In re: Bob Dylan

The Boomer’s Bard ain’t no Boomer!

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, Sept. 2023 – It is the job of literature to produce a fabric broad and deep enough to hold a people together. It must provide the flag a nation’s people rally around, with or without salutes and fanfares. To keep from sticking out like sore thumbs, the best writers only borrow enough from their elders and ancestors so that they blend in, yet remain fresh and distinct voices.

If Philip Nolan is The Man Without a Country, then perhaps America’s principle man of letters, Nobel laureate Bob Dylan, is a man without a generation? That would be because he was born a member of the last cohort to escape the naming-clutch of the consumer economy, which didn’t exist when he was born in May 1941, seven months before America was lured back into the wars of the old world.

If born a mere five years later, he’d have been branded a Baby Boomer, a term useful to people and companies with something to sell. The consumer economy was dreamt up to succeed the manufacturing economy that had sprung to the old world’s rescue twice in the span of 25 years.

Even an obscure reference such as Philip Nolan has relevance in an article on Bob Dylan, because there’s no aspect of the American story that he hasn’t woven into the tapestry of his own mythography.

Confederate poet Henry Timrod became the most famous advocate of slavery’s Lost Cause when Dylan quoted him in his song When the Deal Goes Down, on Modern Times (2006). For all we know, it was Timrod who had inspired Philip Nolan to enlist in Aaron Burr’s treasonous conspiracy?

But we digress – the question is whether Bob Dylan is a man without a generation? As soon as I write that, I wonder if I may have gotten off on the wrong foot? Given his “never-ending tour,” maybe the Thomas More story, A Man for All Seasons, would’ve been more apt?

No, that couldn’t work, because there are only four seasons, and it would be senseless to imagine Dylan as being divisible by four. What may make sense, however, is a literary mashup, such as declaring him to be “The Man for All Generations.”

Embarked as he is today on tour in support of Rough and Rowdy Ways, his 39th studio album, Bob Dylan has attracted paying customers from every generation named by the great American marketing machine. Now it makes sense.

Being pre-generational, Bob Dylan makes music that appeals to people of any and all generations!

And, as he told us in his memoir-adjacent book, Chronicles, Vol. 1 (2004), not only is he not a Baby Boomer, but it was the avant-garde of that cohort who impelled him to buy a rifle so he could protect his family from their rude and rowdy ways.

Perhaps you can see, now, how absurd is the label stamped on him by the popular media, and repeated by succeeding generations of the laziest writers in history – pop culture journalists. Bob Dylan is no more the spokesman for the Baby Boomers than he is for GenZ, iGen, or Centennials.

As he has been telling us since, at least, the 1965 San Francisco press conference, Bob Dylan is a song and dance man (more song than dance). He writes songs, then creates musical settings for them, then sells them. There is nothing easy about it, but it is that simple.

Does Dylan dis Elvis Costello and Bruce Springsteen?

By Dave Read, July 14, 2023 – One can only imagine what Elvis Costello thinks about having his career critiqued by the most taciturn and most discriminating critic in the history of pop music, Bob Dylan. It would be of minimal concern if done via zine, vlog, or even newspaper, but Dylan’s take on his fellow showman appears in a big, fat, almost coffee-table-size book, The Philosophy of Modern Song.*

By burying his judgments in the silent tomb of a book, Mr. Dylan preserves them from being devoured by the odious thief, AI, which ingests every word spoken within range of a microphone hidden by Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and the other cannibals of pop culture.

Sure, his words eventually will be scraped by the machine and mangled into a million abuses, but, a thousand years from now, they’ll remain on the printed page precisely the way they appear today.

This being about Bob Dylan, we know better than to expect it to be simply a case of him deciding to single-out for praise his colleague’s big hit Pump It Up. Instead, the other shoe drops almost immediately – “At the point of Pump It Up, he obviously had been listening to Springsteen too much.”

Springsteen, who he? Oh yeah, Bruce Springsteen is the ultimate “next Bob Dylan!” So, why drag him into a little toast to Elvis Costello? Because that would give the thinking public something to contemplate – that vanishing cohort of people who’d rather think than swallow whole whatever mass media is produced for our consumption.

For Springsteen fans, this must sting, because none of the other 65 songs in the book is a Springsteen composition. Ouch! Just think about that – a sixtysix song survey of modern American song and it excludes the very popular hero of Asbury Park. Oh my.

“Don’t cry for me,” whispers Bruce, “I got me two Grammies for every one Bob Dylan has!”

Anyway, as if to demonstrate how like the hoi polloi he has become, there is an uncredited co-author for the piece on Costello’s song. The first section betrays the strong odor of AI authorship – it is a steaming cup of word soup, with cliche croutons tossed in for umami.

Then, following a spacious caesura, the second part sounds original and makes fresh observations – it very well may be written by Bob, but, even after 50+ years of applied Dylanology, I can’t be certain it is!

*The Philosophy of Modern Song is as much about philosophy as the first Bob Dylan book, Tarantula, is about arachnids.

Dave Read

What is the nature of the power/prize dynamic?

By Dave Read, Nov. 10, 2016 – The moment I saw a picture of the Nobel Prize committee chairperson, I had an idea of why Bob Dylan had been chosen for the Literature award. I imagined her as she would have been in college after hearing Just Like a Woman for the first time, and feeling as if Bob Dylan wrote it and sings it for her alone.

More than once have I taken a date to a Bob Dylan concert, and each time I felt that if he had beckoned her, from the stage, or afterwards from the bus, I’d have gone home alone. And I like to think I’d be okay with that – because there is a woman (or two) with the same gravitational pull on me!

Since Bob Dylan and his songs occupy much of the space capital ‘p’ poetry would if market forces hadn’t replaced it with Creative Writing, the committee knew there’d be precious little blowback if it gave the literary world’s most esteemed diadem to an alien, to someone outside the world of literature – to the self-proclaimed song and dance man!

Springsteen 20 – Dylan 10

OR – maybe this is a case of noble Nobellians balancing the folly of the recording industry, which is in charge of pop culture’s royal family, where Beyonce is head of household. There, you’ll glance past dozens of names before reaching Bob Dylan, whose 10 prizes are half as many as Bruce Springsteen’s, the guy once known as “the next Bob Dylan.”

As luck would have it, when Dylan’s award was announced, Donald Hall (1928-2018), former poet laureate of the United States, was my friend and correspondent. We had been discussing the importance of music to his work when I asked what he thought about Bob Dylan getting the Nobel for Literature.

“Curiously, when I read Bob Dylan on the page the words make no sound! Poetry sound is utterly different from music. When he sings them, I reckon that they make a good noise! They are song literature but on the page they have no sex at all. Compare Thomas Hardy and “During Wind and Rain.” Hardy has four stanzas, each of them tells us that people have fun together as families but then they get old and die. Four times. And it is fairly erotic. Oral sex. Phil Roth should have won the Nobel, and now he never will.”

Prizes, such as the one connected to the dynamite fortune, say as much about the grantor as they do about the lucky winner. Saudi Arabia suddenly gives rich prizes to golfers, just to get people off their back for dismembering journalists.

In 1958, the literature Nobel was given to Boris “Dr. Zhivago” Pasternak – even though the Russian author, already on Stalin’s shitlist, wanted no part of the prize and all the noise it would make. But, since the brand new C.I.A. was eager to rub Uncle Joe’s nose in it, Pasternak was awarded the prize – and suffered for it the rest of his life.

You know who would’ve been a dyn-o-mite recipient of the 1958 Nobel in Literature? The man who wrote “This Machine Kills Fascists,” whose praise Bob Dylan sings on his first record album.

Dave Read

Weeks before Great Britain sends
Beatles toward the Liberty statue,

JFK, martyr/son of her ancient foe,
benames the place they’ll land,
(*not Gold, not Normandy).

Before CBS anoints the uniformed four –
or masses an audience of kids (too young for tits),

They expel Bob Dylan, the native son
who would say John Birch has come
to scare US out of our wits.

The spoonful of sugar that helps the
medicine go down, Bubblegum Pop

Keeps Folk ‘n Blues close to home –
in the sticks, and seedy parts of town,
where Jazz and Poems rise to the top.

Dave Read

* The British landed at Gold Beach, Normandy, on D-Day.

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.