Why Bob Dylan Matters

by Richard F. Thomas

  MacLeish tells me that he considers me a serious poet and that my work would be a touchstone for generations after me, that I was a postwar Iron Age poet but that I had seemingly inherited something metaphysical from a bygone era.

  Their conversation, or at least Dylan’s reconstruction of it, was heading back in time, and soon enough he had returned to Homer, the father of Western literature, the poet whom in the Rome press conference of 2001 Dylan had labeled as belonging to the Golden Age (112): “MacLeish tells me that Homer, who wrote the Iliad, was a blind balladeer, and that his name means ‘hostage’ ”—both details true enough. Whether or not Dylan was recalling a conversation from more than thirty years earlier, the presence of Homer has more to do with his literary and artistic activities of 2004.

  Chapter 4, “Oh Mercy,” jumps to 1989, in another finely crafted section of writing, much of it clearly made up. In the May 23, 2011, issue of Rolling Stone, writer Andy Greene quotes critic Clinton Heylin’s reaction to this chapter:

  “As far as I can tell almost everything in the Oh Mercy section of Chronicles is a work of fiction,” Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin recently said. “I enjoy Chronicles as a work of literature, but it has as much basis in reality as [Dylan’s 2003 film] Masked and Anonymous, and why shouldn’t it? He’s not the first guy to write a biography that’s a pack of lies.”

  The book is best seen as reality filtered through the three ingredients of creativity, in the memoir as in his songwriting: “creativity has much to do with experience, observation, and imagination.” Take, for example, his descriptions of singer Fred Neil, who ran the daytime performances at the Café Wha? in Greenwich Village, where Dylan was a regular after he arrived in New York City in January 1961. In a 1984 interview, Dylan described Neil: “Fred was from Florida, I think . . . and he had a strong, powerful voice, almost a bass voice. And a powerful sense of rhythm.” In Chronicles, Neil has become something else, something larger than life:

  He played a big dreadnought guitar, lot of percussion in his playing, piercing driving rhythm—a one-man band, a kick in the head singing voice. He did fierce versions of hybrid chain gang songs and whomped the audience into a frenzy. I’d heard stuff about him, that he was an errant sailor, harbored a skiff in Florida, was an underground cop, had hooker friends and a shadowy past. He’d come up to Nashville, drop off songs that he wrote and then head for New York where he’d lay low, wait for something to blow over and fill up his pockets with wampum.

  Dylan writes of how Neil let him treat himself to “all the French fries and hamburgers I could eat at the Café Wha?” and he gives a similarly penetrating sketch of Norbert the cook, who used to leave a “greasy hamburger” for Dylan and falsetto singer Tiny Tim, who also performed at the club:

  Norbert was a trip. He wore a tomato-stained apron, had a fleshy, hard-bitten face, bulging cheeks, scars on his face like the marks of claws—thought of himself as a lady’s man, saving his money so he could go to Verona in Italy and visit the tomb of Romeo and Juliet. The kitchen was like a cave bored into the side of a cliff.

  Dylan’s imagination and his creative, vigorous writing again and again transform these figures. Most of them were dead by the time Chronicles was published, so Dylan has a free hand, turning the Village into a carnivalesque museum, capturing that moment when the fifties turned into the sixties and the Beats gave way to folksingers. In the first two chapters of the book, Dylan digs these characters up and gives them new, tragic, heroic, surreal roles. The effect is not unlike that in the great song “Desolation Row”: “Einstein disguised as Robin Hood” off “sniffing drainpipes and reciting the alphabet”—and all the other masks and disguises that song creates. Dylan’s memory of detail is clearly formidable, but so are his imaginative and creative powers and his way with words.

  THE LOST LAND

  Which brings us to what may be his greatest creation in the book, the biggest whopper of them all. Dylan’s flair for language and literature brings us to two interesting characters, Ray Gooch and Chloe Kiel. It’s hard to know what to make of this remarkable couple, who appear in the second chapter, a section of the book that conjures up myth and fiction, a world outside its historical time, but one that in Dylan’s “autobiography” is set in that historically frigid 1961 winter in New York City. The opening line of this chapter, “I sat up in bed and looked around,” faintly recalls the opening of “Tangled Up in Blue”: “Early one morning the sun was shinin’ / I was layin’ in bed.” Only in the book, “it was midafternoon, and both Ray and Chloe were gone” (26). Night owl Dylan is a newcomer to New York, and he is crashing with Ray and Chloe, a colorful couple who some readers and reviewers believe are fictional, although rumor has it that Dylan, when questioned about them, has answered that they are real—for what that is worth, and not that it matters.

  Why did Dylan call Chapter 2 “The Lost Land”? In part I suspect because for everyone the land of our youth is indeed lost, gone by the time we reach a certain age, along with the people who inhabited that land. So a land lost in time makes sense for a chapter recollecting those days, more than forty years before the book came out. But the phrase conjures up other possibilities, the mythic lost lands and utopian places set off from the world, the city of Atlantis beneath the sea, the Tibetan valley of Shangri-la, El Dorado, city of gold. Then there is Land of the Lost, the TV series that Dylan’s children could have watched when it ran from 1974 to 1976 as their parents’ marriage was falling apart. The show’s dinosaurs, lizard-men, and friendly primates might have provided a welcome distraction. Whatever the meanings of the lost land, it is a memorable land, to say the least.

  Dylan points us to this tradition, underscoring the mythical, when he talks about the writers whose stories attracted him even before he started plumbing the rich depths of folk song (39):

  In the past I’d never been that keen on books and writers but I liked stories. Stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs, who wrote about mythical Africa—Luke Short, the mythical Western tales—Jules Verne—H. G. Wells. Those were my favorites but that was before I discovered the folksingers.

  These authors are the early-twentieth-century creators of various lost and nonexistent lands, the lost world of Tarzan, mythical places of Journey to the Center of the Earth and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Island of Doctor Moreau. The title of Chapter 2 of Chronicles perhaps puts us on notice about the genre we are about to read. Fact or fiction, or something in between?

  Ray and Chloe’s apartment, in which Dylan wakes up in the opening words of “The Lost Land,” is said to be in Tribeca, in a building “near Vestry Street below Canal,” close to the Hudson River. This will allow Dylan to walk over to the window and look out “into the white, gray streets and over towards the river.” Dylan also describes the apartment as being on the same block as the Bull’s Head, “a cellar tavern where John Wilkes Booth, the American Brutus [again those Ides of March via the chief assassin of Julius Caesar], used to drink.” Dylan claims to have seen Booth’s ghost in the mirror at the tavern. In reality, the Bull’s Head, now closed, was well north of Canal, almost three miles away from Vestry Street, at 295 East Avenue. It would seem that Dylan needed the tavern to be close to the apartment for the purposes of the story and its drama. This too could be a lot of bull, but it makes for good reading.

  Aside from giving Dylan a place to stay, Ray and Chloe seem to have had no real part in the life that Dylan was leading or people with whom he was associated in the Village, but they come alive through Dylan’s descriptive language and dramatization. Dylan describes Ray as being “like a character out of some of the songs I’d been singing,” ten years older than Dylan—making him all of thirty. Dylan writes (26):

  he was like an old wolf, gaunt and battle-scarred—came from a long line of ancestry made up of bishops, generals, even a colonial governor. He was a nonconformist, a nonintegrator and a Southern nationalist. He and Chloe lived in the place like they were hiding out. . . .

  His “noni
ntegrator” status is picked up on later in the chapter when Dylan talks about the preaching of the man who had “been ‘expelled with gratitude’ from Wake Forest Divinity School” (27, 77):

  Ray was a Southerner and made no bones about it but he would have been antislavery as much as he would have been antiunion. “Slavery should have been outlawed from the start,” he said. “It was diabolical. Slave power makes it impossible for free workers to make a decent living—it had to be destroyed.” Ray was pragmatic. Sometimes it was as if he had no heart or soul.

  And later:

  He wasn’t somebody that would leave any footprints in the sand of time, but there was something special about him. He had blood in his eyes, the face of a man who could do no wrong—total lack of viciousness or wickedness or even sinfulness in his face. He seemed like a man who could conquer and command any time he wished to. Ray was mysterious as hell.

  According to Dylan, they both had jobs, Ray in a tool-and-die factory in Brooklyn, Chloe as a “hatcheck girl at the Egyptian Gardens, a belly-dancing dinner place on 8th Avenue” (26). She too sounds like someone who could have been in a Dylan song: “Chloe had red-gold hair, hazel eyes, an illegible smile, face like a doll, and an even better figure,” a little reminiscent of Ruby in the 1986 song written with Sam Shepard, “Brownsville Girl”: “Ruby was in the backyard hanging clothes, she had her red hair tied back. . . . Brownsville girl with your Brownsville curls / Teeth like pearls shining like the moon above.” This is in sync with the narrating voice of this chapter of Chronicles, a voice that like its author seems to belong back in the sixties, or even further back in time, maybe the forties, right out of a Raymond Chandler novel.

  Ray and Chloe are often away from the apartment, which allows Dylan to take us on tours of the various parts of the place, with “five or six” thematically populated rooms. The detail is exquisite, suggestive either of a photographic memory, unfading across all the years, or something else, namely fiction—or a combination of fact and fiction. As with his songwriting, anything goes.

  THE GUN ROOM

  Dylan describes one room in the apartment as being full of guns:

  There were different parts of guns—of pistols, large frame, small frame, Taurus Tracker pistol, a pocket pistol, trigger guards, everything like in a compost heap—altered guns . . . guns with shortened barrels, different brands of guns—Ruger, Browning, a single-action Navy pistol, everything poised to work, shined out. You’d walk into this room and feel like you were under the vigilance of some unsleeping eye.

  In these descriptions, Dylan is exercising his surreal sense of humor in an absurdist listing of thematically connected objects. This delight in lists became a trademark feature of Dylan’s brilliant satellite radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour, which ran from May 2006 to April 2009. On the show, Dylan treated listeners to an expert, thematically arranged journey through folk, blues, jazz, country, and popular song of every variety. In Episode 1.11, “Flowers,” DJ Dylan treats listeners to one of these lists:

  Tonight we’re going to be talking about the most beautiful things on earth, the fine-smelling, colorful, bee-tempting world of flowers, the Bougainvillea, the Passion Flower, the Butterfly Clerodendron, the Angel’s Trumpets, the Firecracker plant, we’re going to be talking about Rosa rugosa, the Angel Face, All that Jazz, the Double Delight, the Gemini [Dylan’s zodiac sign] and the Julia Child, we’re going to be talking about the Knockout Shrub, the New Dawn, the Mr. Lincoln—and that’s only the roses—we’re also going to hit on the Silver King, the German Statis, the Globe Thistle and the Joe Pie Weed, the Violet, the Daisy, the lovely Chrysanthemum, the Arrow and the Tansy, we’ll be hitting on the Bachelor’s Button, the Coxcomb and the Lion’s Ear, the Love in the Mist and the Victoria Sorghum [laughs],—I just made that one up—we’re going to be talking about “Flowers,” on Theme Time Radio Hour. (58)

  THE TOOL ROOM

  Back in Ray and Chloe’s apartment, another room turns out to be a workshop, with “all kinds of paraphernalia piled up” (58):

  There were some iron flowers on a spiral vine painted white leaning in the corner. All kind of tools laying around. Hammers, hacksaws, screwdrivers, electricians’ pliers, wire cutters and levers, claw chisels, boxes with gear wheels—everything glistening in the backlight of the sun. Soldering equipment and sketch pads, paint tubes and gauges, electric drill—cans of stuff that could make things either waterproof or fireproof.

  Here is yet another list, creating an image of a room overflowing with metalworking tools and gadgets, Dylan delighting in the detail. Dylan is knowledgeable about such metalworking matters. I suggest we’re no longer in the tool room of Ray’s Tribeca apartment, but rather in a version of Dylan’s art studio in Los Angeles that has merged with whatever the reality was in Ray’s workroom in 1961. On November 17, 2013, an exhibit of Dylan’s metal sculpture was put up in the Halcyon Gallery in London and fans discovered that he had for many years been soldering and welding scrap metal objects—car parts, lawn mowers, chains, iron wheels, and so on—into artwork, particularly ornamental gates.

  Dylan picked up these skills long before 2013. He has an uncredited cameo in the 1990 movie Catchfire, in which he has a brief encounter with hit man Milo, played by Dennis Hopper, who is looking for Jodie Foster, in the role of electronic artist Anne Benton. She has witnessed Milo’s killing of a rival and he is on her trail. Hopper also directed the movie, which he disowned, releasing a cable television version under the name Backtrack. In a scene more or less gratuitous to the plot, Dylan is in a workshop sculpting wood with a chain saw and displaying his metal sculpture. Going even further back, and in real life, Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s first real girlfriend and Muse in New York, recalls Dylan’s woodworking skills in her autobiography, A Freewheelin’ Life, published in 2008. After Dylan had bought a secondhand TV for the apartment on Fourth Street, she writes, “The TV never really worked very well, so Bob took it out of the cabinet and used the wood to build a decent coffee table and better shelves.” Such things don’t happen without some training.

  At that point, Bob Dylan was only two years out of high school, and he presumably picked up these skills in Hibbing, where carpentry and metalworking were of immense importance for employment in the mines, but were also available as electives. On December 14, 1956, the middle of Dylan’s sophomore year, the school paper, the Hibbing Hi Times, contained an article “Metal Arts Class Trains Students in Use of Machine, Hand Tools,” with detail that shows where it all likely started:

  Students thus far have produced a wide variety of machine and hand tools, including belt sanders, vises of various kinds, smooth planes for wood working, and a drill press. They have also made repair parts for lawn mowers and tractors, each student grinding his own bits or cutting tools.

  If, as seems likely, Ray Gooch’s tool room is really an allusion to Dylan’s own sculptural activities, it is worth adding a further detail from the imaginative mind of Bob Dylan. In episode 21 of Theme Time Radio Hour, “School,” aired in the fall of 2006, the year Modern Times came out with the lines from Roman poet Ovid, DJ Dylan seems to be back in Hibbing: “there are many different kinds of teachers,” he says, naming only two, “there are Latin teachers, shop teachers.” We know the name of his Latin teacher; perhaps he also picked up some skills in metal arts or the woodworking shop.

  As Dylan wrote, “Ray was as mysterious as hell.” So is Bob Dylan, and one senses a “transfiguration” here, a term we’ll return to soon. Dylan and Ray both work with metal. Ray’s girlfriend Chloe was working at the Egyptian Gardens, whereas Sara Dylan, before she met Dylan, had worked as a model and Playboy Bunny at the New York Playboy Club. And before that, Dylan’s first-known New York girlfriend, Avril, whose apartment he shared in 1961, was also a dancer. Talk about parallel lives. In Chronicles, the stream of consciousness continues into the next room.

  THE LIBRARY

  Ray Gooch’s library is the room in “The Lost Land” that Dylan gives the most attention. B
efore entering the library in this chapter, he explains his own place in the history of songwriting (34–35):

  Songs were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic. . . . 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.

  This is an important moment in the book, where Dylan admits that the boundary between truth and untruth in his mind, and in his art, is indistinct. The fact that Dylan provides this signpost right before entering the library is clear indication that his creative imagination was at the wheel, just as much as his actual memory of the books he may or may not have seen in that room. Dylan describes finding himself in this library “looking for the part of my education that I never got.” And a little later (35–36):

  The place had an overpowering presence of literature, and you couldn’t help but lose your passion for dumbness. Up until this time I’d been raised in a cultural spectrum that had left my mind black with soot.

  We know that this is an exaggeration, and that Dylan’s cultural mind was hardly “black with soot” when he arrived in New York in early 1961, at the age of nineteen. We know that he’d taken B. J. Rolfzen’s poetry classes at Hibbing High, and it is interesting that he claims to have “read [in Ray’s library] the poetry books, mostly. Byron and Shelley and Longfellow and Poe.” But of other books that he here comes across, Dylan says he’s only browsed through them, rather than read them: “I would have had to have been in a rest home or something in order to do that.”