I feel that today is a day when it’s incumbent on me to be newsworthy, so I’m writing about ...
Bob Dylan. When the announcement came last month that he had been selected for the Nobel Prize in Literature, the ensuing hue and cry was, as my Lingua Franca colleague Bill Germano has noted, predictable. The notion of Dylan-as-poet had been controversial for more than 50 years. Bobby Zimmerman, of Hibbing, Minn., adopted a poet’s last name and over the years published a book of verse (Tarantula), a superb memoir (Chronicles: Volume One), and several editions of his lyrics within hard covers; the most recent lists for $60 and came out November 1. (Coincidence? Maybe.) Quite a few of his songs are sprinkled with poets’ names, often in pairs: Verlaine and Rimbaud, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. On the other hand, he has always bristled, to put it mildly, whenever anyone used in his presence either of the “p” words: poet or prophet. In 1965, a reporter (the traditional fall guy/gal for Dylan’s barbs) asked if he indeed considered himself a poet. The response, like so many others, was at the same time a joke and not a joke at all: “Oh, I think of myself more as a song and dance man, y’know.” Dylan’s prickly silence on the Nobel, including whether he’ll attend the ceremony, is true to form.
Going back to 1965, a line in Paul Simon’s “A Simple Desultory Philippic” got at how even then Dylan was a pawn in the broader cultural game.
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Is Dylan qualified to win the Nobel? Some people say no because he’s a singer-songwriter. I say hogwash. At the press conference announcing the prize, Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said, “if you look far back, 5,000 years, you discover Homer and Sappho. They wrote poetic texts which were meant to be performed, and it’s the same way for Bob Dylan.” I’m with her.
Does he deserve to win it? Some naysayers have constructed their arguments out of carefully selected bits of bathos, poetic diction, or awkwardness. Aside from the fact that Dylan’s words fully live only when they’re joined to the music, such cherry-picking is way too easy. Dylan has written more than 500 songs over more than 50 years, and they’re so various that one can justify just about any interpretation or judgment through selective quotation. They differ not only in quality but in style, genre and approach; the only major modern artist who’s switched directions so productively so many times is probably Picasso.
Making the case for him is equally vexed. No amount of arm-waving or citing of favorite lines will convince the skeptic; more likely the opposite. However, if you’ll hear me out I’d like to go through just one of his tunes and give a sense of why, to me, it’s an example of literature on a Nobel-worthy plane. The song is the title track from his 1965 (that year again) album Highway 61 Revisited — hardly obscure but not represented on any of his Greatest Hits compilations, either. You can read the complete lyrics at Dylan’s website; here’s the revelatory first stanza:
Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run”
Well Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
God says, “Out on Highway 61”
Give a listen:
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Musically, the song “revisits” the blues (as Dylan had done and would continue to do throughout his career), with the traditional three-chord structure but 16-bar verses instead of the usual 12. The song is electric literally and figuratively — just a few months earlier, Dylan had blown the musical world out of its assumption that he was a “folkie,” by plugging in his guitar. That’s Mike Bloomfield on slide guitar on this track; what’s described in the liner notes as a “police siren” was really Dylan blowing a toy whistle. I have no doubt that Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys had the sound in mind when he constructed “Good Vibrations” a year later.
The lyrics are dense with references and allusions to the blues, including the title: Route 61 runs from Dylan’s native Minnesota down to the Mississippi Delta, and it was at the crossroads of Highway 61 and U.S. 49 that Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the devil. Georgia Sam (in the second verse) was a name the blues singer Blind Willie McTell sometimes performed under, and “Po’ Howard” was a 1940 Leadbelly tune.
But go back to the absolutely astonishing first verse. The first three lines spin Genesis in hip lingo (American Speech had taken note of Abe’s verb as recently as 1958: “When a hipster puts someone on he is pulling his leg”), plus dialogue that mixes Abbott and Costello back-and-forth with absurdity out of Beckett or Ionesco. A mordant Oedipal grace note can be appreciated when you learn Dylan’s father shared the name of the first Jew.
Note also the strong visuals — “40 red-white-and blue shoestrings” — and vivid stage directions, like the way poor Howard points with his gun. He’s only one of an indelible cast of characters Dylan was creating in his early work. Here alone, besides God and Abe, we’ve got Mack the Finger (with his overstocks and lemons, he might own a job-lot dry goods store in Hibbing), Louis the King, the fifth daughter and the rovin’ gambler. They all convene on Highway 61 — a key GPS coordinate in Dylan’s existential address book, along with the Lowlands, Desolation Row, that mysterious Watchtower, Fourth Street, and Maggie’s Farm. That landscape comes out of what the critic Greil Marcus has called “the old, weird America” — the vivid and sometimes scary narratives and imagery of the blues, folk, and old-time music songs of the early 20th century, collected in Harry Smith’s 1952 six-album compilation, Anthology of American Folk Music.
Trying to explain Dylan is a sucker’s game, not least because of all the booby traps he’s set up for anyone foolish enough to try. I guess my main hope is that I don’t end up tarred with the same brush as Mr. Jones of “Ballad of a Thin Man,” that nowhere man who combines the worst qualities of journalists and English professors. Anyway, I’m out. See you on Highway 61.
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