Sons of the Pioneers

Another in the long series of abbreviated versions of Dylan songs that each contained the by-then formula Byrds/Sonny and Cher arrangement of jingle jangly guitars, over-stated drumming and , just for kicks, a chorus coooing an off key "ahhhhhhhh" in the background. Harrison's talk-singing is impeccably British, charming as a generic trait of Carnaby era artifact, but toothless as an interpreter of one of Dylan's finest, most acidic song-poems. Whatever his technical limits as a singer, Dylan 's nasalisms conveyed attitude, unwavering its combination of exhasustion and disgust. The small talk between Harrison, son of acting stalwart Rex, and  Gary Lewis, son of spastic comedy icon Jerry, is typically lame reparte. It's lameness is the funniest thing about it.

Dylan and Genius: A Long Goodbye Kiss

Bob Dylan, I think, is a class of artist who had an enormous, galvanizing, revolutionizing style for a period of his career, years in which he released an impressive series of albums, from Another Side of Bob Dylan up to Blood on the Tracks, that is one of those bodies of work that are untouchable works of genius . Fitting perfectly well within his interesting notion of the Anxiety of Influence, Dylan's songs and lyrics in that period so profoundly changed the nature of what popular songwriting can be that all songwriters, regardless of style, write in the shadow of that genius.

Younger writers can write further into the direction they believe Dylan was headed, taking further risks, bigger chances, or they can go in the other extreme, writing away from the pull of Dylan's gravity, writing in a way no less risky and perplexing as those who become Dylan apostles. Dylan's case, within that of songwriting, is comparable to that of Shakespeare's, an influence so vast that no artist, even those who intensely dislike the work, can ignore the artist; lesser writers, "weaker” writers as Bloom would put, cannot help but be influenced by the profundity of the work that has gone before. Like it or not, it is a standard that compels you to make a stylistic choice. Genius, though, is fleeting, and Dylan's ability as such was that it came out of him in a flow that was, I believe, effortless, nearly savant-like, requiring less craft than a brain that was firing on all cylinders and producing a language that seemed to compose itself. But genius leaves a good many of our great artists--it is a spirit, perhaps, that takes residence in a person's personality long enough to get the work done and then leaves, sometimes quickly, sometimes gradually.

Other things come into play as well, such as a change in why one engages in the kind of self-interrogation that writing essentially is; Mailer dropped his high style, my favorite style when he came across the Gary Gilmore story and wrote in simpler terms as his fiction become more nuanced and rich. This is was a plus. Allen Ginsberg became a Buddhist and fell in love with the notion of "first thought, best thought" and essentially transcribed his continuous notes to himself, unedited, unmediated by literary qualification, in the effort to present a truer, constantly evolving face to the public in his books of poetry. Much as I like the reasoning and dedication, AG's poetry became far, far less exciting, interesting, became far less good. For Dylan, after his motorcycle accident, he has taken up with simpler more vernacular language, and we see the good it offered he and the listener, with John Wesley Harding and  Nashville Skyline. The language was simpler, and the sources from which Dylan took his inspiration, folk tales, old songs, country western bathos, navigated closely to the banal and hackneyed, but we must admit that Dylan had the skill, the instinct, to manage his language no less artfully than Hemingway would have done at his prime and kept matters enticingly elliptical at the heart of things: there are ways to create a sense of what you're getting at without too much artifice and pretension, useless . He was masterful in creating simpler lyrics that still drew you in and still kept you making intelligent guesses. Hemingway, this virtue wouldn't last, in my view; Hemingway fell prey to depression and concerns of his virility and sought to write his way out of his depression, the result is a series of late-career books that lack the grace or conviction or the brilliance of insinuation of his great work; he veered toward self-parody. Dylan's work, post Blood on the Tracks, became alarmingly prolix and parochial in ideas and a contrived rural diction that sounds completely false, the phoniest I've heard since the quaint southern tales of Erskine Caldwell.

I know that Dylan has always trafficked in clichés, but what he did previously with stale phrases was to subvert them, place them in unexpected juxtapositions, and cleverly invert their meanings to expose their shortcomings. He is not doing that these days--rather I think the good man just starts writing something without an inherent sense of where to go or when to stop or where to edit and seems to write in an attempt to maintain equilibrium. He seems to need to hear himself write; it is more the process than the result that matters. His use of clichés or banal phrases seems more stitchery than rehabilitating the language; they are means that he can connect his stanzas, do patchwork on an incomplete idea.

TEMPEST /Bob Dylan (Sony)

TEMPEST--Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan has a new album, Tempest, an event that would normally not interest me so much had it not been for the large portions of praise the songs and performances have drawn from smart rock and pop critics. There are some pioneers, some esteemed geniuses that a generation of record reviewers (and a generation of critics after them) don't want to let go of, let alone admit that the later work isn't as interesting as the material that drew you to the artist, to begin with. There is a problem with reaching one's zenith so early, in that everything you do afterward is compared with the singular work you'd done years before.

 It's not fair to the particular artist, whether great or mediocre. For Dylan, though, the generally solid reviews that he receives for his stream of albums seems an irrational response from someone who hasn't demonstrated more than the capacity to be mysterious and inscrutable. Mystery and inscrutability are qualities that in themselves that do not make for something that will turn my head ahead and cause me to cogitate beyond reasonable length when the disc is done playing. I don't know what the fuss is all about other than it seems to be a recurring outbreak of Everything- Dylan -Does-is -Genius fever. Musically it is solid, well-produced, and the musicians have a disciplined grittiness that has more polish than the cluttered and slapdash quality of much of Dylan's recent work and yet avoids sounding slick and corporate. It is obvious that sometimes was spent over the soundboard adjusting the mix. The pity is that Dylan is far from his best form here; for all his striving to write with an idiomatic tone his bucolic phrase-making has nearly always seemed practiced, rehearsed too much in a mirror. What is obvious to me is that Dylan continues to traffic in cliches; he is, as Lester Bangs remarked, selling off what is left of his charisma with under-constructed songs and ideas.

Much of the lyrics for this album seem like a parody of an aging musician long past his brilliant work doubling down on bad version of himself; there is an art to sounding as though your lyrics are from a vernacular, but the magic happens when the listener, the witness, forgets the contrivances and believes, for a moment at least, that the voices are from an era and place forgotten . This is what Robbie Robertson did with the Band; lyrics giving elliptical tales a plain-speaking, direct address from within the narrative line, not from without. There is something genuinely conversational and intimate in the best of the Band's rustic workings, no large message or grotesque rumbles of the philosophical swell. Life is too short and interesting to try to make sense of it and the characters Robertson and his bandmates are rather too busy telling everyone what just happened, what happened before, what things were like before any catastrophe, cataclysmic event or historicist debacle made the tides rise and the price of gas to go up.

The reviews have been absurdly positive while the music is merely passable. The lyrics, though, are what's truly abysmal. Smart pop music critics, especially younger ones eager to reinforce the conceit that Dylan is untouchable, have tripped over themselves to praise "Tempest" when in point of fact what Dylan does with this disc is resort to the cliches, tired tropes, and convenient moralism that he proved in the sixties could be abandoned altogether. Once or twice, as in an effort like "Self Portrait", you could argue that the songwriter was being supremely ironic, daring his followers to find sage advice, worth and significance in the banality that album is marked by. Forty years worth of raiding the Prison House of Chestnut Schematics, though, indicates not irony but a bad habit. Some writers are brilliant in their old age, managing a new style to meet their tested experience; Dylan is only vague and pedestrian in his narratives, without a quotable line for the effort.

"They battened down the hatches 

But the hatches wouldn't hold 

They drowned upon the staircase 

Of brass and polished gold. "

The fact that Dylan cannot seem to write anything that does not include hoary prophecies that are more smoke than thunder, nor stay away from convenient phrases that seem more author notes in a screenplay-in-progress, late Dylan is only another workman in the field, dutiful but not brilliant. Dylan wants to write parables of indefinite place and time, but his linguistic invention, his ability to mash up idioms from folk traditions, hip argot and Modernist poetry--TS Eliot, prime period Allan Ginsberg, Rimbaud--is gone; as with Norman Mailer's famously baroque prose style constructed in the 3rd person, I think his ear for that kind of writing has gone deaf. Unlike Mailer, Dylan did not create, for the most part, a compelling replacement. He is a shadow of what he was and stalwart fans pay him a fortune to be precisely that, a stick figure reminder of their youth, not an aging artist who has managed to remain interesting on the merits of his later work. Dylan, I think, is a class of artist who had an enormous, galvanizing, revolutionizing style for a period of his career, years in which he released an impressive series of albums, from Another Side of Bob Dylan up to Blood on the Tracks, that is one of those bodies of work that are untouchable works of genius . Fitting perfectly well within his interesting notion of The Anxiety of Influence, Dylan's songs and lyrics in that period so profoundly changed the nature of what popular songwriting can be that all songwriters, regardless of style, write in the shadow of that genius. Younger writers can write further into the direction they believe Dylan was headed, taking further risks, bigger chances, or they can go in the other extreme, writing away from the pull of Dylan's gravity, writing in a way no less risky and perplexing as those who become Dylan apostles. Dylan's case, within that of songwriting, is comparable to that of Shakespeare's, an influence so vast that no artist, even those who intensely dislike the work, can ignore the artist; lesser writers, "weaker" writers as Bloom would put, cannot help but be influenced by the profundity of the work that has gone before. Like it or not, it is a standard that compels you to make a stylistic choice. Genius, though, is fleeting, and Dylan's ability as such was that it came out of him in a flow that was, I believe, effortless,savant-like, requiring less craft than a brain that was firing on all cylinders and producing a language that seemed to compose itself. But genius leaves a good many of our great artists--it is a spirit, perhaps, that takes residence in a person's personality long enough to get the work done and then leaves, sometimes quickly, sometimes gradually. 

Other things come into play as well, such as a change in why one engages in the kind of self-interrogation that writing essentially is; Mailer dropped his high style, my favorite style when he came across the Gary Gilmore story and wrote in simpler terms as his fiction become more nuanced and rich. This is was a plus. Allen Ginsberg became a Buddhist and fell in love with the notion of "first thought, best thought" and essentially transcribed his continuous notes to himself, unedited, unmediated by literary qualification, in the effort to present a truer, constantly evolving face to the public in his books of poetry. Much as I like the reasoning and dedication, AG's poetry became far, far less exciting, interesting, became far less good. For Dylan, after his motorcycle accident, he has taken up with simpler more vernacular language, and we see the good it offered he and the listener, with John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline. The language was simpler, and the sources from which Dylan took his inspiration, folk tales, old songs, country western bathos, navigated closely to the banal and hackneyed, but we must admit that Dylan had the skill, the instinct, to manage his language no less artfully than Hemingway would have done at his prime and kept matters enticingly elliptical at the heart of things: there are ways to create a sense of what you're getting at without too much artifice and pretension, useless . He was masterful in creating simpler lyrics that still drew you in and still kept you making intelligent guesses.

Like Hemingway, this virtue wouldn't last, in my view; Hemingway fell prey to depression and concerns of his virility and sought to write his way out of his depression, the result is a series of late-career books that lack the grace or conviction or the brilliant insinuation of his great work; he veered toward self-parody. Dylan's work, post Blood on the Track, became alarmingly prolix and parochial in ideas and a contrived rural diction that sounds completely false, the phoniest I've heard since the quaint southern tales of Erskine Caldwell.

I know that Dylan has always trafficked in clichés, but what he did previously with stale phrases was to subvert them, place them in unexpected juxtapositions, and cleverly invert their meanings to expose their shortcomings. He is not doing that these days--rather I think the good man just starts writing something without an inherent sense of where to go or when to stop or where to edit and seems to write in an attempt to maintain equilibrium. He seems to need to hear himself write; it is more the process than the result that matters. His use of clichés or banal phrases seems more stitchery than rehabilitating the language; they are means that he can connect his stanzas, do patchwork on an incomplete idea. Dylan wears his age as if it allows him to say what he wants because he has wrinkles you can hide your money in-- he stands apart, swaying about, the voice that is too busy documenting feats and folly:  it fits neatly into the covert self-mythologizing Dylan has turned into his secondary art. His principle art, his music, and his lyrics are what Andy Warhol foretold decades ago--art is anything he can get away with. What I hear, though, is a slovenly , lazy, uninteresting filter of the creaky, eyebrow-raising cliches and obvious transitions ; there are no amazing associational leaps of fancy here, no "Desolation Row", no "Memphis Blues Again", nothing as truly brilliant as the succinct parables in "John Wesley Harding";  the man who gets the credit and the blame for expanding the pop lyricist vocabulary  is now involved in convincing his audience that the contrived, the hackneyed, the severely corny and portentous are, in his hands, masterful reworkings and reinventions of old forms. I think it more apt to say that he makes me think of a bankrupt interior designer who is constantly rearranging the same old broken, tattered, torn furniture in a wan hope that few will notice how tacky the whole thing actually is.

Fuck Dylan

Bob Dylan is 70 years old, and I say so fucking what? It is time to stop worshipping this guy. I don't care how many good songs he's written, no one deserves the kind of sycophantic , unquestioning adoration this man has received. We are critical of all other things in our popular culture--rap music, Lady Gaga, name your pet annoyance--but Dylan gets a pass despite the over praise and reviewers over exposure. The molding heaps of cliches of what's already been written about Bob Dylan over the last give decades and ponder some as yet unremarked upon essence about the songwriter. What this was, though, was a bit of head scratching , a desperate attempt to force some enthusiasm for a subject while at the same time avoiding saying what everyone is painfully aware of: Dylan has had it as a live performer, and that his genius is something that is long ago, left in another generation's hey day. What this cliched-clogged "review" is saying, in essence, is that Dylan gathered a paycheck with little regard for presenting the music as his audience remembers it, and the faithful kissed his ring and gave him fresh roses. It's a sad thing that Dylan has become a professional celebrity. He has become a bore, and it's painful to read reviewers who insist that he hasn't.The alternative is up to each of us, individually. It is one thing to have a hero while young because he or she sets an example of how to be your own person, apart from the creature comforts of conformity. This, however, should be the transition point where we discover our own interests, trust our own instincts and take the risks that are of our choosing; we should become our own heros. We should have grown up and embraced an interesting world of music and art quite beyond Dylan; we genuflect to him, however, even as we gain speed into our sixties. We cannot get over our youth , we have aged badly in some regards. Our worship of Dylan , for good or ill, becomes the same thing as claiming that Lyndon LaRouche is merely misunderstood. This strips Dylan of his true worth and makes him merely another dime store cult hero. Enough. Fuck Dylan.

Our punk, our genius

Bob Dylan, strictly speaking, is pop. He was pop by the definitions of pop music holding sway in the mid to late Sixties when the word became associated with experimentation, the avant-guard. "Pop" and "Rock" were interchangeable terms. Peter Townsend was the one who coined the term "power pop", in an interview I read in the old Hit Parader music journal,  and used the phrase to describe the Who. It was a term he used to define the Beach Boys, a band he admired quite a bit Definitions of terms change, of course, and with the re-emergence of conspicuously commercial tunes in a post-punk era came a new pop music that was heavy on irony and purely obsessed with its hook value. 

The Beach Boys were an extension of the harmony prone Four Freshmen, a vocal style overlaid upon a Chuck Berry chord progression with lyrics addressing concerns not of the 40s or 50s, surfing and souped cars. The who borrowed the Beach Boys'  vocalese and used it in conjunction with a musical style premised on power chords and snarling teen hooliganism. Dylan, though, was the one who broke from the pack, taking his inspiration from the nominally "pure"  genres contained in the folk music revival.  The good man, though, had something larger to  do rather than adhere to principles; fame was his goal, and fortune;  he walked backward into genius,  into the backwoods with this nasal, grunting vocals and lyrics that blended  an idealized  proletariat idiom with  great heaping doses of  Verlaine and Eliot: he brought literary Modernism to the jukebox. He also understood the dynamics of being a teen ideal. If he couldn't be sexy/dangerous like  Elvis, he could at least be vague, mysterious, "poetic".

The "dignity" and" integrity" that Dylan refused to be marginalized by--ie, made quaint and neutered as a revolutionary force of any definition--were those notions codified by the lefty Folk Revival he eventually abandoned. Their idea of those qualities had little to do with Polonius's greatest platitude--"...to thine own self-be true..." --and everything to do with conformity to a vaguely held consensus.  I would only insist that the means of Dylan following his muse amounts to deftly selected instances of opportunism. Had Dylan been less inspired in his mashing together of his unlike influences, we likely would have regarded him as a pretentious fool trying to beserk himself into genius. Dylan, though, was a genius, and his careerism is mitigated in the music and lyrics that resulted from it. The work is everything. It took rock and roll by surprise. Someone like Dylan from the Sixties wouldn't be considered pop at all. He had singles that found chart positions, he earned gold albums, he toured internationally, gave interviews and signed autographs. He was a pop star, a pop artist, a contradiction that refused to be marginalized by unprofitable consolations such as dignity or integrity. He was going to be famous and get rich; he was a pop star and a punk. Our punk, our genius.

Happy Birthday Mr.Zimmerman

It was Bob Dylan's birthday the other day, and I had the pleasure to attend a tribute performance of his songs , featuring a curious mix of renditions of obscure Dylan songs and versions of more familiar ones that were, in a word, problematic. The gathered performers, singer-songwriters all who obviously feel their debt to the iconic man is something that they cannot repay in full, obviously had fun with their choices and their occasionally idiosyncratic arrangements. The results were mostly enjoyable, although there continues to be the knee jerk habit of praising Dylan's songwriting beyond good sense. Dylan has been in the music game since the early sixties, his influence on other performers is second only to the Beatles for the unalterable game change he brought to rock and pop music, and it's astounding that that through the decades, weathering fads, trends and  several years of bad road, he remains relevant. But that he remains a touchstone younger generations model themselves after isn't the same that everything he's written is equal to the best work; some of it is , in fact, slapdash, repetitive, and unconvincing as narrative vehicles.  

It's often pointed out by critics   and the occasional  academic like Christopher Hicks that Dylan's writing shares with legitimately Canonical figures like Pope and Milton a life's work that reveals the gathering perspective of one who has outlived their foolishness and impulsive certitude; perhaps, Dylan remains a songwriter, not a poet , and his lyrics are locked into the bare chord essentials that have been his preference since "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan". His melodic range is limited, and part of the problem with the weakest of his later songs is that there isn't musical cue to give the artist a hint of when to wrap up his subject. Instead, one chorus follows another , with little variety in a song's melodic logic to indicate when a subtler, terser phrase is needed, when a more vivid refrain is required.

A consistent tension between melody and lyric creates interest, and makes lyrics quotable. Too much of latter day Dylan is not quotable, but are, rather, prolix, a longish bit of daydreaming in the vaguest of locales. The vagueness would be fine if there were a more evocative word selection, but too often Dylan writes what seems like an interesting commencement upon an intriguing passage, only to quickly bury it with insipid qualifiers and disposable asides. What I keep wondering is whether if Dylan had advanced his musical vocabulary--The Beatles had, The Rolling Stones had, Elvis Costello had, Dylan acolytes all--would his lyric chops likewise seen an elevation in quality and variety?

While pondering that at the concert, a performer on stage was attempting a version of  "Like a Rolling Stone",  a miserable experience. It came off more as a Ricky Lee Jones parody than a tribute to Dylan, with an arrhythmic mix and match of tempos and grating blues inflections and melismatic improvisations on the famously acerbic words that made no connection with the surreal rant that is at the song's center. It was an indecisive version, full of stops and starts and wasted vocal gestures--voice and guitar seemed not to know what the other was doing; it was like watching someone try to park too large a car in too small a space. Dylan's best songs deserve better.          

Dylan joins the Canon?

Cambridge University Press,is coming out with booked titled The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan , the intent being, one supposes, that august institution wants to enshrine Dylan at last, accepting him into the Canon. No doubt I will purchase the volume and read closely what a generation of critics reared on Dylan's lyrics will have to say as they make their respective cases for him being a poet worthy of being placed alongside Milton and Eliot. I fear, though, that a good many of them will miss the point of what's been exciting about Dylan's work, that it is, after all, rock and roll. Rock and roll is always worth discussing at length , through as many different filters as possible, but one fears that too many critics, desiring to sound academic , ie, "legitimate" as they bring their learning to an analysis of the songwriter's work, will forget to achieve that state of accelerated insight one discovers in the best of Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs and instead convert their passion to tenure-seeking jargon.

The problem with a number of literary treatments with Dylan's work , I find, has the error of sticking too closely to Dylan's lyrics and attempting to align him with the supreme examples of our poetry. Although these articles are fancifully argued much of the time, Dylan winds up suffering, as there is, I believe , more that contrasts than favorably compares. His language, in itself, hasn't the stuff that sustains a reading that would seek a system of allegory and metaphor that approaches Blake. The lyrics are a bit flat in that sense, limited in dimension, mainly because the writing we consider is not poetry, a medium that can achieve verbal effects on an unlimited number of levels. Dylan's words are lyrics, and their effectiveness, their power lies in the music gives them life.

A straight reading of "Desolation Row" would give the feeling of some intriguing surrealism sadly constrained by a sing-song rhyme scheme. The song , though, changes everything, from the steadfast, aggressive strum of the acoustic guitar, Dylan's vocal performance (snarling, dead pan, phrases bitten off in reserved disgust), guitarist Mike Bloomfield's bittersweet improvisations and the careening harmonica solos add a power not attained by a close reading of the lyric sheet. Greil Marcus, who has been guilty of summary vagueness on the subject of Dylan's Greater Importance, is , nonetheless, superb when he confronts specific Dylan songs, convincingly getting across how the conflated traditions Dylan brought together--folk, blues, Tex Mex, rock and roll and Symbolist Poetry, produced something new, strange and transcendent. He could grasp at how these things worked together for their artistic power. I am afraid, though, that the Cambridge Companion could suffer from a surfeit of specializations that too often have little to do with edification. There are some writings on Dylan's work that are as exotic as the singer's most intangible imagery. An example, cited by the Boston Globe and on Ron Silliman's blog, suggests a turgid time awaits even the most faith Dylan partisan:

"Dylan's lyrics construct an author-reader relation posited on the model of an irresolvable enigma which is both the incitement to and the perpetual frustration of readerly desire."

One had reason to think that rock and roll lyrics were truly the poetry of the age, but hindsight reveals the hubris of youthful assumptions. Far, far too little of the work by even the best lyricists have approached the wealth of expression and style that page poets have managed, even up to the current day. Dylan is not Wallace Stevens, Tom Waits is not Blake, Leonard Cohen is not Shakespeare, Joni Mitchell is not Auden. What needs to be developed is a critical language that can discuss, at length, the work of these songwriters as songwriters who assimilated aesthetic values from poetry. Otherwise I think we're all missing the point and blowing so much smoke up each other's pant legs as we drone in platitudes about how rock lyrics are the poetry. It misses the mark entirely. Lyric writing for music is a distinct craft from than that of the tradition of the page poet. There are points, of course, where the traditions converge and perhaps borrow from one another, but not often enough to willy nilly refer to gifted songwriters as poets. The work that really needs to be done in this area is to expand how one discusses the art of songwriting. Dylan, Paul Simon, Mitchell, Costello, et al, are better referenced against the likes of Stephen Foster, The Gershwins, you name it. Dylan, I would say, has had a very minor effect on contemporary poetry--the revolutions we habitually talk about here in modern verse were well under way long before he even picked up a guitar. His real impact is on music, on songwriting, on rock and roll.It's is his profound influence on popular music that helped changed American culture, and it is in this area that his artistic legacy is based. At the end of the day, Dylan remains a musical artist, not a literary one.


It's not every attempt to place Dylan on a par with canonical poets without insight or mired in a nervously applied jargon. Some are superb pieces of critical thinking. Even Christopher Rick's unfairly mocked, high-level inspection of Dylan's work in his book Dylan's Vision of Sin at least speaks to the reader in comprehensible prose, which greatly mitigates the thin air he's attempting to take deep breaths in. Michael Gray's study, Song and Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan , brings a thoroughness to the subject matter, bring focus on a multitude of influences Dylan absorbed and used t create something new. Gray spends his time on the lyrics and performs some impressive maneuvers to make the lyricist a suitable companion for the page poets, but what makes Song and Dance Man especially powerful is the stress on how the music ratchets up the power of lyrics . He writes, in this book, like a Greil Marcus who doesn't get quickly distracted from completing an idea.

The cited sentence has none of that--it seems a foul odor emerging from a long sealed crypt.Dylan deserves better than the crypt, of course, and I'll pay my money to see how the folks at Cambridge did assembling the best thinking they could find on Dylan's hard-to-classify work. Until I buy and read the Dylan Campanion , of course, my question, to risk using a metaphor a third time too many, is whether the songwriter will be illuminated or embalmed.

Bob Dylan sings for you

No Direction Home, the Martin Scorsese directed five hour documentary on Bob Dylan has finally aired on PBS after much advertising and hype, and those fans eager, as always, to hear the songwriter talk about his music and his life free of evasion and tall tales are treated, again, to another example of how closely Dylan wants to control the public's perception of him. He was, admittedly, quite a bit more forthcoming to questions than he has been in the past, but one never senses that Dylan wasn't done being cagey with his answers; considering that Scorsese himself was brought in late to a project that Dylan's company had been preparing for seven years and that it was Dylan's own employees asking him the questions , it's doubtful we heard everything he had to say about his affairs. Chronicles, his memoir, was a best seller, and it is a publisher's desire to save the best of the rest for the sequel. In the meantime, the trade paperback edition has just come out, and sales are brisk.

The audience is a curious mix, being primarily baby boomers who want the inside skinny from the man they might well consider the last vestige of authenticity (whatever that is) an American performer has demonstrated, and young people, from teens to those just entering college, either late admirers or the merely curious.

I am , for the moment at least, sated with all things Dylan, and hope that my fellow Dylan obsessives feel likewise gorged. I am a strict diet of Bud Powell cool-period Miles Davis. There is little new information in the Scorsese assembled documentary, but there is plenty of rare footage to feast on, all of which gives us a way of studying the history of Dylan's vocal affectations; one might say that he film is Biography of a Bad Singing Voice. Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, Irish laborers, blues groaner, gospel exciter, drugged out whiner. Of themselves, the qualities are slurred and nasal, harsh and authentic, as it were, to the degree of being nearly unlistenable. His rendition of "Man of Constant Sorrow" from an old tv clip wasn't at all pleasant no matter how I try to approach the sequence.

Yet there are wonderful transformations with that voice, when he began writing his own material, his own lyrics. Vowel and voice met and a sound was made, dramatic, effective, beautiful in a new way. His performance of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" at the Newport Folk Festival was riveting, vocally masterful. Nasal, howling, pinched, but asserted, shaped, honed. This wonderful song couldn't have been performed any more effectively with a so called "better voice". I would say that Dylan is an especially bad singer, but I would also insist that he is an absolutely brilliant vocalist. No one could dramatize a lyric like he could. What he does with a lyric is something other than render cozy rhymes against assuring melodies as sweetly as possible.

There is a point in his career, when he eased off topical songs and moved toward more expressive, metaphorical, "poetic" lyrics that his voice became something wholly new in pop music. It's not far off to maintain that what Dylan did vocally between Another Side of Bob Dylan up through John Wesley Harding literally forced us to reconsider what "good" singing was really was.

It was Dylan more than anyone else in pop music history who gave license to the singers-of-limited means to take the microphone and create an emotional experience with vocal qualities that were less than perfect. That is fitting for songs that dealt squarely with less than perfect realities, and this an achievement no less profound than any other Dylan has wrought in folk, rock and pop music.

"I'm Not There": Dylan Degree Zero

The more interesting aspect of Dylan Watching the last four years or so hasn't been his new music, which is fine if a bit cornball and relying too much on the songwriter's reputation for a passing grade, but rather in how well, how brilliantly he's managed and manipulated his image and mythologies. Chronicles, the assumed first volume of an ongoing memoir, had him writing clearly about his influences and his struggles as an up and coming folkie in Greenwich Village in the Sixties, an intelligence that maintained a bucolic trace that never let on too much, too soon about what his fandom wanted to hear about.

I actually enjoyed Tarantula and still parts of it brilliant in ways that would have been interesting if Dylan had continued writing for books, especially the riffs on Aretha Franklin and the odd fellows who suit her, and especially the poem about the end of Bob Dylan, recited at the beginning of Todd Hayne's recent fantasy I'm Not There. As for film making, at least he's allowing professionals, Scorsese and Haynes, to put his accounts together.

I don't think that manipulating his reputation so much in recent years makes Dylan less of an artist, only that it's been the most ingenious expression of his art of late. The self-construction of his persona is crucial to his ability to write songs in the manner he did. The work does stand by itself once we deal with the albums and not the reputation, but like Miles Davis there is a context of rigorously maintained mystery about them that can't really be separated from the work.

Actually, I think Dylan's albums of new material in the nineties and the 2000s are among the best writing in decades, a sure recovery from the depressing drift of his work in the eighties. Love and Theft and Modern Times are the writings of an artist who has let his masks slip a little, allowed his defenses to open just a tad and allowed his thoughts to develop a clear, if haggard voice. None of the lyrics approaches his genius from his best work, but then again Davis never produced some quite like Kind of Blue after that, nor did Mailer attempt to write another Naked and the Dead. While I'm bored unto death with the packaging and repackaging of him as cultural icon, I do admire his willingness to move on to the next music to be written and played, regardless of what others might make of it.


He wasn't about to give away the core and cause of his mystique, and seemed determined to with hold more than he would reveal, a shrewd and measured use of his charisma and allure. The Martin Scorsese directed miniseries for PBS No Direction Home was, of course, a feast of obscure footage and interviews with Dylan and his fellows as they recalled his rise to stardom and their time basking in Bob's cold glow, but again it was a production underwritten and controlled by Dylan, with Scorsese being only the hired gun to bring it too market. Now, finally, thanks to NetFlix, I've seen I'm Not There, director and co writer Todd Hayne's movie that deconstructs, in several overlapping narratives derived from Dylan's factual biography and his self-mythologizing, with a series of actors including Christian Bale and Cate Blanchett taking turns doing impressions of the reclusive icon. I turned it off forty minutes into the DVD , my prurient interest in Dylan and the manner in which he continues to add layers to what's left of his charisma finally exhausted. It’s not that the various versions of Dylan here aren't good or canny; the actors are good mimics who imitate Dylan's accents and affectations from the differing periods of his life, from the days when he wanted to be Woody Guthrie and took to adding a twang to his speech and dropping his g's like were seeding an apple grove, to the citified version of himself, post Greenwich Village and Gerdes Folk City, when the media discovered him and he made himself another cryptic sage with a bag full of self-cancelling aphorisms perfect for the age of McLuhan. Blanchett gets this ideal of Dylan down perfectly, an angular, shock-theatre hair do, a firm, scowling face, a constant attack of the amphetamine jitters.

What brings it down is the lack of a story line that would make this fanciful and hard to take fan letter into something that would inspire my willing suspension of disbelief. There is something about Dylan’s fan base that nears a cult identity, and one picks it up from time to time when a writer starts speaking in a stream of Dylan’s, where song titles and oddments of phrase, riveting and hackneyed, substitute themselves for a real argument; you know the audience reading the stream just nods and grooves on the heaviosity it all. I posted about Dylan’s problematic Pulitzer a month ago, and the only response was from a writer who’d self-published a novel where the character names and the major plot lines are taken straight from Dylan lyrics. I haven’t read the book, but I would imagine it to be at least as annoying as the Beatles film Across the Universe, where a plot is contrived from that band’s lyrics to offer us up—what else?—a tour of the most over-studied clichés of the Sixties. That I was getting the references this movie was making in the course of its unraveled narrative style made the matter more frustrating; it was depressing to realize that one had to be a Dylan obsessive to follow any of this at all. There has always been something cultish about Dylan's fans, but this, among other efforts since the start of the 21st century, is too close to the songwriter asking to be adored and coo'd over. He is willing to remind us again and again and yet again if we missed it the first time that he was a genius poet of the juke box, and we, a generation priding ourselves collectively for being so bright and hip to the Man’s trick of co opting our best ideas, seem more than willing to let this guy sell us our own memories.

BOB DYLAN IS NOT A POET

 1.

An old peeve, this: Bob Dylan is not a poet. He is a songwriter. What he does is significantly different than what a poet does. In any relevant sense, the best of what poetry offers is read off the page, sans melody from accompanying guitar or piano and a convincingly evocative voice. The poet's musical sense, rhythmic properties, and other euphonious qualities are derived from the words and clever, ingenious combinations alone. A reader may appreciate the words, the rhymes, the cadences, the melodious resonance, and dissonance, as the case may be, but all this comes from the language of the poem alone, on the page, without music. When addressing such rich and soul-stirring sounds of nouns and adjectives conjoined, the musicality we speak of has everything to with the poet extending the limits of everyday speech. You can read Shakespeare to full literary potential, I think, because his verse, in the guise of dialogue, still satisfies as writing, with metaphors, rhythms, cadences swirling and ringing to a heightened sense of what the complexity of human emotion can sound like if there were words, allusions, similes, and metaphors that could give life and texture for what are, in his plays, inchoate feelings brewing at some base level of the personality before the mind can provide them with an articulate if flawed rationale.

photograph by Jim Marshall

It was the task of Shakespeare, the poet, and the playwright combined, to give vocal music to what were speeches that made private thoughts, half-plotted schemes, inarticulate resentments, paranoia, the whole conflicting brew of insecurity, self-doubt, and malevolence into something that was the equivalent of music, a sweet, and stirring sound that bypasses the censoring and sense-making intellect and which makes even the foulest of schemes seem just and only natural. The writing, that is to say approximates music from the page and provides for a more complicated task when considering our responses to a provocative set of stanzas. Dylan is a songwriter, a distinct art form, and his words are lyrics, which cannot be experienced to their fullest without the music that accompanies them. One may hum the melodies while pouring over the lyrics and mentally reconstruct listening to an album's songs, but this proves the point. Of themselves, Dylan's lyrics pale poorly compared to page poets. With his music, the lyrics come alive and artful, at their best. They are lyrics, inseparable from their melodies, and not poems, which have another kind of life altogether.

The lyrics are flat and unremarkable save for their strangeness, which is not especially interesting in verbal terms. With music, voila! Transformation. This is a condition that makes what Dylan does songwriting, not the writing of poetry. These are distinct art forms with features and rules of composition that are crucial and non-negotiable. Cohen is an interesting case since he inhabits several writing mediums, IE, novels, poetry, plays music. He's not incredibly prolific in any of these areas--over the forty-plus years that he's been on my radar, his output has been meager, albeit high quality--but it occurs to me that he's more of an actual writer than Dylan is. They are different sorts of geniuses. Cohen, of course, is a novelist overall—"Beautiful Losers," "The Favorite Game"--and a poet, someone wholly committed to making the words from their music, rhythm, and power so that the sort of splendid, soul-racked suffering he specializes in, that deliciously wrought agony that's midway between spiritual experience and sexual release, is fully conveyed to the reader and made as felt as possible.

Cohen tends the words he uses more than Dylan does; his language is strange and abstruse at times, but beyond the oddity of the existences he sets upon his canvas, there exist an element that is persuasive, alluring, masterfully wrought with writing, from the page alone, that blends all the attendant aspects of Cohen's stressed worldliness-- sexuality, religious ecstasy, the burden of his whiteness-- into a whole, subtly argued, minutely detailed, expertly layered with just so many fine, exacting touches of language. His songs, which I find the finest of the late 20th century in English--only Dylan, Costello, Mitchell, and Paul Simon have comparable bodies of work--we find more attention given to the effect of every word and phrase applied to his themes, his storylines. In many ways, I would say Cohen is a better lyricist than Dylan because he's a better writer overall. Unlike Dylan, who has been indiscriminate for the last thirty years about the quality of work he's released, there is scarcely anything in Cohen's songbook you would characterize as a cast-off. 

Cohen takes more care in words he selects to tell his tales. He creates his moods as he provides a sense of location, tone, and philosophical underpinning while subtly suggesting the opposite of whatever mood he might be getting at. Cohen is simply more careful than Dylan. In word selection, more discriminating; the architecture of literary influence is on display in the disciplined rhymes of Cohen's parable-themed lyrics, elegantly so. It is, to be sure, a matter of choice how a writer manages their word flow. Cohen's writing has a sense of someone who labors hard to make the image work, to have that image compliment and make enticingly evocative a scenario that starts off simple and then arrives instantly of fatalistic surrender to powers greater than oneself, both sensual and spiritual. I feel for Dylan's method because he is an admirer of what Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac regarded as Spontaneous Bop Prosody, a zen-like approach to an expression where it was believed that the first thought was the best thought one could have on a subject.

Good poets, great poets, are writers when it gets down to what it is they do, and it's my feeling that Cohen's experience as a novelist, short story writer, and playwright has given him a well-honed instinct for keeping the verbiage to a minimum.  Cohen isn't a chintzy minimalist like Raymond Carver. And fewer words in a piece are not, by default, superior to more extended word counts. Cohen just has a better sense of when it's time to stop and develop a  lyric further.

Dylan's genius is closer to the kind of brilliance we see in Miles Davis, where the influences of unlike styles of music and other elements-- traditional folk, rock, and roll, protest songs, blues, country, French Symbolism, Beat poets--were mixed in ways that created a new kind of music, and required a new critical language to discuss what it was he had done with the influences he'd assimilated, and the range of his power. It is possible to look at aspects of Dylan's art. Fine individual strands wanting--his lyrics may be unfocused or strange for their own sake, his melodies are either borrowed or lack sophistication, his singing is nasal and grating--but taken together, music, words, voice, instrumentation fused, one experiences catharsis, power and galvanizing mysticism in the best recorded moments. "Ballad of a Thin Man" is a flat, curious scribble of a lyric read by itself. Still, with the minor critical intonations of Al Kooper's keyboard and Mike Bloomfield's interned guitar, coupled with Dylan's leering, a snarling dramatization of the lyric, we have an art that is riveting n terms that are purely musical; yes, one might go on at length and create a cosmology of what Dylan's lyrical creations make of the experience, but the emphasis needs to remain on the whole.

"It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) "is a terrific, innovative song lyric, and as a lyric does not have the same power as a well-written poem has on the page when that lyric hasn't the music to give it momentum. The power of the lyric has a sustained "oh wow" element, one line after another summarizing the sad state of the Perfect Union, the Idealized world in harsh, ironic terms, each image and beat of the intoned images, critical, lively, surreal in a seamless mash-up of different concepts, are lifted, foisted, tossed to the listener by the steady and firm strums of the simple guitar Dylan maintains. Lyrics have their advantages and can be pretty artful and subtle, but I maintain that they're a different art form; the words are subservient to the song form, where poems of every sort are autonomous, structures made entirely of language. (Unless, of course, you're a Dada poet who just arrived here with a time machine).

"Desolation Row" and "Visions of Johanna," two songs from what I think is the center of Dylan's most significant period as a song-poet, if you will, likewise are not to make their fantastic excursions through Daliesque landscapes alone on the page, as flat print. Dylan's chords, his voice, and his forward-march rhythms are what make these extended lyrics crisp and suggestive of metaphysical chaos under a thin the thin guise of civility and reason. Drums, organs, twangy and tuneless guitars, police sirens, his braying voice bring a dimension to the lyrics that aren't there without it. Dylan's songs especially--more so than Cole Porter, more so than Chuck Berry, more so than a host of his contemporaries--are not self-sufficient as page-poets are with their work. It can be argued that what Dylan has done is more complex, subtler, and requiring a new vocabulary to discuss than what poets have done, and something I would subscribe to on principle. Dylan remains a songwriter foremost and a poet only through loose analogy. In all, Dylan's lyrics serve the musical experience, the concept of a song, which makes Dylan a songwriter of genius, but not a poet. When they are writing poetry and not novels or songs of their own, poets are committed to making language, and language alone, the means through which their ethereal notions will be preserved. Successor failure depends on how well they can write, not strum a guitar or croon a tune.

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2.

 I do admire the work of artists who remain attractive as they get older, but it is a fact that many writers, poets, songwriters do their best, most compelling work in their early years. Dylan is one of these--the most incredible songs, in my view, were those that combined equal elements of Surrealism, Burroughs-inspired language cut-ups, blues and rural south music vernaculars, and heavy doses of French Symbolism by way of Rimbaud and Mallarme. This gave his stanzas a heightened, alienated feeling of sensory overload, making him the principal Lyricist of the bare existential absurdity that life happens to be. No one got to the infuriating heart of the sensation that life had ceased to mean anything after those matters that "mean" the most to us--marriages, friendships, tastes, financial security, spiritual or religious certainty--were changed, destroyed, or simply vanished. Dylan's writing was of the individual suddenly in the choking throes of uncertainty, batting back encroaching gloom with the kind of swinging, poetic wit that reassembles existence. It is a stance, a state, an aesthetic state of being that made it possible for him to fire on all cylinders for a good run of time. Generally, the poetic quality and intensity that Dylan produced in the longs on the list I made are a substantial body of work that perfectly matches the most vigorous work by Eliot, Pound, WC Williams, Burroughs Ginsberg. It is also not the kind of work you can keep doing for a lifetime; like Miles Davis, he had to. His mature work has often hit the mark and offers the long view of experience in an, especially moving way. Just as often, I think he misses the mark and overwrites or is prone to hackneyed phrasing. 

There is much quality to the later songs, but they are not among Dylan's most excellent as a body of lyrics. Dylan is called more often than not a poet because of the unique genius of his best songs; I don't think he's a poet, but a songwriter with an original talent strong enough to change that particular art forever. I do understand, though, why a host of critics through the decades would consider him a poet in the first place. My list is the songs I think that justifies any sort of reputation Dylan has a poetic genius. I like most of the songs mentioned above for various reasons apart from the ones on my initial 35 choices. The Songs there manage an affinity for evoking the ambiguities and sharp perceptions of an acutely aware personality who is using poetic devices to achieve more abstract and suggestive effects and still tend to be wonderfully tuneful. No one else in rock and roll, really, was doing that before Dylan was. On those terms, nothing he's written is entirely at the level of where he was with the songs on my list; this list consists of the body of work that substantiates Dylan's claim to genius. "Just Like a Woman" is one of the most refined character sketches I've ever heard in a song. What's remarkable is the brevity of the whole, how much history is suggested, inferred, insinuated in spare yet arresting imagery. I rather like that Dylan allows the mystery of this character to linger, to not let the fog settle. The ambiguity gives its suggestive power, and there is the whole element of whether the person addressed is a woman at all, but rather a drag queen. It's an open question. It's a brilliant lyric.

"Drifter's Escape "was on twice and is now a single entry. There is a concentration of detail in the lyric, a compression of Biblical cadence and sequence that makes the song telling and vivid not in its piling on of stanzas but in its brevity. He does the same for "All along the Watchtower," which I regard as a condensed "Desolation Row," a commentary, perhaps, from the tour bus just passing through; the tour guide finally tells the driver, "there must be some kinda way outta here." I regard the true "poetry" of Dylan's music in the earlier music, where he is spectacularly original in how he forced his influences to take new shapes and create new perspectives. Post JWH, I just find too much of his lyric writing prolix, and meandering, time-filling rather than revealing; the surreal, fresh, colloquial snap of his language has gone and is replaced with turns of phrase that are trite, hackneyed, ineffective;' they strike my ear as false. Even "Blind Willie McTell," a song that has been persuasively defended by intelligent fans of Dylan's later work, strikes too many false notes for my tastes. Musically, it drags and philosophically seems a victim of convenient thinking,  a PC version of Song of the South; some of the imagery is simply cloying and seems more suitable for Gone with the Wind than a poet of arguable worth.

...See them big plantations burning
Hear the cracking of the whips
Smell that sweet magnolia blooming
See the ghosts of slavery ships
I can hear them tribes a-moaning
Hear that undertaker’s bell...

Really, that is awful, a dreadful presentation of atmospheric detail meant to create historical context and mood, but it trades on so many received ideas of slavery, racism, the south, et al., that the intent no longer matters. It strikes as more minstrel show than tribute. Had anyone submitted this to serious poetry (or lyric) writing workshop, it would have been handed back to us for revision, with the advice that we rid the narrative of the creaky, questionable window dressing? "When I Paint My Masterpiece" works wonderfully because of its lack of any messages about social justice. It works because it is a short, terse, vivid travelogue, vague and evocative in equal measure. The ambiguity and absence of relevance to anything other than Dylan's need to speak offhandedly about an exciting time in the life of a particular character is what makes this song memorable.

Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble
Ancient footprints are everywhere
You can almost think that you’re seein’ double
On a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs
Got to hurry on back to my hotel room
Where I’ve got me a date with Botticelli’s niece
She promised that she’d be right there with me
When I paint my masterpiece

Well, I had a feeling that the general good sense this album conveys is that Dylan wasn't trying too hard to prove he's a genius. The record is straightforward, and the language is remarkably free of affectation, a tendency that has plagued him post-JWH. I especially like "Sign in the Window"; it has the sincerity and actual and momentary acceptance of where one happens to be in a specific part of life and offers a new set of expectations. The perfectly natural language here, excellent and unexpected rhymes, telling use of local detail that give us color and history without sagging qualifiers to make it more "authentic." The lyrics are a recollection of a trip, places visited, perspectives changing, a nice string of incidents in a language that sounds like a natural voice telling real things, with genuine bemusement.