In re: Bob Dylan

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?

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.”)

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.”

Remembering Dave Van Ronk

Article updated June 26, 2018 by Dave Read

Inside Llewyn Davis, the 2013 Coen Brothers movie based on Dave Van Ronk’s memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street, inspired me to tell the story of a few encounters with Van Ronk over the course of almost 25 years. We met at the Rusty Nail Saloon, Sunderland, MA twice in the mid and late 1970s and then did an interview before a concert at the Eighth Step Coffeehouse in Albany, NY in 1999.

I had been turned on to Van Ronk my first week at college in 1967, when an upperclassman told me that I looked like him. I hadn’t heard of Van Ronk, so I borrowed his copy of Gambler’s Blues, and loved it right off the bat. Before long I added Gambler’s Blues and Dave Van Ronk Sings the Blues to my record collection, which already held 5 or 6 Bob Dylan LPs.

I wasn’t aware of the relationship between Dylan and Van Ronk until I read Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography, by Anthony Scaduto several years later. In it, Scaduto reports that Dylan recorded Van Ronk’s version of House of the Risin’ Sun without asking permission. Even to a Dylan freak, that seemed pretty rude. In the fall of 1975, both of them made appearances in my neck of the woods – Van Ronk played a mid-week show at the Rusty Nail Saloon in Suderland, MA and Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue played back-to-back shows in Springfield.

Beside Dave Van Ronk at the Rusty Nail Saloon

The latter was announced about one week in advance and the rumors were that Dylan’s musical cronies were showing up and playing. Van Ronk’s concert was a couple days before and so when I arrived and saw him sitting alone at the bar, I was excited to say hello and ask if he’d be appearing with Dylan later that week.

He had a glass of whiskey in front of him and was holding his guitar in his lap, slowly moving his palm along it, as if he were warming it up. I said hello, told him I was a big fan, and asked about the Dylan shows. His reply, made in a polite and not unfriendly manner, was that he didn’t want to talk about Dylan. Oops, I thought, and left Van Ronk alone with his pre-concert routine.

I thoroughly enjoyed the show, surprised that he was so entertaining, with a dimension of personality that I hadn’t noticed listening to the records. But I couldn’t help myself later, seeing him getting ready to leave the club; after saying great show, nice to meet you, I asked him to verify Scaduto’s House of the Risin’ Sun report. Dave stopped in his tracks, stared into the vacuum of my eyes, and said, “I told you I do not want to discuss that man.”

Besides feeling like an idiot, and not a litle rude myself, that was all the verification I needed. I attended both Rolling Thunder Revue shows in Springfirld, but didn’t get a chance to run the story by Dylan.

Meeting Dave Van Ronk again

The second meeting occurred 3 or 4 years later, by which time I had made the acquaintance of young woman who became an ardent fan, even though she bore no resemblance to Dave Van Ronk, none whatsoever. Since she also was a guitar player, her esteem may have been more genuine than mine, a mere doppelganger. We got to the club early and saw Van Ronk by himself at the far end of the bar, just the same as before. Instead of approaching with a head full of ideas, this time I was content to introduce my friend to Dave, and tell him that she was a guitar player too. He seemed genuinely charmed and within a few minutes, the three of us were sharing a booth close to the stage.

My recollection of the ensuing three hours is a little fuzzy, except that it was about as much fun as you could have, newfound friends, talking and laughing over round after round of whiskey. He did 3 or 4 sets and eventually the show had the feel of a conversataion between him and her. He ended with a charming dedication to her, but I cannot recall if it was Teddy Bear’s Picnic or Chicken is Nice?

During the 1980s, I saw him again at various clubs in the Hudson Valley and the Berkshires. Those shows were before full houses and neither the opportunity nor the inclination to approach Van Ronk presented itself again. He did seem to be aging poorly, though.

Dave Van Ronk concert and interview

By the late 1990s, I’m writing a music column in a local newspaper and running a website, which credentials were enough to get me into a concert that he would be giving at the Eighth Step Coffeehouse in Albany, NY. We did a telephone interview from his Greenwich Village apartment the day before. (Interview with Dave Van Ronk.)

Dave Van Ronk listening to Garth Hudson in Albany, NY I brought a tape recorder and a camera to the concert, but didn’t get much use out of either. The camera jammed up so I only got a couple eerie double exposures, and I left the tape recorder alone because I didn’t want to be intrusive. Instead, I scribbled notes furiously in the dim light as Dave gave a brilliant 2+ hour concert, which could’ve doubled as a lecture on the history of music in America. And Garth Hudson was in the house, to do a few songs by himself and to accompany Dave on accordian on a few others.

Dave was hale and hearty, appearing way better than he had in the 80s. It’s none of my business, but maybe he’d quit drinking? That was the last time I saw Dave Van Ronk. The sadness of his untimely death in 2002, however, is assuaged by several factors:

He was at the top of his game late in life;
He’d received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP);
He got props from Dylan in Chronicles, Vol. 1;

Also of consolation is the fact that his posthumous CD, “Dave Van Ronk…and the tin pan bended and the story ended,” seems like a replica of the concert he gave at the Eighth Step Coffeehouse. Here’s hoping that Inside LLewyn Davis turns out to be deserving of it’s association with the story of Dave Van Ronk, whose influence extends far beyond the tenure and jurisdiction of the Mayor of MacDougal Street.

Dave Van Ronk @ Amazon.com