Why Dylan Matters

I was convinced I wasn’t going to do anything else, and I had the good fortune to meet a man in New York City who taught me how to see. He put my mind and my hand and my eye together in a way that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt … when I started doing it the first album I made was Blood on the Tracks.

Dylan is characteristically vague on the actual methods or techniques, and one could claim that a song like “Visions of Johanna” from 1966 already seemed to reveal painterly qualities, but it is true that the vivid narrative technique in a song like “Simple Twist of Fate” from the new album gave it new effects that catch what he is talking about:

A saxophone someplace far off played

As she was walkin’ by the arcade

As the light bust through a beat-up shade where he was wakin’ up

She dropped a coin into the cup of a blind man at the gate

And forgot about a simple twist of fate

In a radio interview with folksinger Mary Travers in April 1975, Dylan said of Blood on the Tracks, “A lot of people tell me they enjoy that album. It’s hard for me to relate to that. I mean, it, you know, people enjoying the type of pain, you know?” That’s the point, as Dylan, here deliberately disingenuous, well knew. His artistic genius—in his words, music, and voice—create pain, but precisely because of the brilliance of his art on this album, these songs produce recompense for the loss of love and the memory of what had once been. This is the quite intentional goal of songs like “Simple Twist of Fate,” “Idiot Wind,” or “If You See Her, Say Hello.” These songs also hold the trace of a hope that all might not be lost: in “Simple Twist of Fate” the man “Hunts her down by the waterfront docks where the sailors all come in / Maybe she’ll pick him out again,” this also giving the point of view of the character in the song; or the switch at the end of “Idiot Wind” from “You’re an idiot, babe” to “We’re idiots, babe.” Sharing the blame; or at the end of “If You See Her, Say Hello,” “Tell her she can look me up, if she’s got the time”—though in other versions, any hope is pretty remote, as we’ll see. To have lived through more than forty years with all of the music and poetry of these songs, from the album and in performance, is a source of good fortune and of genuine pleasure and deep contentment, even—or especially—with the pain the album so exquisitely expresses.

Much of the album focuses on nighttime, the time of day when the relationships in its songs seem to fall apart, perhaps also the case with Dylan’s real-life relationships. The first line of the first song of the album, “Tangled Up in Blue,” seems to start on a bright note: “Early one mornin’ the sun was shinin’ / I was layin’ in bed,” but within a moment that feeling is illusory, as the relationship is suddenly no more: “Wonderin’ if she’d changed at all / if her hair was still red.” The singer’s early- morning memory eventually gets back to the evening breakup, after driving out west in a car that the couple abandons as they “Split up on a dark sad night / Both agreeing it was best.” The next song, “Simple Twist of Fate,” begins with a twilight encounter, now in third-person narration: “They sat together in the park / As the evening sky grew dark.” After a one-night stand that could in the narrator’s mind have led to something, in the morning he finds that she’s gone: “He woke up, the room was bare / He didn’t see her anywhere.” In “Meet Me in the Morning,” morning and night frame the song, which begins with “Meet me in the morning, 56th and Wabasha,” and ends with the “sun sinkin’ like a ship,” and in between “They say the darkest hour is right before the dawn.” The year after Bob and Sara Dylan’s divorce, finalized on June 29, 1977, Dylan seemed to recall this aspect of the album’s songs: “I don’t have anything but darkness to lose. I’m way beyond that.” A good deal of the melancholic and painful power of this album, whatever the realities of Dylan’s personal situation, comes from these moments, all shadows in the night, a time of day that would continue to be the temporal setting and condition for the best of Dylan’s song.

In the beautiful “If You See Her, Say Hello,” the narrator’s memories of what has been lost in the relationship also come as night falls, in the second verse: “But to think of how she left that night, it still brings me a chill,” and then again in the final verse: “Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past.” I single out this song for its intense lyric qualities, and not so much for the painterly qualities so apparent elsewhere on the album. The gift of lyric poetry resides in its ability to precisely capture the condition of individuals in their sorrows, joys, loves and losses, desires, hatreds and jealousies. Such poetry is intimately connected to song—again, lyric from lyre, the guitar of the Greeks and Romans. Like song, it enables us to read ourselves into the situations that the poetic voice creates in aesthetically compelling modes. “If You See Her, Say Hello” is another such lyric song-poem. Its five verses are an elaboration of the title, a request by the singer for someone to say hello to a woman who walked out on him, its first verse closing with the rawness of the singer’s feelings: “She might think that I’ve forgotten her, don’t tell it isn’t so.”

This song actually exists in two versions, and in performance with many variations. The first version that Dylan released, on Blood on the Tracks, as quoted above, was actually recorded on December 30, 1974, effectively revising and for many years canceling out an earlier version, which was recorded in September 1974 and eventually released in 1991 on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3. In this version, the messenger was a rival, at least in the singer’s imagination: “If you’re makin’ love to her, kiss her for the kid.” The change makes a world of difference, as the element of jealousy complicates things and makes it a different song, as do multiple other changes in yet other versions, including the first known live performance, at Lakeland, Florida, on April 18, 1976, during the second Rolling Thunder Revue, as the Dylans’ marriage was falling apart: “If you’re making love to her, watch it from the rear / You’ll never know when I’ll be back, or liable to appear.” Other parts of the song change in different performances over the years, replaced by brilliant absurdist lines, “Her eyes were blue, her hair was too, her voice was sort of soft,” or a brutal closing to the song in concert in 2002: “If she’s passing back this way, and it couldn’t be too quick / Please don’t mention her name to me, you mention her name it just make me sick.” And the third stanza is gone altogether, absent from official collections of Dylan’s lyrics. But what I heard all those years ago in Ann Arbor was the pure, lyrical version from the 1975 album, and that’s the one that has stayed with me over the years: “Tell her she can look me up if she’s got the time.”

LEAVING AND COMING BACK TO DYLAN

In the fall of 1977, I left Ann Arbor for Cambridge, Massachusetts, to begin teaching in the green pastures of Harvard University, about fifteen years after Dylan met folksinger Eric Von Schmidt in those same pastures. By then my Dylan collection had been topped up. Dylan’s Muse also seemed to have returned in what looked somewhat like a second classic phase, matching the first from a decade earlier. In early 1976, he had released Desire—not quite up to Blood on the Tracks, but fine enough. With Dylan’s next album, Street Legal, appearing in 1978, the winds of change were again beginning to shift in his music. The opening lines of its first song, “Changing of the Guards,” are vivid and allusive: “Sixteen years / Sixteen banners united over the fields,” inviting the listener to look back those sixteen years to the beginning of Dylan’s career, and take stock of how far he’d come and think in the apocalyptic lyrics of the song about where he might be headed: “But Eden is burning, either brace yourself for elimination / Or else your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards.” There are some good songs on this album, chiefly for me “Is Your Love in Vain,” but the album as a whole was flawed, as Dylan clearly felt by the best index available: only one song, “Señor,” truly entered the repertoire of Dylan performances, and most he didn’t play after 1978.

For the most devoted Dylan fans who have followed his music through each new stage, his songs and all they evoke become a part of us, with each new album adding another layer. For other fans, he effectively disappeared at various points, starting in 1964 or 1965, quitting their world of folk and protest songs to create a different kind of art. To these fans, Dylan had sold out to a hipster look, and had traded acoustic for electric, with all that connoted for the causes with which they had identified him. But what he gave them in those first two years endured, along with the bittersweet memory of what he had been to them, kept alive by new covers of those particular songs by generations of folksingers who came after. Some disappointed fans stuck around through 1966, hoping that Dylan’s sound, which alternated in performances of that year between solo acoustic and electric with supporting musicians, would return to the former. When it didn’t, these people booed at his concerts, and eventually either came to see what was happening there and found something in it that made sense, or decided to leave for good.

The next crop of Dylan fans to take their leave did so for different reasons, in 1979, when the changing of the guards had come to pass as he started writing and singing Christian songs, often preaching from the stage about hellfire and damnation before launching into his performance. That version of Dylan just didn’t fit in with where they were in their lives or what they believed, or didn’t believe in, or with the Dylan they thought they knew from 1966 or 1975 or some other moment. And so it has continued with Dylan’s constant evolution through the decades, with some fans disembarking and others coming back on board, and newer, younger ones signing up for the first time. It is an essential part of Dylan’s genius that he is constantly evolving as an artist. This is not true of the artists of similar longevity, say Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Van Morrison, or Bruce Springsteen. Inevitably that constant evolving creates periods of experimentation and exploration, some less successful than others, but always moving restlessly toward something, and with the music of the last twenty years now having reached, and sustained, a third classic period.

Dylan’s art works in elemental ways, not just through his words and music and voice, but also through his look and appearance. This is also part of his art, from his look of youthful, potent frailty in his early twenties, to his hip and sexualized look on the 1966 tour, through to the powerful maturity of his middle years. His look during the Rolling Thunder Revue tours of 1975–76, which you can see on YouTube and in the 1976 TV movie Hard Rain, is part of the appeal of those performances: 1970s hipster in his mid-thirties, dressed in denim and leather, sometimes sporting a bandana or turban, sometimes with an ornate floral arrangement in his hatband, frequently with white face paint, or with a straggly beard. And into recent years with his elegant, expressive, weather-beaten face, and his scrupulous attention to costume: outfits and hats that at times turn him into a Civil War officer, at times a cowboy, at times the vaudeville performer. In all of these evolutions there is an enigmatic presence that can’t quite be comprehended or described. With Dylan, everything is performance, and all aspects of performance—the words, the music, the voice, the bands, and the look—coming together to create the unique phenomenon that is Bob Dylan.

3

DYLAN AND ANCIENT ROME: “THAT’S WHERE I WAS BORN”

GOIN’ BACK TO ROME / THAT’S WHERE I WAS BORN.

—BOB DYLAN, “GOING BACK TO ROME,” 1963

IF YOU WERE BORN AROUND THIS TIME OR WERE LIVING AND ALIVE, YOU COULD FEEL THE OLD WORLD GO AND THE NEW ONE BEGINNING. IT WAS LIKE PUTTING THE CLOCK BACK TO WHEN BC BECAME AD.

—BOB DYLAN, CHRONICLES: VOLUME ONE, P. 28

In March 2007, I traveled to the University of Minnesota for a symposium in Bob Dylan’s home state titled Highway 61 Revisited: Dylan’s Road from Minnesota to the World. The conference was designed to coincide with the exhibition Bob Dylan’s American Journey, 1956–66, concurrently taking place at the university’s Weisman Art Museum. Many of the best-known Dylan scholars were in attendance: Michael Gray, C. P. Lee, Greil Marcus, Christopher Ricks, Stephen Scobie. The symposium was evidence that Dylan had become part of the academic mainstream. But that fact alone was not what drew me to the north woods along with the other Dylanologists. It was something more: the opportunity to come together to discuss Dylan in this place where his genius had first come into being, at the university where Bob Zimmerman was technically enrolled in 1959–60, just a few blocks from Dinkytown and the coffeehouses where he began in earnest to practice and perfect the art he would take out into the world.

The day before the conference, like many of the others attending, I signed up for a guided bus tour of Hibbing, Minnesota, the town where Dylan grew up. Hibbing is situated about seventy miles northwest of the city of Duluth, built on the rich iron ore of the Mesabi Iron Range, and at the edge of the town lies the world’s largest open-pit iron mine. Dylan was born in Duluth on May 24, 1941, and grew up in Hibbing after his family moved there when he was six years old. The bus ride itself was memorable and scenic, as we headed north from Minneapolis on Highway 61, the road that follows the Mississippi all the way down to New Orleans, and rode through pine stands, past the Frank Lloyd Wright gas station in Cloquet, then on into Hibbing. We were a busload of about forty-five Dylanologists and assorted Dylan fans, including a young guy whose name tag read Jack Fate—the character played by Dylan in the underappreciated 2003 film Masked and Anonymous, as he was eager to explain to the few who needed explaining. Jack was handing out Highway 61 bumper stickers.

We eventually found ourselves standing in the library of Hibbing High—the magnificent “Castle in the Wilderness,” as it’s known—from which Robert Zimmerman graduated in 1959. Our tour guide, John “Dan” Bergan, a now-retired English teacher at Hibbing High, had been a classmate of Dylan’s younger brother, David Zimmerman. David graduated five years after Bob and was “a terrifically talented musician in his own right,” according to Bergan. Our busload of pilgrims was also treated to a talk by eighty-three-year-old B. J. Rolfzen, who had once been Dylan’s English teacher. You could tell he must have been a dynamic teacher fifty years earlier, engaged by poetry and with a fire for conveying the magic of literature to his students. Music journalist and cultural critic Greil Marcus has described this moment from Rolfzen’s talk:

Presumably we were there to hear his reminiscences about the former Bob Zimmerman—or, as Rolfzen called him, and never anything else, Robert. Rolfzen held up a slate where he’d chalked lines from “Floater,” from Dylan’s 2001 “Love and Theft”: “Gotta sit up near the teacher / If you want to learn anything.” Rolfzen pointed to the tour member who was sitting in the seat directly in front of the desk. “I always stood in front of the desk, never behind it,” he said. “And that’s where Robert always sat.” He talked about Dylan’s “Not Dark Yet,” from his 1997 Time Out of Mind: “I was born here and I’ll die here / Against my will.” “I’m with him. I’ll stay right here. I don’t care what’s on the other side,” Rolfzen said, a teacher thrilled to be learning from a student. With that out of the way, he proceeded to teach a class in poetry.

The Hibbing experience was all part of what later came to seem to me a carefully staged tour. It reminded me of a visit I’d taken a few years earlier to Max Gate, the house that novelist and poet Thomas Hardy designed and lived in on the outskirts of Dorchester in Dorset, England, from 1885 till his death in 1928. Or else it was a bit like visiting the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut. As a 2016 headline in the CTPost put it, “Mark Twain fan visits his Hartford mansion, finds it’s like communing with a long-lost friend.” Whatever we think we are doing on such journeys, what moves us is the sense of being at the wellspring of artistic creation, where creative genius began to form the art that would become central to our own lives and imaginations. In Hartford, we’re looking for Huck or Tom. In Dorsetshire, we’re hoping to run into some sign of Tess or the mayor of Casterbridge. Likewise, in Hibbing, we were all there looking for something to connect us to the Dylan we had known back in our youth and been with ever since. We were hoping to find it in the magnificent Hibbing High auditorium, where the fifteen-year-old Bob Zimmermann had played with his band, singing and pounding out a Little Richard tune on the piano, as recalled by his then friend John Bucklen:

He got up there … in this talent program at school, came out on stage with some bass player and drummer, I can’t remember who they were, and he started singing in his Little Richard style, screaming, pounding the piano, and my first impression was that of embarrassment, because the little community of Hibbing, Minnesota, way up there, was unaccustomed to such a performance.

I think we could all imagine that event, but in 2007, fifty years after the show, it was hard to get close. Bob wasn’t there, but it was also easy to imagine him up on the stage looking out at the audience in the elegantly upholstered seats of the 1,805-capacity auditorium of which Dan Bergan, who wrote a booklet on the school, rightly noted, in language that, like the auditorium, seemed remote from the hard realities of the Iron Range:

Nowhere in the United States can one find a high school auditorium—perhaps any auditorium—of such incomparable beauty, of such ornate and elaborate decoration … the auditorium features a 40- by 60-foot stage, framed by its 20- by 40-foot proscenium arch whose borders are marked by massive pillars with composite capitals in gold rising on each side of the stage.

Dylan would soon enough be performing at Carnegie Hall in New York and at the London Palladium, but that stage in Hibbing was not a bad place to start. This auditorium must be emblazoned in his mind. The nostalgia involved in the activation and exploration of memory is something that is essential to Dylan—as he said in 1967, “You can change your name / but you can’t run away from yourself.”

After visiting Hibbing High, our group, a little ragged from the warmth of the early spring day, made the short three-block walk from the school down Seventh Avenue, now “Bob Dylan Drive,” to the corner of Twenty-Fifth Street, and the house Bob Dylan grew up in. According to the Iron Range Tourism Bureau, it is no longer open to the public—“drive-by visits only”—but on that day the owner had actually opened its doors and allowed us to go into the front living room, where he had set up a display of Dylan memorabilia on a coffee table. There was a Dylan song playing, I can’t quite remember which one, and I think all of us felt a combination of pleasure at having arrived at such a place, along with slight embarrassment to be intruding in the inner sanctum. I was relieved that a request to visit the bedroom was declined, though some went around the side of the house to look up at its window. The owner of the house told us about Dylan’s own occasional visits over the years. He would spend time up in the bedroom of his old house, presumably making contact with memories of listening on the radio to the music that would form him, first gospel blues and country, later rock and roll. He surely found his teenage self on these occasions.

Lunch was at Zimmy’s, which has since closed as the town continues its economic decline. Some of us bought very unauthorized-looking Zimmy’s T-shirts, along with copies of B. J. Rolfzen’s memoir, The Spring of My Life, a self-published book in ninety-five pages of Courier font—and an interesting account in its own right of growing up poor in post-Depression America. The bus also took us a few miles out of town for a visit to the famous iron ore pit that you can see from the moon. The best ore was long gone, even when Dylan was growing up, and it was easy to connect to the song “North Country Blues” from The Times They Are A-Changin’—a mining blues folk song Dylan would sing at the Newport Folk Festival on July 26, 1963, then once again, for the last time at a concert, at Carnegie Hall, on October 26 of the same year. “This is a song about iron ore mines, and—a, iron ore town,” he said at Newport. The song is in the voice of a woman, as we discover only in the fourth verse, brought up by her brother, who falls victim to the mines, following the same end as her father. In a final blow her husband deserts her and her three children. Dylan had written the song following a trip back to Hibbing, before the public discovered that he had grown up in the town. Andrea Svedberg broke the news of that reality in a Newsweek article published the Monday after the Carnegie Hall concert.

Once the Hibbing connection was made, “North Country Blues” was too easily situated in Hibbing and to the background of Bob Zimmerman, despite its narrator’s female voice and the far different details of its story. Maybe that was why Dylan sang it only once more, in 1974 at a benefit concert for the Friends of Chile. By 2001, when “Floater (Too Much to Ask)” came out, Dylan cared less about people knowing where he came from, and B. J. Rolfzen in his talk is not the only one to have detected autobiographical undertones to the song, both in the lines he quoted and in the ending of the same verse, on the young people of the town:

They all got out of here any way they could

The cold rain can give you the shivers

They went down the Ohio, the Cumberland, the Tennessee

All the rest of them rebel rivers

By the time of that song, 2001, Dylan’s real identity and background was even more beside the point. While “North Country Blues” is a song that can be tied to the hard lives of those who worked and died in the mines of Hibbing, Minnesota, it is even more a song that came more from the folk tradition of mining songs, and especially from the fertile mind of Bob Dylan. Like Dylan, our group soon enough boarded the bus and headed south, following his fifty-year-old trail, to the University of Minnesota, and the next day for coffee in Dinkytown, where he went in the fall of 1959 to take up the art of folksinger performance on his way to Greenwich Village and destiny. The conference itself was memorable enough, but what has stuck in my mind most is that day, spent in the little Minnesota town of Hibbing.

LATIN AND THE LATIN CLUB, HIBBING, 1956–57

As the only classicist in the group, I was also in Hibbing looking for something else, for traces of a bond I shared with Bob Dylan that for me dated back to 1959, when I began studying Latin at the age of nine. Following lunch at Zimmy’s, I slipped out and walked the two blocks to the Hibbing Public Library. One of the waitresses had told me there was a Dylan exhibit there, featuring a copy of the Hematite, Dylan’s high school yearbook from 1959, the year he graduated. The Hematite was named for the mineral form of iron oxide that brought wealth to the town, and had in the days before the main lode dried up paid for the building of its magnificent school. I had already seen page 76 of the yearbook, at a Dylan exhibit in Seattle in 2005, and in the Scorsese documentary No Direction Home, so I knew what to expect. On that yearbook page the life and career of the future Nobel laureate was summed up in just three details:

Robert Zimmerman: to join “Little Richard”—

Latin Club 2; Social Studies Club 4.

Plenty has been written about Bob’s early interest in Little Richard, one of the foundational singers of rock and roll, whose hit “Tutti Frutti” shot up in the charts at the end of 1955, when Bob was a freshman at Hibbing High. By the following fall, backed by the Shadow Blasters, his name for the first band he had put together, Bob Zimmerman was himself now imitating the songs and stage antics of Little Richard. Indeed, the head shot of Bob Zimmerman at the top of that same yearbook page even alluded to the identity his notice craved, in the form of his trademark Little Richard pompadour hair style. This was well before he started taking on the persona, and the look, of Woody Guthrie as he headed for the folksinging scenes of Greenwich Village.