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Joe Dolce
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Ain’t Gonna Work On Bob Dylan’s Farm No More
Denzel Washington. He must have been a fan of mine… years later he would play the boxer, Hurricane Carter, someone else I wrote a song about. I wondered if Denzel could play Woody Guthrie. In my dimension of reality, he certainly could have. Bob Dylan
Yeah, Bob, and you could play Martin Luther King Jr. Denzel playing Woody. Let's pitch that idea to Mel Gibson! That's probably a film that Gibson ought to produce it as penance for his periodic dog’s breakfast behaviour. But who would play Dylan? Maybe Russell Crowe. He could sing the songs himself. And Oprah Winfrey as Joan Baez. See, in my dimension of reality, all that would be possible, too - but it still don't make it right!
Bob Dylan’s recent award of the Nobel Prize for Literature has created a palpable buzz in artistic circles. It asks questions as to the nature of literature, the role of songwriting in literature and even the relevance of the Prize itself.
I have learned enormously from Dylan - from his TRUE strengths as a songwriter - but also to avoid his true WEAKNESSES in my own work. A skilled mechanic must be able to take an engine apart in order to put it back together. Change the spark plugs when they aren’t sparking. The Literature Prize was bestowed on Dylan for a life's work of introducing 'literary values' into popular music, not for any actual literature – but for his songwriting alone – and more importantly, for its impact culturally.
This blurring of categories opens a real can of worms. Because the industry that has done this the most consistently for the past century has been the motion picture industry. Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Spielberg, Coppola, Kubrick, Lean, Preminger, Merchant Ivory – the list is long. Where are the Nobel Prizes for the cultural impact of introducing ‘literary values’ into popular film?
The New York Times, and a few other major newspapers, are trumpeting the erroneous claim that Dylan is the first songwriter to win the Prize. Someone quipped recently ‘The Times They are Mistaken.’ Rabindranath Tagore, who won the Literature Prize, in 1913, wrote 2000 songs and the words/music to three National Anthems: for India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka - AND he published 50 books of real poetry. Not song-lyrics. A towering achievement that has yet to be surpassed.
The praise, that many fellow artists lavish on Dylan, reads like eulogies.
Songwriting is like fishing in a stream; you put in your line and hope you catch something. And I don’t think anyone downstream from Bob Dylan ever caught anything. Arlo Guthrie, son of Woody Guthrie.
The father of my country. Bruce Springsteenen
Another step towards immortality… his gift with words is unsurpassable… no songs have been more moving and worthy in their depth, darkness, fury, mystery, beauty… none has been more of a pleasure to sing. None will come again. Joan Baez
Maybe for Ms Baez this is unsurpassable. But what a negative message to put out there to future young songwriters, not to mention to Dylan himself. None will come again. So basically, give up. I have always respected Joan Baez as a singer and a courageous and a committed activist. But she never progressed beyond an elementary level as a songwriter, when she had the rare and privileged close-up opportunity to learn from one of the best there was during Dylan’s prime writing period. So what does that tell us about her authority to criticize a song, or even comment on the future of songwriting? Show me, don’t tell me.
Fortunately, some artists have borrowed the famous Dylan skepticism that permeates some of his best works. Like this remark:
“I’m a Dylan fan but this [Prize] is an ill conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostrates of senile, gibbering hippies. Irvin Welsh, Scottish novelist, author of Trainspotting.
Author V.S. Naipaul, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 2001, had plenty of Dylanish skepticism when he commented on the Committee awarding Nigerian, Wole Soyinka, the Prize, in 1986. He said the Academy was “…pissing on literature... from a great height.”
When Bob Dylan performed at the US White House, he missed his sound check and refused to participate in a photo-call with the President and his family afterwards. He sang The Times They Are A-Changin’ and then came down from the stage to shake Obama’s hand before turning around and walking out. Obama later told Jan Wenner, of Rolling Stone magazine: “That’s how you want Bob Dylan, right? You don't want him to be all cheesin' and grinnin' with you. You want him to be a little skeptical about the whole enterprise. So that was a real treat.”
More a reflection of the kindness of the US President to an ill-mannered senior citizen.
A little skeptical. I’ll say. Like this:
You see me on the street, you always act surprised.
You say "how are you?" "good luck", but ya 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!
(Bob Dylan, Positively Fourth Street)
Ouch! Nobel Academy member, and permanent secretary, Sara Danius said, of Dylan’s silent treatment since being awarded the Prize, she was "not at all worried… if he doesn't want to come, he won't come. It will be a big party in any case and the honour belongs to him."
Other members have not been so diplomatic. [Per Wastberg] of the Swedish Academy… says the US singer-songwriter's silence since receiving the honour is ‘impolite and arrogant.’ ABC News
Nor have all musos and writers been particularly goo-goo-gaga in the past.
If Dylan’s a poet, I’m a basketball player. Norman Mailer
Bob is not authentic at all. He's a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. Joni Mitchell
Bob Dylan, however, is the worst poet alive. He can maybe get one good line in a song, and the rest is gibberish. Kurt Vonnegut
Even the now gushing, but once badly rejected, Joan Baez, sang a different tune, at one time.
A huge ego bubble, frantic and lost, so wrapped up in ego, he couldn't have seen more than four feet in front of him. Joan Baez
The term Dylan Tragic has been coined to describe the scores of myopic Dylan fans who accept whatever The Bob does with blind faith. If one tried to imagine what it would be like to be alive in a time where a major (or minor) religion was taking hold, I think this is about as close as we can get today.
Of course, there was the quasi-religious Beatlemania, which expressed itself in screaming, crying cathartic fifteen year olds, who would not have tolerated a single critical word said about their pudding bowl Dieties, (In the Name of the Paul and the John and the George and the Holy Ringo), and, we see it too often in fundamentalist Islam, and just about every other blinker-vision horse-drawn cart interpretation of faith, where even the most innocuous representation of the ‘prophets’ can be met with violence or death. These kind of folks have been standing behind the podium and present and accounted for in Fascist/Fanatic movements throughout history. The head-nodders who either goose-step, or drink the Kool-Aid.
Comic Simon Munnery once said, 'If you have the crowd behind you, you're probably facing the wrong way.'
Will Dylan accept, accept - but donate the money, or outright reject the Nobel Prize? By the time you read this article, this point could be moot.
But a Dylan tragic might say: ‘If Bob accepts the Prize, what a great thing for literature and songwriters.’ Or ‘If Bob rejects the Prize, ‘What a glorious day for a stand against hypocrisy and bureaucratic corruption. The Nobel is a meaningless award. Bob wrote Masters of War, after all.’
Or something like that. Whatever Dylan does is always perfectly understandable by Dylan tragics. No criticism can be permitted of the prophet.
Sooooo… then, there’s the matter of Masters Of War itself, that iconic masterpiece, with its 60s anti-Vietnam War protest:
Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks….
(Bob Dylan, Masters of War)
Now which Masters of War was he referring to - that he could see so clearly through their masks? Dylan’s accepted the National Medal of Arts, from the US Congress. He certainly couldn’t have been talking about President Obama, who has bombed seven countries, during his six years in office, and who presented him with The Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 2012 - the highest civilian award of the US government. He also took the Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres and the Legion of Honour, from the French government, (the latter originally created by Napoleon to ensure political loyalty, and who famously said, "It is with such baubles that men are led.") Then there was the Princess of Asturias Award, from the Spanish government, and, now, at last, the Mount Everest of the Masters, the Nobel Prize, with an income component of almost a million dollars, generated from corporate investments (in ‘safe securities’) of the fortune created by Alfred Nobel, on copyrights of over thirty armaments, explosives, rockets, machine guns and honest-to-God-is-On-Our-Side weapons of war patents.
Randy Pitts, who operated the premiere folk music venue in Berkeley, California, for a decade, the Freight and Salvage, said this about Dylan’s brilliant speech for his Person of the Year Award 2015, for MusiCares, (an instructive speech, I might add), where he not only acknowledges influences, but also dumps a bucket on those who ‘done him wrong’: “His slagging other writers as he did on this occasion, remains petulant and childish, over some long forgotten, half imagined slights in his mind... he can't be content, it seems to me, with being adjudged the best, he must be unassailable.”
Andrew Bolt, in the Herald, praised the giving of the prize to Dylan. Stephen Wright, in Overland, dissed Dylan for 'whining and perpetuating ancient sexualised stereotypes of women'. There are interesting insights in Overland’s twisted take. Patrick McCauley offered the term, ‘misandrist’, reverse misogyny, to describe it. Wright’s essay is generally myopic, but also extremely odd in Overland, which is a bastion of the Left (same as the inner circle of the Swedish Academy.) And Andrew Bolt, normally tarred with the brush of the Conservative Right, has uncritically embraced Dylan. (Well, Andrew has always been a sook for music!) But the shoes are now on opposite feet. The main weakness with both these views is that they are poor reviews - they each lean way too much to one side, or the other. Merge them together and we might get a better understanding of the paradox that is Bob Dylan.
But it’s still good, however, as it demonstrates the whole bunch of us merely have OPINIONS (which contains the crying-when-cut word 'onions') - and there is no absolute truth anywhere in the house, despite all the high-falutin' credentials.
Having these colossal accolades and titles, they get in the way. Bob Dylan
There has been controversy for years about whether the Nobel Prize has validity for measuring anything at all. The Peace Prize was awarded to Obama after only nine months in office, and to Kissinger while he was bombing Hanoi. Yassar Arafat got one. The Chemistry Prize went to the inventor of the lobotomy. Literary giants, James Joyce, Leo Tolstoy and Mark Twain have been passed over for the Literature Prize. But without Twain, and his Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, there could be no contemporary Americana Bob Dylan songs.
The Ig Nobel Prize, a parody of the Nobel Prize, has been given out each year, at Harvard, since 1991, and is presented by a group that includes actual Nobel Laureates, for the ten bizarre achievements in research, that ‘first make people laugh, then make them think.’ Here are some examples: Gordon Pennycook, James Allan Cheyne, Nathaniel Barr, Derek Koehler, and Jonathan Fugelsan, from Canada, won the Ig Nobel Peace Prize, for their scholarly study called "On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit."
The late Ahmed Shafik, from Egypt, won the Ig Nobel Reproduction Prize for studying the effects of wearing polyester, cotton, or wool trousers on the sex life of rats, and for conducting similar tests with human males.
Bob Dylan has written some of the most powerful songs ever written. Especially during his Golden Period, the late 60s, which also happened to be the Golden Period of Commercial Folk Music, where folksongs became Number One hits on popular music charts. (Imagine that happening in today’s twerking world!) As young budding performers, we were surrounded back then by inspiring literate songwriters and true masters of memorable melodies. Dylan was especially gifted at this.
But Songwriting is a category excluded from every single literary prize in the world. Ironically, the very form Dylan writes in – the rhyming, lyric-ballad structure- is discouraged and rejected, like the plague, in every major poetry contest - in Australia, and the world - in preference to modernist deconstructive academic wankery. The pantheon of major poet/editors who pay lip service to Dylan now have utter contempt for the very lyric structures he writes in- if they are done by anyone else - except him.
Les Murray, Geoff Page, and one or two others, are the only serious poet/editors open to the rhyming, lyric-ballad structure, in Australia. Murray, intuitively, is a champion of the very forms Dylan lives and breathes in. Garcia Lorca once said: 'I can imagine no other poetry other than the lyric.' Percy Grainier wrote: 'There is no musical notation yet invented that can capture what happens when a folk singer sings.'
The quality of writing in the brilliant songs upon which Dylan built his reputation: The Time’s They Are a Changin’, Blowing in the Wind, and many other solid folk-song based masterpieces from the late 60s, and the surreal fragmented social commentary of the songs on one of his finest albums, Blonde on Blonde, have all but vanished from his work over the past three decades. His writing has becomes steeped in tepid Americana. Luke-warm Mark Twainism. But his true fans don’t care about this. They have unconditional love. Dylan is Religion for them.
I made myself a New Year's Resolution, after one of the last Bob Dylan albums, that I would never buy another one - no matter how much the mindless music parrots of the media gushed about it. I have stuck to my guns. I have refused on principle to buy Modern Times. After reading through the lyrics to the songs, I know I made the correct decision.
As for Dylan's, Chronicles - Volume One, of his autobiography? I said, 'No way I'm paying twenty-five bucks for Volume One. Then next year, it's another twenty-five bucks for Volume Two? What is this - the serialisation of Bob Dylan's life? Some publisher is trying to bilk me out of my hard earned cash. Do they think I'm stoopidissimo? Why doesn't the old man write his autobiography down properly- and then publish it in one book: one twenty-five dollar price tag. Then this old man can buy it. I can wait for that.’
So I refused - on principle - even though I was interested in reading it. Because after all Dylan has been famous for not talking or talking in Riddlesville - so of course I wanted to hear him talk like a normal person for a change.
Well, someone gave me the bloody book for Christmas! So I started reading it. Then I stopped. I don't believe a word he says about anything anymore. Dylan is the LAST person that can tell me what happened during that magic time when he WAS an authentic genius. He doesn't know. If he knew he would be able to still do it now. He'd be writing more masterpieces. That's right. More songs like Mr Tambourine Man and Like a Rolling Stone. The idea is: if you are a genius when you're young, then you have an obligation to improve it by becoming a master craftsperson - (of course, which he has, as a performer and singer, but NOT as a lyric writer, poet or a creator of memorable melodies - and definitely not as a harmonica player!) - and become more geniusier as you grow older - not lose the genius part, stupid. Study Beethoven. Study Bach. Picassso. Gaudi. Rodin. Sylvia Plath. They improved as they matured, as their technique and their experience improved. Dylan even admits it himself, that those days are long gone, in this Sixty Minutes interview:
Interviewer: do you ever look at music that you’ve written and look back at it and say ‘whoa!’ that surprised me?
Dylan: I used to. I don’t do that anymore. I don’t know how I got to write those songs.
Interviewer: What do you mean you don’t know how?
Dylan: Well, those early songs were almost like magically written:
‘ Darkness at the break of noon
shadows even the silver spoon
hand-made blade the child’s balloon
eclipse both the sun and moon
to understand you know too soon
there is no sense in trying . .’
(Bob Dylan, It’s All Right Ma)
Dylan: Well, try to sit down and write something like that – there’s a magic to that and it’s not Siegfried and Roy kind of magic you know it’s a different kind of a penetrating magic and you know I did it at one time.
Interviewer: You don’t think you can do it today?
Dylan: No… well, you can’t do something forever and I did it once and I can do other things now but I can’t do that.
I admire the honesty in this interview. I found it very moving and actually sad. I wish he could still do it now because I miss that kind of powerful, engaged songwriting.
That said, however, the present reality is this: Bob Dylan is currently setting the bar so low, in songwriting, in his recent work (in both melodies and lyrics) that even YOU can write a more interesting song than he can. I defy any thinking person out there to tell me WHAT the almighty vision is that is contained in Dylan's latest album, Modern Times?
Dylan, these days, is so cliché-ridden, and so bad at putting language together that I can barely pick up my pencil to make notes. I really tried. I wanted to be fair. But it's useless because the man himself is cheatin'. I started on Thunder on the Mountain. I put my pencil down when I reached the line, 'I want some real good woman to do just what I say.' (A red flag went up: what is this waffle doing in my Bob Dylan song?)
Further down, he says, 'Gonna raise me an army, some tough sons of bitches, I'll recruit my army from the orphanages, I've been to St Herman's church, said my religious vows, I've sucked the milk out of a thousand cows.’ That verse made me laugh out loud. I actually liked that . . . in a perverse sort of way. I could visualize him sucking down there under the cow. (Ok - I didn't like it that much.) Sounds more to me like he's been sucking the pig crap out of a thousand SOWS.
Is this the same mind that wrote, 'In a soldier's stance, I aimed my hand, at the mongrel dogs who teach, fearing not that I'd become my enemy, In the instant that I preach.’ - My Back Pages? Please… anyone… just read the lyrics to My Back Pages and tell me a iPod Person hasn't taken over Bob Dylan's body, with burrowing tentacles into his spine and grey matter, moving his lips and fingers. Bob Dylan has gone back to Stupid School - and been kept back a year.
The next couple of songs that I looked at - desperate to write some kind of empowering comment for counter-balance - were so boring and filled with nothingness, that I just kept turning the pages until this corker stopped me dead: I got troubles so hard, I can't stand the strain, some young lazy slut has charmed away my brains. Gag. Disgusting and pathetic. (But probably true. Not Woody Guthrie, alas, but et tu Woody Allen?) That little literary jewel of misogyny was festering there in the middle of a verse of his song, Rolling and Tumbling. The first line goes, I rolled and I tumbled, I cried the whole night long. Sound familiar? It should: it is plagarized word-for-word directly from Muddy Waters' great classic, Rolling and Tumbling. So… did Dylan copy the title AND key images from Muddy's song, without giving him a credit, for a REASON? To serve some larger PURPOSE? Read it over. There is no reason. There is no larger purpose. Just plain laziness and bad writing - and the fool thinks he can get away with it on account a he's Bob Dylan. WELL, HE AINT BOB DYLAN NO MORE. AND I AIN'T GONNA WORK ON BOB DYLAN'S FARM NO MORE. He's a husk of a shell of a vapour of a whiff of someone who shook the little finger of Bob Dylan. At least the Bob Dylan I was influenced by. So what's the opposite of influence? Outfluence.
Poet Myron Lysenko recently posted on his Facebook page: ‘Our chicken has just hatched an egg. I wonder if that qualifies her for the Nobel Prize for Literature?’ Lay Lady Lay.
But I do love Dylan’s Mobius strip of quotations about himself and poetry.
I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet. Bob Dylan
I don't call myself a poet, because I don't like the word. Bob Dylan
I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet. Bob Dylan
I don’t call myself a poet… man… my songs are songs… have you ever met these people who call themselves poets… oh, give me a break. Bob Dylan
There is a chapter in Bob Dylan’s autobiography, Chronicles - Volume 1 that seems to shed some light on the 'Bob Dylan Method' of songwriting that goes a long way to explain why Dylan’s been an egg short of a chicken-crossing-the-road these days with the quality of his material. When Dylan teams up with the remarkable Daniel Lanois, who produced one of his albums for him, he arrived at the session with a bunch of lyrics. Lanois asked him if any of his new songs were like 'With God On My Side', which Lanois liked. Dylan said, 'Not much.' They spent all day working on 'Political World'. Trying different rhythms. Melodies. By nightfall, Dylan left and took a tape home with him. He wasn't happy. The next morning, Lanois played for him what he had done to the song after Dylan had left. His trademark atmospheric and funky stuff. Dylan told him, 'I think we missed it.'
What this little chapter tells me is that Dylan has not only lost the Plot but misplaced the Book. He wants to be in a band and perform, not write songs. He’s continued to develop as a performance artist and a vocal stylist. Like Frank Sinatra did. That's the walk he's walking. Once you have the song, then you can't miss, if you BELIEVE in what you've written - if it is important - if it has to be heard - if you HAVE to record it. It's just a matter of going into the studio and simply telling the story. Everything else is a rich man's wank. Dylan no longer has the songs. He has a voice, but he’s lost the vision. Therefore, he distracts himself with a continually changing array of gifted producers and fresh sounds and hopes that someone else can fix his problem for him. In that case, I would suggest his next producer should be Doctor Phil. Dylan is sitting on a thousand stories that really do need telling - but no clear way for him to reach them. I suggest it's about time he retired from the Mindless Tour Syndrome, like the Beatles were insightful enough to do. Maybe then he'll have something worth writing about.
In the long run, it's merely a record. Lyrics go by quick. Bob Dylan, Rolling Stone, 2006
I acknowledge Dylan's cultural importance and have personally been inspired by his early music, knowing many of his best songs by heart, having performed them in concert myself. Some of my own songs couldn’t have been written without Bob Dylan’s influence. Many will say that this article is filled with venomous, bile, bitter, mean-spirited and immodest comments, (in that case, just think of me as The Fool, in King Lear) - forgetting that Bob Dylan, in his PRIME as a songwriter, was also venomous, bile, bitter, mean-spirited AND immodest. I'm sure you have forgotten the following typical exchanges like this taped phone conversation between Dylan and journalist AJ Weberman, one of the most legendary Dylan tragics of the 70s:
Dylan reveals a strong animosity toward Roger McGuinn (of the Byrds, who, with their Number One hit recording of Mr Tambourine Man, actually brought Dylan to mainstream attention). "F*ck him. You can put that in [your article] twice." In another amusing exchange, Dylan asks rhetorically who writes better songs than he does, and Weberman replies, "I can name you a hundred," to which Dylan replies, "Bullsh*t!" Weberman proceeds to name some pretty lame songwriters, along with some good ones, and Dylan gives his opinions, mostly negative. John Lennon: "Never!" Creedence Clearwater: "Bullsh*t!" George Harrison: " …Maybe." Dylan insist(s) that Weberman… leave mention of his children out of any article… planned and says if they are included "…My wife will hit me, man." John Howells, on AJ Weberman vs Bob Dylan.
There is a very strange collection of people floating around out there in Dylanland, almost as strange as the ones in Elvistown. Weberman, and the 'Dylan Liberation Front', claimed Dylan had sold out and been brainwashed by Albert Grossman and the Record Company mafia. They wore badges that said, Free Bob Dylan, much like the Free Katie Holmes fans today. Weberman pioneered the lovely practice of 'garbology' - the forerunner of modern papparrazism - by probing through Dylan's garbage to find out details about his personal life. Weberman was even beaten up when he refused to cease and desist:
I'd agreed not to hassle Dylan anymore, but I was a publicity-hungry motherf*cker… I went to MacDougal Street, and Dylan's wife comes out and starts screaming about me going through the garbage. Dylan said if I ever f*cked with his wife, he'd beat the sh*t out of me. A couple of days later, I'm on Elizabeth Street and someone jumps me, starts punching me. I turn around and it's like -- Dylan. I'm thinking, can you believe this? I'm getting the crap beat out of me by Bob Dylan! I said, 'Hey, man, how you doin'?' But he keeps knocking my head against the sidewalk. He's little, but he's strong. He works out. I wouldn't fight back, you know, because I knew I was wrong. He gets up, rips off my Free Bob Dylan button and walks away. Never says a word. The Bowery bums were coming over, asking, 'How much he get?' Like I got rolled… I guess you got to hand it to Dylan, coming over himself, not sending some f*cking lawyer.
Many of the people reading this weren't even born when Dylan was singing the very songs that influenced me the most and they have only really known the Modern Bob so to speak. So there are a few Bob Dylans out there, just like there are several Davie Bowies, and it is easy to be misunderstood when talking about just one.
DYLAN’S SHAPE-SHIFTING PERSONAE
I think I have a dualistic nature. Bob Dylan
So why can’t Bob Dylan write songs like he used to? (Come on – fess up – you KNOW he isn’t creating anything to equal his work in the late 60s. No way.)
Why did Dylan, much like Bowie (who had much more control over his character jumps), change his musical personae so often?
One simple reason could have been just to keep from being bored. Night after night of doing shows. Long bus trips. Airports. Singing the same repertoire. But, looking deeper, I think that these ‘costume changes’ were happening unconsciously. Like Woody Allen’s Zelig character, he started to become like the people he was hanging out with. Periodically, something just snapped him, like a lizard’s eyelid, into another kind of artist.
A good deal of this might have had to do with self-preservation of the part of the inner sanctified person he had to keep OUT of the limelight. As a longtime performaholic (P.A. Performers Anonymous), he was battered nightly by fanatical fans, adulation, voice-of-a-generation labels, photo sessions, press, interviews, groupies, people throwing money at him. This would utterly demolish any vulnerable creative - and it has done so to many in the entertainment business- so, like Eve’s Three Faces, Dylan warp-drives a character leap into a quantum new personae, to give him a tough performing personality buffer between him and his demanding and adoring audience – a little breathing room, much like Eve unconsciously made her leaps from personality-to-personality, when one side of her was unable to integrate trauma and pain effectively. Home security.
Unfortunately, his new characters don't play the old characters songs very well! Hence why many of his classic masterpieces get mangled in live performance, with mumbled lyrics, when some of his other ‘characters’ used to be a absolute masters of diction.
Here are some of Dylan’s musical personae. There are many variations of these as well:
Woody Guthrie/Jack Kerouac Man, 1962
Surreal Man (Blonde on Blonde), 1966
Outlaw Man (John Wesley Harding- with lines like “He opened a many a door, but he was never known to hurt an honest man,’ hah! – whereas the REAL John Wesley Hardin, a hardened criminal - killed between 27-45 men), 1967
Country Pie Man (a la Johnny Cash), 1969
Old Testament/Prophet Man, 1979
Americana Man, 1992
Santa Claus Man, 2009
Ol’ Blue Eyes Man, 2016
I can't act! Bob Dylan
Just as Dylan’s lyrics cannot stand that well, without the stunning melodies that he once wrote- melodies that lifted his words into the poetic stratosphere, (and make no mistake: Dylan was a remarkable melodist) - his characters, or personae, become very lifeless dramatically, without song structures to buttress them up.
This is painfully obvious when he tries to play a character in a movie without a song personae to reinforce it. Watch the recent film, Masked and Anonymous. Similar to Mick Jagger’s cringing performance, in Ned Kelly; as the character, Jack Fate, Dylan stumbles awkwardly through the part and only comes to life when he sings his songs with the little throw-together band in the film. Watch him in the poorly edited videoclip of his great song, Cross the Green Mountain, from the American Civil War film, Glory. He is very wooden, almost uncomfortable, way too over-costumed, in period attire and just walks around like someone who’s accidently wandered onto the set. Very much like those old newsreels from the early 1900s where people just stood there, motionless, as though someone was taking a still photograph of them, not understanding what film actually was. Inanimate. And in that bizarre Victoria Secrets commercial, he just glares at all the supermodels in their lingerie.
Dylan’s only work of actual literature, Tarantula, demonstrates the weakness of his real literary ability – a book that was written, paradoxically, during the same period of some of his greatest songlyrics. Because his ‘characters’ sang the songs. But The Emperor with No Clothes wrote the book.
But Dylan, unlike Bowie, has no control over his personae and when they decide to permute. Like the time-traveler, in The Time Traveler’s Wife, the previous Dylan begins to fade and suddenly the new Dylan emerges from the cacoon. Like a pod-person in Body Snatchers, the new one LOOKS like the old one, but if you look closely, you can see the control mechanism inserted into the back of the neck.
This is one reason why he mangles his old songs now. He is UNABLE to reproduce the authentic character personae that originally wrote and performed those particular characters’ songs. So he tells himself - and we believe him – that he is ‘re-inventing’ the songs when, in fact, he has reinvented himself but, unfortunately, is also required to play the old classic material, night after night, from his other long abandoned incarnations. Which, as I said, requires serious acting skill. Which - as he said - he lacks.
Few people fell in love with Dylan and his work simply by reading his words…. anyone who has attended a Dylan concert in the last decade would be well aware the majority of his songs are barely recognisable from their original recorded forms. While his voice has always been an acquired taste, it has become an instrument to twist his lyrics into distorted mumbles which are a language only Dylan fans can understand. Something close to Klingon. Kathy McCabe, The Daily Telegraph
The Bob Dylan that influenced me profoundly does not exist anymore. There is another one out there performing at the moment.
I commented on how I thought Dylan should be producing his own albums instead of letting other producers steer his vision? Well, that’s not entirely true. He actually produced Modern Times, under the pseudonym, Jack Frost. Asked why he chose to do this one himself:
I don't like to make records… I do it reluctantly… I feel like I've always produced my own records, anyway, except I just had someone there in the way. (my emphasis) - Bob Dylan, Rolling Stone, 2006.
The illustrious pantheon of producers he has worked with on his thirty-one albums must love that quote. Dylan considers that they were all merely in the way.
Alexis Petridis, of The Guardian, was the first major critic to ridicule the hype of Modern Times - which he called a "competition to see who can slather Bob Dylan's 32nd studio album with the most deranged praise known to man." Jim DeRogatis, of The Chicago Sun-Times, was particularly critical of the ballads, writing that "Dylan disappoints with...[his] inexplicable fondness for smarmy '30s and '40s balladry." The title of the album is the same as one of Charlie Chaplin's most noted films, Modern Times. The cover photo, Taxi, New York at Night, 1947, is by Ted Croner and has been already used as a cover by the defunct band, Luna, for their 1997 single, Hedgehog/23 Minutes in Brussels.
I don't listen to any of my records. When you're inside of it all, all you're listening to is a replica. Bob Dylan
The last person I remember saying they never listened to their own records was Frank Sinatra, the icon of my parent's generation. I never forgot that because I thought . . . how odd - not to like listening to your own music. All of us young aspiring musos looked forward to the day when we could actually record an album of our own and couldn't imagine not wanting to listen to them once we had one!
Well, if all one was listening to was a replica, then they would call them replicas, not records. Use your words, Bob.
What a record is - is precisely that. A record. Of what happened in the studio.
If Dylan isn't interested in listening to what he does during his recording sessions, why should I? Fair enough?
I wonder if Stradivarius ever played his own violins for enjoyment after he made them? Did Van Gogh drift off in his own finished paintings on many a drunken night for satisfaction?
In my experience, the only reason an artist doesn't like listening to their own recordings is because either the recording goes so off track, or becomes compromised from the original vision, that it doesn't represent the songs, or the artist, correctly - or else nothing happened in the studio that surprises; no miracles, nothing that escapes your control and becomes BIGGER than yourself. To me, those are the real goals of recording. To prepare and perform, and prepare and perform. And then go into the studio and not just make a musical documentary, but allow MAGIC to happen. And record it.
I would think any artist who succeeded in those goals would like to be reminded of it.
I've had a rough time recording. I've managed to come up with songs, but I've had a rough time recording. But maybe it should be that way. Because other stuff which sounds incredible, that can move you to tears -- for all those who were knocked off our feet by listening to music from yesteryear, how many of those songs are really good? Or was it just the record that was great? Well, the record was great. The record was an art form. And you know, when all's said and done, maybe I was never part of that art form, because my records really weren't artistic at all. They were just documentation. Maybe bad players playing bad changes, but still something coming through. Bob Dylan
Probably true, most of the time. But he got it right enough times that he ought to know the difference and say so.
But this is the key to why I think Dylan has chosen to remain steadfastly uncritical of himself:
Puncturing myths, boycotting analysis (my emphasis) and ignoring chronology are likely part of a long and lately quite successful campaign not to be incarcerated within his own legend. Dylan's greatest accomplishment since his Sixties apotheosis may simply be that he has claimed his story as his own. Jonathan Lethem
Fair enough. After all who amongst us can truly understand the pressure these goldfish bowl icons have had to live with their whole lives.
The cul-de-sac of pop artists peaking out early is one of the main reasons I shifted to classical composers like Beethoven, and Schubert for songwriting and performing inspiration. Their success was slow coming. They NEVER seemed to peak out. All through my fragile youth, fellow musical influences were either killing themselves, overdosing, or burning out. Maybe it was too much fame and fortune at an early age. Who knows? I just knew I didn’t want to follow them that far. I probably was lucky NOT to be successful during those days. Probably why I am still alive. The Beatles were one of my lifelines through the mighty shipwrecks of Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and even poet, Sylvia Plath, all incredibly strong influences on me. When The Beatles finally short-circuited, I even clung to the shirttails of their producer, George Martin, which led me to the mystical harbours of JS Bach, the Composer de tutti Composers who figured out the most important lesson of all: how to integrate and balance your personal genius with your everyday life – not sacrifice one for the other. In some ways, Dylan, too, is a survivor in this aspect, although I cannot understand how he can sustain a creative relationship, and family life, with that obsessive touring schedule. It may be one of the reasons he doesn’t practice one of the key components of true confessional songwriting or poetry: writing about parents and family.
I'm speaking for all of us. I'm the spokesman for a generation. Bob Dylan
Up until Liam Gallagher, of Oasis, came along, Dylan held the unofficial record for the rudest intellectual bully in music history for his power trips on media, women and the general public, especially back in the late 60s. Just watch Don't Look Back and Martin Scorsese's documentary, and cringe at the way he takes advantage of the unaware, the unconscious, the wide-eyed and the vulnerable from his position of celebrity. Has he changed? His people skills have much improved but he still capable of dumping a bucket:
I don't know anybody who's made a record that sounds decent in the past twenty years, really. You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them. There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like… static… I remember when that Napster guy came up across, it was like, 'Everybody's getting music for free' I was like, 'Well, why not? It ain't WORTH nothing anyway. Bob Dylan, Rolling Stone, 2006.
Now I would like all my fellow musicians and recording artists who fawn after Dylan uncritically to pay particular attention to the above last quote. He has basically said that probably anything YOU also have recorded in the past twenty years he would consider crap. People who continue to admire those who put them down are called masochists.
I'm not a playwright. Bob Dylan
Let’s take one of Dylan’s recent songs and try to figure out what he wants to say and what he actually has said. There has been quite a bit of praise for the song High Water, off the CD, Love and Theft. It is a good song, but spoiled by several things:
Name dropping. And Dylan's habit, lately, of using colourful but superficial imagery, and lines lifted from other people's songs for no good reason. He mentions quite a few people by name in High Water but does not develop their characters within the body of the song. This would not fly in a film script and it doesn't fly in a song lyric. He is assuming we either know of these folks or will go find out. He never used to write with this kind of 'go figure it out yourself' attitude. His best songs tell you everything you need to know within the songs. He mentions Charley Patton, Big Joe Turner, Bertha Mason, George Lewis and someone called Fat Nancy. Fat Nancy is the only one I am familiar with. She's the one down at the Commonwealth bank that wouldn't give me a loan for a new weed-eater. Who are these people?
1. Charley Patton (father of delta blues). Ok - this is the dedication - so it is acceptable to me. We don't really have to know anything except Dylan admires him. But if you are interested, long before Jimi Hendrix, in 1900, Patton was the entertainer's entertainer with dazzling showmanship, often playing guitar on his knees and behind his head, as well as behind his back. Although Patton was a small man at about 5 foot 5 and 135 pounds, the sound of his whiskey and cigarette-scarred voice was rumored to have carried for over 500 yards without amplification.
2. Big Joe Turner was a blues shouter who wrote Shake Rattle & Roll, and Corrina Corinna, the latter recorded by Dylan on Freewheelin'. So why doesn't he tell us something about this in the song? Or at least say, 'Go look it uuuuuuuupppp on Wikipeeeeeeeedia!'
3. Bertha Mason was a character in the novel, Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Bronte. Rochester's clandestine wife, Bertha is a formerly beautiful and wealthy Creole woman who has become insane, violent, and bestial. She lives locked in a secret room on the third story of Thornfield and is guarded by Grace Poole, whose occasional bouts of inebriation sometimes enable Bertha to escape. Bertha eventually burns down Thornfield, plunging to her death in the flames. Others have seen her as a symbolic representation of the trapped Victorian wife, who is expected never to travel or work outside the house and becomes ever more frenzied as she finds no outlet for her frustration and anxiety. But if Bronte had wanted to speak out in the name of the oppressed slaves of Jamaica, she would have cast Bertha Mason in a better light. Bertha is the most obvious character used to represent colonialism in the Caribbean. But Bertha Mason has NOTHING to do with Dylan's song theme even if he had told us something about her, which he hasn't.
4. George Lewis was a jazz clarinettist from New Orleans. Everyone knows that. Right?
5. Fat Nancy, of course, as I mentioned before, is the Loan officer at the Commonwealth Bank, in Melbourne. She should be fired from the bank - and the song.
Meanwhile:
The Cuckoo is a pretty bird, is pinched from an old traditional song for no good reason.
I believe I'll dust my broom, is pinched from a Robert Johnson song. No context for it to be in Dylan's song.
I'm no pig without a wig, is probably just some slang he heard somewhere. It just jars here and distracts.
Then, what about this B-grade throw-back verse to Highway 61, (off of Blonde on Blonde?)
Well, George Lewis told the Englishman, the Italian and the Jew,
‘You can't open your mind, boys to every conceivable point of view.’
They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway Five
Judge says to the High Sheriff, ‘I want him dead or alive,
Either one, I don't care.’
High Water everywhere. (Bob Dylan, High Water.)
Notice the jerky tone when he brings back in the High Water theme? Cut and paste. As though someone were imitating writing a Dylan lyric. This verse should have either been rewritten to actually say something or omitted. The first couplet has no message worth learning - and the second couplet has no meaning worth extracting, no matter how long you ponder over it. You can READ meanings into lyrics, of course, just like you can 'hear' the voice of Satan if you play Beatle songs backwards.
I asked Fat Nancy for something to eat, she said, ‘Take it off the shelf
- As great as you are a man, you'll never be greater than yourself.’
I told her I didn't really care,
High water everywhere. (Bob Dylan, High Water.)
Another bit of woof-woof. The second line sort of goes around in circles and comes back in on itself, but says nothing.
Why does Dylan RUIN such a good atmospheric song idea, as this one is, by including all this lazy writing mixed in with all the good writing? He doesn't seem to have the judgment any longer to know one from the other.
Sir Christopher Ricks, the world’s most academically qualified Dylan Tragic recently said of Dylan:
The greatest living user of the English language. Christopher Ricks
What an incredible ugly sentence for someone who was a Professor of Poetry, at the University of Oxford. Has Ricks ever written a poem or a song lyric himself? As I advise my own music and lyric-writing students: show me - don’t tell me. Richard Wagner also said: ‘If a person can’t do what you can do, do not give them authority to criticize it.’
Here are Ricks’ comments, in his typical loopy style, on Dylan’s great song, Hattie Carroll:
The way in which it's come up with a cadence that's given to him purely coincidentally by the names — Hattie Carroll's first and her second name both have unstressed final syllables. The man who killed her, William Zantzinger, has that same pattern. It's a newspaper item that gives him a cadence and a rhythm.’
Two sets of unstressed final syllables in the names. Whoa! Quel profundo - and an utterly superficial insight. (I’ve said about all that I care to say about this PhD in Applied Groupie, in a previous essay, Hey, Mr Cowbell Man.)
I am reminded here, though, of another newspaper reference leveled at the Best of Quadrant Poetry collection awhile ago, by poet John Tranter:
‘Most of the contributors are seldom met with elsewhere, and are represented by one or two poems, often in the style of newspaper verse of long ago.’
Newspaper items. Newspaper verse. What’s the matter with these guys? What’s wrong with newspapers? Newspapers are STILL delivering good material for poems (Dylan was a newspaper headline thief) and newspapers are still delivering good work, if the Canberra Times is any example. Poetry columns in newspapers touched the lives of millions of people in the first half of the 20th century but the practice was abandoned. The 2004 Poet Laureate of the US, Ted Kooser, successfully re-established the practice, offering a free poetry column to newspapers, over the course of nine and a half years, again reaching tens of millions of people, some who hadn’t read a poem since their schooldays.
The greatest living user of the English language. Sir Chris: just stop it! Please. One of the errors critics make, in comparing artists, is employing terms like: Greatest, Next-Greatest, Third-Greatest and Last-Greatest. The reality is this: it is about Uniqueness of Personal Vision, not the Cosmic Top Forty.
Who was the greatest guitar player of the past century? Jimi Hendrix, Robert Johnson, or BB King? Albert King, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton or Django Reinhart?
It is impossible to answer that question because each guitarist mapped out some different area.
Who was a greater poet? Sylvia Plath, or Walt Whitman? You can't measure by sheer volume of works either. Whitman wrote hundreds. Plath wrote a couple dozen.
Who was the greater recording artist? Bob Dylan or Slim Dusty? Dylan has recorded 32 albums. Slim recorded 100. All this comparison of meat pies to mojo hands is a futile exercise.
The one thing that remarkable artists do share is this: they create an untouchable space of their own. Their work is beyond comparison, especially with each other. But not within their own body of work. It is quite possible to contrast good and poor poetry and songwriting, mature work and juvenilia within the career of the same artist. Certainly Dylan is way up there in songwriting Nirvana for all time, but so is John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Gordon Lightfoot, Buffy St Marie, Donovan, Van Morrison, not to mention Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Pete Townsend, Robert Johnson, Memphis Minnie, Brian Wilson, and thousands of others nameless souls who have left us the world's great song repository. One day Dylan may be just another anon like so many lost writers in the mists of history.
Is 'Imagine' a greater song than 'Like a Rolling Stone'?
Is 'Satisfaction' a greater song than 'Just Like a Woman'?
Is 'Blowing in the Wind' a better song than 'Johnny B Good'?
How do you measure? You don't.
Artists have to be brave enough to construct, and de-construct, their own work, with an almighty amount of focused consciousness, as well as intuition, in order to keep improving.
If I've got any kind of attitude about me - or about what I do, what I perform, what I sing, on any level, my attitude is, compare it to somebody else! Don't compare it to me. Are you going to compare Neil Young to Neil Young? Compare it to somebody else, compare it to Beck - which I like - or whoever else is on his level. This record should be compared to the artists who are working on the same ground. I'll take it any way it comes, but compare it to that. Bob Dylan
But this is dead wrong as that is precisely what has to be done. You cannot compare Dylan to Beck just like you can't compare Imagine to Like a Rolling Stone. Self-growth is really about personal best so, in fact, you have to compare it to other work in the artist's own catalogue. And that is my point: when you do that, Dylan's contemporary work pales in comparison with his best work. He is on a descending path. He performs hard - but he writes… too easy.
So why isn't Dylan capable of transcending that early stuff? Who knows? Why did JS Bach create fifty solid years of ascending white hot masterpieces that only ceased with his death? Who knows? How could Beethoven create the Ninth Choral Symphony - the key work that influenced Wagner's music-dramas - at the END of his life, when he was DEAF? Some folks keep going, some explode, some implode and some fade away. Dylan is on the slow fade. I've been holding my breath for two decades hoping for another real masterpiece from The Bob, but I think its time to exhale.
As far as the enormous role played in shaping and influencing popular music, well, it is exactly the same for Elvis and Frank Sinatra. Elvis, another young genius, morphed into a pill-popper in a white jumpsuit flashing a phoney FBI badge in Las Vegas and Frank Sinatra, the good looking string-bean in a suit, with the awesome vocal phrasing, the first one who made girls swoon and scream in their seats, long before Elvis and The Beatles, ended up preferring gangsters to writers, and probably had interests in the very Las Vegas casinos that Elvis later played in. Must we hold our tongues about criticizing Elvis and Frankie, too, because of their vital contribution to popular culture? I think it is one of the responsibilities of the artist to shine some light on this process of disintegration which we see happening before our very eyes, over and over again. There is something much greater at stake here besides lemming-like popular culture. Artists become extremely famous and rich. They become god-like. Then their work atrophies, or they self-destruct. I respect the emotional connection people have with Dylan. I have one too, but in a different way. Let’s remember fondly, and be inspired by, the best work - but let's also correctly identify, and learn something, from their unwise, and often deadly, mistakes.
Leonard Cohen recently commented, cynically, on Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize win:
“It’s like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain.”
Many Dylan tragics will read this as a straight out compliment. But the contrast of these discordant images tells me something different- the utter inappropriateness of pinning medals on mountains. Mount Everest doesn’t need a bloody medal to confirm it is the highest mountain. This Award isn’t about Dylan at all – this is about the Academy.
Whenever politics enters, prestige is leached from the Nobel Prize. Joseph Epstein
Bob Dylan neither needs the honour, nor the income, from being awarded the Nobel Prize. But there are plenty of brilliant novelists and poets out there who do. The awarding of a Literature Prize to a songwriter of this obvious stature and great wealth can only be a move by the Academy to inject some vitality and relevance back into what has become, lately, an a irrelevant award; to bring, as Leonard Cohen said, some New Skin for an Old Ceremony.
In an article for the Wall Street Journal, Joseph Epstein said:
Would the literary world be better off without the Nobel Prize in Literature? Certainly it would be no worse off without the Nobel, for as currently awarded the prize neither sets a true standard for literary production nor raises the prestige of literature itself.
But, on the brighter side, one of the benefits of the great misunderstanding of Dylan receiving this weird old Award could be more respect and weight being given to the great lyric-ballad forms, once again, in the minds of the academic literary gatekeepers. Perhaps the level of intelligent songwriting, in popular music, which is now at an all-time low, will begin to reascend to the heights achieved during the Golden Age of the Folk Song, the late 60s, when folk-informed artists like Peter, Paul and Mary, Donovan and The Byrds topped the charts. A turn back to the hymn, the ballad, the rhyme: the way children learn to sing and are first exposed to writing.