Maverick Philosopher

In October of 2016, I wrote,

This brings me to Bob Dylan who was recently 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 soundbites.

I might have added that Dylan is important in the way Kerouac is.  But is Kerouac a great novelist? Obviously not.  I have enough literary sense to realize that my own love of Kerouac is largely determined by my own quirks and generational affiliation.

Ron Radosh, whom I respect highly, thinks that Dylan deserved the prize.  But David P. Goldman, 'Spengler,' whom I also respect, takes a harsh line:

And so it is with Bob Dylan, parodist, satirist, scammer and snake-oil salesman par excellence. He never hid from us what he had in mind: he's been playing with our heads since high school, finding the lever that loosened our tears, and our wallets. He caught a wave in the early 1960s with the folk revival movement, itself a hoax. We Americans are not a "folk," not in the sense that Johann Gottfried Herder used the term. We do not have the deep memory of autochthonous roots that characterizes European cultures, the hand-me-downs of long-lost pagan experience. We are a people self-created by religious and political impulse.

[. . .]

Of course, it was all a put-on. Woody Guthrie was a middle-class lawyer's son. Pete Seeger was the privileged child of classical musicians who decamped to Greenwich Village. The authenticity of the folk movement stank of greasepaint. But a generation of middle-class kids who, like Holden Caulfield, thought their parents "phony" gravitated to the folk movement. In 1957, Seeger was drunk and playing for pittances at Communist Party gatherings; that's where I first met him, red nose and all. By the early 1960s he was a star again.

To Dylan's credit, he knew it was a scam, and spent the first part of his career playing with our heads. He could do a credible imitation of the camp-meeting come-to-Jesus song ("When the Ship Comes In") and meld pseudo-folk imagery with social-protest sensibility ("A Hard Rain's  a' Gonna Fall"). But he knew it was all play with pop culture ("Lone Ranger and Tonto/Riding down the line/Fixin' everybody's troubles/Everybody's 'cept mine"). When he went electric at the Newport Festival to the hisses of the folk purists, he knew it was another kind of joke.

Only someone who was not moved by the music of that period could write something so extreme.  No doubt there was and is an opportunistic side to Dylan.  He started out an unlikely rock-and roller in high school aping Little Richard, but sensed that the folk scene was where he could make his mark.  And so for a time he played the son of Ramblin' Jack Elliot and the grandson of Woody Guthrie.

In his recent Nobel Prize lecture, Dylan mentions early influences. Let's dig up some of the tunes that inspired him.

Buddy Holly, True Love Ways

I think it was a day or two after that that his [Holly's] plane went down. And somebody – somebody I’d never seen before – handed me a Leadbelly record with the song “Cottonfields” on it. And that record changed my life right then and there. Transported me into a world I’d never known. It was like an explosion went off. Like I’d been walking in darkness and all of the sudden the darkness was illuminated. It was like somebody laid hands on me. I must have played that record a hundred times.

Leadbelly, Cotton Fields

It was on a label I’d never heard of with a booklet inside with advertisements for other artists on the label: Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, the New Lost City Ramblers, Jean Ritchie, string bands. I’d never heard of any of them. But I reckoned if they were on this label with Leadbelly, they had to be good, so I needed to hear them. I wanted to know all about it and play that kind of music. I still had a feeling for the music I’d grown up with, but for right now, I forgot about it. Didn’t even think about it. For the time being, it was long gone.

Sonnie Terry and Brownie McGhee, Key to the Highway.  Just to vex London Ed who hates Eric 'Crapton' as he calls him, here is his Derek and the Dominoes version with Duane Allman. Sound good to me, Ed!

New Lost City Ramblers, Tom Dooley

Jean Ritchie and Doc Watson, What Will I Do with the Baby-O?

By listening to all the early folk artists and singing the songs yourself, you pick up the vernacular. You internalize it. You sing it in the ragtime blues, work songs, Georgia sea shanties, Appalachian ballads and cowboy songs. You hear all the finer points, and you learn the details.

You know what it’s all about. Takin’ the pistol out and puttin’ it back in your pocket. Whippin’ your way through traffic, talkin’ in the dark. You know that Stagger Lee was a bad man and that Frankie was a good girl. You know that Washington is a bourgeois town and you’ve heard the deep-pitched voice of John the Revelator and you saw the Titanic sink in a boggy creek. And you’re pals with the wild Irish rover and the wild colonial boy. You heard the muffled drums and the fifes that played lowly. You’ve seen the lusty Lord Donald stick a knife in his wife, and a lot of your comrades have been wrapped in white linen.

I had all the vernacular down. I knew the rhetoric. None of it went over my head – the devices, the techniques, the secrets, the mysteries – and I knew all the deserted roads that it traveled on, too. I could make it all connect and move with the current of the day. When I started writing my own songs, the folk lingo was the only vocabulary that I knew, and I used it.

Mississippi John Hurt, The Ballad of Stagger Lee

Mississippi John Hurt, You Got to Walk that Lonesome Valley

Mississippi John Hurt, You Are My Sunshine

Blind Willie Johnson, John the Revelator

George F. Will, The Prize that Bob Dylan Really Deserves

A lot happened to young Bob in a few short years, from Song to Woody to Like a Rolling Stone.

I saw the movie and it moved me. How about you?

Here is a good article about Dylan's falling out with Seeger.  

A Complete Unknown isn’t that interested in clarifying this point. Because the film almost entirely ignores politics. And it should ignore Dylan’s politics, whatever they might be. But it makes an unforgivable error in ignoring the politics of his Greenwich Village confederates who adhered to the Maoist dictum that art must serve the people, avoid manifestations of the individual, and reject commercial concerns.

As one critic complained in the aftermath of Newport, for the new, electrified Dylan “the words [matter] less than the beat.” What he “used to stand for, whether one agreed with it or not, was much clearer than what he stands for now. [Which is] maybe himself.” Irwin Silber, the rigidly Communist editor of Sing Out! magazine, the in-flight magazine of the radical folk scene, excoriated the New Dylan for having abandoned political songs in favor of “inner-directed, innerprobing, self-conscious” music. Decades later, Silber reflected on his criticism by acknowledging that his “biggest concern was not with the electricity. . . but with what Dylan was saying and doing about moving away from his political songs.”

Dylan was so desperate to slip out from folk’s rigid ideological strictures that he would simply deny the politics even of his most transparently political songs. “Blowin’ in the Wind” wasn’t topical but “just a feeling I felt because I felt that way.” Already in 1964, he would shrug at a song he wrote about the lynching of Emmett Till, “which in all honesty was a bullshit song. . . . I realize now that my reasons and motives behind it were phony.”