Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
Episode Thirty Two: Moon. The harvest moon is big and bright these October nights.
Informed commentary by a lover of and major contributor to musical Americana. Hear how much you've missed and how much young Bobby Zimmerman sopped up through long and cold Hibbing nights listening to the radio.
Around 50:00 Dylan commences reading the Slim Gaillard passage from Kerouac's On the Road and then cues up a Gaillard number.
Buffalo Springfield, For What It's Worth
Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues
Bob Dylan, It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)
Barry McGuire, Eve of Destruction
Creedence Clearwater Revival, Bad Moon Rising
The Who, Won't Get Fooled Again
Rolling Stones, Gimme Shelter
Bob Dylan, Masters of War
Bob Dylan, Not Dark Yet. But it's getting there . . .
Johnny Rivers, Positively Fourth Street.
Of all the versions of my recorded songs, the Johnny Rivers one was my favorite. It was obvious that we were from the same side of town, had been read the same citations, came from the same musical family and were cut from the same cloth. When I listened to Johnny’s version of “Positively 4th Street,” I liked his version better than mine. I listened to it over and over again. Most of the cover versions of my songs seemed to take them out into left field somewhere, but Rivers’s version had the mandate down — the attitude and melodic sense to complete and surpass even the feeling that I had put into it. It shouldn’t have surprised me, though. He had done the same thing with “Maybellene” and “Memphis,” two Chuck Berry songs. When I heard Johnny sing my song, it was obvious that life had the same external grip on him as it did on me. Bob Dylan , Chronicles
Mary Travers interviews Bob Dylan. Not a cover but interesting to the true Dylan aficionado.
Joan Baez, Hard Rain
Gary U.S. Bonds, From a Buick Six
Peter, Paul, and Mary, Too Much of Nothing
Arlo Guthrie, Percy's Song
Byrds, Chimes of Freedom
Jimi Hendrix, All Along the Watchtower
Stephen Stills, Ballad of Hollis Brown
McGuinn, Harrison, Clapton, Petty et al., My Back Pages
Marianne Faithful, Visions of Johanna
But nothing touches the original. This is the bard at his incandescent best. Mid-'60s. Blonde on Blonde album.
More later. Time to rustle up some vittles for wifey, pour myself a stiff one and get tuned up for Bongino. Enjoy your Saturday night.
I forgot how good this is. He played better guitar in the old days, and could do amazing things with his voice.
Tomorrow, Bob Dylan turns 81.
Can one get tired of Dylan? That would be like getting tired of America. It would be like getting to the point where no passage in Kerouac brings a tingle to the spine or a tear to the eye, to the point where the earthly road ends and forever young must give way to knocking on heaven's door. The scrawny Jewish kid from Hibbing Minnesota, son of an appliance salesman, was an unlikely bard, but bard he became. He's been at it a long, long time, and his body of work is as vast and as variegated as America herself. We old fans from way back who were with him from the beginning are still finding gems unheard as we ourselves enter the twilight where it's not dark yet, but getting there. But it is a beautiful fade-out from a world that cannot last.
A tip of the hat to Bro Inky for sending me to Powerline where Scott Johnson has a couple of celebratory pieces with plenty of links to Dylan covers. Here's one and here's the other. An excerpt from the first:
In his illuminating City Journal essay on Pete Seeger — “America’s most successful Communist” — Howard Husock placed Dylan in the line of folk agitprop in which Seeger took pride of place. Husock’s essay is an important and entertaining piece. Dylan is only a small part of the story Husock has to tell, however, and Husock therefore does not pause long enough over Dylan to observe how quickly Dylan burst the confines of agitprop, found his voice, and tapped into his own vein of the Cosmic American Music. Looking back on his long career, one can discern his respect for the tradition as well as his ambition to take his place at its head.
April Stevens' and Nino Tempo's version of Deep Purple became a number one hit in 1963. I liked it when it first came out, and I've enjoyed it ever since. A while back I happened to hear it via Sirius satellite radio and was drawn into it like never before. But its lyrics, penned by Mitchell Parish, are pure sweet kitsch:
When the deep purple falls over sleepy garden walls
And the stars begin to twinkle in the night
Through the mist of a memory you wander back to me
Breathing my name with a sigh.In the still of the night once again I hold you tight
Though you're gone, your love lives on when moonlight beams
And as long as my heart will beat, sweet lover we'll always meet
Here in my deep purple dreams.
Kitsch is bad art, but what is the essence of kitsch, and why is it bad? Presumably it is sentimentality that makes kitsch kitsch, and it is this sentimentality that makes kitsch aesthetically and perhaps even morally dubious. One self-indulgently 'wallows' in a song like this, giving into its 'cheap' emotions. The emotions are 'false' and 'faked.' The melody and lyrics are formulaic and predictable, 'catchy.' The listener allows himself to be manipulated by the songwriter who is out to 'push the listener's buttons.' The aesthetic experience is not authentic but vicarious. And so on. Theodor Adorno would not approve.
There is great art and there is kitsch. I partake of both, enjoy both, and know the difference. What is wrong with a little kitsch in moderation? No, I don't collect Hummel figurines and my stoa is not carpeted with astroturf. What is sentimentality and what is wrong with it? There is a literature on this, but I've read almost none of it. Who has time?
This brings me to Bob Dylan who was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature. Now I've been a Dylan fan from the early '60s. In the '60s I was more than a fan; I was a fanatic who would brook no criticism of his hero. And I still maintain that in the annals of American popular music no one surpasses him as a songwriter.
But the Nobel Prize for Literature? That's a bit much, and an ominous foreshadowing of the death of the book and of quiet reading in this hyperkinetic age of tweets and sound bites. A large theme. Get to it conservative bloggers. Why do I have to do all the work?
Dylan's most sentimental song? I don't know, but Forever Young is in serious contention.
A long, long way from It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding and Visions of Johanna (Marianne Faithful) and Desolation Row. Here is the original of Visions of Johanna.
As promised last week.
Baby Let Me Follow You Down, 1962. From Bob's first album. Lord almighty it is good to hear this again. Dylan played better guitar and harmonic in the early days. The surging, full-throated harp beats the sometimes-annoying tweets and toots of his later harmonic playing. Dylan opens by telling us that he learned this song from Rick [Eric] von Schmidt when he met him one day in "the green pastures of Harvard University." Was he thinking of Woody Guthrie's Pastures of Plenty, 1944? Dylan's effort apparently derives from von Schmidt's Baby Let Me Lay it on You.
Here is a real gem of a find: Bob Dylan Jamming with Eric von Schmidt, May, 1964. Eric von Schmidt, Envy the Thief. Back to the Dylan top ten.
Blowin' in the Wind. From the Freewheelin' album, Bob's second. His best civil rights anthem. Topical but allusive.
A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall. Also from The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. Said to have been written during the Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962. I remember it like it was yesterday. Joan Baez's transcendently beautiful cover. Forgive me if I gush a bit. I'm enjoying a Saturday night cocktail: Tequila + Aperol. Straight up.
Positively Fourth Street. The ultimate put-down song.
With God on Our Side. From the third album.
Spanish Harlem Incident. Fourth album, We'll make do with the Byrds' cover. Not that it isn't good.
Its All Over Now, Baby Blue. Fifth album, probably my favorite. This one goes out to Charaine H., and our bittersweet relationship.
Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you
Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you
The vagabond who's rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore
Strike another match, go start anew
And it's all over now, baby blue.
It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding. Going to a Dylan concert in those days was like going to church. Absolute silence except for the man on stage standing alone singing his own songs and accompanying himself on guitar and harp. We hung on every word.
It Take a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry. From Dylan's 6th album, Highway 61 Revisited.
I Want You. Blonde on Blonde, Dylan's 7th.
All Along the Watchtower, John Wesley Harding.
Hector C. asked me to name my top ten favorite Dylan songs. With pleasure.
Don't Think Twice. I first heard this in the Peter, Paul, and Mary version circa 1962 or '63. Deeply moved by it, I bought the 45 rpm single and noted that the song was written by one B. Dylan. I pronounced the name to myself as 'Dial in' and had a sense that this songwriter was about to speak to me and my life. And here he is still speaking to my 'lived experience' 60 years later.
Chimes of Freedom. With Joan Osborne, NOT Joan Baez! Byrds' version. No Dylan, no folk rock.
Farewell Angelina. Joanie's version. No Baez, no Dylan. She took the scruffy kid under her wing and introduced him to her well-established audience.
Just Like a Woman. Better than the Blonde on Blonde version.
Few songs capture the 'magic' of the '60s like this one. But you had to have been there, of a certain impressionable age, with the right disposition, with an open mind, and an open heart, idealistic, a seeker, and at least a little alienated from the larger society and the quiet desperation and dead usages of parents and relatives . . . .
YouTuber comment: "This Bob Dylan song brings me to tears and I don't know why. I'm 76 years old and remember when it was new. It still is." Comment on the comment: "This is a nostalgic feeling for the passing of the time. A saudade of a time whose dreams seem real. I know about it. I'm 71."
Not Dark Yet. YouTuber comment: "All my life, Dylan has been able to touch my soul. This is undoubtedly one of his best."
An alternative Dylan top ten next week.
It pains me a little to say it, given my own past devotion, but some cold perspective is needed here. Bob Dylan was—from 1962 to the early 1980s—an extraordinary singer-songwriter and, in terms of quantity of great material, simply without equal. For the last 40 years, though, he has mostly been trading on the reputation he built in those years. There are exceptions to this judgment, yes, but not many: the 1983 Infidels album, a few tracks on the 1997 Time Out of Mind, and “Things Have Changed” from the soundtrack of the 2000 film Wonder Boys, for example.
Did Dylan deserve the Nobel Prize for Literature that he won in 2016? I’m not sure; he’s probably not sure, either. He was consistently good for about 20 years, an amazingly long time for a rock star. And he can take credit for spawning a whole musical genre. Many other songwriters in the same musical territory, such as Paul Simon or Bruce Springsteen, have, at their best, been as good or almost as good—but not nearly so often, or for so long.
The truth is, Bob Dylan, now 80, will never get “back on form.” Aging rock stars don’t do that; no one does. One of the most quoted lyrics of “Murder Most Foul” informs us that “It’s 36 hours past Judgment Day.” Dylan has been unquestionably the most influential songwriter of his era; no one can take that away from him. But as a long-time fan, I can’t help but wish that he had hung up his songwriting boots decades ago. His musical stature could then have remained closer to that of artists who die young, unsullied by the inevitable failures that must come to all careers—even one as extraordinary as his.
Can one get tired of Dylan? That would be like getting tired of America. It would be like getting to the point where no passage in Kerouac brings a tingle to the spine or a tear to the eye, to the point where the earthly road ends and forever young must give way to knocking on heaven's door. The Bard's been at it a long, long time, and his body of work is as vast and as variegated as America herself. We old fans from way back who were with him from the beginning are still finding gems unheard as we ourselves enter the twilight where it's not dark yet, but getting there. But it is a beautiful fade-out from a world that cannot last.
Remember Me. With beautiful shots of Suze Rotolo. See Suze Rotolo and the Songs She Inspired.
High Water. (For Charley Patton)
High water risin', risin' night and day
All the gold and silver are being stolen away
Big Joe Turner lookin' East and West
From the dark room of his mind
He made it to Kansas City Twelfth Street and Vine
Nothing standing there
High water everywhere
High water risin', the shacks are slidin' down
Folks lose their possessions and folks are leaving town
Bertha Mason shook, it broke it
Then she hung it on a wall
Says, "You're dancin' with whom they tell you to Or you don't dance at all"
It's tough out there High water everywhere
I got a cravin' love for blazing speed got a hopped up Mustang Ford
Jump into the wagon, love, throw your panties overboard
I can write you poems, make a strong man lose his mind
I'm no pig without a wig I hope you treat me kind
Things are breakin' up out there
High water everywhere.
High water risin', six inches 'bove my head
Coffins droppin' in the street Like balloons made out of lead
Water pourin' into Vicksburg, don't know what I'm going to do
"Don't reach out for me," she said "Can't you see I'm drownin' too?"
It's rough out there.
High water everywhere
Well, George Lewis told the Englishman, the Italian and the Jew
"You can't open your mind, boys To every conceivable point of view"
They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway Five
Judge says to the High Sheriff "I want him dead or alive
Either one, I don't care."
High Water everywhere
Well, the cuckoo is a pretty bird, she warbles as she flies
I'm preachin' the word of God I'm puttin' out your eyes
I asked Fat Nancy for something to eat, she said, "Take it off the shelf
As great as you are a man,
You'll never be greater than yourself"
I told her I didn't really care.
High water everywhere
I'm getting' up in the morning I believe I'll dust my broom
Keeping away from the women
I'm givin' 'em lots of room
Thunder rolling over Clarksdale, everything is looking blue
I just can't be happy, love
Unless you're happy too
It's bad out there
High water everywhere.
We feel intensely and care deeply. We are immersed in life and its passions and projects, its loves and its hates. But wisdom counsels detachment and withdrawal, mentally if not physically: one does not have to haul off to a monastery to cultivate detachment. Retreat into the serene and ataraxic can however be protracted unto nirvanic oblivion, and it is in Buddhism. That might be taking it too far.
Renunciation and world-flight in Christianity, by contrast, are for the sake of a higher life in which finite personhood is, in an Hegelian trope, aufgehoben, simultaneously cancelled and preserved. "I came that you may have life and have it more abundantly." (John 10:10) Jesus did not preach extinction. He preached personal transformation. Buddhism is radical: the renunciation is total. This aligns it with metaphysical pessimism and indeed nihilism, whereas Christianity is full of hope and promise.
One thing is clear: to seek the final fulfillment of desire in this life is a mistake. But could desire itself be a mistake, as the Second Noble Truth has it? If desire itself is a mistake, then life is a mistake.
But you and I have been through that
And this is not our fate;
Let us not talk falsely now
The hour is getting late.
Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower
Analysis here.
Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One (Simon and Shuster, 2004), p. 13:
He was different from the rest of the teen idols, had a great guitarist who played like a cross between a honky-tonk hero and a barn-dance fiddler. Nelson had never been a bold innovator like the early singers who sang like they were navigating burning ships. He didn't sing desperately, do a lot of damage, and you'd never mistake him for a shaman.
Nosiree, Bob, no shaman was he. There is more interesting material on Nelson in the vicinity of this excerpt. Dylan discusses Ricky Nelson in connection with his 1961 hit, Travelin' Man. But the great guitar work of James Burton to which Dylan alludes was much more in evidence in Hello Mary Lou. The Dylan Chronicles look like they will hold the interest of this old 60's Dylan fanatic.
Here is a better taste of James Burton and his Fender Telecaster with E. P. And here he is with the Big O dueling with Springsteen. Here he jams with Nelson's sons. Orbison on Nelson.
It has been over thirty years now since Nelson died in a plane crash while touring. The plane, purchased from Jerry Lee Lewis, went down on New Year's Eve 1985. That travelin' man died with his boots on — as I suspect he would have wanted to. In an interview in 1977 he said that he could not see himself growing old.
Be careful what you wish for.
Bob Dylan turns 77 today. Scott Johnson offers two fine columns in celebration.
Thanks, Bob, for all the music and all the memories, and for your wonderfully individual and self-reliant appropriation and celebration of Americana. It wouldn't have been the long strange trip it's been without you. May you die with your boots on.
Not Dark Yet (the 1997 lament)
Make of it what you will. Did Dylan sell his soul to the devil for name and fame?
As a Dylan aficionado since the early '60s, I can tell you that Dylan is never quite straight in an interview. He is a story-teller and shape-shifter. He is a legend in his own mind, but unlike most of us who are legends in our own minds, he has made of the legend in his mind a legend of his time.
The man in me will hide sometimes
To keep from being seen.
But that's just because he doesn't want
To turn into some machine.
Could the author of Father of Day, Father of Night have made a pact with the Prince of Darkness?
A bum knee sent me to the hot tub yesterday afternoon for a long soak. There I struck up a conversation with a 20-year-old grandson of a neighbor. He hails from Minnesota like seemingly half of the people I meet here this time of year. "Which town?," I asked. "Red Wing" was the reply. And then I remembered the old Dylan tune, "The Walls of Red Wing," from his topical/protest period, about a boys' reform school. The kid knew about the correctional facility at Red Wing, and he had heard of Bob Dylan. But I knew that Dylan could not be a profitable topic of conversation, popular music appreciation being a generational thing.
So we turned to hiking. He wanted to climb The Flatiron but his grandmother said, "not on my watch." The wiry, fit kid could easily have negotiated it. So I recommended Hieroglyphic Canyon and Fremont Saddle, hikes to which his overly protective granny could have no rational objection.
Music is a generational thing, or at least popular music is. But such pursuits as hiking, backpacking, hunting, and rafting bring the men of different generations together. The old philosopher and the young adventurer came away from their encounter satisfied.
Here is Joan Baez' angel-throated rendition, and here is that of the man himself. Here I am in Peralta Canyon on the descent from Fremont Saddle: