The Dylanologists

by David Kinney

  If anybody was primed to take what Chris Johnson found in that bookstore in Japan and turn it into his life’s work, it was Scott, whose encyclopedic brain seemed to hold whatever he dug up in his research. As it happened, the primary tool in this effort would be his computer. Dylan had expected to keep the band of Dylanologists busy for a long time after his death. He said it would take a hundred years for people to figure him out. But he probably didn’t foresee the scope of the Internet, and in particular Google Books. When the company started digitally scanning books of major libraries and making the pages available and searchable, the work of sourcing Dylan’s lyrics became exponentially easier for the diggers.

  Over time, Scott and others began unpacking “Love and Theft.” The record amazed Scott. It showed hard work and focus and craft. The way Dylan juxtaposed the surreptitious quotes was intricate, and often funny. It rewarded repeat listens and careful study. “He takes all these lines from all these places,” Scott said, “and they all come off as Dylanesque.” In the opening track, “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum,” Dylan sings about various sets of twins, duos, and brothers, and the thefts harken back to earlier works on the theme. The characters in the title are best known as the copycats from Lewis Carroll. The Land of Nod is where Biblical Cain was exiled after killing his brother. “Your presence is obnoxious to me” comes from a minstrel sketch involving a woman who rents the same apartment to two men and they don’t know it, since one works all night and one works all day. “Stab you where you stand” is a line in the Edgar Allan Poe short story “William Wilson,” about a man and his doppelgänger. In a 1932 movie about circus freaks, one of the Siamese twins says, “Her master’s voice is calling.” The distinctive guitar riff comes from a 1961 rockabilly song called “Uncle John’s Bongos” by Johnnie & Jack, who were brothers-in-law.

  Scott made another, more surprising connection. The lyrics have a certain New Orleans flavor. Dylan sings of “a street car named Desire” and quotes that Mardi Gras cry “Throw me somethin’, mister!” But Scott contended that the song is also seasoned with hidden references from a more pedestrian source, a travel guide to New Orleans. A throwaway phrase in a restaurant review finds a home on “Love and Theft” (and became something more grisly in the transference): Brains cooking in a pot are “dripping in garlic and olive oil.” To those who thought it sounded like a coincidence, Scott pointed out that Dylan lifted several other phrases from the travel guide, including the clunky phrase “a multi-thousand-dollar gown.”

  Later, he discovered on “Tweedle Dee” bits of obscure recordings by the New Lost City Ramblers, an influential Village folk-revival band dedicated to old-time music. As these references piled up, Scott started thinking more about Dylan’s musical template, “Uncle John’s Bongos.” He didn’t think it was a coincidental choice. One of the founders of the Ramblers was John Cohen, who had been celebrated on the Grateful Dead’s anthem “Uncle John’s Band.” The writer, Robert Hunter, sprinkled that song with nods to the band’s recordings—just as Dylan had done here. (It’s also worth noting that Hunter and Dylan have written some songs together over the years.) Scott figured that by tucking the hidden references into “Tweedle Dee,” Dylan wanted to underscore how important the Ramblers were to him, and to folk music. His argument is bolstered by Chronicles, in which Dylan praises the band extravagantly. “All their songs vibrated with some dizzy, portentous truth.”

  None of Scott’s detective work happened in a linear way; unraveling the threads took years. A decade after the release of “Love and Theft,” he and the others weren’t done yet. And while they worked, Dylan continued to issue new recordings that were ripe for study.

  In 2005, he released a song on a movie soundtrack called “Tell Ol’ Bill.” It’s gloomy and cryptic: the tortured inner monologue of a man navigating a bleak landscape alone. “Secret thoughts are hard to bear,” he sings. The specter of a lost love seems to hang over everything. Dylan’s melody hews faithfully to “I Never Loved but One” by the Carter Family. Both songs’ narrators wish for “one smiling face” to comfort them. “All my body glows with flame,” Dylan sings, a curious line that appeared in the poem “The Geranium” by Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816). The poet put the phrase in the mouth of a woman convulsed in amorous rapture, for the flower is not just a flower. Dylan drew from two other poems of tragically lost love. The phrase “lying restless in heavy bed” was sixteenth-century Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser’s; the “thunder-blasted trees” were Poe’s—like his narrator, they will bloom “no more.” Dylan also seemed to be recycling the opening of an old folk song called “Old Bill” about a man who leaves his home in the morning and returns in “de hurry-up wagon”—a hearse—with “his toe-nails a-draggin’” following an encounter with a .38. “Oh, no, dat cain’ be so,” his wife cries out. Finding these allusions felt like opening up doors into new rooms where the same scene played out ad infinitum.

  A diligent digger could find other echoes. Were those Virgil’s “iron clouds,” the ones that portend doom in his epic poem? And was that a snippet from Don Quixote? And was that French general Joseph Joffre speaking before the first Battle of Marne in 1914? The songs of Late Dylan are filled with rabbit holes like those, obscurities that could be allusions or could be the products of hyperactive Internet searches and overactive imaginations.

  In 2006, annotators were given a new record to contend with, Modern Times. Studying the songs, Scott made a significant discovery: Dylan was reusing poetry by a forgotten Civil War–era Charleston native named Henry Timrod. “A round of precious hours,” goes a poem published in 1857. “Oh! here, where in that summer noon I basked, / And strove, with logic frailer than the flowers.” A century and a half later, Dylan sang, “More frailer than the flowers, these precious hours.” Warmuth posted the find online, and within a week he had tracked down a dozen more phrases from Timrod in six songs. (He even found Timrod on “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum.”)

  A story about the borrowings from Timrod made the New York Times, and that prompted Edward Cook, a Dylan fan and Dead Sea Scrolls scholar at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., to poke around in Chronicles.

  The memoir started out as liner notes for reissues of three old records, and in the process it turned into something closer to autobiography. “I got completely carried away in the process of . . . I guess call it, ‘novelistic writing,’” Dylan said. He didn’t love the work; as all authors know, when you’re writing a book you’re not living your life. As he worked on it, he told music journalists that he was struggling. “My retrievable memory, it goes blank on incidents and things that have happened.” So he was gathering stories about his life from others and using them, even if he knew them to be untrue. “I’ll take some of the stuff that people think is true and I’ll build a story around that.” But when the book came out in 2004, Dylan said he had surprised himself. His memory had come back to him. “I found I could visualize what people looked like and what they were wearing and even how particular rooms were furnished.” The memoir “set the record straight,” Dylan told one journalist. He assured another that “when you write a book like this, you gotta tell the truth, and it can’t be misinterpreted.”

  Even on the surface, Chronicles was an idiosyncratic book. Dylan told the story of arriving in New York and making it big; of dealing with fame in the late 1960s and early 1970s; of losing his way and struggling to record 1989’s Oh Mercy. When it appeared, critics hailed the book for its candor. But Dylan had skipped over what biographers considered the stations of the cross: Highway 61 Revisited, Newport in 1965, the motorcycle accident, his marriage(s), the turmoil that led him to write Blood on the Tracks. The stories he chose to tell didn’t ring true to people who had followed Dylan’s life and career closely. Of course, anyone who expected the master fabulist to play it straight this time had not been paying attention all these years. Still, even considering the elastic rules of the memoir genre, Chronicles was notably u
nreliable.

  But it wasn’t until 2006 that anyone realized something else: Not all the words were his.

  Given the Timrod discoveries in Modern Times, Cook decided to check out a few oddly distinctive phrases from a section about a couple who put Dylan up during his early days in the Village. The words had jumped out at Cook earlier when he tried to figure out whether the pair, Ray Gooch and Chloe Kiel, were real or not. (Probably not, he concluded.) When Cook searched the phrases online, he turned up jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow’s 1946 book, Really the Blues, which was about a “white kid who fell in love with black culture.” The book is full of jive, and Mezzrow describes a woman as “a Maltese kitten” and “a solid viper”—a pot smoker. Those were the exact words Dylan used to describe Chloe; he also threw in another bit of Mezzrow jive talk from later in the book, “cool as pie.”

  Cook didn’t do anything with this information at first. For a week, he didn’t tell anybody. He just enjoyed the sensation. He had a secret with Dylan. “It would be the only time I would have a Bob Dylan moment,” he said. Cook also wanted to see what else was there. He reread Chronicles with a more critical eye and things started to jump out at him, things that looked suspicious. He found a line from Proust, and a phrase lifted from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. When you find one or two thefts like that, he said, “you suspect everything.”

  Finally, Cook posted his discoveries on his blog with some critical words. He considered it “pretty close to real plagiarism.” Borrowing material for songs was standard in the folk music world. But he had a problem with Dylan appropriating others’ words in his book. “He’s being lazy,” he says. “You kind of want someone to earn it if they’re going to get praise as a great writer. It ticks me off.”

  His piece was the beginning of a reappraisal of Chronicles by students of Dylan. The post started circulating among fans, and soon made its way to Scott.

  He read it and sighed.

  “Great,” he told himself. “Now I’ve got the next couple of years booked.”

  4

  Scott once sent me a little riddle, a bite-size taste of what he had been up against. “On page five of Chronicles: Volume One our chronic argonaut uses material from a classic work of science fiction in a most interesting way. It is in the first paragraph, see if you can find it.” On the page, Dylan was describing John Hammond, the great-grandson of a Vanderbilt who as a talent scout and record producer had played an instrumental role in the careers of Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Charlie Christian, Aretha Franklin, and many others, including Dylan. Hammond “had been raised in the upper world, in comfort and ease—but he wasn’t satisfied and he had followed his own heart’s love, music . . .”

  Latching onto that sci-fi phrase, “the upper world,” I got to work. I pulled out “The Chronic Argonauts,” an H.G. Wells short story from 1888, and read it straight through with Dylan in mind. Would he have appreciated this idea of a man lost in time, as Dylan had so often seemed? But there was no mention of “the upper world” there. Next I tapped “H.G. Wells” and “the upper world” into Google and discovered a section of The Time Machine. In the book, a man travels to the year 802,701, where he discovers humanity split into two races, the Eloi, a weak, indolent, unintelligent upper-world people, and the Morlocks, an apelike people who live underground and feed on the Eloi. Lamenting how the upper-world Eloi had devolved into ignorant frailty over generations, the time traveler “grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly toward comfort and ease.”

  To Scott’s thinking, this was Dylan’s peculiar and hidden way of expressing contempt for an empty upper-class world, and his respect for a man who could have lived a pointless life of inherited wealth and privilege but instead made something of himself. It took me a couple of hours to unravel—there were other dead ends—and without Scott’s hint I would never have thought to look.

  Scott came to think Dylan had sprinkled hidden subtexts on nearly every one of the memoir’s 293 pages. He compared notes via e-mail with Cook, who continued to dig up references, and soon Scott’s working copy of Chronicles was filled with marginalia: Jack London on page 173, Henry Miller on page 174, Thomas Wolfe on page 175. They found Dylan recycling from magazines, novels popular and obscure, even the Internet.

  One discovery came when Scott poked around in a section of the memoir about Oh Mercy that was set in New Orleans, where the album was recorded. It only seemed natural to check the same travel guide he had linked to “Tweedle Dee.” His instincts were right. The guide described “pigeons looking for handouts” and a Cajun band’s “chinka-chinka beat.” Ten years later, Dylan used the same words in Chronicles.

  A while later, Scott found that Dylan mined the March 31, 1961, issue of Time while writing about the era when his career took off. Dylan helped himself to descriptions of life in Hanoi and observations about nuclear-bomb “worriers.” One article in the issue about the “Age of Anxiety” noted the prevailing wisdom that anyone could do or become anything, that “housewives can become glamour girls,” that “the slow-witted can become intellectuals,” and that “the indecisive can become leaders of men.” Dylan swiped the line and then appended a gag: “If you were an indecisive person, you could become a leader and wear lederhosen.”

  In writing about the topical songs that 1960s folksingers wrote based on stories in the newspapers of the day, Dylan listed headlines from a 1936 John Dos Passos novel, a work that itself used cut-up writing techniques. Dylan secretly paired Mark Twain with The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu, a 1916 novel by British novelist Sax Rohmer. Shelley verse was in one paragraph, Hemingway in the next.

  Dylan’s appropriations were not random. They were deliberate. When Scott delved into them, he found cleverness, wordplay, jokes, and subtexts. To portray the bearded, gruff folksinger Dave Van Ronk, a Greenwich Village denizen, Dylan chose the description of a wolf-dog in a Jack London story and melded it with a line about New Yorkers from a city travel guide. Scott found dozens of borrowings from London, and that was telling in and of itself: London had been accused of plagiarism in his time. By weaving these hidden quotations into Chronicles, Scott argued, Dylan was acknowledging that he is a product of his influences, that his voice is “an amalgam of the voices of so many others.”

  In 2010, Scott’s friend Tom Gogola helped him get a piece in the New Haven Review, and his ideas began circulating widely in Dylan circles. His blog became a must-read for fans. “Chronicles: Volume One is loaded with things to be decoded,” Scott wrote. “I think of it as The Da Vinci Code of rock ’n’ roll.” But he didn’t believe Dylan had written the book in bad faith; he had just hidden another book between the lines. Scott thought Dylan was an artist toying with his audience. He loved it. He presented every find with the joy of a person solving a brain teaser.

  A few guys longed for the old days, before everything was a search-engine click away. Peter Stone Brown followed Scott’s work closely and he found the discoveries interesting. But he had misgivings about Scott’s approach. “With each new Googled discovery,” he wrote, “he seems more and more like a cat waiting behind a door ready to pounce on the next moving object.” Peter would appreciate it more if Scott were reading widely and happened to stumble on the antecedents of Dylan’s lyrics in the process. That was how Peter found the subterranean scriptural roots of “I Pity the Poor Immigrant.” He read the Bible. Fans caught Dylan’s musical borrowings because they knew those old folk songs; they owned the records.

  Scott acknowledged that search engines made it possible for anybody to track down this stuff, not just scholars well versed in the classics or poetry or some other arcane field of study. But even so, it took time and effort, as the H.G. Wells example demonstrated. It was trickier than people might have imagined. “If it was so easy,” Scott said, “there’d be fifty blogs like mine.”

  Some people doubted his conclusions. How did
Scott know the matches weren’t coincidental? Many apparent borrowings seemed like commonplace phrases. Was it not possible that Dylan had a photographic memory for the things he had read? Couldn’t he have a brain that worked differently from ours, one that sponged up choice bits of language, which he then unwittingly spat back out? Doubtful, Scott answered. Neither coincidence nor an overactive memory would explain how seven phrases appeared on pages 203–04 of Chronicles that resembled the 1998 book Confederates in the Attic by best-selling author Tony Horwitz: “an overhanging porch with support beams that had long ago rotted away”; “oiled ringlets”; “in the trees, a solitary bird warbling”; “moss covered logs”; a bumper sticker that reads “WORLD’S GREATEST GRANDPA”; “hog parts hanging from hooks on walls—hog jowls, hog ears”; and “make you wanna squeal.” (Horwitz was flattered. He only wished Dylan had cribbed lines for a song.)

  This was not an exact science. I spent some time poking around on page 153, where Dylan described his epiphany in Locarno, Switzerland. He wrote that as he had struggled to sing that night, he managed to conjure up “some different type of mechanism to jump-start the other techniques that weren’t working.” Curious to see what I would find using Scott’s approach, I searched “mechanism,” “jump-start,” and “techniques.” Up popped page 27 of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Singing. File under: It couldn’t be. (Could it?) Scott had a long list of phrases that could have been borrowed but more likely were not.

  Some people seemed upset that anybody went searching at all. As if to even look for this stuff was tantamount to questioning the legend. Scott began to feel like he was moving too fast for people, even those who already accepted the idea that Dylan was doing some borrowing. Scott would make a claim, and they would say, Now you’ve gone off the deep end. He shrugged off the doubters. He had spent his life listening to and playing American popular music. He thought maybe he had developed “a freakish ability” to see what other people couldn’t.