Why Bob Dylan Matters
Page 11
While riding on a train goin’ west
I fell asleep for to take my rest
I dreamed a dream that made me sad
Concerning myself and the first few friends I had
If the thought and sentiment of this song seem too old for the young man writing it, who regularly returned to Hibbing in the days when he was still seeing some of those first few friends, that is because it is borrowed from a traditional ballad, “Lady Franklin’s Lament.” Dylan has acknowledged that he got the tune and much of the lyrics from the English folksinger Martin Carthy, whom he heard singing it when he was in London at the end of 1962. The song, which goes back to 1850, is about the disappearance of Sir John Franklin, looking for the Northwest Passage in Baffin Bay in 1845:
We were homeward bound one night on the deep
Swinging in my hammock I fell asleep
I dreamed a dream and I thought it true
concerning Franklin and his gallant crew
The twenty-one-year-old, in a dark December in London, expresses a longing for the friends of his youth, but he does so by evoking the words of that old song:
How many a year has past and gone
And many a gamble has been past and won
And many a road taken by many a friend
And each one I’ve never seen again
The words of Lady Franklin in the mid-nineteenth-century folk song, “Ten thousand pounds would I freely give / To know on earth that my Franklin lives,” become in Dylan’s rewriting “Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat / I’d give it all gladly if our lives could be like that.” Not much money to get back those lost years; by keeping the mid-nineteenth-century amount of the old song, though dollar for pounds, Dylan is inviting exploration of the relationship to the original, pointing to his source, part of the intertextual play.
Sometimes just a few words or phrases are enough to create an intertextual connection, as in Dylan’s “Kingsport Town,” recorded in 1962 but not officially available for almost thirty years, when it came out in 1991 on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3. It has never been included in the official lyrics books, including the most recent edition from 2016, The Lyrics: 1961–2012, but the song appears on Dylan’s official website with the designation “Written by Bob Dylan (arr.).” “Kingsport Town” is sung to the tune of Woody Guthrie’s “Who’s Going to Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet” (1938), which itself goes back a lot earlier, ultimately to Scottish folk traditions. Guthrie’s song is a failed persuasion song, in which the male narrator asks four questions, in a sequence moving from innocent or practical to seductive:
Who’s gonna shoe your pretty little feet?
Who’s gonna glove your hand?
Who’s gonna kiss your red ruby lips?
Who’s gonna be your man.
To the first three questions, a female voice in turn responds:
Papa’s gonna shoe my pretty little feet
Mama’s gonna glove my hands
Sister’s gonna kiss my red ruby lips
I don’t need no man
This exchange opens and closes the song, with the center containing the lament of the man whose woman is gone:
The fastest train I ever did ride
Was a hundred coaches long,
And the only woman I ever did love
Was on that train and gone
On that train and gone, boys,
On that train and gone,
And the only woman I ever did love
On that train and gone.
In “Kingsport Town,” Dylan borrows the tune, and also borrows “gloves” for the second line as a sort of “footnote” to the source in Guthrie’s song, alluding along with the melody to his source. His opening verse will also be used as the closing verse, creating a form of what is called “ring composition,” a very elemental poetic structure going back to the Greeks and Romans:
The winter wind is a blowing strong
My hands have got no gloves
I wish to my soul that I could see
The girl I’m a-thinking of
But Dylan utterly transforms the song. His narrative picks up where Guthrie left us: the girl is gone, the singer is on the run, “a high sheriff on [his] trail” because of unspecified problems connected to falling for a “curly-headed dark-eyed girl.” The repeated “Who’s gonna” questions of Guthrie’s frame are in the center of “Kingsport Town,” and they are very different questions, only one of them picking up on the model: “Who’s a-gonna be your man?” with “Who’s gonna . . . ?” itself the ultimate intertextual trace in the new song. Now, in Dylan’s song, the question has nothing to do with persuasion, as in the original, but is rather replaced by his imagining the girl he fell for as being with another man:
Who’s a-gonna stroke your cold black hair
And sandy colored skin
Who’s a-gonna kiss your Memphis lips
When I’m out in the wind
When I’m out in the wind, babe
When I’m out in the wind
Who’s a-gonna kiss your Memphis mouth
When I’m out in the wind
The answer? Not papa, mama, or sister, but someone else, maybe a fellow student of Suze Rotolo, off in Italy, studying art in Perugia, while Dylan is gloveless, out in the wind of New York City. This is an exquisite piece of intertextual writing, recorded at the same session as “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” Both songs gain much of their dynamism from the old songs that gave Dylan the idea for the new classics his experience and imagination created out of those source texts.
COMPETITIVE INTERTEXTUALITY: CONFRONTING JOHN LENNON AND DONOVAN
Dylan’s song “Fourth Time Around” (from Blonde on Blonde, February 1966) and its relationship to the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” (from Rubber Soul, December 1965) are fairly well known but worth mentioning in the larger context of Dylan’s thefts and intertexts. The song has been described as “Bob Dylan impersonating John Lennon impersonating Bob Dylan,” but it is also a song in which Dylan triumphs in the battle that he wages with Lennon. When you listen to “Fourth Time Around” and then go back to “Norwegian Wood,” the Beatles song sounds coy, almost innocent in comparison to the sophistication of Dylan’s voice and lyrics on the classic 1966 album. It is hard to imagine Dylan actually singing this to Lennon, which he apparently did, and it is very easy to believe reports of Lennon being unhappy at what must have seemed like mockery and parody. Dylan outdoes, accentuates, overloads the rhymes, and on one level does parody the simple rhyme of the Beatles song. Here are the relevant lyrics of the two songs side by side:
The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood”
Bob Dylan’s “Fourth Time Around”
I sat on a rug biding my time
Drinking her wine
We talked until two and then she said
“It’s time for bed”
And when I awoke I was alone
This bird had flown
So I lit a fire
Isn’t it good Norwegian wood?
I stood there and hummed
I tapped on her drum and asked her how come
And she buttoned her boot
And straightened her suit
Then she said “Don’t get cute
And I tried to make sense
Out of that picture of you in your wheelchair
That leaned up against . . .
Her Jamaican rum
And when she did come, I asked her for some
She said, “No, dear”
I said, “Your words aren’t clear
You’d better spit out your gum”
If you accept the fact that Dylan’s song is directed at Lennon and the Beatles, Dylan’s “I never asked for your crutch / Now don’t ask for mine” is devastating. He’s essentially telling the Beatles, “Stay away from what I’m doing.” Dylan must have felt that the Beatles, and John Lennon as the songwriter with whom he was likely the most competitive, had to be confronted.
The y
ear before saw a preview of this side of Dylan, the artist whose aim is to stay at the peak of Parnassus. Dylan met the Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan during his 1965 tour of England, parts of which were filmed by D. A. Pennebaker for the documentary Don’t Look Back (1967). Donovan, five years Dylan’s junior, is part of a group gathered in Dylan’s hotel room. At one point, Donovan starts playing guitar and launches into his song “To Sing for You.” “That’s a good song, man,” says Dylan before Donovan even finishes, then grabs his guitar and in response delivers a version of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” singing “You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last. . . .” Donovan listens while nervously smoking a cigarette, and he seems to get the point, particularly apparent as Dylan looks directly at him and sings the closing line as if it were written for Donovan, a verdict on the folk traditions that Dylan’s music is rendering obsolete: “And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.” It’s not a particularly easy scene to watch—it’s hard to imagine John Lennon taking Dylan’s private performance of “Fourth Time Around,” of which we have no record, much differently.
LOST AND FOUND IN TRANSLATION: ARTHUR RIMBAUD
After Time Out of Mind (1997), and especially in the songs that followed in the twenty-first century, Dylan began integrating translations of non-English texts and the worlds they evoke into his song. This was a process that had begun years before with exposure to the writings of French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891).
In A Freewheelin’ Time, her memoir of her days in Greenwich Village before, during, and after her relationship with Dylan, Suze Rotolo recalls reuniting with Dylan and catching up after their separation, when they both returned to New York in early 1963:
He had traveling tales to tell, opinions to express, more songs to sing, and I had found other artists, poets, and music to add to my roster of enthusiasms to share. I was reading poetry by Rimbaud and it piqued his interest.
Folksinger and native New Yorker Dave Van Ronk, one of Dylan’s early contacts and minders in the Village, also recalls recommending Rimbaud to Dylan early on, and claimed to have seen a book of Symbolist poetry in Dylan’s apartment, a claim not inconsistent with Rotolo’s memory. Perhaps even more interesting is the recollection of photographer and musician John Cohen, who recalls Dylan showing him the words of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” in September 1962, when Suze was off studying in Italy: “I said ‘Bob, if you are going to do that kind of thing you should look at Rimbaud and Verlaine.’ ” Dylan is probably the most reliable source on the matter, even in Chronicles: Volume One (288): “Someplace along the line Suze had also introduced me to the poetry of French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud.” Memory is a creative thing, especially given what is here at stake, introducing Bob Dylan to Arthur Rimbaud.
Generally speaking, the French Symbolist poets, including Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, were interested in describing the effects of things rather than the things themselves. They focused on the confusion of those effects, and the chaotic images that can be conjured up by that fusing and confusing in their work. Rimbaud and Verlaine are known for having a tempestuous relationship, with the two living a dissolute lifestyle that included the frequent and liberal use of hashish and alcohol. Rimbaud stopped writing at the age of twenty-one, by which time he had produced an impressive body of poetry and prose, and Verlaine eventually ended up in jail for shooting Rimbaud in the hand. The changes Dylan was going through from 1964 to 1966 included wine and marijuana, perhaps other drugs, but also include making contact with Rimbaud, whose poetry came to his attention just at the right time. Dylan had no real models in what he was doing with his lyrics and his music in these years. The Beats were now more or less a thing of the past, or at least on the way out, and it was the joy of immersion in chaotic language, in contradictory and nonlinear thought, images of sound and light, that Rimbaud seems to have shown him. There was nothing like it in the English language at the time.
In Dylan’s 1974 song “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” clearly addressed to Sara Dylan as their marriage was breaking up, Dylan pairs the two French poets:
Situations have ended sad
Relationships have all been bad
Mine’ve been liked Verlaine’s and Rimbaud
By 1974, Rimbaud had surely not meant much to Dylan for some years—in his draft of the song in the new Bob Dylan Archive, housed at the University of Tulsa, he misspells the name “Rimbeau,” of which too much should not be made in a notebook—but that made for a great verse, and in and of itself guaranteed that biographies of Dylan would put “Rimbaud” in their indexes.
Dylan was also attracted to Rimbaud’s construction of a poetic identity separate from the identity of the person—“I is an other”—the exhortation to separate the “I” in a poem or song from the identity of the singer. The singer is always distinct from the song, and Dylan had long known that, but it must have been reassuring to find an expression of that reality in the words of the French poet to whom he was strongly attracted. As he wrote in Chronicles: Volume One (288):
I came across one of his letters called “Je est un autre,” which translates into “I is someone else.” When I read those words the bells went off. It made perfect sense. I wished someone would have mentioned that to me earlier.
The principle he expressed there was confirmed at a concert at New York’s Philharmonic Hall on Halloween in 1964, when he addressed the audience: “I’m wearing my Bob Dylan mask”—which can be heard on The Bootleg Series Volume 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964. And in a television press conference Dylan gave in San Francisco on December 3, 1965, Rimbaud was still at the top of his list when he was asked about his favorite poets, even if by then he was being less than forthright in responding to questions about what he was reading or who was influencing him. Here he immediately lapses into the absurd, putting on the mask:
What poets do you dig?
Rimbaud, I guess; W. C. Fields; the family, you know, the trapeze family in the circus; Smokey Robinson; Allen Ginsberg [the camera moves to Ginsberg, in the audience, looking very serious]; Charlie Rich—he’s a good poet.
Dylan had reached the point where he was not willing to give away too much about what he was reading or what was going into his songs. A few months later, on March 12, 1966, he told Robert Shelton, in an interview for the biography Shelton was writing,
Rimbaud? I can’t read him now. Rather read what I want these days. “Kaddish” [by Ginsberg] is the best thing yet. Everything else is a shuck. I never dug Pound or Eliot. I dig Shakespeare.
As for the presence of Rimbaud in Dylan’s songs, in February 1964, on a visit to New Orleans, Dylan publicly embraced his influence: “Rimbaud’s where it’s at. That’s the kind of stuff that means something. That’s the kind of writing I’m gonna do.” Dylan was at this point writing “Mr. Tambourine Man”—“Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin’ ship,” plausibly traced to Rimbaud’s poem “The Drunken Boat” (“Le Bateau Ivre”). Just these eight lines from Rimbaud’s hundred-line poem are sufficient to show the appeal they would have had for Dylan:
And afterwards down through the poem of the sea,
A milky foam infused with stars, frantic I dive
Down through green heavens where, descending pensively,
Sometimes the pallid remnants of the drowned arrive.
Where suddenly the bluish tracts dissolve, desire
And rhythmic languors stir beneath the day’s full glow.
Stronger than alcohol and vaster than your lyres,
The bitter humours of fermenting passion flow.
—“The Drunken Boat,” tr. Norman Cameron, 1942
Rimbaud’s vivid, dreamlike images and disarrangement of the senses, with everything all piled up to the breaking point, and the poet in the midst of a natural world beyond control, but in which he revels—this is the essence of the art that Dylan came across sometime in 1962 or 1963, and it is indeed the essence of the art of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” part
icularly in the poetry of its joyous final stanza, capturing the dynamism of what Dylan had become:
Then take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.
The words are all Bob Dylan’s, but Rimbaud helped show him how they could be assembled. This is a new form of intertextuality, no longer verbal or reusing specific phrasing, but more aesthetically tuned and almost spiritual. Rimbaud’s way of seeing the world left its imprint on some of Dylan’s best-known and most classic songs of the period, in addition to “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” and above all, I would say, “Chimes of Freedom,” first performed on that same road trip in February 1964, recorded on June 9, 1964, and released on August 8 of the same year on Another Side of Bob Dylan.
In “Chimes of Freedom,” Dylan’s narrator and a friend are caught in a thunderstorm and “duck inside the doorway” of a church. As we’ll see, the location matters and the church bells and lightning bolts are fused with each other as the song unfolds in six verses, each with eight lines that proceed in closely ordered fashion: four lines describing what is going on with the two observers watching the storm, and four lines in which the tolling bells and the lightning come together in a symphony, upheld by the “chimes of freedom flashing.” The writer Paul Wolfe has attacked the song for raising “bewilderment to the highest degree,” but there was nothing quite like it in Dylan’s work to date, and it represented a fundamental artistic shift. I quote just the opening verse. What is most striking is the vast empathy Dylan summons up for a whole array of those for whom the chimes of freedom are tolling: