Why Dylan Matters

It was from her ship a-sailin’

Saying I don’t know when I’ll be comin’ back again,

It depends on how I’m a-feelin’

Dylan and Suze would later get back together, but written during those first days that Dylan spent in Rome, it preserves the evidence of a painful memory of separation, “across that lonesome ocean.” Dylan would sing the song on Studs Terkel’s show in May 1963. Terkel asks for a love song. Dylan: “You wanna hear a love song?” Terkel: “Boy meets girl. Here’s Bob Dylan, boy meets girl.” Dylan strums a chord or two—and corrects Terkel, “Girl leaves boy.”

Dylan’s trip to Rome also gave us a song called “Goin’ Back to Rome,” which he would perform on February 8, 1963, at Gerde’s Folk City, once he returned from his trip. “Goin’ Back to Rome” is not copyrighted, or included among the songs on Dylan’s official website, but it is preserved on the bootleg recording “The Banjo Tape,” transcribed here correctly for the first time:

Hey, well, you know I’m lying

But don’t look at me with scorn.

Well you know I’m lying

But don’t look at me with scorn.

I’m going back to Rome

That’s where I was born.

Buy me an Italian cot and carry,

Keep it for my friend.

Buy me an Italian cot and carry

Keep it for my friend.

Go talk to Italy

All around its bend.

You can keep Madison Square Garden

Give me the Coliseum.

You can keep Madison Square Garden

Give me the Coliseum.

So I don’t wanna see the gladiators

Man I can always see ’em.

While the lyrics here are obscure, they may not be pure nonsense. We can connect “going back to Rome” with the fact that the twenty-one-year-old had actually been in Rome the month before. And when he sings, “Buy me an Italian cot and carry, / Keep it for my friend,” we wonder about the identity of the friend for whom he would buy the portable baby cot. Could it have been for Suze Rotolo herself, whose pregnancy later that year was terminated by an abortion? Suze was presumably in the audience at Gerde’s that night, having just been reunited with a Dylan much happier than the one who had been moping around the Village in the second half of 1962 while she was off in Italy.

The song’s claim of a birthplace in Rome is an early instance of Dylan’s tendency to create environments for his various identities and characters. Another example is in the traditional “Man of Constant Sorrow” (1962), where the narrator is “going back to Colorado,” where he was “born and partly raised.” Other versions of this song have the singer “born and raised” in old Kentucky, others in San Francisco, and so on. As long as the meter of the place is the same (Cólorádo, Sán Francísco, etc.), anything works, variety and change of place and time being a natural feature of folk songs. But for Dylan, Rome is different. It is hard not to connect his staking a claim for his birthplace in Rome with other utterances that try to create a new point of origin for himself, one that makes more sense in the creative mind of this genius, like this moment in his 2004 60 Minutes interview with Ed Bradley. Questioned about changing his name from Robert Zimmerman to Bob Dylan, he replied: “You’re born, you know, the wrong names, the wrong parents.”

Even before the trip to Rome and the penning of the song “Goin’ Back to Rome,” which followed the visit, was an even earlier song, “Long Ago, Far Away,” sung before he would have known of the Folkstudio in Rome, in Minneapolis friend Tony Glover’s apartment on August 11, 1962. Recorded in November 1962, the song shows he was thinking of ancient Roman times. It shows a debt to gospel, as it considers human cruelty throughout history, from the point of view of those who suffer, not least the crucified Jesus, with whom the song begins and ends:

To preach of peace and brotherhood

Oh, what might be the cost?

A man he did it long ago

And they hung him on a cross.

Then the ironic, even sarcastic, refrain, implying that nothing has changed:

Long ago, far away,

Things like that don’t happen

No more, nowadays

The thrust of the song is along the lines of Woody Guthrie’s song “Jesus Christ”:

This song was made in New York City

Of rich man and preachers and slaves

If Jesus was to preach like He preached in Galilee

They would put Jesus Christ in His grave.

Of the examples in the five verses in the body of Dylan’s song, only two specify historical moments, the chains of slaves “during Lincoln’s time,” and in the striking image of the second to last verse, absent from the official Dylan website:

Gladiators killed themselves

It was during the Roman times

People cheered with bloodshot grins

As eyes and minds went blind

Long ago, far away

Things like that don’t happen

No more, nowadays

“Goin’ Back to Rome” has “always see ’em” rhyming with “Coliseum,” and we will see this rhyme used again, a few years later, in a famous and much better song from 1971, “When I Paint My Masterpiece.” The first two verses of that song are all about Rome. It is thought to preserve the memory of another trip Dylan took to Rome, following the 1965 tour of England that was the subject of D. A. Pennebaker’s film Don’t Look Back. According to this plausible theory, Dylan went back in the company of his new Muse, Sara Lownds, whom he would marry by the end of the year. Sara left her husband, Hans Lownds, to take up with Dylan, and it is hard not to connect this reality with one of Dylan’s most iconic lines, from “Idiot Wind,” written in 1974: “They say I shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy.”

Sara is absent in name from “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” thus allowing the singer in the scene Dylan paints to have an assignation with “a pretty little girl from Greece,” or in the official lyrics, “Botticelli’s niece,” who will be able to help out with painting the masterpiece in the title and in the last line of each verse:

Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble

Ancient footprints are everywhere

You can almost think that you’re seein’ double

On a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs

Got to hurry on back to my hotel room

Where I’ve got me a date with Botticelli’s niece

She promised that she’d be right there with me

When I paint my masterpiece

It is worth noting that “When I Paint My Masterpiece” was the regular opener for the first of the two Rolling Thunder Revue tours in the fall of 1975, which also featured the new song “Sara.” “Sara” is pretty much the opposite of “Idiot Wind” in its lyrical and sweet memories of their decade-long relationship, children and all. The only song with a title and lyrics that are unambiguous on the identity of the lover, its last two choruses end with a hint of the breakup toward which the two were headed: “You must forgive me my unworthiness. … Don’t ever leave me, don’t ever go.” By this time, Dylan was involved with other women, and when the 1976 part of the Rolling Thunder Revue resumed in Lakeland, Florida, on April 18, 1976, “Sara” was gone from the setlist, its position taken over by “Idiot Wind”—the first public performance of the song that had come out fifteen months earlier. In a televised performance on May 23, 1976, the eve of Dylan’s thirty-fifth birthday, he delivers a glorious, impassioned version of it with his wife, children, and mother in the audience. It was likely not much appreciated by Sara, sitting there, the object of much of the song’s anger and venom. Their divorce was finalized on June 29, 1977.

Clearly Dylan feels a connection to the antiquity of Rome, as he does with no other place. When he first traveled there in 1963, he was immediately inspired. That’s why in January 1963 he would write and sing the words “Goin’ back to Rome, / That’s where I was born.” That trip to Rome, subsequent trips, and the adoption of the city as the place where he was born seemed years later to incite a kind of artistic rebirth for Dylan, or at least it coincided with that rebirth.

PRESS CONFERENCE IN ROME, 2001

Bob Dylan would be back in Rome on July 23, 2001, for an interview with a group of European journalists who had been listening that morning to an advance copy of his new album, “Love and Theft,” due out the following September. This was in between concerts in Pescara, on the Adriatic coast of Italy, and Anzio, on the coast south of Rome. On this tour he performed in Scandinavia, Germany, England, Ireland, but it was Rome that he chose for the press conference that would plant a few clues about the new directions in his songwriting. One of the reporters asked an early question:

Are you enjoying to be in Rome?

Oh yeah.

You’re often here in Rome.

Pretty regular huh?

You write songs about [Rome].

Quite a few.

It is interesting that Dylan doesn’t limit himself to just the obvious song or to any one song, but “quite a few.” The journalist misses his observation, and is just thinking of the song in question:

“Paint My Masterpiece.”

Exactly.

You speak exactly of this here. …

Exactly. This is it … Spanish Steps.

The Hotel de la Ville, where the interview took place, was a little way along the Via Sistina from the top of the Spanish Steps—another prop for the interview. As the press conference continued, Dylan proceeded to lay down a trail for journalists to follow:

My songs are all singable. They’re current. Something doesn’t have to just drop out of the air yesterday to be current. You know, this is the Iron Age, we’re living in the Iron Age. But, what was the last age, the Age of Bronze or something? We can still feel that age. I mean if you walk around in this city, you know, people today can’t build what you see out there. Well at least, you know when you walk around a town like this, you know that people were here before you and they were probably on a much higher, grander level than any of us are. I mean it would just have to be. We couldn’t conceive of building these kind of things. America doesn’t really have stuff like this.

This looks close to being scripted, preplanned, and he gets back to it later in the interview after the journalists fail to pick up on where he was going:

We’ve talked about these ages before. You’ve got the Golden Age, which I guess would be the age of Homer, then we’ve got the Silver Age, then you’ve got the Bronze Age. I think you have the Heroic Age someplace in there. Then we’re living in what some people call the Iron Age, but it could really be the Stone Age. We could really be living in the Stone Ages.

Dylan’s language was tantalizing and now caught the attention of those present. After the first of these comments, where he said that something can be “current,” but also as old as the Age of Bronze, and “we can still feel that age,” one of the journalists sensed an opening:

Do you read history books?

Huh?

Do you read books about history? Are you interested about that?

[pause] Not any more than just would be natural to do.

Earlier in the interview, he had been asked about “new” poets on “Love and Theft.” His response deflected the truth, typical of Dylan, for whom there were lots of new poets beginning to enter his arsenal:

Are you still eagerly looking for poets that you may not have heard of or read yet? Or do you go back to the ones that have interested you like maybe Rimbaud? [pause, followed by a sigh of sorts]

You know I don’t really study poetry.

He may not study poetry, but the ancient footsteps that are everywhere on “When I Paint My Masterpiece” are also on “Lonesome Day Blues,” one of the songs from the new album that the reporters had just been listening to, and the one that echoes the lines he had adapted from the Roman poet Virgil:

I’m gonna spare the defeated—I’m gonna speak to the crowd

I’m gonna spare the defeated, boys, I’m gonna speak to the crowd

I’m goin’ to teach peace to the conquered

I’m gonna tame the proud.

Dylan, however, was not going to spell things out more than he had already done. That’s not his style. The journalists would have to make that connection for themselves. The interview ended with applause from the twelve satisfied and grateful reporters. “Now I’m gonna go see the Colosseum,” he told them. In reality, this was a highly unlikely proposition, though a drive-by could have happened. In 1965 he and Sara could just have pulled off a visit, but in 2001 Dylan would have been mobbed in such a public and open space. As is often the case with Dylan, he was visiting the song in that moment and in his mind’s eye.

The second verse of “When I Paint My Masterpiece” has the singer in the Colosseum, reusing the rhyme he had come up with for “Goin’ Back to Rome”:

Oh, the hours I’ve spent inside the Coliseum

Dodging lions and wastin’ time

Oh, those mighty kings of the jungle I could hardly stand to see ’em

Yes, it sure has been a long, hard climb

Train wheels runnin’ through the back of my memory

When I ran on the hilltop following a pack of wild geese

Someday, everything is gonna be smooth like a rhapsody

When I paint my masterpiece

With the fourth line—“It sure has been a long, hard climb”—he looks across the ten short years in which so much had happened since he had set out from his native Minnesota and arrived in Greenwich Village. But what about the next lines? The train wheels running through the back of his memory might seem to take us into another Dylan song, “Bob Dylan’s Dream,” from 1963, when he falls asleep while “riding on a train goin’ west” and is taken back to the days of his youth, and to the first few friends he had back then—by way of a nineteenth-century folk song.

But why does his memory train have him “running on the hilltop following a pack of wild geese”? Clinton Heylin tried to make sense of it: “he has returned in his time machine to Hibbing, remembering a time when he ‘ran on a hilltop following a pack of wild geese.’ ” But it is hard to find space for Hibbing in this song, whose next verse, “I left Rome and landed in Brussels,” would sandwich his hometown on a short plane ride between the capitals of Italy and Belgium. And following geese in Hibbing doesn’t make too much sense, unless the geese were in some classroom at Hibbing High, either during a Latin class or in discussion at the Latin Club. The wild-goose chase to which his memory goes back from the streets of Rome is more likely to refer to one of the favorite stories about ancient Rome, bound to have been on the quiz shows of the Latin Club, in which the sacred geese of the goddess Juno on the Capitoline Hill warned the Romans that invading tribesmen from Gaul were attacking the religious center of Rome. Virgil has the scene, along with other high points of Roman history, Romulus and Remus, the Sabine women, and Tarquin the Proud, on the shield that the hero Aeneas, Rome’s founder, carries into battle in the Aeneid:

And here the silver goose was fluttering

Through gilded porticos cackling that the Gauls were at the gate

“CHANGING OF THE GUARDS” AND THE SOULS OF THE PAST

It would be some years before the streets of Rome, or at least some things Roman, came back into his lyrics, but in one song from the immediate pre-Christian—in some ways not even pre-Christian—phase he can be seen reaching back through the years and the centuries, giving us fragments of worlds, hard to unravel or pin down, but highly evocative. “Changing of the Guards” was put out as the first track of the 1978 album Street Legal. The opening words of the song, and the album, have generally been seen as taking stock, looking back across the years to the beginning of his career in 1962: “Sixteen years / Sixteen banners united over the field.” Asked about these numbers in an interview with Jonathan Cott in November 1978, Dylan—of course—denied the relevance of the math, as he denies any single meaning for his songs. The images, situations, and characters that this song rolls out put it almost beyond overall interpretive reach—“It means something different every time I sing it.” The song proceeds through an array of figures, across fields with the good shepherd grieving, desperate men and desperate women, perhaps the music industry with which he had been dealing in those years: “Merchants and thieves, hungry for power, my last deal gone down,” and later, “Gentlemen he said / I don’t need your organization, I’ve shined your shoes / I’ve moved your mountains and marked your cards.” Just as it can mean something different every time he sings it, so it can mean something different every time I hear him sing it, depending on what images, all generally mysterious, are flashing by.

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