Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus Read online

  You wouldn’t steal Self Portrait? It wouldn’t steal you either. Perhaps that’s the real tragedy, because Dylan’s last two albums were art breaking and entering into the house of the mind.

  (20) Songwriting can hardly be much older than song-stealing. It’s part of the tradition. It may even be more honorable than outright imitation; at least it’s not as dull.

  Early in his career, Bob Dylan, like every other musician on the street with a chance to get off it, copped one or two old blues or folk songs, changed a word or two, and copyrighted them (weirdest of all was claiming “That’s All Right,” which was Elvis’s first record, and written—or at least written down—by Arthur Crudup). Dylan also used older ballads for the skeletons of his own songs: “Bob Dylan’s Dream” is a recasting of “Lord Franklin’s Dream”; “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” finds its way back to “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill.” “Pledging My Time” has the structure, the spirit, and a line from Robert Johnson’s “Come on in My Kitchen”; “Don’t the moon look lonesome, shining through the trees,” is a quote from an old Jimmy Rushing blues. “Subterranean Homesick Blues” comes off of Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business.” This is a lovely way to write, and to invite, history, and it is part of the beauty and inevitability of American music. But while Dylan may have added a few words to “It Hurts Me Too,” from where he sits, it’s simply wrong to claim this old blues, recorded by Elmore James for one, as his own. That Self Portrait is characterized by borrowing, lifting, and plagiarism simply means Bob will get a little more money and thousands of people will get a phony view of their own history.

  (21, 22)

  That splendid frenzy, the strength of new values in the midst of some sort of musical behemoth of destruction, the noise, the power—the totality of it! So you said, well, all right, there it is . . .

  The mythical immediacy of everything Dylan does and the relevance of that force to the way we live our lives is rooted in the three albums and the two unforgettable singles he released in 1965 and 1966: Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde, “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Those records defined and structured a crucial year—no one has ever caught up with them and most likely no one ever will. What happened then is what we always look for. The power of those recordings and of the music Dylan was making on stage, together with his retreat at the height of his career, made Dylan into a legend and virtually changed his name into a noun. Out of that Dylan gained the freedom to step back and get away with anything he chose to do, commercially and artistically. The fact that more than a year now separates one album from another heightens their impact, regardless of how much less they have to offer than the older albums which established this matrix of power in the first place. In a real way, Dylan is trading on the treasure of myth, fame, and awe he gathered in ’65 and ’66. In mythical terms, he doesn’t have to do good, because he has done good. One wonders, in mythical terms of course, how long he can get away with it.

  (21) “Minstrel Boy” is the best of the Isle of Wight cuts; it rides easy.

  (22) The Band plays pretty on “She Belongs to Me” and Dylan runs through the vocal the way he used to hurry through the first half of a concert, getting the crowd-pleasers out of the way so that he could play the music that mattered. Garth Hudson has the best moment of the song.

  (23)

  Vocation as a Vocation. Dylan is, if he wants to be, an American with a vocation. It might almost be a calling—the old Puritan idea of a gift one should live up to—but it’s not, and vocation is strong enough.

  There is no theme richer for an American artist than the spirit and the themes of the country and the country’s history. We have never figured out what this place is about or what it is for, and the only way to even begin to answer those questions is to watch our movies, read our poets, our novelists, and listen to our music. Robert Johnson and Melville, Hank Williams and Hawthorne, Bob Dylan and Mark Twain, Jimmie Rodgers and John Wayne. America is the life’s work of the American artist because he is doomed to be an American. Dylan has a feel for it; his impulses seem to take him back into the forgotten parts of our history, and even on Self Portrait there is a sense of this—he’s almost on the verge of writing a western. But it’s an ambitious vocation and there is not enough of that, only an impulse without the determination to follow it up.

  Dylan has a vocation if he wants it; his audience may refuse to accept his refusal unless he simply goes away. In the midst of that vocation there might be something like Hamlet asking questions, old questions, with a bit of magic to them; but hardly a prophet, merely a man with good vision.

  (23) “Wigwam” slowly leads the album to its end. Campfire music, or “3 A.M., After the Bullfight.” It’s a great job of arranging, and the B-side of the album’s second natural single, backing “Living the Blues.” “Wigwam” puts you to bed, and by that I don’t mean it puts you to sleep.

  (24)

  Self Portrait, the Auteur, and Home Movies. “Auteur” means, literally, author, and in America the word has come to signify a formula about films: movies (like books), are made by authors, i.e., directors. This has led to a dictum which tends to affirm the following: movies are about the personality of the director. We should judge a movie in terms of how well the auteur has developed his personality in relation to previous films. His best film is that which most fully presents the flowering of his personality. Needless to say such an approach requires a devotion to mannerism, quirk, and self-indulgence. It also turns out that the greatest auteurs are those with the most consistent, obvious, and recognizable mannerisms, quirks, and self-indulgences. By this approach Stolen Kisses is a better film than Jules and Jim because in Stolen Kisses there is nothing to look for but Truffaut while in Jules and Jim there was this story and those actors who kept getting in the way. The spirit of the auteur approach can be transferred to other arts, and by its dictum Self Portrait is a better album than Highway 61 Revisited, because Self Portrait is about the auteur, that is, Dylan, and Highway 61 Revisited takes on the world, which tends to get in the way. (Highway 61 Revisited might well be about Dylan too, but it’s more obvious on Self Portrait, and therefore more relevant to Art, and . . . please don’t ask about the music, really . . . )

  Now, Dylan has been approached this way for years, whether or not the word was used, and while in the end it may be the least interesting way to listen to his music it’s occasionally a lot of fun and a game that many of us have played (for example, on “Days of ’49” Dylan sings the line “just like a roving sign” and I just can’t help almost hearing him say “just like a rolling stone” and wondering if he avoided that on purpose). One writer, named Alan Weberman, has devoted his life to unraveling Dylan’s songs in order to examine the man himself; just as every artist once had his patron, now it seems every auteur has his critic.

  (24) Self Portrait is a concept album from the cutting room floor. It has been constructed so artfully, but as a cover-up, not a revelation. Thus “Alberta #2” is the end, after a false ending, just as “Alberta #1” was the beginning, after a false beginning. The song moves quickly, and ends abruptly. These alternate takes don’t just fill up a side, they set up the whole album, and it works, in a way, because I think it’s mainly the four songs fitted in at the edges that make the album a playable record. With a circle you tend to see the line that defines it, rather than the hole in the middle.

  (25)

  Self Portrait, the Auteur, and Home Movies, con’t. We all play the auteur game: we went out and bought Self Portrait not because we knew it was great music—it might have been but that’s not the first question we’d ask—but because it was a Dylan album. What we want, though, is a different matter—and that’s what separates most people from auteurists—we want great music, and because of those three albums back in ’65 and ’66, we expect it, or hope for it.

  I wouldn’t be dwelling on this but for my suspicion that it is exactly a perception of t
his approach that is the justification for the release of Self Portrait, to the degree that it is justified artistically (the commercial justification is something else—self-justification). The auteur approach allows the great artist to limit his ambition, and turn it inward. To be crude, it begins to seem as if it is his habits that matter, rather than his vision. If we approach art in this fashion, we degrade it. Take that second song on John Wesley Harding, “As I Went Out One Morning,” and two ways of hearing it.

  Weberman has determined a fixed meaning for the song: it relates to a dinner given years ago by the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee at which they awarded Bob Dylan their Thomas Paine prize. Dylan showed up, said a few words about how it was possible to understand how Lee Harvey Oswald felt, and got booed. “As I Went Out One Morning,” according to Weberman, is Dylan’s way of saying he didn’t dig getting booed.

  I sometimes hear the song as a brief journey into American history; the singer out for a walk in the park, finding himself next to a statue of Tom Paine, and stumbling across an allegory: Tom Paine, symbol of freedom and revolt, co-opted into the role of Patriot by textbooks and statue committees, and now playing, as befits his role as Patriot, enforcer to a girl who runs for freedom—in chains, to the south, the source of vitality in America, in America’s music—away from Tom Paine. We have turned our history on its head; we have perverted our own myths.

  Now it would be astonishing if what I’ve just described were on Dylan’s mind when he wrote the song. That’s not the point. The point is that Dylan’s songs can serve as metaphors, enriching our lives, giving us random insight into the myths we carry and the present we live, intensifying what we’ve known and leading us toward what we never looked for, while at the same time enforcing an emotional strength upon those perceptions by the power of the music that moves with the words. Weberman’s way of hearing, or rather seeing, is more logical, more linear, and perhaps even more correct, but it’s sterile. Mine is not an answer but a possibility, and I think Dylan’s music is about possibilities rather than facts, like a statue that is not an expenditure of city funds but a gateway to a vision.

  If we are to be satisfied with Self Portrait we may have to see it in the sterile terms of the auteur, which in our language would be translated as “Hey, far out, Dylan singing Simon and Garfunkel, Rodgers and Hart, and Gordon Lightfoot...” Well, it is far out, in a sad sort of way, but it is also vapid, and if our own untaught perception of the auteur allows us to be satisfied with it, we degrade our own sensibilities and Dylan’s capabilities as an American artist as well. Dylan did not become a force whose every movement carries the force of myth by presenting desultory images of his own career as if that was the only movie that mattered—he did it by taking on the world with assault, and by seduction.

  In an attack on the auteur approach, as it relates to film, the actress Louise Brooks quotes an old dictionary, and the quote reveals the problem: “The novel [the film]”—the song—“is a subjective epic composition in which the author begs leave to treat the world according to his own point of view. It is only a question, therefore, whether he has a point of view. The rest will take care of itself.”

  Bob Dylan, Self Portrait (Columbia, 1970).

  ———. Great White Wonder (1969). The first Dylan bootleg: a two-record set comprised of songs taped in Minnesota in 1961, radio shows from the early 1960s, basement tape numbers, and even a TV performance of “Living the Blues.”

  Elvis Presley, “Blue Moon” (1955, first issued on Elvis Presley, RCA, 1956), collected on Sunrise (RCA, 1999).

  Louise Brooks, in Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By . . . New York: Knopf, 1969, 364.

  NEW MORNING

  New York Times

  15 November 1970

  Bob Dylan’s New Morning is his best album in years, a set of twelve new songs that hide their real power to move the listener within the bright pop flash of entertainment.

  Many of the songs seem to have been made up on the spot, with confidence in the ability of first-rate musicians to move in any direction at any time. “I know you’re gonna think this song is just a riff,” Bob sang five years ago, being careful to add, “unless you’ve been inside a tunnel and fell down sixty-nine, seventy feet over a barbed wire fence.” The riffs, inventions, and studio jams of New Morning have their own personality—not the repose of Nashville Skyline or the seeming indifference of much of Self Portrait, but the full joy of anticipating the right move and the exhilaration of hitting it square and bouncing off a chord into a new lyric.

  The more carefully worked out songs—“Went to See the Gypsy” and “Sign in the Window” in particular—are deceptive, because they, too, maintain the listener’s sense of the album as a work of effortless music. These songs appear obvious, and while they are not, one is still quite free to hear them as if they were.

  New Morning is fun to listen to. Dylan has never sung with such flair. The record has its own sound, a rich, open rock ’n’ roll combination of Dylan’s piano, Al Kooper’s organ, girl singers, two or three snappy guitars, and some fine hotshot drumming.

  The musicians as a group are at their best on the title song, playing hard rock. The surprising toughness of the cut—which in other hands might have been (and probably will be) just another bland hymn to optimism—results not from dump-truck heaviness but from perfect timing, a jolt of pure excitement near the end of the number, and from Bob’s singing. As the lyrics give us a pretty picture, Dylan sings out the last word or two with a hard-edged vengeance, not submitting to the obvious way to sing the song, but intensifying the simple enthusiasm of the number with such firm determination that a whole conversation of emotions comes into play.

  One aspect of this album’s distinction is its masterful organization. The songs speak to each other, sometimes working partly as cues for or comments on numbers that precede or follow. The first cut, “If Not for You,” acts like the hook line of a single, breaking the ice with its gaiety. Dylan’s harmonica moves in, just this once, like Alfred Hitchcock in a walk-on, offering a bit of familiarity. The frolic of the song disarms the listener’s inevitably apprehensive stance (“Hmmmmm, what’s this one going to be?”) and creates a space of easy freedom for both Dylan and his fans.

  In this kind of mood, you can either tune in on all the neat comments Bob is making about his honorary degree in the second song, “Day of the Locusts,” or simply enjoy the fact that he’s singing his head off.

  The cut ends with an escape to the Black Hills of Dakota and the next opens up with the singer quietly celebrating the slow-passing time up in the mountains. This sort of correspondence, or the two casual references to catching fish, or the various place names that appear throughout the album (Utah, Las Vegas, Minnesota, Montana, California) give the album its own reality without forcing the songs into a logical pattern.

  When the album ends, with two religious inventions—the first a spoken paragraph of what sounds like a TV preacher’s sermon, the second a ghostly Calvinistic rumble—one finds that, again, the songs comment on each other, as the Oral Roberts corn of the last strains of “Three Angels” (“But does anyone hear the music they play? Does anyone even try?”) is undercut by the stern testament of “Father of Night.” After a bit, the two songs begin to fade into each other, each gains in interest, and the joke of “Three Angels” takes on a little of the force of “Father of Night.” New Morning, as an album, has a context from which each song grows but to which no song submits.

  This is an American album with a western impulse (“Movin’ west,” as we used to say), and “Sign on the Window” may lie at the heart of New Morning. “Sign on the Window” is the richest of the twelve songs and perhaps the best recording Dylan has ever made. His versatile piano work lies beneath much of the album; here, he’s playing mostly by himself. The band and the girls move in briefly between verses, but it’s Dylan’s performance:Her and her boyfriend went to California

  Her and her boyfriend done change their tune
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  My best friend said now didn’t I warn ya . . .

  “Sign on the Window” is the other side of “Sweet Betsy from Pike,” in a way, the tale of the man who didn’t get to make the trip. One can see the singer, drunk in a town somewhere east of the Mississippi, as his isolation deepens into exclusion. “Sure gonna be wet tonight on Main Street,” goes a line, and the power of Dylan’s singing and of his piano makes that feel like the best line he ever wrote. Gonna be wet tonight on Main Street, but you know, there’s nowhere else to be.

  Dylan plays out the emotion of the song on his piano. “Build me a cabin in Utah,” he sings as it ends. “Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout . . . That must be what it’s all about.” It’s certain that these last lines will be hailed as Bob Dylan’s new message to us all, but they’re hardly that. When a wife and a trout stream settle easily on the same plane, that’s not a way of life but the ease of a dream. A cabin in Utah is the sort of dream one needs when it’s gonna be wet tonight on Main Street, when fantasy is set against experience.

  Rather than “What it’s all about” or even what this one song is all about, it’s that old American urge, that old half-question: “There must be a place that’s open, yet...” How far west do you have to go to be free? It’s a very great song, a love song moving west on the first American dream.

  This fine album comes only a few months after Dylan’s mostly unsuccessful Self Portrait. Not only does New Morning rock with the vitality that Self Portrait lacks, but Dylan’s decision to release a new record without the usual year’s wait is in itself an act of vitality. One of the functions of rock ’n’ roll is the disruption of cultural patterns, and, by extension, of rock ’n’ roll patterns. Dylan has, to some degree, broken the rule of reserve that seems to have been governing his career, and in doing so he has brought some life back to the rock ’n’ roll scene.