find me / remind me
show me / know me
rock me / lock me
teach me / reach me
– after these:
Come baby, shake me, come baby, take me, I would be satisfied
Come baby, hold me, come baby, help me, my arms are open wide
I could be unraveling wherever I’m traveling, even to foreign shores
But I will always be emotionally yours
Shake me / take me: this is unexpected only in the benign impulse recognized in “shake” there. And unraveling / traveling: this is unexpected only in its sudden twinge of darkness. “As he lay unravelling in the agony of death, the standers-by could hear him say softly, ‘I have seen the glories of the world.’”63 But hold me / help me? How easily “Come baby, hold me” could have slid equably into “come baby, fold me”, with “my arms are open wide” simply waiting there to do the folding. But “Come baby, hold me, come baby, help me”: the rotating of “hold me” into that unexpected calm plea, at once central and at a tangent, “help me”. The turn has the poignancy of Christina Rossetti, who thanks the Lord For a Mercy Received:
Till now thy hand hath held me fast
Lord, help me, hold me, to the last.64
To the last. Will always be more-than-emotionally Yours. The thought lightens her darkness and ours.
In the lightness of a Doonesbury strip there was an exchange that enjoyed its comedy not exactly at Dylan’s expense (Jimmy Carter is the one who is quoted) but on his account:
– “An authentic American voice!” Can you beat that, Jim? I mean, I just want it to rhyme, man.
– Now he tells us.
Not so much “Now he tells us” as How he tells us, or rather How he does more than just tell us. Show and Tell. Anyway, Dylan himself has been happy to convey the ways in which rhyme, among the many things that it can be, can be fun.
Is rhyming fun for you?
“Well, it can be, but you know, it’s a game. You know, you sit around . . . It gives you a thrill. It gives you a thrill to rhyme something you might think, well, that’s never been rhymed before.”65
an’ new ideas that haven’t been wrote
an’ new words t’ fit into rhyme
(if it rhymes, it rhymes
if it don’t, it don’t
if it comes, it comes
if it won’t, it won’t)66
Robert Shelton had recourse to a rhyme of a sort when he put it that “Dylan pretends to know more about freight trains than quatrains.” Dylan, years later, spoke of what he knows:
“As you get older, you get smarter and that can hinder you because you try to gain control over the creative impulse. Creativity is not like a freight train going down the tracks. It’s something that has to be caressed and treated with a great deal of respect. If your mind is intellectually in the way, it will stop you. You’ve got to program your brain not to think too much.”
And how do you do that?
“Go out with the bird dogs.”67
What is at issue is not pretence but premeditation. Dylan is conscious of how much needs to be done by the unconscious or subconscious.
Still staying in the unconscious frame of mind, you can pull yourself out and throw up two rhymes first and work it back. You get the rhymes first and work it back and then see if you make it make sense in another kind of way. You can still stay in the unconscious frame of mind to pull it off, which is the state of mind you have to be in anyway.68
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, the aphorist and sage, believed that artists both do and do not know what they are doing, and that their works are even wiser than they are. “The metaphor is much more subtle than its inventor.”69
There’s a lyric in “License to Kill”: “Man has invented his doom / First step was touching the moon”. Do you really believe that?
“Yeah, I do. I have no idea why I wrote that line, but on some level, it’s just like a door into the unknown.”70
The Sins
Envy
Song to Woody
It would have been only too human for Bob Dylan at nineteen to envy Woody Guthrie. His fame, for a start, and (not the same) the sheer respect in which Guthrie was held, his staunch stamina, his being an icon who wouldn’t have had any truck with such a self-conscious word and who had not let himself become an idol. Enviable. Inevitably open, therefore, on a bad day, to competitive petulance.
For ’tis all one to courage high,
The emulous or enemy.71
And yet not so. Truly high courage knows the difference between emulation and its enemy, envy. Dylan was sufficiently secure of his genius, even at the very start, to be able to rise above envy, rising to the occasion that was so much more than an occasion only.
Song to Woody is one of only two songs written by Dylan himself on his first album. (If the song had been called Song for Woody, it would not be the same, would be in danger of mildly conceited cadging as against a tribute at a respectful distance.) The other song by Dylan on the album, Talking New York, also paid tribute to “a very great man”,72 and didn’t even need to tell you that it was again Woody Guthrie to whom Dylan was showing gratitude. Talking New York brings home that there was not all that much to be grateful for, back then, when it was early days:
Well, I got a harmonica job, begun to play
Blowin’ my lungs out for a dollar a day
I blowed inside out and upside down
The man there said he loved m’ sound
He was ravin’ about he loved m’ sound
Dollar a day’s worth
But Song to Woody appreciates a life’s worth, and it knows about gratitude: that, for a start, gratitude is the due of Woody Guthrie, and not of him alone. That to give gratitude is to be the richer, not the poorer, for the giving. And that it is gratitude that sees through and sees off envy. Gratitude is the sublime sublimation of envy. Meanwhile, all this is of course easier said than done. Or, if your doing takes the form of the art of song, easier said than sung. For there is, from the very start, a challenge about how you are going to end any expression of gratitude. The expression of it has to end without ever suggesting for a final moment that the feeling itself has come to an end. The song, like everything human, will have to end, but not because gratitude has ceased.
SONG TO WOODY
I’m out here a thousand miles from my home
Walkin’ a road other men have gone down
I’m seein’ your world of people and things
Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings
Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song
’Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along
Seems sick an’ it’s hungry, it’s tired and it’s torn
It looks like it’s a-dyin’ an’ it’s hardly been born
Hey, Woody Guthrie, but I know that you know
All the things that I’m a-sayin’ an’ a-many times more
I’m a-singin’ you the song, but I can’t sing enough
’Cause there’s not many men ’ve done the things that you’ve done
Here’s to Cisco an’ Sonny an’ Leadbelly too
An’ to all the good people that traveled with you
Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind
I’m a-leavin’ tomorrow, but I could leave today
Somewhere down the road someday
The very last thing that I’d want to do
Is to say I’ve been hittin’ some hard travelin’ too
How do we sense that the final verse of this simple (far from easy) song is to be the final verse, without there being a cadging nudge? Things would be different on the printed page, because your eye can see that you’re reading the last lines, whereas your ear can’t in the same way hear that it is hearing them.73
You sense that the end is imminent because the song turns back to the beginning (gratitude is a virtuous circle, not
a vicious one): the opening words of the final verse, “I’m a-leavin’”, recall the opening of the first verse, “I’m out here”, passing back through – though not passing over – the hailing that heartens the three central verses of the song: “Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie”, “Hey, Woody Guthrie”, “Here’s to Cisco . . . Here’s to the hearts and the hands . . .”.
And there are other intimations that the song, which is not going to quit, is about to leave. For instance, the second line of the first verse, “Walkin’ a road other men have gone down”, is glimpsed in the vista of the second line of this final verse, “Somewhere down the road someday”. Again, this feels like the final verse because of the announcement “I’m a-leavin’ tomorrow” – and yet not obdurately the last verse since it does go on immediately “but I could leave today”, so there may or may not be a little time in hand. The rhyme today / someday has a stranded feeling, reluctant to leave (-day after -day), especially when combined with the wistful effect in the move from the beginning to the end of the line: “Somewhere down the road someday”.
Added to all of which, it feels truly like the last verse, because in the sentence that makes up these two lines (the penultimate line and then the last line) the song concedes what it needs to:
The very last thing that I’d want to do
Is to say I’ve been hittin’ some hard travelin’ too
The singer (the young Dylan, yes, but the point is art, not autobiographical application) is truthful and rueful: I wouldn’t want even to seem to upstage you or pretend that I’ve had your life’s experiences, including the hard travelling of the hard old days. Hard, though, my disclaimer, for I do have some claim to share things with you, don’t I? And then “The very last thing” turns out to be almost the very last thing in the song: that is, it opens the very last sentence of the song but it does not close the song. For the very last line of the song is not where those words occur.
This is an arc completed, not a feeling vacated. Our mind is tipped off – through Dylan’s play with the phrase “The very last thing” – and so is our ear: for this is the first time, the only time, then, that a rhyme has returned in the song: too / you in the one but last verse, and then do / too in these very last lines. (“Travelin’ too”: the word has itself travelled on from the previous stanza: “that traveled with you”.)
I’m a-singin’ you the song, but I can’t sing enough
’Cause there’s not many men ’ve done the things that you’ve done
– so Dylan sings, finding a way of making this truth of gratitude’s benign insatiability ring true. Some of the tribute’s authenticity, and its being so entirely an envy-free zone, must come from the reluctance to make an inordinate claim even for the singer whom you are honouring, audible in “not many men”. Any men, really, when it comes to the world that Dylan is evoking? Let us leave it at not many men.
“Walkin’ a road other men have gone down”: and other men than both Guthrie and Dylan are to be the beneficiaries of the song’s gratitude. Not only as being thanked both personally and on behalf of us all, but because of the nature of gratitude itself, which appreciates – even in the moment when it is grateful to genius – that genius is not solitary and can thrive only because of all the others that keep it company, “all the good people” that travel with it – and with the rest of us.
Here’s to Cisco an’ Sonny an’ Leadbelly too
An’ to all the good people that traveled with you
This is full of respect, even while the names themselves are duly differentiated: Cisco Houston, Sonny Terry, and Leadbelly are spoken of famously and familiarly, though not impudently. Woody Guthrie is Woody in the title, Song to Woody, but in the song proper he is treated with a propriety that is saved from being too deferential by the affectionately chaffing lead-in: “Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song” (that might seem cheeky of young me, but honestly it isn’t), and
Hey, Woody Guthrie, but I know that you know
All the things that I’m a-sayin’ an’ a-many times more
That is quite something to say, and to sing, and it asks – as art, I mean, not as a personal plea – a substantiated trust that we will take it in the spirit in which it is offered: not as false modesty but as true tribute. For the song has not moved, as it so easily might have done, from the words of the first verse, “I’m seein’ your world”, to something along the lines of “Now I’m goin’ to show you my world”, but to a world that is neither yours, Woody Guthrie, nor mine (as yet . . .), “a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along”. And “I know that you know” can, on this happy unenvious occasion, have nothing of the icy negation of Positively 4th Street with its soured repetition of the word “know”. No?
Positively 4th Street
If you want your good book to get a bad review, have a friend review it. Envy has a way, regrettably and even regretfully, of rearing its sore head. Of course friendship thinks of itself as the enemy of envy, but then there is nothing more embitteredly envious than a friendship betrayed.
You got a lotta nerve
To say you are my friend
When I was down
You just stood there grinning
You got a lotta nerve
To say you got a helping hand to lend
You just want to be on
The side that’s winning
But if there had always been positively no two-way street, they wouldn’t now be standing in this acid rain.
For friendship (and Positively 4th Street has to be a song about a friendship that went wrong, that soured) differs most of all from love in this: that friendship has to be reciprocal, reciprocated. I can love you without your loving me, but I can’t be your friend without your being my friend. (My befriending you is something quite other.) “You just want to be on / The side that’s winning”? Careering into envy, are you? The song itself is concentratedly one-sided, and from the very beginning it makes clear that it is going to strike unrelentingly the same note and the same target.
This starts with the immediately metallic rhyme within “You got a lotta nerve”. (Nerve as impudence, but with nerves tautly a-quiver in every arrow-strung line.) Then there’s the re-insistence, promptly, of the entire line repeated, “You got a lotta nerve”, same timing, same placing, pounding with the same instrument – and this with the very next line then saying yet once more “you got a”. (Helping hand to lend? You must be joking.) At once obsessedly repetitive and laconically flat-tongued, the song is a masterpiece of regulated hatred – the great phrase for the key-cold clarity (not charity) of Jane Austen.74 The fire next time, maybe, but the ice this time. Anyway, revenge is a dishing-it-out that is best eaten cold.75
Impact impinges. Repeatedly. The song exercises its sway while swaying (like a boxer), for it has an extraordinary sense of powerfully moving while threateningly not moving.76 “You just stood there grinning”: the song just stands there, not grinning, but grinding. Might it even be said to just stomp there? No, because it bobs a bout. So when we suddenly find (it is a surprise) “surprised” precipitating “paralyzed” –
You see me on the street
You always act surprised
You say, “How are you?” “Good luck”
But you don’t mean it
When you know as well as me
You’d rather see me paralyzed
Why don’t you just come out once
And scream it
– it is that the song has realized its power, tonic and toxic, to paralyze its opponent.
“You say, ‘How are you?’ ‘Good luck’”. Disarming? No, and Dylan declines to lower his guard. For luck invites envy, as is understood in Idiot Wind:
She inherited a million bucks and when she died it came to me
I can’t help it if I’m lucky
You can’t be blamed for being lucky – but you can be disliked for it, and you are likely to be envied for it. All you can do is shrug and propitiate (“I can’t help it if I’m lucky�
�). It was good of Dylan to wish us well at the end of an interview in 1965:
Is there anything in addition to your songs that you want to say to people?
“Good luck!”
You don’t say that in your songs.
“Oh, yes I do; every song tails off with, ‘Good Luck – I hope you make it.’”77
It is a nice thought that every Dylan song tails off with “Good Luck” to those of us who are listening to it, but what about those whom the song addresses as you?78 Positively 4th Street does not tail off, it heads off, and in any case it does not tail off with “Good Luck” to its interluckitor. Dylan’s farewell in the interview has a cadence that is illuminatingly close to the wording of the cited farewell in this song from the very same year.
“Good Luck – I hope you make it”
“Good luck”
But you don’t mean it
The feeling of paralysis (the root notion of fascination79) is a consequence of the counterpointing – or counterpunching – of the units musical and verbal. Musically, the unit is of four lines, but verbally (as lyrics) the unit has a rhyme scheme that extends over eight lines. Positively 4th and 8th. The effect is of a sequence that both is and is not intensely repetitive. So while musically the song is in twelve verses, rhymingly it is in six. The armour-plated template in each set is simply the rhyming of lines two and six, and of lines four and eight. But Dylan, as so often, loves not only to attend but to bend his attention, and so to intensify, and what we hear within those first eight lines is the not-letting-go of any of the first four lines: “nerve” is repeated in the fifth line, the whole line back again as though in a lethal litany; “lend” takes up “friend”; “on” off-rhymes with “down”; and “winning” is in a clinch with “grinning”. (All the more a clinch in that the final rhyme, here as throughout, is a disyllabic rhyme, all the way from this grinning / winning to the final be you / see you.) As though on probation, not one line of the first four is let off its obligation to report back during the ensuing four.
Whereupon the next set can afford to relax, as though the template should be enough for now (that / at, and show it / know it), yet not quite enough, since Dylan threateningly dandles a rhyme-line from the first verse, whose “When I was down” immediately gets re-charged here:
Dylan's Visions of Sin Page 6