Bob Dylan in America

by Sean Wilentz

  Dylan’s biographers tell of the musical education he received once he arrived on MacDougal Street. But Chronicles reveals the depths of Dylan’s education and self-education from books during his early years in New York. The most exactly rendered scenes of Dylan reading occur in the groaning-shelf apartment of a somewhat mysterious couple who lived even farther downtown than Greenwich Village. (The couple is almost certainly a fabrication, most likely a composite, built out of Eve and Mack Mackenzie, Dave Van Ronk and Terri Thal, Ray and Bonnie Bremser, and a few others.) But Dylan also read at the New York Public Library on Forty-second Street. Although at first his choices of reading had little reason or rhyme—if he didn’t connect with a book right away, he says, he’d re-shelve it—the intellectual feast he describes amounted to a pretty fair core curriculum for any college, including Tacitus, Machiavelli, Milton, Balzac, Clausewitz, and Pushkin. It also included, Dylan reports, many books on American history, above all the history of the Civil War. “How much did I know about that cataclysmic event?” he muses.16 “Probably close to nothing. There weren’t any great battles fought out where I grew up. No Chancellorsvilles, Bull Runs, Fredericksburgs or Peachtree Creeks.” But he quickly filled in the gaps in his knowledge. Biographies of Robert E. Lee and the antislavery Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens, he says, made the greatest impression on him; he took inspiration from the gray as well as the blue.

  In all of these books were amazing thoughts, contained in personal stories as well as philosophical treatises, set against the backdrop of grander bewildering dramas—and it was all as pliable to Dylan’s intelligence, he discovered, as any ballad. (“A political poem about the murder of innocents by the Duke of Savoy in Italy,” he recalls of Milton’s “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont.”17 “It was like the folk song lyrics, even more elegant.”) Here, too, especially in the American past, were unforgettable characters, utter individuals, as mighty as John Henry and as sinister as Diamond Joe. Having, he says, “cast off gloomy habits and learned to settle myself down,” Dylan trained his mind to tackle longer and more difficult books: “I began cramming my brain with all kinds of deep poems.18 It seemed like I’d been pulling an empty wagon for a long time and now I was beginning to fill it up and would have to pull harder. I felt like I was coming out of the back pasture.” While pulling that wagon, he began to understand that beyond an affection and talent for music, he had a powerful mind.

  Although particularly drawn to history books, Dylan did not think about the past with an eye to tracking dialectical abstractions; nor was he interested in looking backward for pointers about the present or the future. History, he figured, was cyclical: civilizations rose, decayed, and fell, each different from all the others but also fundamentally the same; and there was no telling where America was in its historical cycle; it was too new. What struck him most powerfully, though, was his realization of the closeness between then and now, especially in America: that the distance was so small, it could fit inside an apostrophe, and that the songs on which he’d wagered his heart and voice collapsed the distance automatically. It wasn’t just that J. P. Morgan and Teddy Roosevelt would have made great ballad heroes or villains. There was also something in the language of the folk songs, an old but living vocabulary, and a grammar that seemed to be groping for itself—a language, he now writes, that was “tied to the circumstances and blood of what happened over a hundred years ago over secession from the Union—at least to those generations who were caught in it.19 All of a sudden, it didn’t seem that far back.”

  Many of the ballads Dylan had been singing told old stories of capricious or tragic death, when a lovely scene shattered and the Grim Reaper appeared. Traditional songs like “Pretty Polly” and “Omie Wise” fit that mold, as did Leadbelly’s version of “In the Pines” and Woody Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre.” Listening to the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem at the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street, Dylan heard other kinds of songs drenched in history, where “even in a simple, melodic wooing ballad there’d be rebellion waiting around the corner.”20 Rebellion spoke to Dylan louder than death; he wanted, he now says, “to change over” songs like “The Minstrel Boy” and “Kevin Barry” to have them fit an American landscape. And so, searching for “some archaic grail to lighten the way” for his songwriting, he went uptown to the New York Public Library and read about America during the Civil War era—not just what historians had to say, but the sources themselves, old articles from newspapers with titles like the Pennsylvania Freeman that the library made available on microfilm.

  Irish folk singers the Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem in the Columbia Records studios in 1963 in New York City. Left to right: Liam Clancy, Tommy Makem, Pat Clancy, and Tom Clancy. (photo credit 10.4)

  For a professional historian, it was mildly thrilling to learn that Dylan discovered the cuneiforms of his art in the microfilm room. Dylan quickly realized, as any novice historian does, that in the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s there were many issues and stories besides slavery—reform movements, rising crime, religious revivals, riots over whether an English or an American actor should be allowed to perform in a New York theater. Americans worshipped the same God, shared the Constitution and the major political parties, thought of their democracy as the world’s best hope; yet increasingly, different groups of Americans eyed each other as enemies. “After a while,” Dylan writes, “you become aware of nothing but a culture of feeling, of black days, of schism, evil for evil, the common destiny of the human being getting thrown off course.”21 It felt creepy, reading of an America not at all like the one outside the library walls but that still, in some mysterious ways—not least amid the black struggle for civil rights—resembled it a lot. In time, the stories and the feelings, and the language and the rhetoric of the newspapers, cohered: “Back there, America was put on the cross, died and was resurrected.22 There was nothing synthetic about it. The godawful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything that I would write.”

  Dylan doesn’t call this a breakthrough, but that is what it was. He had already, through the folk songs, landed in a parallel universe, “one where actions and virtues were old style and judgmental things came falling out on their heads.23 A culture with outlaw women, super thugs, demon lovers and gospel truths … streets and valleys, rich peaty swamps, with landowners and oilmen, Stagger Lees, Pretty Pollys and John Henrys—an invisible world that towered overhead with walls of gleaming corridors.” The only problem was there was too little of it, and, as lovingly preserved by the folklorists, that universe still felt cut off from the present: “It was out of date, had no proper connection to the actualities, the trends of the time. It was a huge story but hard to come across.” But once he had read the history, the gap closed; what had once felt real but antique now was the underground story of the day, as he would relate it in songs he was now ready to write, a mere imitator no more. The more he thought about it, the more the parallel universe was really real and completely visible; in fact, it was all around him, on Seventh Avenue, where he passed a building where Walt Whitman had lived and worked, “printing away and singing the true song of his soul,” and on Third Street, where he stared mournfully up at the windows of Edgar Allan Poe’s house.24 The songs were no longer an escape from conformist reality, but reality itself. “If someone were to ask what’s going on, ‘Mr. Garfield’s been shot down, laid down.25 Nothing you can do.’ That’s what’s going on.” Looking for the American version of the Irish “Minstrel Boy,” he had found what he needed and more in the public library, a story of biblical proportions, a story that was not over, not by a long shot—the story of the death and transfiguration of a nation.

  Bob Dylan’s education did not end there, and Chronicles: Volume One, always with gratitude, tells how it continued, from collaborating briefly with Archibald MacLeish (which produced the songs on New Morning) to stumbling, many years later, upon an unnamed jazz singer in a California bar, who reminded him how to perform. Shortly after that, D
ylan relates, he recalled a “mathematical” musical system that the great and now nearly forgotten blues guitarist Lonnie Johnson had taught him decades earlier, and that now helped him get back on track. But Dylan learned something else, important and indelible, around the time he first communed with Johnson, something that unlocked the mysteries of the folk songs Dylan had come to love. It was his first real discovery of America, his greatest great awakening. After that he was ready to clear his throat with “The Death of Emmett Till” and then write “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” and everything else. He had learned to write about the present out of the past. And in that stuff, there was, and there is, a future.

  Over the next few years, however, Chronicles also became a focus of controversy. Although consistently grateful to so many of Dylan’s past friends, mentors, and muses, the book did not acknowledge the literary sources that had aided its author in the here and now. Two years after it was published, bloggers on various sites, led by one “Ralph the Sacred River” (his own pseudonym a pun on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s sacred river Alph in the epic poem “Kubla Khan”), began reporting on its various borrowings. One small example came from Mark Twain. In Chronicles, Dylan describes writing the song “Political World” for Oh Mercy in a sudden burst of inspiration after a long drought:

  One night when everyone was asleep and I was sitting at the kitchen table, nothing on the hillside but a shiny bed of lights …

  In chapter twelve of Huckleberry Finn, Huck describes the first days of drifting, with Jim, down the Mississippi River on their raft:

  Every night we passed towns, some of them away up on black hillsides, nothing but just a shiny bed of lights, not a house could you see … There warn’t a sound there; everybody was asleep (emphasis mine).26

  Numerous other passages in Chronicles bear similar likenesses to passages from works by authors ranging from Marcel Proust to (most frequently) Jack London. Apparently, Dylan used some of the same techniques in composing his memoir as he had in writing “Love and Theft,” lifting no more than a few words a line or two at a time, but always lines that contained striking images or felicitous turns of phrase. Some readers and critics dismissed the revelations as nothing more than examples of one artist picking up fragments from other artists. Others, though, questioned whether what passed as unobjectionable recycling in folk and blues music amounted, in the case of a published memoir, to what “Ralph” described as “pretty close to real plagiarism.”

  The charges appeared far too late to affect the book reviewers, whose enthusiasm for Chronicles led to its being named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography for 2004. Even had the charges arisen earlier, it is likely that the critics would have dismissed them as trivial. By now, chiefly through Time Out of Mind and “Love and Theft” (and despite the failure of Masked and Anonymous), Dylan had come far in reestablishing himself as a musical symbol, a survivor who somehow represented not only the Dylan of the “protest” 1960s and the hipster Blonde on Blonde 1960s but every shape he had ever assumed—and along with that every facet of American popular musical history. Discovering a few phrases lifted from Mark Twain and Jack London in a book so engaging, fluid, and generous as Chronicles would not have been sufficient grounds for daring to knock a national treasure. Indeed, the discoveries probably would have added to Dylan’s mystique.

  But when Dylan released his next album of new material in 2006, its title taken from that of a famous film from the 1930s, renewed claims of alleged plagiarism (which had also begun to hover over “Love and Theft”) became too numerous and angry to ignore. Dylan’s continuing artistic comeback had brought him ever-increasing public praise and stature, but there were writers who now declared his new work was, at best, derivative and, at worst, a shill. Even as a senior citizen, Dylan was still getting under some people’s skin.

  * This is not at all to claim that Masked and Anonymous is some sort of cinematic equivalent of Moby-Dick, or anything close—an absurdity that some normally perceptive and generous friends and critics read into an essay of mine written in early summer 2003 that accompanied the film’s release, and from which parts of this chapter are drawn.

  * It’s worth noting that one of the film’s rare defenders in the mainstream press, the New York Times rock critic Jon Pareles, said that Masked and Anonymous “plays like a feature film, complete with an intelligible plot, vivid professional camera work, and well-known actors,” observed that it flips easily between what Pareles called “the death-haunted estrangement of ‘Time Out of Mind’ and the gallows-humor cackles and shrugs of ‘Love and Theft,’ ” and concluded that “it also plays like a Dylan song: a shaggy-dog story about power, love, show business, prodigal sons, faith and destiny.” Pareles, “Film; Bob Dylan Plays Bob Dylan, Whoever That Is,” New York Times, July 27, 2003.

  11

  DREAMS, SCHEMES, AND THEMES:

  Modern Times, August 29, 2006; Theme Time Radio Hour with Your Host Bob Dylan, May 3, 2006-April 15, 2009; The Bootleg Series, Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased, 1989–2006, October 7, 2008; and Together Through Life, April 28, 2009

  An advance copy of Dylan’s Modern Times came in a slim jewel case and a plain white cover, listing ten new songs. The song titles made it clear that the music would be in the style that Dylan had been working with since Time Out of Mind, self-consciously reclaiming old songs and poems, sometimes explicitly, and giving them his own sounds and layers of meaning. The borrowing began with the album’s title.

  During his early years as a performer, Dylan’s amusing, quirky stage persona had been called Chaplinesque, and one of Dave Gahr’s color photographs featured on “Love and Theft” portrayed Dylan, in mustache and dark curly hair, like an aging version of Chaplin’s Little Tramp, and so the title, Modern Times, came as no shock.* At the very least, it delivered a tribute to Chaplin and to the Chaplin film of the same name, in which the much-misunderstood Tramp tries to survive in a harsh new world of heavy industrial mass production. The film ends with the Tramp in a cabaret, pantomiming and improvising a song whose words he has lost—and he makes a big hit. The very last shot is of the hero and his beloved orphan girl (played by Paulette Goddard), having eluded the police who want to arrest her on a vagrancy charge, walking straight into the dawn, full of doubt but hardly hopeless. (“Buck up—never say die. We’ll get along!” the Tramp tells the despairing girl.) It is one of the countless images in Chaplin’s films that could easily have turned up in a Dylan song, especially the last songs on his albums, which almost always seem to contain sentiments of hope or good luck. And, as it happened, Dylan’s album had an additional connection to Chaplin’s film, but it would become clear only upon listening.

  Still from Modern Times (1936). (photo credit 11.1)

  Beneath the album title, the song titles on the white cover showed that Dylan was not only borrowing a great deal but also being more up front about it than ever, even though it lacked any formal credit lines or little explanatory essays as accompanied World Gone Wrong. Nearly half the titles came directly or almost directly from well-known blues songs: “Rollin’ and Tumblin’ ” (an old song first recorded by Hambone Willie Newbern in 1929, though most famous in the version recorded in 1950 by Muddy Waters); “Someday Baby” (Sleepy John Estes); “Workingman’s Blues #2” (Merle Haggard); and “The Levee’s Gonna Break” (Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie’s “When the Levee Breaks,” though best known to rock and rollers in Led Zeppelin’s version, from which Dylan apparently took his own title). Another title, “When the Deal Goes Down,” strongly resembled that of the old-time country classic “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down” (recorded by Charlie Poole in the 1920s, but also by the New Lost City Ramblers, Doc Watson, Flatt & Scruggs, and numerous others in the 1950s and 1960s). And those were just the easy ones. The title and some of the narrative touches of still another, “Nettie Moore,” came from a song I’d never heard of that turned out to be a popular sentiment
al blackface song from the 1850s.

  Blues guitarist and singer Memphis Minnie and her husband, guitarist Kansas Joe McCoy, pose for a portrait, circa 1930. (photo credit 11.2)

  On first listen, the music and the lyrics were also as expected, only more so. Some of the songs, such as “When the Deal Goes Down,” are different in every way from their predecessors—yet even the melody of “Deal Goes Down” reworks an old Bing Crosby hit, “Where the Blue of the Night (Meets the Gold of the Day).” Musically, “Rollin’ and Tumblin’ ” is basically a cover version of the familiar song, with much of the first and last verses intact, except that where the singer in Muddy Waters’s version woke up not knowing right from wrong, the singer in Dylan’s thinks he must have bet his money wrong. (In the original, infidelity leads to drink; in Dylan’s, a sour relationship with a woman leads, finally, to a bid for reconciliation and to “put old matters to an end.”) “The Levee’s Gonna Break” is even closer to the original, quoting a few lines and mixing scenes of disaster with talk of love. (Just as the original made no hints about the recent floods in Mississippi and Louisiana, Dylan’s song made no hints about Hurricane Katrina the year before: given the impact of both events, neither song had to.) The melody, structure, and title of “Shake Shake Mama” come from one of Mance Lipscomb’s records. The refrain to one of the more original songs, “Ain’t Talkin’,” echoes that of an early Stanley Brothers recording, “Highway of Regret.”

  The additional link with Chaplin’s Modern Times had to do with the album’s sound as well as its lyrical content. Chaplin originally planned to make his film as a talkie, with the dialogue, like everything else, in sound. By 1936, nearly a decade after Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer, the use of sound had become universal. But Chaplin decided that his famous Little Tramp character would not translate well in a talkie picture, and he stubbornly kept the dialogue to Modern Times silent, run on panels as silent films always had. Dylan, in interviews after “Love and Theft”—which he produced himself, under the name Jack Frost, much as Chaplin directed his own movie—discussed his decision to use older forms of microphones and recording equipment that, he insisted, better fit his voice and his music. The same rules applied to the recording of Modern Times—as with Chaplin, a deliberate archaism, the peculiar archaism that had become a part of Dylan’s style of composition.