Why Bob Dylan Matters

by Richard F. Thomas

  Far between sundown’s finish an’ midnight’s broken toll

  We ducked inside the doorway, thunder crashing

  As majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds

  Seeming to be the chimes of freedom flashing

  Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight

  Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight

  An’ for each an’ ev’ry underdog soldier in the night

  An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing

  The song is evidence of how Dylan’s genius was working in these years, combining something traditional with the new poetic outlook he had seen in the French Symbolist poet from the nineteenth century. Dave Van Ronk plausibly claims Dylan got the song from him. In fact he got the idea for part of the song from Van Ronk, whose New York City roots went back a few generations:

  Bob Dylan heard me fooling around with one of my grandmother’s favorites, “The Chimes of Trinity,” a sentimental ballad about Trinity Church. . . . He made me sing it for him a few times until he had the gist of it, then reworked it into “Chimes of Freedom.”

  “Chimes of Trinity” is a song by M. J. Fitzpatrick, from 1895, and the chorus is pretty much as Van Ronk remembers it:

  Tolling for the outcast tolling for the gay

  Tolling for the millionaire and friends long pass’d away

  But my heart is light and gay

  As I stroll down old Broadway,

  And I listen to the chimes of Trinity.

  This is essentially the template for lines 5–8 of each of Dylan’s verses. Van Ronk only remembered the chorus, so that is all he passed on to Dylan, through an oral tradition that had stripped the song of its individual verses, just leaving a chorus for which Dylan’s creative imagination would find new components. Dylan had to look elsewhere for his series of four-line stories leading into the chorus. In part these came from his own fertile imagination and frenzied poetic visions. But these lines, which do not come from “Chimes of Trinity,” have also struck readers as reminiscent of Rimbaud, as described by Mike Marqusee in his book on the politics of Dylan’s art:

  Each verse begins with four lines adumbrating a single conceit (at some length and often with needless convolution): the fusing of thunder, lightning, and church bells. It’s a self-conscious exercise in the “disarrangement of the sense” recommended by Rimbaud and the French symbolists whom Dylan was reading at the time.

  So what poem of Rimbaud’s was Dylan borrowing? I propose that it’s one Rimbaud wrote in 1871, at age sixteen, called “Poor People in Church.” It’s a blistering expression of youthful contempt, of which one translator has said, “Few adolescent rebellions have yielded such a harvest of vitriolic verse.” In Scottish poet Norman Cameron’s translation (the version that Dylan is likely to have read), Rimbaud goes through the different contemptible “types” in his church scene:

  The timid ones, the epileptic one, from whom

  Yesterday at the cross-roads people turned aside,

  The blind ones, nosing at old missals in the gloom,

  Who creep into the court-yards with a dog for guide

  We hear some of this in Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom,” where chimes toll for the “deaf an’ blind.” But more interesting is Dylan’s style, which echoes Rimbaud’s use of “one” (timid ones, epileptic one, blind one) in his fifth verse:

  Electric light still struck like arrows, fired but for the ones

  Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting

  Tolling for the searching ones

  And again, in the sixth:

  Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed

  For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse

  “Far between” is how “Chimes of Freedom” begins, while Cameron’s translation of “Poor People in Church” starts out “between,” the opening verse setting the scene, as in Dylan:

  Between oak benches, in mean corners stowed away,

  Warming the air with fetid breath, fixing their vision

  On the gilt-dripping chancels twenty mouths, which bray

  The pious canticles with meaningless precision

  Similarly, in verse 8 of Cameron’s Rimbaud, with another anticipation of Dylan’s “Far between” opening:

  Far from the smells of meat, the smells of musty serge,

  Prostrate and sombre farce in loathsome pantomime.

  And now the worship blossoms with a keener urge

  The mysticalities become still more sublime.

  Most of these lines of Rimbaud are singable to the tune of “Chimes of Freedom,” but only in Cameron’s 1942 translation.

  The difference in tone between his song and that of “Poor People in Church” is a marked one, and therein lies the difference between Dylan and Rimbaud, who had by 1966 outlived his purpose for Dylan. The disgust and contempt of the French poet for “the timid ones, the epileptic ones . . . the blind ones” that permeates Rimbaud’s poem is replaced by the sheer empathy of the singer and his friend or lover in Dylan’s song, “starry-eyed an’ laughin’ ” as they listen one last time to those bells, “Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed / For the countless confused, accused misused, strung-out ones and worse.”

  No one can really know who Bob Dylan is, but it is here worth quoting Klas Ostergren, member of the Swedish Academy present at the small gathering when Dylan picked up his Nobel Prize medal: “it went very well. He was a very nice, kind man.” In this difference of outlook between the French poet and the American singer may lie the answer to why Dylan, within just a couple of years, said of Rimbaud, “I can’t read him now.” Rimbaud wrote no poetry after the age of twenty-one. Bob Dylan was just getting started.

  6

  THE GIFT WAS GIVEN BACK: TIME OUT OF MIND AND BEYOND

  ON SOME NIGHT WHEN LIGHTNING STRIKES,THIS GIFT WAS GIVEN BACK TO ME AND I KNEW IT. . . .THE ESSENCE WAS BACK.

  —INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT HILBURN, LOS ANGELES TIMES, DECEMBER 14, 1997

  There is not much intertextuality in Dylan’s work in the decades during and after his retirement from performance in 1966, except of course for the Bible, particularly on the 1967 album John Wesley Harding. Obviously, that became more specific and more evident in 1979, when Dylan’s explicitly Christian phase began, but the Bible—Old Testament and New—is a text that was in Dylan’s blood, both from his Hebrew school days in Hibbing and from growing up in that predominantly Christian community. The Christmas polkas and other Yuletide songs on Dylan’s 2009 album, Christmas in the Heart, come from various musical traditions, but also from a place that is real, the mining town of Dylan’s youth. Perhaps more important, since boyhood he had been listening to and absorbing gospel music and the blues on the radio, and this material, refracted through his own genius and his own writing, has always been part of his arsenal. In Tangled Up in the Bible, Michael J. Gilmore, who discusses intertextuality in his introduction, has collected many of the specific biblical intertexts.

  Through the 1980s and early ’90s there were plenty of great songs, and a couple of great albums, but most, Dylan included, would agree that with the release of his 1997 album, Time Out of Mind, came the dawning of the third classic period. The aesthetics of the songs are more intense, they are more up to date and timeless, no matter how old some of the material they are building on. With the folk and blues cover albums of 1992 (Good As I Been To You) and 1993 (World Gone Wrong), Dylan went back to school and returned to the blues and folk traditions from which he had so brilliantly diverted in the mid-1960s, when he made folk uncool, but which were always a part of him and whose strains would turn up in so many of the songs of Time Out of Mind.

  This comeback for Bob Dylan has now lasted twenty years, in touring and recording, and in this period he again found his intertextual voice, embarking on a new mode of songwriting that has given his work a more conscious allusive and literary focus. This may have been what D
ylan was hinting at in 2004, when Ed Bradley interviewed him for the CBS show 60 Minutes following publication that year of Chronicles: Volume One. At one point Bradley asks Dylan if he could again write the songs like those from the 1960s, like “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” “Uh-uh,” he replies, at which point Bradley asks: “Does that disappoint you?” Dylan follows up in cryptic fashion: “Well, you can’t do something forever. I did it once, and I can do other things now. But, I can’t do that.”

  The title Time Out of Mind is itself allusive or intertextual. It seems to borrow from, or at least allude to, singer-songwriter Warren Zevon’s 1978 song “Accidentally Like a Martyr,” the refrain of which ends with the phrase in question: “Never thought I’d ever be so lonely / After such a long, long time / Time out of mind.” Zevon’s title, “Accidentally Like a Martyr,” alludes in turn to Dylan’s song titles from 1965 and 1966 containing adverbs: “Positively 4th Street,” “Queen Jane Approximately,” “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” “Obviously Five Believers.” The Zevon song itself, “Accidentally Like a Martyr,” along with the same artist’s song “Mutineer,” were regularly on Dylan’s setlists during his fall tour of 2002, when Zevon was dying of cancer, as was public knowledge.

  “Time Out of Mind” is also the title of and in the lyrics to a song by the jazz-rock group Steely Dan from their 1980 album, Gaucho. More important, the meaning of the phrase also points to time immemorial, time beyond memory, signaling a new phase for Dylan, in which he began to explore the past, eventually the very distant past, and conflate it with his own present, so producing worlds that are hard to pin down, and complex in the stories and images they conjure up. Dylan’s album titles that followed show this process continuing. “Love and Theft,” the only Dylan album title in quotation marks, points to the intertextual thefts that album was carrying off. Modern Times puts in play the question of just how modern the times of the album will turn out to be. Together Through Life begs the question, “Whose life? Dylan’s? The lives of fans who have been with him over the years?” And finally, Tempest, which ultimately comes from the Latin word for “time” (tempus), and whose worlds have an immense temporal range—Homer in the eighth century BC to John Lennon on Monday, December 8, 1980, when “they shot him in the back and down he went” (“Roll on, John”). These strands will all be brought together in the hybrid worlds built by Dylan’s imagination, as he takes a line of Homer describing Odysseus “throwing filthy rags on his back like any slave” and gives it to Lennon, sharing with his old friend the identity with Odysseus that he took to himself, as we’ll see on other songs on Tempest.

  DYLAN UNLEASHED

  Dylan provides the best discussion of what he is doing with these albums in the interviews he has given during this renaissance—cryptic as many of them are. Of central importance is Mikal Gilmore’s interview “Dylan Unleashed,” the one in which Dylan claimed, or seemed to claim, to have undergone “transfiguration.” Gilmore knows his subject as well any of the interviewers Dylan has singled out over the years. They started out on the back patio of a Santa Monica, California, restaurant: “At moments I pushed in on some questions, and Dylan pushed back. We continued the conversation over the next many days, on the phone and by way of some written responses.” Dylan clearly wanted to get the story, and the message, straight. What followed was a commentary on his art, particularly in performance:

  Well . . . the Time Out of Mind record, that was the beginning of me making records for an audience that I was playing to every night. They were people from different walks of life, different environments and ages. There was no reason for these new people to hear songs I’d written 30 years earlier for different purposes.

  And a little later again in the context of performance:

  Most of the songs work, whereas before, there might have been better records, but the songs don’t work. So I’ll stick with what I was doing after Time Out of Mind, rather than what I was doing in the seventies and eighties [he doesn’t include the sixties], where the songs just don’t work.

  The setlists that followed in his performances through the rest of the fall of 2012 bear out what Dylan is saying here. In these concerts there is a fairly even balance between, on the one hand, material from the 1960s up to Blonde on Blonde (1966), and on the other, songs from Time Out of Mind and later. He included “Tangled Up in Blue” regularly, as always, along with another occasional few from Blood on the Tracks (1975). By the following spring the songs of Tempest had taken the primary position as his setlists started to take on a more fixed quality. With a few notable exceptions, Dylan’s songs from the late 1970s to the early 1990s are absent. They don’t work in performance, and by now Dylan may have come to sense that with what had become of his art, the newer songs were simply much better.

  At the end of the interview Gilmore takes up the issue of intertextuality in the songs:

  Before we end the conversation, I want to ask about the controversy over your quotations in your songs from the works of other writers. . . . Yet in folk and jazz, quotation is a rich and enriching tradition. What’s your response to those kinds of charges?

  Oh, yeah, in folk and jazz, quotation is a rich and enriching tradition. That certainly is true. It’s true for everybody, but me. I mean, everyone else can do it but not me. There are different rules for me. . . . And if you think it’s so easy to quote him and it can help your work, do it yourself and see how far you can get. Wussies and pussies complain about that stuff. It’s an old thing—it’s part of the tradition. It goes way back. These are the same people that tried to pin the name Judas on me. Judas, the most hated name in human history! If you think you’ve been called a bad name, try to work your way out from under that. Yeah, and for what? For playing an electric guitar? As if that is in some kind of way equitable to betraying our Lord and delivering him up to be crucified. All those evil motherfuckers can rot in hell.

  Seriously?

  I’m working within my art form. It’s that simple. I work within the rules and limitations of it. There are authoritarian figures that can explain that kind of art form better to you than I can. It’s called songwriting. It has to do with melody and rhythm, and then after that, anything goes. You make everything yours. We all do it.

  In my view, the process of “transfiguration” that Dylan explores in this interview is more or less the process that literary critics call “intertextuality,” perhaps an intertextuality of characters in the song, as much as the straight texts themselves. The process of transfiguration has been with Dylan from the beginning, from banging out Little Richard songs on his Hibbing High piano with a Little Richard hairdo, to channeling Woody Guthrie at the folk scenes of Dinkytown in Minneapolis, to going electric even before the appearance at Newport in 1965, and to all the phases that followed.

  “TRYIN’ TO GET TO HEAVEN”

  Dylan’s transfigurations in his dark and beautiful album Time Out of Mind find their roots in figures from the past, who take on new life thanks to the gift he was born with and the work to which he has put that gift. The singer in the first line on the first track of the album is “walking through streets that are dead, / Walking, walking with you in my head.” Nothing is resolved by the time the song, “Love Sick,” ends: “Just don’t know what to do / I’d give anything to be with you.” The images in the album are of humans isolated in a world of trouble. The melancholy is only made more stunningly poignant and beautiful by the bluesy voice of the singer and the music of it all, even if Dylan himself felt producer Daniel Lanois overdubbed and rearranged the album in a way that distanced it from the effect he himself was going for in the studio.

  The narrator has other company in these songs, in the characters that are part of the intertextual fabric of some of the lyrics. “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven” is such a song. When it came out, Dylan fans, myself included, participated in a collaborative effort to identify all the blues, folk, and gospel voices that haunt it and form its backdrop. “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven” has at l
east ten intertexts that Dylan arranges and reworks to produce a song whose elements speak from their own original contexts, while at the same time becoming integral and vital parts of the new song. We might ask, what effect do these intertexts have in the song? How does their presence contribute to the mood and meaning of what is being sung? Here is the song, with the allusions, or intertexts, noted as they occur (Dylan’s lyrics are in bold, with the corresponding intertext italicized below):

  The air is gettin’ hotter,

  There’s a rumblin’ in the skies.

  I’ve been wadin’ through the high muddy waters,

  I wade muddy waters, trying to reach dry land

  —Tom Rush, “Turn Your Money Green”

  But the heat riseth in my eyes.

  Everyday your memory goes dimmer,

  It doesn’t haunt me like it did before.

  I’ve been walkin’ through the middle of nowhere,

  Tryin’ to get to heaven before they close the door.

  Look at that sister comin’ ’long slow,

  She’s tryin’ to get to Heaven fo’ they close the do’

  —Alan Lomax, “The Old Ark’s A-Moverin’,” The Folk Songs of North America

  When I was in Missouri,

  They would not let me be.

  I had to leave there in a hurry,

  I only saw what they let me see.

  I was in Missouri they would not let me be

  Yeah when I was in Missouri, baby, would not let me be

  No and I could not rest content until I come to Tennessee

  —Furry Lewis, Tom Rush, et al., “Turn Your Money Green” (first and last verse)

  You broke a heart that loved you,

  You have wrecked a heart that loved you

  —Byron Arnold, “Golden Chain,” Folk Songs of Alabama

  Now you can seal up the book and not write anymore.

  Seal up your book, John,

  An’ don’t write no more,

  O John, John,

  An’ don’t write no more.

  —Alan Lomax, “John the Revelator,” Our Singing Country