To read Mike Marqusee’s Chimes of Freedom with little prior knowledge of Bob Dylan is to come away with an intimidating impression: Marqusee offers a portrait of a young man who for about 7 years seemed to exist on a transcendent plane in which artistic ability, self-scrutiny, and sensitivity to the currents of political and social feeling around him were all working together at a remarkable intensity. We have all read sentences many times like my previous sentence; we are used to these cliched hyperbolic summaries of Bob Dylan’s 60s output. I believe that while it adds to the chorus of these common readings of Dylan in the 60s, Marqusee’s book is more deft than many. He really does compose a sophisticated and engrossing political-artistic biography, in which Bob Dylan’s art is examined and framed according to Dylan’s mercurial political identity. Marqusee’s readings of class and race in the familiar early songs refresh our appreciation of them, and he is among the few writers who do some justice to Dylan’s voice.
I’ve no desire to argue with Marqusee’s analysis of Dylan’s ability to articulate–in fact, his ability to create–states of being in which moral outrage, social critique, confession, anti-intellectualism, erudtion, spontaneity, artfulness all participate. By the time Bob cuts off his hair and rides straight away, falls off his motorcycle, retreats to the basement, Marqusee’s critical knife-set is ready for him: Marqusee contrasts the whimsical playfulness in the basement with the psychedelia of the lowlands. He examines the unnerving, complex withdrawal from political consciousness and public life, partly by giving Clothes Line Saga the scrutiny it deserves. He examines the unnerving, complex disavowal of the topical and the revolutionary in John Wesley Harding’s songs. It is a tour de force of critical biography that Marqusee is able to sustain the narrative of Dylan’s political development into the shuttered and cryptic series of dreams that is John Wesley Harding. He pulls it off and I applaud him. And he employs very very high standards that are familiar to us: Bob Dylan is a genius when he channels the unruly and mighty currents of thought, awareness, social change of the mid 1960s. When he gets into that basement in that quiet hamlet in upstate New York, how can the wild boy-genius maintain the relevance, the one-step-ahead-of-everythingness he himself set the bar for in 1966? He can do some fascinating and maybe brilliant things, but not quite the one-step-ahead-of-everything things that he did 64-66.
It’s really this Bob Dylan Story that I want to crusade against to my last breath. The story in which some kind of falling-off takes place beginning in 1967. The falling-off in which Bob Dylan stops promising his fans that he is leading them into a new universe that he has designed just for them. In this story, John Wesley Harding is a response to its predecessors, it’s “an arrested moment, as Dylan sought to refine the lessons of previous years.” Marqusee grants the album “stylistic coherence.” He gives insightful readings of the songs I mentioned above, and I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine and Drifter’s Escape, because they participate in the story Marqusee is telling with such skill: the development of a self-conscious artist.
As I Went Out One Morning gets short shrift. Marqusee says it “fails to satisfy….There is nothing here but allegory and not a very illuminating one at that.” 
(This was the most un-illuminating allegory I could find at short notice.) He links the Tom Paine reference to the beloved fiasco of Dylan’s appearance at the Thomas Paine award ceremony, and then claims the link is too weak to sustain the song. The song doesn’t work for him, and I see how it does not.
But I’d like to wrench the song away from Mike Marqusee and look at it. The song clocks in at 2 minutes 49 seconds, a mere heartbeat for a Dylan song. The lyrics total 140 words. Three characters appear, there are five spoken lines–complete with dialogue tags that should but do not weigh down lyrics that are already pared down. There is an exchange of four spoken lines alone in the second verse. There are only two adjectives in the song, both describe the girl who is the occasion for the song’s drama. There is one adverb in the song, the girl’s “secretly”–a word that is temptation and confession and plea all at once. Look at the precision with which the verbs carry the song’s plot and also carry its themes: the singer is free, he merely went to breathe the air around Tom Paine’s–he is free to move about in the world, even upon another man’s land, to take the air at his leisure. All very well until he spied the girl–spying implies something is hidden. She walks in chains–unlike the singer, she is not free, but her beauty is his snare. He offers her his hand–a gallant and intimate gesture that belies the truth of the encounter: his own freedom permits him gallantry, but her enslavement forbids her to respond with the same code. She took his arm, she is violent and possessive in her bid for freedom. The man can afford to be courtly with his desire. All they’ve got out in that field is their bodies and voices, and the 2nd verse is a compact dance of power and powerlessness: the man asserts the authority that’s his to begin with, and formally insists she “depart”–as though he is now the one enslaved and she controls his freedom. The lyrics give her the vocabulary of supplication “wish…beg….pleaded.” The singer speaks only the language of authority “you have no choice,” he says simply. She tries to tempt him by reversing the roles, she’ll “accept him”. It’s worth noting that at this point Dylan chooses the South as the destination of freedom for this woman who walks in chains. The world of John Wesley Harding is indeed not the same as the world of Oxford Town.
Christopher Hitchens uses the first 2 lines of the song as an epigraph for his book on Thomas Paine. Tom Paine, the voice of reason against power, egalitarianism, Common Sense. But the language assigned him in this song is the language of authority and power. He runs, shouts, and commands. He hastens to take control of the situation. He addresses the singer with deference. He claims responsibility for the woman’s actions. Now the singer does not seem quite the carefree simple character who merely wants to breathe air belonging to all men, and spy beautiful women who are also the property of men. He seems at the end to be a figure who can demand respect and to whom others are responsible. The woman is silent at the song’s end, she’s let go of the singer, her bid for freedom is over. The song is over.
The singer is ultimately absolved of his own desire, it’s the woman’s urgent plea for freedom that intimidates him, and he’s rescued by another man’s power over the woman. The singer is free again at the end, the woman’s still walking in her chains. You can see it all: the field, the woman in the distance and then in the foreground, the hands, the arm, the woman’s urgent and seductive face as she pleads, the man now frightened and repulsed, another man running, the woman knows she is truly powerless and drops her hand. A drama of desire, freedom, authority, powerlessness, will, subordination, intimidation, order restored: it’s all there in the 24 (I think i got that right) verbs.
It’s the restoration of order that’s so troubling here. The singer remains free, absolved of having approached an enslaved woman with disingenuous courtesy. Dylan’s vocals just make the story more morally troubling. The meticulous enunciation, the way “hand” and “grip” are high, sustained, and imploring notes–the singer just seems so convincing and sympathetic.
Am I just exchanging one politics for another, by giving this delicate and barbed and rich song a *gendered* reading? Like Bob himself, I don’t want to pose any question that I already have the answer for. I don’t have the answer for that question. But I want to reclaim what I think is a marvelous impressionistic moral drama from Mike Marqusee dismissal of it.
Here are some fabulous Blonde-on-Blonde-era photos by Jerry Schatzberg. How a person can be this thin, this messy, this strung out, and this photogenic is a mystery even Kate Moss can’t solve. Enjoy. http://dylanstubs.com/pictures/1966_1/index.html
In April 2005, I never heard of any Neverending Tour, it seemed a fairy tale miracle when I passed the Beacon Theater on Broadway and 74th Street and saw Bob Dylan’s name on the marquee, just 2 or 3 short weeks after reading Chronicles and finding my brain recalibrated. As I’ve said elsewhere, I had nothing but time and money on my hands, so when I quiveringly sat down at my computer and quiveringly ordered tickets from StubHub for the show on Friday, April 29, for a gaspingly great sum, all the quivering was from nervous anticipation and not the expense. But there were five concerts in this series at the Beacon in April. I have a cousin who is an entertainment lawyer and two emails later, I found myself in a room at the Riga Hotel, handing over a fax and my ID to a woman at a card table set up in the hotel room, and leaving with an 8th row ticket to the Thursday night, April 28th show. I still have no idea what happened. 
In those few weeks before the concerts, I bought Hwy 61, Bringing it All Back Home, Blood on the Tracks, and Blonde and Blonde, I read Robert Shelton and Clinton Heylin, I bought Dont Look Back. I managed to fit in listening to 2 or 3 albums, often 2x each, reading 40 or 50 pages, and watching DLB once or twice every day. Although now I would lead a newbie directly to Tell Tale Signs, and Oh Mercy, and John Wesley Harding, and Paul Williams, I had no human mentors, and I went the canonical route. Holding that ticket in my hand, in my urgent naivete, the thought of seeing Bob Dylan live produced a state of freakish anticipation in me: WHAT WOULD HE LOOK LIKE. WHAT WOULD THIS BE LIKE. Since he is, well, no longer the creature from Dont Look Back. It is not easy not to be captivated by that creature, always in graceful bowlegged motion, his rudeness irresistible to me (as of course it was not to many people), his face withstanding the most invasive close-ups. 
And what if nobody goes? What if I am forced to feel sorry for this man so soon after discovering him? WHAT IF I AM TOO LATE?
On line for the restroom, I saw a woman who was not young, and who had shaved her head and tattooed it in different colors. People intimidated me, they weren’t the usual bland cheerful gaggle at a rock concert. Back to my seat for Merle Haggard. I found that I was sitting next to a couple and their children. They were all attractive and affluent looking. The couple seemed excited to see Bob Dylan, and they had an enormous pair of birdwatching binoculars which they generously offered to share with me when The Time Came. Now I was a little disappointed, I have to say: it felt now as though I was in store for something like the Radio City Christmas Show. Meanwhile, Merle Haggard was energetic and entertaining. When he was done, I made another trip to the restroom–good god! Look at all these people! The hallways were now mobbed, people loud and juiced up. Why are they all out here? There was now something edgy and sharp to the atmosphere of the Beacon.
I hear the voice say “Columbia recording artist” and I think, oh how awful! His record company makes him play this before his concerts! I feel angry and defensive.
And there he is, hunched over a small keyboard. It’s easy for me to find and feel my first impressions: Cold. Fierce. Present. He looks up briefly from the keyboard, and from where I am sitting, row 8, no binoculars, I can see his eyes, ice blue. I don’t feel welcome, or delighted, but I feel that a cold wind has blown all my anticipation away for good. 
I didn’t know these songs. And I could see the words and I could feel the work of singing them.I listened, and listened, and he sang, and he sang. There was such Thereness to his voice, which I described at the time as being dry and alive like the desert. There was an astounding moment when he walked to a stand and picked up a harmonica, and I saw the same bouncing shuffle, the same set of the shoulders, the same long fingers, that I’d memorized from Dont Look Back. It’s the same person, somehow. And then he did the song A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall. I’d heard of the song, but never heard a recording of it before this.
I got it right away: the young boy to whom the world is fragmented, surreal, inexplicably grotesque, inexplicably threatening, inexplicably inviting. His father, to whom the world is known and ordered, wants to hear his son’s adventures, I could hear the father envying and intimidated by the boy’s freedom. But no boy is singing this song, a man who should take the father’s role is singing the boy’s life. Fathers, sons, images obscurely gruesome–bleeding hammers, things dripping, why am I finding a ladder covered in water frightening? The dry, clear, insistent voice lays out every vision for me to see. Hamlet’s father. Hamlet’s father’s ghost, that’s what this is. “I could a tale unfold whose lightest word/Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood.”
What I felt was a fear unleavened by awe. This was no operatic sweep of feeling, something I had developed a taste for before I started listening to Bob Dylan. I had been a Wagner aficionado, and I’d learned the sensuous thrill of dark passions evoked in torrents of voice and music, but this was different. I was not intoxicated, I was frightened. When the singer told me he’d been to a place where “black is the color and none is the number,” I knew for certain that he’d been there, he’d been to a void and he was demanding I see it for myself. This was not pleasant. It was not even the vertigo of the sublime, which I’d studied and had some understanding of. It was just a man insisting I share his nightmare. 
I’m going back out, he sang. There seemed a low surge from the people around me in the theater. “I’ll reflect from the mountain so all souls can see it” and right there for me it was all saved, he was going to put himself on that mountain so we wouldn’t have to live his nightmare any longer, and as soon as this absurd, romantic wave of relief rolled through me, the theater erupted–people, men, shouting and calling–they heard and felt what I did? It wasn’t only me? I felt we were all rescued in some way together. You can, in fact, hear this for yourself on a recording of this concert. You can hear the insistence and clarity of Dylan’s voice, and you can hear the eruption of shared feeling in the last verse. 
But I am too late, aren’t I. I’m too late despite the fact that Bobby Dylan himself got the dates wrong, and claimed he wrote Hard Rain in the first flush of Cuban Missile Crisis anxiety, when he played the song to a sizable audience a month before the missiles were sighted (see Marqusee, page 60). I’m too late for the apocalyptic imagery of the song to do a more authentic kind of moral and emotional work: to articulate fears of nuclear destruction or social disintegration, to articulate collective fears that the agents of destruction and disintegration are politicians separated by chasms of conscience and awareness from the people really *hearing* this song. I knew real fear and I knew real community through the performance of the song, but weren’t these feelings Romantic, based on fantasies of timeless Art and transcendent experience? Apres my fear and my collectivity, I would go out into a nice spring night on the Upper West Side, and make my way home bearing the intensity of my experience as a lantern inside me, illuminating new truths about how emotion can be transmitted, what makes a voice beautiful, what makes age potent, what makes language meaningful. The man in rags panhandling in Verdi Square– his plight was no more distressing to me than it ever was. The woman working the 72nd St token booth at midnight–I did not stop to think more deeply about the persistent racial division of labor in my world. Mike Marqusee writes with great eloquence and energy about the hunger Bob Dylan both aroused and satisfied for young people in the early 1960s who were awakening into political awareness, creative experiments, new ways of feeling, and a runaway urgency to right wrongs. A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall was of this vitality. Wasn’t my experience selfish, inert, inauthentic, compared to what I would have experienced at the song’s original moment?
Bob Dylan’s career is providing an unprecedented opportunity in the history of art: at every stage of this artist’s career, you will find the same man, singing and re-singing the same songs, writing and rewriting songs, and you will find other people engaging with this one man and his doings, and claiming inspiration and transformation through this engagement, dismissing or reviving his *relevance*, discovering or discarding personal connections with his doings. There is no equivalent anywhere to this documentation of the career, and the response to the career, of any other major artist. This is my pedantic and long-winded way of saying that I’m not going to answer my question above, about whether my experience of Hard Rain in 2005 was less than someone’s experience of it in 1963. But the question itself is part of my experience of the song. And in the year 2505, when someone else encounters this song, and sees and feels something new and strong as a result, they will have a vocabulary for their experience that I can’t possibly foresee.
….and so, having read Chronicles, I started my expeditions to Tower Records. Tower Records no longer exists.
. I did what today I would sneer at: the first CD I bought was the compilation The Essential Bob Dylan. The package seemed to be an instructive overview, and I was still trailing the grimy clouds of grad school, and I still went at things as Educational Projects. 
I found the songs so…peculiar. So difficult. The voice always above or below, behind or ahead of the music. The words formed phrases that would catch my attention but there was no time ponder because I was already carried into the next line, the next stage of the song’s story. And the pleasure of the melodies, with their own rough and lovely snares, and the textures of the voice, these would also capture other levels of attention, and by the end of the song, I’d wonder what had happened. 
The two songs I went back to each day, over and over, trying to grasp what they were, were Tangled up in Blue and Shelter from the Storm. The line in Tangled Up in Blue that seemed like an unfathomable mystery to me was “…she opened up a book of poems and handed it to me.” In a song whose verses swing through a man’s life, like swinging through treetops, vine to vine, swooping over years and decades…..the singer takes the time to describe one simple, actual action as it would be described in ordinary prose, and delivers the words with care and feeling. The dull phrase becomes unaccountably lovely. I could not get over that….it seemed such a magnificent and reckless squandering of the song’s time and of the voice’s attention. It was a mystery to me, this experience of the utterly incongruous: he made a stage direction into a moment of delicacy. 
”A creature void of form.” A creature void of form????? How can you sing this in a song, how can you toss this gorgeous and difficult phrase to me and let the song rush on? Where are the dullards with their tedious arguments about whether Bob Dylan is a poet? A poem exists in any time frame the poet or the reader chooses: put it down, contemplate, contemplate some more, roll a phrase round your mind. But try to keep up with Shelter from the Storm–try to parse all the registers of this song, the colloquial, the lyrical, the allegorical; then try to manage the completely elusive chronology–the affair begins, ends, begins, there are narrative verses that are timeless and abstract.Now try to manage all this in a brisk melody, with the singer’s phrasing always at some odds with the melody, so that there is pattern but no monotony. The refrain shifts its tone with each repetition. He can make the phrase ‘shelter from the storm” stand out and you feel there is a place that’s always safe and warm; and then he’ll bite off the phrase “I’ll give ya,” with such a bitter sense of betrayal and disillusionment you feel the blackness of a soul that can never be safe and warm. You have to parse, consider, and feel, all within seductive metrical musical time. The demands and rewards of this work are just not to be found elsewhere.
The verse for me in Shelter from the Storm, when I began listening to this music daily, was 
I saw Bob Dylan perform Shelter from the Storm in June 2007, at Jones Beach here in NY. He sounded cracked, tender, frail, enduring. Suddenly I got it–I got this performance of this song: I heard that he is here, singing the song for us, all these years down the road, because there’s no shelter for him. 
The Makor Center is located in a lovely old brownstone with pretty staircases and a comfortable library and nice little classrooms, so it invites a pleasant feeling of self-indulgent self-improvement, and it is just up the block from Central Park, so it puts one in a relaxed and idyllic state of mind, and it is just round the corner from New York City’s Mormon headquarters, so it puts one in an iconoclastic and liberal state of mind. I like to think all these states of mind were lazily at work in my head when I noticed flyers posted around Makor advertising an upcoming talk with Greil Marcus about his new book. 
Oh all right, here’s your fifteen dollars.
Precisely thus, although if I remember, his glasses had more of the Le Corbusier look to them.
At one point, Marcus started talking about how, when he was in the middle of writing this book, someone told him that Bob Dylan himself was writing his memoirs, and they were likely to be published at just the same time as Marcus’s book. I think I had seen this book in stores, it had a very classy black and white cover. Marcus said something to this effect: “At first I thought, oh great, his book is going to contradict what I’m writing, he’s going to give information that’ll trump my research. And then I thought–nah. Bob Dylan’s autobiography is going to be a big coffee table book, you know, with facsimiles of cocktail napkins with lyrics on them.” 
.
And on the vague current of these vague feelings, when I was faced with the cover of Chronicles, it was not at all difficult to say Yes: the package of that book was simply stunning. Stark and pure, it certainly had a gravity and a tone that made it stand out on the shelf. You don’t need any context or any magic to be attracted to the cover of that book, it’s absolutely beautiful. Pick it up and turn it over, and there is a photo of a very young man with such an unnervingly arresting face, he seems almost too interesting. I felt lavish and purposeful spending the $20-plus on this hardcover book.
I opened it up right outside the store, and read the first two or three pages as I headed for the subway and by the time I’d swiped my Metrocard, I’d exchanged the Here and Now of being my own self on the 79th street platform, for the There and Then of this narrator’s voice. Like turning a glove inside out: the allure of this voice turned my present into his past, and this feeling continued for all the hours and days I stretched out to finish this book.
I can claim no other distinction as a Bob Dylan fan, none at all–except that I am the only person I have ever met who became one through reading Chronicles. To me, the book was like any book about a topic I had no prior knowledge of at all: it had to hold my interest on its own merits, and not on how well it lived up to expectations I had.
I read the last words–”…but it wasn’t run by the devil either,” and I looked up and saw a man in a green maintenance uniform pushing a cart laden with brushes and rags and other cleaning supplies. I’d never been in the museum before when it was actually closing. For one moment the man was part of the world of the book, then he was his own person, and I had to return to the world outside the book. 
There is a fine essay in the October (I believe) Isis (2008) tracing Hemingway references in the song Moonlight. Dylan’s early comments on Hemingway support the author’s argument that there is a substantive, thematic link we can forge between Dylan’s gothic song about love and some kind of violence in a dark and threatening world, and Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, and A Farewell to Arms, both of them narratives of love inextricable from war. Dylan’s admiration for Hemingway’s experiments in how much can be borne by the fewest words influenced Dylan’s own experiments in how much can be borne by metered and sung language. This is what I want to be reading: close attention to Dylan’s work that brings him further into the kinds of canons people conventionally elevate. Hemingway is already becoming superannuated, more often elevated in convention than in honest response. Good enough: I want my Dylan conventionally elevated, if only because it will bring him routinely to the attention of enervated intellectuals who may be refreshed and awoken.
