Bob Dylan Meets the Pope

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A Complete Unknown

I’ve just finished watching “A Complete Unknown.” I think it is a brilliant movie. There were so many things going on, so many telling details. I think it needs watching again and again. Which is what we need in movies now: because we no longer see them in theatres, a one-shot thing, but buy them, as we used to buy records, to play over again.

And what is in effect a musical is ideal for this.

The casting for Dylan was incredibly good. Timothée Chalamet really gets Dylan down pat, reminiscent of Val Kilmer playing Jim Morrison. Hard to do, with someone so famous and still living. Definitely earned an Oscar. 

Ed Norton as Pete Seeger is also brilliant. A little easier, since Seeger is somewhat less famous. But he really does seem to be Seeger himself.

Joan Baez is not as good. Not Monica Barbaro’s fault. She does a fine job with the role, but nobody could imitate Baez’s unique and uniquely good voice.

And Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash is a fail. Unlike enough that it is distracting, and interferes with the willing suspension of disbelief. Again, the problem is the voice. You needed an actor with a deep baritone. Without it, Holbrook just comes across as a generic greaser, a Fonzie.

Seeger’s “parable of the teaspoon brigade” looks at first like a fail by the scriptwriter. Because it does not work. The obvious way to balance the imaginary seesaw was of course not to fill the leaky bucket of sand with teaspoons, but to take some rocks out of the other one.

Or perhaps this was an intentional parody of Seeger’s political views.

I think the latter. I hear Dylan himself annotated the script. Dylan likes to subtly send people up. He does it to Seeger in his autobiography by lamenting how unjust it is that Seeger was set upon by the government, he being descended from people coming over on the Mayflower and all. 

In other words, Seeger was a poseur who never really risked anything with all his leftist politics, and had no rapport with the actual working class. All a sham. He was really a card-carrying member of the old rich. Went to private school, parents were prominent academics and bureaucrats.

There are other lines and opinions in the movie that I feel certain are Dylan himself speaking: “Picasso is overrated.” 

Yep.

“Bette Davis was not trying to find herself.”

Yep. The task of the artist is not to find himself, but to lose himself. As Keats said, “the poet is the most unpoetical thing in existence.” The “chameleon poet” disappears into the work through “negative capability.” Bobby Zimmerman disappears. Irving Layton referred to his poems as “my dead selves.” 

Baez’s songwriting is lousy.

Yep. It seems obvious to me why their relationship was doomed. Baez was not at Dylan’s intellectual level. But she was too successful and ambitious to live in his shadow. She would have been a millstone around his neck. He would crush her ego.

I’m a dedicated folkie, and also a dedicated rocker. I love them both. But I do find it heartbreaking that Dylan abandoned the folk movement; that pretty much killed it, and it was so beautiful. 

Why did he do it?

The reason the movie suggests and the one Dylan himself suggests, is that everyone was trying to own him. He felt trapped by the expectations of the movement. He needed to break free to be his own man.

But I think that is kind of a cover story. It is not Dylan who felt trapped. Dylan was not real; the self was gone, and there was only the music. It was the voice in his head, the place the songs come from, that felt trapped. It could no longer speak in the folk idiom. 

People imagine authors, poets, and songwriters have command of their material. The best ones don’t.

Someone once asked Stephen King why he only wrote horror.

“Do you think I have a choice?” he answered.

So Dylan could not stay in folk. He had no more folk songs. He would only let them down.

But why did he have to confront the Newport Folk Festival with the fact? Didn’t he owe something to that paying audience? Wasn’t he deliberately insulting their taste? Couldn’t he have sung some of the old songs, just one more time?

I believe the key to that is Suze Rotolo—Sylvie in the film. 

I think Dylan was truly and completely in love with her. She was his first love. And I think she was the one who left him. Probably, as the film suggests, because his brilliance and success crushed her ego. I think she was his muse. For the folk and protest period, he was speaking for her. His voice was trying to please her.

And when she was gone, I suspect it is not just that the folk songs no longer came. It was also that they suddenly became too emotional for him, with too many memories.

I often fear as I read my poetry in public that I might break down. Leonard Cohen needed to get drunk before a performance; when he began, he considered wearing a mask. Dylan went through a period of performing in whiteface.

Dylan’s early folk lyrics are very intimate.

He had to create a new hard-edged persona to protect himself. So, edgy rock. Sunglasses.

And the new songs spoke out of a bitterness. He was badly hurt.

Even today, a Dylan concert is disappointing. Because he won’t play his own songs straight. When he plays his own stuff, he always plays it in a weird bouncy tempo. I’m not sure what it is musically; I think it is 3/3. Happy happy joy joy. The effect, I think, is to take the emotional edge off it, to distance himself from it. Otherwise he may still fear breaking down in public.

Perhaps still for Suze. Perhaps for other heartbreaks since. Everything beautiful comes from pain.

I think there is a similar thing with Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen. 

Men do not easily get over their first true love. We are not meant to.

Everybody's Wounded

 

 Well, it's Father's Day, and everybody's wounded

First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.

These are the final words of Leonard Cohen’s song/poem “First We Take Manhattan.” In it, he is clearly equating the fashion industry with Nazism. His father was in the fashion business. 

I don’t like your fashion business, mister

I don’t like those drugs that keep you thin

I don’t like what happened to my sister

First, we take Manhattan

Then we take Berlin.

These are the first words of Leonard Cohen’s song/poem “The Story of Isaac,” in which he speaks as Isaac, about to be ritually slaughtered by his father Abraham.

The door, it opened slowly

My father, he came in

I was nine years old.

His father died when Cohen was nine.

Something was going on between Cohen and his father, that he is not speaking openly about.

When it all comes down to dust

I will kill you if I must

I will help you if I can

When it all comes down to dust

I will help you if I must

I will kill you if I can

Perhaps something was also going on between Bob Dylan and his father. Dylan alludes to the same Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac in “Highway 61 Revisited.” The song is important enough in his mind that it also gives its name to the album.

Oh God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son"

Abe says, "Man, you must be puttin' me on"

God say, "No." Abe say, "What?"

God say, "You can do what you want Abe, but

The next time you see me comin' you better run"

Well Abe says, "Where do you want this killin' done?"

God says, "Out on Highway 61."

It might be significant that Dylan’s father’s name was Abraham. Highway 61 passed by his childhood home.

Happy Father’s Day. Everybody’s’ wounded.

Popular Music and Politics

Memorial to John Lennon, Central Park, New York.

I think everyone assumes that the world of popular music, like Hollywood, is a leftist redoubt. One thinks, once again, of Joni Mitchell, of Neil Young's “anti-war” album, of Bob Dylan and the tradition of “protest songs,” of John Lennon's “Imagine,” and on and on. More generally, there is a hostility on the right towards the arts.

I think this is a big mistake.

To begin with, the arts by their nature are not political. Artists in general, including popular musicians and songwriters, are politically naive, perhaps more naive than the average person. But political organizations, by their nature, are eager to co-opt when they can. It seems to me that it is the left that has co-opted art, and it is a mistake for the right to allow them this ground. Because, while artists are mostly apolitical by nature—free spirits cannot function within a political organization—what they create can be immensely influential politically.

Dylan is the classic case in point. The truth is, nobody can really pin down Dylan's religion or politics. And this seems to be very deliberate on his part. Back in his “protest” days, he was given an award by a leftist organization, the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. He took the occasion of the award presentation to announce publicly that he was not interested in politics.

Protesting the World Bank. CDs available.

“You people should be at the beach....There's no black and white, left and right to me anymore. There's only up and down, and down is very close to the ground, and I'm trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial such as politics.”

Dylan was wise enough to realize that politics is a trap for artists. On the one hand, political groups are desperate to claim a fairly prominent artist on their own; they are soon knocking at any successful artist's door persistent as Mormon missionaries. At the same time, becoming connected with a movement gives an artist a ready-made distribution channel, enabling his art. WB Yeats says he got the advice, early in his political career, that to make it in Ireland as an artist, you had to have either the Catholic Church or the Independence movement behind you. As a Protestant, he could not hope for the Catholic Church. So he chose to join the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Hence Yeats's politics; which everyone else since has taken so seriously.

The danger of this approach, though, is that then the artist has a harness on, which rarely rests easily on an artist's shoulders. When he must always look over his shoulder at the possible political repercussions of what he sings, paints, or writes, this can lead to second-rate, insincere art. And politics is fickle: become publicly identified with a cause, and once the cause goes away, often, so do you. Yet, once you have become identified with a movement or a cause, it is very difficult and dangerous to get away. Not only will you have lost your audience; they will turn on you and hate you as a traitor. Dylan has risked this several times. Few members of Sinn Fein have a good word to say about Yeats today.

John Train in his early years.

Phil Ochs is a perfect counter-example of the danger Dylan sidestepped here. He got bought and sold as an anti-war advocate. The war ended. He was passe. He seems to have realized he had been tricked and trapped; in his last days, he re-imagined himself as a new person, “John Train,” who was systematically opposed to Phil Och's politics. Then he hanged himself.

Currently, there is also obviously tremendous pressure within the arts community to at least pretend you are leftist in order to get along. You have to be pretty big before you dare challenge your peers on such a matter—pretty big, and pretty politically aware. Andy Warhol once commented that he was for lower taxes, and really should be a Republican. “But artists aren't allowed to be Republicans, are they?”

Somebody should set up a refugee program for artists, welcoming them, getting the word out, trying to help them with a new audience when they flee the left-wing cult of the arts. It would have to be done delicately, though; the way Catholics do missionary work. No point in fleeing a leftist cult only to get caught up in a rightist one.

In the meantime, those on the right can at least be understanding, and not jerk their knees at a Joni Mitchell, a Neil Young, or a Keith Richards. They are leftists in the same sense that fish ride bicycles.

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).

Blowin' Right on Time

Bob Dylan lives and breathes in a kind of mystical union with the corporate soul of the American Midwest; just as you cannot listen to Leonard Cohen without feeling you are in Montreal. Accordingly, trains are a common and an important thing in his songs. I can easily understand that. My grandparents' farm was right on the old Grand Trunk/CN main line between Montreal and Toronto. We spent many mornings and afternoons watching the trains, waving at the brakemen, and putting pennies on the tracks.

Trains are something profound. So profound they inspired my older brother to become a railroad engineer.

To a kid in the Midwest, no doubt, as in Gananoque, trains meant freedom. Hopping on a train and going somewhere West into the night... Or, for that matter, East, to the big cities.

Bound For Glory: Album Cover, "Slow Train Coming"

But by dint of that, trains symbolize something else. Freud said it, and it is, I think, clear in Dylan's use of trains in his earlier work. Trains symbolize death, that ultimate passage.

This, I think, explains "Duquesne Whistle," the single from his new album. Dylan is now 71. He almost died a few years ago. Like Leonard Cohen, like all artists once they reach a certain age, if they are lucky enough to do so, death becomes their most important interest.

And, as with Cohen, the realization of impending death seems to be, to Dylan, liberating. He seems more lively and more creative than he has been for some time.

Superficially, "Duquesne Whistle" is a simple song about a man going home to see his sweetheart, apparently after being away for a long time. A classic folk theme--”Tie a Yellow Ribbon,” "Green Green Grass of Home," and all that.

But some lines just don't fit that concept. Most notably, “I can hear a sweet voice gently calling/Must be the mother of Our Lord.” Not a common experience riding the old CN main line, so far as I know.

References to the train whistle seem vaguely apocalyptic, and increasingly so throughout the song: “Blowing like it's gonna sweep my world away.” “Sounding like she's on a final run.” “Blowing like she ain't gonna blow no more.” “Blowing like the sky's gonna blow apart.” “You're like a time bomb in my heart.” “Blowing like it's gonna kill me dead.”

Clear enough, surely? Time's up. Sounds more than a bit like Gabriel's trumpet.

There is also the obvious anomaly that the woman in the song seems at the same time to be at the destination of the ride, on the ride, and with him before he starts on the ride.

Too Subtle an Allusion?: Album cover: "Blood on the Tracks"

“You're smiling through the fence at me/Just like you always smiled before” sounds like her greeting him at his destination. But then he says the whistle is “blowing like my woman's on board”--as though he is the one waiting for her arrival. And then he says, as if an aside, “I wake up every morning with that woman in my bed.”

All of this fits together, and avoids being nonsense, if and only if “that woman” is, in all cases, just whom she is identified as being: the “Mother of Our Lord,” the Virgin Mary. She is the woman who is always with us, even when we sleep; perhaps especially in our dreams; yet will greet us more directly, face to face, no longer just smiling through the fence, at our final destination.

The song is a disguised prayer, in which Dylan imagines heaven as an idealized Midwestern home town. As the Midwest as it appears in art and song.

Let him hear who has ears to hear.

Dylan Transfigured

Rolling Stone’s recent (September) interview with Bob Dylan suggests some interesting things about Dylan’s religious life.

First, it seems he experienced his religious conversion not in the seventies (traditionally 1978), but already by Blonde on Blonde, indeed in ‘64. He says in the interview that “Rainy Day Women” is based on the Book of Acts.

Second, he is still religious, as only some had suspected; he never left it. He still refers to Jesus as “Our Lord”—in fact, he also does so in the recently released song “Duquesne Whistle.” He planned his next album to be a collection of hymns. He says “No kind of life is fulfilling if you haven’t been redeemed.” Asked if the Bible informs his songs, he responds “Of course, what else could there be?”

He also, paradoxically, when asked about his faith, says “Who’s to say that I even have any faith or of what kind?” But he prefaces it with “O ye of little faith,” and immediately follows it with “I see God’s hand in everything.” Which seems to mean not that he has no religion, but that his religion has progressed past faith to certainty.

There are also some indications that he might actually be Catholic, or at least have studied Catholicism and accepted it as some sort of authority. He says he was “transfigured,” and when asked to clarify, says “you can go learn about it from the Catholic Church.” Sixties flashback: What was he talking about in “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine”? Wasn’t that a pretty Catholic song? And before his supposed seventies conversion? Of course, it was 1967, so we were all too drugged up to notice:

"I dreamed I saw St. Augustine
Alive, with fiery breath
And I dreamed I was among the ones that put him out to death
Oh, I awoke in anger, so alone and terrified
I put my fingers against the glass
And bowed my head and cried."

The image of martyrdom is a very Catholic one, and Dylan inserts it deliberately: the real St. Augustine was not martyred.

In his latest release, “Duquesne Whistle,” he says the train whistle sounds “like the Mother of Our Lord.” Isn't that a Catholic image? Isn't it Mary calling us to Jesus? To that Slow Train Coming?

Time to comb back through Dylan’s lyrics to 1964. There’s a doctoral thesis here…

Dylan's 12 Best Songs

There was a movement a few years ago to nominate Bob Dylan for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

It would probably be a good choice, better than most in recent years. If the thought of Jim Morrison being “the best poet of his generation” is appalling, Dylan by contrast probably deserves that title.

His stuff is spotty, some of it wincy. He also lifts things wholesale; he is profoundly traditionalist, profoundly conservative, rather than an innovator. But the best is the best.

My personal, unordered selection of twelve favourite Dylan songs—an imaginary “greatest hits” album:


Gotta Serve Somebody - 1979

Relentless, hard driving, the soul of simplicity. It is the one Dylan song I most love to listen to, even though the lyrics are almost nothing at all. Though Dylan is most famous for his lyrics, here he shows that he doesn’t really even need them—he can do it all with one line and the music, if he chooses.


I Want You – 1966

Primal in the same way. Absolutely pitiless. What could be simpler?

“I want you,
I want you,
I want you
So bad”

Mr. Tambourine Man – 1965

Lovely terms like “the jingle-jangle morning.” It means nothing, and yet one immediately knows what it means. “Evening’s empire.” “The ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming.” It’s primal in another sense: it captures something essential about the nature of art. The Tambourine Man is the archetype of the artist, and this is what he does: he takes us

“Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.

... to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.”

The saving power of art.


Visions of Johanna – 1966

Perhaps Dylan’s most poetic song. It captures the sense of lost love perfectly. Just get the opening line:

“Ain’t it just like the night,
to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet?”

You can’t dislike it after that.

“Lights flicker from the opposite loft;
In this room the heat pipes just cough;
The country music station plays soft
But there's nothing, really nothing to turn off…”

“Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while…
But Mona Lisa musta’ had the highway blues--
You can tell by the way she smiles.”

Tomorrow is a Long Time – 1971

Again, just get the opening lines:

“If today was not an endless highway,
If tonight was not a crooked trail,
If tomorrow wasn't such a long time,
Then lonesome would mean nothing to me at all.”

The purest, the most perfect, of love songs.


You Ain’t Going Nowhere – 1971

Just wonderful nonsense verse:

“Genghis Khan and his brother Don,
They could not keep on keeping on;
We’ll cross that bridge after it’s gone…”

Absolutely none of it makes any sense—and the sense of that seems to be of being giddy with joy. Another feeling perfectly captured.


Blind Willie McTell – 1991

“Seen the arrow on the doorpost
Saying, ‘This land is condemned
All the way from New Orleans
To Jerusalem.’"

Like “Mr. Tambourine Man,” this one says something very deep about the nature of art; and also, in this case, about the nature of the world. I think, just because it was so powerful, Dylan was afraid to record it for many years. It came and comes too close to revelatory truth.

“Well, I heard the hoot owl singing
As they were taking down the tents
The stars above the barren trees
Were his only audience
Them charcoal gypsy maidens
Can strut their feathers well
But nobody can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell.”

To Ramona – 1964

This is a remarkable love song that also manages to work as a piece of philosophy. That’s a very dangerous thing to try to do. Dylan pulls it off.

“The flowers of the city
Though breathlike, get deathlike at times.
And there's no use in trying
To deal with the dying,
Though I cannot explain that in lines.”

“I've heard you say many times
That you're better than no one
And no one is better than you.
If you really believe that,
You know you’ve got
Nothing to win and nothing to lose.”

It Ain’t Me, Babe – 1964
Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright – 1963

These are a Dylan specialty—the anti-love song. Tinged with humour, extremely emotionally poised. Again, a very hard thing to do well, in poetry or song just as in life. Can anyone else but Dylan do this?

“I'm walking down that long, lonesome road, babe.
Where I'm bound, I can't tell;
But goodbye is too good a word, gal;
So I'll just say 'fare thee well.'
I ain't saying you treated me unkind;
You could have done better, but I don't mind.
You just kinda wasted my precious time;
But don't think twice, it's all right.”

Ballad of a Thin Man – 1965

This is theatre of the absurd as a song. And everything Jim Morrison and the Doors ever did can be taken from this one Dylan song.

“You raise up your head
And you ask, ‘Is this where it is?’
And somebody points to you and says
’It's his’
And you say, ‘What's mine?’
And somebody else says, ‘Well, what is?’
And you say, ‘Oh my God
Am I here all alone?’

Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?”

And the tune is, in the way of “I Want You,” relentless.


Just Like a Woman – 1966

You just can’t beat the refrain:

“

She takes just like a woman,
And she makes love just like a woman,
Then she aches just like a woman;
But she breaks just like a little girl.”

Yes, he is a poet—and a good enough one to deserve the Nobel Prize. It is only a bias against pop culture that prevents it. But, in America, pop culture is the culture; and that is a good thing. It comes with real democracy.