He was shot down by a hungry kid trying to make a name for himself
The townspeople wanted to crush that kid down and string him up by the neck
I once tried to sum up why it earned its place among his Greatest Hits, third time around:
The end of an age, an age ago, ending “long before the stars were torn down”. At 11 minutes, it has world enough and time to be a love story, a trek, a brief epic . . . Patience, it urges. We wait for eager ages for his voice to introduce us to the Brownsville Girl herself. Great rolling stanzas (“and it just comes a-rolling in”), and memories of the Rolling Thunder Revue, especially since Sam Shepard plays his part. About films, it has the filmic flair of Dylan’s underrated masterpiece, Renaldo and Clara. Delicious yelps from the back-up women, who sometimes comically refuse to back him up. He: “They can talk about me plenty when I’m gone.” They: “Oh yeah?” It moves, and yet stays put, circling back round. One of those great still songs.42
What particularly takes Dylan about films, I take it, is that they move – why else would they be movies? – while at the same time or in a different sense they don’t. Don’t thereafter move from what they once were. For to film it is to fix it. And a re-make of a film is not the same thing as re-performing a song. Like Brownsville Girl, a film – including this one within the song that someone remembers or kinda remembers – moves and yet stays still. It stays more than just stills, that is true, but to see it again is to see it exactly as it was, for all time. (Eternity is a different story.) There is comedy in Brownsville Girl’s beginning “Well, there was this movie I seen one time”, for although “one time” makes perfectly good sense and we know what he means, it is going to be many more than one time that we shall hear tell of his seeing it. The second time it goes, or rather, arrives, like this:
Something about that movie though, well I just can’t get it out of my head
But I can’t remember why I was in it or what part I was supposed to play
All I remember about it was Gregory Peck and the way people moved
And a lot of them seemed to be lookin’ my way
The way people moved, and meanwhile the film moved, and how they looked out my way from the screen as though I were the performer (no longer “a hungry kid trying to make a name for himself ”), not – on this relief of an occasion – the performee. And yet the film, once and for all, is not going to move, or move out of my head. Even when an actor returns in the re-make of a film, as did Robert Mitchum for the second Cape Fear, he is not himself or is not his previous self. One man in his time plays many parts. And so the song muses on the Muse of Film:
Well, I’m standing in line in the rain to see a movie starring Gregory Peck
Yeah, but you know it’s not the one that I had in mind
He’s got a new one out now, I don’t even know what it’s about
But I’ll see him in anything so I’ll stand in line
A new one out now, the old one being in then, preserving its people, just as they were, for ever and a day. “Welcome to the land of the living dead.” Not just The Night of the Living Dead, which is one particular film, but the land of the living dead, filmland. “I’ll stand in line”: much is made of lines in this song, the medium of song being lines and it’s not being only Dylan’s audience that has to be willing to stand in line. Any song must. And Dylan reels out the lines themselves, one of the furthest extended being a line that does indeed find itself over the line (we forgive it its trespasses):
Now I’ve always been the kind of person that doesn’t like to trespass but sometimes you just find yourself over the line
And then, as the song winds to a conclusion, it winds back to the beginning, this time underlining “one time” with “twice”:
There was a movie I seen one time, I think I sat through it twice
I don’t remember who I was or where I was bound
All I remember about it was it starred Gregory Peck, he wore a gun and he was shot in the back
Seems like a long time ago, long before the stars were torn down
And so – in this requiem for the stars, the living dead – on to the refrain for the last time, a refrain that is a showing, or a plea for a showing:
Brownsville girl with your Brownsville curls
Teeth like pearls shining like the moon above
Brownsville girl, show me all around the world
Brownsville girl, you’re my honey love
Show me all around the world: that is all that any film asks.
There is in Dylan’s songs a sense that competition between sister-arts is as inevitable and (mostly) as unproductive as any other sibling rivalry, but that only a very touchy visual artist would object to a singer’s envisaging the day When I Paint My Masterpiece. But there is (praise be) such a thing as stealthy competition.
Praise be to Nero’s Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody’s shouting
“Which Side Are You On?”
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain’s tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much
About Desolation Row
There is some pitching of poems against songs here. The question “Which Side Are You On?” can be approached from many sides, one being the premiss that these words will strike slightly differently upon the ear. For it is the case that not even Dylan can unmistakably sing the difference between upper and lower case (not “Which side are you on?”), whereas to the eye the distinction is a Piece of Cake. It’s just that there is something that you need to know. The capital title of that unmisgiving political song.
So the central contention turns out not to be between those two heavyweight modernists, or between their high art and that of the lowly calypso, or between poems and songs, or even between the Titanic and the iceberg,43 but between two deeply different apprehensions of what it is that songs can most responsibly be. And of what the world truly is, as against the simplicities of Once upon a time. “An I see two sides man” –
It was that easy –
“Which Side’re You On” aint phony words
An’ they aint from a phony song44
Dylan didn’t like to bad-mouth a song that was in a good cause. But he knew, even back then in 1963, that this “two sides” business was averting its eyes and its ears from too much. So before long he was hardening his art. “Songs like ‘Which Side Are You On?’ . . . they’re not folk-music songs; they’re political songs. They’re already dead.”45
What does the word protest mean to you?
“To me? Means uh . . . singing when I don’t really wanna sing.”
What?
“It means singing against your wishes to sing.”
Do you sing against your wishes to sing?
“No, no.”
Do you sing protest songs?
“No.”
What do you sing?
“I sing love songs.”46
Love songs in age, as in youth.
Rhymes
“What is rhyme?” said the Professor. “Is it not an agreement of sound –?” “With a slight disagreement, yes” broke in Hanbury. “I give up rhyme too.” “Let me however” said the Professor “in the moment of triumph insist on rhyme, which is a short and valuable instance of my principle. Rhyme is useful not only as shewing the proportion of disagreement joined with agreement which the ear finds most pleasurable, but also as marking the points in a work of art (each stanza being considered as a work of art) where the principle of beauty is to be strongly marked, the intervals at which a combination of regularity with disagreement so very pronounced as rhyme may be well asserted, the proportions which may be well borne by the more markedly, to the less markedly, structural. Do you understand?”
“Yes” said Middleton. “In
fact it seems to me rhyme is the epitome of your principle. All beauty may by a metaphor be called rhyme, may it not?”
Gerard M. Hopkins (On the Origin of Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue)47
Rhyme, in the words of The Oxford English Dictionary, is “Agreement in the terminal sounds of two or more words or metrical lines, such that (in English prosody) the last stressed vowel and any sounds following it are the same, while the sound or sounds preceding are different. Examples: which, rich; grew, too . . .”
A device, a matter of technique, then, but always seeking a relation of rhyme to reason (without reason or rhyme?), so that “technique” ought to come to seem too small a word and we will find ourselves thinking rather of a resource. Rhymes and rhythms and cadences will be what brings a poem home to us.
People have always complained that rhyme puts pressure on poets to say something other than what they really mean to say, and people have objected to Bob Dylan’s rhyming. Ellen Willis told him off: “He relies too much on rhyme.”48 It’s like some awful school report: you’re allowed to rely on rhyme 78 per cent, but Master Dylan relies on rhyme 81 per cent. Anyway, you can’t rely too much on rhyme, though you can mistake unreliable rhymes for reliable ones.
For success, there is the simple (not easy) stroke that has the line, “Oh, Mama, can this really be the end?”, not as the end, but as nearing the end of each verse of Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again. And the rhyme in this refrain is beautifully metaphorical, because it’s a rhyme of the word “end” with the word “again”:
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis Blues again?
“End” and “again” are metaphorically a rhyme because every rhyme is both an endness and an againness. That’s what a rhyme is, intrinsically, a form of again (a gain, too), and a form of an ending.
In Death is Not the End, each verse ends:
Just remember that death is not the end
Not the end, not the end
Just remember that death is not the end
And the four verses at first maintain the tolling of this severe rhyme: friend / mend, comprehend / bend, descend / lend, and then at last soften it, though not much, from an end rhyme into the assonance men / citizen. (Assonance differs from rhyme in not having the same end.) But just remember that the song has not only four verses but a bridge, and that the bridge (a bridge to the next world) is variously at a great remove from the sound of that particular rhyming or assonance on end, having instead the sound-sequence that springs from life: dies / bright light / shines / skies:
Oh, the tree of life is growing
Where the spirit never dies
And the bright light of salvation shines
In dark and empty skies
The rhyme dies / skies depends upon its distance from the end sound, just as it depends upon “dies” being, in full, “never dies”. The bridge is, then, at a great remove. And yet it is not complacently or utterly removed from the end-world, given the sound in “empty”.
“All beauty may by a metaphor be called rhyme, may it not?” asked a speaker in Hopkins’s imaginary conversation. Moreover, rhyme is itself one of the forms that metaphor may take, since rhyme is a perception of agreement and disagreement, of similitude and dissimilitude. Simultaneously, a spark. Long, long ago, Aristotle said in the Poetics that the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor, for it is upon our being able to learn from the perception of similitude and dissimilitude that human learning of all kinds depends. One form that mastery of metaphor may take is mastery of rhyme.
Ian Hamilton said of “Dylan’s blatant, unworried way with rhyme” in All I Really Want to Do that it is irritating on the page, but sung by him it very often becomes part of the song’s point, part of its drama of aggression. Many of Dylan’s love songs are a kind of verbal wife-battering: she will be rhymed into submission – but to see them this way you have to have Bob’s barbed wire tonsils in support.49
I think it’s true that women in Dylan’s vicinity sometimes have as their mission being rhymed into submission, but that isn’t battering, it’s bantering.
Still, the rhyming can be fierce. Take the force of the couplet in Idiot Wind,
Blowing like a circle round my skull
From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol
Rolling Stone reported: “It’s an amazing rhyme, Ginsberg writes, an amazing image, a national image like in Hart Crane’s unfinished epic of America, The Bridge. The other poet is delighted to get the letter. No one else, Dylan writes Ginsberg, had noticed that rhyme, a rhyme which is very dear to Dylan. Ginsberg’s tribute to that rhyme is one of the reasons he is here”:50 that is, on the Rolling Thunder Review and then in Dylan’s vast film Renaldo and Clara.
And it’s a true rhyme because of the metaphorical relation, because of what a head of state is, and the body politic, and because of the relation of the Capitol to the skull (another of those white domes), with which it disconcertingly rhymes. An imperfect rhyme, perfectly judged.
Dylan: “But then again, people have taken rhyming now, it doesn’t have to be exact anymore. Nobody’s gonna care if you rhyme ‘represent’ with ‘ferment’, you know. Nobody’s gonna care.”51 Not going to care as not going to object, agreed; but someone as imaginative about rhymes as Dylan must care, since always aware of, and doing something with, imperfect rhymes, or awry rhymes, or rhymes that go off at half-cock, so that their nature is to the point. The same goes for having assonance instead of rhyme: entirely acceptable but not identical with the effect of rhyme, and creatively available as just that bit different. The rhyme skull / Capitol is a capital one.
Dylan adapts the skull of the Capitol to the White House elsewhere, in 11 Outlined Epitaphs:
how many votes will it take
for a new set of teeth
in the congress mouths?
how many hands have t’ be raised
before hair will grow back
on the white house head?
But can it be that Dylan was guilty of baldism? A bad hair day. Time to soothe and smoothe: A Message from Bob Dylan to the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (13 December 1963) assured those of us who are bald oldsters or baldsters that “when I speak of bald heads, I mean bald minds”. You meant bald heads, and it was a justified generational counter-attack, given how the young (back then) were rebuked for their hair.
A rhyme may be a transplant.
The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense
Take what you have gathered from coincidence
(It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue)
One of the best rhymes, that. For all rhymes are a coincidence issuing in a new sense. It is a pure coincidence that sense rhymes with coincidence, and from this you gather something. Every rhyme issues a bet, and is a risk, something for gamblers – and a gambler is a better (“for gamblers, better use . . .”).
Granted, it is possible that all this is a mere coincidence, and that I am imagining things, rather than noticing how Dylan imagined things. We often have a simple test as to whether critical suggestions are far-fetched. If they hadn’t occurred to us, they are probably strained, silly-clever . . . So although for my part I believe that the immediate succession “gamblers, better . . .” is Dylan’s crisp playing with words, not my doing so, and although I like the idea that there may be some faint play in the word “sense”, which in the American voicing is indistinguishable from the small-scale financial sense “cents”,52 I didn’t find myself persuaded when a friend suggested that all this money rolls and flows into “coincidence”, which does after all start with c o i n, coin. Not persuaded partly, I admit, because I hadn’t thought of it myself, but mostly because this is a song, not a poem on the page. On the page, you might see before your very eyes that coincidence spins a coin, but the sound of a song, the voicing of the word “coincidence”, can’t gather coin up into itself. Anyway Dylan uses his sense. “One of the
very nice things about working with Bob is that he loves rhyme, he loves to play with it, and he loves the complication of it.”53 A quick canter round the course of his rhyming. There is the comedy: it is weird to rhyme weird / disappeared, reckless to rhyme reckless / necklace, and outrageous to rhyme outrageous / contagious.54 And in Goin’ to Acapulco the rhyme what the hell / Taj Mahal mutters “what the hell”. There is the tension, for instance that of a duel in the world of the Western:
But then the crowd began to stamp their feet and the house lights did dim
And in the darkness of the room, there was only Jim and him
(Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts)
Once “did dim” has set the scene, the two of them stand there: Jim and him, simplicity themselves. And there is the satire: Dylan can sketch a patriotic posturing simply by thrusting forth the jaw of a rhyme with a challenge.
Now Eisenhower, he’s a Russian spy
Lincoln, Jefferson, and that Roosevelt guy
To my knowledge there’s just one man
That’s really a true American:
George Lincoln Rockwell
A true American will pronounce the proud word, juttingly, Americán. You got a problem with that?
Clearly, rhyme is not exactly the same phenomenon on the page as it is when voiced (on stage or on album). On the page, “good” at the line-ending in One Too Many Mornings is likely to be broadly the same in its pronunciation (though not necessarily in its tone, and this affects pronunciation) as the same word, “good”, at the line-ending two lines later. But in singing, Dylan can play what his voice may do (treat them very differently) against their staying the same: the word both is and is not the one that you heard a moment earlier. Or take “I don’t want to be hers, I want to be yours” (I Wanna Be Your Lover). On the page, no rhyme; in the song, “yers”, which both is and is not a persuasive retort to, or equivalent of, “hers”, both does and does not enjoy the same rights. The first rhyme in Got My Mind Made Up, long / wrong, has an effect that it could never have on the page, since Dylan sings “wrong” so differently from how he sang “long”. There is something very right about this, which depends upon comprehending the way in which the multimedia art of song differs from the page’s poetry.
Dylan's Visions of Sin Page 4