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Beyond Blowin’ in the Wind; In Defense of Bob Dylan (not that he needs it)
A friendly response to Old Bathos’s formidable post (linked below). For the record, I’m not certain there’s a right or wrong answer to this, art and music tastes being so subjective, but I felt compelled to respond, nonetheless.
“Faux profundity,” they say. “Intentional ambiguity and hackneyed themes,” are the complaints as eyes roll at his Nobel Prize.
Bob Dylan comes in for some harsh criticism on Ricochet. And I can understand that. Dylan arrived on the scene in the early ’60s, and he inadvertently came to symbolize the era, an era of cultural changes that conservatives often lament – the sexual revolution, the cult of self-expression and self-exploration, rebellion for the sake of rebellion, and so on. And there was a lot of faux profundity (John Lennon’s Imagine, which came up in the comments to Bathos’ post is a great example), intentional ambiguity, and hackneyed themes back then. Poseurs abounded.
But Bob Dylan was not among them. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think he’s some down-to-earth normie, I’m sure he’s a really weird guy. He liked to mess with reporters and fans and never gives straight answers in interviews, with a jerk’s sense of humor. I’ve read that he once introduced every song at his concert as “Mr. Tambourine Man,” but never actually played it. He’s probably insufferable in person, I have no idea and I don’t care. His art has inspired millions, myself among them.
It’s not just the poetry of his lyrics, it’s the whole sound of the songs. Without the music, without his voice, the instruments, the lyrics don’t carry the same punch. Bringing all that together, his creations do what all good art does, they communicate something about the human experience that can’t be adequately conveyed by direct language. Dylan’s not the only or the first person to master this art form, but he’s one of the best, and he made it much more popular than it ever was before.
He was able to do this because he had a genius ability to indirectly instill feelings and moods and ideas in his listeners, to tap into some memory of theirs, to remind them of something they’ve already known or felt, maybe way down below the conscious level. Yes, sometimes the poetry is weird and seems random, but I hope to explain, below, with a couple of examples, why that’s not the case. (I’ve already defended Blowin’ in the Wind as something more than preachy fluff, so I’ll focus on other songs here.)
In some songs, the lyrics are easy to understand but carry meaning below the surface. That’s common enough, but again, Dylan’s awfully good at it. One Too Many Mornings is a fine example. Dylan could have just written some straightforward lyric saying something like, “I’m very tired and stressed, and I don’t know if things will be any better tomorrow.” Clear enough for the purposes of providing the basic information to the listener. He could have done that. But instead, he chose to sing, quietly, weakly, with a softly picked guitar in the background:
“Down the street the dogs are barking,
And the day is getting dark,
As the night comes in falling,
The dogs will lose their bark,
And the silent night will shatter
from the sounds inside my mind,
As I’m one too many mornings
And a thousand miles behind.”
(Dylan was about 22 when he wrote that song, having never been married, had kids or a real job. How he was able to capture exactly what it’s like to be a 40-something guy after a long day, loaded with responsibility and feeling exhausted and sorry after an argument with the wife, I have no idea. But he did.)
Now, I know, the lyrics to One Too Many Mornings, while they may be saying more than meets the ear, at least make sense on the surface. And this song is not of earth-shattering artistic importance, or much different than any number of songs, but it’s still small and brilliant. It resonates, which is why, though it is sort of in the back catalog of Dylan’s songs, it’s been covered by over 30 artists, from Johnny Cash to Burl Ives to Flat & Scruggs and others. (The David Gray version is particularly good.)
But what about Dylan’s more random lyrics, nonsensical images out of nowhere? Well, it’s the same idea, I think – that is, with those songs too, he is trying to convey something that just can’t be said directly, but carried to your subconscious with images and words that link up with ones you’ve been storing in your mind.
Here’s an example. Wanting to convey this message, Dylan could have used something very direct, like, “When you’re young and some tragedy, or some heartbreak, forces you to grow up too early when your childhood world crumbles, and you face a harsh reality, pain, and real loneliness for the first time, you enter a tough new world. But you have to stand up and face it, and after a while, you’ll get used to it and find your way forward.” And that would have been okay.
But instead, he wrote, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” a song that conveys the same thing, but with imagery that makes the point in a way no simple lyric could. The sound of the song drives the message home, too, starting with a sharp, heart cutting, harmonica note, then a soft-electric guitar that almost sounds like it’s trying to comfort you, and then Dylan’s harsh voice on top, delivering the brutal truth that you need to know:
“You must leave now,
Take what you need, you think will last.
But whatever you wish to keep,
You better grab it fast.
Yonder stands your orphan with his gun,
Crying like a fire in the sun.
Look out the saints are coming through,
And it’s all over now, baby blue.
The highway is for gamblers,
Better use your sense.
Take what you have gathered from coincidence.
The empty handed painter from your street.
Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets.
The sky, too, is folding under you.
And it’s all over now, baby blue.”
It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue is a song about an individual’s pain and challenge. But Dylan’s weird mix of words and images often goes toward more universal themes. To describe Hell, Dylan could have said, “Hell is the absence of God, abandonment, desolation from all that is good, and in that world, everything is perverted and sad and empty.” But instead, he sang mournfully, with a painfully beautiful guitar in the background:
They’re selling postcards of the hanging,
They’re painting passports brown,
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors,
The circus is in town.
Here comes the blind commissioner,
They’ve got him in a trance,
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker,
The other is in his pants.
And the riot squad, they’re restless,
They need somewhere to go,
As Lady and I look out tonight from
Desolation Row.”
It goes on from there with similar scenes – for over 11 minutes! I don’t advocate going through the references and allusions in songs like Desolation Row, trying to figure out precisely why, for example, Albert Einstein is disguised as Robin Hood and sniffing drainpipes. Better to just let the images come to you, like you’re looking at a huge painting filled with different scenes, and the feeling will emerge. Nothing is right on Desolation Row, and even scientific genius is worthless and unwanted. (And yet, interestingly, people are apparently drawn to the place – “And though her eyes are fixed upon Noah’s great rainbow / she spends her time peeking into Desolation Row.”)
Now, I admit, I can’t tell you for certain that Desolation Row is meant to symbolize Hell, or the absence of God. But that’s what the images, and the sounds, convey to me. When those images link up with whatever other stuff I have floating around in my subconscious, that’s the feeling I get, that’s the message I receive. I think it’s an objectively defensible interpretation – after all, look at the images in the song. Like the Einstein passage described above, it’s a set of bizarre scenes with all kinds of characters from history and literature who are all sad, confused, selfish, twisted, and mean. There’s no love, no contentment, no order, no happiness, nothing sacred. Everything is broken and hopeless.
And who, and what, is missing from this list of characters? To me, that answer is clear. This is a song about the cold emptiness of a world without God. (I maintain that a longing for God – for perfect goodness, for righteousness, for truth – is a major theme in many of Dylan’s songs, even long before he explicitly wrote about God. For the best example, listen to “Visions of Johanna.” If that’s a hackneyed theme in our time, well, don’t be surprised if you look out one day and see that blind commissioner coming down the street.)
I’ve just tried to pull out a few examples. Obviously, he has hundreds of songs, not all of them great, but enough of them are to warrant the attention he’s gotten.
No, Dylan’s not a hack, not a faux intellectual, not a pie-eyed hippie, not just another preachy folk singer, not just a shallow celebrity. He’s created a body of work that has a serious place in Western literature, that captures its time in history, and that captivated the people who encountered it, and which will survive for centuries. Your kids and grand-kids will study these songs in college literature courses, and they’ll understand their own culture better for having done so. If that’s not worthy of a Nobel Prize, I don’t know what is.
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A fine post, D.A.V., and obviously one that took a lot of work in the writing. It’s a strong defense of someone that, as you pointed out, is not going to be everybody’s R> cup of tea. There’s a reasonable tendency to resist, to strike back at artists who always seem to get the breaks from writers, critics, and historians. That doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily wrong.
Thanks D. A. I happen to be a fan of Dylan’s music. If that makes me a minority here at Ricochet on this issue, so be it.
I think, for me at least, Tangled Up in Blue is a good example of what you’re talking about. Not one single detail matches, but it still feels like a description of what I’ve done in my own life.
“… boring, repetitive melodies, obscure lyrics, and a voice like a dog caught in a barbed wire fence.” I might have agreed until I bought the album Time Out of Mind.
I know where he got it. Back in 1972 I visited northern Minnesota. Bob Dylan grew up in Hibbing in the heart of the Iron Range. That place was the picture of desolation. The iron ore was played out and the town was mired in poverty.
What I have always liked is Dylan’s sense of humor. His words often make me laugh. He pokes fun at the pomposity of others but (almost) never in a mean way.
I was among those who joined the pig-pile of Dylan’s Where Have All the Flowers Gone, but insufficiently noted that the facile lyrics in that song are an exception to a long career of great songwriting—ignoring Masters of War. Your insight that his lyrics seek something that can’t be said directly is spot on. When Leonard Bernstein suggested that discordant jazz notes often represent something “in between,” he well could have been talking about Dylan’s words.
When Highway 61 Revisited came out, Like a Rolling Stone received vast AM airplay. I’d cruise around waiting for it to come over the vibrasonic in my Pontiac. (Ah, to be young with 29 cent a gallon gasoline and careless with college assignments.) Desolation Row didn’t get any airplay, so I had to return home and crank up the Thorens to ponder Bette Davis, The Good Samaritan, Einstein, Dr. Filth, et al. interwoven with Charlie McCoy’s magnificent accompaniment. A fine selection! Thanks.
I am and have always been a Dylan fan, likewise Paul Simon and Randy Newman. Are there any songs more “male” than “Lay Lady Lay“, “You Can Keep Your Hat On” or “Me and Julio”? All three songwriters put out some pretty treachly stuff, but that’s often a part of the artistic journey. How else do you explain “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer?” But Dylan, Simon and Newman were each capable of amazing stuff, evocative, essential, simple. But these are songs, not poems, and without the music, the performance, they are lost. The music elevates the words.
Still my favorite. I used a line for a quick invite to a birthday celebration (at 11:30PM after my pharmacy tech shift).
I wholeheartedly endorse this post! Listened to Dylan a lot in the 60s and 70s. Drifted away from him for many years but over the past decade have come back, often with a greater appreciation for the songs he wrote back then but also discovering some gems he’s done since 1980. Can’t resist adding some here.
I don’t think Dylan ever released his own studio version of Tears of Rage. He wrote the lyrics and Richard Manuel of The Band the music. We carried you in our arms on Independence Day/And now you’d throw us all aside and put us on our way/Oh, what dear daughter ‘neath the sun would treat a father so/To wait upon him hand and foot, yet always answer no?
Dylan wrote and recorded Blind Willie McTell in the early 8os but only released a version of it a decade later. Haunting sound and lyrics. This version says Dylan and Mark Knopfler but it is Mick Taylor on guitar with Knopfler producing.
Released by Dylan in 1989, this is a cover of Ring Them Bells by Sarah Jarosz. Ring them bells Sweet Martha for the poor man’s son/Ring them bells so the world will know that God is one.
When I began school at age 5, I was something of a clueless misfit child. Or at least it seemed that way to me. At age eight, after a couple of years of my sister reading to me, I learned to read. Reading Old Yeller in one long sitting changed my life. I was no longer a clueless misfit, just a misfit. Through reading I could dream.
The first Dylan song I ever heard was Desolation Row. My sister was home from college for the holidays and we were driving back from eating pizza on a Saturday night and WLAC radio played the eleven minute song. I suspect the DJ needed a bathroom break. As I listened to the strange imagery I asked Who is that? My sister said I think that is Bob Dylan. I was 14 at the time and it changed my life every bit as much as learning to read. The great thing about art in any medium is that sometimes it reaches into your soul. And when it does that, one thing leads to another, day after day and year after year.
Dylan became like John Denver’s Old Guitar for me. “It introduced me to some friends of mine and brightened up some days and it helped me make it through some lonely nights.”
I think “Flowers” was Pete Seeger.
Thank goodness for The Basement Tapes and Music from Big Pink so that we can hear Richard Manuel interpret Bob Dylan. I wish he’d done more.
And is this the only time that Mick Taylor played on a Dylan track? That’s what he should have done after leaving the Stones. He’s too great of a guitarist to be forgotten.
And Taylor isn’t even on the version of the song Dylan finally released years later which has no guitar, just piano!
You’re absolutely right! Blowin’ in the Wind was the earlier song under discussion & I confused the two. Ah, age. Thanks for the correction!
Mick Taylor plays guitar on the Infidels album, along with Dylan and Knopfler.
Since I came along after the 60s, Dylan belonged to the old musty hippies and folkies and other groups that had failed to heed Townsend’s desire to expire before they aged. The lyrics were interesting, but the voice annoyed, and the sound was dated. Now? I think he’s a remarkable, important voice in American culture, and I am still utterly indifferent.
I think it’s the same with Elvis Costello: you had to be there, and that’s a shame, because there’s a brilliance that transcends the era. Costello, for a long stretch, was as lyrically ingenious as Dylan – if more focused on the vagaries of modern love – and much more musically inventive. But he was never really consecrated as the Voice of an Era by a particular demographic cohort like Dylan.
An able defense of Bob Dylan. I was a fan from my high school days onward and saw him live when he infuriated his fans a second time with his Jesus phase music. He had seen it all before when he “went electric,” causing a portion of the folk music fans to claim he was selling out.
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Your post was linked on the all-Dylan info clearinghouse, http://www.expectingrain.com a couple o’ days ago.
That’s cool. I was not aware of that site. It doesn’t surprise me that there is one, though, as there is quite a group of Dylan followers out there.
There is also a site called https://thebobdylanproject.com/ which purports catalog every single song written or performed by Dylan, plus the notable covers. It’s sort of a “six degrees of Bob Dylan” thing. I can’t imagine having the time to put that together, but I assume they have a bunch of volunteers and contributors.
It’s a great place to find interesting covers of his songs, as they are almost all there, usually with links to youtube or some other streaming service.
The sheer magnitude of the covers they list on that site – pick any modern era musician and they almost certainly have covered a Dylan song at some point – really speaks to his influence in the culture.
I’m one of the nerds who visits expectingrain daily, so I will check out the bobdylanproject too…..and the Dylan Archives in Tulsa, should I ever get back to my home state. Thanks!
Exactly. This is why he won the Nobel Prize, and deserved it. His music is a major stream in the subconscious of our civilization, his words connect its consciousness to its subconscious; and to its conscience–all through his work is a strain of prophecy. And his love songs, from tender to poisoned; no one matches his range there.