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A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Indifference, of Bob Dylan’s Significance

So long as he rides the wave of American music
as it rises in the Delta, in the Piedmont, in the Panhandle,

So long as he raises the questions that bubble beneath
the surface wherever shell-shocked citizens collect,

Bob Dylan makes sense, Bob Dylan makes people sit up
and take notice, Bob Dylan makes good songs.

When he discovers red stripes in the American flag*
and sets out to alert his beleaguered sisters and brothers

That unseen actors wreak havoc, Bossman says no,
that song must go, but you can stay Bob Dylan, you can stay

So long as you play in the space set aside for Minstrels,
for Jesters, for Beatles, and for the Song and Dance man.

Sense, not dollars, fell away from Dylan songs;
Principle fades to Black, as Prize arrives in a red Cadillac.

Dave Read

*CBS revoked its invitation for Bob Dylan to perform on the Ed Sullivan Show in May, 1963, because the song he wanted to play exposes the vicious and stupid John Birch Society, which is an early iteration of the Tea Party. An illustration of the adage, “He who pays the piper, calls the tune.”

Ever the Imp, Bob Dylan won’t say whether he copped the Welsh poet’s name, but we’ll cop to repurposing this Dylan Thomas poem title: A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

By Appointment of His Royal Bobness

(Ed. note – This is our take on the “official” preview/review of Rough and Rowdy Ways, published June 12 in the New York Times. We’ll deal with the record itself in the coming days.)

Article updated June 18, 2020 by Dave Read

Team Dylan controls access to Bob Dylan the same way access to the Angels is wholly mediated by the Chief Commander, Dylan’s nickname for God, as he revealed to Ed Bradley on 60 Minutes in 2004, when CBS got The Interview for the release of Dylan’s book Chronicles, Volume One.

Rough and Rowdy Ways, Bob Dylan album released June 19, 2020.

For the Juneteenth* release of Rough and Rowdy Ways, which seems bound to raise as much of a ruckus as Chronicles did, TV historian Douglas Brinkley and the Old Grey Lady herself got The Interview, published June 12, under the headline of the millennium: Bob Dylan Has a Lot on His Mind.

Bob Dylan created Bob Dylan to protect Abe and Beatty Zimmerman from the trials and tribulations of their first born son, who fled to the City, to see Woody, and to see what else is afoot. Having stolen all the records he could get his hands on at the University of Minnesota, Dylan’s January 1961 trip to NYC was as much a record-raiding party as it was a Woody Guthrie pilgrimage.

With Jackie still unpacking in Washington, DC, NYC’s Washington Square Park and environs was the domain of Dave Van Ronk, who had mastered his craft in MacDougal St. cabarets and basements, along with a multitude of singers, songwriters, blues belters, Clancy brothers, folkies, poets, lefties, comics, and the odd ne’er do well.

Van Ronk helped the unwashed phenomenon settle into life in New York; his wife Terri Thal managed Dylan until he was ready to turn pro, in 1962, when he signed with Albert Grossman, who’d already meddled in his affairs by arranging Robert Shelton’s infamous New York Times piece months earlier. Today, Shelton’s puffery would require a Sponsored Content flag.

Born the same year Dylan bolted college, Professor Brinkley was invited into Dylan’s enterprise some time ago, and already has plunged into the Bob Dylan archive, which the University of Tulsa bought for $15 fifteen million in the waning days of the Obama Administration.

After Dylan dropped Murder Most Foul on the sore, masked, head of the world in April, the breezy Brinkley tells us his relationship with Dylan is such that he’s comfortable reaching out to him, which led to their cellular chinwag, a.k.a. The Interview.

Included on Rough and Rowdy Ways, Murder Most Foul is a seventeen minute song about the JFK assassination. Brinkley asks Dylan if he wrote the song “as a nostalgic eulogy for a long-lost time?”

That is the second-stupidest question Dylan has ever fielded, right behind the one asking how it feels to be spokesman for a generation. It makes me imagine Brinkley ask Picasso, “what is the square root of Cubism?”

Will he redeem himself by asking his friend who he thinks shot JFK? Of course not. Do I care about anything else some professor has to say about this or any other Dylan album. Fuck no, school’s over.

*A Trump rally was scheduled for Juneteenth in Tulsa; Love and Theft was scheduled for release on 9/11. (Trump goes the “exclusive interview” route, too.)

Dylan before market forces…

Article updated July 2, 2020 by Dave Read

Whithin two years of arriving in New York, Bob Dylan was making works of aural impressionism, for which there was no market. By the time money caught up with aural impressionism, it was long gone, like a turkey through the corn, ready to rock out loud, fucking loud.

In these songs, be alert to the strength and eloquence of unusually long lines of lyric, delivered with combinations of rhythm and rhyme, underscored by colorful guitar notes, sparse sonic treats that keep the lyric loping along to their conclusions:

In re: Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize lecture

780 Holmes Road Revisited,* or, Where’s the Art, Bob?

Article updated June 27, 2017 by Dave Read

Throughout his career, Bob Dylan has been an exponent of the “folk process,” wherein an artist appropriates an extant song, modifies it to the degree that now there are two songs, which may appear to be siblings, but not identical twins.

Blowin’ in the Wind is an example, adapted from the African-American spiritual No More Auction Block; no one would confuse the two, nor would anyone deny that the new song has it’s own merit.

Whether or not one improves the other or amounts to a meritorious extension of the other, is irrelevant – upon composition of the new work, a new discussion begins.

But Dylan also has simply appropriated the folk process product of others when it suited him, such as on his first album, when he recorded Dave Van Ronk’s adaptation of the traditional folk song House of the Rising Sun, depriving his mentor Van Ronk the full benefit of his own artful work.

Dave Van Ronk was a big man, got over it, and eventually was delighted to point out that Dylan eventually stopped performing the House of the Rising Sun after Eric Burdon and The Animals had a big hit with it, for fear of being dissed for ripping them off!

Now there’s news that Bob Dylan has taken the “folk process” to a whole new level, of particular interest to us in the Berkshires, because he’s playing fast and loose with Moby-Dick. In order to fulfil his obligation to the Swedish Academy, which blew the world’s mind last year when it awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature, he delivered a lecture on June 4, just 2 days before the $923,000 cash part of the prize would have turned to dust.

In it, he said Moby-Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Odyssey “have stuck with me ever since I read them way back in grammar school…” and he wanted to tell us about them. Regardless of precisely when Bob Dylan attended “grammar school,” it’s clear he’s referencing a long-ago time, and so we wouldn’t begrudge him a little “googling” in preparing his remarks.

But, especially with a million bucks at stake, one would expect a little more “folk process” than what Mr. Dylan delivered. If you google “Moby-Dick,” the website SparkNotes appears – and if you read the Moby Dick section of Dylan’s lecture, you’ll see enough of SparkNotes to earn a grammar school kid a failing grade for plagiarism.

As reported by Andrea Pitzer in Slate:

“Across the 78 sentences in the lecture that Dylan spends describing Moby-Dick, even a cursory inspection reveals that more than a dozen of them appear to closely resemble lines from the SparkNotes site. And most of the key shared phrases in these passages (such as “Ahab’s lust for vengeance” in the above lines) do not appear in the novel Moby-Dick at all.”

I’ll bet there are a thousand MFA candidates in writing programs across America, and not a few tenured professors too, who would pay good money for a chance to help Bob Dylan edit his shopping list! Why, then, wouldn’t he reach out for help on a $923,000 speech – at least enough help that would merit a passing grade in grammar school?

*780 Holmes Road is the Pittsfield, MA address of Arrowhead, where Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick; Bob Dylan’s most famous album is called “Highway 61 Revisited.”

Bob Dylan at Tanglewood July 2, 2016

July 2, 2016 Tanglewood concert review by Dave Read

It was a night of biblical proportions at Tanglewood, a concert by Bob Dylan that was a revelation, following a set by Mavis Staples that was a revival. The revelation is that some 55 years into his career, by remaining true and not wavering from his original vision, Bob Dylan was able to belt out a genre-skimming array of 20 songs, imbuing each one of them with just the right degree of scorn or glee, humor or haughtiness, bile, blasphemy, or belligerence.

Dylan’s constancy was demonstrated by She Belongs To Me, the second song tonight, which he also performed the first time I saw him, on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour. Tonight’s set started with Things Have Changed, his trophy-winning song from 2000, which was performed with more ardor and vehemence than an opening number usually gets, as if he’d been singing along backstage to old girlfriend Maris Staples!

Bob Dylan sings the Great American Songbook

Tonight’s setlist also demonstrated that Mr. Dylan’s perusal of the Great American Songbook is no passing fancy; besides doing five songs from the 2 new “Sinatra” albums, Fallen Angels and Shadows in the Night, he also sang How Deep is the Ocean and I Could Have Told You, brand new entries on Bob Dylan’s setlist. While it’s hard to imagine that his own lyrics have overlooked any nuance of emotion or condition of life, nontheless he seems all fired up to be singing this material, making a fresh wind blow through Tin Pan Alley.

Those seven songs were distributed evenly among his own, five of which hail from Tempest, which took the world by storm upon release in 2012, when Dylan-wags reminded us that The Tempest is the name of Shakespeare’s last play. Turns out not to mark the end of the line for the bard of Hibbing, at all! Tempest is a great album, and tonight Bob Dylan delivered five songs from it with a high degree of fidelity to the recorded versions: Pay in Blood, Duquesne Whistle, Early Roman Kings, Scarlet Town, Long and Wasted Years.

Duquesne Whistle gets your attention

Duquesne Whistle, in the 7tyh spot tonight but 1st on the album, reminds me of Like A Rolling Stone, the opening number on Highway 61 Revisted. Whereas the latter shocks the listener with the loud crack of a snare drum right up front, Duquesne Whistle lollygags for more than half a minute before slapping you awake. Bob Dylan is an artist who doesn’t put much effort into promotion, but every now and then he takes the measure of our attention.

And tonight, he even addressed the audience, after the first 9 songs, telling us the band would be leaving the stage but would return in a few minutes. For years, he spoke only to introduce the band and maybe say thank you at the end of the set and before the encore, but hadn’t even been doing that much talking lately. This encore alone was worth the price of admission: Blowin’ in the Wind, with Dylan’s vocals and piano assiduously accented by violin, and a rollicking reading given to Love Sick, off the immense 1997 album Time Out of Mind.

Mavis Staples rouses the audience

Mavis Staples had the audience in the palm of her hand by the time her opening set wound up, and on their feet, singing along and testifying! She doesn’t share Dylan’s reticence, rather is as chatty as your sister, eager to tell you what’s been happening. We couldn’t sit still during her set, which left us revived with the fervor of the Sixties. Her band is awesome and they mix up an intoxicating blend of gospel, soul, funk, blues, and rock ‘ roll.

Bob Dylan plays the Berkshires

Article updated Dec. 22, 2018; written by Dave Conlin Read

Bob Dylan’s Tanglewood show, July 2, 2016, was the seventh time he has performed in the Berkshires, but only the fifth time he has headlined a concert here. His surprise appearance as guest of Joan Baez at her Aug. 17, 1963 concert in Pittsfield, when he sang Only a Pawn in Their Game, Blowin in the Wind, and A Hard Rain’s A-gonna Fall, came in the midst of an epic summer – following July appearances at a pivotal Civil Rights Rally in Greenwood, MS and the Newport Folk Festival and just before the March on Washington. Local reporter Milton R. Bass wrote: “His voice is not a pretty one, his guitar playing is just plain old banging away, but there is an intensity about him, a dedication, that forces one’s attention where it belongs.”

Rolling Thunder Revue Berkshires respite

Rolling Thunder Revue at Springfield, MA Nov. 6, 1975 handbill.

Dylan’s second Berkshires’ visit was November 7, 1975, during the first wave of the Rolling Thunder Revue. After playing two shows the day before in Springfield, he brought the troupe to Mama Frasca’s Dream Away Lodge for an all-day party and sing-along in Becket. Catching back-to-back episodes of the Rolling Thunder Revue is about as lucky as any Dylan fan can get, and listening to Vol. 5: Live 1975 of the Bootleg Series practically brings it all back home again!

Dylan at Tanglewood

When Dylan headlined his first concert in the Berkshires, at Tanglewood, July 4, 1991, the most familiar image of him was from the Grammys a few months earlier when he accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award, without a word of thanks to anyone, but with characteristically cryptic remarks about defilement and redemption, after performing an accelerated version of Masters of War, at a time when the country was drunk on the patriotic glory of the Gulf War. According to the Tanglewood electrician working the show that night, Dylan was quite belligerent, threatening to blow the show off if his demands for a total backstage blackout weren’t met. My friend told me that it nearly came to fisticuffs!

The second Tanglewood show Aug. 4, 1997, came on the heels of Dylan’s bout with histoplasmosis, a respiratory infection that nearly took him out. Opening the show was BR5-49, whose multi-instrumentalist Donnie Herron, who has been a member of Dylan’s band since 2005, when Larry Campbell departed. He performed an abbreviated set of 13 songs, including an excellent reading of Tangled Up in Blue, plus the rarely-performed This Wheel’s On Fire, co-written with Rick Danko, but without All Along the Watchtower, which had been on nearly every setlist since 1992.

Dylan’s ball park shows in Pittsfield

Then came the two ballpark/variety shows: June 23, 2005 and Aug. 26, 2006 at Wahconah Park in Pittsfield. With the estimable Willie Nelson on the undercard in 2005, Dylan went deep into his own songbook to perform a set that included 9 songs from 1967 and earlier. Mr. Dylan is expected to go deep into the songbook again at Tanglewood, but not his own, rather the Great American Songbook, including numbers Frank Sinatra may have done at Tanglewood in 1994.

Desolation Row is first among perhaps a score of favorite Dylan songs, from Highway 61 Revisited, which was released when I was sixteen. It was the highlight of the 2006 show, as I wrote at the time: “The arrangement of Desolation Row was simply spectacular – it was a sound ballet. There was luscious acoustic work between Garnier and Freeman, laying down swinging, jazzy lines and then doubling them. Geroge Recile was all over his drum kit, making thunder and great brassy noise. And Herron pinned down every phrase of Dylan’s with hot rivets of electric mandolin; a wicked cool effect.”