You probably can’t read the caption below this classic New Yorker cartoon by Carl Rose. The mother says to the little girl “It’s spinach, dear.” And the little girl says “I say it’s broccoli and I say the hell with it.”

This has pretty much summed up my feeling about Like A Rolling Stone. The song has been a tonic, sure enough, yet not quite a joy or a revelation. There are  treasured moments in it for me: “Go to him, he calls you, you can’t refuse” Here are  3 sets of 3 word each, 3 simple present tense phrases, 3 syllables, then 3 syllables, then the final 4 syllables and somehow this extra syllable pulls out the line into a perfect Siren’s call. If you’ve ever walked through SoHo on a warm summer Saturday evening, all those bistros and cafes and barsandgrills with their sidewalk tables and all the hilarity that black American Express cards can buy–there’s nothing to say about this except “all the pretty people drinkin and thinkin they got it made.”

But extracting and  relishing  lines is not what we’re about here, is it. We can leave that kind of supercilious laziness to Clive James (isn’t he the one who declared that no Bob Dylan song is as good as its best line?). LARS has never entered me whole and left me internally rearranged. No  live version I have heard has deepened, or colorized, or teased my experience of the song. 

That I haven’t heard the song deeply, that I haven’t found it prying open my own doors of perception, has been a problem for me, let me tell you. Until now.

I’ve had the great pleasure to find this book, Like A Complete Unknown: The poetry of Bob Dylan’s songs 1961-1969, by John Hinchey, published in 2002. I’ve had the equally great pleasure of corresponding with Mr. Hinchey on the topic of Bob Dylan, and the possibility that someone may actually read this and actually track down his book would be as much as I could ask of this self-indulgence I call Blog.

Reading John Hinchey’s book constitutes having a captivating, revelatory, and passionate conversation about Dylan’s songs. His focus is the creation of address in the lyrics. Let me quote here from his introduction: 

My theme is this: the most distinctive feature of Dylan’s poetry is the way it is implicitly shaped by the changes (as Dylan imagines them) that are induced in his listener in response to the song as it unfolds. That is. when Dylan addresses “you” in his songs, he means it and acts like he means it. As the lyric unfolds, “you” are changed by what “you” hear, and anticipating these changes in the “you” he is addressing, Dylan’s perception of and attitude toward “you” changes correspondingly. (14)

 I hope other people will find this speaks to your own experience of being changed by a song, of somehow collaborating with the singer in the creation of the song’s feeling and meaning. I like so much his use of the word “unfold”, because that is the etymology of explicate, and knowing this, we’re invited to see an explication of a lyric as an unfolding of it, explication as work we do to help the lyric open into shapes, rather than the conventional nonsense that we confine and desiccate poetry by explicating it.

Now, Hinchey’s own explications of Dylan’s lyrics are demanding and intimate without being academic or self-indulgent, if this makes sense. He gets himself up close to the songs and the mark of how effective his descriptions of the songs are is that whenever I disagree with him on something, I feel such a strong reaction that my own relation to the song is illuminated and either changed or reinforced. 

I urge you to take on Hinchey’s reading of LARS for yourself, and I’m not going to summarize or analyze here his fascinating discussion.   Enough to say it freed me to go back to the song, and start to create my own experience of address with it, which I had never done. Here are bits and pieces:

All the talk about how the singer is viciously putting down the woman, Miss Lonely.  All the talk about what a nasty angry triumphant song it is. It is largely men doing this talk about the song, and no one seems to consider the time-honored tradition of men telling women how to live their lives, which is what this song sounds like.   There has been no shortage of men throughout history who have applied  resources of knowledge, enthusiasm, and authority– resources that rival even Bob Dylan’s gifts– to the task of telling women how their lives ought be lived. 

I think LARS takes that tradition and turns it around.  I’ve often wondered, why on earth does she keep listening to what seems to be a harangue? I know she’s there, because I know he isn’t asking “how does it feel?” rhetorically, he isn’t addressing the thought of this woman, he is addressing the person.  Why does she stay for this ordeal? Because she already knows something. Now she isn’t talking so loud or seeming so proud. She is already falling from the pedestal of her vicarious, pampered, artificial, impotent life. He’s got her exactly when she will understand every difficult word of the song. She’s starting to roll, and the singer’s art and labor is to sing her into the reality of the rolling stone. 

Some art and labor it is, too. The images in the song are naked mysteries, not gauzy metaphors.  They’re a language of reality the singer shares with the woman. I am invited into their strange language (literally strange, as Bob Dylan himself always uses the word). I am invited because the condition of the world this language describes is that it’s the real one we all inhabit together. Only we must have our own chrome horses  and  diplomats and our own jugglers and clowns. The singer only knows how to sing about hers, because LARS is  her song. I have to make my own vocabulary for reality. Hard work for everyone, isn’t it? 

Remember that “no direction home” contains a home. There is a home. There’s no way to find it. This is not the same as homelessness. And the word home is the bit of vocabulary  that does belong to every single person who hears the song. 

What does it mean to ask someone “how does it feel?” It means that whatever you know about the person’s life,  about the reality we all inhabit, you can not know on your own how their  life feels to them.

How banal this sounds, and how awful the truth of it is, and how often he asks her how it all feels–at each step of her coming-into-reality, and how much humaneness in his granting Miss Lonely her individuality, and how much humaneness in making such an effort to relieve that loneliness by asking her to tell him how she feels.
 

 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.

….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’ve heard newborn babies wailin’ like the mournin’ dove

And old men with broken teeth, stranded without love

Do I understand your question, man? Is it hopeless and forlorn?

Come in she said, I’ll give ya shelter from the storm

The singer’s heard the voices at both ends of life, and he can offer them to us in the delicate lyrical figure of the babies like mourning doves, and he can offer them to us in the hard and literal picture of broken teeth, men stranded without love. He can toss off these graceful and vivid images of the beginning and end of life, and then he turns to us, he changes his register from the artful to the conversational in a heartbeat–is that what we want? Is that what we’re asking him? Tell us what life is about, tell us if it’s really hopeless and forlorn–isn’t that what we want from our artists, answers and consolation?  What’s his answer? He returns to his own drama of hope and hopelessness, back to the woman and her shelter, craved, rejected, craved some more.  His only answer to us is his own life.

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. 

What do you learn as a Bob Dylan fan?  How to hear a life.