Why Bob Dylan Matters

by Richard F. Thomas

  Meanwhile, back in the restaurant in Boston town on “Highlands” and in 1997, things come to a head and the exchange is about to break down as the feminist waitress with the “pretty face and long white shiny legs” changes the topic in a way that will clinch the case that he is in the wrong time and place:

  Then she says, “You don’t read women authors, do you?”

  At least that’s what I think I hear her say

  “Well,” I say, “how would you know and what would it matter anyway?”

  “Well,” she says, “you just don’t seem like you do!”

  I said, “You’re way wrong”

  “Which ones have you read then?” I say “I read Erica Jong!”

  And so the character of “Highlands” is stuck in the past with his Neil Young and his Erica Jong. For him Erica Jong is the author of the 1973 blockbuster Fear of Flying, in which Jong coined the phrase “zipless fuck” to capture her ideal of the perfectly liberated woman’s right to have sex with strangers. But it didn’t work on the waitress in the song, who without a word of response at this point leaves the stage.

  Dylan generally doesn’t play his longer songs in concert. “Desolation Row” (11:20) is an exception, though it is always abbreviated. He has never performed “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” (1966) or “Tempest” (2012), long songs but shorter than “Highlands.” As I’ve mentioned, singing at a faster tempo, Dylan was able to trim “Highlands” to around ten minutes to perform it, and I want to draw attention to the first two concerts at which he played it, a month apart in 1999, eighteen months after the release of Time Out of Mind. In both concerts (Chula Vista, California, on June 25 and Madison Square Garden in New York on July 27) it came in the setlist right after “Tangled Up in Blue,” the song to which I am suggesting it served as a sequel, offering as it did an intricate intertextual response. Dylan performed the song precisely so he could have it back-to-back with “Tangled Up in Blue,” a glimpse of the then-and-now across a quarter of a century.

  After the waitress walks away in “Highlands,” he steps back out into the street and, with a chorus closing the restaurant scene, gives us a commentary on what has just happened: “Some things in life, it gets too late to learn.” The sense of alienation continues in the four verses that follow, but he recovers by the end of the song, realizing that the Highlands he’s been looking for is not in any place or time, that is, not in any time out of his own mind:

  Well, my heart’s in the Highlands at the break of day

  Over the hills and far away

  There’s a way to get there and I’ll figure it out somehow

  But I’m already there in my mind

  And that’s good enough for now.

  And so the album ends, with the singer’s expression of contentment with the way he is. In this song, the last one on an album that would prove to be the beginning of a new period of now classic songs, albums, and performance, stretching across the next twenty years, Dylan creates a voice whose songs look back across the years from a place of artistic confidence. These last words on the album Time Out of Mind reveal an artist who has rediscovered his genius. Leading into this verse, the singer makes a discovery: “I got new eyes / Everything looks far away.” Far away in space and in time, back into the past but also into the future.

  Or, as he would put it in “Bye and Bye,” on the 2001 album “Love and Theft,” “The future for me is already a thing of the past.” The quote marks around the title of this, the thirty-first studio album, are unique to the album, indicating that even the title is “stolen” and further pointing to the new process of theft, plagiarism, or intertextuality that is at the very center of his art, particularly the songs released in the new millennium.

  “SHADOWS ARE FALLING”: DYLAN’S MAJESTIC SADNESS

  “Not Dark Yet,” the seventh track on Time Out of Mind, from 1997, is among the most poetic of Dylan’s songs. The weary but strong voice of the singer is closer to his end than his beginning, the opening three words, “Shadows are falling,” finding their response in the close of each of the four verses: “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.” In the line “Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain,” the apparent paradox captures the sound of the song, which in the moment of its being sung describes with beauty the very despair the song constructs. Each of the four verses fills in the details of the life of someone who has been through much, suffered much, getting ready for the dark, but still has hope, even if the last lines suggest it is not quite at hand: “Don’t even hear the murmur of a prayer / It’s not dark yet but it’s getting there.”

  It is on Time Out of Mind that Dylan’s aesthetics of melancholy are at their darkest, “bleak and riveting,” as critic Jon Pareles put it, “closer than ever to the clear-eyed fatalism of classic blues.” A number of the songs, particularly as they close, confront love that is lost but can’t be forgotten, the pain left hanging there as the songs end, frequently with the words of the song title:

  “Love Sick”

  “Just don’t know what to do / I’d give anything just to be with you”

  “Standing in the Doorway”

  “You left me standing in the doorway crying / Blues wrapped around my head”

  “Million Miles”

  “Yes, I’m tryin’ to get closer but I’m still a million miles from you”

  “’Til I Fell in Love with You”

  “I just don’t know what I’m gonna do / I was all right ’til I fell in love with you”

  “Make You Feel My Love”

  “Go to the end of the world for you / To make you feel my love”

  Melancholy as an aesthetic experience in any art form—whether music, literature, or painting—produces both pain and pleasure, the latter making the former bearable, compensating for it. It comes through contemplation of place and time, and frequently of persons lost or absent. It can be intensified by the memory of past events or situations now gone, and by the sense of loss that such memories evoke.

  “Thou majestic in thy sadness at the doubtful doom of humankind.” So wrote Alfred, Lord Tennyson in “To Virgil,” a poem across the ages to the Roman poet who gave him so much. Tennyson would have had in mind a passage from the end of Virgil’s Georgics, on Orpheus, the mythic poet numbered among those who “enriched our lives with the newfound arts they forged”—now including Dylan by way of the Nobel medal he has with that line of Virgil’s Latin on it. Toward the end of the Georgics, Orpheus had through the power of his song rescued his wife, Eurydice, from the Underworld. But he made a human error and looked back, and she was lost, back into the pit:

  Like smoke

  Disintegrating into air she was

  Dispersed away and vanished from his eyes

  And never saw him again, and he was left

  Clutching at shadows, with so much more to say

  —Virgil, Georgics 4, tr. David Ferry

  The majestic sadness of those lines comes from the same place that gives us the songs on Time Out of Mind and many since, including those from his recording of the Great American Songbook. The lyrical darkness of Dylan’s vision of the last twenty years has brought him into a close alignment with Virgil. At the end of the song “Duquesne Whistle” (2012), written with Robert Hunter, we hear the singer wondering.

  The lights of my native land are glowin’

  I wonder if they’ll know me next time around

  I wonder if that old oak tree’s still standing

  That old oak tree, the one we used to climb.

  Going into exile two thousand years earlier, Virgil’s shepherd-poet wondered the same thing.

  Oh, will it ever come to pass that I’ll

  Come back, after many years, to look upon

  The turf roof of what had been my cottage

  And the little field of grain that once was mine,

  My own little kingdom.

  —Virgil, Eclogue 1, tr. David Ferry

  This ability to capture
with compelling artistry the universal human emotion that comes with absence, and with memory of a place lost is just one reason Virgil and Bob Dylan both matter. It is time to put them more directly together.

  7

  MATURE POETS STEAL: VIRGIL, DYLAN, AND THE MAKING OF A CLASSIC

  Immature poets borrow; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

  —T. S. Eliot, “Philip Massinger,” 1920

  A few days after it came out, on September 11, 2001, as mentioned earlier, I started listening to the songs on “Love and Theft,” and when I arrived at “Lonesome Day Blues,” I heard Virgil, greatest of the Roman poets, singing with the voice of Dylan:

  Dylan:

  I’m gonna spare the defeated—I’m gonna speak to the crowd

  I’m gonna spare the defeated, boys I’m gonna speak to the crowd

  I am goin’ to teach peace to the conquered

  I’m gonna tame the proud

  Virgil:

  remember Roman, these will be your arts:

  to teach the ways of peace to those you conquer,

  to spare defeated peoples, tame the proud

  Spare the defeated, teach, peace, conquered, and tame the proud. This is beyond coincidence. Virgil’s lines, from Book 6 of his epic, the Aeneid, are set in the Underworld. The ghost of Aeneas’s father is instructing him, and future Romans, on how to conduct themselves as they build their empire, whose remains are still so visible today in the city of Rome. Aeneas will in fact fail at the end of the poem to live up to his father’s instructions, as he kills his defeated enemy. That final move is a culmination of the second half of Virgil’s poem, and of the epic wars of Aeneas, whose depiction is generally taken to allude to the civil wars of Julius Caesar and his adopted son, future emperor Augustus Caesar, whose propaganda presented the Caesars as the descendants of Aeneas, and so of Venus, the divine mother of Aeneas. It is this darker aspect of Virgil’s poem that seems to be appealing to Dylan.

  Vietnam, the war of Dylan’s youth, also seems very much in the air in the words of the “Lonesome Day Blues,” whose singer is in a bad way, stripped through death, desertion, and elopement of all his family: “My pa he died and left me, my brother got killed in the war / My sister she ran off and got married, never was heard of any more”; also in the sixth verse: “Set my dial on the radio / I wish my mother was still alive.” In the official Bob Dylan: The Lyrics: 1961–2012, the second line reads, “I’m telling myself I’m still alive.” So Vietnam is the natural setting for the song, at least as heard by any baby boomer with ears to hear. But once we recognize the Virgilian intertext and its context of the ancient Roman civil wars, something happens to the song’s meaning. The two contexts, familiar to me—Rome and America—merge and make the song about no war and every war, as happens so often with Dylan’s lack of specificity around time and place in his songwriting.

  Of course this doubling of the temporal contexts proved to be too simple, for there were other intertexts in the song, as the world of Dylanology discovered in the pages of the Wall Street Journal on July 8, 2003, almost two years after the album came out. An American named Chris Johnson had been browsing in a bookstore in Fukuoka, Japan, fifty miles from the town of Kitakyushu, where he was teaching English. On the first page of the English translation of a Japanese gangster novel, Junichi Saga’s Confessions of a Yakuza, Johnson read “My old man would sit there like a feudal lord” and immediately recognized a line from Dylan’s song “Floater (Too Much to Ask),” from the same album “Love and Theft”: “My old man he’s like some feudal lord.” Over the next few days, the Dylan community responded with blog posts and articles on the popular site expectingrain.com, seeming to compete for the wittiest adaptation of Dylan’s act of theft: “They ain’t his, babe.” “The lines they were a-changin’.” “The Freestealin’ Bob Dylan.” But others also chimed in, defending Dylan’s borrowings as cultural collage and traditional literary allusion, the way song and poetry have worked for centuries.

  I was more interested in how the lifted passages might work in their new setting. A Japanese gangster novel and the Roman poet Virgil’s Aeneid, side by side, felt like the sort of creative surrealistic juxtapositions that had its roots in Dylan’s songwriting going back to the sixties, now with the disparate elements coming not from Rimbaud or folk song, though that would never disappear, but from literary texts, and specifically a Japanese novel. Dylan disperses some twelve undeniable passages from the novel across five songs on “Love and Theft,” generally two per song. This is a pattern that was to be repeated with the words of Ovid and Henry Timrod on Modern Times (2006), and Homer on Tempest (2012)—the presence of one allusion confirming the other on the song in question, showing the allusion to be no accident. This included two passages in “Lonesome Day Blues”:

  Dylan:

  Samantha Brown lived in my house for about four or five months

  Don’t know how it looked to other people,

  I never slept with her even once.

  Saga 208:

  Just because she was in the same house didn’t mean we were living together as man and wife, so it wasn’t any business of mine what she did. I don’t know how it looked to other people, but I never even slept with her—not once.

  Dylan:

  Well my captain he’s decorated—he’s well schooled and he’s skilled

  My captain, he’s decorated—he’s well schooled and he’s skilled

  He’s not sentimental—don’t bother him at all

  How many of his pals have been killed.

  Saga 243:

  There was nothing sentimental about him—it didn’t bother him at all that some of his pals had been killed. He said he’d been given any number of decorations, and I expect it was true.

  Again, the context of the words is what matters, since Dylan, by quoting the words, is at least potentially invoking the situation those words describe. Confessions of a Yakuza, which Dylan probably picked up while on tour in Japan, is a remarkable piece of writing. It blurs the genres of novel and biography, fiction and nonfiction, a little like Dylan’s own Chronicles: Volume One. Its narrative complexity, along with a lively use of colloquial language, must have appealed to Dylan’s literary sensibilities. The author of Confessions is the doctor and novelist Junichi Saga, whose book tells the story of the life of an early- to mid-twentieth-century gangster, Ijichi Eijii (b. 1904), who was Saga’s patient. The two stolen passages that appear in “Lonesome Day Blues” come from late in the novel. The first concerns a woman named Osei (= Samantha Brown), who is staying with Eiji not long before the American defeat of Japan in World War II.

  The second quote from “Lonesome Day Blues” comes from Eiji’s final narrative chapter, as he recalls running into Osei again in 1951: “The Korean War was going strong, and my new gambling place in Tokyo was doing really well.” Why does this sound so much like a line from a Dylan song? The inspiration for Dylan’s “decorated” captain is one Nagano Seiji, encountered while Eiji was in prison, and who had sliced off a fellow prisoner’s arm. The pals whose deaths in Dylan’s song “don’t bother him at all” were the soon-to-be archenemies of the clearly American singer of “Lonesome Day Blues,” Japanese soldiers who died in the Chinese-Japanese War (1937–45). History, reality, and fantasy are all put in the mix, with surrealistic effects that are only heightened as we see the texts Dylan is working into his song. “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven” had drawn together blues, gospel, and folk to create its world. In “Lonesome Day Blues” Dylan repeats the method, but now with a Roman epic poem and Japanese novel providing the parts.

  The war with which “Lonesome Day Blues” begins (“Well,
my pa he died and left me, my brother got killed in the war”) was about to become even more complex. Sometime in the early 2000s the critic and musician Eyolf Østrem pointed out on his blog that Dylan also layers two passages from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in “Lonesome Day Blues”:

  Dylan:

  My sister, she ran off and got married / Never was heard of any more.

  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Ch. 16:

  . . . and my sister Mary Ann run off and got married and never was heard of no more . . .

  Dylan:

  Last night the wind was whisperin’ somethin’ —I /was trying to make out what it was / I tell myself something’s comin’ / But it never does

  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Ch. 1:

  I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. The stars was shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful . . . and the wind was trying to whisper something to me and I couldn’t make out what it was.

  So now Dylan’s song adds to the mix the writing of Mark Twain, with whom Dylan has always shared an affinity, up and down the Mississippi, on which they were both, near enough, born and raised. The first of the Huck Finn quotes comes from the Grangerford-Shepherdson episode of the novel. Huck quotes Buck Grangerford’s explanation of the origins of the feud that is systematically eliminating the two families, all with the look of the Civil War, which Twain had lived through as a young man in his twenties:

  “Well,” says Buck, “a feud is this way. A man has a quarrel with another man, and kills him; then that other man’s brother kills him; then the other brothers, on both sides, goes for one another; then the cousins chip in—and by and by everybody’s killed off, and there ain’t no more feud.” (Ch. 18)

  Dylan’s Twain quotes in “Lonesome Day Blues” complicate our understanding of the line “my brother got killed in the war,” making us gather up all the references, and allusions, from Vietnam back to the American Civil War, with the borrowed Virgil lines taking us even further back in time, to the civil wars that tore apart the Roman republic, long an interest of Bob Dylan.