Why Bob Dylan Matters

by Richard F. Thomas

  This is not a matter of laziness or plagiarism. All of these references come from a speech of the mature Odysseus, whose identity the characters in Dylan’s songs, and Dylan himself, are taking upon themselves. And when he sings these songs in performance, Dylan has had a classical statue next to him onstage. It is a river goddess, a likeness of a statue group of Pallas Athena (Minerva). The group is outside the Parliament building in Vienna—suggesting a connection between democratic Austria and the ideal Athenian democracy, of which Athena is the patron goddess. The same river goddess is on the cover of Tempest. Why? I would say because Dylan transfigured into Odysseus, the wandering survivor of so many blows, quite naturally has with him a statue associated with the goddess, has taken her on as his divine patron.

  When Odysseus wins the contest, she exclaims that “no one can touch you, much less beat your distance!” Dylan has long known that the same applies to him. In early June 2010, when he was slipping the lines from Homer into performances of “Workingman’s Blues #2” and writing the songs for Tempest in which his voice became that of Odysseus, he was touring in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. From June 9 to June 12, he circled Vienna, performing three concerts in three countries: in Bratislava, thirty miles east of Vienna across the Slovak Republic border, then north to Prague in the Czech Republic, and then back into Austria, at Linz, to the west of Vienna. My guess is that he dropped in on the Austrian capital, where he has performed a number of times. That’s when it all came together: Homer, the Athena statue group, and the creative mind of Bob Dylan, who notices everything around him.

  On March 22, 2017, just before the release of Triplicate, Dylan had a conversation with author Bill Flanagan exclusive to the official website bobdylan.com. Flanagan is too seasoned an interviewer of Dylan to have asked the old chestnut of a question, “What do you think of Joan Baez?” But that is what he asked, and Dylan’s response may be heard as a commentary on the process here traced, Bob Dylan as Odysseus one more time:

  She was something else, almost too much to take. Her voice was like that of a siren from off some Greek island. Just the sound of it could put you in a spell. She was an enchantress. You’d have to get yourself strapped to the mast like Odysseus and plug up your ears so you wouldn’t hear her. She’d make you forget who you were.

  In Book 12 of the Odyssey, the hero ties himself to the mast and gets his crew to fill their ears with beeswax, so they cannot hear the enchanting song of the Sirens, which he listens to. Dylan is clearly having fun as he imagines himself in the role of Odysseus.

  And once more, in his June 2017 Nobel lecture, with which this book will more or less conclude, Dylan expresses this connection between Odysseus the arch-trickster and himself:

  He’s always being warned of things to come. Touching things he’s told not to. There’s two roads to take, and they’re both bad. Both hazardous. On one you could drown and on the other you could starve. He goes into the narrow straits with foaming whirlpools that swallow him. Meets six-headed monsters with sharp fangs. Thunderbolts strike at him. Overhanging branches that he makes a leap to reach for to save himself from a raging river. Goddesses and gods protect him, but some others want to kill him. He changes identities. He’s exhausted. He falls asleep, and he’s woken up by the sound of laughter. He tells his story to strangers. He’s been gone twenty years. He was carried off somewhere and left there. Drugs have been dropped into his wine. It’s been a hard road to travel.

  In a lot of ways, some of these same things have happened to you. You too have had drugs dropped into your wine. You too have shared a bed with the wrong woman. You too have been spellbound by magical voices, sweet voices with strange melodies. You too have come so far and have been so far blown back. And you’ve had close calls as well. You have angered people you should not have. And you too have rambled this country all around. And you’ve also felt that ill wind, the one that blows you no good. And that’s still not all of it.

  Here “he” in the first paragraph is Odysseus, and “you” in the second paragraph is Bob Dylan, confirming his transfiguration, and listing a few of their shared experiences: some Circe of the sixties putting drugs in his wine; sharing the bed of his own Calypso, the “wrong woman”—whoever that might be in reality; angering those fans not ready for the changes he went through. But the “you” of this paragraph is not just Bob Dylan. It is also you and me, those who have been part of his odyssey. As he sang in “Mississippi,” perhaps thinking of Odysseus as early as 1997, “I’ve got nothin’ but affection for all those who’ve sailed with me.” In this Dylan is not just channeling Homer. He seems to have added another poet, the great Constantine Cavafy, whose poem “Ithaca” expresses the idea that we all have, or should have, a little Odysseus—indeed a little Bob Dylan—in us. Here is the first verse of Cavafy’s poem:

  As you set out toward Ithaca,

  hope the way is long,

  full of reversals, full of knowing.

  Laistrygonians and Cyclops,

  angry Poseidon you should not fear,

  never will you find such things on your way

  if your thought stays lofty, if refined

  emotion touches your spirit and your body.

  Laistrygonians and Cyclops,

  savage Poseidon you will not meet,

  if you do not carry them with you in your soul,

  if your soul does not raise them up before you . . .

  —Cavafy, “Ithaca,” tr. Theoharis

  Dylan returns to the third person “he” as he closes his lecture on the Odyssey, with a focus on the trickster hero’s homecoming and his dealing with the suitors who have been trying to woo his wife Penelope during his twenty-year absence, and who will pay with their blood for their misdeeds:

  When he gets back home, things aren’t any better. Scoundrels have moved in and are taking advantage of his wife’s hospitality. And there’s too many of ’em. And though he’s greater than them all and the best at everything—best carpenter, best hunter, best expert on animals, best seaman—his courage won’t save him, but his trickery will.

  All these stragglers will have to pay for desecrating his palace. He’ll disguise himself as a filthy beggar, and a lowly servant kicks him down the steps with arrogance and stupidity. The servant’s arrogance revolts him, but he controls his anger. He’s one against a hundred, but they’ll all fall, even the strongest. He was nobody. And when it’s all said and done, when he’s home at last, he sits with his wife, and he tells her the stories.

  Though ostensibly speaking of Odysseus, with an allusion to the Cyclops scene (“he was nobody”), Dylan is again pointing to his own song, and chiefly to “Pay in Blood,” one of the most Odyssean songs on Tempest, and one that he sings night after night, with his Minerva statue behind him, backing him up:

  How I made it back home nobody knows

  Or how I survived so many blows

  I been through hell, what good did it do?

  My conscience is clear, what about you?

  Again “Nobody,” aka Odysseus, knows how the singer found his homecoming, like Odysseus the singer has survived blows and been through hell, or the underworld, and as the repeated refrain of the next verse affirms: “I pay in blood but not my own.”

  This method of composition is not to be thought of as mere quotation or citation. Rather it is a creative act involving the “transfiguring” of song and of literature and of characters going back through Rome to Homer. It is the means by which Dylan imagines and creates the worlds that he then inhabits in his songs and in performance. He has been up to this mostly in the years since “Love and Theft” in 2001 but his songwriting has always come from other places, drawing its meaning from them, not least the worlds of the Greeks and Romans. In the process Dylan becomes part of the stream that flows from Homer on into the present. As he said at the close of his Nobel lecture: “I return once again to Homer, who says, ‘Sing in me, o Muse, and through me tell the story.’ ” Long may that story run.

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  THE SHOW’S THE THING: DYLAN IN PERFORMANCE

  Like the poems of the Greeks and Romans, Bob Dylan’s song is meant to be experienced in performance. Dylan himself captured the essence of the matter in an interview with music critic Jon Pareles, two days before the release of his 1997 comeback album, Time Out of Mind:

  A lot of people don’t like the road, but it’s as natural to me as breathing. . . . I’m mortified to be on the stage, but then again, it’s the only place where I’m happy. It’s the only place you can be who you want to be.

  In the words of Bob Dylan, “Any minute of the day, the bubble could burst” (“Sugar Baby,” 2012). When that day comes, the Tulsa archive and other resources will preserve a simulacrum, an image or likeness, of the man and his performance. As such, it will be without full human essence, and it is that yearning for that human experience that keeps us coming back to Dylan.

  That’s why I decided to get myself down for one of the last shows of the 2016 fall tour, in Clearwater, Florida, on November 19. “Had to go to Florida,” as the 2001 song “Po’ Boy” put it. All 2,180 seats at Ruth Eckerd Hall were filled, a beautiful venue with perfect acoustics on the shores of Alligator Lake, south of Safety Harbor. I had last seen Dylan and his band earlier in the year, on July 14, that time on the Boston waterfront. I partly felt an urge to see a post-Nobel Dylan concert. I was pretty sure nothing would be revealed in Clearwater or anywhere else—just a performance, from Stu Kimball’s opening guitar stage left, to Dylan and the band lined up and motionless under the closing lights. These days you have the words, the song, the band, and you have voice, gesture, and presence of Dylan, and that’s likely all there will be from here on out. The concert was brilliant from start to finish, as revealed on a recording available on YouTube at the time of writing. There was also something about the story or drama that Dylan’s setlist had become that induced me to get one last concert in. I had gotten an inkling in Boston, and it came home powerfully in Clearwater.

  UNCOVERING THE GREAT AMERICAN SONGBOOK

  Six of the songs in the concert were from the new “cover” albums, the only studio recordings that Dylan has put out since Tempest in 2012. In Boston the number of those songs had been eight, including the final performance of the tour for Irving Berlin’s song from 1932, “How Deep Is the Ocean (How High Is the Sky)?” David Kemper, a drummer for the Jerry Garcia Band who played with Dylan from 1996 to 2001, tells of going into the studio for four days before a tour, also doing old songs, like Dean Martin’s “Everybody Loves Somebody Some Time.” When the band recorded “Love and Theft” in 2001, Kemper recalls Dylan saying:

  “All right, the first song we’re going to start with is this song,” and he’d play it on the guitar and then he’d say “I want to do it in the style of this song,” and he’d play an early song. Like he started with “Summer Days” and he’d play a song called “Rebecca” by Pete Johnson and Big Joe Turner. . . . It was like, “Oh my God, he’s been teaching us this music [all along]—not literally these songs, but these styles.”

  Some years later, Dylan would begin to bring such songs into his concerts, at first just one song. On October 26, 2014, he was in Hollywood for the last of a three-night stand at the Dolby Theatre. He and his band closed with a single encore, “Stay With Me,” a song written by Jerome Moross and Carolyn Leigh for the 1963 film The Cardinal, starring Tom Tryon. It is a short song, at home in that movie, where it comes across as a sort of prayer:

  Should my heart not be humble, should my eyes fail to see,

  Should my feet sometimes stumble on the way, stay with me. . . .

  Once Frank Sinatra covered it in 1964, the song became more secular, though no less poignant, without any specific cultural context. By the end of the fall of 2014, in the hands of Bob Dylan, “Stay With Me” had, in the words of music journalist David Fricke, been turned into “the most fundamental of Great American Songs: a blues.”

  The success in performance of “Stay With Me” may have helped Dylan decide to lay down these American standard songs of the middle third of the twentieth century—“the same songs that rock ’n’ roll came to destroy,” as Dylan put it in an interview with Robert Love. Shadows in the Night was released on February 3, 2015. Dylan was clearly proud to have his five-piece band backing what was initially described as a “Sinatra cover album” but came to be seen as something more than that as the other albums followed. In place of an orchestra, Dylan’s voice is accompanied by the touring band that has now been with him for quite some time, with horns added for some songs. The critical response was overwhelmingly positive, with Triplicate topping the British charts within a week of its release. Once again, Dylan knew what he was doing, and what he was doing was “uncovering,” not covering, these songs, bringing them back to life as surely as he had brought Homer, Virgil, Ovid, and Timrod back from their “crumblin’ tombs.”

  In the interview with Love, Dylan confirmed Kemper’s memory of playing such songs as far back as 2001, when the drummer left the band. The songs, Dylan revealed, all seem connected one way or another: “We were playing a lot of these songs at sound checks on stages around the world without a vocal mic, and you could hear everything. You usually hear these songs with a full-out orchestra. But I was playing them with a five-piece band and didn’t miss the orchestra.”

  For these songs, the studio was only the start. They had started out in sound checks, Dylan’s way of teaching his band about the old “standards,” and had then been taken into the studio. Now they were back onstage, in performance, almost a third of the setlist in recent performances. That’s where they needed to be heard to see how well they fit particularly with Dylan’s own more recent songs. With the exception of “Some Enchanted Evening,” all the songs from Shadows in the Night soon joined “Stay With Me” and became part of Dylan’s performance, through the spring and summer concerts of 2015.

  In reality, Dylan has given new life to these songs, particularly in performance. They are not just revived, they are transformed, even transfigured, by virtue of Dylan’s incorporating them into his own story. If you listen to the forty-one-year-old Sinatra singing “Autumn Leaves” in 1957, backed by an orchestra and in his full maturity, that is a fine experience, but it is just a song, covered by Sinatra, sung beautifully. Hearing Dylan end a concert with his version of the song, with Donnie Herron’s steel guitar lead-in replacing the string section—and outdoing the orchestra in its plaintive qualities as an interpretation of the song—is a different experience, because Dylan, aged seventy-five, also singing beautifully, had integrated the song into the story of his own songbook.

  On December 20, 2016, NBC aired The Best Is Yet to Come, a concert in honor of the singer Tony Bennett’s ninetieth birthday a few days earlier. The show was filmed on September 15 at Radio City Music Hall. On October 28, on the band’s day off between concerts at Jackson, Mississippi, and Huntsville, Alabama, Dylan went into Workplay Studios in Birmingham, Alabama, and recorded a video of a Charles Strouse and Lee Richard Adams song from 1962, “Once Upon a Time”—covered by Bennett, Sinatra, and others—which was then shown during the NBC concert. It would eventually be released on the first disc of Triplicate. Both there and when I first heard it on TV, it somehow took me back to the great 1965 song “Like a Rolling Stone,” which shares its opening with the title of the “cover song,” “Once upon a time. . . .” In that studio Dylan’s words and the band’s accompaniment express the melancholic sense of a world that is past, never to be brought back: “Once upon a time, the world was sweeter than we knew / Everything was ours; how happy we were then / But somehow once upon a time never comes again.” If that is too melancholy for you, YouTube will get you to the 1965 song itself, performed two weeks earlier by the same musicians in 2016 at the Desert Trip concert, on October 14, the day after the announcement of the Nobel Prize. There you’ll find the other Dylan singing a great, driving version, the guitars of Charlie Sexton and Donnie Herron unleashed as they follow Dylan
’s singing: “Once upon a time, you dressed so fine. . . .” Bob Dylan’s world encompasses both songs and everything in between.

  The band in these more recent concerts is now truly backing Dylan and his songs. Something has happened in the days since the performances of 2009–10, when Sexton returned to the band after leaving it in 2002, and Dylan seemed happy to showcase the new guitarist who was so right for the music that ended up on Tempest. Sexton is as good as ever, but he and all of the musicians are now there in the service of the band, the concert, the songs, and the singer. It is the songs, Dylan’s performance, the integrity and completeness of the concert, and the story it tells, that are always the focus.

  Dylan has scattered the songs of Shadows in the Night, Fallen Angels, and Triplicate across his set, mingling them with his own original songs, particularly those of the twenty-first century. He has given himself material for concerts for years to come, even if he makes no more records. In this setting the covers are no longer covers, no longer belong to anyone but Dylan, are part of his performative essence. Just as a line of Virgil in “Lonesome Day Blues” or Homer in “Early Roman Kings” no longer belongs to those ancient poets, but is stolen, a part of the song, these standards now belong to Dylan, precisely because they are heard in the arrangement and the performance of Dylan. And in the setting of a concert, individual songs become part of a larger, connected fabric. The new songs, as he told Love, “fall together to create a certain kind of drama.” And now, integrated with the new, deliberately restricted setlists of these years, they participate in a larger drama, telling the story of Dylan’s journey through the years.

  Dylan at the end of the interview tries to explain to Love how he puts together a show:

  It starts like this. What kind of song do I need to play in my show? What don’t I have? It always starts with what I don’t have instead of doing more of the same. I need all kinds of songs—fast ones, slow ones, minor key, ballads, rumbas—and they all get juggled around during a live show. I’ve been trying for years to come up with songs that have the feeling of a Shakespearean drama, so I’m always starting with that.