Listen to This

by Alex Ross

  I was reminded of some similarly hazy lines from “Meet Me in the Morning,” circa 1974:

  Look at the sun, sinking like a ship

  Look at the sun, sinking like a ship

  Ain’t that just like my heart, babe

  When you kissed my lips?

  This tangled metaphor—the sun like a ship, the heart like the sun—can spin in any direction. Is the heart glowing like a sunset? Or is it sinking out of sight? And is the ship going over the horizon, or is it just sinking? The less happy implication is that it is in the nature of ships, and of hearts, to sink.

  When others have tried to read Dylan line by line, they have usually chased after outside references. (He mentioned the Bomb! T. S. Eliot! Joan Baez!) Talking about “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” Ricks begins not with the real-life case of William Zantzinger—a wealthy young Maryland farmer who, in 1963, caused the death of a black barmaid and got off with a six-month sentence—but with the rhythm of Zantzinger’s name: a strong beat followed by a weak one. The whole song, he says, is dominated by that loping, tapering rhythm of the name, from which Dylan removed an unsingable “t”:

  William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll

  With a cane that he twirled round his diamond ring finger

  At a Baltimore hotel society gathering.

  It produces a feeling of helplessness, the way each line ends in a weak beat, and this seems to be the point: cry all you want, the gentle suffer. The dominant emotion is not political anger but a quavering sympathy for Hattie Carroll, whose race is never mentioned. This song certainly doesn’t raise hopes for judicial reform, and it has not gone out of date, like the cardboard protest anthems of its era. (In 1991, William Zantzinger was found to have collected rent from tenants who had been living in extreme squalor in houses that he didn’t own. This time, the judge handed out strongly an eighteen-month sentence, in a work-release program.)

  “Now’s the time for your tears,” Dylan sings at the end. Ricks said to me, “He doesn’t underscore it—say, ‘Now is the time.’ He doesn’t exhort you. Maybe you should have cried before, when Hattie died.” (Paul Williams thinks that the refrain for the preceding verses, “Now ain’t the time for your tears,” is actually sarcastic, and that Dylan is addressing “cause-chasing liberals who concern themselves with the issues and have no real empathy for people.” Another axial moment.) Ricks went on to criticize some of Dylan’s more recent performances of “Hattie Carroll”: “He doesn’t let it speak for itself. He sentimentalizes it, I’m afraid.” Here I began to wonder whether the close reader had zoomed in too close. Ricks was fetishizing the details of a recording, denying the musician license to expand his songs in performance. I had just seen Dylan sing “Hattie Carroll,” in Portland, and it was the best performance that I heard him give. He turned the accompaniment into a steady, sad waltz, and he played a lullaby-like solo at the center. You were reminded that the “hotel society gathering” was a Spinsters’ Ball, whose dance went on before, during, and after the fatal attack on Hattie Carroll. This was an eerie twist on the meaning of the song, and not a sentimental one.

  Ricks’s readings are wonderfully perceptive, but they are, in the end, readings: they treat Dylan as a textual rather than musical phenomenon. They also tend to grant him an infallibility that runs counter to his shambolic creative process. Dylan himself declines the highbrow treatment— though you get the sense that he wouldn’t mind picking up that Nobel Prize. Even in the sixties, he said of those who called him a poet, “Genius is a terrible word, a word they think will make me like them.” He seems to prefer an audience of teenage Deadheads in a basketball arena. He may occasionally surprise the kids with moody masterworks, like “Hattie Carroll,” “Visions of Johanna,” and “Not Dark Yet,” or he may teach them a Stanley Brothers bluegrass hymn, but more often he gets them to jump up and down to “Tangled Up in Blue.” This way, he packs in the crowds, and he also makes sure that he cannot be pinned down. Every night, whether he is in good or bad form, he says, in effect, “Think again.”

  DULUTH, MINNESOTA. Dylan was born here, in 1941, before moving with his family to the iron-ore town of Hibbing. He has never played in Duluth before. The city is moderately excited by his return. He is front-page news for two days running in the Duluth News Tribune. Storefronts downtown are adorned with WELCOME HOME, BOB signs. Duluthans are hoping that he will have something to say to the city: he did, after all, mention Duluth when he accepted the 1998 Grammy for Album of the Year. (wow! DYLAN SAID ‘DULUTH’! ran a local headline.) At the show, a fan tosses onto the stage a paper airplane on which he has written, “Please speak.” It lands upside down. Dylan does not speak. The silence is a bit chilly; a few words would have made the audience ecstatic. Dylan’s defense for this kind of criticism is that public speeches are a no-win situation. If he speaks a few words, people say he hasn’t said enough. If he speaks at length, people think he’s lost his mind. In the end, Minnesotans don’t seem too miffed by the episode. I ask one local resident the following day whether he feels let down. “A little,” he replies. “But in the paper it said he smiled a lot.”

  Discussion of Dylan often boils down to that: “Please speak. Tell us what it means.” But does he need to? He had already given something away, during the ritual acoustic performance of “Tangled Up in Blue.” This dense little tale, which may be about two couples, one couple, or one couple plus an interloper, seems autobiographical: it’s easy to guess what Dylan might be thinking about when he sings, “When it all came crashing down, I became withdrawn / The only thing I knew how to do was keep on keeping on / Like a bird that flew …” See any number of ridiculous spectacles in Dylan’s life. But the lines that he shouted out with extra emphasis came at the end:

  Me, I’m still on the road, heading for another joint

  We always did feel the same, we just saw it from a different point

  Of view

  Tangled up in blue.

  Suddenly, the romance in question seemed to be the long, stormy one between Dylan and his audience. Dylan is over there and the rest of us are over here, and we’re all seeing things from different points of view. And what is it that we’re looking at? Perhaps the thing that comes between him and us—the music.

  Night after night on this tour, “Tangled Up in Blue” brought the audience to life. The words had their bonding effect, but it was really the music that established a particular kind of intimacy between the singer and the crowd. Dylan’s arrangement was itself an array of different musical points of view. The published version of the song is driven by sweetly chiming major chords, but in this version the singer kept slipping into a different scale—into the blues. Dismantling and rebuilding his own song, he bent notes down, inverted the melody, spread out the pitches of the chords, leaned on a single note while the chords changed around it, stressed the offbeats, laid triple rhythms on duple ones. As the rest of the band held on to straitlaced diatonic harmony and a one-two beat, the song tensed up: opposing scales met in bittersweet clashes, opposing pulses overlapped in a danceable bounce. The radio staple became a new animal.

  As I went through my Dylan records and tapes, I realized that in many cases I was only half listening to the lyrics—that the music was giving the words their poetic aura. Often, Dylan’s strongest verbal images occur toward the beginning of a song, and it falls to his musical sense to make something of the rest. In “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” the eleven-minute ballad that closes Blonde on Blonde, Dylan fashions majestic metaphors to capture the object of his affection—“your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes”—and then, in the second-to-last verse, he clouds over: “They wished you’d accepted the blame for the farm.” What farm? What happened to it? Why would she be to blame for it? “Phony false alarm” is the rhyme in the next line, and it doesn’t clear things up. The refrain makes another appearance—“My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums / Should I leave them by your gate, / Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?”—and b
y this time you ought to be losing patience with it. What are “warehouse eyes,” and how can one leave them? Dylanologists beat their heads against such questions. But the music makes you forget them. The melody of the refrain—a rising and descending arc, made up of consecutive notes of the D-major scale—is grand to begin with, but in the fifth verse Dylan makes it grander. As the band keeps playing the scale, he skates back up to the top D with each syllable. He sings on one note as the rest of the harmony moves around him: it’s as if he’s surveying the music from a summit. This is a trick as old as music. In Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, the soprano catches our hearts in the same way when she sings, “Remember me, remember me.”

  Like Hank Williams before him—or Schubert or Verdi, for that matter—Dylan sharpens the meaning of the lyrics in the mechanics of the music. Take “Mama, You Been on My Mind,” which was long associated with Joan Baez and subsequently appeared in Dylan’s own voice on the boxed set The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1—3. The song begins with a crabbed, cluttered image:

  Perhaps it’s the color of the sun cut flat

  And covering the crossroads I’m standing at …

  The harmony under these words moves from an E-major chord to a G-sharp seventh and on to C-sharp minor and an F-sharp seventh. It’s an awkward series of changes, matching the baroque images on the page. Our eyes and ears go “Huh?” Then the singer seems to shrug off, with a self-deprecating grin, the attempt to poeticize his emotion—

  Or maybe it’s the weather or something like that

  But Mama, you been on my mind

  —and the harmony gets easier, too, going gently from E major to C-sharp minor and back to E. The meaning changes as the chords change.

  Dozens of Dylan songs work in the same way. The disquieting gospel number “In the Garden” shows the agony of Jesus in Gethsemane by wandering through ten different chords, each one like a betrayal. “Idiot Wind,” the centerpiece of Blood on the Tracks, channels its universal rage—“Someone’s got it in for me, they’re planting stories in the press”—into a single harmonic convulsion: each verse of the G-major song begins with grinding C minor, which is like a slap to the ear. More often, the chords are mysteriously simple. In “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” there are just four of them, but they are strung along in an unresolved, drooping sequence—a picture of the “long black cloud” that comes down on Billy the Kid.

  This is not to say that the music is everything. Dylan does have a fearsome command of the English language. The neat click of the rhymes keeps you interested across all leaps of sense and changes of scene. John Lennon, not long before he died, satirized Dylan as a cynic who rhymed out of a lexicon, but I don’t know of a dictionary that would have generated this couplet:

  What can I say about Claudette?

  Ain’t seen her since January,

  She could be respectably married or running

  a whorehouse in Buenos Aires.

  Dylan also has a knack for tricky enjambments—lines that seem complete in themselves but are subverted by what follows. These are effects for the ear, not for the eye, and Dylan sells them in performance. There’s a tape of him singing “Simple Twist of Fate” in San Francisco in 1980, in which the meaning twirls almost word by word. It’s a thoroughly rewritten version of the Blood on the Tracks song, and the last verse starts this way:

  People tell me it’s a crime

  To remember her for too long a time

  She should have caught me in my prime

  She would have stayed with me

  Instead of going back off to sea

  And leaving me

  Dylan slows down, and we may think that the story is at an end. But it’s not.

  To med-i-tate …

  A grin now steals into the voice, which had been appropriately elegiac before. Dylan’s stress on “meditate” tells us that the title refrain is coming around for its final rhyme, but we can’t quite guess how he’ll make the leap. His voice fills with pride—pride is one of the great emotions that he can convey—and the tempo picks up again: “Upon! A! Simple! Twist! Of! Fate!”

  Behind the wordplay are some deep musical resonances. The softly twanging bass line in “Simple Twist of Fate” takes the form of a basso lamento—the same kind of downward chromatic pattern that anchors Dido’s Lament. Admittedly, Dylan’s tale of abandoned love doesn’t have quite the same tragic weight as Purcell’s. A man has a brief affair with a woman, and when she walks away he finds himself haunted by her, much as he tries to forget her. The music unfolds at a relaxed tempo, in a major key. Yet the lamento figure casts a creeping shadow, as it does in the opening bars of Schubert’s String Quartet in G. And, as in the mighty Purcell aria, the words keep stressing the inscrutable fate that drives human affairs:

  A saxophone someplace far off played

  As she was walking on by the arcade

  As the light burst through a beat-up shade

  Where he was waking up

  She dropped a coin into the cup

  Of a blind man at the gate

  And forgot about a simple twist of fate.

  A fascinating gender reversal has taken place across the centuries. In Purcell, it is the man who is called away, leaving Dido bereft: “Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.” In Dylan’s smaller-scale tragedy, the woman is the one who hits the road, and the man is left to contemplate the twisting and turning of fate.

  Whether or not Dylan looked as far back as 1689—with him, you never know—the peculiar solidity of his lyrics comes in their easy give-and-take with older songs. He has said that the traditions of folk, blues, spirituals, and popular ballads are his real religion, and his habit of crossing genres may explain his habit of crossing religions. “I believe in Hank Williams singing ‘I Saw the Light,’” he told the critic Jon Pareles. Dylan has a viselike memory for lyrics of all sorts, and his favorite method as a songwriter is to take one line from an extant song and add one or a dozen lines of his own. “As I went out one morning,” an old lyric says. “To breathe the air around Tom Paine’s,” Dylan adds. Time Out of Mind was a thrilling return to form because he picked up with a vengeance that magpie mode of composition. Old song: “She wrote me a letter and she wrote it so kind, / And in this letter these words you could find.” Dylan rewrites the second line: “She put down in writing what was in her mind.” Old song: “This train don’t pull no gamblers, / Neither don’t pull no midnight ramblers.” Dylan says, “Some trains don’t pull no gamblers, / No midnight ramblers, like they did before.”

  Everything on Time Out of Mind goes under one dreamy, archaic mood. The album manages to skip the twentieth century: trains discourage gambling, people ride in buggies, there’s no air-conditioning (“It’s too hot to sleep”), church bells ring, “gay” means “happy,” the time of day is measured by the sun, lamps apparently run on gas (and are turned “down low”), and, most of the time, the singer is walking. He is almost ready to stray into the rustic wasteland of Schubert’s Winterreise, which opens with the Dylanesque lines “I came here as a stranger / A stranger I depart.” The wistfulness is intense: the singer is in love with a musical past that is gone forever. You picture him leaning late over his favorite records and song-books, listening, writing, reading, writing. These are songs about the loneliness of listening: you could add to them “Blind Willie McTell,” which was recorded in 1983 and appeared in the Bootleg boxed set as a kind of fanfare to Time Out of Mind. “I’m gazing out the window of the St. James Hotel,” he sang. “And I know no one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.”

  The melancholy could become crushing, but Dylan doesn’t let it. The best songs on Time Out of Mind are inexplicably funny: there’s a wicked glee in the performance as Dylan manipulates the tatters of his voice, the scatteredness of his inspiration, the paralysis that might arise from his obsession with history, the prevailing image of himself as a mumbling curmudgeon. And in one song—“Not Dark Yet”—all the flourishes of his songwriting come together: slow, stately
chords, swinging like a pendulum between major and minor; creative tweakings of the past (“There’s room enough in the heavens” becomes “There’s not even room enough to be anywhere”); prickly aphorisms (“I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from”; “Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain”); and glints of biblical revelation, not to mention what one Internet expert has identified as a quotation from the Talmud (“I was born here and I’ll die here against my will”). If he can’t sing some low notes, he gestures toward them with a slide, so that you feel them. And, as he did in “Sad-Eyed Lady,” Dylan finds a way to augment the refrain. The line “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there” keeps creeping up, note by note, in the singer’s now limited range. Like Skip James, the cracked genius among Delta blues singers, Dylan gives a circular form a dire sense of direction.

  The sense of arrival in “Not Dark Yet” is enormous. Once again, as Christopher Ricks would point out, words turn on their axis and encompass their opposite. The song ends, “I don’t even hear a murmur of a prayer / It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.” This couldn’t be bleaker, could it? Bob Dylan stares into the face of death and decay. But as he sings “murmur of a prayer,” he lifts the tune yet another step and does a graceful little turn at the top, creating an altogether new melody. And he slips in a triplet—a slight dancing rhythm that someone else picks up on guitar. As the song winds down, it’s not the darkness that lingers but the freshly swaying motion in the music, and that theoretical possibility of a “murmur of a prayer.” The man who worships Hank Williams is looking back at “I Saw the Light,” a would-be uplifting gospel number that was really filled with terror. “I saw the light, I saw the light, / No more darkness, no more night,” Hank insisted, in a melody that fell, and you didn’t believe him. Bob declares, with a gallant upward turn, “I don’t even hear a murmur of a prayer.” You don’t believe him, either.