Erasing "Bringing It All Back Home"

It's the 50th anniversary of recording of Bob Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home. I listened to the whole album this morning while working out, looking for something to write about it. I found myself overwhelmed by how many individual lines and images would be worthy of lengthy posts. So instead of writing a blog post, I have done an erasure of the lyrics.

-->

        homesick   it
It’s          it      alley

              away

       back, write
              hit

       it all took  back
                      back
       take          fall
                      fall
                      all

       Halloween

It’s          with

It            all
                      Limit

Without    faithful     situations   wall  all

        all    bring              with

       it

       it
Especially  it’s

        it

       really

It            take

       all    away

              call it
              hit
       took
Writing                   with
              all    editor
       waitress     kitchen
       without

       all    back alley
       invited

With               front
       it

       all    with
       Call
       ball
It     it

       bringin’ back
       either
Back               back suit
It

It             with
       it back

              back  took
              it      away

              all

Take
Wait                      it

It’s                  it’s
                      it’s
              it
It’s   take
With all

Its
With        lit 
       its
All           with
Its    it
All    all    fall
With with

With
Sits with     hermit
All    wait  with

It            it      totally

With ditch
It's                  balloon

                      with

       waterfalls pity

It’s                         downfall
                      small        call
       all           nothing      all

It’s          without
              really        waits
                      its

It’s    it’s                        it

All                  nothing
              with         really

                             lit
                             fit
                             quit
       it
        it                          it

       nothing

Nothing                          criticize
        nothing            with

        it’s

Limited                    it
Obscenity  really
              all

With                      security
It                    bitterly
        fall         naturally

                       it

        it’s          it’s

It's All                    take
                                     it
                             with
        it’s all

Take         it’s all

All                                 home
All                          all    home
        taken all
        it’s all                            calls

       it’s all

Fleet Foxes

"Helplessness Blues," by Fleet Foxes, is an impressive record with a rich sound full of harmonies and unusual arrangements of instruments. It is good enough to be disappointed: why does it leave me cold? Perhaps it celebrates its sources too openly, too proudly: a late-60s psychedelic folk sound I associate with Donovan, Fairport Convention, or the Incredible String Band. "Lorelai" even explicitly cites Dylan's "Blonde on Blonde," specifically "Fourth Time Around."

These are all great sources, so this might well grow on me. And the wild saxophone on "The Shrine/An Argument" shatters the sweet sounds with dissonance. In short, a recognizably brilliant album that still falls short of truly moving me, though I'm still hopeful that it will. (Hat tip to DMB.)

Blowin in the Wind parodies

I readthis morning that David Lee Roth has parodied Bob Dylan on the new Van Halen album: "How many roads must a man walk down / before he admits he is lost?"

Can you sue somebody for stealing a parody? After all, the Chenille Sisters got there first:

Mystery Dance

On the cover of his first album, My Aim Is True, Elvis Costello strikes a Buddy Holly pose, but the album's music has less Buddy Holly in it—except for "Mystery Dance." Its stops and starts and driving shuffle rhythm recall "Not Fade Away," but Costell0's lyrics provide a completely different perspective on eternal love, the main subject of so many of Holly's songs. "Mystery Dance" shows how early rock-and-roll's euphemistic presentation of sexual desire in terms of dancing and romantic love leaves its listeners unable to just "do it."

The "mystery dance" of sex is what the singer wants to learn, but in the second verse, when an opportunity to try it out comes up, he and his potential partner are at a loss:

Well, I remember when the lights went out.
I was trying to make it look like it was never in doubt.
She thought that I knew, and I thought that she knew.
So both of us were willing but we didn't know how to do it.

The music offers Buddy Holly as a possible place to learn about such things, while the first verse turns to another possible source of information about love for teenagers:

Romeo was restless; he was ready to kill.
He jumped out the window 'cause he couldn't sit still.
Juliet was waiting with a safety net.
He said, "Don't bury me 'cause I'm not dead yet."

Romeo and Juliet are exemplary figures of teenagers in love who are misunderstood by the world around them: the outside world does not want them to "know how to do it." But even they do not actually show or tell their audience what to do when the moment of truth comes.

If classic literature and pop music fail, maybe pornography will help:

Well, I was down under the covers in the middle of the night,
Trying to discover my left foot from my right.
You can see those pictures in any magazine,
But what's the use of looking if you don't know what they mean.

In fact, it's not just pornographic pictures that don't help (in this case, not with sex, but with masturbation), but those "in any magazine": sexy advertisements don't do the job either.

Perhaps the singer ought to ask someone for help, which is what he does in the chorus:

Why don't you tell me 'bout the mystery dance?
I wanna know about the mystery dance.
Why don't you show me 'cause I've tried and I've tried but I'm still mystified.
I can't do it any more and I'm not satisfied.

In a sense, though, he does not ask for help: though he wants to know how to do "the mystery dance," he actually asks why nobody will tell him or show what to do. In a way, he's wondering why nobody has given him a sex-ed class!

The demo version of "Mystery Dance" contains one last verse that turns to one other possible source of information, beyond literature, music, and magazines:

I'm gonna walk right up to heaven dodging lightning and rods.
I'm gonna have this very personal conversation with god.
I said, "You've got the information; why don't you say so?"
He said, "Well, I've been around, and I still don't know."

Religion doesn't help either, and the singer is left with nothing to do but repeat his frustration while the song fades out: "I can't do it anymore and I'm not satisfied."

The singer's lack of satisfaction echoes another bit of earlier rock-and-roll, of course: "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." Even Mick Jagger, though, does not offer any help to a frustrated young man: he talks about how unsatisfied he is because of how the radio and the television present images to him that do not satisfy him. Only in the song's final verse does he address sex specifically—but only to refer to a girl who turned him down! We all know that "Satisfaction" is about "the mystery dance," but it's no help for that song's frustrated singer either!

*

The Buddy Holly feel of "Mystery Dance" is already gone by the time the Attractions start playing it:



And these days, the song can sound quite different:



When Bob Dylan does that to his songs, people hate it!

On Bob Dylan the Poet

Martin Schäfer and I were interviewed by Eric Facon for Swiss Radio DRS2 in honor of Bob Dylan's birthday. You can listen to the interview here (in German).

Night Shift

Looking for Simon Armitage's "Night Shift" (another poem from Zoom!), I found two postings of it in essays by Jeffrey Side that decry Armitage's poem from two very different perspectives. In one, Armitage's poem is used an example of how weak contemporary poetry is in contrast with Bob Dylan's lyrics ("Ambiguity and Abstraction in the Lyrics of Bob Dylan", from The Argotist). In the other, Armitage's poem is used an example of weak "empiricist" poetry ("Empirical and Non-Empirical Identifiers", from Jacket). In both cases, Side argues that the poem "leaves nothing to the reader's imagination" and is hence weak. But just because the scene described in the poem is clear does not mean the poem does not do anything, and just because the scene is free of abstractions does not mean that the poem does not make abstract interpretation possible. (I'm going out on a bit of a limb in saying this because I have not read the whole essay in either case.)

So here's the poem (I feel free to quote the whole thing since it's already on-line in two places, thanks to Side's interest in it; in fact, I'm grateful to him that I don't have to type it all up but can cut and paste!):

Once again I have missed you by moments;
steam hugs the rim of the just-boiled kettle,

water in the pipes finds its own level.
In another room there are other signs

of someone having left: dust, unsettled
by the sweep of the curtains; the clockwork

contractions of the paraffin heater.
For weeks now we have come and gone, woken

in acres of empty bedding, written
lipstick love-notes on the bathroom mirror

and in this space we have worked and paid for
we have found ourselves, but lost each other.

Upstairs, at least, there is understanding
in things more telling than lipstick kisses:

the air, still hung with spores of your hairspray;
body-heat stowed in the crumpled duvet.

Given my interest in the issue of "evidence" in Armitage's poems, it's not surprising that I noticed the ways in which identifying evidence plays a role here: the poem is about all the "signs" that "you" have left behind, signs that make it clear that the speaker has "missed you by moments." As in "Snow Joke," each detail is something that first has to be identified as more than just a detail; only then can it be "read" (or "misread") as evidence, as a sign.

That is at the level of the poem's story (that paraphrasable thing that Side identifies), but, as with my point about evidence in "On Miles Platting Station," every feature of the poem could be read as "evidence" of something else, by the very fact of its being in a poem. I am reading the details of the poem as evidence of how evidence works, so I pick out the details that are evidence of that, but a different reading could be developed about the role of "heat" in the poem, or perhaps the repetition of the word "lipstick."

*

It's striking that Side holds up songwriters (Dylan, Cohen) as better poets than Armitage. I wonder what he would make of Armitage's lyrics? On his Scaremongers CD, or in the musical documentaries that he has written lyrics for (see the Century Films website).

Beyond Here Lies Nothin'

There's a free download of "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'" from Bob Dylan's forthcoming CD Together Through Life available at bobdylan.com—today only (Monday, March 30). Check it out: sounds like the recent stuff, but with horns!

Top 5 songs of 2008

Once I factor out the Grateful Dead tunes, here are my top five tracks from my last.fm charts for 2008:

Greg Brown, Canned Goods
World Saxophone Quartet, Hattie Wall
Miles Davis, Bitches Brew
Greg Brown, If I Had Known
Greg Brown, Cold and Dark and Wet

The next highest one that is not by one of those guys/bands is Dylan's "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again," followed by Chris Smither's "Leave the Light On."

An old Deadhead who loves jazz and folk, that's me. :-)

Dylan in Basel

What more do I need to say? I am very excited that Bob Dylan will be playing in Basel on April 14! I'll be there!

Anagram poems

Here's my comment on a post by Deborah Ager:

One can also write anagram poems in which each line is an anagram of the first. Once, when I was very agitated and depressed (breakup blues), I did it with Dylan titles:

You’re gonna make me lonesome when you go
where eyes go. Unmake me, you, long moon on a
lake. O one, go, how you unsang me, my mere one.
Go anger, you lone omen, when you make me so
alone, our unknown game, o my eye goes home.

I was amazed by how expressive such a constraint could be.

Dylan as poetry 2

In their comments on my post on Dylan as poetry, Don Brown emphasized the element of performance as essential to the poetic quality of Dylan's lyrics, while Brian Campbell pointed out the absurdity of the apparent literary-critical assumption that evaluation of lyrics as poetry means that one should ignore the music when considering the "poetic quality" of a lyric. In his second comment, Brian quoted the comments on his blog by R. W. Watkins, who did not dispute that songs can be evaluated as poetry, but argued that Dylan is not the best example (Nick Cave and Tom Waits, among others, being better).

Several responses:

— Anyone listing people who are at least as good as Dylan should go and listen to a whole bunch of Greg Brown. (Do I proselytize? Yes, I proselytize. I am large, I contain multitudes.)

— Don and Brian's comments mesh nicely: the performance of the music is essential to a great lyric. This has some implications about how the songwriter's goals are different than the poet's. When writing a song, I am extremely focused on how the words feel in my mouth when sung, as it were. Further, listeners to songs want to sing along, and that has an immense influence on what constitutes a good lyric. When I read poetry, which I do so quite passionately, I am looking for many things, but I don't think that "singing along" is what I am looking for, either literally or figuratively.

— The pragmatist in me says that I should stop discussing Dylan as poetry hypothetically and look at a lyric and a poem. So here's "All Along the Watchtower" (words copied from bobdylan.com):

"There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief,
"There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth."

"No reason to get excited," the thief, he kindly spoke,
"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.
But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate,
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.

Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl,
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.

To have something to compare this to, I used some random-number generation (and a bit of hedging) to pull a book out of my poetry collection and find a poem with a similar structure. I ended up with Philip Larkin:

Who called love conquering,
When its sweet flower
So easily dries among the sour
Lanes of the living?

Flowerless demonstrative weeds
Selfishly spread,
The white bride drowns in her bed
And tiny curled greeds

Grapple the sun down
By three o’clock
When the dire cloak of dark
Stiffens the town.

— I won't go into an analysis of the differences between the two, and of their relative quality. But one thing is quite clear here that I have long noticed as a significant difference between songs and poems: enjambment is rare in songs, or even completely absent (due to the conventions, I guess, of melodic phrasing), while it is an essential tool of the poet, whether in formal verse or in free verse.

If anyone would like to comment on these two texts, I'd love to hear what you have to say.

Dylan as poetry

I posted this comment on Matt Merrill's post about Dylan. Matt was responding to this piece (which I have not read yet).

*

First of all, it's a little hard to test Dylan's lyrics as poetry, since his best texts are ones that one is mostly already familiar with. Perhaps Andrew Motion (and you and I) should have read the lyrics to all the songs on "Modern Times" before listening to the CD. An experiment for his next album?

Secondly, I'm a little unsure about the idea of "depending for effects on the music"? It's hard to separate the music and the text, of course, but just because the music provides effects does not mean the text could not stand alone. To use your example of RT: "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" is a wondrous text. I can't imagine without the music, because I know RT's version too well, as well as Greg Brown's superb cover of it on his "The Live One," but the text is still flawless.

Finally, I have a collection of Greg Brown's live covers of Dylan that is fantastic. I can send you a copy if you like.

Songs and Poems

A comment on a post by Rob MacKenzie (and the comment on that post by Ben Wilkinson):

I'm teaching a course on poetry and songwriting right now, and many of the students are in bands (and though they are Swiss, they sing in English). Reading their texts, I am very conscious of the distinction between songs and poems: songs, as Ben put it so well, "lack the singularity that the good poem possesses."

This is a matter of phrasing: writing that can work well in songs often falls flat if read without music, because the presence of the music allows the songwriter to prop up phrases that are unable to stand on their own (too cliched, for example).

That said, I'll defend Dylan (and Tom Waits) as contemporary songwriters who have written many texts that stand up on the page, without the music.

Birthdays

I like the fact that while today is Bob Dylan's 66th birthday, it is also Joseph Brodsky's birthday (it would have been his 67th). A nice pairing, that.

(Thanks, Mom.)

John Daniel

Keith Woodruff drew my attention to John Daniel's website. John was my first poetry teacher. Here's what I wrote as a comment on Keith's blog:

Thanks for the link to John's web site. It inspired me to drop him a note. I have fond memories of my two workshops with him: reading Bishop and Roethke (among others), looking at Dylan's "Love Minus Zero/No Limit" as an example of a good song lyric, having my apprentice poems ripped to pieces — in anticipation of their further shredding in Denise Levertov's workshops, until one day she said that a poem of mine needed no workshopping, because it was done. That poem, "The Burning," is the only poem from that period that I still submit anywhere or consider part of a possible manuscript.

Songs to listen to

Okay, here's my list of killer songs to listen to, again in alphabetical order (as with my songs to play list):

1. Down on the Corner, by Creedence Clearater Revival

Or when played by Blues Nettwork, a Basel blues band, with a tuba playing the bass line.

2. It's a Wonderful World, by Louis Armstrong

Especially at the end of the Madeline movie with Frances McDormand, when Madeline and her fellow pupils are running around overjoyed!

3. London Calling, by The Clash
4. Love Has Come To Town, by Talking Heads

What a bass line!

5. Loving Cup, by The Rolling Stones

But actually, it was Phish doing this one live that really blew my mind.

6. Morning Dew, by The Grateful Dead

Especially Terrapin Station - Drums - Space - Morning Dew in Ventura, July 22, 1984.

7. Mystery Achievement, by The Pretenders

Another brilliant bass line. Jack Sayers used to play this one brilliantly in various bands back in my Stanford days.

8. Spring and All, by Greg Brown

That's just my Greg song for today.

9. Visions of Johanna, by Bob Dylan

The Dylan song I love most at the moment, after the brilliant version in Zurich a few weeks ago.

10. Who Are You?, by Tom Waits

Or any other T. W. ballad.

Songs to play

"I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar." (Jorge Luis Borges, "Borges and I")

Many people have been posting lists of songs that blow their minds. My list of songs includes those that it blows my mind to play. In alphabetical order by title, with the line I most like to sing:

1. Comes a Time, by Neil Young

It's a wonder tall trees ain't layin' down

2. Friend of the Devil, by The Grateful Dead

Got two reasons why I cry away each lonely night

(especially on mandolin)

3. I Love Paris, by Cole Porter

I love Paris in the summer when it sizzles

(Oh, that shift from minor to major!)

4. If I Had Known, by Greg Brown

Summer was invented for her to wear that dress

(That line is so cool that I stop strumming to sing it)

5. New Coat of Paint, by Tom Waits

Heard the mystery shuffle of an overflowin' day

6. No Woman, No Cry, by Bob Marley (though it was written by Vincent Ford, Marley's guitar player at the time)

In this great future, you can't forget your past

7. Suzanne, by Leonard Cohen

And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him

8. Things We Said Today, by The Beatles

Me I'm just a lucky guy

9. What a Wonderful World, by Sam Cooke

Maybe by being an A student, baby, I could win your love for me

10. You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go, by Bob Dylan

I could stay with you forever and never realize the time

Dylan in Zurich

I was going to write one of my verse "essays" as a review of the Dylan concert (see my "essays on jazz" on Ron Carter and Dave Holland), but the verses I began writing took on a life of their own and have evolved into a poem in their own right (i.e., no longer a review of the concert) that I will have to do a bit of work on to get right. So these few words in prose will have to do as a review.

Dylan continues to blow the roof off with his live performances. This is a working band of the finest quality. I was especially struck by Denny Freeman, whose guitar work had never really caught my attention before (he joined the band in March, 2005, and I heard him with BD in Zurich in November of the same year, plus I've heard him on quite a few bootlegs). His playing was eye-opening, especially on the ballads, above all on a gorgeous rendition of "Visions of Johanna," where he played the sparsest, slowest of melodies, with a couple of slightly bent double-stops as climaxes.

The setlist:

1. Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum
2. The Times They Are A-Changin'
3. Watching The River Flow
4. It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)

I missed Larry Campbell's bouzuki here, but it was still a powerful version.

5. Girl Of The North Country

The current arrangement of this one is so poignant that it continues to bring tears to my eyes.

6. Rollin' And Tumblin'
7. Visions Of Johanna

I mentioned Freeman's soloing here; Dylan began the tune with a painfully beautiful harmonica solo, too.

8. Things Have Changed
9. When The Deal Goes Down
10. Highway 61 Revisited
11. Spirit On The Water

This was the one I was looking forward to from Modern Times. Great to hear it!

12. Tangled Up In Blue

Absolutely blew the house down. Freeman was brilliant here, too; again, nothing with virtuosic speed, just beautiful melodies, especially in the guitar's low range. "Some are mathematicians ..."

13. Nettie Moore

Even more haunting live than on the album.

14. Summer Days

Serious Dylan fans are sick of this one, but I hope they listened to it last night, because the band just took off with it. As powerful as Neil Young with Crazy Horse—and like CH, also threatening to lose control, but never quite doing so.

15. Blowin' In The Wind

An unusual, surprising almost rock-n-roll version. This one was for all those who complain about how Dylan rearranges his tunes, because this rearrangement was absolutely first-rate.

(encore)
16. Thunder On The Mountain

Faster than on Modern Times, much more rock-n-roll drive.

17. Like A Rolling Stone

The first Dylan show I have ever attended where he did not play "All Along the Watchtower"!

Shooting Star

Listening to a splendid live version of this Dylan tune, from 1997, I was struck by the wonderful bridge ("Listen to the engine," etc.):

Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of you.
You were trying to break into another world
A world I never knew.
I always kind of wondered
If you ever made it through.
Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of you.

Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of me.
If I was still the same
If I ever became what you wanted me to be
Did I miss the mark or
Over-step the line
That only you could see?
Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of me.

Listen to the engine, listen to the bell
As the last fire truck from hell
Goes rolling by, all good people are praying,
It's the last temptation
The last account
The last time you might hear the sermon on the mount,
The last radio is playing.

Seen a shooting star tonight
Slip Away.
Tomorrow will be another day.
Guess it's too late to say the things to you
That you needed to hear me say.
Seen a shooting star tonight
Slip away.

(from Oh Mercy, 1989)

Bob on guitar

After several years of playing only keyboards (for reasons which were never explained, as far as I heard), Bob Dylan opened his European tour last night on electric guitar, in Stockholm, with "Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine)." He switched back to keyboard halfway through the show. Oh, those walls of electric guitars!

You say my kisses are not like his,
But this time I'm not gonna tell you why that is.
I'm just gonna let you pass,
Yes, and I'll go last.