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take us all to tulsa

Linked poems kill ignorance.

How ’bout that kid
from the Iron Range,
now wranglin’ us down
to where Woody was born –

to the tearful place
Alabama Creek were made
to call home by errant rulers,
by men crooked as the river.

Bright light shines on Black Wall Street –
bookstores, music shops, juke joints
abound, the town’s never had it so good!
God bless the Song and Dance man’s big stash.

Dave Read

News item.
It was announced in March 2016 that Bob Dylan sold his “archive” to the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the University of Tulsa. Included are some 6,000 manuscripts, recordings, and ephemera that will be open to academic research, while casual Dylan fans also will be served by the project.

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

…I drove down an aisle of sound, nothing real but in the bell…
– William Stafford, from Across Kansas

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 songs ring true, so long as they comport
with Common Sense, Bob Dylan songs ring a bell.

But, when he finds 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, just

So long as you play in the space laid aside for Minstrels and Rogues,
for Beatles and Jesters, where the Song ‘n Dance man rules the roost.

Dave Read

*CBS revoked its invitation for Bob Dylan to perform on the Ed Sullivan Show in May, 1963, because Dylan wanted to play “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.” Thus allowed to gestate in the shadows, the John Birch Society morphed into today’s Republican Party. Remember kids, “He who pays the piper, calls the tune.” The network ran a piece on the Birchers some months later, remember? Of course not, but you wouldn’t have been able to get Dylan’s song out of your head.

While Bob Dylan disclaims use of the Welsh poet’s name, we cop gladly to lifting this Dylan Thomas title: A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

Across Kansas

My family slept those level miles
but like a bell rung deep till dawn
I drove down an aisle of sound,
nothing real but in the bell,
past the town where I was born.

Once you cross a land like that
you own your face more; what the light
struck told a self, every rock
denied all the rest of the world.
We stopped at Sharon Springs and ate –

My state still dark, my dream to long to tell.

By Appointment of His Royal Bobness

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 likely created Bob Dylan to buffer family from the trials and tribulations of number one son, who fled to the City, to see Woody, and to see what else is afoot. Having lifted 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. To imagine Bob Dylan without the serendipity of Grossman’s role, before the forms had been pried from the concrete plinth of an eight decade career, is too much to ask!

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.)

** New York Times, until Johnny couldn’t read anymore.

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.

These songs are so complete, so whole, they leave nothing out nor bear any dross, I remain stunned that the general public and their chief taste-makers kept dunning Dylan for moving along, for growing. Why would he loiter after completion of a project?

Norwegian Bachelor Asshole

Garrisons are both born and made –
one houses straight shooters whose works
may excite the poets; the other is unarmed,
dangerous, and shoots blank, vapid verse.

Dave Read

Garrison Keillor takes a stab at poetry:

“Now and then people ask me why we didn’t have Dylan on the show,” the former host of “Prairie Home Companion” writes in “Living With Limericks,” which was published last week. “Because I don’t care to be associated with him, that’s why.”

“I think that ‘My Back Pages’ is one of the worst songs ever written,” he continues. “I could name others. It’s no wonder he took a pseudonym, so as to avoid bringing shame on the Zimmerman family.”

There is a songwriter named Bob
Who makes some people’s hearts throb
They find a thrill in
Listening to Dylan
And for me it’s more like a job.
Copied from the Star Tribune.

In re: Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize lecture

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

Article updated Dec. 16, 2020 by Dave Read.

I totally stand by this, except that I also think that Mr. Dylan’s work merits the highest order of blue ribbon from the world’s top prize givers – the Swedes may be best. But, despite oodles of meritorious literary content, his work belongs in the music category, not the literature one.

Also, if indeed he was slippery in his Melville comments, he gets a pass, a big fat one, for channeling Captain Ahab in dialogue with Joan Baez, at the Dream Away Lodge, right here in the Berkshires in an episode included in the recent Martin Scorsese mashup. Melville’s Ahab declaims that “to think’s audacity…” – while Dylan admonishes Baez, “…thinking fucks you up.”

June 27, 2017 – 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.”