Why Bob Dylan Matters

by Richard F. Thomas

  Part of the performance has to do with meeting people for the first time in a crowded bar or some burger place before the show, sharing stories, knowing you’re going to add a chapter. For that evening, the rest of your life’s activities, day jobs, worries about family, pretty much everything else, recedes and is replaced by a leveling, shared anticipation of how Bob and the band will be, what he will sing, even these days when you know, within a song or two, just what he’ll be singing. The performance spills over into these moments, as precious as the shows, because they are part of the shows. This must be what it was like getting ready for the visit of the itinerant lyre players of ancient Greece, who would travel all around the Mediterranean playing to crowds, or talking with friends in ancient Athens in between the plays of a Greek tragic trilogy, say Aeschylus’s Oresteia, where participating in a play by Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides and shared Athenian citizenship were the same thing.

  I felt a version of this after the Clearwater show. As I walked out into the warm November night, most people seemed to be smiling, glowing with warmth at what was an utterly perfect performance from start to finish. You know they’ll be back. But for others that may have been the last waltz. I overheard three groups as I was leaving. One man, in his late thirties, far from sharing in the glow, was pretty angry: “No fucking country rock!” he exclaimed to the woman he was with. “He was like fucking Lawrence Welk! I slept in my car to do this. Prick!” Noticing my interest, she asked him to moderate his language. I wondered how she had liked the concert. Two women, also in their thirties or so, were more neutral: “Some of the words you could understand fine. If he wanted to, he could sing so you could understand everything.” Her friend agreed. I thought Dylan’s voice was magnificent, but if you didn’t know a song like “High Water (For Charley Patton)” the lyrics might have been tough to pick up. Then there were two college kids, a little more knowledgeable it seemed, one of them complaining, “The only classic he’s done in recent setlists is ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ and he didn’t even do that!” I couldn’t resist intruding at this point, noting that he had in fact done the song, as the first of the two closers tonight as for some time. He didn’t believe me, and I moved on, not wanting to press the point.

  In all of these cases there was something at stake, something to do with memory, song, and shared human emotions and the joy, sorrow, or pain that is involved in listening to Bob Dylan. A long-dead grandfather; lost lover; wife, or husband, a friend who never made it through—a casualty perhaps of Vietnam, heroin, AIDS, Iraq, Afghanistan. Or to put it more simply, music and song are an essential part of being human, and particularly of being in the company of other humans. The music of our youth in particular stays with us. When it changes too much in performance, the singer may be doing things to those memories.

  “He’s just changed altogether,” says the young English fan in Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home. “He’s changed from what he was, he’s not the same as what he was at first.” “I didn’t even recognize him,” laments his friend. “Bob Dylan was a bastard in the second half,” says another, referring to the electric backing of the Hawks from the tour of 1966, when Dylan did his famous half-acoustic, half-electric concerts. They should have known. He had already told them in March 1965, when Bringing It All Back Home came out, with the electric version of “Maggie’s Farm”:

  Well, I try my best

  To be just who I am

  But everybody wants you

  To be just like them.

  Why has this been going on for more than fifty years? And why do people keep coming back? Because Dylan has become a classic, in fact always was, and that matters in the lives of the millions he has touched, even if he’s moved on down the road from where they met him. That can disappoint those in search of where he was and they were on whatever occasion he mattered. And how does Dylan feel about that? “I used to care but things have changed,” he sings. I say he cares, but that above all he cares, and always has cared, about his art and a vision that is the gift of genius. On to Stockholm!

  CONCLUSION: SPEECHLESS IN STOCKHOLM

  On October 1, 2008, the British paper the Guardian ran a headline above a photo of Philip Roth, NO NOBEL PRIZES FOR AMERICAN WRITERS: THEY’RE TOO PAROCHIAL. The source was Horace Engdahl, then permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy and one of the eighteen members whose job it is to select the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. “The U.S. is too isolated, too insular,” said Engdahl. Himself fluent in six languages, he went on, “They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the great dialogue of literature.” The response from writers in the United States had been as harsh as the statement, perhaps because Engdahl’s words seemed to be an advance notice that there would be no American winner in 2008. David Remnick of the New Yorker told the Associated Press, “You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures.”

  Sure enough, that year and for the next seven years, the drought stretching back to 1993, when Toni Morrison won the award, would continue, with a rich variety of non-American winners: French-Breton, Romanian-German, Spanish, Swedish, Chinese, Canadian, Ukrainian-Belarusian.

  But by October 13, 2016, things had changed. Sara Danius, who had taken over as permanent secretary of the Nobel Committee, delivered the news to the applause and acclamation of the scores of journalists present for the occasion, in an elegant building that in an earlier age housed the Stockholm Stock Exchange. The text Danius read in Swedish, English, French, and German was as simple as it was meaningful and momentous: “The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2016 is awarded to Bob Dylan for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”

  This moment was actually twenty years in the making. In 1996, two Dylan fans in Norway, journalist Reidar Indrebø and attorney Gunnar Lunde, contacted the office of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, hoping for support for the nomination of Bob Dylan. Nobel nominations are only accepted from members of the Swedish Academy itself or of other similar academies, from professors of literature and language, from past Nobel laureates, or from presidents of literary societies around the world. Ginsberg met none of these criteria, but he had decided to anoint Dylan as his successor, one poet thus recognizing the artistic genius of another who would replace and eclipse him. Ginsberg’s office put the wheels in motion by contacting a professor at the Virginia Military Institute named Gordon Ball, who was the author of three books on Ginsberg, and who had been a fan of Bob Dylan since first seeing him perform at the historic Newport Folk Festival in 1965. As a result of this chain of communication, beginning in 1996, and then again every year afterward, Ball had been nominating Bob Dylan for the Nobel. Two decades later, in 2016, the message had finally gotten through. As one commenter put it, “Looks like the Nobel Committee has gone electric.”

  The reaction to the announcement from the literary community was swift and uncompromising, and a mix of celebration and detraction. Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, and Salman Rushdie immediately hailed the choice. Rushdie, who may well have been a candidate himself, was unstinting, quoted in the New York Times as saying that “from Orpheus to Faiz, song and poetry have been closely linked,” and calling Dylan “the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition,” with a further punctuation, “Great choice.” King declared himself “ecstatic” and called the choice “a great and good thing in a season of sleaze and sadness”—this in the difficult and tawdry weeks leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Andrew Motion, poet laureate of the United Kingdom, considered the award “a wonderful acknowledgement of Dylan’s genius: for 50 and some years he has bent, coaxed, teased and persuaded words into lyric and narrative shapes that are at once extraordinary and inevitable.”

  Those who objected were in the minority, their objections often definitional: Dylan might be a good singer-songwriter, but wi
thout music his words could not stand on their own, and thus were not poetry or literature. So, for instance, Irish literary critic Edna Longley called the award “a ridiculous decision, and an insult to real poets.” But by the time of the ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, 2016, naysayers in the media and blogosphere had largely been silenced. In the words that Engdahl read at the ceremony, the awarding of the Nobel Prize “was a decision that seemed daring only beforehand and already seems obvious.”

  The Nobel Prize ceremony, also triadic, a play in three parts, took place on December 10, 2016, and the formal address that evening was delivered by the same Horace Engdahl who had called American writers parochial eight years earlier. The speech sounded very much like the work of a committee, with various threads that somehow all came together, in many ways reflecting the complexity of the phenomenon that is Bob Dylan. The address began with the opening question: “What brings about the great shifts in the world of literature?” The answer got to the heart of the matter: “Often it is when someone seizes upon a simple, overlooked form, discounted as art in the higher sense, and makes it mutate.” The committee had also closely engaged with the question of whether song can be literature. Maybe they even debated or disagreed over the issues, which has long seemed irrelevant to many, as the address went on to note:

  In itself, it ought not to be a sensation that a singer/songwriter now stands recipient of the literary Nobel Prize. In a distant past, all poetry was sung or tunefully recited, poets were rhapsodes, bards, troubadours; “lyrics” comes from “lyre.”

  Throughout Engdahl’s address, we are inevitably hearing the voices of various members of the academy, as well as of Gordon Ball from his annual nominations, and of Dylanologists whose writings had been brought to the attention of those voting.

  Engdahl went on to talk of the many qualities that had persuaded the committee: the creativity that begins with imitation, the dazzling rhymes “scarcely containable by the human brain,” Dylan’s love songs, his eclipse of those in whose tradition he sang—Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, Blake, Rimbaud, Whitman, Shakespeare, his bringing back of a poetic language “lost since the Romantics.” For the Nobel Committee, Bob Dylan mattered because of his creation of an art that compelled them to see it as literature of the highest order:

  By means of his oeuvre, Bob Dylan has changed our idea of what poetry can be and how it can work. He is a singer worthy of a place beside the Greeks’ aoidoi [“poet-singers”], beside Ovid, beside the Romantic visionaries, beside the kings and queens of the Blues, beside the forgotten masters of brilliant standards.

  PATTI SMITH COVERS “A HARD RAIN’S A-GONNA FALL”

  Next came the second act, starring Patti Smith, a sort of channel to Dylan, who had opted not to attend the award ceremony. Bob Dylan’s absence in Stockholm, and the fact that it took him weeks to respond when the prize was first announced, are matters of speculation. My guess is that he just couldn’t see himself in that august room; it wasn’t his thing. So Patti Smith singing Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” was as close as we were going to get that night. Anyone who saw that performance was a live witness to why Dylan matters. The modern significance of his work was seemingly encapsulated by this one song, written more than half a century earlier in Greenwich Village by a twenty-one-year-old. The song’s line “Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter” may well have come from the reality of Dylan’s life in the Village in those days, as he sang in cafés for hamburgers and spare change and slept on couches. Dylan wrote “A Hard Rain” in the summer of 1962 and first performed it on September 22, in the weeks before the Cuban missile crisis of October 16–28, the closest the world came to all-out nuclear war. When the song was released on May 27, 1963, on Dylan’s first original album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, it was naturally assumed that the “hard rain” was the rain of nuclear bombs that had threatened a few months before. Indeed, by then there was no reason not to connect it to such events—though ultimately the language of the song, and the absence of defining and limiting topical, geographical, or chronological elements, make it a song for any time. Dylan has said of this and by extension of all song, “it doesn’t really matter where a song comes from. It just matters where it takes you.”

  Each verse of Dylan’s song begins with a variant of a line from a seventeenth-century Anglo-Scottish ballad called “Lord Randall.” In the original ballad, the singer addresses a character named Lord Randall: “Oh where ha you been, Lord Randall, my son, / And where ha you been, my handsome young man.” But in Dylan’s song he substitutes “my blued-eyed son” for “Lord Randall,” thus allowing the song to be addressed to the strikingly blue-eyed Bob Dylan himself.

  If we interpret the lyrics as a sort of call-and-response between Dylan the singer and Dylan the addressee, the song transforms from a narrative ballad to a cry of warning that Dylan has to offer to a world gone wrong:

  And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it

  And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it

  Each of the scenes the blue-eyed boy encounters in the final verse is as vivid now as it was back in the 1960s:

  Where the people are many and their hands are all empty

  Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters

  Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison

  Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden

  Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten

  Where black is the color, where none is the number

  In a piece she wrote for the New Yorker in December 2016, Patti Smith recalls how she came to sing “A Hard Rain” at the ceremony. She had first heard it in 1963, the year the album came out, when she was sixteen. According to Smith, her mother, a waitress, had bought the album for her secondhand, using her tip money. Smith described it as “a song I have loved since I was a teenager, and favorite of my late husband”—guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith.

  “I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’,” Smith sang, halfway through the second verse. At that moment, the camera focused on presenter of the Nobel Prize in Physics, Thors Hans Hansson, a distinguished gray-haired, bearded gentleman. His formal white tie and tails might have led one to think he would disapprove of a Bob Dylan song being performed at the Nobel ceremony, following the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra’s rendition of Jean Sibelius’s Serenade, from the King Christian II Suite. But then Hansson’s lips started moving as he sang to himself, “blood that kept drippin’.” Clearly the theoretical physicist was at that moment just another Dylan fan. And if one expected to see doubt or disapproval on the faces of others in attendance, either at the novelty of the award or at the failure of Dylan to come to their ceremony, the truth was far from it, as Dylanologist David Gaines reported:

  The Swedish Minister of Culture, a striking woman in a red dress, cried throughout the song. When Smith closed, the royals and the other 1,250 people looked toward her and applauded. My Swedish friends with whom I watched the broadcast (it is the most widely watched program in Sweden every year) told me, “We have never seen such applause before.”

  At this point the camera moved back toward the stage as Smith stumbled over the lyrics, halfway through the second verse of a song that she had been singing with such power. She struggled to find her place, eventually giving up and turning to the orchestra: “Sorry. I’m sorry. Could we start that section again?” She looked out at the audience: “I apologize. Sorry. I’m so nervous.” In response, the hall seemed to echo with applause, restoring her confidence. She picked up where she had left off and finished the song beautifully, from the crowd’s perspective. As Smith wrote of the experience in the New Yorker:

  From the corner of my eye, I could see the huge boom stand of the television camera, and all the dignitaries upon the stage and the people beyond. Unaccustomed to such an overwhelming case of nerves, I was unable to continue. I hadn’t forgotten the words that were now a part of me. I
was simply unable to draw them out.

  “Patti Smith botches Nobel tribute to absent Bob Dylan,” proclaimed the New York Post on December 11, a putdown of both artists. The Post missed the point. In that lapse you see the frailty and humanity of the singer, as she goes on to complete the song, but you also see her resilience. Through Smith’s performance, we witnessed the lyrics of “A Hard Rain” come to life, showing us what it means to fall, as we’ve all fallen, and to get up and struggle on. Smith was performing for an audience that included the king of Sweden and other royals, as well as scientists and academics and members of the Swedish Academy and high society. The roomful of men in white tie and tails and women in evening gowns lent a strict formality to the occasion, with differences and individuality concealed behind evening dress. Those six words—“I apologize. Sorry. I’m so nervous”—were so honest and vulnerable that they shifted the tone and canceled out any differences in the room, between physics and folk song, chemistry and rock, medicine and popular culture.

  In the early sixties, years that had students hiding under their desks in nuclear war drills, the song’s lyrics had taken listeners to the threat of Cold War missile attacks. On the night of Smith’s performance, fifty-five years after the song was written, its lyrics conjure up new associations: people “whose hands are all empty” remind us of an inequality throughout the world that seems endless; “pellets of poison” might evoke the poison of electoral politics in 2016, or the environmental consequences; “damp dirty prison” might suggest mass incarceration in the United States or Kalief Browder, the black teenager held for three years without trial and in solitary confinement at New York’s Rikers Island, dead by his own hand at twenty-two. As for the “always well-hidden” executioner’s face, it’s not now the hooded executioner, but maybe a uniformed figure in a dimly lit room, deploying a drone far from its target—like playing a video game. What other song from 1962 still works the way “Hard Rain” does?