Dylan's Visions of Sin

by Christopher Ricks

  75 As against the affable warmth, the forget-it extravagance, in I Shall Be Free No. 10:

  Now I gotta friend who spends his life

  Stabbing my picture with a bowie-knife

  Dreams of strangling me with a scarf

  When my name comes up he pretends to barf

  I’ve got a million friends!

  76 Not Dark Yet: “I know it looks like I’m movin’ but I’m standin’ still”. This, as contemplation, not as confrontation.

  77 Press conference / interview with Ralph J. Gleason, Rolling Stone (14 December 1967, 20 January 1968).

  78 Paul Zollo, Songwriters on Songwriting (1997), p. 79. Zollo: “In your songs, like his [Guthrie’s], we know a real person is talking, with lines like, ‘You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend’.” Dylan: “That’s another way of writing a song, of course. Just talking to somebody that ain’t there. That’s the best way. That’s the truest way.”

  79 OED, 2b: “To deprive of the power of escape or resistance, as serpents are said to do through the terror produced by their look or merely by their perceived presence.”

  80 On a different occasion this would be a charge more likely to be pressed against another than against oneself. “I hurt easy, I just don’t show it / You can hurt someone and not even know it” (Things Have Changed). The rhyme reasons differently.

  81 See this page on the simply knotty lines in Hattie Carroll: “And handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance / William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence.”

  82 William James on the artist-entertainer Shakespeare:

  He seems to me to have been a professional amuser, in the first instance, with a productivity like that of a Dumas, or a Scribe; but possessing what no other amuser has possessed, a lyric splendor added to his rhetorical fluency, which has made people take him for a more essentially serious human being than he was. Neurotically and erotically, he was hyperaesthetic, with a playful graciousness of character never surpassed. He could be profoundly melancholy; but even then was controlled by his audience’s needs . . . Was there ever an author of such emotional importance whose reaction against false conventions of life was such an absolute zero as his?

  (To T. S. Perry, 22 May 1910, The Letters of William James, 1920, vol. II, see this page)

  William James’s love of Shakespeare: love minus “an absolute zero”. An interviewer asked Dylan: “Are you trying to say something when you write or are you just entertaining?” And he: “I’m just an entertainer, that’s all.” Sure. Los Angeles (16 December 1965); Bob Dylan in His Own Words, compiled by Miles (1978), p. 77.

  83 Preface to Shakespeare (1765).

  84 Thomas Campbell, Farewell to Love (1830).

  85 New Bearings in English Poetry (1932), see this page.

  86 In reply to Anthony Scaduto: “I told him once more that I would not delete the references to his family and Bob replied . . .” Bob Dylan (1971, revised edition 1973), see this page.

  87 See what a difference it makes when Scaduto, variously misquoting Positively 4th Street, does without “You’d know”: “There is no line in all pop music filled with more hate than the last line of the song, which sums it up: If you could stand in my shoes you’d see what a drag it is to be you.” Not “in my shoes”, but “inside”. Not “you’d see what a drag it is to be you”, but “You’d know what a drag it is / To see you” (Scaduto, Bob Dylan, see this page).

  88 Press conference / interview with Ralph J. Gleason, Rolling Stone (14 December 1967, 20 January 1968).

  89 Those for whom the friend sounds just like a woman could find support, albeit jokey, in the fact that the next song in Lyrics 1962–1985 (the previous one on Biograph), Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? (where “You” is assuredly a woman), can be heard to end, in the only released performance, with four lines not printed in Lyrics: “You got a lotta nerve / To say you are my friend / If you won’t come out your window / Yes come out your window”. Dylan is fooling around, but the guest-appearance of the first two lines there may say something about how to envisage the friend. Michael Gray mentions “the ‘Good Luck!’ that the woman is permitted to actually say”, following this with “she . . . her . . . her . . . her”, but a footnote now says: “I no longer assume the ‘you’ to be a woman” (Song and Dance Man III, 2000, see this page).

  90 Interview with Scott Cohen, Spin (December 1985).

  91 A student essay (not from the university where I teach): “Tragedy makes you cathart.”

  92 Note to Positively 4th Street in Biograph.

  93 “this land is your land & this land is my land – sure – but the world is run by those that never listen to music anyway” (Tarantula, 1966, 1971, see this page).

  94 There is poignancy in the contrast of the hotels (the Chelsea Hotel, recalled two thirds of the way through Sara, the St. James Hotel as the penultimate moment of Blind Willie McTell). Sara is a song that asked of Dylan not that he be himself (a true thing to be) but that he be autobiographically himself (which is less true to his genius and how it sees truths). This meant claims and disclaimers (“Sara, Sara, / You must forgive me my unworthiness”):

  I can still hear the sound of those Methodist bells

  I’d taken the cure and had just gotten through

  Stayin’ up for days in the Chelsea Hotel

  Writin’ “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” for you

  Granted, “Those Methodist bells” are other than “the undertaker’s bell”; Sara’s “arrow and bow”, two lines after “your door”, other than “the arrow on the doorpost”; “Wherever we travel”, other than “I traveled”; and “an old ship”, other than “slavery ships”. Nevertheless, “I’m gazing out the window / Of the St. James Hotel”, writing Blind Willie McTell for Blind Willie McTell. On Dylan, McTell, and the blues song St. James Infirmary and what it meant to McTell and others, see Michael Gray, Song and Dance Man III, chapter 15.

  95 Those of us who wonder about Dylan the ten-o’-clock-scholar may recall Milton, L’Allegro, 49–52:

  While the cock with lively din,

  Scatters the rear of darkness thin,

  And to the stack, or the barn door,

  Stoutly struts his dames before

  This, three lines after Milton’s “at my window”. McTell sang of the Atlanta Strut, and in Sugar Baby Dylan sings of “the Darktown Strut”.

  96 His pseudonym when recording in January 1963 with Richard Farin˜a and Eric von Schmidt.

  97 In performance he sometimes abbreviates, combining lines from the third and fourth verses into one verse. I wish that he didn’t exercise his prerogative just here.

  98 Rolling Stone (22 November 2001).

  99 Words and music by Abel Meeropol (“Lewis Allan”). See Nancy Kovaleff Baker, American Music, vol. 20 (Spring 2002).

  100 In his poem Doctrinal Point:

  Magnolias, for instance, when in bud,

  Are right in doing anything they can think of;

  ...

  Whether they burgeon, massed wax flames, or flare

  Plump spaced-out saints, in their gross prime, at prayer,

  Or leave the sooted branches bare

  To sag at tip from a sole blossom there

  They know no act that will not make them fair.

  They know no act that . . . I know no one can . . .

  101 “I paid ten shillings for a blind white horse” (or “for an old blind horse”), from “My mother said that I never should / Play with the gypsies in the wood” (The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, ed. Iona and Peter Opie, 1951, see this page).

  102 Quoted in the sleeve-notes to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. These were not included in the collected lyrics.

  103 Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1928).

  104 Encyclopaedia Britannica, eleventh edition.

  105 The Waste Land. Eliot’s preceding line has “Your arms full”; Dylan’s succeeding line has “a stick in his hand and a pocket full of money”. Michael G
ray is good on the cherry riddle that supplies both “a stick in his hand” and the money (a groat in the riddle), though I wish that he didn’t call the line from the riddle “this obscure, innocuous quotation” (Song and Dance Man III, p. 670).

  106 These are all from The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (1994, 1997–).

  107 The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang.

  108 For brandy / sugar candy, see The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, see this page:

  Over the water and over the lea,

  And over the water to Charley.

  Charley loves good ale and wine,

  And Charley loves good brandy,

  And Charley loves a pretty girl

  As sweet as sugar candy

  109 The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, see this page: “The cat’s in the well”.

  110 OED, a quotation from 1887, Handy-Bandy.

  111 The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, pp. 232–3:

  Handy spandy, Jack-a-Dandy,

  Loves plum cake and sugar candy;

  He bought some at a grocer’s shop,

  And out he came, hop, hop, hop, hop

  112 Song and Dance Man III, pp. 668–9. Furthermore, in The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes this riddle is on the page facing “Handy dandy, riddledy ro” (see this page), because of the alphabetical sequence “halls”, “handy”.

  113 Michael Gray, hard-boiled as ever, says “the solution is merely ‘an egg’” (merely, eh), and goes on to speak ill of the riddle and its “earthbound explanation for the break-in”: Dylan, praise be, “strips away the old Classical Greekery”, the “florid or portentous Victorian formalism”, the “vicarishly nineteenth-century versifying tone” and the “purring poesy”. Like Gray, I think Handy Dandy is terrific (though I find it scary, not “good-natured” or full of “refreshing sunlit glimpses”), but do we have to bad-mouth the egg riddle in order to good-mouth the song?

  114 Geoffrey Madan’s Notebooks, eds. J. A. Gere and John Sparrow (1981), see this page.

  115 Matthew 6.

  116 Samuel Butler’s Notebooks, eds. Geoffrey Keynes and Brian Hill (1951), see this page. Butler, in passing, tilts at The Whole Duty of Man, a devotional work from 1658.

  117 OED, 16e, “string: a continuous series of successes or of failures”. (A long string particularly proffers this, and Dylan sings the word “long” with relish.)

  118 “Socialism, hypnotism, patriotism, materialism”, he sings in No Time to Think, immediately following this with “Fools making laws for the breaking of jaws”. The Queensberry Rules in boxing, for the heavyweight champion?

  119 As printed in Lyrics 1962–1985, the last line of the penultimate verse had accommodated a “but” (“You may call me anything, but no matter what you say”), in anticipation of, and instead of, the start of the final refrain, but this is not what he sings.

  120 Samuel Butler’s Notebooks, see this page.

  121 In his edition of Poems and Ballads & Atalanta in Calydon (2000), Kenneth Haynes notes: “Dolores is Swinburne’s anti-madonna; her name derives from the phrase ‘Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows’.” The subtitle of Dolores is NOTRE-DAME DES SEPT DOULEURS.

  122 OED, 7b (a preparation of the metal, used in medicine), to be kept carefully separate from OED, 10b (the euphorbiaceous poisonous plant Mercurialis perennis).

  123 On the rhyme on “rhymes”, see this page.

  124 There are, for instance, four questions in lines 73–80, one of them tilting at credulous presumption: “What spells that they know not a word of”. Later (lines 393–6): “Who are we that embalm and embrace thee / With spices and savours of song? / What is time that his children should face thee? / What am I, that my lips do thee wrong?” Who among them . . .

  125 A unique colouring is given to this rhyme, since alone of these insistences that shape the song, this one picks up a preceding rhyming (with the word “kiss”, and its likeness to rhyming itself) from earlier in the verse: “The kings of Tyrus with their convict list / Are waiting in line for their geranium kiss / And you wouldn’t know it would happen like this / But who among them really wants just to kiss you?”, into “Who among them do you think could resist you?”

  126 Wilfred Mellers:

  Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands stands with Mr. Tambourine Man as perhaps the most insidiously haunting pop song of our time. It’s impossible to tell from the verses whether the Lady is a creature of dream or nightmare; but she’s beyond good and evil, as the cant phrase has it, only in the sense that the simple, hypnotic, even corny waltz tune contains, in its unexpected elongations of line, both fulfilment and regret. Mysteriously, the song also effaces Time. Though chronometrically it lasts nearly 20 minutes, it enters a mythological once-upon-a-time where the clock doesn’t tick.

  (Bob Dylan: A Retrospective, ed. Craig McGregor, p. 165)

  127 Poetry (September 1946); reprinted with a postscript, 1950, in Ezra Pound, ed. Peter Russell (1950).

  128 Song and Dance Man III, see this page.

  129 Swinburne (1920); Selected Essays (1932, 1951 edition), p. 324.

  130 Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir (1897), vol. I, see this page.

  131 OED, 1b, Tindale’s New Testament, 1525.

  132 The not-at-all ghostlike soul in Andrew Marvell’s A Dialogue between the Soul and Body complains of the bodily senses and of how they thwart it, poor soul: “Here blinded with an eye; and there / Deaf with the drumming of an ear, / A soul hung up, as ’twere, in chains / Of nerves, and arteries, and veins”.

  133 See Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. G. Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, vol. III, see this page and note; 13 April 1778.

  134 The snake is seen but not heard (“snake” goes unsung) in Man Gave Names to All the Animals.

  135 Odds and Ends, Million Dollar Bash, Goin’ to Acapulco, Lo and Behold!, Apple Suckling Tree, Please, Mrs. Henry, Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread, Tiny Montgomery.

  136 Samuel Butler, Hudibras, since you ask.

  137 When Theodore Roethke reads his poem The Sloth (1972), he hesitates as to the long or the short o.

  138 To Percy Withers; The Letters of A. E. Housman, ed. Henry Maas (1971), see this page.

  139 On rhymes on rhyme, see this page. For an edgy frictive rhyme of “lazy” with “crazy”, not relaxed at all this time around, see Handy Dandy, see this page.

  140 Through the Looking Glass, chapter VI.

  141 Not included in Lyrics 1962–1985 (1985), but in The Songs of Bob Dylan: from 1966 through 1975 (1976), sheet-music. The song-book for Self Portrait has at the end “Repeat 6 times and fade.” The women are not satisfied with a mere six.

  142 Roger Ford points out to me that the songwriting credits in the Self Portrait song-book are more explicit than those on the LP. Alberta #1: Revised Melody and Arrangement by Bob Dylan. Days of ’49: Revised Melody and New Music by Bob Dylan. All the Tired Horses: Words and Music by Bob Dylan. I learn, again from Roger Ford, that Donovan, Dylan’s imitator, had written and recorded (three years earlier) Writer in the Sun, with its “And here I sit, the retired writer in the sun” (Sunshine Superman).

  143 See this page, on Lay, Lady, Lay.

  144 Not that a responsible crossword would permit King’s, with its apostrophe, to count as a five-letter word.

  145 Desolation Row.

  146 Francis Paget on Accidie, quoted in George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book, ed. James Ramsden (2002), see this page. For an analysis of accidie, or acedia, its relations to sloth, and its refusal of God’s “gift of laughter”, see F. H. Buckley, The Morality of Laughter (2003), pp. 169–70. Clothes Line Saga both accepts and transmits the gift of comedy. Buckley: “The acedic may indeed be listless, for they lack a motive for action. With Kierkegaard, they simply can’t be bothered.” Dylan can be bothered, even as to those who can’t be.

  147 Released in 2002 on Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.

  148 On The Basement Tapes box, Dyl
an’s song was listed as Answer to Ode, not as Clothes Line or Clothes Line Saga. I learn all this from Roger Ford.

  149 Parodying Thomas Hood, The Bridge of Sighs, as Archie Burnett notes in The Poems of A. E. Housman (1997), p. 544.

  150 On Biograph, it is 4' 32'.

  151 Anthony Scaduto, Bob Dylan (1971, revised edition 1973), p. 194.

  152 Dylan sings “moaned” and “the best” on Biograph; as printed in Lyrics 1962–1985, “played” and “best”.

  153 See the lines from Barnes on see this page, delighting in such rhymes.

  154 The setting of Time Passes Slowly, where time “fades away”, might suggest “ready for to fade”, “there is no place I’m going to”, and “no one to meet” in Mr. Tambourine Man.

  155 The OED includes a reminder of the tambourine’s “use as a collecting dish”: “Will you kindly drop a shilling in my little tambourine”. Kipling’s Absent-Minded Beggar in hope of a shilling, Dylan’s “ragged clown behind / I wouldn’t pay it any mind”.

  156 See Boots of Spanish Leather and Mama, You Been on My Mind.

  157 New York Times (8 January 1978).

  158 Bob Dylan: Freedom and Responsibility, in Bob Dylan:A Retrospective, ed. Craig McGregor (1972), see this page.

  159 Abandoned Love, which mounts, like Mr. Tambourine Man, a parade. “I march in the parade of liberty”.

  160 Playboy (March 1966).

  161 Tarantula (1966, 1971), see this page.

  162 Ed. F. A. Wright (1948). It was first published in 1788, and Keats learnt much from it.

  163 W. K. Wimsatt used to give a lecture entitled Aristotle or Else. The scholar Gerald Else declined to be warned off.

  164 Gary Gilmore, a brutal murderer, is allowed by Norman Mailer the right to tell brutal truths: