Dave Read

American Leviathans

What does Bob Dylan owe Herman Melville?

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 2, 2023 – One hundred ten years after Moby-Dick broke the surface of the inchoate, if not placid, American scene, another leviathan broke the surface of American somnambulance, making waves near the port of New York, which have yet to crest, five dozen years later.

Of all the literary links and/or melding metaphors available for an epistle addressed to Bob Dylan’s audience, Herman Melville/Moby-Dick seems suitable because Dylan’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech is loaded with 78 sentences about Moby-Dick, a new world record!

“Oh! time was, as when the sunrise nobly spurred me…” Captain Ahab, chapter 37.
“New Morning,” Bob Dylan, LP #12

Also, because the public transformed Dylan into a veritable white whale, a thing great enough to support generations of barnacles right across the pecuniary spectrum, but especially in the book business and in the academy.

Not only that, but Bob Dylan channeled Herman Melville during an impromptu tête à tête with his erstwhile muse, Joan Baez. The exchange was recorded because it took place in the midst of the Rolling Thunder Revue, and is included in the movie based on it by Martin Scorsese.

Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, Mama Frasca's Dream Away Lodge, Rolling Thunder Revue party, Nov. 1975. Ken Regan photo. — Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, Mama Frasca’s Dream Away Lodge, Rolling Thunder Revue party, Nov. 1975. Ken Regan photo.

Dylan and his traveling circus enjoy a rare day off in the Berkshire woods, between a double-header the previous day in Springfield and a show the next day in Vermont. They have the run of Mama Frasca’s Dream Away Lodge in Becket, which happens to be a favorite haunt of Arlo Guthrie, who lives nearby and who had been invited to join the troupe for the Springfield shows.

In Moby-Dick, Captain Ahab is nearly blissed out – “as the morning of the third day dawned fair and fresh.”

“Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; THAT’S tingling enough for mortal man! to think’s audacity. God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.”

The decidedly unschooled Bob Dylan also is near bliss, a decade and a half since he weighed the anchor of his mind in the shallow harbor of Hibbing, Minnesota, now early in the most storied tour in the annals of American popular music.

I attended the Springfield shows, and about twenty years later, I became friends with a guy who had been both neighbor and friend of Mama Frasca.** Not only did he attend the all-day party, but he was with Mama Frasca when Arlo called to make arrangements for the party.

Apparently, the name of Joan Baez came up during the conversation, because as my friend tells the story, when Mama Frasca hung up the phone, she was overcome with joy, “Joan Baez is coming, Joan Baez is coming.” So profound was Mama’s affection for the counter-culture chanteuse that, when she arrived decked-out in dungaree, Mama whisked her upstairs and gave her a pretty white dress to put on.

With the party in full-swing throughout the lodge and environs, Dylan and Baez have a moment alone together at the bar. The former lovers chide each other on their recent marriages:

“It really displeases me that you ran off and got married.”

“You got married first and didn’t tell me.”

“Yeah, but I married the woman I loved.”

“Yeah, that’s true – and I married the man I thought I loved.”

“See, that’s what thought has to do with it – thought will fuck you up!”

“You’re right, I agree with that.

“It’s heart, it’s not head.”

It is unlikely that Mr. Dylan, in the hemisemidemiquaver that precedes his reply, scanned memory for a stored phrase to use. There is a chance, however, that Revue poet Alan Ginsberg happened to be on Chapter 135 at that moment, as he recited from Moby-Dick all day, delighted to be within a dozen miles of Melville’s Arrowhead home, where the book was written.

My thesis is that great minds think alike – and not infrequently they think about the very nature of thought. For artists such as Melville and Dylan, it’s never enough to become masters of their craft; every sunrise illuminates a new horizon, and new horizons exert a force on them that we ordinary sailors are lucky just to read about.

Dave Read

* Wikipedia page on Like A Rolling Stone, with reference to Kooper; there are many renditions of the story worth searching out on the Internet.

** Interview about the Rolling Thunder Revue party at Mama Frasca’s

The Dylan-Baez dialogue is on Youtube – as if the poem needs facts!

OK

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

Is TV’s Douglas Brinkley the Thin Man?

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, June 18, 2020 – 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.