The Best American Poetry

"The Dylan Watch" (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

 Highway 61 Revisited: Bob Dylan's Road from Minnesota to the World. Colleen J. Sheehy and Thomas Swiss, Editors. University of Minnesota Press, 2009. $22.95.

This is an uncommonly intelligent collection of 20 essays about Bob Dylan's origins and influence. Some readers will wish that a more discernible thematic thread ran through the book, but no serious Dylan reader will be disappointed in the scope or quality of the material.

The book is dedicated to B.J. Rolfzen, Dylan's influential high school English teacher. Greil Marcus' opening essay is a model of good writing about Dylan. Rolfzen, it is clear, loved poetry. He once told me, "I used to read names on tombstones and repeat the names in claass. I liked the sound of the names." Marcus mentions a paper Dylan wrote about The Grapes of Wrath. Rolfzen told me he gave Dylan a "B" and still regrets it. Anyone who wishes to see Rolfzen in action should view Mary Feidt's wonderful documentary Tangled Up in Bob.

There is an intriguing article by Anne Waldman on Dylan's relationship to the Beat poets. Waldman and Allen Ginsberg were among those who accompanied Dylan on the Rolling Thunder Revue.

Robert Polito has a suggestive, even eye-opening, examination of "the folk process," a euphemism for stealing. Polito looks at the materials Dylan took from others and inserted into his own work to create songs in which the past and the present mingled.

There are four essays that connect Dylan to race in America. There is a wider point to be made here, one that might have been included in a more expansive approach to Dylan and otherness. Dylan saw African-Americans as only one group of others he was drawn to explore. He famously looked at other religions. In the very album from which the book's title is taken, Dylan examined his feminine side.

David Yaffe's essay reviewing Dylan's connection to race is particularly compelling. Yaffe ends his essay with a revelatory pun tying together Dylan's fascination with blackness in America and a song title from his album Time Out of Mind. Seeking a summary of Dylan and race, Yaffe writes: "He's not dark yet, but he's getting there."

This book asks new questions and, most significantly, amply illustrates that Dylan scholarship can be lively without being trivial and serious without being pedantic.

"The Dylan Watch" (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

In this post, I want to offer an alternative way of viewing three songs on Dylan’s album Highway 61 Revisited. Those songs can be seen as a dialogue between different parts of Dylan’s self.

Many interpreters understandably consider "Like A Rolling Stone" as a mockery of some woman. Candidates have included the pop actress Edie Sedgwick, Joan Baez, and others. But, especially in the context of other songs on the album, it is also possible to view the song in another way completely.

This alternative interpretation is that a new creative part of Dylan, formed by a reaction to maddening internal confusion and the roar of demands from the world, is angrily snarling and singing to the old Dylan, the one who was sure of himself and clear about his identity as king of the folk singers.

What makes the song particularly intriguing is that the new Dylan refers to the old Dylan as a woman. The old Dylan is "Miss Lonely." Why a woman? One interpretation is that this newer creative self sees self itself as fragmented and is allowing one part of the self to explore another. Additionally, within a self are all sorts of “others” that the uncreative self suppresses. So the new self notes the existence of a feminine side.

In one verse, the new Dylan sings to the old Dylan about Albert Grossman. Dylan's enigmatic manager is called his "diplomat" in the verse, and the concluding line is about Grossman's supposed taking of Dylan's money:

You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
Ain't it hard when you discover that
He really wasn't where it's at
After he took from you everything he could steal.

At the end of the song, Dylan pleads with his former self to go see someone who used to amuse him with language: 

You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can't refuse

Who is “Napoleon in rags”? He is Dylan (the “Napoleon” of singers) before the fame and before the money, when he lived in “rags” but was pleased with himself, when he was excited by his bursts of creative language, a Dylan driven by artistic motives not business interests.

In 1970, Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston interviewed Dylan and asked about the identity of Queen Jane in the song "Queen Jane Approximately." Dylan answered in what must have appeared to be one of his whimsical and nonsensical responses. He said: "Queen Jane is a man." But he was having fun with them by sneaking in the truth in a barrage of evasive responses.

In the song, the new Dylan is speaking to the old Dylan, again represented as a woman. In this case the king of folk music is appropriately a Queen. The "approximately" in the song’s title is there because such a feminine representation is not precisely his former self. The speaker mentions the exhaustion Dylan must feel about his self and his songs ("you're tired of yourself and all of your creations") and the anguished folk crowds angry that he is not singing protest songs ("all of your children start to resent you"). The speaker then invites "Queen Jane" to see him, to get away from the “bandits” in the commercial world in which “Queen Jane” lives out a musical life. The speaker is Dylan’s untainted creative self urging the successful Dylan to return.

Dylan’s dialogues with his self continue in another way on the album in "Ballad of a Thin Man."

Most critics see the song as an attack on journalists, who don't understand Dylan at all but continue to write about him. This is certainly plausible--especially considering the mention of a pencil in the first verse--but the song seen in its entirety leads to a very different interpretation.

In this interpretation, the new genuine and creative Dylan calls the old, confused Dylan “Mr. Jones” and sees him as someone who doesn’t understand the homosexuality around him and is confounded by it. The language of the song is filled with very explicit gay imagery:

Well, the sword swallower, he comes up to you
And then he kneels.
He crosses himself
And then he clicks his high heels
And without further notice
He asks you how it feels
And he says: "Here is your throat back
Thanks for the loan."

Given this imagery, it is more sensible to understand the "bone" the geek hands Mr. Jones and the "pencil" in Mr. Jones' hand as he walks into the room as phallic images.

The new Dylan is angry at the old Dylan for not understanding what is happening to him, for not comprehending the warping of his own creative core, the part of himself that was genuinely thrilled by the creative possibilities of combining language and music. The song is a cry from within mourning for what has happened to that part of Dylan’s self.

"The Dylan Watch" (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

This is the story, so far as I know never told, of Bob Dylan's first meeting with Woody Guthrie. I tell it now in honor of Dylan's new album and in memory of Mark Eastman, the man who told me the story and who died on October 4, 2008. I cannot verify the facts, so I will let readers decide for themselves.

Heading to New York for the first time, Dylan found his way first to Madison, Wisconsin and then to Chicago. Once there, Dylan headed immediately to see Kevin Krown. The two had met in the summer of 1960 in Central City, Colorado, and Krown had told Dylan to stop by if he was ever in Chicago.

Mark Eastman was a friend of Krown's. Eastman recalled that Dylan arrived at a dorm in Chicago looking like a "lost soul carrying a guitar." He was very shy, Eastman said. "He seemed like a little lost boy, with a frail quality, like he couldn't cook a cup of soup. He was in constant motion."

At some point, Dylan, Krown, and Eastman determined to head east to meet Woody Guthrie, and they did so several weeks later. Eastman and Krown hitchhiked to New York, and Dylan got a ride in a '57 Impala. Krown had a friend who had a vacant apartment in midtown, and the people said they could stay there. The three--and a fourth person whose name Eastman didn't recall--met at the apartment.

Dylan probably arrived sometime after the snowstorm on January 20, 1961. Eastman recalled there was snow on the ground when he got there and that he would have gone to New York on Fridays and weekends. Therefore, Dylan most likely arrived in New York on Friday, January 27th.

On the day after they got to New York, Dylan, Krown, Eastman, and the mysterious fourth person took a bus trip of about an hour and a half to Greystone Hospital to visit Woody Guthrie. Eastman said, "We walked into the floor where someone asked for Woody." There were "chairs along the wall, attendants in green mopping the floor." Eastman looked at the patients wandering around and felt depressed. "We sat down on some chairs in the corner of the room. Finally an attendant walked out with Woody, whose body was bent in strange angles. He almost looked like a prisoner from Auschwitz. However, he seemed happy and excited to have company. It was hard to understand Woody. Dylan played him some songs. Woody was very interested. He really bonded with Dylan. It seemed as if everyone present paid attention and felt that something significant was happening. The mopping of the floor stopped. I remember Woody asking the attendant to bring out how own guitar. Somehow even under the terrible weight of the crippling effects of Huntington's disease, Woody hammered out some chords to This Land is Your Land, and Bob and he sang the song together.

"As we were getting ready to leave, Woody wrote a few words for each of us." Eastman couldn't recall all the words Woody wrote on his. From other evidence, it seems that on Dylan's Woody wrote, "I ain't dead yet."

Eastman continued his story: "That evening we went to a party in Greenwich Village near NYU. Dylan played a couple of songs, but he wanted to leave. So he and I left and walked down the street [MacDougal] and went into The Commons or some other club. Dylan convinced the guy to let him play and a basket was passed around." The Commons, later named the Fat Black Pussycat, is the most likely place they went.

Bob Dylan had arrived.

"The Dylan Watch" (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Bob Dylan is on what must seem to him to be  be an ever-quickening nonstop journey to his next birthday. He'll be 68 on May 24th. Such an age might prompt him to consider retirement. But age seems to have sped up his pace, as though some hyper-awareness of the ever-reducing time he has left requires a defiant burst of creative activity. But then throughout his career the palpable presence of death-- sometimes menacing, sometimes alluring--has always brought out his fiercest yearning for creation. It still does. He has a new album coming out later this month. He's working on a second volume of his memoirs. He tours as though on a mission.

Why does he keep going? I'd like to believe he's trying to demonstrate that artistry endures through life, that behind his weathered face and dissipated voice is a soul that still houses a yearning youth with a fire in every vein. And if he doesn't quite have the agility of youth, he has the cagey mind of the experienced and determined.

In his youth the flashing images burning in his mind found their way into memorable songs during extraordinary moments in social history. He changed the age enough so that he now paces nervously in the penthouse of what Leonard Cohen has called the "Tower of Song." It's enough for several lives. But Dylan never did like limits imposed on him. He wants to see just how far the human spirit can stretch, to explore all the still dark corners of his seemingly boundless mind.

So others can sum up his achievements. I want him to rage against the dying of the lyric. I hope when he's 120 he'll be refusing interviews and be pessimistic about the world and still be struggling to find love.

For him, there are always the songs. Art is all that lasts. That's the love that won't desert him, won't be faithless, won't break his heart with slick words or empty promises. And so Dylan the artist won't stop looking for ways to produce that art. For him the rest is very far from silence.

"The Dylan Watch" (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Clinton Heylin is the author of Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, which I find the most useful of all the Dylan biographies. Among his other groundbreaking books, Heylin took on the jaw-dropping task of compiling a day-by-day Dylan chronology through the mid 90s and detailing Dylan's recording sessions through 1994. Heylin has made a compelling case to be considered the best Dylan researcher in the world.

In his new book, Revolution in the Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan, 1957-1973 (Chicago Review Press), Heylin discusses Dylan's first 300 songs. The book is informative on every page. The songs are placed in the order in which they were written, not released. When the information is available, Heylin lists where the lyric for each song is published, its first known performance,and studio recordings and then offers some background and assessment. In many cases, the songs are either rumors or barely-known, such as the first song in the collection "Song to Brigit" written, according to guesswork, when Dylan was 15. Here is where Heylin shines, unearthing valuable information and compiling it in a way that makes the book an indispensable reference work for anyone seriously interested in Dylan.

I do have some quibbles with the book. I don't like Heylin's unpleasant penchant for denigrating other Dylan researchers. I wish that some of the songs were accompanied by more complete or revealing stories. For example, Heylin notes that Dylan wrote Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues in one night after Noel Stookey (Paul of Peter, Paul & Mary) showed him a newspaper story. But there's an important addition to the story. Stookey told me that it was because Dylan could write such a song and not just sing traditional songs that Stookey told Albert Grossman, his manager and soon Dylan's, to keep an eye on the young man. Similarly, there's more interesting material about "Blowin' in the Wind" than presented here. I differ with some of Heylin's analyses. I find him too willing to conclude that Dylan was simply after a feeling, an assertion that renders analysis at best useless and at worst an interference with the purity of the feeling.

But these are good kinds of arguments to have with a book. Heylin is himself argumentative, so he invites such wrestling with his work. What's important is that the book makes the wrestling worthwhile.

"The Dylan Watch" (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

In a recent comment, David Lehman asked about Dylan's relationship with Archibald MacLeish. In Chronicles, his autobiography, Dylan reported that he had just returned from his father's funeral when he found a letter from MacLeish asking him to write some songs for a new play. The play was Scratch, an adaptation of Benet's story, "The Devil and Daniel Webster." Since Dylan's father died on June 5, 1968, it was sometime after that when Dylan and his wife drove from Woodstock to Massachusetts to see "Archie," as Dylan called the poet, someone he thought at the heights of American poetry.

The meeting itself did not go all that well. MacLeish did most of the talking. He was respectful and careful to mention that he thought Dylan a serious poet. But Dylan must have been shocked to discover that MacLeish still thought of him as a protest singer. Dylan immediately grasped that there would be no artistic relationship, although he did end up writing three songs for the play: "Father of Night," "Time Passes Slowly," and "New Morning." They didn't work for the show, which, Dylan wryly noted, closed after two days.

   
photo by Ken Regan, 1975

At least the meeting went better than the one Dylan had with Carl Sandburg in February 1964. The poet wouldn't let Dylan past the porch of his ranch in Hendersonville, N.C. In the twenty minutes Sandburg gave him, the poet said he had not even heard of Dylan. And Dylan tried to meet other poets as well, especially the Beats. Dylan was particularly taken with Allen Ginsberg, whom he had first met on December 26, 1963. Dylan liked Ginsberg, who lived outside the rules of society, was naive in his idealism, and didn't try to use Dylan. He let Dylan be himself. He was kind.

It is easy to suggest that Dylan wanted to meet famous poets because they had the authority to grant him, by association, an authentic poetic identity. But I think there was a deeper reason for his interest. Dylan was in search of models and mentors. He had to be overwhelmed by his own talent and by the reaction to it. He needed to speak with people who had the same sort of access to language he did. There weren't many people with as congenial a relationship to English who had also achieved widespread recognition. Only they could help him understand how an artist survives and deals with fame. Sandburg wouldn't listen. MacLeish couldn't understand. Only Ginsberg among the poets was a genuine teacher, someone who had an intense intelligence combined with a willingness to listen and take seriously what others said. He gave Dylan an education. He helped Dylan acquire a secure sense of what a poetic self was and the way to maintain the integrity of that self in a very strange world.

The Dylan Watch (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

    In "Red River Shore," Dylan sings of a wise woman he wanted to wed who offered him the best advice she had: "Go home and lead a quiet life." Whether real or symbolic, the woman's advice must have been considered close to sacred.

   But what is "a quiet life"? The term is often used spiritually to mean a life apart from the wicked world, a life that sees politics as unable to overcome the tragic flaws of human nature, and so a life without faith in politics but rather in artistic creation or the redemption offered by God or both.

    "A quiet life" had undeniable virtues for Dylan. It is a life that provides escape from the expectations of crowds, managers, critics, and fans. It is a life in which failed marriages, failed loves, failed friendships, and failed songs swirl into meaningless and are replaced by a divine presence, relationship, and life that has supreme meaning and is supremely safe.

    However, the arc of Dylan's career doesn't lead from intense social involvement and a quest for fame to social isolation. There is a constant tension, as if the need to express an opinion and the need for fame were at one end of the spectrum with the need for anonymity at the other with Dylan rushing passionately between the two, as if trying to prove Frost wrong, that he can go down two roads simultaneously.

    And Dylan has been lucky when he rushed back toward fame. He has retained his audience and critical support, his health, and his determination. Not everyone famous, though, wanted to leave fame and then return to it. Greta Garbo is perhaps the most famous of the well-known in search of a quiet life, although she didn't say what is often ascribed to her. Instead of "I want to be alone," she said, "I want to be let alone," which is less about becoming a hermit and more about the exhaustions of fame. But my favorite example is Gardner McKay, a television actor in the 1960s show Adventures in Paradise. After three years, McKay voluntarily left 20th Century Fox. Marilyn Monroe wanted the handsome actor to star with her in a film, a role that would have offered enormous fame. McKay declined. He ended up as an agronomist's assistant in the Amazon rain forest and died in 20001.

    Dylan's retreats to the quiet life were often hardly quiet. Highway 61 Revisited was a very public struggle to find hidden selves separate from the identity fame had given him. He has not given up touring or making records or painting or writing. He seems to need both the recognition and the quiet.

    Of course, he has written extensively about the quietest of lives. The anticipation of death has been on his mind constantly from the very beginning of his writing career. Maybe Heaven was the "home" the woman from the Red River Shore invited him to inhabit.

The Dylan Watch (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

    This is a post about Bob Dylan and Judaism.

    Were Dylan more of an ordinary person, an ordinary analysis might suffice. Such an analysis would include the normally revealing facts that Robert Zimmerman was born to Jewish parents, raised as a Jew, given a lavish Bar Mitzvah, and attended Camp Herzl in Webster, Wisconsin for four consecutive summers, from 1954-1958. As the camp's name suggests, it was Zionist, no surprise given that both Zimmerman parents were active in Jewish organizations. When Bobby Zimmerman first went to the University of Minnesota he stayed at the house of a Jewish fraternity, Sigma Alpha Mu. His first marriage was to a Jewish woman. He visited Israel's Western Wall and reportedly sought to live on a kibbutz. He remains connected to the Lubavitch movement.

    Dylan, that is, sounds like a middle-class Jewish success story, that of a man who, because of his enormous talent and hard work, was on extraordinarily intimate terms with both America's musical traditions and the English language. But there was also an inner religious torment unnoticed by the surface analysis. All minority group members must navigate the general human struggles of maturing, but minorities must add sometimes multiple struggles about such issues as self-acceptance and desiring the sometimes contradictory goals of acceptance by a wider group and maintaining the born self. Bobby Zimmerman's self-administered ethnotherapy was to develop an American self, "Bob Dylan."

    It would be cheap and easy to claim that Dylan's religious search came solely because his efforts to deal with anti-Semitism and minority status led at one point to his dealing with what he saw as the contradictions of being both Jewish and American by denying his Jewish self and fiercely embracing some sort of fundamentalist Christianty. Dylan's religious search was genuine. He deserves to have his quest taken seriously. But, ultimately, his attachment to Christianity was as problematic for him as his attachment to Judaism.

    It is not possible to say precisely what his religion is, or what mixture it is, or what its shape is. All we can say is that Dylan orients his life toward a sacred reality. He seems to feel a personal, direct relationship to God, perhaps even to have "conversations" with God. He seems to feel guided by God, blessed by God, and morally indebted to God.

    The ancient Israelites introduced the world to the idea of a single, personal, moral God. In that basic sense, Dylan is certainly Jewish. Additionally, the word "Israel" means someone who wrestles with God, not someone who obeys God or even believes in God. Has anyone more publicly wrestled with God than Bob Dylan? The wrestling has sometimes produced untraditional and even questionable results, but no one can doubt that it has also produced an enduring and uniquely magnificent body of art.

The Dylan Watch (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

William Zantzinger died on January 3rd, almost 46 years after he was held responsible for the February 9, 1963 death of an African-American barmaid named Hattie Carroll. Bob Dylan transformed Zantzinger into a national villain and a symbol of why a civil rights revolution was needed. Dylan's memorable song "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" was recorded on October 23, 1963 and released on January 13, 1964 on his album The Times They Are a-Changin'.

However vicious, repulsive, racist, and cruel Zantzinger may have been, the facts of Hattie Carroll's death don't completely cohere with the way the song presents them. Zantzinger was at a fancy event dressed up and carrying a toy cane. According to news reports, a drunken Zantzinger hit several employees with the cane and repeatedly used racially derogatory words. At one point he went to the bar and asked Hattie Carroll for a drink. She was evidently too slow for him, and he began calling her racially insulting names and hitting her on the shoulder with the cane. Carroll, whose heart was enlarged and who had hypertension, went to the kitchen. She left and later collapsed and died of a stroke. The medical examiner thought Zantzinger's nasty language had bothered her as the caning. A three-judge panel concluded that the caning itself could not have caused her death and so reduced the charges to manslaughter. Zantzinger was sentenced to six months in jail. In the song, Zantzinger's sentence has much to do with Zantginger's high political connections. In fact, his father had served a single term as a state legislator and been on the Maryland Planning Commission.

Writing for the January 26, 2009 issue of The New Yorker, David Simon (creator of The Wire) notes that he interviewed Zantzinger 25 years after the death. The most interesting part of the interview is that Zantzinger claims he was going to sue Dylan. He told Simon, "Scared that boy good." Zantzinger claimed his lawyer had contacted both Dylan and Columbia Records but refrained from the suit because Zantzinger had had enough of courtrooms.

But there is a lingering question. It was just about the time of the album's release and its immediate aftermath--the very time that Zantzinger's lawyers would most likely have threatened Columbia and Dylan with a lawsuit--that Dylan began to move away from explicitly political songs.

His reasons for doing so--the desire to explore the personal and a refusal to be owned by any movement--continue to make the most sense, and there is no reason to conclude Dylan ever lacked courage or felt legally or artistically threatened by a possible lawsuit. Indeed, Dylan was always a particularly courageous artist. But it would be interesting to see Columbia's legal file on the matter. And I wonder if the realization that the political songs could not be written without sometimes getting a nasty reaction and potential confrontation also contributed in some way to Dylan's move away from those explicitly political songs.

The Dylan Watch (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Bob Dylan had the "honor" of having his music be the subject of the first bootleg album in rock history. "Bootlegs" are albums or CDs that include music their artists or companies did not want to release yet or at all. The term "bootleg" probably derives from selling illegal whiskey which was sometimes hidden in the leg of a boot. "Bootlegs" are not pirated music, that is cheap copies of material that is commercially available.

In July 1969, two long-haired men in Los Angeles created The Great White Wonder. The men were known by various names, especially Ken and Dub, although in a Rolling Stone story, they called themselves Patrick and Vladimir. (When asked by the reporter to spell the name, "Vladimir' changed his name to Merlin.) The two created the TMQ ("Trademark of Quality") label and found 26 examples of unreleased Dylan material from various sources. The album itself had a blank, white gatefold cover. The album labels were white and blank. The copy I saw in 1969 did not have the title on the cover, but everyone knew the name.

The first and third sides of the albums included 12 songs and four cuts of Dylan talking. This material was taken from a tape made on December 22, 1961 in the Minneapolis residence of a former girlfriend, Bonnie Beecher. (Beecher is in competition for the title of "Girl From the North Country.") Dylan's friend, the musician Tony Glover, recorded it. Despite where it was taped, it is often called the Minneapolis Hotel Tape. The second side included various studio outtakes. The end of side two and side four included nine songs that Dylan and the group later known as The Band recorded in a house dubbed Big Pink. Finally, "Living the Blues" was lifted from a Johnny Cash television show.

Radio stations began to play selections from the bootleg. Ken and Dub borrowed cars and drove the albums to various record stores. For understandable reasons, they left no contact information. They sold the albums to the stores for $4.50 each. (For big customers--those who bought more than 50 copies--the would-be entrepreneurs lowered their unit price to $4.25.) The shops varied in how much they charged customers. The Psychedelic Supermarket, a Hollywood establishment with a name detailing its inclinations, charged customers $12.50.

There were not, as I recall, extended discussions about the morality of making the material available or purchasing it. There was a presumption that Dylan's genius trumped his right to control his own material. I don't know if the bootlegs hurt his music or concert sales. I do know that sitting down in the late evening with the lights low it was a thrill to put those albums on a turntable and hear the familiar voice singing new and unfamiliar and utterly remarkable material.