THE CURIOUS CELEBRITY OF BOB DYLAN

Jerry Harkins

Let me begin this diatribe with an embarrassing confession:  I do not like either the persona or the work of Robert Allen Zimmerman, aka Bob Dylan.  God knows I have tried.  As Nadia Boulanger said when asked why she did not like modern music, I condemn myself for this failure.  For one thing, I am part of a very small minority.  This is beyond eccentric, perhaps beyond bizarre.  But to my ears, the songs he writes are mindless drivel and he performs them terribly.  Joyce Carol Oates once wrote, his voice sounds “as if sandpaper could sing.”  And she, like everyone else, is a fan.  She even dedicated a short story to him and wrote, “If, as a poet per se, Dylan is not consistently original or inspired, as a musician-poet he's sui generis.”  He certainly is that, for which thank the Lord.

Another of his admirers tells us that, “As a vocalist, he broke down the notion that a singer must have a conventionally good voice in order to perform, thereby redefining the vocalist’s role in popular music.” Yes, he did.  My problem begins with that unconventional, lousy, fingernails-on-a-blackboard voice.  It wavers around a pitch like a drunk man trying to navigate through a funhouse.  Wavers is my attempt to be polite.  It implies something like yodeling which is pleasant enough but is nothing like what Bob Dylan does.  He scratches and screeches.  He swallows words.  He mumbles as though he doesn’t give a damn whether anyone’s listening or not.  In the first volume of his memoirs, he tells us that a lot of his songs were written specifically to alienate his audience and free him from the burden of being a “the voice of a generation.”  Poor baby!  But at least he succeeded.

The nasal twang is, of course, part of the act, one of the few aspects of the act that he actually seems to practice.  It makes him sound like he grew up in Okemah, Oklahoma or Godawful, Texas but, no, he was raised in Hibbing, Minnesota, not far from Grand Rapids.  Grand Rapids, Minnesota.  It –– the voice ––  is an embarrassing caricature of Woody Guthrie who really did grow up in Okemah.  Dylan, on the other hand, is a standard issue white-bread-and-mayonnaise Mid-western American when he’s not on stage.  He unabashedly thinks of himself as the Holden Caulfield of Hibbing.  It is possible that he does not understand what the phrase “catcher in the rye” means to Holden whose dream casts him as pretty much an anti-Dylan.  On the other hand, there is a definite resonance.  Dylan, like Holden, is a self-obsessed child who does entirely too much whining. His parents probably took Dr. Spock too seriously.

I just don’t like the man or his music although I think I should.  He has, after all, an impressive resume having released at least 61 albums and published more than 450 songs.  Rolling Stone Magazine claims his “Like a Rolling Stone” is the greatest song of all time, bar none.   It has been widely covered by other singers and has been the subject of mostly very positive reviews by critics from the rock media and academia.  The same magazine also named Dylan as the seventh greatest singer of all time.  Surely they jest.  But maybe not.  He is much admired.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

In 1970, before he was 30 years old, Dylan was awarded an honorary doctorate by Princeton University because he had “so brilliantly distinguished himself in good works.”  In 2000, he won the Oscar and the Golden Globe for the song “Things Have Changed” which he wrote for and sang in the high power but mostly forgettable film Wonder Boys.  In 1997, he received the Kennedy Center Honors.  In 2004, he received another doctorate, this time from St. Andrews University in Scotland.  In 2008, he was given an honorary Pulitzer Prize for his "profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power."  In 2010, he was awarded the National Medal of the Arts and in 2012, he received the National Medal of Freedom.  None of these honors made him happy.

For years, as October became imminent, I held my breath until the word came from Stockholm that the prize has been awarded to someone I never heard of and not to Mr. Dylan.  Not that he gave a damn.  Then in October 2016 the Swedish Academy announced that it was awarding him the Nobel Prize in Literature of all things for "...having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition."  This was followed by the announcement the following month that the new laureate would be unable to attend the prize ceremony in Stockholm on December 10 due to "pre-existing commitments." He’s famous for this sort of reverse snobbery.  He nearly walked out on the Princeton ceremony, he accepted the Oscar by satellite from Australia, and he looked terminally bored at the Medal of Freedom ceremony.  At least he made it which is more than he did for the Medal of the Arts which he blew off.  He arrived 50 minutes late for the 90-minute St. Andrews ceremony and he sent his son to pick up the Pulitzer.

In 2013, the American Academy of Arts and Letters installed Mr. Dylan as an American Honorary Member its highest accolade which is limited to fifteen persons of great distinction.  The President of the Academy noted that Dylan is a, “…poet, composer, musician, who has moved our culture with a consequence perhaps unmatched by any artist of our time.”  Dylan, of course, didn’t show up but he did drop them a quick note saying, "I look forward to meeting all of you some time soon."

Having admitted to his achievements, I do take a bit of comfort from the fact that neither he nor his music has ever sold particularly well.  He, his songs and his albums are entirely missing from lists of all-time best sellers although some of the singles have done well briefly on the Billboard charts, including the Hot 100.  He is hardly a commercial failure but his success seems to be driven by an appeal to the more educated and affluent members of the audience.

Some commentators assert that he re-invented the singer-songwriter category which is, historically, nonsense unless they mean that it now includes people who can’t sing and songs that that make no sense.  Since the time of Homer, there has never been a shortage of great singer-songwriters and it has never been a category needing re-invention.  Some say Dylan is a good guitarist.  Not especially, at least not in the role of a lead guitarist.  He can strum some basic chord progressions which is the most elementary way of using the instrument unless your name is Pete Townshend and you play for the Who.  And, whatever you hear elsewhere, “Like a Rolling Stone” is not a good song.  It is a nasty, misogynist rant, a petulant, childish tantrum.  It sounds for all the world like the work of a loathsome adolescent who has been ignored by the homecoming queen.  The melody is boring.  Worst of all is the substance of the song.  The refrain, repeated four times is:

How does it feel

How does it feel

To be on your own 

With no direction home

Like a complete unknown

Like a rolling stone?

The similes in the last two lines refer to the loneliness described in the preceding two.  Somehow, being lonely is like being unknown and like being a rolling stone.  Of all the people in the world, Bob Dylan believes that being well known, being a celebrity, is a curse.  He’d much rather be left alone.  Then comes the title line:  like a rolling stone.  What, if anything, was he thinking when that popped up on the page?  Certainly a rolling stone has direction.  It’s going downhill which is at least consistent with the churlish theme of the song.  But stones rarely roll anywhere.  Stone metaphors almost always refer to solidity, immovability.  Steady like a rock.  Or, in the case of the 1936 Fordham offensive line, sturdy like seven blocks of granite.  Even the adage that a rolling stone gathers no moss is ambiguous.  Is that good or bad?  The original Muddy Waters blues “Rollin’ Stone”  asks exactly that question.  (It is the Waters song, not Dylan’s, that gave its name to the rock group and the magazine.  It was named the 465^th greatest song of all time, just squeezing out Missy Elliot's "Get Ur Freak On.")

Not all Dylan lyrics are burdened with his psychological baggage.  “With God on Our Side” is a clever anti-war song.  It doesn’t have nearly the emotional impact of, say, Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”  The melody isn’t original but rather a copy of “The Patriot Game” which in turn was taken from a traditional Irish tune, “The Merry Month of May.”  But it makes a good point and is easy to sing.  “Blowin’ in the Wind” is a simple campfire song which asks a series of inscrutable questions the answers to which are said to be blowing in the wind. 

How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?

How many times must a man look up before he can see the sky?

How many years can a mountain exist before it is washed to the sea?

The questions are reminiscent of the complaints addressed to God in the opening lines of the Book of Habakkuk.  “How long, Lord, must I call for help but you do not listen?  Or cry out to you, 'Violence!' but you do not save?  Why do you make me look at injustice?  Why do you tolerate wrongdoing?"  Trailer park existentialism.  Still, unlike some others he has written, it’s a pleasant little song that does no harm.  The overriding Bob Dylan narrative is that of a grouchy ingrate dismissing one lover after another in the most odious terms he can think of.  His innocence has been abused.  “Don’t Think Twice” is typical:

I ain’t sayin’ you treated me unkind

You could have done better but I don’t mind.

You just kinda wasted my precious time.

But don’t think twice, it’s all right.

 Over a long career, Dylan seems to have had bad experiences with women.  “Just Like a Woman” complains:

She takes like a woman, yes she does.

She makes love just like a woman, yes she does.

And she aches just like a woman,

But she breaks just like a little girl.

What is he complaining about?  Should she take, make love and ache like something other than a woman?  Or maybe that’s okay with Bob if only she didn’t break like a little girl.  Breaks?  Sure, it doesn’t make sense but it does rhyme with takes, makes and aches. I get the distinct sense that Mr. Dylan does not like women and he especially does not like to feel indebted to them.  I wonder if that’s what Princeton was referring to when it insisted he had, “so brilliantly distinguished himself in good works.”

It is pointless to parse song lyrics too closely.  Whether you’re listening to Franz Schubert’s Winterreise or Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” lyrics often have a way of making the listener cringe.  Be-Bop-A-Lula!  But the idea of a song is not to be an exercise in syllogistic logic.  Most songs seek to create a mood and, like an abstract painting or a dance performance, they do not need to rely on strict syntax.  Still, in the era of the Great American Songbook—say the early 1920’s to the late 1950’s—they did and we were spoiled.  Composers and lyricists almost always made their meaning clear.  Think of any song by the Gershwin brothers, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, Johnny Mercer or dozens of others of that time.  The listener could not avoid the messages of their songs.  They are the essence of what Marshall McLuhan meant by “hot” media, offering total aural involvement with minimal stimulus.  Two generations of listeners were conditioned and made comfortable by the composers, lyricists and singers of the Golden Age of Tin Pan Alley.  It was left to the postwar generation, especially to the singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan, to exploit a cooler esthetic.  For me, it was too much to ask.  It was not what I wanted from a song.

Dylan is a child of post-war angst, part of a generation influenced by artists and intellectuals exhausted by war and the value systems that had failed to protect them against horrendous evil.  Among the most discontented were the beat poets who influenced the young Bob Dylan both philosophically and rhetorically.  Indeed, he might well have been one of them had he taken more care with his lyrics but, like many others of that time, he seems to have assumed that they were ad libbing.  He was particularly taken with the greatest of them all, Gregory Corso.  Corso is difficult in the sense that James Joyce is difficult.  Consider this excerpt from one of his best known works, Bomb:

O Bomb I love you


I want to kiss your clank eat your boom


You are a paean an acme of scream


a lyric hat of Mister Thunder


O resound thy tanky knees


BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM


BOOM ye skies and BOOM ye suns
BOOM

BOOM ye moons ye stars BOOM


nights ye BOOM ye days ye BOOM


BOOM BOOM ye winds ye clouds ye rains


Go BANG ye lakes ye oceans BING


Barracuda BOOM and cougar BOOM


Ubangi BOOM orangutang 


BING BANG BONG BOOM bee bear baboon


ye BANG ye BONG ye BING

I first heard “Bomb” in 1956 in a college recital by Corso, Philip Whalen and Alan Ginsberg.  The latter did an extemporaneous parody of Bomb which went:

Bish, bash, bing, bang

Turtles exploding over Istanbul

Baby, you’re a bomb,

Bomb I love you.

Boom!

I think you can sense how this might have appealed to Bob Dylan and how he might have wanted to emulate the new rhetoric.  Going on 500 songs, though, he has never come close.  I can’t tell you why and I make no claim that anyone could make a successful song from a beat poem (except maybe Philip Glass).  Dylan may have all the requisite skills but he seems to lack the craftsmanship to put them together.  Or maybe the discipline. 

In mid-career, Dylan found Jesus which instantly made him a subject of interest to the world’s scholars of religion as an exemplar of contemporary culture who nonetheless was serious about religion.  The “post-liberal post-conservative” Catholic priest, Robert Barron, says he has always been profoundly religious.  For example, the wind in “Blowin’ in the Wind” is actually the breath of Yahweh which contains all the answers and that the narrator of  “Like a Rolling Stone” is the voice of God asking if it hasn’t made you feel better to have rid yourself of all your material and earthly concerns. As he often does, Father Barron may be thinking too much.

During his fundamentalist period, Dylan’s lyrics often became hymns.  “Pressing On” is a fair example:

Many try to stop me, shake me up in my mind

Say, “Prove to me that He is Lord, show me a sign”

What kind of sign they need when it all come from within

When what’s lost has been found, what’s to come has already been?

The lyric demands proof not that there is a God but that Jesus is God.  Dylan says the proof comes from within.  He goes on to say it can come only when what was lost is found (Luke 15:11) and “what has been will be again” (Ecclesiastes 1:9).  But that is gibberish.  The two biblical quotations seem to be thrown in at random.  Neither has anything to do with proving that “He is Lord.”  On the other hand, the internality of that proof is an important theological construct although hardly an orthodox one.  It is actually a critique of two pillars of the apologetics of Father Barron and those like him who remain committed Thomists.  First, it suggests that the attempt to make sacred knowledge objective and impersonal through an appeal to dogma is futile because such knowledge is inherently internal.  Second, it conflicts with the claim the church makes to exclusive custody of the Truth.  An internal God is ineffable and not discernable through such human contrivances as revelation, magisterium or a “deposit of faith.”

I would like to think that Dylan is actually trying to promote apophactic theology but probably not.  In any event, it appears that he is now past the Christian stage of his life.  He seems to have returned to Judaism, this time as a supporter if not a member of the ultra-orthodox Chabad-Lubavitch movement.

  

Ever since the advent of rock and roll, popular musicians have been exploring new ways of responding to the impulse to create.  It sometimes seems that the genius of Tin Pan Alley served as an obstacle to innovation until the early rockers blew up the dam.  A very similar process of breaking through occurred in classical music after Beethoven and in jazz after the era of Louis Armstrong.  Today, artists such as Bono, Alison Krauss and Union Station, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, the Dixie Chicks, Elton John and, yes, Bob Dylan have been expanding and elaborating on received genres.  It is not at all surprising that some of these experiments work and others do not.  Nor is it surprising that critics, pundits and other “experts” frequently (read almost always) turn out to be wrong.  Rolling Stone was not only wrong to call “Like a Rolling Stone” the greatest song of all time, it was utterly vacuous.  The editors are entitled to name their favorite song but they should know there is no such thing as the greatest song.

There are times—mostly when I’m listening to Dylan—when I think I’m right about him and everybody else is wrong.  Actually though I stopped listening years ago which means I’ve had more time for contemplating my own fallibility.  But life is short.  As a high school student, I once argued that there were enough great poets to occupy my time on this earth without having to resort to anti-Semitic lunatics like Ezra Pound.  Similarly, there are enough wonderful singers out there without having to listen to drivel sung by sandpaper.

Subsequently

Two years after this was published, Rolling Stone (the magazine) revised its list of the world's greatest songs published in 2004.  "Like a Rolling Stone" was demoted to the fourth greatest slot, replaced by "Respect" by Otis Redding which was promoted from Number Five.  "Respect" is not the world's greatest song either but at least it was made famous by Aretha Franklin.  I trust the downward spiral of its predecessor will accelerate in coming editions of the list.