Welcome to Gardener is Gone, devoted to the art of Bob Dylan. Although I provide links to useful resources, you’ll find little in the way of news here, nothing in the way of gossip, and when I’m not looking at a recording or performance straight in the face, I’m never more than one or two degrees of separation from that. I live in New York, and you can find here information about Dylan events and meetups where we can share opinions and violent disagreements in person, often fueled by pitchers of beer, which can only sharpen the wits and deepen the mutual affection of everyone involved.
When I started this blog about a year ago, I had a dim and meager dream of seeing my thoughts and feelings regarding Bob Dylan’s work arrayed in a professional-looking typeface, highlighted with apt little illustrations. Dimly I hoped like-minded people–people who also find an endlessly renewing abundance of pleasure and a perpetual quest for meaning in Dylan’s songs–would find my own bloviations, in their neat typeface, and we could become friends, of a sort. My dim and meager dream is now in full swing: I’m happy with this font, it’s much easier than I thought to insert little pictures, and I’ve met a few very excellent people through this indulgence.
I’ve had the great good fortune to indulge my interest in Dylan in other slightly more public ways, which you can read about here, and as these activities and bloviations accumulate, I want to amend my dim and meager dream into something grandiose and unrealizable. More dream and less pastime.
I’ve come to feel that the invisible reader –the invisible Dylan listener–I’m addressing here is not necessarily of my time and place, although all serious comments from those of you in the here and now are precious as carbuncles, and keep them coming.
Well, who are you? You could be 20 or 43 or 16 or 38, and you could be in a Starbucks in Menlo Park right this minute, 1:23 PM EST on October 7, 2009. Or you could be floating around a space station parked outside Neptune on October 8, 5409. You’ve just heard Desolation Row, or Highlands, or all of Blood on the Tracks, or three songs from John Wesley Harding, or Not Dark Yet, and you’re wondering what exactly you just heard and why you didn’t know this existed before. Or someone had an extra ticket to see Bob Dylan play one town over and you thought, what the hell, and expected a wizened has-been, but left the venue wishing the show had gone on for another hour. In the weeks that follow, you find more of this music, and discover that most of it sounds impossibly different from the rest of it, and in fact, this man’s music is nearly more different from itself than it is from other music.
And the story that’s told about Bob Dylan’s music is hard for you to find yourself in. You may wish for the excitement of political righteousness and action that you’re told The Times They Are A-Changin’ was the soundtrack to, but realistically this is a fantasy, and the song still grips you and makes sense to you. Unfortunately, you play New Morning often and with great delight, although you understand this is only a minor album created in the quiet smoke following the supernova of Bob Dylan’s genius. You also understand that the peculiar language and method of the songs he wrote from about 1989 on is problematic and apparently a condition of failing inspiration.
Well, I would like to offer you an alternative to that story. My grandiose crusade is based on a commitment to the ongoing vitality and richness of Dylan’s work–there is remarkable invention and expressiveness and thought throughout the span of his music, waiting to provoke a lifelong conversation with new listeners. For those of you in 5409, I can tell you that Bob Dylan is all over the place here in 2009—he can make front page news by straying onto someone’s yard in New Jersey, or singing corny Christmas songs. This is a strange time of hyper-visibility in his career, and for people like me, it’s an opportunity to speak up and start introducing new stories about what makes art great, enduring, intimate, original, profound, beautiful.
Or, we could just meet up after a show and boozily argue about Larry Campbell.
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Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Eruke (you are welcome to email me directly at gardenerisgone@gmail.com)
I think my favorite collaboration between Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan is For You Babe, which is not more than a wild ditty. It hardly even qualifies for an outtake. Guitars play ferociously sunny chords, Bob sings lines in and out of the music, not much intelligible except “Oh, babe, for you!” and he sings these nothings with great Pan-like ardor, and then Ginsberg begins a cheerful chant. He lists what he’ll bring: his eyes, his sacred cow. It’s all completely pointless and completely delicious: Bob’s voice soars and darts like a swallow, you wonder what serious folly will come out of Ginsberg’s mouth next, the music gets in your bones, it’s over too soon. In this whatever-it-is there is love and humor and a kind of primordial physicality of voices and music. Whenever I hear it, I am so happy that Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg met each other.
Yes, this is fanciful and childlike, and a trivial moment in the story of Bob Dylan and Beat culture, Beat aesthetics, Beat writers. And fortunately for that story, Sean Wilentz has taken it on. Sean’s prominence as an American historian runs parallel to his prominence as a chronicler of Bob Dylan, and that alone is a condition worth exploring. One would not say that esteemed historian Sean Wilentz also has contributed important work to the study of Abraham Lincoln. That is an absurdity, because it is an apposite dressed up as a comparison. Why do we marginalize Sean Wilentz’s liner notes for Live 64 and not his editorship of a book of essays on Lincoln? Oh no, I’m on my soapbox. Rewind. It’s still a long trip to 92nd St from Princeton, but Sean Wilentz’s remarkable altruism delivered him up to room S-280 to offer a concrete and detailed picture of the moment in time when the Beat culture and Bob Dylan intersected. Prof. Wilentz very generously provided our Tuesday night class with a preview of one chapter of his upcoming book on Bob Dylan’s America. The book, to be published in September 2010, will map the several Americas that helped form the many Dylans. The chapter whose draft he presented to us covered Dylan’s relationship with Beat culture in general, the complex relationship between Beats and Folks, the particular relationship between Dylan and Ginsberg.
A simplistic description of a first-rate historian would be a person with a capacious and organized memory, a relentless appetite for story, and a scrupulous judgment for the quantity and veracity of facts that are required to narrate a viable story. We got a fine demonstration of this with Sean’s opening to his talk. He wanted to begin with a segue between the chapter in his manuscript before the one he would present. The earlier chapter discussed Aaron Copland as a populist innovator. Copland’s score for the 1939 film version of Of Mice and Men was understood to be daring, likely the very first movie score to use dissonance. One person who watched this movie absorbedly was Jack Kerouac. So absorbedly, that fifteen years later, Kerouac described the moment the movie made its impression in his Mexico City Blues. 22 years after Kerouac’s memory made it into his poem, his poem made it into Dylan’s Renaldo and Clara: it’s Mexico City Blues that Ginsberg recites to Dylan at Jack Kerouac’s grave in the footage often reprinted as still photos and therefore familiar as an incident in Dylan’s life and art to people unfamiliar with the movie.
What Beat writers did with syntax, with narrative, with conventional vocabularies of *serious* literature–all the many ways Beat writers created escape routes specifically for prose and poetry, was not Sean’s focus. Instead, he drew a clear picture of the complex cultural and political theaters of the late 1950s and early 1960s, in which Folks and Beats both fought the Rising Tide of Conformity, both “shared disdain for materialism and convention.” The Folk contingent sought a high ground where social relations and individual voices were not the tools of the masters of war and of commerce, and not the victims of a morally bankrupt legal system . They built this high ground from a nearly lost world they saw as the spring of authenticity. They came together and they created in a spirit of purpose: sing the right songs, write the right songs, and do right, and a current will form that may beat back the tide of corruption and greed and passivity. Bob Dylan wore sloppy farmer’s jeans and a clean flannel shirt such as a poor man might wear to church, and he bore the expression of a young man facing down the cankered world his elders have handed him.
The Beat contingent sought escape. In-your-face escape. They had several getaway cars. For example, poetry that showed language can be real without being realistic, moral without being clean, and crazy without being irrational. They formed communities based on appetites for each other, for adventures in experience, for adventures in consciousness. Bob Dylan wore cigarette-leg jeans, leather jackets, and bore the expression of a young man who has seen entire universes only he can chart for the rest of us if we’d only stop asking him stupid questions and let him get on with his work.
Bob Dylan enters this crowded stage in 1961, and as Sean Wilentz put it, “Manhattan was more complicated than Minneapolis.” The brisk and certain trajectory of Dylan’s ascendance in 1961-1963 is a story that can always feel freshly strange and exciting, and more so when we look at these complications, the choices facing him. By 1961, the great work of the Beat writers had been done, and on January 26, 1961, 2 days after young Bob Dylan’s arrival, a group of NY writers held a discussion titled The Death of the Beats. The Folk world was the Here and Now for Dylan, but as Sean put it, “Ginsberg and Kerouac were in his brain.” Then Dylan gets into Ginsberg’s brain, via A Hard Rain’s A -Gonna Fall. When Ginsberg heard the song, it seems an extraordinary thing happened. It is easy to say that he heard The New Great Thing, or that he heard the hiss of the torch being passed, and gallantly let go his end of the torch. He did hear, as Sean put it, “the merger of poetry and song Pound predicted as the future of poetry.” But Ginsberg heard the singularity of Dylan’s art, not merely the realization or culmination or continuation of artistic ideals that he himself helped to define and put in play.
In the space of 15 Internet minutes you can find plenty of text, images, and film footage to document the long-running respect and different kinds of collaboration between Ginsberg and Dylan. I’m fascinated by the peculiarity of the relationship, even more than the matter of the collaborations. Allen Ginsberg in 1963, when he finally met Dylan, was not merely a renowned American poet, he was a notorious American poet: he renewed poetry with a legitimate originality, he made reading a poem a truly unsafe act, and he was Jewish and gay and traveled anywhere he liked and tried on ways of being that intrigued him. He really was Out in a way that may no longer be possible . And then the story more or less goes that Ginsberg Meets Dylan, and acknowledges the greater artist, adores the greater artist, follows the greater artist as long as he is welcome. Ginsberg’s love is repaid with Dylan’s respect and affection and a more enduring welcome than he offered many others in his different circles. Sean talked about Dylan’s making it possible for Ginsberg to become a “cultural avatar” in the years after his own creativity was not enough to sustain his relevance.
That’s a true enough history. I like the story that’s illuminated by this history: in this story, it’s the compass of Ginsberg’s spirit that becomes visible. The intrinsic freeness of Ginsberg’s spirit answered Dylan’s music, by becoming infinitely hospitable to Dylan’s art. Desolation Row may have satisfied Ezra Pound’s dreams of the art of the future, but its Beat heritage was conspicuous to Ginsberg and he could have laid his worship right there and left it. Yet Ginsberg did not just worship Dylan as an obvious heir–he met him right away as a singularity unbound by laws, and Dylan’s new ways of being and creating only fed Ginsberg’s availability to his art. There were partings and detours for sure, but the transparency of this inspiration is clear to anyone seeing Ginsberg’s interviews in No Direction Home.
Where are relations like this elsewhere in the history of art? There is this wonderful circle to me, where Ginsberg’s fearlessness and spiritual appetite wrote Howl in the first place, and then this fearlessness and appetite is what heard, really heard Hard Rain. I learned from the story of this relationship that we use the same instruments to create with and to hear with.
At left, Pace University, a hall of learning located on the southernmost protuberance of Manhattan. It is a long and arduous journey from here at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, to 92nd St and Lexington Ave; even if you get a seat on the express, the subway is crowded at all times of the day. After a long day of pedagogy and bureaucracy, the chair of Pace’s English department, Walter Raubicheck, offered his time to our little Dylan crew uptown. Our class this Tuesday involved Walter’s presentation on Mr Tambourine Man, primarily the poetic life of the song. Full disclosure laws compel me to reveal that I have known Walter for several years through the Dylan meet-up group (next meet-up Monday 11/9 6 PM Kettle of Fish 59 Christopher you can meet Walter yourself!). Acquaintances or no acquaintances, discussing assonance, Keats, and consciousness with strangers at 9 PM on a weekday speaks of Walter’s energy level and generosity.
Here is another building, it’s the house where Keats died in Rome. Let’s say that a difference between a great poet and a lesser poet, is that the voice of the great poet gets past so much insulation in us and finally reaches that chamber where we actually *hear* a single human speaking into us. And let’s say that one way we recognize this greatness isn’t only in encounters with the art, but in uncanny dropoffs of time: Keats’ death was prolonged and painful and mainly conscious, and the awfulness of this suffering rings through the windows of this house like a real feeling, not because the painful death of a decent young man is by default a tragedy, but because the young man’s living self is something we can meet in his poetry, and so his death can be a strange true pain to us now. How did I end up on the Spanish Steps?? We need to get to the jingle jangle morning…
Walter introduced his talk by reading from Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale. As you can see at the left here, a nightingale is a rather meager and drab bird to withstand the weight of so much enduring Romantic thought and feeling and beauty. And those little wings have to carry it high, by the light of the moon. Before arguing for a connection between Mr Tambourine Man and the Romantic tradition, Walter reminded us that Dylan himself is “self-taught” in literature. He referred to an interview Dylan gave to Robert Hilburn in which the topic of traditional English poetry came up; Chronicles also offers tastes of his fluency. Walter’s point here being merely to establish a legitimate sense of tradition, rather than to impute grand precocity to Dylan’s naively captivating song. Mr Tambourine Man is no more naively captivating than Keats’ Ode.
And so in both the poem and the song, there is a speaker/singer awoken through his own attention to a sound. It’s a sound he listens for and hears with peculiar openness, and so it is not a general alarm that awakes him, but a personal address. In both the poem and the song, the speaker/singer needs this address in order to “get access to that level of psyche”–from which poems and songs are seeded. It isn’t the endstop of freed consciousness the nightingale and the tambourine provide, but these sounds open a portal to language and music, so the consciousness can be articulated and shared. Shared. Let me show you what something I have felt is like, I want you to feel it too. 
“Take me disappearing.” We take this kind of originality in language for granted sometimes. This clause is just wrong grammatically, and it wakes us up to what’s happening to the singer: absurd to ask someone to take me…nowhere. They’re with me, so it’s not nowhere…. But of course we never quibble with this, because we’re already on that razor’s edge of passive and active, of internal and external, of here and not here, that the singer wishes me to be balanced on as he goes through it. And Walter pointed out the participles throughout the song: vanished, swirling, laughing, spinning, swinging, driven… There are many verbs in this song that are not active. Remember, we are on the razor’s edge of passive and active. Walter pointed out the dark and frightening places the singer has to get through before ending up on that windy beach. Through those smoke rings of his own mind, there’s a frozen, haunted, deformed, twisted, sorrowful world. How fast does he get through this? Not fast enough not to notice the cold and the fear and sorrow. And remember that he’s been appealing to the tambourine man repeatedly, to play for him. To get him where he needs to go, even though he knows he has to get through the haunted places first. This is just not about intoxication, it’s about facing a kind of awakening. It’s a fairly brave song, not so much a song about a euphoric dropping out. The beach is not calm. The sky is too sharp and bright. Only the singer knows what circus sands look like. Memory and fate are drowned, but he still knows there’s a past and a future, a today and a tomorrow. Only one hand waves free. Picture the difference between two hands and one: there’s something childish, puerile, cliched about dancing on a beach waving both your arms over your head. There’s something oddly graceful and dignified about one hand waving free. And a touch of restraint. Remember this song is about consciousness. Not unconsciousness.
Walter brought us back to history and Tradition, and the nightingale in Jokerman. Walter hears in this song Dylan distancing himself from the Romantic figure of the 60s. He’s got that freed awareness, but without truth, what good is it? The grown up Jokerman’s dance is a little sinister, a little grotesque, more ambiguous, more un-inviting than the boy’s dance on the windy beach. 
This portrait of a girl by Lucian Freud, it just 
Then there’s Rudy. This is what the song conjured for me the first time I really paid attention to it, and what it conjures, effortlessly, every time I hear it. At the end of the Circe episode in Ulysses, Leopold contemplates the passed-out Stephen, is overcome by tenderness for the boy, the tenderness leads him to a vision of his dead son, Rudy. The Rudy he sees is an 11-year old boy, wearing a Roman helmet, and an Eton suit, and reading a book “right to left”– obviously reading Hebrew, Bloom’s native/ancestral language. In this image is collapsed history, empires, civilization, and the weight of what Bloom sees in the son he has lost, the past and the future he lost through the death of his son. The moment of human love has enough weight to collapse time in this way. Bloom endures a sudden awakening to a consciousness of time larger than the present, and there is the sleeping young artist, and there is benevolence and compassion and strangeness, and there is magnificently compressed and astonishingly communicative imagery. Much here that echoes in Mr Tambourine Man. And there is a beach, and there is sand, and there is a diamond. Here’s the passage itself:
Imagine Marilyn Monroe facing a besotted crowd and saying, “I’ve got my Marilyn Monroe mask on.” Imagine Cary Grant facing his own assortment of admirers and saying, “I’ve got my Cary Grant mask on.” Blowing their covers.
We’ve just finished week 4 of the class I-can’t-help-it-if-I’m-lucky to be teaching at the 92nd St Y. When I was a passive but opinionated student in this course, I felt more comfortable writing little narratives of the experience. The remedy is to act as though I’m still a passive and opinionated student.
It’s already been a parade of different voices and visions describing Bob Dylan. It’s one thing to know abstractly that Dylan is an artist who looks one way from one angle, another way from another angle, and the quantity of angles is too many to be arithmetically possible. But it’s another thing to have people smarter and more interesting than oneself demonstrate this fact.
Our first guests were Norma and David Gaines, of Southwestern University in Texas. Norma’s background is in art history, and she spoke to us about Dylan the Visual Artist. This was a nonpareil treat for me, personally, since informed and engaging discussions of his painting and draughtsmanship are few and far between. Norma showed strongly-colored images from Drawn Blank, and described the drawing technique in terms of impressionistic and expressionistic traditions of Big M Modern art–the oblique or compressed viewpoint of a Kirchner street scene, the brisk strong outlines, singing colors, and vigorous use of empty space of a Matisse. 
Dylan’s willingness to return to drawings again and again with different color schemes can remind us of Monet’s variations on a theme. Norma was taken by the fiery sky Dylan applied to one of the variations of the receding train tracks, and it turned out to be a popular image with us also–so many bright and fevered and strange skies in the songs, from diamond skies, to pain pouring down, to the Fourth Part of the Day. Norma found a connection between Dylan’s self-portrait and Matisse’s portrait of his wife: the black outlined ear, the long-ish head, the bold eyebrows. What Norma did was let us see what Dylan may have seen that lingered in his mind visually as we know so much music and language lingers in his mind. The argument that Bob Dylan is a great painter is not a road I would travel on. But that his paintings have a strong visual life to them, that their palettes and compositions hold the eye and invite us into one moment of seeing the world as this artist sees and seizes it, that’s a road I can walk down, and Norma gave us an excellent clear-sighted and informative map.
David Gaines took his place at the desk to talk to us about humor and Bob Dylan. He confessed right up front that it’s nearly impossible to talk about humor without simply saying “That’s funny, isn’t it? And then that other thing, that’s funny too, isn’t it?” There are of course not just theories about humor but theories about why it is so hard to theorize about humor and now you are drifting off to sleep, as well you should be. David did great justice to his subject: he insisted that Dylan’s humor is underrated, insisted that taking humor seriously in Dylan’s songs does not extract the humor from the songs, played 115th Dream and Brownsville Girl. I laugh out loud just from the way Bob sings ”I didn’t feel like letting my head get blown off,” and makes that sentiment sound lyrical and poignant, plus he croons about 6 syllables more than the musical line should be able to hold. So there is humor in the performances as well as in the lyrics. Bob the maskedandanonymous ubertrickster is already a cliche, but making Trickster Bob a cliche will not protect us from by being tricked. David mentioned a book that seems worth looking up, Trickster Makes the World, by Lewis Hyde.
Last night, we entered the scary world of science and math, but luckily our guide was Tim Anderson, a professional audio engineer who made it possible for us to understand some of the technical concerns of recording that many of us fans take for granted or condescend to. I’m often smug about Bob Dylan’s preference for old-fashioned recording methods, with really no idea of what I’m talking about. Tim explained not merely that but how digital recording makes it possible to eliminate from the recording the ambient sound of the room in which the music is being performed. He helped me see the way analog recording is a series of physical processes that preserve the continuity of a sound wave’s fluctuations , and digital recording reconstructs sound waves from ever-smaller sections of the wave–digital interrupts the continuity of a sound wave, although the fragmented bits are smaller than small, and the smaller they get, the more *fully* the sound wave can be rebuilt. I hope I have this right.
Bob Dylan has been outspoken about his distaste for digital sound. He apparently does not want to lose the sound of the room in which he records his songs. I like to imagine that he wishes to capture the moment in time, the place-in-time, of the performance of the song. He wishes perhaps a thumbprint, a shadow, of the irrecoverable time and place to be present on the recording. All very Romantic-talk, but whether or not I am hearing the physical traces of time-and-place in this presence, perhaps the presentness of Dylan’s voice happens because he is comfortable believing the moment is being captured more comprehensively…. Oh well, throw on the dirt, pile on the dust.
I then asked Tim to listen to One of Us Must Know, and then Most of the Time, and talk about two of Bob Dylan’s most well-known ”sound albums.” He helped me hear that some of that mythic thin wild mercury is a matter of sibilance. The recording levels can be manipulated to emphasize the silvery sibilance of Dylan’s vocals, as well as the percussion, especially cymbals. A discussion ensued in which the comment was made that this sibilance is less noticeable in other songs, such as Visions of Johanna. True enough, but there seems to be enough high brightness in the tones of the instruments throughout the album–the tinkly (in a good way) piano, e.g. Even Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands has its own brightness and does not have the vast open aural spaces of Oh Mercy. Tim explained how that distance between the vocals and the instruments is achieved, and how reverb contributes to the effect on this album that some of us adore (me), and many of us can’t stand (many others). An interesting comment was made that Most of the Time sounded like “a science fiction movie,” and for the first time I could hear the impersonal quality of the the album’s music–it sounds synthetic, I can hear that, but I still find it intoxicating.
Last night’s class began and ended with the delightful experience of live music, as our own Toby performed The Times They Are A-Changin’, and then played both Lady Franklin’s Lament and Bob Dylan’s Dream, thus treating us to a wonderful lesson in Bob’s sources and borrowings. We ended the class with Toby’s performance of his own original talkin’ blues, the cleverness and pleasure of which can’t be reproduced here.
