Together Through Life,
I think that his consistency extends to his tastefulness (in musical terms), his instinct for spontaneous and dynamic creativity in the studio, and his particular way of looking at the world in his songs. Although all of these qualities are apparent on the new album, it is the latter one that is perhaps the easiest to contemplate in print. Continue reading “Together Through Life – Bob Dylan”
I think it’s actually too much to look at every interesting bit of Bob Dylan’s 2009 Rolling Stone interview all at once, so let’s do it piecemeal. One of the most amusing parts is what may go down in Dylan-lore (whatever that is) as “The Sarkozy Incident.” Bob Dylan was performing in Paris on April 7th while Douglas Brinkley was tagging along to conduct his interview, and so we get a glimpse at something that may happen much more often than we know, i.e., a political leader heading backstage at a Dylan show for an audience with the man himself. The story of what went down when President Nicolas Sarkozy (the conservative French leader) and his wife Carla Bruni met Dylan is conveyed in different parts in the print interview and the online outtakes. And here’s the gist:
[from the print article][from the online outtakes]After the show, the Sarkozys wander backstage, anxious to meet Dylan. The French president is attired in a black turtleneck and jeans. In a single swooping motion, Sarkozy seizes Dylan’s hand, welcoming him to France. “It was like looking at my mirror image,” Dylan tells me later, about the encounter. “I can see why he’s the head of France. He’s genuine and warm and extremely likable. I asked Sarkozy, ‘Do you think the whole global thing is over?’ I knew they just had a big G-20 meeting and they maybe were discussing that. I didn’t think he’d tell me, but I asked him anyway.”
[again from the print article]Q: I want to just follow-up on that globalization talk you had with Sarkozy [after his April 7th show in Paris].
Dylan: Yeah, I ask him, I said, “With all these bailouts and stimulus packages, all these bailouts throughout the country. I’m just wondering whether globalism is dead in the tracks? Ya know, is it over?” He doesn’t say yes, he didn’t say no.
Q: Bob, he is a politician…
Dylan: Yeah!
Q: But what intrigued me was you saying that we must get back to being the United States.
Dylan: Oh, and he could get back to being France.
Q: Boy, you’re an individualist, aren’t you? Does globalism therefore get oppressive to you? The global Internet? Global economics? Are you missing what some critics call the older, weirder America?
Dylan: I never thought the older America was weird in any way whatsoever. Where do people come up with that stuff? To call it that? What’s the old weird America? The depression? Or Teddy Roosevelt? What’s old and weird? Well, musically, no. Musically we play a form of American music and that’s not gonna go away. Whatever happens in the world won’t affect that whatsoever. But you know globalism is, I would think, about getting rid of boundaries, nationalities. You’re a part of one big world, no? It might take people awhile to get used to that. I don’t like the trend.
When President Sarkozy, looking to make small talk, asked Dylan, “Where do you live?” the quick response was a few simple words: “Right here….No. I’m just joking. I’m from the Lone Star State.” (Dylan ended by giving Sarkozy a Texas-style belt buckle as a gift.)
So, to summarize: Sarkozy and his wife got backstage to meet Bob Dylan. Bob asks Sarkozy point-blank if “globalism is dead,” and tells him that Americans need to get back to being the United States, and then he can get back to being France. Sarkozy gives no quotable answer on this, but at some point asks Dylan where he lives, to which Bob responds, “The Lone Star state,” and then gifts Sarkozy with a “Texas-style” belt buckle. (There’s no word, by the way, on whether Carla Bruni thanked Bob for writing “You Belong To Me” for her.)
After you quit cracking up over all this, what do you say about it? Firstly: Bob Dylan is a heckuva-lot better at choosing meaningful gifts for foreign world leaders than our currrent president. No dumb DVDs from the Bard of Hibbing, but instead a real and concrete piece of Americana. I never imagined, by the way, that among the many burdens of being Bob Dylan was having to meet foreign leaders and give them gifts, but then I guess there’s so much I don’t know.
So what about this globalism stuff? The chutzpah of Bob in just coming out and asking such a question of Nicolas Sarkozy is of-course hilarious—but then what has he got to lose?
Those of us who’ve followed Dylan closely over the years won’t be too surprised by his attitude towards the idea of One Big Happy World, but the directness in his remarks here is noteworthy.
You can go back to Slow Train Coming for his disgust at “Sheiks walkin’ around like kings, wearing fancy jewels and nose rings / Deciding America’s future from Amsterdam and Paris.” And “Union Sundown” takes the issue on from another angle.
At the Live Aid show in 1985, which was to raise money for people starving in Ethiopia, Bob Dylan showed up, but famously (or notoriously as some may think) used the stage to plead the case for small American farmers who were going bankrupt.
And about a month after September 11th, 2001, Dylan made a remark from the stage, responding to something Madonna had recently said from the same stage:
“I know Madonna was here a few weeks ago telling everybody to think global – and I know a whole bunch of you are doing that – I want to try and tell you: rethink it!” (Staples Arena 10-19-2001.)
On his “Theme Time Radio Hour” show—the one with the theme of “Blood”—Dylan at one point said this:
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Those are the words of noted politician and clock collector, Thomas Jefferson.
Of-course TJ said that in the days before we were all citizens of the world, in a global environment, when it was still possible to be a patriot in deed and not just in words. Another example of how the future confuses us. Which is why we stick with our credo: Predicting the past is our way to the future.
There are other examples, but I’m too lazy right now to dig around for all of them. Certainly, his 2003 film Masked and Anonymous presents a nightmarish vision of a future America, where borders have been thrown askew and ethnic rivalries fuel perpetual violence.
Bob Dylan is an American (not to mention a proud Texan!). He likes it that way, and clearly thinks that America stands for something worthwhile, or at the very least it used to. I think that his skepticism of globalization also has roots in the biblical prophecy of a one-world-government headed by the Antichrist. People may pooh-pooh that as they choose, but there is no shortage of evidence that Dylan takes his Bible very seriously indeed.
Now, let’s be straight here, and face the fact that this globalization thing cuts across the usual political divisions. On the left, there is that kind of “think global” feel-goodism — the idea that we’re all citizens of the world, in this together, and borders shouldn’t matter, and we’re all just the same etc., etc.. We should believe in “International Law” and we should have “International Courts” to force everyone to get in line. It’s the never-ending push for centralization which is also a core weakness of leftism generally. The global environmentalist movement pushes these themes too, and it also has roots in Marx’s theories about how humanity is divided by class rather than by nationality: the proletariat versus the rich. History has not really borne out these theories, but in each new generation there are those who latch onto it. It’s a brand of utopianism, and it has been very much in ascendance on the world stage in the last couple of decades. We shall see how it shakes out with the current economic crisis (this was effectively the basis of Dylan’s point to Sarkozy).
On the political right (in America), there is a strictly economic globalism: the belief that the nearer we get to truly free trade, no tariffs, no restrictions on the movement of capital, less restrictions on the movement of labor, etc. etc., the better it will be for everyone. Not all brands of American “conservatives” buy into this, but it has been the prevailing view. (I’m no economist myself, but I’ve generally been more impressed by free trade arguments versus protectionist ones.)
It’s safe to say, based on the record, that Dylan is intensely skeptical of both kinds of globalism. For whom is this more of a problem—those who insist on interpreting Dylan in a Leftist framework, or those of us who are (one way or another) conservative-minded Dylan fans? Well, speaking for myself, I have no problem with Dylan’s views on the subject. I think free trade is generally a good thing, but it’s an area where people can disagree amicably. There is clearly a human cost to free trade, in addition to its benefits. On the other hand, I would suggest that Dylan’s rejection of world-citizen-feel-goodism is fundamentally in opposition to leftist modes of thinking.
Which all goes to show that he is not and never has been a political leftist, Q.E.D, game-over, rest in peace. Of-course that old debate is never over, because the media shorthand for Bob Dylan always has him as fundamentally a lefty folk/protest singer and a prince of the “counterculture,” no matter what the evidence to the contrary. It goes on, but with this interview, Dylan has once more demonstrated the untruth of that perpetual caricature.
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And another slice from this interview with Douglas Brinkley in Rolling Stone (the print article):
Like the dour-faced farmer in Grant Wood’s painting American Gothic, Dylan seems to have the American songbook in one hand and a raised pitchfork in the other, aimed at rock critics, politicians, Wall Street financiers, back-alley thieves, the world wide web – anything that cheapens the spirit of the individual. His nostalgia is more for the Chess Records 1950s than the psychedelic 1960s. He believes that Europe should lose the euro and go back to its old currencies – “I miss the pictures on the old money,” he says. If Dylan had his way, there’d be Sousa bands on Main Street and vinyl albums instead of CDs. Teenagers would go on nature hikes instead of watching YouTube. “It’s peculiar and unnerving in a way to see so many young people walking around with mobile phones and iPods in their ears and so wrapped up in media and video games,” he says. “It robs them of their self-identity. It’s a shame to see them so tuned out to real life. Of course they are free to do that, as if that’s got anything to do with freedom. The cost of liberty is high, and young people should understand that before they start spending their life with all those gadgets.”
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And, lest we skip over it, there’s also this from the Brinkley interview:
I never thought the older America was weird in any way whatsoever. Where do people come up with that stuff? To call it that? What’s the old weird America? The depression? Or Teddy Roosevelt? What’s old and weird?
The “people” who “come up with that stuff” are, or is, Greil Marcus. He coined the expression — at least as far as I’m aware — in his book “Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes.” The book was even later renamed as “The Old Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basment Tapes.”
It seems to me that perhaps Bob just delivered an extremely economical review of that book.
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Addendum 5/1/2009: In the interests of fairness, let me print this response from an anonymous reader, titled “What You (And Dylan) Forgot About”:
From the Anthology of American Folk Music liner notes, in an essay by Greil Marcus entitled “The Old, Weird America”, Greil Marcus himself quotes Dylan (speaking on some critics’ complaints that his lyrics are incomprehensible):
“‘All the authorities who write about what it is and what it should be,'” Dylan said, “when they say keep it simple, [that it] should be easily understood — folk music is the only music where it isn’t simple. It’s weird….I’ve never written anything hard to understand, not in my head anyway, and nothing as far out as some of the old songs.”
So the expression does have a root in Dylan. But perhaps Bob can be excused, as it was an awfully long time ago…
The new Rolling Stone interview with Bob Dylan conducted by author Douglas Brinkley — which consists of varying content in the print magazine versus the online “outtakes” — has a whole bunch of funny and delightful and interesting bits. So much so, that it calls for a mega-post to deal with it, which I’m not up to doing at this moment. But from where we sit we would be remiss if we did not immediately highlight the passage in the print interview where the name of former president George W. Bush comes up.
Dylan talks a lot about the state of Texas in the interview, including about the “independent-thinking people” that he says come from there. Picking it up at one point:
“I think you really have to be a Texan to appreciate the vastness of it and the emptiness of it,” Dylan says. “But I’m an honorary Texan.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Well,” he says, “George Bush, when he was governor, gave me a proclamation that says I’m an honorary Texan [holds hand up in pledge, laughs]. As if anybody needed proof. It’s no small thing. I take it as a high honor. ”
Brinkley goes on to ask Dylan something more (we’re not told the exact question) about George W. Bush:
Almost every American artist has taken a piñata swipe at Bush’s legacy, but Dylan refuses. He instead looks at the Bush years as just another unsurprising incident of dawn-of-man folly [Brinkley’s characterization, of-course –Ed]. “I read history books just like you do,” Dylan says. “None of those guys are immune to the laws of history. They’re going to go up or down, and they’re going to take their people with them. None of us really knew what was happening in the economy. It changed so quickly into a true nightmare of horror. In another day and age, heads would roll. That’s what would happen. The rot would be cut out. As far as blaming everything on the last president, think of it this way: The same folks who had held him in such high regard came to despise him. Isn’t it funny that they’re the very same people who once loved him? People are fickle. Their loyalty can turn at the drop of a hat.”
What he says is plainly true; although, of-course, not all of George W. Bush’s supporters came to despise him. (He has never been held in contempt in this space, and never will be. Disagreements on a few issues do not justify contempt for a man of such character and decency as Dubya.)
As for his being named an honorary Texan by Bush: it makes me feel like a terrible failure that I never heard that this had happened, and so had never mentioned it here. Of-course, it’s not the kind of thing that would get a lot of attention in the media. That’s why Bob Dylan himself had to tell us about it. Belated congratulations to him. A high honor indeed.
The UK Times Online has a response today to the excerpts from Bob Dylan’s interview with Bill Flanagan that were published yesterday and analyzed so astutely in this space. The new article is titled: After the summer of love, Bob Dylan backtracks on Barack Obama.
Up until now it had been a mutual love affair.
As the campaign for the American presidency gathered pace last June, Bob Dylan lent his support to Barack Obama, telling The Times that his candidacy was “redefining the nature of politics”.
In return Mr Obama described the singer as an icon, and boasted of having “probably 30 Dylan songs on my iPod”, including “the entire Blood on the Tracks album”.
But in an interview to be published on Dylan’s website today, the hero of 1960s counterculture seems to have cooled on the prospects of the recently elected American leader.
Asked if he thought that Mr Obama would make a good president, the singer said that he had no idea.
What’s that old saying or warning about the press? “They’ll build you up and then they’ll tear you down.” This is a particularly perverse twist on that concept. The media created the story of the “mutual love affair” between Bob Dylan and Barack Obama, and now somehow Dylan is to blame for not playing along.
All of this originated with an article by Alan Jackson in the Times last June. The article as a whole was just fine — Bob was giving the interview in order to talk about his artwork, an exhibition of which was about to open up in London. And it’s an interesting interview on the subject of his paintings and drawings, worth rereading.
But it was not the substance of this interview on his artwork that got picked up and spread around the world. It was the completely off-topic ambush at the end. As I remarked at the time (and still wonder about), it’s quite possible that Dylan didn’t even know his words at this point were going to be in the published interview. Read it again:
My time with Dylan is up and we stand in preparation for my leaving the room. As a last aside, I ask for his take on the US political situation in the run-up to November’s presidential election.
“Well, you know right now America is in a state of upheaval,” he says. “Poverty is demoralising. You can’t expect people to have the virtue of purity when they are poor. But we’ve got this guy out there now who is redefining the nature of politics from the ground up … Barack Obama. He’s redefining what a politician is, so we’ll have to see how things play out. Am I hopeful? Yes, I’m hopeful that things might change. Some things are going to have to.” He offers a parting handshake. “You should always take the best from the past, leave the worst back there and go forward into the future,” he notes as the door closes between us.
Note that we don’t hear what the actual question was that Dylan was asked. Note the “…” at one point, telling us that something was redacted. Note, above all, that what Dylan is quoted as saying doesn’t appear to make any clear sense. Sure, he appears to be saying something quite positive about Obama, although we can’t tell if he’s smiling while saying it, or being at all ironic when he credits a politician with “redefining the nature of politics from the ground up.” But what is that stuff about poverty and purity? How does that fit with anything else he’s saying? I don’t care how smart you think you are: it is incomprehensible in any normal way, as published. It’s crying out for more context or a follow-up question. But there is none. As they stand up to go their separate ways, the journalist threw some unknown question at Bob about politics and then later printed this rather mixed-up response from him. The editor should have struck it out, frankly. But instead, I’m sure the editor was wetting his pants, knowing what a big story it would be, if it could be spun as “Bob Dylan endorses Barack Obama!” And the Times duly did that in a separate article, and the rest of the world enthusiastically followed suit.
It became gospel. Well, some might say, “Dylan didn’t fight it.” But then, he never does, does he? If he tried to fight every distortion and misconstrual that appears in the press with regard to himself, he would go crazy in about twelve hours flat (believe me, I know). Later, Jann Wenner interviewed The One on the campaign trail, and did his best to erect the entire myth in stone.
WENNER:
You were endorsed by Bob Dylan a few days ago. What’s that mean to you?OBAMA:
I’ve got to say, having both Dylan and Bruce Springsteen say kind words about you is pretty remarkable. Those guys are icons.
It’s kind of funny, isn’t it, to endorse someone for president and then, not even 90 days into his presidency, say that you “have no idea” if he’ll even be a good president. But the endorsement never happened. It was fog, mirrors and wishful thinking, pushed hard by Jann Wenner and a host of other committed leftists pursuing their undeclared agenda in the pages of newspapers and magazines everywhere. Nothing much new there. Then, we had Dylan’s remarks from the stage in Minnesota on election night, and more distortion by the media, completely leaving out the context and the irony inherent in Dylan’s words.
It’s a lesson, if needed, on the extraordinarily strict standard to which you have to subject everything that you read. And that goes double when politics is involved, and quadruple when the name Bob Dylan is involved.
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On a personal note, I well remember the day that Dylan’s alleged endorsement of Barack Obama hit the wires. I was out of state on vacation and not planning on blogging or anything like that. Not having seen the news, I casually checked my e-mail. Expecting at most one or two messages, I was greeted by a couple of dozen. Quite a few were from people who apparently don’t like RWB very much (a thing which is very painful to contemplate), saying things like, “See this?!” “What do you say to that!!” and “Look’s like your site’s reason for being just ended!!” There was also a reporter from ABC News trying to get my reaction to it. Altogether, I was suddenly pretty busy, coming up with an instant response and then writing about it in this space. In truth, rather than trying to figure out Dylan’s remarks, I should have just said: This is nonsense, and incomprehensible as printed. Not Dylan’s fault, just bad journalism. Of-course, that wouldn’t have been enough for anyone — it would have seemed like a cop-out. But the passing of time has proven, in my belief, that this is really the only way to look at it.
Of-course yesterday, when the Times found itself printing what is effectively the antidote to their previous shoddy story, in the form of a plain Q & A between Bob Dylan and Bill Flanagan, I didn’t get any calls from news organizations asking for my reaction to Bob Dylan not being an Obama endorser after all. And there were no e-mails from enemies saying, “Hey, guess we were wrong about this – sorry!”
About this, I am not at all surprised, but never let it be thought that I am so noble as to resist pointing it out.
It was in the UK Times last June where the whole “Bob Dylan endorses Barack Obama” story got started, so it is appropriately ironic (if indeed it is not purposeful) that it is in the UK Times today that that whole canard gets put finally to rest. (D’ya think?!)
The third part of Bob Dylan’s interview with Bill Flanagan is published in the Times Online today, instead of at BobDylan.com where we read the earlier parts.
The second part of the interview closed with Bob being asked some general questions about politics. Let’s recap:
[Bill Flanagan] What’s your take on politics?
[Bob Dylan] Politics is entertainment. It’s a sport. It’s for the well groomed and well heeled. The impeccably dressed. Party animals. Politicians are interchangeable.[BF] Don’t you believe in the democratic process?
[BD] Yeah, but what’s that got to do with politics? Politics creates more problems than it solves. It can be counter-productive. The real power is in the hands of small groups of people and I don’t think they have titles.
Not a vote of confidence in politicians in general, as being the kind of people who can bring on an “age of light” or anything like that. When the interview starts up again, Flanagan doesn’t pursue Bob on his assertion about power being “in the hands of small groups of people.” That’s a pity, since it leaves the impression that Dylan might subscribe to some odd conspiracy theories. And, well, maybe he does! But kudos to Bill Flanagan for going directly at Bob on the subject of Barack Obama. Herewith is the money part of the exchange (of-course everyone will read the whole interview at the Times Online site).
Bill Flanagan: In that song Chicago After Dark were you thinking about the new President?
Bob Dylan: Not really. It’s more about State Street and the wind off Lake Michigan and how sometimes we know people and we are no longer what we used to be to them. I was trying to go with some old time feeling that I had.
BF: You liked Barack Obama early on. Why was that?
BD: I’d read his book and it intrigued me.
BF: Audacity of Hope?
BD: No it was called Dreams of My Father.BF: What struck you about him?
BD: Well, a number of things. He’s got an interesting background. He’s like a fictional character, but he’s real. First off, his mother was a Kansas girl. Never lived in Kansas though, but with deep roots. You know, like Kansas bloody Kansas. John Brown the insurrectionist. Jesse James and Quantrill. Bushwhackers, Guerillas. Wizard of Oz Kansas. I think Barack has Jefferson Davis back there in his ancestry someplace. And then his father. An African intellectual. Bantu, Masai, Griot type heritage – cattle raiders, lion killers. I mean it’s just so incongruous that these two people would meet and fall in love. You kind of get past that though. And then you’re into his story. Like an odyssey except in reverse.
BF: In what way?
BD: First of all, Barack is born in Hawaii. Most of us think of Hawaii as paradise – so I guess you could say that he was born in paradise.
BF: And he was thrown out of the garden.
BD: Not exactly. His mom married some other guy named Lolo and then took Barack to Indonesia to live. Barack went to both a Muslim school and a Catholic school. His mom used to get up at 4:00 in the morning and teach him book lessons three hours before he even went to school. And then she would go to work. That tells you the type of woman she was. That’s just in the beginning of the story.
BF: What else did you find compelling about him?
BD: Well, mainly his take on things. His writing style hits you on more than one level. It makes you feel and think at the same time and that is hard to do. He says profoundly outrageous things. He’s looking at a shrunken head inside of a glass case in some museum with a bunch of other people and he’s wondering if any of these people realize that they could be looking at one of their ancestors.
BF: What in his book would make you think he’d be a good politician?
BD: Well nothing really.[emphasis added] In some sense you would think being in the business of politics would be the last thing that this man would want to do. I think he had a job as an investment banker on Wall Street for a second – selling German bonds. But he probably could’ve done anything. If you read his book, you’ll know that the political world came to him. It was there to be had.
BF: Do you think he’ll make a good president?
BD: I have no idea.[emphasis added] He’ll be the best president he can be. Most of those guys come into office with the best of intentions and leave as beaten men. Johnson would be a good example of that … Nixon, Clinton in a way, Truman, all the rest of them going back. You know, it’s like they all fly too close to the sun and get burned.
This all really leaves me with just about nothing to comment upon. It’s just about as straightforward as you can get, isn’t it? Bob Dylan was intrigued by Barack Obama as an American figure — and he certainly is an interesting American figure — but it wasn’t about believing he was some kind of savior, or even about supporting his political agenda in particular. He read Obama’s book — not the fluffy one he ran for president on, but the earlier one that’s actually about his life — and found it interesting. As illustrated in the later part of the interview, Bob is a history buff (we knew that already anyway). He reads plenty of American history, and he has a fascination with presidents. He is struck by Obama’s blood ancestry, and the idea that he might even be related to Jefferson Davis! But he has “no idea” if Obama will make a good president.
There is nothing much for me to comment on here, because it pretty much matches how I thought Bob looked at these things. On the other hand, those who were under the impression that he did endorse Barack Obama last June, and those who were under the impression that his remarks on election night in Minnesota were a joyous welcoming of the new era of Obama, as they were portrayed in many other places — those people will have a pretty hard time reconciling these straightforward remarks of Bob to Bill Flanagan with their mistaken conception of where Bob has been coming from.
In this case, his remarks are clear because we are getting them verbatim and in context, and the interviewer is doing a decent job of getting at what Bob thinks. In the Times interview from last June, this was not the case, when it came to his remarks about Obama. And the remarks from the stage in November were unclear because they were remarks from the stage, and so many people just needed to presume that Bob was expressing their own inner joy at Obama’s election (even when it was helpfully explained that this was not really the case).
What’s left to say? In terms of Bob’s personal politics — if he thinks about things that way — nothing is revealed. He’s neither endorsing nor slamming Barack Obama. He simply is saying he finds it interesting, from a historical perspective, to watch this next chapter unfold in the long drama of the U.S. presidency.
It might be noted that he includes Richard Nixon as one of those presidents who came “into office with the best of intentions” and left as a beaten man. That is not the thinking of any doctrinaire liberal/left individual.
But then, we all knew that Bob has never been one of those. Didn’t we?
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With all this hullabaloo about Obama, don’t miss the new song from Together Through Life
Thanks to Helen K. for her fascinating response to the previous post:
You wrote:
“There is one verse, however, that arguably sounds a jarring note. It doesn’t seem to make any kind of biblical sense or any kind of normal sense. That’s this one:
I wanna be with you in paradise
And it seems so unfair
I can’t go back to paradise no more
I killed a man back there
What’s that about? The singer saying to his God, “I wanna be with you in paradise,” is straightforward enough, we may think. But that he can’t go “back to paradise” because he “killed a man back there”? How is that? Is not the LORD a forgiving God? And how is it that the singer was in paradise before, and killed a man there at all?”I don’t have any problem with this at all, biblically or logically, once you make a distinction between Paradise-as-Eden and Paradise-as-Heaven. If it is true, Biblically, that “in Adam’s Fall, we sinned all” it’s not such a huge step for the singer to poetically take on not only Adam’s sin but Cain’s (sin is sin, after all, when it comes to unfitting one for paradise). And let’s face it, it sounds much better to sing “I can’t go back to paradise no more/ I killed a man back there” than “I can’t go back to paradise no more/ I ate some fruit back there.”
Now we see that the singer really can’t be with his God in Paradise … not in the same way that unfallen Adam was, with no knowledge of evil. The only possible Paradise open to us is the Heavenly one, not the Mesopotamian one, and (because the Lord is indeed a forgiving God) the only way to get there is forward, by way of the Cross (see “Ain’t Talkin'”– wherein a journey begins in a garden, and does not end when it again reaches a garden –noli me tangere!– but continues “up the road and around the bend,” out of our mortal range of sight).
I had attempted to make sense of the verse in my head in a some similar way, but couldn’t quite find it satisfactory, and so was very pleased with the “pun to God” idea instead. But there’s a whole lot to what Helen says there.
One thing that probably bears consideration here is the word itself, paradise. There is much tradition that does indeed refer to the Garden of Eden as paradise. However, in the tradition of the Bible in English, I do not know that it is so described. That particular word paradise — as distinct from heaven or any other concept of the afterlife — shows up in the most prominent translations I’ve checked only three times, and all in the New Testament. That is, in Luke 23:43; 2 Corinthians 12:4; and Revelation 2:7.
The usage in Luke is the most instantly familiar, being one of Jesus’ final remarks before his death, and addressed to the thief on the cross: Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.
So, from that point of view, it’s more difficult to understand paradise as being a reference to Eden, or, as another reader suggested, to the Promised Land (and Moses’ inability to enter into it).
But the case is never closed.
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A few responses to the “Van Morrison in Dylan-slam-shock?” story (inspired by his remark about the “Zimmerman mythology” in an interview in the Telegraph).
Thanks to Bob W. who says:
I like Van Morrison’s music. I think I own two or three of his recordings (Astral Weeks is not one of them) but, I’m sorry, most of what he said in that interview is self-delusional BS. Especially the part about “So I don’t really fit into this mythology.” Yeah right…what about the Otis Redding mythology and the Ray Charles mythology then? It seems to me that VM has spent his entire career trying his best to “be” those two guys. I really don’t know what he’s talking about, but if he thinks his work hasn’t been influenced by Bob Dylan then he needs another shot of Irish whiskey and get his head on straight. And while I would agree that one doesn’t automatically think “Dylan” when you hear a Van Morrison song, no way would Vannie boy have gotten from “Brown Eyed Girl” to “Poetic Champions Compose” without listening to a whole lot of Zimmerman.
What Van Morrison “is”, is one of the best singers to come down the pike but he’s certainly not an original (if that’s his perception of himself). And, he is definitely part of the whole Rock, Soul, Folk, Country, R&B, Jazz “mythology” that has developed over the past half-century…and he should be man enough to admit it.
The part about not being in the music business is really laughable….beyond self-delusional. That’s all he’s part of…IMHO.
Sue also writes including the following:
You’re right, it’s hard to decipher exactly what Van the Man meant – or Lennon for that matter – but what IS obvious, to me anyway, is that while his fellow artists don’t seem to mind saying all kinds of stuff about him Dylan is pretty scrupulous in following the dictum “if you haven’t got anything good to say about someone say nothing at all”. I think I’ve only ever heard him say good things about other people. If he ever does say anything bordering on criticism he’s always being general, never specifically citing someone by name. It’s a pity then that they don’t grant him the same courtesy.
I often wonder if Paul Simon squirmed a bit at their first meeting after he had said those (stupid) things about Dylan’s songs being predictable. Hey, maybe Bob works with these people purely for the enjoyment of seeing them squirm. Couldn’t blame him for that.
On the subject of Morrison, it’s always annoyed me how people say Dylan is disrespectful to his audience because of his perceived indifference during a concert. Which I think is nonsense BTW. But it seems Morrison’s attitude is somehow accepted. I DO think he is unbelievably rude. I remember my sister telling me how friends of hers went to see him for the first time, very excited, only to find that he had his back to the audience for the entire concert. I also have a bootleg where he abuses the audience. You can’t say Bob is like that even though he has good reason to be given the number of times throughout his career his so-called fans have turned their backs on him.
And Mary of BabyBlue shared some thoughts on the sense of bitterness that comes through in that talk with Van Morrison:
Van Morrison could achieve more if that bitter root was softened with humor. He takes himself way too seriously. Dylan seems to achieved the balance of taking the music seriously, but not himself. Also, if I could be so bold, I think Van Morrison’s persona is troubling for an audience of women. Dylan could have that problem too (he certainly has had his issues, at least in the past!) – but again, his charm wins out every time! That’s got to build up resentment to Dylan’s contemporaries – of which Van Morrison (or Donavon for that matter) are a shrinking exclusive group. I’m not sure if the Next Generation has latched on to Van Morrison as they seem to be doing to a certain degree with Dylan. But of course, Dylan keeps touring locations to get the next generation to hear him – which is how he swept me up too.
So, Van: don’t mess with Bob, even by implication. We’ve got his back!
Now, I’m a huge fan of Van Morrison, going back to the same point at which I got into Dylan, when I was about 16 years-old. There are very few of his albums which I don’t own. I have to therefore make a big distinction between grumpy old Van in terms of his statements, and the real genius as he comes across to me on his records and in his performances. I’ve often thought that Dylan had virtually no peers in the last four decades of popular music, because of how he both occupies it and transcends it, but that if anyone was a peer of his in that realm, it was Van Morrison. (Of-course Van would apparently choke me to death for accusing him of being part of “popular music” — or for implying that he himself has any peers.)
Interestingly, in his songwriting he sometimes deals with similar kinds of issues relating to the music business — songs from Hard Nose The Highway to Professional Jealousy, A Town Called Paradise (that sounds familiar!), Big-Time Operators, etc etc. But he makes something different of these themes in his songs and in how he performs them. He transcends the pettiness and makes something cathartic and even fun out of it. And, it should be noted, Van does give great credit to so many musicians who he’s loved and by whom he’s been inspired, like the ones Bob W. cites above. He does this in his songs, in direct lyrical shout-outs, and in musical references. His better angels are those that guide him when he’s making music. Maybe he should quit doing interviews. (Or just do one with Yours Truly to clear the air.)
Regular readers of the writings in this space might not be unfamiliar with the suggestion that there is a way of listening to a great number of Bob Dylan songs — especially his work of the last couple of decades or so — such as to hear them as a kind of dialogue with Him who we can just call the LORD, ecumenically-speaking, and in the tradition of the Bible in English. My own appreciation of this originally came out of reading the deeply insightful writing, on Bob Dylan’s work, of Ronnie Keohane.
There’s plenty of this to be heard, should you be so inclined, on Dylan’s most recent LP, Modern Times. One example that could hardly escape even the most secular or agnostic of listeners is “Spirit on the Water”.
The first verse goes:
Spirit on the water
Darkness on the face of the deep
I keep thinking about you baby
I can’t hardly sleep
You don’t need a degree in Bible-ology to know that the first lines of this song reflect and reference the first few sentences of the Bible, and of the book of Genesis.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
So, if you take the first verse of the song at face value, the singer is addressing this song to that very Spirit on the water. Taken in that way — as a love song to the Creator — it’s easy to see the meaning and poignancy of verses like this one:
I’d forgotten about you
Then you turned up again
I always knew
That we were meant to be more than friends
There are so many ways in which people can forget the existence, and miss the presence, of the Creator. It’s almost as if there’s a conspiracy to make one forget, even if one happens to believe in the first place. Yet, the persistence of reminders (Then you turned up again) is arguably one of the greatest constants of all. The steady twinkling of a distant star, the sublime strokes of a masterpiece of art, the unasked for kindness of a stranger, the bells of some church in the distance, an inner knowledge that will not be quieted: Then you turned up again.
In certain of the verses of this song, a listener may also wonder if the perspective has changed, and if — instead of the singer addressing his Maker — what we hear is the Creator addressing his creatures:
Sometimes I wonder
Why you can’t treat me right
You do good all day
Then you do wrong all night
You can go through all of the verses of the song in this way, and they resonate one way or another according to this theme.
There is one verse, however, that arguably sounds a jarring note. It doesn’t seem to make any kind of biblical sense or any kind of normal sense. That’s this one:
I wanna be with you in paradise
And it seems so unfair
I can’t go back to paradise no more
I killed a man back there
What’s that about? The singer saying to his God, “I wanna be with you in paradise,” is straightforward enough, we may think. But that he can’t go “back to paradise” because he “killed a man back there”? How is that? Is not the LORD a forgiving God? And how is it that the singer was in paradise before, and killed a man there at all?
Others may have found a way through it, but I never could figure it out. That’s why I’m hugely indebted to reader Kim for sending me the following in an e-mail:
I am probably just stating the obvious, but I will do so anyway: he can’t really just be talking about heaven [in this verse]. I’m thinking he’s also talking about Paradise, TX. Makes sense to me, anyway. What do you think?
Well, I think that it is a pretty brilliant perception, and one that certainly wasn’t obvious to this listener.
Paradise, Texas, had a population of 459 according to the 2000 census (and as reported by Wikipedia).
It is not, however, the only town or city called Paradise in the United States, as a long look at an atlas or another quick visit to Wikipedia would reveal. There are also the following:
Paradise, Arizona
Paradise, California
Paradise, Kansas
Paradise, Kentucky
Paradise, Michigan
Paradise, Montana
Paradise, Nevada
Paradise, Pennsylvania
Paradise, Utah
Paradise, Washington
There are also towns and cities called Paradise in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and England.
You might say that there’s a lot of people out there who really have their own little slice of heaven.
Who can tell to which town or city called Paradise the singer in this song might be referring, if indeed he is referring to a town or city? I don’t personally know how to pick one over the other. But just introducing the idea that it is an actual geographical real-world location to which he is referring changes everything, doesn’t it?
Consider: Bob Dylan loves citing place-names in his songs. We know this. Especially American place names, from Baton-Rouge to Corpus Christi to Boston-town and so many others. You could almost recreate a map of America from his songbook, if all other records were lost. And, for that matter, he also loves foreign place names, from Tangiers to Buenos-Aires to Gibraltar and beyond.
So how does it alter the sense of this verse if the singer is referring to a real town or city called Paradise? Assume, as we do here, that he is addressing the words to God. What the verse then becomes is a four line joke, a gag, a pun — and we also know how much Bob loves his puns — that is directed towards none other than the Creator Himself:
I wanna be with you in paradise
And it seems so unfair
I can’t go back to paradise no more
I killed a man back there
As befitting this sweet song of love, the singer says, and God hears, “I wanna be with you in paradise.” No problem there, God thinks. But then the singer goes on, “it seems so unfair,” because he can’t return to paradise, owing to the fact that he “killed a man back there.” He can’t go back to Paradise, the town, because he killed someone there, and now there are wanted posters on the walls, and a price on his head. (As Mrs. C. observes, it is like a vision from the Old American West, where you have to get of town to evade the sheriff and the crimes you committed in that particular locality. Places with great names like Tombstone.) The singer doesn’t provide us with these details, of-course. But then, after all, the song isn’t addressed to us. The singer is serenading the One who knows all those details already. God knows that this guy singing the song once killed a man in Paradise (Texas, Montana, Nevada — you name it). The joke, the gag, the pun, is on God Himself.
Making a joke to God is kind of audacious. And it can also be understood as a particularly intimate expression of love, can it not? It is only the most devoted who can joke to one another in this way, daringly making light of past transgressions.
Understood in this manner, the affectionate and playful nature of the song is asserting itself all the more in this previously confusing verse. Not every verse is without some mystery, of-course, even within this way of understanding the song, but that is as it should be. Every line doesn’t have to be nailed down and explained away. It is enough that there is nothing that is discordant or contradictory to this sense of the song, and that can be said, I think, if paradise is, after all, just Paradise (with a latitude and a longitude).
And that’s very nice indeed.
Well, maybe. (Thanks to Rich for the tip.) Van Morrison generally gives interesting interviews, when he can bring himself to do it at all. At the moment, he is uncharacteristically ubiquitous, at least in the U.S., showing up everywhere from the Don Imus show to “Live with Regis and Kelly.” He is promoting his new (live) version of Astral Weeks
In any case, in a recent interview in the U.K. Telegraph, Van alluded to Bob Dylan — someone with whom he’s collaborated and of whom he’s spoken admiringly in the past — in an odd manner. To give better context to it I include here also an earlier part of the interview where the journalist first brings up the name of Bob Dylan. They had just been discussing the robust chart success that Van’s albums have had in recent years.
SF: I’m just wondering if there’s anything we can read into it to say that maybe people are craving this kind of music. Bob Dylan had his first #1 in 30-something years with his last album. Somehow it seems that maybe there’s a renewed interest in this not rock music.
VM: I don’t really know. They’re just promoting, especially with the download thing, like it’s always been: let’s just get the next load of kids in and milk that and then get the next lot in and milk those. It’s the same as it was in the old days, only much more. Like I say, the people running these companies don’t know anything about music and they don’t are about music; they’re not interested. It’s a con, it’s a front, you know?
[…]SF: Well, the title of the last album seems very apropos to me: Keep It Simple. If I think about the times that I’ve seen you live, it’s really about the music, and it’s not about all of these other things that seem to get grafted on to some people’s concerts, where it’s more about the lighting design or the costumes…
VM: Yeah, well, you see I don’t know anybody who does what I do, because I do it all. Like, some of the people you mentioned there, they don’t do it all. I do it all. You name it, I do it: jazz, blues, whatever. I can do everything. Because that’s the background that I came out of. So I don’t really fit into this mythology. I don’t fit into the rock mythology, or the Zimmerman mythology or any of that shit. I don’t fit into any of that. I’m not creating any image. I’m anti-mythology. I’m not really in the music business as such.
Earlier in the interview he’d also mentioned the “Beatles myth” and the “Elvis Presley myth.”
Is he putting down Bob Dylan as a musician, as being more about the “mythology,” and also, implicitly, as not being able to “do it all” like he (Van) can? Well, it would seem unlikely, considering their history as mutual admirers. Still, it’s a strange choice of words. (And this is the thanks Bob gets for playing Van several times on “Theme Time Radio Hour”!) It seems more likely that he’s putting down those writers (maybe even like yours-truly) and publicity-people who, he believes, promote a mythology of Dylan. It’s a little hard to say. I do think that Van does tend to protest too much about not being this and not being that, but he’s entitled. He’s also a moody and capricious chap, and maybe he’s got some bee in his bonnet about Dylan right now.
It’s also odd that he chooses to call Dylan “Zimmerman” in this context. We all know that there is a Bob Dylan myth (or many of them, actually) but what exactly is the “Zimmerman myth”? It can’t help but bring to mind, for me at least, that litany from John Lennon’s song God:
I don’t believe in magic,
I don’t believe in mantra,
I don’t believe in Jesus,
I don’t believe in Kennedy,
I don’t believe in Elvis,
I don’t believe in Zimmerman,
I don’t believe in Beatles,
I just believe in me,
Yoko and me,
And that’s reality.
I’ve always thought that was such a weak ending, by the way (“I just believe in me, Yoko and me, And that’s reality”). In John Lennon’s case, perhaps he just thought “Zimmerman” was more musical, or more clever, than “Dylan.” And maybe it is, indeed, in the context of the song. Also, this way, it wouldn’t be confused with the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (maybe John did believe in him).
I guess it’s impossible to judge why Van Morrison chose to cite Dylan’s original surname in this way during the interview. It probably means nothing in particular. Now, in any case, the incident will just become another small part of the great “Van Morrison mythology.”
Thanks to reader Jason for his very gracious e-mail:
I haven’t familiarized myself enough with your work on Bob Dylan but have found [your website] quite interesting. I’m kinda a fan of Dylan’s music and left of center politically. But what I was wondering is why the left or “left” and the counterculture of the 1960s–and to this day–consistently misunderstood and misinterpreted Dylan in thinking he was “one of them” so to speak. I mean, clearly in many ways he was not, as your website successfully demonstrates. And secondly if people had come to terms with Bob Dylan’s lack of interest in politics or political engagement, or agreement with them on various issues of the day–and OK I just mean looked at him more from the perspective you bring to us (as for as I thus far can tell) on [your website], well then how would that have affected his legacy? Would Dylan have had the following and the impact, or as many fans if the young people–up until today–didn’t continue to sort of make him “theirs”? And put words in his mouth even. I enjoyed your take on the election night concert, btw. I found the idea that Dylan would mean things are going to change because Obama has been elected very weird. I voted for Obama but that didn’t seem to make sense to me that Dylan would say something like that.
The relevant part of my reply:
You ask a couple of good questions. As to why Dylan is claimed by some on the left as one of their own, or claimed by anyone — I personally think it’s due to an appreciation of the depth and power of his songs, and the desire to enlist them for the cause. It’s much the same reason that people quote scripture for their own purposes, even when they don’t regularly read scripture or believe in it themselves.
As to whether, if this hadn’t happened to such an extent, it would have affected his legacy: I guess so, depending on how you define his legacy. It’s very hard to separate all of that out now and imagine a world where Dylan didn’t emerge during the 1960s and wasn’t claimed, unwillingly, as a leader of a general counterculture and anti-war movement. Without all of that, I suppose, he wouldn’t be as well known or attract as much attention in everything he does. On the other hand, his songs might be better appreciated by some for their qualities as songs, rather than political statements. It is something I’ve thought about, and it’s an interesting way of considering his songs –especially the ones from the early 1960s that have all that cultural baggage. It’s interesting to imagine Dylan emerging and the songs being heard for the first time in some other decade — the 1940s, the 1950s, or the 1970s or 1980s. How would they have been heard differently? We’ll never know, really, but it’s interesting to consider.
I now remember that I did play one of those mind-games — imagining a Dylan song being heard in a different decade — in a review of Greil Marcus’s book “Like A Rolling Stone” for The Weekly Standard. It was in response to some of his writing that book, i.e. his consideration of the song very much in the context of historical events of the time.
Everyone knows the context of the mid-sixties–it’s the most belabored and overconsidered time period of modern American history, after all. It would be far more interesting, surely, to take Dylan’s work completely outside the old clichés of time and place and see how it stands for the ages, assuming the writer believes that it does.
Imagine, if you will, that Dylan had not appeared on the recording scene in 1962. He shows up, instead, 10 years later, in 1972, and, following the same chronology, releases his breakthrough “Like A Rolling Stone” in 1975. Would we now be treated to a book by Greil Marcus telling us how perfectly the [song] summed up the mood of post-Watergate America? “When Bob sings (‘You’re invisible now, you’ve got no secrets to conceal!’) he is almost chasing Richard M. Nixon into that helicopter!”
It would be as valid as any of the juxtapositions of historical events–such as the Watts riots and the Vietnam war–with Dylan’s musical output as Marcus makes here. And that’s a tribute to the timelessness and power of Dylan’s work to the same degree as it is a criticism of Marcus’s strategy.
So, I guess that little mind-trick might demonstrate that while you might take Dylan out of the 1960s, you still couldn’t prevent people from trying to co-opt his work into their political agenda. There’s always a way, when the desire to do it is sufficiently strong. And Dylan’s work has demonstrated itself to be a supremely tempting target. However, I think that outside of the context of the 1960s, the myths so created wouldn’t have the same power and longevity.
From Norway to Greece to Ireland and places in-between, the protests against Israel’s right to defend its citizens are ubiquitous and quite ugly.
Tens of thousands of demonstrators marched in cities across Europe and the Middle East on Saturday to protest against Israel’s offensive in Gaza, clashing with police when some rallies turned violent.
Police in riot gear confronted around 20,000 protesters brandishing banners and Palestinian flags outside the Israeli embassy in central London, while Oslo police used tear gas against rock-throwing activists in the Norwegian capital.
About 30,000 took to the streets of Paris, many demonstrators wearing Palestinian keffiyah headscarves and chanting “we are all Palestinians”, “Israel murderer” and “peace”. Some threw stones at police and burnt Israeli flags.
[…]More than 40,000 people protested against the Gaza assault in towns across Germany, while demonstrators at the Israeli embassy in Dublin threw shoes and carried a mock coffin, covered with pictures of wounded or dead Palestinian children.
“The haunting images of homes wrecked, of terrified families existing among rubble in shock and despair, and of endless funerals, has rightly outraged people across the world,” said Gerry Adams, president of nationalist party Sinn Fein.
In Rome, Italy, a trade union has promoted the idea of boycotting Jewish owned shops.
The all too obvious Bob Dylan lyric applies all too well.
Well, he’s surrounded by pacifists who all want peace,
They pray for it nightly that the bloodshed must cease.
Now, they wouldn’t hurt a fly.
To hurt one they would weep.
They lay and they wait for this bully to fall asleep.
He’s the neighborhood bully
…
Addendum: For a strikingly hard-eyed and incisive look at the war that Hamas has demanded Israel wage against it, read Spengler’s latest: Suicide by Israel. Excerpt:
To insist that Israel desist entirely from military activities that have a high probability of causing civilian casualties is doubly hypocritical. That would demand, in effect, that Israel value the lives of Palestinian civilians more than those of its own civilians, who are subject to rocket bombardment. That is something no state in the world can do, and it is silly to ask it. Israel has less reason than any other on Earth to heed such a demand. Never has the state of Israel been offered mercy by its enemies, nor has it any reason to expect it. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain by following the almost-golden rule: “Do unto others before they do unto you.”
Israel is in the unenviable position of mopping up a problem created by the inertia of the international community. Fourth-generation “refugees” living in towns officially designated as “camps” never have existed under international law until the world community found it expedient to defer the “Palestinian problem” into the indefinite future. The Gazans cannot be economically viable on their 139 square miles of sand, and the humiliation of perpetual dependency and poverty makes a political solution unattainable.
Without any of the irony of Bob Dylan’s song from 1983, a writer named Gideon Levy in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz characterizes Israel as a “neighborhood bully” for its military action against Hamas in Gaza.
Once again, Israel’s violent responses, even if there is justification for them, exceed all proportion and cross every red line of humaneness, morality, international law and wisdom.
What began yesterday in Gaza is a war crime and the foolishness of a country. History’s bitter irony: A government that went to a futile war two months after its establishment – today nearly everyone acknowledges as much – embarks on another doomed war two months before the end of its term.
[…]Blood will now flow like water. Besieged and impoverished Gaza, the city of refugees, will pay the main price. But blood will also be unnecessarily spilled on our side. In its foolishness, Hamas brought this on itself and on its people, but this does not excuse Israel’s overreaction.
The history of the Middle East is repeating itself with despairing precision. Just the frequency is increasing. If we enjoyed nine years of quiet between the Yom Kippur War and the First Lebanon War, now we launch wars every two years.
Blood will flow like water, the writer tells his readers, and “the history of the Middle East repeats itself.” These things are inarguable, but merely stating them does nothing other than provide a kind of sanctimonious pedestal from which the observer can criticize those taking action.
Does Israel’s response to the persistent rain of rockets and mortars over its southern border “exceed all proportion”? This is the now-familiar theme being pursued by Israel’s critics across the capitals of the world — with the noteworthy and crucial exception, so far, of Washington D.C..
Hamas’s strategy of firing missiles into southern Israel cannot be understood in isolation. Although in isolation it is bad enough. No country on earth can tolerate these kinds of open attacks against its citizens and long remain a nation at all. But Hamas in the south is acting with a strategy similar to Hezbollah in the north. Both receive support from the Iranians, who are themselves pursuing a nuclear weapon and talking publicly of wiping Israel off the map. Theirs can be seen as a three-pronged strategy for the destruction of Israel without ever having to fight the Israeli Defense Forces in one enormous battle. It is a war of attrition, of threat and of fear. Israeli residents in the south of that tiny country must evacuate their homes under threat of Hamas missiles, just as residents of the north had to in 2006 as Hezbollah’s rockets were launched over the border (and just as they might have to again at any time). The mere fact that Iran is pursuing an atomic bomb and talking about the destruction of Israel puts a threat of doom over the heads of all Israelis. Imagine how magnified that will be once Iran actually achieves the bomb, or announces that it has achieved it. Imagine trying to raise a family when enemy missiles, with ever-increasing range and lethality, are closing in from the south and from the north, and when a nation that openly wishes your family’s death achieves the practical capability to cause it. Imagine trying to carry on a business — trying to carry on anything at all. The Iranian strategy, with the enthusiastic support of Hamas and Hezbollah, is to simply make life in Israel untenable for a critical mass of Jews, who will then either go somewhere else (those that have somewhere else to go) or give up the fight. A conventional war of nations and of armies, of the kind that Israel has won repeatedly in its history since 1948, is therefore avoided. Or, at the least, postponed until Israel is much more weakened and demoralized.
It is not an outlandish strategy. It is a very practical one, and it is one that is being pursued with some effect. If you wonder how a people’s confidence and will to fight can be broken down by literally interminable threats and violence, just read Mr. Levy’s column again.
Now, considering that Hamas’s missiles are part of an overall strategy for the total destruction of Israel, one has to ask the question: What is a “proportional response” to those who are attempting to destroy your country?
A response reflecting a natural will to live and to fight would be a response which defeats that enemy. The Israelis in the south need to be assured that their nation has the capability of defending them from these attacks, or else they simply have no reason to stay. The Israelis in the north are surely watching, and all Israelis are watching — even those who, like Mr. Levy, seem to have already given up the will to fight.
Though his use of the term “neighborhood bully” in his column seems to echo Bob Dylan’s song (from his album Infidels), I myself would guess that Mr. Levy has never heard Dylan’s Neighborhood Bully. In reality, it is Dylan’s song that is actually a response — albeit 25 years ahead of schedule — to Mr. Levy’s column, and to similar sentiments with which Israelis (uniquely among nations of the earth) need to contend day after day and year after year. Running out the clock, time standing still. It sure is a funny thing.
…
The neighborhood bully just lives to survive,
He’s criticized and condemned for being alive.
He’s not supposed to fight back, he’s supposed to have thick skin,
He’s supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in.
He’s the neighborhood bully.
…
Well, he’s surrounded by pacifists who all want peace,
They pray for it nightly that the bloodshed must cease.
Now, they wouldn’t hurt a fly.
To hurt one they would weep.
They lay and they wait for this bully to fall asleep.
He’s the neighborhood bully.
In the Canadian newspaper London Free Press, James Reaney writes on Bob Dylan’s recent show in London, Ontario. Guitarist Paul James (with whom Dylan has history) replaced Stu and Denny for the first several tunes. Reaney regrets that photographers were not allowed: “So you’ll have to take my word that Dylan was wearing a big white cowboy hat and a black suit with red trim that made him look like a bellhop in a wild west hotel.” That’s an interesting way of describing Bob, although I can’t imagine it’s quite the effect he’s going for. Reaney also writes this:
This reviewer has decided to accept Dylan’s decision to play around with his famous words. When he wants a line to be heard clearly — say, the slashing “I hope that you die” from Masters of War or the self-mocking “You think I’m over the hill” from Spirit on the Water or the menacing “How does it feel?” from Like a Rolling Stone — it could be heard.
“Unintelligible,” Dylan said clearly during the band introductions, one clue that this master artist and joker can be heard when he needs to.
Dylan said “unintelligible”? What’s that about? Well, let’s check the tape, which I happen to have. Click below for Dylan’s band intro and remarks – my transcription of the relevant part is below that.
So, after introducing Denny, Stu and Donnie, Bob says (to the degree that it’s intelligible, of-course):
If you haven’t noticed, there’s a journalist backstage, and he’s asking somebody, “Is he always so unintelligible?” Unintelligible. Does anybody out there think I’m unintelligible? [Pause, indistinct crowd reaction. Bob laughs.] Tell me the truth now!
Pretty funny stuff. The way he rolls that word around, “unintelligible,” sounds a little W.C. Fields-esque to me. In any case, just priceless.
No doubt everyone’s heard it already by now, but for the record, here is an mp3 file of Bob Dylan’s remarks at his gig in Minnesota on election night 2008:
He spoke during his encore, in between playing “Like A Rolling Stone” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.” He introduced his band members and made his fateful comments after naming the bass player and mainstay of his band all these long years, the estimable Tony Garnier. Here is my own scrupulously accurate transcript:
I wanna introduce my band right now. On the guitar, there’s Denny Freeman. Stu Kimball is on the guitar too. Donnie Herron as well, on the violin right now, playin’ on the steel guitar earlier. George Recile’s playin’ on the drums.
Tony Garnier, wearin’ the Obama button — [applause] alright! — Tony likes to think it’s a brand new time right now. An age of light. Me, I was born in 1941 — that’s the year they bombed Pearl Harbor. Well I been livin’ in a world of darkness ever since. But it looks like things are gonna change now …
These remarks have been referred to and partially quoted in a variety of established news outlets since Bob Dylan made them. None of these reports, as far as I’ve seen, included Dylan’s reference to Tony’s Obama button, or his references to what he says is Tony’s belief that “it’s a brand new time now” and “an age of light.” Leaving out this context alters the tone of Dylan’s comments and renders them incomprehensible. As I said the other day, the remarks as reported seemed “completely cockamamie” and “not the Bob Dylan I know.” (Not that I’ve ever met the guy, you understand.)
As opposed to the professional journalists in attendance at the concert who got this thing so wrong, a kind reader of my website who wishes to be known only as John W., and who was also in attendance at that gig, had emailed me a much more accurate rendering of Bob’s remarks, in advance of us being able to hear the audio. His accuracy and fairness in remembering and reporting Bob’s actual words leads me to also give great credence to his overall description of the moment. You may or may not do the same. It is not crucial to understanding what Bob was really saying, but in the absence of a good quality video it helps paint the picture. This is how John characterized it:
What seemed to prompt him to talk to the crowd more than anything was Tony Garnier’s donning of an Obama button. It was Tony’s turn to be introduced and Bob started to chuckle a bit and said something like, “Tony Garnier over there wearing his Obama button (raises his eyebrows)…..Tony thinks it’s gonna be an Age of Light (chuckling)…..Well I was born in 1941, the year they bombed Pearl Harbor. Been living in darkness ever since……Looks like that’s all gonna change now (chuckling a bit).” Then he broke into “Blowin’ In The Wind.”
On the bootlegger’s audio, I don’t detect the sound of Dylan chuckling, but there’s such a thing as a quiet and more visual kind of chuckle and that may be what John was picking up on. It’s far from crucial in any case.
The news reports of Dylan’s remarks that I have seen all portrayed them as being a sincere endorsement by Bob Dylan of the notion that President Barack Obama is going to change everything for the better. I didn’t see any attempt to explain what he meant by saying that he’s been living in a world of darkness since he was born in 1941, the year of the attack on Pearl Harbor. It just makes sense to some people, I guess, to think that Bob Dylan has been miserable in this world since birth but that Barack Obama is going to change all of that. I couldn’t understand it myself. In my original post I put forth just one conceivable explanation (based on Bob’s deep links to the black American experience) but concluded that really only Dylan himself could explain the remarks as reported in the press.
Now, knowing the full context and tone of his words, I no longer think that Dylan needs to explain anything at all. I don’t believe that his actual remarks are even at all mysterious or cryptic. I think that they are crystal clear and they are consistent with how this man and this artist has tried to carry himself throughout the long and crazy years he’s been on this planet. He is being faithful, and we should also remember that it’s not easy to be faithful — it’s not easy for any of us. The dignity of this man is something that is not often pointed out. But he is a man of very great dignity, and this moment on the stage in Minnesota on election night of 2008 — offhand though it may or may not have been — was a moment where he exhibited great dignity as well as respect for his fans and for things more important than fame and wealth.
But lest I choke up too much here, let’s also lighten up, because his remarks were first and foremost jocular ones. When he says that Tony Garnier with his Obama button believes it’s going to be a “brand new time” and “an age of light,” he is clearly needling Tony, but doing it affectionately. I hate to descend to the level of saying “listen to how he says” something, but there are actually people out there who — after hearing the audio — are still taking Dylan’s remarks completely seriously; so for them, please: listen to how he says “an age of light.” Does it sound like something he believes in? Be honest for a moment and have an ear to hear. (But no one can be forced to do so.)
Once it is understood that Dylan is joking around and does not seriously believe that all things will be made new by the incoming U.S. president, then his words about living in a world of darkness for his entire life become comprehensible in the context of what his songs have told us again and again.
This litany will be of necessity very incomplete, but consider: Dylan sings of living in a world of mixed-up confusion, where everything is broken. He’s hung over, hung down, hung up and a million miles from the one he loves. He longs to disappear past the haunted, frightened trees. He looks out with his lady from Desolation Row, and sings a lullaby that goes, “When the cities are on fire with the burning flesh of men, just remember that death is not the end.” He sees the cat in the well, with the wolf looking down. He’s knocking and trying to get to heaven before that door shuts. He wanders around Boston town but his heart is in the Highlands — he can’t see any other way to go. The times are always changing and changing, and yet nothing ever really changes. Don’t conclude that he is without solace, however: he’s liable to stand on the table and propose a toast to the King. He’s using all eight carburetors. The hills and the one he loves have always given him a song.
The world of darkness, in other words, is not something foisted upon Bob by presidents of the United States or by political powers or anyone else in particular. For him (and maybe if we think about it for us too) it is just normality: it is the way things are. The world is a difficult place. Life is hard. People suffer and people die. The truth about anything that is of this world is ever-elusive and leaves one ultimately bereft of comfort.
Now, what I want to know is this: Is the new American president going to fix all that for Bob — all of the above? Is he going to take Bob out of this darkness he’s lived in since 1941? Does anyone think that Bob Dylan believes that, and that’s what he wanted to tell everybody on election night of 2008?
Bob Dylan is neither an idiot nor a crank, though he’s been called both on various occasions. He knew very well, singing to that University of Minnesota audience, how hyped up most of them were for Barack Obama’s election. His remarks were not a slam of Barack Obama, nor an endorsement of John McCain, or anything like that. In his own way, he was kindly alerting those with ears to hear that one should not have such high expectations of a politician or of any fellow human being. There will be no age of light; at least not until the real age of light, and that age will not be instituted by any president of the United States. All presidents, you see, sometimes have to stand naked.
Of-course, most at the gig heard what they were so desperate to hear: that change is a comin’ with Obama, and it’s all gonna be great.They heard “it looks like things are gonna change now” without the irony that the context provides. And Bob, dignified, gave them that respect. He didn’t mock them. Everyone has to come to their own understandings at their own pace. Some will think twice about what he said.
He then sang “Blowin’ in the Wind.” I love the current live arrangement of this song, which Bob and the band have been playing for quite a while. I wrote about it in a previous post here. It is indeed a buoyant and a joyous version. It is a version of the song which conveys — to this listener at any rate — how wonderful a thing it is that the answer is right there blowing in the wind in front of our faces. Thanks, Bob.
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It is better to put trust in the LORD than to put confidence in princes. Psalm 118:9
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Addendum: And one more thing. We all no doubt remember Bob’s quoted remarks in that interview with the U.K. Times last June. As they stood up to end the interview, the interviewer asked him “in a last aside” something about the coming U.S. election.
We don’t know exactly what the question was or what Dylan’s full response was. There is no pretence that we are being provided a complete transcript — it’s not that kind of an article. Dylan is quoted as crediting Barack Obama with “redefining the nature of politics from the ground up” and “redefining what a politician is.” He is quoted as saying that he’s “hopeful that things might change” and that “some things are going to have to.” Our fresh experience of seeing how journalists and newspapers missed the humor and irony of Bob Dylan on stage in Minnesota on election night — and gave us a completely different story — cannot but make me entirely reevaluate whatever I thought I knew about Dylan’s remarks in that interview. They may have been entirely ironic. Or maybe not. He also is quoted as saying, “You can’t expect people to have the virtue of purity when they are poor.” The remarks as quoted are, in the final analysis, incomplete and not fully comprehensible on their own — just like what was quoted in the Minnesota newspapers after the election night gig. So make of those quotes what you will, or, perhaps more wisely, make nothing of them at all.
A few days ago I wrote a little about the newly released song “Red River Shore” from Bob Dylan’s Tell Tale Signs collection.
Perhaps I was going a tad nuts implying that it might be the greatest thing Bob Dylan has ever done. After all, you could certainly argue that there’s nothing radical about the record. It’s not going to set the world upside down, or spark revolution in the streets, or spawn hundreds of imitators in the music biz trying to copy the “Red River Shore” sound. You could hardly imagine a simpler melody, and some might say that Bob Dylan can write a song like this in between rolling out of bed and brushing his teeth. And maybe he can, if the mood is right. Yet, the song and the performance moved me and shook me up in a way that is very rare; all the rarer, in fact, as I get older and bend a little from the weight of believing that I’ve heard it all already. And isn’t it nice to be able to get that excited about something again?
The song is stirring and poignant in direct proportion to the way in which it expresses feelings which are unspeakable. This also makes it difficult to write about, and likewise makes me personally not want to write about it too much.
There is one thing that the mind of the listener probably meditates upon, and goes back and forth about, when listening to the song, and that is the question of just who this girl is—the girl from the Red River shore. Of-course any given listener can believe that she is just a girl—some variation of an unrequited human love for whom the singer is pining. And there ain’t nothing wrong with that.
However, without wanting to speak too much to what perhaps can’t or shouldn’t be said outside of the song itself, I will say that it has crossed my mind, while listening to this song, that the girl from the Red River shore is perhaps the same “she” for this singer as the “she” of “Shelter from the Storm” is for the singer of that song. And I offer this not by way of trying to define an end to the meaning of the song, but rather to open up its possibilities (as if that’s even necessary).
In that song from Blood on the Tracks, the singer is by turns nurtured and comforted by this female figure; he is then alienated from her through his own failing ( “I took too much for granted, got my signals crossed”), and is finally left meditating at once optimistically and hopelessly on the ultimate possibility of truly knowing her or uniting with her.
Well, I’m livin’ in a foreign country but I’m bound to cross the line
Beauty walks a razor’s edge, someday I’ll make it mine.
If I could only turn back the clock to when God and her were born.
“Come in,” she said,
“I’ll give you shelter from the storm.”
“[W]hen God and her were born.” It’s one of those great lines: an imponderable line that you cannot help but ponder and ponder. It’s a poetic jump that takes the feeling of the song beyond normal expression. It sounds a little bit like some kind of secret key—like a Rosetta Stone line. But it defies being completely nailed down, and so its magic survives.
Taken in any kind of literal sense, it’s a big thing to say that someone or something has been around as long as God himself. You might be really hung up on an ex-girlfriend or boyfriend, but when you get into that kind of thinking then you’re going somewhere else entirely.
Now, the parallel with the girl from the Red River shore can perhaps be seen most clearly, likewise, in the final verse of that song. After singing about the “man full of sorrow and strife” (Is 53), whom — the singer has heard — used to be able to literally raise the dead, he sings:
Well I don’t know what kind of language he used
Or if they do that kind of thing anymore
Sometimes I think nobody ever saw me here at all
‘Cept the girl from the Red River shore
Well, when he sings about this man who used to raise the dead, we know—any listener knows, regardless of his or her own faith or lack thereof—that this singer is (just like that earlier singer) invoking none other than God himself. If this man he heard about actually did used to do that, then he was, at least in some inscrutable sense, God. Yet the singer then puts the girl from the Red River shore on a level beyond anyone else he’s ever known, and potentially beyond even that Man, when he indicates that she may have been the only one who ever actually saw him on this earth—the only one whose acknowledgment of his existence proved that he actually did exist. That is a heavy honor indeed, and quite a heavy burden for any girl from the Red River shore to bear.
Perhaps it’s worth summarizing some of the qualities of this figure—if it is one figure—this “she” who promised shelter from the storm, and this girl from the Red River shore.
Back when he was just a “creature void of form,” she was there for him. And then when he needed a “place where it’s always safe and warm,” she was there. Later, she walked up to him “so gracefully and took [his] crown of thorns.” She was there again when the entire world seemed to just pose a question that was “hopeless and forlorn.” This mysterious girl was the only one he ever wanted to want him—the one with whom he wishes he “could have spent every hour of [his] life.” He is a stranger in the land in which he is duty-bound to live, but she—and the hills—give him a song with which to get by. Although many saw them together at one time, when he goes back to inquire with them no one even knows what he’s talking about. Each day he lives is “just another day away” from that girl from the Red River shore.
So, she is the very source of song itself. From her comes comfort, protection and wisdom, at those times when he needs it most desperately. Yet she is somehow invisible to the world, and, although she has touched him, she remains just out of his reach: unattainable.
While she is an eternal presence for him, she is in some sense distinct from that other presumed eternal presence; i.e., God.
I don’t know necessarily what you might call such a being (if you’re not calling her the girl from the Red River shore). However, it cannot but strike me that, for Christians, there is actually a specific name that can be applied to a figure who meets all of these criteria. Indeed, it was that aforementioned man full of sorrow and strife who gave the figure a name, as in Luke 11:13:
If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?
The Holy Spirit is believed, by Christians, to be at once God and a distinct person—in a sense that I’m distinctly unqualified to plumb. This is part of that theological mystery called the Holy Trinity, where God is believed by Christians to be at once Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But, relevant here, it does mean that the Holy Spirit is as old as—or, if you like, was born at the same time as—God, because the Holy Spirit is God, while still being in a real way the Holy Spirit. Interesting, no?
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Now, am I saying that “Red River Shore” is “Bob Dylan’s song about the Holy Spirit”? By no means would I blandly state that. The heartbreak, the longing, the love and the mystery that inhabits “Red River Shore” can’t and shouldn’t be labeled, solved and neatly filed away like a doctrine. And we know that the writer of “Shelter from the Storm” is unlikely to have been self-consciously writing about a specifically Christian concept like the Holy Spirit. I’d also tend to believe that in his greatest songs, Bob Dylan is not deliberately writing about anything at all. When things are happening at that level, the song is always in some way expressing itself. I believe that he’s made much this point himself in interviews over the years.
Yet, it is one measure of the greatness of this song that amongst all of the various ways in which it works and holds true is also this quasi-theological sense. Pretty astounding.
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Is it the greatest song that Bob Dylan has ever done, as I breathlessly intimated it might be a few days ago? Who the hell knows? But I can say without hesitation that it’s the greatest song by anybody that this listener has heard in a long, long time.
At his blog, Yisrael Medad reproduces an article that was published in 1987 in an Israeli publication. Written by an apparent long-time friend of Bob Dylan’s named Tuvia Ariel, it is entitled “Rambling on Dylan,” and that about describes it, although it is an interesting rambling.
Excerpt:
I remember calling Bob in the late days of October or early November 1973. “We need you here in Israel,” I told him collect. “But you got the war won,” he said. “You don’t need me.” Not to fight, I told him, and before I could say another word, that I wanted him to come and sing in the hospitals for the wounded, before I could even make a sound he said “eh” and I knew that if I had told him that the Jews needed him to fight in their army, needed Zimmerman the Jew, he would have come. Bob Dylan the Entertainer couldn’t make it. “I’m making a movie right now and I can’t get away.” “I promise you,” I said, “the movie will bomb.” The movie bombed.
And while on the subject of proofs of God’s existence … happy birthday to the state of Israel.
Now his holiest books have been trampled upon,
No contract he signed was worth what it was written on.
He took the crumbs of the world and he turned it into wealth,
Took sickness and disease and he turned it into health.What’s anybody indebted to him for?
Nothin’, they say.
He just likes to cause war.
Pride and prejudice and superstition indeed,
They wait for this bully like a dog waits to feed.What has he done to wear so many scars?
Does he change the course of rivers?
Does he pollute the moon and stars?
Neighborhood bully, standing on the hill,
Running out the clock, time standing still.
Paul Westphal has enjoyed a storied career in American basketball. As a player, he was drafted by the Boston Celtics in 1972, and earned a championship ring with that team in 1974. He went on to play six seasons with the Phoenix Suns (leading them to the NBA finals in ’76), and continues to rank Continue reading “Q &A with Paul Westphal on Bob Dylan”
I was really delighted a few days ago to receive an email from one Bob Cohen with the text of his article below attached. Bob Cohen is presently the Cantor at Temple Emanuel in Kingston, New York. Back in the early 1960s, he was one of the New World Singers (more on them here), along with Gil Turner, Happy Traum and Delores Dixon. They were close associates in Greenwich Village with a young singer named Bob Dylan, as he himself also recounts in his memoir, “Chronicles.” Dylan ultimately wrote liner notes for an album that the New World Singers recorded, in which he pays tribute to each of his friends, saying this about Cohen:
Bob Cohen’s quiet – I first seen him at a City College folksong hall an’ thought he was some sort of a Spanish gypsy by the way he wore his sideburns an’ moustache an’ eyebrows – but he didn’t talk so I couldn’t tell – I must a sat an hour next to him waitin’ to hear some gypsy language – he never said a word – he laughed a few times but all folks no matter what race laughs in the same tongue – I seen him sing later that night an’ it didn’t bother my thoughts no more as to if he was gypsy or gigolo – he tol’ me more about my new world in that ten minutes time than the pop radio station did all that week
What Bob Cohen writes speaks for itself, and I’m grateful to be able to reproduce it here. I think it stands both as an affectionate first-person remembrance of a remarkable moment of history and also as a wise reflection on what is so special and powerful about Dylan’s songwriting.
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HOW BLOWIN’ IN THE WIND CAME TO BE by Bob Cohen
Here is how Bob Dylan came to write “Blowin’ In the Wind” which he now says, as quoted in various articles, he wrote in 10 minutes and came out of the melody of “No More Auction Block For Me” described as a spiritual that he thinks he may have heard on a Carter Family record. (see the New Republic article by David Yaffe.) That was much more than he said on the CBS-60 Minute Ed Bradley interview, where it came down to the song coming out of the wellsprings of his creativity. To paraphrase Walter Cronkite: I was there.
Dylan had blown into NYC in the early 1960s and hung out at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village. Gerdes was a long room – on one side was a bar and a cash register – then a half wall and on the other side, some round tables, chairs, and a very small stage with a microphone. We, the New World Singers, a group that some thought might one day inherit the mantle of the Weavers, were at that time myself, Gil Turner, Delores Dixon and Happy Traum. Delores was a black woman, a New York City school teacher who had a deep alto voice.
In our set at Gerde’s Folk City, Delores would step forward in the middle of the set and sing solo “No More Auction Block For Me” – a very moving song of freedom written during slavery times, insisting “no more, no more” and sadly reflecting on the “many thousands gone.” She sang it with spirit and determination. Alan Lomax, calling it “Many Thousands Gone” writes: “This is one of the spirituals of resistance (W.E.B. Dubois called them ‘Sorrow Songs’), whose ante-bellum origin has been authenticated. Runaway slaves who fled as far north as Nova Scotia, after Britain abolished slavery in 1833, transmitted it to their descendants, and it is still in circulation there. At the time of the Civil War an abolitionist took it down from Negro Union soldiers.” (p. 450, Lomax, Alan – Folksongs of North America, Doubleday, 1960).
Dylan liked our group. In his recent memoir: “Chronicles Vol. I” he writes: “…with my sort of part-time girl-friend, Delores Dixon, the girl singer from The New World Singers, a group I was pretty close with. Delores was from Alabama, an ex-reporter and an ex-dancer.” – p. 64) – and then when I met Delores about ten years later, she remarked that Dylan had gone home with her one night and the next morning he was working on “Blowin’ in the Wind” and she said to him: “Bobby, you just can’t do that” (take the melody of that traditional song and write new words to it – it’s a scene similar to the scene in the Ray Charles bio pix when Ray’s new wife tells Ray that he just can’t take an old Gospel song she sang in her group and make it into a love song.) Both Bob and Ray preceded anon.
So one day soon after that, Dylan says to us: “Hey, I got this new song” and we go down to the basement at Gerdes (filled with rats, roaches and other folkies) and he sings his new song: “Blowin’ In the Wind”which was based on the melody of “No More Auction Block”. In those days we spoke of “borrowing” tunes, something Pete Seeger called “the folk process”. Woody Guthrie and Joe Hill and even J.S.Bach had done it. We thought it was great and started to sing it. We would bring Dylan up on that postage stamp of a stage to sing it along with us. It seemed to me then as it does now that his re-working or recreation of that spiritual carried on its original message and was in itself a song of resistance to all the injustice in the world. We would go on to sing it in Mississippi in 1963-64 where it became a civil-rights anthem.
During our sets at Gerdes, Dylan would sit at the bar drinking wine that we often bought for him. He listened to us night after night. After about a year when we made an album for Ahmet Ertegun, head of Atlantic records and son of a Turkish diplomat, (Ahmet loved the blues and he is wonderfully portrayed in the recent film “Ray”), Dylan would write the liner notes for our album much in the same style he uses in his new book, “Chronicles”, writing generously about each of us. Ironically, when we sang “Blowin’ In The Wind” for Ahmet Ertegun he said that if we could change the lyrics to make it a love song then he would include it on our album! But we were too far into the essence of that song to change it, singing it at college rallies to raise money for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and its voter registration work in the South.
When Moe Asch (Folkways) decided to release an album of topical songs on Broadside Records (Broadside, the topical song magazine that first printed many of Dylan’s songs along with others) we were asked to sing “Blowin’ In the Wind” and we did – making it the first recording of that song, even before Bob did it on Columbia Records. Delores insisted on singing the chorus as “The answer my friend is blown in the wind” and we couldn’t talk her out of it – so that’s what you hear. I think she thought that “Blowin'” was improper English usage. It reminds me of a funny story about the lyricist, Jack Yellen, who wrote the words for the song “Ain’t She Sweet” on which he made a bundle, going back to his high school reunion and being scolded by his English teacher: “And I thought I taught you that ‘ain’t’ is bad grammar!”
Smithsonian-Folkways released our recording of the Dylan song as part of a 5- CD set “The Best of Broadside” which got two Grammy nominations (in 2000) for best notes and production, but we lost to Louis Armstrong and John Coltrane respectively. I read recently that it actually won two Indie awards.
I always believed that “Blowin’ In the Wind” reflected Dylan’s Judaic heritage. Jews are well-known to always answer a question with a question. The story goes of a Jewish fellow and a non-Jewish fellow walking down the street, and the non-Jew says to the Jew, “How come you guys always answer a question with a question” and the Jew replies: “So what’s wrong with that?!” So here is Dylan asking some very important basic questions about human society – “How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?” and the questions themselves imply the answers. In that particular question one can hear resonating, a line from a Yiddish folk song based on a poem by David Edelstadt: “Vakht Oyf!” (“Awake!”) that asks “How long will you remain slaves and wear degrading chains?” and Dylan’s questions all reflected that yearning for justice and for peace. That the answers are blowing or blown in the wind.
When Ed Bradley asked what Dylan meant when he talked about his agreement with the Commander-in-Chief (trying to explain his use of the word “destiny”) – Bradley wondered aloud whether he was talking about a Commander on earth – and Dylan answered – yes both on earth and somewhere beyond. This is what I call “God talk” or “Godspeak” – the way one talks if one has even the vaguest concept of a force beyond what we can experience with our five senses. It is, of course, in Dylan’s very own style, his very unique vernacular, but it acknowledges God, and is God inspired nevertheless.
Dylan still seems to have “issues” with his parents, but like all of us with the same issues, he has imbibed more from them than he realizes or is willing to admit. He may have traded in Hibbing for New York City, but the ethics, outrage at injustice, love of language and metaphor came out of the religion and culture called Judaism which on many levels incorporates us all. In a recent interview in Newsweek (10/4/04) Dylan is quoted as saying: “The difference between me now and then (back in Hibbing, Minn. as a youngster) is that back then, I could see visions. The me now can dream dreams.” This is a very close paraphrase of the Hebrew prophet, Joel who said “Your old men shall dream dreams, And your young men shall see visions.” (Joel 3:1)
Dylan knows there is little profit in being a prophet, but the force of his words expressing his thoughts and his heart carry much the same message of those who went before.
Bob Cohen is the cantorial soloist and music director at Temple Emanuel in Kingston, New York, and Chair of the Ulster County Religious Council, an interfaith organization. He will be giving a guest lecture at NYU’s class on Bob Dylan this spring.
And he has a website of his own at CantorBob.com.
There’s a piece by Paul J. Cella at Redstate called “The irony of Bob Dylan.” It’s largely a reaction to a review of Chronicles written by Jim Kunstler. I guess it comes as a surprise to me that it is still a surprise to some others that Dylan, in Chronicles, names Barry Goldwater (R-Az) as his “favorite politician” around the period of 1961/62. But then it shouldn’t surprise me: his reference to Goldwater didn’t get the kind of attention it warranted in most of the reviews and publicity surrounding that memoir, probably because a whole lot of people didn’t know what the hell to make of it. A reminder of what exactly it was (from page 283 of the original hardcover):
There was no point arguing with Dave (Van Ronk), not intellectually anyway. I had a primitive way of looking at things and I liked country fair politics. My favorite politician was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who reminded me of Tom Mix, and there wasn’t any way to explain that to anybody. I wasn’t that comfortable with all the psycho polemic babble.
Tom Mix was a star of silent westerns. Barry Goldwater of-course was the iconic Republican who wrote “The Conscience Of A Conservative” and was a formative influence on Ronald Reagan. Dylan was writing about the 1961/62 era.
Anyway, towards the end of his piece, Cella says the following:
Given that the counterculture of the Sixties, which tried to set up Dylan as its spokesman or poet-laureate, has conquered and is even now solidifying its preeminence in our society, there is a special and marvelous irony to note.
All the sneering revolt that churns through the great anthems of Dylan’s best work, “Like a Rolling Stone” being perhaps the most well-known exemplar; all the defiance, the fury of impudence; all the challenge thrown vaguely at some contemptible oppressor —
You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse
When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.How does it feel?
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?— all this may be justly hurled with equal passion against the generation, now leading our country toward ruin, which wanted it as its slogan, and which unjustly hurled it against the basically sound social order preceding it.
And Bob Dylan himself may have even meant it that way.
Well, it might be tempting to hear the song as put-down of the then-emerging 60s generation, and you could probably take that interpretation a long way if you wanted to. But I personally would resist that temptation. I think the song works most profoundly as, ultimately, a reflection on the singer’s self. And this particular singer did happen to be breaking out and breaking through on an artistic level at the time that had to be both terrifying and exhilarating — two emotions that balance each other exquisitely in the song, I think. Of-course the song doesn’t have be nailed down, and maybe a lot of its power comes from the fact that it can’t be. I do think, though, that it is very often fruitful to look at songs where Dylan appears to be criticizing and taking apart someone other as potentially being reflections on the self instead. I find it difficult to hear, for example, “Just Like A Woman” or “Sweetheart Like You” other than in this way. (And let Todd Haynes make of that what he will.)
Joseph Bottum is the Editor of First Things: The Journal of Religion, Culture and Public Life. He is also a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, where he was the Books and Arts Editor for some years. He’s a widely published essayist, reviewer and poet. A couple of his recent pieces include “The Books of Christmas,” and “Death & Politics.” P.G. Wodehouse fans would enjoy reading his “God & Bertie Wooster.” And “Reading by Osmosis” would bring smiles to anyone who loves those skippin’ reels of rhyme. His 2001 book “The Fall & Other Poems
I was delighted to be able to talk to him recently about his affection for the work of Bob Dylan. Continue reading “Q & A with Joseph Bottum on Bob Dylan”
Robert Spencer’s bio at Jihad Watch states that he “has been studying Islamic theology, law, and history in depth since 1980.” Since September 11th, 2001, he has been one of a priceless few whose knowledge of and clear speaking to issues surrounding Islam, jihadism and terrorism has helped the rest of us catch up (although the catching up has been slow and is very much ongoing). In books like “The Truth About Muhammad
