Bob Dylan

by Lee Marshall

  The ideas of the new critics bear some similarity to those outlined by Roland Barthes in his famous 1968 essay ‘The Death of the Author’, which also argues that the intentions of the author should not be used as a way of determining the meaning of a work. However, whereas ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ argues that the meaning of a work is inherent in the work itself, ‘The Death of the Author’ argues that the meaning of a text is generated by the act of reading. Rather than persist in close textual analysis, we need to see how readers create meaning by interpreting the work in relation to other cultural texts, ideas, beliefs, values and so on. This approach has the advantage of highlighting the social nature of how cultural meaning is reproduced and circulated. By concentrating on how the reader generates meaning, issues such as how, when and where the text is used become important.

  As an example of how ‘reading’ generates meaning, consider the line ‘Even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked’ from the song ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’. The song was written in 1964, performed at concerts that year and the next and, in 1965, was released on the album Bringing It All Back Home. The line was not held up for special scrutiny and did not receive any special audience response. When he returned to touring in 1974, Dylan performed the song regularly. This time, however, the line elicited a specific response: a spontaneous cheer from the crowd because of the ongoing Watergate scandal, during which President Nixon was incriminated in a burglary of Democratic Party offices. Concerts from this tour were recorded and released as a live album, Before The Flood. This meant that a much wider audience became aware of the crowd’s reaction at these shows and for the next twenty years or so, the ‘spontaneous’ cheer became a standard response to the line whenever Dylan performed the song. In the late 1990s, to my ears at least, the meaning of the cheer changed once more, this time to irony, as then president Bill Clinton faced allegations of sexual impropriety. In more recent years, the cheer has perhaps gained a new political significance as a response to George W. Bush’s presidency and the invasion of Iraq. This one particular line has thus had several different meanings in its lifetime: from generalised philosophical comment, to contemporary political statement, to rock cliché, to ironic joke, to contemporary political statement once more. It would be impossible to claim that all of these meanings were embedded in the words themselves, and nonsense to suggest that these later meanings could have been in any way intended by Dylan when he wrote the song in 1964 (though we could argue that he has chosen to play the song in concert at particular times for a reason). The meaning of the text changes because of its social circulation, because of how we as listeners have created meaning (we might also add here that because of this social circulation it is impossible for the line to mean in 2005 what it meant in 1964). In recognising this fact, Barthes’ exaggerated argument is that we can only ‘liberate’ the reader by ‘killing’ the author, by dismissing the ‘author-God’ as the originator of meaning.

  During the course of the twentieth century, then, the author as the keystone of meaning within a work has been accosted on both sides – trumped by either the text itself or its readers. This has certainly had an impact on Dylan scholarship, and key principles of writers such as Day, Ricks and Scobie are not only that we can never assume the ‘I’ of a Bob Dylan song to be Dylan himself, but also that any biographical reading of a song is necessarily restrictive and inferior:10

  What purpose has been served by determining a biographical reference? Does it really contribute anything worthwhile to our critical understanding and appreciation of the songs themselves?11

  Dylan himself has criticized those who offer biographical readings of his songs:

  I read that this [‘You’re A Big Girl Now’] was supposed to be about my wife. I wish somebody would ask me first before they go and print stuff like that. I mean, it couldn’t be about anyone else but my wife, right? Stupid and misleading jerks sometimes these interpreters are . . . Fools, they limit you to their own unimaginative mentality. (Cameron Crowe interview, 1985)

  People say the record [Time Out Of Mind] deals with mortality – my mortality for some reason! Well, it doesn’t deal with my mortality. It maybe just deals with mortality in general . . . I found this condescending attitude toward that record revealed in the press quite frequently. (Mikal Gilmore interview, 2001) *

  Dylan’s songs often seem constructed in ways that work against an author-centred reading. Firstly, he regularly inserts fictional detail into seemingly autobiographical songs.12 Scobie uses the line ‘They say I shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy’ (from ‘Idiot Wind’) as an example of this. One further example would be ‘Boots Of Spanish Leather’, in which the singer’s loved one leaves for Spain, whereas the song was surely prompted by Dylan’s girlfriend leaving for Italy. Secondly, Dylan ‘refuses the role of omniscient narrator’.13 As Romantic thought developed in the eighteenth century, the work of art became conceptualised as a ‘heterocosm’, its own world subject to its own internal laws. The poet, as creator of this world, was obviously its all-seeing God.14 However, Dylan often subverts such an idea by emphasising that he never knows everything about the tale he is telling, that the view he can offer is always partial and can only be incomplete. For example, in ‘John Wesley Harding’, he sings:

  John Wesley Harding

  Was a friend to the poor,

  He trav’led with a gun in ev’ry hand.

  All along this countryside,

  He opened a many a door,

  But he was never known

  To hurt an honest man.

  This begins by sounding authoritative – Dylan is telling us what is, not what he thinks – but by the last lines, the narrator’s authority is undermined. He cannot definitively say that the outlaw never hurt anyone, only that he was never known to. This fragmentary knowledge is a convention in much folk music. As songs were passed down, and moved around, pieces of information were lost, misheard and so on. Knowledge in folk music is often uncertain and the narrator of a folk song often makes clear what is known and unknown. The difference here, however, is that Dylan wrote the song and is famous for writing his own songs. By adopting this convention, Dylan adds an inherent irony to the work, playing with the generic conventions and undermining the Romantic assumptions about works revealing things about their authors. For example, in ‘Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts’, the narrator tells us:

  No one knew the circumstance but they say that it happened pretty quick

  The door to the dressing room burst open and a Colt revolver clicked.

  No one? Come on, Bob, you wrote the song – surely you can tell us!

  HOW WE HEAR MUSIC: RECORDINGS, WORDS AND VOICE

  Some Dylan critics thus argue that Bob Dylan’s life should not be considered the final arbiter of the meaning of a song. I would not want to argue strongly against this but it fails to consider the effects that stardom has on the production and interpretation of songs. The criticisms of author-centred analysis have, in the main, emerged within literary criticism and it is notable that the three critiques I provided as examples (Day, Ricks and Scobie) are written by scholars of literature. Dylan is a particularly literary songwriter; from his earliest years, he was being described as a poet. I will discuss this in a later chapter but the question it raises for our current purpose is this: what should we be thinking about when discussing a Bob Dylan song? Is it only the words that matter? Is the meaning of the song to be found only in the meaning of the words?

  This is certainly the way it seems to some people, both fans and critics. However, this literary approach produces a kind of disassociation of Dylan and the song that to me, as a fan, seems intuitively wrong. Let me try to explain by analogy. A poem written by William Wordsworth was intended to be read by an individual. Following the principles of new criticism, we could consider the poem to have some existence independent from that of its author – as words on a page. When the reader picks up the book cont
aining the poem, their direct engagement is with a text and not with an author. In this instance, the literary argument about whether the words contain meaning intended by the poet, whether it is the words themselves that create meaning, or whether meaning is generated by the act of reading, seems to me a reasonable one in which to engage.

  We may even be able to engage in a similar discussion regarding classical music. The development of written musical notation generated an idea of the musical ‘work’ outside of its performance. The musical score therefore exists independently of its creator. However, the idea of ‘the work’ in popular music (broadly conceived as a commercialisation of folk music facilitated by the invention of recording technology) is founded on the recorded performance. As an example, think of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’. I’d be willing to bet that the overwhelming majority of readers have just thought of the recorded version, maybe even heard the recorded song in their head – the opening snare drum, the swirling organ, the rolling piano, the confident voice.* There are certain elements of that performance – a performance that most people would think of as ‘the work’ – that cannot be adequately expressed in written form. In popular music the distinction between performance and score is unsustainable.15 We cannot fruitfully say that the song has any existence outside of its particular performance. Instead, the song is only instantiated, made real, by that particular performance. As such, it is inseparable from the singer.

  In differentiating between songs and poems, I am not just pointing out that songs provide a ‘different system of punctuation’ for words than poems,16 important though that may be. More important is how the words are mediated through the voice (in this instance, the voice of a star) and the effects that this mediation has on our interpretations of authorship. We do not hear the words in isolation (unlike the Wordsworth poem), but only through Bob Dylan. This is crucial for understanding the meaning of Dylan’s songs, but is yet to be adequately addressed in Dylan literature. Writers such as Gray pay lip service to the idea that Dylan’s words are performed rather than read but still essentially treat the songs as poems, with the meaning of the song resulting from the words. It is notable that in the index to Gray’s 900-page analysis of Dylan,17 there is no reference for singing, vocals, voice or performance. Yet, as Allan Moore argues, if the meaning of a song can be reduced to its words, why bother to sing it?18 *

  In trying to work out how songs create meaning, Simon Frith suggests that rather than treating songs ‘as poems, literary objects which can be analysed entirely separately from music’, we need to consider them ‘as speech acts, words to be analysed in performance’.19 Words are important to songs – there are few instrumental hit records – but research conducted on listeners suggests that what the words say – their ‘meaning’ – is actually an insignificant reason for liking a song.20* What matters is not the content of the words, but their expression, their presentation.21 This is something Dylan has repeatedly iterated:

  When I do whatever it is I’m doing, if there’s rhythm involved and phrasing involved then that’s where it all balances out – in the rhythm of it and the phrasing of it. It’s not in the lyrics. People think it’s in the lyrics – maybe on the records it’s in the lyrics y’know, but in a live show it’s not all in the lyrics. It’s in the phrasing and the dynamics of the rhythm. It’s got nothing whatsoever to do with the lyrics. I mean, it does . . . it does have something to do with the lyrics – the lyrics have to be there, sure they do, but . . . (Bruce Kleinman interview, 1984)

  If the meaning of a song was purely ‘in the lyrics’ then we would surely become tired of the song quickly and not replay it. Yet even songs with ‘mundane’ lyrics can be a joy to rehear if the joy is transmitted through the singing and/or the music (Nashville Skyline, for example), while songs with interesting and skilful words can fall flat and not be amenable to repeated listening (the fate of most political pop).**

  Let me approach this argument from another direction; I’m sure I can’t be alone among Dylan fans in saying that there are songs I listened to for years without actually concentrating on the meaning of the words. I knew the words, sure, and could sing along with them, but had never thought about what they actually ‘meant’ until, one day, my ears picked up on certain words and I paid particular attention to them (‘I Want You’ is an example that springs to mind). Perhaps new critics would dismiss my behaviour as absentminded listening but I would say that I knew what the song meant before I paid attention to those words. I would also contend that this is how most people listen to Dylan, even dedicated fans (for example, Paul Williams notes how it was years before he recognised that ‘Chimes Of Freedom’ involved the singer being caught in a storm).22

  Lyrics need to be considered as a form of rhetoric. In order to understand how songs ‘work’ for us, how they mean something,

  we have to treat them in terms of the persuasive relationship set up between the singer and the listener. From this perspective, a song doesn’t exist to convey the meaning of the words; rather, the words exist to convey the meaning of the song.23

  What matters in many cases is not the logical development of an entire narrative, but rather how specific lyrical phrases become invested with force through the music and performance. Frith suggests Public Enemy’s ‘Don’t Believe The Hype’ and Springsteen’s ‘Born In The USA’ as good examples.24 In Dylan’s catalogue, ‘Rainy Day Women Nos 12 & 35’ would be a good example. It is not the most sophisticated of lyrics, but it works as a song because the chorus line ‘But I would not feel so all alone / Everybody must get stoned!’ is joyous and brilliantly matches the collective, Salvation Army band-style performance of the musicians. And what does ‘I Want You’ ‘mean’ other than the singer’s insistent claim ‘I want you . . . so bad’? Another example from the same album is ‘Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again’. The song is clearly ‘about’ displacement and alienation but the meaning is not really in the words. The series of experiences recounted offer glimpses but nothing like a coherent explanation of the feeling. The alienation is clear, however, in the way that the singer tells Ruthie ‘Aw, c’mon now!’ and in the repeated chorus line that invests these particular words with force:

  Ah, mama, can this really be the end?

  To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again.

  This kind of approach is encapsulated by Paul Williams in his argument that Dylan songs evoke feeling rather than meaning.25* This is not to say that songs are meaningless, however, which Williams’ insistence upon the impossibility of explaining the meaning of the song sometimes suggests. ‘Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands’ is obviously not meaningless, even if the meaning of the song is not exactly clear from the mysterious build up of images in the verses.

  One of the ways in which words are given emphasis, or the meaning of the song is conveyed is, obviously, through music:

  A lot of times people will take the music out of my lyrics and just read them as lyrics. That’s not really fair because the music and the lyrics I’ve always felt are pretty closely wrapped up. You can’t separate one from the other that simply. (Toby Cresswell interview, 1986)

  Allan Moore has been critical of the lack of consideration given to music’s role in the construction of meaning, arguing that accounts of songs often relegate music to the role of pleasant back-drop to the words. He concludes that ‘by failing to take into account the attitude set up by the music, so many other analyses of song lyrics are not only incomplete, but lead to erroneous conclusions’.26 It is certainly the case that the music in my two previous examples is extremely important for establishing meaning. The music to ‘Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands’ is sensuous and luxuriant. It is essential to projecting the meaning of the song and envelops the listener like a lover’s limbs. If the accompaniment was different, then the song would have a different meaning. In ‘Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again’, the distinctive musical changes at the chorus – the staccato beat, the falling bassline �
�� definitely serve to invest those lines with particular meaning.

  The music works by creating a structure for Dylan’s voice to impart meaning through his emphasis – ‘OH, mama can this REAlly BE the END?’ – and, although music is important for creating meaning in itself, what I am particularly interested in here is how the voice works to convey meaning, because

  in songs, words are the sign of a voice. A song is always a performance and song words are always spoken out, heard in someone’s accent. Songs are more like plays than poems; song words work as speech and speech acts, bearing meaning not just semantically, but also as structures of sound that are direct signs of emotion and marks of character.27

  This is why the distinction between poems and songs is important: whereas poems can exist independently, it makes no sense to think of a song as existing outside of its performed voice. And the voice is, obviously, a mark of the singer. It’s that voice. When you hear the song, you know who is singing.

  Dylan’s voice is distinctive and has been the subject of much discussion. Philip Larkin described it as ‘cawing, derisive’ while it was characterised by Robyn Hitchcock as ‘a corrosive voice, restless, inconsolable, eating through the excuses that humanity feeds itself’.28 Dylan has a remarkable voice. John Bauldie’s description of ‘I’m Not There (1956)’ offers some indication of how Dylan’s voice creates meaning separately from the words it utters. This song, still officially unreleased, was recorded in Woodstock during the summer of 1967. Bauldie states: