Why Bob Dylan Matters

by Richard F. Thomas

  They’re spoonfeeding Casanova

  To get him to feel more assured

  Then they’ll kill him with self-confidence

  After poisoning him with words

  But on take 1 things were very different. “Spoonfeeding” had a direct object, and its subject, rather than the ominous “they,” the ones pulling the strings, is “he,” the Phantom of the Opera: “He is spoonfeeding Casanova / Boiled guts of birds / He will kill him with self-confidence.” In take 5 “He is spoonfeeding Casanova / The guts of birds / Then he’ll club him with self-confidence.” Eventually, after how many more takes we don’t know, it gets to the right place. The “boiled guts of birds” are gone and the “spoonfeeding Casanova,” without that direct object, has an ominous power of its own, its subject no longer the Phantom, rather the mysterious “they.” Without the evidence of the earlier takes we would never imagine that it could ever have been otherwise. This is simply one small example and provides a glimpse into the creative rethinking, taste, and judgment that go into poetic perfection, the only thing that matters for the artist, be he Dylan or Virgil.

  THE TULSA ARCHIVE AND “DUSTY SWEATBOX BLUES”

  On March 2, 2016, the New York Times published an article by Ben Sisario, “Bob Dylan’s Secret Archive,” which reported that the George Kaiser Family Foundation had bought six thousand pieces, the entire archive of Bob Dylan—concert recordings, hours and hours of film, the leather jacket he wore at Newport in 1965, the night he went electric. The archive includes notebooks and scraps of paper, hotel stationery with cigarette burns and coffee stains, and of most interest for my purposes, Dylan’s song drafts. It is now held in the Helmerich Center for American Research at the University of Tulsa, where it will remain available to Dylan scholars. The Bob Dylan Center is scheduled to open in 2019 in downtown Tulsa, and will display some materials rotating in and out from the archive. Kaiser went to Harvard and is three years younger than Dylan and Joan Baez. His generosity was partially motivated by what was happening in his college days in Cambridge: “I was taken by Joan Baez in college when she was singing down the block.” The world of Dylan research has been transformed, and the results will show for years to come. Thanks to the generosity of Dylan’s manager of nearly thirty years, music producer Jeff Rosen; Larry Jenkins, who has been coordinating with the archive on Dylan’s behalf; and Michael Chaiken, inaugural curator of the archive, I can here give a glimpse, from images and transcriptions of Dylan’s writing, into the archive and the working mind of Bob Dylan. Fasten your seat belts.

  The Tulsa archive for the first time reveals a process something like that recorded for Virgil—in his case writing or reciting a number of lines in the morning, then going back, deleting, changing, licking into shape. In the archive there is one five-by-three-inch blue spiral notebook of forty-five pages, which once cost nineteen cents, as its cover announces. On its pages Bob Dylan worked in miniature handwriting on drafts of several of the songs of Blood on the Tracks, the classic album of 1975. None of the songs is complete, with some unrecognizably distant from their final perfection, proof that just like Virgil, “he proceeded to turn into verse one part after another, taking them up just as he fancied, in no particular order.” Indeed, there are even lines that would end up in other songs: one line in a draft of “Tangled Up in Blue,” “As I watched you disappear over that lonesome hill,” would end up in the superb outtake “Up to Me,” released on Biograph in 1985, more than ten years after it was written: “Well I watched you slowly disappear down into the officer’s club.” Traces of another draft line from “Tangled Up in Blue,” “When you needed me most I was always off by myself,” even ended up, changed, maybe less honest than the earlier one, on another album, Desire (1976), though addressed to the same woman, in the song “Sara”: “You always responded when I needed your help.”

  Only some song titles are set. On one page “Idiot Wind” has the title “Selfish Child.” And the iconic song of the seventies, sole survivor of that decade in the setlist of Dylan’s 2017 tour, was once to be called “Dusty Sweatbox Blues,” one of the most striking revelations from the Tulsa archive. Music critic and author Neil McCormick describes this song in his own virtuoso sentence:

  The most dazzling lyric ever written, an abstract narrative of relationships told in an amorphous blend of first and third person, rolling past, present and future together, spilling out in tripping cadences and audacious internal rhymes, ripe with sharply turned images and observations and filled with a painfully desperate longing.

  It took genius, imagination, and hard work to get the song to that place. On page 23 of the notebook, we see the close of the first verse from back then. Fortunately, Dylan kept working at it and we did not get to hear this version:

  And I was walking by the side of the road

  Rain falling on my shoes

  Headin’ out to the old east coast

  Lord knows I paid some dues

  Wish I could lose, these dusty sweatbox blues.

  “Tangled Up in Blue,” as the song was renamed, that title also in the notebook, has featured in some 1,600 concerts, while the concert video of the song from the Rolling Thunder Revue tour of 1975–76 has had around 20 million views on YouTube. By now it may be the most recognized song in Dylan’s huge arsenal. It is also a song that went through many changes, from the rejected 1974 New York session (which came out in 1991 on The Bootleg Series Vol 1–3: Rare & Unreleased 1961–1991) to the familiar Minnesota version on Blood on the Tracks. And it has had as many variations in performance as any Dylan song.

  The title was eventually changed, possibly “Blue Carnation,” then “Tangled Up in Blue” as revealed on page 15. At the head of the page before that there is a list of possible words for ending the second-to-last line of each verse, which all end with the song’s title, “tangled up in blue”: “Jew–who–few clue–do–flew–grew–new–rue–sue–too–you–zoo–shoe–glue–view.” Five of these turn up on the song, along with two new ones, “through” and “avenue.”

  The woman of “Tangled Up in Blue,” already in the singer’s past when he is “layin’ in bed / Wond’rin’ if she’d changed at all / If her hair was still red,” is naturally taken to have some basis in Dylan’s wife Sara Dylan, who had worked as a “Bunny” in the Playboy Club in New York before Dylan met her: she “was working in a topless place / when I stopped in for a beer,” as the song puts it. Across a number of pages of the notebook her role shifts and refracts as Dylan seeks to find just how he wants to describe the thinly camouflaged Sara, “so easy to look at, so hard to define,” in the song “Sara,” from Desire. In the notebook, with a tiny difference—“she was dancing in a topless place”—the ambiguity of the studio versions evaporates. At another point the woman seems to be in a play of some sort, maybe based on Milton’s Paradise Lost—but in a secular-looking establishment, with the rhythm of the final version audible in the words of the draft (9):

  Called for you back stage that night but it was to [sic] easy for you to leave

  The 2nd act had just begun where Adam first meets Eve

  I drifted into the audience of cattle dealers and pimps

  Blue smoke rising from the

  I tried to catch a glimpse

  [illegible] (we) (you) I got too overly involved

  Called for you backstage that night

  I think you were in a trance

  The Prince of Darkness blew his lines

  So I thought I’d take a chance

  The woman is also with someone else, a too-young rival nowhere visible in the song that would emerge from the notebooks: “That new boy hanging by your side, you’ll teach him what [illegible, presumably “to do”?] / He must be all of 17, hey darling, shame on you.” This is just a sampling of the different versions of the woman who is in the singer’s past and perhaps, as the last stanza of the song allows, also in his future: “So now I’m going back again / Got to get to her somehow”—“gonna find her (get to her) somehow�
� in the notebook.

  The third verse of the song already on various albums had a number of variants of the jobs the wandering singer has held but couldn’t keep: in the great north woods working as a cook, drifting down to New Orleans, working on a fishing boat outside of Delacroix (also in Louisiana), loading cargo onto a truck, and so on. We can now add: “Used to work up in Oregon, with 20 men in a shack (helped build, logging) / Never did like the hours too much and one day I got the axe.” Another variant is hilarious but would have to go, since it crossed the line into the openly autobiographical:

  So I departed down to LA

  Where I (reckoned) met my cousin Chuck

  Who got me a job in an airplane plant

  Loading cargo onto a truck.

  As Dylan reveals in Chronicles: Volume One, his mother arranged the first accommodations for her eighteen-year-old freshman son when he arrived in Minneapolis in the summer of 1959:

  My mother had given me an address for a fraternity house on University Avenue. My cousin Chucky, whom I just slightly knew, had been the fraternity president . . . my mom said that she’d talked to my aunt about calling Chucky and letting me stay there.

  As he crafted and recrafted these jobs in “Tangled Up in Blue,” Dylan was clearly having fun, his mind roaming around the country, imagining the jobs that he himself never had in real life. As he sings with some self-irony on the 2006 song “Workingman’s Blues #2,” “Some people never worked a day in their life / Don’t know what work even means.” He knows what work means, but not jobs like these.

  Another of the album’s great songs, “Idiot Wind,” in draft has lines wildly different from the versions that came out in 1975 or 1991, with words that are more revealing about the identity of Bob Dylan than he has anywhere let out (22):

  People all have a different idea

  Of who I am but I’m [illegible, probably “sure”] it’s true

  That none of them know what I’m really like

  I don’t know, maybe it’s the same for you.

  “Idiot Wind,” rightly seen as among those songs that most directly confront what was going wrong with the marriage, shows Dylan struggling to catch the precise tone, which it would never finally succeed in doing—the reason for its success as art: “You’re an idiot, babe,” but also “We’re idiots, babe,” sharing the blame for what went wrong. There are four lines in the notebook of which there are no traces in the song:

  I gave you [illegible] and soft summer rain

  But you weren’t contented ’til you saw me in pain

  You took my blood babe, hope it gave ya a thrill

  Now it’s my turn, I’m gonna give up the bill

  Apart from the enigmatic last line, these verses clearly go too far for the mix of anger and regret that make it onto the final versions. Whatever experience lies behind the song—and everyone knows what that is—the maturity of the songwriter jettisoned the lines along with a sentiment that no longer fits. The notebook is invaluable in showing us precisely the process Dylan the songwriter goes through as he struggles to reconcile experience and imagination in the interest of making a song.

  Finally, for more than forty-two years, like countless others I have had in my head this version of the first verse on the album’s song “Meet Me in the Morning”:

  Meet me in the morning, 56th and Wabasha

  Meet me in the morning, 56th and Wabasha

  We could be in Kansas

  By the time the snow begins to thaw

  In those days before Google Maps or any Internet at all, I had no idea where Wabasha might be, not that it really mattered. It in fact turned out to be in Minnesota, where it runs through downtown St. Paul, south across the Mississippi. There is no Fifty-Sixth Street in St. Paul, but Wabasha does intersect with Fifth Street and Sixth Street, a few blocks west of Highway 61 and eight miles east of Dinkytown, the place Bob Dylan spent those sixteen months honing his musical skills before heading to New York City in January 1961. On page 1 of the blue notebook there is a different beginning to the verse, with only the ending surviving the process of rewriting:

  Meet me in the morning [illegible] we could have a ball

  My grandfather had a farm but all he ever raised was the dead

  He had the keys to the kingdom but all he ever opened was his head

  Meet me in the morning, it’s the brightest day you ever saw

  We could be in Kansas by the time the snow begins to thaw

  There are currently hundreds of books on Bob Dylan, the best of them clocking in at six hundred to nine hundred pages. We are only started on the long road that is the phenomenon of Dylanology. As Dylan sang on “Mississippi,” “Stick with me baby, stick with me anyhow / Things could start to get interesting right about now.”

  8

  MODERN TIMES AND THE WORLD’S ANCIENT LIGHT: BECOMING HOMER

  I’VE BEEN CONJURING UP ALL THESE LONG DEAD SOULS FROM THEIR CRUMBLIN’ TOMBS

  —BOB DYLAN, “ROLLIN’ AND TUMBLIN’”

  The release of Bob Dylan’s thirty-second studio album, Modern Times, on August 29, 2006, was attended by a sense of great anticipation from fans who were now reveling in Dylan’s third “classic” period. Twice before in Dylan’s career, peaks had descended to valleys—relatively speaking. John Wesley Harding, released in 1967, was and is a fine album, but it was not what those electrified by Blonde on Blonde from the year before had hoped for. Similarly, Desire, coming on the heels of the 1975 masterpiece Blood on the Tracks, is among Dylan’s best albums, but fails to attain the heights of what had come before. Would Modern Times point back in the direction of Under the Red Sky from 1990, and other materials out of whose ashes—again, relatively speaking—Time Out of Mind and “Love and Theft” had risen? Or would what had been given back to Dylan—and to all of us—since 1997 keep on going? The latter proved to be the case, by near-universal assent. Rolling Stone pronounced the album Dylan’s “third straight masterwork,” and within two weeks Modern Times had topped the charts on the Billboard 200, the first Dylan album to do so in the thirty years that had passed since Desire hit that mark in 1976. Modern Times came out five years after “Love and Theft” and it would be another six before the 2012 masterpiece Tempest.

  This might seem a very different pace than Dylan’s period from 1964 to 1966, when all those songs came tumbling out. But in the early 2000s, Dylan was doing much more than just writing songs. He’d cowritten and starred in the 2003 movie Masked and Anonymous, a demanding, if hugely underrated, piece of work; in 2004 he’d published his bestselling memoir, Chronicles: Volume One; he was performing in concert at twice the rate that he had been in the sixties; he was painting and producing metal sculpture; and he recorded three seasons of his radio show Theme Time Radio Hour from May 2006 to April 2009. In 2008, moreover, he released The Bootleg Series Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs, a trove of unreleased and variant versions of his songs from 1989 to 2006. In hindsight, the passage of time is trivial given the enduring achievement of what these years have produced: Dylan’s music from the late twentieth and twenty-first century is a body of work that is comparable with that of any other period from Dylan’s, or any artist’s, career.

  From the very beginning, the songs of Modern Times seemed rich in narrative texture, old and weary, mystical, musically varied, the songs alternately of a bluesman whose lyrics revealed the passing of time and of a highly poetic troubadour, still on the road after all these years. And these songs too take us back into another age. Even before the album came out, its title had piqued curiosity. Did the modern times suggest a connection with the 1997 masterpiece, Time Out of Mind? That album had reached back into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and beyond, to Robert Burns and the long traditions that went even further back in Burns’s own folk heritage. And how did the 1936 Charlie Chaplin movie Modern Times enter into things? For those who know the movie, Chaplin’s exploration of the desperate plight of the worker in the Great Depression resonates in the opening of one of the alb
um’s songs, “Workingman’s Blues #2”: “The buying power of the proletariat’s gone down / Money’s getting shallow and weak.” Once 2008 rolled around, almost bringing a new Great Depression for the new century, the song’s lines seemed more prophetic than retrospective.

  In the song “When the Deal Goes Down,” one of those great songs last played and as it seems laid to rest in Rome on November 7, 2013, Dylan expresses a sense of fatigue with “this earthly domain, full of disappointment and pain,” and yet there is contentment and a readiness for what lies ahead, a resolution that whatever went wrong, “We learn to live and then we forgive / O’er the road we’re bound to go.” This particular song, like most of those on Modern Times, is overloaded with images, its narrative logic not entirely graspable. But it is a work of great beauty. In the lyrics there is a deep sense of humanity, and of survival. And how does the setting of the opening line, in “the world’s ancient light,” jibe with the modern times of the title? “When the Deal Goes Down” comes close at times to the equally powerful 1997 song “Not Dark Yet.” Where that song gave us “I was born here and I’ll die here against my choice,” this song ends its first verse, “We live and we die, we know not why / But I’ll be with you when the deal goes down.” “Not Dark Yet,” in which the singer seems utterly alone, offered little in the way of hope, beyond the gift of the song itself. “When the Deal Goes Down” seems to have achieved some degree of hope, expressed through proximity to the addressee. The singer is not alone.

  Director Bennett Miller’s video of the song, starring Scarlett Johansson, captures its mood brilliantly, getting to the heart of the nostalgia and longing of Dylan’s words. As the song opens, somewhere in time, “In the still of the night, in the world’s ancient light,” perhaps 1957, the video begins with a jerky, handheld 8mm filming of the central character in summer frock and sunglasses, a girl from the north country of Bob Zimmerman’s youth. The then twenty-one-year-old actress could be a few years younger as someone films her on a boat in New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty caught in the background. She is soon heading back home in a Chevy Bel Air convertible, its Minnesota plates revealing the year 1955. We are moved back in time, out of the world of the present, with its “earthly domain, full of disappointment and pain,” to a time and a world whose passing Dylan has often noted. Dylan has moved back there in his song, for instance. The year could be 1958, the Minnesota girl could be Echo Star Helstrom, Bob Zimmerman’s first steady girlfriend, and who knows, Bob could be the man behind the camera. Or not.