Why Bob Dylan Matters

by Richard F. Thomas

  But Eden is burning, either get ready for elimination

  Or else your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards.

  But the traces of Virgil, and the beginnings of a textual engagement with the poetry of Greece and Rome, are to be found here in the “song that has been there for thousands of years,” as Dylan put it.

  TEMPEST: GOIN’ BACK TO ROME—AGAIN

  Bob Dylan chose September 11, 2012, as the U.S. release date for what is now his latest album, and one of his best: the critically acclaimed Tempest. The worlds created in the songs on this album come out of the song tradition, reading, and still fertile and exuberant imagination that Dylan has been drawing from for years. Those worlds, created out of his experience, observation, and particularly his imagination, resist any sort of easy definition. They are strange and beautiful, ominous and dangerous, and utterly compelling. The characters in “Soon After Midnight” come thick and fast: “a gal named Honey” took his money; “Charlotte’s a harlot, dresses in scarlet / Mary dresses in green,” while he’s “got a date with the fairy queen.” The identities are impenetrable, but if you enter into the world of this song, beautiful in performance, where it has been a favorite, that is a sufficient world, its final line leaving everything hanging there: “It’s soon after midnight and I don’t want anyone but you.” Or take “Tin Angel,” the album’s eighth track. For no apparent reason, it shares its title with that of a Joni Mitchell song, and it also starts out with the exact first line of Woody Guthrie’s “Gypsy Davy”—“It was late last night when the boss came home.” It then turns into a twenty-eight-verse ballad of narrative and dramatic dialogue that ends up in a cross between the death scenes of Othello and Hamlet, with the boss, his wife, and his rival, Henry Lee, “chief of the clan” but otherwise unidentified, all dead, “together in a heap.”

  “Tempest,” the album’s ninth track, is even longer, a forty-five-verse ballad about the sinking of the Titanic. The tune and the first two verses are from the song “Titanic” by the Carter Family; the rest is from the highly cinematic mind of Dylan. The song includes lines from another Roman poet: in Dylan, “Davey the brothel keeper / Came out, dismissed his girls”; in Juvenal, “the pimp was already dismissing his girls” (Juvenal 6.127). Juvenal turns up on other tracks of Tempest, confirmation that Dylan is drawing from the Roman satirist. “Tempest” is crowded with scenes of chaos, civil war even breaking out at one point: “Brother rose up against brother / In every circumstance / They fought and slaughtered each other / In a deadly dance.” In “Bob Dylan Unleashed,” Mikal Gilmore’s September 27, 2012, interview with Dylan about Tempest, Dylan describes it as a record “where anything goes and you just gotta believe it will make sense.”

  In the same interview, talking of the changes he and his music had gone through over the years, Dylan offered an interesting detail: “I went to a library in Rome and I found a book about transfiguration.” We’ll return to that library, and to transfiguration. For now Rome “transfigured” will play an important role in two songs on the album, whose components have echoes of the Roman identities of some of the earlier songs.

  “SCARLET TOWN”

  “In Scarlet Town, where I was born,” the first line of the sixth song on Tempest, takes us back fifty years to Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village, at the Gaslight Cafe. The ten songs he sang back then were taped informally and released on Live at the Gaslight 1962. Anyone who doubts Dylan’s ability to sing with a beautiful and melodious voice when he wants to should listen to the second to last track on that album, Dylan’s version of the traditional seventeenth-century Scottish ballad “Barbara Allen.” William lies on his deathbed wasting away for the unrequited love of Barbara Allen, whom he omitted to toast down at the tavern, so giving her the mistaken impression he didn’t care for her. Far from it. She is sent for and when she realizes he in fact loved her, she too dies for love of him. From his grave a red, red rose grows up, from hers a briar, the entwining of the two plants uniting them at least in death.

  In Dylan’s new song, “Scarlet Town,” the characters familiar from the ballad don’t figure until verse three, where Barbara Allen has a new name: “Scarlet Town in the month of May / Sweet William on his deathbed lay / Mistress Mary by the side of the bed / Kissing his face, heaping prayers on his head.” We then enter the world of nursery rhyme as the next verse calls on Little Boy Blue to blow his horn. But otherwise ballad and nursery rhyme play no real role in the song, gone for good and absent from the last eight verses. “Uncle Tom still working for Uncle Bill” in the second verse, and the last three verses, addressed to a woman, are now in a contemporary world of regret, “A lot of things we didn’t do that I wish we had.”

  Scarlet Town is indeed, as Dylan said of the album at large, a place “where anything goes.” His 1962 “Barbara Allen” had begun “In Charlotte Town, not far from here,” clearly heard in the opening of the new song—“In Scarlet Town where I was born,” but it has other company, now from the unreleased song of 1963, “Goin’ back to Rome / That’s where I was born.” Beyond this particular echo, we encounter a literary and cultural pastiche that forms the world of this song. Here “the streets [of Rome?] have names that you can’t pronounce.” “In Scarlet Town you fight your father’s foes / Up on the hill a chilly wind blows,” where the hill in this context resembles the one in “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” the Capitoline Hill, one of the Seven Hills of Rome, which may lie behind another of the images in the song: “The Seven Wonders of the World are here.” The father is most easily Julius Caesar, whose foes were fought and defeated by his adoptive son, the future emperor Augustus. As Dylan said in the same interview after the album came out:

  Who knows who’s been transfigured and who has not? Who knows? Maybe Aristotle? Maybe he was transfigured? I can’t say. Maybe Julius Caesar was transfigured.

  Transfigured into this song perhaps, now dead as his son fights his father’s foes?

  One verse of the song, the sixth, points in its entirety to Rome and adds a new ingredient, that of Christians under Rome or in Rome:

  On marble slabs and in fields of stone

  You make your humble wishes known

  I touched the garment but the hem was torn.

  In Scarlet Town where I was born

  “Marble slabs and in fields of stone” has an ancient world feel to it, perhaps the Roman Forum, while the next lines point toward biblical lands and to the woman in the Gospel of Luke 8.43–48 who makes her humble wishes known by touching the hem of Jesus’s garment as Jesus passes by, and is immediately cured of her chronic bleeding. Dylan may even be channeling Sam Cooke’s or some other version of the gospel song “Touch the Hem of His Garment.” But the biblical and the Roman have always been side by side, ever since he saw The Robe, or stood on the stage at Hibbing High acting the role of that Roman soldier.

  The next song on Tempest didn’t seem to be concealing much, or so it appeared when the title was announced. It looked like things were headed for the eighth century BC, back to Romulus and Remus and the other kings of Rome, perhaps a lesson from the would-be Roman history teacher.

  “EARLY ROMAN KINGS”

  In the seventh track of Tempest, Rome made it into a song title, “Early Roman Kings.” As it would emerge, the song at first had little to do with actual Roman kings like Romulus or Tarquin the Proud. That would be too easy:

  All the early Roman Kings in their sharkskin suits

  Bowties and buttons, high top boots

  Driving the spikes, blazing the rails

  Nailed in their coffins in top hats and tails

  Fly away little bird, fly away, flap your wings

  Fly by night like the early Roman Kings.

  Dylan’s voice is strong and sinister, matching the darkness of the lyrics and delivering a song that in performance would become his favorite from the album, played at well over three hundred concerts by 2017. The Roman Kings turned out to be a gang from the Bronx, one of many active i
n the 1960s and ’70s, mentioned in Sol Yurick’s 1965 novel, The Warriors, based on actual gangs that flourished at the time. But that too would be too easy to suit the songs of this album, whose worlds connect the old and the new, as Dylan put it, and which correspond to nothing objectively observable. The second verse in fact takes us back to ancient Rome:

  All the early Roman kings in the early, early morn’

  Coming down the mountain, distributing the corn

  Speeding through the forest, racing down the track

  You try to get away, they drag you back

  Tomorrow is Friday, we’ll see what it brings

  Everybody’s talking ’bout the early Roman Kings

  In ancient Rome the grain supply was taken very seriously. Corn distribution was a form of dole, and there was even a magistrate responsible for the allotment of cheap or free grain to an urban populace, whose unrest in times of famine, which happened often enough, would pose a serious threat to the state. In a rather modern-sounding jab at the Roman people, the poet Juvenal, whose Satires, written around AD 130, have a modern ring to them, noted that the people who used to care about electing politicians and military leaders suddenly had a desire for just two things, “bread and circuses” (Satire 10.81). That’s what Dylan’s early Roman kings are up to in the second verse: “distributing the corn” and “racing down the track”—Dylan knows that the racetrack of ancient Rome is the Circus Maximus, a short walk from the Colosseum. The classical pastiche runs through the song. Juvenal comes back in the last verse, in the line “Gonna put you on trial in a Sicilian court,” which Dylanologist Scott Warmuth plausibly connected to a different poem of Juvenal, Satire 6, where the household regime of a Roman matron is said to be as cruel as that of a Sicilian court—referring to the proverbial cruelty of the ancient tyrants of Sicily. We will return to this song later in the book, where its lyrics take the identity of the Roman kings back as far as you can go in Western literature, to Odysseus, Homer’s vagabond king of the island of Ithaca. But before that, let’s make one more trip back to Rome, with Dylan in the fall of 2013.

  GOIN’ BACK TO ROME: SETLIST SUNDOWN

  The recent albums of Bob Dylan have become the essential elements of the singer’s concert setlists in recent years. He reaches back selectively to the songs of the sixties and seventies, but to the annoyance of those who yearn for the old songs and the old voice, the world he constructs for performance today draws from his recent masterpieces, increasingly interwoven with some of the songs from the Great American Songbook of the mid-twentieth century, five albums’ worth by 2017. The setlists have also become more fixed, with little variation, but with constant modulations in his singing and in his band’s accompaniment in the performed versions of those songs.

  Then something happened that is without parallel in Dylan’s concerts of the last several years. In the middle of the 2013 fall concert tour, which had begun in Oslo and gotten as far as Milan, Dylan and the band headed south to Rome, for two concerts at the Atlantico, a four-thousand-seat venue in the ancient capital. For those two nights in Rome, November 6 and 7, and only those two nights, he almost completely threw away the setlist that everyone was expecting. “Bob is serving the crowd a la carte,” wrote an Italian reviewer of the first Rome show. To examine the details of the menu over these two concerts is to reveal an artist who was connecting the place he first visited more than fifty years before with the art he had created across those years in over thirty-five hundred performances. The two concerts were retrospective in the extreme, with not a single song from the 2009 album Together Through Life or his great 2012 album, Tempest, which had become a concert staple. Dylan opened the two evenings in Rome, and each performance of the European tour of 2013, with “When I Paint My Masterpiece” and its locally popular opening lines: “Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble / Ancient footprints are everywhere”—appropriately allusive for those two performances. I would venture to say he used the song as opener throughout the tour because he knew what he would be doing in Rome.

  And then, remarkably, for the remainder of the two Roman sets, Dylan performed seventeen songs that appeared in none of his other concerts that year. Even more striking is the fact that fifteen of the songs in the two Rome setlists have to date featured in no regular concert since, with one exception, to which we’ll eventually get. These are some of Dylan’s finest and best-loved songs, a veritable greatest-hits list: “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,” “Honest with Me,” “Queen Jane Approximately,” “Ain’t Talkin’,” “Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine),” “Boots of Spanish Leather,” “Every Grain of Sand,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” “Man in the Long Black Coat,” “Positively 4th Street,” “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” “When the Deal Goes Down,” “Under the Red Sky,” and “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met).” In hindsight, four years after the Rome concerts, this list reads like a swan song offered up to the Romans who have interested Bob Dylan across the centuries.

  Two of the songs he performed in Rome, “Girl of the North Country” and “Boots of Spanish Leather,” bring in a further dimension. These two songs had been written or partially written in Italy in early 1963, both with rich folk music traditions behind them, and if any single woman is behind “Girl of the North Country,” she probably came from where the song put her, up in the woods of northern Minnesota. But their lyrics were also inextricably linked to Dylan’s relationship with Suze Rotolo, whose absence had helped generate those songs fifty years before the Rome concerts. Suze died on February 25, 2011, so perhaps Dylan’s performance of “Boots of Spanish Leather” in Rome was also a tribute to her. Whether or not that is so, only one person knows, and we’re unlikely to hear from him on that score. Now it’s time to follow the trail back to where it all began in earnest, on the streets of New York City, in the early sixties.

  4

  “VIBRATIONS IN THE UNIVERSE”: DYLAN TELLS HIS OWN STORY

  YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT ME WITHOUT THAT YOU HAVE READ A BOOK BY THE NAME OF “THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER,” BUT THAT AIN’T NO MATTER. THAT BOOK WAS MADE BY MR. MARK TWAIN, AND HE TOLD THE TRUTH, MAINLY. THERE WAS THINGS WHICH HE STRETCHED, BUT MAINLY HE TOLD THE TRUTH.

  —MARK TWAIN, THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN

  I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT AGE OF HISTORY WE WERE IN NOR WHAT THE TRUTH OF IT WAS. NOBODY BOTHERED WITH THAT. IF YOU TOLD THE TRUTH THAT WAS ALL WELL AND GOOD AND IF YOU TOLD THE UN-TRUTH, WELL THAT’S STILL WELL AND GOOD. FOLK SONGS TAUGHT ME THAT.

  —BOB DYLAN, CHRONICLES: VOLUME ONE

  Dylan’s memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, was published on October 5, 2004, classified by his publisher as “biography.” Readers soon realized they were dealing with anything but a biography in the traditional sense. Dylan’s life seems almost impossible to contain or set in any category—we see only what he lets us see. The five chapters of Chronicles take the reader through selected periods of Dylan’s life, in a style that is delightful, lively, and clear, and that filters the autobiographical through the artist’s creative imagination. The book covers only a tiny fraction of the enigmatic life of Dylan. In reality, it’s more like a play, in five acts, but with constant flashbacks, fast-forwarding, inventions, and falsehoods. The structure is elegant: Chapters 1, 3, and 5 read like the truth, while Chapters 2 and 4 read somewhat like fiction, and as Dylan says, “that’s still well and good.” Time is rarely linear, and particularly within those more imaginative second and fourth chapters a sense of the surreal predominates. Incongruities and deliberately chaotic juxtapositions abound, to hilarious and hugely pleasurable effect. This is not an autobiography in any sense of the word.

  Chapter 1, “Markin’ Up the Score,” opens with a conversation between Dylan and Lou Levy, of the Leeds Music Publishing Company. Dylan does not give dates here or anywhere else in the book, but the scene must belong to late 1961, after John Hammond, “the great talent scout and discoverer of monumental artists,” as Dylan pu
t it, signed him on with Columbia Records, thus setting in motion the public career of the twenty-year-old. Similarly, other chapters focus on Dylan’s story at other very specific moments in his career, again without any linearity, and maintaining silence on much of what Dylan fans would like most to hear about—the astonishing music from 1965 to 1966, the Rolling Thunder Revue tours of 1975–76, the Christian years of 1979–81. The fluid treatment of time in Chronicles: Volume One is reminiscent of his practice in many of his songs, a deliberate frustrating of attempts to impose temporal order on his world.

  Instead, Chapter 3, “New Morning,” sharing its title with Dylan’s 1970 album, starts with the twenty-seven-year-old Dylan returning from Hibbing to New York and reuniting with his wife and children—he never names them, and in the real world “my wife” in Chapter 3, Sara, is a different human being from “my wife” in Chapter 4, Carolyn Dennis. The year must be 1968, since he had gone back to Minnesota that year for the funeral of his father, Abe Zimmerman, who died on June 5. A prominent theme of the chapter is a songwriting collaboration with poet and playwright Archibald MacLeish, also librarian of Congress under FDR. Dylan and MacLeish didn’t quite see eye to eye on the songs Dylan had delivered, and Dylan ultimately realized the project wasn’t going to work, but their encounter gives him the opportunity for some fine writing, descriptive vignettes of “Archie’s” place in rural Conway, Massachusetts, with lively conversation between the two. At one point, Mac-Leish asks Dylan if he has read Sappho and Socrates (meaning Plato, presumably, since Socrates left no writing). “I said, nope I hadn’t and then he asked me about Dante and Donne. I said not much.” The talk then turns to a topic familiar from the Rome press conference of 2001 and the draft of “Changing of the Guard” (111):