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John Herdman

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Herausgeber: The Magic Road
Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
Sprache: Englisch

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Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in June 2016, and seldom in recent years has it been more richly deserved. That a song writer's lyrics should be regarded as literature was an idea at which many were surprised. Others have felt that to isolate the lyrics of a song from its musical context is unreal. Ultimately that is true: a song is an indefeasible whole, an inseparable marriage of words and music which achieves its overall emotional effect by that symbiosis and not otherwise. Yet it can also be said that the two components can be separately considered as two elements in the artist's creative utterance, and discussed as such. The evidence of Dylan's manuscripts supports the view that in writing his lyrics his way of going about things is not always widely different from that of a poet. Bob Dylan commented on the Nobel Prize in Literature which was awarded to him "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition": "When I first received this Nobel Prize for Literature, I got to wondering exactly how my songs related to literature. I wanted to reflect on it and see where the connection was." Voice Without Restraint, refers to and is from the song "I dreamed I saw St Augustine" on John Wesley Harding, and is a phrase chosen to evoke the full-blooded commitment to his artistic utterance which is the hallmark of Bob Dylan's voice – in all senses.

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Leseprobe

The lyrics of Bob Dylan quoted with the permission of the following publishers, appeared in the 1982 edition of Voice Without Restraint. Permission has been sought from the new copright owners.

WARNER BROS INC

TOMORROW IS A LONG TIME Copyright, 1963

DWARF MUSIC

BIG SKY MUSIC

RAM’S HORN MUSIC

SPECIAL RIDER MUSIC

WHERE ARE YOU TONIGHT (JOURNEY THROUGH THE

BOB DYLAN

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am more than grateful for the stimulation provided over the years by conversation with other Dylan enthusiasts, and in particular I wish to thank the following for their invaluable help and suggestions during the writing of this book: Alan Barr, Andrew Greig, Noeleen Grindle and Rory Watson. 12

FOREWORD

This book was written over forty years ago. It was intended to coincide with Bob Dylan’s 40th birthday, but the vicissitudes of publishing resulted in its missing that target by close on a year. Had I been inclined to look forward, at that date, to what the future might hold for Dylan and its author, I think I would not have predicted that it would be republished to honour its subject’s 80th birthday, just a couple of months before my own.

I hope that this study has more to offer than the interest of an historical artefact. The work Dylan has produced since 1979, the date which ends my survey, is so remarkable and so extensive that had I decided to rewrite the book to cover this long later period, my views on what preceded it would inevitably have been modified. The work of any considerable artist is a continuum, and our understanding of its earlier stages cannot fail to be influenced by our awareness of the work to which they led. In the case of Bob Dylan this later development has been so astonishing and so impressive as to make the commonplace about his capacity for self-renewal and self-reinterpretation 14seem strangely inadequate. The roll-call of great songs after 1979 rings out: “Every Grain of Sand”, “Blind Willie McTell”, “Mississippi”, “Red River Shore”, “Not Dark Yet”, “Highlands”, “Ain’t Talkin’”, “Tempest”, “Murder Most Foul” – one could go on. Perhaps the greatest songs are more thinly spread through the albums than were their predecessors in the mid-sixties and mid-seventies, but they are still supported by an astonishing number of distinctively memorable and powerful satellites. However, since it has never been my intention to expand and rewrite this book to cover those four decades and more of new songs, I have resisted the temptation to tamper with what I originally wrote about the earlier years.

Since the time this book was written the ready availability of alternative versions of Dylan’s songs has increased out of all measure, and this has made possible many insights into the song writer’s capacity for self-re-invention and artistic self-renewal which were much less accessible forty years ago. But I would certainly not change the main thrust of the study, which was to emphasise the primacy and centrality of instinct and feeling in Dylan’s creative exploration of the entire gamut of human emotions. Though it will seem a large claim, I believe that this achievement is Shakespearean in stature, in that just as Shakespeare took hold of the nascent art-form of his day – the Elizabethan drama – and made it his own in an unmatched exploration 15of human experience, so Dylan has done, and with almost unwavering confidence, with the central new art-form of his own day, and to comparable effect.

It is not possible to avoid mention of the award to Bob Dylan of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. Seldom in recent years has it been more richly deserved. That a song writer’s lyrics should be regarded as “literature” in the same way as the work of a poet, novelist or dramatist was an idea at which many traditionalists looked askance. Others have felt that to isolate the lyrics of a song from its musical context is unreal. Ultimately that is true: a song is an indefeasible whole, an inseparable marriage of words and music which achieves its overall emotional effect by that symbiosis and not otherwise. Yet it can also be said that the two components can be separately considered (though never without an overarching consciousness of their final indivisibility) as two elements in the artist’s creative utterance, and discussed as such. The evidence of Dylan’s manuscripts supports the view that in writing his lyrics his way of going about things is not always widely different from that of a poet. Besides, the publication of his lyrics separately from the music acknowledges that they enjoy a certain degree of autonomy as creative products independently of the music – so long as one always remembers that the lyric is not the song. The present study has, I hope, acknowledged that, both explicitly and implicitly. 16

A word about the title of this book, Voice Without Restraint. The words to which it refers (from “I dreamed I saw St Augustine” on John Wesley Harding) were chosen to evoke the full-blooded commitment to his artistic utterance which is the hallmark of Bob Dylan’s voice – in all senses. However, I have become uncomfortably aware that their use as a title might suggest that Dylan’s voice lacked artistic restraint. Nothing, of course, could be further from my intention. Dylan’s tact and restraint at all points at which these qualities are appropriate has, I hope, been sufficiently emphasised in the body of this study. And besides, it seems too late in the day to change the title now.

J.H. February 2021

CHAPTERS

TITLE PAGEACKNOWLEDGEMENTSFOREWORD1 - Introductory 2 - How Does it Feel? 3 - Telling The Story 4 - Hard Rain and Slow Trains 5 - Some Other Kinds of Poems 6 - Dodging Lions NOTES ON SOURCESSELECT BIBLIOGRAPHYDISCOGRAPHYBY JOHN HERDMANCOPYRIGHT

Chapter One

Introductory

In probably the most lucid passage in Bob Dylan’s novel Tarantula― a work of which lucidity is not the prime characteristic ― a “butter sculptor” named Snowplow Floater delivers a funny and extremely cutting dismissal of a critic of his work.1 It is a passage which any prospective critic of the songs of Dylan would do well to read, and one calculated to make him think twice before starting. “Do you know what it feels like to make some butter sculpture?” Floater demands, “do you know what it feels like to actually ooze that butter around & create something of fantastic worth?” He announces his indifference to the critic’s opinions, telling him that he takes himself too seriously and will end up in hospital with an ulcer; “― just remember, tho”, he advises him before signing off, “when you evaluate a piece of butter, you are talking about yourself, so you’d just better sign your name…” Elsewhere in the same book Dylan suggests that “nothing is worth analyzing ― you learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past”.2

He is right to be wary. “The point is not understanding what I write but feeling it”, he once told an interviewer,3 and this protestation voices a basic truth: Dylan’s art must be “understood” primarily on the nerves. The attempt to substitute a cerebral comprehension for a felt response, which is really what Dylan is condemning, in fact makes real understanding impossible. But true understanding does not negate feeling; on the contrary, it arises entirely from it. The question of the ultimate value of criticism applies, of course, to all art, though it may seem especially pertinent and pressing when we are dealing with an art that is as immediateas Dylan’s. I have no doubt, though, that it has value. As is the case with all artists, there are doubtless some aspects of Dylan’s creation which were unconscious and spontaneous in the making, others which were quite deliberate and even calculated; but in no case is the process magical by which feelings and emotions are translated into symbols apprehensible by the senses; this occurs in concrete, specific ways, even though the process may have been instinctive or subliminal for the artist. In criticism, besides, we define the content of art first of all by defining our response to it. It is how the artist impels our response that is of primary interest; and in understanding how we respond we make that response richer and more conscious ― which does not mean less feeling. Understanding as a substitute for feeling could only be misunderstanding.

The present study owes a great debt to Michael Gray’s Songand Dance Man - The ArtofBobDylan, which is far and away the best and most serious extended examination of Dylan’s work that we have. Gray established beyond question that Dylan’s creative importance could be demonstrated by critical analysis, and also provided invaluable material on his background in the folk tradition, pop music and the rock revolution. The form of my own book is therefore very much determined by what Michael Gray has and has not already done. In the first place, SongandDance Man takes the story only as far as 1970*, and I want to bring it up to date by examining the very important work of the past decade which takes in, I believe, one of the peaks of Dylan’s achievement. I shall not disregard the earlier years, about which, as with the work of any great artist, there will always be more to say, but proportionately the study will be weighted more on the side of the later albums. I shall also concentrate much more upon Dylan’s own output than upon his background, mainly because of the work already done in this field by Michael Gray and others but partly also because I think there is still too much stress laid on Dylan as a representative figure of his time and too little on the songs which make him pre-eminent and for which, more than for any “public” role, he will in the long run be remembered.

This book, again, is primarily a study of the lyrics rather than the music. In examining Dylan’s hybrid art some degree of specialisation is probably inevitable, and for my own part I readily admit that I lack the expertise and the critical vocabulary to discuss the musical aspects adequately. I think, that is, that I understand on my nerves what Dylan is doing musically but I cannot intellectualise my response. What is important when dealing with one particular aspect of an artist’s work is not in the process to falsify the other aspects. Dylan is primarily a song writer and not a visual poet and his lyrics cannot be dealt with in the same way that one would deal with poetry intended for the eye. As Michael Gray has put it, “it ought to be kept in mind that the selection and organisation of Dylan’s language is governed by the artistic disciplines of a medium not solely linguistic or literary … Structurally the words of a song differ necessarily from those of a poem. They are not the sole arbiters of their own intended effects, rhythmically or in less technical ways.”4 In considering the sense of the lyrics (which is something more than their “meaning”) I shall therefore always ask myself: what is the voice saying, what is the musicsaying? Does my understanding square with that? And, of course, all my impressions come first of all from listening to Dylan, not from reading him.

George Steiner, in the course of an examination of the decline of verbal culture in the West attendant upon the decay of religious belief, has suggested at some length that we have entered a period in which “a sound-culture seems to be driving back the old authority of verbal order.”5 “The literacies of popular and classical music”, he shows, “informed by new techniques of reproduction not less important than was the spread of cheap mass-printing in its time, are entering our lives at numerous, shaping levels. In many settings and sensibilities, they are providing a ‘culture outside the word’.”

Steiner indicates, too, that this development may represent a natural turning-back towards elements which form the very foundations of human culture. “Conceivably, an ancient circle is closing. Lévi-Strauss has asserted that melody holds the key to the ‘mystèresuprèmedel’homme’. Grasp the riddle of melodic invention, of our apparently imprinted sense of harmonic accord, and you will touch on the roots of human consciousness. Only music, says Lévi-Strauss, is a primal universal language, at once comprehensible to all and untranslatable into any other idiom. Speech comes later than music; even before the disorder at Babel, it was part of the Fall of man. This supposition is, itself, immemorial.”

It is within this context, the context of Marshall McLuhan’s “global village” dominated by electronic communications, that the art-form developed pre-eminently by Dylan takes on its importance. For it is precisely by joining itself once more to music that verbal culture may assure its own continuance. Nietzsche showed in The Birth of Tragedy that the emergence of Western literary forms was fundamentally involved with “the spirit of music”. It seems clear that there is a connection between the present attenuation and exhaustion of these forms and their almost total divergence from their musical roots. The popularity of poetry readings may stem from a sense of the inappropriateness to contemporary social conditions of a literature based entirely on the private response of individual reader to writer. Yet the limitations and snares of this cult are immense, and arise from the unsuitability of the reading as a medium for the communication of visual poetry whose structure is primarily determined by the conditions of print. The restoration to the ear of a more important role among the senses, which has been effected by the coming of the electronic media and which to some extent counters the long dominance of the eye, has been the occasion for the word to resume its old association with the principle of melody. Dylan’s art combines literary and musical elements in an inseparable whole and in conditions of the most intimate inter-dependence, in a way that has not been familiar in the literate culture of the West since before the invention of printing.

That is not of course to deny that Dylan has had his precursors in the popular music of this century, not to mention the oral traditions of non-literate peoples. The point is that his relation to the traditions of “high” or “élite” art is quite different from - and closer than - those of such precursors. Again, it is true that in his own day he has been only half a step ahead of a host of excellent song-poets and writers of rock lyrics ― Jagger and Richards, the Beatles, Joni Mitchell, Robert Hunter, Van Morrison, Randy Newman, Bruce Springsteen and many more. Yet on the one hand it is more than doubtful whether any of these could have done what they have, in the way that they have, without the example of Dylan; and on the other, Dylan remains the best: the most complex and varied, the most widely ranging, the most self-renewing, the deepest. Among all these practitioners of a new and thriving art-form, his stands out as the paradigmatic case. He is the major individual artist who has taken command of the central form of his time, and never can there have been a form which made the work of such an artist available to so huge and so far-flung an audience.

It is not only in the form of his art that Dylan reflects the changing cultural conditions of which Marshall McLuhan was writing in the sixties; he reflects them also in the character of his sensibility. McLuhan is constantly at pains to stress the simultaneity of perception, the consciousness of different levels of experience co-existing, which he believes links “electronic man” with his preliterate ancestors: “Paradoxically, at this moment in our culture, we meet once more preliterate man. For him there was no subliminal factor in experience; his mythic forms of explanation explicated all levels of any situation at the same time.”6 Dylan’s songs, in the mosaic structure which they so often exhibit, vividly communicate just such a multi-layered explication, and Dylan has said more than once that such a habit of mind is natural to him. Talking to Playboy, for instance, about an abortive documentary called Eat the Documentmade about him in 1966, he observes, “… the more I looked at the film, the more I realized that you could get more onto film than just one train of thought. My mind works that way, anyway. We tend to work on different levels.”7 And replying to a RollingStonequestion about the different levels noticeable in his songs, he replies, “That’s right, and that’s because my mind and my heart work on all those levels. Shit, I don’t want to be chained down to the same old level all the time.”8 Dylan’s sensibility is not mainly linear and sequential, that is, not based on a mode of perception in which the claims of the eye override those of the other senses; its bias is rather spatial.

Dylan’s art has strong links too with the conditions under which in preliterate cultures, oral poetry was composed. Albert B. Lord has written of these conditions: “Our oral poet is composer. Our singer of tales is a composer of tales. Singer, performer, composer and poet are one under different aspects butatthesametime. Singing, performing, composing are facets of the same act.”9 With some qualifications, this is true of Dylan: certainly the different functions which Lord enumerates come together in him as in the traditional “singer of tales”. Although he composes before he performs, he always in some sense recreates, hence re-composes, his songs in performance. Unlike an oral maker he writeshis songs, but he does so with a re-creative process in mind, and as David Buchan says, “Oral composition is … an essentially re-creative process.”10 Speaking of the conditions which obtain when literacy is beginning to overtake the old oral tradition, Buchan notes that “it is possible, at a certain point in the tradition, for a person to be both literate and an oral composer. It is only when a person ceases to be re-creative along traditional lines and accepts the literate concept of the fixed text that he or she can no longer be classed as oral.”11 Dylan, placed at a time when an aural mode is beginning to make great inroads upon the assumptions of literacy, works in a similar border-land. In performance he is not tied to any fixed text, but the fact of recording does give certain performances the status of permanency which was denied to the oral makers. His lyrics, again, do appear in print, though the text cannot be regarded as fixed in a strict sense, and this method of publication is in any event very secondary to the aural forms of performance and recording. The fluid, provisional nature of Dylan’s songs makes them, in their literary aspect, a notable and important departure from literate tradition. They can be, and are, altered and renewed again and again to conform with new moods, new times, new preoccupations. This quality is entirely dependent on their being cast in an aural rather than a visual mode (unlike contemporary classical music, which remains tied to an established textual form).

Another point which follows from the particular cultural conditions under which Dylan is operating is that his work cannot be abstracted from the way in which heinterprets it in performance: the “interpretation” is part of the creative essence. Words and music are alike inseparable from their relation to Dylan’s voice; performed by others, his songs can sometimes virtually disappear, or at the least become something different and less. They can be said to exist fully only in performance or recording by Dylan. Not only do words which may seem to have a kind of half-life on the page come into their full being when he sings them, but the music is devitalized if we fail to listen to the words it is carrying - and this is something which differentiates Dylan from the majority of rock artists. Ellen Willis makes the point well when she indicates that, “Words or rhymes that seem gratuitous in print often make good musical sense and Dylan’s voice, an extraordinary interpreter of emotion … makes vague lines clear.”12 What Dylan “means” in a song, also, is not always what the words say: the sense may be conveyed through tensionsbetween words, expression and musical mood. Dylan’s voice does not just interpret his lyrics, it gives them life. His marvelous timing and breath-control, his capacity for drawing out lines almost to breaking-point, his emotional subtlety and inspired phrasing, make it one of his greatest artistic assets. Its interpenetration with his literary talents must always be kept in mind when thinking about the lyrics.

What is most undeniable about Dylan’s achievement over the years is his astonishing ― seemingly almost limitless ― emotional range, and his power of creative renewal, what Jon Landau has called his “unrelenting capacity to grow”.13 This central creative endowment is intimately related to his unregenerate individualism and his courage in following his own path in the face of extraordinary pressures. There can be few if any artists who have had to reckon with commercial pressures of the enormity of those which have been Dylan’s lot, in his unique position as a serious major artist who is also ― or has been ― a popular cultural hero in a global context. His coolness and nerve in coping with them have testified to a formidable integrity. His achievement, too, stands in contradiction to the views of those who see art moving in the direction of collaborative or communal activity: although he works with other musicians, and seems to have a knack of bringing the best out of them, his own personal vision always remains in control. In this sense he looks both ways: his pioneering development of an art-form which corresponds to the realities of communication in the modern world is matched by an individualism which links him with traditional concepts of artistic freedom. Ellen Willis has here again been the most farsighted of his critics: “Dylan is no apostle of the electronic age. Rather, he is a fifth-columnist from the past, shaped by personal and political non-conformity, by blues and modern poetry. He has imposed his commitment to individual freedom (and its obverse, isolation) on the hip passivity of pop culture, his literacy on an illiterate music. He has used the publicity machine to demonstrate his belief in privacy. His songs and public role are guides to survival in the world of the image, the cool and the high. And in coming to terms with that world, he has forced it to come to terms with him.”14

Much of the discontent and even rage at Dylan’s successive artistic revolutions and the accompanying modifications of his image can be traced to a sense of frustration on the part of the media and his fans that he would and will not allow them to own or control him. The chorus of condemnation in the wake of the 1965 Newport Festival in particular, when Dylan demonstrated his move to electric rock, was almost universal, only a few brave voices like that of Paul Nelson asserting that in their preference for Pete Seeger over Dylan the Newport audience had chosen “the safety of wishful thinking rather than the painful, always difficult stab of art.”15 In one of a series of particularly nasty and short-sighted articles Ewan MacColl described Dylan as “a youth of mediocre talent” and his work as “tenth-rate drivel”, and with a quite singular ineptitude characterised him as representing a “movement” of American song writing “where journalism is more important than art, where flabby sentimentality and shrill self-pity take the place of passion.”16 In this context it is good for a Scotsman to be able to record that a voice in Scotland was raised thus early in defence of Dylan. Hamish Henderson, one of the fathers of the Scottish folk revival, pled that we should be grateful for “the creators, the makers, the composers, those with a spark of the divine fire ― if anyone can leaven this unholy lump, they will. And before we start reaching for stones to chuck at Bob Dylan, as if he were a sort of folk-song equivalent of the woman taken in adultery … let us for heaven’s sake remember that an unmistakeable vein of genuine poetry runs through the best of his work … The folk scene has been bedevilled not only be the cynical money-grubber ― and the witless bonehead – of the commercial revival, but also by the phony purist: the bloke who poses as the clearer out of an Augean stable into which he himself has tipped a goodly amount of muck.”17

Henderson’s comments have a pertinence which extends beyond the immediate circumstances of that mid-nineteen-sixties quarrel, for it is not only the folk purists who have turned against Dylan when he has moved in a direction they have not approved of: the rock fraternity has proved equally sensitive to his subsequent reorientations. His “country period” of around 1969-70, when he produced Nashville Skyline, Self Portrait and New Morning, saw his rock following reacting with horror at his adoption of what they saw as a musical style representing the values of “redneck” America, values regarded as diametrically opposed to those he was deemed to have stood for and represented in the nineteen-sixties. It was assumed that Dylan was lost, that he had sold his soul, and could now be discounted as a serious force in popular music. Actually he was reflecting, just as he did in his early “protest” days and again when he voiced the feelings of the streets in his rock heyday, the mood and tendency of American life as it was shortly to reveal itself; and before too long he was to resurface with some of the greatest albums of his career.

Now once more, with his conversion to Christianity in 1979 and the issue of Slow Train Coming, Dylan is being accused of “betrayal” by his followers, and savaged by the musical press. To cite but one of many possible examples, Michael Goldberg proclaims that “Bob Dylan has left the side of free-thinking, socially aware, sometimes cynical human beings trying to make ethical choices in a modern world ripped apart by the war and prejudice. For him, all is solved in one simple act: accepting God. Where are the deprogrammers when we really need them?”18 As always there have been prominent exceptions to the dominant trend of reaction, for example Jann Wenner’s highly appreciative review of Slow Train Coming in RollingStone,19 in which he hails the record as one of Dylan’s greatest ever. But in general the tone of the response leaves us with a strong and rather depressing sense of déjàvu.

All this is not of course to suggest that the country style albums are among Dylan’s most notable achievements, or that there are no disturbing tendencies of thought and feeling in Slow Train Coming. The point is rather that a tone which we can recognise appears in all these periodic condemnations of Dylan’s changes of direction, a tone which goes beyond specific criticism of elements of content. It is a tone of moral outrage, and also distinctly proprietorial. It seems to suggest that Dylan should not be allowed to change and grow (and growth is, need it be said, impossible without change), that if for instance he adopts an “unacceptable” set of beliefs he is betraying those who depend on him for moral leadership, that he should be accountable to his audience for his actions and his attitudes. It is the same old “spokesman for a generation” syndrome which Dylan was obliged to deflate in 1964-5, and it seems altogether likely that, in addition to the dictates of his own inner needs, one of the factors which precipitates his sometimes startling switches of viewpoint is precisely the need to resist such expectations.

The sense that this argument has been rehearsed before, though in different terms, and that it has always proved to be his detractors who have had to come to terms with Dylan and not vice versa, seems not to impress itself on musical journalists. Dylan himself has said of his Newport experience that “It’s like going out to the desert and screaming and then having little kids throw their sandbox at you.”20 It was not ― and this is at the heart of the matter ― just the artistic change which disturbed the little kids; it was the move away from explicit political commentary, from what Dylan himself never called “protest”, and especially the abjurance of any public role as spokesman for his generation and of any kind of responsibility other than that of the artist towards his material. His rejection of the simplistic and the superficial in all such contexts, in particular his resistance to all those debilitating tendencies in the modern world which can be associated with the term “journalism”, has been radical and undeviating, and his alertness and style in dealing with the entrapments of the media compel our admiration and applause. Ewan MacColl could scarcely have picked a less appropriate way to detract from Dylan’s achievement than to suggest that for him “journalism is more important than art”, for his nineteen-sixties’ interviews are classic documents in the defusing and neutralization of the journalist, and the art of approaching real issues through exposing the hollowness of stock attitudes. I shall have occasion later to examine in more detail Dylan’s relations with the media and with his public.

However little responsibility Dylan has been prepared to accept for his “generation”, there can be little doubt that he has modified its consciousness; and not only his own immediate generation but those which have followed it. Again and again he has shown himself uniquely responsive to the underlying pressures and tendencies of his time, to such an extent that he has been able to tell people what they felt before they themselves realised that they were feeling it ― which is one reason why so often his public has taken time to catch up with his moves. This kind of sensitivity has amounted on occasions to something like clairvoyance. His most famous anticipation of an actual event relates to the Watergate scandal. In 1974, the year of Nixon’s disgrace, Dylan was touring the United States for the first time since his motor cycle accident of 1966. On the Before the Flood double concert album recorded live during that tour, he sings “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” which contains the lines:

Goodness hides behind its gates

But even the president of the United States

Sometimes must have

To stand naked.

The words are acknowledged by an overwhelming burst of applause from the audience. The song must have been written nearly ten years earlier, for it was included in Bringing It All Back Home which was released in March 1965.

Dylan’s central significance is that he has destroyed the notorious gap between “high” and “popular” art. Because he is a rock musician it is natural that his musical background should have received more attention than his literary interests, but one of the keys to his success is that he has combined the instincts of a popular musician, and those which as a song writer he inherits ultimately from the oral composers of songs and ballads, with the very different kinds of approach and activity which belong to the literary writer. He is himself fully aware of this in spite of sometimes claiming the contrary. He has been at pains to play down his “poet” role in many interviews, preferring to refer to himself as a “song and dance man”, a “trapeze artist”, and even just a “guitar player” - not surprisingly, in view of the approach of most of his questioners. The authors of Bob Dylan:AnIllustratedDiscographyhave however turned up an October 1965 interview on Radio Detroit in which they quote him as saying (their paraphrase) that “his work can’t be called songs any more and that they need a new description as he regards them as a new form of expression”.21

Dylan has said a number of things on the subject of “influences’ which it is as well to bear in mind when touching on the subject of his literary roots. In the poem ‘My Life in a Stolen Moment’ he observes that “there’s too many to mention and I might leave one out”; he acknowledges Woody Guthrie and Big Joe Williams but reminds us that the decisive influences come from the fleeting, multifarious sights and sounds encountered in everyday living:

Open up yer eyes an’ ears an’ yer influenced

an’ there’s nothing you can do about it…

In one of his ‘11 Outlined Epitaphs’ he estimates those influences as “hundreds thousands / perhaps millions”. All the same it seems that there were a number of individual artists who made a particularly strong impression at the time his work was becoming fused into that special amalgam of music and poetry peculiar to him. Woody Guthrie’s contribution is both well-known and inescapable: his presence behind the early songs is overwhelming, even those in which Dylan’s individuality is most assured. Turning to more “literary” figures, Michael Gray adduces by close textual study verbal parallels between Dylan and Blake, Browning and Eliot which are certainly remarkable but which could sometimes reflect coincidence as much as indebtedness. Strangely, though, he makes no mention at all of two European poets whose influence on Dylan is both acknowledged and a matter of copious record, namely Rimbaud and the early Brecht.

It is true that the way these writers affected Dylan is not easily brought out by textual analysis. Apart from one or two rather crude examples their influence is general and diffuse rather than verbally specific. (One such exception is ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, which clearly has as a model Brecht’s ‘Concerning the Infanticide Marie Farrar’: not only are there obvious similarities of form and content, but Dylan claims to have made his song in the same way that Brecht made his poem, refashioning the words of a newspaper report.22) The influence is none the less important. The poems and ballads in Brecht’s first book of verse Hauspostille(he used to chant some of them in a harsh and crude voice to his own guitar accompaniment) are a major formative presence behind Dylan’s first albums; as Woody Guthrie taught him that a simple song could be a poem, so Brecht taught him that a poem could also be a song. I am sure, again, that the drug-orientated and visionary songs from Bringing It All Back Home through Highway 61 Revisited to Blonde on Blonde are profoundly, if diffusely, influenced by the Rimbaud of LesIlluminations.

Perhaps equally important is the effect which the life-styles of these poets had on the formation of Dylan’s image (and because of his public situation his projection of successive “images” has a far more intimate relation to Dylan’s art than can be imagined for any solely literary figure). The stereotype of the anarchic, antisocial, vagabond poet, which Brecht developed in such early plays as Baal and Im Dickicht der Städte, was taken directly from Rimbaud (as Martin Esslin points out in his study of Brecht23), and Dylan inherited it from both of them. It seems entirely likely too that the mythical adolescence which Dylan invented for himself – repeated flights from home to the freedom of the road ― owed something to the realities of Rimbaud’s life as well as much to the Woody Guthrie hobo tradition. References to the significance of Rimbaud and Brecht to Dylan’s early development can be checked in Anthony Scaduto’s biography, but Rimbaud in particular seems to have remained of interest to Dylan throughout the seventies. He is referred to in a song on Blood on the Tracks, appears in Dylan’s Jacket notes for Desire, and is mentioned in a 1978 Playboyinterview.24 However, all this should not be made too much of: when all is said and done it is the stuff of life which influences an artist most. Having drawn attention to these two writers whose relevance to the formative stages of Dylan’s development has been rather overlooked, I shall leave the question of influences aside until the specifics of looking at particular songs dictate otherwise.

In general my concern with Dylan’s lyrics will be with how they work rather than with what they mean. Michael Gray is right to assert that “What Dylan does not do … is to offer a sustained, cohesive philosophy of life, intellectually considered and checked for contradictions.” He is too immediate for that, too alive in the moment, and too mercurial. There is however one persistent area of preoccupation with which he is recurrently concerned, and that is religion. It is not (at least until Slow Train Coming) something which he sets out to define and elucidate, not a “message” that he strives to convey; rather it is something which will not leave him alone, which again and again obtrudes on his consciousness and asserts its claims through his songs. It represents, in the last resort, a part of his personality which has not been under his control, which repeatedly breaks through into consciousness in the form of persistent themes and obsessive images. As such it is important and interesting enough, or so it appears to me, to be isolated and considered as an autonomous entity in Dylan’s art, and a chapter of this book will be devoted to examining it.

Beyond that, I shall make few forays into the risky territory of “interpretation”. Dylan has long had to bear the cross of having his songs scoured and dissected in the search for keys and codes, and to some extent he has brought it on himself: the obscurity of much of his writing, together with his undoubted penchant

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