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Why Dylan Matters
Richard F. Thomas
‘At last an expert classicist gets to grips with Bob Dylan’ Mary BeardWhen the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Bob Dylan in 2016, the literary world was up in arms. How could the world’s most prestigious book prize be awarded to a famously cantankerous singer-songwriter in his seventies, who wouldn’t even deign to make a victory speech?In Why Dylan Matters, Harvard Professor Richard F. Thomas answers that question with magisterial erudition. A world expert on Classical poetry, Thomas was initially ridiculed by his colleagues for teaching a course on Bob Dylan alongside his traditional seminars on Homer, Virgil and Ovid. Dylan’s Nobel prize win brought him vindication, and he immediately found himself thrust into the limelight as a leading academic voice in all matters Dylanological.This witty, personal volume is a distillation of Thomas’s famous course, and makes a compelling case for moving Dylan out of the rock n’ roll Hall of Fame and into the pantheon of Classical poets. The most dazzlingly original and compelling Dylan book in decades, Why Dylan Matters will amaze and astound everyone from the first-time listener to the lifetime fan. You’ll never think about Bob Dylan in the same way again.
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COPYRIGHT (#ulink_26a9099c-93c6-5716-82f4-ef3c26d801e1)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com)
First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017
First published in the United States by Dey Street, an imprint of William Morrow in 2017
This William Collins ebook edition published in 2018
Copyright © Richard F. Thomas 2017
Designed by Renata De Oliveira
Richard F. Thomas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Nobel Prize in Literature, Award Ceremony Speech 2016 © The Nobel Foundation 2016
Nobel Prize in Literature, Banquet Speech 2016 © The Nobel Foundation 2016
Nobel Prize in Literature, Nobel Lecture 2017 © Bob Dylan p. 13, Nobel Prize in Literature, Medal image, reverse side © The Nobel Foundation, Photo: Lovisa Engblom
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008245467
Ebook Edition © August 2017 ISBN: 9780008245481
Version: 2018-11-06
A GUARDIAN AND INDEPENDENT BEST MUSIC BOOK OF 2017 (#ulink_f407bb0d-776c-542d-af08-34442162e01d)
‘At last an expert classicist gets to grips with Bob Dylan. Richard Thomas takes us from Dylan’s high school Latin club to his haunting engagement with Ovid and Homer in recent albums. He carefully argues that Dylan’s poetry deserves comparison with Virgil’s – and Thomas, senior professor of Latin at Harvard and author of some of the most influential modern studies of Virgil, should know!’
Mary Beard
‘A poignant blend of memoir, literary analysis through a classical lens, musicology and, above all, love. [Thomas] loves Dylan with a passion so selfless and so intense that it’s impossible to emerge from the book untouched’
Guardian
‘Accessible and enjoyable … Richard F. Thomas’s elegant, charming book offers something for everyone – not just the super-fans’
Independent
‘The coolest class on campus’
New York Times
‘The book joyously bounces from topic to topic, mixing anecdotes about Dylan’s creative process, historical concerts, and wry press conferences with penetrating literary critique – and no shortage of Thomas’ own personal recollections of bonding with Dylan’s music. A highly informed, yet intimately personal celebration of one of our most important living writers – not despite, but because of the medium in which he writes’
NPR
‘Thomas’ outstanding, eminently readable and beautifully bound work, answers that question in relation to his subject with a resounding ‘Yes’. Dylan matters. Emphatically’
Tribune
‘Why Dylan Matters is about the work of an astonishingly great artist and performer, and how that work echoes the great Greek and Roman poet-performers – Homer, Virgil, Horace, Catullus and Ovid – whose five voices are heard in Dylan’s work. Richard Thomas teaches us, with loving and passionate authority, how he hears in these poems the voices and music of these great ancient poets; he teaches us how poems listen and hear and speak to other poems through all time’
David Ferry, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry
‘Richard Thomas has created a monument to Bob Dylan – and, also, a Rosetta Stone. The erudite and politically engaged Thomas is the perfect guide through the wondrous mystery of Dylan’s genius’
James Carroll, author of Constantine’s Sword
‘Secures Dylan’s place in a pantheon of literary heroes from Virgil to Eliot. A critical breakthrough that makes a masterful case for why Dylan is the bard of our times’
Andrew McCarron,
author of Light Come Shining: The Transformations of Bob Dylan
‘Listen to Bob Dylan in performance. But read this book for help on how to hear his lyrics’
Irish Examiner
‘An enormously rewarding academic study of Dylan’s significance and significations … Thomas’s classicist’s training, sharp ear for allusion and taste for detailed research give his book a very special and distinctive allure’
Argo
DEDICATION (#ulink_68e0dc1a-549f-5345-b258-75326c9d2822)
To four generations of Harvard freshman in
“FRSEM 37u: Bob Dylan”
2004–2016
CONTENTS
COVER (#uce59473f-87eb-53d5-a2a7-069cf54b5197)
TITLE PAGE (#u401c0b2d-6874-55d9-adfb-da28f49f2f8c)
COPYRIGHT (#ud9bafcf6-8d39-5e1f-a7c6-cdd5a2f0fee4)
PRAISE (#ufaf5824b-aeb6-5e6f-a7bd-6474c0a4f284)
DEDICATION (#uf88ba3a4-1dac-506b-9871-a44865224ac5)
BOB DYLAN’S DISCOGRAPHY (#u1a82fce7-763e-5a7e-b31a-23ad2cb95d2c)
1 WHY DOES DYLAN MATTER TO US? (#udd7df952-a08c-5e36-8c25-c1bb7583ff75)
2 TOGETHER THROUGH LIFE (#u27ce8c8b-92f0-57ec-90ea-1c75927de94b)
3 DYLAN AND ANCIENT ROME: “THAT’S WHERE I WAS BORN” (#uab5b31c4-9569-51fd-9685-2956cb897488)
4 “VIBRATIONS IN THE UNIVERSE”: DYLAN TELLS HIS OWN STORY (#litres_trial_promo)
5 THE EARLY THEFTS: “MINE’VE BEEN LIKE VERLAINE’S AND RIMBAUD’S” (#litres_trial_promo)
6 “THE GIFT WAS GIVEN BACK”: TIME OUT OF MIND AND BEYOND (#litres_trial_promo)
7 MATURE POETS STEAL: VIRGIL, DYLAN, AND THE MAKING OF A CLASSIC (#litres_trial_promo)
8 MODERN TIMES AND THE WORLD’S ANCIENT LIGHT: BECOMING HOMER (#litres_trial_promo)
9 THE SHOW’S THE THING: DYLAN IN PERFORMANCE (#litres_trial_promo)
CONCLUSION: SPEECHLESS IN STOCKHOLM (#litres_trial_promo)
NOTES (#litres_trial_promo)
BIBLIOGRAPHY (#litres_trial_promo)
INDEX (#litres_trial_promo)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
BOB DYLAN LYRICS—COPYRIGHT INFORMATION (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)
BOB DYLAN’S DISCOGRAPHY (#ulink_a60ec092-e7d8-5826-9ecf-2b6d34572a66)
1 (#ulink_1ea2b778-0197-56bc-b6f6-b20f0a7b5c48)
WHY DOES DYLAN MATTER TO US? (#ulink_1ea2b778-0197-56bc-b6f6-b20f0a7b5c48)
THERE’S A MOMENT WHEN ALL OLD THINGS
BECOME NEW AGAIN
—BOB DYLAN
Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde was one of two albums I packed in the trunk I sent from New Zealand to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the early summer of 1974. The other was Songs of Leonard Cohen. I was twenty-three years old and had sold off the rest of my record collection to finance a two-month backpacking trip through Greece, before starting my doctoral studies at the University of Michigan. The trip to Greece was my first, but I had been fascinated by the Greeks and Romans since the age of nine, growing up in Auckland, New Zealand, half a world away from where their civilizations rose and fell. I arrived in Ann Arbor on August 18, 1974, days after Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency, ready to begin my professional life as a scholar and teacher of classical literature. My trunk finally arrived in October, and its familiar contents were a welcome sight. Along with the survivors of my record collection, that trunk contained the few classical texts I had accumulated as an undergraduate: the writings of Homer and Virgil, the epic poets of Greece and Rome, along with Sappho, Catullus, Horace, and Ovid, the brilliant lyric poets and love poets whose work captures what it means to live and love, to win and lose, to grieve and celebrate, and to grow old and die. For two thousand years, their poetry has fired the minds and imaginations of philosophers and poets, painters, sculptors and musicians, dreamers and lovers.
For the past forty years, as a classics professor, I have been living in the worlds of the Greek and Roman poets, reading them, writing about them, and teaching them to students in their original languages and in English translation. I have for even longer been living in the world of Bob Dylan’s songs, and in my mind Dylan long ago joined the company of those ancient poets. He is part of that classical stream whose spring starts out in Greece and Rome and flows on down through the years, remaining relevant today, and incapable of being contained by time or place. That’s why Dylan matters to me, and that’s what this book is about.
From the beginning of his musical career, Bob Dylan has been working with artistic principles, and attitudes toward composition, revision, and performance, that bear many similarities to those of the ancients. He has also been living and writing in a world that bears many striking similarities to that of the ancient Romans, whose republic was the model on which the Founding Fathers built our own system. I believe that Dylan early on came to recognize this similarity, and it has been reflected in the worlds he creates for us in his music ever since.
Cullen Murphy’s 2007 book, Are We Rome?, addresses this question, arguing that our time (Dylan’s time) looks quite a bit like for the most part that of the Romans at various moments in their more than thousand-year history. According to Cullen, the ties that bind the two cultures include the condition of being a superpower, tensions caused by ethnic differences, the persistent memory of civil wars long after the last battle was fought, a sense of the fragility of political structures and decline of the human condition, the relaxation of moral and religious bonds, and a pushback against the countercultures.
At the heart of it, Rome around the last century BC and the beginnings of the first century AD and America in the second half of the twentieth share a sense of modernity, by which I mean a few things. By then Rome had more or less established herself as the dominant power in the Mediterranean world. The absence of serious external enemies, along with the sheer size of her empire, led to competing struggles among those whose task it was to govern the state and extend and defend its vast borders. Starting in the middle of the century these competing forces clashed, and a series of civil wars led to the elimination—by death on the battlefield, murder, and assassination—of one figure after another, along with the defeat of the ideals or interests they represented. The names are well known: Pompey the Great, Julius Caesar, Brutus, Mark Antony, all killed in a succession of bloody civil wars that went on for eighteen years. By around 30 BC, Augustus Caesar as he would be renamed, the last man standing, delivered the final blow to the republic and stepped in as the first emperor of Rome.
This period of political uncertainty coincided with the emergence of a brilliant succession of poets and other writers, as happens at moments of political and national crisis or greatness: Athens in the fifth century BC, Elizabethan England, America and Great Britain between the two world wars—the rise of the so-called Moderns. Such moments give rise to a heightened sense of the past, along with uncertainties about the future. In each of these periods new art forms responded to what was happening, disrupting the old forms and traditions, busting them up, renewing what had gone before, moving into uncharted territory. The Roman poets in question will become familiar in the pages that follow: Catullus, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. Others would have filled out their ranks, but their texts did not survive the centuries. Their art addressed the large issues of their day, the perilous state of their world, and the aftermath of civil war. Similarly, Dylan’s art would speak to the horrors of the wars of his day, the Second World War and the cold war that followed, historic episodes like the Cuban missile crisis, and the fear of nuclear warfare, eventually Vietnam, even Iraq. And in both cases, through music and poetry that would prove to be enduring, memorable, and meaningful to ages beyond their own, Dylan and the ancients explore the essential question of what it means to be human.
Dylan’s songs have been part of my song memory since my mid-teens, but it would be decades before they became more fully aligned in my mind with the Greek and Roman poets I was beginning to read back then. And it was chiefly in the twenty-first century that Dylan started to reference, borrow from, and “creatively reuse” their work in his own songs. I first began to make the connection after a trip to the coast of Normandy, where I had been invited in the spring of 2001 to give a lecture at the University of Caen on Virgil and other Roman poets. My host, Catharine Mason, a linguistics professor there, met me at the train station. She suggested that instead of touring the town, pretty much pummeled out of its historical state before the D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944, we might head for the beach. That sounded good to me, so I followed her to the parking lot. As we got into her car and she turned the key in the ignition, music came blasting from her car stereo. As we’ve all done, she had gotten out of the car earlier without thinking to turn down the volume, and the familiar bars of Dylan’s “Idiot Wind,” then and now one of my favorite songs, urgently interrupted our tentative conversation:
You hurt the ones that I love best and cover up the truth with lies
One day you’ll be in the ditch, flies buzzin’ around your eyes
Blood on your saddle
Our conversation quickly turned to Dylan, to that song and its importance. For Catharine, a single mother who had recently gone through a divorce, and an American expatriate bringing up two young sons in France, the breakup song had powerful personal resonance. She had gotten hooked on Dylan twenty-five years after I had, with his 1990 album Under the Red Sky, whose nursery rhyme and fairy-tale traditions became part of the rhythm of bringing up her two young sons. As we walked on what had been Sword Beach, landing point for the British Third Division on D-Day, she talked about her plans for a conference on the performance art of Dylan. Did I want to give a paper at her conference, and maybe even co-edit the proceedings into a volume, she asked? I said sure, not really knowing how I would find a way into the topic. But in the back of my mind, I was thinking about how the songs from Dylan’s 1997 album, Time Out of Mind, had lately begun somehow to remind me of the work of the Roman poets. Still, I had yet to share this insight with anyone.
It was not until many months after my trip to Caen, soon after September 11, 2001, the day that permanently changed the modern world, that what I would present at the Dylan conference became clear to me. Dylan’s album “Love and Theft” came out on that day, and I bought it at the Tower Records in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a daze, in the hours after the towers in New York had been leveled. When I eventually listened to the album, I heard Virgil, loud and clear in the tenth verse of “Lonesome Day Blues”:
I’m gonna spare the defeated—I’m gonna speak to the crowd
I’m gonna spare the defeated, boys, I’m gonna speak to the crowd
I’m goin’ to teach peace to the conquered
I’m gonna tame the proud.
The idiom, rhymes, and music of these lines belonged to Dylan, but the thought and diction, rearranged by Dylan, came from Rome’s greatest poet, Virgil. In Dylan’s lyrics, I recognized these lines from Virgil’s Aeneid, spoken by Anchises, father of Aeneas, the mythical founder of Rome. Anchises, who had died on the journey from Troy to Sicily, instructs his son from the Underworld on just how Rome is to rule the world:
but yours will be the rulership of nations,
remember, Roman, these will be your arts:
to teach the ways of peace to those you conquer,
to spare defeated peoples, tame the proud.
—Virgil, Aeneid 6.851–53, tr. Mandelbaum
Suddenly, when I heard Virgil’s lines echoed in Dylan’s song, my paper topic was obvious. “Bob Dylan’s Performance Artistry” ended up taking place in Caen in March 2005, and I brought along my younger daughter, who was a college freshman at the time and a veteran of a few Dylan concerts. I was delighted, and surprised, that she’d chosen to spend her first college spring break with her father at a Bob Dylan conference. But that was the point. I’d taken her and her sister along to academic conferences before, where they would generally disappear into whatever city we happened to find ourselves. But at the Dylan conference in Normandy, things were different. My daughter attended every event, and even joined the Dylanologists for after-dinner Dylan trivia games. We were even treated to a Hendrix-style rendition of Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” by Catharine Mason’s teenage sons. I was astonished to see their enthusiasm, but perhaps I shouldn’t have been. When I see the younger generation of Bob fans, like my daughters, or Catharine Mason’s sons, or the students in my freshman seminar, engage with his work, it is a testament to the intergenerational nature of his work, and how his art endures.
In 2003, between my trips to Normandy, I decided to submit a proposal to the Freshman Seminar program at Harvard for a course on Dylan (the first of its kind, to my knowledge). The seminar was eventually approved by the faculty committee responsible for selecting these courses, though not without a fight. I later heard from a friend and member of the committee who had supported my proposal of pushback from some quarters. “What’s he going to do, sit there and listen to ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ with his students?” was the general attitude. Well, yes, it would be hard not to include that song in the course. My friend had countered that my proposal was no different, and no less appropriate, than putting in to teach the works of T. S. Eliot. This argument won the day, and the seminar has been warmly supported ever since. I teach it every four years, most recently in the fall of 2016.
Since 2003, the seminar has evolved and changed, as Dylan has continued to produce new work and break new boundaries. We trace the evolution of Dylan’s songs from their early folk, blues, and gospel roots and by way of the transition of his art from acoustic to electric in the studio and in performance, the latter being the arena that most inspires and motivates him. We move chronologically but also explore the way the themes of his song connect over time, are part of a larger system that connects song to song and album to album, down through the years. The themes comprehended by Dylan’s songbook are as boundless as those of the folk and literary cultures from which his art emerged, and these are the themes of the seminar: music and social justice, war and the human response to war, love and death, faith and religion, song as compensation for the realities of mortality. I place particular emphasis on trying to have the students see Dylan’s art as art and to attend to his songs not as autobiography, but as the product of a highly creative imagination that constantly manipulates and transforms linear time and the details of any actual life experience, much of which he has carefully concealed from the very beginning.
The first time I offered it in 2004, I had no idea what to expect. Would four or forty students apply for one of the twelve spots in the Dylan seminar? Would seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds actually be interested in the work of a musician who for many epitomizes only the 1960s, pretty far back in the rearview mirror for them? I had over the years seen a certain number of teens and twenty-somethings at Dylan concerts, so I was hopeful. As it turned out, there is plenty of interest and every four years the crop has been plentiful. The students turn up for any number of reasons. Some want to understand the obsessions of a father or grandfather, others want to deepen their appreciation of Dylan’s art or their own skills as songwriters. In the application, students are asked to say why they want to be in the seminar, and the responses show that Dylan’s appeal is as varied as the dimensions of his art:
“I want to take this seminar because I want to be a better writer. I want to analyze his lyrics and internalize the reason people empathize with his sentiment. Maybe I can’t, maybe it’s innate.”
“I’m both a singer and composer I am interested in the way Dylan marries lyrics and music.”
“I knew all the words to ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ by the time I was four years old. My dad had played Dylan to me practically from birth.”
“My favorite English teacher from high school loves Dylan.”
“While Dylan may not possess the crazy guitar chops of guys like Slash or Jimi Hendrix, his lyrical genius makes his music just as, if not more, powerful.”
“I want to gain an understanding of how music can interact with history and philosophy.”
After twelve years of teaching the course, I have experienced firsthand the intergenerational power of Dylan. His art transcends time, and the power of his songs appeals to young adults whose parents were not yet born when Dylan started putting his words and music together. Dylan is here to stay. He has become a classic, each new album shifting the boundaries of the art he took up all these years ago. And with his 2016 award of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the world has recognized his literary merit—vindication for those who have long recognized the fact. My seminar happened to meet on October 13, 2016, the day the Nobel Prize was announced, and it was one of the high points of my teaching career to experience the utter joy of my first-year students on that day, since they knew the judgment of the committee was righteous.
This book will end with the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm, but for now let’s visit a more recent stop there on Dylan’s long path. On April 1, 2017, Bob Dylan, still on the road at the age of seventy-five, started a twenty-eight-concert European tour with the first of two performances at the Stockholm waterfront. Earlier in the day, he had met privately with twelve of the eighteen members of the Swedish Academy to receive his diploma and gold medal for the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, which had first been announced five months before, “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” Sara Danius, academy member and its permanent secretary, reported the essentials of the private medal ceremony on her blog:
Spirits were high. Champagne was had. Quite a bit of time was spent looking closely at the gold medal, in particular the beautifully crafted back, an image of a young man sitting under a laurel tree who listens to the Muse. Taken from Virgil’s Aeneid, the inscription reads: Inventas vitam iuvat excoluisse per artes, loosely translated as “And they who bettered life on earth by their newly found mastery.”
Danius’s evasive “quite a bit of time was spent looking closely at the gold medal” fools nobody: everyone else in that room had seen the medal many times before. Dylan was clearly the one who must have been studying it most carefully. An artist who notices everything in the world around him, and one with a connection to Virgil’s work, as we’ll learn more about later in this book, Dylan would have been fascinated by the image on the reverse side of the medal, designed by Swedish engraver Erik Lindberg in 1902.
The man we see here is not just any young man. He would seem to represent the poet Virgil, one of the shepherd-singers of his poem Eclogue 1, “meditating the woodland Muse” as he sings in the shade of a tree. The singer on the medal is likewise looking up at the Muse as she plays the seven-stringed lyre, or cithara as the Greeks and Romans called it—the word that gives us guitar. Beside him is depicted an ancient box (capsa) with three papyrus rolls, the young man’s supply of writing materials. Dylan knew just what he was looking at, having integrated Homeric singing and lyre playing from the Odyssey into his 2012 song “Early Roman Kings”—“Take down my fiddle, tune up my strings”—which he would perform the next day in Stockholm. Like the image, the words engraved around the medal’s rim are also Virgil’s: Inventas vitam iuvat excoluisse per artes. In its larger context the line comes from a description of the privileged place that singers have deserved in Virgil’s version of paradise in Book 6 of his epic the Aeneid:
And Orpheus himself, the Thracian priest with his long robes,
keeps their rhythm strong with his lyre’s seven ringing strings,
plucking now with his fingers, now with his ivory plectrum.
And faithful poets whose songs were fit for Apollo
those who enriched our lives with the newfound arts they forged
and those we remember well for the good they did mankind.
—Virgil, Aeneid 6, tr. Fagles
In 1945, T. S. Eliot wrote an essay titled “What Is a Classic?” devoted to Virgil, and to why the Aeneid became a classic over time. In 1948, when Eliot received his Nobel Prize in Literature, he must have been pleased to see Virgil’s line of poetry, and the image, on the medal. What Eliot wrote of Virgil as classic in his essay could apply equally to his own work The Waste Land, the classic of modernist poetry, or to the work of Bob Dylan:
[Virgil] was, if any poet ever was, acutely aware of what he was trying to do; the one thing he couldn’t aim at, or know that he was doing, was to compose a classic: for it is only by hindsight, and in historical perspective, that a classic can be known as such.
This is a book about Bob Dylan, the genius of my lifetime in his artistic use of the English language, and of its song traditions—just as surely as Eliot was the poetic genius of the first half of the twentieth century. It is mildly ironic that Dylan has acquired this status. After all, the mention of Eliot in his 1965 song “Desolation Row”—a song he also sang on the Stockholm waterfront on the evening of the medal award—had an iconoclastic ring to it:
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain’s tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
In that song, Dylan may seem to be on the side of the calypso singers and fishermen, situated like them
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much
About Desolation Row
As readers have noted, not only does Dylan name Eliot and Pound; in Eliot-like fashion his verse allusively builds on the ending of Eliot’s first great poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (124–31):
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
Even though he seems in “Desolation Row” to distance himself from the two modernist poets, even as he alludes to one of them, like it or not, and like T. S. Eliot, Bob Dylan has also become an icon and a classic. Over that he has no control.
This is also a book about how Dylan’s genius has long been informed by the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome, and why the classics of those days matter to him and should matter to all of us interested in the humanities. We live in a world and an age in which the humanities—the study of the best that the human mind has risen to in art, music, writing, and performance—are being asked to justify their existence, are losing funding, or are in danger of losing funding. At the same time, those arts seem more vital than ever in terms of what they can teach us about how to live meaningful lives. The art of Bob Dylan, no less than any other works produced by the human mind in its most creative manifestation, can be put to work in serving and preserving the humanities.
In his final treatise, On Moral Duties, written in 44 BC, Marcus Tullius Cicero, the Roman statesman, orator, writer, and thinker, quoting from the Roman playwright Terence, wrote: “I am a human. I consider nothing connected to humanity to be alien to me.” For Cicero, thinking about justice and correct action in difficult times is a hallmark of humanistic thought, as is having empathy for the human condition. That was a mark of Cicero, and it is a mark of the focus on humanity that is at the core of Dylan’s art. Dylan’s art has long enriched the lives of those who listen to his music, through a genius that captures the essence of what it means to be human.
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TOGETHER THROUGH LIFE (#ulink_5df782ef-95b4-5168-8ba3-6b7ec5b8f289)
As was the case for many who came of age in the mid-1960s, my first Dylan experience centered on issues of social justice. When I was thirteen or fourteen, I sang “Blowin’ in the Wind” with my school chorus in New Zealand. This song, from Dylan’s first original album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, was my first, true introduction to Dylan’s music, though I was already familiar with the chart-topping version sung by the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary. When we sang Dylan’s version in chorus, I remember being somewhat put off by the “addition” of the words “Yes ’n’ ” before each of the questions, absent from the version I had hardwired from the radio—“Yes ’n’ how many seas must a white dove sail?” and so forth. I recall pointing this out to the chorus director, who was clearly an early Dylan fan. He insisted that we sing the Dylan version, and I soon came to share his preference.
We could sing this song and make it our own back then in New Zealand because it belonged to no one time or place, but rather was right for any time or place as a cry for justice and peace. A few years later, in 1969, “Blowin’ in the Wind” would take on a new and more immediate meaning for me, as I participated as a member of HART (Halt All Racist Tours), a student organization protesting the New Zealand rugby tours of apartheid South Africa. Now the song’s reach had expanded, beyond the U.S. civil rights struggle that was its original backdrop. It was also about Nelson Mandela and others, sentenced by the apartheid regime to life imprisonment with hard labor on Robben Island—within clear sight of the pleasant beaches of Cape Town. Before 1967, New Zealand had been sending racially selected teams to play against whites-only rugby teams in South Africa. Then Maori players were allowed to play with the status “honorary white.” “Yes, ’n’ how many times can a man turn his head / Pretending he just doesn’t see?”—those lines easily came to mind as I joined those marches. In these years the song also became an anthem as we demonstrated against my country’s symbolically important and militarily insignificant involvement in Vietnam: “Yes, ’n’ how many times must the cannonballs fly / Before they’re forever banned?”
“Blowin’ in the Wind” worked pretty well for those occasions, as it had for the seminal civil rights protest March on Washington on August 28, 1963, there sung not by Bob Dylan, but by Peter, Paul and Mary. Dylan himself sang two songs from his as-yet-unreleased album of that year, The Times They Are A-Changin’, first “When the Ship Comes In,” accompanied by Joan Baez, and then on his own, “Only a Pawn in Their Game.” In spite of its historical role at moments such as these, “Blowin’ in the Wind” can’t now, and couldn’t then, simply be labeled a protest song. From his first known performance of the song, in April 1962 at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village, Dylan struggled to free it from such categorization. Here’s the way the songwriter—that’s what he was, it needs to be stressed, not a protester—introduced the song back then:
This here ain’t a protest song or anything like that, ’cause I don’t write protest songs. … I’m just writing it as something to be said, for somebody, by somebody.
Too late. As the Roman poet Horace (65–8 BC) put it, “Once it’s let loose the word flies off and can’t be called back.” Dylan couldn’t call back the song, but he soon stopped singing it in concert. He only performed it a handful of times during the decade in which it had become an anthem, including a memorable performance for his debut at the Newport Folk Festival on the evening of July 26, 1963. The memory of that show would help to fuel a sense of betrayal in the minds of folk and protest song purists not only at the next Newport festival in 1964, when Dylan opted not to play the song, but especially and finally at Newport in 1965, when he traded his traditional solo acoustic performance for one backed by Mike Bloomfield’s electric guitar. Things had already changed at Newport the previous year, when Dylan played new, still-unreleased songs “It Ain’t Me, Babe” and “Mr. Tambourine Man,” the latter showing how astonishingly complex and poetic his language and song had become. The lyrics of “It Ain’t Me, Babe” almost seemed to be directed to fans who had come expecting a repeat of “Blowin’ in the Wind” from the year before: “Go ’way from my window / Leave at your own chosen speed / I’m not the one you want, babe / I’m not the one you need.” The end of the refrain, “It ain’t me you’re looking for, babe,” in hindsight, came across as a warning of what would happen at the next year’s festival, on July 25, 1965. That evening, with Bloomfield’s howling electric guitar riffs coming out of the darkness of the stage, alternating at times line by line with Dylan’s singing, Dylan delivered the message: “Well I try my best / To be just like I am / But everybody wants you / To be just like them / They say sing while you slave and I just get bored / I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.” The acoustic Dylan that folk fans loved hadn’t gone away, but the song they had heard and loved two years before was silenced for the time being. Something else was happening that many folk purists, particularly older ones, along with those in the antiwar movement, were just not ready for. The songs of those years, culminating in the “thin, wild mercury music” of Blonde on Blonde, as Dylan himself described it, had entered another universe. In just fifteen months, from March 22, 1965, to May 16, 1966, Dylan recorded and released three albums—Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde—that would establish and perfect the entirely new genre of folk-rock, a convenient label, even if it was not to Dylan’s liking.
As the years went on, for people who stopped following Dylan’s new music, who booed at the concerts of 1966 and were radicalized by the deepening involvement in Vietnam, Dylan was frozen in time, only those few songs relevant to what now mattered. He was useful as a protest singer, joined at the hip to that acoustic version of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” “Masters of War,” the other great song on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan that was adopted as a protest anthem, was addressed directly to those who build the weapons and send the young men to die for the wars from which they profit. Like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” it created an indelible association in the minds of those who would head off to Vietnam. Dylan’s disclaimer about not writing protest songs made back in 1962 at Gerde’s hadn’t worked. His music, powerful from the beginning, would take on a life of its own. Dylan didn’t turn up at the protest marches of 1965 and later to sing “Blowin’ in the Wind,” but singers like Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and others unknown and without fame would take over for him, at marches, in student unions, in student apartments, wherever the antiwar movement was to be found, in the United States, in Auckland, and throughout the world. As student protest leader Todd Gitlin put it: “Whether he liked it or not, Dylan sang for us. … We followed his career as if he was singing our songs.”
Seven years after those songs came out, as Dylan relates in his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, it was the message, not the music, that the media and general public recalled. By 1970 he had been off the road for four years, trying to dodge the demands of those who wanted him to return either to the antiwar song or to the sound and the lyrics that he had invented in 1964–66, the true basis of his musical fame by that point. After Dylan stopped touring in 1966, now raising his family with Sara Dylan in Woodstock and New York City, and writing very different music, as we’ll see, he still couldn’t get away from the old labels. In his memoir, Dylan recalls receiving his honorary degree from Princeton University in June 1970, annoyed at being labeled “the conscience of America”:
“Though he is known to millions, he shuns publicity and organizations preferring the solidarity of his family and isolation from the world, and though he is approaching the perilous age of thirty, he remains the authentic expression of the disturbed and concerned conscience of Young America.” Oh Sweet Jesus! It was like a jolt. I shuddered and trembled but remained expressionless. The disturbed conscience of Young America! There it was again. I couldn’t believe it! The speaker could have said many things, he could have emphasized a few things about my music.
For Dylan, it is the art of the song that matters. And song has powerful effects, especially when it responds to human conflict, to perceived injustice, to oppression. It is through song that we give depth to the sentiments for which mere speech is at times of crisis insufficient. And the more perfect the song, the more authentic the singer becomes in the minds of those who hear the song. How can a songwriter who creates songs with such fundamental and persuasive messages not believe those messages? That has always been the shackle from which Dylan has struggled to free himself. The message of a handful of Dylan’s songs was what lingered in the consciousness of those who had heard them and had been involved, on one side or the other, for or against the war in Vietnam. To this day, the attitude of anyone old enough to have had a position on that war probably lines up pretty well with what they think of Bob Dylan the man, even after all these years.
“Blowin’ in the Wind” is part of Dylan’s poetry and art, exquisite in its classical structure and form. The song is written in three verses, each with three questions, each question extending over two lines, and each followed by the same answering couplet:
How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?
Yes, ’n’ how many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand?
Yes, ’n’ how many times must the cannonballs fly
Before they’re forever banned?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind
How many years can a mountain exist
Before it’s washed to the sea?
Yes, ’n’ how many years can some people exist
Before they’re allowed to be free?
Yes, ’n’ how many times can a man turn his head
Pretending that he just doesn’t see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind
How many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky
Yes, ’n’ how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, ’n’ how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind
The urgent refrain that supposedly provides an answer really gives no answer at all, but rather creates its own questions: “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind / The answer is blowin’ in the wind.” Is the wind blowing the answer away from us, never to be heard, or blowing it toward us, about to right the injustices of those nine urgent questions? Roman critics had a saying, “The art of poetry is to not say everything.” That is precisely what Dylan’s refrain does, indeed what much of Dylan’s art does; it implants the possible answer in our imaginations, and the rest is up to us.
It is the height of irony that Dylan’s main fear about how the song would be labeled may have lain elsewhere. One of his earliest and most famous interviews took place in May 1963, on Studs Terkel’s radio show on WFMT in Chicago. The young Dylan was in town to play at a local club, the Bear. Not included in Terkel’s 2005 published collection of interviews, And They All Sang, and therefore not to be found in Jonathan Cott’s The Essential Interviews, the following exchange took place in the lead-up to Dylan’s closing song and may be heard on a tape of the show:
ST: What’s one way to sign off … a signing-off song?
BD: Sign-off song, let’s see. Hmm. Oh, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” there’s one I’ll sing you.
ST: Isn’t that a popular song, that’s a popular song, I believe.
BD: God, I hope not.
ST: By “popular” I mean in a good sense. A lot of people are singing it.
BD: Oh, yeah.
After an eight-year hiatus, the song came back twice on August 1, 1971, in Dylan’s afternoon and evening performances at the Concert for Bangladesh. “Blowin’ in the Wind” returned to his setlists for good in January 1974. By then Watergate and Nixon were more in his fans’ consciousness, and the song, obviously not a pop song, could finally take its place in his repertoire as part of his art in performance. I heard Dylan sing the song twice in 2016, in Boston in July and in Clearwater, Florida, in November and twice again in June 2017, on each occasion as the first of the two encores to close his concerts, its regular place in setlists of recent years—and he has now sung it at more than 1,400 concerts, a world away from the acoustic version recorded by the twenty-one-year-old Dylan. The song is still urgent in its questions, but it can’t, couldn’t ever, be attached to any one historical event or condition.
The same goes for “Masters of War,” in terms of its enduring resonance. Dylan had performed the song 884 times by the end of 2016. Vietnam had become a dim backdrop by this time even in the minds of baby boomers, but the masters of war (“You that build the death planes / You that build the big bombs”) never really go away. They were close at hand when Dylan performed acoustic versions of “Masters of War” in Australia and New Zealand in early 2003, including on March 15, when millions of demonstrators in those two countries and across the globe took to the streets urging two politicians not to proceed. American president George W. Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair had for months been building the case for bringing war to Iraq. I myself heard the song in those months reflecting on how relevant its message seemed, forty years on. After the bombs started falling on Baghdad on March 18, and in concerts for the rest of 2003, Dylan stopped playing the song. We’ll never know why, but perhaps Dylan felt that would make it too overtly a “protest song,” the old label. It returned the following year, however, and stayed on setlists until November 23, 2010, when it disappeared, so far for good, except for one performance on October 7, 2016, at the Desert Trip music festival in Indio, California, a weekend extravaganza where some of those particular fans would have expected to hear the song, along with hits by Neil Young, the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Roger Waters, and the Who.
Throughout December 1974, as my first semester as a Ph.D. student was drawing to a close, I regularly stopped in at the local record store on campus to pick up Dylan’s new album, Blood on the Tracks, unaware that Columbia Records had held up its release. My pilgrimages to the record store became part of the rhythm of life, and I made some friends in the process, leading to late nights throughout my Ann Arbor years with music and revolution in the air at a blues club called the Blind Pig, or the Del Rio, which offered free jazz on Sunday evenings. The Ann Arbor Blues Festival had debuted a few years before I got to campus, in the fall of 1969, and featured artists like Muddy Waters, B. B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Son House, and Lightnin’ Hopkins. There were funding issues and by 1974 the festival had finished its run, but there was still good music from local bands and musicians attracted to that town’s entertainment market of more than thirty thousand students.
As fans would later discover, Blood on the Tracks was delayed because Dylan had gone back to Minnesota, where he rerecorded some of the songs. But in due course Blood on the Tracks turned up in January 1975 and soon took its place right up there with Blonde on Blonde, a new classic for a new decade. The characters of that earlier album had been mysterious and lovely: Louise and Johanna in “Visions of Johanna,” the sad-eyed lady in “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” The first girlfriend of my imagination had bits of each even before she materialized. After those eight years, things had changed with the romantic visions of Blood on the Tracks: “Situations have ended sad / Relationships have all been bad,” Dylan sang on “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” He later denied that the album was about getting divorced from Sara Dylan. Sara Lownds had married Dylan on November 22, 1965, and their divorce would come almost three years after the songs were written. But there is no denying that with Blood on the Tracks, the art and the beauty seem to come more from a sense of hurt and loss, and seldom is experience not an ingredient of art, as Dylan himself has said. All these years later, the emotion in those songs is as palpable as ever, in the studio versions and thousands of versions recorded in concert. That is what literature, song, and the way they work on memory and experience conspire to give us. Poetry and music are compensations for the pain that comes along with the human condition, and they are what can help us along. That’s what Virgil’s words on the Nobel medal mean, honoring those “who enriched our lives with the newfound arts they forged.”
The music that Dylan produced in the eight years between these two great albums indicates anything other than decline. But it’s hard to articulate the disappointment back through those years that the particular sound of Blonde on Blonde had gone away, never to return. The music he made between that album and Blood on the Tracks was all part of Dylan’s continuing evolution, particularly in mid-1967 as he worked with members of the Band, in seclusion in upstate New York. Some of this material was released on The Basement Tapes in 1975, and much of the rest was long available on unofficial bootleg versions, eventually to be released in 2014 in a six-CD set. Then came the relative simplicity of language on the 1967 album John Wesley Harding, with its biblical engagement and old-school feel. Here Dylan sang with a more spare accompaniment, turning away from the hip, mod sixties to a sound that seemed rooted in nineteenth-century Americana, a return to a new, creative version of the folk traditions that had always been in his blood. Eighteen months later, with the 1969 release of Nashville Skyline, Dylan seemed to be creating a new genre, now inventing country rock, as he had invented folk rock a few years earlier. The next year saw release of his album Self Portrait, and then New Morning. Self Portrait was hit particularly hard by critics, including by music historian Greil Marcus, who famously opened his Rolling Stone review with the words “What is this shit?” It wasn’t until 2013, when Dylan put out The Bootleg Series Volume 10: Another Self Portrait, with alternate, live, and overdub-free versions, that the brilliance of this period truly came to light, as Marcus himself would eventually acknowledge.
But the fact is that in 1975, when Dylan put out Blood on the Tracks, the world changed for those who cared about his music, maybe in part because of the sublimation of life experience into art, which is the essence of the album. Gone for now was the “old, weird America,” as Marcus had so well described it, of the songs Dylan was laying down with the Band. Gone were the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century worlds of bootlegging, hoboing, and minstrel boys on Self Portrait, gone too the country pie of Nashville Skyline. And gone was the white picket fence that New Morning had tried to build around Bob and Sara Dylan and their four children, against the odds.
Many of the songs on Blood on the Tracks were constructed through the principles and practice of painting, a skill and insight he picked up from Norman Raeben, a painting teacher in New York City, in early 1974. To be sure, Dylan attributed to Raeben the very comeback that the album represented.
I was convinced I wasn’t going to do anything else, and I had the good fortune to meet a man in New York City who taught me how to see. He put my mind and my hand and my eye together in a way that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt … when I started doing it the first album I made was Blood on the Tracks.
Dylan is characteristically vague on the actual methods or techniques, and one could claim that a song like “Visions of Johanna” from 1966 already seemed to reveal painterly qualities, but it is true that the vivid narrative technique in a song like “Simple Twist of Fate” from the new album gave it new effects that catch what he is talking about:
A saxophone someplace far off played
As she was walkin’ by the arcade
As the light bust through a beat-up shade where he was wakin’ up
She dropped a coin into the cup of a blind man at the gate
And forgot about a simple twist of fate
In a radio interview with folksinger Mary Travers in April 1975, Dylan said of Blood on the Tracks, “A lot of people tell me they enjoy that album. It’s hard for me to relate to that. I mean, it, you know, people enjoying the type of pain, you know?” That’s the point, as Dylan, here deliberately disingenuous, well knew. His artistic genius—in his words, music, and voice—create pain, but precisely because of the brilliance of his art on this album, these songs produce recompense for the loss of love and the memory of what had once been. This is the quite intentional goal of songs like “Simple Twist of Fate,” “Idiot Wind,” or “If You See Her, Say Hello.” These songs also hold the trace of a hope that all might not be lost: in “Simple Twist of Fate” the man “Hunts her down by the waterfront docks where the sailors all come in / Maybe she’ll pick him out again,” this also giving the point of view of the character in the song; or the switch at the end of “Idiot Wind” from “You’re an idiot, babe” to “We’re idiots, babe.” Sharing the blame; or at the end of “If You See Her, Say Hello,” “Tell her she can look me up, if she’s got the time”—though in other versions, any hope is pretty remote, as we’ll see. To have lived through more than forty years with all of the music and poetry of these songs, from the album and in performance, is a source of good fortune and of genuine pleasure and deep contentment, even—or especially—with the pain the album so exquisitely expresses.
Much of the album focuses on nighttime, the time of day when the relationships in its songs seem to fall apart, perhaps also the case with Dylan’s real-life relationships. The first line of the first song of the album, “Tangled Up in Blue,” seems to start on a bright note: “Early one mornin’ the sun was shinin’ / I was layin’ in bed,” but within a moment that feeling is illusory, as the relationship is suddenly no more: “Wonderin’ if she’d changed at all / if her hair was still red.” The singer’s early- morning memory eventually gets back to the evening breakup, after driving out west in a car that the couple abandons as they “Split up on a dark sad night / Both agreeing it was best.” The next song, “Simple Twist of Fate,” begins with a twilight encounter, now in third-person narration: “They sat together in the park / As the evening sky grew dark.” After a one-night stand that could in the narrator’s mind have led to something, in the morning he finds that she’s gone: “He woke up, the room was bare / He didn’t see her anywhere.” In “Meet Me in the Morning,” morning and night frame the song, which begins with “Meet me in the morning, 56th and Wabasha,” and ends with the “sun sinkin’ like a ship,” and in between “They say the darkest hour is right before the dawn.” The year after Bob and Sara Dylan’s divorce, finalized on June 29, 1977, Dylan seemed to recall this aspect of the album’s songs: “I don’t have anything but darkness to lose. I’m way beyond that.” A good deal of the melancholic and painful power of this album, whatever the realities of Dylan’s personal situation, comes from these moments, all shadows in the night, a time of day that would continue to be the temporal setting and condition for the best of Dylan’s song.
In the beautiful “If You See Her, Say Hello,” the narrator’s memories of what has been lost in the relationship also come as night falls, in the second verse: “But to think of how she left that night, it still brings me a chill,” and then again in the final verse: “Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past.” I single out this song for its intense lyric qualities, and not so much for the painterly qualities so apparent elsewhere on the album. The gift of lyric poetry resides in its ability to precisely capture the condition of individuals in their sorrows, joys, loves and losses, desires, hatreds and jealousies. Such poetry is intimately connected to song—again, lyric from lyre, the guitar of the Greeks and Romans. Like song, it enables us to read ourselves into the situations that the poetic voice creates in aesthetically compelling modes. “If You See Her, Say Hello” is another such lyric song-poem. Its five verses are an elaboration of the title, a request by the singer for someone to say hello to a woman who walked out on him, its first verse closing with the rawness of the singer’s feelings: “She might think that I’ve forgotten her, don’t tell it isn’t so.”
This song actually exists in two versions, and in performance with many variations. The first version that Dylan released, on Blood on the Tracks, as quoted above, was actually recorded on December 30, 1974, effectively revising and for many years canceling out an earlier version, which was recorded in September 1974 and eventually released in 1991 on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3. In this version, the messenger was a rival, at least in the singer’s imagination: “If you’re makin’ love to her, kiss her for the kid.” The change makes a world of difference, as the element of jealousy complicates things and makes it a different song, as do multiple other changes in yet other versions, including the first known live performance, at Lakeland, Florida, on April 18, 1976, during the second Rolling Thunder Revue, as the Dylans’ marriage was falling apart: “If you’re making love to her, watch it from the rear / You’ll never know when I’ll be back, or liable to appear.” Other parts of the song change in different performances over the years, replaced by brilliant absurdist lines, “Her eyes were blue, her hair was too, her voice was sort of soft,” or a brutal closing to the song in concert in 2002: “If she’s passing back this way, and it couldn’t be too quick / Please don’t mention her name to me, you mention her name it just make me sick.” And the third stanza is gone altogether, absent from official collections of Dylan’s lyrics. But what I heard all those years ago in Ann Arbor was the pure, lyrical version from the 1975 album, and that’s the one that has stayed with me over the years: “Tell her she can look me up if she’s got the time.”
LEAVING AND COMING BACK TO DYLAN
In the fall of 1977, I left Ann Arbor for Cambridge, Massachusetts, to begin teaching in the green pastures of Harvard University, about fifteen years after Dylan met folksinger Eric Von Schmidt in those same pastures. By then my Dylan collection had been topped up. Dylan’s Muse also seemed to have returned in what looked somewhat like a second classic phase, matching the first from a decade earlier. In early 1976, he had released Desire—not quite up to Blood on the Tracks, but fine enough. With Dylan’s next album, Street Legal, appearing in 1978, the winds of change were again beginning to shift in his music. The opening lines of its first song, “Changing of the Guards,” are vivid and allusive: “Sixteen years / Sixteen banners united over the fields,” inviting the listener to look back those sixteen years to the beginning of Dylan’s career, and take stock of how far he’d come and think in the apocalyptic lyrics of the song about where he might be headed: “But Eden is burning, either brace yourself for elimination / Or else your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards.” There are some good songs on this album, chiefly for me “Is Your Love in Vain,” but the album as a whole was flawed, as Dylan clearly felt by the best index available: only one song, “Señor,” truly entered the repertoire of Dylan performances, and most he didn’t play after 1978.
For the most devoted Dylan fans who have followed his music through each new stage, his songs and all they evoke become a part of us, with each new album adding another layer. For other fans, he effectively disappeared at various points, starting in 1964 or 1965, quitting their world of folk and protest songs to create a different kind of art. To these fans, Dylan had sold out to a hipster look, and had traded acoustic for electric, with all that connoted for the causes with which they had identified him. But what he gave them in those first two years endured, along with the bittersweet memory of what he had been to them, kept alive by new covers of those particular songs by generations of folksingers who came after. Some disappointed fans stuck around through 1966, hoping that Dylan’s sound, which alternated in performances of that year between solo acoustic and electric with supporting musicians, would return to the former. When it didn’t, these people booed at his concerts, and eventually either came to see what was happening there and found something in it that made sense, or decided to leave for good.
The next crop of Dylan fans to take their leave did so for different reasons, in 1979, when the changing of the guards had come to pass as he started writing and singing Christian songs, often preaching from the stage about hellfire and damnation before launching into his performance. That version of Dylan just didn’t fit in with where they were in their lives or what they believed, or didn’t believe in, or with the Dylan they thought they knew from 1966 or 1975 or some other moment. And so it has continued with Dylan’s constant evolution through the decades, with some fans disembarking and others coming back on board, and newer, younger ones signing up for the first time. It is an essential part of Dylan’s genius that he is constantly evolving as an artist. This is not true of the artists of similar longevity, say Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Van Morrison, or Bruce Springsteen. Inevitably that constant evolving creates periods of experimentation and exploration, some less successful than others, but always moving restlessly toward something, and with the music of the last twenty years now having reached, and sustained, a third classic period.
Dylan’s art works in elemental ways, not just through his words and music and voice, but also through his look and appearance. This is also part of his art, from his look of youthful, potent frailty in his early twenties, to his hip and sexualized look on the 1966 tour, through to the powerful maturity of his middle years. His look during the Rolling Thunder Revue tours of 1975–76, which you can see on YouTube and in the 1976 TV movie Hard Rain, is part of the appeal of those performances: 1970s hipster in his mid-thirties, dressed in denim and leather, sometimes sporting a bandana or turban, sometimes with an ornate floral arrangement in his hatband, frequently with white face paint, or with a straggly beard. And into recent years with his elegant, expressive, weather-beaten face, and his scrupulous attention to costume: outfits and hats that at times turn him into a Civil War officer, at times a cowboy, at times the vaudeville performer. In all of these evolutions there is an enigmatic presence that can’t quite be comprehended or described. With Dylan, everything is performance, and all aspects of performance—the words, the music, the voice, the bands, and the look—coming together to create the unique phenomenon that is Bob Dylan.
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DYLAN AND ANCIENT ROME: “THAT’S WHERE I WAS BORN” (#ulink_ae2f310b-f579-5eb6-bac5-3c75c9d128a6)
GOIN’ BACK TO ROME / THAT’S WHERE I WAS BORN.
—BOB DYLAN, “GOING BACK TO ROME,” 1963
IF YOU WERE BORN AROUND THIS TIME OR WERE LIVING AND ALIVE, YOU COULD FEEL THE OLD WORLD GO AND THE NEW ONE BEGINNING. IT WAS LIKE PUTTING THE CLOCK BACK TO WHEN BC BECAME AD.
—BOB DYLAN, CHRONICLES: VOLUME ONE, P. 28
In March 2007, I traveled to the University of Minnesota for a symposium in Bob Dylan’s home state titled Highway 61 Revisited: Dylan’s Road from Minnesota to the World. The conference was designed to coincide with the exhibition Bob Dylan’s American Journey, 1956–66, concurrently taking place at the university’s Weisman Art Museum. Many of the best-known Dylan scholars were in attendance: Michael Gray, C. P. Lee, Greil Marcus, Christopher Ricks, Stephen Scobie. The symposium was evidence that Dylan had become part of the academic mainstream. But that fact alone was not what drew me to the north woods along with the other Dylanologists. It was something more: the opportunity to come together to discuss Dylan in this place where his genius had first come into being, at the university where Bob Zimmerman was technically enrolled in 1959–60, just a few blocks from Dinkytown and the coffeehouses where he began in earnest to practice and perfect the art he would take out into the world.
The day before the conference, like many of the others attending, I signed up for a guided bus tour of Hibbing, Minnesota, the town where Dylan grew up. Hibbing is situated about seventy miles northwest of the city of Duluth, built on the rich iron ore of the Mesabi Iron Range, and at the edge of the town lies the world’s largest open-pit iron mine. Dylan was born in Duluth on May 24, 1941, and grew up in Hibbing after his family moved there when he was six years old. The bus ride itself was memorable and scenic, as we headed north from Minneapolis on Highway 61, the road that follows the Mississippi all the way down to New Orleans, and rode through pine stands, past the Frank Lloyd Wright gas station in Cloquet, then on into Hibbing. We were a busload of about forty-five Dylanologists and assorted Dylan fans, including a young guy whose name tag read Jack Fate—the character played by Dylan in the underappreciated 2003 film Masked and Anonymous, as he was eager to explain to the few who needed explaining. Jack was handing out Highway 61 bumper stickers.
We eventually found ourselves standing in the library of Hibbing High—the magnificent “Castle in the Wilderness,” as it’s known—from which Robert Zimmerman graduated in 1959. Our tour guide, John “Dan” Bergan, a now-retired English teacher at Hibbing High, had been a classmate of Dylan’s younger brother, David Zimmerman. David graduated five years after Bob and was “a terrifically talented musician in his own right,” according to Bergan. Our busload of pilgrims was also treated to a talk by eighty-three-year-old B. J. Rolfzen, who had once been Dylan’s English teacher. You could tell he must have been a dynamic teacher fifty years earlier, engaged by poetry and with a fire for conveying the magic of literature to his students. Music journalist and cultural critic Greil Marcus has described this moment from Rolfzen’s talk:
Presumably we were there to hear his reminiscences about the former Bob Zimmerman—or, as Rolfzen called him, and never anything else, Robert. Rolfzen held up a slate where he’d chalked lines from “Floater,” from Dylan’s 2001 “Love and Theft”: “Gotta sit up near the teacher / If you want to learn anything.” Rolfzen pointed to the tour member who was sitting in the seat directly in front of the desk. “I always stood in front of the desk, never behind it,” he said. “And that’s where Robert always sat.” He talked about Dylan’s “Not Dark Yet,” from his 1997 Time Out of Mind: “I was born here and I’ll die here / Against my will.” “I’m with him. I’ll stay right here. I don’t care what’s on the other side,” Rolfzen said, a teacher thrilled to be learning from a student. With that out of the way, he proceeded to teach a class in poetry.
The Hibbing experience was all part of what later came to seem to me a carefully staged tour. It reminded me of a visit I’d taken a few years earlier to Max Gate, the house that novelist and poet Thomas Hardy designed and lived in on the outskirts of Dorchester in Dorset, England, from 1885 till his death in 1928. Or else it was a bit like visiting the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut. As a 2016 headline in the CTPost put it, “Mark Twain fan visits his Hartford mansion, finds it’s like communing with a long-lost friend.” Whatever we think we are doing on such journeys, what moves us is the sense of being at the wellspring of artistic creation, where creative genius began to form the art that would become central to our own lives and imaginations. In Hartford, we’re looking for Huck or Tom. In Dorsetshire, we’re hoping to run into some sign of Tess or the mayor of Casterbridge. Likewise, in Hibbing, we were all there looking for something to connect us to the Dylan we had known back in our youth and been with ever since. We were hoping to find it in the magnificent Hibbing High auditorium, where the fifteen-year-old Bob Zimmermann had played with his band, singing and pounding out a Little Richard tune on the piano, as recalled by his then friend John Bucklen:
He got up there … in this talent program at school, came out on stage with some bass player and drummer, I can’t remember who they were, and he started singing in his Little Richard style, screaming, pounding the piano, and my first impression was that of embarrassment, because the little community of Hibbing, Minnesota, way up there, was unaccustomed to such a performance.
I think we could all imagine that event, but in 2007, fifty years after the show, it was hard to get close. Bob wasn’t there, but it was also easy to imagine him up on the stage looking out at the audience in the elegantly upholstered seats of the 1,805-capacity auditorium of which Dan Bergan, who wrote a booklet on the school, rightly noted, in language that, like the auditorium, seemed remote from the hard realities of the Iron Range:
Nowhere in the United States can one find a high school auditorium—perhaps any auditorium—of such incomparable beauty, of such ornate and elaborate decoration … the auditorium features a 40- by 60-foot stage, framed by its 20- by 40-foot proscenium arch whose borders are marked by massive pillars with composite capitals in gold rising on each side of the stage.
Dylan would soon enough be performing at Carnegie Hall in New York and at the London Palladium, but that stage in Hibbing was not a bad place to start. This auditorium must be emblazoned in his mind. The nostalgia involved in the activation and exploration of memory is something that is essential to Dylan—as he said in 1967, “You can change your name / but you can’t run away from yourself.”
After visiting Hibbing High, our group, a little ragged from the warmth of the early spring day, made the short three-block walk from the school down Seventh Avenue, now “Bob Dylan Drive,” to the corner of Twenty-Fifth Street, and the house Bob Dylan grew up in. According to the Iron Range Tourism Bureau, it is no longer open to the public—“drive-by visits only”—but on that day the owner had actually opened its doors and allowed us to go into the front living room, where he had set up a display of Dylan memorabilia on a coffee table. There was a Dylan song playing, I can’t quite remember which one, and I think all of us felt a combination of pleasure at having arrived at such a place, along with slight embarrassment to be intruding in the inner sanctum. I was relieved that a request to visit the bedroom was declined, though some went around the side of the house to look up at its window. The owner of the house told us about Dylan’s own occasional visits over the years. He would spend time up in the bedroom of his old house, presumably making contact with memories of listening on the radio to the music that would form him, first gospel blues and country, later rock and roll. He surely found his teenage self on these occasions.
Lunch was at Zimmy’s, which has since closed as the town continues its economic decline. Some of us bought very unauthorized-looking Zimmy’s T-shirts, along with copies of B. J. Rolfzen’s memoir, The Spring of My Life, a self-published book in ninety-five pages of Courier font—and an interesting account in its own right of growing up poor in post-Depression America. The bus also took us a few miles out of town for a visit to the famous iron ore pit that you can see from the moon. The best ore was long gone, even when Dylan was growing up, and it was easy to connect to the song “North Country Blues” from The Times They Are A-Changin’—a mining blues folk song Dylan would sing at the Newport Folk Festival on July 26, 1963, then once again, for the last time at a concert, at Carnegie Hall, on October 26 of the same year. “This is a song about iron ore mines, and—a, iron ore town,” he said at Newport. The song is in the voice of a woman, as we discover only in the fourth verse, brought up by her brother, who falls victim to the mines, following the same end as her father. In a final blow her husband deserts her and her three children. Dylan had written the song following a trip back to Hibbing, before the public discovered that he had grown up in the town. Andrea Svedberg broke the news of that reality in a Newsweek article published the Monday after the Carnegie Hall concert.
Once the Hibbing connection was made, “North Country Blues” was too easily situated in Hibbing and to the background of Bob Zimmerman, despite its narrator’s female voice and the far different details of its story. Maybe that was why Dylan sang it only once more, in 1974 at a benefit concert for the Friends of Chile. By 2001, when “Floater (Too Much to Ask)” came out, Dylan cared less about people knowing where he came from, and B. J. Rolfzen in his talk is not the only one to have detected autobiographical undertones to the song, both in the lines he quoted and in the ending of the same verse, on the young people of the town:
They all got out of here any way they could
The cold rain can give you the shivers
They went down the Ohio, the Cumberland, the Tennessee
All the rest of them rebel rivers
By the time of that song, 2001, Dylan’s real identity and background was even more beside the point. While “North Country Blues” is a song that can be tied to the hard lives of those who worked and died in the mines of Hibbing, Minnesota, it is even more a song that came more from the folk tradition of mining songs, and especially from the fertile mind of Bob Dylan. Like Dylan, our group soon enough boarded the bus and headed south, following his fifty-year-old trail, to the University of Minnesota, and the next day for coffee in Dinkytown, where he went in the fall of 1959 to take up the art of folksinger performance on his way to Greenwich Village and destiny. The conference itself was memorable enough, but what has stuck in my mind most is that day, spent in the little Minnesota town of Hibbing.
LATIN AND THE LATIN CLUB, HIBBING, 1956–57
As the only classicist in the group, I was also in Hibbing looking for something else, for traces of a bond I shared with Bob Dylan that for me dated back to 1959, when I began studying Latin at the age of nine. Following lunch at Zimmy’s, I slipped out and walked the two blocks to the Hibbing Public Library. One of the waitresses had told me there was a Dylan exhibit there, featuring a copy of the Hematite, Dylan’s high school yearbook from 1959, the year he graduated. The Hematite was named for the mineral form of iron oxide that brought wealth to the town, and had in the days before the main lode dried up paid for the building of its magnificent school. I had already seen page 76 of the yearbook, at a Dylan exhibit in Seattle in 2005, and in the Scorsese documentary No Direction Home, so I knew what to expect. On that yearbook page the life and career of the future Nobel laureate was summed up in just three details:
Robert Zimmerman: to join “Little Richard”—
Latin Club 2; Social Studies Club 4.
Plenty has been written about Bob’s early interest in Little Richard, one of the foundational singers of rock and roll, whose hit “Tutti Frutti” shot up in the charts at the end of 1955, when Bob was a freshman at Hibbing High. By the following fall, backed by the Shadow Blasters, his name for the first band he had put together, Bob Zimmerman was himself now imitating the songs and stage antics of Little Richard. Indeed, the head shot of Bob Zimmerman at the top of that same yearbook page even alluded to the identity his notice craved, in the form of his trademark Little Richard pompadour hair style. This was well before he started taking on the persona, and the look, of Woody Guthrie as he headed for the folksinging scenes of Greenwich Village.
But few have paid much attention to his membership in the Latin Club. With his newfound performing interests, and from the evidence of his dropping off the honor roll from 1956 to 1958—he made it back on for his last year—his later claim to be interested in nothing beyond his music (liner notes, Biograph, 1985) might seem credible enough, though mostly on piano, not yet guitar. But right around this time he was also turning up to Latin class and to Latin Club meetings, and he certainly posed for the group photo of the club that came out in the 1957 Hematite. Bob Zimmerman’s enrollment file “disappeared” years ago from the meticulously kept records of the school, but we know that he was taking Latin and learning about Rome that same year he put his first band together. In addition to the yearbook, the school paper, the Hibbing Hi Times, for November 30, 1956, in the regular “Club Notes” column also gives us a unique rarity, a record, unimpaired by the potentially creative memory of those friends who later recalled this or that detail—part of a day in the life of the fifteen-year-old:
SOCIETAS LATINA HOLDS INITIATION
Societas Latina [Latin Club] held its annual initiation party and ceremony for new members recently in the high school cafeteria. Several associated members of the club were present also.
Second-year students vied on a mock TV program, answering questions on Roman gods and goddesses and identifying words dealing with various phases of Roman life. Winners were awarded prizes. After the formal pledge of allegiance by new members, initiates received badges and were raised from the status of slave to that of plebeians. Members then adjourned to the punch bowl where Consul Mary Ann Peterson and Anna Marie Forsmann, in Roman dress, presided.
Consul Joe Perpich, assisted by Dennis Wickman, Bob Zimmerman, and John Milinovich, was in charge of the formal induction and radio program.
For whatever reason, interest in the Roman gods and goddesses, helping with the radio, or the favorable gender imbalance (fifty girls to fourteen boys)—or all three—Bob Zimmerman was a member of the Hibbing High Latin Club. The only other information about the Latin Club comes with the paper’s issue for March 15, 1957, in the spring of Bob’s membership year, under the headline LATIN CLUB EDITS IDES OF MARCH NEWS:
Societas Latina members today published a paper to celebrate the death of Caesar on the Ides of March (March 15). The paper included Roman history, an original poem, cartoons, and many other items with a Roman background.
Any trace of that paper is long gone, but it is safe to assume Bob Zimmerman played some role in the celebration. Almost sixty years later, as we’ll see, Dylan was quoted as saying, “If I had to do it all over again, I’d be a schoolteacher—probably teach Roman history or theology.”
We can’t be sure what got Bob Zimmerman interested in Latin and the Romans, but it looks as if those interests started in the years before he walked into Miss Irene Walker’s Latin class in the fall of 1956. Bob’s uncle owned the Lybba, named after Dylan’s great-grandmother, one of the town’s four movie theaters, along with the State, and the Gopher, like the Lybba both just a few blocks from his home, the fourth a drive-in. The early to mid-1950s saw an intensification of movies about Greece and Rome, the latter in particular, along with biblical movies, with or without Romans. This was part of a post–World War II, Cold War–generated escape into the relative security of antiquity: swords and sandals, rather than the atom bomb. At the same time, these years saw the height of McCarthyism and the blacklisting of Hollywood actors, producers, and directors. The ancient world could be used as a medium for camouflaging contemporary red-baiting while depicting persecutions emanating not from Washington, D.C., and the House Un-American Activities Committee, but rather from the city of Rome: between 1950 and 1956, when Bob decided to take up Latin, any number of such movies were available for him to have seen, including Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1953 hit version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, starring Marlon Brando, one of Dylan’s favorites, who got the best actor nomination for his role as Mark Antony.
In these years the following movies about the ancient world were available for Bob Zimmerman to see, free at the Lybba, or at either of the other two theaters, opening on the following dates:
Serpent of the Nile: Gopher, July 26, 1953
The Robe: State, January 1, 1954 (and its sequel):
Demetrius and the Gladiators: Lybba, June 24, 1954
Julius Caesar: State, February 9, 1955
The Silver Chalice: State, February 11, 1955
Jupiter’s Darling: Lybba, March 11, 1955
Helen of Troy: State, March 4, 1956
Alexander the Great: Lybba, June 16, 1956
In 1951 he may have been too young for Quo Vadis, with Peter Ustinov as the lyre-playing emperor Nero, but it probably made a return visit in the years that followed. By the time Ben-Hur came out in 1959, Bob Zimmerman was moving on, though he claimed in an interview that the book on which the movie was based was part of the scriptural reading he did in his youth, just as he mentions The Robe and the 1961 King of Kings as early influences. There is not much else to do in Hibbing, particularly in the cold of the northern Minnesota winter, whether or not the theater is owned by your uncle.
I know I’m not the only classicist who was attracted to the world of Rome by Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 movie, Spartacus, starring Kirk Douglas, which I first saw as an eleven-year-old. That movie opened at the Lybba on December 29, 1961, when Bob Dylan was back in Hibbing from his first year in Greenwich Village, for the end-of-year holidays—a year later he chose to visit Rome, and on his return to Greenwich Village sang a song he had just written, “Goin’ Back to Rome.” These movies were beginning to peter out when Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton gave us Cleopatra and Mark Antony in Mankiewicz’s lavish 1963 epic, Cleopatra. Such things happen. Bob Zimmerman moved on, dropped Latin and stuck with his music, and became Bob Dylan. But my contention is that the memory of his contact with classical antiquity, like the memory of everything else, stayed with him, and had a similar early influence on the evolution of his music, as did the poetry he read in B. J. Rolfzen’s English class and his own extensive and varied reading.
According to Dylan’s own account in Chronicles: Volume One, published in 2004, the Rome of Hibbing makes one more appearance in his high school days, by way of the Black Hills Passion Play of South Dakota, a touring group that came to town to act out the suffering, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus. It seems they also needed locals to play the part of extras, as Dylan fondly recalls:
One year I played a Roman soldier with a spear and helmet—breastplate, the works—a non-speaking role, but it didn’t matter. I felt like a star. I liked the costume. It felt like a nerve tonic … as a Roman soldier I felt like a part of everything, in the center of the planet, invincible. That seemed a million years ago now, a million private struggles and difficulties ago.
Who knows what year this was, perhaps Dylan’s sophomore year of high school, when members of the Hibbing High Latin Club got to take on such roles. If he was a Roman soldier, he presumably participated in the scene depicted in the gospels where Roman soldiers cast lots to see who will get the tunic of the crucified Jesus—both scenes familiar to him from The Robe and King of Kings. Bob Dylan revisited that scene in the 1975 song “Shelter from the Storm,” where the singer’s role is different, but reminiscent of the play he refers to in Chronicles. First “she walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns,” suggesting an identification with Jesus Christ, and four verses later “In a little hilltop village, they gambled for my clothes / I bargained for salvation an’ they gave me a lethal dose.” It doesn’t matter whether his role as a Roman soldier was a reality or one of the many inventions and embellishments in his memoir, though the former seems more likely in this case. In his mind, back in 1957 and an epoch later in 2004, the road from Hibbing, like all roads, led to Rome. Dylan went back to Rome again, and to his role as a Roman soldier, in his Nobel lecture, delivered on June 5, 2017. In the lecture, he discusses three books that influenced him since grammar school, All Quiet on the Western Front, Moby-Dick, and the Odyssey, and describes the experience of Paul Bäumer, the soldier-narrator of All Quiet as being like “You’re on the real iron cross, and a Roman soldier’s putting a sponge of vinegar to your lips.”
In Dylan’s 2006 song “Ain’t Talkin’,” the narrator says, “I’ll avenge my father’s death, then I’ll step back.” While the avenging of a father’s death may initially suggest Hamlet, one of Dylan’s favorite plays, I believe the echoes of the line may also lead to Rome, and to the aftermath of the killing of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March, 44 BC, the event celebrated by the Latin Club in 1957. As is now well known, “Ain’t Talkin’ ” steals a number of verses from the exile poems of the Roman poet Ovid, banished in AD 8 by the emperor Augustus to the desolate shores of the Black Sea. When Augustus took control through civil war and came to rule over the Roman Empire, he presented himself as restoring the state from the slavery imposed by Brutus and the other assassins of Julius Caesar:
Those who killed my father I drove into exile, by way of the courts, exacting vengeance for their crime. … I did not accept absolute power that was offered to me.
The reality was otherwise, of course. Augustus maintained the trappings of republic, but in effect his power was absolute; he avenged his father’s death, but he did not step back.
Whatever the impulse, for Bob Dylan the city of Rome, and along with it the culture of the ancient Romans, came to hold a special place over the years. We’ll never know for sure what all those movies and his membership in the Latin Club have to do with this productive association, but the fact is that Rome and the Romans turned up in his songs from early on, and they continue to play a role in his creative imagination.
DYLAN AND CATULLUS
Folk music and the blues may be seen as the primary reservoir of Dylan’s words and melodies for pretty much all of his music that followed. Rock and roll was the musical staple of his high school years, and it remained a part of him as he soaked up the various folk traditions, in Dinkytown in Minneapolis, and later in Greenwich Village. But folk was the old from which the new would emerge. For the youth of America, rock and roll was generational; it belonged to them. It cleared out the music of their parents, the era before immediately after World War II, the Great American Songbook, given voice by Perry Como, Frank Sinatra, and Tony Bennett—the mine to which Dylan would return, starting with the 2015 album Shadows in the Night. With what was happening, musically and culturally in the mid-1960s, Bob Dylan’s genius was in the right time and the right place.
Something similar was happening in the middle part of the first century BC in Rome. Traditional forms of literature, drama, and early epic poetry were coming to be perceived as old-fashioned, precisely as society was opening up in other ways. A clash of cultures was taking place in Rome during this period, similar to the clash that would begin to take place in post-sixties America. Among other now-lost poets of antiquity, flourishing in the two decades before Julius Caesar was killed, was a rare survivor, an ancient Roman poet who can usefully be compared to Dylan, the avant-garde lyric poet Catullus. He died young (c. 54 BC) after creating a body of work that electrified Roman readers, reflected the turmoil and the modernity of Roman times, and changed the course of literary history.
Catullus has long been one of my favorite poets. For me, no other poet, except maybe Dylan, has been able to convey a sense of the pain caused by the loss of love as intensely as Catullus. Dylan wouldn’t begin to make creative use of the poetry of ancient Greece and Rome until the albums he released in the twenty-first century, even though he had long been living in the Rome of his memory and imagination.
In his 2007 movie, I’m Not There, director Todd Haynes used Dylan’s 1966 song “I Want You” for a scene in which Heath Ledger and Charlotte Gainsbourg, playing the roles of Robbie and Claire, immediately recognizable versions of Bob and Sara Lownds, first fall in love. The song encapsulates first love, joyous, and just right for that moment, with its highly poetic verses and its simple, direct refrain: “I want you, I want you / I want you so bad / Honey, I want you.” Catullus too captured in his poetry the first flush of love, for instance in one of his “kiss” poems: “Suns can set and then come back again, / When our short day sets once and for all, / our night must be forever to be slept. / Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, / then another thousand and second hundred, / then still another thousand, then a hundred.”
But the lyrics of Catullus and of Dylan mostly share a focus on love that is lost, that doesn’t work out—that’s where the poetry is. So, for instance, Catullus Poem 11, one of his last poems to Lesbia, the name he gave to the Muse (recalling Sappho, who lived on the Greek island of Lesbos), who inspired his love song. He begins with an address to two acquaintances, whose task it will be to take a message to Lesbia: “You who are ready to try out / whatever the will of the gods will bring / Take a brief message to my old girlfriend / words that she won’t like. / Let her live and be well with her three hundred lovers, / Not really truly loving them / but screwing them all again and again.” The poem ends by shifting the brutal tone and bringing out the hurt and the love that is still there: “Let her not look back for my love as before / which through her fault has fallen like a flower on the edge of a meadow / nicked by the blade of a passing plough.”
By 1975, whatever the realities of his relationship with his wife, Sara, Dylan was, like Catullus as time went by, approaching the end of a relationship in trouble, and he constructed a lyric voice that made art from that situation. The song we already saw, “If You See Her, Say Hello,” is similarly about a relationship that is over:
If you see her, say hello, she might be in Tangier
She left here last early spring, is livin’ there, I hear
Say for me that I’m all right though things get kind of slow
She might think that I’ve forgotten her, don’t tell her it isn’t so
The song, separated from the autobiographical, is like Catullus’s poem, and is there for anyone who has shared that loss and hurt. Like Catullus, Dylan too imagines the rival who has supplanted him: “If you’re making love to her …” Back in Ann Arbor, I was reading the Latin poetry of one, and listening to the songs of the other. And that is how Catullus and Dylan, both lyric poets, sharing common human situations across twenty centuries, have become inextricably linked in my mind, and why they belong together.
Catullus would have been much more familiar in America in the early 1960s, as is clear from an early scene from Cleopatra. It was the highest-grossing film of 1963, won four Academy Awards, and still lost money, so costly was its production. It is highly likely that Dylan, like millions in America and around the world, saw it that year, as I did back in New Zealand. Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra, kittenish and scantily clad on her couch in Alexandria, receives a visit from Rex Harrison’s Julius Caesar. Richard Burton’s Mark Antony is waiting in the wings, and will take over after the assassination of Caesar on those Ides of March. Her spies have reported on Caesar’s movements:
CLEOPATRA: This morning early, you paid a formal visit to the tomb of Alexander. You remained alone beside his sarcophagus for some time. … And then you cried. Why did you cry, Caesar?
CAESAR, CHANGING THE SUBJECT: That man recites beautifully. Is he blind?
AN ATTENDANT: Don’t you hurt him.
CAESAR: I won’t. Not anyone who speaks Catullus so well.
CLEOPATRA: Catullus doesn’t approve of you. Why haven’t you had him killed?
CAESAR: Because I approve of him.
CAESAR, TO THE YOUNG SINGER, HIS WORDS MEANT FOR CLEOPATRA:
Young man, do you know this of Catullus?
Give me a thousand and a thousand kisses
When we have many thousands more,
we will scramble them to get the score,
So envy will not know how high the count
And cast its evil eye.
Several scenes later, once Cupid’s work is done and Caesar and Cleopatra are lovers, she lies back on her bed and volunteers, “I’ve been reading your commentaries, about your campaigns in Gaul.” He, skeptical: “And does my writing compare with Catullus?” She, suggestively: “Well, it’s [slight pause] different?” “Duller?” he asks. “Well, perhaps a little too much description.”
Unlike today’s audiences, those watching the film in 1963, including Dylan, would have gotten these references. Ancient Rome and its spoken language, Latin, the biggest language club at Hibbing High and elsewhere, used to be much more relevant. As late as January 28, 1974, the cover of Newsweek could show Richard Nixon, H. R. Haldeman, and Rosemary Woods encoiled by the Watergate tapes in an image that was a clear allusion to the twin snakes in Virgil’s Aeneid that devour the Trojan priest Laocoön, who is trying to urge his people not to bring the Greeks’ fateful horse into the city. Readers of Newsweek, Dylan included, would have gotten it, either from their knowledge of Virgil or of the ancient statue of the scene, now in the Vatican. Until 1928, enrollments in Latin language courses in the United States outstripped all other languages combined. Spanish took over as the years went by, but in 1962 there were still 702,000 students studying the ancient language. Sputnik, the Cold War, and the perceived need for more science and practicality in U.S. school curricula put an end to all that. The decline began when the National Defense Education Act of 1958 omitted Latin from the curriculum—a year after Bob Zimmerman had been in Latin class at Hibbing High. It took some time to see the full effects of that measure, but by 1976 the number of Latin students had dropped sharply to 150,000, helped by the difficult nature of the language, along with its association with the church, discipline, and authority. Latin hardly fit the ethos of the counterculture.
The paradox here is that Catullus’s poetry is in fact completely modern in the themes and sentiments it expresses. Those who understand his work read it for the beauty and the music of his verse, for the intensity of the personal voice, and for solace when they have loved and lost. Catullus was among the most-read poets of a number of the Beat poets. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, laureate poet of Victorian England, visiting the ruins of Catullus’s house on Lake Garda in northern Italy, thought of Catullus’s poem to his dead brother: “Came that ‘Ave atque vale’ [hail and farewell] of the poet’s hopeless woe / Tenderest of Roman poets nineteen hundred years ago.” The historian and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859) could not read Catullus’s Poem 8 without weeping. It has been a favorite since Thomas Campion, the poet, musician, and doctor, translated it and put it to music in the early seventeenth century. Unlike many in our age, Campion obviously saw no distinction between poem and song. The poem is a self-address, urging strength and resolve, after the loss of Lesbia’s love:
Poor Catullus, you should stop being a fool!
Should realize what you see is lost is gone for good.
Bright were the suns that once shone once for you
When you would go wherever she would lead you.
That girl loved as no other will ever be.
Many playful things happened then,
Things you wished and she then wanted too.
Bright indeed the suns that once shone for you.
Now she doesn’t want you. You should be the same.
The poem continues, with the poet unable to get beyond the love that is lost, as he imagines her with another: “Whom will you kiss, whose lips will you nibble.” Or, as Dylan put it in refrain of the 1997 song “ ’Til I Fell in Love with You”: “I just don’t know what I’m going to do / I was all right ’til I fell in love with you.” Or at the end of “Love Sick,” from the same album:
I’m sick of love; I wish I’d never met you
I’m sick of love; I’m trying to forget you
Just don’t know what to do
I’d give anything to be with you
This is the art of Catullus and the art of Bob Dylan, then a fifty-six-year-old songwriter, the essence of which he sums up in Chronicles: Volume One: “experience, observation, and imagination”—qualities he shares with the Roman poet.
Another poem of Catullus, his shortest, was translated by Abraham Cowley, English Civil War poet, in the seventeenth century:
I hate and yet I love thee too;
How can that be? I know not how;
Only that so it is I know,
And feel with torment that ’tis so.
In spirit these poems share much with the songs Dylan was writing in the second half of 1962, when he was wasting away in the Village, pining for the absent Suze Rotolo, and producing some of his best work because of that absence. Perhaps he even knew the Catullus poem above—Miss Walker may have shown it to the Latin class, given its simplicity and brevity—as we seem to hear its echoes in a letter he wrote to Suze in 1962:
It’s just that I’m hating time—I’m trying to … bend it and twist it with gritting teeth and burning eyes—I hate I love you.
The songs of this period come across as heartfelt, and reflect a reality, but like the poems of Catullus, they come into being and endure through the artistry with which they capture the human condition. The connection between the lyric genius of these two poets may be coincidental, but Dylan’s interest in the city in which Catullus lived, loved, lost, and died young is a very real thing.
DYLAN VISITS ROME
Bob Dylan would pay the first of many visits to Rome, also his first time in Europe, in January 1963, a side trip after performing in a BBC film in London the month before, during what was also his first trip to England. The summer before these trips, in June 1962, Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s girlfriend and Muse of those years, had been taken off to Italy by her mother. Mary Rotolo disapproved of her young daughter’s relationship with Dylan, and Suze herself was troubled by the stress that Dylan’s exploding fame was beginning to cause. Originally scheduled to return by Labor Day, she stayed on past the summer, studying art for the rest of the year in the Umbrian city of Perugia. But Dylan’s trip to Rome had nothing to do with retrieving Suze, who by then had returned to New York. So why did he first visit Rome, and not Paris, Berlin, or Madrid? The liner notes to his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, mention that he actually performed on this first trip to Rome, at the Folkstudio in the bohemian region of Trastevere (“across the Tiber”), “in its heyday a Greenwich Village–style club with three or four performers every night and a generous open-stage policy.” It seems likely that Rome and its fascination had existed in Dylan’s imagination, dating back just a few years before the trip to his study of Latin and the Latin Club, all those movies, and his stage debut as a Roman soldier, with the highlights of the eternal city, not least of all its Colosseum (or “Coliseum”) and gladiators, appealing to his young mind.
Dylan’s separation from Suze Rotolo gave us some of his greatest songs, written while they were apart: “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” “One Too Many Mornings,” “Girl of the North Country,” and of course, “Boots of Spanish Leather,” its first six verses a dialogue between the singer and his lover. Dylan and Rotolo had corresponded during her absence, and the seventh verse of the song captures the pain of the man who has been left behind:
I got a letter on a lonesome day
It was from her ship a-sailin’
Saying I don’t know when I’ll be comin’ back again,
It depends on how I’m a-feelin’
Dylan and Suze would later get back together, but written during those first days that Dylan spent in Rome, it preserves the evidence of a painful memory of separation, “across that lonesome ocean.” Dylan would sing the song on Studs Terkel’s show in May 1963. Terkel asks for a love song. Dylan: “You wanna hear a love song?” Terkel: “Boy meets girl. Here’s Bob Dylan, boy meets girl.” Dylan strums a chord or two—and corrects Terkel, “Girl leaves boy.”
Dylan’s trip to Rome also gave us a song called “Goin’ Back to Rome,” which he would perform on February 8, 1963, at Gerde’s Folk City, once he returned from his trip. “Goin’ Back to Rome” is not copyrighted, or included among the songs on Dylan’s official website, but it is preserved on the bootleg recording “The Banjo Tape,” transcribed here correctly for the first time:
Hey, well, you know I’m lying
But don’t look at me with scorn.
Well you know I’m lying
But don’t look at me with scorn.
I’m going back to Rome
That’s where I was born.
Buy me an Italian cot and carry,
Keep it for my friend.
Buy me an Italian cot and carry
Keep it for my friend.
Go talk to Italy
All around its bend.
You can keep Madison Square Garden
Give me the Coliseum.
You can keep Madison Square Garden
Give me the Coliseum.
So I don’t wanna see the gladiators
Man I can always see ’em.
While the lyrics here are obscure, they may not be pure nonsense. We can connect “going back to Rome” with the fact that the twenty-one-year-old had actually been in Rome the month before. And when he sings, “Buy me an Italian cot and carry, / Keep it for my friend,” we wonder about the identity of the friend for whom he would buy the portable baby cot. Could it have been for Suze Rotolo herself, whose pregnancy later that year was terminated by an abortion? Suze was presumably in the audience at Gerde’s that night, having just been reunited with a Dylan much happier than the one who had been moping around the Village in the second half of 1962 while she was off in Italy.
The song’s claim of a birthplace in Rome is an early instance of Dylan’s tendency to create environments for his various identities and characters. Another example is in the traditional “Man of Constant Sorrow” (1962), where the narrator is “going back to Colorado,” where he was “born and partly raised.” Other versions of this song have the singer “born and raised” in old Kentucky, others in San Francisco, and so on. As long as the meter of the place is the same (Cólorádo, Sán Francísco, etc.), anything works, variety and change of place and time being a natural feature of folk songs. But for Dylan, Rome is different. It is hard not to connect his staking a claim for his birthplace in Rome with other utterances that try to create a new point of origin for himself, one that makes more sense in the creative mind of this genius, like this moment in his 2004 60 Minutes interview with Ed Bradley. Questioned about changing his name from Robert Zimmerman to Bob Dylan, he replied: “You’re born, you know, the wrong names, the wrong parents.”
Even before the trip to Rome and the penning of the song “Goin’ Back to Rome,” which followed the visit, was an even earlier song, “Long Ago, Far Away,” sung before he would have known of the Folkstudio in Rome, in Minneapolis friend Tony Glover’s apartment on August 11, 1962. Recorded in November 1962, the song shows he was thinking of ancient Roman times. It shows a debt to gospel, as it considers human cruelty throughout history, from the point of view of those who suffer, not least the crucified Jesus, with whom the song begins and ends:
To preach of peace and brotherhood
Oh, what might be the cost?
A man he did it long ago
And they hung him on a cross.
Then the ironic, even sarcastic, refrain, implying that nothing has changed:
Long ago, far away,
Things like that don’t happen
No more, nowadays
The thrust of the song is along the lines of Woody Guthrie’s song “Jesus Christ”:
This song was made in New York City
Of rich man and preachers and slaves
If Jesus was to preach like He preached in Galilee
They would put Jesus Christ in His grave.
Of the examples in the five verses in the body of Dylan’s song, only two specify historical moments, the chains of slaves “during Lincoln’s time,” and in the striking image of the second to last verse, absent from the official Dylan website:
Gladiators killed themselves
It was during the Roman times
People cheered with bloodshot grins
As eyes and minds went blind
Long ago, far away
Things like that don’t happen
No more, nowadays
“Goin’ Back to Rome” has “always see ’em” rhyming with “Coliseum,” and we will see this rhyme used again, a few years later, in a famous and much better song from 1971, “When I Paint My Masterpiece.” The first two verses of that song are all about Rome. It is thought to preserve the memory of another trip Dylan took to Rome, following the 1965 tour of England that was the subject of D. A. Pennebaker’s film Don’t Look Back. According to this plausible theory, Dylan went back in the company of his new Muse, Sara Lownds, whom he would marry by the end of the year. Sara left her husband, Hans Lownds, to take up with Dylan, and it is hard not to connect this reality with one of Dylan’s most iconic lines, from “Idiot Wind,” written in 1974: “They say I shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy.”
Sara is absent in name from “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” thus allowing the singer in the scene Dylan paints to have an assignation with “a pretty little girl from Greece,” or in the official lyrics, “Botticelli’s niece,” who will be able to help out with painting the masterpiece in the title and in the last line of each verse:
Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble
Ancient footprints are everywhere
You can almost think that you’re seein’ double
On a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs
Got to hurry on back to my hotel room
Where I’ve got me a date with Botticelli’s niece
She promised that she’d be right there with me
When I paint my masterpiece
It is worth noting that “When I Paint My Masterpiece” was the regular opener for the first of the two Rolling Thunder Revue tours in the fall of 1975, which also featured the new song “Sara.” “Sara” is pretty much the opposite of “Idiot Wind” in its lyrical and sweet memories of their decade-long relationship, children and all. The only song with a title and lyrics that are unambiguous on the identity of the lover, its last two choruses end with a hint of the breakup toward which the two were headed: “You must forgive me my unworthiness. … Don’t ever leave me, don’t ever go.” By this time, Dylan was involved with other women, and when the 1976 part of the Rolling Thunder Revue resumed in Lakeland, Florida, on April 18, 1976, “Sara” was gone from the setlist, its position taken over by “Idiot Wind”—the first public performance of the song that had come out fifteen months earlier. In a televised performance on May 23, 1976, the eve of Dylan’s thirty-fifth birthday, he delivers a glorious, impassioned version of it with his wife, children, and mother in the audience. It was likely not much appreciated by Sara, sitting there, the object of much of the song’s anger and venom. Their divorce was finalized on June 29, 1977.
Clearly Dylan feels a connection to the antiquity of Rome, as he does with no other place. When he first traveled there in 1963, he was immediately inspired. That’s why in January 1963 he would write and sing the words “Goin’ back to Rome, / That’s where I was born.” That trip to Rome, subsequent trips, and the adoption of the city as the place where he was born seemed years later to incite a kind of artistic rebirth for Dylan, or at least it coincided with that rebirth.
PRESS CONFERENCE IN ROME, 2001
Bob Dylan would be back in Rome on July 23, 2001, for an interview with a group of European journalists who had been listening that morning to an advance copy of his new album, “Love and Theft,” due out the following September. This was in between concerts in Pescara, on the Adriatic coast of Italy, and Anzio, on the coast south of Rome. On this tour he performed in Scandinavia, Germany, England, Ireland, but it was Rome that he chose for the press conference that would plant a few clues about the new directions in his songwriting. One of the reporters asked an early question:
Are you enjoying to be in Rome?
Oh yeah.
You’re often here in Rome.
Pretty regular huh?
You write songs about [Rome].
Quite a few.
It is interesting that Dylan doesn’t limit himself to just the obvious song or to any one song, but “quite a few.” The journalist misses his observation, and is just thinking of the song in question:
“Paint My Masterpiece.”
Exactly.
You speak exactly of this here. …
Exactly. This is it … Spanish Steps.
The Hotel de la Ville, where the interview took place, was a little way along the Via Sistina from the top of the Spanish Steps—another prop for the interview. As the press conference continued, Dylan proceeded to lay down a trail for journalists to follow:
My songs are all singable. They’re current. Something doesn’t have to just drop out of the air yesterday to be current. You know, this is the Iron Age, we’re living in the Iron Age. But, what was the last age, the Age of Bronze or something? We can still feel that age. I mean if you walk around in this city, you know, people today can’t build what you see out there. Well at least, you know when you walk around a town like this, you know that people were here before you and they were probably on a much higher, grander level than any of us are. I mean it would just have to be. We couldn’t conceive of building these kind of things. America doesn’t really have stuff like this.
This looks close to being scripted, preplanned, and he gets back to it later in the interview after the journalists fail to pick up on where he was going:
We’ve talked about these ages before. You’ve got the Golden Age, which I guess would be the age of Homer, then we’ve got the Silver Age, then you’ve got the Bronze Age. I think you have the Heroic Age someplace in there. Then we’re living in what some people call the Iron Age, but it could really be the Stone Age. We could really be living in the Stone Ages.
Dylan’s language was tantalizing and now caught the attention of those present. After the first of these comments, where he said that something can be “current,” but also as old as the Age of Bronze, and “we can still feel that age,” one of the journalists sensed an opening:
Do you read history books?
Huh?
Do you read books about history? Are you interested about that?
[pause] Not any more than just would be natural to do.
Earlier in the interview, he had been asked about “new” poets on “Love and Theft.” His response deflected the truth, typical of Dylan, for whom there were lots of new poets beginning to enter his arsenal:
Are you still eagerly looking for poets that you may not have heard of or read yet? Or do you go back to the ones that have interested you like maybe Rimbaud? [pause, followed by a sigh of sorts]
You know I don’t really study poetry.
He may not study poetry, but the ancient footsteps that are everywhere on “When I Paint My Masterpiece” are also on “Lonesome Day Blues,” one of the songs from the new album that the reporters had just been listening to, and the one that echoes the lines he had adapted from the Roman poet Virgil:
I’m gonna spare the defeated—I’m gonna speak to the crowd
I’m gonna spare the defeated, boys, I’m gonna speak to the crowd
I’m goin’ to teach peace to the conquered
I’m gonna tame the proud.
Dylan, however, was not going to spell things out more than he had already done. That’s not his style. The journalists would have to make that connection for themselves. The interview ended with applause from the twelve satisfied and grateful reporters. “Now I’m gonna go see the Colosseum,” he told them. In reality, this was a highly unlikely proposition, though a drive-by could have happened. In 1965 he and Sara could just have pulled off a visit, but in 2001 Dylan would have been mobbed in such a public and open space. As is often the case with Dylan, he was visiting the song in that moment and in his mind’s eye.
The second verse of “When I Paint My Masterpiece” has the singer in the Colosseum, reusing the rhyme he had come up with for “Goin’ Back to Rome”:
Oh, the hours I’ve spent inside the Coliseum
Dodging lions and wastin’ time
Oh, those mighty kings of the jungle I could hardly stand to see ’em
Yes, it sure has been a long, hard climb
Train wheels runnin’ through the back of my memory
When I ran on the hilltop following a pack of wild geese
Someday, everything is gonna be smooth like a rhapsody
When I paint my masterpiece
With the fourth line—“It sure has been a long, hard climb”—he looks across the ten short years in which so much had happened since he had set out from his native Minnesota and arrived in Greenwich Village. But what about the next lines? The train wheels running through the back of his memory might seem to take us into another Dylan song, “Bob Dylan’s Dream,” from 1963, when he falls asleep while “riding on a train goin’ west” and is taken back to the days of his youth, and to the first few friends he had back then—by way of a nineteenth-century folk song.
But why does his memory train have him “running on the hilltop following a pack of wild geese”? Clinton Heylin tried to make sense of it: “he has returned in his time machine to Hibbing, remembering a time when he ‘ran on a hilltop following a pack of wild geese.’ ” But it is hard to find space for Hibbing in this song, whose next verse, “I left Rome and landed in Brussels,” would sandwich his hometown on a short plane ride between the capitals of Italy and Belgium. And following geese in Hibbing doesn’t make too much sense, unless the geese were in some classroom at Hibbing High, either during a Latin class or in discussion at the Latin Club. The wild-goose chase to which his memory goes back from the streets of Rome is more likely to refer to one of the favorite stories about ancient Rome, bound to have been on the quiz shows of the Latin Club, in which the sacred geese of the goddess Juno on the Capitoline Hill warned the Romans that invading tribesmen from Gaul were attacking the religious center of Rome. Virgil has the scene, along with other high points of Roman history, Romulus and Remus, the Sabine women, and Tarquin the Proud, on the shield that the hero Aeneas, Rome’s founder, carries into battle in the Aeneid:
And here the silver goose was fluttering
Through gilded porticos cackling that the Gauls were at the gate
“CHANGING OF THE GUARDS” AND THE SOULS OF THE PAST
It would be some years before the streets of Rome, or at least some things Roman, came back into his lyrics, but in one song from the immediate pre-Christian—in some ways not even pre-Christian—phase he can be seen reaching back through the years and the centuries, giving us fragments of worlds, hard to unravel or pin down, but highly evocative. “Changing of the Guards” was put out as the first track of the 1978 album Street Legal. The opening words of the song, and the album, have generally been seen as taking stock, looking back across the years to the beginning of his career in 1962: “Sixteen years / Sixteen banners united over the field.” Asked about these numbers in an interview with Jonathan Cott in November 1978, Dylan—of course—denied the relevance of the math, as he denies any single meaning for his songs. The images, situations, and characters that this song rolls out put it almost beyond overall interpretive reach—“It means something different every time I sing it.” The song proceeds through an array of figures, across fields with the good shepherd grieving, desperate men and desperate women, perhaps the music industry with which he had been dealing in those years: “Merchants and thieves, hungry for power, my last deal gone down,” and later, “Gentlemen he said / I don’t need your organization, I’ve shined your shoes / I’ve moved your mountains and marked your cards.” Just as it can mean something different every time he sings it, so it can mean something different every time I hear him sing it, depending on what images, all generally mysterious, are flashing by.
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