Bob Dylan: Together Through Life
by Robert Roper
JULY 13, 2010 TAGS:
Bob Dylan turned 69 in May. To make it sound more portentous: He has now entered his 70th year. Bob was always chronologically a little ahead of the generation that embraced him, and now, as Baby Boomers are rounding into their ’60s and taking, some of them, their first look at the end of the road, Dylan is out there on the frontier, spying what’s to come, what’s already here.
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The news is not good. Exhaustion, confusion, and death await us. As one of Bob’s most notable songs from the ’90s has it, “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.” Things are terrible, and not only that, they’re going to end. In “It’s All Good,” a tune from Together Through Life (2009), Dylan shows the modern world in the throes of unremitting sin, anguish, and decay:
…widows cry, the orphans plea
Everywhere you look there’s more misery
Come along with me babe, I wish you would
You know what I’m sayin’, it’s all good
All good, I said it’s all good, all good
Cold blooded killer stomp into town
Cop car’s blinkin’, somethin’ bad goin’ down
Buildings are crumblin’ in the neighborhood
But there’s nothin’ to worry about ’cause it’s all good
It’s all good, I say it’s all good
“It’s all good” -- he doesn’t mean that, does he? No, of course not, he means the opposite. That silly catch-phrase, “It’s all good,” has caught his attention, and he’s turned it on its head, an old trick of his. But even the irony is kind of tired, played out; it’s nothing like the snarling, withering irony of Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde, albums written when Bob was a towering font of youthful attitude, in the 1960s.
While the Baby Boomers were busy building their ordinary lives, buying vacation homes and packing their IRA’s with ready dough, then getting foreclosed on a lot of those houses and seeing a third of the value of their pensions disappear overnight, Dylan was off somewhere shaking his head, sucking an eye-tooth, pulling at that mean little moustache he wears these days. He’s not surprised. Bad news is to be expected. Life is about harm, the collapse of hope; and then, at the very end, that unavoidable date with the Reaper. Whoopee! Thanks a lot, Bob! We needed to hear that.
Actually, many of us did, and do. When Dylan says it, it stays said. The credibility he enjoys is enormous among a certain demographic; he is the most honored American songwriter of our time, and by virtue of the prominence of American cultural product in the world, the most honored and influential songwriter on earth. Among Americans and Europeans and South Americans and Russians and South Africans and Israelis and Norwegians he enjoys the status that two centuries ago was accorded the preeminent poets – he is the Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth of our time, our Emerson, Dickinson, and Whitman, and our Auden and Neruda and Mandelstam to boot. He has fulfilled for nearly 50 years the classic functions of the seminal poet, that is, to register his times in vivid and memorable words, and to prophesy.
Consider a signature line, from “Ballad of a Thin Man,” 1965. “Something is happening here, and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?” There’s a lot of smirking in that lyric, a rich enjoyment at the expense of a square, but, basically, that was the question, wasn’t it, at the time? Something was happening and he could feel it, and his young audience could also feel it, or anyway could believe that they felt it when they heard Bob Dylan singing about it. According to R. W. Emerson, “too feeble fall the impressions of nature” upon the ordinary man or woman – being “ordinary” meaning that what we feel doesn’t quite move us to poetic speech, to words adequate to what we feel. But the poet feels his times and his life in this real and surreal world, and he or she can describe those feelings so that the rest of us also, memorably, feel them.
About that other task of the poet, prophesying, wearing the mantle of the prophet. That was always a comfortable fit for Bob. Prophesying not in the sense of reading tea leaves, saying who’ll win in the third race at Hialeah, but in the biblical sense of exposing sin, identifying the failings of the people at large, lashing them with fiery words. “Ballad of a Thin Man” is one of his earliest prophesy-songs, showing how lame and self-deluding and shameful a whole class of people is. Other songs in the same mode – the list is long – are “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Positively 4th Street,” “All Along the Watchtower,” “Disease of Conceit,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” “You Gotta Serve Somebody,” “Idiot Wind.” “You got a lotta nerve,” as Bob sings in “Positively 4th St.,” expressing thereby his basic attitude toward human corruption. The nerve of us all, being so flawed, so inherently imperfect. Damn the whole lot of us, anyway.
Now that Bob has entered his seventh decade, what can we expect of him? To try to predict the turnings of mind and spirit of an original poet is beyond anybody except, possibly, another such poet, but to judge from his last few albums of new material, going back to 1997’s Time Out of Mind, there will be more of two kinds of song. The first kind is the “Not Dark Yet, But It’s Getting There” type, songs of exhaustion, of seeing that it’s all about to end, and end badly. One of the great songs of this kind is “Highlands,” from Time Out of Mind, a 16 1/2 minute, slow-rocking ramble through the first, surprised recognition that the final chapter in life has already begun. It starts with an echo of the Scottish poet Robert Burns, author of such lyrics as “To a Mouse” and “John Anderson, My Jo.” In one of his famous poems Burns wrote,
My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here,
My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer….
Wherever I wander, wherever I rove,
The hills of the Highlands for ever I love.
Dylan takes this nostalgic sentiment and rings a few changes on it; he retains the sweetness, the yearning, but he improves on Burns’ nature descriptions, adding appropriate detail:
Well my heart’s in the Highlands gentle and fair
Honeysuckle blooming in the wildwood air
Bluebells blazing where the Aberdeen waters flow
Well my heart’s in the Highland,
I’m gonna go there when I feel good enough to go….
My heart’s in the Highlands at the break of dawn
By the beautiful lake of the Black Swan
Big white clouds like chariots that swing down low
Well my heart’s in the Highlands
Only place left to go
The only place left to go: for Dylan, the highlands sound like a place of comfortable retreat, a wilderness vacation spot, maybe, in Utah, with powder skiing and nature walks nearby (“Build me a cabin in Utah/Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout/Have a bunch of kids who call me Pa/That must be what it’s all about,” from “Sign in the Window,” 1970). But the highlands are also a place of final retreat, a last resting place – he’s getting there one step at a time, he tells us, and so are the rest of us, whether we want to go or not. Meanwhile, stuck strangely in the middle of this Burnsian reverie is a passage out of another kind of Dylan vision, a puzzling, on-the-edge encounter like the one described in “Visions of Johanna,” for example, or “Desolation Row.” He’s in an empty diner, having a discussion with a lone waitress, trying to figure out what to order for lunch. “She got a pretty face and long white shiny legs,” he tells us, but they aren’t on the same wavelength, he and the waitress – she doesn’t really want to serve him, and he can’t adequately answer the weird questions she throws at him. It boils down to a testy exchange in which she accuses him of not reading any women authors:
Least that’s what I think I hear her say
“Well,” I say, “how would you know and what would it matter anyway?”
“Well,” she says, “you just don’t seem like you do.”
I said, “You’re way wrong.”
She says, “Which ones have you read then?”
I say, “I read Erica Jong.” She goes away for a minute and I slide up out of my chair I step outside back to the busy street but nobody’s going anywhere
It’s funny, but there’s something wrong with the “I” character: he’s run out of gas, he feels discouraged, futile. He’s disoriented in some way, and look what he has to deal with in this frame of mind: mortality, of all things. Here it is, the end of life, a foretaste of it, presaged by an end of all desire (he can’t figure out if he wants to eat anything, and the good-looking waitress doesn’t fire him up any). “You can say I was on anything but a roll,” he informs us, and furthermore, Woke up this morning and I looked at the same old page Same ol’ rat race Life in the same ol’ cage.
I don’t want nothing from anyone, ain’t that much to take Wouldn’t know the difference between a real blonde and a fake Feel like a prisoner in a world of mystery I wish someone would come And push back the clock for me
We know what you mean, Bob. Push back that clock maybe 40, 50 years, way back to when you woke up every day knowing exactly what you wanted for lunch. But nobody’s going to do that for you, reset the clock of life, and in our increasingly feeble state, you and we now have to deal with the most troubling aspect of existence – that it ends.
The other kind of song that we can expect more of from Dylan, should we be fortunate enough to have more original music coming from his direction, is the heartbroken love-song. The iconic heartbroken love-song of late-stage Dylan is “Love Sick,” from Time out of Mind, a very grim ditty indeed. “I’m sick of love,” he sings, “I’m in the thick of it. This kind of love, I’m so sick of it:”
I’m walkin’ these streets that are dead
I’m walkin’ with you in my head
My feet are so tired, my brain is so wired
And the clouds are weepin’…
Whoopee again, Bob! Love at an advanced age becomes, like everything else in the later years, a sort of illness, he tells us, a catastrophe. In last year’s ironically entitled Together Through Life album, Dylan gave us another catchy love song, the entirely unironically named “Beyond Here Lies Nothing” – its message was that beyond love there is, literally, nothing, and yet love itself is nothing, just an unstable, impermanent state of mutual illusion. Or as he put it in “Forgetful Heart,” another love song from the same album,
Can’t take much more
Why can’t we love like we did before?
Forgetful heart, we loved with all the love that life can give
What can I say, without you it’s so hard to live
Can’t take much more….
The door has closed forevermore, if indeed there ever was a door
The gloom is thick – laughably thick, you might almost say. Except that, in Dylan’s visions of hopelessness and helplessness, of the air going out of the balloon of life, and the little shred of colored rubber fizzling down to the pavement, there’s a lot of entertainment value. The late songs are agreeably musical, and the words are sly, bleakly funny, touching, honest – as with much of Dylan’s output over these last 50 years, completely pedestrian lines such as “we loved with all the love that life can give” alternate with casual, shiv-in-the-ribs messages such as “The door has closed forevermore, if indeed there ever was a door.”
And Dylan, as the iconic poet of an age, is himself immensely inspiring. There he is, going on 70, writing original material and touring a whole lot, not exhausted in any real sense, still out there a little ahead, feeling, coming to know, and bringing back the strange existential news. He has written so prolifically, close to 500 published songs, that his creativity has come to seem effortless, but in fact his career has been marked by dry periods, by the struggles of a real man in the grip of mortal life (not a mega-star in bed more and more only with his own narcissism), courting a difficult muse. In the early ’90s he told an interviewer,
“There was a time when the songs would come three or four at the same time, but those days are long gone…. You get caught up in wondering if anyone needs to hear it. Maybe a person gets to the point where they have written enough songs.” A few years later he told another interviewer, “The recording process is very difficult for me. I lose my inspiration in the studio real easy, and it’s very difficult for me to think that I’m going to eclipse anything I’ve ever done before…. My mission, which starts out wide, becomes very dim after a few failed takes and this and that.”
So, it’s not so easy being Bob Dylan. He’s got a struggle on his hands, and it’s not getting any easier, not at this point. But it remains doable, if you take it day by day, one small obstacle at a time. As he tells us in “Highlands,”
The wind, it whispers to the buckeyed trees in rhyme
Well my heart’s in the Highland,
I can only get there one step at a time.
Well my heart’s in the Highlands with the horses and hounds
Way up in the border country, far from the towns
With the twang of the arrow and a snap of the bow
My heart’s in the Highlands Can’t see any other way to go
Robert Roper, a regular contributor to Obit, is the author of Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War.
The news is not good. Exhaustion, confusion, and death await us. As one of Bob’s most notable songs from the ’90s has it, “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.” Things are terrible, and not only that, they’re going to end. In “It’s All Good,” a tune from Together Through Life (2009), Dylan shows the modern world in the throes of unremitting sin, anguish, and decay:…widows cry, the orphans plea
Everywhere you look there’s more misery
Come along with me babe, I wish you would
You know what I’m sayin’, it’s all good
All good, I said it’s all good, all good
Cold blooded killer stomp into town
Cop car’s blinkin’, somethin’ bad goin’ down
Buildings are crumblin’ in the neighborhood
But there’s nothin’ to worry about ’cause it’s all good
It’s all good, I say it’s all good
“It’s all good” -- he doesn’t mean that, does he? No, of course not, he means the opposite. That silly catch-phrase, “It’s all good,” has caught his attention, and he’s turned it on its head, an old trick of his. But even the irony is kind of tired, played out; it’s nothing like the snarling, withering irony of Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde, albums written when Bob was a towering font of youthful attitude, in the 1960s.
While the Baby Boomers were busy building their ordinary lives, buying vacation homes and packing their IRA’s with ready dough, then getting foreclosed on a lot of those houses and seeing a third of the value of their pensions disappear overnight, Dylan was off somewhere shaking his head, sucking an eye-tooth, pulling at that mean little moustache he wears these days. He’s not surprised. Bad news is to be expected. Life is about harm, the collapse of hope; and then, at the very end, that unavoidable date with the Reaper. Whoopee! Thanks a lot, Bob! We needed to hear that.
Actually, many of us did, and do. When Dylan says it, it stays said. The credibility he enjoys is enormous among a certain demographic; he is the most honored American songwriter of our time, and by virtue of the prominence of American cultural product in the world, the most honored and influential songwriter on earth. Among Americans and Europeans and South Americans and Russians and South Africans and Israelis and Norwegians he enjoys the status that two centuries ago was accorded the preeminent poets – he is the Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth of our time, our Emerson, Dickinson, and Whitman, and our Auden and Neruda and Mandelstam to boot. He has fulfilled for nearly 50 years the classic functions of the seminal poet, that is, to register his times in vivid and memorable words, and to prophesy.
Consider a signature line, from “Ballad of a Thin Man,” 1965. “Something is happening here, and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?” There’s a lot of smirking in that lyric, a rich enjoyment at the expense of a square, but, basically, that was the question, wasn’t it, at the time? Something was happening and he could feel it, and his young audience could also feel it, or anyway could believe that they felt it when they heard Bob Dylan singing about it. According to R. W. Emerson, “too feeble fall the impressions of nature” upon the ordinary man or woman – being “ordinary” meaning that what we feel doesn’t quite move us to poetic speech, to words adequate to what we feel. But the poet feels his times and his life in this real and surreal world, and he or she can describe those feelings so that the rest of us also, memorably, feel them.
About that other task of the poet, prophesying, wearing the mantle of the prophet. That was always a comfortable fit for Bob. Prophesying not in the sense of reading tea leaves, saying who’ll win in the third race at Hialeah, but in the biblical sense of exposing sin, identifying the failings of the people at large, lashing them with fiery words. “Ballad of a Thin Man” is one of his earliest prophesy-songs, showing how lame and self-deluding and shameful a whole class of people is. Other songs in the same mode – the list is long – are “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Positively 4th Street,” “All Along the Watchtower,” “Disease of Conceit,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” “You Gotta Serve Somebody,” “Idiot Wind.” “You got a lotta nerve,” as Bob sings in “Positively 4th St.,” expressing thereby his basic attitude toward human corruption. The nerve of us all, being so flawed, so inherently imperfect. Damn the whole lot of us, anyway.
Now that Bob has entered his seventh decade, what can we expect of him? To try to predict the turnings of mind and spirit of an original poet is beyond anybody except, possibly, another such poet, but to judge from his last few albums of new material, going back to 1997’s Time Out of Mind, there will be more of two kinds of song. The first kind is the “Not Dark Yet, But It’s Getting There” type, songs of exhaustion, of seeing that it’s all about to end, and end badly. One of the great songs of this kind is “Highlands,” from Time Out of Mind, a 16 1/2 minute, slow-rocking ramble through the first, surprised recognition that the final chapter in life has already begun. It starts with an echo of the Scottish poet Robert Burns, author of such lyrics as “To a Mouse” and “John Anderson, My Jo.” In one of his famous poems Burns wrote,My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here,
My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer….
Wherever I wander, wherever I rove,
The hills of the Highlands for ever I love.
Dylan takes this nostalgic sentiment and rings a few changes on it; he retains the sweetness, the yearning, but he improves on Burns’ nature descriptions, adding appropriate detail:
Well my heart’s in the Highlands gentle and fair
Honeysuckle blooming in the wildwood air
Bluebells blazing where the Aberdeen waters flow
Well my heart’s in the Highland,
I’m gonna go there when I feel good enough to go….
My heart’s in the Highlands at the break of dawn
By the beautiful lake of the Black Swan
Big white clouds like chariots that swing down low
Well my heart’s in the Highlands
Only place left to go
The only place left to go: for Dylan, the highlands sound like a place of comfortable retreat, a wilderness vacation spot, maybe, in Utah, with powder skiing and nature walks nearby (“Build me a cabin in Utah/Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout/Have a bunch of kids who call me Pa/That must be what it’s all about,” from “Sign in the Window,” 1970). But the highlands are also a place of final retreat, a last resting place – he’s getting there one step at a time, he tells us, and so are the rest of us, whether we want to go or not. Meanwhile, stuck strangely in the middle of this Burnsian reverie is a passage out of another kind of Dylan vision, a puzzling, on-the-edge encounter like the one described in “Visions of Johanna,” for example, or “Desolation Row.” He’s in an empty diner, having a discussion with a lone waitress, trying to figure out what to order for lunch. “She got a pretty face and long white shiny legs,” he tells us, but they aren’t on the same wavelength, he and the waitress – she doesn’t really want to serve him, and he can’t adequately answer the weird questions she throws at him. It boils down to a testy exchange in which she accuses him of not reading any women authors:
Least that’s what I think I hear her say
“Well,” I say, “how would you know and what would it matter anyway?”
“Well,” she says, “you just don’t seem like you do.”
I said, “You’re way wrong.”
She says, “Which ones have you read then?”
I say, “I read Erica Jong.” She goes away for a minute and I slide up out of my chair I step outside back to the busy street but nobody’s going anywhere
It’s funny, but there’s something wrong with the “I” character: he’s run out of gas, he feels discouraged, futile. He’s disoriented in some way, and look what he has to deal with in this frame of mind: mortality, of all things. Here it is, the end of life, a foretaste of it, presaged by an end of all desire (he can’t figure out if he wants to eat anything, and the good-looking waitress doesn’t fire him up any). “You can say I was on anything but a roll,” he informs us, and furthermore, Woke up this morning and I looked at the same old page Same ol’ rat race Life in the same ol’ cage.
I don’t want nothing from anyone, ain’t that much to take Wouldn’t know the difference between a real blonde and a fake Feel like a prisoner in a world of mystery I wish someone would come And push back the clock for me
We know what you mean, Bob. Push back that clock maybe 40, 50 years, way back to when you woke up every day knowing exactly what you wanted for lunch. But nobody’s going to do that for you, reset the clock of life, and in our increasingly feeble state, you and we now have to deal with the most troubling aspect of existence – that it ends.The other kind of song that we can expect more of from Dylan, should we be fortunate enough to have more original music coming from his direction, is the heartbroken love-song. The iconic heartbroken love-song of late-stage Dylan is “Love Sick,” from Time out of Mind, a very grim ditty indeed. “I’m sick of love,” he sings, “I’m in the thick of it. This kind of love, I’m so sick of it:”
I’m walkin’ these streets that are dead
I’m walkin’ with you in my head
My feet are so tired, my brain is so wired
And the clouds are weepin’…
Whoopee again, Bob! Love at an advanced age becomes, like everything else in the later years, a sort of illness, he tells us, a catastrophe. In last year’s ironically entitled Together Through Life album, Dylan gave us another catchy love song, the entirely unironically named “Beyond Here Lies Nothing” – its message was that beyond love there is, literally, nothing, and yet love itself is nothing, just an unstable, impermanent state of mutual illusion. Or as he put it in “Forgetful Heart,” another love song from the same album,
Can’t take much more
Why can’t we love like we did before?
Forgetful heart, we loved with all the love that life can give
What can I say, without you it’s so hard to live
Can’t take much more….
The door has closed forevermore, if indeed there ever was a door
The gloom is thick – laughably thick, you might almost say. Except that, in Dylan’s visions of hopelessness and helplessness, of the air going out of the balloon of life, and the little shred of colored rubber fizzling down to the pavement, there’s a lot of entertainment value. The late songs are agreeably musical, and the words are sly, bleakly funny, touching, honest – as with much of Dylan’s output over these last 50 years, completely pedestrian lines such as “we loved with all the love that life can give” alternate with casual, shiv-in-the-ribs messages such as “The door has closed forevermore, if indeed there ever was a door.”
And Dylan, as the iconic poet of an age, is himself immensely inspiring. There he is, going on 70, writing original material and touring a whole lot, not exhausted in any real sense, still out there a little ahead, feeling, coming to know, and bringing back the strange existential news. He has written so prolifically, close to 500 published songs, that his creativity has come to seem effortless, but in fact his career has been marked by dry periods, by the struggles of a real man in the grip of mortal life (not a mega-star in bed more and more only with his own narcissism), courting a difficult muse. In the early ’90s he told an interviewer,
“There was a time when the songs would come three or four at the same time, but those days are long gone…. You get caught up in wondering if anyone needs to hear it. Maybe a person gets to the point where they have written enough songs.” A few years later he told another interviewer, “The recording process is very difficult for me. I lose my inspiration in the studio real easy, and it’s very difficult for me to think that I’m going to eclipse anything I’ve ever done before…. My mission, which starts out wide, becomes very dim after a few failed takes and this and that.”
So, it’s not so easy being Bob Dylan. He’s got a struggle on his hands, and it’s not getting any easier, not at this point. But it remains doable, if you take it day by day, one small obstacle at a time. As he tells us in “Highlands,”
The wind, it whispers to the buckeyed trees in rhyme
Well my heart’s in the Highland,
I can only get there one step at a time.
Well my heart’s in the Highlands with the horses and hounds
Way up in the border country, far from the towns
With the twang of the arrow and a snap of the bow
My heart’s in the Highlands Can’t see any other way to go
Robert Roper, a regular contributor to Obit, is the author of Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War.
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