The view from 1975: BLOOD ON THE TRACKS

 

(This originally appeared in a another version in  the San Diego Reader, 1975).

In the waning days of 1974, as the hoi polloi queued for Led Zeppelin’s latest eruption of amplified bravado, the rock critics, their brows knitted in a familiar fret, awaited Bob Dylan’s *Blood on the Tracks* with the hushed anticipation of cloistered scholars. The masses could revel in their sonic bacchanals, all sweat and decibels; the critics, those fastidious sentinels of taste, craved something weightier, a voice to parse the nation’s disquiet. Dylan was no mere troubadour—he was a chameleon, a poet of the asphalt and the soul, whose nasal hymns had once seemed to reorder the stars. His pronouncements demanded attention; symposia were convened, pens poised for annotation. Perhaps this exaggerates the fervor, but for years, the press had swaddled him in a cocoon of expectation, their adulation both tribute and burden. Now, rumor held that *Blood* was his homecoming, a retreat from the facile mysticism and barroom bonhomie of recent years. I settled into my chair, skeptical, curious for the inevitable sleight of hand. The critics, it appeared, had already uncorked their champagne. *Blood on the Tracks* is Dylan as his acolytes remember him: the harmonica’s thin, asthmatic wail, like a wind skittering through a deserted alley; a voice that stumbles and gasps, tethered to no rhythm save its own caprice; lyrics that cascade in a torrent of images, defying meter yet thick with private meaning. It is the Dylan of yore, the Greenwich Village bard reborn, and the critics greeted him with open arms. The counter culture's tip sheet *Rolling Stone*, in high ceremony, banished its usual reviews to make room for a pair of ponderous essays—Jonathan Cott and Jon Landau, high priests of the moment, flanked by a chorus of eminent voices, with only Dave Marsh’s dissent piercing the hosannas. The verdict was near-unanimous: a triumph, a poet’s return, a tapestry of genius. Familiar praises, repolished to a gleam. Yet what unsettles is the ardor itself, a kind of collective yearning. From my modest perch in Clairemont, far from San Francisco’s bohemian haze—where rock stars seem to embody the fan’s unspoken longings—*Blood* feels less like a revelation than a simulacrum, a deftly crafted echo of a voice grown faint. Dylan sounds detached, a performer playing himself for an audience he no longer trusts. It is as if, wearied by the chase, he has lain down in the snow, offering his bones to the circling pack. The image is not a kind one. Once, I too fell under Dylan’s spell. In the acne-scarred fervor of junior high, his sneer was a talisman, his mystique a lantern in the suburban dusk. He was untouchable—defiant, electric, a man who spurned the world’s judgment with a curl of his lip. His life was a mosaic of excess: the endless road, glimpsed in the flickering frames of D.A. Pennebaker’s grainy verite *Don’t Look Back*; the rumored pharmacopoeia—amphetamines, perhaps heroin, a brush with acid; whispers of liaisons with Allen Ginsberg, apocryphal or not, that lent him the sheen of a Byronic rogue. He was a poet of America’s underbelly, his songs spilling forth like dispatches from a frontier aflame. *Highway 61 Revisited*, *Bringing It All Back Home*, *Blonde on Blonde*—these were his gospel, a sound sui generis, jagged and alive. His early folk forays were a young man’s masquerade, aping the ghosts of blues and hillbilly bards; what followed *Blonde* was a retreat into domesticity, a softening that drained his fire. *John Wesley Harding* offered glimmers—parables refracted through a biblical lens—but it lacked urgency. *Nashville Skyline*? A friend, now estranged, once claimed it taught him “rednecks are human too.” I swallowed a grimace. To hear *Blood on the Tracks* is to confront the ghost of the Dylan devotee. In 1966-67, he was our mirror, our savior, singing for the awkward, the inward, the boys scribbling verse in lamplit bedrooms, haunted by the draft and the weight of their own inertia. Life was a cocktail of dread and ennui, the suburbs a velvet cage. Dylan’s tangled curls, his reedy defiance, his “go to hell” lyrics—they were a dream of escape, a way to defy the cul-de-sacs without stepping beyond the lawn. He carried our burdens, a scapegoat for a generation too cosseted to follow Kerouac’s dusty road. Time dulled that enchantment. I turned to rawer sounds—Grand Funk’s blunt force over the Moody Blues’ ethereal drift—seeking not insight but obliteration. Dylan, stung by the tepid sales of *Planet Waves* and *Before the Flood*, chose to appease his flock. *Blood* is the result, but it is a warped mirror, reflecting a past that no longer breathes. If *Blood* is a feint, it is also a confession. Dylan abandoned his speed-freak persona for survival’s sake—such fires consume their keepers. To demand that old ferocity is to court a corpse. Recapturing *Highway 61* is like bottling a storm. So, with coffee cooling and cigarette ash lengthening, I watch the record turn. “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome” begins—Dylan’s voice nasal, laced with a theatrical sincerity, as if Elvis were crooning for a supper club. The guitars plod, the harmonica sputters like a failing engine, a nod to Gerdes Folk City for those who missed the myth’s first act. He veers off-pitch, scatters references to Rimbaud and Delacroix, teasing the annotators. Who is this for? “Tangled Up in Blue” fares better, its voice truer, but it lacks revelation. “Simple Twist of Fate” stumbles. “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” reaches for *Highway 61*’s surreal shimmer but collapses into cliché, a tale told too often. The platitudes gather like dust, stifling the air. My cigarette burns to its nub; I resist the urge to halt the needle. This is a bitter pill from a man who once seemed to hold the cosmos in his throat. Yet I gleaned my Dylan truths long ago—I should not mourn. New voices beckon: Little Feat’s earthy pulse, Roxy Music’s urbane glitter, Harvey Mandel’s sinuous lines, perhaps Queen’s baroque audacity. The band lumbers on, Dylan mimicking himself with a faint, knowing smile, as if he sees through his own charade. The parade has passed, its banners faded. The record ends, the arm lifts. I turn on the radio, and Led Zeppelin’s primal wail floods the room—a coarser, truer song.

A THICK PARAGRAPH CONDENSING THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN BOB DYLAN AND LEONARD COHEN

 

Bob Dylan is, in essence and in fact, a song lyricist who has a particularly strong gift for the poetic effect, while Cohen is a poet in the most coherent sense; he had published several volumes of poetry and published two novels before his taking up the guitar. Dylan's style is definitely the definition of the postmodern jam session, a splendid mash-up of Little Richard, Hank Williams, Chuck Berry and a long line of obscure or anonymous folk singers whose music he heard and absorbed. His lyrics, however arcane and tempered with Surreal and Symbolist trappings--although the trappings, in themselves, were frequently artful and inspired--he labored to the pulse of the chord progression, the tight couplets, the strict obedience to a rock and roll beat. This is the particular reason he is so much more quotable than Cohen has turned out to be; the songwriter's instinct is to get your attention and keep it, and to have you humming the refrain and singing the chorus as you walk away from the music player to attend to another task. Chances are that you are likely to continue humming along with the music while you work, on your break, on the drive home, for the remains of the day. This is not to insist that Cohen is not quotable or of equal worth--I am in agreement that Cohen, in general, is the superior writer to Dylan, and is more expert at presenting a persona that is believably engaged with the heartaches, pains and dread-festooned pleasures his songs take place. His lyrics are more measured, balanced, and less exclamatory and time-wasting, and exhibit a superior sense of irony. Cohen is the literary figure, the genuine article, which comes to songwriting with both his limitations and his considerable gifts. All is to say that Dylan has Tin Pan Alley throwing a large shadow over his work. Cohen, in turn, is next to a considerable bottle of ink and a quill. Cohen tends the words he uses more than Dylan does; his language is strange and abstruse at times, but beyond the oddity of the existences he sets upon his canvas there exists an element that is persuasive, alluring, masterfully wrought with a writing, from the page alone, that blends all the attendant aspects of Cohen’s stressed worldliness– sexuality, religious ecstasy, the burden of his whiteness– into a whole, subtly argued, minutely detailed, expertly layered with just so many fine, exacting touches of language.  His songs, which I find the finest of the late 20th century in English–only Dylan, Costello, Mitchell and Paul Simon, have comparable bodies of work–we find more attention given to the effect of every word and phrase that’s applied to his themes, his storylines. In many writers overall. Unlike Dylan, who has been indiscriminate for the last thirty years, I would say Cohen is a better lyricist than Dylan because he’s been a better critic of the work he’s released, there is scarcely anything in Cohen’s songbook that wasn’t less than considered, pondered over, measured for effect and the achievement of the cultivated ambiguity that made you yearn for some of the sweet agonies that accompanies a permanent residence in the half-lit zone between the sacred and the profane.

A NOTE

 Bob Dylan performed at New York's esteemed Carnegie Hall, for which he additionally wrote the program notes.  Titled My Life in a Stolen Moment, it's a long, rambling length of free verse poetry that is an intriguing example of Dylan juvenilia. A self- conscious and entirely awkward combination of Beat style first-thought-best-thought idea and the unlettered eloquence of the deep feeling poor white, it purports to be the true telling of Dylan's upbringing in small-town Minnesota.It's not a reliable document. As an autobiography, I wouldn't trust a word of it. Dylan embellished his story from the beginning. Inconsistencies and incongruities in his stated timeline were noted early on. I remember that Sy and Barbara Ribakove were suspicious of Dylan's accounting of his life back in 1966 with their book "Folk-Rock: The Bob Dylan Story." All the fabulation has certainly given a couple of generations of Dylan obsessives much to sift through and write books about. It's a poem, of course, but not a good one. What had always irritated me about Dylan's writing was his affectation of the poor, white rural idiom. It's dreadful, unnatural sounding as you read it (or listen to it from his early recordings). While it's one thing to be influenced by stories of hobo life, the Great Depression, and to use the inspiration to find one's uniquely expressive voice as a writer or poet, what Dylan does here ranks as some of his most pretentious, awkward, and preening writing. One can argue in Dylan's defense with the vague idea of negative capability, but that holds water only if the writing is great and the writer is possessed by genius. Of course, Dylan is/was a genius, but this was something he wrote when he was merely talented and audacious. Genius hadn't bloomed yet. This bucolic exercise has always been an embarrassment, juvenilia that sounds juvenile.

QUEEN JANE APPROXIMATELY

 Lately, considering this list, I've been attracted again to "Queen Jane Approximately," one of Dylan's best "list-making" songs. One the sharpest songs on his 1966 double-album Blonde on Blonde, this love-sick lament is deceptively simple, It first reads as the moaning agony of a young man moaning in the moonlight, but the closer look, the harder listen avails us a tour of the troubled sideroads and detours a saddened might wander. The song is a lament, a plea, the wishful thinking of a rejected suitor holding out the hope for reconciliation for a lover who has left. Dylan's lyrics on Blonde on Blonde were the best he wrote during his long and quarrelsome career. They were a sardonic mash-up of kitchen sync surrealism and hallucinogenic Symbolism that brought the demented perceptions of Rimbaud and Verlaine into the American idiom.

 

The album is to be felt, not understood. It's a visceral experience.  The lyrics defied literal interpretation but still resonated with you in ways that made you think of your circumstances that defy the easy explanation. "Queen Jane Approximately" stands out for the opposite reasons; the language is simple, direct, and sharp. The lyrics, with only the lightest surreal tint attached to them, investigate a purely human experience. The stanzas are an inventory of interpersonal failures, the collapse of a world upon someone who imagined they were the center of it. Being the center of the universe is too much because gravity will eventually crush you.

 

When your mother sends back all your invitations

And your father, to your sister, he explains

That you're tired of yourself and all of your creations

Won't you come see me, Queen Jane?

Won't you come see me, Queen Jane?

 

The basic idea is that we have a personality at the center of this entreaty, someone suffering the agonies of frustration, unfulfilled dreams, incredible, horrible ennui who, it seems, has been in stasis for a very long time. We are hearing someone assessing how their life has gone wrong and what choices made have to make it a different and more beneficial situation, a contemplation so severe that we witness, I suspect, the "paralysis of analysis." The estrangement of even the most severe narcissist from the self-gratifying, self-admiring activities that gave them their most precious reason to live which drags one to the bottom floor of their devastated justification to continue breathing the same air as the rest of us: a life in tatters, shattered, cursed with an acute view of self-designed schemes, agendas, world-classifying agendas that failed one after another, Queen Jane, we suppose, is slump-shouldered, smoking too many cigarettes, engaging in various means of self-destruction by the inch. Dylan's narrator, a former lover perhaps, a jilted suitor who realizes what a full-blown mess this person is and yet still desires company, intimacy, still strives to be a rock to anchor her despair upon, offers himself, his fellowship, his support quite despite all the sharply described failures he recounts as he makes his offer.

 

Now, when all of the flower ladies want back what they have lent you

And the smell of their roses does not remain

And all of your children start to resent you

Won't you come see me, Queen Jane?

Won't you come see me, Queen Jane?

 This is Dylan's lyric writing at its best, a bit disgusted, surreal in ways that match the speechless experiences of the soul without the lard of banal introspection. There is an endearing and enduring. This is fatalism, and "Queen Jane Approximately" is discreetly the song of a man who is a glutton for punishment. Even without the profession of unconditional love, there is the sense of a young man deep in his intoxication.  He imagines himself as a saint, a martyr for a more significant cause, the delicious delusion that one has an inexhaustible store of patience to accept the consequences of loving a person committed to making decisions based on self and garnering misery and self-pity as the reward. This is a preview of a tragedy under construction. The suitor is as damaged as the woman he is making his overtures.

 

Now, when all the clowns that you have commissioned

Have died in battle or in vain

And you're sick of all this repetition

Won't you come see me, Queen Jane?

Won't you come see me, Queen Jane?

  The language is a finessed balance between comprehensible plain-speak and Dylan's penchant for surreal sizing the details; this makes the situation plain as glass yet quaintly familiar. And the fact the guitar and piano sound a bit sour, out of tune (perhaps) adds to the alluring strangeness. This is what one sees at the intersection of Desolation Row and Positively 4th Street.

TARANTULA

 Bob 

Dylan is a word slinger, maybe a genuine poet during some parts of his oeuvre. Still, he is not a writer, not as we understand the word, a craftsman, an artist, a professional of words, instructional or artistic, who crafts sentences that start someplace and create precedence for the sentence that follows, one idea organically following another until the journey of words, paragraphs, pages, concludes somewhere far from where one started to write. That is, writers write things that make sense in some respect, as in you understand clearly the thing being described, or that you understand it more abstractly and realize that the writer is undertaking a task that tries to deal with several things--philosophical notions, contradictory arguments, overlapping historical data --and bringing a coherent framework to understand complex matters, or that, or at least come away with a sense of what the writer is getting at. Even Dylan's wildest lyrics, from Desolation Row to his more recent brilliance noteworthy Rough and Rowdy Ways: surreal or non sequitur as the stanzas may be, the line limits and the need t rhyme imposed restrictions on Dylan's musings. But let's keep in mind that these aren't actual musings since musings are the sort of thought process that, though occurring while the subject is at rest, nonetheless come to a point or offer, at best, stand-alone masterpieces of coherence.  Dylan's mind is neither at rest nor looking to connect ideas in any fashion that have a resemblance to the world you both live in. As with the other great and threatening modernists, Pound, Eliot, Stern, he wants to change the way you see, feel and smell the world.

Unresponsible Black Nite Crash

the united states is Not soundproof – you might think that nothing can reach those tens of thousands living behind the wall of dollar – but your fear Can bring in the truth … picture of dirt farmer – long johns – coonskin cap – strangling himself on his shoe – his wife, tripping over the skulls – her hair in rats – their kid is wearing a scorpion – the scorpion wears glasses – the kid, he’s drinking gin – everybody has balloons stuck into their eyes – that they will never get a suntan in mexico is obvious – send your dollar today – bend over backwards … or shut your mouths forever

the bully comes in – kicks the newsboy

you know where – & begins ripping away

                                                                    --from Tarantula 

The book goes on like this, one-liners of light bulb brilliance extended to the breaking point of where all associations are gone, and the brain is dead with the ravages of whatever drugs were being passed around the tour bus and found their way into the hotel room. All that can be done in the center of the night when the rest of the hotel room is either asleep or murmuring their own serenades to the dawn no one is sure will for them is to type, even more, an attempt to fill the page with a verbal world that is rhythm, cadence and shattered images crushed together in a representation of the existence that assaults the senses when exhaustion is passed by. Consciousness seems to hover by a delicate string between one last grand illumination and the final resolute darkness. 

 Well, yes, if you made through that tortured sentence and its unhinged and perhaps uninteresting associations, you correctly detect a hint of parody in my construction or lack of building. This is to suggest that the fault of the Dylan book is not his exuberance as word slinger or the genius he has at his most manic moments to come up with a punctuated stammer that resides very close to poetic genius--no, the fault is the mistake many a young man or woman jacked up on drugs and coffee and unfiltered cigarettes, that is the attempt to live in a permanent present tense. No past, no future, just right now, always, just us, the things in the room or in the street, things with names or no names, just us seeing, uttering names, and slapping the labels on anything that does not match. Good poetry takes time to...catch its breath, reflect, to...discover things, ideas, connections, what have you, the would-be bard hadn't the slightest idea existed in any sense. As startling as Tarantula's language seems at first, it stops surprising you even in the book's short length because the writing itself seems the very thing from which writing, as a process, was supposed to for a period free you from distractions. The writing seems a distraction. One might compare the book entirely to the proverbial over-stuff pantry that finally bursts open through the doors.                  

 He needed to wrap up his investigations into his more obscure imaginings. He gave you something to talk about. Tarantula was written on the road, in hotel rooms, on tour, rattled off in high doses of speed, and maybe other drugs too inane to bother talking about, and it certainly reads like it, snub-nosed Burroughs, Kerouac without the jivey swing. Some parts make you laugh, some good lines abound. Still, it suffers in that readers wanted their hero, the poet of their generation, to write a genuinely good of poetry or some such thing, with true believers tying themselves in self-revealing knots to defend the book that is interesting as an artifact to the historical fact of Dylan's fame and influence and not much else. There is a part I like, effective as poetry, a bit of self-awareness that shows that Dylan realizes that his persona is false, a conspiracy between himself and the major media and that somewhere in the future, he might have to account for the construction of the whole matter.

BOB TURNS 80, APPROXIMATELY

HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED

Of course, there had to be a Dylan record on a list of albums that had a high impact in the manner I put my straight shoulder to the wheel, and it's this one, "HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED". This is less a music collection than a weapon, a dual-edged shiv that brought everything that songwriter was interested in--Burroughsesque nightmares, the plaintive flatness of rural folk traditions, a carnivalization of the inane and crucifying obligations we've bought into to rationalize lives based on a religion comprised solely on the idea of debt. It was glorious anarchy as well, a chamber of blues, boogie, electric guitars, guitars, and drums thrashing forward without penance with a momentum that ripped the seams of whatever structure these songs had to begin with. Dylan is nasal, braying, mewling, nasty in his vocalizing, which is to say that he's pissed, a combination of gotcha! Dead-to-rights broadsides against what is false and based on distraction, deception, deceit, and outright schoolyard finger-pointing, an aggrieved creep ranting at others about how unfair he's been treated. This fantastic combination, folkie Dylan backed by an electric band, gets the tracks done fast, taking little time for finessing the brew. It's worth mentioning that while blues guitar genius Mike Bloomfield was on the session (with Al Kooper as well, late of the Blues Project and later to found Blood Sweat and Tears), Dylan, jerk/punk/asshole/speed freak he was, told Bloomfield that he didn't want "any of that B.B.King shit..." Or words to that effect. 

The disc is full of rawboned, ethereal masterpieces like JUST LIKE TOM THUMB'S BLUES, FROM A BUICK SIX, BALLAD OF A THIN MAN, QUEEN JANE APPROXIMATELY, and his epic Masterwork DESOLATION ROW, which may be the most convincing evocation of Dante's 9 Circles of Hell. Without going into the tall grass of direct textual comparison of works created in different mediums, I do regard Desolation Row as a cunningly succinct lyric evocation of a hell very closely related to Hieronymus Bosch's oil painting The Garden of Earthly Delight. A triptych composed on oak panels between 1490 and 1510, the painting, like Desolation Row, is a horrid tour of a terrain where we have the souls of who we assume is the deceased being tormented and tortured by methods and nightmare creatures who represent the earthly vices and gluttonous pleasures that become instruments of eternal agony. The scenarios in Desolation Row, delivered in swift and surreal stanzas, seem, as well, a range of types which each in their own way thought that they had arrived at some inevitable claim to greatness or destiny only to realize too late that it was all vanity and pride that kept them from being authentically alive. There is room for argument o this point, and no doubt there are cries already from listeners who find it sophistry and pretentiousness on Dylan's part to try to up his stature with what has been termed over the years as witless jabbering. Dylan has run of ideas more than once in his lifetime and has written and released songs that were crowded, cliched, and vague rather than evocative, but there are other moments during his decades where he was firing on all cylinders, so to speak, where his taste for the surreal, the discordant, the dissolutely baroque could evoke not just thrills over blazing, quotable couplets, but which provide the condensed, Emily Dickens like the capacity to stir within the listener a deeper, more fulfilling introspection. Yes, he could be that good.

  One can enthuse, elaborate, abstract form, and wax philosophical upon these keen nihilistic odes. Still, it will have to suffice to remark that I consider this record one of the albums that needed to exist for the birth of punk rock to take place, along with the "KICK OUT THE JAMS" by the MC5 and the first albums by the Stooges and Velvet Underground. . Everyone seems to start and end at different places, tempos are ragged, sometimes tentative, the pace is bludgeoning, the instruments are often out of tune, and its all glorious, brilliant Dylan in the middle of it all, snarling, burning through his genius and abusing his muse for the greater glory of what would become a definitive record. It is raw and spiky and gives you a perspective that says no proof because there is no pudding.

 You'd be right, I suppose, in linking Dylan's early cynicism about the motives of people and the institutions they represent to his dalliance of brimstone Christianity. It does seem a natural progression, although I've expanded my view on is "SLOW TRAIN COMING" album and would equate it closer to the fatalistic Christianity of Flannery O'Connor, a writer who was obsessed with the vision of Christ, the afterlife, as a strange way of thinking that you've cut the spiritual requirements to sit at God's right or left hand, whichever comes first. She's was a body of thinking about Christianity that was too weird and personal to be of any use any to anyone except those readers of American Southern fiction who marveled at the writer's skill at imagining the worst while dealing, even in submerged form, on matters of Belief. Dylan's Christianity is likewise too weird to be of any use to any evangelist who might cite him as a saved celebrity. His view was apocalyptic, and I think no less nihilist than when he was a mad lad realizing the universe with his skill at saying profound-sounding things that no one honestly understood. But for "HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED", it's more profitable, nay, more enjoyable to take this on its own terms and its own era-defined conditions of composition and again get wowed by the spiked punch of insight, insult, revelation, resentment, love, rage, the general rampage of impulses he contained with the simple guitar chords he had in his armory. The wonder of the album is that unlike so many discs by great artists at the time, including, this one hasn't aged.

DON'T SING DYLAN LYRICS, DANCE THEM!

Choreographer Twyla Tharp's 2006 dance interpretation of Bob Dylan's songs, creakily titled "The Times They Are A-Changin'," brings to mind Richard Goldstein's remark in his old collection "The Poetry of Rock" that interpreting Dylan's lyrics is "...like running a USO in Hanoi" because the chance of getting "hit by flack" was unavoidable. Everyone has Their Own Private Dylan. Unless one's interpretation of the songwriter's lyrics achieves genius nearly equal to the subject under review--I'm thinking of Greil Marcus's critical book the Invisible Republic-- each spin and burnishing of Dylan's writing will be found wanting. I had a chance to see Tharp's "Times..." show in San Diego and couldn't escape the desperation to make such an adaptable body of work lend itself to theatrical presentation; as mentioned, the songs are fine as rock and roll numbers and work within criteria independent of other forms, but they are rather redundant, repetitive, musically constrained to furnish material for the work a choreographer is supposed to do. Billy Joel and the Beach Boys are obvious choices for dance interpretations simply because the songs have more bounce, variety, invention than the relatively primitive strumming. Dylan preferred; a successful dance sequence derived from "Good Vibrations" isn't far afield. "Times...", though, seemed without ease or grace, and the dancers might as well have had tire chains around their ankles. The storyline, such as it was, was Kerouac kitsch filtered through some cracked lens of euphoric recall. The movies in my head when I was seventeen listenings to "Blonde on Blonde" on headphones was more potent than the busy mess Tharp gave San Diego audiences, and her mistake was trying to make sense of what I think might have been her similarly subjective and private response to Dylan's work. What she's mounted and now brought to New York is a buzzkill. It's like trying to explain why a Coen Brothers movie is funny. It cannot be done.

DYLAN IS NOT A POET, BUT HE PLAYS ONE ON TV

 1.

photograph by Jim Marshall

An old peeve, this: Bob Dylan is not a poet. He is a songwriter. What he does is significantly different than what a poet does. In any relevant sense, the best of what poetry offers is read off the page, sans melody from accompanying guitar or piano and a convincingly evocative voice. The poet's musical sense, rhythmic properties, and other euphonious qualities are derived from the words and their clever, ingenious combinations alone. A reader may appreciate the words, the rhymes, the cadences, the melodious resonance, and dissonance, as the case may be, but all this comes from the poem's language alone, on the page, without music. The musicality we speak of when addressing such rich and soul-stirring sounds of nouns and adjectives conjoined has everything to with the poet extending the limits of everyday speech. You can read Shakespeare to full literary potential, I think, because his verse, in the guise of dialogue, still satisfies as writing, with metaphors, rhythms, cadences swirling and ringing to a heightened sense of what the complexity of human emotion can sound like if there were words, allusions, similes, and metaphors that could give life and texture for what are, in his plays, inchoate feelings brewing at some base level of the personality before the mind can give them an articulate if flawed rationale.

It was the task of Shakespeare, the poet, and the playwright combined to give verbal music to what were speeches that made private thoughts, half-plotted schemes, inarticulate resentments, paranoia, the whole conflicting brew of insecurity, self-doubt, and malevolence into something that was the equivalent of music, a sweet and stirring sound that bypasses the censoring and sense-making intellect and which makes even the foulest of schemes seem just and only natural. The writing approximates music from the page and provides for a more complicated task when considering our responses to a provocative set of stanzas. Dylan is a songwriter, a distinct art form, and his words are lyrics, which cannot be experienced to their fullest without the music that goes along with them. One may, of course, hum the melodies while pouring over the lyrics and mentally reconstruct of listening to songs of an album, but this proves the point. Of themselves, Dylan's lyrics pale badly compared to page poets. With his music, the lyrics come alive and artful, at their best. They are lyrics, inseparable from their melodies, and not poems, which have another kind of life altogether.

The lyrics are flat and unremarkable save for their strangeness, which is not especially interesting in verbal terms. With music, voila! Transformation. This is a condition that makes what Dylan does songwriting, not the writing of poetry. These are distinct art forms with features and rules of composition that are crucial and non-negotiable. Cohen is an interesting case since he inhabits several writing mediums, IE, novels, poetry, plays music. He's not especially prolific in any of these areas--over the forty-plus years that he's been on my radar, his output has been meager, albeit high quality--but it occurs to me that he's more of an actual writer than Dylan is. They are different sorts of geniuses. Cohen, of course, is a novelist overall—“Beautiful Losers,” “The Favorite Game”--and a poet, someone wholly committed to making the words from their own music, rhythm and power so that the sort of splendid, soul-racked suffering he specializes in, that deliciously wrought agony that's midway between spiritual experience and sexual release, is fully conveyed to the reader and made as felt as possible.

Cohen tends the words he uses more than Dylan does; his language is strange and abstruse at times, but beyond the oddity of the existences he sets upon his canvas, there exist an element that is persuasive, alluring, masterfully wrought with writing, from the page alone, that blends all the attendant aspects of Cohen's stressed worldliness-- sexuality, religious ecstasy, the burden of his whiteness-- into a whole, subtly argued, minutely detailed, expertly layered with just so many fine, exacting touches of language. His songs, which I find the finest of the late 20th century in English--only Dylan, Costello, Mitchell, and Paul Simon have comparable bodies of work--we find more attention given to the effect of every word and phrase that's applied to his themes, his storylines. In many ways, I would say Cohen is a better lyricist than Dylan because he's a better writer overall. Unlike Dylan, who has been indiscriminate for the last thirty years about the quality of work he's released, there is scarcely anything in Cohen's songbook you would characterize as a cast-off.



Cohen takes more care in words he selects to tell his tales. He creates his moods, as he provides a sense of location, tone, and philosophical underpinning while also working subtly working to suggest the opposite of whatever mood he might be getting at. Cohen is simply more careful than Dylan.
In word selection, more discriminating; the architecture of literary influence is displayed in the disciplined rhymes of Cohen's parable-themed lyrics, elegantly so. It is, to be sure, a matter of choice how a writer manages their word flow. Cohen's writing has a sense of someone who labors hard to make the image work, to have that image compliment and make enticingly evocative a scenario that starts off simple and then arrives at a moment of fatalistic surrender to powers greater than oneself, both sensual and spiritual. My feeling for Dylan's method is that he is an admirer of what Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac regarded as Spontaneous Bop Prosody, a zen-like approach to an expression where it was regarded that the first thought was the best thought one could have on a subject.

Good poets, great poets, are writers when it gets down to what they do, and it’s my feeling that  Cohen’s experience as a novelist, short story writer, and playwright has given him a well-honed instinct for keeping the verbiage to a minimum. This is not to say Cohen is a chintzy minimalist, such as  Raymond Carver, or that fewer words in a piece are, by default, superior to longer word counts; rather, Cohen just has a better sense of when it’s time to stop and develop a  lyric further.

Dylan's genius is closer to the kind of brilliance we see in Miles Davis, where the influences of unlike styles of music and other elements-- traditional folk, rock, and roll, protest songs, blues, country, French symbolism, Beat poets--were mixed in ways that created a new kind of music, and required a new critical language to discuss what it was he had done with the influences he'd assimilated, and the range of his influence. It is possible to look at aspects of Dylan's art. Fine individual strands wanting--his lyrics may be unfocused or strange for their own sake, his melodies are either borrowed or lack sophistication, his singing is nasal and grating--but taken together, music, words, voice, instrumentation fused, one experiences catharsis, power and galvanizing mysticism in the best recorded moments. "Ballad of a Thin Man" is a flat, curious scribble of a lyric read by itself. Still, with the minor key intonations of Al Kooper's keyboard and Mike Bloomfield's interned guitar, coupled with Dylan's leering, a snarling dramatization of the lyric, we have an art that is riveting n terms that are purely musical; yes, one might go on at length and create a cosmology of what Dylan's lyrical creations make of the experience, but the emphasis needs to remain on the whole.

" It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)"is a terrific, innovative song lyric, and as a lyric does not have the same power as a well-written poem has on the page when that lyric hasn't the music to give it momentum. The power of the lyric has a sustained "oh wow" element, one line after another summarizing the sad state of the Perfect Union, the Idealized world in harsh, ironic terms, each image and beat of the intoned images, critical, lively, surreal in a seamless mash-up of dissimilar concepts, are lifted, foisted, tossed to the listener by the steady and firm strums of the simple guitar Dylan maintains. Lyrics have their advantages and can be quite artful and subtle, but I maintain that they're a different art form; the words are subservient to the song form, where poems of every sort are autonomous, structures made entirely of language. (Unless, of course, you're a Dada poet who just arrived here with a time machine).

"Desolation Row" and "Visions of Johanna," two songs from what I think is the center of Dylan's greatest period as a song-poet, if you will, likewise are not to make their fantastic excursions through Daliesque landscapes alone on the page, as flat print. Dylan's chords, his voice, and his forward-march rhythms are what make these extended lyrics crisp and suggestive of metaphysical chaos under a thin the thin guise of civility and reason. Drums, organs, twangy and tuneless guitars, police sirens, his braying voice bring a dimension to the lyrics that aren't there without it. Dylan's lyrics especially--more so than Cole Porter, more so than Chuck Berry, more so than a host of his contemporaries--are not self-sufficient as page-poets are with their work. It can be argued that what Dylan has done is more complex, subtler, and requiring a new vocabulary to discuss than what poets have done, and something I would subscribe to on principle. Dylan remains a songwriter first and foremost and a poet only through loose analogy. In all, Dylan's lyrics serve the musical experience, the concept of a song, which makes Dylan a songwriter of genius, but not a poet. When they are writing poetry and not novels or songs of their own, poets are committed to making language and language alone, the means through which their ethereal notions will be preserved. Successor failure on their part depends solely on how well they can write, not strum a guitar or croon a tune.

____________________________________________________________ 

2.

 I do admire the work of artists who remain interesting as they get older, but it is a fact that many writers, poets, songwriters do their best, most compelling work in their early years. Dylan is one of these--the greatest songs, in my view, were those that combined equal elements of Surrealism, Burroughs-inspired language cut-ups, blues and rural south music vernaculars, and heavy doses of French Symbolism by way of Rimbaud and Mallarme. This gave his stanzas a heightened, alienated feeling of sensory overload, making him the principal Lyricist of the bare existential absurdity that life happens to be. No one got to the infuriating heart of the sensation that life had ceased to mean anything after those matters that "mean" the most to us--marriages, friendships, tastes, financial security, spiritual or religious certainty--were changed, destroyed, or simply vanished. Dylan's writing was of the individual suddenly in the choking throes of uncertainty, batting back encroaching gloom with the kind of swinging, poetic wit that reassembles existence. The stance, a state, an aesthetic state of being that made it possible for him to fire on all cylinders for a good run of time. Generally, Dylan's poetic quality and intensity in the longs on the list I made are a substantial body of work that lines up perfectly with and matches the strongest work by Eliot, Pound, WC Williams, Burroughs Ginsberg. It is also not the kind of work you can keep doing for a lifetime; like Miles Davis, he had to. His mature work has often hit the mark and offers a long view of experience, especially moving. Just as often, I think he misses the mark and overwrites or is prone to hackneyed phrasing. 

There is much quality to the later songs, but they are not among Dylan's greatest as a body of lyrics. Dylan is called more often than not a poet because of the unique genius of his best lyrics; I don't think he's a poet, but a songwriter with an original talent strong enough to change that particular art forever. I do understand, though, why a host of critics through the decades would consider him a poet in the first place. My list is the songs I think that justify any sort of reputation Dylan has a poetic genius. I like most of the songs mentioned above for various reasons other than the ones on my initial 35 choices; the longs there manage an affinity for evoking the ambiguities and sharp perceptions of an acutely aware personality who is using poetic devices to achieve more abstract and suggestive effects and still manage to be wonderfully tuneful. No one else in rock and roll, really, was doing that before Dylan was. On those terms, nothing he's written is quite at the level of where he was with the songs on my list; this list consists of the body of work that substantiates Dylan's claim to genius." Just Like a Woman" is one of the finest character sketches I've ever heard in a song. What's remarkable is the brevity of the whole, how much history is suggested, inferred, insinuated in spare yet arresting imagery. I rather like that Dylan allows the mystery of this character to linger, to not let the fog settle. It is the ambiguity that gives its suggestive power, and there is the whole element of whether the person addressed is a woman at all, but rather a drag queen. It's an open question; it's a brilliant lyric.

"Drifter's Escape "was on twice and is now a single entry. There is a concentration of detail in the lyric, a compression of Biblical cadence and sequence that makes the song telling and vivid not in its piling on stanzas but in its brevity. He does the same for "All along the Watchtower," which I regard as a condensed "Desolation Row," a commentary, perhaps, from the tour bus just passing through; the tour guide finally tells the driver, "there must be some kinda way outta here." I regard the true "poetry" of Dylan's music in the earlier music, where he is spectacularly original in how he forced his influences to take new shapes and create new perspectives. Post JWH, I just find too much of his lyric writing prolix, and meandering, time-filling rather than revealing; the surreal, fresh, colloquial snap of his language has gone and is replaced with turns of phrase that are trite, hackneyed, ineffective;' they strike my ear as false. Even "Blind Willie McTell," a song that has been persuasively defended by intelligent fans of Dylan's later work, strikes too many false notes for my tastes. Musically, it drags and philosophically seems a victim of convenient thinking,  a PC version of Song of the South; some of the imagery is simply cloying and seems more suitable more for Gone with the Wind than a poet of arguable worth.

...See them big plantations burning
Hear the cracking of the whips
Smell that sweet magnolia blooming
See the ghosts of slavery ships
I can hear them tribes a-moaning
Hear that undertaker’s bell...

Really, that is awful, a dreadful presentation of atmospheric detail meant to create historical context and mood, but it trades on so many received ideas of slavery, racism, the south, et al., that the intent no longer matters. It strikes as more minstrel show than tribute. Had anyone submitted this to serious poetry (or lyric) writing workshop, it would have been handed back to us for revision, with the advice that we rid the narrative of the creaky, questionable window dressing? "When I Paint My Masterpiece" works wonderfully because of its lack of any messages about social justice. It works because it is a sharp, terse, vivid travelogue, vague and evocative in equal measure. The ambiguity and absence of relevance to anything other than Dylan's need to speak offhandedly about an interesting time in a particular character's life is what makes this song memorable.

Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble
Ancient footprints are everywhere
You can almost think that you’re seein’ double
On a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs
Got to hurry on back to my hotel room
Where I’ve got me a date with Botticelli’s niece
She promised that she’d be right there with me
When I paint my masterpiece

Well, I had a feeling that the general good feeling this album conveys is that Dylan wasn't trying too hard to prove he's a genius. The record is straightforward, and the language is remarkably free of affectation, a tendency that has plagued him post-JWH. I especially like "Sign in the Window"; it has the sincerity and actual and momentary acceptance of where one happens to be in a certain part of life and offers a new set of expectations. The perfectly natural language here, good and unexpected rhymes, telling use of local detail that give us color and history without sagging qualifiers to make it more "authentic," the lyrics are a recollection of a trip, of places visited, of perspectives changing, a nice string of incidents in a language that sounds like a real voice telling real things, with genuine bemusement.  

DYLAN GIVES YOU A SEVENTEEN MINUTE SPANKING

Murder Most Foul is the best set of stanzas Dylan has written in decades. The rhymes of this song cover a host of subjects as to where the songwriters and Nobel Prize winner he's been. Dylan begins st with the kind of burned-out , cracker barrel chattiness that has made much , if not most, of his eighties, nineties, and yes, 20s output a slog through the long grass of intensification. Murder Most Foul rapidly morphs into a kind of acerbic acuteness that made his late folk and early electric work so damn satisfying. Less fingerprinting, let us say, softer, but there is a compassionate irony here, something found in the third person omniscience of John Cheever and John Updike, something all seeing, interested, sympathetic to unsatisfactory results of best laid plans and the best intention ed art, but resolutely detached all the same, the Kierkegaard God remaining silent and unmoving in the wake of our dire consequences and continued mediocrity, the sort of  irony that contains no message other than pose the question concerning what our next move is. 

This song is a welcome, if sadly belated companion to the Phil Ochs masterpiece The Crucifixion, which is among the best rock-poem lyrics ever scribed and which handily beat Dylan at his own rock-poet game; this is prime Dylan, I believe, older, older, wizened and wiser, but a man aware of his own legacy and reputation as an artist who needs to put life into perspective, the ways in which he emerged after the Fall From Grace, meaning the assassination of JFK and the end of the myth of an American Camelot, a sprawling attempt to reconcile what seemed to be promised by the Presence of John F. Kennedy under who's direction a country could transcend the differences that separate us and have us join together in common cause of a creating a more perfect union and the witnessing and not wholly disguised disgust toward the same culture that, in the current climate, is drunk on personal pronouns and the assumption that gross materialism and mythological entitlements come with the words that refer to oneself as the only agent of action that matters. 

Dylan's finds himself in a universe crueler, stupider, more self-seeking than when he first started, and finds himself spoken of as deity, philosopher, poet, all manner of seer, sage and prophet who is supposed tell what to do and how to think about a reality does not yield its activities to the dictates to personal whim or the mythology of immutable laws of history. The only law of history is that there is no law of history. The undercurrent in Murder Most Foul's seventeen minute reach is that for Dylan, a man who has been alive long enough to see the major movements of American life, that nothing has changed in terms of what American feels it needs, which is the belief that we as a Nation are number one in the history of all things, that we are a nation of men with unlimited liberty , that self-seeking is a virtue that cures every perceived ailment; we find that the passage of time has changed the fashions , the furniture, the architecture of appearances, but the stupidity remains. This stupidity is not an element that goes deep but rather THE WHOLE THING  we base all we tell ourselves on. Murder most foul is loopy, long, prolix, an overstuffed set of luggage filled with name checks and the like, and likely could have benefited had it been cut to , say, ten minutes, but it is the work of a fine poetic mind that has woken up, or at least discerned a way to discuss what's been brewing in that brain these so many years.

Rolling the stone uphill

Author Greil Marcus made a name as a rock critic by insisting that the tide of history is directly mirrored by the pop music of the period. This can make for exhilarating reading because Marcus is, if nothing else, an elegant stylist given to lyric evocation. But it is that same elegance that disguises the fact that he comes across as a middling Hegelian; the author, amid the declarations about Dylan, the Stones, the Band, and their importance to the spontaneous mass revolts of the sixties, never solidifies his points. He has argued, with occasional lucidity, that the intuitive metaphors of the artist/poet/musician diagnose the ills of the culture better than any bus full of sociologists or philosophers and has intimated further that history is a progression toward a greater day. Marcus suggests through his more ponderous tomes—Lipstick Traces, Invisible Republic, The Dustbin of History—that the arts in general, and rock ‘n’ roll in particular, can direct, in ways of getting to the brighter day, the next stage of our collective being.

Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads is an attempt to assemble a history of the pivotal song, bringing together well-worn facts about dates, names, and incidents that have been amply discussed in many previous studies of Dylan’s life and work. The idea buzzing underneath Marcus’ account of the people, places, and things that led up the creation of “Like a Rolling Stone,” the six-minute transitional masterpiece that made rock and pop musicians do a hard left turn, was that Dylan was the hero in history and was not aware that he would be a hero. Known and more obscure facts about Dylan’s life and writing are presented breezily. Brought to us are short, sharp glimpses of how Dylan moved from being an imitator of Woody Guthrie and backwoods balladeers to a hero of the civil rights movement. He was fascinated with French Symbolist poets Rimbaud and Verlaine and the Beats (especially the barbed-wire prose of William Burroughs).

The diffusely presented elements eventually lead to Dylan’s controversial decision to abandon folk music and “go electric.” It’s conceptually intriguing for Marcus to focus on the titular song and the entire album it was drawn from, 1965’s Highway 61 Revisited. The incidents, the details, and the exchanges—real and imagined—of who Dylan was working and socializing with at the time of the recording of “Like a Rolling Stone” are fascinating in themselves. Still, the elliptical style is frustrating as one finishes one chapter and starts another: you begin to wonder when the data begins to cohere into an argument for what it all means. Marcus prefers a gestalt approach, to have his topic appreciated from the many obscure incidents instead of having everything presented in complexity theory. The reader is likely supposed to understand what he’s getting at without the professor’s hand directing him back to the chalkboard diagram. An admirable trait in more skillful writers, but Marcus is often lost in the smallest implications of any one piece of evidence. The lack of even the slightest thesis statement, the failure to follow through on an intriguing idea that arises from his research is maddening.

Lucky for the reader, Marcus is an engaging prose writer, and one can forgive to a degree for not being clearer with what he was getting at. His preferred method seems to be inference rather than careful argument; there is something in his tone that seems to be inspired by the early poems of Eliot and William Carlos Williams. Like them, he seems content to let the “sense-making” to the reader. I suppose everyone knows a character like Marcus, a smart person who makes smart declarations about large, expansive topics but lacks the skills or willingness to make a formal argument.

Marcus, though, isn’t the one to draw us the map. But what has been aggravating with Marcus since he left the employ of Rolling Stone and began writing full-length books and essays for cultural journals is that he chokes when there’s a point to be made—he defers, he sidesteps, he distracts, and he rather gracelessly changes the subject. Again, this can be enthralling, especially in a book like his massive Lipstick Traces the Secret History of the 20th Century, where he assumes some of Guy DeBord’s assertions in Society of the Spectacle and situates rock ‘n’ roll musicians in a counter-tradition of groups that spontaneously develop in resistance to a society’s centralized ossification and mounts an attack, through art, on the perceptual filters that blind the masses to their latent genius.

He never quite comes to the part where he satisfyingly resolves all the mounting, swelling, grandly played generalizations that link Elvis, the Sex Pistols, and Cabaret Voltaire as sources of insight geared to undermine an oppressive regime. Still, the reader has fun along the way. Marcus wants to be a combination of Marcuse and Harold Bloom. He rarely accomplishes anything, the singular criticism either of them produced in their respective disciplines, political philosophy, and literary criticism, but he does hit the mark often enough to make him a thinker worth coming back to.

Marcus has written so much about Dylan or has absorbed so much material that he can produce a reed-thin critique on one song and pretend that it is much more than what it really is. The problem is a lack of thesis, a conceit Marcus at least pretends to have with his prior volumes; he depends entirely on third-hand anecdotes, half-recollected memories, and a flurry of details gleaned from any one of the several hundred books about Dylan published over the last 30 years. This amounts to little more than what you’d have if you transcribed a recording of the singer’s more intense fans speaking wildly, broadly, intensely amongst themselves by passing coherence for Sturm and Drang. For the rest of us with a saner appreciation of Dylan’s importance, Like a Rolling Stone is a messily assembled jumble of notes, press clippings, and over-told stories. Marcus, obviously enough, attempts an impressionistic take on the song, but the smell of rehash doesn’t recede, ever.

DYLAN DOES NOT SING. HE DOES SOMETHING ELSE

 If you're wondering, ever, why rock criticism is The Red-Light District of the reviewing arts, this article recently posted on the Esquire website to celebrate Bob Dylan's 78th birthday, shows the reason. The essay baldly asserts that Dylan is "The Greatest American Singer of All Time". Written by someone named Jeff Slate, a songwriter and occasional music journalist, the piece an unctuous, overeager stroll through the obvious facts of Dylan's career , laced with fatuous claims for this to be the greatest American singer. The basic formulation is that as a developing artist, a man dedicated to making a splash in the music world with the resources at this command, the young Dylan had tried on several musical styles—blues, folk, field hollers, gospel, rock-and-roll, and that he had made each style his own reinventing all of them. The basic problem is that Dylan has an awful instrument for carrying a tune. There's room for an agreement that the Bard of the Counter Culture has created a good number of impressive, moving, and subtle vocal performances during his long stay in the public eye, but that isn't the same thing as being the Greatest Singer this culture has ever produced. Slate gushes like a nervously prolix fanboy as he over rates the artist's obvious accomplishment. He undersells what was going on in the kind of reinvention that's required for an artist of latent genius to accomplish anything beyond the bathroom and the hairbrush.Dylan is a great singer because he had the ability that suited the qualities and limitations of his voice. All great songwriters do this, especially with Burt Bacharach, who wrote perfect melodies for a stream of quirky vocalists who , without him, likely would have trouble finding a good ftt for their native sound. I am thinking specifically of Dionne Warwick and Gene Pitney, two singers who, I'm convinced, might have languished without Bacharach's melodic accommodations of their strengths. Dylan is a more extreme example of this. His early versions of anonymous folk classics are drearily cluttered with many affectations that make me cringe when played . The genius of his vocal style didn't develop until he committed to writing his songs; the affectations began to fall away and, by the time we come to Blonde on Blonde, we've experienced a long string of potent lyrics dramatized b y a singular , original style that handily introduced and forced acceptance of a new aesthetic in pop singing. Mick Jagger is someone I'd say is an artist who followed the same route, a man with a technically awful voice who, in partner Keith Richard, had a voice that could create musical context and frame Jagger's singing. I've argued that Dylan and Jagger were not singers, but VOCALISTS, men who could do interesting things with their voice to dramatize a lyric. What those two do is a certain singing, but the distinction is helpful in keeping one's statements about an artist's work both sober and sane.Dylan, though, is not the greatest American singer. Sinatra can , hypothetically, could sing "Blowing in the Wind" or "Just Like a Woman" with style and aplomb (the results , no doubt, would sound ridiculous), but Dylan couldn't handle a single tune from Sinatra's songbook. There are many would argue otherwise, that he could pull off the fete and change the direction of history once again, but the brilliance of this man, Dylan, lies entirely on the work he created.On his own songs, the gentleman rules without peer. "No sings Dylan like Dylan" was an early Columbia slogan for the songwriter, quite a prescient declaration as we take the long view of his career. But is less about Dylan's singing than it is about the article writer's rote hyperbole.