Roll On John

John Lennon died December 8, 1980. I remember it well; I was in graduate school. I’m now about to turn 60.

Why is Bob Dylan releasing a memorial song to John Lennon this much later—over thirty years?

Because Dylan will now soon go where Lennon is; in the natural order of things, the eternal footman is nigh.

Lennon becomes the paradigm of the artist at the point of death.

Dylan imagines Lennon’s life journey, strikingly, as a passage on a slave ship:

Sailing through the tradewinds
Bound for the sun
Rags on your back just like any other slave
They tied your hands and they clamped your mouth
Wasn’t no way out of that deep dark cave

Striking, because in worldly terms Lennon seemed to have it all: wealth and fame. And despite the fact that he made his fortune with his hands and his voice, Dylan sees his hands tied and his mouth clamped shut.

But Lennon apparently felt the same way: as Dylan begins the song by suggesting, his psyche was only tenuously held together by drink and drugs. And Dylan quotes the Lennon line “I heard the news today, oh boy,” which refers to a “lucky man who made the grade” who “blew his mind out in a car.”

Life for even the luckiest among us, in other words, is a passage on a slave ship, bound and gagged. Dylan ends by referring to Lennon’s situation in life as a “deep dark cave.” Looks like a clear reference to Plato’s Cave. The world of the senses, in other words, is a dark prison; the true light of the spirit is off behind us in an unexpected direction, unperceived.

Dylan reinforces this reference, surely, by describing Lennon’s life direction as “Bound for the sun.”

As Plato explains, if any individual chained in the cave manages somehow to break free and see the real world by the light of the real sun, be will be dazed and confused for some time. If he then returns to the dark cave, he will of course not be believed, but will seem to his colleagues to be mad.

A portrait of the artist.

Incidentally, Dylan depicts Lennon’s death, continuing the conceit, as his ship being wrecked in a storm—a reference to the album title which identifies the album’s real theme, in turn, as death.

Dylan makes clear in several ways that the song is not just about John Lennon, the individual, but about the artist at all times, and even more broadly about the human condition.

To begin with, the title is generic: “Roll On John” is also the title of an old folk song, one Dylan himself has recorded. This by itself suggests that the song is not about any one particular John; and “John,” of course, is traditionally considered a perfectly generic name.

Note too that the title and refrain is given in the present tense; and Dylan gives this “John” advice for the future: particularly striking since the supposed subject of the song is dead so long. I mean, even if you believe in the Catholic purgatory, this is a soul which has surely one way or the other come to its final rest…

So the advice is for listeners in general, and probably not least for Dylan himself.

Tyger, tiger, burning bright,
I pray the lord my soul to keep
In the forests of the night.

He is praying about his own death: “Now I lay me down to sleep/I pray the Lord my would to keep;/If I should die before I wake/I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

He is also, perhaps, working out the reference to the Blake poem, speaking of this present existence like Blake did as a night of sleep and a realm of evil, from which we will eventually waken.

His advice, simply put, is to travel; mentally, presumably, not just physically. (Another Blake image: “The Mental Traveller”). Not to accept the truths we are handed, but to set off to explore. This is the only way to find that passage upwards into the sun.

Pull out your bags and get ‘em packed.
Leave right now you won’t be far from wrong
The sooner you go, the quicker you’ll be back
You’ve been cooped up on an island far too long

This is clearly not a recipe for happiness: “they’ll trap you in an ambush before you know.” It alienates you, as Plato knew, from those around you, who see only the shadows of marionettes on the distant wall. They may decide you are mad; they may even want to kill you.

They’ll trap you in an ambush before you know
Too late now to sail back home

But this is still the best way to go, the right-hand road. This is the human condition. You can’t get to heaven following the crowd.

Enter through the narrow gate.
For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.
But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it. 

(Matthew 7:13-4).