be far more interesting than the paintings that they discuss. In my previous post, which centered on what appears to be a hidden nod by Dylan to Duchamp, I mentioned that there are other coded references to explore. My previous post established how Dylan discusses Woody Guthrie on the surface of the interview and also in a coded fashion by using an element from one of Guthrie's letters. Dylan employs this same strategy several times in the interview.

A comment that Dylan makes in the interview is, "Painting is visual. There isn't anything Darwinistic about it, whereas making music is more like stunt flying or bullfighting." What Dylan seems to be doing here is referencing an essay on the fall of boxer Mike Tyson by Joyce Carol Oates.

"Rape and the Boxing Ring" Newsweek February 24, 1992:

The paradox of boxing is that it so excessively rewards men for inflicting injury upon one another that, outside the ring, with less 'art,' would be punishable as aggravated assault, or manslaughter. Boxing belongs to that species of mysterious masculine activity for which anthropologists use such terms as 'deep play': activity that is wholly without utilitarian value, in fact contrary to utilitarian value, so dangerous that no amount of money can justify it. Sports-car racing, stunt flying, mountain climbing, bullfighting, dueling — these activities, through history, have provided ways in which the individual can dramatically, if sometimes fatally, distinguish himself from the crowd, usually with the adulation and envy of the crowd, and traditionally, the love of women. Women — in essence, Woman — is the prize, usually self-proffered. To look upon organized sports as a continuum of Darwinian theory — in which the sports-star hero flaunts the superiority of his genes — is to see how displays of masculine aggression have their sexual component, as ingrained in human beings as any instinct for self-preservation and reproduction. In a capitalist society, the secret is to capitalize upon instinct.

Of course playing music is not like stunt flying or bullfighting, in that one is unlikely to die by engaging in the act, but the distinctions between playing music for the adulation of the crowd, the love of women and the inherent sexual component versus the solitary act of painting that Dylan makes in this way are interesting. Boxing as Dylan's sport of choice is well known, but the subject matter here is not what draws my attention - it is the author of the piece. Joyce Carol Oates' haunting short story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?," perhaps her most noted work, begins with the dedication "For Bob Dylan."

Dylan's planting of the reference to Oates in this interview could serve as a marker or clue in his vast array of puzzles and games. In "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" a young girl is led to her doom by one Arnold Friend. In an interview with John Knott and Christopher Keaske for their book Mirrors: An Introduction to Literature Oates stated, "Arnold Friend is a fantastic figure: he is Death, he is the 'elf-knight' of the ballads, he is the Imagination, he is a Dream, he is a Lover, a Demon, and all that."

Oates' description of the daemon lover in her short story includes, "The driver's glasses were metallic and mirrored everything in miniature." Later she adds, "He opened the door very carefully, as if he were afraid it might fall off. He slid out just as carefully, planting his feet firmly on the ground, the tiny metallic world in his glasses slowing down like gelatine hardening, and in the midst of it Connie's bright green blouse."

I've long considered that a passage in Chronicles: Volume One, a book that is filled with hundreds of reworked lines from other sources, could be an allusion to the mirrored sunglasses of an old fiend known as A. Friend. On page 164 of his memoir Dylan makes a quick passing comment regarding his wife:

She could make me feel like I wasn't in some godforsaken hole. One day when she was wearing metallic sunglasses I could see myself in miniature and thought how small everything had become.

This section of Chronicles: Volume One is loaded with word play. For instance, the previous page has a tale about seeing soul singer Joe Tex on The Tonight Show that is crafted out of elements from Gerri Hirshey's Nowhere to Run. The following page has a line from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Go another page in either direction and you'll find reworked material from Jack London, Joe Eszterhas, Marcel Proust and Sax Rohmer - if you know where to look.

It has been noted that disc jockey Bobby King in "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" may reflect aspects of Dylan as well. In their essay "Connie's Tambourine Man: A New Reading of Arnold Friend" Mike Tierce and John Michael Crafton explore the messianic aspects of Friend. They write, "Rising out of Connie's radio, Arnold Friend/Bob Dylan is a magical, musical messiah; he persuades Connie to abandon her father's house. As a manifestation of her own desires, he frees her from the limitations of a fifteen-year-old girl, assisting her maturation by stripping her of her childlike vision."

Over the years I've clocked thousands and thousands of hours on the air as a disc jockey, so I tend to pay especial attention to the role of the disc jockey in literature. I'm struck by a passage where Oates captures a bit of Bobby King's patter:

She sat on the edge of her bed, barefoot, and listened for an hour and a half to a program called XYZ Sunday Jamboree, record after record of hard, fast, shrieking songs she sang along with, interspersed by exclamations from "Bobby King": "An' look here, you girls at Napoleon's — Son and Charley want you to pay real close attention to this song coming up!"

As a student of the blues when I read "Son and Charley" I immediately think of Son House and Charley Patton. I can't help but wonder if Oates might have considered that too. I imagine disc jockey Bobby King working in oblique references to some of his favorite artists in between the shrieking songs in a way that would go over the heads of his teenage listeners.

"Along with Son House and Charley Patton no one was more important to the development of Delta blues than Tommy Johnson" said Dylan the disc jockey on an episode of his Theme Time Radio Hour. It's as if Bobby King, the blues fanatic who had to play the Top 40 of the day, finally got to spin the records that he loved on the radio so many decades later.

Of critical writing on "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" there is no shortage. Much is made of this passage: "'Now, these numbers are a secret code, honey,' Arnold Friend explained. He read off the numbers 33, 19, 17 and raised his eyebrows at her to see what she thought of that, but she didn't think much of it."

I am taken by the broad range of interpretations of what the secret code that is painted on Friend's golden car might mean. One interpretation has you counting the books of the Bible in reverse, another posits that the numbers add up to a sexual position. Yet another suggests that it represents the true age of Friend followed by the ages of his previous victims. I think that there is a chance that Dylan has come up with his own code, one that points in the direction of Arnold Friend.

"Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" was sparked in part by the true crimes of the notorious Charles "Smitty" Schmid. This strange charismatic thrill-killer was dubbed "The Pied Piper of Tucson" by LIFE magazine in an article of the same name back in 1966. Oates comments on this in one of her books.

From (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities:

He charmed his victims as charismatic psychopaths have always charmed their victims, to the bewilderment of others who fancy themselves free of all lunatic attractions. The Pied Piper of Tucson: a trashy dream, a tabloid archetype, sheer artifice, comedy, cartoon — surrounded, however improbably, and finally tragically, by real people. You think that, if you look twice, he won't be there. But there he is. I don't remember any longer where I first read about this Pied Piper — very likely in Life Magazine. I do recall deliberately not reading the full article because I didn't want to be distracted by too much detail. It was not after all the mass murderer himself who intrigued me, but the disturbing fact that a number of teenagers — from "good" families — aided and abetted his crimes.

I'll give Oates a pass for not recognizing the difference between a mass murderer and a serial killer. In my previous post I mentioned that the eight foot tall image of a 1966 LIFE magazine cover with added cryptic text by Dylan that is on the Gagosian Gallery website deserves additional scrutiny. Here is Dylan's added text:

The Shadow
The Mask
The Bowl
The Underworld
The Birds
The Enemy
The Prick
The Tower
The Risk Taking
The Test of Time
Thinking Outside the Box
What Happens Next

"What Happens Next" added to the cover of the February 25, 1966 issue of LIFE could be interpreted in a number of ways. An approach that incorporates the cliched "Thinking Outside the Box" would be to consider the following issue of LIFE, in that it is what happens next. The next issue of LIFE was dated March 4, 1966. That just happens to be the issue that features the article "The Pied Piper of Tucson" by Don Moser.

There is much more going on here. If you can tune out the noise coming from the echo chamber of accusations leveled towards Dylan over the past few weeks and look at the work there are plenty of intriguing things to find.

Deciphering The Asia Series: Dylan, Duchamp and the Letter from Woody

2011-10-01T16:22:00.000-06:00

All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. - Marcel Duchamp

When considering what Bob Dylan might have had in mind with his new collection of paintings The Asia Series, which has raised a bit of a hubbub, a good place to start is the interview with John Elderfield that is in the catalog for the series.

Dylan has been using the interview form to incorporate hidden messages and subtext. For instance, in the 2009 interview with Bill Flanagan to promote the album Together Through Life, which appears to have been conducted via email, Dylan included a series of hidden references to the poems of Juvenal. I covered this in a pair of posts at the time. Sean Wilentz makes reference to my posts in his book Bob Dylan in America when he writes, "By 2009, Dylan, knowingly or not, was mixing other allusions with his carnival reveries—Atlas the Dwarf and Miss Europe probably come out of Juvenal's Satires—but then again, the late Roman Empire was a circus, too."

That Wilentz writes "knowingly or not" is a cop-out, a big one. I have provided hundreds of examples of Dylan using material from other sources in his work, from his songs to his memoir to his interviews, often with clear winks or nods. It is part of his method, an aspect of his art that has not been fully explored or appreciated.

In my previous post I demonstrated how Dylan's description of artist Red Grooms in Chronicles: Volume One is, in part, a collage constructed out of passages from articles on Grooms that appeared in TIME and New York Magazine. I showed how Dylan seems to have included a hidden reference to muralist José Clemente Orozco in that discussion of Grooms. I mentioned that Dylan uses similar methods to incorporate hidden references to other visual artists, particularly Kandinsky and Rouault.

Because of that this series of exchanges in the Elderfield interview caught my eye:

You are reported as having said in the late 1970s, "I've learned as much from Cézanne as I have from Woody Guthrie." Before getting to Cézanne, are you interested in Guthrie's paintings as well as his songs? And did you talk to him about them when you visited him?
Woody made simple sketches for small publications, and he was a sign painter before becoming a musician. But I never did talk to him about it.

Staying with American art for a while, you have spoken of your interest in the paintings of George Bellows and Thomas Hart Benton. I can see how makers of narrative figure compositions would attract you, but why them in particular—if, indeed, they are particular favorites?
Benton is the Uncle Dave Macon of painting. Most of his pictures have a knee-slapping, banjo-riffing, farmyard quality. And it looks to me like he knew something about the camera obscura, though to what degree it's hard to say. Whether he painted his models upside down, I don't know, but that style has always fascinated me. As for Bellows, I just like his themes and his color combinations.

Among more recent Americans, you have spoken about Red Grooms. When did you become interested in his work?
I think I talked about Red Grooms in my book. I saw a few of his exhibitions back in the '60s and have always marveled at his ability to create excitement out of mundanity. Fantastic dreams, mass wealth on a little scale, preposterous and satirical, but very imposing.

That Dylan calls Thomas Hart Benton the "Uncle Dave Macon of painting" is peculiar, in that Dylan calls Red Grooms the "the Uncle Dave Macon of the art world" in Chronicles: Volume One. Dylan is drawing attention to this for a reason. He is continuing his discussion of Woody Guthrie from the previous question in the interview, but in a way that needs to be deciphered.

I've written about and demonstrated Dylan's use of the letters of Jack London, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe. Dylan also uses material from the letters of Woody Guthrie and he is acknowledging this here. In a colorful 1941 letter to Millard Lampell of the Almanac Singers Guthrie refers to Pete Seeger as "the Uncle Dave Macon of the labor movement." Here's part of the letter:

Dear Mill, Howdy Boy,

How's the writers cramps? Making lots of money? It looks like the more money you make the worse it cramps your writing. Same way with singing or anything else. But the way you old boys are set up there in your old loft I imagine there aint no way in the world you could let money cramp you. The more dough you go to making the more you get to run around with the white collars. I hope you don't ever let their ideas soak in on you. It was such a good stew that you old boys made and the best time was had right there too. Your songs and the stuff you wrote were worth a lot to either side and will attract attention for you from both sides. The other side sucks you dry and dont give you nothing. Our side gives you the real stuff you need and whole train loads of good fresh material, but not much money. We aint on the money side and dont fight with money, but we use the Truth and its like a spring of cold water. Hows the Ciscoes and have you seen them lately? I wrote to them and their address has been changed. You big horse you must have been awful busy a getting rich. You aint wrote me a drop. Old Pete's still a throwing his head way back like a coyote and a frailing that old banjo. Petes really been around. He's the Uncle Dave Macon of the labor movement.

That the original context of the Uncle Dave Macon comment in Guthrie's letter has to do with the labor movement adds another dimension to Dylan's comments regarding Benton, bringing to mind a number of Benton's works on the subject. It is put to better use here than it was in Chronicles: Volume One, where it was applied to Red Grooms.

When Dylan comments on Grooms in this new interview he may be using some of the same techniques that he uses in that section of Chronicles: Volume One that he just called attention to. First, notice that Dylan makes a passing reference to camera obscura. Dylan probably used a similar method for the paintings in The Asia Series. He also may be making a reference to another artist who often took a confrontational approach in his art. When discussing Red Grooms he uses the odd phrase "preposterous and satirical." I suggest that those three words are a key, just as "Uncle Dave Macon" serves as a key. In Chronicles: Volume One Dylan hid that reference to Orozco while discussing Grooms. This time he could be discussing the work of Marcel Duchamp through the same method.

From the 1945 essay "Marcel Duchamp: Anti-Artist" by Harriet Janis and Sidney Janis:

The Coffee-grinder is Duchamp's earliest proto-dada work, his first gesture of turning against the practises as well as the symbols of the traditional artist. Here for the first time, he dissects the machine, and in exploring its parts, makes a new machine, showing in the process sardonic amusement with, and irreverence for, the power of the machine and the modern sanctities of efficiency and utility. Something of this general attitude is present in Rube Goldberg's humorous play on mechanization, where a complex and fantastic display of ingenuity is employed to obtain a disarmingly simple result; in Ed Wynn's delightfully preposterous and satirical invention, contrived on the principle of the typewriter, as an aid for eating corn on the cob; and in Charlie Chaplin's film Modern Times, especially where the efficiency of the system for feeding the worker seeks to destroy the last vestige of human will and to convert him into a robot or a cog in the machinery.

That the same sentence as my suspected key phrase includes "Modern Times," the title of a recent Dylan album, draws my attention as well.

I suggest that The Asia Series could be a subversive act created with thoughts of Duchamp. If the intent was to cause controversy then the installation at the Gagosian Gallery is wildly successful. Dylan as Duchamp is not a new idea, Milton Glaser's iconic portrait of Dylan is just that.

There is much, much more going on here. The new Dylan interview has other coded references to explore. The eight foot tall image of a 1966 LIFE magazine cover featuring jet fighters flying over Vietnam with added cryptic text by Dylan that is on the Gagosian website, but is seemingly not part of The Asia Series, also deserves additional scrutiny.

I do appreciate The New York Times mentioning my 2010 essay for New Haven Review, which regards some of Dylan's methods, in their coverage of The Asia Series. My essay might add some context and background for those seeking something more constructive than the din of plagiarism accusations I see being played out in the media.

Bob Dylan and the Matter of TIME

2011-05-16T00:18:00.000-06:00

In honor of Bob Dylan's 70th birthday the May 23, 2011 issue of Time has a two-page spread featuring a timeline of Dylan's life and career. It includes some ridiculous assertions, such as the claim that Dylan covered the LL Cool J hit "Mama Said Knock You Out." Dylan recited a verse from the song on an episode of his Theme Time Radio Hour, hardly a cover. The most meager attempt at fact-checking would have revealed this.

The Time item does point out that Dylan dismissed the magazine during a 1965 interview with their reporter Horace Judson, as seen in the film Dont Look Back. The editors at Time missed a great opportunity to toot their own horn, by showing how Dylan has, in recent years, paid homage to the magazine by using various issues and articles as source material in his work.

In a portion of Dylan's memoir Chronicles: Volume One, where he devotes a couple of pages to painting a picture of the world from his early 60's Greenwich Village vantage point, he liberally uses elements from the March 31, 1961 issue of Time. Dylan clearly went through the issue and took pieces from article after article, recasting them it in all sorts of ways. I discussed this at length in a post on expectingrain.com back in 2009, check that out to see the full breakdown, as well as the spirited responses.

I'll present two of the examples here, both taken from the cover story of that issue.

Time, March 31, 1961, "The Anatomy of Angst":

For many Bomb worriers, it seems to be a true phobia, a kind of secular substitute for the Last Judgment, and a truly effective nuclear ban would undoubtedly deprive them of a highly comforting sense of doom.

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 88:

Reputable psychiatrists were saying that some of these people who claimed to be so against nuclear testing are secular last judgment types — that if nuclear bombs are banned, it would deprive them of their highly comforting sense of doom.

Time, March 31, 1961, "The Anatomy of Angst":

This leads to a kind of compulsory freedom that encourages people not only to ignore their limitations but to defy them: the dominant myth is that the old can grow young, the indecisive can become leaders of men. The housewives can become glamour girls, the glamour girls can become actresses, the slow-witted can become intellectuals.

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 90:

The dominant myth of the day seemed to be that anybody could do anything, even go to the moon. You could do whatever you wanted — in the ads and in the articles, ignore your limitations, defy them. If you were an indecisive person, you could become a leader and wear lederhosen. If you were a housewife, you could become a glamour girl with rhinestone sunglasses. Are you slow witted? No worries — you can be an intellectual genius.

That gag about the lederhosen makes me smile every time I read it. Dylan returns to Time when he writes about Harry Belafonte in Chronicles: Volume One. His tribute to Belafonte is constructed almost entirely out of elements from a March 2, 1959 Time cover story.

Here are a few examples:

Time, March 2, 1959, "HEADLINERS: Lead Man Holler":

His appeal is remarkably independent of age or sex. In a recent concert in Pittsburgh, he packed the hall with steelworkers. symphony patrons, bobby-soxers and schoolchildren.

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 68:

He appealed to everybody, whether they were steelworkers or symphony patrons or bobby-soxers, even children — everybody.

Time, March 2, 1959, "HEADLINERS: Lead Man Holler":

Throughout he has clung to a certain tough quality that can flash out as easily as his boyish smile. Recently TV Director Don Medford tried to define the key to Belafonte's dramatic magnetism: "Behind him is this hard core of hostility. Like Brando, Jimmy Dean, Rod Steiger, he's loaded with it."

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 68:

Harry was an authentic tough guy, not unlike Brando or Rod Steiger. He was dramatic and intense on the screen, had a boyish smile and a hard-core hostility.

Time, March 2, 1959, "HEADLINERS: Lead Man Holler":

To protesting purists, Belafonte replies: "All folk songs are interpretations. Otherwise you might as well go back to the first time and say 'ugh.'"

Chronicles: Volume One, pp. 68 - 69:

The folk purists had a problem with him, but Harry — who could have kicked the shit out of all of them — couldn't be bothered, said that all folksingers were interpreters, said it in a public way as if someone had summoned him to set the record straight.

Time, March 2, 1959, "HEADLINERS: Lead Man Holler":

He talks in analytically flavored prose about "Negro situations" and says: "In 1944, with three other Negro sailors and our dates, I was refused a table at the Copacabana. Nine years later I was back there as the headliner. How do you bridge that gap emotionally?"

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 69:

Sometime in the past, he had been barred from the door of the world famous nightclub the Copacabana because of his color, and then later he'd be headlining the joint. You've got to wonder how that would make somebody feel emotionally.

Dylan uses elements from Time in other places in Chronicles: Volume One, for instance a passage regarding seeing the Harlem Globetrotters-esque softball team The King and his Court while growing up in Hibbing shares very similar language with a 1963 Time item. One usage of material from Time sheds light on what is very likely one of Dylan's inspirations when it comes to using this assemblage method of writing. A careful look at Dylan's comments on artist Red Grooms reveals much.

Chronicles: Volume One, pp. 269 - 270:

There was a connection in Red's work to a lot of the folk songs I sang. It seemed to be on the same stage. What the folk songs were lyrically, Red's songs were visually—all the bums and cops, the lunatic bustle, the claustrophobic alleys—all the carnie vitality. Red was the Uncle Dave Macon of the art world. He incorporated every living thing into something and made it scream—everything side by side created equal—old tennis shoes, vending machines, alligators that crawled through sewers, dueling pistols, the Staten Island Ferry and Trinity Church, 42nd Street, profiles of skyscrapers. Brahman bulls, cowgirls, rodeo queens and Mickey Mouse heads, castle turrets and Mrs. O'Leary's cow, creeps and greasers and weirdos and grinning, bejeweled nude models, faces with melancholy looks, blurs of sorrow—everything hilarious but not jokey.

That first bolded passage above is borrowed from a Time item on Grooms.

Time, January 19, 1976 "Art: Gorgeous Parody" by Robert Hughes:

It all seems to be there: the gauzy profile of skyscrapers seen from the Statue of Liberty, the brokers and bums and cops, the lunatic bustle, the claustrophobic alleys and carnival vitality.

The second bolded passage is grafted from two different sources. The first is from a slightly unflattering item on Grooms that ran in New York Magazine.

New York Magazine, June 28, 1976 “Grooms, Goya, and the Grotesque” by Thomas B. Hess, pp. 76-77:

Grooms leans hard on ethnic stereotypes — his Chinese cooks have slabby buck teeth, his slinky black pimp is poly-pro-prognathous. No one will object, of course, because creeps, greasers, weirdos, nudists, and other cretins aren't on the 57th Street art circuit, and, also, there's that general air of good clean American fun that captivates so many of Groom's assistants, promoters, and fans all over the world.

Notice how Hess uses the word "nudists" and Dylan substitutes the phrase "grinning, bejeweled nude models" in its place. This is a key element in the passage. Dylan seems to have used that as a pivot point to make a nod to José Clemente Orozco's 1934 mural Catharsis.

Painted Walls of Mexico from Prehistoric Times Until Today by Emily Edwards, p. 227:

Orozco's fresco, facing west, represents a colossal struggle. Against a background of mechanized war, two huge figures of men fight to the death above grinning, bejeweled, nude harlots.

Dylan is having a side conversation about Mexican murals and the pessimism of Orozco while appearing to write about Grooms. Dylan uses similar methods to incorporate a good number of hidden references to other visual artists that interest him, particularly Kandinsky and Rouault. Dylan seems to be embracing that notion of "everything side by side created equal" and is writing in a way that is analogous to the methods that Grooms uses while assembling his art.

In Chronicles: Volume One Dylan takes writing from Time, Jack London, Joe Eszterhas, Ernest Hemingway and dozens of others, from vulgarians to poets, and pieces them together in an attempt to create that carnie vitality. Like the outside talker at the sideshow Dylan can come off as friendly and engaging, while at the same time feeding his audience outrageous half-truths as well as downright falsehoods and illusions. He charms with his fakery and dares the protesting purist to call him out as a fraud, all the while speaking in a secret language and exhibiting a supreme level of showmanship. It takes tremendous skill and daring to walk that unseen tightrope, and there is nothing faked about that.

"I don't need Time magazine." Dylan famously said in 1965. He may not need the magazine, but he certainly does use it, and to gain a greater understanding of Dylan's work one does need to read Time magazine. Just don't expect to read about it in Time magazine.

Dylan Dossier: The Jack London File

2011-05-09T18:15:00.000-06:00

Something may be noticed for the pure sake of noticing. There is no attempt to explain it at once, no attempt to give it an importance. The thing is just noticed. If it gives rise to an idea, then so much the better: if not, there is no attempt to wring an idea from it. Later on it might prove useful. But it is noted in its pure form, unaltered by considerations of importance or having to fit into a context. In this way the richness of an open consciousness embraces all that is offered without the need to explain or classify or construct at every instant. - Edward de Bono

I can conceive of no more laughable spectacle than that of a human standing up on his hind legs and yowling plagiarism. No man with a puny imagination can continue plagiarizing and make a success of it. No man with a vivid imagination, on the other hand, needs to plagiarize. - Jack London

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 13:
"Nelson had never been a bold innovator like the early singers who sang like they were navigating burning ships.”

"The Seed of McCoy" by Jack London:
“Captain Davenport had been under the fearful strain of navigating his burning ship for over two weeks, and he was beginning to feel that he had had enough.”
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 21 (regarding Dave Van Ronk):
“He was gruff, a mass of bristling hair, don't give a damn attitude, a confident hunter.”

“Bâtard” by Jack London:
“He was broad-chested, powerfully muscled, of far more than ordinary size, and his neck from head to shoulders was a mass of bristling hair — to all appearances a full-blooded wolf.”
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 22:
“My breath froze in the air, but I didn't feel the cold.”

White Fang by Jack London:
“Their breath froze in the air as it left their mouths, spouting forth in spumes of vapor that settled upon the hair of their bodies and formed into crystals of frost.”
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 26:
“Ray was like a character from out of some of the songs I'd been singing, someone who had seen life, done deeds and lived romances — had traipsed around, had a broad grasp of the country, its conditions.”

"An Odyssey of the North" by Jack London:
“They had seen life, and done deeds, and lived romances; but they did not know it.”

"The Priestly Prerogative" by Jack London:
“It was she who studied maps, and catechised miners, and hammered geography and locations into his hollow head, till everybody marveled at his broad grasp of the country and knowledge of its conditions.”
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 26:
“Ray was maybe ten years older than me-from Virginia he was like an old wolf, gaunt and battle-scarred - came from a long line of ancestry made up of bishops, generals, even a colonial governor.”

Call of the Wild by Jack London:
“Then an old wolf, gaunt and battle-scarred, came forward.”
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 28:
“The world was being blown apart and chaos was already driving its fist into the face of all new visitors.”

"The Priestly Prerogative" by Jack London:
“Parker gasped, was within an ace of driving his fist into the face of his boorish visitor, but held himself awkwardly in check.”
==
Chronicles: Volume One, pp. 28 - 29:
Coming from a long line of Alexanders and Julius Caesers, Genghis Khans, Charlemagnes and Napoleons, they carved up the world like a really dainty dinner.”

"Goliah" by Jack London:
“An heroic figure had been made out of Goliah. He was the man, or the demigod, rather, who had turned the planet over. The deeds of Alexander, Caesar, Genghis Khan, and Napoleon were as the play of babes alongside his colossal achievements.”

"The Priestly Prerogative" by Jack London:
“But at last their mutual creation, a really dainty dinner, was completed.”
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p 29:
“Whether they parted their hair in the middle or wore a Viking helmet, they would not be denied and were impossible to reckon with — rude barbarians stampeding across the earth and hammering out their own ideas of geography.”

"The Priestly Prerogative" by Jack London:
“It was she who melted the stony heart and wrung credit from the rude barbarian who presided over the destiny of the P. C. Company; yet it was Edwin Bentham to whom the concession was ostensibly granted. It was she who dragged her baby up and down creeks, over benches and divides, and on a dozen wild stampedes; yet everybody remarked what an energetic fellow that Bentham was. It was she who studied maps, and catechised miners, and hammered geography and locations into his hollow head, till everybody marveled at his broad grasp of the country and knowledge of its conditions.”
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 35:
“It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk on it.”

"An Odyssey of the North" by Jack London:
“An unbroken sea of frost, its wide expanse stretched away into the unknown east. The snowshoes were withdrawn from the lashings of the sleds. Axel Gunderson shook hands and stepped to the fore, his great webbed shoes sinking a fair half yard into the feathery surface and packing the snow so the dogs should not wallow. His wife fell in behind the last sled, betraying long practice in the art of handling the awkward footgear.”
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 35:
"A certain rude rhythm was making it all sway, though."

"The Master of Mystery" by Jack London:
"A certain rude rhythm characterized his frenzy, and when all were under its sway, swinging their bodies in accord with his and venting their cries in unison, he sat bolt upright, with arm outstretched and long, talon-like finger extended."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 43:
"There was a lot of halting and waiting, little acknowledgment, little affirmation, but sometimes all it takes is a wink or a nod from some unexpected place to vary the tedium of a baffling existence."

"Where The Trail Forks" by Jack London:
"He had pleasured in camp-fire chats with her, not as a man who knew himself to be man and she woman, but as a man might with a child, and as a man of his make certainly would if for no other reason than to vary the tedium of a bleak existence."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 48:
"Bobby and I would meet again sometime later at a folk festival. Right from the start, you could tell that Neuwirth had a taste for provocation and that nothing was going to restrict his freedom. He was in a mad revolt against something."

White Fang by Jack London:
"It was not a good grip, being too low down toward the chest; but Cherokee held on. White Fang sprang to his feet and tore wildly around, trying to shake off the bulldog's body. It made him frantic, this clinging, dragging weight. It bound his movements, restricted his freedom. It was like the trap, and all his instinct resented it and revolted against it. It was a mad revolt."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 48:
"Like Kerouac had immortalized Neal Cassady in On the Road, somebody should have immortalized Neuwirth. He was that kind of character. He could talk to anybody until they felt like all their intelligence was gone. With his tongue, he ripped and slashed and could make anybody uneasy, also could talk his way out of anything. Nobody knew what to make of him. If there ever was a renaissance man leaping in and out of things, he would have to be it. Neuwirth was a bulldog."

White Fang by Jack London:
"But White Fang could not get at the soft underside of the throat. The bulldog stood too short, while its massive jaws were an added protection. White Fang darted in and out unscathed, while Cherokee's wounds increased. Both sides of his neck and head were ripped and slashed. He bled freely, but showed no signs of being disconcerted. He continued his plodding pursuit, though once, for the moment baffled, he came to a full stop and blinked at the men who looked on, at the same time wagging his stump of a tail as an expression of his willingness to fight.

In that moment White Fang was in upon him and out, in passing ripping his trimmed remnant of an ear. With a slight manifestation of anger, Cherokee took up the pursuit again, running on the inside of the circle White Fang was making, and striving to fasten his deadly grip on White Fang's throat. The bulldog missed by a hair's-breadth, and cries of praise went up as White Fang doubled suddenly out of danger in the opposite direction.

The time went by. White Fang still danced on, dodging and doubling, leaping in and out, and ever inflicting damage. And still the bulldog, with grim certitude, toiled after him. Sooner or later he would accomplish his purpose, get the grip that would win the battle. In the meantime he accepted all the punishment the other could deal him. His tufts of ears had become tassels, his neck and shoulders were slashed in a score of places, and his very lips were cut and bleeding -- all from those lightning snaps that were beyond his foreseeing and guarding."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 49:
"A couple of times I dropped a coin right into the played 'The Man That Got Away' by Judy Garland. The song always did something to me, not in any stupefying, tremendous kind of way."

"The White Silence" by Jack London:
"Nature has many tricks wherewith she convinces man of his finity--the ceaseless flow of the tides, the fury of the storm, the shock of the earthquake, the long roll of heaven's artillery--but the most tremendous, the most stupefying of all, is the passive phase of the White Silence. All movement ceases, the sky clears, the heavens are as brass; the slightest whisper seems sacrilege, and man becomes timid, affrighted at the sound of his own voice."

(Later in Chronicles: Volume One material from this passage is used to describe Hank Williams.)
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 54:
"It was freezing winter with a snap and sparkle in the air, nights full of blue haze. It seemed like ages ago since I'd lay in the green grass and it smelled of true summer-glints of light dancing off the lakes and yellow butterflies on the black tarred roads. Walking down 7th Avenue in Manhattan in the early hours, you'd sometimes see people sleeping in the back-seats of cars. I was lucky I had places to stay-even people who lived in New York sometimes didn't have one. There's a lot of things that I didn't have, didn't have too much of a concrete identity either. 'I'm a rambler-I'm a gambler. I'm a long way from home.' That pretty much summed it up."

"The Men of Forty-Mile" by Jack London:
"'Reason or no reason, it's the truth I'm tellin' ye. Last fall, a year gone, 'twas Sitka Charley and meself saw the sight, droppin' down the riffle ye'll remember below Fort Reliance. An' regular fall weather it was--the glint o' the sun on the golden larch an' the quakin' aspens; an' the glister of light on ivery ripple; an' beyand, the winter an' the blue haze of the North comin' down hand in hand. It's well ye know the same, with a fringe to the river an' the ice formin' thick in the eddies--an' a snap an' sparkle to the air, an' ye a- feelin' it through all yer blood, atakin' new lease of life with ivery suck of it. 'Tis then, me boy, the world grows small an' the wandtherlust lays ye by the heels."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 56:
"Ray had told me to read Faulkner. 'It's hard, what Faulkner does,' he said. 'It's hard putting deep feeling into words. It's easier to write Das Kapital.'”

Letters From Jack London: Containing an Unpublished Correspondence Between London and Sinclair Lewis, p. 78:
"Thinkers do not suffer from lack of expression; their thought is their expression. Feelers do; it is the hardest thing in the world to put feeling, and deep feeling, into words. From the standpoint of expression, it is easier to write a Das Capital (sic) in four volumes than a simple lyric of as many stanzas."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 58:
"Ray wasn't like that. He wasn't somebody who would leave footprints on the sands of time. He had blood in his eyes, the face of a man who could do no wrong — total lack of viciousness or wickedness or even sinfulness in his face. He seemed like a man who could conquer and command anytime he wished to."

The Sea-Wolf by Jack London:
"'And why do you think I have made this thing?' he demanded abruptly. 'Dreaming to leave footprints on the sands of time?' He laughed one of his horrible mocking laughs. 'Not at all. To get it patented, to make money from it, to revel in piggishness, with all night in while other men do the work. That's my purpose. Also, I have enjoyed working it out.'

'The creative joy,' I murmured.

'I guess that's what it ought to be called. Which is another way of expressing the joy of life in that it is alive, the triumph of movement over matter, of the quick over the dead, the pride of the yeast because it is yeast and crawls.'

I threw up my hands with helpless disapproval of his inveterate materialism, and went about making the bed. He continued copying lines and figures upon the transparent scale. It was a task requiring the utmost nicety and precision, and I could not but admire the way he tempered his strength to the fineness and delicacy of the need.

When I had finished the bed, I caught myself looking at him in a fascinated sort of way. He was certainly a handsome man—beautiful in the masculine sense. And again, with never-failing wonder, I remarked the total lack of viciousness, or wickedness, or sinfulness, in his face. It was the face, I am convinced, of a man who did no wrong. And by this I do not wish to be misunderstood. What I mean is that it was the face of a man who either did nothing contrary to the dictates of his conscience, or who had no conscience. I incline to the latter way of accounting for it. He was a magnificent atavism, a man so purely primitive that he was of the type that came into the world before the development of the moral nature. He was not immoral, but merely unmoral.

As I have said, in the masculine sense his was a beautiful face. Smooth-shaven, every line was distinct, and it was cut as clear and sharp as a cameo; while sea and sun had tanned the naturally fair skin to a dark bronze which bespoke struggle and battle, and added to both his savagery and his beauty. The lips were full, yet possessed of the firmness, almost harshness, which is characteristic of thin lips. The set of his mouth, his chin, his jaw, was likewise firm or harsh, with all the fierceness and indomitableness of the male; the nose also. It was the nose of a being born to conquer and command."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 63 (regarding Cisco Houston):
"He didn't need to say much—you knew he had been through a lot, achieved some great deed, praiseworthy and meritorious, yet unspoken about it."

White Fang by Jack London:
"He carried himself with pride, as though, forsooth, he had achieved a deed praiseworthy and meritorious."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 71:
"A folk song has over a thousand faces and you must meet them all if you want to play this stuff."

White Fang by Jack London:
"Life had a thousand faces and White Fang found he must meet them all -- thus when he went to town, in to San Jose, running behind the carriage or loafing about the streets when the carriage stopped."

(A phrase from the sentence that appears before this in White Fang appears on page 252 of Chronicles: Volume One, noted below.)
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 92:
"He seemed to have some golden grip on reality, didn't sweat the small stuff, quoted the Psalms and slept with a pistol near his bed."

"The Great Interrogation" by Jack London:
"We were speaking of this man you saw fit to marry. What manner of man was he? Wherein did he charm your soul? What potent virtues were his? True, he had a golden grip,--an almighty golden grip. He knew the odds. He was versed in cent per cent. He had a narrow wit and excellent judgment of the viler parts, whereby he transferred this man's money to his pockets, and that man's money, and the next man's. And the law smiled. In that it did not condemn, our Christian ethics approved. By social measure he was not a bad man. But by your measure, Karen, by mine, by ours of the rose garden, what was he?"
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 96:
"When I hear Hank sing, all movement ceases. The slightest whisper seems sacrilege."

"The White Silence" by Jack London:
"Nature has many tricks wherewith she convinces man of his finity--the ceaseless flow of the tides, the fury of the storm, the shock of the earthquake, the long roll of heaven's artillery--but the most tremendous, the most stupefying of all, is the passive phase of the White Silence. All movement ceases, the sky clears, the heavens are as brass; the slightest whisper seems sacrilege, and man becomes timid, affrighted at the sound of his own voice."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 97 (regarding Albert Grossman):
"Usually when he talked, his voice was loud, like the booming of war drums."

"The God of His Fathers" by Jack London:
"From the opposing camp came the booming of war-drums and the voices of the priests stirring the people to anger."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 104:
"The waitress at the lunch counter wore a close-fitting suede blouse. It outlined the well-rounded lines of her body. She had blue-black hair covered with a kerchief and piercing blue eyes, clear stenciled eyebrows."

"The Great Interrogation" by Jack London:
"A close-fitting blouse of moose-skin, fantastically beaded, outlined faithfully the well-rounded lines of her body, while a silken kerchief, gay of color and picturesquely draped, partly covered great masses of blue-black hair. But it was the face, cast belike in copper bronze, which caught and held Mrs. Sayther's fleeting glance. Eyes, piercing and black and large, with a traditionary hint of obliqueness, looked forth from under clear-stencilled, clean-arching brows."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 112:
"The afternoon sun was breaking, throwing a vague radiance to the earth."

"The Great Interrogation" by Jack London:
"Through this the afternoon sun broke feebly, throwing a vague radiance to earth, and unreal shadows."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 112:
"A jackrabbit scampered past the scattered chips by the woodpile."

"The Great Interrogation" by Jack London:
"Pierre pointed to the scattered chips by the woodpile."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 116:
"I really was never any more than what I was — a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze."

The Sea-Wolf by Jack London:
"And at once, as in an instant's leap, the sun was blotted out, there was no sky, even our mastheads were lost to view, and our horizon was such as tear-blinded eyes may see. The gray mist drove by us like a rain."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 133:
"When he said to the crowd that I preferred isolation from the world, it was like he told them that I preferred being in an iron tomb with my food shoved in on a tray."

White Fang by Jack London:
"He was in an iron tomb, buried alive. He saw no human face, spoke to no human thing. When his food was shoved in to him, he growled like a wild animal."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 166:
"The political world in the song is more of an underworld, not the world where men live, toil and die like men."

"An Odyssey of the North" by Jack London:
"And when he did sleep, his brain worked on, and for the nonce he, too, wandered through the white unknown, struggled with the dogs on endless trails, and saw men live, and toil, and die like men."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 167:
"I cast an embracing glance over the primordial landscape."

"In The Forests of the North" by Jack London:
"'Rum meeting place, though,' he added, casting an embracing glance over the primordial landscape and listening for a moment to the woman's mournful notes."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 169:
"It's like I saw the song up in front of me and overtook it, like I saw all the characters in this song and elected to cast my fortunes with them."

"The Wisdom of the Trail" by Jack London:
"Sitka Charley, from boyhood, had been thrown continually with white men, and as a man he had elected to cast his fortunes with them, expatriating himself, once and for all, from his own people."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 169:
"Yet to me, it's amazingly simple, no complications, everything pans out. As long as the things you see don't go by in a blur of light and shade, you're okay. Love, fear, hate, happiness all in unmistakable terms, a thousand and one subtle ramifications."

"In The Forests of the North" by Jack London:
"And then they are amazingly simple. No complexity about them, no thousand and one subtle ramifications to every single emotion they experience. They love, fear, hate, are angered, or made happy, in common, ordinary, and unmistakable terms."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 173:
"There's a smashing and crashing of furniture and glass. Something just breaks and gives no warning. Sometimes your dearest possessions."

White Fang by Jack London:
"The strange god paused at the foot of the great staircase and listened, and White Fang was as dead, so without movement was he as he watched and waited. Up that staircase the way led to the love-master and to the love-master's dearest possessions. White Fang bristled, but waited. The strange god's foot lifted. He was beginning the ascent.

Then it was that White Fang struck. He gave no warning, with no snarl anticipated his own action. Into the air he lifted his body in the spring that landed him on the strange god's back. White Fang clung with his fore-paws to the man's shoulders, at the same time burying his fangs into the back of the man's neck. He clung on for a moment, long enough to drag the god over backward. Together they crashed to the floor. White Fang leaped clear, and, as the man struggled to rise, was in again with the slashing fangs.

Sierra Vista awoke in alarm. The noise from downstairs was as that of a score of battling fiends. There were revolver shots. A man's voice screamed once in horror and anguish. There was a great snarling and growling, and over all arose a smashing and crashing of furniture and glass."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 189:
"The dichotomy of cutting this lyrically driven song with melodic changes, with a rockin' Cajun band, might be interesting ... but the only way to find out, is to find out. Once we started trying to capture it, the song seemed to get caught in a stranglehold. All the chugging rhythms began imprisoning the lyrics. This style seemed to be oblivious to their existence. Both Dan and I became plainly perplexed."

White Fang by Jack London:
"Having received sundry lessons from Matt, said lessons being imparted by means of a club, the sled-dogs had learned to leave White Fang alone; and even then they were lying down at a distance, apparently oblivious of his existence."

White Fang by Jack London:
"He was plainly perplexed, and he came back again, pausing a dozen feet away and regarding the two men intently."

White Fang by Jack London:
“Matt shrugged his shoulders. 'Got to take a gamble. Only way to find out is to find out.’"
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 190:
"We recorded it a lot, varying the tempos and even the keys, but it was like being cast into sudden hell."

"Jan, The Unrepentant" by Jack London:
"But Jan upreared in his Berserker rage; bleeding, frothing, cursing; five frozen years thawing into sudden hell."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 190:
"I was wearing a blue flannel shirt and it was soaked through."

White Fang by Jack London:
"From shoulder to wrist of the crossed arms, the coat-sleeve, blue flannel shirt and undershirt were ripped in rags, while the arms themselves were terribly slashed and streaming blood."

(Other material from this passage shows up on page 216 of Chronicles: Volume One.)
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 191:
"Felt like I had turned a corner and was seeing the sight of a god's face."

White Fang by Jack London:
"Thus, in the early morning, instead of roaming and foraging, or lying in a sheltered nook, he would wait for hours on the cheerless cabin-stoop for a sight of the god's face."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 193:
"Even with all the churches and temples and cemeteries, New Orleans doesn't have the psychic current of holy places. That's a cold, frozen fact. It takes you a while to figure that out. In a lot of places you have to change with the times."

"Jan, the Unrepentant" by Jack London:
"He looked yearningly at that portion of Jan's anatomy which joins the head and shoulders. 'Give it up,' he repeated sadly to Lawson. 'Throw the rope down. Gawd never intended this here country for livin' purposes, an' that's a cold frozen fact.'

Jan grinned triumphantly. 'I tank I go mit der tent und haf a smoke.'

'Ostensiblee y'r correct, Bill, me son,' spoke up Lawson; 'but y'r a dummy, and you can lay to that for another cold frozen fact. Takes a sea farmer to learn you landsmen things. Ever hear of a pair of shears? Then clap y'r eyes to this.'"
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 193:
"As a vocalist, it was like trying to scale the slippery trunk of a tree.”

"At The Rainbow's End" by Jack London:
"'Oh, Donald, man, will ye no lend a hand?' he sobbed again, his hands bleeding from vain attempts to scale the slippery trunk."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 194:
“It had a certain definite awe about it and eventually, Danny and I saw eye to eye, went back and listened to Dopsie's version and used it.”

"Where the Trail Forks" by Jack London:
"So they stood in a certain definite awe and curiosity as to what his conduct would be when he moved to action."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 210:
"It didn't have mysteries lurking in its vast recesses, mysteries built when and by whom no man could tell."

"In a Far Country" by Jack London:
"The cabin was one of the many mysteries which lurk in the vast recesses of the North. Built when and by whom no man could tell."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 211:
"Danny's sonic atmosphere makes it sound like it's coming out of some mysterious, silent land."

"Gold Hunters of the North" by Jack London::
"But the North still whispered, and more insistently, and he could not rest till he went over Chilcoot, and down into the mysterious Silent Land."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 213:
"The song came to me complete, full in the eyes like I'd been traveling on the garden pathway of the sun and just found it."

"An Odyssey of the North" by Jack London:
"Nor did I find a maiden till one night coming back from the fishing. The sunlight was lying, so, low and full in the eyes, the wind free, and the kayaks racing with the white seas. Of a sudden the kayak of Unga came driving past me, and she looked upon me, so, with her black hair flying like a cloud of night and the spray wet on her cheek. As I say, the sunlight was full in the eyes, and I was a stripling; but somehow it was all clear, and I knew it to be the call of kind to kind. As she whipped ahead she looked back within the space of two strokes, -- looked as only the woman Unga could look, -- and again I knew it as the call of kind. The people shouted as we ripped past the lazy oomiaks and left them far behind. But she was quick at the paddle, and my heart was like the belly of a sail, and I did not gain. The wind freshened, the sea whitened, and, leaping like the seals on the windward breech, we roared down the golden pathway of the sun."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 214:
"It was frigid and burning, yearning - lonely and apart. Many hundreds of miles of pain went into it."

"The Gold Hunters of the North" by Jack London:
"'There are the continents,' he indicated; 'and up there near the polar cap is a country frigid and burning and lonely and apart, called Alaska..."

"In a Far Country" by Jack London:
"...voices destined to string a trail of oaths along many a hundred miles of pain."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, pp. 215 -216:
"It's cut out from the abyss of blackness - visions of a maddened brain, a feeling of unreality - the heavy price of gold upon someone's head."

White Fang by Jack London:
"From below, as from out an abyss of blackness, came up a gurgling sound, as of air bubbling through water."

White Fang by Jack London:
"He was a man and a monstrosity, as fearful a thing of fear as ever gibbered in the visions of a maddened brain."

White Fang by Jack London:
"A heavy price of gold was upon his head."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 216:
"Someone who loved life but cannot live, and it rankles his soul that others should be able to live."

"The Story of Jees Uck" by Jack London:
"He, who loved life, could not live, and it rankled his soul that others should be able to live."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 216:
"In some kind of weird way, I thought of it as my 'I Walk the Line,' a song I'd always considered to be up there at the top, one of the most mysterious and revolutionary of all time, a song that makes an attack on your most vulnerable spots, sharp words from a master."

White Fang by Jack London:
"White Fang was in a rage, wickedly making his attack on the most vulnerable spot. From the shoulder to wrist of the crossed arms, the coat sleeve, blue flannel shirt and undershirt were ripped in rags, while the arms themselves were terribly slashed and streaming blood.

All this the two men saw in an instant. The next instant Weedon Scott had White Fang by the throat and was dragging him clear. White Fang struggled and snarled, but made no attempt to bite, while he quickly quieted down at a sharp word from the master."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 217 (regarding Johnny Cash):
"Johnny didn't have a piercing yell, but ten thousand years of culture fell from him. He could have been a cave dweller. He sounds like he's at the edge of the fire, or in the deep snow, or in a ghostly forest, the coolness of conscious obvious strength, full tilt and vibrant with danger."

"The Son of the Wolf" by Jack London:
"Thling-Tinneh was trying to speak, but his people drowned his voice. Then Mackenzie strode forward. The Fox opened his mouth to a piercing yell, but so savagely did Mackenzie whirl upon him that he shrank back, his larynx all agurgle with suppressed sound. His discomfiture was greeted with roars of laughter, and served to soothe his fellows to a listening mood."

"The Son of the Wolf" by Jack London:
"Time and again he was forced to the edge of the fire or the deep snow, and time and again, with the foot tactics of the pugilist, he worked back to the center. Not a voice was lifted in encouragement, while his antagonist was heartened with applause, suggestions, and warnings. But his teeth only shut the tighter as the knives clashed together, and he thrust or eluded with a coolness born of conscious strength. At first he felt compassion for his enemy; but this fled before the primal instinct of life, which in turn gave way to the lust of slaughter. The ten thousand years of culture fell from him, and he was a cave-dweller, doing battle for his female."

"The Son of the Wolf" by Jack London:
"A few moments later they were swallowed up by the ghostly forest."

"The Son of the Wolf" by Jack London:
"'O my husband!' Zarinska's voice rang out, vibrant with danger."

"The Son of the Wolf" by Jack London:
"The Bear floundered out and came back full tilt."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 210:
"It didn't have mysteries lurking in its vast recesses, mysteries built when and by whom no man could tell."

"In a Far Country" by Jack London:
"The cabin was one of the many mysteries which lurk in the vast recesses of the North. Built when and by whom no man could tell."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 217:
"Wind whipped in the open doorway and another kicking storm was rumbling earthward."

"Siwash" by Jack London:
"Another tremendous section of the glacier rumbled earthward. The wind whipped in at the open doorway, bulging out the sides of the tent till it swayed like a huge bladder at its guy ropes."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 217:
"The light had gone out of the day. In the trees, a solitary bird warbling. We did it as we damn well pleased and there was nothing more to say. When the record was all added up, I hoped it would meet head on with the realities of life. I was going to thank him, but sometimes you can do it without opening your mouth, you can live it. "

"In a Far Country" by Jack London:
"Suddenly, without warning and without fading, the canvas was swept clean. There was no color in the sky. The light had gone out of the day."

"In a Far Country" by Jack London:
"'Then do as you damn well please, we won't have nothing to say.'"

"In a Far Country" by Jack London:
"He must not say 'Thank you;' he must mean it without opening his mouth, and prove it by responding in kind."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 218:
"When we finished recording it felt like the studio could have gone up in a sheet of flame. It was so intense in there for the past couple of months or so. Lanois had created a haunting, not stumbling or halting album. He said he'd help me make a record and he didn't break his word. We went by circuitous ways but we got there."

Call of the Wild by Jack London:
"This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight."

White Fang by Jack London:
"But the man who went softly, by circuitous ways, peering with caution, seeking after secrecy -- that was the man who received no suspension of judgment from White Fang, and who went away abruptly, hurriedly, and without dignity."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 220:
"He steered this record with deft turns and jerks, but he did it. He stood in the bell tower, scanning the alleys and rooftops."

"Siwash" by Jack London:
"Dick Humphries threw the bight of the sail twine over the point of the needle and drew it clear with a couple of deft turns and a jerk."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 220:
"My limited vision didn't permit me to see all around the thing."

"Siwash" by Jack London:
"He bore women too large a portion of his rough heart to mind them, as he said, when they were in the doldrums, or when their limited vision would not permit them to see all around a thing."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 251:
"I felt like I'd been cast into sudden hell."

"Jan, The Unrepentant" by Jack London:
"But Jan upreared in his Berserker rage; bleeding, frothing, cursing; five frozen years thawing into sudden hell."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 252 (regarding a Ramblin' Jack Elliot record):
"I had nothing near the compelling poise of self that I heard on the record."

White Fang by Jack London:
"And the chief thing demanded by these intricacies of civilisation was control, restraint - a poise of self that was as delicate as the fluttering of gossamer wings and at the same time as rigid as steel."

(This is the sentence before, "Life had a thousand faces and White Fang found he must meet them all...")
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 253:
"The road ahead had always been encumbered with shadowy forms that had to be dealt with in one way or another."

"Thanksgiving on Slav Creek" by Jack London:
"The trail ahead lighted up, and as far as they could see it was cumbered with shadowy forms, all toiling in the one direction."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 253 (regarding Joan Baez):
"A voice that drove out bad spirits."

"The God of His Fathers" by Jack London:
"The sparse aborigines still acknowledged the rule of their chiefs and medicine men, drove out bad spirits, burned their witches, fought their neighbors, and ate their enemies with a relish which spoke well of their bellies."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 255 (regarding Joan Baez):
"Both Scot and Mex, she looked like a religious icon, like somebody you'd sacrifice yourself for and she sang in a voice straight to God . . . also was an exceptionally good instrumentalist"

"The God of His Fathers" by Jack London:
"But when I was come to that place, the priest stood in my way, and spoke soft words, and said a man in anger should go neither to the right nor left, but straight to God."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 255:
"Cleopatra living in an Italian palace."

"The Priestly Prerogative" by Jack London:
"We'll buy an Italian palace, and you can play Cleopatra to your heart's content."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, pp. 257 - 258:
"However true that might have been, I, too, had the axe in my hands and needed to tear out of there, head off to where life promised something more - felt that my own voice and guitar would be equal to the situation."

"To The Man on Trail" by Jack London:
"More than one rough adventurer of the North felt his heartstrings draw closer, and experienced vague yearnings for the sunnier pastures of the Southland, where life promised something more than a barren struggle with cold and death."

The New Yorker and Bob Dylan the Cowboy Dandy

2011-04-16T05:15:00.001-06:00

Ian Crouch, in an item for The New Yorker titled "Literary Smackdown: Bob Dylan in China," examines the response to a recent New York Times column by Maureen Dowd. Dowd called Dylan a sellout regarding his recent concerts in China. This hubbub is barely worth a mention, but a passage by Crouch, which includes a quick quote from Dylan's memoir Chronicles: Volume One, caught my eye.

For his whole career he’s been a fibber, a master dissembler, and a raffish raconteur: “I was more a cowpuncher than a Pied Piper,” he writes, and here at least, we might take him at his word.

Crouch should not have taken Dylan at his word, in that those nine words from page 115 of Chronicles: Volume One are part of a cryptic hidden message.

What Dylan is doing here, in part, is making commentary regarding the book The Cowboy and the Dandy: Crossing Over from Romanticism to Rock and Roll by Perry Meisel, Professor of English at NYU. In the book Meisel writes about Dylan at length, and calls him the "manifest crossing of cowboy and dandy" at one point.

The word "cowpuncher" is your first clue. In the book Meisel writes about the Willa Cather novel The Professor's House, and makes this observation regarding the character Tom Overland.

The Cowboy and the Dandy, p. 93:

Nor is Tom just a cowpuncher; reflecting the book's own double stance, he is also a scientist who invents a revolutionary airplane engine and a reader of Virgil in Latin, thanks to a Spanish priest who once tutored him in New Mexico.

To make sure that you catch the nod to Meisel Dylan makes a very clever and subtle move. He incorporates two distinctive elements from pages very close to Meisel's use of "cowpuncher," but he makes sure that he doesn't use any of Meisel's own words. Dylan lifts parts from Meisel's quotations of Cather. The less determined Dylan detective could perhaps catch the use of Cather, but might never tie it to Meisel.

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 116:

I really was never any more than what I was — a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze.

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 114:

It seemed like every day there was a new riot in another city, everything on the edge of danger and change — the jungles of America being cleared away.

The Cowboy and the Dandy: p. 92:

In a reflective enactment of it, Cather paints London in decidedly Paterian terms, recognizable by trope, terms that emphasize relief, perspective, comparison as the central mechanisms of life: Alexander sees "Parliament catch fire with the sunset," "the slender tower . . . washed by a rain of golden light and licked by little flickering flames"; "the bleached gray pinnacles" even "floated in a luminous haze" (35). Indeed, the latter metaphor is the same Paterian one that Woolf uses in "Modern Fiction" to describe life itself - "a luminous halo" (1919, 2:106). No wonder the stirrings of past love reawaken in Alexander only after his return home to Boston, including "the vibration of unnatural excitement" and "a sense of quickened life" (68).

But Alexander cannot handle the new awareness brought on by the heightened role - and rule - of contrasts. So concerned does he grow about the tensions that structure him that he eventually gives their effects plain voice: "'I am never at peace,'" he says in a letter to Hilda ; "'I feel always on the edge of danger and change'" (101).

Dylan has also worked a little bit of Jack London into one of the above lines as well.

The Sea-Wolf by Jack London:

And at once, as in an instant's leap, the sun was blotted out, there was no sky, even our mastheads were lost to view, and our horizon was such as tear-blinded eyes may see. The gray mist drove by us like a rain.

Some purloined Jack London appears every couple of pages in Chronicles: Volume One, frequently paired with material from another writer. In his book Bob Dylan in America Sean Wilentz writes, "Discovering a few phrases lifted from Mark Twain and Jack London in a book so engaging, fluid, and generous as Chronicles would not have been sufficient grounds for daring to knock a national treasure." Wilentz has not examined the material closely enough, and his staunch and spirited defense is off-target and based out of ignorance. It is one of the elements that will make his book date poorly. Chronicles: Volume One is a national treasure because it appears to be fluid and generous, but is actually written in code from cover to cover. It is a treasure map.

In a featurette on the DVD for Dylan's film Masked and Anonymous co-writer Larry Charles remarks, regarding the script, "I always said to everybody, 'Treat the text like a treasure map.'" I've been approaching Dylan's late work as a treasure map and I've found riches that are, clearly for some, beyond belief. In this case the golden nugget is a tip on a book that you might want to read and a nod to an author that Dylan paid attention to. Dylan's generosity is beneath the surface.

The cowboy and the cowpuncher, the dandy and the Pied Piper; yet another instance of Dylan at play. It should also stand as a clear example of why one should never underestimate Dylan or take him at his word. The scope of his schemes is so vast that it is going to take years to unravel them, especially when writers like Wilentz insist on poisoning the well and selling their subject short.

Bob Dylan and High Water (For Henry Rollins)

2011-04-11T20:57:00.002-06:00

There is still a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry. - Martin Gardner

There's so many sides to Bob Dylan, he's round. - Bernard Paturel

In his book Still on the Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan, 1974-2006 Clinton Heylin makes a number of astute observations about the song "High Water (For Charley Patton)." Regarding the lines, "Big Joe Turner lookin’ east and west from the dark room of his mind/He made it to Kansas City, Twelfth Street and Vine" Heylin writes:

Cute. Dylan knows Turner made an album called Kansas City Here I Come, just as he knows Twelfth Street and Vine got a name-check in Wilbert Harrison's “Kansas City,” a song he had covered himself. But for once there is nothing pasted on about this couplet.

I think that there very may well be something pasted on here; another interesting image that Dylan may have picked up from Henry Rollins.

Now Watch Him Die by Henry Rollins, p.110:

When someone tries to talk to me I only feel the emptiness of the language, the desperation of words. The hunger of the need to communicate. I know my truth in that I know I'll never be able to say anything back to them that isn't coming from the dark room that is my mind.

There is another line in the song that has a strong parallel to the writing of Rollins. In the song Dylan sings, "'Don't reach out for me,' she said 'Can't you see I'm drownin’ too?'"

Art To Choke Hearts & Pissing In The Gene Pool by Henry Rollins, p. 82:

I can see it in your eyes. They're wet like a dog's. You're looking for a leg to climb to keep you from drowning. Your hands reach out, clutching for something solid to hold onto. You're weak and in need. You want something to hold so you can have something to blame. Don't reach out to me. I'm drowning too.

This song still has much to give, it is so finely layered. Dylan sings, "Jump into the wagon, love, throw your panties overboard" and this line is worth a closer examination, in that how it is constructed is quite interesting.

The phrase "jump into the wagon" is most likely a nod to a line from the mid-19th century song "Wait for the Wagon," a number with a long and strange history. It started off as a parlor song and soon moved into the minstrelsy. A wide range of different lyrics were applied to the tune. There were a slew of political parodies coming from many different angles. One version became a popular rebel song during the War Between the States. Here's a verse and chorus from the rebel version.

Our cause is just and holy, our men are brave and true
To whip the Lincoln invaders is all we have to do
God bless our noble army, in Him we all confide
So jump into the wagon and we'll all take a ride

Wait for the wagon
The dissolution wagon
The South is our wagon
And we'll all take a ride

The song's history of transmogrification dovetails perfectly with many of the "Love and Theft" themes. When considering the rest of that particular line in "High Water (For Charley Patton)" it is useful to consider how Dylan uses a line from another mid-19th century composition in the same song. The minstrelsy song "De Boatman's Dance," by "Dixie" composer Daniel Decatur Emmett, has the line "When you go to de boatman's ball, dance wid my wife or not at all" and this has long been recognized as a probable element in the "High Water" line, "Bertha Mason shook it—broke it, then she hung it on a wall/Says, 'You're dancin’ with whom they tell you to or you don't dance at all.'" Dylan is clearly familiar with the Emmett composition, in that he incorporates the line, "I lost my gal at the boatman's ball" in his song "Waiting For You." The Bertha Mason who speaks the line in "High Water" is likely the character from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.

This pairing of high and low is a theme that Dylan explores a number of times in "Love and Theft." For instance, a line from the Poe short story "William Wilson," about a doppelgänger, is paired with a line from an 1856 minstrel show sketch about a comical duo in the song "Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum" (for more on Dylan and Poe I recommend the essay "Tell-Tale Signs - Edgar Allan Poe and Bob Dylan: Towards a Model of Intertextuality" by Christopher Rollason.) I believe that Dylan is doing a similar thing here, and those panties are the key.

When Dylan sings "throw your panties overboard" I believe that he is making a nod to a passage from Castle to Castle by Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

Heartbreak, idleness, and sex go together . . . and not only the kids . . . grown women and grandmothers! naturally they're most passionate . . . fire in their twats ... at times when the page is turning . . . when History brings all the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind! panties overboard! when the Fifis lead their oxen to slaughter!

The Vichy government in exile in Germany at the close of World War II is the setting for Céline's novel. He devotes pages and pages to the behavior of women and "the attraction of fresh meat and troop trains."

The critical passage in the original French reads, "bonnets et têtes à l'ouragan ! slips par-dessus le moulins !" and this can be interpreted in a different way. I might translate that as, "bonnets and heads in the hurricane ! slips over the mills !"

Céline was playing with an idiomatic expression, popular in France at that time, about throwing one's bonnet over the mill, meaning to act in folly or to wander into wickedness. By having the women throw their slips over the mills he emphasized the sexual aspect.

Ralph Manheim, who translated the book, surely knew this. Manheim is noted for recognizing that a translator's challenge is "to impersonate his author." He sacrificed Céline's use of the idiomatic expression for the more colorful and punchy "panties overboard." It is a wonderful transformation. He boils the essence of a long passage regarding the behavior of these women in a time of war down to two well chosen words. Manheim had a knack for this. His 1992 obituary in The New York Times includes an interesting passage.

"He works with the most elliptical French and the knottiest German and turns it into English like an alchemist," Vicky Elliott wrote in the International Herald Tribune. She called him a master at "finding English voices for other people."

"Slips over the mills" underwent an alchemical change into "panties overboard" and Dylan the alchemist seems to have instinctively recognized this.

"Jump into the wagon, love, throw your panties overboard" could be interpreted as, "Join the cause in this time of great upheaval and act out sexually in the way that women in these situations sometimes do." It's not a pretty picture, but it is one that fits the dark theme of the song.

When considering the notion of Dylan using an element from the Céline translation keep in mind that in my previous post I presented a passage where Henry Rollins consciously apes the style of Céline and made my case that Dylan likely found the key kernel for the song "Things Have Changed" in that passage. For Dylan it seems that the impersonation of Céline by Rollins is just as valid as Manheim's impersonation.

In my previous post I also began to explore Dylan's use of material from The Letters of Thomas Wolfe in Chronicles: Volume One and mentioned the interest of Rollins in both Wolfe and literary letters. In his March 25, 2011 column for LA Weekly Rollins touched on seasonal change and his reading habits. Rollins writes, "The autumn is a great time of year for me. I reread F. Scott Fitzgerald short stories and passages of Thomas Wolfe and listen to records that I reserve primarily for that time of the year. Pulling them out of their jackets is like greeting old friends. Some would call this tradition. For me, it's ritual."

I have some additional suggested passages from Wolfe's letters for Rollins to consider when autumn his ritual rolls around. In my previous post I showed how Dylan has Bono speak the words of Wolfe at one point in Chronicles: Volume One. Dylan takes on the voice of Wolfe himself when describing his frame of mind and his interactions with producer Daniel Lanois while recording the album "Oh Mercy" in New Orleans. Here are a few examples.

Chronicles: Volume One, pp. 217 - 218:

There had been a clashing of spirits at times, but nothing that had turned into a bitter or complicated struggle.

The Letters of Thomas Wolfe, p. 395

You say nothing of the bitter and complicated struggle which has been going on between two people for two years.

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 221:

I try to use my material in the most effective way. The songs were written to the glory of man and not to his defeat, but all of these songs added together doesn't even come close to my whole vision of life. Sometimes the things that you liked the best and that have meant the most to you are the things that meant nothing at all to you when you first heard or saw them. Some of these songs fit into that category. I suppose all these things are simple, matter of fact enough.

On the record, I had to make spur of the moment decisions which might not have had anything to do with the real situation.

The Letters of Thomas Wolfe, p. 343:

You mention the fact that I have worked hard in an effort to learn how to use my material in the most effective way.

The Letters of Thomas Wolfe, p. 341:

...that the story has been written to the glory of man and not to his defeat.

The Letters of Thomas Wolfe, p. 343:

That is that I should like my work to be of one piece with all my life, and that to me the labor of writing does seem to be united to a man's whole vision of life...

The Letters of Thomas Wolfe, p. 368:

To me it is and always has been the most difficult kind of reading, just as it is the most difficult of writing, and the poems that I have liked the best and that have meant the most to me are those that meant nothing at all to me when I first read them.

The Letters of Thomas Wolfe, p. 389:

All these things I suppose are simple and matter-of-fact enough, but all the strangeness and mystery of time and chance and of the human destiny is in them for me and they seem wonderful.

The Letters of Thomas Wolfe, p. 395:

What you did not say in your story, however, and what you know to be true, is that the Guggenheim fellowship and this sudden spur-of-the-moment decision had nothing to do with the real situation.

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 221:

That being said, I had wholehearted admiration for what Lanois did. A lot of it was unique and permanent. Danny and I would see each other again in ten years and we'd work together once more in a rootin' tootin' way.

The Letters of Thomas Wolfe, p. 315:

...I'd like to say to you that he has the most genuine and whole-hearted admiration for your genius and power as a novelist - he feels, as I do, that your talent is unique and permanent, that there is no one like you, and that if they read any of our books in the future they will have to take account of you.

The Letters of Thomas Wolfe, p. 226:

...rootin', tootin', shootin', son-of-a-gun...

The Letters of Thomas Wolfe, p. 644:

...rootin, tootin, shootin, son of a gun...

Much of Chronicles: Volume One is constructed in this rootin', tootin' manner, from dozens of different sources. In this particular stretch Dylan appears to be warmly letting you in, but he's not doing that at all. It's a freeze-out. He's hiding behind a wall of Wolfe.

In other instances Dylan's use of material from other sources does let you in a little bit. When Dylan describes his producer Bob Johnston instead of Thomas Wolfe he uses Tom Wolfe, with elements from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Chronicles: Volume One, p 134:

Bob was an interesting cat - originally from West Texas, living in Tennessee, built like a wrestler, thick wrists and big forearms, barreled chest, short but with a personality that makes him seem bigger than he really is — a musician and songwriter who had even written a couple of songs that Elvis recorded.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (describing Ken Kesey), p. 7:

He has thick wrists and big forearms, and the way he has them folded makes them look gigantic. He looks taller than he really is, maybe because of his neck. He has a big neck with a pair of sternocleido-mastoid muscles that rise up out of the prison workshirt like a couple of dock ropes. His jaw and chin are massive. He looks a little like Paul Newman, except that he is more muscular, has thicker skin, and he has tight blond curls boiling up around his head. His hair is almost gone on top, but somehow that goes all right with his big neck and general wrestler's build.

Dylan also paints Bob Johnston with elements from a description of Confederate general James Ewell Brown Stuart that appears in Jeff Shaara's Civil War novel The Last Full Measure.

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 135:

He should have been wearing a wide cape, a plumed hat and riding with his sword held high.

The Last Full Measure by Jeff Shaara, p. 217:

That they would win, that his men would ultimately destroy the enemy, was never in doubt. If his men were ever unsure, all they would have to do was watch their commander, the wide cape, the plumed hat, riding through them with the sword high, yelling at him with all the fire in his soul. They would see it in his face, in his eyes, and would share the same fire, the spirit for the fight. It was fun.

Bob Johnston as Ken Kesey in Jeb Stuart Civil War drag is just one of a very large number of concealed images that lurk right beneath the surface of Chronicles: Volume One. In this case the pairing is also apropos. Based on the interviews that I've seen with Johnston, as well as the footage of him working in the studio in the 1970 documentary The Nashville Sound, it is an excellent way to describe the energy and passion that Johnston exudes. With Dylan the compliments often come in code. Worth noting is that Dylan appears in Civil War garb in the video for "'Cross The Green Mountain," a song he wrote and recorded for the film version of Jeff Shaara's novel Gods and Generals.

The description of Johnston is similar to the odd pairings that exist in Dylan's songs from this era, like that line about the wagon and the panties. The range of what Dylan is doing, as well as the possible motives for these schemes, is just beginning to be recognized and explored. The scope has been grossly underestimated. Civil War books and songs, Thomas Wolfe and Tom Wolfe, Henry Timrod, Henry Miller and Henry Rollins: all grist for the alchemist and just the barest tip.

"Things Have Changed" between Bob Dylan and Henry Rollins

2011-03-13T06:20:00.081-06:00

When considering the possible impact that the poetry and prose of Henry Rollins has had on Bob Dylan a look at some of the songs that were recorded during the Time Out of Mind sessions that are not on the album can be illuminating. A number of those songs eventually surfaced on The Bootleg Series Vol. 8 – Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989–2006.

The song "Dreamin' of You" has a number of lyrics that Dylan reworked into the Time Out of Mind track "Standing in the Doorway."

"Dreamin' of You" by Bob Dylan:
"Even if the flesh falls off my face/It won't matter, long as you're there"

"Standing in the Doorway" by Bob Dylan:
"And even if the flesh falls off of my face/I know someone will be there to care"

That is an interesting image, one that I believe may have been inspired by a passage in the Rollins book Black Coffee Blues, in a section titled "61 Dreams / 1986-1989."

Black Coffee Blues by Henry Rollins, pp. 119 - 120:

#38: I have a machine gun and I'm shooting people as they walk by my house. It's night time but I can't see them. One guy comes through the door and I unload an entire clip into him but he keeps coming at me. Flesh is falling off his face, his skull is made of metal. He smiles and falls. I hear a voice. I turn and shoot. It's Bernie Wandel. The bullet blows part of his head off. I tell him that he's going to die and that I'm sorry. He says it's ok.

In this next example of lines that the two Dylan songs share it is important to keep in mind that this is the very first line of the song "Dreamin' of You." Dylan's use of lines from Rollins as the first line of a song is something that is repeated several times on Time Out of Mind.

"Dreamin' of You" by Bob Dylan:
"The light in this place is really bad"

"Standing in the Doorway" by Bob Dylan:
"The light in this place is so bad"

Here's a poem by Rollins that may have played a role.

See a Grown Man Cry: Collected Work, 1988-1991 by Henry Rollins, p. 96:

One way conversation
Yea, hi I thought I'd check in
This house I'm at is full of bugs
There's lots of things that I don't tell you
Lots of things that don't have words to wear
The light in this place is really bad
I'm thinking about your eyes
Hell, we're tied up in this shit you know
Stuck behind walls, frozen in doorways
I hope these bugs don't get into my food
If I could remember where I was
I could tell you where I'm at right now
I'm in someone's apartment that's all I know
I spent the night talking to a lot of people from a stage
I don't know who I am
A voice, an answering machine
One lining it through life
Yea sure I'm hung up, aren't you?

My favorite couplet in "Dreamin' of You" does not appear in "Standing in the Doorway": “For years they had me locked in a cage/Then they threw me onto the stage." If you flip back just a little bit in See a Grown Man Cry: Collected Work, 1988-1991 the first line in the first poem on a page will draw your attention.

See a Grown Man Cry: Collected Work, 1988-1991 by Henry Rollins, p. 89:

For years they had me locked in a cage
They told me to be proud of what I was
And what they thought it made me into
They tried to teach me to love the cage
And to love them
It didn't work

If you flip a few pages in the other direction in the Rollins book you'll come across a poem that includes "The air is getting hotter," which is the first line of the Time Out of Mind song "Tryin' To Get To Heaven."

See a Grown Man Cry: Collected Work, 1988-1991 by Henry Rollins, pp. 100 - 101:

Alone in my room late at night
Awhile ago there was a woman here
She talked a bunch of shit
I told her it was time to leave
She did
I think about the fucking freak show I'm caught in
Looking through a magazine
There's a woman drinking beer with a dog
Sometimes you have to deny the entire world access
These freaks
Busloads full
The world is full
The air is getting hotter
Brings me to a burning reality
Fuck the faceless
Plow through them
Drop the fire
Kurtz was right
He always was
He's the only one who had the right idea
He gave the gift
The message from the jungle
Keep breeding
The more you got, the more I want to burn
I saw you last night
Scabbed mouthed and dangerous
Like a lab experiment
What a joke all of this is
What a shallow grave you dig for yourselves
Swinging like a hinge
Slack jawed and glazed
I don't need video games
I've got you

In my initial post on the Dylan/Rollins connection I pointed that out the line "When you think that you lost everything/You find out you can always lose a little more" from "Tryin' to Get To Heaven" bears similarities to a passage on pages 45 and 46 on the Rollins book High Adventure in the Great Outdoors, and mentioned that if you flip through the pages in that section of that book 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," but I did not give the examples.

The example from "Til I Fell in Love With You" is another instance of a line that also appears in a song that eventually surfaced on The Bootleg Series Vol. 8 – Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989–2006.

"'Til I Fell in Love with You" by Bob Dylan:
"I've been hit too hard, I've seen too much/Nothing can heal me now, but your touch"

"Marchin' To The City" by Bob Dylan:
"I've been hit too hard, seen too much/Nothing can heal me now, but your touch"

High Adventure in the Great Outdoors by Henry Rollins, pp. 48 - 49:

Seen too much
Hit too hard
Too much damage
Just imagine someone walking
Around smoldering from an o.d. of life
A walking wreck
A pathetic shell
What I feel
Pain, depression
I'm tired
I don't want to react
I'm wrecked
Pull me off to the side for a breather
What do you mean there's no time?

The Time Out of Mind song "Cold Irons Bound" kicks off with the line "I'm beginning to hear voices and there's no one around." It bears similarities to the opening line from another poem by Rollins, one, again, that is just a few pages away.

High Adventure in the Great Outdoors by Henry Rollins, pp. 42 - 43:

I hear voices
When no one is around
I have seen the inside of my skull
I have crawled inside my skull
I am not alone
There are killers in there
I have met them
Sometimes they kick at the inside of my skull
It makes me twitch
There are killers living in my skull
Murderers in my skull
They make use of my body
They take my body and kill with it
I feel no pain
My body is the weapon of my mind.
I have pressed my hands against the inside of my skull
I have felt the insanity
I can mutilate
I can kill
I have before, it was just flesh in my hands
It was easy
I have murderers living in my skull
I have met them from time to time
They are my true friends
Don't disturb my insanity, don't you dare
There are killers in this house
They say you're ill, cure the illness
I listen to my skull
I have killed many inside my skull
I live with killers
It's time to come out

For those familiar with the music of Black Flag that poem will strike a chord, in that Rollins explores the same theme, and the same opening line, in the title track of their 1985 album In My Head. "Cold Irons Bound" and "In My Head" appear to be kissing cousins. The musical worlds of Dylan and Black Flag may seem disparate at first blush, but they do overlap. Consider that in the mid 80's, for a short stretch, the punk rock band The Plugz was Dylan's band, appearing with him on Late Night with David Letterman. The Plugz played on bills with Black Flag.

In the Time Out of Mind song "Can't Wait" Dylan sings, "I'd like to think I could control myself, but it isn't true" and this is yet another instance where I think the work of Rollins played a part.

Now Watch Him Die by Henry Rollins, pp. 66 - 67:

If I allowed myself to care about you
I would hang myself up again
Like I have done so many times before
When I lost my self control
I would like to think that I could control myself at all times
But it just isn't true
I catch myself slipping all the time
I laugh when I caught myself tonight
Wondering if you were going to call me
Like you said you would
When the clock went past two a.m. and you hadn't called
I knew I was in one of those situations
Where I could not attach myself to it
Or let it drag me down
So I let it go
And now I see that I did the right thing
By not giving a fuck about you and your life
What was I thinking anyway?
I'm a lot of terrible things
But at least I'm not a sucker anymore

An alternate version of "Can't Wait" on The Bootleg Series Vol. 8 – Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989–2006 includes another line that was likely inspired by Rollins as well, one that Dylan later incorporated into a key song on "Love and Theft" in 2001, a song that includes a slew of other hidden schemes.

"Can't Wait" (alternate version) by Bob Dylan:
“Well, my back is to the sun because the light is too intense/I can see what everybody in the world is up against”

"Sugar Baby" by Bob Dylan:
"I got my back to the sun ’cause the light is too intense/I can see what everybody in the world is up against"

Black Coffee Blues by Henry Rollins, p. 72:

My back is to the sun, my face is to the abyss. Will you come with me? Demon sun burning my back with red eyes. My pupils being sucked out by the vacant spaces in their faces.

Keep in mind that Henry Rollins has the sun burning his back at all times, in the form of a very large tattoo. The sun imagery is important to consider.

There are additional examples that add further credence to the possible placement of this Rollins line in "Sugar Baby."

"Sugar Baby" by Bob Dylan:
"Every moment of existence seems like some dirty trick"

Art To Choke Hearts & Pissing In The Gene Pool by Henry Rollins, pp. 200 - 201:

Do you ever get the feeling that there’s no way out? Everything around you closes in. The walls that have all of your favorite pictures become your enemies. It’s suffocation. Every thing, every thought, every movement, everything becomes a knife slashing at your face. You start to think that existence is a dirty trick. A sucker punch. You're a punched out sucker waiting for the air to not be so hard to breathe. You have to look out because you're walking into coffin walls all the time. You turn around and something says: Don't breathe, don't think, don't move. Don't do anything to remind yourself that you're alive. Maybe then you'll be ok. Ok for now or as long as it takes your heart to beat once. Don't close your eyes, don't do it buddy, don't do it missy. Don't even blink. You don't want to miss a second of it.

"Sugar Baby" by Bob Dylan:
"You went years without me, might as well keep goin' now"

See a Grown Man Cry: Collected Work, 1988-1991 by Henry Rollins, p. 118:

I've been gone a long time
So long that I forgot I had a face
Forgot that I had a voice that you could hear
When you tell me how much I mean to you
And you want to know how I feel
I see my silence spit in your face
I didn't mean to throw a rock into your reflection
Maybe some things are better left broken and scattered
Veiled in darkness, secret bitterness and self doubt
I should have known better
Than to start something that I couldn't finish
That I couldn't care about
That I couldn't remember starting in the first place
I don't want to know you
You went years without me
You might as well keep on going

In the case of the Time Out of Mind song "Dirt Road Blues" Dylan seems to have engaged in a interesting gambit to draw attention to a specific couplet. Seth Rogovoy took the bait and explored this a little bit in his 2009 book Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet.

In the published lyrics, which differ from the words Dylan sings on the album version of the song, the narrator is going to keep on walking, he says, until he is “right beside the sun,” where, in a Dylanesque twist, he says, “I'm gonna have to put up a barrier to keep myself away from everyone.” Oh, to hear Dylan sing that line!

Dylan seems to be doing some fancy footwork here, beyond the Dylanesque Twist he's doing the Dylanesque Frug, the Dylanesque Monkey, The Dylanesque Mashed Potato and perhaps some Dylanesque slam dancing too.

Now Watch Him Die by Henry Rollins, p. 86:

I get off only on the music. That's all there is for me. The crowd is just a distraction, an expanse of flesh that throws cups and ice. They were lucky tonight. There was a barrier to keep me away from them as I know that I could casually release short controlled bursts of body damaging violence to strangers without raising my blood pressure one bit.

A way that Dylan could walk until he was beside the sun would to be make his destination standing on a stage next to Rollins, who perpetually has the sun on his back, with that barrier between them and the audience.

Time Out of Mind was certainly recognized, with Dylan receiving three Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year in 1998. Dylan won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 2000 for "Things Have Changed" and the Oscar became a stage prop in his touring show. For the key line in "Things Have Changed" Dylan seems to have locked in tight on a passage where Rollins tries on the voice of Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

"Things Have Changed" by Bob Dylan:
"I used to care, but things have changed"

One From None by Henry Rollins:

Celine rocked.
Goddamn!...they're dead!...walking corpses...and so young!...from now on I push them all away...call me any damn thing you want...I don't care!....they're dead...the pretty ones too!...so hard to talk to them...a waste of time...so empty!...I can't figure out what makes them go....too bad...life is over so quickly...oh well...I used to care...things have changed and I see that I must have been out of my mind to think that I could have woken them up!...they 're dead...can you imagine that...trying to wake the dead...what a joke!...more powerless power to them!

This playing with voice is interesting when it comes to how the worlds of Rollins and Dylan intersect. If you pick up a copy of Black Coffee Blues and read just a few sentences past the excerpt that Dylan reworked in Chronicles: Volume One you'll see that Rollins mentions listening to Roy Orbison. Most readers of Black Coffee Blues weren't in a band with Roy Orbison, perhaps the passage resonates differently for those who were.

In Black Coffee Blues Rollins takes broad swipes at Bono of U2, calling him Boner, Bozo, Bravo, Bolo and Bone-me. Rollins put ridiculous words into the mouth of Bono as well.

In Chronicles: Volume One Dylan too has fun with the character of Bono, also putting words into his mouth, specifically the words of Thomas Wolfe. Consider this passage where Dylan and Bono discuss the birthplace of America (I cover other aspects of this exchange in my New Haven Review essay "Bob Charlatan").

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 175:

Bono says something about the English coming here and settling Jamestown and that the Irish built New York City-talks about the rightness, the richness, glory, beauty, wonder and magnificence of America.

The Letters of Thomas Wolfe, p. 286 (It is December, 1930 and Wolfe is in Paris and is unhappy, especially with the "scandal-mongering apes and baboons" he has encountered):

For God's sake, don't think I am mad with suspicion and distrust — I have never hated or in the end suspected a good person, but I know that my exultancy is right, that the sense of joy and glory is true and just, that the richness, glory, beauty, wonder and magnificence of America — the feel of the wind, the sound of snow, the smell of a great American steak — By God, these are real things and true things, and these people are liars and cheap swindlers.

Chronicles: Volume One is loaded with material from the letters of noted writers. Dylan uses elements from the letters of Jack London and Hemingway, but it is the letters of Thomas Wolfe that get the most play. In April of 2009 I suggested that Dylan may have been reading the letters of James Joyce while writing songs for Together Through Life.

A stock line that Sean Wilentz, the author of Bob Dylan in America, uses in interviews is, "Being a historian means you get to read a lot of dead people’s letters." Dylan using a dead person's letter to discuss the birth of America would have been a wonderful topic for Wilentz, one seemingly tailored for his expertise. It is a shame that he didn't recognize this Easter egg of required reading. It is just one of a number of Wilentz's glaring missed opportunities for a richer discussion.

Part of Dylan's description of Bono in Chronicles: Volume One seems to come from another writer named Henry; Henry Miller.

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 174 (regarding Bono):

He's like that guy in the old movie, the one who beats up a rat with his bare hands and wrings a confession out of him.

Sexus by Henry Miller:

You've beaten up many a rat with your bare hands, haven't you? Somebody held the guy down and you went at him until he screamed blue murder. You wrung a confession out of him and then you dusted yourself off and poured a few drinks down your throat. He was a rat and he deserved what he got. But you're a bigger rat, and that's what's eating you up. You like to hurt people. You probably pulled the wings off flies when you were a kid. Somebody hurt you once and you can't forget it.

The letters of these specific dead people is an area of interest for Henry Rollins as well. In a 2005 interview Rollins said, "I'm a fan of the letters of writers that I enjoy. I have every Henry Miller letter book, all the Thomas Wolfe letter books, every possible letter book I've been able to find of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Hemingway was an interesting letter writer. The letter books are interesting because it captures them in this kind of unguarded moment – rarely do people think, 'Well, this is going to get published.' So you catch them when they're not, you know, in character or whatever. It helps you to appreciate this...thing they were able to build to make their literature really work."

Henry Rollins also published a reprint of a collection of Henry Miller letters called Dear Dear Brenda and had the opportunity to personally go through the actual letters, choosing additional material for his edition.

Regarding Dylan's use of the Rollins material Michael Gray commented, "...these lines read better, and sound better, and manage to be so Dylanesque, coming from Dylan." I think that Gray makes a great point. Henry Rollins is certainly not Bob Dylan, but he is a part of Dylan's voice, and their uncanny shared interests, especially regarding the letters of great writers, is intriguing. The Letters of Thomas Wolfe and the books of Henry Rollins seem to appear next to each other in the required reading list on Dylan's coded syllabus.

Bob Dylan takes Henry Rollins through "Mississippi"

2011-03-02T08:06:00.021-07:00

"Mississippi" is one of the key songs of interest when taking a look at how Bob Dylan seems to have taken inspiration from the prose and poems of Henry Rollins. "Mississippi" was initially recorded during the sessions for the 1997 album Time Out of Mind and some of those versions turn up on The Bootleg Series Vol. 8 – Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989–2006. Dylan revisited the song a few years later and included it on "Love and Theft" in 2001. A careful look at all three of those releases helps to shine a bit of light on Dylan's writing process, showing how different lines from Rollins were worked and reworked, and how Dylan moved many of those lines from song to song in the course of the process.

In a Rolling Stone interview in 2001, regarding Time Out of Mind, Dylan said, "People say the record deals with mortality — my mortality for some reason! [Laughs] Well, it doesn't deal with my mortality. It maybe just deals with mortality in general. It’s one thing that we all have in common, isn't it? But I didn't see any one critic say: 'It deals with my mortality' — you know, his own. As if he’s immune in some kind of way – like whoever’s writing about the record has got eternal life and the singer doesn't. I found this condescending attitude toward that record revealed in the press quite frequently, but, you know, nothing you can do about that."

If Henry Rollins were to write a review of Time Out of Mind he might be the one critic who could accurately say, "It deals with my mortality." If you take a look at one of the passages from Rollins that I included in my initial post on this subject you'll see that it includes, "I wallow in my mortality." I read an interview with Rollins from a couple of years back where he said, "I think the last two Dylan records have just been incredible - Time Out of Mind and 'Love and Theft'. Those were just amazing." There are some good reasons why he might have related to those records, ones that he most likely did not recognize.

On Time Out of Mind I believe that eight of the eleven songs have traces of Rollins:
"Dirt Road Blues"
"Standing in the Doorway"
"Million Miles"
"Tryin' to Get To Heaven"
"'Til I Fell in Love with You"
"Cold Irons Bound"
"Can't Wait"
"Highlands"

"Mississippi" would have been a ninth entry on an album that I think is, in part, a song cycle based on Dylan's impressions of the themes of alienation, depression and mortality that Rollins expresses in his early books. "Mississippi" does tie in thematically with what Dylan is doing on "Love and Theft" as well, in that it is an album where many lyrics are constructed out of quotations, with Rollins being just one of many people that Dylan is quoting. Five of the songs on "Love and Theft" seem to include quotes from Rollins.

There are two poems by Rollins that appear on the same page of his book See a Grown Man Cry: Collected Work, 1988-1991 that bear very strong parallels to the opening verses of "Mississippi."

See a Grown Man Cry: Collected Work, 1988-1991 by Henry Rollins, p.156:

Welcome to this pure example of perfect human sadness
Your life in the finite ghetto
Yes your life is short
Yes your days are numbered
No you'll never escape
Touch the invisible wall of the ghetto
Man made
Run wild and get your wings singed
Find yourself in my arms
Your blood maniacally racing
Not even it can escape the ghetto

"Mississippi":

Every step of the way we walk the line
Your days are numbered, so are mine
Time is pilin’ up, we struggle and we scrape
We're all boxed in, nowhere to escape

See a Grown Man Cry: Collected Work, 1988-1991 by Henry Rollins, p.156:

I don't want to know you
I have nothing for you
I don't even have a self for myself anymore
People pick at your body like crows
You want a friend, go hang out with a big rock
It's not me you want
No matter what you think

"Mississippi":

Got nothin' for you, I had nothin' before
Don't even have anything for myself anymore
Sky full of fire, pain pourin’ down
Nothing you can sell me, I'll see you around

The final line in this next poem by Rollins seems to be the inspiration for the best line in "Mississippi" and perhaps the entire album, one that people quote frequently. This poem appears at the end of a section of the book and the bottom half of the page following it is blank. When one flips through the book the eye is naturally drawn to this line of text.

Now Watch Him Die by Henry Rollins, pp. 77 - 78:

1993 go
I will continue to pull the muscle from the bone
I will find out more
I will grow stronger
There's nothing else to do
No other place to go
I am in Detroit
Getting ready to go out and see the Beastie Boys play
1993 is a few hours away
I can't wait to put this year and its fake, hollow glory behind me
All the facts, stats, numbers
Want to dump it
Too heavy to carry
4 trips to Europe
2 to Australia
Japan
Singapore
182 shows
400 + interviews
I shook 1992 by the neck
The road shot into me
Now there's only 1993
Don't attach
Hit hard
Disappear into the treeline
Keep moving
It gets harder to get up in the morning
Lines on my face
It should start getting interesting right about now

"Mississippi":

Everybody movin’ if they ain’t already there
Everybody got to move somewhere
Stick with me baby, stick with me anyhow
Things should start to get interestin' right about now

Here's the final element from one of Rollins' books that parallels "Mississippi."

Art To Choke Hearts & Pissing In The Gene Pool by Henry Rollins, p. 26:

I just got back from the trip. The mission. It's impossible to come all the way back. I just don't ever seem to get there. Now I'm sitting alone in my cell, thinking about the whole thing. All my memories come to me in nightmarish form. Rearing their ugly heads, forcing me to remember the whole thing. You can't come back. Smoke slowly rises from the burnt villages I left back there. You can't come back, not all the way. Never.

"Mississippi":

Well, the emptiness is endless, cold as the clay
You can always come back,
but you can't come back all the way
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long

"Mississippi" could have been a key part of the Time Out of Mind song cycle, instead it is a ghost of the album. Additional ghosts appear, take form and change shape when examining The Bootleg Series Vol. 8 – Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989–2006 and I'll explore these in future posts.

The Mind Polluting Words of Bob Dylan and Henry Rollins

2011-02-15T20:19:00.023-07:00

As I mentioned in my previous post, the first element that led to revealing just how much of a role the work of Henry Rollins has played in Bob Dylan's songwriting since the late 90's was a passage in Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One that bears a strong resemblance to a section of the book Black Coffee Blues by Rollins. Here are the two passages.

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 74:

Radio sounds came shifting out of cafes. Snowy streets full of debris, sadness, the smell of gasoline. The coffeehouses and folk music joints were only a few blocks away, but it seemed like miles would go by.

Black Coffee Blues by Henry Rollins, p. 101:

September 18, 1990. Frankfurt, Germany: Waiting for the flight out. Outside on the street, the drunks argue and laugh. The hauptbahnhofis is a few blocks away. The junkie dead collect and drool. Tonight I was on the Autobahn. Clear night, stars, pine trees. Motion is all. I am hooked. Those truckers, the hard faraway look in their eyes. I know this is where I belong.

October 5, 1990. Somewhere in Georgia: Big moon on the rivers we cross. Roads full of debris and sadness, old music shifting on the radio. The smell of gasoline on my hands. The woman at the diner said that all the other employees were either in AA, NA, or were "drug fiends." How many times down this road? Station to station of exhaustion. Keep moving fast enough, enough of the time without looking back. You won't see the pieces of yourself fall and shatter. Crackling voice on the phone reinforces the distance. One ear to the receiver, so you're already only half-listening to the voice talking to you from the other world. The world that isn't addicted to motion. Miles go by, stare at the cracks in your hands.

Much of Chronicles: Volume One is constructed out of appropriated material, but only a few of the writers that Dylan used while crafting his memoir are also used in his lyrics. Rollins is at the top of that list, in terms of the volume of material from his books that shows up in Dylan's lyrics. One has to turn just a few pages from the above passage in Rollins' book to find an example of this.

Black Coffee Blues by Henry Rollins, p. 107:

I fell into my room. Got away from the streets and the noise. I am looking at the walls. They look good to me right now. Slowly I am forgetting them and their mind polluting words. I don't know how to handle praise. I feel like a con man when I stand there and take it from them. I feel like a commercial. I do it all wrong. I don't know what right is, but I know that I am doing it all wrong.

I love dreamless sleep. Dreams tell me too much. Sometimes the less I know, the better. The more I look, the more I see.

This passage seems to have been the spark for a couple of the lines in the Time Out of Mind song "Million Miles": "Well, there’s voices in the night trying to be heard/I'm sitting here listening to every mind-polluting word" and "I'm drifting in and out of dreamless sleep/Throwing all my memories in a ditch so deep".

Dylan returns to Rollins and the theme of voices in the night trying to be heard in a most interesting way in the song "Lonesome Day Blues" on his 2001 album "Love and Theft". A comparative literature study by Dylan is disguised as a blues couplet.

Dylan sings, "Last night the wind was whisperin’ somethin’—I was trying to make out what it was/I tell myself something's comin'/But it never does".

The first part of that line, identified years ago, is based off of a passage from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

The stars were shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die; and the wind was trying to whisper something to me, and I couldn't make out what it was, and so it made the cold shivers run over me.

Dylan seems to have crafted the second part of the couplet by building the rhyming line out of a passage where Rollins also writes about listening to the voices of the night.

Art To Choke Hearts & Pissing In The Gene Pool by Henry Rollins, p. 191:

I tell myself that something's coming. I don't know what, but it's coming... but it never does and I knew that it wouldn't in the first place. But to think that something's coming makes me feel like living a little more. Sometimes I don't feel like that at all, living I mean. Sometimes I crave something so big that it will be big enough to really knock me out, or do something. I sit here and I can hear all this noise and shit outside and I wonder if any of it's for me, if any of those noises are supposed to be telling me something. I listen intently. I don't want to miss the right one. What a drag, but I don't know what's dragging. The night is the only constant. But that doesn't help much right now.

Dylan seems to rework another line from Rollins into a different verse in "Lonesome Day Blues" as well. Dylan sings, "Funny, how the things you have the hardest time parting with/Are the things you need the least".

Art To Choke Hearts & Pissing In The Gene Pool by Henry Rollins, p. 68:

The things I need least are the things that I have the hardest time parting with. The process of weeding out, elimination. It's like going through withdrawals. It hurts to pull away, to leave things behind. The pain is temporary, like a lot of things.

Also on page 68 Rollins writes, "I know where to go, I know who I can trust. I know who I can depend on." This is echoed in the "Love and Theft" song "Bye and Bye", where Dylan sings, "I know who I can depend on, I know who to trust".

The layered thematic ties between "Million Miles" and "Lonesome Day Blues" are quite rich. On the surface are the obvious ties between the songs lyrically. Besides the elements regarding the voices in the night Dylan sings, "I’m just sittin’ here thinking with my mind a million miles away" in the latter song. Below the surface Dylan is using lines from Rollins in the first song, and then seems to compare Rollins and Mark Twain in the latter song. Dylan includes more lines from both Twain and Rollins in another song on "Love and Theft" as well. I'll cover this in a future post.

There is a passage on page 84 of Black Coffee Blues that is worth taking a look at. Rollins writes:

The next song I wrote was about the distance I felt when I thought about that girl. The song centered around the lines, "The closer I get, the farther away I feel." I was thinking that all the time I was with her, I worked hard to put that out of my mind. Romance passes the time.

Rollins eventually wrote a song called "Down and Away" using those lines. I suspect that Dylan read that passage and considered that to be a good theme for a song, and that that passage very well may have been one of the sparks that led to "Million Miles".

Being compared to Mark Twain by Bob Dylan is quite a compliment. I have to consider that Dylan is sincere when he is positioning Henry Rollins as a unique American voice. When placed in the context of just how much he used from Rollins, and there is a lot more to come, I suggest that it merits a much closer look at the work of Rollins.

Bob Dylan disguised as Henry Rollins

2011-02-13T09:38:00.060-07:00

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.

Bob Dylan, Scarface and The Science of Charlatanism

2010-09-13T05:59:00.037-06:00

I always tell the truth, even when I lie. - Tony Montana

An essay I wrote for New Haven Review regarding Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One is now available online. In the essay I discuss the music theory system that Dylan claims to have learned from Lonnie Johnson. This portion of the book has long puzzled musicians, in that it is mostly made up of double talk about metaphysical power and numerology and very little that one can actually apply to playing music. It is entertaining, but it is shuck and jive. Something I found shows that this was most likely intentional mischief. A paragraph in that section of the book appears to be constructed from a series of oddly grafted passages from Robert Greene’s 1998 bestseller The 48 Laws of Power, from a section of the book titled, “The Science of Charlatanism, or How to Create a Cult in Five Easy Steps."

Something that I left out of the essay, for space considerations, has to do with an strange instance of serendipity. When I first pieced together that Dylan seemed to be using material from a step by step guide on how to become a successful charlatan I discussed it with a number of musicians, writers and friends via email. Many of them contributed useful feedback and I thank them for it. Last September in an email to one friend, in an attempt to add a little context regarding Greene's book, I mentioned that, "48 Laws of Power is huge in the world of hip hop, almost as obligatory as The Art of War or the deluxe edition of Scarface on DVD." At that time last year Robert Greene's book The 50th Law, co-written with 50 Cent, had just been released. Dylan had mentioned The Art of War, and quoted from it, in a 2001 interview with Mikal Gilmore for Rolling Stone.

The day after I wrote that email I found that Dylan actually was using material from Scarface in Chronicles: Volume One, only it wasn't from the 1983 Brian De Palma film, or the 1932 version by Howard Hawks. Dylan had, perhaps in an attempt to be truly old school gangsta, reached back to the original novel by Armitage Trail.

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 129:
"MacLeish wanted clear answers. He looked at me with his wise eyes. He possessed more knowledge of mankind and its vagaries than most men acquire in a lifetime."

Scarface by Armitage Trail, p. 4:
"He was shockingly old for his age, as is almost every boy from such an environment. He looked thirty with his wise eyes, cynical but poetic mouth and well-developed beard that left a heavy pattern on his swarthy cheeks. And he possessed more actual knowledge of mankind and its vagaries than most men acquire in a lifetime. You could have set him down flat broke in any city in the world and he would never have missed a meal. Nor would he have needed to steal; stealing was the way of people without brains. He held a contempt for thieves; particularly those of the petty larceny variety."

Note the "poetic mouth" in the mask that Dylan places on Archibald MacLeish. The commentary on thieves and stealing in the Scarface passage ties in well with similar remarks from Jack London's letters that I touch on in my essay.

When I went to learn more about Armitage Trail and Scarface what I found was a sad story. Woody Haut covers it well in his book Heartbreak and Vine: The Fate of Hardboiled Writers in Hollywood. He writes that Howard Hughes, "purchased the narrative not so that he could adapt the plot but simply so that he could use the title." He adds that screenwriter W. R. Burnett, "had a low opinion of the novel." Haut was kind and did not go into the specifics. What Burnett had said in an interview was, "The book was an awful piece of crap — pulp." A morbidly obese drunk, Armitage Trail, real name Maurice Coons, would be dead before the film was released. A twist of fate had him pass away in Grauman's Chinese Theater. The intervening decades have added further insult, in that the version of Scarface that is currently in print suffers from low budget design and is littered with typos, making it difficult to get lost in the occasionally snappy prose. With def poet Dylan shining a new light on the man's work things might be looking up. Perhaps it's the beginning of an odd noir happy ending.

The Hidden Confederates in Bob Dylan's Attic

2010-05-15T18:27:00.017-06:00

In a recent interview Greil Marcus called Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One, "...a wonderfully written book with incredible turns of phrase." He expanded on this by saying, "He talks about early rockabilly singers as 'captains on burning ships', things like that. You can see him making choices between one word and the other. How do I say this? What's the way to get this across? The way the book is written, it repels any notion of a ghost writer. No ghost writer could come up with this."

At another point in the interview he said, "If building a richer house for the thing you're writing about has any purpose, it's to open the discussion. It's to simply tell people, just as one message, that there's more here than maybe you thought."

I suggest that there is a ghost writer in Chronicles: Volume One, that the book is written through the writing of Jack London, and that London's ghost inhabits the book. I'll open the discussion with some observations regarding the turn of phrase that Marcus singled out.

Here's the passage that he was referring to: "Ricky Nelson was singing his new song, 'Travelin' Man.' Ricky had a smooth touch, the way he crooned in fast rhythm, the intonation of his voice. He was different than the rest of the teen idols, had a great guitarist who played like a cross between a honky-tonk hero and a barn-dance fiddler. Nelson had never been a bold innovator like the early singers who sang like they were navigating burning ships."

That last sentence includes what I believe to be the very first of the dozens and dozens of times that Dylan uses material from Jack London. What Dylan has done here is very clever. Anyone familiar with "Travelin' Man" knows that the song is a smooth tune about a sailor going from port to port and meeting with his various girlfriends. The "bold innovators" that Dylan compares Nelson with seems to be based on elements from Jack London's short story "The Seed of McCoy." The tale involves a ship with a hull full of burning wheat. In the story London writes, "Captain Davenport had been under the fearful strain of navigating his burning ship for over two weeks, and he was beginning to feel that he had enough."

I believe that this is no coincidence, that it is intentional, just one instance of a device that Dylan employs throughout the book. There is a wonderful passage in Nabokov's Ada where he writes that, "...some law of logic should fix the number of coincidences in a given domain, after which they cease to be coincidences, and form, instead, the living organism of a new truth."

Dylan paints so many of the people in his book with the words of Jack London that I am convinced of this living organism.

The next example of this occurs just a few pages later in Chronicles: Volume One. When describing Dave Van Ronk he writes, "He was gruff, a mass of bristling hair, don't give a damn attitude, a confident hunter."

Dylan has used part of a description of the wolfdog Bâtard from London's story of the same name: "He was broad-chested, powerfully muscled, of far more than ordinary size, and his neck from head to shoulders was a mass of bristling hair - to all appearances a full-blooded wolf."

What is really amazing here is how Dylan goes on to describe Van Ronk as "a confident hunter." That phrase is used by Dylan to indicate Van Ronk is a New Yorker, but in a most cryptic way. In Kate Simon's classic 1959 NYC travel guide New York Places & Pleasures: An Uncommon Guidebook a portrait of the typical New Yorker includes, "Through this yearly renascence, following the torpor of summer, the New Yorker moves like a confident hunter — this will be the year of the business killing..." Dylan returns to Simon's book many times. Just as Dylan's descriptions of his time in New Orleans includes elements from Bethany Bultman's travel guide New Orleans, his descriptions regarding his early days in New York City are peppered with phrases from Kate Simon. Dylan's portrait of Izzy Young is especially colored with Simon's words, it accounts for the careless slant of his tie and much more.

This type of play goes on and on. The mysterious Ray Gooch is described as, "an old wolf, gaunt and battle-scarred" - a phrase right out of Call of The Wild. When Dylan writes, "Ray was like a character from out of some of the songs I'd been singing, someone who had seen life, done deeds and lived romances - had traipsed around, had a broad grasp of the country, its conditions." he has grafted elements from two of London's stories.

From "An Odyssey of the North":
"They had seen life, and done deeds, and lived romances; but they did not know it."

From "The Priestly Prerogative":
"It was she who studied maps, and catechised miners, and hammered geography and locations into his hollow head, till everybody marveled at his broad grasp of the country and knowledge of its conditions."

If you look carefully you will discover that the actions and attributes that Dylan ascribes to Bob Neuwirth in Chronicles: Volume One are very similar to those of a bulldog in White Fang.

Dylan also uses some Jack London when he brings up Greil Marcus. He writes, "Greil Marcus, the music historian, would some thirty years later call it 'the invisible republic.' Whatever the case, it wasn't that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambitions to stir things up. I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk on it."

From "An Odyssey of the North":
"An unbroken sea of frost, its wide expanse stretched away into the unknown east. The snowshoes were withdrawn from the lashings of the sleds. Axel Gunderson shook hands and stepped to the fore, his great webbed shoes sinking a fair half yard into the feathery surface and packing the snow so the dogs should not wallow. His wife fell in behind the last sled, betraying long practice in the art of handling the awkward footgear."

I've discussed Dylan's use of the words of others with a number of people and they all agree that Dylan is indeed up to something, but how they each characterize just what that might be has varied greatly. I opened the discussion with my friend Stuart Lipkowitz and what he gave me back floored me. Stuart is an ethnomusicologist and he is always up to something interesting, ranging from playing Klezmer violin with his combo Kompanye to building a banjo out of a gourd and a goat skin to arranging for Brett and Rennie Sparks of The Handsome Family to discuss writing ballads with his high school students.

Last year Stuart and I were both attending a party at the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History and I was talking with him about the various things that I had found in Dylan's book. I mentioned how Dylan had used material from a number of books about the Civil War and how I had stood in front of a wall of a thousand books on the subject at the library wondering which ones might also be on Dylan's bookshelf. Stuart suggested that a book that might have had appeal to Dylan would be Confederates In The Attic: Dispatches From the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz. He even suggested a particular chapter. When I took a look at the book a few days later the meter on my Geiger counter became pinned. I discovered that Stuart was dead right. His educated guess provided some of the building blocks to of one of the strangest sections of Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan's encounter with Sun Pie.

Stuart's intuition helped unlock this -

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 203:
"It was wood framed, an overhanging porch with support beams that had long ago rotted away — pickup truck full of vegetables parked out front and a junked out '50s Oldsmobile Golden Rocket up on blocks in the tall grass."

Confederates In The Attic, p. 255:
"We broke camp again and hiked deeper into the woods until we found an abandoned cabin with mud chinking and an overhanging porch with support beams that had long since rotted away."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 203:
"A young girl was on the balcony beating the dust off a rug, dressed in pink gymnastic tights, had long black oiled ringlets and a bath towel around her shoulders."

Confederates In The Attic, p. 276:
"We also learned that the temperature reached 87 degrees on the day of the Charge; that Pickett graduated last in his class at West Point; that the general oiled his long ringlets with scented balm; and that Rob wrote his senior paper in high school on Pickett's Charge and got a C-minus."

An interesting passage on page 277 of Confederates In The Attic revolves around "one impossibly long sentence" from William Faulkner's novel Intruder in the Dust. The sentence includes the phrase "long oiled ringlets." Someone concludes, "Guy could fuckin' write." after the sentence is read out loud.
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 203:
"There were figurines and sham jewels, some items in display cases, umbrellas, slippers, blue voodoo beads and votive candles. There were ironworks around the entryway, oak boughs-acorn motifs, a few bumper sticker signs. One said WORLD'S GREATEST GRANDPA. Another one said SILENCE. One said KEEP ON TRUCKIN'."

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 209:
"I started to buy one of the bumper stickers but Sun Pie gave it to me for free the one that said WORLD'S GREATEST GRANDPA."

Confederates In The Attic, p. 172:
"A mini-van drove up with a bumper sticker that read 'World's Greatest Grandpa.' Leaping from the van, an elderly woman in a floppy hat ran her finger along the monument."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 203:
"There were hog parts hanging from hooks on walls-hog jowls, hog ears, make you wanna squeal."

Confederates In The Attic, p. 261:
"Hog parts also had hung from the walls: hog shoulders, hog jowls, hog ears. The house specialty was souse, a concoction of congealed pig's ear and foot, shaped into a loaf and sliced like bread."
==
Chronicles: Volume One, p. 204:
"Sun Pie repaired boats in a trussed-up backyard, a yard full of crowbars, broken chains and moss covered logs."

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 217:
"The light had gone out of the day. In the trees, a solitary bird warbling. We did it as we damn well pleased and there was nothing more to say. "

Confederates In The Attic, p. 171:
"Now, where 100,000 men had clashed that April day in 1862, I sat on a moss-covered log, listening to a solitary bird warble somewhere in the trees above."
==
I have found so many other similar instances of Dylan's bulk use of the material of others that I have written a boilerplate "I have found something that may be of interest to you" email. I sent one to Horwitz and he wrote me back. I haven't asked his permission to quote his comments so I wont. I continued my journey into this minefield with elements from another discussion. Before I had pieced this together my friend Ron Phillips, who has provided me with a lot of thoughtful feedback and challenges regarding my digging into Chronicles: Volume One, had expressed his specific interest in what Dylan was up to on page 203 and I kept his observations in mind. As I took an even closer look at the page I discovered that the passages from Horwitz's book were only the beginning. The page includes two of the most oddly constructed sentences in Dylan's memoir.

A close look at "There were figurines and sham jewels, some items in display cases, umbrellas, slippers, blue voodoo beads and votive candles. There were ironworks around the entryway, oak boughs-acorn motifs, a few bumper sticker signs." reveals one of the most tightly woven pieces of writing I've ever come across in Dylan's work. Dylan has used material from four different sources here.

The bumper sticker is from Confederates In The Attic.

The ironworks with the oak boughs-acorn motif is another example of Dylan dipping into New Orleans by Bethany Bultman. From page 101 of Bultman's book: "Return to Royal Street and turn right to see a fine example of ironwork: the oak boughs-and-acorns motif of the La Branche House, at St. Peter."

I believe that the sham jewels and slippers are from The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells: "At last I reached the object of my quest, a dirty fly-blown little shop in a byway near Drury Lane, with a window full of tinsel robes, sham jewels, wigs, slippers, dominoes and theatrical photographs." Dylan uses material from Wells many times in the book and at one point makes a clear reference to the fact that he is aware that he is doing so.

The blue voodoo beads are from Hemingway's short story "Nobody Ever Dies": "In the shadow of the tree, behind the darkened car from which the searchlight played, there was a Negro standing. He wore a flat-topped, narrow-brimmed straw hat and an alpaca coat. Under his shirt he wore a string of blue voodoo beads." In the same paragraph on page 203 Sun Pie wears a "narrow brimmed, flat topped straw hat." Dylan uses a lot of other material from Hemingway throughout Chronicles: Volume One, in fact Tom Carson's 2004 review of the book in The New York Times mentions one of Dylan's nods to Papa.

In his introduction to the 1999 Penguin Classics edition of Finnegans Wake John Bishop writes, "One of the more interesting features of Finnegans Wake is that it even encourages the expansion of our understanding of what exactly it means — or can mean — to read. Is the reader who spends weeks researching and explicating a single page of Finnegans Wake — a common, pleasurable practice and a little liberal education in itself — doing quite the same thing as the reader who whips through the entire book in the same time? 'Reading' turns out to be as pluralistically malleable a procedure in Finnegans Wake as are interpretation and the discovery of meaning."

Dylan sings about reading James Joyce in "I Feel A Change Comin' On." Perhaps he is the kind of reader (and writer) who spends weeks on a page. When I read Dylan's book in this manner I see that living organism of a new truth.

That Dylan put that much effort into those two sentences on page 203 of Chronicles: Volume One left me more mystified by his memoir than I was to begin with. Much of the book is constructed in a similar fashion. I present this in the spirit of, as Greil Marcus put it, "building a richer house" and, far from being an attempt to show the man behind the curtain, I believe that examining and discussing the book reveals even more magic. The surface has barely been scratched and I maintain that the scheme is for real.

The Not-So-Fiendish Plot of Bob Dylan and Dr. Fu Manchu

2010-05-09T17:48:00.008-06:00

A comment on my previous post included, "Dylan's New Orleans comment is disingenuous or, rather, deliberately ironic/paradoxical because the home of the blues and the blues itself, so dear to Dylan, are home to/rooted in voodoo."

The statement in question, regarding how Dylan writes about New Orleans not having "the psychic current of holy places," needs to be considered in the context of what he writes about the city just a few pages earlier in Chronicles: Volume One: "New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don't have the magic anymore, still has got it."

The passage that contains the latter sentence is constructed in a most amazing way, using many elements from Sax Rohmer's 1916 novel The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu and a little bit of Mark Twain. Dylan's use of Sax Rohmer material was first noticed by Edward Cook a couple of years ago. Cook pointed out a passage that was clearly taken from Rohmer's 1919 novel Dope. Last year I post a couple of stray lines from Chronicles: Volume One that I discovered had parallels in The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu (they can be found in a thread on expectingrain.com regarding Dylan's use of material from the March 31, 1961 issue of Time magazine) and I've since found many more. Edward Cook and I have shared notes and have pinpointed material from a number of Rohmer's other novels being used in Chronicles:Volume One, but none are used as much as The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu. Dylan researcher Fred Bals has noted that "it's likely that the name of Dylan's production company, 'Grey Water Park' is a reference to a setting used by Sax Rohmer in several 'Fu-Manchu' stories."

Nowhere in Dylan's memoir is the use of Sax Rohmer material as dense as it is in this passage regarding New Orleans -

Chronicles: Volume One, pp. 179 - 180:
"Right now, I strolled into the dusk. The air was murky and intoxicating. At the corner of the block, a giant, gaunt cat crouched on a concrete ledge. I got up close to it and stopped and the cat didn't move. I wished I had a jug of milk. My eyes and ears were open, my consciousness fully alive.

The first thing you notice about New Orleans are the burying grounds — the cemeteries — and they're a cold proposition, one of the best things there are here. Going by, you try to be as quiet as possible, better to let them sleep. Greek, Roman, sepulchers — palatial mausoleums made to order, phantomesque, signs and symbols of hidden decay — ghosts of women and men who have sinned and who've died and are now living in tombs. The past doesn't pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time. The ghosts race towards the light, you can almost hear the heavy breathing spirits, all determined to get somewhere. New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don't have the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. "
==
From The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu:
My heart thumping furiously in my breast, I bent over him; and for the second time since our coming to Cragmire Tower, my thoughts flew to "The Fenman."

There are shades in the fen; ghosts of women and men
Who have sinned and have died, but are living again.
O'er the waters they tread, with their lanterns of dread,
And they peer in the pools--in the pools of the dead....

A light was dancing out upon the moor, a witch-light that came and went unaccountably, up and down, in and out, now clearly visible, now masked in the darkness!

"Lock the door!" snapped my companion--"if there's a key."

I crept across the room and fumbled for a moment; then--

"There is no key," I reported.

"Then wedge the chair under the knob and let no one enter until I return!" he said amazingly.

With that he opened the window to its fullest extent, threw his leg over the sill, and went creeping along a wide concrete ledge, in which ran a leaded gutter, in the direction of the tower on the right!

Not pausing to follow his instructions respecting the chair, I craned out of the window, watching his progress, and wondering with what sudden madness he was bitten. Indeed, I could not credit my senses, could not believe that I heard and saw aright. Yet there out in the darkness on the moor moved the will-o'-the-wisp, and ten yards along the gutter crept my friend, like a great gaunt cat. Unknown to me he must have prospected the route by daylight, for now I saw his design. The ledge terminated only where it met the ancient wall of the tower, and it was possible for an agile climber to step from it to the edge of the unglazed window some four feet below, and to scramble from that point to the stone fence and thence on to the path by which we had come from Saul.

This difficult operation Nayland Smith successfully performed, and, to my unbounded amazement, went racing into the darkness toward the dancing light, headlong, like a madman! The night swallowed him up, and between my wonder and my fear my hands trembled so violently that I could scarce support myself where I rested, with my full weight upon the sill.

I seemed now to be moving through the fevered phases of a nightmare. Around and below me Cragmire Tower was profoundly silent, but a faint odour of cookery was now perceptible. Outside, from the night, came a faint whispering as of the distant sea, but no moon and no stars relieved the impenetrable blackness. Only out over the moor the mysterious light still danced and moved.

One--two--three--four--five minutes passed. The light vanished and did not appear again. Five more age-long minutes elapsed in absolute silence, whilst I peered into the darkness of the night and listened, muscles tensed, for the return of Nayland Smith. Yet two more minutes, which embraced an agony of suspense, passed in the same fashion; then a shadowy form grew, phantomesque, out of the gloom; a moment more, and I distinctly heard the heavy breathing of a man nearly spent, and saw my friend scrambling up toward the black embrasure in the tower. His voice came huskily, pantingly:

"Creep along and lend me a hand, Petrie! I am nearly winded."
==
There is a lot to chew on there. If you are not familiar with Rohmer's characters, Nayland Smith is a bit like Sherlock Holmes and Petrie is his Watson. The most interesting thing that I see here has to do with the gaunt cat. In the book Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture by Tina Chen this line in Rohmer's novel is brought up when she discusses how Rohmer positions Smith and Fu Manchu as mirror images, albeit ones that are "perhaps inverted and/or distorted." Chen writes, "Petrie's description of Smith as 'a great, gaunt cat' yokes together two of the signature characteristics ascribed to the Doctor: his 'gaunt' frame and 'cat like gait.'" One can also see this mirror image played out in the 1980 film The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, in which Peter Sellers plays both Nayland Smith and Dr. Fu Manchu.

Of course Dylan would wish that he had a jug of milk to give that big, bony kitty, he is clearly attracted and that type of identity play. That Dylan has further masked the Nayland Smith/Fu Manchu gaunt cat by changing "great" to "giant" is also a nice touch. There is much more to explore here, especially how the hidden use of the Rohmer material might tie in with the passages in Chronicles: Volume One in which Sun Pie talks with Dylan about how to prepare for the coming invasion of millions of Chinese. "The Unparalleled Invasion" by Jack London is also worth looking at.

Dylan places the phrase "signs and symbols of hidden decay" in between elements from taken from Rohmer and I believe that he is quoting from Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi. Here is how Twain used the phrase, it appears in the final paragraph of chapter nine:

"No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty's cheek mean to a doctor but a 'break' that ripples above some deadly disease. Are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to him the signs and symbols of hidden decay? Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn't he simply view her professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself? And doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?"

An element from Life on the Mississippi showing up in the portion of the book regarding cemeteries, ghosts and death on the Mississippi has Dylan's signature all over it. I also love that Dylan that used "signs and symbols" as a sign and symbol; Dan Brown has got nothing on Bob Dylan. I reiterate my contention that much of Dylan's memoir is constructed in this manner, with hundreds of examples from cover to cover.

Life on the Mississippi does have some other things to consider. Twain writes, "Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!"

I don't think that I am anywhere near mastering the language of Chronicles: Volume One, but I have carefully gone through it, word by word, page by page over a long period of time. The grace, beauty and poetry are all still there. If anything I am even more enchanted, and the path that I have been brought down by learning more about how Dylan works has included a number of interesting encounters and moments. There's more detail about this in an article I've written for New Haven Review that should be released in the next few weeks.

The Perplexing Puzzle of Bob Dylan and Jann Wenner, The Unrepentant

2010-05-05T20:31:00.007-06:00

One of the responses to the theory I presented in my previous post, regarding what I see as a hidden message in Chronicles:Volume One about song interpretation, included, "I'm not saying you're wrong about it, I'm just not convinced you're right." For my unconvinced reader I will present another puzzle that Dylan seems to have planted. Since today is the fifth day of May, a date that features prominently in the song "Isis," I am tempted to discuss Dylan's use of material from Madame Blavatsky's 1877 book Isis Unveiled. Blavatsky's charlatanism does tie in with some other themes that appear in the book's hidden subtext, but that discussion will have to wait until a future date. Instead I will present a puzzle that uses some of the same elements as my previous example; a similar grafting of material from contemporary music writing and the writing of Jack London.

Are these just examples of "the chance that mimics choice" that Vladimir Nabokov writes of in "The Vane Sisters," a short story which includes a number of deliberate puzzles, including a critical acrostic for the reader to discover? I think not.

The same comment on my previous post also included, "Is Dylan really trying to make a point with cryptographs? To whom? Puzzle enthusiasts?" I believe that this is precisely what Dylan is doing. Just like many of Nabokov's narratives are built with a strategy or scheme in mind, with masked chess moves or anagrams, Dylan too has embraced a love of puzzles and has incorporated a great number of them into his memoir in order for them to be solved by the careful reader. I believe that Dylan's scheme is for real.

There are number of parallels between Dylan and Nabokov that can be useful to consider. When I read Joni Mitchell's comment that "Bob is not authentic at all" Nabokov's disdain for authenticity and sincerity came to mind. There is an interesting passage in the forward to Nabokov's Mary where he contrasts the novel with his memoir Speak, Memory. He writes, "I had not consulted Mashenka when writing Chapter Twelve of the autobiography a quarter of a century later; and now that I have, I am fascinated by the fact that despite the superimposed inventions (such as the fight with the village rowdy or the tryst in the anonymous town among the glowworms) a headier extract of personal reality is contained in the romantization than in the autobiographer's scrupulously faithful account."

The fictional version was more real for Nabokov. This is certainly something to consider when looking at the number of experiences that Dylan passes off as his own in Chronicles: Volume One, experiences which turn out to be incorporated from other sources - that Dylan is presenting what perhaps is a stronger personal reality by using the anecdotes of others.

Nabokov, like Dylan, clearly did not want to be interpreted or have his ideas paraphrased - but he certainly wanted his work to be decoded. Chronicles: Volume One is loaded with things to be decoded, I think of it as The Da Vinci Code of rock 'n' roll.

Dylan uses material from an overwhelming number of sources in Chronicles: Volume One, but it is the work of Jack London that he returns to again and again, dozens and dozens of times. Nabokov takes a potshot at Jack London in his short story "The Doorbell" and a running gag in his novel Pnin involves people not knowing who London is. Pnin visits a book store and asks for, "...a celebrated work by the celebrated American writer Jack London." The bookseller draws a blank, holds her temples and repeats, "London, London, London." Nabokov once dismissed Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad as "the writers of books for boys" and I imagine that he would probably place Jack London in the same category.

In stark contrast, Dylan seems to be a fan of these books for boys, incorporating material from each of the three into Chronicles: Volume One, ranging from the quick nod to Heart of Darkness on page 124, to the lines from over a dozen Hemingway short stories that appear throughout the book, to the long laundry list of Jack London that I've compiled.

I am intrigued by how at one point in his memoir Dylan has crafted an puzzle worthy of Nabokov by using material from Jack London, a writer that Nabokov seemingly did not respect. In the portion of Chronicles: Volume One where Dylan discusses the recording of the album Oh Mercy he writes, "Even with all the churches and temples and cemeteries, New Orleans doesn't have the psychic current of holy places. That's a cold, frozen fact."

Dylan has packed a lot into those two sentences. He is comparing New Orleans to Tangier by using material from an amazing article that Robert Palmer wrote for Rolling Stone, in which Palmer returns to Morocco to visit with the Master Musicians of Joujouka and experiences visions while in a trance state. Dylan then tags this with a reference to Jann Wenner. Here is how he did it -

From "Into The Mystic" by Robert Palmer, Rolling Stone, March 23, 1989:
"Tangier's cunningly balanced architecture of surfaces, arches, and crenelated towers serves as a kind of transformer for the spiritual electricity of the muezzin's call. In Morocco there are different kinds of electricity. This kind is called baraka, a kind of psychic current that certain holy places, sounds, and people absorb and hold like storage batteries. The receptive can plug into these sources - without getting fried, one hopes."

Dylan's sentence "That's a cold, frozen fact." is there to let you know that this reference to Robert Palmer's article is indeed intentional and not a fluke.

From the short story "Jan, the Unrepentant" by Jack London:
"He looked yearningly at that portion of Jan's anatomy which joins the head and shoulders. 'Give it up,' he repeated sadly to Lawson. 'Throw the rope down. Gawd never intended this here country for livin' purposes, an' that's a cold frozen fact.'

Jan grinned triumphantly. 'I tank I go mit der tent und haf a smoke.'

'Ostensiblee y'r correct, Bill, me son,' spoke up Lawson; 'but y'r a dummy, and you can lay to that for another cold frozen fact. Takes a sea farmer to learn you landsmen things. Ever hear of a pair of shears? Then clap y'r eyes to this.'"

The use of the line from "Jan, the Unrepentant" is meant to signify Jann Wenner. I had a great laugh at my own expense when reading London's story and trying to suss out why Dylan had used the passage. While reading the tale a second time I realized that since the character is Scandinavian his name would not have the hard "J" sound - that it wasn't Jan like "Jan-Michael Vincent," but rather Jan like..."Jann Wenner." It was a light bulb moment combined with egg on my face.

That Dylan has partnered Robert Palmer's line with a reference to the man who paid Palmer for writing it is glorious. What a clever way to pay respect to Palmer. I marvel at how much thought that Dylan must have put into that. Much of Dylan's book functions on this type of level.

I could just list page after page of similarities between the writing of Dylan and Jack London, but what that would result in is not my goal. "The suggestion of plagiarism is always sensational. When a half-page of deadly parallel is run in a newspaper, plagiarism is certainly suggested." Jack London wrote those words on April 10, 1906 in an angry letter regarding an item that had run in The New York World, one that showed more than a dozen uncanny similarities between one of London's short stories and a non-fiction article that had run in McClure's Magazine a few years earlier. I'll leave the sensational suggestions of plagiarism to Joni Mitchell and the knee jerk straw horse arguments to others, but just because it might be fodder for the media grist mill doesn't mean that we shouldn't continue to examine Dylan's work and have a discussion of what material he used from others and his possible reasons for doing it.

Adam Gopnik wrote an illuminating profile of magician Jamy Ian Swiss called "The Real Work" that ran in The New Yorker in 2008. In the article Gopnik writes about how David Blaine was preparing for an endurance feat involving sleep deprivation by reading A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson. I've been reading that book too, not only to learn about Joyce, but also to learn more about their approach to literary puzzle and problem solving, perhaps something that could be applied to learning more about Dylan the magician. One of my favorite lines in the A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake is, "Not until a sufficient number of readers have survived thousands of independent plunges will our Key become obsolete." I love the notion of plunging into a book thousands of times to see you might come up with. There is a section in Nabokov's "The Vane Sisters" regarding characters "examining old books for miraculous misprints" that touches on Finnegans Wake, mentioning "a prophetic sequence of the initial letters of Anna Livia Plurabelle" that I particularly enjoy, in that what Nabokov has his characters do is the antithesis of the measured approach that Campbell and Robinson took.

There is a passage in Lolita where Nabokov compares the stability of characters in books and how we sometimes try to impose the same expectations on people. In the book Humbert Humbert states, "Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us."

That our man Z is mercurial, labeled as Judas, engaging in things that have been taken as betrayals, whether that takes the form of going electric or finding religion or releasing a Christmas album, is hardly an original observation. Nabokov has Humbert say, "No matter how many times we reopen 'King Lear,' never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs." I suggest that the Dylan inside Chronicles: Volume One is not fixed like King Lear and if one plunges again and again into Chronicles: Volume One what one emerges with is an ever-changing Z.

The Strange Case of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell & Michael Stipe

2010-04-22T21:47:00.005-06:00

Joni Mitchell made some inflammatory comments regarding Bob Dylan in a recent interview with the LA Times: “Bob is not authentic at all: He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I.”

Juli Weiner at Vanity Fair suggests that Mitchell's comments might stem from some discoveries that I made regarding Dylan's use of material from the poet Henry Timrod on his album Modern Times.

The plagiarism portion of Mitchell's comment doesn't interest me that much, but I am intrigued by the notion of Dylan and deception that she brings up. Much of Dylan's recent work does involve elements of deception, much in the same way that the work of Penn & Teller or Ricky Jay is about deception. Dylan has been engaging in puzzles and games and false surfaces and things that are not exactly what they seem. It is not something to put down, it is something to celebrate and marvel at. It is a major aspect of his work. One place that he does this extensively is in his memoir Chronicles: Volume One.

One puzzle, a hidden commentary of sorts, that Dylan has incorporated into Chronicles: Volume One is, in part, about Joni Mitchell. In the book Dylan writes this about the recording of his album Oh Mercy -

Chronicles: Volume One, p. 216:
I wasn't sure that we had recorded any historical tunes like what he had wanted, but I was thinking that we might have gotten close with these last two. "Man in the Long Black Coat" was the real facts. In some kind of weird way, I thought of it as my '" Walk the Line," a song I'd always considered to be up there at the top, one of the most mysterious and revolutionary of all time, a song that makes an attack on your most vulnerable spots, sharp words from a master.
==
The phrase "mysterious and revolutionary" is the key to a puzzle. It is not a commonly used phrase, if you hunt you will not find that many examples. When I narrowed down the examples of usage of that phrase in conjunction with songwriting I was left with only one other person who had used it, Michael Stipe of R.E.M. It turns up in a biography of Joni Mitchell. I believe that Dylan chose it specifically. Here is the passage in context:

Joni Mitchell: Shadows and Light by Karen O'Brien, p. 128:
Each 'relationship' song is held up to the light, scrutinized, examined for clues and hidden secrets, energized by a reluctance to accept mystery, to accept that it's good to be puzzled sometimes, that it's a gift not to be presented with the transparently obvious time and time again, because in that space created by not knowing, we can imagine, we can relate, we can endow work with the value, if any, that it holds for us. Significant writing uses mystery, abstraction, subtlety and skill to enable us to do that. As the writer and critic Susan Sontag observed, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art and the world: 'To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of "meanings"'.

In the coming years, Mitchell would express her frustration at the often wildly inaccurate theories about her lyrics and their subjects, theories that destroy the listener's ability to make the song their own. Michael Stipe of REM has articulated the same frustration:

I really don't want to reveal anything about a character
or a song because I can remember, as a teenager, a
record falling into my lap, and how magical and mys-
terious and revolutionary and unbelievably life-altering
even one song on a record like that can be. I would hate
to diminish or be unfaithful to that notion. Plus, I main-
tain that my take, my interpretation of what my songs are
about, is, in the whole world, the least important take. I
wrote them but that does not give me some divine insight
into their meaning.

The best possible response, however, to the question "What are your songs about?" was vintage 60s Bob Dylan: "Oh, some are about four minutes, some are about five, and some, believe it or not, are about eleven or twelve," he replied.
==
I laughed out loud when I first found this, it is a very clever joke. Karen O'Brien has credited Dylan as having the best possible response to people's reluctance to accept the mystery of songs and Dylan deflects, using the words of Michael Stipe in response. That the passage that drew Dylan's eye also includes mention of "clues and hidden secrets" makes it even more rich. For attempting to be the Sherlock Holmes of the old, weird America I was rewarded with an example of Dylan's wonderful humor and a poke in the eye for playing detective at the same time.

I am sure that some would dismiss these three words as mere coincidence, but I think that this is no coincidence. Dylan's entire memoir is structured in this manner, from cover to cover. To try open the minds of those who may say "nay" to my theory I present something else that Dylan has done in the very same sentence. Dylan ends the sentence by calling "I Walk the Line," "a song that makes an attack on your most vulnerable spots, sharp words from a master."

I present that tail end of the sentence in question is clearly lifted from the work of Jack London.

White Fang:
White Fang was in a rage, wickedly making his attack on the most vulnerable spot. From the shoulder to wrist of the crossed arms, the coat sleeve, blue flannel shirt and undershirt were ripped in rags, while the arms themselves were terribly slashed and streaming blood.

All this the two men saw in an instant. The next instant Weedon Scott had White Fang by the throat and was dragging him clear. White Fang struggled and snarled, but made no attempt to bite, while he quickly quieted down at a sharp word from the master.
==
I've written an article for New Haven Review that should be published soon that explores many of Dylan's other puzzles, including his extensive use of the work of Jack London throughout Chronicles: Volume One.

When it comes to this approach to composition Dylan is in good company, James Joyce once wrote, "I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man for that seems to me a harsh but not unjust description." When the full range of Dylan's scissors and paste work is revealed I believe that there will need to be a complete reevaluation of his memoir.

Joni Mitchell's comments regarding Dylan's authenticity brought to mind a 1939 Billboard article that Nick Tosches included in his book Country. It points out that, "synthetic hillbillies are as a rule more desirable in a night club than the real ones." The article begins with this wonderful passage: "Real hillbillies rarely have good night club acts, says Meyer Horowitz, who ought to know. Jewish and Italian hillbillies usually outshine all others on showmanship, he says."

Authenticity has been out for more than seventy years. Synthetic scissors and paste hillbillies with a sense of showmanship are in - and I'll take Dylan's night over Mitchell's day every time.

Bob Dylan, Jeff Bridges & The Monkey Girl

2010-03-13T19:08:00.005-07:00

I was glad to see Jeff Bridges get the Oscar nod for Crazy Heart; I enjoyed his performance very much. Many scenes in the film were shot in Albuquerque, where I live, and occasionally I found the familiar locations a bit distracting. One scene takes place in the parking lot of a bar just a few blocks from my home, a big concert scene that is set in Arizona was shot in an amphitheater on the outskirts of Albuquerque, a venue where I saw Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson last summer. That evening, through the clouds of incense smoke, I spotted Dylan's Oscar for "Things Have Changed," from the movie The Wonder Boys, on an amplifier behind him.

A film that Jeff Bridges and Bob Dylan were both in that nobody got any Oscars for was Dylan's Masked and Anonymous. While it may not be a critic's favorite it is a film I that I've watched again and again and have spent quite a bit of time studying. In the film Bridges plays Tom Friend, a troubled reporter. The bonus features on the Masked and Anonymous DVD include an interesting deleted scene featuring Bridges, it is a shame that it isn't in the film as it is a powerful performance.

Bridges delivers this monologue: "I grew up on a farm. I slept with the cows. My old man broke his leg, became addicted to drugs, then he became a missionary. We had nothing against rats, but we used to have to shoot them because they'd eat the potatoes and flour. If rats were like frogs and ate water and mud, we would have left them alone. Then we lived in a mobile home park. We lived in a Prowler next to a Holiday Rambler and the Nomad. I had a baby horse. It meant everything to me. I wouldn't have traded it for a racehorse. The saddle was so small you could've put it on a cat. My old man, he went down the tunnel of love, the dark ride. It was the only way he could go. At carnival time, everybody had to put on a mask, and you had to eat and drink through your mask. Somebody brought be what I thought was eggs and home fries, and I gobbled it down. Then somebody told me later I'd eaten the flesh of my old man."

The bolded passages are there to illustrate how those lines are crafted out of material from a book of sideshow photography called In Search of the Monkey Girl. The book features photos by Randal Levenson as well as an essay called "Stories From The 1981 Tennessee State Fair" by Spalding Gray. Dylan's interest in sideshow is deep, something that I wrote about at length in a post last year.

Some of the material in the monologue is from Spalding Gray's essay and some is from notes that Levenson wrote for a few of his photos, an interesting bit of cut and paste. Here are the elements in their original context -

"Stories From The 1981 Tennessee State Fair":
"Maurice started in. He said he was of French-Canadian descent, from Burlington, Vermont, and his father had worked for IBM and broken his leg and become addicted to very strong drugs, painkillers the doctor had given him that were too strong, and the father actually died from this addiction. He was also very pessimistic, and the boys had buried him; they had thrown the dirt in on the grave. After that, Maurice had gotten into taking a lot of LSD; he had taken well over seventy trips, so this was an autobiographic sideshow. And he always went for the clear light. Now he got involved with this Catholic order, the Maryknoll order, and he had been a missionary in Africa, and he got thrown out of the Maryknoll order, because he was involved in sedition, and he decided to become a more conservative minister and went to the Princeton Seminary to study the ministry."

"Stories From The 1981 Tennessee State Fair":
"Most of the carnival people seemed to be from Montgomery, Alabama, and all of them lived in different trailers-mobile homes called the Blazer, the Prowler, the Wolverine, the Nomad, the Holiday Rambler, the Free Spirit."

"Stories From The 1981 Tennessee State Fair":
"He started smoothing back his hair, telling me, 'I bet you've never seen hair like this. I'm seventy-six years old and I've still got all my hair. I've been riding boxcars most of my life, sleeping on cardboard boxes. And I finally came into a gold mine Tiny Tina. I wouldn't trade her for a racehorse..."

"Stories From The 1981 Tennessee State Fair":
"As we were talking the Tiny Tina man got out a little teeny saddle. It was so darling a little leather saddle so small you could put it on a cat."

From Randal Levenson's notes for the photograph "Dark ride roughie, King's Shows, Woodbridge, Ontario, 1974":
"This fellow ran the dark ride, a ride like the tunnel of love, and he never took off the mask; he ate through it, drank through it."

Randal Levenson's notes for the photograph "Bob and Virginia Melvin, Fargo, North Dakota, 1976":
"Late one night in Minot, the show had closed and I was tired and hungry. The only places to eat on the grounds were the old slaughteryard and the grab joints, so I went into town to the diner, the only spot that wasn't closed up for the night. I ordered the safe thing — eggs and home fries — and then Virginia came in and ordered a couple of hamburgers to go. We talked a little about the day, and then I said, 'Where's Bob?' She said, 'Oh, he's out in the car.' I was going to ask, 'Why doesn't he come in?', but then I realized he couldn't come in, not because he'd give away his act, but because he would alarm people in the restaurant. There they were, worn out after a long day. He couldn't go inside and she was going to have to go back to the trailer and put one of those burgers through the blender, but they were going to eat well and they were going to eat together. That's when I began to understand what the two of them had with each other."

What I find fascinating about the passage above is that Levenson describes the eggs and home fries as "the safe thing" and in Masked and Anonymous that meal has become human flesh; the least safe, most taboo thing one could possibly consume.

Masked and Anonymous includes other material that appears to be drawn from In Search of the Monkey Girl.

Mickey Rourke's character Edmund delivers these lines to Dylan's character Jack Fate: "You know how it is Jack. When inferior people want to revolt, they do. And when they become equal they want to be superior. You're looking at the top man now, Jack. It's no dog and pony show. We're not just some macho men from the flea market."

"Stories From The 1981 Tennessee State Fair" by Spalding Gray (writing about what he would do if he bought a high striker, the carnival game where you swing a hammer and try to get a weight to go up a pole and ring a bell):
"I could make a lot of money at Washington Square when I got back. Or I could go down to Canal Street to the flea market. I'd wear sunglasses. It would be a good chance to make fun of macho men."

In the film Jack Fate encounters a Man-Eating Chicken sideshow act, an act that is featured prominently in Gray's essay.

In the script for Masked and Anonymous there is a scene where Jack Fate encounters a blind man, clearly Oedipus, who rants about Freud slandering him. The blind man goes on and on about Freud's cocaine use and some of his dialogue is constructed out of Levenson's notes for his photo "'Go-go Coaster' Inland Empire, Shelby, Montana, 1976."

In a featurette on the DVD Larry Charles, the director and co-writer of Masked and Anonymous, mentions how he told the cast to treat the script as a treasure map. There are indeed many interesting things buried in the script. If you know where to dig you will find elements from Naked Lunch, a couple of August Strindberg plays, Jim Bouton's Ball Four as well as nods to novels by John Dos Passos, Kenneth Patchen, Paul Auster and a lot more.

I am particular interested in how Dylan incorporated the elements regarding the tiny horse into the script. The World's Smallest Horse has been a staple of sideshow for decades. The bally used to pitch the horse always incorporates the same elements, but has transformed over time much the way that a folk song that is passed down changes over the years/decades/centuries. Usually the horse is pitched as being from "the wilds of Arizona," In Spalding Gray's essay the horse is from "the southwest wilds of Arizona." The line in the bally that I like the most regards what the horse eats. When I came across Tiny Tim, The World's Smallest Horse at the New Mexico State Fair last year the bally, a recording that played on an endless loop, included "just a shoebox of hay and a cup full of water makes a mighty big meal for Tiny Tim." I found a clip on YouTube with a field recording of the small horse bally for a different Tiny Tim that has the line as "just a handful of grain and a cup full of water is enough for Tiny Tim." Jim Zajicek of Big Circus Sideshow has his own take on this bally when he pitches "Little Biscuit" and Wayne Keyser's terrific CD Bally: Sounds of the Sideshow includes a recording of the little horse bally that must be over 40 years old that features all the classic elements.

The same folk process that one observes when studying Child Ballad variants is in play when it comes to sideshow bally. There has been some interesting research on this topic, a 1983 article in The Journal of American Folklore by Amanda Dargan and Steven Zeitlin called "American Talkers: Expressive Styles and Occupational Choice" and the amazing companion set of recordings American Talkers: The Art of the Pitchman, available on iTunes, are good starting points, but it is an area that deserves much more exploration. Of particular interest on American Talkers: The Art of the Pitchman is a recording by the late John Bradshaw titled "Blow Off for Priscilla the Monkey Girl." Bradshaw is doing a pitch for the same monkey girl, Percilla Bejano, that Levenson was in search of.

Wayne Keyser produces a podcast called Ballycast and in a recent episode he touches on sideshow and the folk tradition. Keyser talks about some bally recorded for Hubert's Museum, a place Dylan writes about visiting in Chronicles: Volume One, and brings Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music and Greil Marcus' The Old, Weird America into the discussion. I've listened to every episode of Ballycast, Keyser has done some fascinating interviews, but episode #035, "Hubert’s, Sideshow as Folk Art, & Lizard Men," is a good starting point for anyone interested in getting a better bead on how to approach Dylan's interest in sideshow as well as how folk music, oral tradition and sideshow bally dovetail.

Together Through Life dispatch #9 - Studying The Art of War

2009-04-24T01:00:00.001-06:00

In August of 2006 a person who uses the handle "Peggy Day" on the website expectingrain.com made the following comment regarding Bob Dylan's then new album Modern Times: "Thunder on the Mountain has the line: 'I've been sitting down studying the art of love' Wonder if he's referring to 'The Art of Love' by Ovid..." It was a prescient observation.

A few weeks later New Zealand poet Cliff Fell noticed that a number of lines on Modern Times had roots in the poetry of Ovid, but, perplexingly, they were from a different collection of poems, The Poems of Exile.

Last November I pieced together that Dylan had indeed been studying The Art of Love, the Peter Green translation titled The Erotic Poems: The Art of Love, The Amores, Cures for Love, and On Facial Treatment for Ladies, and had incorporated lines from it into songs on Modern Times. The examples are pretty cut and dry, Dylan's "If I catch my opponents ever sleepin'/I'll just slaughter them where they lie" to Ovid's "Catch your opponents sleeping/And unarmed. Just slaughter them where they lie" for instance.

In Dylan's recent interview with Bill Flanagan he stated, "I think I have a dualistic nature" and I believe that one of the lines in the Together Through Life song "Jolene" shows that, as well as Dylan's sense of humor, at work.

In the song Dylan sings, "Can't fight somebody with his back to a hill." That struck me because I've never heard anybody ever say that. "Back to a wall," sure, but never "back to a hill." Where did that come from?

I did a Google search for the phrase "with his back to a hill" and it returned a mere four hits. One was for the song's lyrics, quoted on expectingrain.com, and two were for Sun-Tzu's The Art Of War.

The Art of War: Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, translated by John Minford, includes these lines:

"These are axioms
Of the Art of War:
Do not advance uphill.
Do not oppose an enemy
With his back to a hill."

You can choose to write that off as chance or coincidence. I don't think it is. It has all the earmarks of something that Dylan would do intentionally and I think of the Minford translation as more assigned reading.

Regarding Dylan's previous assignment of the David Wright translation of The Canterbury Tales I noticed that the song "It's All Good" contains the line "restaurant kitchen all full of flies." In The Prologue of The Cook's Tale appears the line, "Because your cookshop's always full of flies." I'll bet that this is the same kitchen, the bane of the health inspector for over six hundred years.

Together Through Life dispatch #8 - The Human Race is Doomed

2009-04-21T09:24:00.002-06:00

In my previous post I presented how Bob Dylan had encoded a reference to the satires of Juvenal, specifically Susanna Braund's translation for Loeb Classical Library, Juvenal and Persius, into his recent interview with Bill Flanagan.

Perhaps to ensure that his reference could not be brushed off as a coincidental twist of linguistics Dylan had encoded another reference to Braund's translation into the interview:

Bob Dylan: There didn't seem to be any general consensus among my listeners. Some people preferred my first period songs. Some, the second. Some, the Christian period. Some, the post Colombian. Some, the Pre-Raphaelite. Some people prefer my songs from the nineties. I see that my audience now doesn't particular care what period the songs are from. They feel style and substance in a more visceral way and let it go at that. Images don't hang anybody up. Like if there’s an astrologer with a criminal record in one of my songs it’s not going to make anybody wonder if the human race is doomed. Images are taken at face value and it kind of freed me up.

From Braund's translation of Satire 6:
"Whatever the astrologer says they'll believe has come from Ammon's fountain, now that the oracles at Delphi are silent and the human race is doomed to darkness about the future. Yet the most important of these is the one that's been exiled most often. That's the source of their faith in his skill, if his right hand has clanked with iron. There's no talent in any astrologer without a criminal record, but only in the one who nearly died, who just managed to get sent to a Cycladic island and finally languished on tiny Seriphus."

There is certainly some face value humor in that. The interview has other things of interest in it, for instance at one point Dylan weaves in a line from a Gary Snyder poem. I'm going do some more digging to see what else might be there.

Together Through Life has become available to listen to online and I've come across a similar pairing of references in the song "It's All Good."

Here's the first verse:
"Talk about me babe, if you must
Throw on the dirt, pile on the dust
I'd do the same thing, if I could
You know what they say, they say it’s all good
All good, It’s all good"

I suggest that this verse references Hamlet Act V, scene i. When Laertes jumps in Ophelia's grave he exclaims, "Now pile your dust upon the quick and the dead."

The final verse of the song shows why it is probably Shakespeare's dust:
"I'm gonna pluck off your beard and blow it in your face
This time tomorrow I'll be rolling in your place
I wouldn't change a thing, even if I could
You know what they say, they say it’s all good
All good, Oh yeah"

In Act II, scene ii Hamlet's soliloquy includes:
"Who calls me villain? breaks my pate across?
Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face?
Tweaks me by the nose? gives me the lie i' the throat,
As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this? Ha!"

What fun word play. Will Shortz has got nothing on Bob Dylan. I'm going to play this record some more and consult my Theme Time Radio Hour secret decoder ring; the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.

Together Through Life dispatch #7 - Sideshow Bob

2009-04-17T20:53:00.001-06:00

I named my blog Goon Talk in part because it is a term used to describe the secret language of carnival workers. Bob Dylan has been telling tall tales regarding the carnival and the sideshow and speaking in code for almost fifty years. In the fifth installment of Bill Flanagan's interview with Dylan, promoting his new album Together Through Life, one of Dylan's responses drew my attention; I spotted some goon talk:

BF: Does that mean you create outsider art? Do you think of yourself as a cult figure?

BD: A cult figure, that's got religious connotations. It sounds cliquish and clannish. People have different emotional levels. Especially when you're young. Back then I guess most of my influences could be thought of as eccentric. Mass media had no overwhelming reach so I was drawn to the traveling performers passing through. The side show performers - bluegrass singers, the black cowboy with chaps and a lariat doing rope tricks. Miss Europe, Quasimodo, the Bearded Lady, the half-man half-woman, the deformed and the bent, Atlas the Dwarf, the fire-eaters, the teachers and preachers, the blues singers. I remember it like it was yesterday. I got close to some of these people. I learned about dignity from them. Freedom too. Civil rights, human rights. How to stay within yourself. Most others were into the rides like the tilt-a-whirl and the rollercoaster. To me that was the nightmare. All the giddiness. The artificiality of it. The sledge hammer of life. It didn't make sense or seem real. The stuff off the main road was where force of reality was. At least it struck me that way. When I left home those feelings didn't change.

Atlas the Dwarf and Miss Europe are not sideshow attractions who might have made their way through Minnesota in the late fifties, they are figures who date back to the tail end of the 1st century AD. They show up in the satires of the Roman poet Juvenal (born c. AD 55—died 130), specifically his eighth satire on the theme of nobility. Many phrases from his satires are in common parlance, such as "bread and circuses" and "Who watches the watchmen?"

Over the past two thousand years there have been dozens of translations. The passage Dylan refers to has appeared variously as:

"We call someone's dwarf, Atlas; a negro, Swan; a diminutive and deformed wench, Europa."

"We call the dwarf of some one, Atlas: An Ethiopian, a swan a little and deformed wench, Europa."

"We call a dwarf Atlas, an Aethiopian Cygnus, a crooked girl Europa..."

and

"We call a kept dwarf 'Atlas,' a negro boy 'Swan,' and a crooked, ugly wench 'Europe.'"

Peter Green, whose translations of the poetry of Ovid Dylan has shown a fondness for, has the passage as, "Who'd claim high nobility for one who falls short of his breeding, who's only distinction is a famous name? But dwarfs get labeled 'Atlas', a blackmoor's 'Snowball', some ugly misshapen girl gets known as 'Miss Europe'..."

I don't believe that Dylan has been reading the Peter Green translation this time though, because in the interview, which is most likely not a traditional sit down Q&A, but a construction of some other sort, Dylan uses the phrase, "the deformed and the bent."

A translation by Susanna Morton Braund, published in 2004, has the passage as, "It is our practice to call someone's dwarf 'Atlas,' his Ethiopian slave 'Swan,' and his bent and deformed girl 'Miss Europe.'"

I suspect that the Braund translation is on Bob Dylan's bookshelf.

The carnival/sideshow world shows up in other places in Dylan's work; the songs "Dusty Old Fairgrounds" and "Ballad of a Thin Man" for instance. In "Honest With Me" he sings "The Siamese twins are comin' to town."

In Chronicles: Volume One there is this passage, "The Leopard Girl. A carnie barker had explained about her, how her mother who was pregnant with her in North Carolina saw a leopard on a dark road at night and the animal had marked her unborn child. Then I saw the Leopard Girl and when I did, my emotions got weak." Leona the Leopard Girl was from Laurens, South Carolina; it was probably her that he saw, but Dylan might also have encountered Lola the Leopard Girl at Hubert's Museum in Times Square.

There is also the parade of talent in Masked and Anonymous; Ella the Fortune Teller, The Great El Mundo, female contortionist Brenda the Body Bender (who is in the script, but not the film), and the not-so-terrifying "Man-Eating Chicken" act, complete with a classic bait and switch sideshow banner.

Dylan included Quasimodo in the list of sideshow performers he gave to Flanagan, and, of course, the hunchback of Notre Dame is in the song "Desolation Row," a song where "the circus is in town" and there is a carnival. Regarding "Desolation Row" Dylan told Edna Gundersen in 2001, "That's a minstrel song through and through. I saw some ragtag minstrel show in blackface at the carnivals when I was growing up, and it had an effect on me, just as much as seeing the lady with four legs."

"Desolation Row" begins with the line about selling postcards and there is a lost Dylan song called "Won't You Buy A Postcard" regarding sideshow performers.

When Cynthia Gooding interviewed Dylan for WBAI in 1962 they had this exchange:

CG: At the carnival did you learn songs?

BD: No, I learned how to sing though. That's more important.

CG: Yeah. You made up the songs even then.

BD: Er, actually, I wrote a song once. I'm trying to find, a real good song I wrote. An' it's about this lady I knew in the carnival. An' er, they had a side show, I only, I was, this was, Thomas show, Roy B Thomas shows, and there was, they had a freak show in it, you know, and all the midgets and all that kind of stuff. An' there was one lady in there really bad shape. Like her skin had been all burned when she was a little baby, you know, and it didn't grow right, and so she was like a freak. An' all these people would pay money, you know, to come and see and ... er ... that really sort of got to me, you know. They'd come and see, and I mean, she was very, she didn't really look like normal, she had this funny kind of skin and they passed her of as the elephant lady. And, er, like she was just burned completely since she was a little baby, er. And ... er, it's a funny thing about them: I know how these people think, you know. Like when they wanna sell you stuff, you know, the spectators. And I don't see why people don't buy something, because, you know, like they sell little cards of themselves for, you know, like ten cents, you know. They got a picture on it and it's got some story, you know. And they've very funny thinking, like they get up there like, a lot of them are very smart, you know, because they've had to do this, I mean, still you can't. A lot of them are great people, you know. But like, they got a funny thing in their minds. Like they want to. Here they are on the stage, they wanna make you have two thoughts. Like, they wanna make you think that, er, they don't feel, er, bad about themselves. They want you to think that they just go on living everyday and they don't ever think about their, what's bothering them, they don't ever think about their condition. An' also they wanna make you feel sorry for them, an' they gotta do that two ways you see And er ... they do it, a lot of them do it. And ... er, it's er. I had a good friend, this woman who was like that, and I wrote a song for her, you know, a long time ago. An' lost it some place. It's just about, just speakin' from first person, like here I am, you know, and sort a like, talkin' to you, and trying, an' it was called, "Won't You Buy A Postcard". That's the name of the song I wrote. Can't remember that one though.

CG: There's a lot of circus literature about how freaks don't mind being freaks but it's very hard to believe.

BD: Oh yeah.

CG: You're absolutely right, that they would have to look at it two ways at the same time. Did you manage to get both ways into the song?

BD: Yeah. I lost the song.

If I spot any more instances of Dylan spizeaking cizarny I'll be sure to pass them along to my fellow grizzers, gricers and gunzels.

Together Through Life dispatch #6 - "Whorish as Ever".

2009-04-16T00:18:00.001-06:00

A line in David Fricke's review of Together Through Life in the new Rolling Stone caught my attention. Fricke writes, "There is another line worth noting on 'I Feel a Change Comin' On' - 'You are as whorish as ever' - and Dylan growls it like a compliment."

I noted in one of my previous posts that the same song includes the line, "I’m listening to Billie Joe Shaver and I’m reading James Joyce" and I commented:

I suspect that the Joyce that Dylan may favor might be his letters, especially his pleading love letters to his wife Nora.

In one letter, from August 22, 1909, Joyce wrote, "Do not ever lose the love I have for you now, Nora. If we could go on together through life in that way how happy we should be. Let me love you, Nora. Do not kill my love."

In an interview regarding the new CD Dylan said, "These new songs have more of a romantic edge" and this particular aspect of Joyce might have appealed to him.
==========================

I've been reading Joyce's wonderfully filthy letters to his wife for the past few weeks and I recognized that Joyce frequently calls his wife Nora "whorish" as a compliment and was quite fond of the word.

For example, Joyce's letter to Nora from December 8, 1909 begins with "My sweet little whorish Nora I did as you told me, you dirty little girl..."

His letter from the following day includes, "Buy whorish drawers, love, and be sure you sprinkle the legs of them with some nice scent and also discolour them just a little behind."

His letter from December 6, 1909 mentions, "a whorish movement of your mouth."

Fricke was right, Dylan does growl it like a compliment, and I believe that it may be a nod to James Joyce. I think that this lends further credence to my guess that the title of the CD has nothing to do with Walt Whitman, as some have supposed, and everything to do with Joyce.

Another possibility to consider is that the phrase "whorish as ever" shows up in the Peter Green translation of Ovid's The Erotic Poems: The Art of Love, The Amores, Cures for Love, and On Facial Treatment for Ladies, a book that Dylan seems to have used as the source for a number of lines on Modern Times.

Together Through Life dispatch #5

2009-04-14T05:08:00.001-06:00

Sometimes Bob Dylan makes it easy.

In part four of Dylan's interview with Bill Flanagan, just recently posted, he says, "Only a few of those radio ballads still hold up and most of them have Doc Pomus’ hand in them. Spanish Harlem, Save the Last Dance for Me, Little Sister … a few others. Those were fantastic songs. Doc was a soulful cat. If you said there was a little bit of him in This Dream of You I would take it as a compliment."

In the same interview it is established that a line in the song "This Dream of You" is “How long can I stay in this nowhere café?” - a line that is not in the thirty second clip that is available and had not been mentioned in any of the early reviews.

I've got a compliment for Bob Dylan. There is a little bit of Doc Pomus in "This Dream of You."

Doc Pomus wrote a song with Willy DeVille called "Just To Walk That Little Girl Home" and the opening line is "It's closing time in this nowhere café." It appears on the 1980 Mink DeVille album Le Chat Bleu.

Both recordings feature prominent accordion as well.

"Just To Walk That Little Girl" home is featured in the film The Pope Of Greenwich Village, which stars Mickey Rourke.

Dylan is a fan and friend of Mickey Rourke. Rourke is in Dylan's film Masked and Anonymous and Dylan wrote about Rourke in Chronicles: Volume One.

In the section of the book regarding the recording of the album Oh Mercy Dylan writes, "To get my brain into something else for a minute, I'd gone back to the local movie theater, this time to see Homeboy starring Mickey Rourke, who played a shy and awkward cowboy boxer named Johnny Walker. Christopher Walken was in it, too. Everybody in the movie was pretty good, but Mickey's acting was at the upper end. He could break your heart with a look. The movie traveled to the moon every time he came onto the screen. Nobody could hold a candle to him. He was just there, didn't have to say hello or good-bye. Just seeing him act gave me the inspiration to cut the last two songs for this album."

I wonder if Dylan knows that there is another actor in that film who also helped inspire one of his songs: Willy DeVille, who plays the role of Moe's bodyguard in Homeboy.

Together Through Life dispatch #4

2009-04-12T15:34:00.002-06:00

Thirty second ringtones of every song on Dylan's Together Through Life became available yesterday and I've been giving them a listen.

The song "My Wife's Home Town," or at least the thirty seconds of it online, is essentially a loving carbon copy of Muddy Waters' "I Just Want To Make Love To You" with different lyrics (and, from what I've read, Willie Dixon gets credit on the CD). David Hidalgo's accordion takes the place of Little Walter's harmonica licks. On the Waters record Little Walter takes the lead break and I wonder if Hidalgo gets to do the same on this track. Mike Campbell plays guitar on the album, although I don't know if he is on this particular song, and in recent years he has been playing the Rolling Stones' arrangement of "I Just Want To Make Love To You" with Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers.

The groove on "It's All Good" has a bit of a Slim Harpo feel, similar to "Shake Your Hips." To my ears a lead guitar line seems to quote the melody of Harpo's "I Got Love If You Want It," but the ringtone fades out before the full phrase is completed. You can check out Dylan covering that Slim Harpo track here. Here is a fun clip of the Kinks covering the same song. The Who, back when they were the High Numbers, did it with different lyrics as "I'm The Face."

The ringtones also provide new snatches of lyrics. The song "Forgetful Heart" includes the line, "Forgetful heart, we laughed and had a good time, you and I" and this appears to be another line with roots in the David Wright translation of The Canterbury Tales as the line, "Let's laugh and have a good time, you and I" is in The Sea-Captain's Tale.

In the same song Dylan uses the line, "Nothing shocks me more than that old clown" from The Canterbury Tales, and I can see why that line might have jumped off the page at him, it's got a certain flair to it, but the appeal of the "good time" line is a bit perplexing.

In 2003 Dylan told Robert Hilburn, "If you like someone's work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to." I like Dylan's work, that's why I look for these things.

Fred Bals from http://www.dreamtimepodcast.com/ commented on my blog last year that he thinks that "Dylan has the equivalent of a commonplace book."

While I have The Bob Dylan Scrapbook it is the The Bob Dylan Commonplace Book that I really want to see.

The commonplaces of Francis Bacon, Milton, Thoreau and Emerson have been published, so I hold out hope that Dylan's may eventually become available. I'm not going to buy a ringtone, but I'd certainly but that.

Regarding the practice of keeping a commonplace Emerson wrote, "Make your own Bible. Select and collect all those words and sentences that in all your reading have been to you like the blast of a trumpet out of Shakespeare, Seneca, Moses, John, and Paul."

I imagine that Dylan's commonplace books are messy ones. Larry Charles, who co-wrote Masked and Anonymous with Dylan, has talked about how Dylan dumped a pile of scrap paper with notes on them on a table when they began work on the script.

If his commonplaces ever do become available I expect that lots of trumpet blasts that were never even suspected will be found. In the absence of Bob Dylan's commonplace books the next best thing I can think of to do is to follow the breadcrumbs and recreate them secondhand. It is not some pointless exercise in exposing thievery or for making asinine accusations of plagiarism, it is a way to show respect for the work and to perhaps garner an inkling into how he creates it.

Together Through Life dispatch #3

2009-04-07T09:53:00.001-06:00

"Along with Son House and Charley Patton no one was more important to the development of Delta blues than Tommy Johnson. And long before the stories about Robert Johnson selling his soul at the crossroads those same stories were told about Tommy Johnson. His live performances where he would play guitar behind his neck while hollerin' the blues at full volume are legendary. Unfortunately his addiction to alcohol was so pronounced that he was often seen drinking sterno and even shoe polish strained through white bread when whiskey wasn't available...Tommy only recorded until 1930, but he was still performing as late as 1956 when he suffered a fatal heart attack. Seems a shame we never got to hear some of them later performances.”
Bob Dylan - Theme Time Radio Hour

Part of Dylan's radio show rap is taken verbatim from Cub Koda's entry on Tommy Johnson that appears in All Music Guide To The Blues. Disc jockeys crib from Cub Koda a lot, I've done it. Koda really knew his records. On one episode of Theme Time Radio Hour, regarding Cub Koda, Dylan said, "We miss him.” I'm with him on that.

On Dylan's new CD he tips his hat to Tommy Johnson again.

"If you want to live easy, pack your clothes with mine
Mmmm, want to live easy, pack your clothes with mine
If you want to live easy, babe, pack your clothes with mine"
Tommy Johnson - "Lonesome Home Blues"

"Well life is for love and they say that love is blind
If you want to live easy, baby pack your clothes with mine"
Bob Dylan - "I Feel a Change Coming On"

In the same song Dylan also sings, "I’m listening to Billie Joe Shaver and I’m reading James Joyce."

I suspect that the Joyce that Dylan may favor might be his letters, especially his pleading love letters to his wife Nora.

In one letter, from August 22, 1909, Joyce wrote, "Do not ever lose the love I have for you now, Nora. If we could go on together through life in that way how happy we should be. Let me love you, Nora. Do not kill my love."

In an interview regarding the new CD Dylan said, "These new songs have more of a romantic edge" and this particular aspect of Joyce might have appealed to him.

Is this where Dylan got the title of the album? Perhaps. The Whitman theory that is out there might also be on target. I certainly will be looking to see if more parallels between lyrics on the new CD and Joyce's letters reveal themselves.

I have long wondered where Dylan got the title for his 2003 film Masked and Anonymous from. Something I discovered recently suggests an answer.

Dylan most likely named his 2001 release "Love and Theft" as a nod to Eric Lott's book Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class.

A discovery I made last year regarding how Dylan incorporated lines from an 1856 minstrel show sketch called "Box and Cox" into his song "Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum" on that album led further credence to that supposition.

There is a book by Dale Cockrell from 1997 called Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World. Eric Lott wrote a blurb that appears on the back cover that says, "Trawling the chief popular institutions of Jacksonian America, Dale Cockrell links, as no one before him properly has, the saloons, circuses, vaudevilles, folk festivals, street processions, and yellow journals to the urgent if politically ambiguous 'disorder' of blackface minstrelsy. A deep, fascinating and crucial book."

On page 122 of Demons of Disorder appears this passage: "As those who effect charivaris are masked and anonymous, so were the editors of the Flash, who identified themselves publicly only as 'Scorpion, Startle & Sly'; likewise, their intention was to shape through entertainment - a carnivalistic engagement with the humanly compelling."

I bet that if you browse Bob's bookshelf Demons of Disorder can be found there.

Together Through Life dispatch #2

2009-03-17T23:07:00.002-06:00

The other day a friend wrote me an email that included, "When I started digging into Dylan, it was because I realized that I could get a more perfect view & understanding of great American music, as long as I allowed myself to be filtered through his glass." I too love how more directions and puzzles are opened up by paying attention to Bob Dylan's songs. I'm a song chaser, I'm a disc jockey because I love songs, and Dylan has so many great songs to chase. That he has written even more songs for me to hear? Hooray!

In my last post I wrote that the David Wright translation of The Canterbury Tales merits further examination because one can extrapolate that Bob Dylan favors the book based on his use of lines from it in a couple of songs.

One line I presented was "I'm pretty sure she'll make me kill someone" from Dylan's song "My Wife's Home Town," which will be on his forthcoming album Together Through Life. That line appears in The Prologue of the Monk's Tale.

The other line was from the alternate version of the song "Ain't Talkin'" that appears on Tell Tale Signs. Dylan sings, "None dare call her anything but madam/No one flirts with her or even makes a pass." The Reeve's Tale has the line, "None dared to call her anything but 'Madam'/Or flirt with her, or even make a pass."

I've been going through the book and now many pages are dog-eared and highlighted. It appears that this translation was the source for many lines on Modern Times.

Alex Ross got an early listen to the new album and he quoted some additional lines from a few of the forthcoming songs on his blog. Several of the lines that he quoted appear in The Canterbury Tales as well:

Bob Dylan - "Forgetful Heart" -
"Down by the river Judge Simpson walking around/Nothing shocks me more than that old clown"

The Summoner's Tale -
"'I've been insulted,' said the friar. 'Today
Down in your village—not the meanest potboy
Would put up with my treatment in your town!
But nothing shocks me more than that old clown"
==
Bob Dylan - "I Feel a Change Coming On" -
"And the fourth part of the day is already gone"

Introduction to the Sergeant-at-Law's Tale -
"The time was ten o'clock. And suddenly
He pulled his horse around:
'Now, gentlemen,
I have to warn all in this company
A fourth part of the day's already gone."

As for Modern Times, there is another line from "Ain't Talkin'":

"Ain't Talkin'" -
"Ain't talkin', just walkin', carrying a dead man's shield"

The Knight's Tale -
"Each of these huge white horses had a rider
One of them carrying the dead man's shield."
==
The song "Thunder on the Mountain" has three lines that correspond:

"Thunder on the Mountain" -
"Remember this, I'm your servant both night and day"

The Sergeant-At-Law's Tale -
"Remember, I'm your servant night and day"
==
"Thunder on The Mountain" -
"I've already confessed – no need to confess again"

The Summoner's Tale -
"My parish priest has shriven me today:
I've told him all about my condition;
There's no need to confess again,' said he,
'Unless I choose, out of humility.'"
==
"Thunder on The Mountain" -
"For the love of God, you ought to take pity on yourself"

The Squire's Tale -
"For the love of God, take pity on yourself"
==
These next passages are so similar that they also bear mentioning:

"Workingman's Blues #2" -
"Got both eyes tight shut/Just sitting here trying to keep the hunger from/Creeping it's way into my gut"

The Monk's Tale -
"I am so hungry that I cannot sleep
I wish to God I would sleep for good
Then hunger would not creep into my gut."
==
"Spirit on the Water" -
"I'm a thousand times happier than I could ever say"

The Sergeant-At-Law's Tale -
"A thousand times happier than I can say"

Turning back to the new record, a new song, "Shake Mama," is quoted as having has the line, "I'm motherless/I'm fatherless/Almost friendless too."

That line also appears in a 1938 Lonnie Johnson recording of a song called "Friendless and Blue." Johnson sings, "I'm motherless and I'm fatherless, I'm almost friendless too/Seems the world is down on you, no one knows what to do."

Of course blues couplets are endlessly recycled, but considering the lengthy passage on Lonnie Johnson that Dylan included in Chronicles, Vol. 1 I think that the Johnson record is the likely source.
==
Update:

I noticed another line that appears to be related.

"Thunder on The Mountain" -
"I wouldn't betray your love or any other thing"

The Knight's Tale -
"Neither of us would ever cross the other
In love or any other thing, dear brother"

This makes a total of four lines
==
Update #2:
The lines "Down by the river Judge Simpson walking around/Nothing shocks me more than that old clown" is from the song "Shake Shake Mama," the early reporting on the album, before its release, made it appear that the lines were in the song "Forgetful Heart."

New Dylan Album dispatch #1

2009-03-13T01:03:00.002-06:00

Last October I made a post that pointed out similarities between lines in the alternate version of Bob Dylan's song "Ain't Talkin'" that appears on his Tell Tale Signs CD and a passage from The Canterbury Tales.

Dylan has a new CD that reportedly will be released soon and an early report on it that appears on the Mojo website includes some lyrics that not only lends credence to my Canterbury Tales theory, but also helps pinpoint the exact translation of The Canterbury Tales that Dylan favors.

In my post last October I suggested that Dylan's lines, "None dare call her anything but madam/No one flirts with her or even makes a pass" were similar to a passage from The Reeve's Tale.

The Chaucer translation that I presented at that time went, "No creature dared call her anything but 'madam.' There was no man so bold that he would walk near her or dared once to flirt or dally with her."

The Mojo article quotes a line from a new Dylan song "My Wife's Home Town" as "I'm pretty sure she'll make me kill someone."

If you do a Google book search for the line "I'm pretty sure she'll make me kill someone" there is only one hit - and it is from a translation of The Canterbury Tales done by David Wright.

The passage goes like this:

I'm pretty sure she'll make me kill someone
One of these days - I'll end up on the run
For I'm a dangerous fellow with a knife
Even if I daren't stand up to my wife

When I went to look up the corresponding passage for the section of "Ain't Talkin'" that had previously drawn my interest I discovered that it appears as "None dared to call her anything but 'Madam' Or flirt with her, or even make a pass" - almost an exact match for the Dylan lines.

Compare and contrast:

Dylan: "I'm pretty sure she'll make me kill someone"
Chaucer: ""I'm pretty sure she'll make me kill someone"

Dylan: "None dare call her anything but madam/No one flirts with her or even makes a pass"
Chaucer: "None dared to call her anything but 'Madam' Or flirt with her, or even make a pass."

The David Wright translation of The Canterbury Tales merits further examination. It certainly will be on my bookshelf next to my Henry Timrod and Ovid collections, right in-between my copies of Junichi Saga's Confessions of a Yakuza and Bethany Bultman's New Orleans.

More to come...

Bob Dylan and The Parisian Prowler

2008-12-22T04:03:00.001-07:00

Charles Baudelaire's 1864 poem "Un cheval de race," from his collection of prose poems Le Spleen de Paris, has been translated into English many times.

The poem includes the line "Le Temps et l’Amour l’ont marquée de leurs griffes."

Depending on which translation you go with that line in English could be:

"Time and Love have marked her with their claws" or

"Time and Love have thus marked with their claws" or

"Time and Love have scarred her with their claws" or

"Time and Love have scored her with their claws" or

"Time and Love have set the mark of their claws upon her" or

"Time and Love have thus marked with their claws"

There is a translation of this collection of poems by Edward K. Kaplan that appeared as The Parisian Prowler: Le Spleen de Paris, Petits Poèmes en Prose. Kaplan's work received some high praise, for instance the late French scholar Claude Pichois stated, "This new translation not only transmits the spirit and general sense of Baudelaire's texts, but it does so while offering improvements over previous translations."

Kaplan's version of that line from "Un cheval de race" is different from all the others above. He has the line as "Time and Love have branded her with their claws."

I entered "marked scored scarred branded" into some English to French translation software and it gave me the response "marqué marqué marqué marqué." There are many ways to go with that word and Kaplan is the only one that I've found who decided to go with "branded."

With that in mind consider this verse from the song "Po' Boy" by Bob Dylan from his album "Love and Theft":

Time and love has branded me with its claws
Had to go to Florida, dodgin' them Georgia laws
Poor boy, in the hotel called the Palace of Gloom
Calls down to room service, says, "Send up a room"

I bet that if you browse Bob's bookshelf the Baudelaire there includes Kaplan's translation.

The Masquerade of Birds

2008-12-17T08:51:00.001-07:00

There is passage in an essay that Robert Polito wrote for The Poetry Foundation titled "Bob Dylan: Henry Timrod Revisited" that struck me.

He wrote, "So pervasive and crafty are Dylan’s recastings for 'Love and Theft' that I wouldn’t be surprised if someday we learn that every bit of speech on the album—no matter how intimate or Dylanesque—can be tracked back to another song, poem, movie, or novel."

I think that "every bit of speech" might be a stretch, but I believe that there are still plenty of things still to uncover. Here's one that I came across recently that I'd not seen mentioned before:

From the essay "The Poet" by Ralph Waldo Emerson:
"...when Aesop reports the whole catalogue of common daily relations through the masquerade of birds and beasts; — we take the cheerful hint of the immortality of our essence..."

From the "Love and Theft" song "Moonlight":
"The boulevards of cypress trees/The masquerade of birds and bees"

Tell Tale Signs dispatch #7

2008-11-12T00:09:00.001-07:00

My exploration of Bob Dylan's new CD Tell Tale Signs: the Bootleg Series Vol. 8 continues with another look at the alternate version of the Modern Times song "Ain't Talkin'."

In dispatch #4 I wrote about Dylan's liberal use of lines from Ovid in the Modern Times version of the song and pointed out nine different examples.

In a post at The Askesian Society website Jonny Thakkar makes an interesting observation, pointing out that, "We learn from Tell Tale Signs that the early version of 'Ain’t Talkin’' contains no Ovid references. Given that it ends up with nine, this is surprising."

I had not recognized that difference between the versions.

In that Thakkar points out another line from the Modern Times version of the song that came from Ovid it should have brought his tally to ten.

Thakkar presented this:
"Aint Talkin" - "I’m not nursing any superfluous fears"

Ovid - Black Sea Letters 2.7.5-6 "Of this I’ve no doubt - but the very dread of misfortune often drives me to nurse superfluous fears."

To up the ante I present an eleventh line from the song that clearly has roots in the poetry of Ovid.

From the Peter Green translation of Ovid's The Erotic Poems: The Art of Love, The Amores, Cures for Love, and On Facial Treatment for Ladies:

"Night attacks are a great thing. Catch your opponents sleeping
And unarmed. Just slaughter them where they lie."
The Amores Book 1, Section 9, lines 21 - 22

Compare that to Dylan's "If I catch my opponents ever sleepin'/I'll just slaughter them where they lie."

Dylan mentions this book by name in the Modern Times song "Thunder on the Mountain," singing, "I've been sitting down studying the art of love/I think it will fit me like a glove."
===================================
Update:

I found a few more lines in The Erotic Poems: The Art of Love, The Amores, Cures for Love, and On Facial Treatment for Ladies -

“I’ve been conjuring up all these long dead souls from their crumblin’ tombs”
“Rollin’ And Tumblin’”

“She conjures up long-dead souls from their crumbling sepulchres”
The Amores Book 1, Section 8, lines 17 - 18
=========================
“I ain’t nobody’s house boy, I ain’t nobody’s well trained maid”
“Rollin’ And Tumblin’”

“You must get yourself a houseboy and a well-trained maid, who can hint what gifts will be welcome.”
The Amores Book 1, Section 8, lines 88 - 89

Box and Cox

2008-10-26T04:29:00.001-06:00

I appreciate the good natured tone of the comment left by Fred of http://www.dreamtimepodcast.com/ regarding my previous post where I presented my theory that Bob Dylan read Bethany Bultman's book New Orleans and incorporated a number of phrases and lines found in it into his own work. Fred seems to be playing devil's advocate, I assume to test the quality of my original argument. Fair enough. I stand by my theory, I'm game and I will respond.

First though, Fred writes, "I'm a little skeptical about this theory, Scott, as opposed to say, your recent discovery that 'your presence is obnoxious to me,' may have come from the 'Box and Cox' playlet, which is a much more solid piece of deduction, in my opinion."

Fred devoted enough time and energy to investigate links I discovered between an 1856 minstrel show sketch and Dylan's song "Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum" and post about it on his blog that I'll send you over there - http://www.dreamtimepodcast.com/2008/10/your-presence-is-obnoxious-to-me.html

Take a listen to episode 40 of his Dreamtime podcast while you're visiting as well.

To clarify what Fred calls "a more solid piece of deduction," in that instance I was comparing and contrasting the following lines:

Dylan -
"Tweedle-dee Dum said to Tweedle-dee Dee/'Your presence is obnoxious to me'."

Box and Cox -
Box: (Looking significantly at Aunty B.): Well, I oughter hab, dat's a fac', for I pays for it. So if you's no dejections, I'll just remark dat your presence is obnoxious to me - I wants to go to bed.

Dylan -
"'I've had too much of your company,'/Says, Tweedle-dee Dum to Tweedle-dee Dee"

Box and Cox -
Box: No mam! I've had too much of your company already. Vamoose!

The Dylan Doodlebug

2008-10-19T14:17:00.001-06:00

I do not boast to have a rod, gathered with vows and sacrifice, that borne about will strangely nod to hidden treasure where it lies. I confess that what follows are the results of an easily executed parlor trick.

I present that Bob Dylan used the travel guide New Orleans by Bethany E. Bultman, published by Fodor's Travel Publications, as a source for a number of lines in his song "Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum" from his "Love and Theft" album.

"Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum" has some obvious nods to New Orleans and Mardi Gras. For instance, he namechecks A Streetcar Named Desire and the song has the line, "Tweedle-dee Dee - he's on his hands and his knees/Saying, 'Throw me somethin', Mister, please.'" If you want beads at Mardi Gras "throw me sumtin' mista!" is what you shout out to the passing krewes.

In the song Dylan sings, "Brains in the pot, they're beginning to boil/They're dripping with garlic and olive oil." Dylan's reference to New Orleans here is beyond cryptic.

In a restaurant review in New Orleans Bultman writes, "Food is served family-style, dripping in garlic and olive oil. Extremely difficult to find; check your map. $$$"

This is not coincidence. Something that is easily demonstrated by showing that Dylan does it again.

In the song Dylan sings, "My pretty baby, she's lookin' around/She's wearin' a multi-thousand dollar gown."

In New Orleans Bultman writes, "At the other end of the spectrum are the gay balls - a combination of Las Vegas and the Lido with just a dash of camp thrown in. They're presided over by a grand female-impersonating queen in a multi-thousand-dollar gown."

For those who would still say "nay" I present that Dylan so liked Bultman's book that he nicked a few passages to include in Chronicles: Volume One.

In Chronicles Dylan writes, “Andrew Jackson and his ragtag army of pirates, Choctaws, free blacks, lawyers and merchants militia defeated Britain’s finest, sent them back out to sea for good.”

In New Orleans Bultman writes, "Jackson and his ragtag army of Kentuckian Long Rifles, ill-prepared militiamen, Indian braves, Creoles, free men of color, and pirates blasted the British lines with mercilessly accurate cannon fire and artillery."

Notice that in Dylan's version Jackson's ragtag army includes lawyers, a good gag.

There are a number of other instances of Dylan lifting from Bultman in his book, but in an effort to make this post a little less laundry list-like I will present just one more:

New Orleans, "...pigeons looking for handouts, and itinerant artists sketching the passersby."

Chronicles: Volume One, "A place to come and hope you'll get smart - to feed pigeons looking for handouts."

Bethany Bultman is the program director of the New Orleans Musicians' Clinic, an organization that provides access to health and social welfare services for the New Orleans music community.

If you enjoyed this Dylan doodlebug parlor trick I ask that you visit the clinic's website, sign up for their newsletter and consider lending your support.
================================
Update:

Here are some additional lines that I did not originally include in my post.

In the song Dylan sings, "Looking in the window at the pecan pie/Lot of things they'd like they would never buy."

In her book Bultman includes this excerpt from Lillian Hellman's memoir Pentimento:
"Hammett was drinking heavily, dangerously. I was sick of him and myself and so one weekend I took off to see my aunts in New Orleans. I would not have liked to live with them for very long, but for a few days I always liked their modest, disciplined life in the shabby little house that was all they could afford since each had stopped working. It was nice, after the plush of Hollywood, to sleep on a cot in the ugly living room, crowded with stuff that poor people can't bring themselves to throw away, nice to talk about what we would have for the good dinner to which one of many old ladies would be invited to show off my aunts' quiet pride in me. Nicest of all was to take a small piece of all the Hollywood money and buy them new winter coats and dresses at Maison Blanche, to be delivered after I left for fear that they'd make me return them if I were there, and then to go along to Solari's, the fine grocers, and load a taxi with delicacies they liked and would never buy..."

Also in "Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum" Dylan sings, "They've got a parade permit and a police escort."

New Orleans, "The social clubs assume all the expense of the parade, including hiring the bands. Bands can cost well over $1,000, and the police escorts and parade permits cost over $1,500."

Chronicles: Volume One, "Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain."

New Orleans, "These innovations allowed other decorative styles to flourish as well, particularly Italianate, Gothic and Romanesque.

Tell Tale Signs dispatch #6

2008-10-15T12:57:00.002-06:00

My exploration of Bob Dylan's new CD Tell Tale Signs: the Bootleg Series Vol. 8 continues with a look at the song "'Cross the Green Mountain."

The song was previously released on the soundtrack to the 2003 film Gods and Generals, which is about the Civil War.

Lines from a number of Civil War era poems had already been found in the song, including Whitman's Come Up From The Fields Father, Melville's The Scout Toward Aldie, Timrod’s Charleston and Nathaniel Graham Shepherd’s Roll Call.

I poked at the song and six more poems fell out. They all appear in the same book, Singers and Songs of the Liberal Faith by Alfred Porter Putnam, published in 1875.

Contrast and compare:

In the song Dylan sings, "Serve god and be cheerful, look upward, beyond/Beyond the darkness that masks the surprises of dawn."

SERVE GOD AND BE CHEERFUL

"Serve God and be cheerful." The motto
Shall be mine, as the bishop's of old:
On my soul's coat-of-arms, I will write it
In letters of azure and gold.

"Serve God and be cheerful," self-balanced,
Whether fortune smile sweetly or frown.
Christ stood king before Pilate. Within me,
I carry the sceptre and crown.

"Serve God and be cheerful." Make brighter
The brightness that falls to your lot;
The rare or the daily sent blessing,
Profane not with gloom and with doubt.

"Serve God and be cheerful." Each sorrow
Is — with your will in God's — for the best,
O'er the cloud hangs the rainbow. To-morrow
Will see the blue sky in the west.

"Serve God and be cheerful." The darkness
Only masks the surprises of dawn;
And the deeper and grimmer the midnight,
The brighter and sweeter the morn.

"Serve God and be cheerful." The winter
Rolls round to the beautiful spring,
And in the green grave of the snowdrift
The nest-building robins will sing.

"Serve God and be cheerful." Look upward!
God's countenance scatters the gloom;
And the soft summer light of his heaven
Shines over the cross and the tomb.

"Serve God and be cheerful." The wrinkles
Of age we may take with a smile;
But the wrinkles of faithless foreboding
Are the crow's feet of Beelzebub's guile.

"Serve God and be cheerful." Religion
Looks all the more lovely in white;
And God is best served by his servant
When, smiling, he serves in the light,

And lives out the glad tidings of Jesus
In the sunshine he came to impart;
For the fruit of his word and his spirit
"Is love, joy and peace" in the heart.

"Serve God and be cheerful." Live nobly,
Do right and do good. Make the best.
Of the gifts and the work put before you,
And to God without fear leave the rest.

WILLIAM NEWELL
================================
In the song Dylan sings, "It's the last day's last hour of the last happy year" and "I look into the eyes of my merciful friend."

A NEW-YEAR'S HYMN.

ALL the days of my life, be they many or few,
The Father of Spirits will lead me unseen;
His goodness and mercy my steps will pursue,
By his rod I am led, on his arm I would lean.

All the days of my life, be they shadowed or bright,
His love, meeting mine, will fall full on my soul;
His voice, if I hear it, will guide me aright,
And his uplifting hand bear me on to the goal.

All the days of my life, days of light or of gloom,
I will trust the wise love of that merciful Friend,
As I climb through the dark to my heavenly home,
Still with me to comfort, to cheer and defend.

Let the days of my life, be they many or few,
Be hallowed by duty, made lovely by love;
And every New Year with good works flower anew,
While Christ at the root feeds the fruitage above.

Then, if many or few, if clouded or clear.
My days on the earth will have glimpses of heaven,
And the last day's last hour of the last happy year
Will of all be the best by the good Father given.

WILLIAM NEWELL
================================
In the song Dylan sings, "And then I ask myself, is this the end?/Memories linger, sad yet sweet"

JARED SPARKS
A Sonnet, sent to Mrs. Sparks on receiving a photograph of her husband, 1866.

I look upon thy features, honored friend,
With many thronging memories, sad yet sweet,
And then I ask myself, "Is this the end?
Shall we no more that noble presence meet?"
Will God, the Father, sporting with us, cheat
The heart's deep promise of another home, —
Another land where parted spirits come
Into another union more complete?
Nay, in the silence of that speaking look,
In the grave aspect lighted with a smile,
I read the answer to the yearning soul
Echoing the message of the Holy Book,
And on "that blessed hope" I anchor, while
I wait God's time to see the perfect whole.

WILLIAM NEWELL
===========================
In the song Dylan sings, "I listen while I stand/To the music that comes from a far better land" and "I feel that the unknown world is so near"

SERVICE IN THE HEREAFTER.

I would my work were better done;
I would it were but just begun;
For, listening where I waiting stand,
Comes music from the Better Land.
Oh, busy hand, and heart, and brain,
Why have ye toiled so long in vain?
I feel that unknown world so near!
And yet my spirit knows no fear.

For longer life I will not pray,
I will not ask another day;
For Thou, dear Father, even yet,
New chance may give, new tasks may set.

Beyond the grave, to thee more true,
Oh, give me still thy work to do;
The power to serve Thou'lt surely spare;
Shall not thy service wait me there ?

LOUISA JANE HALL
==============================
In the song Dylan sings, "But virtue lives and cannot be forgot."

THE DEPARTED.
"Compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses."

GENIUS for us has wrought,
Martyrs have bravely died midst flood and
fire,
And patriots gladly sought
Within our souls fresh valor to inspire!
Their voice is on the air;
They speak in every breeze, where'er we roam;
They bid us guard with care
The virtues of our country and our home.

Their influence fills the Past
With noble thoughts and generous deeds sublime,
Rich legacies — to last
From sire to son, throughout all coming time.

The present hour is theirs;
Of half our good are they the Primal Cause;
Their struggles, hopes, and prayers,
Have given to us both Liberty and Laws.

The Nations have their dead, —
Brave souls, that like the stars of light do shine;
Great spirits, who have led
Benighted millions on to life divine.

And saintly forms above,
Gentle and fair, may hover o'er the earth,
And bend in holy love
O'er each sad heart that mourns departed worth.

O, might some heavenly hand
Draw back the shadowy curtains of the sky,
That once that glorious band
Of bright angelic souls could meet the eye!

But they are with us still
In thought and deed. Yes, they are with us here,
To sanctify the will,
To soothe each grief, and calm each idle fear.

At the soft sunset hour,
When evening's splendors melt along the sky,
We feel their hallowing power
To kindle faith and raise the heart on high.

The mystery of life!
O who can sound its depths? Its bliss? its woe?
Its fears? its hopes? its strife? —
Their meaning all, — not men nor angels know!

We are fast hastening on:
Soon must the path of death by us be trod:
When life's great work is done,
May we be with Heaven's host, and with our God!

Our faith, our works of love,
Our charity within the haunts of woe, —
When we shall soar above,
The influence of these must live below.

The memory of the just
Shall still be dear, whate'er their earthly lot:
Dust may return to dust,
But Virtue lives, and cannot be forgot.

R.C. WATERSTON
===================================
In the song Dylan sings, "I'm ten miles outside the city and I'm lifted away/In an ancient light that is not of day."

SUNDAY ON THE HILL-TOP.

Only ten miles from the city,
And how I am lifted away
To the peace that passeth knowing,
And the light that is not of day!

All alone on the hill-top!
Nothing but God and me,
And the spring-time's resurrection,
Far shinings of the sea;

The river's laugh in the valley,
Hills dreaming of their past,
And all things silently opening,
Opening into the Vast!

Eternities past and future
Seem clinging to all I see;
And things immortal cluster
Around my bended knee.

That pebble is older than Adam!
Secrets it hath to tell ;
These rocks, — they cry out history,
Could I but listen well.

That pool knows the ocean-feeling
Of storm and moon-led tide;
The sun finds its east and west therein,
And the stars find room to glide.

That lichen's crinkled circle
Still creeps with the Life Divine,
Where the Holy Spirit loitered
On its way to this face of mine;

On its way to the shining faces
Where angel-lives are led,
Where I am the lichen's circle
That creeps with tiny tread.

I can hear these violets chorus
To the sky's benediction above;
And we all are together lying
On the bosom of Infinite love.

I — I am a part of the poem,
Of its every sight and sound ;
For my heart beats inward rhymings
To the Sabbath that lies around.

Oh, the peace at the heart of Nature!
Oh, the light that is not of day!
Why seek it afar for ever,
When it cannot be lifted away?

WILLIAM CHANNING GANNETT

Tell Tale Signs dispatch #5

2008-10-12T15:20:00.001-06:00

My exploration of Bob Dylan's new CD Tell Tale Signs: the Bootleg Series Vol. 8 continues with a look at the previously unreleased song "Can't Escape from You," which was recorded in 2005.

I knew that a number of Dylan songs from this period featured lines from the poems of Henry Timrod so I looked to see if perhaps this song might have some Timrod in it. It turns out that it did.

In the song Dylan sings, "I cannot grasp the shadows/That gather near the door."

In his poem A Vision of Poesy Henry Timrod wrote, "I cannot grasp the shadows as they pass."

Lines from this same Timrod poem show up in three different songs on Dylan's Modern Times: "When the Deal Goes Down," "Beyond the Horizon" and "Workingman's Blues #2"

The poem also includes the lines "A childish dream is now a deathless need" and "And high and hushed arose the stately trees, yet shut within themselves, like dungeons, where lay fettered all the secrets of the breeze" which Dylan incorporated into his song "Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum" from his 2001 release "Love and Theft."
==========================

A Vision of Poesy

Part I

I

In a far country, and a distant age,
Ere sprites and fays had bade farewell to earth,
A boy was born of humble parentage;
The stars that shone upon his lonely birth
Did seem to promise sovereignty and fame--
Yet no tradition hath preserved his name.

II

'T is said that on the night when he was born,
A beauteous shape swept slowly through the room;
Its eyes broke on the infant like a morn,
And his cheek brightened like a rose in bloom;
But as it passed away there followed after
A sigh of pain, and sounds of elvish laughter.

III

And so his parents deemed him to be blest
Beyond the lot of mortals; they were poor
As the most timid bird that stored its nest
With the stray gleanings at their cottage-door:
Yet they contrived to rear their little dove,
And he repaid them with the tenderest love.

IV

The child was very beautiful in sooth,
And as he waxed in years grew lovelier still;
On his fair brow the aureole of truth
Beamed, and the purest maidens, with a thrill,
Looked in his eyes, and from their heaven of blue
Saw thoughts like sinless Angels peering through.

V

Need there was none of censure or of praise
To mould him to the kind parental hand;
Yet there was ever something in his ways,
Which those about him could not understand;
A self-withdrawn and independent bliss,
Beside the father's love, the mother's kiss.

VI

For oft, when he believed himself alone,
They caught brief snatches of mysterious rhymes,
Which he would murmur in an undertone,
Like a pleased bee's in summer; and at times
A strange far look would come into his eyes,
As if he saw a vision in the skies.

VII

And he upon a simple leaf would pore
As if its very texture unto him
Had some deep meaning; sometimes by the door,
From noon until a summer-day grew dim,
He lay and watched the clouds; and to his thought
Night with her stars but fitful slumbers brought.

VIII

In the long hours of twilight, when the breeze
Talked in low tones along the woodland rills,
Or the loud North its stormy minstrelsies
Blent with wild noises from the distant hills,
The boy--his rosy hand against his ear
Curved like a sea-shell--hushed as some rapt seer,

IX

Followed the sounds, and ever and again,
As the wind came and went, in storm or play,
He seemed to hearken as to some far strain
Of mingled voices calling him away;
And they who watched him held their breath to trace
The still and fixed attention in his face.

X

Once, on a cold and loud-voiced winter night,
The three were seated by their cottage-fire--
The mother watching by its flickering light
The wakeful urchin, and the dozing sire;
There was a brief, quick motion like a bird's,
And the boy's thought thus rippled into words:

XI

"O mother! thou hast taught me many things,
But none I think more beautiful than speech--
A nobler power than even those broad wings
I used to pray for, when I longed to reach
That distant peak which on our vale looks down,
And wears the star of evening for a crown.

XII

"But, mother, while our human words are rife
To us with meaning, other sounds there be
Which seem, and are, the language of a life
Around, yet unlike ours: winds talk; the sea
Murmurs articulately, and the sky
Listens, and answers, though inaudibly.

XIII

"By stream and spring, in glades and woodlands lone,
Beside our very cot I've gathered flowers
Inscribed with signs and characters unknown;
But the frail scrolls still baffle all my powers:
What is this language and where is the key
That opes its weird and wondrous mystery?

XIV

"The forests know it, and the mountains know,
And it is written in the sunset's dyes;
A revelation to the world below
Is daily going on before our eyes;
And, but for sinful thoughts, I do not doubt
That we could spell the thrilling secret out.

XV

"O mother! somewhere on this lovely earth
I lived, and understood that mystic tongue,
But, for some reason, to my second birth
Only the dullest memories have clung,
Like that fair tree that even while blossoming
Keeps the dead berries of a former spring.

XVI

"Who shall put life in these?--my nightly dreams
Some teacher of supernal powers foretell;
A fair and stately shape appears, which seems
Bright with all truth; and once, in a dark dell
Within the forest, unto me there came
A voice that must be hers, which called my name."

XVII

Puzzled and frightened, wondering more and more,
The mother heard, but did not comprehend;
"So early dallying with forbidden lore!
Oh, what will chance, and wherein will it end?
My child! my child!" she caught him to her breast,
"Oh, let me kiss these wildering thoughts to rest!

XVIII

"They cannot come from God, who freely gives
All that we need to have, or ought to know;
Beware, my son! some evil influence strives
To grieve thy parents, and to work thee woe;
Alas! the vision I misunderstood!
It could not be an angel fair and good."

XIX

And then, in low and tremulous tones, she told
The story of his birth-night; the boy's eyes,
As the wild tale went on, were bright and bold,
With a weird look that did not seem surprise:
"Perhaps," he said, "this lady and her elves
Will one day come, and take me to themselves."

XX

"And wouldst thou leave us?" "Dearest mother, no!
Hush! I will check these thoughts that give thee pain;
Or, if they flow, as they perchance must flow,
At least I will not utter them again;
Hark! didst thou hear a voice like many streams?
Mother! it is the spirit of my dreams!"

XXI

Thenceforth, whatever impulse stirred below,
In the deep heart beneath that childish breast,
Those lips were sealed, and though the eye would glow,
Yet the brow wore an air of perfect rest;
Cheerful, content, with calm though strong control
He shut the temple-portals of his soul.

XXII

And when too restlessly the mighty throng
Of fancies woke within his teeming mind,
All silently they formed in glorious song,
And floated off unheard, and undivined,
Perchance not lost--with many a voiceless prayer
They reached the sky, and found some record there.

XXIII

Softly and swiftly sped the quiet days;
The thoughtful boy has blossomed into youth,
And still no maiden would have feared his gaze,
And still his brow was noble with the truth:
Yet, though he masks the pain with pious art,
There burns a restless fever in his heart.

XXIV

A childish dream is now a deathless need
Which drives him to far hills and distant wilds;
The solemn faith and fervor of his creed
Bold as a martyr's, simple as a child's;
The eagle knew him as she knew the blast,
And the deer did not flee him as he passed.

XXV

But gentle even in his wildest mood,
Always, and most, he loved the bluest weather,
And in some soft and sunny solitude
Couched like a milder sunshine on the heather,
He communed with the winds, and with the birds,
As if they might have answered him in words.

XXVI

Deep buried in the forest was a nook
Remote and quiet as its quiet skies;
He knew it, sought it, loved it as a book
Full of his own sweet thoughts and memories;
Dark oaks and fluted chestnuts gathering round,
Pillared and greenly domed a sloping mound.

XXVII

Whereof--white, purple, azure, golden, red,
Confused like hues of sunset--the wild flowers
Wove a rich dais; through crosslights overhead
Glanced the clear sunshine, fell the fruitful showers,
And here the shyest bird would fold her wings;
Here fled the fairest and the gentlest things.

XXVIII

Thither, one night of mist and moonlight, came
The youth, with nothing deeper in his thoughts
Than to behold beneath the silver flame
New aspects of his fair and favorite spot;
A single ray attained the ground, and shed
Just light enough to guide the wanderer's tread.

XXIX

And high and hushed arose the stately trees,
Yet shut within themselves, like dungeons, where
Lay fettered all the secrets of the breeze;
Silent, but not as slumbering, all things there
Wore to the youth's aroused imagination
An air of deep and solemn expectation.

XXX

"Hath Heaven," the youth exclaimed, "a sweeter spot,
Or Earth another like it?--yet even here
The old mystery dwells! and though I read it not,
Here most I hope--it is, or seems so near;
So many hints come to me, but, alas!
I cannot grasp the shadows as they pass.

XXXI

"Here, from the very turf beneath me, I
Catch, but just catch, I know not what faint sound,
And darkly guess that from yon silent sky
Float starry emanations to the ground;
These ears are deaf, these human eyes are blind,
I want a purer heart, a subtler mind.

XXXII

"Sometimes--could it be fancy?--I have felt
The presence of a spirit who might speak;
As down in lowly reverence I knelt,
Its very breath hath kissed my burning cheek;
But I in vain have hushed my own to hear
A wing or whisper stir the silent air!"

XXXIII

Is not the breeze articulate? Hark! Oh, hark!
A distant murmur, like a voice of floods;
And onward sweeping slowly through the dark,
Bursts like a call the night-wind from the woods!
Low bow the flowers, the trees fling loose their dreams,
And through the waving roof a fresher moonlight streams.

XXXIV

"Mortal!"--the word crept slowly round the place
As if that wind had breathed it! From no star
Streams that soft lustre on the dreamer's face.
Again a hushing calm! while faint and far
The breeze goes calling onward through the night.
Dear God! what vision chains that wide-strained sight?

XXXV

Over the grass and flowers, and up the slope
Glides a white cloud of mist, self-moved and slow,
That, pausing at the hillock's moonlit cope,
Swayed like a flame of silver; from below
The breathless youth with beating heart beholds
A mystic motion in its argent folds.

XXXVI

Yet his young soul is bold, and hope grows warm,
As flashing through that cloud of shadowy crape,
With sweep of robes, and then a gleaming arm,
Slowly developing, at last took shape
A face and form unutterably bright,
That cast a golden glamour on the night.

XXXVII

But for the glory round it it would seem
Almost a mortal maiden; and the boy,
Unto whom love was yet an innocent dream,
Shivered and crimsoned with an unknown joy;
As to the young Spring bounds the passionate South,
He could have clasped and kissed her mouth to mouth.

XXXVIII

Yet something checked, that was and was not dread,
Till in a low sweet voice the maiden spake;
She was the Fairy of his dreams, she said,
And loved him simply for his human sake;
And that in heaven, wherefrom she took her birth,
They called her Poesy, the angel of the earth.

XXXIX

"And ever since that immemorial hour,
When the glad morning-stars together sung,
My task hath been, beneath a mightier Power,
To keep the world forever fresh and young;
I give it not its fruitage and its green,
But clothe it with a glory all unseen.

XL

"I sow the germ which buds in human art,
And, with my sister, Science, I explore
With light the dark recesses of the heart,
And nerve the will, and teach the wish to soar;
I touch with grace the body's meanest clay,
While noble souls are nobler for my sway.

XLI

"Before my power the kings of earth have bowed;
I am the voice of Freedom, and the sword
Leaps from its scabbard when I call aloud;
Wherever life in sacrifice is poured,
Wherever martyrs die or patriots bleed,
I weave the chaplet and award the meed.

XLII

"Where Passion stoops, or strays, is cold, or dead,
I lift from error, or to action thrill!
Or if it rage too madly in its bed,
The tempest hushes at my 'Peace! be still!'
I know how far its tides should sink or swell,
And they obey my sceptre and my spell.

XLIII

"All lovely things, and gentle--the sweet laugh
Of children, Girlhood's kiss, and Friendship's clasp,
The boy that sporteth with the old man's staff,
The baby, and the breast its fingers grasp--
All that exalts the grounds of happiness,
All griefs that hallow, and all joys that bless,

XLIV

"To me are sacred; at my holy shrine
Love breathes its latest dreams, its earliest hints;
I turn life's tasteless waters into wine,
And flush them through and through with purple tints.
Wherever Earth is fair, and Heaven looks down,
I rear my altars, and I wear my crown.

XLV

"I am the unseen spirit thou hast sought,
I woke those shadowy questionings that vex
Thy young mind, lost in its own cloud of thought,
And rouse the soul they trouble and perplex;
I filled thy days with visions, and thy nights
Blessed with all sweetest sounds and fairy sights.

XLVI

"Not here, not in this world, may I disclose
The mysteries in which this life is hearsed;
Some doubts there be that, with some earthly woes,
By Death alone shall wholly be dispersed;
Yet on those very doubts from this low sod
Thy soul shall pass beyond the stars to God.

XLVII

"And so to knowledge, climbing grade by grade,
Thou shalt attain whatever mortals can,
And what thou mayst discover by my aid
Thou shalt translate unto thy brother man;
And men shall bless the power that flings a ray
Into their night from thy diviner day.

XLVIII

"For, from thy lofty height, thy words shall fall
Upon their spirits like bright cataracts
That front a sunrise; thou shalt hear them call
Amid their endless waste of arid facts,
As wearily they plod their way along,
Upon the rhythmic zephyrs of thy song.

XLIX

"All this is in thy reach, but much depends
Upon thyself--thy future I await;
I give the genius, point the proper ends,
But the true bard is his own only Fate;
Into thy soul my soul have I infused;
Take care thy lofty powers be wisely used.

L

"The Poet owes a high and holy debt,
Which, if he feel, he craves not to be heard
For the poor boon of praise, or place, nor yet
Does the mere joy of song, as with the bird
Of many voices, prompt the choral lay
That cheers that gentle pilgrim on his way.

LI

"Nor may he always sweep the passionate lyre,
Which is his heart, only for such relief
As an impatient spirit may desire,
Lest, from the grave which hides a private grief,
The spells of song call up some pallid wraith
To blast or ban a mortal hope or faith.

LII

"Yet over his deep soul, with all its crowd
Of varying hopes and fears, he still must brood;
As from its azure height a tranquil cloud
Watches its own bright changes in the flood;
Self-reading, not self-loving--they are twain--
And sounding, while he mourns, the depths of pain.

LIII

"Thus shall his songs attain the common breast,
Dyed in his own life's blood, the sign and seal,
Even as the thorns which are the martyr's crest,
That do attest his office, and appeal
Unto the universal human heart
In sanction of his mission and his art.

LIV

"Much yet remains unsaid--pure must he be;
Oh, blessëd are the pure! for they shall hear
Where others hear not, see where others see
With a dazed vision: who have drawn most near
My shrine, have ever brought a spirit cased
And mailëd in a body clean and chaste.

LV

"The Poet to the whole wide world belongs,
Even as the teacher is the child's--I said
No selfish aim should ever mar his songs,
But self wears many guises; men may wed
Self in another, and the soul may be
Self to its centre, all unconsciously.

LVI

"And therefore must the Poet watch, lest he,
In the dark struggle of this life, should take
Stains which he might not notice; he must flee
Falsehood, however winsome, and forsake
All for the Truth, assured that Truth alone
Is Beauty, and can make him all my own.

LVII

"And he must be as armëd warrior strong,
And he must be as gentle as a girl,
And he must front, and sometimes suffer wrong,
With brow unbent, and lip untaught to curl;
For wrath, and scorn, and pride, however just,
Fill the clear spirit's eyes with earthly dust."

--------

The story came to me--it recks not whence--
In fragments. Oh! if I could tell it all,
If human speech indeed could tell it all,
'T were not a whit less wondrous, than if I
Should find, untouched in leaf and stem, and bright,
As when it bloomed three thousand years ago,
On some Idalian slope, a perfect rose.
Alas! a leaf or two, and they perchance
Scarce worth the hiving, one or two dead leaves
Are the sole harvest of a summer's toil.
There was a moment, ne'er to be recalled,
When to the Poet's hope within my heart,
They wore a tint like life's, but in my hand,
I know not why, they withered. I have heard
Somewhere, of some dead monarch, from the tomb,
Where he had slept a century and more,
Brought forth, that when the coffin was laid bare,
Albeit the body in its mouldering robes
Was fleshless, yet one feature still remained
Perfect, or perfect seemed at least; the eyes
Gleamed for a second on the startled crowd,
And then went out in ashes. Even thus
The story, when I drew it from the grave
Where it had lain so long, did seem, I thought,
Not wholly lifeless; but even while I gazed
To fix its features on my heart, and called
The world to wonder with me, lo! it proved
I looked upon a corpse!
What further fell
In that lone forest nook, how much was taught,
How much was only hinted, what the youth
Promised, if promise were required, to do
Or strive for, what the gifts he bore away--
Or added powers or blessings--how at last,
The vision ended and he sought his home,
How lived there, and how long, and when he passed
Into the busy world to seek his fate,
I know not, and if any ever knew,
The tale hath perished from the earth; for here
The slender thread on which my song is strung
Breaks off, and many after years of life
Are lost to sight, the life to reappear
Only towards its close--as of a dream
We catch the end and opening, but forget
That which had joined them in the dreaming brain;
Or as a mountain with a belt of mist
That shows his base, and far above, a peak
With a blue plume of pines.
But turn the page
And read the only hints that yet remain.

Part II

I

It is not winter yet, but that sweet time
In autumn when the first cool days are past;
A week ago, the leaves were hoar with rime,
And some have dropped before the North wind's blast;
But the mild hours are back, and at mid-noon,
The day hath all the genial warmth of June.

II

What slender form lies stretched along the mound?
Can it be his, the Wanderer's, with that brow
Gray in its prime, those eyes that wander round
Listlessly, with a jaded glance that now
Seems to see nothing where it rests, and then
Pores on each trivial object in its ken?

III

See how a gentle maid's wan fingers clasp
The last fond love-notes of some faithless hand;
Thus, with a transient interest, his weak grasp
Holds a few leaves as when of old he scanned
The meaning in their gold and crimson streaks;
But the sweet dream has vanished! hush! he speaks!

IV

"Once more, once more, after long pain and toil,
And yet not long, if I should count by years,
I breathe my native air, and tread the soil
I trod in childhood; if I shed no tears,
No happy tears, 't is that their fount is dry,
And joy that cannot weep must sigh, must sigh.

V

"These leaves, my boyish books in days of yore,
When, as the weeks sped by, I seemed to stand
Ever upon the brink of some wild lore--
These leaves shall make my bed, and--for the hand
Of God is on me, chilling brain and breath--
I shall not ask a softer couch in death.

VI

"Here was it that I saw, or dreamed I saw,
I know not which, that shape of love and light.
Spirit of Song! have I not owned thy law?
Have I not taught, or striven to teach the right,
And kept my heart as clean, my life as sweet,
As mortals may, when mortals mortals meet?

VII

"Thou know'st how I went forth, my youthful breast
On fire with thee, amid the paths of men;
Once in my wanderings, my lone footsteps pressed
A mountain forest; in a sombre glen,
Down which its thundrous boom a cataract flung,
A little bird, unheeded, built and sung.

VIII

"So fell my voice amid the whirl and rush
Of human passions; if unto my art
Sorrow hath sometimes owed a gentler gush,
I know it not; if any Poet-heart
Hath kindled at my songs its light divine,
I know it not; no ray came back to mine.

IX

"Alone in crowds, once more I sought to make
Of senseless things my friends; the clouds that burn
Above the sunset, and the flowers that shake
Their odors in the wind--these would not turn
Their faces from me; far from cities, I
Forgot the scornful world that passed me by.

X

"Yet even the world's cold slights I might have borne,
Nor fled, though sorrowing; but I shrank at last
When one sweet face, too sweet, I thought, for scorn,
Looked scornfully upon me; then I passed
From all that youth had dreamed or manhood planned,
Into the self that none would understand.

XI

"She was--I never wronged her womanhood
By crowning it with praises not her own--
She was all earth's, and earth's, too, in that mood
When she brings forth her fairest; I atone
Now, in this fading brow and failing frame,
That such a soul such soul as mine could tame.

XII

"Clay to its kindred clay! I loved, in sooth,
Too deeply and too purely to be blest;
With something more of lust and less of truth
She would have sunk all blushes on my breast;
And--but I must not blame her--in my ear
Death whispers! and the end, thank God! draws near!"

XIII

Hist! on the perfect silence of the place
Comes and dies off a sound like far-off rain
With voices mingled; on the Poet's face
A shadow, where no shadow should have lain,
Falls the next moment: nothing meets his sight,
Yet something moves betwixt him and the light.

XIV

And a voice murmurs, "Wonder not, but hear!
ME to behold again thou need'st not seek;
Yet by the dim-felt influence on the air,
And by the mystic shadow on thy cheek,
Know, though thou mayst not touch with fleshly hands,
The genius of thy life beside thee stands!

XV

"Unto no fault, O weary-hearted one!
Unto no fault of man's thou ow'st thy fate;
All human hearts that beat this earth upon,
All human thoughts and human passions wait
Upon the genuine bard, to him belong,
And help in their own way the Poet's song.

XVI

"How blame the world? for the world hast thou wrought?
Or wast thou but as one who aims to fling
The weight of some unutterable thought
Down like a burden? what from questioning
Too subtly thy own spirit, and to speech
But half subduing themes beyond the reach

XVII

"Of mortal reason; what from living much
In that dark world of shadows, where the soul
Wanders bewildered, striving still to clutch
Yet never clutching once, a shadowy goal,
Which always flies, and while it flies seems near,
Thy songs were riddles hard to mortal ear.

XVIII

"This was the hidden selfishness that marred
Thy teachings ever; this the false key-note
That on such souls as might have loved thee jarred
Like an unearthly language; thou didst float
On a strange water; those who stood on land
Gazed, but they could not leave their beaten strand.

XIX

"Your elements were different, and apart--
The world's and thine--and even in those intense
And watchful broodings o'er thy inmost heart,
It was thy own peculiar difference
That thou didst seek; nor didst thou care to find
Aught that would bring thee nearer to thy kind.

XX

"Not thus the Poet, who in blood and brain
Would represent his race and speak for all,
Weaves the bright woof of that impassioned strain
Which drapes, as if for some high festival
Of pure delights--whence few of human birth
May rightly be shut out--the common earth.

XXI

"As the same law that moulds a planet, rounds
A drop of dew, so the great Poet spheres
Worlds in himself; no selfish limit bounds
A sympathy that folds all characters,
All ranks, all passions, and all life almost
In its wide circle. Like some noble host,

XXII

"He spreads the riches of his soul, and bids
Partake who will. Age has its saws of truth,
And love is for the maiden's drooping lids,
And words of passion for the earnest youth;
Wisdom for all; and when it seeks relief,
Tears, and their solace for the heart of grief.

XXIII

"Nor less on him than thee the mysteries
Within him and about him ever weigh--
The meanings in the stars, and in the breeze,
All the weird wonders of the common day,
Truths that the merest point removes from reach,
And thoughts that pause upon the brink of speech;

XXIV

"But on the surface of his song these lie
As shadows, not as darkness; and alway,
Even though it breathe the secrets of the sky,
There is a human purpose in the lay;
Thus some tall fir that whispers to the stars
Shields at its base a cotter's lattice-bars.

XXV

"Even such my Poet! for thou still art mine!
Thou mightst have been, and now have calmly died,
A priest, and not a victim at the shrine;
Alas! yet was it all thy fault? I chide,
Perchance, myself within thee, and the fate
To which thy power was solely consecrate.

XXVI

"Thy life hath not been wholly without use,
Albeit that use is partly hidden now;
In thy unmingled scorn of any truce
With this world's specious falsehoods, often thou
Hast uttered, through some all unworldly song,
Truths that for man might else have slumbered long.

XXVII

"And these not always vainly on the crowd
Have fallen; some are cherished now, and some,
In mystic phrases wrapped as in a shroud,
Wait the diviner, who as yet is dumb
Upon the breast of God--the gate of birth
Closed on a dreamless ignorance of earth.

XXVIII

"And therefore, though thy name shall pass away,
Even as a cloud that hath wept all its showers,
Yet as that cloud shall live again one day
In the glad grass, and in the happy flowers,
So in thy thoughts, though clothed in sweeter rhymes,
Thy life shall bear its flowers in future times."

Tell Tale Signs dispatch #4

2008-10-11T09:48:00.001-06:00

My exploration of Bob Dylan's new CD Tell Tale Signs: the Bootleg Series Vol. 8 continues with a look at the alternate version of the Modern Times song "Ain't Talkin'."

This was the first song from Tell Tale Signs that I started to examine because the original version was so rife with lines lifted from the Peter Green translation of The Poems of Exile by Ovid. If you've never seen the comparison of the nine lines from "Ain't Talkin'" and The Poems of Exile I've included them below. If you are a fan of "Ain't Talkin'" then the Stanley Brothers' song "Highway of Regret" is considered required listening as it is the source of the song's refrain.

There are new verses in the alternate "Ain't Talkin'" so I initially started to scan for those lines in my copy of The Poems of Exile in the sections that Dylan obviously favors. I didn't find anything there though.

While I did not find any more Ovid in translation in the alternate "Ain't Talkin'" I did find some Chaucer in translation in the song. It is from The Reeve's Tale.

Chaucer:
There durste no wight call her aught but Dame:
None was so hardy, walking by that way,
That with her either durste rage or play,
But if he would be slain by Simekin
With pavade, or with knife, or bodekin.

Chaucer in translation:
No creature dared call her anything but "madam." There was no man so bold that he would walk near her or dared once to flirt or dally with her, unless he wished to be slain by Simkin with a cutlass or knife or dagger.

Verse five of the alternate version of "Ain't Talkin'":
It's the first new day of a grand and a glorious Autumn
The queen of love is coming across the grass
None dare call her anything but madam
No one flirts with her or even makes a pass
=====================================
"Ain't Talkin'" and Ovid:

"Ain't Talkin'" - "Every nook and cranny has its tears"
Ovid - Tristia, Book 1, Section 3, Line 24 - "every nook and corner had its tears"

"Ain't Talkin'" - "all my loyal and my much-loved companions"
Ovid - Tristia, Book 1, Section 3, Line 65 - "loyal and much loved companions, bonded in brotherhood"

"Ain't Talkin'" - "I'll make the most of one last extra hour"
Ovid - Tristia, Book 1, Section 3, Line 68 - "let me make the most of one last extra hour"

"Ain't Talkin'" - "I practice a faith that's been long abandoned"
Ovid - Tristia, Book 5, Section 7, Lines 63-64 - "I practice terms long abandoned"

"Ain't Talkin'" - "They will tear your mind away from contemplation"
Ovid - Tristia, Book 5, Section 7, Line 66 - "tear my mind from the contemplation of my woes"

"Ain't Talkin'" - "In the last outback at the world's end"
Ovid - Black Sea Letters, Book 2, Part 7, Line 66 "I'm in the last outback, at the world's end"

"Ain't Talkin" - "They approve of me and share my code"
Ovid - Black Sea Letters, Book 3, Part 2, Line 38 - "who approve, and share, your code"

“Ain’t Talkin’” Who says I can’t get heavenly aid?
Ovid, Tristia 1.2.12-13 Who says I can’t get heavenly aid when a god’s angry with me?

“Ain’t Talkin’” They will jump on your misfortune when you’re down
Ovid, Tristia 5.8.3-5 Why jump / on misfortunes that you may well suffer yourself? / I’m down.

Tell Tale Signs dispatch #3

2008-10-09T11:22:00.001-06:00

My exploration of Bob Dylan's new CD Tell Tale Signs: the Bootleg Series Vol. 8 continues with a look at allusions to Byron and Blake in the song "Marchin' to the City." I ran these by a noted literary critic and scholar and he replied, "Entirely persuasive, and thrilling, but then you know that." That's good enough for me.

In "Marchin' to the City" Dylan sings, "With a smile that could make all the planets dance."

Compare that to this verse from Don Juan by Byron:

"Bride of the Sun! and Sister of the Moon!"
('T was thus he spake) "and Empress of the Earth!
Whose frown would put the spheres all out of tune,
Whose smile makes all the planets dance with mirth,
Your slave brings tidings -- he hopes not too soon --
Which your sublime attention may be worth:
The Sun himself has sent me like a ray,
To hint that he is coming up this way."

In Chronicles: Volume One Dylan wrote, "I had broken myself of the habit of thinking in short song cycles and began reading longer and longer poems to see if I could remember anything I read about it in the beginning. I trained my mind to do this, had cast off gloomy habits and learned to settle myself down. I read all of Lord Byron’s Don Juan fully from start to finish."

In "Marchin' to the City" Dylan also sings, "I was hoping we could drink from life's clear streams." Compare that to the following:

You Don't Believe

You don't believe - I won't attempt to make ye:
You are asleep - I won't attempt to wake ye.
Sleep on! sleep on! while in your pleasant dreams
Of Reason you may drink of Life's clear streams.
Reason and Newton, they are quite two things;
For so the swallow and the sparrow sings.

Reason says `Miracle': Newton says `Doubt.'
Aye! that's the way to make all Nature out.
`Doubt, doubt, and don't believe without experiment':
That is the very thing that Jesus meant,
When He said `Only believe! believe and try!
Try, try, and never mind the reason why!'

William Blake

Tell Tale Signs dispatch #2

2008-10-08T13:28:00.001-06:00

The Post Office delivered my copy of Bob Dylan's Tell Tale Signs: the Bootleg Series Vol. 8 yesterday.

I smiled when I looked at the discs and see that they claim that the music is presented in two audio formats, stereo and the Spectra-Morphic sound process.

It's not the first time that a Dylan product has boasted of being in an imaginary process. The DVDs for the film No Direction Home claims to be in the nonexistent Viva-pictal process (a play on Columbia Records' old Viva-tonal recording process from the 20's.) Kudos to the person responsible for the gags.

I groaned while reading the liner notes by Larry "Ratso" Sloman when I saw that the last name of the Vaughan brothers, Stevie Ray and Jimmie, was misspelled three times.

My exploration of possible allusions and references on Tell Tale Signs continues with a look at the previously unreleased song "Marchin' to the City." The bulk of the lyrics ended up being used in the song "Til I Fell in Love With You" and some of them show up in "Not Dark Yet," both from Time Out Of Mind.

There are allusions to both Blake and Byron in the song, I'll get to those tomorrow. In "Marchin' to the City" Dylan sings, "I'm chained to the earth like a silent slave/Trying to break free out of death's dark cave."

I believe that the idea of "a silent slave" may have come to Dylan from the writings of Frederick Douglass. Given Dylan's interest in the Civil War the passage below may have resonated with him. Also take into consideration that Dylan does mention Frederick Douglass in Chronicles: Volume One.

From Life and Times of Frederick Douglass:
Slaves were expected to sing as well as to work. A silent slave was not liked, either by masters or overseers. 'Make a noise there! Make a noise there!' and 'bear a hand,' were words usually addressed to slaves when they were silent. This, and the natural disposition of the negro to make a noise in the in the world, may account for the almost constant singing among them when at their work. There was generally more or less singing among the teamsters at all times. It was a means of telling the overseer, in the distance, where they were, and what they were about. But on the allowance days those commissioned to the Great House farm were peculiarly vocal. While on the way they would make the grand old woods for miles around reverberate with their wild and plaintive notes. They were indeed both merry and sad. Child as I was, these wild songs greatly depressed my spirits. Nowhere outside of dear old Ireland, in the days of want and famine have I heard sound so mournful.

In all these slave songs there was ever some expression of praise of the Great House farm - something that would please the pride of the Lloyds.

I am going away to the Great House farm,
O,yea! O,yea! O,yea!
My old master is a good old master,
O,yea! O,yea! O,yea!

These words would be sung over and over again, with others, improvised as they went along-jargon, perhaps, to the reader, but full of meaning to the singers. I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of these songs would have done more to impress the good people of the north with the soul-crushing character of slavery than whole volumes exposing the physical cruelties of the slave system; for the heart has no language like song. Many years ago, when recollecting my experience in this respect, I wrote of these slave songs in the following strain:

"I did not, when a slave, fully understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was, myself, within the circle, so that I could then neither hear nor see as those without might see and hear. They breathed the prayer and complaint of souls overflowing with the bitterest anguish. They depressed my spirits and filled my heart with ineffable sadness."

The remark in the olden time was not unfrequently made, that slaves were the most contented and happy laborers in the world, and their dancing and singing were referred to in proof of this alleged fact; but it was a great mistake to suppose them happy because they sometimes made those joyful noises. The songs of the slaves represented their sorrows, rather than their joys. Like tears, they were a relief to aching hearts. It is not inconsistent with the constitution of the human mind, that avails itself of one and the same method for expressing opposite emotions. Sorrow and desolation have their songs, as well as joy and peace.

Tell Tale Signs dispatch #1

2008-10-07T10:49:00.001-06:00

The new Bob Dylan CD Tell Tale Signs: the Bootleg Series Vol. 8 was released today.

I remain fascinated by Bob Dylan's magpie tendencies and when he releases new songs I can't wait to find out what's in them. I want to see where he's coming from. It is always surprising and points me in all sorts of new directions.

My approach to unlocking a Dylan song is to reverse engineer it. If I focus on just a few words or a rhyme very often it yields gold.

I don't even have a copy of the CD in hand yet and already I've found allusions to Blake, Byron, Chaucer, Henry Timrod, Frederick Douglass and more. I'm going to feature these in a series of posts.

For today I've got an interesting discovery regarding the song "Can't Escape From You."

In the song Dylan sings, "You've wasted all your power/you threw out the Christmas pie/Now you're withering like a flower/you'll play the fool and die."

The Christmas pie/fool and die rhyme seems have been constructed from two poems by George Wither (1588-1667). Dylan has coyly namechecked the poet by using the word "withering" in the verse. I ran this by a noted literary critic and scholar and he joked, "'Struth what a sleuth."

Here are the poems:

A Christmas Carol

So now is come our joyful'st feast,
Let every man be jolly.
Each room with ivy leaves is drest,
And every post with holly.
Though some churls at our mirth repine,
Round your foreheads garlands twine,
Drown sorrow in a cup of wine,
And let us all be merry.

Now all our neighbors' chimneys smoke,
And Christmas blocks are burning;
Their ovens they with bak'd-meats choke,
And all their spits are turning.
Without the door let sorrow lie,
And if for cold it hap to die,
We'll bury 't in a Christmas pie,
And evermore be merry.

Now every lad is wondrous trim,
And no man minds his labor;
Our lasses have provided them
A bag-pipe and a tabor.
Young men and maids and girls and boys
Give life to one another's joys,
And you anon shall by their noise
Perceive that they are merry.

Rank misers now do sparing shun,
Their hall of music soundeth,
And dogs thence with whole shoulders run,
So all things there aboundeth.
The country folk themselves advance,
For crowdy-mutton's come out of France.
And Jack shall pipe and Jill shall dance,
And all the town be merry.

Ned Swash hath fetch'd his bands from pawn,
And all his best apparel;
Brisk Nell hath bought a ruff of lawn
With droppings of the barrel;
And those that hardly all the year
Had bread to eat or rags to wear,
Will have both clothes and dainty fare,
And all the day be merry.

Now poor men to the justices
With capons make their arrants,
And if they hap to fail of these
They plague them with their warrants.
But now they feed them with good cheer,
And what they want they take in beer,
For Christmas comes but once a year,
And then they shall be merry.

Good farmers in the country nurse
The poor, that else were undone.
Some landlords spend their money worse,
On lust and pride at London.
There the roisters they do play,
Drab and dice their land away,
Which may be ours another day;
And therefore let's be merry.

The client now his suit forbears,
The prisoner's heart is eased,
The debtor drinks away his cares,
And for the time is eased,
Though others' purses be more fat,
Why should we pine or grieve at that?
Hang sorrow, care will kill a cat,
And therefore let's be merry.

Hark how the wags abroad do call
Each other forth to rambling;
Anon you'll see them in the hall
For nuts and apples scrambling.
Hark how the roofs with laughters sound!
Anon they'll think the house goes round,
For they the cellar's depth have found,
And there they will be merry.

The wenches with their wassail bowls
About the streets are singing,
The boys are come to catch the owls,
The wild mare in is bringing.
Our kitchen boy hath broke his box,
And to the dealing of the ox
Our honest neighbors come by flocks,
And here they will be merry.

Now kings and queens poor sheepcotes have,
And mate with everybody;
The honest now may play the knave,
And wise men play at noddy.
Some youths will now a-mumming go,
Some others play at rowlandhoe,
And twenty other gameboys moe,
Because they will be merry.

Then wherefore in these merry days
Should we, I pray, be duller?
No, let us sing some roundelays
To make our mirth the fuller.
And, whilst thus inspir'd we sing,
Let all the streets with echoes ring,
Woods and hills and everything,
Bear witness we are merry.
============================
Shall I Wasting In Despair

Shall I, wasting in despair
Die because a woman's fair?
Or make pale my cheeks with care
'Cause another's rosy are?
Be she fairer than the day,
Or the flow'ry meads in May,
If she be not so to me,
What care I how fair she be?

Shall my heart be griev'd or pin'd
'Cause I see a woman kind?
Or a well-disposed nature
Joined with a lovely feature?
Be she meeker, kinder, than
Turtle dove or pelican,
If she be not so to me,
What care I how kind she be?

Shall a woman's virtues move
Me to perish for her love?
Or her well-deserving known
Make me quite forget mine own?
Be she with that goodness blest
Which may gain her name of best
If she be not such to me,
What care I, how good she be?

'Cause her fortune seems too high
Shall I play the fool and die?
Those that bear a noble mind,
Where they want of riches find,
Think what with them they would
That without them dare to woo;
And unless that mind I see,
What care I how great she be?

Great, or good, or kind, or fair,
I will ne'er the more despair;
If she love me, this believe,
I will die ere she shall grieve;
If she slight me when I woo,
I can scorn and let her go;
For if she be not for me,
What care I for whom she be?