Latest / Booked On Rock with Eric Senich / The Lyrical Art Of Bob Dylan [Episode 174]

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The Lyrical Art Of Bob Dylan [Episode 174] · Booked On Rock with Eric Senich

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The old rule remains the case that you've got to master the form before you
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can break it. E'soga just coming along as a sort of amateur songwriter,
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thinking you can throw in as many words in a line as you like.
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Dylan has mastered all these demands of economy and concentration and all that, and
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then you can break three a bit and we're totally bumped rock and roll.
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I mean, I'll leave you. You're reading. Little Hands says it's time
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to rock and roll, Rock, roll up, I totally booked. Welcome
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back to book down Rock, the podcast for those about to read and rock.
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Find the podcast online at bookdown rock dot com. You can find every
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episode there, along with links to listening platforms, exclusive videos, blogs,
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and the latest rock book releases. Author Michael Gray as this episode's guest.
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He's here to talk about the brand new, three part fiftieth anniversary edition of
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his highly acclaimed book, Song and Dance Man, The Art of Bob Dylan.
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The first edition of Song and Dance Man was the first book to seriously
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examine the work of Bob Dylan, originating the realm of scholarship put Dylan on
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the road to the Nobel Prize fifty years and hundreds of Dylan books later,
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many still consider it one of the very best. Rolling Stone called it monumental,
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endlessly illuminating. The original Song and Dance Man was released in nineteen seventy
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two, and it covered Dylan's work through nineteen seventy self Portrait, but it
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was expanded in a new edition in nineteen eighty two and again in two thousand,
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growing to over nine hundred pages and covering Dylan's work through nineteen ninety seven's
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Time out of Mind. But Song and Dance Man has been out of print
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for over a decade, during which time Bob Dylan won a Nobel Prize for
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Literature, continued delivering critically lauded records, and earned a new generation of fans
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while sustaining older ones in his seventh decade as an artist. The fiftieth Anniversary
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series puts every word of Song and Dance Man back into print, but at
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an accessible three volume four, and Michael Gray is here to tell us about
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what's inside those three volumes. A playlist of the songs we discussed in this
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episode can be found on the show notes page. Michael Gray, Welcome to
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the Book Done Rock Podcast. Thank you Before I ask you about this beautifully
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arranged three volume fiftieth anniversary edition, can you take us back to the original
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book from nineteen seventy two titled Song and Dance Man The Art of Bob Dylan.
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This was the first critical study of Dylan's work. What was it about
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his work that connected with you so much so that you decided to write the
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original book? First of all words, because you know, I didn't grow
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up on folk music. I grew up on rock and roll, and for
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me, rock and roll was a marvelous antidote to the kind of uptight sort
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of school that I went to, so it was greatly liberating. But I
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was also very good at English. I liked books, I like reading,
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and when I got to university, which was at the end of nineteen sixty
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four, which was a great time to become a university student, because the
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nineteen sixties was just exploding and I was being trained to scrutinize English literature,
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texts, nineteenth century novels, the Romantic poets particularly. I liked close to
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the text analysis, as that was the phrase where he really looked at why
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a particular sentence used those particular words, and you know, the most admirable
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people were the ones who were the most concise. If you think of someone
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like Charles Dickens, he's obviously popularly thought to be very long winded and you
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know, huge books with blah blah blah blah blah, but actually there are
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many many paragraph in his work where any modern writer would take five times as
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long to say the same thing. Very very concentrated use of language sometimes.
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And it seemed to me that when I first heard Bob Dylan, there was
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something about well, first of all, he was writing very long songs.
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You know, this was the mid sixties. He was just going electric,
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as it was called. And he was unlike anybody else I'd ever heard.
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You know, I was used to simple songs with exciting music, and here
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was somebody who, in the acoustic work seemed to be more or less stripping
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music away altogether and just emphasizing words. And then next minute, you know,
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what do you know? There's subterranean hamsick blues. And this was amazing
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to me. Was also very he astonished me because every time he made a
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record, but he sounded completely different. Not only was the music different,
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but the voice too. You know, he was like a ventriloquist. I
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mean, he had all these voices, whereas most people I've won, you
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know, Elvis had a couple because he had an early, beautiful, early
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hillbilly voice, and then he got stuck in a kind of voice, and
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so, you know, and then because the song seemed so long and complicated
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and interesting, I started really wanting to look into those and my natural inclination
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was to look at words, and so that's how it started. And then
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I found that, you know, he was being treated as either a sort
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of folky or as a pop star because now suddenly he was groovy and was
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wearing Chelsea boots and you know, had singles in the hit Parade, and
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what nobody was treating him as was any kind of serious artist. And it
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seemed to me that maybe he was. And in the course of exploring that,
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you know, the process of studying someone is a process whereby you whether
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what you thought was there really is there or not. And I found that
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it really was. I also found that, you know, unlike most people
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in on the radio or in popular music of any kind, he was obviously
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very well read. You know, there are references to work by other people,
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and he named checks a lot of writers and poets and so on,
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so altogether, this was really the prompt to carrying on. Yeah, I
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just needed to write about him at length, and so it turned into a
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book, because what else could you do. I'm far too old to be
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trying to catch up with what Bob Dylan has done in the twenty first century.
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I mean, I did do another book published in two thousand and six
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and eight, the Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, and that does at least cover things
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like the Love and Theft Album of two thousand and one. It still seems
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to me to be the one really great album Bob Dylan album of the twenty
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first century. Better than Rough and Rowdy Ways and certainly better than you Know
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Tempest. And I thought Modern Times was like Love and Theft Light Murder Most
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Foul. When I heard that, I thought Dylan still has that effect on
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me, Murder Most Foul. I was mesmerized by that song. Yeah,
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that was That was an extraordinary piece of work, and extraordinary time to throw
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it out. Of course, very brilliant timing if you wanted to look at
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it that way. Some of the writing within that long track, the stuff
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where you're inside John F. Kennedy's head and he's being rushed to the hospital.
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That's extraordinary creative writing. I'm trying to think of the one verse that
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really gets me as a boy. Was it sitting next to my wife?
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It was something alluding to just one minute my wife is sitting to the left
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of me, and the next minute I'm being rushed to the hospital. And
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it was It was just so beautifully written, and what you had just mentioned
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it was concise, concentrated. It's like just the emotion in the fewest words.
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By the way I found the lyric writing in the back seat next to
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my wife, heading straight on into the afterlife. That got me. Yeah,
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yes, man, Yeah, give me chills. So Volume one explores
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the ways that Dylan's early writing relates to folk music, blues rock, and
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mainstream literature. He was just twenty years old when his nineteen sixty two self
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titled debut was released. Only two songs are his own song to Woody and
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Talk in New York. The rest are traditional indoor old blue songs. And
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it's an album you know, few people liked, and it didn't sell.
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You say in Volume one the quote it has such a young Dylan on it,
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that he sounds about seventy five. Can you expand on that? Yeah,
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well, he's trying to sound like a very old blues man. In
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March sixty two, he so, after he's recorded that album in March sixty
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two, he goes across the river into Brooklyn and he goes into the studio
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that is owned by the old blues singer Victoria Spivey, and she's recording an
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album with three people, herself and Roosevelt Psychs and Big Joe Williams and Big
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Joe Williams. Let's Bob play harmonica and sing back up vocals on a version
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of Sitting on Top of the World. And at one point, actually I
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think two points, Big Joe generously stands back from the vocal mike so that
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the only vocal you hear, just for a line of the chorus is Bob's.
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And it's funny because there are these two people with their very different agendas.
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There's middle aged Big Joe Williams trying to sound as on the ball and
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fit and it's rustling as possible, and there is this absurdly youthful Bob Dylan
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trying to sound as old as the hills. He's developing so quickly. Nineteen
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sixty three is the Free Will and Bob Dylan All Originals now blown in the
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way and the hard Rain's Gonna Fall Masters of War. This in the following
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album, nineteen sixty fours of Times They are a change in contain Dylan's quote
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unquote famous protest songs. But you know that Dylan uses cliche in these songs
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for emphasis. It's more rhetoric than are. Did Dylan not have a trust
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in his audience early on, or was he still trying to determine just who
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his audience was since it was still so early in his career. I don't
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know. I mean, I try not to decide what Bob is thinking about,
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or nobody knows what Bob's thinking exactly. I tried to just look at
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the work itself, and in the end, you know what I feel is
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that however charismatic he has been, and however interesting his life may or may
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not have been, in the end, in the final end, to use
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one of his nice double meanings tautologies, you would say if they weren't deliberate,
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in the final end, it's the work that matters. It's the work
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that resounds around the world. And I know that one of his early friends
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up north picked up the lyrics of Times They Are Changing and read out a
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bit about senators congressman please heed the call and said, what is this shit?
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And I think that it really didn't take Bob long to realize that that
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was a pretty wet political thing to be saying. And we moved on to
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by the time of Highway sixty one, we were talking about dr filth,
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not senators and congressman. And that's the album you call his first fully fledged
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eagle flight into Rock nineteen sixty five. That album came out blues, bass,
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rock and roll. He's grown quite a bit from his rock roots in
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the mid sixties, and along with the sonic shift is the effect literary culture
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is having on his contribution. And you did mention this earlier talk about the
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influence major English poets had on Dylan and some of the songs that maybe are
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a good example of that influence. Well, I think you can't get away
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from Shakespeare and you can't get away from the King James Bible, either whether
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you want to or not, because it's just the language. The English language
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is saturated in it. But then I think there are you know, there
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are various nineteenth century people that you liked Americans too, people like roth waldo
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Emerson. But one of the people who really stands out for me is Robert
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Browning, the British poet who was the master of the dramatic monologue, and
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Dylan, i think, becomes a new master of the dramatic monologue. That
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is a song in which you only hear one side of a dialogue, but
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it's quite clearly a dialogue is going on. And Browning has a thing where
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he's talking to some critic and saying you Sigadibs, who thirty years of Aids
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writes statedly for Blackwood's Magazine, and you can just hear the sneer in the
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voice there, and it's exactly paralleled by Bob Dylan with Ballad of a Thin
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Man. You walk into the room with a pencil in your hand and so
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on. You know something's happening here, but you don't know what it is,
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do you, mister Jones. And then at the end of Subterranean Homesick
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Blues, we get that verse about don't want to be a bump better chew
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gum. The pump don't work because the vandals took the handles, and there's
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an absolutely parallel use of all those of all those candles, handles sandals rhymes
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in one of Browning's poems. It's in the book. I can't quote it
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verbatim off the top of my head, but it's just so strikingly obvious that
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he has read Robert Browning. Browning is also there in his nineteen eighties song
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Blind Willie mctel because it's Browning who wrote, who writes God's in his heaven,
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rule through with the world, and he does it as a series of
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statements that run backwards, and they then parallels this. The whole of Blind
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William Actel is a sort of running backwards through American history. And instead of
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God's in his heaven, all's right with the world, we get God is
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in his heaven and we all want what's his, But power and greed and
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corruptible seed seem to be all that there is. And that's a song you
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highlight, that's one you think highly of. I think that's the one that
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was not included on the original album, but in later years. Yeah,
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absolutely. It was only officially released years later on a compilation. Yeah yeah,
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Dylan said he didn't think he sang it right. But then you know,
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the artist is never the best judge of their own work. I mean,
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why should they be, because like any other listener, what they're very
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aware of is the conscious part of what they've created. But you know,
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if you're a great artist, you're open. You're open to the unconscious,
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to the subconscious, to all that. I've said before, Elvis thought that
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old check was just as good as That's all right, he was wrong,
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And you know, by the same token, Dylan has often left great songs
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off his albums and Blind and William tells, certainly one of them Springsteen is
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I think of Springsteen too. A lot of times he'll just leave a song
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out because it doesn't fit in with what the overall theme of the album is.
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But then you listen to it later, you said, boy, this
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is brilliant. Yes. It's interesting to read in Volume one about how Dylan
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shows a vivid growth in the complexity of his use of language, but then
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by the end of the decade he begins to pair down and opt for a
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new simplicity in his writing. Chapters four and five of Volume one the two
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opposite progressions of his artistry. When you think of Dylan's use of language towards
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complexity. Some notable examples that come to mind for you, well, just
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all the all the sort of suppose the stuff that gets lazily labeled as surrealism,
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the Tarantula book, Songs on Highway sixty one revisited and Blonde on Blonde,
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you know, where it's not still clear who the I or the U
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or the he or the she is and where you know, I mean jewels
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and binoculars hang from the head of the mule. I mean, don't ask
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anybody what that means in terms of you know, it's it's not a statement
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in the same terms as she belongs to me, even if she belongs to
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me, is itself meant ironically? You know, you have to you have
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to unpick some of that stuff, or you have to let it flow over
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you and just feel it as the poetry that it is. I remember the
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first time I saw him live was in May nineteen sixty six in Liverpool when
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he was doing the first half of his show solo acoustic and then brought on
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the people who later became the band for the second half, except Levon Helm
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wasn't there and one of the songs he sang in the acoustic part was Visions
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of Johanna, which had not yet been released in Britain Blonde and Blonde was
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not out when he was singing this, so it was the debut of a
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most amazing song. I mean, a song the like of which you'd never
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heard in your life before. Nobody had written one like that before, many
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of any verses fourteen lines per verse, and you know, and in the
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middle of it he sings, yeah, the one he sings about the jelly
19:00
faced women, or sneeze here, the one with the mustache said geez,
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I can't find my knees. And you know, he was sort of pretty
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stoned when he was doing those shows, and yet uncannily word perfect. And
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at the time he was still teaching people that the same sort of thing that
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the beat poets had been teaching people, that is that, you know,
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language did not have to be formal and correct. It could be weird,
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it could be off the wall without lacking seriousness. And you know, even
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though we thought we were so here at the time, we still basically had
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on our shoulders the sort of assumptions about what a poem ought to be like.
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And you could feel people turning around in their seats when they hear this,
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geez, I can't find my knees now. You could sort of feel
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people going the sister all right, it's just still poetry, you know.
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That's so that sort of complexity of language aligned with faithfulness beat poet playfulness was
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part of what he brought it to a far far wider audience than had ever
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heard it before. Here's what I am interested in getting your thoughts on,
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because it's directly after Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands from sixty six is Blonde
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on Blonde. That you know, Dylan draws back from the ever thickening undergrowth
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of surreal, elusively complex use of language. After this that he begins the
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harder process of paring down towards a new simplicity. It is harder. I
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mean, some people may think, well, it's easier to pare it down
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into a new simplicity, but that's not really the case, I don't think.
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But I'm interested in your thoughts on that. I agree. I think
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it's even in prose, it's often easier to write at length than to pare
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it down to the bits. That and it's still an evolving through this process
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too. Is he started to say, you know what, I think I
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need to challenge myself. I think so. Yes, I mean, as
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I said before, I'm not keen to assume his own motivations and these matters.
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But yeah, essentially I think so. And I think John Wesley Harding
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challenged not only that, but of course also challenged what was happening in rock
21:26
music because after Blonde and Blonde, everybody wanted to make a double album.
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Everybody wanted to do long guitar solos, not that Bob had done, but
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you know everyone else was doing that. There were groups like The Zeppelin didn't
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think it was They thought singles were this terrible, old fashioned commercial death stuff
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that all you could do was express yourself with an album or a double or
21:56
a triple album. And you know, that kind of rock music was getting
22:02
increasingly lavish and multi layered. I mean, when you think back that Sergeant
22:10
Pepper was achieved on a four track machine, it's amazing. But nevertheless it
22:15
was a huge sound and a lavish album. And nothing could have cut through
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all that more incisively than the pair down, biting simplicity of John Wesley Harding.
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And if that was biting in its simplicity. He didn't stick with that
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either, because the album after that, Nashville Skyline, was very warm and
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mellow. I mean, another huge contrast. And the first time I heard
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that, I was with a friend and we were just laughing at the outrageousness
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of Bob singing all these kind of country cliches and singing them so slyly.
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John Wesley Hardy, that's stripped down to a chilly minimum, is how you
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described it. The most dramatic example of that, you say, is all
23:07
along the watch Tower. That's surrealism and its stripped down to a chilly minimum.
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And then you mentioned something you said, it's a circular song all along
23:17
the Watchtower. Yeah, this gets picked up on. I'm not sure how
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much I'd want to stand by that particular thing. I mean, it depends
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whether you find it a dot dot dot or a full stop. At the
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end, two riders were approaching and the wind began to howl. Now does
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it stop there? Does the wind begin to howl in the sense of is
23:40
it going to carry on howling? And then does it flip right back to
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the beginning After the two riders have approached, do they then have this conversation.
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There must be some way out of here, said the joker to the
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thief. All these are two riders. And there was a period when Dylan
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was still singing that song as a sort of crowd pleasing encore number hundreds of
24:07
times. There was a period where he did end up by re singing the
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first verse as the last verse. None of them along the line know what
24:18
any of it is worth, full stop, and that became the end of
24:22
the song. So you know, it's as circular as you want to think
24:26
of it. The book Down Rock Podcasts will be back after this. Michael
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Gray as our guest to talk about the three part fiftieth anniversary series of his
24:37
book, originally released nineteen seventy two, titled Michael Gray's Song a Dance Man
24:41
The Art of Bob Dylan. The second volume gets into an interesting period of
24:45
Dylan's career, the gospel period that's from seventy nine through the eighties. One
24:52
of the periods that continues to fascinate both longtime fans and curious listeners is Dylan's
24:57
religious period. He proclaimed his faith in three albums nineteen seventy nine, Slow
25:03
Train Coming nineteen eighty saved in nineteen eighty one Shot of Love, So this
25:08
all starts. There was a story of a fan throwing a metal cross on
25:14
stage No. Nineteen seventy. I think the media tried to say that that's
25:18
the moment, but that's not well true because I think I think that tour
25:22
was the new album. When that nineteen seventy eight tour was happening, was
25:27
Street Legal. And what I'm saying in the book is that there are there
25:33
are signs in Street Legal that he is moving away from secular love and seeking
25:44
for the higher love of God. So it seems to me that the hints
25:51
are there before someone throws across on the stage. Now, I think at
25:56
the end of the album in there's there's quite a strong hint that ah,
26:07
that that he hasn't found enough. You know, he's been this, he's
26:14
been a married man, he has all these children, he writes all these
26:18
songs. We Better talk is over, and you know, the Street Legal
26:25
is full of It is full of songs of turmoil, and the underlying turmoil
26:32
there is is about what has he got to cling to? But I'm kind
26:41
of breaking my own rule there by by surmising that this is what he's feeling.
26:49
All I'm really going on is is what the songs are saying. But
26:53
certainly, certainly it comes comes out with the bang and when it comes to
27:00
slow Training coming in seventy nine. What I feel about all that, by
27:04
the way, is of course that we all got very distracted by the lyrics,
27:10
by the preaching, and therefore, comparatively speaking, failed to notice that
27:17
this was the pop Dylan, who had explored folk music, who had explored
27:22
rock and roll, who had explored country music, now exploring another great form
27:30
of American popular music, black church music, gospel. There was an interesting
27:37
comment you made too in the book that I wanted to ask you to explain,
27:41
because you do note that spiritually Dylan may have arrived around this period,
27:45
but artistically he was coasting. And there's an interesting quote from the book are
27:48
you write quote? What makes these Bornegan albums so flawed and shallow in the
27:52
context of Bob Dylan's whole catalog is that he has been satisfied on these records
27:57
to a certain argue and declaim, but he has hardly bothered anywhere on them
28:02
to fulfill the more important task of the artist. He has not created worlds
28:06
here he has only argued about them. Can explained that part of me still
28:12
agrees with that. Part of me thinks that I really underrecognize them strengths of
28:19
the better songs on that record. I mean. The stuff that got me
28:23
at the time as being arguing instead of creating was the shock of hearing the
28:33
person who had said don't follow leaders, watch the parking meters now saying there's
28:41
only one authority. That's the authority on high. You know, that's quite
28:47
a vault fuss. That's quite a kind of betrayal of everything Bob Dylan had
28:52
ever said to us, which had always been you have to find your own
28:57
salvation in this world. You know, right back when when he was a
29:03
pop star in sixty five and he came to Britain and they filmed Pennybaker filmed
29:08
Don't Look Back. There's a fascinating section of that where he's arguing with the
29:17
he's being interviewed by the guy from Time magazine. The guy from Time magazine
29:23
says, do you know what your songs are about? And Dylan quite rightly
29:30
says, you've got a lot of nerve to ask me a question like that.
29:33
But then he goes on to say, and this is you know,
29:36
this is a twenty five year old being told he's the hippis person on the
29:41
planet. At this point, he's very groovy, he has hit singles,
29:45
he's the most you know, there's a whole press conference there hanging on his
29:52
every word. But when he's talking to the Time magazine guy, he goes
29:56
on to say, you're going to die, and so am I. We're
30:00
going to be off the planet, you know, and it could be twenty
30:06
years or it could be tomorrow. And you know, how seriously you take
30:11
yourself in the face of that is up to you. So this is an
30:17
extraordinarily thoughtful young man at a time when most of us would have had our
30:22
heads turned absolutely entirely by that kind of level of fame and grooviness and so
30:32
and so, when Dylan starts preaching that there's only one authority instead of you
30:40
have to find your own salvation in this world, that was difficult, a
30:45
hard pill to swallow. But obviously, you know, those albums are better
30:52
than I credited them with. The trouble with writing a book is, you
30:57
know, you get pinned down as to your assessment. Whereas you know,
31:03
if you're if you're a living, breathing human being, which I just about
31:08
still am, you you have to be flexible and you have to recognize that
31:15
what seems great one day doesn't necessarily seem so great the next, and vice
31:21
versa. And when you see the footage of something like Dylan in Toronto singing
31:29
what can I Do for You, there's absolutely no doubting his commitment to belief,
31:40
and also no doubting his skill as a as a creative artist in rendering
31:47
that very very vividly. But also you know, in terms of in terms
31:52
of the sheer lyrics there, soon as a man is born, you know,
31:59
the spot begin to fly. He sings on that what can I do
32:04
for you? It's an outrageously sort of direct addressed to God, isn't it.
32:09
I mean, it might be addressed to Jesus, But that's the same
32:13
thing, isn't it. And it has a nice line like, soon as
32:17
a man is born, you know, the sparks begin to fly. It's
32:22
an even nicer line if you hear underneath it the line he's spinning off from
32:29
the King James Bible, which is man is born unto trouble, as the
32:35
sparks fly upward. I mean, that's that's the level of creativity that he
32:40
is putting into this stuff. There's nothing casual about it. It's hound writing
32:50
that any ohe it would be proud. I always wonder maybe you know,
32:54
but is this Does this stuff just come to him naturally? Does he work
32:58
at it? Does he have no where? He revises and revises again,
33:05
notebooks and he writes things down. And we certainly have, in the case
33:10
of the book the notebooks that formed his tiptoeing towards Blood on the Tracks in
33:16
the mid seventies, we have we have a real demonstration of how much he
33:22
revises his work, how many phrases are crossed out and changed. Yeah,
33:30
it's it's a big part of it. And more recently, when he's more
33:37
cutting and pasting, he says, he has a box with all these quotations
33:43
in it, and you know, you can you can pull them out randomly
33:46
and see what you come up with and how things may fit together. What
33:52
inspires his lyrics? Does he see things randomly? Does he see a billboard
33:55
or or hear a comment over here, a comment from somebody and say,
34:00
boy, that's interesting. What inspires him to start to dig into something a
34:05
concept or a song. I know. I mean, I think it's a
34:08
compulsion to create, and yes, he could grab it from anywhere, anywhere
34:14
at all. You know. In the towards the end of the fifties,
34:17
there was a very popular hit maker called Dwayne Eddie who just played a very
34:24
deep sounding guitar. One of his best known records was called forty Miles of
34:32
Bad Road, and that was just a phrase he had overheard someone say while
34:38
standing in a line. This is a book that I was one of.
34:43
With all authors, you write a book and then maybe years down the line,
34:45
you think differently of a certain topic or in this case, is an
34:49
album or a song. And one example would be All Mercy from nineteen eighty
34:52
nine. That was that critically acclaimed album that Dylan released, and you originally
34:57
reviewed it as a great album, but you I allude it to being a
35:00
fine album in the book. Where do you place it among his eighties catalog
35:05
or what are your overall thoughts on it now as opposed to then, yeah,
35:08
I think it's a fine album. It's not a great album, you
35:13
know. I mean, obviously it's possible to find all this labeling and categorizing
35:20
highly tiresome. What I find tiresome is the people who say, hey,
35:25
you know, man, it's all just personal, personal judgment. You know.
35:31
I find that tiresome because it implies that there are no standards at all
35:37
in art, and that, for some weird reason, Leonardo da Vinci and
35:44
Monnet Rembrandt are considered to be great, whereas I personally, as a guy
35:52
who lives in Oklahoma and votes for Donald Trump, I personally don't like any
36:00
of that should I find that kind of stuff tyresoon And therefore a certain amount
36:06
of line drawing has to be made. However, many times you may revise
36:10
where the line is or should be. But you know, people use words
36:16
like great far, far too easily in social media, on social media and
36:22
in the arts, especially with stuff like rock music, where clearly there are
36:30
many people who go to a Dlerent concert. Maybe not so much now that
36:34
he's in his eighties, but certainly during the huge performance decades of the never
36:44
ending tour, people would go. You know, you would hear people standing
36:47
at the front shouting Maggie's farm rather than being interested in what the artist himself
36:58
wanted to be performing. So yeah, I think there's a lot of yahooism.
37:01
But on the other hand, I can also see that sometimes you know,
37:07
one man's very fine album is another man's great album. Man, what
37:12
the hell is the difference? You know? Right though? About it?
37:15
They just want to hear the hits. That's like it just dehumanizes the artists.
37:17
It's like their jukebox. And the Beatles went through that towards the end
37:22
of that run where they just decided, let's let's stop touring because nobody's listening
37:27
to us anyway. They're not even you couldn't hear them. They were just
37:31
all they could hear was screams. And as an artist, that's gotta be
37:37
that just got to be maddening. Yeah, And I think you know,
37:40
for Dylan too, I mean even even in more recent years. Yeah,
37:45
he's complained about seeing the same old faces in the front rows of his shows.
37:53
Well, if I were Bob Dylan, I'd be more likely to complain
37:57
about the sort of industry execs and celebs who have acquired absurdly overpriced VIP seats.
38:08
Dylan's nineties work VOME three covers the nineties work, and it includes a
38:13
defensive Under the Red Sky from nineteen ninety and a reassessment of nineteen ninety seven's
38:17
Time out of Mind. Let's start with Under the Red Sky. This is
38:21
an album, as you write, riddled with nursery, rhyme and to a
38:23
lesser extent, fairy tale. Talk about why you defend this album. And
38:29
also there's a song called Handy Dandy, right, is a song that you
38:31
point out in the book. Yeah, handy Dandy. I mean, you
38:35
know, the chorus is tires m okay andy dandy, sugar and candy.
38:39
But it's a very skillfully written song and a delivery. I mean, one
38:45
of the things that Dylan has always been very good at is squeezing as many
38:49
syllables per line into a line as he likes. You know, There'll be
38:52
one verse of a song where there are eight syllables in the fourth line,
39:00
and then the next time the verse comes along, there are fourteen syllables in
39:05
the same line, where the tune is the same, the pattern is the
39:07
same, but Bob can squeeze them it and often with a deliberate kind of
39:14
long pause, so that not only is he squeezing them in, but he's
39:20
giving himself even less time to finish off that squeezing in because he's left a
39:25
deliberate long pause where no one else would leave one. It's part of his
39:31
genius as a if you like, it's the sort of jazz end of his
39:35
spectrum as a using his voice as an instrument, the sponsaneity. You know,
39:42
there was a long, long period where, for example, Memphis Blues
39:45
Again he would sing more or less at every concert. And yet you know
39:50
that has a chorus, Oh Mama, can this really be the end?
39:53
To be stuck inside a mobile with the Memphis Blues Again? You know,
39:58
in the course of singing that once, he has to sing that line about
40:02
five times, never once says it exactly the same delivery. You go to
40:08
a second show and you get five more different ways of delivering that line.
40:15
You know, the range of possibilities is absolutely endless. And yeah, one
40:20
of the great virtues of a song like Handy Dandy on the Under the Red
40:23
Sky album is the extraordinary number of syllables that he can fit into those playfully
40:30
long lines. There's a similar one in Summer Days on Love and Theft,
40:37
the bit about you can't repeat the past? What do you mean you can't
40:40
repeat the past? Of course you can, which is squeezed into this much
40:45
shorter, economical amount of space, and Handy Dandy is full of those.
40:52
There are some very very long lines in that song, and he just delights
40:57
in the way that he brings them off. I find that interesting, Michael,
41:00
because I have friends who there are certain artists that I enjoy listening to
41:05
that do have a lot of syllables that are all in one in one verse
41:08
or one line, and it'll drive them nuts. And I don't see it
41:13
that way. Yeah, I mean, you know, of course, the
41:16
old rule remains the case that you've got to master the form before you can
41:24
break it. It's so good just coming along as a sort of amateur songwriter
41:30
thinking you can throw in as many words in a line as you like.
41:35
You know, Dylan has mastered all these demands of economy and concentration and all
41:42
that, and then you can break through a bit, as he does with
41:46
a song like Handy Dandy. I don't have the lyric in front of me,
41:51
and I can't remember it off the top of my head, but there
41:53
are extraordinarily long lines in that song which are just beautifully But the other defense
42:00
of Under the Red Sky is against the idea that because because it uses nursery
42:07
rhyme. Therefore it's to be condemned as hopelessly simple. Those people should read
42:15
a book by Iwonner and Peter Opie Opie I Eat. They're both long dead
42:22
now about nursery rhymes, because you know, there's a great deal of complexity
42:28
there, and it's not the complexity that people lazily think of, which is
42:32
that you know that ring a ring a roses pocket pullar poses a tissue or
42:38
tissue will fall down, is somehow a reference to the plague. I mean,
42:45
that's that's a myth. That's not true. That's not what matters.
42:50
What matters about fairy tales, and to a lesser extent, nursery rhymes is
42:54
their psychological truth. And for Dylan, you know, of course, he
43:00
had a grandchild when he made this album I'm told, and it's partly dedicated
43:07
to Gabby Goo Goo, presumably that that is the girl who becomes his daughter,
43:14
Gabrielle. But his use of nursery rhyme is extremely clever on this album.
43:20
You know, most people know about six these days, if they know
43:23
many at all, but he uses over thirty. In other words, he's
43:28
gone into that genre deeply in the way that he goes into so many other
43:35
genres, and it produces some very good songs. I think the title track,
43:39
under the Red Sky is a lovely song. I did seat Michael,
43:44
I got some lyrics for you from Handy Dandy. I thought I'd really okay,
43:47
here we go. Here's my favorite. I think Handy Dandy's sitting with
43:50
a girl named Nancy in a garden feeling kind of lazy. He says,
43:54
he says, you want to gone, I'll give you one. She says,
43:58
Boy you talking crazy? Yeah? Yes, I mean really he fits
44:02
all that in him so beautifully, and a bit at the end, boy
44:07
You're talking crazy? Also, doesn't that remind you of one of those sort
44:15
of cowboy TV things? Yeah, Handy Dandy, just like Sugar and Candy.
44:20
Handy Dandy, pour him another Brandy. Yeah, Hey, let's suck
44:23
time out of mind from nineteen ninety seven, because I before I ask about
44:29
your reassessment of this album, there's this one song, not dark yet,
44:32
that was immediately moving to me and it still hits me deep. And speaking
44:37
of lyrics, I have a lyric from the song and it's the one that
44:42
says I was born here and I'll die here against my will. I know
44:45
it looks like I'm moving, but I'm standing still. That gets me every
44:50
time. Oh, well, that's one of the great songs on the album.
44:53
Yes, yes, you have a reassessment of this, right, your
44:57
experience. You didn't have that experience upon f listen, but that's changed over
45:00
time. Well, when I first heard it, I just thought it's ponderous.
45:07
You know, he's claiming a great seriousness here, a great gravitas,
45:13
which he does very little to justify. You know, it's you know,
45:17
you're not supposed to tell people you're feeling miserable. You're supposed to show them
45:22
you're feeling miserable, show, don't tell. I mean, any novelist has
45:28
to abide by that law if they want to write something with resonance that lasts,
45:32
you know. And I thought there was far too much of that,
45:36
Bob being posedly dignified about that album. But I recognized all along that there
45:44
were four marvelous songs on it, not Dark Yet, standing in the Doorway
45:50
and High Learns and the other one Standing in the Doorways are great when you
45:55
all look at the track list here, because that was remember at that time,
46:00
it was somewhat of a quote unquote comeback album for Bob Dylan. Yeah,
46:06
that's more of a commercial type of statement, but I mean it was,
46:09
and I believe it was in the aftermath of his interesting heart disease.
46:15
And you know, he had been completely a figure of the past as far
46:23
as the media were concerned, even as far as his own record company was
46:28
concerned. Really, I mean, they'd done the thirtieth anniversary bash for him
46:32
at in New York in nineteen ninety two. Quite what that was the thirtieth
46:39
anniversary of wasn't clear, but they did. But really, when he was
46:45
touring in the mid nineties, as part of that never ending tour, the
46:50
record company didn't even bother to take any notice of where he was. He
46:55
wasn't selling any records. He wasn't he did not matter to Sonny Records.
47:01
And then he has this interesting heart disease and suddenly there are all these media
47:07
people thinking, no, maybe he'll die. Maybe book Doon's been a really
47:13
interesting figure all alone. And then he comes out with this album, which
47:17
you know, has a lot of gravitas and solemnity and is full of new
47:23
writing, bags of new writing. So it's a critical success, but you
47:30
know, part of this is just the weird way media behaves. And here
47:37
are the eleven tracks, Love, Sick, Dirt, Road Blues, Standing
47:39
in the Doorway, Million Miles, trying to get to Heaven Till I Fell
47:43
in Love with You, Not Dar Quiette Cold Iron's Bound, make You Feel
47:46
My Love. That's a great one. I use the word great, Sorry,
47:51
Michael, can't wait Highlands. Those are the eleven tracks. Yeah,
47:55
actually, I think make You Feel My Love is the worst song? Is
48:00
right? There you are? Yeah, there we go? And it's I
48:06
noticed that it's absolutely the favorite Bob Dylan song of people who don't like Bob
48:10
Dylan. Is that right? Yeah? Absolutely it is. Yes, I
48:15
don't like Bob Dylan's work, but I like some of his songs. I
48:21
especially like make You Feel My Love by Adele or by Garth Brooks. Yeah,
48:28
anybody but Bob. Yeah I played it at my wedding. Yeah yeah,
48:32
absolutely, so funny. So let's you did talk at the front about
48:37
his most recent work, so we'll finish just getting your thoughts on his recent
48:40
work like twenty twenties Rough and Rowdy Ways featuring murder Moo's Foul and his most
48:45
recent album, Shadow Kingdom, which is studio album number forty. Does Bob
48:51
Dylan still have things left to say and express? Artistically? Shadow Kingdom is
48:55
a weird work because of course it's all old songs. Although one of them,
49:00
and I think it's the best track, the most effective track is the
49:05
least old of them all, and that is What Was It You Wanted,
49:07
which was originally from Oh Mercy. Shadow Kingdom first was presented to us as
49:15
a sort of TV special that you had to pay for to watch, and
49:20
then an age goes by, and then it becomes a video and an album,
49:25
and it was billed at the time as Dylan's early songs or something along
49:30
that line. There's nothing very early as far as I'm concerned about a nineteen
49:37
eighty eight song from Oh Mercy, like what Was It You Wanted? But
49:42
basically most of them were from the sixties or seventies, and a couple of
49:46
them are very effective. Indeed, one of them I think is Forever Young,
49:51
because he sounds so patently far away from anything remotely young, And What
49:57
was It You Wanted, I think is a Brillian revisiting of a song without
50:02
changing the words, and yet wholly altering the meaning, which is something Bob
50:07
has always been good at. I remember him there were a couple of concerts
50:13
in the nineties where he did that with Like a Rolling Stone. I mean,
50:17
even with that song, you know it had always been scathing and condemnatory
50:24
and all that, and suddenly you're hearing him quietly pacing the stage and turning
50:30
it into a sort of soliloquy, a Hamlet soliloquy where he's addressing himself.
50:39
Once upon a time, you dress so fine through the bums of time in
50:44
your prime, didn't you? Doesn't change a word, but the tone,
50:49
the mood, the pace completely changes the meaning of the song. And I
50:55
think he does that on Shadow Kingdom with what was It You Wanted? Because
51:00
on Our Mercy the original, that too is quite a sort of derisory song.
51:06
You might think of it as a as a sort of Bob Dylan complaint
51:10
song about always being bugged by people who want things from him, which clearly
51:15
is the case. It must be extraordinarily difficult to walk around the outside world
51:22
being Bob Dylan, where people are always rushing up to you and asking you,
51:27
at the very least when you sign this please if not rather more and
51:31
so originally that song, you know, it's sort of what was it you
51:36
wanted when you were kissing my cheek? Yeah, which of course has its
51:42
own reference to Judas and Jesus and so on. And then when he sings
51:45
it on Shadow Kingdom as this far older person, it seems to have transformed
51:52
into a song of genuine confusedness, what was it you wanted? I use
51:58
the same person who was here before they playing our song. It's a really
52:04
beautiful, affecting performance, almost of a person with sort of mild Alzheimers.
52:09
You might say it's his ability to do that, to transform the meaning of
52:15
one of his own works without changing any word, is yet another of the
52:22
things that he is so uniquely marvelous at being able to do. The brand
52:27
new three part fiftieth anniversary edition of Michael Gray's Song and Dance Man The Art
52:31
of Bob Dylan is out now through the FM Press. You can find out
52:35
wherever books are sold. I will have a link to the Fmpress's site all
52:39
three volumes. There you can click the link and buy all three. And
52:44
also you have a website Michael right because I've seen it Michael Gray dot net.
52:47
I believe. Yeah, that's it Michael Gray dot net. Yeah,
52:52
well, thank you so much, Michael. We have been emailing back and
52:54
forth just trying to make this happen and it was well worth the wait.
52:59
Thank you very much. That's it. It's in the books. H