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.
YOU MAY NEED TO SCROLL WAY DOWN TO FIND THE LISTS OF POSTS AND LINKS IN THE RIGHT HAND MARGIN.
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Eruke (you are welcome to email me directly at gardenerisgone@gmail.com)
The first and third (reggae) version of Mississippi are great. The second one is not that great. Reference the Rolling Stone interview Dylan did in 2001 when L&T came out. He spoke about Lanois trying to make a sexy version of Mississippi that Dylan disliked. I suspect it is version 2. Dylan said something like, “Lanois didn’t understand that the song had more to do with the Declaration on Independence than sexy.”
We readers are waiting for you to comment on the resurgence of Leonard Cohen, his black hats and black clad band and what you might have to say about the two, Bob and Leonard. And then, if you really got going, you might say something about Paul Simon and the two.
Thank you very much for writing, and inquiring after my opinion. If you are a Leonard Cohen fan, I hope you’ve had the chance to see him on his current tour. I did see him at Radio City here in NY a few months ago. It was my first Leonard show, and I did not even start listening to him until I saw the documentary of the Hal Wilner tribute, I’m Your Man, and finally heard *up close* these magnificent lyrics. I think Bob Dylan is in a category of his own, no category at all, and I think Leonard Cohen is a brilliant brilliant poet. Anyone not teaching The Traitor in a course exploring metaphor and figurative language isn’t doing justice to the topic. And if you’re teaching a course on religious poetry, you can draw a line from George Herbert to Hallelujah, or even just the 2nd verse of Suzanne.
Leonard In Show And Concert was a vigorous, witty showman who aimed to charm and provoke everyone in the audience. He was entirely successful–I felt flattered by the connection he sought with the audience, and grateful for his generosity. Each song came across so clear and true to the original that I could see the lyrics as he sang them. He made a theater of strangers feel like a human community. I can’t speak to subtle manipulations of phrasing or intonation or anything like that, I’m not fluent enough in Leonard Cohen, but I’d love to know what Cohenists would say about that. I can say that every song sounded as I knew it. His hat seemed more charcoal gray? He certainly is dapper, and although Bob seems to be in a comparatively elegant phase in terms of his costuming, we know it’s a costume.
When I see Bob D In Show And Concert, I am seeing a man carrying out his vocation. Each night He Is What He Does. He communicates. addresses, connects, entirely through the songs. Nothing he could say to me before singing Jolene or Honest With Me or Senor is going to *tell* me anything at all that the song won’t tell me. I don’t ever feel that I am seeing a show delivered to me as a unified experience. I feel I’m watching and hearing a man being what he does, doing what he is, night after night. I’m not the same today as I was yesterday, and neither is he. And it comes out on stage. There are shifts of feeling and texture in every concert that never fail to teach me how to be alert to how fleeting sensations can be, and how captivating they can be while they’re present. I’ll be seeing Leonard Cohen again in October at Madison Square Garden (an interesting venue for a 74 year old Jewish man in a suit who sings about betrayal, doubt, and despair), and I feel eager and honored to see him again, even if it’s the same exact production I saw at Radio City. I feel hungry to know what Bob Dylan’s gonna do to me next.
One thing that seems important to me is the way both Bob and Leonard are charismatic, vigorous, expressive, interesting, and not at all youthful. I don’t mean they’re not young, I mean they’re not youthful, which is the only kind of energy and appeal we’re willing to grant the not-young. Go see either one of these men perform, and you’re seeing an in-the-moment summoning of kinds of energy that we don’t have much vocabulary for in our culture.
I’m sorry I don’t have too much to say about Paul Simon. I think he’s had an honest, serious, committed career, I think he is ambitious without being portentous, I’ve never seen an interview with him that wasn’t intelligent and self-aware. His songwriting just doesn’t move or provoke me the way it does many many other people. I’ve never seen him perform. I cry every time I see him and George do Here Comes The Sun on Sat. Nite Live, but then again, so does everyone.
Thanks again for writing, and reading. Keep listening to what you love, and I do hope you’ve had/will have a chance to see Leonard.
Your page name is a Leonard Cohen lyric, correct?:
The gardener is gone
but back here on the lawn,
his spirit continues to drool
Is there Dylan with that lyric?
And yes, Cohen does make the audience fieel like a community, more now that in the past. He as acheived, and he has cultivated to some extent a Prophet-like demeanor. I saw him in 1973 (Bottom Line), 1994 (MSGarden theater), and last year at the Beacon. His sagacity grows, slthough it is rehearsed. He is the master folk singer, with all due respect to Dylan. Hear ing Dylan sing Cohen’s Hallelujah will help one to agree.
Sorry, I misquoted the Cohen lyric. He doesn’t say “The gardener is gone”, he says, “His body is gone but back here on the lawn….”, from One of Us Can Not be Wrong (Songs of LC).
My great good luck to have stumbled upon “gardenerisgone” near the end of the year & (feeling rather like Peter Rabbit in Mr. McGregor‘s garden & to the annoyance of my family) devoted what time could be stolen devouring the “gardener’s” posts.
“Posts” is too slight a word to describe “gardener’s” bountiful harvest.
“gardener“ doesn’t shy away from deft exegesis; which is not to say it is weighted down with “show-off” academic gravitas. On the contrary it can be sincerely solemn & full of whimsy – simultaneously. & why not ? Its subject, after all works in the tradition of the great vaudevillian comics, as well as the profound prophets & moralists.
In short, “gardener” offers simply the best, most intriguing commentary since The Telegraph/Wanted Man & John Bauldie
Thank you & Congratulations !
P.S. I hope the check mark below “Notify me of new posts via email“ is an invitation & notice to come again as McGregor‘s garden offers new crops
Dear Dana–I see Farmer McGregror running at Peter in his little blue jacket, soon to be lost. I hope you were not denied blackberries and milk for dessert. I can’t be disingenuous about your extremely gracious comments here. John Bauldie and Paul Williams should be anyone’s models for this topic–and I hope anyone would agree that it’s the bottomless treasure chest of this topic that’s responsible for anything good that;s said about it. I love your reference to vaudevillian, there is so much of that in Dylan that ‘s ignored in favor of Mr. Enigma.-I am just waiting for the night when he’s center stage after the encores, enduring the last cheers of the evening with that restless, annoyed manner we’re all familiar with, and he takes his hat off and out flies a couple of bedraggled and furious doves. It will happen! Keep listening to Bob, and thank you again.
Dear Michael–Holy Profiterole, I did not know the Leonard Cohen reference! My gardener is taken from Ain’t Talkin’: my modest aim is to replace Nietzsche’s taunting aphorism, “God is dead,” with Dylan’s more subtle and witty and troubling and visual lyric–”There’s no one here, the gardener is gone.” What Leonard Cohen song is that from?
I’ve had the chance to see Leonard twice here in NY in the last 2 years. I like the idea of rehearsed sagacity: he is a showman, and his showmanship the kind that’s ritualistic and never superficial. David Boucher’s book, Dylan and Cohen, is an excellent comparison of the two artists, and does justice to each. Dylan’s 1988 performance of Hallelujah, which circulates widely and can be heard on YouTube, is one of the greatest performances of religious art, ever. John Donne and George Herbert roll about in their graves whenever anyone plays Dylan’s Hallelujah. “Well—what’s it to ya?”
Hi-
Looking forward to reading more of your blog.
I’d like to suggest you add a couple more to the readers ages though- like 61 (me) and even 75! LOL
we are the original Dylan listeners and are still following, being moved, and finding AHA moments within his lyrics- and new AHA moments opening up in lyrics we’ve heard a thousand times before.
I’m planning on starting a blog on Dylan soon- well, not really ON dylan.
I do art journals and am planning on using Dylan lyrics for my AHA’s via both writing and art/collage journals.
When i get it going I’ll link to you.
take care,
I’ll be back.
OH- if you click on the current blog there are a couple of examples-
nothing fabulous. but I love doing them.