Bob Dylan in America

by Sean Wilentz

  Lost John sittin’ on a railroad track

  Something’s out of whack

  Blues this morning falling down like hail

  Gonna leave a greasy trail.

  There are no doubts about Dylan’s borrowing here. The first line is from “Long Gone Lost John,” an old song recorded in 1928 by the great, undervalued, risqué medicine show bluesman and banjo player Papa Charlie Jackson, then turned into one of the hits of the 1950s British skiffle craze by the craze’s biggest star, Lonnie Donegan. (Later still, the skiffle player turned rock and roller John Lennon recorded the song, as did Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, as a tribute after Lennon’s murder.) Dylan’s third line, more familiar to American listeners, comes direct from Robert Johnson’s blues masterpiece “Hell Hound on My Trail,” with the inserted words “this morning” echoing the title of one of the classic blues studies from the early 1960s, Paul Oliver’s Blues Fell This Morning.

  Pat Brady (third from left) and Bob Nolan (far right) with Roy Rogers (center) and the Sons of the Pioneers on the set of Home in Oklahoma, 1946. (photo credit 11.5)

  The quotations sound random, but Dylan reconstructs them in a clever and amusing way. Both of the two lifted lines last for two measures, in each case followed by a one-measure pause when only the bass drum beats (just as in the introduction), followed by two measures of what seem to be non sequiturs. At first, it sounds as if Dylan means to sing an old folk song but can’t get beyond the opening line: something’s out of whack. But then Dylan appears to be playing a parlor game (or maybe a dressing room game): give him a bit of old lyric, he’ll think for a second—the pause—and then, boom, he comes up with a rhyming line of his own. “Track” and “out of whack”—why not? And why not take Robert Johnson’s own rhyme from “Hell Hound”—“hail” and “trail”—but make the trail into something that’s left behind and greasy.

  The pattern reappears throughout the song: Dylan supplies either direct quotations from or allusions to numerous blues and country recordings—including no fewer than three snippets from two more Papa Charlie Jackson songs, “Bad Luck Woman Blues” and “Look Out Papa Don’t Tear Your Pants,” but also including the standards “Frankie and Albert,” “Moonshiner,” W. C. Handy’s “Yellow Dog Blues,” and Hank Williams’s “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive”—and finishes them off according to the rules of what seems to be his little game.* (Hence: “Albert’s in the graveyard, Frankie’s raisin’ hell/[pause/boom]/I’m beginning to believe what the scriptures tell.”) Far from plagiarizing, Dylan is in this instance drawing attention to his self-conscious borrowing, and seems to be having fun with it. With his backbeat and his pauses, he is also having fun playing around with rhythm. But the song’s refrain about love lost and the world going black—sung with Donnie Herron playing fiddle on a heart-catching tune that, if not reworked from Stephen Foster or one of the other minstrel songwriters from the 1850s, might as well be—keeps “Nettie Moore” from becoming anything like a jest. In an interview that accompanied the release of Modern Times, Dylan said he took special pains with “Nettie Moore” to make sure that the song was not simply a free association of verses. And after one listens to the song several times, “out of whack,” “Frankie and Albert,” and the refrain all do fit together—possibly as a modern form of classic American balladry.

  Dylan’s game turns out to have layers that are far from haphazard, let alone nonsensical. When he sings of the world of research going berserk with “too much paperwork,” he could be talking about efforts to extract deep meaning from his songs. But then he alludes to “Frankie and Albert” as fact, stone cold fact, and the succeeding line, about beginning to believe what the scriptures tell, might mean the Bible but might also mean “Frankie and Albert” and all the other verses that have inspired Dylan and that, for him, require no ponderous exegesis. (“I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music,” Dylan told an interviewer in 1997.6 “I don’t find it anywhere else … I don’t adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists … I’ve learned more from the songs than I’ve learned from any of this kind of entity. The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.”)

  Other hints and provocations begin to add up, without ever becoming directly linked. There, in plain view, is a song of a lover’s murder: Albert is dead, and Frankie is raising hell. (Dylan might just as well have sung Delia and Curtis, but the reference would have been more obscure.) There is a singer who has committed a pile of sins, thus far with impunity, who is hounded by the blues, and who loves his departed Nettie hard, with a love so thick even a knife cannot destroy it. There is a faint suggestion that Nettie was unfaithful. (“Don’t know why my baby never looked so good before / I don’t have to wonder no more.”) Suddenly there is a judge who enters the courtroom (and enters the song, only to disappear), and all are bidden to stand: some kind of official justice or injustice is done. It is early spring, the river is on the rise, yet the singer, with no one around him to tell of his continuing love for Nettie, sees the world darken before his eyes. A moment of hope arrives: the singer’s grief gives way, he sings of a lifetime with his love, like some heavenly day—in the original “Gentle Nettie Moore,” the singer is certain he will meet his wife in heaven—and then the singer stands in the bright sun and the voice of holy praise rises. But, like the melody, what rises in the lyrics soon falls—and the singer suddenly wishes that it were night, and then, for the last time, everything goes black.

  “I’m going where the Southern crosses the yellow dog,” in “Nettie Moore”: the conjunction of the Southern Railway and the Yazoo Delta Railroad, Moorhead, Mississippi. (photo credit 11.6)

  Far from random, “Nettie Moore” is a song of surpassing sorrow, of every spark of hope extinguished, every certainty thwarted—“Everything I’ve ever known to be right has proven wrong / I’ll be drifting along,” Dylan sings—but there’s no one left whom he can talk to, or at least no one who will understand. And gradually, a more exact possibility falls into place: the singer has stabbed his beloved but unfaithful Nettie to death with a knife; now convicted for the crime and alone in jail, with no one left to tell, he comprehends everything, declares and re-declares his love, his heart thumping loud, before his execution, when all goes black just as the springtime is cresting. Alternatively, the singer, an aging member of a cowboy band—like the Sons of the Pioneers?—is mourning the lost love of his life who may still be alive, and he lives in darkness, with no one left from the old days of “then” with whom to talk.

  Or such, at least, are two reasonable readings of a song that, taking Dylan at his word, has a very exact meaning and is not arbitrary or indiscriminate. The song wafts through time and space, past and present, old songs and new, as Dylan’s recent songs do. It presents itself in the fragmented, ambiguous way that has marked Dylan’s music, through many phases, for decades. And it is a song that, from time to time, is as plain and obvious to me as whatever Dylan had in mind was or is to him.

  To say that Dylan, by 2006, appeared to be more open and talkative with the public would be saying little, given what had long been his notorious reticence. Apart from press interviews—usually timed to coincide with the release of an album, and almost always in print, not on film—Dylan hardly ever spoke in public anymore, even through a mask, outside his lyrics and occasional liner notes. At the press conference in Park City, Utah, for the premiere of Masked and Anonymous he appeared briefly, wore a blond wig beneath a blue wool cap, and said nothing. One of the Web sites that tracks Dylan concert appearances and set lists even included a feature, BobTalk, that immortalized his offhand comments from the stage, on the order of “Thanks everybody! That last song was a song about trying to say goodbye to somebody.7 This one is about trying to say hello to somebody.” True, by the 1990s, Dylan’s interviewers noted that he was less cagey and combative than he had been thirty years earlier, and that, although certain topics about his private life were off-limits, he was friendly and even helpful in trying to convey how he had concei
ved his latest project, or how he went about writing songs. But these interviews were rare.

  This began to change in Chronicles, where, even though the words were still printed, Dylan’s candor and gratitude came through—and they were his own words, or mostly his own. It changed even more with Martin Scorsese’s documentary No Direction Home, where selections from the total of roughly eighty hours of on-camera interviews gathered by Jeff Rosen showed Dylan telling parts of his own story, sometimes pensively, sometimes playfully, but always grasping for the right word or turn of phrase until he found it. The film begins with Dylan just talking: “I had ambitions to, ahhhhh, set out and find—like an odyssey, goin’ home somewhere, set out to find, ahh, this home that I’d left awhile back and couldn’t remember exactly where it was but I was, ahhh, on my way there.8 And, ahhh, encountering what I encountered on the, on the way was how I envisioned it all, I didn’t really have any ambition at all. I was born very far from where I’m supposed to be, and so I’m on my way home.” Coming so soon after Chronicles, the film showed Dylan opening up about himself as never before outside his songs, but also, as was said of his friend Ginsberg, composing on the tongue.*

  Even more came through on Theme Time Radio Hour with Your Host Bob Dylan, which appeared for three seasons, and in one hundred episodes, on XM satellite radio (later Sirius-XM) beginning in May 2006. Here was a new, thoroughly digitized version of an old technology, with a national reach far greater than that of the fifty-thousand-watt stations Dylan had listened to late at night as a boy. Here was a virtual reality that was benign, indeed uplifting, the virtual community of shared tastes and desires created by any disc jockey and his listeners. The show originated from no place in particular—in fact, it was recorded and assembled for the most part in Los Angeles, edited in New York, and broadcast from the XM studio in Washington, D.C.—so Dylan, now wearing his disc jockey mask, along with the show’s producers, could make real in words their own archaic fantasies about the surroundings that the listeners could never see. Appearing on a subscriber-only satellite station, the shows also had no commercials, allowing Dylan and his accomplices additional room for invention. And in his selection of themes as well as recordings, Dylan could yet again reclaim and reassemble the American musical past, providing his own patter but also, now, letting the music speak for itself—with no complicating charges of plagiarism.

  One of the most interesting features of the show was Dylan the DJ, or his persona as a DJ. He never denied who it was behind the microphone, dropping, here and there, little jokes or anecdotes about his life as a musician among musicians. With his choice of themes, listeners learned, among other things, that the Bob Dylan who decades earlier wrote a song about the New York Yankees pitcher Catfish Hunter remains very much a baseball fan, enough so to offer his own a cappella singing of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” on his show entitled “Baseball.” But Dylan also took on a role, as a disc jockey from out of the past but also as instructor of music appreciation, biographer, comedian, commentator, and dispenser of recipes, household hints, and other bits of useful information.

  Jaime Hernandez poster for Theme Time Radio Hour with Your Host Bob Dylan, XM radio, 2007. (photo credit 11.7)

  One writer has suggestively likened the show to Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets in proclaiming the virtues of writers whose work was in danger of being misunderstood or forgotten. The comparison captures a bit of what the show conveyed, but it is incomplete and a little too high-minded. Theme Time Radio Hour sounded more like another conjuring—a blend of an old-time radio show, complete with little jingles, and a hometown newspaper out of the 1940s or 1950s, with its vintage ads, home entertaining features (such as instructions on how to mix an ideal mint julep on the “Drinking” show), lists of interesting things to know (on the “Weather” show, the three American cities that are windier than the Windy City, Chicago: Dodge City, Kansas; Amarillo, Texas; and Rochester, Minnesota), freely associated True History Facts (including the information, dispensed during the show called “War,” that more than three hundred soldiers under the age of thirteen served in the Civil War, most as fifers or drummers, but some as combatants, including one George S. Lamkin, who joined the Mississippi Battery when he was eleven years old and was severely wounded at Shiloh before he turned twelve), telephone call-ins and “letters” from listeners (the latter in the form of e-mails, contrived by Dylan and the producers), and plenty more besides the music.

  With his co-producers, Dylan created an imaginary theater, with heavy overtones of the 1940s and 1950s. The show supposedly emanated from Studio B in something called the Abernathy Building (which in the second season became the “historic” Abernathy Building), close by to Samson’s Diner and Elmo’s Bar and Carl’s barbershop. The actress Ellen Barkin introduced most of the shows with a noirish monologue, sound effects in the background, describing snapshots of big-city private life, somewhat in the spirit of Edward Hopper’s painting Nighthawks: the very first of them—“It’s nighttime in the Big City. Rain is falling, fog rolls in from the waterfront. A nightshift nurse smokes the last cigarette in a pack”—was typical. One imagines that the movie theaters are featuring She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, or maybe Victor Mature and Hedy Lamarr playing in Samson and Delilah. That nurse’s pack of cigarettes costs fourteen cents. Everybody smokes.

  From out of this past, Dylan the DJ—no latter-day Symphony Sid Torin or Alan Freed, his voice sounding as old as the hills—spun his platters (of which, of course, there were none in this digital age), playing a great deal of music that one doesn’t hear on the radio anymore—except on some college stations and the odd listener-supported radio station like WWOZ in New Orleans—telling something about the performers and, often, even listing the label on which the recording appeared, as if we could run out and buy them. And Dylan’s tastes turned out to be even more eclectic than most listeners could have imagined. There was, not surprisingly, plenty of blues and rhythm and blues, beginning with the very first record on the very first show, Muddy Waters performing “Blow, Wind, Blow”;* and there was plenty of country (from the Carter Family onward), western swing, gospel, doo-wop, and rock and roll, by performers and groups both famous and long forgotten; and occasionally, Dylan played jazz (including, as the preface to his show “Moon,” Charlie Parker playing “Ornithology,” which the DJ instructor pointed out was based on the chord structure of “How High the Moon”).

  But Dylan also played a great deal of Glenn Miller, Frank Sinatra (the performer played most often in the first season), Patti Page, and various crooners from the 1930s through the 1950s, including Bing Crosby. He played LL Cool J and spoke knowledgeably about rap. He took time to recite repeatedly fitting lines of serious literature, from Yeats’s “Drinking Song” to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Baseball Canto.” And sometimes, instead of juxtaposing one thing and another, he threw different things into the same pot and stirred, as on the “Devil” show, when he read of Satan from Paradise Lost, while he played the Reverend Gary Davis in the background, performing “Devil’s Dream.”

  By the end of the third season, close to a hundred hours existed of Dylan speaking, intermittently, in a grand act of archiving and presentation, offering a vast cabinet of curios as well as masterpieces, musical and literary—and taking glances backward over the traveled roads, from all directions, that he had followed on his long journey home. In a variation on his modern minstrel composing, Dylan had found, in radio, an imaginative medium far better suited than film for writing another song—a song that also turned out to be another kind of memoir, collecting and codifying the scriptures of a lifetime.

  After five years of steady touring with new bands, built around Tony Garnier and George Recile, Dylan had hammered out a new sound in concert, louder and driven by more powerful guitar and drums, but also enhanced by his own keyboard playing—in 2003, Dylan began cutting back playing the guitar onstage—as well as the multi-instrumental talents of Donnie Herron, formerly of the updated country and weste
rn-swing band BR5-49. The concertizing was steady, usually in tandem with another act, and the venues were imaginative, like the minor-league ballparks that Dylan toured during the summers of 2005 and 2009. Of the dozen or so concerts I attended after 2002, most were uneven musically—in part because of the band’s loudness, in part because of the raggedness of Dylan’s voice—but all had at least a few arresting moments. None surpassed the performance at the Reverend Ike’s United Church Palace in Washington Heights in Manhattan at the end of November 2008. After passing through the gilded lobby of a former Loews movie palace, covered with the reverend’s “prosperity preaching” slogans—including “I Am Not Other People’s Opinions”—an almost entirely white crowd filed into the theater to hear Dylan open with “Gotta Serve Somebody,” a song he hardly ever performs anymore, playing a fine harmonica break and snaking through a little preacher man dance. The ensemble also played a strong arrangement of “It’s Alright, Ma” (which brought out the chord structure it shares, funnily, with the Everly Brothers’ “Wake Up, Little Susie”) and a blues band version, with Dylan again fronting on harmonica, of “ ’Til I Fell in Love with You,” from Time Out of Mind.*

  By early 2009, the band, with the all-important temporary addition of the multi-instrumentalist David Hidalgo, of Los Lobos, had jelled in the studio, producing (almost out of thin air, it seemed) a new album of original songs, Together Through Life. But before that, Dylan released the latest in his series of so-called official bootleg albums, a three-CD set of outtakes and concert performances since 1989, called Tell Tale Signs.

  What tales did the signs tell? The concert introduction delivered by Al Santos, the stage manager, about Dylan’s progress from has-been to reborn star comes word for word from some mock afflatus in an admiring article about Dylan that appeared in the Buffalo News in 2002. (Dylan’s appropriations extend well beyond his songs.) It jibes with Chronicles: Volume One, where Dylan describes the artistic crises and physical trauma that abated shortly before he recorded Oh Mercy in 1989. All that followed from that recovery forms one of the tales told on Tell Tale Signs, which starts in 1989 and ends in 2006, the year that Dylan released Modern Times. There are also the tales inside the signs (that is, the songs) themselves, from the formulaic, protesty “Everything Is Broken” and the heartbroken “Most of the Time” on Oh Mercy to “Ain’t Talkin’,” the final cut on Modern Times—a harrowing minor-key excursion through suffering, abandonment, unanswered prayers, and contemplated revenge that ends with a swelling, redemptive major chord. And although it may just be a coincidence, these tales coincide exactly with yet another story that remains in the background, unmentioned—the decline and then sudden downfall of America’s age of Ronald Reagan, from the ascension of George Bush the elder in 1989 to the beginning of Bush the younger’s unraveling in 2006.