Jean-Martin Buttner [Swiss journalist]: Why are Dylan fans the worst? I don’t mean the people who like music, I mean the obsessed kind. And why do they look as ridiculous as they do?

Greil Marcus [writer and critic]: I don’t know the answer to that. There’s no question you’re right. Hum. Not just the worst, they’re the stupidest. I think it’s because something in Dylan’s writing leads people to believe that there is a secret behind every song. And if you unlock that secret then you’ll understand the meaning of life. Like every song is this treasure chest, and nothing is what it seems.

Buttner declares that “obsessive” Bob Dylan fans “look ridiculous,” and then Buttner asks Greil Marcus to explain his aspersion as though it were an observation. Which Greil Marcus proceeds to do–he explains that obsessive Bob Dylan fans look ridiculous because they are stupid. And they are stupid because “something in Dylan’s writing leads people to believe there is a secret meaning behind every song.”   Each song is a “treasure chest” in which the “stupidest” people find “the meaning of life.”

For me, it all boils down to  Greil Marcus’s little “Hum.”  It’s patient and thoughtful.   How tiring it must be to confront, day after day after day,  the misjudgments of other people on a topic in which one has an enduring and influential professional interest. Such inane misjudgments, and so very many other people.

Here is a painting called Hunting Scene, by a painter named Piero di Cosimo who lived from 1462-1522. It hangs in a corner of a Renaissance gallery on the 2nd floor of the Metropolitan.   Rolling from one end of the painting to the other is a rampage of bloodthirst and destruction that seems eruptive, an orgy that may give irony to the conventional title, if I knew enough about irony in 15th century Florence. A dog leaps on a lion’s back and clamps its jaws on the lion’s eyes, and the lion’s pain is right there in his horribly outstretched tongue. Animals bowed and bug-eyed in terror are clubbed to death by satyrs. A mighty man embraces a beast and I can hear its ribs cracking. A naked man seems at first to be oddly crouching on a horse, until I see the small unearthly transparent monkeyish beast leaping to the man’s back and I realize he’s trying to flee–the poor hunter a victim to his prey.  And behind these deaths I can make out trees in flames.   The forest itself is so mad with violence that it’s spontaneously combusting.

Each assault is vivid and the canvas seems to shudder in its frame. Fear and pain and cruelty are so piquantly displayed on all the little faces. I can’t look away and I’m kind of distressed because as a rule I can’t stand anything to do with hurt animals.  When a couple of stylishly dressed French tourists glided over to see what was in this little corner of the gallery, I quickly step aside with a voyeur’s embarrassment.  They moved on and I turn to the placard describing the painting, hoping for an adjective or two to confirm my own response. Instead, I read the biography of a thing: this painting may be a thing that Giorgio Vasari described among a series of panels; it is a thing that “possibly” hung in the “John and Mabel Ringling museum;” the origin of the content “seems to be derived from the writings of the Roman architect Vitruvius.”   Here I had made a special friend with Piero di Cosimo’s lurid pagan vision. But the museum reminded me that nearly one hundred generations of people esteeming and protecting the painting led to our meeting. My having been in a strangely vicious or avid mood when I ambled over to that corner of the gallery,  my little intoxicated fascination with it, the discovery that I was enjoying violence–even with all this personal agitation, my attention was only a mayfly’s moment in the life of this object.

Hard Rain/ Slow Train: Passages about Dylan, by Michael Anton Miller is a new book published by Jupiter Hollow Media in Denver. Miller’s purpose:

This book pays attention to the poet in Bob Dylan. The genius we know by that name includes the poet but cannot be delimited by that designation. …Geniuses are like Rorschach tests. We can’t help seeing in them that which we see, because we are who we are….It’s more a matter of getting to know ourselves better…. And so the attention paid to the poet in Hard Rain/Slow Train, focuses on the words and on the way they are used, not as a way of trapping the poet but as a way of suggesting the incredible and astonishing patterns of his flight, which is like the magical and mesmerizing flight of a butterfly.  The sight of a butterfly on the wing thrills the heart.

Michael Anton Miller leads us right into his magic kingdom of treasure chests and secret meanings of life. His voice is florid and certain. There is something in Bob Dylan’s writing that leads Miller to believe

   It is an integral part of Dylan’s genius to have recognized that our ordinary longing to find love in the world by connecting up with a significant other, which plays such a central role in our emotional life and development, parallels the more profound longing of the human spirit for self-realization…

In the point of view developed in this book, the “I” or self is understood as representing the masculine factor in personal consciousness, which primarily manifests itself through the will, as individual existential self-assertion.  On the other hand, the mind is taken to represent the feminine factor in which the thoughts of the self are continually conceived and given form.

 

Here I respectfully return the keys to Miller’s magic kingdom for the time being. I am not a good tourist for this kind of philosophical/psychological itinerary. Conceptions of feminine and masculine consciousness will never appeal to me.  And Michael Anton Miller heard something in Dylan’s writing that sounded to him like a meaning of life.  His book may be strange and fervid and even objectionable, and I wish it well.

Daniel Mark Epstein’s book, The Ballad of Bob Dylan, is sane and informed, personal and insightful, comprehensive and engaging. Epstein narrates and critiques Dylan’s career along the axis of four concerts he himself attended in 63, 74, 97, and 09, in DC, New York and Maryland. He provides detailed descriptions of these shows, interlaced with biography, cultural context, and analysis of Dylan’s work. The sense of a ballad, a story with one storyteller, is heightened by Epstein’s frequent transcription of interviews, or summaries of other texts, or description of film footage, without context or attribution in the text itself. He relies heavily on familiar  biographies for his telling of Dylan’s childhood and simply knits what he’s borrowed into what is supposed to feel like a coherent and reliable narrative. He takes interviews, film footage, critical reviews and other writings, and lays them all out for us as bits of documentary evidence in his ballad, rather than an assortment of other points of view.  I came away with an unexpectedly large and intimate knowledge of drummer David Kemper. Since Kemper  seems to have given Epstein a lot of his time, it is very fortunate that he was already Epstein’s “favorite” drummer of all drummers who have worked with Bob Dylan. Epstein’s  memory of the 1963 show in DC is astonishingly detailed and responsive. The end result of all this nonchalant testing of the reader’s credulity can be endearing, there is so much of it, and all handled with such good cheer.

Epstein’s book is smart and energetic and upright, and guaranteed to please a great range of readers. Its publisher, HarperCollins, could afford a fairly breathtaking cover photo.

I’m going to go out on a limb here, and guess that Greil Marcus and Jean-Martin Buttner would be more likely to find Michael Anton Miller ridiculous, obsessive, and stupid, than Daniel Mark Epstein. In Epstein’s book, Dylan is gifted, inspiring, curious, flawed, familiar. In Miller’s book, Dylan is misshapen, fantastic, wrong, personal. Epstein’s Dylan is a treasure chest, and it’s the kind that can be cataloged by Sotheby’s. Miller’s is the kind Marcus deplores–a secret stash, where nothing is what it seems.

Even if I never finish Miller’s book, and I read Epstein’s through in just a few sittings, I’m with Miller. Art comes from bright and weird and misshapen places and it awakens bright and weird and misshapen questions and feelings in us. Of course art is a treasure chest with secrets and meanings–that is the life of fantasy, and meeting art can make us fantastic. Making public one’s weird and misshapen meaning of life is a free ticket to looking ridiculous and stupid. To anyone who recognized themselves in Buttner’s and Marcus’s exchange, I say–play on, play on, play on.  There’s room enough in Bob Dylan’s songs for all our magic kingdoms.

“Love and Theft” and all its loving backward turns hits the streets on Sept 11, 2001, when “you can’t repeat the past? What do you mean you can’t, of course you can,” becomes supernaturally, horrifyingly, irrelevant, and “coffins dropping from the sky like balloons made out of lead,” becomes hideously, supernaturally relevant. We wait five years for Bob Dylan to tell us more, and he leads us right into these Modern Times. And he wastes no time announcing  these modern times  with ancient echoes: And it came to pass on the third day in the morning, that there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud; so that all the people that was in the camp trembled.  Thunder on the mountain, fires on the moon/There’s a ruckus in the alley and the sun will be here soon/Today’s the day, gonna grab my trombone and blow.  Now, in a world not quite yet destroyed, when we hear him sing this in show and concert, we know the show is almost over.

Here’s a prophet for you.  The thunder peals, and he looks round his mountain, taking a measure of what he can see. He sees all the way to the moon, where fires burn impossibly and airlessly, and then he sees all the way down to the folk in the alleyway and their wild ways. But the sun/son will be here, light is coming. Our prophet’s going to get that trombone. Like an angel’s trumpet but with a blues voice. This will be music made for important announcements and dancing in the streets, and ruckuses. Because today is the day. He has the news. Today is the day. It’s today, what we’re waiting for.  Stick with him because there’s hot stuff—ruckuses, fires burning in dead lunar air, the light of suns and sons—and it goes with him everywhere. And we all know that fire talks truth to prophets.

I have heard the key turn in the door once. We want keys to open doors and trunks and lockets and codes, and we want to play that trombone in the right key too. And so we get Alicia Keys….and now our prophet is back on earth, and we’ve got to face all those mortal years separating him from this girl’s youth and beauty and music. He can see ruckuses and moon fires, but where is that girl born in the very kitchen of Hell! Where hasn’t he roamed to find her—even all the way to the hot land where Elvis rests in peace. We need to stick with him, but now he’s looking for this girl. It’s this way often with Bob Dylan—just when you think he’s coming at you from on high, where you want him,  a pretty face carries him away. Spirit on the water/Darkness on the face of the deep/I’m wild about you, gal….

But listen, His very soul is expanding, and it’s me and you he’ll let in—even straight into his heart.He’s come back to us, no?  See? The key is really for us.  Sort of. Whoever gets there will only sort of understand. There is a space we can’t enter. The key won’t open that door. And you could be wrong anyway—you might not be that You.  There is not even solitude in the mountains. Who is it that brought him here, to the mountain in the first place, and now wants to run him off? Away, get thee down.   You know what, whoever You are, You come read the writing on the wall. It’s a code?  You have the key to it already. Anyone can read what it says, our prophet is not here to translate the mystery. Come read what it says yourself–you/You  don’t need a translator.

He’s got to get going.  The thunder sounds again—reminding him today’s the day.  Got to get going.. Now the thunder sounds like a drum, rolling and portentous.  He wants to sleep where the music’s coming from. We have heard that music comes from a far better land, where perhaps sleep is long and dreamless.  And he can get to this place on his own, just follow the music. Remember, You/you,  he’s done your will night and day. He deserves to rest. But the sun is on its way.  He can’t stop here and unload, can he.

So back to the world’s ruckus. Things are under siege, angry people firing guns, guns in the dark. He’d like to get out and try something—to help them? To find a new way not ruled by violence? He’s too far from town, though, isn’t he? Too far from the busy, settled world of men, women, anger,  pistols? That’s no excuse—the cold wind blows, picking up speed, he has to follow the hot stuff. He’s going to get out there for the first time in the song—and see what other people need.  A prophet goes among the people and hears their side of things.

It could be that these others need something like love. While you’re still free, and can roam on a loose rein, pick one to whom you could say: ‘You alone please me.’She won’t come falling for you out of thin air. He’s going to take his time with this, really sit down and study it. The art of  it. The expertise, the skill. Really get it right. No more wandering and chasing anyone through Tennessee. It’s true Love’s wild, and one who often flouts me: but he’s a child of tender years, fit to be ruled.  Somewhere there’s a woman pure at heart, who’ll do just what he says, because her goodness will meet his  in free submission. Safe love, permissible intrigue sounds just right. And while he’s waiting for that good woman to take her place under his schooled thumb, the world has gone nowhere and he’s tolled right back to it. How can we stand this cruel world? [And Clinton Heylin missed this line from Kokomo Arnold, whom we shall get to presently.] All of us, look—the world outside goes on its wicked harming ways.

Thunder again—he knows, he knows, he already told us/you he’s on his way to find out about the needy ones. And taking the hard road, too, no shortcuts. Some day, some day, he’ll lie down with the music, stand next to his King, have the sweetness of both. He’s not faithless, he’s true to love that needs no book-learning. True throughout—true to everything. Ready now…

C’est l’amour, c’est la guerre. For all this trouble and cruelty, on this hard road to succor—an army’s needed. He can’t do it himself, but he’s dead set to raise this army. Have you ever heard him call anyone a son of a bitch? Well, then, this is serious business. A children’s crusade! The motherless children, who’ll fight for anyone’s love, they’ve got nothing to lose.  He’ll empty the orphanages. And he’s clean at heart. He’s said his religious vows, right on the corner of 38th Ave south and 54th street, in Minneapolis. The milk of innocence and compassion courses through him like a torrent—he has, in Herculean fashion, drained cows dry. Such is the measure of his virtue.

So, his little troops behind him, orphans with guns, you know– like fires in the sun that can’t be consumed and destroyed. Oh. but the devil of  hot desire trips him up on the hard road.  This woman now, she’s got what she’s got and he’s got what he’s got—it’s the way of the world, you know. Neither of them is blessed with anything but they have what they need, those pork chops and that pie. The cruel world still awaits though.  Shame on my greed and wickedness, before I throw the first stone at these un-divine lovers. He knows he’s clay like me, no angel at all, leave him to his sweet and greasy love and keep my dreams to myself. He can’t read them and can’t make them come true. Got nothing for you, had nothing before—just got these pork chops for me and my friend. After all his religious vows, he damns my dreams. DAMN, even. DAMN and SONS OF BITCHES. Oh, the language he has to use to be heard over that thunder.

And it peals again, but this time the wind’s twisted itself into real trouble, bearing straight for him.  Here it comes—the twister may yet get him, but he’ll get this in first. Slip it in of a sudden—the calamity five years gone. The masters of war now belittled to ladies in Washington. Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, scrambling for safety—can’t you see them running, lifting up their skirts, and looking up at empty skies? Empty and safe over their heads, because a man said… “Let’s roll,” and saved them, and was killed. A gruesomely impudent allusion, I’d thought for long, and in fact it’s my imagination that’s gruesome and impudent. This line is no topical cleverness at all. Lifted in toto from Mr. Kokomo Arnold’s own beautiful story of peril, sorrow, and duty, Mean Old Twister.  I heard something real that was not there, and so our wicked old artificer cannot be blamed for playing bloodcurdlingly fast and loose with history. I did it.

He survives that twister, just as Kokomo Arnold does. And again–today’s the day! Look! Everybody’s heading out! Swarming over endless plains, perhaps, but still he wants to go, he wants to join them, follow. He does not want to lead and command and see and explain. It turns out he doesn’t want the risk of a new sun/light/voice. He doesn’t want any new. Doesn’t want to see or be a New. Don’t ask him to do more, and, besides, once again he tells you he’s clean: he did it right there and then, and fessed up on top of it. You—whoever You/you are– cannot ask any more of him.

But still here, though. Not quite satisfied with that raised fist. Not really going. No more hard road down either. Going up north—farther into the mountain, where he seems unable to stand or lie or sit. He’s gone to outpace the thunder, damn it, and live like quiet people do: money, working the earth, tools, and a real room where a man and his tools can rest between bouts of real work. And he’ll leave us with what we demand of a prophet. He blesses us, finally using the word God, and indeed pairing it with Love, in a common exclamation which we may take commonly or particularly, it’s our call. For the love of God, we must turn to ourselves for pity.  The world remains cruel, there is love and sun and gods to be found, and we’re to find them on our own.  He will  leave us now to turn to his work, and in his last act of generosity implores us to turn to our own souls. His other act of generosity—a song worth singing. He’s given us quite a lot here, and we should part as friends. As Kokomo Arnold sings, “Everybody happy round here in my neighborhood.” Try the version from Bethel, New York, on July 18, 2009.

Stately in his own peculiar way, and  not at all plump, Bob Dylan offered the good people of Cork and whatever auslanders were in the house last night, a strange and beautiful St Augustine that you may hear in a very nice recording that I may or may not have linked to successfully here. If I didn’t, please forgive me and track it down elsewhere.

The last time he performed the song was also in Ireland, in Dublin on 11/26/05–I had the vast pleasure to be in the audience for that, and now still breathing and able to hear the song’s newest life.  His voice is bedrock and also pure air and very fastidious word-to-word. The harmonica solo touchingly recalls the original and then picks up its own strength.  It’s one of those deeply focused performances that draws the listener in so close that one lyric change can startle.

In my corner of the globe, I don’t expect to get  the green jacket, regrettably– many thanks to whoever is responsible for this superb recording, and safe travels to Mr. Dylan and the band–we’ll see you at Jones Beach. Bring whatever you got.

Here is a photo I took last week of something Bob Dylan passed many times as a teenager.  It is the panel protecting a fire extinguisher set into a niche   left of the entrance to the Hibbing High School auditorium. It’s a captivating thing for a few reasons, even inside a building that captivates your attention and admiration every couple of feet. For Fire is aurally lovely, with its alliteration and near-rhyme. And I like the ambiguity of the stately phrase: For Fire. Perhaps if I happen to need fire, I can find the ingredients behind this panel. Perhaps if fire itself requires sustenance,  it can get what it needs behind this panel. The jewel tones of the lettering, the elegant pattern of the leaded glass, may remind you of Tiffany-style glasswork, and indeed, this fire extinguisher is protected by the work of Louis Tiffany’s studio.  I’d like to say I can imagine a boy with a sharp and mobile attention, and a sensitivity to color and wordplay, being fleetingly entertained by this familiar object, but I’m not good at that kind of fanciful reverie. It’s more true to say that hundreds of hours of attention to Bob Dylan’s songs has heightened my own sensitivities to color and wordplay and strangeness. In the emergency for which this artful business was designed, the beautiful panel would be in the way, and almost be certainly be shattered. Of course that is the way of things, and that  is something else I hear often enough in Bob Dylan’s songs.

Back to Hibbing, and other  emergencies. Here is another photo I took of railroad tracks leading into and out of Hibbing, where young Zimmerman may or may not have had a frightening sort-of accident on a motorcycle. At that time, maybe a half dozen people had a strong personal interest in his safety. Mythology invites us to symbolize these old tracks as destiny leading our restless young genius out of the torpid, suffocating little town.  And we’re talking fulfilled destiny here. A mere 6 years after he rode out of Hibbing, this young man’s clumsiness on a motorbike would galvanize the attention of thousands of people on more than one continent, and be written about in decades to come as an important turn in an important artist’s wheel.

In No Direction Home, you can hear Bob Dylan make short work of finding himself a restless young something or other in a small town. Hibbing is distinguished by being the very first of countless places Dylan has left, and a visit to Hibbing can offer anyone evidence that it is not simply Anywhere, USA. The changeling living in the Zimmerman home may have fled with more than  appetite and ambition.

This street sign and fire hydrant are the lonely gatekeepers to what looks like a grassy tree-filled park. The park is curiously marked with flat slabs of concrete and short flights of steps that are set into the grass and lead nowhere. This is the site of the original town of Hibbing, once called North Hibbing, which was the lifeline to and from the iron mines.  The mines grew, and the town grew, and soon they were too close for profit on the one hand and comfort and safety on the other. A settlement began a short distance south of North Hibbing, and after legal and political strife, negotiations, allurements,  pragmatism, and other inducements, the town moved south. On rollers pulled by horses and then engines, homes and businesses and public buildings were towed about a mile and a half.  People ended up opening their same doors on to different streets.  Fixtures like fire hydrants, street signs and lamps, and foundations were impractical or unnecessary to either move or remove. A visitor to old North Hibbing can walk upon the remains of  a community abandoned through vigor and ingenuity and compromise and compulsion, very different from walking upon the fertile remains of a battlefield or a town lost to flooding or other atrocity. You feel quiet and lonesome there and the place seems alive with the simple sadness of any benign ghost, anything necessarily lost. The past is very close behind in North Hibbing, and uncommonly so.

This is the Hull-Rust-Mahoning Mine in Hibbing over 100 years after iron ore was first discovered there. It looks uncannily natural to me, an impressive geological formation. The one or two trucks I saw trundling busily among the piles of earth seemed unmanned exploratory vehicles, bravely and mysteriously purposeful. At the time of our restless young something or other’s childhood, the mines in Hibbing produced 25% of the country’s iron ore. Within the history of late 19th-early 20th century  European emigration to the US, Hibbing must stand out a little, due to the disproportion between the voracity of the mines’ need for labor, and the size and isolation of their setting. Men poured in from Finland,  Ukraine,  Italy, their different skills put to work in the mines themselves and in the town they built. The demands of mining brutally demanded cooperation, the climate brutally reduced  many cultural distinctions to shared survival tactics, and quarters were close.  Assimilation was fairly rapid, rough, and compulsory.  In a coastal city, or an inland city with a greater variety of industries and more accessibility to other cities or large towns, a significant immigrant  population can lead to cosmopolitanism, in which a fluid in-and-out population is constantly refreshing culture.  Something different seems to have happened in Hibbing.  Difference was accommodated, tolerance was a necessity, yet the flexibility of the diverse community was also bounded and isolated, rather than continually challenged and renewed.

And this photo is partly what this kind of assimilation looks like. In 1954, Robert Zimmerman’s parents hired a Rabbi for their son’s Hebrew lessons in preparation for his Bar Mitzvah, which was hosted here at The Androy Hotel in the downtown Hibbing, and was attended by something like 200 people. We do wrong to condescendingly applaud this small town for an impressive level of tolerance, and if you’ve ever read Beatty Zimmerman’s adamant refusal to indulge any question of outsiderness in her life on the Iron Range, she must be taken at face value. This is the cooled crucible of assimilation.

I’ve visited Hibbing High School twice, and it’s been a singularity for me both times. It is magnificent in its material self, and not merely remarkable as an artifact of frontier ambition. I am thinking of buildings I’ve visited whose united design and function   humble and ennoble whoever enters them, and this simply is one of them. I’ve been a high school teacher and I can guess that apathy, dishonesty, impatience, and ignorance live there–in students, teachers, and administrators– as they do in any American high school, and still the building has the persistent solid rich thrum of a monument.  Day after day for years, our restless young something or other would have passed the paintings in these photos. Oil paintings flank the walls along either side of the grand entrance staircase. On one side, the history of America, on the other side, the history of Minnesota.  There is the intrepid mother and child entering the frontier they would help civilize, there is the ritual of civilization created through the testaments of powerful men. Our restless young something or other walked a gauntlet of symmetrical memorialized history day after day after day.

Bob Dylan sings, When I left my home, the sky split open wide. His Hibbing was a city of seams. Healed ruptures.  He grew healthy and protected upon healed ruptures of land, of Old World poverty, of ethnic and national hatred or incomprehensibility.  A seam is not false and it’s not a lie, but there may be a sarcophagal quality, a  nervelessness to it that would be intolerable to a certain sensibility. The splitting of the sky seems exactly the right rupture for this sensibility. Welcome to the infinite demands of the right now–will  you be ready for it forever?, is what the sky splitting open wide seems to say. Let’s say this was the first time he answered: Try me.

Make the trip to Hibbing. It is not a symbolic pilgrimage. You’ll find an unforgettable vein of American history in the spaces there, and you’ll find people deeply and presently conscious of their own personal histories. The people of Hibbing welcome visitors and pander to no one, not to Bob Dylan, and not to Bob Dylan fans. Find Linda and Bob Hocking at Zimmy’s and learn what intelligent hospitality looks like. They pander to nothing and they will embrace you according to the way that you live. That’s all, I’m done.  You must go to Hibbing.

As a child in New York, I remember being taken to the UN for any number of those elementary school trips that seemed to have no real purpose–Mrs. Wasserstein’s run out of numbers for multiplication tables, Randy Schumann looks like he’s going to be acting up again, everyone put on your little jackets, we’re going to the United Nations. And when you’re 7 or 8 years old, there is a terrible glorious magic to the UN because you are told over and over–”Now remember, once we are in that building, we are no longer in America.”  This was the closest I would get to Narnia, and despite the fact that the inside of the UN looked like the lobbies to museums and office buildings I was familiar with, the magic always worked to make me feel thrillingly if meaninglessly away and different.  I expected to see people fly through the air, and friendly talking animals, and I’ll suddenly be grown up. These fantasies inevitably were blasted to nothing by the real magic in the lobby. The pendulum.  A suspended metal weight swings rhythmically around a circle and an adult explains that the earth’s orbit is making the metal cylinder move. It will keep moving till the world ends. And if you’re 7 or 8, you stare at the swinging weight and you feel certain that you see it slow down, you do–right now! I’m on 46th street but I’m not in America, and the earth is not the solid sidewalks I think it is, and to top off all the marvels,  I think I see the world ending this moment.  Randy Schumann points at an African diplomat crossing the lobby and asks Mrs. Wasserstein in a loud voice, “How come that man can wear a dress to work?”

Apparently we are indeed facing the end of the world, tomorrow, May 21, 2011, EST, so it is a good thing that I have the time today to write my Bob Dylan Birthday post.  So much of being a Bob Dylan fan is time-bending, time-traveling, end-of-times, beginnings-of-times. Therefore, it will be a fine synchronicity if the pendulum on 46th street winds down for real tomorrow. I am grateful that having been a neurotic and imaginative child rehearsed the proper state of mind for all collapses of time and reality.

So just two days ago I’m standing right where this photo was taken, on the corner of 60th street and 5th Ave in Brooklyn. I’m listening to Seven Curses on my iPod, and I’m waiting to hear “…hanging branch abandoned,” my favorite phrase in the song.  I love the sound of those four As, and abandoned is a word I particularly savor in Dylan’s songs. For the umami feel of the word. He always gets so much thereness in those syllables that reference leaving-for-good. Abandoned it out West. Before I abandon it.  A faith that’s been long abandoned. All their earthly principles they’re gonna have to abandon.

The building above occupies the entire block between 59th and 60th streets and 5th and 6th avenues. It  is a basilica named Our Lady of Perpetual Help. I stand on the corner, I hear Reilly’s daughter seeing the bare tree, I look at the church, and a wisp of a thought starts to curl.  All the crosses in Dylan’s songs, and his special attention to the crucified Jesus.  The nailed, suspended, suffering, sacrificial image of Jesus seems of a piece with all the hangings Dylan’s sung:  Hezekiah Jones high as a pigeon, Reilly the horse thief, the malign postcards, Rosemary on the gallows, the judge warning Jim Jones not to get too gay in Botany Bay…to the sign on the cross, the thief on the cross.   Nothing but a wisp, standing at the crossroads of how many different epochs? The moments of each of these songs in their composition, their performances, my listenings. And the times out of time in the dream of eternity which we hear in some of Dylan’s hanging songs, and  in the building across the street from where I stand and have this wispy thought.

Back home that evening, I have a treat. Keith Richards has posted footage of his appearance with  Bob Dylan at the 1991 Seville Guitar Expo. Bob Dylan in his Forest Hills-Unplugged polka dots is elegant, rumpled, and rockstarish. He introduces Keith, who takes his side of the stage with command and good cheer. They light into a Shake Rattle and Roll that doesn’t really roll anywhere, but you want it to roll on and on forever regardless, watching the two gentlemen trading vocals, leaning into their microphones. I’d never seen this clip before, and there I was in 1991, impatient with closeups of the saxophone player. The money shot comes in the last few seconds of the clip, after the song is done.  The camera follows Dylan loping off the stage, then alone across the wide empty backstage area and finally to an exit–Dylan hunched, private, and fleeing at his own pace. Thanks to my 2011 technologies, I can watch his hasty retreat as many times as I like.

And just last night I got to hear something I’d never heard before: a recording of Dylan and The Band in St Louis in 1974. The general sound of the recording brought back memories of shows I was attending at the time, before I knew Bob Dylan existed. You can hear that big arena sound, all about loud, and the comfortable swelling roars of thousands of people allowed to smoke dope to their hearts’ content.

In this technically primitive recording, Dylan’s voice is very big and very loud and you don’t miss a word.  It’s 74, and he’s belting out every syllable, every consonant a bullet. For some numbers he seems mainly to be shouting to beat a stopwatch, and for others,  you simply wonder if what you know is wrong, that human energy maybe is not quantifiable. Here he sings/tells the story of Desolation Row with a weird prosaic intensity that tires out the listener while the singer has more breath, and then even more. When he gets to Hollis Brown, the delivery hammers the poignancy of the song and what you get is the ugliness, the screaming wife, the crying children,  Hollis Brown’s pounding head, the heft of the gun, the pile of bodies, hard-baked doom all around. And this being another song that reminds us of certain conditions unaffected by time–sickness, dried up wells, hunger are part of the natural course, and Hollis Brown does not destroy everything because his family starves, but because they starve in isolation, with”no friend.” The line goes from Hollis Brown to What Good Am I?, says another wisp of a thought in my head.

All the attention and folderol of Bob Dylan’s upcoming birthday. If you relish this man’s work, if you’ve felt a particular gratitude to have shared real time with him in the general life span way as well as in concert halls, then you want to mark this Milestone. It’s also true that milestones belong to a straight-line chronology, a chronology that summarizes and memorializes, and  that is nothing like the day-to-day experience of Dylantime if you are a fan in 2011. Dylantime for us is a delirious chutes and ladders life in and out of years and decades,  and always ready at a moment’s notice  for a new encounter with what we thought was familiar.

Nevertheless. Human energy one person at a time is quantifiable, and 70 is a countable number. And with that thought right there, and the chance that we’ll all wake up tomorrow to the end of all time–Bob Dylan, we bless you on this mighty birthday. And if there is eternity, we’ll find you there again.

I’m pasting and posting here the full texts of Maureen Dowd’s April 9 commentary on Bob Dylan’s China appearances, and Sean Wilentz’s speed-of-light rebuttal.  I’m sure I’m not alone in wishing to thank Prof. Wilentz for taking time that could have been far better spent in productive non-rebuttalesque pursuits to address the carelessness and ignorance distributed through Dowd’s essay. 

Some of her carelessness is easily dismissed, even risible: I don’t see any evidence here that she read the set lists of Dylan’s China shows, nor that her knowledge of his work extends beyond superficial readings of sound bite lyrics.

Some of her carelessness is professional: I don’t see that Dowd offers her readers documentary evidence that Chinese officials of any kind  reviewed and restricted set lists, and evidence that Dylan agreed to the restrictions. Nor does she provide her readers with evidence that she had any contact with Chinese citizens to determine if some of them may have already had  a familiarity with Dylan’s work, rather than being oppressed automatons susceptible to dangerous consciousness-raising upon hearing Blowin’ in the Wind,  and similarly susceptible to being further narcotized by oppression upon not hearing Blowin’ in the Wind.  

Some of her carelessness is rhetorical: Somehow she takes the words of David Hajdu, Sean Wilentz, and Bob Dylan, who all speak to Dylan’s explicit unwillingness to serve as a political mascot or agent, to defend an argument that Dylan  is a hypocrite who has failed an obligation to serve as a political mascot or agent.

For me, her worst carelessness is the flabby devil (hat-tipping here to Joseph Conrad) of armchair moral righteousness.  Bob Dylan is a sell-out because he ostensibly did not serve Maureen Dowd’s pious vision of speaking truth to power in China.  The answer we can offer her comes conveniently in the form of a sound-bite: You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you.  Ask Bob Dylan to do what he does, and kick your own kicks.   Read on, and thanks again to Prof. Wilentz for taking the time to rebut with patience.

Blowin’ in the Idiot Wind

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: April 9, 2011

Bob Dylan may have done the impossible: broken creative new ground in selling out.   The idea that the raspy troubadour of ’60s freedom anthems would go to a dictatorship and not sing those anthems is a whole new kind of sellout — even worse than Beyoncé, Mariah and Usher collecting millions to croon to Qaddafi’s family, or Elton John raking in a fortune to serenade gay-bashers at Rush Limbaugh’s fourth wedding.

The first time I read Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox, I thought it was about historical vision.  Time and life as the fox sees them are many things. In the course of a day, a fox needs to find and catch its meals and avoid becoming a meal. This lifestyle requires covering a lot of space, and having vision like a cursor, ceaselessly parsing the world’s bits. Time and life as the hedgehog sees it is one big thing. The hedgehog claims a very small territory and day after day hunkers down until Something blots out the sun for good, or, if his luck holds, the sky is not blotted out. The point of Berlin’s book is Tolstoy, who knew  time and life as an ultra-fox, but anguished to know a pattern, a moral and ultimate purpose,  lying behind all the microcosms.  Tolstoy took to a historian, Joseph de Maistre,  who  offered a strong pattern that appealed strongly to Tolstoy, and who is  the sort of writer people who are likely to read Tolstoy today would find a disturbing and primitive figure.  First time around, I left-brainedly followed Berlin’s meticulous account of the development of Tolstoy’s historical vision through Maistre to christianity.  And when I reread Berlin’s book just recently, I thought the book was about Tolstoy.  About a man who could see and then replicate a microcosm in every moment of present human life, and yet who couldn’t stand the inadequacy of his gift.  it would seem his conscience begged for a moral gravity and intention to the infinitude of real experience. Vladimir Nabokov famously included this question on the final exam he gave his undergraduate students: what was the wallpaper pattern on the Karenins’ bedroom wall? This is supposed to illustrate Nabokov’s unreachable standard of close reading, but in reality, it seems impossible for even an ordinary reader to  miss seeing the detail of  those violets , and not to remember them forever.  This was exactly the problem for Tolstoy–he could not endure seeing everything at once and as it really is without apprehending The Geometry behind it.  The lesser among us would choose the fox over the hedgehog, and Tolstoy teaches us to beware what we wish for. Beware the gift of seeing everything, and then hearing your conscience demand an explanation.

I once heard Sean Wilentz say that Bob Dylan is a great  “historian.” That was the very word he used. Historian. I thought, “What has Bob Dylan taught me about history?”   Heaven blazin’ in my head, I–I dreamt a monstrous dream.  Now here is a history lesson:  the past assaults a person, and if the person  is vulnerable to memories that exceed their own time and place, the person may endure a condition we can call historical visionary.  The gift of being a historical visionary  makes dreadful demands on its chosen ones.  There is appalling mystery–something came up out of the sea.  There is far more of the world visible than the mortal eye can take in–the ravaged land lies for miles behind.  There are atrocious accidents–killed outright he was, by his own men.  There is the witness’s claim on his one inviolable and unprovable and lost moment–stars fell over Alabama/I saw each star.  There is the singular and commonplace grief that can easily seem, given the fullest field of vision, to be the entire purpose of human actions–he’ll never get better, he’s already dead.  Bob Dylan is a historian because he delivers to me the burden of historical vision–the ineluctable, particular, unchangeable and inexplicable past. Just moments after Sean Wilentz declared Bob Dylan to be a great historian, he shared with us that he never liked ‘Cross the Green Mountain.

Bob Dylan in America is a book way out of joint, and this is exactly why it should be read with urgent and minute attention by anyone who wants to know what history is.  Much of the material has appeared elsewhere in different contexts that require different attentions to the passage of time, and in his introduction Wilentz addresses the way the book is and is not a collection of writings.  Forget about the introduction, and read the book as exactly an experience of the incompatible experiences of time that constitute history.

The early chapter on Aaron Copland barely grazes Bob Dylan. We read Wilentz’s story of Copland’s innovations and outsiderness, his explicit originality welcomed right straight into the modernist inner circle, then  followed by the turn to more accessible forms and a popularity disdained by that inner circle.  Wilentz wants to  stretch Copland into Dylan via the obvious: the fairly recent use of Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man or Appalachian Spring to tell us (in harmony with the scent of Nag Champa) that the Show and Concert is about to begin.  But the real connection is deeper–Dylan is the riseform in this chapter about Big  Letter Modern hierarchies and categories of art,  Dylan lurks just offstage in Copland’s story about the Popular Artist Pleasing The Groundlings  and the Radical Inventor Ringing In The New. We can read and hear Dylan through the scrim of Copland’s story and here is one way that times are layered upon each other.

The Copland chapter is textbook history.  We relax into the authority of factual accuracy and properly weighed and evaluated material. But then there are the chapters of Witness, in which subjectivity is king and we know  all that’s truly present passes and changes in an instant, so we pray for a Truth more solid than the Facts. Wilentz attended the Philharmonic Halloween concert when he was 13, and then a Rolling Thunder show in Connecticut when he was a young man. The schoolmarm in me  believes that 13 is far too young to be exposed to almost anything at the Halloween show, and If You Gotta Go is the very least of it.  And in these chapters, Wilentz marvelously demonstrates the hopeless uncrossable divide between memory and history: he has a fiction writer’s ability to get everything wrong consciously and meaningfully, and he reminds us of the tremulous impossible weirdness of asking personal memory to be the staple ingredient of history.  At the Rolling Thunder show, he hears a song called Ices, and reading his account, you also hear a song called Ices.  The energy, the edginess, the mystery of the whiteface and masks–those of us not there can know all that from recordings and footage, and the Witness confirms that what we know is what was there. Witness is  Really Wrong and Really Right. Nothing like textbook history. And to face down the past, you have to face down both.

Oh dear, there is a third kind of history.  I call it homesickness, which I think is more to the point than nostalgia.  It’s the fact of  youcan’tgohomeagain but you go there anyway and endure the condescension of everyone who sneers at your quaintness. Or, if your vision and your voice is strong enough, you bring people back with you. Right there is a problem–we’re not supposed to retreat, we’re supposed to advance.  Wilentz takes on Dylan’s magnificent and radical retreat, starting with the two lookback records, Good As I Been To You, and World Gone Wrong.  His differing opinions of each I can’t agree with (I think they are both intoxicating), but that’s no matter. Wilentz specifically   takes on Lone Pilgrim,  which helped him know how he felt about losing his own father.  Now we are back to textbook history–the accurate and scrupulous and ordered account of What Happened–but assembled in a strange backass personal scramble. Bob Dylan sings (no, he breathes the song, as Wilentz describes correctly) about a buried fellow talking to a sad living fellow visiting his grave, and in this fiction there are plenty of facts and Wilentz does the sweaty work of dusting them off and presenting them clean and correct. He does this BECAUSE  Bob Dylan’s breathing of this song many many decades after the facts that underlay it helped a historian know how he felt about the recent loss of his father. This is pawning history for truth–the owner, the past, can still reclaim it, but meanwhile the owner does not own it.  You can’t teach this history. And you corrupt it by schlepping it into the present to impute meaning and feeling to conditions it knows nothing about.  I’m going to say that the Bob Dylan we have known for the last nearly 20 years, is where we go to   learn the Truth of this errant schlepping.  Fitzgerald’s image of boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past is beautiful and illuminating, but to be in one of those boats, stowing my oars and surrendering to the current, that’s something else.

No one will ever write the book on Bob Dylan and America or Bob Dylan and history.  Read Sean Wilentz’s book anyway, to think hard about Bob Dylan, America, memory, and history. I’ve got a spoiler and a dedication now. You can find my name at the way bottom of pages 141 and 269 in Professor Wilentz’s book, at the end of the footnotes. A far  greater testament to his scruples as a scholar than to anything I did. And I dedicate this post to Mr. Chum Lee, a man who knows something about the solid and liquid value of the past, and who bumped fists with Bob Dylan. Chum Lee– I am absolutely certain that your signed copy of Self Portrait will impress women.