Dave Read's essays

Zimmerman becomes Dylan

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, June 2023 – For all anybody knows, Bobby Zimmerman changed his name, not to renounce his father’s name, but to transform himself into a product with a catchy brand name.
White Horse Tavern, Greenwich Village, NYC.
When he arrived there in 1961, Greenwich Village was still home to the ghost of Dylan Thomas, who had had his last drink there eight years earlier, at the White Horse Tavern. That is where Bob would apprentice himself to the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, who were adding the treasury of Irish folk songs to the pot already boiling with the music of Appalachia, the Piedmont, Mississippi delta, and whatever places Woody Guthrie had traveled to.

No matter what he had in mind by changing his name, Bob Dylan turned me on to Dylan Thomas, whose poems, in turn, opened wide the door of poetry, a threshold never to be re-crossed. Besides the star-crossed Welshman, he also turned me on to Dave Van Ronk, William Zantzinger, Queen Jane Approximately, and the Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, only one of whom I’m lucky enough to have met!

See here: Interview with Dave Van Ronk.

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!

Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize lecture

Where’s the Art in that, Bob?

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, 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?

(Ed. note Dec. 2020 – I stand by these thoughts, 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.”)