Why Bob Dylan Matters

by Richard F. Thomas

  Dylan would give us some insight into what he was trying to do in “Lonesome Day Blues” and in other songs on the album in a Rolling Stone interview with Mikal Gilmore three months after its release:

  The whole album deals with power . . . the album deals with power, wealth, knowledge and salvation. . . . It speaks in a noble language. It speaks of the issues or the ideals of an age in some nation, and hopefully, it would also speak across the ages.

  The generalized language of Dylan’s description “a noble language,” “of an age in some nation,” “across the ages,” fits well with the voices and texts that are activated in “Lonesome Day Blues.” These nations and ages include imperial Rome and imperial Japan, but always America, particularly America of the nineteenth century, a time in which many of Dylan’s lyrics, even he himself, have taken up residence. These include the world of Rome, the world in which Virgil saw Augustus, divine descendant of the hero Aeneas, turn republic into empire. Nothing could better suit historical reality than what Dylan sings in “Bye and Bye”:

  I’m gonna establish my rule through civil war

  Gonna make you see just how loyal and true a man can be.

  Again, in another of the songs on the album, “Honest with Me”:

  I’m here to create the new imperial empire

  I’m going to do whatever circumstances require

  The dark places from which these lines come stretch back “across the ages,” to a poet whose status within his own culture has much in common with that of Dylan in our times. Creative genius can emerge in human history at any time and in any place. When that happens, similarities may emerge, accidentally or by design.

  A TALE OF TWO “PLAGIARISTS”: VIRGIL AND DYLAN

  In Chapter 5 we saw Virgil’s intentional borrowing from Homer, with Odysseus’s encounter with his mother woven into the fabric of the Aeneid and its hero’s meeting with the shade of his wife and father. There was no attempt to conceal the theft; yet again, a reader’s noticing the theft and activating the meaning of the stolen lines is part of what makes new meaning. Two thousand years ago critics noticed, as the Roman historian Suetonius (c. 69–122), recorded in his Life of Virgil:

  Asconius Pedianus in a book he wrote “Against the Detractors of Virgil,” sets out a few of the charges against him, dealing with historical detail, and with the accusation that he took many lines from Homer. He reports that Virgil would defend himself against the accusation: “Why don’t they try the same thefts? If they do they’ll find out it’s easier to steal Hercules’ club from him than to steal a line from Homer.”

  Some of them got it, some didn’t. This is what T. S. Eliot meant when he wrote, “Immature poets borrow, mature poets steal.” Mature poets make the old line new, and make it their own, improve on it, or at least match it. Dylan, who would come to steal from Homer in the song “Early Roman Kings,” seemed to be channeling Virgil’s response to his critic in the interview with Mikal Gilmore in 2012 following the release of Tempest:

  And if you think it is so easy to quote him [Henry Timrod] and it can help your song, do it yourself and see how far you can get. It’s an old thing—it’s part of the tradition. It goes way back.

  Dylan is no longer just talking about the folk tradition, about “Barbara Allen” going back to the time of the Renaissance, or songs on Modern Times going back to Henry Timrod and the nineteenth century. Dylan here even seems to be stealing Virgil’s response to his critics; more likely both are giving independent glimpses into how the intertextual process works, in any place or time. In the parallel voices of Virgil (“let them try it”) and Dylan (“see how far they can get”), identical in tone, you hear the confidence of two mature poets, late in their careers, who know what they are doing, have always known what they are doing, and who are confident in the classical status that their genius and their art have achieved.

  WHEN A POPULAR SONG BECOMES A CLASSIC

  Virgil’s works, like Dylan’s song or Seamus Heaney’s poetry, were taught in his own lifetime. That is one sign of genius, a recognition that something unusual is going on, and that the art of today is going to be around for many tomorrows, and is therefore worth introducing into the curriculum. That is historically unusual; it generally takes the passage of a lifetime or more for the curriculum to acknowledge that new art is worth teaching. Like Dylan, Virgil too came from a backwater region in the north, but eventually, also because of his song and his brilliance, found his way to the metropolis. Rome was not so much to his liking but that was where the action was, so that was where he went, at least for a time. He preferred the climate and the culture of Naples or Sicily, as Dylan would prefer that of upstate New York and then California, both away from Rome and New York City, the two capitals of the world two thousand years apart, in which they had earned their fame. Virgil also came from humble origins, perhaps the son of a potter, maybe a beekeeper. He died a wealthy man, worth over the equivalent of $10 million, presumably reward for his poetry, if we believe the ancient biography of Suetonius, written more than a century after the poet’s death. In short, Virgil was a rock star in his time, as popular as any of the hugely popular lyre-singers from back in Homer’s day and beyond. The historian Tacitus (c. 56–120), another favorite of Dylan’s, describes Virgil’s popularity as being

  vouched for by the letters of Augustus, and by the behavior of the citizens themselves; for on hearing a quotation from Virgil in the course of a theatrical performance, they rose to their feet as a man, and did homage to the poet, who happened to be present at the play, just as they would have done to Augustus himself.

  Anyone who has attended a Dylan concert, in their seat until the opening cadences of “Tangled Up in Blue,” can relate. Virgil was also said to be shy, or perhaps fearful of his fortune and fame, fearful even of his fans, as Suetonius reports:

  whenever he appeared in public in Rome, where he very rarely went, he would take refuge in the nearest house, to avoid those who followed and pointed him out.

  Like Dylan, he was also widely “covered,” by singers whose names do not survive: the success of the Eclogues on their first appearance was such that they were frequently performed onstage. These may even have been the first versions many Romans heard, as was true for many songs of Dylan, heard first in the performance of Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, the Byrds, and some even prefer those versions. The YouTube video of British pop singer Adele covering Dylan’s “Make You Feel My Love” on the David Letterman show in 2011 has had around 50 million hits. Only a million of us have seen the bootleg Dylan version of the same song from that show in Rome on November 6, 2013. I know which one I prefer.

  We think of Virgil, or at least those of us who think of him these days, as a classic. But before he became a classic, he was part of popular culture, just as opera was pop before time turned it, or some of it, into something different. Every classic starts out as popular; it is read, viewed, and heard by the people, because its music, words, or images touch something in us, express universals that are profoundly meaningful. Art of any sort will only be read or listened to by future generations if the generation in which it is produced recognizes it first—there are exceptions, the painting of Van Gogh, for example, who was ahead of his time, but people eventually got it in his case. When popular works continue to be meaningful beyond their time, they attain a status that can best be termed “classical.”

  Virgil was read and followed by later poets and educated Romans, who were acquainted with his verses from their early school days. But he was also read by the people in the city of Pompeii; in more than fifty places, his lines were scrawled on walls, a century after his death, preserved by the volcanic ash that buried the city. In AD 73 or 74 a Roman soldier taking part in the siege of the Jewish fortress at Masada wrote a line, preserved on a papyrus scrap, that Virgil’s Carthaginian queen Dido spoke to her sister, “Anna, my sister, what dreams terrify me in my anxiety!” And at the other end of the Roman empire his lines are the only poetry to be foun
d on wooden tablets excavated at Vindolanda, a fort on Hadrian’s Wall in the north of England.

  It is another feature of the classic that it creates tags, brief quotes that lend an air of authority. The user of the tag may at some point become unaware of the source, or at least the specific context of the quote, but tags both have a poetic quality and a message that is timeless, and so can have a life of their own, no longer tied to context. Shakespeare provides numerous examples, “to be or not to be,” “pound of flesh,” “a rose by any other name,” and so on. Or T. S. Eliot’s “Let us go then, you and I,” “Do I dare to eat a peach,” or “April is the cruelest month,” and so on. Virgil generated his own share, most famously “beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” and “Love conquers all.” Dylan has joined this company. I recently emailed a colleague, no fan of Dylan to my knowledge, to tell him I wouldn’t be able to make it to a conference, given the deadline for this book. His response, “Don’t think twice, it’s all right,” showed that the Dylan tag had entered his consciousness, and emerged as a version of “that’s okay.” “The times they are a-changin’ ” and “the answer is blowin’ in the wind,” “only a pawn in their game,” have similar status.

  “WHAT IS A CLASSIC?”

  It is no coincidence that Sir Christopher Ricks, the distinguished and prolific literary critic and editor of English literature, has produced the fullest editions, with variant readings duly recorded, of both T. S. Eliot (2015) and Bob Dylan (2014). In each case, it is possible to see from these editions slight and less slight changes in poems or songs that came about by changes of mind by the artist or by performance variation. The classic text is something that sticks around, that outlasts its moment. That is why, separate from Ricks’s 961-page songbook, there have been three official editions of Bob Dylan lyrics, most recently in 2016: Bob Dylan: The Lyrics: 1961–2012, partly edited by the songwriter himself. If Dylan follows up Tempest with a new original album, posterity will need a fourth edition. Ricks works largely on the greatest English literature of the last five centuries, the seventeenth to the twenty-first. I work mostly on the five centuries from the third BC to the second AD, which gave us the best of Roman literature, works without which Dante, Milton, and Eliot would have written something, but something other than what they gave us. That Ricks and I come together on the art of Bob Dylan is no coincidence.

  “What Is a Classic?” is an essay by T. S. Eliot, given as a lecture in London to the Virgil Society in 1944. Four years later, Eliot would himself be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Eliot wrote this essay at a time of considerable crisis, a time when the end of the war in Europe seemed assured, but also a time at which it was not clear what the new Europe would look like, not unlike the present:

  We need to remind ourselves that, as Europe is a whole (and still, in its progressive mutilation and disfigurement, the organism out of which any world harmony must develop), so European literature is a whole, the several members of which cannot flourish, if the same blood-stream does not circulate throughout the whole body. The blood-stream of European literature is Latin and Greek—not as two systems of circulation, but one, for it is through Rome that our parentage in Greece must be traced.

  Metaphors of European bloodstreams may seem odd, even vaguely disturbing, in the light of the anti-Semitism of some of Eliot’s early poetry, but in thinking about Eliot it is important not to jettison the valuable with the odd. Eliot is also a poet who worked as Dylan would come to work, in his visions and revisions, in his being aware of writing in certain traditions. His thoughts on becoming a classic are therefore of some value. Almost everything in Dylan’s early song can in some way be traced to the tradition of folk song and the blues. These are old traditions, and though they have been considered to be lower in register because of the social context of their performance, the greater simplicity of their melodies, or for any number of other reasons, with time they acquire a status that gives them a permanence, or “maturity” as Eliot put it.

  A LIFETIME OF LABOR

  I WROTE “BLOWIN’ IN THE WIND” IN 10 MINUTES, JUST PUT THE WORDS TO AN OLD SPIRITUAL.

  —BOB DYLAN, 2004

  THAT IS ALL WE DID IN THOSE DAYS. WRITING IN THE BACK SEAT OF CARS AND WRITING SONGS ON STREET CORNERS OR ON PORCH SWINGS, SEEKING OUT THE EXPLOSIVE AREAS OF LIFE.

  —BOB DYLAN, 1977

  Early readers of Virgil were just as interested in how their poet put together his work as we are with Dylan or Eliot. So it is that details about the Roman poet’s methods were preserved across 150 years and made it into the same Life of Virgil:

  When he was writing the Georgics it is said to have been his custom to dictate each day a large number of verses which he had composed in the morning, and then to spend the rest of the day in reducing them to a very small number, wittily remarking that he fashioned his poem after the manner of a she-bear, and gradually licked it into shape. In the case of the Aeneid, after writing a first draft in prose and dividing it into twelve books, he proceeded to turn into verse one part after another, taking them up just as he fancied, in no particular order. And so as not to check the flow of his thought, he passed over some things without finishing them and propped up others with very slight words, which he used to joke were put in like struts to support the work until the solid pillars arrive.

  Dylan, in Chronicles: Volume One, which mentions the same Suetonius history of The Twelve Caesars, uses a similar metaphor for Hank Williams’s songwriting (96):

  In time, I became aware that in Hank’s recorded songs were the archetype rules of poetic songwriting. The architectural forms are like marble pillars and they had to be there.

  Was Dylan talking about Hank Williams or about himself—or both? And was he also speaking across the centuries to Virgil, each working with the metaphor of pillars? Over the years we’ve been given occasional glimpses of how Dylan’s writing and rewriting happens. Some of Dylan’s songs may actually have come to him as easily as he would have us believe in interviews, but for the most part, his process has always been as painstaking and thoughtfully creative as that of any poet. There is now striking evidence from the new Bob Dylan Archive indicating common methodologies, shared across the centuries. Genius generally does not manifest itself spontaneously; it also takes hard work. The often-quoted statement from Romantic poet William Wordsworth, to the effect that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” should not be quoted in isolation from what follows: “it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” Great songs and poems may give the impression of being spontaneously and easily produced—that is the mark of a poem or song, that it comes across as perfect and as expressed the only way it could possibly have been expressed. It may be that some stage of the writing of “Blowin’ in the Wind” did take just ten minutes, as he claims. But I have my doubts. As he said, “if you told the un-truth, well, that’s still well and good.”

  In the New Yorker for October 24, 1964, Nat Hentoff recounts how Dylan recorded the entire album Another Side of Bob Dylan in a single session. “I’ve no idea what he’s going to record tonight,” recording producer Tom Wilson told Hentoff. “It’s all to be stuff he’s done in the last couple of months.” As it happened, the recording was done in one session, fourteen songs from 7:05 P.M. till 1:30 A.M. the following day. Eleven would appear on the album, recorded at the rate of around two songs per hour. Hentoff talks about Dylan’s lifestyle at this point:

  He prefers to keep most of his time for himself. He works only occasionally and during the rest of the year he travels or briefly stays in a house owned by his manager, Albert Grossman in Bearsville, New York—a small town adjacent to Woodstock and about a hundred miles north of New York City. There Dylan writes songs, works on poetry, plays, and novels, rides his motorcycle, and talks with his friends. From time to time, Dylan comes to New York to record for Columbia Records.

  There is the tranquility Wordsworth mentions as a necessary ingredient to the production of great poetr
y. And we can assume that for Dylan, as for any poet, there are interruptions and resumptions in the writing of the songs. One of the great ones on this album, “Chimes of Freedom,” is a case in point. In February 1964, Dylan and three others went on a road trip from New York to New Orleans, then on to Denver and Berkeley. One of those on board, Dylan’s tour manager, Victor Maymudes, claims that right from the start of the trip Dylan started writing “Chimes of Freedom,” sitting in the backseat with a portable typewriter on his knee. We know he performed the song in Denver on February 14, a full eight months before the New York recording session. In 2005 a teaser emerged from Dylan’s archive, a page of stationery from the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in Toronto, where Dylan was working on a TV program in late January 1964, before the road trip. The page is covered on both sides by handwritten lyrics of “Chimes of Freedom,” with pen-and-pencil corrections. The song, which Dylan need not have written during the hotel stay itself, has most of its components, with each of the six stanzas set, though each still under construction with much not yet near its final form. The page refutes the claim that Dylan dashed off the poem or started composing it on a typewriter while riding in the back of a station wagon a month after the stay in Toronto. Whatever the truth of the matter, the writing of “Chimes of Freedom” took time and hard work to finalize, in addition to the innate genius of Bob Dylan.

  The process continues in recording sessions, mostly with musical arrangement, but sometimes with lyrics, where Dylan has been known to rewrite during the sessions. Accompanying musicians wait while he jettisons poetry and rewrites lyrics. Now with the release in 2015 of take 1 of “Desolation Row” from The Bootleg Series Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965–1966, we can get a sense of how this must go. Here the lyrics were more or less set before Dylan entered the studio, the product of his private toiling. But one exception comes in verse 7, which turns to Casanova, one of the presumed acquaintances whose faces the singer rearranges and disguises with such literary and fantastic names. The final version is just right: