Judas!

Welcome to issue 11, all being well you will receive this on schedule (October, 2004). Itis, however, slightly in doubt for the first time. This is due to my being away for much of thesummer and Keith moving house during the same period. This, admittedly clever, move onhis part did not fully succeed as I have tracked him down and given him an all but impos-sible deadline to meet.As he’s always met these before, I am confident he will again.

Speaking of schedules, as I write this introduction, the publication date of Bob Dylan'smemoirs - an event akin to the Loch Ness Monster appearing on a T.V. chat show at onepoint - is almost upon us. The advance excerpts released have had me enthralled, amusedand no little surprised. It is all so generous, revealing and lucid. I am gratified, too, as acouple of quotes from these passage already exemplify what I was talking about in a speechI gave at Strathclyde University in September.

I mention this as it is another of my talks (to add to the one in here) that will be writtenup one day so beware its appearance in issue 12! If so it will be accompanied by another grip-ping chapter from John Hinchey's follow up to his excellent book, A Complete Unknown.The aforementioned Chronicles - plus associated releases and interviews - will obviouslyfeature heavily in that issue so please send in your thoughts. I envisage a 'forum' similar tothe one Mick Gold conducted on the Never Ending Tour in issue 4.

Another thing that may be in issue 12 - again feel free to volunteer - is an in-depth reviewof Paul Williams's Mind Out Of Time. Clearly a new volume in Paul's ‘Performing Artist’series deserves no less but I fear we may have missed the boat slightly on this one. As asponsor I was hoping to get a pre-release copy to review for you but - presumably due to itbeing published in Europe - this didn’t arrive until yesterday. (Many thanks for the inscrip-tion when it did eventually arrive,Paul,most thoughtfully put.) Regular Judas! readers have,of course, already encountered the Oh Mercy chapter, which we ran in a previous issue andwhich surely ranks right up there with the finest of Paul's writings (In addition,you can readearlier interviews with Paul on Judas!'s website in the Homer, the slut archive section of thesubscribers’ area.)

Anyway, issue 12 is for the future, for now we hope you enjoy issue 11 which, in additionto my own article, sees Björn Waller, Pádraig Hanratty and Jim Brady return to these pages,the Judas! debuts of Scott Marshall and Leonard Cohen expert Jim Devlin adding to MartinVan Hees’s regular column and the culmination of Andrew Davies’s epic saga.

Till next time,

Kind regards and happy reading

Andrew Muir

from Inside A Prune

ContentsNumberEleven

Let Thy Wilbury Doneby Björn Waller

Shatter Like The Glassby Jim Brady

They’re Planting Stories In The Pressby Scott M. Marshall

Lies That Truth Is Black And Whiteby Andrew Muir

Dylan And Cohen: Poets Of Rock And Rolla review by Jim Devlin

Time Is An Enemyby Pádraig Hanratty

Philosophical Reflectionsby Martin van Hees

Red, White And Blue Shoe Strings - Part IVby Andrew Davies

Photo Credits:Front & back cover, Charleston, South Carolina 17th Aug 2004Inside back cover, Cernobbio (near Como), Italy 28th July 2004All Duncan Hume

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I was 15 years old in 1988. And you know, it would be so easy to claim that Iwas down with the cool stuff, that I bought Daydream Nation, Franks Wild Yearsand Tender Prey the day they were released, not to mention the pilgrimage I madeacross the pond to see Dylan in Concord...

…except it would be a lie. In the mid-to-late 80s I was listening to a lot ofpretty sissy music. Don’t we all at that age? When I look through the albums Ibought back then they’re called Diesel And Dust, The Joshua Tree, SolitudeStanding… not necessarily bad albums, but nothing everyone else wasn’t listeningto. (At least no one can prove I ever owned a Samantha Fox record. Thank Godfor used record stores.) I did listen to some of my parents’ records - Beatles, Stonesand other stuff like that - though mostly in secret; it was a bit embarassing for a15-year-old to admit that that music made more sense to me than anything I washearing on the top 10 chart. Bob Dylan? A fleeting acquaintance from mymother’s very scratchy Greatest Hits. I suppose I must have thought he sounded abit like Mark Knopfler.

So sometime in late ’87 or early ’88, my father came home with a new record- a remarkable event, as he’s never been one to buy more than half a dozen recordsper year. It was George Harrison’s comeback album Cloud 9, and as the closetBeatles fan that I was, I listened to that album a lot. So when I heard a new singleon the radio that summer with Harrison singing I knew it wasn’t on the album…and who were those other guys singing with him? Of course, it turned out to be‘Handle With Care’ by the Traveling Wilburys. And I loved that song right fromthe get-go. Not just because it solved my problem of what to get Dad for hisbirthday. I mean, Harrison, Dylan, Orbison and the ELO guy on the same record?Oh, and some youngster named Tom Petty. The old man would love it, and Icould listen to it when he wasn’t home.

So I ended up buying the single for Dad, and eventually the LP for myself. Andfor a while, I played the hell out of it, much like I did with the follow-up two yearslater. And even if my tastes have drifted in different directions since then, theWilburys records are still very much a precious part of my record collection (bysome cruel twist of fate, they sit right in between Transvision Vamp’s Pop Art andU2’s The Unforgettable Fire).

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Let Thy Wilbury DoneLooking back at the

Traveling Wilburys

by Björn Waller

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Now that we hear rumours that theWilburys albums will finally be re-released, I think it is interesting to examinethe songs Dylan wrote for the Wilburys;traditionally, a lot of people seem to thinkthat the ‘revival’ of Oh Mercy came out ofnowhere. Between the delayed release ofthe terrible Down In The Groove (makingit appear more than a year after it wasrecorded), the universal (and in myopinion undeserved) bashing of under thered sky and the lack of any proper post-Dylan And The Dead live albums, Oh

Mercy seems to stand out like the 2001monolith - insular genius surrounded byvast deserts of barbarity. (His other collab-orations during that time just add to that;‘Steel Bars’, anyone?) How did Dylan gofrom ‘Had a Dream About You, Baby’ to‘Most of the Time’? Well, here’s about analbum’s worth of brand new Dylan origi-nals, spread out over two years and tworecords, which are often ignored whenDylan’s career is summarised. That theTraveling Wilburys were a joke is fairlyobvious. The aliases they used, the absurd

song lyrics, the fact that the liner notes totheir albums were written by MontyPython members… but were they JUST ajoke? And exactly what part did they playin Dylan’s rebirth as a performer in thelate 80s/early 90s?

Within days of Down In The Groovebeing unleashed on an undeserving audi-ence, Dylan was in the studio with theWilburys. The sessions were over quickly,Dylan went on tour, and Vol 1 wasreleased the day the 1988 tour ended.When you look at it that way, it seems likesomething tossed off in a weekend, some-thing no one really believed in. Yet it soldlike hotcakes, spearheading or at leastjoining the rise of a beast long thoughtextinct: the supergroup. The last time wesaw it was in the late 60s and early 70s,with bands like Derek & The Dominoes,Blind Faith, CSN&Y etc. But all of asudden in the late 80s, there were scores ofrecords by allstar acts; CSN&Y reunitedfor a second studio album (the dismalAmerican Dream), as did theHighwaymen. Whether folk-rock (LittleVillage, The - ahem - Notting Hillbillies),indie rock (Electronic, Dim Stars) orheavy metal, no genre seemed immune tothe sudden urge for lucrative side projects.Of course, having a bunch of well-knownnames in the same group is usually a goodcommercial decision, but not always anartistic success (for an excellent example,just compare Little Village to John Hiatt’sBring The Family - same musicians, samemood, yet the ‘group’ effort is ridiculouslyinferior). But where many of these super-groups seemed to have been more fun toplay in (and get paid for) than to listen to,

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the Wilburys started by coincidence and atleast initially managed to turn that intosome really nice music with a sponta-neous, fun feel.

That five artists of this calibre wouldhook up and form a band was unexpected,but in a way it made perfect sense. Theyhad been working together in differentconstellations for years, and it came at theright time for all involved, too. Dylan wasjust entering a period of creativity whichover the following 3 years would see himplay 265 shows and write Oh Mercy andunder the red sky. Tom Petty’s career waspeaking and would shortly result in theexcellent Full Moon Fever. Harrison andOrbison were making high-profile come-backs after several years out of the lime-light, and Lynne, who had tried to disbandELO a few years earlier, had become amuch sought-after producer. It all cametogether by accident, but an accident thatcould probably only have happened at thispoint in time. Most people probably knowthe story: Harrison needed a B-side for hisnext single…

‘And so I just thought I’ll just go intothe studio tomorrow and do one, and ithappened that Jeff was working withRoy and Roy wanted to come. My guitarwas at Tom’s house for some reason andI had to go round and get it. And theonly studio that we could find availablewas Bob’s.’ (Harrison)1

‘Handle With Care’, the result of thatfirst day, was written by Harrison withsome input (‘Give us some lyrics, youfamous lyricist!’) from Dylan. It is prob-

ably the quintessential Wilburys song,capturing everything that was ever goodabout the band in just over 3 minutes -not only is it one of the catchiest songs ofHarrison’s solo career, but listen to thatarrangement! Harrison takes the leadvocal, sounding happier than ever,Orbison gets to sing a ‘lonely bit’ thatmakes perfect use of his high tenor (thevoice that convinced a young Neil Youngthat he could sing), and the froggiervocalists of the group get to crowd aroundthe mic on the chorus. Dylan even adds atypical harmonica solo over the fade.Aliases or not, there was no mistakingwho these guys were - and yet it all workswhen you put it together.

So it made sense for them form anactual group and put an album together.The phrase ‘wilburies’ had come upduring the Cloud 9 sessions, to describevarious technical snafus and supposedgremlins in the studio. As the bunch ofgremlins hanging around Dylan’s studiothey were, the band briefly consideredcalling themselves the TremblingWilburys before settling on Traveling.And as a final touch to seal the bond, theyeven went as far as assuming Ramones-style aliases: Nelson (Harrison), Lucky(Dylan), Lefty (Orbison), Otis (Lynne)and Charlie T. Wilbury Jr. (Petty). Yet forall the joking around (underlined byMichael Palin’s pythonesque essay on theorigins of the Wilburys) they were obvi-ously serious about the music, and, notcompletely unlike the Basement Tapes, thegood times had by all never gets to over-ride the fact that these are real songs,funny but never just for laughs. There’s

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almost a boyish giddiness to the album -they really seem excited to be in a band.Harrison, Orbison and Dylan had beensolo artists for a loooong time, and onecan’t help but wonder if the informality ofthe proceedings brought back fondmemories of the Quarrymen and theGolden Chords.

‘We watched Roy give an incredibleconcert and kept nudging each otherand saying, ‘Isn’t he great? He’s in ourband.’ We were real happy that night.’(Petty) 2

Lynne always takes a lot of flak for hisproduction of the album - he overdubssynthesizers, horns, extra guitars andvocals on pretty much everything. And it’strue that 15 years on it sounds dated. Still,I think he deserves some credit for givingit a consistent sound; no matter how goodthe mood was and how sympathetic thevarious Wilburys were to each other,having five very different artists in oneband could have made for a very schizoidalbum, but they really do sound like aband - not five solo artists, not Jeff Lynneand guest vocalists. There’s a balancebetween the band members’ personalitiesand the uniformity of the sound. (Also,few of Dylan’s producers during the 80scaptured his voice as well as Lynne does onthe two Wilburys albums.)

One advantage of the ‘secret’ identi-ties was of course that it gave them thefreedom to do whatever they wantedwithout having to have it compared totheir impressive collective back catalogue -and perhaps even blur the lines of who did

what. Take ‘Rattled’, for instance. Nowhere’s a great little rockabilly tune by theSun Records alumnus who recorded ‘OobyDooby’, right? Except it’s actually JeffLynne. The Wilburys were not only friendsbut fans of each other as well, so you’renever quite sure who is doing what andwhy; if a lyric sounds Dylan-like, it may bebecause one of the others is influenced byDylan, but also because he’s consciouslytrying to write like Dylan - and of course,it might even be Bob himself who wrote it!Still, there are (probably) three (mostly)Dylan originals on Vol. 1. The first, ‘DirtyWorld’ is possibly one of the earliestWilbury tracks, as Harrison namechecksthe ‘trembling wilburies’. The raciness (byDylan standards) of it and the use of thephrase ‘dirty mind’ in the first line hasmade some people wonder if he wrote it asa Prince parody. If he did, he failed miser-ably, as the lyrics of this decidedly unfunkylittle strummer are incredibly chastecompared to, say, ‘Darling Nikki’ (even ifthe chorus hints at an F word - ‘Dirtyworld, dirty world, it’s a -ing dirtyworld…’) and of course Dylan’s hoarsevocals sound nothing like His Purpleness.Personally, I think it sounds more like anupdated 50s rocker à la Warren Smith – it’scertainly no dirtier than some of the trackscut back then. But no matter what it’ssupposed to sound like, as a Wilburys songit works a treat. Listen to Dylan drawl hisway through this and try not grin:

You don’t need no wax job, you’resmooth enough for me!If you need your oil changed I’ll do it foryou free!

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Oh baby, the pleasure’d be all mineIf you’d let me drive your pickup truckand park it where the sun don’t shine…

As a song, it almost sounds unfinished;a couple of verses are followed by a longfree association round with all theWilburys chanting nonsense lyrics, andthen a brief chorus as the song fades (andindeed, the circulating demo fades out afterthe last ‘proper’ verse). I’d hazard a guessthat it is exactly what it sounds like; a half-improvised happy romp through threechords by a bunch of friends enjoying eachothers’ company and a few beers (albeitlater ‘perfected’ by Lynne in the studio).For sheer hilarity, it’s no ‘See You LaterAllen Ginsberg’, but it does have charm.

‘Congratulations’, the only Wilburystune Dylan has performed live (I’d add ‘todate’, but let’s get real) opens side 2. Yes, Iknow it was released on CD as well, but tome the Wilburys albums will always bevinyl LPs. As a song it’s passable, thoughnothing special - both lyrics and music areclichés that have been used better by lessersongwriters. What makes the song work isthe vocal. Even Lynne’s production and allthe Wilburys singing what can charitably becalled ‘harmony’ can’t hold Dylan backhere, as he gives those old vocal cords areally good working over, constantlyteetering on the edge of pitch, spitting thewords out with a sarcasm that is pure joy tolisten to. The last verse – ‘Congratulationsfor making me wait, congratulations, nowit’s too LATE!’ – is easily one of his beststudio vocals of the late 80s.

‘Tweeter And The Monkey Man’ on theother hand, is a damn fine song; an excel-

lent mid-tempo rocker with a simple buteffective riff and lyrics about a New Jerseydrugbust gone bad. To some extent, it’sobviously a Springsteen parody/pastiche(Rolling Stone called it ‘Dylan’s wonder-fully bitchy way of asserting who’s reallythe Boss’, which pretty much nails it). Yetit’s also a typical Dylan story song, with aplot that sounds clear the first time youhear it but upon closer inspection revealsenough loose threads, foggy identities andlingering question marks to match ‘TheBallad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest’,plus a smattering of generic americana.The only thing that doesn’t quite work isthe chorus, which sounds tacked-on andreally suffers from Lynne’s overproduc-tion. And again, the vocals are an absolutehoot. He hits all the Dylan clichés; drawn-out vowels (‘Now the town of JerseyCiteeeee is quiiiieting down agaaaaaain…’),nasal and whiny with just enough phlegmin his throat, packing far too many wordsinto one line somehow… But unlike somany of his vocal performances in thepreceding years, where he often seemed totry to sing like Bob Dylan (‘We Are TheWorld… ‘nuff said) it sounds completelynatural here. Dylan’s vocals on Vol 1 arenot overly pretty - much closer to theraspy voice of Oh Mercy than anything hehad recorded before. If anything, thecoarseness of Dylan’s vocals stands outeven more here when put up againstLynne’s glitzy production and the smoothvocals of the other Wilburys (well, OK, notcounting Petty) than in Lanois’ moresympathetic soundscape. Yet whereHarrison seems to feel pretty cozy amongLynne’s synthesizers and saxophones,

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Dylan - even though his voice soundsolder than ever - sounds rejuvenated, likehe’s going head to head with the produc-tion in a chicken race to see who gets toburst out of the speakers first, not in anaggressive way but simply because he’shaving a blast and is more relaxed thanhe’s been in a studio for years. As if singingas Lucky Wilbury meant he didn’t have totry to remember how Bob Dylan issupposed to sing.

So we have three brand new Dylansongs here*. And it seems to me that asdifferent as they are from each other, theystill have something in common. Theshuffle of ‘Dirty World’, the doo-wopstylings on ‘Congratulations’, theSpringsteen references on ‘Tweeter’; Dylanis playing with genre clichés, and unlikewhat he had been doing a few years earlier,they’re clichés he’s familiar with. There’scertainly no attempt to sound like 1988here. Throughout his career, Dylan hasoften learnt and re-learnt how to write byrewriting other songs or playing withclichés; from ‘1913 Massacre’ and‘Scarborough Fair’ to ‘The Future’ and‘Uncle John’s Bongos’.

‘It’s only natural to pattern yourselfafter someone (…) If I wanted to be apainter, I might think about trying tobe like Van Gogh, or if I was an actor,act like Laurence Olivier. If I was anarchitect, there’s Frank Gehry. But youcan’t just copy somebody. If you likesomeone’s work, the important thing is

to be exposed to everything that personhas been exposed to. Anyone who wantsto be a songwriter should listen to asmuch folk music as they can, study theform and structure of stuff that hasbeen around for 100 years.’ (Dylan) 3

The ‘forms and structures’ Dylan useson these songs might not be 100 years old,but they are no less obvious than those of,say, ‘Girl of the North Country’. Whetherthis is a deliberate attempt to jump-starthis muse or just a way for him tocontribute something to the Wilburysrecord, Bob alone knows. But the sequenceof them does seem to hint at a quick devel-opment over the few days he had to writeand record them; as if all Dylan reallyneeded to write songs again was a slightlydifferent perspective.

Apart from his own compositions,Dylan also gets to do lead vocals on theweird ‘Margarita’, a showcase for whatLynne can do behind a producer’s deskand not much more, Dylan’s vocals soundbored and the best line of the song goes‘Went to the Big Apple/Took a bite’. Ouch.Curiously enough, he’s the only Wilburywho doesn’t do lead vocals on ‘End Of TheLine’, a good-timey Harrisong serving toend the album on the same note as‘Handle With Care’ started it.

The Wilburys never played live as agroup. With Harrison notoriously stage-shy and Dylan, Petty and Orbison busywith their solo careers, it’s understandablethat they chose not to spend too muchtime on what was never intended to bemore than a side project. And yet... thelong break in Dylan’s touring schedule

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* Eh? There are three on DITG, all dreadful but stillDylan songs, and five on KOL, all but one dreadfulbut still Dylan songs, collaboration on both albumsnotwithstanding.

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between the release of Vol 1 (released theday before the last 1988 NET show) andthe restart of the 1989 tour may not havehad anything to do with it, but tour planswere apparently serious enough for TomPetty to ask his production and lightingdesigner, Jim Lanahan, to come up with anidea for a stage design.

‘I envisioned some kind of TerryGilliamesque vehicle as the set. The sailswere going to be projection surfaces, andthe wing was a thrust that we could go outon.The wheel house was the monitor mixposition, and there would be smokecoming out of the smokestack and thewheels on the train would turn.’ 4

Exactly how a Traveling Wilburys showwould turn out - and if it would be anygood - is anyone’s guess. Good backingmusicians would of course be essential,especially since they’d probably have toresort to their individual back cataloguesto fill out a full concert; 2-3 songs each?‘Highway 61 Revisited’ and ‘Love You To’sitting next to ‘Calling America’ and ‘YouGot It’? Dylan and Orbison duetting on amedley of ‘Crying’ and ‘Baby Stop Crying’?Oh, the humanity… Above all, with a‘Terry Gilliamesque’ stage setup, it wouldtend to play up the comedy aspect of theWilburys - something that worked wellover a couple of days worth of recordingsessions, but can you imagine Dylan andHarrison joking it up on stage every nightover a nationwide tour? There’s a catch 22here: the Wilburys were supposed to befun, and in order for a live show to work,they’d have to maintain the off-the-cuff

feel of the LP - yet they would have to beserious about it; with five lead singers anda high-profile tour they couldn’t just walkup on stage and wing it. Perhaps it’s for thebest that it never happened - though it’s aninteresting what-if.

But of course, Orbison’s death onDecember 6th, 1988 put a definite stop toany plans there might have been. Rumourshad Del Shannon taking Orbison’s place inthe group, which seems like an intriguingidea; he had worked with Petty before, andlike Orbison he was one of the ‘original’rock stars in dire need of a career boost.Sadly, this too fell through as Del Shannoncommitted suicide in February 1990,shortly after recording Rock On togetherwith Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty. (TheWilburys eventually released a cover of hisclassic 1961 hit ‘Runaway’ as a B side forthe ‘She’s My Baby’ CD single. It’s not abad version, though it sticks a bit too closeto the original – apart from Dylan’s briefharmonica solo, which is delightfully outof place.) So while the Wilburys continuedto work together in various constellationsthroughout ’88 and ’89, the ‘band’ itselfremained quiet. Until April of 1990, whenDylan apparently gave Harrison a ring:

Bob: When are we doing anotherWilburys record?George: Why? Do you want to?Bob: Yeah, don’t you?George: Yeah, I do. 5

The result was quickly recorded andreleased some months later as Vol 3. Yetanother little joke. This time the linernotes were written by Eric Idle, and they

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called upon a slightly different gang ofWilburys: Boo (Dylan), Muddy (Petty),Clayton (Lynne) and Spike (Harrison). Isthere any significance in the namechanges? Perhaps. The album does have adifferent feel; more serious and sociallyconscious, yet at the same time muchsillier than Vol 1 ever got. Take Petty forinstance; his contributions as Charlie T.Wilbury Jr. were ‘Last Night’ and themock-futuristic ‘Margarita’ - the two leastsuccessful songs on Vol 1. As Muddy, heonly contributes one track - a blues (!)about owning too many musical instru-ments, which turns out to be one of thebest songs on the album. Lucky Wilburywas a pretty easy-going fellow; BooWilbury, much like his distant cousin BobDylan on his 1990 album, was a fargrumpier guy with a dark sense ofhumour.

While Vol 3 is not a bad album, really,it does pale next to its predecessor. It’s notjust the absence of Orbison that’s beingfelt - he was sort of the odd man out onVol 1 anyway - but more a case of theWilburys failing to work as a unit. Wherethe first album had been a happy, naturalthing, Vol 3 often seems contrived.Though Lynne’s production works hard tocover this up, most of the songs here areobviously written and mostly performedby one Wilbury with the others serving asbacking musicians. But that means thatthere’s a lot more ‘pure’ Dylan on thisalbum than there was on Vol 1. Out of 11songs, there are (again, probably) at leastfour Dylan originals here, as opposed totwo and a half on the first one. Also, hegets to sing a lot more lead.

‘She’s My Baby’, which starts the albumoff, does so as raucously as any Dylanalbum opener since… well, OK, ‘PoliticalWorld’, I suppose. It’s got the same ‘kickingin the door’ feel, opening the album onvolley. And while it’s not his most chal-lenging lyric ever, it is a riot to hear Dylanspit ‘She likes to stick her tongue right downmy throat!’. But unfortunately, we alsoimmediately see the problem of the albumhere. Lynne’s production with heavydrums and a ridiculous guitar solo byGary Moore goes completely against themellow mood of Vol 1 - and though itsounds like a typical democratic Wilburystune with everyone singing a verse each,this was originally a Dylan solo number.By the time Lynne is finished producing it,he’s taken the first verse for himself and allthe others get to sing before Dylan has achance to get to the mike. It works, but*how much better it could have been.

‘Inside Out’ is probably a Harrisongfeaturing Bob on lead vocals. At least that’sOlof Björner’s guess, and I like to thinkDylan isn’t responsible for this. It appearsto be some sort of ecological lament abouteverything, you know, turning… yellow.Problem is, serious subjects and silly lyricsrarely mix very well; there are some nicevocals, but the weak lyrics and dreadfulchorus (‘Don’t it make you want to twistand shout?’ - more like shake, rattle androll over, frankly) drag the song down.

Dylan has written a long line of ‘love’songs chastising the woman for failing todo her part in a relationship, from ‘Bootsof Spanish Leather’ to ‘Sugar Baby’, and his

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* Why wonder? The version wih Bob singingthroughout has been out for pretty much as long asthe album itself.

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two most interesting songs on Vol 3 fallinto that category – and do so with a bang.‘If You Belonged To Me’, a dark little songnot completely dissimilar in melody to‘Dirty World’, is quite interesting. Forstarters, it’s barely a Wilburys song at all –Dylan sings all the lead vocals, plays harpall over the place, the others barely evenget to sing backup here. He wrote quite afew of these love-gone-bad songs duringthe 80s; but ‘If You…’ works a heck of a lotbetter than, say, ‘Under Your Spell’ or‘Something’s Burning, Baby’. Dylan almostgoes completely over the top here, espe-cially with that wonderful line ‘The guyyou’re with is a ruthless pimp, everybodyknows/Every cent he takes from you goesstraight up his nose’, yet he never reallyturns it on so much that the song risksbecoming a joke. Also, note that BooWilbury (again) seems a bit less of amisanthrope than grumpy ol’ Bob Dylan;the message of the song, after all, is that lifeisn’t half as bad as the woman he’s singingto thinks it is. Of course, her problem iseasily solved: ‘You’d be happy as you couldbe if you belonged to me.’ Boo is about asmuch into women’s lib as Bob, apparently.

If ‘If You Belonged To Me’ straddledthe fence between serious and self-parody,Dylan happily jumped off that fence a fewminutes later; kicking off side 2 of thealbum is ‘Where Were You Last Night?’, acompletely lightweight, silly and reallyadorable little song. This may not beDylan poking fun at every bitter love songhe’d ever written, but it sure sounds like it.Starting off fairly normally with the titleline, it seems to be a fairly normal songabout jealousy (‘What did you do? Who

did you see?’) which may or may not haveborrowed a line or two from ‘In The Pines’.But as we soon see, it’s not a matter of justone night, and by the time we get to thelast verse it’s ‘Where were you last year?You sure as hell weren’t here!’ In a way, it’sthe complete antipode of ‘Most of theTime’, the narrator still furiously obsessedwith a relationship that’s been over forages - and of course, that setup just begsfor parody. ‘You won’t get rid of me as longas you’re alive’, indeed. By the time Dylanends it by wheezing ‘it’s getting to me,making me gloomy’ you can picture himcovered in cobwebs, still waiting for a datewho never showed up and never will .

‘Seven Deadly Sins’, the album’sremaining Dylan original, is yet anothergenre exercise - again, a doo-wop ballad. Itis not at all bad, but hardly anything towrite home about; while it’s no worse, it’salso no better than the equally clichéd‘Congratulations’, and this time Dylan’svocals don’t work for it - he has rarelysounded as croaky as he does here. He addssome nice vocals on Harrison’s ‘The Devil’sBeen Busy’, another song trying in vain tocombine a serious message with a sense ofhumour; Lynne is really trying his besthere, adding layers of guitars and sitars, yetthe main (or only) point of interestremains Dylan’s and Harrison’s ‘duet’,which actually works well if you disregardthe trite lyrics. Dylan also sings the bridgeon Lynne’s ‘New Blue Moon’ (and managesto sound exactly 100% unconvincing as helaconically drawls ‘ya-hoo.’)

The final track probably contains morethan a few Dylan lines. ‘Wilbury Twist’, adance craze best reserved for those who

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can afford the doctors’ bills, actuallymanages to sound like the kind of light-weight fun that much of the album triestoo hard to be, as all four Wilburys tradeverses and instruct listeners to ‘Lift yourother foot up/Fall on your ass/Get backup/Put your teeth in a glass’. Of course,Lynne buries it in saxes and choruses, butstill it’s a good enough closer.

Four non-album songs also came outof the sessions for Vol 3. ‘Runaway’ wasmentioned above. The single ‘Nobody’sChild’, a cover of a song by Cy Coben andMel Foree, was released to benefit theRomanian Angel Appeal, spearheaded byOlivia Harrison to help bring some reliefto Romanian orphans. The song itself ispleasant enough; Dylan carries the songwith some nice vocals and harp, and thelyrics are eerily spot-on for the occasion.But after Lynne has added layers of guitarsand backing vocals, you can’t help but feelthat it sounds a bit too… well, jolly. Youend up very grateful that Dylan didn’thave Lynne produce Good As I Been ToYou, though. Then there are two outtakes:‘Like A Ship’ is a dreary little Dylannumber somewhat rescued by a lovelybridge. It sounds like something that stillneeds work - or at least a more committedlead vocal. Harrison’s ‘Maxine’, in contrast,is a pretty good effort, and it’s hard to seewhy it was left off the album.

Dylan’s voice on Vol 3 is rougher thanit had ever been in the studio before; hehad been touring a lot since the last albumand had just finished sessions for another.His songwriting, on the other hand, isdefinitely sharper, the songs more realisedin some sense - more songs in themselves

than writing exercises. And if nothing herematches the best songs on Oh Mercy andunder the red sky, at least a couple of thesongs here stand well on their own and arean interesting indication that even ifDylan’s pen was drying up after thewriting burst of 1989, it was not yetcompletely empty.

But that was it, basically. After therelease of the ‘Wilbury Twist’ single inMarch 1991, the Wilburys have neverreconvened again. Aside from GeorgeHarrison’s 1992 live album creditingproduction to Spike and Nelson Wilbury(who, of course, are both Harrison), therehave never been any other releases, and thetwo LPs soon went out of print. Not thatno one ever thought about it. Over theyears there were several reunion rumours;in connection with the release of theBeatles Anthology, Lynne mentionedwanting to make a third album ‘if we canget in touch with Bob’. Petty and Harrisonboth dropped hints a while later:

‘I saw George four or five days ago. Wehad breakfast and talked. I think we’llprobably do another Wilbury albumnext year. That’s a great little side thingthat I have. I can go into another worldfor awhile.’ (Petty)6

Exactly what came of this - if indeed itwas ever more than just somethingmentioned in passing - is uncertain, thoughI suppose that in 1997 Dylan had otherthings on his mind (Time Out Of Mind,almost dying etc). Another rumour in 1999would have had the Wilburys backing upCarl Perkins on a new record - despite the

12

Judas!

fact that Perkins had died the year before.

The idea was to use some vocal tracks

Perkins had recorded before his death and

have the Wilburys record backing tracks

(and, one assumes, vocals). And as late as

2000 - as Harrison appeared to be beating

his cancer - Petty mentioned that it would

be fun to do another album. But with Dylan

uninterested and Harrison’s health

declining, the opportunity either never

came about or they simply decided it wasn’t

worth the effort. After all, they’d struck it

lucky once and just gotten by the second

time - a third attempt might have been

pushing their luck.

Which returns us to the question, as

this is a Dylan magazine after all: what

importance did the Wilburys have in

Dylan’s career? Perhaps none; perhaps

they were just a pleasant diversion for him

during a time when he was to some extent

reinventing himself. But perhaps the

recording of Vol 1 did plant a seed in

Dylan’s head. He had been unhappy with

the way albums were recorded in the 80s,

now all of a sudden he had the chance to

record an album in a relaxed setting,perform without the pressure of having tolive up to his own myth, play around withsong structures and lyrics… Vol 1 doesnot, all by itself, explain the change Dylanwent through as a recording artist between1987 and 1989, but it does offer somehints. Vol 3 is not the great lost Dylanalbum, but it does seem to indicate thatDylan had every intention of continuingwriting and recording. Whether hiscomplete silence between 1991 and 1997was caused by the poor critical receptionof Vol 3 and under the red sky or if hesimply couldn’t write anymore is still anunanswered question, but if he couldcome up with 5 or 6 songs shortly afterwriting under the red sky, surely hecouldn’t have been completely empty?

But above all, the Wilburys recordsremain an interesting side project, offeringsomething we don’t see often; Dylancollaborating with other artists, not tolend his name to them or theirs to his, butsimply for the hell of it. They were nevermeant to be more than that; but overall,they were certainly no less either.

AppendixHard Traveling: The Wilburys, 1987-1992

1987Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Let MeUp! I’ve Had Enough!- ‘Jammin’ Me’ (Dylan/Petty)

Bob Dylan with Tom Petty & TheHeartbreakers: Temples In Flames tourGeorge Harrison, Cloud 9, produced byLynne - ‘When We Was Fab’ (Harrison/Lynne)

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Judas!

1988Traveling Wilburys, ‘Handle With Care’singleTraveling Wilburys, Vol 1

Randy Newman, Land Of Dreams,produced by Lynne and featuring Lynneand Petty

1989Traveling Wilburys, ‘End Of The Line’single

Tom Petty, Full Moon Fever, produced byPetty & Lynne and featuring Harrison,Lynne, Orbison and Shannon- ‘Free Fallin’’, ‘I Won’t Back Down’, ‘A FaceIn The Crowd’, ‘Yer So Bad’, ‘ A Mind WithA Heart Of Its Own’, ‘Zombie Zoo’(Lynne/Petty)- ‘Runnin’ Down A Dream’(Lynne/Campbell/Petty)

Roy Orbison, Mystery Girl, produced byLynne & Orbison and featuring Lynne &Petty- ‘You Got It’, ‘California Blue’

(Lynne/Orbison/Petty)- ‘A Love So Beautiful’ (Lynne/Orbison)

Various artists, Lethal Weapon 2 OST- ‘Cheer down’, George Harrison

(Harrison/Petty), produced by Harrison &Lynne

1990Traveling Wilburys, ‘Nobody’s Child’singleTraveling Wilburys, Vol 3Traveling Wilburys, ‘She’s My Baby’ singleBob Dylan, under the red sky, featuringHarrison

Jeff Lynne, Armchair Theatre, featuring

Harrison and Shannon

- ‘Blown Away’ (Lynne/Petty)

The Jeff Healey Band, Hell To Pay,

produced by Lynne and featuring Harrison

- ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’

(Harrison)

1991Traveling Wilburys, ‘Wilbury Twist’ single

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Into The

Great Wide Open, produced by and

featuring Lynne

- ‘Learning To Fly’, ‘Into The Great Wide

Open’, ‘The Dark Of The Sun’, ‘All The

Wrong Reasons’, ‘Out In The Cold’, ‘Built

To Last’ (Petty/Lynne)

- ‘All Or Nothin’’, ‘Makin’ Some Noise’

(Petty/Campbell/Lynne)

Del Shannon, Rock On!, produced by

Lynne, featuring Petty and Lynne

- ‘Walk Away’ (Lynne/Petty/Shannon)

1992George Harrison, Live In Japan, produced

by ‘Spike & Nelson Wilbury’

Ringo Starr, Time Takes Time, produced by

Lynne and featuring Lynne & Petty

1 www.wilburys.info

2 www.wilburys.info

3 ‘Rock’s enigmatic poet opens a long-private door’,

Los Angeles Times, 4 April 2004

4 ‘Unseen Design’, Entertainment Design, 1 February

2000

5 http://www.bjorner.com

6 BAM, 7 February 1997

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15

Back in issue three of Judas! we brought you some of the opening pages of JimBrady's 1979 dissertation for Strathclyde University. We are pleased to now bring youthe conclusion to his detailed study.

…‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ expands this attack on the dogmatically empiricalmind. ‘Mr Jones’, like the man in ‘Crawl Out Your Window’ with his ‘businesslikeanger’, has standardised his emotions, elevating facts over any other kind of expe-rience and thereby insulating his ‘self ’ from any emotions which might upset itsintegrity: his ‘pencil’, through which he carefully filters his experiences, is asymbol of this detachment. In view of this, the juxtaposition of his ‘imagination’with his factualism is heavily ironic,

You have many contactsAmong the lumberjacksTo get you factsWhen someone attacks your imaginationBut nobody has any respectAnyway they already expect youTo just give a checkTo tax-deductible charity organistions.

Indeed Mr Jones’s pencil is another connection between the two men (theother has his ‘chalk’); both define themselves by their reliance on these instru-ments which in their hands lead to blind and uncomprehending rationality:

Shatter Like

The Glassby Jim Brady

Judas!

16

You walk into the roomWith your pencil in your handYou see somebody nakesAnd you say, ‘Who is that man?’You try so hardBut you just don’t understandJust what you’ll sayWhen you get home.

These vicarious experiences - both hiscontact with the working-class ‘lumber-jacks’ and with those nightmarish freaks -are symptomatic of this man’s search foreasy answers to difficult questions. ‘Youtry so hard’ is ironic since he is not in facttrying to relate these new experiences tohis own narrow awareness but worryingabout how to explain it all to his (prob-ably equally blinkered) wife; that verse’sconcluding couplet has the same batheticreduction that was applied in ‘Crawl OutYour Window’; and it has the same func-tion, that is to underline the evasivenessof this empirical attitude - whichpretends to be intensively dedicated totruth but fears it - and to ridicule andrefute the conception of mankind whichit produces.

Mr Jones’s painful bewilderment in theface of these new experiences continues,although he holds on to his certainties,asserts his standards of ‘normality’ andends the song unchanged; still attemptinguselessly pedestrian and pedantic analysis.Jon Landau writes of this song;

‘he (Dylan) wants to blame Mr Jonesfor things that aren’t his fault and theresult is, to me an embarrassinglyhateful putdown…’

Michael Gray takes the oppositeattitude;

‘Ballad of a Thin Man’s importance isthat it deals with a universal experience- the feeling of a loss of identity and themind’s attempt to overcome the conse-quent sense of debility. There is nocondemnation of the many, or the old,nor any corresponding implication ofpraise for the trendier, younger few. Thesong implicates its narrator quiteconsciously and so makes clear that weare each of us the Mr Jones whoseconfusion we witness.

Gray is, I think, correct. Whether ornot the narrator is implied the sense ofconfusion is so powerfully evoked andthe dilemma so universal that the songis clearly far more than ‘an embarrass-ingly hateful putdown’. The optionbetween the imagination (and its depth)and the superficiality and worthlessnessof factualism is everyone’s, and Dylan’sregret - there is no blaming since essen-tially you ‘harm’ or limit only yourself -is that imagination is so frequentlyrejected.

The third verse is a particularly fright-ening, Kafkaesque inversion of Mr Jones’sreality; going to a freak show, he is himselfarraigned as a misfit,

You hand in your ticketAnd you go watch the geekWho immediately walks up to youWhen he hears you speakAnd says, ‘how does it feelTo be such a freak?’

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17

And you say ‘Impossible’As he hands you a bone

Because something is happening hereBut you don’t know what it isDo you, Mister Jones?

The ‘something’ which the chorusrefers to is the honest recognition andappraisal of one’s own experiences and thevicariously educated Mr Jones has beenincapable and unwilling to open his mindeven to anyone else’s;

You’ve been through all ofF. Scott Fitzgerald’s booksYou’re very well readIt’s well known

The verb there is derogatory - ‘beenthrough’ as opposed to ‘understood’ oreven ‘read’.

Finally then, these freaks are (like ‘themystery tramp’) in part a self-projectionwhich Mr Jones refuses to accept and thesong’s bewilderment refers to the discrep-ancy between that false exclusiveness andthe unsettling feelings which it attempts toignore.

This rejection of factualism is foundeven in Dylan’s earliest work; the bitterlyunderstated conclusion to ‘Ballad of HollisBrown’ equates factuality with indifference;

There’s seven people dead,On a South Dakota farmThere’s seven people deadOn a South Dakota farmSomewhere in the distance There’s seven new people born.

Dylan perceives that this empiricalattitude is basic to his society’s way ofthought and he recognises its reductive-ness. Going back to that ‘peel the moon’image; he recognises that such thorough-ness actually misses the point altogether;the moon having all kinds of significancebeyond the merely physical, will not yielditself. This attitude is well represented in awriter like Hemingway, in whose famousrendering of the bare truth there is, onDylan’s attitude, an evasion and fear oftroublesome emotions; in the abovequotation for instance, Dylan’s ironyreveals that the ‘Hemingway-like’reporting (like Mr Jones with his pencil)of ‘facts’ masks a refusal to think or feel atany level beyond that of the objective‘fact’.

‘Tombstone Blues’ is surely an attackon Hemingway, ridiculing his hunting,his athleticism and his tough stoicalpose;

Well, John the Baptist after torturing athiefLooks up at his hero the Commander-in-ChiefSaying, ‘Tell me great hero, but pleasemake it briefIs there a hole for me to get sick in?’

The Commander-in-Chief answers himwhile chasing a flySaying, ‘Death to all those who wouldwhimper and cry’And dropping a bar bell he points to theskySaying, ‘The sun’s not yellow, itschicken’

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18

The most important aspect of that isthe implication of how the ‘Commander’s’Hemingwayesque sublimation of emotionis the dominant ethic, and the line,

‘Death to all those who would whimperand cry’

recognises - albeit comically - that deeptragic emotions amount to nothing morethan a nuisance for many people.Hemingway’s values (and those of hisfollowers) are antithetical to Dylan;whereas the latter hopes that the individualmay discover himself through emotionalopenness, someone like Hemingway, whodiscounts the transcendental in man, canonly view new and startling emotionalexperiences as a threat to that ‘self ’ whichhe has constructed out of social ritual andconvention; this failure to come to termswith experience is well illustrated inFarewell to Arms which asserts the primacyof the physical aspects of life.

The head was mine, and the inside ofthe belly. It was very hungry in there. Icould feel it turn over on itself. The headwas mine, but not to use, not to thinkwith; only to remember and not toomuch remember.

Another consequence of placing one’sexistential faith in the physical empiricalworld is that religious or mystical feelingsare also incomprehensible and frightening;

‘You understand but you do not loveGod’‘No’

‘You do not love him at all?’ he asked‘I am afraid of him in the night some-times’‘You should love him’‘I don’t love him much.’

The kind of surface factualism whichthose extracts commend is seen by Dylan asdetrimental to American Culture; he sees thatculture as preferring learning to wisdom,reason to the imagination, philistinism toArt, and emotional fear and sloth to spiritualcourage and energy; thus the ‘true’ self isbanished further and the ‘wastepaper-basketself ’ accepted with little dissent because it iseither an easier concept to live by, or (for theempiricist) the only one possible. Thus, in‘Please Crawl Out Your Window’ the man’s‘business-like anger’ is a necessary defence; adefusing of any emotion which threatens hisexistential stability: and similar motifs ofemotional repression occur in the songsdiscussed below.

In ‘Gates of Eden’ Dylan states theseideas quite explicitly, contrasting the tragicwaste of the imaginative faculty withAmerica’s prevailing materialism; theimage is a particularly democratic one,suggesting the universality of this potentialand positively refuting any elitist implica-tions of ‘Ballad of A Thin Man’,which mighthave been read as making them/us distinc-tions (as it was by Jon Landau) andreserving true awareness for a chosen few,

The kingdoms of ExperienceIn the precious wind they rotWhile paupers change possessionsEach one wishing for what the other hasgot.

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The last verse also bears comparisonwith ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’; its pattern isanalogous.

At dawn my lover comes to meAnd tells me of her dreamsWith no attempt to shovel the glimpseInto the ditch of what each one means.

Mr Jones’s experiences were alsodream-like, they were ‘glimpses’ of whatmight have been - for his empirical mind - ahigher form of truth: as with this loverthough, he made no attempt to come toterms with the ‘glimpses’ and make of thema complete vision. (The metaphor of ‘shov-elling’ is of course another of those imageswhich assert the labour and concentrationneeded to discover the truth.)

The overall pattern of this song is anal-ogous to ‘Lay Down Your Weary Tune’,contrasting in the same way the defectivebut rehabilitative human state with anideal but essentially inhuman perfection.As in the latter song this ideal is not some-thing we can attain - ‘the gates of eden’, asthe image suggests, are closed - but some-thing which, in its purity and simplicity, isan exemplar of our flaws (and Dylan’sconcern here is largely with the societalflaws which aggravate the individual’sweakness). The ideal world, as with Naturein ‘Lay Down Your Weary Tune’ is beyondour kind of consciousness - it just exists;

‘No sound ever come from the Gates ofEden’`‘And there are no sins inside the Gatesof Eden’.

The crucial distinction for man is thathe is without this limited unconsciousperfection and can improve himself.

The second verse presents a picture ofurban life - admittedly an awkward andcontrivedly ‘poetic’ one - whilst thebiblical sounding second part expressesthe incoherence and superficiality of thisapparently solid concrete and metalreality.

The lamppost stands with folded armsIts iron claws attachedTo curbs ’neath holes where babies wailThough it shadows metal badgeAll and all can only failWith a crashing but meaningless blow.

The third verse attacks thisHemingway attitude of stoical thought-lessness through a military metaphor - theobediently mindless ‘savage soldier’ withhis ‘head in sand’. The fourth refers to themodern church and the false religiosity ofits followers. Their responses to life’sdepth and variation is muddled and insin-cere; they half-accept, half-reject materi-alism and sensuality.

With a time-rusted compass bladeAladdin and his lampSits with Utopian hermit monksSide saddle on the Golden CalfAnd on their promises of paradiseYou will not hear a laughAll except inside the Gates of Eden

Common to these people and to thetypical American - rather unkindlydismissed as ‘the grey flannel dwarf ’ - is

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20

the denial and neglect of the ‘kingdoms ofexperience’ in favour of the ‘golden calf ’ ofmaterialism.

Now, a natural corollary of these fearsis hostility to the Artistic mind; the Artistis likely to confront Americans with thetrue depths of their own being and as aresult he is dismissed as fanciful orreduced to the position of one of MrJones’s freaks. As Saul Bellow said,

The writer has sunk, then, from thecurer of souls - which was his properbusiness in the nineteenth century tothe level of the etiquette page in thepaper, or advice to the lovelorn, some-thing of that nature.A great many writers have been quitewilling to charge themselves with thisfunction, being public figures, role-taking, turning themselves into exhibi-tionists.

Dylan, of course, in his 1960’s positionas Media demagogre was made exception-ally aware of the public’s desire for sensa-tion rather than contemplation, andbehind his refusal to accept their roles lie anumber of his familiar themes. Responseslike these to the Art-debating clamour ofthe audience Bellow mentions typifyDylan’s rejection of stereotyping, of easyanswers, superficiality and role-taking;

Q. Many people writers, collegestudents, college writers - all felttremendously affected by your musicand what you’re saying in the lyricsA. Did they?Q. Sure. They felt it had a particular

relevance to their lives… I mean youmust be aware of the way that peoplecome on to you.A. Not entirely. Why don’t youexplain to me.Q. I guess if you reduce it to itssimplest terms the expectation of youraudience feels that you have the answer.A. What answer?

In his art this kind of integrity is trans-mitted into works like ‘The Three Kings’which satirises this demand for the Artistto exhibit himself as a kind of tamepsychological weirdo, an entertainingdiverting oddity for a thoughtless, preten-tious audience:

‘Frank… Mr Dylan has come out witha new record…and we understandyou’re the key’‘That’s right’… ‘Well then could youplease open it up for us?’‘And just how far would you like to go in?’‘Not too far but just far enough so’s wecan say we’ve been there’…‘All right’ … he sprung up, ripped offhis shirt and began waving it in the air.A light-bulb fell from one of his pocketsand he stamped it out with his foot.Then he took a deep breath, moanedAnd punched his fist through the plateglass window.‘Far enough’.‘Yeah, sure Frank’.

‘It’s Alright Ma’ refers to this crisis ofimagination and its subsequent neurosisfrom the viewpoint of the Artist who willnot submit.

Judas!

21

And if my thought-dreams could be seenThey’d probably put my head in a guil-lotineBut its alright, ma, its life, and life only.

If that seems a little paranoiac‘Maggie’s Farm’ offers the same thoughtmore humorously,

Well, I wake in the morningFold my hands and pray for rain.I got a head full of ideasThat are drivin’ me insane.Its a shame the way she makes me scrubthe floor.I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm nomore.

‘Outlaw Blues’ uses similar wit, comi-cally expounding the image of the Artist asan exhibitionist who, if not carefullywatched, might open up his coat andreveal something shocking.

Don’t ask me nothin’ about nothin’I just might tell you the truth.

‘Tombstone Blues’ combines a seriousclaim for the power of the ArtisticImagination (in this case music, with theaptly ridiculour ‘tuba’ forming the earth-bound contrast) with a jibe at those whoseek easy answers. ‘Flagpole’, here suggeststhat the ‘dear lady’ being addressed isAmerica.

Where Ma Raney and Beethoven onceunwrapped their bed rollTuba players now rehearse around theflagpole

And the National Bank at a profit sellsroad maps for the soulTo the old folks home and the college

Now I wish I could write you a melodyso plainThat could hold you dear lady fromgoing insaneOf your useless and pointless knowledge.

Contemporary Society, Dylansuggests, has replaced the Artist withsomething much less adequate, indeedsomething ridiculous and spiritualitybecomes synonymous with money.

Before concluding with ‘DesolationRow’ - perhaps the most potent of Dylan’svisions of America’s imaginative failures -there remains his discussion of a relatedtheme; that of the delusion of innocenceand purity which pervades the AmericanMind. Dylan’s early ‘protest’ song ‘WithGod on Our Side’ dealt with this extremerighteousness - from a political viewpoint- as a kind of double think,

Oh my name it is nothin’My age it means lessThe country I come fromIs called the MidwestI’s taught and brought up thereThe laws to abideAnd that land that I live inHas God on its side…

… And you never ask questionsWhen God’s on your side.

‘I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine’ is a moremature treatment of the American delusion

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22

that they are a people untainted by the evilwhich initially drove them to their ideal newworld. This song is written in the traditionof writers like Hawthorne and Melville (infact Dylan dedicates it to Melville in concertperformances) who constantly questionedAmerican Innocence. The following isalmost certainly the kind of experience ofthat falsity which prompted the song andwhich underlies ‘It’s Alright Ma’s fear of theAmerican ‘Guillotine’.

Dylan was speaking at a dinner held by aleftist group, not long after the murder ofJohn F. Kennedy:

I’ll stand up and be uncompromisableabout it, which I have to be to be honest.I just got to be, as I got to admit that theman who show President Kennedy - LeeOswald - I don’t know exactly what hethought he was doing, but I got to admithonestly that I too - I saw some of myselfin him. I don’t think it could have gonethat far… I saw things that he felt in me -not to go that far and shoot…Some members of the audience began toboo and hiss, and Dylan went forward:‘You can boo… it’s Bill of rights, it’s freespeech and… someone broke in andsaid his time was up and Dylan laterclaimed the chairman began kickinghim under the table.

This is a perfect illustration of self-delusion and Dylan’s comments draw boththemes - the delusion of factuality and thepseudo-innocence - together,

They didn’t understand me becausethey got mind-blinders on. They

couldn’t understand that Oswald waslike me, and like you. He was uptightAbout the times we’re livin’ in, about allthe lies they feed ya, about the historybooks that tell ya facts not worth adamn, but never once tell you howsomebody feels. That’s what Oswaldwas about, that’s what I’m about.

Brave, rather than foolish, Dylan’sexpression of kinship with Oswald, and aswe will see, with the Goths who pillagedHippolyta and killed Augustine, is aneloquent, if saddening, testament to man’scapacity to shatter the finest dreams.

The narrator’s horror in this songarises from the realisation of his ownblackness, his own potential evil

I dreamed I saw St Augustine;Alive with fiery breathAnd I dreamed I was amongst the onesThat put him out to deathOh, I awoke in angerSo alone and terrifiedI put my fingers against the glassAnd bowed my head and cried.

Dylan here superimposes on hisfamiliar theme of self-evasion aHawthornian vision of man’s culpabilityfor the world’s evil and suggests thatattempts at whitewashing and soul onlymake the sense of evil all the more terri-fying when it inevitably, as in the murderof Kennedy or Augustine, breaks throughto the conscience.

There are two contemporaneous songswhich comment further on America andbalance that sense of evil. ‘I Pity The Poor

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23

Immigrant’, as the title suggests, isaddressed to the ‘immigrant’ Americanrace and it stresses that the evil of theabove song is an aberration and that theirdeluded materialism is neither a normalnor permanent state;

I pity the poor immigrant Who tramples through the mud,Who fills his mouth with laughing And who builds his town with blood,Whose visions in the final end Must shatter like the glass.I pity the poor immigrant When his gladness comes to pass

‘Terms of Rage’ is a less optimisticcompanion to this; again the ‘I’ who istalking seems to represent the originalspirit of America (now overthrown).There is a strong sense of ‘family’ betrayal- the worst kind of infidelity.

We carried you in our armsOn Independence DayAnd now you’d throw us all asideAnd put us on our way

Transcendental values have been lostand a spiritual void now exists,

Now, I want you to know that whilewe watched,You discover there was no one true.Most ev’rybody really thoughtIt was a childish thing to do.

(Again Dylan uses that infant image.)In place of religious impulses, we have

materialism;

And now the heart is filled with goldAs if it was a purse

This parallels the poor immigrant’scondition,

‘… who falls in love with wealth itselfAnd turns his back on me’.

Dylan is at best ambivalent towards thefuture of his society and the song withwhich I will conclude, carefully balancesthat pessimism with faith in the salvationof the individual.

The unevenness of ‘Desolation Row’hasalready been noted; much of its imagery isgratuitous and some of it exhibits a juvenilesense of paranoia,‘the cyanide hole’and the‘heart-attack machine’ constitute suchoverstatement that their intended sinis-trality becomes laughable.

Elsewhere though the images dosucceed; the out of place Romeo, theabsolutely appropriate Cain and Abel, ‘theblind commissioner’ and finally Ophelia,secretly flirting with sanity,

And though her eyes are fixed uponNoah’s great rainbowShe spent her time peekingInto Desolation Row.

Perspective, as that suggests, is allimportant and the recognition of reality isa rare thing here; those who do ‘thinkabout’ ‘Desolation Row’ are punished anddelusion rules;

Now at midnight all the agentsAnd the superhuman crew

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Come out and round up everyoneThat knows more than they do.‘The titanic sails at dawn’

is of course another reference to the delu-sions of America’s Mr Jones’s and in thesame verse (which unaccountably put EzraPound and Eliot on the doomed ship).

Dylan borrows the false whimsy ofEliot’s ‘Prufrock’ to reinforce this stress onthe sane, realistic perspective,

…Calypso singers laugh at themAnd fishermen hold flowersBetween the windows of the seaWhere lovely mermaids flowAnd nobody has to think too muchAbout Desolation Row.

This penultimate verse is a usefulconcluding point since its ideal of unself-conscious perfection recalls the songwhich began this discussion. At this point,however, Dylan’s dissatisfaction with thatstate seems more marked; the instinctive-ness of these people is something whichdoes not belong to the world of

‘Desolation Row’ and their ideal rings justas false as Prufrock’s daydream. Man’sposition then, is that he must comprehendreality as fully as possible; withouthowever, falling into the ‘Titanic’ - likedelusions of empiricism.

Part of this is the acknowledgement ofour own disastrous creations, and the finalverse defiantly faces American Life; theArtist accepts that he is in part responsiblebut asserts at the same time that suchacceptance may lead the individual toremake and transcend that reality:

Yes, I received your letter yesterday(About the time the doorknob broke)When you asked me how I was doingWas that some kind of joke?All these people that you mentionYes I know them, they’re quite lameI had to re-arrange their facesAnd give them all another nameRight now I can’t read too goodDon’t send me no more letters noNot unless you mail themFrom Desolation Row.

We’ve Moved Again

Woodstock Publications/Woodstock Bookshave moved to:

11 Lea RoadHemingford Grey, Huntingdon

Cambridgeshire PE28 9ED United Kingdom

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In the summertime of 1991, after amini tour of North America, Bob Dylantook a breather before heading down toSouth America for more concerts: three inArgentina, one in Uruguay, and five inBrazil.

On August 8, opening night in BuenosAires, Dylan treated his audience to CurtisMayfield’s gospel song, ‘People Get Ready.’If the lyrics of Mayfield’s compositionrepresented the cliched ‘gospel truth,’ thenwhat happened off the stage, days later, inPorto Alegre, Brazil, represented its polaropposite.

‘What is truth?’ asked GovernorPontius Pilate, many moons ago, beforegiving the green light to execute a certainthirty-three-year-old Jew who had causedno small stir in the religious community.

Nearly two thousand years later,another Jew - who has made his mark onthe world of music - was about to play foran enthusiastic audience. The stakes werenot, arguably, as high as they were back inancient Palestine, but truth, in a way, wason the line. Why? Because certainly someof Bob Dylan’s fans, who descended uponthe venue at Gigantinho in Porto Alegre,Brazil, in August 1991, had recently readthe interview in their local newspaper

…the interview in Zero Hora whichfeatured the same man whose music theywould soon be enjoying (an interviewreportedly conducted some two monthsearlier, in Budapest, Hungary).

One of those fans happened to beEduardo Bueno, who soon realized, muchto his dismay, that the interview wasattributed to him! He had never inter-viewed Bob Dylan. Bueno duly paid a visitto Jose Jardim (the newspaper’s chiefeditor) and revealed that the interviewwas, in fact, a fraud. ‘I subsequently wrotefor Zero Hora a review of the wonderfulconcert Dylan gave in Porto Alegre,’ Buenoremarked, ‘in which I had the opportunityto tell the readers that the ‘Budapest inter-view’ had never taken place.’

But who would concoct such a fraud,and for what reason? And why wasEduardo Bueno put in the mix? Theconvoluted tale began nineteen monthsearlier, in 1990, when Dylan was in Brazilfor two concerts (São Paolo on January 18,and Rio de Janeiro on January 25).Through the grapevine it was discoveredthat Bueno was not only a devoted fan ofDylan’s music, but was also mingling withthe Dylan entourage in Brazil. For thesereasons, he was asked to write a first-

They’re Planting Stories in the Press:

Ripples & Reverberations from a 1991 Bob Dylan ‘Interview’

by Scott M. Marshall

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person account of the tour. The requestwas made by Luis Fonseca, a newspaperreporter for O Estado de São Paolo.Bueno agreed. Although he shared hisstories with Fonseca, Bueno made it clearthat he never actually spoke to Dylan, andthat ‘care should be taken with everythingwe printed because too much bullshit hasalready been published about Bob.’

So, after hanging out with some ofDylan’s entourage, attending the two gigs,and writing his four-page piece in January1990, Bueno left Rio de Janeiro andreturned to his home in rural, southernBrazil. A few weeks later, when Buenofinally read the published piece (he had toleave before it appeared in print), he wasutterly shocked. ‘The reporter hadrewritten everything, invented several ofthe stories, printed fake names that I hadnever heard of, and worst of all,’ remem-bers Bueno, ‘had put a lot of words intoDylan’s own mouth - and he published itunder my name.’

Just as we learned he had to do thefollowing year, in 1991, Bueno made hisappointment with an official at a news-paper.‘On February 17 [1990], I flew to SãoPaolo, made an appointment with OEstado’s director, Augusto Nunes, told himwhat happened and said that I’d be forced tosue them if they didn’t do something aboutit,’ Bueno explained. ‘Consequently, thereporter was fired and the paper printed ahalf-page apology the following day.’

Bueno thought the nightmare wasbehind him. It wasn’t.

In August 1991, it was déjà vu time -i.e.,the Budapest ‘interview’ that cropped up inZero Hora, the newspaper in Porto Alegre.‘Ihave my suspects, but I’ve been unable to

prove anything against anyone,’Bueno said,‘but you know in Brazil, as anywhere else,nobody likes to lose their job.’

Bueno’s comments certainly implythat the culprit here was Luis Fonseca, thereporter who he confided in (and wasbetrayed by) some nineteen monthsearlier. If so, what a culprit Fonseca hasproven to be. He essentially put intomotion, via two Brazilian newspapers intwo consecutive years, some falsehoodsthat have yet to dissipate from the denseworld of Dylan information.

When a Dylan fanzine based inEngland (now defunct) reprinted bothpieces, including the Budapest ‘interview’nearly a year after it was originallypublished in Porto Alegre, the Pandora’sbox was officially wide open (which noman has been able to shut). But TheTelegraph was not some unreliable rag.As most readers of Judas! will know, itenjoyed a solid reputation and had been inexistence for basically a decade. Its editor,the late John Bauldie, had even recentlypenned the liner notes to an official Dylanrelease, The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3(1991) under the sanction of Jeff Rosen,Dylan’s longtime associate.

Although the title of the reprinted inter-view in The Telegraph should have,arguably, raised some eyebrows (‘Angels,Vampires, The Bible, Mick Jagger, The NewHat, and the Ill-Fated Gig in Transylvania’),some of its details - first showcased in Brazil- were ably fashioned to feign authenticity.However, the introductory paragraph thatpreceded the interview did contain somered warning flags:

‘Budapest: Wednesday, June 12, 1991.On the terrace of his suite at the Buda Penta

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Hotel, overlooking the lovely district ofCastelo, the oldest part of the city of Buda,and the River Danube, Bob Dylan spoke toEduardo Bueno about…well, all sorts ofthings, really. The interview was printed inthe Brazilian magazine, Caderno 2, on June20, 1991, under the title “Bob Dylan BreaksHis Five-Year Silence”.’

Although Bueno has noted how thename of the hotel Dylan stayed in and thename of the stadium he was playing in madeit appear ‘professionally done,’ there are otherthings in the paragraph that should havealerted a careful reader. The time between thesupposed interview and the date of themagazine was only eight days (12 June to 20June). This seems suspicious since magazinestake a while to get to press, not to mentionthe fact that many magazines have dates ontheir covers that are dated well beyond theactual publication/release date. Whatever thecase, the red warning flag of red warningflags was found in the article’s title: ‘BobDylan Breaks His Five-Year Silence.’

Huh?Let’s see, some quick math brings us to

this apparent conclusion: from thesummer of 1986 until the summer of 1991,Dylan didn’t grant any interviews. Tell thatto Sam Shepard who interviewed Dylan forthe July 1987 issue of Esquire. Tell that toRobert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Timeswho interviewed Dylan in Tel Aviv inSeptember 1987; or Kurt Loder of RollingStone who interviewed the singer the nextday, after the Jerusalem gig. Or EdnaGundersen of USA Today, who, in July of1988, interviewed Dylan. Or check withKathryn Baker, who interviewed Dylan amonth later for an article that was syndi-cated via the Associated Press.

And that’s just the beginning of thispurported period of media silence: USAToday (Edna Gundersen, September1989), WNEW-FM radio, New York (DanMeer, September 1989); Q magazine(Adrian Deevoy, October 1989); USAToday (Edna Gundersen, August andNovember, 1990); Guadalajara ColonyReporter (February 1991); promo inter-view for The Bootleg Series (Elliot Mintz,March 1991); Spy (Joe Queenan, March1991); and SongTalk (Paul Zollo, April1991). That’s thirteen interviews…andwho knows, there were probably more.

So much for the ‘Five-Year-Silence.’After The Telegraph reprinted the

‘interview,’ 1 the whole wide world ofDylan publishing, it seemed, had inadver-tently embraced Budapest as if it were so.Here are just a few examples, and Godknows (to quote a song) how many otherexamples exist from the fruit that burstforth from Budapest.

Christian Williams’ 1993 book, withthe ironic title, Bob Dylan In His OwnWords, contained quotes from theBudapest ‘interview’ on several pages.Williams’ publisher, Omnibus Press, wasbased in London, New York, Paris, andSydney. The interview that neverwas…was making the rounds.

As subscribers to On the Tracks (thelatest U.S. fanzine) received their fourthissue in 1994, one article 2 included a nice-sized quote in a box on a page, a definiteeye-catcher, with quotes from, yes, youguessed it - the Budapest ‘interview.’

One would think the indefatigableClinton Heylin - Dylan chronicler andbiographer that he is - would’ve recognizedthe bogus interview somewhere along his

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journey of research. After all, Heylin wasone of the co-founders of The Telegraph,the very fanzine that published EduardoBueno’s retraction not long after the inter-view appeared (a two-page retraction noless, and over 800 words).3 However, Heylinand Bauldie cut ties around this timeperiod so perhaps Heylin never saw theretraction. Whatever the case, when Heylinupdated one of his books in 1996, BobDylan: A Life in Stolen Moments Day byDay: 1941-1995, there were entries thatlikely sent Eduardo Bueno fuming throughthe landscape of Brazil:

January 19, 1990: ‘In the evening, afterrelocating from Sao Paolo to the Rio PalaceHotel in Copacabana, Dylan is interviewedon a somewhat informal basis by Brazilianjournalist Eduardo Bueno. Bueno drops alot of the right names -Matisse, Cezanne,Michelangelo - and one wrong one, [Elvis]Presley, but Dylan has little to say.’

June 12, 1991: ‘In the afternoon, Dylanis interviewed on the terrace of his suite atthe Buda Penta Hotel by Brazilian jour-nalist Eduardo Bueno. It is a very oddinterview, Dylan seemingly toleratingsome impertinent lines of questioningabout angels, vampires, and Brazil itself.’

Thus, the Budapest ‘interview’continued to pick up steam; despite Heylin’swarning that ‘it is a very odd interview’.

With wide-scale use of the Internet bythe mid-1990s, folks were enabled to post(and find) all manner of Dylan minutiaefrom the world of fanzines, magazines,newspapers, and books. Surely thosepersnickety quotes from Budapest havelurked in the shadows of cyberspace forsome time now.

Heylin further perpetuated the non-interview - inadvertently - in his updated

biography, Bob Dylan Behind the Shades:Take Two (Viking, 2000). Published byWilliam Morrow in the U.S. as Bob Dylan:Behind the Shades Revisited (2001), thebiography included a more advanced caseof Budapest confusion. Heylin attributedsome of the non-existent quotes to JoeQueenan’s actual interview with Dylan in1991 (Spy magazine).

Dylan’s had a ‘God-given destiny,’something he told a journalist in 2001.He hates to keep ‘beating people over thehead with the Bible’ as he said in 1986 toanother journalist, but it’s the only instru-ment he knows that ‘stays true.’

Truth seems to intrude into everycorner of the planet, sometimes welcome,sometimes not, and its counterfeit (forexample, the Budapest mess) is alsocompeting for an audience.

Since this article was so heavy on ‘truth’and ‘facts,’ it would be ironic (perhapsfitting) if multiple errors were committed.Feel free to send in those corrections or clar-ifications to the folks at Judas! Here’shoping I didn’t commit a whopper of theBudapest variety. In Budapest, Dylan said[well, actually never said] he read the KingJames version of the Bible.

Incidentally, I think we’re getting waytoo many versions of the Bible thrown atus these days. I said that.

Copyright 2004 by Scott M. Marshall

1. Eduardo Bueno, ‘Angels, Vampires, The Bible,Mick Jagger, The New Hat, and the Ill-Fated Gig inTransylvania,’ The Telegraph #42 (Summer 1992),pp. 40-48.2. Laurence A. Schlesinger, ‘Trouble in Mind: ARabbinic Perspective on Bob Dylan’s “ReligiousPeriod”,’ On the Tracks #4 (Fall 1994), p. 44.3. Eduardo Bueno, ‘The Letterbox,’ The Telegraph#44 (Winter 1992), pp. 44-45.

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Postscript: What will follow shortlyhere is a transcript of the bogus Budapestinterview - ‘Angels, Vampires, The Bible,Mick Jagger, The New Hat, and the Ill-Fated Gig in Transylvania’ by EduardoBueno - as reprinted in The Telegraph #42(Summer 1992), pp. 40-48.

What purpose, you may ask, does thisserve? Well, maybe Dylan aficionados willbe able to better recognize quotes fromthis bogus interview when they run acrossthem. A game can even be played with it.Whoever perpetrated the fraud (onEduardo Bueno and numerous Dylan fansfor years to come) made it seem genuinein a number of ways, including accuratehistorical references and the inclusion ofsome quotes (or paraphrases) taken fromauthentic Dylan interviews; the techniqueof the perpetrator parallels the story thatsays that the devil will insert a bit of truthinto each lie to make it more palatable…

Budapest: Wednesday, June 12, 1991.On the terrace of his suite at the BudaPenta Hotel, overlooking the lovely districtof Castelo, the oldest part of the city ofBuda, and the River Danube, Bob Dylanspoke to Eduardo Bueno about…well, allsorts of things, really. The interview wasprinted in the Brazilian magazine,Caderno 2, on June 20, 1991, under thetitle ‘Bob Dylan Breaks His Five-YearSilence.’

Bueno: When this tour began, back inItaly, everything seemed a bit tense.Yugoslavia, the first Eastern Europeancountry you’ve played in your 30-yearcareer, is also going through pretty tense

times right now. What do you think ofwhat’s been happening in Eastern Europein the last couple of years?Dylan: You’re saying that you thought thetour began in a tense sort of a way?Bueno: Well, a little bit. Don’t you thinkso?Dylan: Uhmmm…Bueno: Well, anyway, what do you thinkabout what’s happening in Eastern Europenow that you’re here for the first time?Dylan: I’ve been here before, in 1978 or’79, on holiday…Do you know anythingabout the history of Central or EasternEurope?Bueno: A little.Dylan: Well, then you must know thatthese countries don’t have a really solidnational unity. More important than that,they don’t have an ethnic unity. Thesecountries are countries that were created,invented. They’re not organic. They weresort of toys on the big nations’ tables. Sowhat’s happening now is simply a returnto the natural order of things.Bueno: Are you in favor of separatistmovements?Dylan: I’m not really interested in govern-ments or countries. I think that the indi-vidual, the man alone, just him, the singlebeing, is what really matters. I’m in favourof the absolute freedom of the individual.I think that politics is the devil’s instru-ment. Politics kills. Politics is dirty. Politicsis corrupt. I mean, everybody knows that.Bueno: The best government is the onewhich doesn’t govern…Dylan: Yes. Thoreau was always rightabout that…Is this what you wanted totalk to me about?

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Bueno: No, I wanted to talk about angels.Dylan: Angels?Bueno: Yes. In an interview you did withSam Shepard in Esquire magazine, heasked you what were your thoughts aboutangels and you didn’t finish giving him ananswer because the telephone rang andyou went to answer it and when you cameback, the subject was changed.Dylan: Well, the Bible says that angelsexist.Bueno: That’s exactly what you saidbefore. But do you believe in angels?Dylan: Of course. I believe in everythingthat the Bible says…and according to theBible, there are five angels for each humanbeing.Bueno: Do you read the Bible a lot?Dylan: Yes.Bueno: All the time?Dylan: Always.Bueno: Which are your favourite books inthe Bible?Dylan: Leviticus and Deuteronomy.Bueno: What do you think about theApocalypse?Dylan: It will not be by water, but by firenext time. It’s what is written.Bueno: Which edition of the Bible do youread?Dylan: King James’s version.Bueno: That’s not really a Fundamentalistversion of the Bible, is it?Dylan: I’ve never been Fundamentalist.I’ve never been Born Again. Those are justlabels that people hang on you. They meanjust about as much as Folk Singer, ProtestSinger, Rock Star. That’s to say that theydon’t mean anything at all.Bueno: I heard you wanted to go to

Transylvania in Romania, to the area whereBram Stoker was inspired to write Dracula.Dylan: Yes, but the trip was cancelled, ormaybe just postponed.Bueno: It was here in Budapest that BelaLugosi was born—the greatest movieDracula. Did you know that he diedshouting, “I’m immortal! I’m King of theVampires!”?Dylan: I think he was Dracula incarnate.Bueno: Do you believe in vampires?Dylan: Sure. The world is run by vampires.Wherever you go, there are vampires. Themusic business is controlled basically byvampires.Bueno: How is your relationship with themusic business, with your record companyand so on?Dylan: Well, my business is to write songs,to make records, and to play shows hereand there. Basically, that’s it. I’m not veryinterested in what the men who run therecord companies, or the producers, or themusic publishers, have to say to me. Noneof them has ever told me anything inter-esting in the last 25 years. Last year, thevice-president of my record label told methat Oh Mercy didn’t sell many copiesbecause the record’s title didn’t meananything. Well, it meant something to me!After that, somehow I felt all the moredetermined to make my records the waythat I like to make them. But none of myrecords sell very many copies, do they?Bueno: What records are you listening tonowadays?Dylan: Hey, you know, I can’t understandwhy there are so many new records. Thereare thousands of new records every week,and most of them mean absolutely

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nothing. I don’t want to sound too conser-vative, you know what I mean, but thereare already enough good old records.Nobody needs new records that don’t doanything new.Bueno: In Brazil, your tour manager toldme that you only listened to old things—Bill Monroe, things like that.Dylan: That’s true. That’s what I listen tothe most: Bill Monroe, Hank Williams, BigMama Thornton, Jean Ritchie, BlindWillie McTell, rural blues, country blues.But I like rap too. I listen to rap a lot. I heara bit of dance music sometimes. My sonsand daughters like it. One of them’s a bigGuns N’ Roses fan.Bueno: You know, when you sang‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ in Ljubljanaand Belgrade, I had the feeling that theaudiences in the East were much moreconnected with the spirit of the song thanWestern audiences, who probably nowassociate that song with Guns N’ Roses.Dylan: Guns N’ Roses are OK. Slash is OK.But there’s something about their versionof that song that reminds me of the movieInvasion of the Body Snatchers. I alwayswonder who’s been transformed into somesort of a clone, and who’s stayed true tohimself. And I never seem to have ananswer.Bueno: In Portuguese, the title of thatmovie is Soul’s Vampires.Dylan: Great title.Bueno: On your 50th birthday, an Englishnewspaper, The Independent, asked a lot ofpeople what they’d give you as a birthdaypresent. Mick Jagger said, ‘After what I sawon the Grammys, a new hat and somegood songs’.

Dylan: Well, a new hat I’ve already got. It’shere. It’s called a Borsalino. I bought it inMilan, five days ago, for $75. New songs?Well, I don’t think he’s ever written a songlike ‘Masters of War.’ But to do my show, Idon’t need to be moving from here andthere. But I love Mick, I always did.Bueno: Your tour to Brazil was postponedfrom June to August. Some of the newspa-pers said you were frightened of thecholera epidemic.Dylan: Did they say that? Well, I think youknow better than me what newspapers arelike.Bueno: What did you think of Brazil?Dylan: Well, I’d been there before. I don’treally want to say too much about it,but…a few sewers wouldn’t do thecountry any harm. That’d help with thecholera too…I think we’ve already talkedmore than enough, don’t you think so?Bueno: One last question, then. What areyour plans for the future?Dylan: Oh…I generally don’t even knowwhat I’m doing next week. Well, I knownow, today. I guess my plans are to go onwriting, recording, and performing live.My life’s been pretty much like this for aslong as I can remember. To tell you thetruth, I think that my life is getting betterall the time. I think that the older you are,the better you get. So I’m gonna keep onfor a long time. If you come see me whenI’m 90 years old, you’ll find me on a stagesome place.

(Original translation by Ricardo Ferrara)

End of the bogus Budapest ‘interview’ (allapproximately 1300 words of it)

Taormina, Italy 28th July 2001by Duncan Hume

Judas!

Note: this article is based on the transcript of a talk and therefore is both morepersonal and informal in tone than is usual when dealing with such subjects.

The idea for this article did not start with Dylan alone, instead it was films thatraised questions in my mind, and those questions were to do with historical accu-racy (or inaccuracies) and whether or not these are important in entertainmentor art. The real reason for writing the article is that although the questions keptpresenting themselves, I was not sure of the answers. By writing this article, I amtrying to find out. I first covered this area at the fourth annual John GreenMemorial day when I read out my notes for this article. I would like to thank thosepresent for their feedback on the day and since and hope that they feel - as I do -that they have sharpened it.

My starting point is the film Braveheart which - despite having much torecommend it - was spoiled for me by disquieting changes to history. I am refer-ring to such things as the introduction of the ‘pregnancy’ and other fabricationsjust for the sake of Hollywood and its low expectations of its audiences1. It is notas if the story were not stirring enough, nor that the film had failed to captivatewhile sticking close enough to historical fact (there is still a great deal of leewayfor ‘invention’ that cannot be disproved after all). There was no need for the delib-erate fabrication in what was supposedly a historical epic.

Mel Gibson directed and starred in Braveheart and then went on to make afilm called The Patriot. I have never watched this late film as, having already beendisturbed by how history was falsified in Braveheart, I heard that in The Patriot, itwas distorted again. This ‘gut reaction’ on my part alerted me to the fact thathistorical inaccuracies in entertainment do bother me at some level. How deeplythough, I needed to find out.

Mel Gibson said about the misrepresentation of history in the film, in hischarming manner: ‘I don’t know what the Brits are worried about, it’s only a film’.That is the statement that started me thinking and worrying. ‘It’s only a film’, butif it is a film that is staging a historical event or a series of historical events - is itimportant if you twist history or not?

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Lies That Truth IsBlack And White

by Andrew Muir

Judas!

Naturally, I immediately startedthinking about Dylan; but, just before wego on to how the above questions affect hissongs, a few more words on films. Thereare too many examples of my theme evento merely list without ending up with abook length publication. Nonetheless Iwould like to note, in passing, that thiskind of thing goes from wild inventionand deliberate distortion to relativelyminor lies. The reasons for this range frompolitical propaganda to lazy incompetenceand include dubious theories on ‘givingthe audience what it wants’.

For example, I have not seen the filmTitanic - it seems I am all but alone in that- and I have not seen it, partly at least,because of something that irritated meabout historical inaccuracy. Like mostScots I am very proud of being Scottish,and what annoyed me was that theychanged a Scottish hero into a coward. Inthe film there is a role of a Scottishcoward; in real life this person died savinga number of people. In the film, theychanged him from a hero to a coward for‘plot reasons’, something they would nothave done for, let’s say, an Irish or Jewishor Black man but because it was aScotsman they thought they could getaway with it. As indeed they could and did.Some of the people behind this gross liedid ‘make amends’ by travelling to a cele-bration of the character’s real life heroismbut how many people who watched thefilm know that? Very few I would say -perhaps as few as noticed the last line afterthe ‘credits’ in the film Hurricane.

‘Hurricane’, the song, will feature laterin the main, Dylan-based part of thisarticle but I would like to keep with films,

for the moment. This film, supposedly adramatisation of the Hurricane Carterstory, is one in which historical accuracyundoubtedly does matter because this is adeliberate staging of something thathappened to make a specific point.

Or, rather a staging of what the film-makers want you to believe happened; thefilm is a disturbing mixture of fiction andfact; with far more of the former than youwould imagine. Much of it is a tissue ofinvention and wild supposition; youmight well wonder how they can get offwith such a thing. Yet one remembers MelGibson again and the slippery evasion of:‘it’s only a film’. Legal escape is supplied by,in very small writing, an admission at thevery end of the film which states:

While this picture is based upon a truestory some characters have beencomposited or invented and a numberof scenes invented.

How many people will notice that, Iwonder? Certainly none of the reviewersdid. The vast majority of viewers acceptthe story as ‘historical re-creation’, as the‘truth’ - as they are clearly meant to. Yetmuch of it is not true, and we are nottalking minor details here; some of thethings that are made up in it are the racistcop who goes through his life chasingHurricane Carter; the scene whereHurricane Carter first gets into troublewith the authorities shows the youngCarter saving a boy from a paedophileattack. Where that comes from I know not,the first record of Carter’s trouble with thepolice is of him mugging a man for $55and a wristwatch. There is a connection

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between this and the film inasmuch asboth involve Carter hitting the man with abottle. However one is a cowardly attackand the other a heroic defence of anotherboy. Then there are the episodes thatentangle fact with fiction and supposition:the murder event itself and what theeyewitnesses said being a major example;the film portrays of Carter as the happyand successful soldier (despite his recordof court martial leading to a discharge as‘unfit for duty’), all of this brings to mind,as much of the film does, the phrase fromelsewhere on the same Dylan, albumDesire ‘but the truth was far from that’.

The film appears as though it ispresenting a ‘true story’ of ‘what reallyhappened’ yet it is not doing that. It is adeliberate re-writing of history for thepurposes of ‘entertainment’. Now,‘Hurricane’ the song by Dylan aboutHurricane Carter, is shall we say inventiveand stretches the truth too much (in waysthat the film lamentably built on) and hassome (hopefully unintentional) inaccura-cies. However, it is nowhere near as guiltyof fabrication as the film, and, there mayeven be - to presage a controversial pointdealt with later - an excuse for the inaccu-racies inasmuch as if Hurricane Carter wasinnocent, the song’s attempt to free him isto be lauded; there is no such excuse for thefilm. Still, we will come back to ‘Hurricane’,the song, later; it is a most complicated andcontentious case and there are other songsto examine before then.

Firstly though, a slight digression tomake an important point: When you ques-tion the facts behind the songs and filmsthat I do in this article, you find peoplethinking of yourself as belonging to pro-

racist or pro death penalty camps. I muststress as much as one possibly can onpaper that I am not, nor ever will be, ineither of those despicable groups. I do,however, worry whether historical accura-cies are important or not - no matter whoor what the ‘truth’ is being re-invented for.

Let us to go back to the beginning,Dylan-wise, and trace the story of thesekinds of songs from the early days up until1975’s epic ‘protest song’. The story, if youwill, ‘from Emmett Till to HurricaneCarter’.

The reason that I go back to ‘TheDeath of Emmett Till’ is that Dylan madea very interesting comment about thissong back in 1964. He said then that:

‘I used to write songs, like I’d say, “Yeah,what’s bad, pick out something bad, likesegregation, OK, here we go,” and I’dpick one of the thousand million littlepoints I can pick and explode it, some ofthem which I didn’t know about. Iwrote a song about Emmett Till, whichin all honesty was a bullshit song…Irealize now that my reasons andmotives behind it were phony. I didn’thave to write it.”

These statements: ‘bullshit song’ and‘reasons and motives behind it werephoney’ are interesting in the light of whatDylan went on to write later in his life.Given the overall horror of the EmmettTill story and the almost complete accu-racy of Dylan’s song, it is one of the least‘bullshit’ songs he’s ever written, speakingstrictly in terms of historical accuracy. It is,though, something other than factualaccuracy that his ‘bullshit’ and ‘phoney’

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remarks refer to, it is his motivation inwriting it.

As a song, it is just a piece of juveniliawith the occasional flash of somethingmore deft; but ‘The Death of Emmett Till’has only got one verse with any historicalerrors in it at all. And, given the sheerracist brutality of what happened, you canforgive Dylan the inaccuracies. Just for therecord, however, they occur in one verseonly, in the lines:

…to stop the United States of yelling fora trial,Two brothers they confessed that theyhad killed poor Emmett Till But on the jury there were men whohelped the brothers commit this awfulcrime.

The brothers didn’t confess and - at thetime at least - it was not known that therewas anybody on the jury who had helpedthem2. However, given the rest of the grue-some story, it was not really such a terribleliberty to take.

Dylan was later to gently mock himself(‘The moral of this story, the moral of thissong…’) for bluntly pointing out moralmessages to his listeners with lines like:

This song is just a reminder to remindyour fellow man

Yet, even in the preachery ‘The Deathof Emmett Till’, Dylan plays the US cardquite cleverly (as he does in the similarlyrighteous, ‘You Bin Hidin’ Too Long’). Thenation enters the song as an ‘easily fooledbut definitely on the side of the goodies’character:

And then to stop the United States ofyelling for a trial,

The moral itself is that this incidentmust not be allowed to sink into historybecause the problem is still prevalent.Eventually, after all the moral high-hand-edness and pleas for justice and ethicalawareness, the young Dylan is not averseto appealing to patriotic feelings. It is aneffective ending, pointing out how easy itcould be to stop these atrocities whilereminding everyone how far America wasfrom being a land of the free or brave:

This song is just a reminder to remindyour fellow manThat this kind of thing still lives todayin that ghost-robed Ku Klux Klan.But if all us folks that thinks alike, if wegive all we could give,We could make this great land of ours agreater place to live.

After having dismissed this as a ‘bull-shit song’, Dylan has, unsurprisingly, notplayed ‘The Death of Emmett Till’ sincearound the time he wrote it. He does,however, regularly play ‘The LonesomeDeath of Hattie Carroll’, which I think wewould all agree is one of Dylan’s greatestmasterpieces. The development of writingfrom ‘Emmett Till’ to, less than two yearslater, writing ‘The Lonesome Death ofHattie Carroll’, makes Robert Johnsonmeeting the devil and selling his soul inreturn for his guitar skills seem a morethan plausible story because, whateverhappened to Dylan then at whichevercrossroads, he went from writing propa-ganda pieces to masterpieces.

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Another excellent thing about ‘HattieCarroll’ is that it has brought the best out ofDylan’s critics. Christopher Ricks has neverbeen better than when he’s writing ortalking about ‘Hattie Carroll’; and criticafter critic have risen to meet the challengeof elucidating the brilliance of the lyrics. Itis a quite wonderful song, and I could go onat length the poetry and the genius of it;but that is not what the article is about - itis historical truth I am discussing.

I listened to ‘Hattie Carroll’ for manyyears and believed the whole story as sungto be true. Then I saw the newspaper articlethat Dylan had based the song on andDylan had clearly believed those ‘facts’(there are no quotation marks strongenough to convey the irony of ‘facts’ as usedin Newspaperspeak, Orwellian doublespeak to the nth degree). I think we allknow how ‘truthful’ tabloid papers are, andit crossed my mind that all might not beexactly as I had always thought. However, itnever really occurred to me that the HattieCarroll story was anything intrinsicallyother than what Dylan sang. Then, ClintonHeylin’s Behind The Shades drew my atten-tion to the fact that perhaps the story wasnot all that it had seemed. There is some-thing splendidly Heylinesque, is there not,in the way that Heylin sees Zantzinger[Dylan drops the ‘t’ from the name in thesong] as the victim of the story 3? This iswhat Clinton wrote about it:

Dylan’s portrait of William Zantzingerin ‘The Lonesome Death of HattieCarroll’ verges on the libellous,depicting him as a privileged son whokilled a black maid by striking her withhis cane at a Baltimore ‘society gath-

ering,’ escaping with a nominalsentence because of his political connec-tions. The reality of the case is that the24-year-old Zantzinger got drunk at aparty and began tapping people with awooden carnival toy cane. One of thepeople he tapped was a 51-year-oldbarmaid with an enlarged heart andsevere hypertension. When she ques-tioned his need for another drink, hebecame verbally abusive. Carrollbecame very upset and, on returning tothe kitchen, complained aboutZantzinger to a co-worker. She thencollapsed and was taken to hospitalwhere she died the following morning.The extent of Zantzinger’s politicalconnections was a grandfather who hadserved on the State planning commis-sion in the 30s.

Although you need not necessarily endup in total agreement with Heylin’s inter-pretation. You begin to discover a verydifferent event from the one immortalisedin the song when you start reading into theofficial records. Zantzinger is unquestion-ably an odious person who has committedcrimes, racially based at that, since 1964.However, in the case of the tragic death ofHattie Carroll what was debated in thecourtroom was not at all what the sensa-tionalist reporting - which Dylan based hissong on - depicted as having happened.That reporting gave a wildly inaccurateview of the prosecution case whereas in theabove extract, Clinton is, more or less.quoting Zantzinger’s defence. Unpalatablethough it may be to lovers of the song (itcertainly is to this one), the defence case wasthe one that was mostly proved in court.

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As one of the three sitting Judges, D.Kenneth McLaughlin. remarked soonafterwards: ‘The press portrayed it as aman beating a woman to death when itwas actually a woman suffering astroke.’

There was even doubt right up untilthe end of the case over whether or notZantzinger had struck Hattie with a caneat all. More than one of the prosecutionwitnesses said it had been broken earlier inthe evening. The judges finally decided hehad ‘hit’ her with his carnival cane. I put‘hit’ in speech marks because this is wherethings begin to appear wildly differentfrom the newspaper account(s) the song isbased on and the story has become to bethought of. The first accounts included theeye-witness testimony from otherbarmaids who re-affirmed in court thatZantzinger had launched a vicious blowon the right shoulder ‘hard enough tostun’ Hattie.

However the state doctor (prose-cuting) stated on the first day of the trialthat there was not a mark left by the ‘blow’.The autopsy revealed she had died of a‘huge (brain) haemorrhage’. The doctorwent on to say, however, that in hisopinion there was a ‘definite relationshipbetween the assault and the onset of thesymptoms’.

By ‘assault’ Dr. Petty was referring tothe whole incident, that is; the insults aswell as the ‘attack’ with the cane. These hesaid had caused an ‘emotional reaction’that ‘aggravated the blood pressure’ whichin turn ‘triggered the stroke’.

So the case progressed, with first andsecond degree murder falling by thewayside and manslaughter being debated.

The ‘blow’ that ‘slew’ Hattie Carroll in thesong was not what was being debated incourt; but whether or not the incident hadprecipitated the stroke or whether thehypertension and enlarged heart theunfortunate Hattie suffered from wouldhave claimed her life in any event. Doctors-from the defence side- stated that HattieCarroll could have died at any time andthat it could not be claimed that there wasa physical connection between any allegedblow and her death; whereas the medicalexperts on the prosecuting side statedthere was a definite, or at least probable,connection no matter whether she couldhave died at any moment or not.

As Deputy State Attorney Charles E.Moylan very movingly stated: ‘If a personcommits a wrongful act, he is responsiblefor all the consequences…even if heshortens her life by as little as 20 minutes(he is responsible for her death).’

So, Zantzinger was found guilty ofmanslaughter. Judge McLaughlin’ssumming up detailed the crime with thesewords:

‘“…when a person by violent actionsets in motion a chain of circumstancesagainst her to die sooner than she other-wise would have died, it would beunreasonable and possibly subversive ofjustice that criminal responsibilityshould not attach”. The judgesconcluded that although “emotionitself cannot cause death” it can precip-itate it: “the blow struck by the cane wasnot of such a nature as to cause physicaldamage to the deceased, butcontributed to the death by creating inher a fear and excitement”.’

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All of this is still far from the tabloidreport entitled ‘Rich Brute Slays NegroMother of 10’; detailing the ‘brutal beatingby a wealthy socialite4’ who ‘rained blows onthe back and head of Mrs Carroll’. Yet it isthe sensationalist printing of a murderousslaying that has passed into ‘history’, Dylanread the newspapers and believed them5

and he turned their stories into a masterlysong that has in turn been re-told in maga-zine, books and radio shows as though itwere the gospel truth. More of all this someother time, however as I am curtailing thisinvestigation here because I have beeninformed a much more detailed study ofthe story is already underway and I amsending my research documents towardsthat; the twists and turns in the real courtcase of Hattie Carroll are well worthy of anin-depth study.

Once the field has been cleared againI will return to the tale but I would like toleave you with one other, rather strange,observation. This is that Zantzinger doesnot come across as particularly racistwhen you have studied the accounts ofthe night. (Of course he was and is aracist but we mainly know that fromthings unconnected with the death ofHattie Carroll.)

He did call Hattie Carroll ‘a black bitch’so my comment seems initially ‘strange’.On the other hand if you were to arrestpeople for saying such things, many of thefootball fans in the UK would be in jail tosay nothing of some of the players theysupport 6 or, indeed, a depressingly largenumber of people in general.

Not that I am condoning Zantzingercalling her a ‘black bitch’, of course, butwhat should be remembered in the sense

of this article, is that the people Zantzingerwas most violent to that night were white,not black.

Those we know of include his wifewith whom he fought on the dance-floor.Literally so, at that, they struggled on theground as he beat her head with a shoe.This disturbed neighbouring couples andan altercation ensued between Zantzingerand a Mr. Biggs (it was he who claimed hebroke Zantzinger’s cane after they fought,a point corroborated by another witnessthough this was before Zantzinger hadencountered Hattie). Zantzinger alsoattacked the arresting policeman (his wifewas by now fighting on his side and bit thecop’s leg). In other words, the violentabuse that was going on was multi-racial -not that it excuses anything thatZantzinger did - but it adds anotherdifferent complexion to the story behindthe song. Finally there is the mystery ofwhy William Zantzinger (who seems tohave spent much of his life thievingmoney from people) has often talkedabout libelling Dylan, but never has.

The major point for this article is this:if something as clear-cut as ‘The LonesomeDeath of Hattie Carroll’ starts to have greyareas, you begin to question everything.You start to think that Zantzinger - who ina drunken night upset a maid of fragilehealth who later died - is not as guilty asthe multiple killing (‘manslaughter in thehighest degree’) driver in ‘Percy’s Song’. Inthe one case Dylan rages against inefficientsentencing, in the other he pleads heart-breakingly for leniency. In both cases he isso convincing in his deliveries that it tookyears before I ever thought of the compar-ison and contrast.7

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Another one of Dylan’s greatest earlyprotest songs (and one that again has beenvery well written about) is ‘Only a Pawn inTheir Game’. This song tell the story ofhow poor white trash are manipulatedinto working for corrupt politicians bybeing ‘fooled into thinking’ that they arebetter than the blacks and, therefore,should have no complaints over their ownmiserable lives. It is one of Dylan’s mostcompelling songs from this time because itdoes not preach as such; instead it opensup for you a whole way in which the worldworks and evil flourishes. The idea itself isnot new, of course, and had been writtenabout extensively in America before Dylanbut it had not been put this way in songbefore.

There are many quotes that show howaccurate Dylan’s analysis was. Some ofthese are available from a marvellouswebsite8 that picks such instructive exam-ples that I am going to utilize some of theirquotations here. These come from LillianSmith’s book, Killers of Dreams. She writesfrom the point of view of the poor whitetrash that Dylan is singing about in thesong:

…but we clung to our belief. Our whiteskin made us better than all the otherpeople and this belief comforted us forwe felt worthless and weak whenconfronted with authorities who hadcheapened nearly everything we helddear except our skin colour. In our landwe could still be king.

This is the terrain of Dylan’s song.Then, talking about politicians, Ms Smithgoes on to write:

… they needed poor whites to be theiryes men, moral henchmen quieting theleaders’ uneasy conscience. Like Davidplaying on his harp to Saul, the ruralwhites sang the lies the dominant groupwanted to hear.

These are telling insights from some-body who lived it and Dylan’s song bril-liantly portrays the same thing. His linedescribing the South politician preachingto the poor white man: ‘you’ve got morethan the blacks, don’t complain’ brings bothwriter and lyricist come to the sameconclusion:

It was only the poor whites who ledthem to love these lies which theyneeded sorely to believe were true. To besuperior, to be the best people on earthwith the best system of making a livingbecause your sallow skin was whitemade you forget that you were eaten upwith malaria and hookworm, madeyou forget that you lived in a shantyand you ate pot liquor and cornbread.

The song quite brilliantly depicts thesame insights as Ms. Smith and I am nothere to criticise the song at all as a song orits insights. I am here, though, to point outhistorical inaccuracies and, would youbelieve it, this one is also, historicallyspeaking, ‘wrong’.

The point of the song is that a mind-manipulated member of poor white trashbackground shot Medgar Evers in theback, not knowing in any real sense whathe was doing or why. (The automotivedescription in the opening verse isextraordinarily skilful in conveying this.)

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This may have seemed the most likelyexplanation of the killer’s motivation forthe cowardly murder, but it is not whathappened.

What Dylan describes is terrible (andtrue, no doubt, in a general sense but I amhere concerned with the narrower stric-tures of historical accuracy) but the truthof the killer and his background is evenmore horrific; less insidious, perhaps, buteven more invidious.

The person that shot Medgar Evers wascalled Byron de la Beckwith, not exactly apoor white trash name, you will havenoted. He was once a fertiliser salesman bytrade, which is perfectly apt for a man whospent his life spouting bullshit. The pointthough is that he was not poor; he paid his$10,000 bail in cash.

He was not stupid either, at least not inthe commonly accepted meaning of theword. He ran for Lieutenant Governorshipof Mississippi four years after shootingMedgar Evers in the back and got over34,000 votes. All of which is not to denyhis beliefs were idiotic in the extreme aswell as being evil to the core.

An out and out racist of the worstpossible kind, he was a member of the KuKlux Klan and the White Knights andwhat was known as the White Collar Klan(operating under the banner of theinnocuously named ‘Citizen’s Council’),who used business means to oppress theblacks. (He also hated Jews and indeedeveryone other than those whom he saw asGod’s Chosen people - white, right-wingChristians only; and some of them hewasn’t too sure about.)

Byron de la Beckwith knew exactlywhat he was doing. He worked to a polit-

ical agenda. He liaised with other polit-ical groups. When he eventually wascaught and jailed years later, for anothercrime, he had a car boot full of dyna-mite. You get the picture; this was aracist and bigot, a coward, a murdererand a terrorist.

He died ‘unrepentant’ as his dementedfollowers still like to announce. His prisoncell was decorated with Confederate andLithuanian flags; he campaigned for awhite only USA until his untimely (as infar too late) death. A thoroughly evilperson was de la Beckwith; but not poorwhite trash and not, unfortunately,someone unaware of what he was doingand why.

In other words he was not ‘only apawn in their game’. Dylan did actuallysing about the exact kind of thing thatByron de la Beckwith was in an unfin-ished two verse song called ‘Talking Devil’in 1963:

well sometimes you can’t see him sogoodwhen he hides his head ‘neath a snow-white hood and he rides to kill with his face well hidand then goes home to his wife and kids,I wonder if his kids know who he is.

Well he wants you to hate and he wantsyou to fear,wants you to fear something that’s noteven here.He’ll give you his hate, he’ll give you hislies,he’ll give you the weapons to run outand die and you give him your soul.

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That was the real person that killedpoor Medgar Evers. Unfortunately,though, the likes of Byron de la Beckwith’swife and kids knew precisely what theirhusbands and fathers were doing; theywere brought up to share the same beliefs.His kind still flourish, too. There are,disturbingly, a number of websites andassociations in America today who stillhail him as a hero and martyr.

The recurring question that hashounded me is: if you write about some-thing that happened historically and youare factually inaccurate, does it weaken thesongs or not? Nothing will weaken ‘TheLonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’’s bril-liant exploration of injustice and its poeticanalysis of the polarising forces in societyfor me. Still, I wish it was true all the waythrough. Nothing will change the truth ofhow poor white trash are manipulated in‘Only a Pawn in Their Game’. It just sohappens the one example he has picked isinaccurate. Does it matter? Dylan himselfworried about these things.

On his fourth album he repudiated his‘protest phase’ in ringing and poeticterms. I was astonished when I first heard‘My Back Pages’ as I had just grown tolove all these wonderful protest songs andhere suddenly was the man who hadwritten and performed them saying thathe had been wrong, that this was not whathe should be writing and he was not goingto sing about these kinds of thingsanymore.

I thought it was incredibly brave foran artist to have written all these magnif-icent songs and then to write this beau-tiful one repudiating them. So, this articlewould never have been written if Dylan

had left it there; but he did not. Years latera double-sided single with two versions ofthe one protest song, ‘George Jackson’split Dylan fans and critics into twocamps. Rolling Stone commented at thetime that:

‘The song immediately divided Dylanspeculators into two camps: those whosee it as the poet’s return to social rele-vance and those who feel that it’s acheap way for Dylan to get a lot ofpeople off his back.’

Undoubtedly the ‘George Jackson’release was a very interesting episode inDylan’s career. Why did he put it out?

Peter Doggett, writing in Judas! issuenine, commented:

To my knowledge, Dylan has nevercommented on George Jackson,or his song,in any interview. Yet there are clues withinhis lyrics as to the depth of his emotionaland political involvement. For example, theopening lines (‘I woke up this mornin’/Therewere tears in my bed/They killed a man Ireally loved’) suggest an immediacy ofresponse unlikely in a man who had onlydiscovered how passionately he felt afterreading a book. Factually and philosophi-cally, in fact, there was nothing in ‘GeorgeJackson’ that betrayed any deeper knowl-edge of his subject’s life and beliefs thanDylan could have learned from the sixo’clock news. ‘They were frightened of hispower,’ he said of the prison guards, ‘theywere scared of his love’; but love, especiallyfor his captors, was an emotion markedlyabsent from most pages of Soledad Brother.

Michael Gray astutely described thesong’s most revealing verse:

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Judas!

‘Jackson says in one of his letters that,from now on, he’s just going to dividepeople into the innocent and the guilty.As Dylan re-states this, it is Us and Us,not Us and Them:

Sometimes I think this whole worldIs one big prison yardSome of us are prisonersThe rest of us are guards.

This, one might feel, is Dylan’s onlyauthentic contribution to the song; alsothe sentiment most at odds withJackson’s political philosophy.’

George Jackson comes across in thesong as one of the most saintly people thatDylan’s ever sung about. As is, to digressslightly from my main theme, Joey Galloas portrayed by Dylan in ‘Joey’. That songis a total rewriting of history. I do notactually mind ‘Joey’, despite the fact thathe was a terrible person, far removed fromthe figure in the song. But then I do notthink the song Joey actually pretends to beanything other than a myth and we allknow what a myth is, don’t we, afterwatching Renaldo and Clara?

‘Joey’ is a myth making song. It is likesinging about Billy the Kid, anotherpsychopathic killer for all we know, orJesse James and Robin Hood and all suchother ‘heroes’. Dylan is showing us howwe build up these myths round theseoutlaws. He also uses the song to openthe second side of the album, making itconnect in the listener’s mind (in thosefar off vinyl days) to the opening song ofthe first side. Which brings us back to‘Hurricane’

Now, Dylan’s ‘Hurricane’ is nowherenear as bad at distorting the truth as thefilm but it does have a number of inaccu-racies and stretching of the truth. ButDylan, as we know, can be affected bysomething he reads or somebody hemeets. One of the reasons that GeorgeJackson does appear as such a saintlyfigure, is that Dylan had read SoledadBrother and, as anyone who has read thebook will tell you, it is remarkablypowerful. Obviously, it is from GeorgeJackson’s point of view and you’ve got totake it that this is his story powerfulthough it is. The same can be said forHurricane Carter’s The Sixteenth Roundand, to a large degree, that book and hismeeting with Hurricane Carter is whatDylan bases his song. Clearly, therefore,you are getting the song from HurricaneCarter’s point of view. If Hurricane Carterreally was innocent I do not mind if Dylandid twist the truth. To get an innocent manout of jail, I think, you could go to almostany length. Though whether HurricaneCarter is innocent or not is something wewill probably never know.

He eventually got released on groundsof procedural irregularities (again,nothing like it is in the film and nothinglike it comes across in the song); it waseventually accepted that racism wasinvolved in his conviction and therefore hewas, quite properly, released.

Indeed, one feels almost guilty of ques-tioning his innocence. As Stephen Scobieremarked in my interview with him forJudas! issue nine:

What I do want to say is: whether or nothe was guilty, you have to look at the

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kind of work that he has done inCanada since his release from prison,the kind of work that he has done onbehalf of people wrongly accused ofmurders in cases that are much, muchmore clear-cut than his, cases whereDNA evidence and things like that haveabsolutely conclusively proven the inno-cence of people who have been foundguilty of murders. The kind of work thathe has done since he got out of prisonseems to me entirely admirable, and Ifind it really suspicious that there’s still astrong faction that wants to discreditCarter and discredit the kind of workthat he’s done, by arguing that he is infact guilty. I think it tends to come frompeople who are in favour of the deathpenalty - and Carter, whatever his guiltor innocence, has emerged in the last tenor fifteen years as one of the most charis-matic and articulate proponents of theargument against the death penalty. SoI find it very suspicious that there is stillsuch a strong effort to discredit him.

Although in the same interview, heacknowledged that:

I think it’s entirely possible that he wasguilty; I think it’s entirely possible thathe was innocent. I tend towards thebelief that he was innocent, but certaingroups certainly have doubts…

I am not here to argue that one way orthe other. I have been reading about it foryears and I am no nearer knowing what tobelieve. Carter has done some wonderfulthings in recent years and he did someterrible things when he was younger. If you

want to read up on Hurricane Carter, thereare many, many websites about the case. Bevery careful though, some of these websitessay; ‘we’re not racist’ which is a very easything to say whether you are or are not.Similarly, others claim that they are notpro-death penalty yet they read very muchas though they are.

As for the song itself, I do not want topull it apart because, as I say, Dylan wasconvinced that Carter was innocent. Aswith ‘The Lonesome Death of HattieCarroll’, his motives in writing the songcould not be purer. Dylan was warned offthe Hurricane Carter story by people likeKinky Freidman and Joni Mitchell but hewas convinced by Carter’s version of theevents and went ahead with his song. Manypeople who warned Dylan off gettinginvolved thought they were proven correctwhen, in 1976, Carter was re-convicted inhis second trial, Dylan did not say much atthe time, he only had one comment on itthat I know off. It is a very interestingcomment. He said about the second trialthat they ‘still knew what buttons to press’.

So, clearly, Dylan was still convincedthen that Hurricane Carter was innocentand indeed he made his story a central partof Renaldo and Clara. Dylan was clearlyconvinced and if you are convinced aninnocent man’s in jail, you would feel justi-fied in ‘stretching the truth’.

For the record, though, some of thethings that are incorrect in the song thataffect historical accuracy quite importantlyinclude: Dylan claims that Carter was ‘faraway in another part of town’ - he was not.He was stopped near the scene of themurder The song repeatedly states ‘onetime he could have been the champion of

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Judas!

the world’.Perhaps that once was true but bythe time of the murders he was not acontender; which is what is implied.Another liberty taken is the line about thewounded man who:

…looks up tthrough his one dyin’ eyeSays, “Wha’d you bring him in here for?He ain’t the guy!”

He did not; what he said was: ‘I don’tknow’ - but that does not rhyme as welldoes it? This is not just a flippant point.The noted scholar and Dylan fan,Christopher Ricks once spoke aboutTennyson’s famous line: ‘into the valley ofdeath rode the 600’. Julian Barnes recallsthis in Flaubert’s Parrot.

…concerned ‘The Charge of the LightBrigade’. ‘Into the valley of Death/Rodethe six hundred.’ Tennyson wrote thepoem very quickly, after reading a reportin The Times which included the phrase‘someone had blundered’, He also reliedon an earlier account which hadmentioned ‘607 sabres’. Subsequently,however, the number of those who tookpart in what Camille Rousset called ceterrible et sanglant steeplechase was offi-cially corrected to 673. ‘Into the valley ofDeath/Rode the six hundred andseventy-three’? Not quite enough swingto it, somehow. Perhaps it could havebeen rounded up to seven hundred - stillnot quite accurate, but at least moreaccurate? Tennyson considered thematter and decided to leave the poem ashe had written it: ‘Six is much betterthan seven hundred (as I think) metri-cally so keep it.’

Not putting ‘673’ or ‘700’ or ‘c.700’instead of ‘600’ hardly seems to qualifyas a Mistake to me…

Perhaps not, but it seems hardly fair onthe 73 who are not immortalised, whosedeaths are ignored.

Dylan also wildly romanticises thecharacter of Carter in ‘Hurricane’ in theverse about the horses. Hurricane Carter’sreal connection with horses was punchingthem unconscious as a way of showing off.Not quite the same connection as inDylan’s song.

It is intriguing that Dylan, who haddescribed ‘Emmett Till’, as ‘bullshit’ and‘phoney’ should go on to write songslike ‘George Jackson’ and ‘HurricaneCarter’

When Dylan does decide that thingsare after all ‘black and white’, he returns tothe powerful weapons of earlier writings.‘Hurricane’ is a vastly greater lyricalaccomplishment than ‘The Death ofEmmett Till’ but a lot of similarities exist.The use of contrast for example, plusoutright finger-pointing:

The trial was a pig-circus, he never hada chance

is a line that would be equally at home ineither song. As would:

If you’re black you might as well notshow up on the street’Less you wanna draw the heat.

You’ll be doin’ society a favour

And the all-white jury agreed

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Judas!

Although, the ‘Hurricane’ story is froma different perspective than that of ‘TheDeath of Emmett Till’ (black - falsely-guilty as opposed to white-falsely-inno-cent) the lines:

Couldn’t help but make me feelashamed to live in a landWhere justice is a game,

would suit ‘The Death of Emmett Till’whose own:

And so this trial was a mockery,but nobody seemed to mind.

would fit the later song.To return to my question: does it

matter that a film or a book or a songbased on a historical incident or series ofincidents reflects them accurately or is the‘wider’ artistic truth more important orsimply the entertainment value? It obvi-ously matters to me or I would not bewriting this article, and also to thosepeople who have told me that reflecting onmy talk at Northampton has made themuneasy about these songs.

Songs about Robin Hood and Billy theKid and Jesse James are one thing, longago as they are; Joey and Byron De LaBeckwith though are recent andZantzinger and Carter are still with us. Dothe facts matter or are the songs inde-pendent of history? Does the distance oftime between when we hear the songs andwhen the incidents took place change youranswer? If so how many years does it needto be? Is the time of Robin Hood so longago that truth is irrelevant to the myth?Probably most people think it is - but what

about Billy The Kid or Billy Zantinger? Isthere a difference between forty years agoand one hundred and forty years?

All these questions from me; a strangeway to end an article except it is not reallyfinished, I have answered that it doesmatter to me but it is, I hope, an ongoingdebate. One that I want you to continue.Please send your answers to the abovequestions to the usual address or visit ourwebsite at www.judasmagazine.com whereyou will find this article and a voting poll.

With thanks to Ron Turnbull, ClintonHeylin and Gerry Barrett and the JohnGreen Convention

1. Audiences moulded in their tastes by Hollywoodand the media industry themselves2. Or at least as was provable at the time , not for thefirst time Dylan’s words rang even truer in hindsightthan first they were heard3. Though I take his reference to the odious creatureas poor William Zantzinger to be a joke on his read-ership’s sensibilities utilising one of the song’s mainstrands of oppositional imagery.4. Rich beyond Hattie’s wildest imaginings thoughZanzinger certainly was, “wealthy socialite” is going abit far. Tobacco farmer he was, not rich enough to getthrough the winter without a bank loan for ##though5. It he does to this day, recently having mentionedhow anyone would be outraged by a “young manbeating up an old woman”6. Lee Bowyer spat worse verbal abuse to an Asianlady in a MacDonalds not that long ago; thoughlonger ago than when he was involved in the case ofthe beating up of an Asian man.7. This point was earlier made by Robert Forryan 8. http://www.fortunecity.com/tinpan/parton/2/onlypawn.html

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47

This is such an easy book to recom-

mend. Did I just say easy? It’s not an easy

read by any means: the text is dense and

the author's authoritative views and opin-

ions, in addition to the mass of historical

and contextual details, and the copious

footnotes all make for a slow and consid-

ered read. But you will be rewarded. Bear

in mind though what Stephen Scobie,

well-respected author of books on both

Cohen and Dylan, said in reply to a ques-

tion about the distinction between poet

and songwriter: ‘A poem can survive on its

own on the printed page without any

accompaniment of music or the author's

voice. A song on the other hand is always a

little inadequate on the printed page. It

needs to have the music and very often it

needs to have the author's voice.’ Cohen

himself has never claimed the wish to be

accepted as a poet [‘it’s a crown I've never

worn’ he said in 1985], and if Dylan ever

has, that means I need to re-read Michael

Gray's Song and Dance Man III, again, or

Christopher Ricks’s Visions of Sin, to check

just what he might have said. Boucher’s

basic premise in this book is that both are

poets, of rock and roll of course, and sets

out to prove his case. He makes a very

strong and persuasive case indeed. That

they are also songwriters is almost taken

for granted without that seeming to be

faint praise, with a decent smattering of

lyrics [poetry?] from almost a dozen

Cohen songs and over 20 Dylan songs

throughout the book.

I really enjoyed the introduction: 23

pages, and as good a telescopic intro to

either artist’s work as you’ll find anywhere

else. David Boucher namechecks, among

others, and there are many others, Homer,

Shakespeare, William Blake, the San

Francisco Beat poets, Allen Ginsberg of

course, the Liverpool poets McGough and

Henry, Rimbaud, Pound, Lorca, Jack

Kerouac, Dave Van Ronk, Woody Guthrie,

Alexander Trocchi, Albert Camus and the

Bible without ever causing this reader to

be overwhelmed by such a roll-call of

writers and authors and artists and singers

DYLAN & COHEN Poets of Rock and Rollby David BoucherContinuum, 2004263pp, 16 b&w illus.ISBN 0-8264-5981-1UK£16.99/US$19.95

A review by Jim Devlin

Judas!

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and the like who have had some ‘influence’on Cohen and Dylan. It made me reflectthat I wish I’d read this book beforeploughing through Song and Dance ManIII and Visions of Sin and Prophet of theHeart and Various Positions. That's not acriticism of these big books, just my way ofrationalising my approach to dealing withthe sheer volume of material on offerwhen writing about ‘these two iconicwriters and performers’.

Not only is this the first book toexplore both Cohen and Dylan separatelyand together, seriously, assiduously, withtheir respective artistic developmentsunder close examination - a fine reason initself to go out and buy a copy, it alsocontains a wealth of material, Dylan-wise,for example, about the John Birch Society,hootenanies, Greenwich Village andGerdes Folk City whose succinctnessserves to frame and contextualise Dylan’swork without causing any distractionaway from it. And all this within the firstcouple of chapters. Cohen’s life and workare outlined in greater detail in thatsplendid introduction and there's heapsmore in chapter 4, where the authortracesa chronology in Montreal and Hydra andNew York which is both well-paced andfocused on Cohen's literary and musicalwork since the 50s, thereby providing acogent and important overview thatprovides a platform for the deeper analysispacking the middle pages. Check out ‘ThePolitics of Identity and Authenticity’ inchapter 5 and learn about the SNCC,CORE, NAACP, SCLC, COFO and IWW;take the phone off the hook and thenlisten to all the Dylan songs on p. 126; walk

through the front door of the ChelseaHotel and into the corridors whereBrendan Behan, Mark Twain, DylanThomas, Virgil Thompson et al. had livedand worked, then realise you've got to readagain Boucher's dead-on, almost noncha-lant, explanation of the French chansonand chansonier tradition [p. 137]; bywhich time I was more than ready for theauthor's noble attempt, finally, finally, to‘compare the work of Dylan and Cohen aspoet-songwriters’, which makes up chapter6. It’s all Dylan in chapter 7, by the end ofwhich you’ll have Donald White, EmmettTill, Medgar Evers, Davey Moore andHattie Carroll rattling around in yourhead so that when you hear the songs[especially the 1964 plaintive and gentlyrolling acoustic version of ‘Hattie Carroll’in contrast with the later RTR electricperformance mentioned on p.175], thewords will sting like fiery darts; all Cohenin chapter 8, and with the phone still offthe hook, the time to enjoy ‘The NightComes On’ and ‘Everybody Knows’ and‘Suzanne’ of course, and ‘Dance Me to theEnd of Love’ will be well spent; you’ll alsoprobably read a few more of Cohen’spoems than you'd expect. The finalchapter, ‘The Religious Experience’, exam-ines how ‘religion has played an importantrole throughout Dylan's career’ [p.212 ff],and the ‘constant pull toward Judaism afterpassionate flirtations with Christianity thatcharacterises much of Cohen's spiritualquest’ [p.219 ff]

Throughout the book, I had to workhard to link the lyrics and poetry with themusic of the songs though, becauseBoucher pays scant attention to the latter:

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the tunes and melodies and intros andaccompaniments, Dylan’s syncopatedvocals and harmonica riffs, the 4-beatrhythms and guitar solos and drum fillsetc. are not a feature of this book, which,as a listener to the songs of Cohen andDylan, you might reasonably expect tofind in it. The nearest we get to it is hisstatement [p.3]: ‘lyrics are distinctive intheir way, often gaining their particularforce in the performance, the combination ofintonation and notation, betraying adependency on the music that is integral totheir appeal.’ But because Boucher’sangle is so much more on thehistorical, as evidenced by the firstpart of his statement of intenton p. 34: ‘In this book the domi-nant political and social cultureof the 1960s is predominantly thecontext against which the songs ofLeonard Cohen and BobDylan are explored’,there is little room leftto discuss ‘the songs’ asmusical structures,and I missed that. Iwould have welcomedsome of Boucher’sinsights into thepassion and pain ofthese songwritersand their song-writing; I wanted tobe reminded ofCohen’s slow and metic-ulous working methods, andneeded more about Dylan’smusical wizardry in hisreworkings of songs in live

performances. I spotted a few errors:Irvine Welsh, surely [p.18, p.262], andLeonard’s collaboration with Phil Spectorwas on Death of a Ladies’ Man, the album[p.20], not to be, but often is, confusedwith his book Death of a Lady's Man. In1975, didn’t the RTR mostly play shows upand down the eastern coast of the US witha handful of concerts in Quebec, Torontoand Montreal, and not ‘across the UnitedStates’? [p.94]. I can’t agree with Boucher'ssweeping claim that ‘Cohen … was almostcomatose in many of his live appearances’

[p.79] Many?! How many?! Whichones? And any notion that ‘Chelsea

Hotel #2’ is about anyone elseother than Janis Joplin is erro-neous [p.192] This is a well-

researched book. I counted up413 footnotes: that’s an

average of 46 per chapter. Theillustrations are well-chosen and

include some real gems likethe ‘Warning’ stickerabout Dylan’s Savedalbum, and the lovelyMarianne filmstrip. Aproper bibliographyand, dare I say it, adiscography, wouldhave been welcome.Incidentally, StephenScobie concluded his

answer to that poet-or-songwriter question

with the words: ‘Dylan is asongwriter. Cohen is both.’

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After the slim pickings of the early 1970s, Blood On The Tracks was seen as adramatic return to form by Dylan, a gripping fusion of autobiographical hurt andcreative evasion.Heylin calls the album ‘perhaps the finest collection of love songs ofthe twentieth century’.1 For Shelton, it is ‘the spiritual autobiography of a woundedsensibility’.2 Williams highlights another of the album’s key themes:

[The] very essence of timelessness, evocation of the past as a universal, omnipresentnow.3

Many of Dylan’s most famous songs are concerned with time. ‘Blowin’ in theWind’ repeatedly asks: ‘How many times?’ In this song, time seems static, perpetu-ating all the wrongs of the world. In ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’, time finallystarts to budge and people must be willing to move with it:

You’d better start swimmin’Or you’ll sink like a stone.

To be alive is to be able to evolve with time, to be ‘busy being born’. People whoisolate themselves from time are ‘busy dying’.The liner notes to Highway 61 Revisitedcontain the following observation:

On the slow train time does not interfere.

For Dylan, there were two types of people:

It happened maybe that those words [‘The Times They Are A-Changin’] were the onlywords I could find to separate aliveness from deadness.4

In ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, Miss Lonely is on the slow train. She lives in an isolatedworld with her chrome horses and diplomats.She doesn’t realise that time is movingon, that everything is not exactly the way that it seems:

You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns.

Time Is An Enemyby Pádraig Hanratty

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Throughout this period, Dylan mocksthose who can’t tap into the changing times,who, like Mr. Jones, don’t know what’shappening, where it’s at. In 1978, Dylanwould be still mocking those people:

People were still dealing with illusionand delusion at that time. The timesreally change but they don’t change.5

In the 1960s, Dylan’s youthful impa-tience seeks constant change, new trips onmagic swirling ships. Mindless repetition -‘How many times?’ - must be avoided:‘And you’re sick of all this repetition.’ Thegreatest horror is to be stuck inside ofMobile with the Memphis Blues again.And again.

The motorcycle crash led to a spiritualre-evaluation. Having been dramaticallyreminded of his mortality, Dylan began touse his songs to explore how precious timeis: ‘Lost time is not found again.’ The songsrecorded in the Big Pink basement don’tlook forward to coming changes; theycelebrate a mythical past:

‘Take care of all of your memories,’ saidMick,‘For you cannot relive them.’

The present becomes a time of relaxedreminiscence, not impatient anticipation.The songs celebrate that which does notchange. The Basement Tapes and JohnWesley Harding are full of simple timelesstruths. Nashville Skyline presents a manwho is happy with the way things are:‘Cause tonight I’ll be staying here withyou.’ In New Morning, Dylan seems to be

trying to cut himself away from time andall the changes it brings:

Time passes slowly up here in themountains.

He now is content to merely ‘watch theriver flow’. Permanence, not change, iswhat is craved:

May you stay forever young.

Blood On The Tracks shows timewreaking havoc. The times are changingagain, but the changes are no longerwanted.In the face of this uncertainty,somesongs try to cling to the simple truths:

Been shooting in the dark too long,When somethin’s not right, it’s wrong.

However, other songs show how timecan shatter the most apparently timelesstruths:

What’s good is bad, what’s bad is good,You’ll find out when you reach the topYou’re on the bottom.

Everything becomes ‘a little upsidedown’. The slow train has moved on and leftblood on the tracks. Indeed, even time itselfis torn apart on this album. Events are notpresented in chronological order. Each songtells its story through a series of randommemories and musings. Scenes from thepast mingle with the present and future asmemory and anticipation coexist almostsimultaneously, like they did when Dylanfound himself stuck inside of Mobile:

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Now people just get uglierAnd I have no sense of time.

The songs explore some timeless zoneas the narrators live an almost static exis-tence, constantly replaying the past. Eachnarrator broods on his own situation,turning it into a fable in an attempt toextract some universal lesson from thewreckage. In 2001, Dylan said:

I mean, you’re talking to a person thatfeels like he’s walking around in theruins of Pompeii all the time. It’s alwaysbeen that way, for one reason oranother.6

Time is further deconstructedthrough the use of fictional masks. Dylanuses the songs to explore real emotionsrelated to recent episodes in his life.However, each song is a fiction, withDylan’s past and the narrators’ fictionalpast melting into each other. Charactersmerge and split into different personas,with ‘I’ becoming ‘he’, and ‘you’ becoming‘she’. Masks collapse as the frowns of thejugglers and clowns are once againrevealed: ‘I couldn’t believe after all theseyears you didn’t know me any better thanthat.’

What had seemed like domestic bliss atthe time is now portrayed as an illusion, apantomime. This was something he evenhinted at in his earlier songs:

I’m crestfallen.The world of illusion is at my door.

In 1980, Dylan said of his songs:

If I was searching, it was just to… getdown to the root reality of the waythings really are, to pull the mask off.7

In the songs, Dylan hides behind manyfictional masks. This is something he hasoften done:

The man in me might hide sometimesTo keep from being seen.But that’s just because he doesn’tWant to turn into some machine.

The breakdown of identity in thisalbum would be further explored inRenaldo And Clara. When promoting thatmovie, Dylan offered the followingopaque observation on the notion of self:

It’s about the naked alienation of theinner self against the outer self-alien-ation taken to the extreme.8

Before writing these songs, Dylan hadtaken painting lessons with NormanRaeben. This led Dylan to explore a newstyle of songwriting:

He put my mind and my hand and myeye together in a way that allowed me todo consciously what I unconsciouslyfelt. And I didn’t know how to pull it off.I wasn’t sure it could be done in songsbecause I’d never written a song likethat. But when I started doing it, thefirst album I made was Blood On TheTracks. Everyone agrees that that waspretty different, and what was differentabout it is that there’s a code in thelyrics and there’s no sense of time.

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There’s no respect for it: you’ve gotyesterday, today and tomorrow all inthe same room, and there’s very littlethat you can’t imagine not happening.9

For Dylan, this is the primary functionof songs:

Well, songs are just thoughts. For themoment they stop time. Songs aresupposed to be heroic enough to give theillusion of stopping time. With just thatthought.10

Once time has been captured in asong, past experiences never die:

A songwriter tries to grasp a certainmoment, write it down, sing it for thatmoment, and then keep that experiencewithin himself, so he can be able to singthe song years later.11

The first timeless fable we’re presentedwith is ‘Tangled Up in Blue’. Like all songson the album, it explores the dynamics of alove relationship. However, it is not somechronological soap opera; instead, we get aseries of random memories and musings:lovers eloping; lovers breaking up; workingin the Great North Woods; chance meet-ings in a topless place; memories ofMontague Street; keeping on keeping onafter the bottom fell out. Because the linearsequence has been tangled up, it’s difficultto grasp the full picture:

I was trying to be somebody in thepresent time while conjuring up a lot ofpast images. I was trying to do it in a

conscious way. I used to be able to do itin an unconscious way, but I wasn’t intoit that way anymore. I wanted to defytime, so that the story took place in thepresent and past at the same time. Whenyou look at a painting, you can see anypart of it or see all of it together.12

The song opens with the narrator lyingin bed, but immediately becomes reminis-cence. The woman he once knew may nowbe a different person:

Wond’rin’ if she’d changed at all,If her hair was still red.

The sudden passing of time is alludedto, with the lovers ‘splitting up on a darksad night’. When times change, peoplereact differently: the woman freezes up;something inside the man dies; thenarrator becomes withdrawn. When thebottom falls out, identities begin to blur:‘Don’t I know your name?’ People’s masksdisintegrate:

All the people we used to know,They’re an illusion to me now.

The narrator is now haunted by thepast. Indeed, in the past, he was alsohaunted by an earlier past:

But all the while I was alone,The past was close behind.

The past is a vault of painful experi-ences and mentally reliving them alsocauses pain. However, the narrator stillwants to return to that past:

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So now I’m goin’ back again,I got to get to her somehow.

The past the narrator wants to returnto is some ideal past. The real past hasbeen tangled up in guilt, doubt, and regret.Hindsight shows that all secure feelings ofpermanence and certainty were nothingmore than illusions.

In ‘Simple Twist of Fate’, the song’s verytitle is a testament of time’s unpredictability.On one level, the song, originally called‘Fourth Street Affair’,

13

finds Dylan musingabout Suze Rotollo, his girlfriend in theearly 1960s. However, it soon develops intoa more creative exploration. The first threeverses of the song recall a chance encounterin a park, where the narrator is fooled intothinking that this is the start of a profoundrelationship. In verse four, the carpet issuddenly moving under him:

He woke up, the room was bare,He didn’t see her anywhere.

The ticking of the clocks reminds himthat time has moved on without him: ‘Iwas born too late.’ He must now play bytime’s rules:

Hunts her down by the waterfrontdocks where the sailors all come in.Maybe she’ll pick him out again, howlong must he wait?Once more for a simple twist of fate.

The song shows how transient allrelationships ultimately are. Time tearsapart those whom it throws together. Theman and woman are merely pawns at the

mercy of greater forces: ‘Blame it on asimple twist of fate.’

‘If You See Her, Say Hello’ could beseen as a sort of sequel to ‘Simple Twistof Fate’. In this song, the narrator is stillhunting for his woman: ‘She might be inTangier.’ However, the relationship lostin this song is more profound than theone in ‘Simple Twist of Fate’. They werelovers in this song and had a violent‘falling out’.

The song obviously echoes ‘Girl fromthe North County’. In that song, it was theman who had moved on and wanted to beremembered to one who ‘once was a truelove of mine’. This time, it’s the womanwho moves on. She looked forward to apromising future, while the narratordesperately tried to cling to the past:

Though the bitter taste still lingers onFrom the night I tried to make her stay.

The narrator is left alone, wallowing inmemories of those who have moved on.These memories are fleeting, but vivid,reminding the narrator how transient thegood times can be:

Sundown, yellow moon,I replay the past.I know every scene by heart,They all went by so fast.

Indeed, the memories are so vivid thatthey can seem real, as the past seems tobecome part of the present:

She still lives inside of me,We’ve never been apart.

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In his youthful days, the narratorwould have welcomed change. However,change is now painful: ‘It pierced me to theheart’. To heal his wounds, he tries to keepmoving, knowing that he’ll never escapethe past:

And I hear her name here and thereAs I go from town to town.

He recognises that his failure to acceptthat times have changed is a weakness:

And I’ve never gotten used to it,I’ve just learned to turn it off.Either I’m too sensitiveOr else I’m gettin’ soft.

For the woman, it is time to change, toembrace the possibilities of the future; shewill be moving forward, not ‘passing backthis way’. Things are now moving morequickly for her, something the narratorrecognises:

Tell her she can look me upIf she’s got the time.

The narrator tries to step outside thechanges and just watch the river flow.However, this stasis is no longer relaxingbecause it means he just wallows inpainful memories. He no longer celebratesthe fact that time passes slowly:

Say for me that I’m all rightThough things get kind of slow.

After the swift changes, there is toomuch time to study the wreckage. A

similar idea would crop up years later in‘Standing In The Doorway’:

Yesterday, everything was going too fast.Today, it’s moving too slow.

In some songs, the narrator lives indifferent time frames simultaneously.‘You’re Gonna Make Me LonesomeWhen You Go’ is sung in the present,but it looks back to past pleasure andanticipates future pain. The song is astream of consciousness: the narratorsees ‘flowers on the hillside bloomin’crazy’ while remembering when lifehad ‘never been so easy or so slow’and anticipates when ‘you’re gonnamake me lonesome when you go’.

This song is about Ellen Bernstein,14

Dylan’s then girlfriend. She has noted howthe chaos in Dylan’s life at that timespurred him to such creative heights:

I think that he’s always in somemeasure of pain, being that creative.That kind of artistic genius goes hand-in-hand with demons.15

In the past, time was a ‘blue riverrunning slow and lazy’, time passing slowlyup there in the mountains. The narratorbelieved that time could not interfere withhis happiness:

I could stay with you foreverAnd never realise the time.

Although the narrator can see the painthat’s coming, he can’t prevent it. He seeshis future suffering as part of a historical

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cycle, the inevitable destruction wroughtby time:

Situations have ended sad,Relationships have all been bad,Mine’ve been like Verlaine’s andRimbaud.

As the future becomes more certain,the past begins to lose some of its glossand become riddled with doubt: ‘Can’tremember what I was thinking of.’ Pastcontentment is now seen as illusory. Ofcourse, the past will become part of thefuture for the narrator: ‘I’ll see you in theclouds above.’ She’ll continue to live insideof him.

The changes will be violent, hitting thenarrator ‘from below’. However, they’ll befollowed by a chance for the narrator to re-examine the past,to deconstruct all the illusions:

You’re gonna make me wonder whatI’m doin’,Stayin’ far behind without you.Yer gonna make me wonder what I’msayin’.Yer gonna make me give myself a goodtalkin’ to.

The reason why changes seem sosudden in these songs is because thenarrator is often blind to the subtlechanges a lover goes through over time.When the revelation finally comes, as in‘You’re a Big Girl Now’, it’s a painfulshock:

Our conversation was short and sweet,It nearly swept me off-a my feet.

When faced with how much thingshave really changed, the narrator initiallyrefuses to face facts:

A change in the weather is known to beextreme,But what’s the sense of changing horsesin midstream?

This offers a sharp contrast to thenarrator in ‘Just Like a Woman’:

I just can’t fit.Yes, I believe it’s time for us to quit.When we meet again,Introduced as friends,Please don’t let on that you knew mewhen I was hungry and it was your world.

Now, the narrator is not so eager tocast aside the past:

Time is a jet plane, it moves too fast.Oh, but what a shame, if all we’veshared can’t last.

In these songs, the characters are oftenreluctant to admit they’ve reached the endof the journey:

She turned around to look at meAs I was walkin’ away.I heard her say over my shoulder‘We’ll meet again some dayOn the avenue.’

A few years later, Dylan is more real-istic about the chances of these happyreunions:

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It’d be great to cross pathsIn a day and a half.Look at each other and laugh.But I don’t think it’s liable to happen.

There are other echoes to ‘Just Like aWoman’ in ‘You’re a Big Girl Now’. In theBlonde On Blonde song, the narrator has to‘stand inside the rain’. In the Blood On TheTracks song, the narrator is ‘back in therain’, no longer sheltered from the storm.

He finally swears that he can change,but it’s too late. The present is only under-stood when the past is examined in retro-spect. The changes are only seen asinevitable in hindsight. In the past, heblinded himself to the changes that werehappening around him. In his desperationto perpetuate his happy state, he’dforgotten the old advice to Ramona:

Everything passes, everything changes,Just do what you think you should do.

He now has learnt the lesson and mustpay the price. He must relive the pain againand again, like a corkscrew to the heart.

However, sudden changes don’t alwayslead to acceptance of guilt. They can alsoinspire venomous anger. In ‘Ballad in PlainD’, Dylan’s anger at love’s changes led to apainfully autobiographical song. Thistime, in ‘Idiot Wind’, he hides behind thepersona of a man who may have shot Grayand took his wife to Italy:

I thought I might have gone a little bittoo far with ‘Idiot Wind’. I might havechanged some of it. I didn’t really thinkI was giving away too much; I thought

that it seemed so personal that peoplewould think it was about so-and-sowho was close to me… But I’m notgoing to make an album and lean on amarriage relationship. There’s no way Iwould do that, anymore than I wouldwrite an album about some lawyer’sbattles that I had.16

However, as the furious catharsisunfolds, the mask breaks down and thesong becomes more direct:

Even you, yesterday,You had to ask me where it was at.

The problem is that it was the narratorwho did not know where it was at. Heneeded a fortune teller to tell him what heshould have known: ‘Beware of lightningthat might strike.’

In many Dylan songs, wind is a symbolof change, a purging agent that sweepsaway the pretence of the past. All answersto the problems of the present are blowingin the winds of change. In ‘All Along theWatchtower’, some people are ready for theapocalyptic wind, as the princes keep theview. The thief knows that the wind isgoing to blow away falsehood and deceit,all the jokes that people play, and revealthe truth:

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.

The idiot wind is also a symbol of change.However, this is no benign purification, but

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reckless destruction. Unlike the othersongs, this song takes place within thestorm, rather than in the calm, emptyaftermath. We get current confusion,rather than future understanding:

Well, it’s bloodletting, it’s what heals alldisease. Neither aggression nor angerinterests me. Violence only does on aninterpretative level, only when it’s aproduct of reason. People are attractedto blood. I’m personally not consumedby the desire to drink the blood. Butbloodletting is meaningful in that it cancure disease.17

The contentment of previous times istorn asunder and becomes a rapidlyfading memory:

I haven’t known peace and quiet forso long I can’t remember what it’slike.

In time, he’ll be able to engage inwistful reminiscences. For now, he canonly look back in anger and look venge-fully into the future:

One day, you’ll be in the ditch,Flies buzzin’ around your eyes,Blood on your saddle.

As illusions crumble, anger leads toself-loathing: ‘We are idiots, babe.’ Thepantomime is over and people no longerknow how to act. True faces are revealed asmasks are cast aside. Once upon a time,Dylan gleefully tore away the masks thatpeople hid behind:

You’ve got a lot of nerveTo say you are my friend.When I was down You just stood there grinning.

The tearing off of masks now leads toangry bewilderment:

I can’t remember your face anymoreYour mouth has changed, your eyesdon’t look into mine.

Actually, the narrators sometimes seethemselves as being somehow differentfrom the other characters because, unlikethe other characters, they don’t change.They retain their identity. This is hinted atin ‘Idiot Wind’ and also in ‘Buckets of Rain’:

I seen pretty people disappear likesmoke.Friends will arrive, friends will disappear.If you want me, honey baby,I’ll be here.

Soon after the album was released,Dylan would see that such changes are anatural and essential part of life:

A person’s body chemistry changesevery seven years. No one on Earth isthe same now as he was seven years ago,or will be seven years from today. Itdoesn’t take a whole lot of brains toknow that if you don’t grow, you die.You have to burst out; you have to findthe sunlight.18

In a later song, Dylan would see theadvantage of these changes:

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You don’t have to be afraid of lookinginto my face.We’ve done nothing to each other timewill not erase.

Back in the idiot wind, the narratorrealises that the previous calm was the lullbefore the storms of change, what Dylanonce called the ‘stillness in the wind/ Beforethe hurricane begins’. Time will ultimatelydestroy everything that it has built:

It was gravity which pulled us down,And destiny which broke us apart.

It is not enough to simply blame destinyfor all the problems, but, for the narrator, thatwill do for now. The song is a catharsis, aprimal howl releasing all the pent-up fury. Lifeis seen as being idiotic - ‘everything’s a littleupside down’ - and these events are merelysymptoms of that idiocy.Spurious blame givesa momentary sense of resolution:

Now I’m finally free.

However, the narrator knows that anysense of freedom will be fleeting:

I followed you beneath the starshounded by your memoryAnd all your ragin’ glory.

‘Shelter from the Storm’ provides anantidote to the poison of ‘Idiot Wind’, justas on earlier albums ‘Girl from the NorthCountry’ provided an antidote to ‘Don’tThink Twice, It’s All Right’, and ‘I Don’tBelieve You’ reversed the sentiments of ‘ItAin’t Me, Babe’.

At a concert in Paris in July, 1978, Dylanintroduced this song as ‘l’histoire de ma vie’,the story of his life. The story is told, asusual,through a series of vivid memories,asbrief images from the past mingle withscenes and thoughts from the present. Thenarrator is aware of the random, unpre-dictable nature of time, so he presents hisstory in a random, unpredictable form; theverses could be sung in practically anyorder.

The song looks back to a time before theidiot wind, when the relationship was in itsinfancy. How distant that ‘long-forgottenmorn’ seems now. Their meeting has takenon an almost mythic status.Similar to ‘Like aRolling Stone’,the song opens like a fairy tale:

’Twas in another lifetime.

This time, the narrator is able toacknowledge that his lover saved him fromthe chaos, the ‘storm’, of his earlier days:

I came in from the wilderness,a creature void of form.‘Come in,’ she said, ‘I’ll give youshelter from the storm.’

Years later, Dylan would still be acutelyaware of how dangerous his lifestyle was inthe 1960s:

I couldn’t go on doing what I had been. Iwas pretty wound up before that accidenthappened. It set me down so I could seethings in better perspective. I wasn’tseeing anything in any kind of perspec-tive. I probably would have died if I hadkept on going the way I had been.19

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The woman’s love was a haven of tran-quility in a world populated by ‘steel-eyeddeath’ and ‘the one-eyed undertaker’ (bothstern images of time’s destruction); it wasa ‘place where it’s always safe and warm’.

The song echoes some of Dylan’s‘domestic songs’:

If not for youMy sky would fall,Rain would gather too.Without your love I’d be nowhere at all,I’d be lost if not for you.

His lover protected him from thestorm outside, sheltered him from thechaos of his earlier life. Indeed, her arrivalmarked a breaking away from the earlierlife:

Everything up to that point had beenleft unresolved.

This is not a memory to be dismissedin the fury of the moment, an experiencedenounced as worthless. The narrator cansee what has been lost. The sky has fallenand rain has gathered, leaving the narratordesperately trying to reclaim the past:

If I could only turn back the clock towhen God and her were born.

He knows his mistakes and would tryto rectify them, if only he could relive the past:

And if I pass this way again, you canrest assuredI’ll always do my best for her, on that Igive my word.

However, he cannot relive the past andmust now accept his own failure to keeptrack of the changing times:

Now there’s a wall between us, some-thin’ there’s been lostI took too much for granted, got mysignals crossed.

Dylan would later realise that relivingthe past requires more powers than he’scapable of mustering:

I wish I was a magician.I would wave a wandAnd tie back the bondThat we’ve both gone beyond.

Like Miss Lonely, he never turnedaround to see the frowns. The one-eyedundertaker blows his horn, warning howfutile it is to hope for permanence in aworld of transience. Everything passesaway and only time lasts forever:

But nothing really matters much, it’sdoom alone that counts.

In Blood On The Tracks, figures of timeand death often merge. The presence ofdeath, the one-eyed undertaker, reminds usof our mortality, of how fleeting our timereally is. A fundamental change in life isoften seen as the death of an era (‘and some-thing inside of him died’). One of thediscarded songs on the album was called‘Belltower Blues’,20 presumably an earlyversion of ‘Call Letter Blues’. Dylan wouldreturn to the image of the bells of mortalityover the years, most recently in ‘Moonlight’:

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For whom does the bell toll for, love?It tolls for you and me.

The omnipresence of death has been arecurring theme with Dylan from hisearliest days:

Don’cha know, everybody dies. Itdoesn’t matter how important youthink you are. Look at Shakespeare,Napoleon, Edgar Allan Poe, for thatmatter. They are all dead, right?21

In Dont Look Back, Dylan was quiteeloquent on the subject:

I’m saying that you’re going to die, andyou’re gonna go off the earth, you’regonna be dead. Man, it could be, youknow, twenty years, it could betomorrow; any time. So am I … Allright: now you do your job in the face ofthat and how seriously you take your-self, you decide for yourself.22

‘Buckets of Rain’ includes a whimsicalway to deal with this:

Life is sad,Life is a bust.All ya can do is do what you must.

Sometimes, Dylan’s thoughts on thesubject were a bit weirder:

Did you ever clip your toenails, cut yourhair? Then you experience death.23

In 2001, his world view was as light-hearted as ever:

Obviously everything must finish. Thatwhich ties everything together andwhich makes everyone equal is ourmortality. Everything must come to anend.24

In Masked And Anonymous, Jack Fateoffers a concise analysis of the relationshipbetween time and death:

All of us in some way are trying to killtime. When it’s all said and done, timeends up killing us.25

In a world where time kills everything,memories become more precious, as thenarrator of ‘Up to Me’ realises:

Death kept followin’, trackin’ us down,at least I heard your bluebird sing.

You have to cling on to any preciousmemories, because ‘time is an enemy’. Therelentless march of time is alluded to againand again in the album through images ofwind, rain, and hail. Shelton notes howDylan ‘uses natural elements to describehis tempest-tossed mood’.26

In ‘Up to Me’, the narrator believes thatthe only response is to try to keep up withthe march:

One of us has got to hit the road,I guess it must be up to me.

He can try to follow his lover’s trail,but the Union Central has already startedpulling out. He now sees that things havechanged, something he wasn’t alwaysprepared to do:

Judas!

I’d just about convinced myself thatnothin’ had changed that much.

Life changes suddenly and unpre-dictably. All you can do is play your cards,never knowing what your next hand willbe. Many people bluff: they hide their inse-curities behind icy masks of confidence.But the bluff can’t be played forever:

So go on, boys, play your hands,life is a pantomime.

Eventually, the clowns start frowningand the joker cries out: ‘There must be someway out of here!’ The great emperor todaybecomes ‘Napoleon in rags’ tomorrow.

Blood On The Tracks contains its ownpantomime about the nature of time, ‘Lily,Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts’.Whereas the other songs are like paintings,this song is like a movie, an art form Dylanis very familiar with:

A movie is something that gives theillusion of stopping time. You go some-place and you sit there for a while.You’re looking at something. You’retrapped. It’s all happening in yourbrain and it seems like nothing else isgoing on in the world. Time hasstopped. The world could be coming toan end outside, but for you time hasstopped.27

The song is another meditation on thenature of time and love. Any love that everexisted between Jim and Rosemary hasbeen replaced by pretence, a publicpantomime with ‘every hair in place’.

However, trouble lurks in the shadows:

But just beyond the door, he felt jeal-ousy and fear.

In the course of the song, the masksand dresses will be torn off; the festival isover and people will reveal their true char-acter. There is no need to hide any morebecause the curfew has been lifted.Something in the air awakens everyone’srepressed fears:

Anyone with any sense had already lefttown.

The Jack of Hearts is the catalyst, theone who reminds people of all those feel-ings they had hidden beneath the grease-paint: ‘I know I’ve seen that face before.’

Gambling motifs abound: thegambling wheel has been shut down, butthe women play five-card stud by the stair.People continue to bluff, trying to ignoretheir nagging insecurities:

‘ “There’s something funny going on,”he said, “I can just feel it in the air.” ’

Backstage in everyone’s minds, once-forgotten memories are stirring: Lilyremembers her ‘strange affairs with menin every walk of life’; Big Jim is thinkingabout his time down in Mexico; Rosemaryis looking back on all the ‘bad things’ thatshe has done. Time blurs as memoriesmingle with anticipation:

She was gazin’ to the future, riding onthe Jack of Hearts.

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Judas!

The pretence continues: false eyelashesflutter; a brand new coat of paint is applied;a leading actor hurries by. However, as thenight proceeds, the masks begin to disinte-grate. Lily throws off her dress and takes thedye out of her hair. Rosemary sees her trueself reflected in the knife. When the lightsdim, all the false scenery vanishes and Jimmust face his enemy, time:

But then the crowd began to stamptheir feet and the house lights did dim,And in the darkness of the room therewas only Jim and him.

The scenery blurs into confusion.Rosemary and the hanging judge getdrunk. No one seems to know what timethe show will begin. When it finally starts,everyone is caught off guard:

No one knew the circumstance but theysay that it happened pretty quick.

The narrative, like time, marchesrelentlessly on: someone tries to shootthe Jack of Hearts (literally trying tokill time), but the revolver clicks;someone stabs Big Jim; Rosemary is onthe gallows. The confusion of the nightbefore cuts to the harsh clarity of themorning after: the hanging judge isnow sober.

The cabaret is over; the bank safehas been cleaned out. Those whoremain survey the wreckage, puttingup ‘Closed for repair’ signs. Like thenarrators in the other songs, Lily is leftbehind, alone, haunted by randommemories:

She was thinkin’ ’bout her father, whoshe very rarely saw,Thinkin’ ’bout Rosemary and thinkin’about the law.But most of all she was thinkin’ ’boutthe Jack of Hearts.

There is a profoundly different sense oftime on this album than on previous ones.Since John Wesley Harding, Dylan’s albumshad had, by and large, a relaxed feel tothem, a sense that time was standing still,or at most flowing ‘slow and lazy’. BloodOn The Tracks tries to face head-on thefact that time ‘moves too fast’, that every-thing is transient and unpredictable. In the1980s, Dylan would continue to feel leftbehind by time:

The thing I really notice now is time.Things used to go a lot slower. Thesedays now go by so very fast.28

Narrator after narrator is left reeling asthe slow train of time suddenly becomes ajet plane. Time leaves them all behind:

I would have followed you in the doorbut I didn’t have a ticket stub.

On Blonde On Blonde, Dylan sang:

Then time will tell just who has fellAnd who’s been left behind.

Being left behind, each narrator looksback on the past with hindsight eyes. Theyrealised that they had allowed themselvesto be lulled into a false sense of security,that what seemed permanent was just a

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mask, an illusion. Everyone was just hidingtheir fear of life’s fundamental transience.In ‘Abandoned Love’, Dylan would sing:

Everybody’s wearing a disguiseTo hide what they’ve got left behindtheir eyes.

In ‘Up to Me’, a song that was signifi-cantly left off the album, Dylan throws offthe disguise:

And if we never meet again, baby,remember me,How my lone guitar played sweet foryou that old-time melody.And the harmonica around my neck, Iblew it for you, free,No one else could play that tune,You knew it was up to me.

Dylan too must have looked back onthose long-gone days when a thin, ghost-like figure stumbled alone on to the stagewith his guitar and harmonica, confi-dently announcing that the answer wasjust blowin’ in the wind, that the ship wascoming in, that the times were a-changin’.He could tap into the rapid beat of time,predict its changes. To some, he almostseemed like a prophet, gifted to ring in thechanges that only he was aware of: ‘No oneelse could play that tune.’ And, of course,that persona was just another disguise:

I didn’t create Bob Dylan. Bob Dylanhas always been here … always was.When I was a child there was BobDylan. And before I was born, there wasBob Dylan.29

On the 1960s’ albums, Dylan oftenlooked forward to the future. On thisalbum, he looks to the past, the lost timethat can’t be found again. By 1976,Dylan would already be changing hismessage:

The past doesn’t exist. For me, there’sthe next song, the next poem, the nextperformance.30

In 2003, Dylan argued that his songstry to tap into the present, not the past:

I’m always trying to stay right square inthe moment, I don’t want to getnostalgic or narcissistic as a writer or aperson. I think successful people don’tdwell on the past. I think only losers do.31

The album is a lament to times past, ameditation on the woman who went awayfrom his window and lived at her ownchosen speed. He finds himself bewilderedas masks fall away all around him. Thissame stupefied confusion and despairpermeated the otherwise playful ‘I Don’tBelieve You’:

I can’t understand,She let go of my handAn’ left me here facing the wall.I’d sure like t’ knowWhy she did go,But I can’t get close t’ her at all.

On Blood On The Tracks, Dylan isonce again aware of the rapid currents of time. ‘Call Letter Blues’, another out-take song, contains the following lines:

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65

Well, I walked all night longListenin’ to them church bells tone.

However, the more he listens to time,the harder it becomes to understand. In‘Meet Me in the Morning’, he finds himselflost in a timeless zone:

They say the darkest hour is right beforethe dawn.But you wouldn’t know it by me Every day’s been darkness since youbeen gone.

In this darkness, time disintegrates.Events are not presented in chronologicalorder; they become a random series ofmemories and musings. Past, present, andfuture intermingle as time becomes tangledup.A fictional past is peppered with the realemotions hidden beneath the mask.

Certain themes recur in Dylan’s songsover the years: love; identity; freedom;justice; God; authority; apocalypse; andblondes.The theme of time was there on hisvery first album and has been a continuousthread ever since. Soon after Blood On TheTracks, Dylan offered a surreal rewriting ofhis most famous anthem about time:

Eden is burning, either brace yourselffor eliminationOr else your hearts must have thecourage for the changing of the guards.

By the end of the 1970s, Dylan wasdealing with the fundamental transienceof existence by embracing fundamentalistChristianity, by seeing all the chaos as partof God’s ‘perfect finished plan’, a relentless

march to apocalyptic judgement. In the1980s and 1990s, his writing portrayed aconstant struggle to come to terms with aworld gone wrong, as time continued towreak havoc. By 2000, he would adapt amuch more stoic reaction to time’s unpre-dictability:

People are crazy and times are strange.I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range.I used to care, but things have changed.

Dylan is as contradictory and unpre-dictable as the world he writes about. TimeOut Of Mind offered a predominantly(though not entirely) bleak insight intothe mind of someone who appeared to beirreversibly out of touch with hissurroundings: ‘I’ve got new eyes, every-thing looks far away.’ Then the irresistiblevaudevillian verve of “Love And Theft” wasunleashed in 2001. Despite all the highwater and lonesome days, that albumpresented a man relishing the challengeslife was flinging at him as his time grewshorter: ‘Feel like a fighting rooster, feelbetter than I ever felt.’

In his next album, we might find anentirely new analysis of these themes.

Only time will tell.

Notes1. Clinton Heylin, Bob Dylan Behind The Shades

Take Two, Penguin Books (2001), p. 372 2. Robert Shelton, No Direction Home, Da Capo

(1997), p. 440 3. Paul Williams, Performing Artist 1974-1986,

Omnibus Press (1994 ), p. 234. Chicago Daily News, 27 November, 19655. Playboy, March, 19786. Rolling Stone, 22 November, 2001

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7. Los Angeles Times, 23 November, 19808. Rolling Stone, 16 November, 19789. Rolling Stone, 16 November, 1978 10. Bill Flanagan, Written On My Soul,

www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/85-mar.htm11. People Magazine, 10 November, 1975 12. Flanagan13. Heylin, p. 37314. Heylin, p. 37215. Heylin, p. 37116. Flanagan17. Rolling Stone, 16 November, 1978 18. TV Guide Magazine, 11 September, 197619. Rolling Stone, 16 January, 1986

20. Heylin, p. 37621. Village Voice, 3 March, 196522. Dont Look Back, Pennebaker Associates, Inc.

and Ashes and Sand, Inc. (1967)23. Playboy, March, 1978 24. Rome press conference, 23 July, 200125. Masked And Anonymous, BBC Films and

Marching Band Productions (2003)26. Shelton, p. 44327. Flanagan28. Los Angeles Times, 17 November, 198529. Rolling Stone, 16 November, 1978 30. TV Guide Magazine, 11 September, 197631. Los Angeles Times, 4 April, 2004

Charleston, South Carolina 17th Aug 2004

Judas!

Do Right To Me Baby (Do UntoOthers) - Rules and Regulations

The ‘Golden Rule’ – treat others as youwould like to be treated by them – is afundamental tenet of many religions andideologies. Early formulations can befound in Confucius as well as in Buddhistand Hindu writings. For many of us,however, the most well-known renditionsare to be found in the Bible, notablyMatthew 7:12 and Luke 6:31. Given theprominent place that the rule has occupiedin the history of our thinking, it is notsurprising that it forms an important partof our ‘conventional moral wisdom’. Therule represents a spirit of impartiality andfairness – acting morally means that onedoes not give more importance to one’sown desires and wishes than to those ofothers.

Nevertheless, the rule is not undis-puted among philosophers. It has beenquestioned whether it can indeed serve asa moral criterion. If we see the rule assome form of consistency test, then it isnot clear that it can serve as a test for themorality of our acts. After all, a wickedman can also be consistent in thedescribed way. Take, for instance, a foot-ball hooligan who is always willing to take

up a fight with the supporters of other

football teams. He may well wish – and

many hooligans will probably indeed wish

– that the supporters of the other teams

will also be willing to fight with them at

any given moment. Thus, he acts in a way

towards others as he would also like to be

treated by them. Yet we would be reluctant

to say that the action is permissible

because it accords with the Golden Rule.

Passing the test is therefore not suffi-

cient for an act to be moral, and the

Golden Rule thus cannot be the ultimate

foundation of all of our moral principles:

we need extra criteria for the assessment of

an action’s moral quality. In fact, passing

the Golden Rule need not even be neces-

sary for an act to be moral. Drawing on an

argument that the nineteenth century

philosopher Kant formulated against the

rule, suppose a criminal is being convicted

by a judge to several years of imprison-

ment. Couldn’t he object to the imprison-

ment by asking whether the judge himself

would like to be imprisoned? If the judge

answers negatively, his verdict would break

the Golden Rule.

At a first hearing, ‘Do Right To Me

Baby (Do Unto Others)’ seems to form a

straightforward embracing of the Golden

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PhilosophicalReflections

by Martin van Hees

Judas!

Rule. By describing in each of the versesspecific ways – some of them rather funny– in which the singer does not want to betreated by others, it gives substance andthus a concrete meaning to an abstractprinciple. The lyrics do not defend therule, although the invocation of theGolden Rule in the chorus, and the title ofthe song itself, shows that it is embracedby the singer. The song thus fits naturallyon an album of gospel songs. On the onehand, it gives substance and meaning to acore principle of Christian thinking. Onthe other hand, just like gospel songs ingeneral jubilate rather than defend aparticular religious point of view, the songdoes not so much argue for the principleas give witness of the singer’s acceptanceof it.

As is often the case with Dylan,however, things are not as straightforwardas they seem. Take the song’s chorus:

But if you do right to me, baby,I’ll do right to you, too.Ya got to do unto othersLike you’d have them, like you’d havethem, do unto you

Whereas the last two lines simply seemto embrace the Golden Rule, the first twolines of the chorus give a twist to it. Thoseinitial lines make clear that the GoldenRule as embraced here doesn’t apply toany sort of act – contrary to the standardversion – but only to those that are right,that is, acts that we are morally permittedto perform. But that means that inapplying the Golden Rule the singeralready knows what the morally rightthing to do is. Hence ‘Dylan’s version’ of

the Golden Rule is not supposed to formthe basis of our morality, and the above-described philosophical problems there-fore do not apply.

That a moral view is already presup-posed is also illustrated by the fact theemphasis in the verses is not so much onwhat the singer expects from others, buton what he considers to be right himself.Each verse contains four lines, three ofwhich describe a particular way in whichthe singer does not want to treat others.Although the second part of each of thoselines make clear that the singer does notwant to be treated by others in that wayeither, those remarks are added (and sung)as almost an afterthought. What the singerwants others to do to him seems to be aconsequence of what he believes is right,and the order is thus the opposite of whatone would expect from an application ofthe Golden Rule. Moreover, the existenceof an independent moral stance of thesinger is emphasised by the fact that eachverse contains exactly one line that is atodds with the pattern of the other threelines. They make an unconditional state-ment about what the singer wants – astatement that does not refer at all to theactions of others.

If we thus shift our attention awayfrom the last two lines of the chorus, thesong turns out not to be so much aboutembracing the Golden Rule, but insteadforms a description and celebration of thesinger’s moral stance. That moral stanceprecedes and affects the Golden Rule, andthus enables the application of that rulewithout falling into the philosophicalpitfalls described.

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The following night saw me at anotherIrish pub, this time however, I chose O’Reilly’s on the Place de la Bourse. Themain reason for the new bar was that Iwanted to avoid Derek just in case he hadrealised the full extent of his poor decisionand was looking for me in Celtica to gethis tickets back. At least he can tell hisgrandchildren that he gave up the chanceof seeing one of the most famous figuresin the history of music to watch somedonkey pretending to be Phil Lynott. Ialready had my own ticket for the showbut it is possible that the Canadian wouldbe sans billet when he arrived; even if hewasn’t, there were always people wantingtickets. Unless, of course, the gig happenedto be in Innsbruck.

It had felt like a lifetime since I had lastseen Dylan even though I had only actu-ally missed the one show, at theOberhausen Arena in Germany. Of course,although I was sipping a pint in theBelgian pub, my mind was in Germanyand the gig that I was missing. I was ratherpleased in a selfish sort of way that therewas nothing too outrageous or interesting

in the set-list, when I checked it afterwardson the website. The Canadian would prob-ably report back with tales of ‘Hurricane’,‘Restless Farewell’ and ‘Moonshiner’ but inreality, ‘Every Grain of Sand’ and ‘You’re ABig Girl, Now’ were as interesting as it got,on paper at least.

The Forest National is one of thosevenues that, once you have been there acouple of times, you can guess what sort ofevening you are in for by the seatingarrangement in the auditorium. It hasthose rows of removable seating and I wasmore than happy to notice that tonight,most of them had been taken away. Insuch venues, this tends to indicate that thetickets have sold well as the removal of theseats means that there is more standingroom and consequently, an increasedcapacity. My previous visits to the ForestNational, in 1998 and 2000 were mixedaffairs. The 1998 show was one of my firstconcerts outside of the UK and I put themuted atmosphere down to the possibilitythat the continent audiences were perhapsless fanatical than the British ones.Subsequent shows have proved this not tobe the case but the only thing I canremember from that first Brussels show(aside from an excellent ‘Ballad of HollisBrown’) was that nobody in the audience

Red, White and BlueShoe Strings - IV

by Andrew Davies

Brussels 28/4/2002

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70

seemed to moved an inch all night,making me feel uncomfortable when I wastrying to get excited about the occasion.The October 2nd, 2000 show was sand-wiched in between two trips to the UK andwas a rousing evening, like much of thatparticular leg of the Never Ending Tour. Itcould have been my new care free, I’m-going-to-enjoy-myself-whether-you-like-it-or-not attitude combined with anoticeable resurgence in Dylan perform-ance quality that made it a special nightbut the audience was enthusiastic and farmore inspired than two years earlier.Besides, we also got ‘Tell Me That It Isn’tTrue’ and ‘Seeing The Real You At Last’.

On this, my third trip, the bandopened with a bouncy version of theyouthful sounding ‘Hallelujah, I’m ReadyTo Go’. It was fantastic but it was thesecond song that put us all in Bob’s pocket,a place where we remained for the rest ofthe evening. Two years ago, Bob missed theopportunity to play ‘Highlands’ inAberdeen and as if alerted to the lostchance, attempted to make amends byrunning through it the following night inGlasgow. No such mistake was madetonight, thankfully, and Bob followed thestimulating opener with a song that waswritten to be played in Brussels, ‘When IPaint My Masterpiece’. Those who arecynical enough to be of the opinion thatmentioning the word Brussels in a song isnot reason enough to make it being playedin the city a special moment were clearlynot in the hall. The extended version sawthe verse in question being played twice,on both occasions huge cheers met thenews that Bob left Rome and flew into

Brussels. Dylan, obviously enjoying thereaction, kept up the showmanship andthrew in another random Brussels thathad the audience in fits. This simple pieceof cabaret was the moment of the wholetour for me and even future listening ofCD bootlegs of the show would continueto warm the heart. This spectacle wasfollowed with ‘If You See Her, Say Hello’,‘Moonlight’, ‘I Believe In You’ and ‘LoveSick’. Also worth a mention is ‘Knockin’On Heaven’s Door’, the opening chordshad me groaning in negative anticipationbut, following a make-over that involvessome serious Charlie and Larry vocalassistance, never have I heard such aninspired version.

The Canadian had arrived earlier inthe day with his friend Mel, another fromhis homeland, who now lived in Zurich. Ithadn’t occurred to me that Mel might notactually be a man and although nobodycould ever accuse her of being lady, shewas definitely a female, of sorts. I rackedmy brains to find the most appropriateword to describe her without being overlyoffensive or unkind; the best I could comeup with was butch. Her arms were biggerthan both my legs and she had a perma-nent scowl on her face that reminded meof the short, fat, green guard that met LukeSkywalker at the gates of Jabba’s place inThe Return Of The Jedi. The upsettingimage of her in bed with the skinnyCanadian flashed through my mind andforced me to try and erase it with tequila.However, in fairness, she had beenpleasant enough to me earlier and wasgrateful that I had managed to get her aticket for what was (along with my missed

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71

German show) to be one of her two stopson the tour. Clearly, she had to get back toterrorising the people of Zurich. After theshow, I took the odd couple to Celtica,where I was half hoping to meet journalistDerek. I had no idea of predicting whatwas actually going to happen.

Once again, the bar was busy and theupstairs dance floor was packed withdrunken but jubilant Dylan fans. Themassive bouncers on the door let us in freeof charge; possibly either because theyrecognised me from the other night orthey were terrified of asking Mel formoney. Not that she would have hadmuch, the amount I charged her for theticket. We had been there for an hour or soand had been joined by a couple fromLondon, Michael and Pamela Hurst, whowere Dylan fans living in Brussels. TheCanadian took the opportunity to inflicthis various opinions on the new company,leaving me to talk with the woman. Shewas sinking her pints like a trooper and Iwas drunk enough to have a few sly swipesat her but, probably in my favour, shewasn’t really listening to me. Her gaze wasaiming straight over me and was fixed onsomebody near the bar. I thought at firstthat there was somebody in sight that Melfancied but the stare was more like thekind that comes on bouncers when theirweighing up whether or not to wade into abrawl. Besides, I didn’t have Mel down asthe sort to stare longingly; if there wassomeone she wanted, she would probablyjust go and mercilessly take, the poor blokewould be powerless. The whole idea mademe rue my earlier shower.

Pissed off with being ignored, I turned

around to see what exactly was keepingher attention. My stomach turned overwhen I saw who it was: the member of theGerman fan club who was carrying Normin Frankfurt before the police frightenedhim away. The reason for my malaise wasnot so much that the guy was here,although I could have done without it, butmore because I could guess why Mel wasbehaving in this way. My theory was this:The bloody Canadian had fed his chunkyfriend an inflated version of the Frankfurtincident and his part in it, no doubtplaying up his Ruben Carter role. TheGerman was probably at the previousshow and got pointed out to Mel by theCanadian, from a safe distance, of course.Now, in the bar, fuelled by the Canadian’shyperbole, bucket loads of Guinness andmore testosterone than all the bulls inBelgium could muster between them, shemarched over to the member of theGerman fan club, squared right up to himand before he knew what was happening,head butted the boy smack in the face. Hewent down right away in a mess of bloodand I was half expecting an all-encom-passing fight to spark off but amazingly, itdidn’t ignite. Most people didn’t knowwhether to run away screaming or laughbut she put up some insane and enter-taining resistance to the bouncers whoreluctantly stepped in to remove her fromthe club. The Canadian hastily followedher out into the Brussels night with wordsthat he would see me for tomorrowsjourney to Paris after he saw her safely onthe plane to Switzerland. I never saw heragain and not a single tear was shed on thesubject either.

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72

There were crazy things going on rightacross Europe. Every day, the news seemedto be showing yet more headlines aboutIsrael’s bloody conflict with Palestine inthe east and there was the worrying busi-ness of a growing support for the right inthe west, a phenomenon that manifesteditself with the unforeseen democraticsuccess in the first round of the Frenchpresidential election of the underesti-mated Jean-Marie Le Pen. Paris was to bethe Never Ending Tour’s next stop.

When I met the Canadian at the trainstation to catch the express into France, hisgeneral appearance was edging on thepoor side. In fact, he looked like he’d beenattacked by a dog. The bags under his eyeswere painful-looking dark affairs and hisbrittle, exhausted body was having anawful time keeping the rucksack up off thefloor. He told me that he had no sleep andhad just been to the airport to see thelovely Mel onto the plane before rushingback into town to catch the train. I pointedout to him that he could have flown intoParis seeing as he was at the airportanyway but my suggestion was met withan unnecessary bit of scorn. He may havebeen tired but I told him that if his sharp-ness towards me was to continue then assoon as we got to Paris, I would secure himto his rucksack and dump him at thebottom of the Seine. As for me, I was ingood shape. Give or take a violent Canadianfemale, Brussels had been a huge successfor me both musically and financially and

I was very sorry when the time came toleave.

I was, by this point, really getting intothe swing of the tour. I was still enjoyingthe shows and having an excellent timegetting involved in the culture thatsurrounded them. Loathed, as I was toleave Belgium, I was very much lookingforward to getting to Paris and was eagerto arrive. The Canadian and self foundsome seats in the centre carriage andparked ourselves down. The boy was stillin a whining mood but, to his credit,produced a bottle half full of bourbon anda couple of plastic cups as soon as westarted moving. As happy as I was withthis, I was even happier when he fell asleepleaving me to the whiskey and the journeyin peace.

With the journey enhanced by theWembley Arena show from October 6th,2000, on my mini disc player, we rolledinto the Gare du Nord in what seemed likeno time at all. That night at Wembley (thesecond of two) was another one thatcontinues to stick in my mind for all sortsof reasons. It was a Friday night (the nightprior to the last football match at theneighbouring stadium before they pulledit down) and I remember it mainlybecause I was standing right next toRonnie Wood, who spent the eveningblatantly ignoring the venue’s No-Smoking policy. Bob was on sparklingform that night, even in the famously badvenue, and throughout ‘Like a RollingStone’, all I wanted to do was turn toWood, point at the stage and say:

‘That’s how it’s done, Junior!’

Paris 30/4/2002

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73

Obviously, not wanting to make anenemy of Ron, I resisted the urge but atleast Wood seemed to be enjoyinghimself, something that cannot be said ofa lot of the audience. I was surprised anddisappointed to see that so many of themiserable-faced lumps of meat that hadstood for two and a half hours theprevious night with their arms foldedwere there again. I had stood in line withsome South African students who were inEngland during a gap year in theirstudies. There was immense energycoming from them and their excitementelevated mine all out of proportion. Theytold me that they were living and workingat some tourist resort in the New Forestand had spent nearly all of the littlemoney they had earned getting toWembley to see Bob. I didn’t have theheart to tell them that they could havegone to Portsmouth. After the concert,some bright spark thought it would be agood idea to close down Wembley Parktube station, resulting in six thousandpeople and me making for WembleyCentral, which, on a freezing Octobernight that threatened rain, seemed like itwas a continent away.

I spent my first Parisian afternoondoing the whole tourist thing as I had neverbeen to the French capital before now. Thetraffic in the centre of town was incredibleand the noise from the cars was drownedout, only by the shouting of those drivingthem. I made a mental note to never bringa car into Paris. The dubious guidebookthat I had borrowed from the sleepingCanadian was little help so I soon aban-doned it in favour of my own instincts.

The girl at the information place told methat Paris was the place where lovers offood, wine, art and music flock to taste theexquisite flavours of the city that justifi-ably holds the title of the capital of style.She rattled the sentence off in style and itmade me think that her previous job hadto have been at Strasbourg Station.

‘Are you here on holiday?’ she asked.‘In a way’, I replied, ‘I’m here to see BobDylan.’‘Is that a friend of yours?’

The two sets played by Dylan in Pariswere, as far as I was concerned, symbolic ofthe two rounds of voting in the French elec-tion: i.e. the first was worrying and thesecond, reassuring. The first night at leZenith, a pleasant venue that was seeminglypacked full of Britons, lacked whateverfactor it is that more than occasionallymakes Dylan’s concert performances trulyastonishing. The opening minute of ‘SheBelongs To Me’ at song number two wasenough to raise my hopes to an almightylevel but it fizzled out lamentably andunspectacularly.One of my favourite tunes,the prospect of hearing it done live wasconsiderably more exciting than actuallyhearing it being performed, especially inthis lacklustre manner. It was a pattern thatwas to continue through the evening, withthe exception of the accomplished offeringsfrom “Love And Theft”. So significantlysuperior were the performances of thesetracks that I wished that he had simplyplayed the whole album from start to finish,tagged on the obligatory ‘Blowin’ in theWind’ finale and called it a night.

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The following night, in front of analmost identical audience, the differencewas not so much obvious as it hit you overthe head with a shovel. Opening with ‘I AmThe Man,Thomas’as though a statement ofrediscovered confidence and self-belief,Bob delighted his flock with a similar showof entertainment to that he had given inBrussels. Once again, the reasons for themuch-improved performance are far moreelusive than simply the song selection but itcertainly helped. ‘She Belongs To Me’ hadbeen hastily replaced at two by a solid ‘IWant You’. At three these days, we eithertend to get ‘It’s Alright Ma’ or ‘DesolationRow’. The former sounded tired and slug-gish on the first night in Paris and wasthankfully replaced on night two. ‘It Ain’tMe Babe’ is another song that has beentreated both grandly and appallingly inconcert by Dylan in the past. If you arefortunate enough to come across any tapesof the fine readings of the song pulled out byDylan and The Hawkes in 1966 or a coupleof the best Rolling Thunder versions (morecaution advised here) then you’ll enjoy asgood a five minutes as Dylan has everprovided. Predictably though, on the otherside of the coin, I have recordings of it athome that would have you swearing andresorting to violence if you saw a band atyour local pub execute it with so little careand esteem. Fortunately, this version of thesong was closer to the first batch ofperformances than the second and the newacoustic arrangement,as much as you knewthat it really wasn’t true, did it’s best toconvince you that you were hearing thedefinitive version. It was refreshing to hearthe rowdy ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ open up

the electric section of the show, not becauseI had grown tired of ‘Solid Rock’ or‘Country Pie’ but because the song wasbecoming a bit of a predictable encorefixture. The tune also gave the guitarists thefirst opportunity of the night to getinvolved in the nightly competitive roundsof musical breaks. ‘Simple Twist of Fate’followed with continued confidence andclass; Blood On The Track’s most tendermoment receiving a suitably articulatevocal delivery from Bob. Once again it wasthe “Love And Theft” material that tookthings up to the next level, tonight in theshape of‘Lonesome Day Blues’and ‘Floater’.

The second batch of acoustic numberswere the killers that defined the wholeevening and their placing in the set after twoglorious rocking moments from “Love AndTheft” was an immaculate piece of plan-ning. ‘Fourth Time Around’ was the first ofthe three and featured Dylan’s best vocals ofthe night,he seemed completely involved inthe song as though he still stood by everyword and once again, the enhancedperformance quality was a clear conse-quence of Dylan’s complete attention.‘Visions Of Johanna’ is always a specialmoment even though it is possibly the onesong in Dylan’s catalogue that does notneed concert performance to help itbreathe, so majestic and elusive is therecording on Blonde On Blonde. It wasthough warm enough to have the wholearena on Bob’s side by its harp-assistedconclusion, a situation that was activelyconfirmed by a harmonious ‘Don’t ThinkTwice, It’s All Right’. It’s only now that Iwrite these notes do I notice the unusualabsence of ‘Tangled Up in Blue’.

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‘Summer Days’ and ‘Drifter’s Escape’raised the temperature in the hall again andadded to the stench of sweat throughout thefirst few rows. Sandwiched between the twowas ‘Not Dark Yet’, its inclusion in the setprobably down to the ovation that ‘When IPaint My Masterpiece’ received in Brussels.Remembering the Brussels moment, it wasall I could do to stop myself smilingthroughout the song until Bob got to thekey moment.Unfortunately,when Bob toldus that he’d not only been to London but gayParis, the Parisian audience rather coldlyfailed to respond. Not expecting this, I letout a good loud cheer at the appropriatetime, met only by the crazy looks of thosearound me. I felt a little foolish, of course,but I suppose I should have known judgingby the Anglicised make up of the audience.As a footnote, this business does mean thatif you pick up any recordings of said showon the dodgy stalls and you hear one idiotcheering at that vital point, it’s probably me.

It’s much of a muchness whether the lastsong of the main set is ‘Leopard Skin Pill-Box Hat’ or ‘Rainy Day Women No’s 10 and35’. There is very little to choose betweenthem these days in terms of structure andthey seem to melt into one another anyway.They serve as set closing guitar showcasesand that’s fine but I have noticed that Boband the band need to put the work in earlierin the set and win the audience over beforethis point. If all has gone well before, theaudience allow these slightly indulgent setclosers as a necessary and deserved releaseof musician steam; otherwise it’s justtreated as a noise. The encores werepredictable but masterfully delivered andby the time ‘All Along the Watchtower’ had

reached its furious peak, the whole placewas saluting the stage in triumph.

‘Is there anything else I can do for youat all, Sir?’The taxi driver had been a helpful sortand carried my bags right into theterminal.‘No, thank you very much.’

I liked the man; I think his name wasJames. He hadn’t done anything tooextraordinary but he hadn’t bored me orleft me standing with my bags. I would nothave needed that sort of bother on ajourney that was a considerable moreamount of trouble than it should havebeen. I should have caught the train fromParis into Holland with the Canadian but,for some reason, I couldn’t quite face it.The journey instead involved a ricketyplane from Paris to Hamburg, an unex-pected four-hour wait and then an onwardconnection to Rotterdam; Dylan’s finalstop in mainland Europe before headinginto the UK.

A frustrating and unexplained airportdelay always manages to beat the life out ofyou. There’s nothing to do, of course. Aftera while, children, holidaymakers and busi-ness travellers tend to get right on yournerves, an unfortunate reaction when insuch a location but I was in that sort ofmood. My frame of mind was improvedby the idea of arriving in Rotterdam, asthis was to be my first visit to the city. The

Rotterdam 2/5/2002

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Canadian had persistently carried onabout how wounded he was that Dylanwould not be stopping off in Amsterdam.Apparently, it was a joke that Bob would,like, go all the way to the Netherlands andnot do a concert in Amsterdam where youcan buy grass from nuns and police offi-cers who will, like, skin up for you andloan you a whore because that’s what islike there.

I got on the plane with very littletrouble worth reporting. I was mentallyprepared for the grilling I was going toreceive during my check-in. Any Britishnational attempting to board a plane fromHamburg to the Netherlands is alwayslikely to attract some attention as thismust all add up to the fact that your shoesare full of marijuana. In these circum-stances, although no hostility should beexercised, it is imperative to rememberthat the customs official is not your friend,nor does he have any emotions or soul. Donot mistake him for a human being. If hestops you and stares with his black, roboticeyes, be calm. Say nothing. Make thebastard work. Any wit you may put his wayduring the course of an exchange will notbe received as you intended; so stayingquiet is paramount. Thank you, officer, foryour thorough and intrusive search of myinnocent bags. Thank you for the ominousthreat of ramming your rubber-glovedfinger up my rectum.

I felt a lot better once I had got into myseat on the plane; a businessman in a darkblue suit with pinstripes sat next to meand began to read a one-sided pamphletthat was to last him for fifty minutes. Youhave to get your money’s worth out of

these things, I suppose, well done thatman. In honesty, I was relieved to see himclimb into the seat next to me. We shouldnever knock businessmen such as this;they are ideal travelling companionsduring flights because they don’t want totalk to you. All they want to do is read thepaper or do some work and be left alone.That’s fine with me. The last thing youneed is some pest next to you harping onabout stamps or their family or wine orholidays or any of that carry on. An oldschool friend of mine, David Elliott, oncetold me that the holy grail of aeroplanetravelling companions is the sexy, rich,middle-aged whore looking for youngflesh to devour en route to a book launchin Manhattan. Not that David ever metanyone like that, of course. In fact, theclosest thing that he’s ever got to joiningthe mile high club was an encounter withDeborah Williams at the top of the BwlchMountain in the Valleys but that doesn’tcount, even though it was a long wayabove sea level.

A man with a thick Irish accent calledout to the flight attendant for a whiskeyand the good lady fetched one around tohim. I had thought about joining him butdecided to resist until I got to Rotterdam.

‘Actually’, the businessman in the suitwith pinstripes said ‘I think that I’llhave one too.’‘Of course, Sir’The businessman turned around to theIrishman behind us.‘You’ve planted the seed in my mind.’He said with a smile.‘As long as you don’t expect me to plant

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any more seeds in you.’ The Irishmanreplied quickly to the amusement ofthose around who understood English. Ithough that the businessman mighttake exception to this but, thankfully, ina playful, wry way, he assured theIrishman that no such thought hadcrossed his mind and smiled again as hegot sucked back into his paper.

In need of a stretch of the legs, Iclimbed over the businessman and madehaste to the washer room to give the oldself a brush-up. I was delayed en route bya pretty young vegetarian who wasprotesting to the attendant about the meatin her bagel. It was clear to me that theassistant required some extensiveCustomer Handling training and I made amental note to write that on the CustomerComments Slip slotted inside the vomitbag. Like a cat, I stepped in to assist thesewarring damsels in 30,000 feet, gastro-nomic distress. I was in a position to offerthe pretty vegetarian some herbivorouscuisine as I had brought some along in myhand luggage. Nothing special, just a fewbits and pieces but it was always good to beprepared when travelling. She was agrateful girl. I threw in some words todiffuse the situation and they bothlaughed. Slick man.

We were almost in Rotterdam whenthe businessman in the dark blue suit gotout of his chair and went to the washerroom. I could see the door from my seat inthe fourth row and I watched with amuse-ment when the pretty vegetarian with thesparkling eyes got up and tried the door. Ilooked around me, everyone was half

asleep, lulled into dry mouth slumber bythe distant hum of the engine. It was to mysurprise that the door had opened whenshe tried it and to my extreme shock whenshe disappeared inside. After about tenminutes the pretty vegetarian came out ofthe tight little door and fixed her eyes tothe floor as she made her way gingerlyback to her seat. My eyes were playingtricks on me. Was this real? What is goingon here, my God? A minute or so later, thebusinessman with a red face in the darkblue suit emerged from his love patch likea victorious General returning homefollowing a just battle to save theoppressed. He sat back down next to meand nodded knowingly. The fiend. For therest of the way he sat starring out of theminiscule window smiling and chuckling.What a great story that would make in thebar tonight, after the conference, he wasprobably thinking. Did he provide herwith a vegetarian alternative? No. Did hemake her laugh? Well, possibly but some-thing about this whole business was notright. He tormented me for the rest of theday. I haven’t been so upset since I lost myGenuine Basement Tapes box set when Imoved house. What did I tell you aboutthe businessman? He is your worst-night-mare travelling companion.

I had no idea where in Rotterdam theCanadian was staying but I had managedto get myself into some lodgings in theheart of the place. A hotel with good prox-imity to the city centre, of course, canprove very advantageous if you are slightlyworse for ware of an evening in a strangetown. The elongated stay at HamburgAirport had made me extremely grateful

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that the show was not until the followingnight. This meant that I could spend anevening exploring the sights ofRotterdam. For what it’s worth, I had heldon to the Canadian’s prehistoric travelguide and thumbed my way through it.According to the yellowing pagesRotterdam is the city that boasts thelargest and busiest port in the world.Again, not trusting the accuracy of mysource, I suspected that since it’s publica-tion, a million other ports might havetaken over Rotterdam. Nevertheless, Ipaid it a visit and sure enough, vast andfull of activity it was. However, after anhour or so of walking around andwatching pungent oil carrying vesselscrawl in and out, I decided my curiosityhad been satisfied and I moved on intothe city.

The maddest things about Rotterdamcity centre are the cube-shaped apart-ments that balance on a long plinth.These Kijk-Kubus (viewing cubes) lookfairly ropey as residential structures butare a good modern attraction. Theysomehow manage to look futuristic andbohemian at the same time. It would benice to think of them being inhabited byartists and poets but I would imaginethat they are, in fact, full of people whowork in the city.

The purpose of this brief venture intoHolland turned out to be a strangeevening in an even stranger venue. If Bobhad managed to avoid the NewcastleArena and Docklands in London,Rotterdam’s Ahoy would have been astrong contender for the worst-venue-of-the-tour prize. The place seemed

completely incapable of helping the bandand the audience generate any sort ofatmosphere. It wasn’t that the acousticswere bad at all but the hall had a peculiaressence about it that made me a bituncomfortable and appeared to have asimilar effect on those around me. It isalways a shame to see some obviouslyremovable seats placed smack in front ofthe stage. I am a great believer in the frontrows being given over to those who wantto stand as I do think this improves theambience. My evening was thrown intothe bizarre as early as the third song whena lady in a pink uniform tapped me on theshoulder during It’s Alright, Ma and askedme if I wanted an ice-cream.

The performance was good andDylan, after a static start, seemed to getinto the swing of things and his left legwas soon throwing all sorts of shapes. IThrew It All Away was a nice surprise atnumber two, as was an outing for ‘BlindWillie McTell’ but the strange atmospherepersisted throughout. The lazy, eccentricjazz of ‘If Dogs Run Free’ was the mostappropriate tune of the night, not inlyrical content but mood generatedalthough I don’t really know how toexplain what I mean by that. All the talkon the way out was the position on anamplifier of what appeared to be Bob’s‘Things Have Changed’ Oscar, if it reallywas the award itself, how typically Dylanthat he didn’t actually play the song thatwon it for him. However, whether it wasthe Oscar or not, I didn’t care because bythe end of the night and my Europeanadventure, I was more than ready to catchmy flight back to London.

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I drove to Brighton from my flat in Bathon the morning of the concert. I had slept inmy own bed for the first time in what feltlike an age and I was refreshed and excited atbeing home again. I left Rotterdam imme-diately after the show at the Ahoy and flownback to London in time to catch the firsttrain of the day west to Bath. Getting thetrain down to the south coast had beencontemplated but not being in Germany, Ihad no idea if I would have been able to getback afterwards. The use of the car turnedout to be an excellent decision as the hotSaturday morning sun and cool breezecontributed to a superb and enjoyablejourney. With the car parked up, I set off tothe Brighton Centre to the spot where I hadarranged to meet the Canadian. I could seethe boy from a good distance away, sittingwith his glum and gormless expression nextto his all conquering rucksack, and weheaded off in the direction of one of thepubs in Brighton city centre that wasshowing the FA Cup Final.Like most peoplefrom his continent, the Canadian wasnonplussed with the idea of watching‘soccer’but he got into the spirit of it all aftera glass or two,even though the quality of thegame was a bit Down In The Groove. Itwasn’t too long before the familiar twang ofthe Canadian’s moaning met my ears,however, with his steady and justifiedoutrage of the price of British beer. I didn’task how he got from Holland to Englandbut he told me that the Rotterdam concertwas, like, clearly the best night of the tour so

far and there was no way tonight was goingto be anywhere near as good.

The United Kingdom, of course, playsa significant part in the life and careerstory of Bob Dylan. Stories and accountsof Dont Look Back, The ‘Royal Albert Hall’Concert, The Isle of White Festival andEarl’s Court, to name but four, almostalways make up some of the most note-worthy and important chapters in anybiography on the subject. Add thishistoric, fruitful love affair between Dylanand Britain to the fact that he was mainlyawesome on his last visit here in 2000 andexpectations outside the Brighton Centreare high. I had forgotten, by this point,everything that I had experienced on theroad in Europe; tonight was the first nightall over again.

There was a friendly vibe in the lineoutside the venue, once again, as there hadbeen on the whole in Europe. The localnewspaper had produced a special editionwith a wraparound Dylan front and backpage and very small men were selling themfor as little as 10p from supermarket trol-leys. Naturally, the collector in me wantedto buy one but it would have got destroyedbefore the end of the night and there wasno way that I was losing my place in thequeue to take the paper back to the car. IfI had spotted the special papers earlier, allwould have been well because we had goneback to the car to put the rucksack in theboot. I’m sure nobody needs me to tell infull, the story of the dynamics involved inthat seemingly simple operation so I’llleave it to imagination.

It is, as it has always been, impossiblefor the Dylan show to manage the levels of

Brighton 4/5/2002

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expectation unfairly piled onto it. Onceagain, just like it was at the Newport FolkFestival and the subsequent 1966 tourwith The Hawks, Dylan finds his audiencesplit into two distinctive camps. I‘m nottalking about the acoustic / electric debatebut another argument altogether morecomplex and subtle. Nowhere during myexperiences on the Europe 2002 tour did Isee better evidence of this than inBrighton and how fitting it was that audi-ence division was once again an attributeof Dylan’s British spectators. Ondescribing the two sides of the currentobservation, I will try as far as possible tobe objective. The first (Group One as I’llcall them) are the kind we have alreadywitnessed in Europe; the overly expectantBobcats, of which I suppose I am one, whodemand that ‘Tangled Up in Blue’, ‘Like aRolling Stone’ and ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ bedropped in favour of ‘No Time To Think’,‘Days of 49’ and ‘Buckets of Rain’. GroupOne is made up of the people who buy anynew Dylan product on the day of release;they also buy and trade bootleg albums,cassettes, CD’s, CD-R’s, mini-discs, video’sand photographs; read the fanzines, maga-zines, biographies, lyric interpretationsand reviews; regularly check the websiteand other relevant sources for the latestinformation; they care what songs wereplayed on what night, in what order and inwhat arrangement; they have a copy ofGreatest Hits but can’t remember whenthey last played it, if ever; they attend asmany concerts as their circumstances willallow; they probably don’t go out and seeanybody else’s show. Group One peoplevary considerably, of course, some will

naturally be more infatuated and obsessivethan others and to be put into this cate-gory, folks do not necessarily have to getinvolved in all of the above. The point isthat Group One people are in the know, asit were; they will certainly own “Love AndTheft” as well as being able to make areasonable estimate of what songs Dylanmay play on one particular night and howthey may be sung.

At the other end of the hall is the secondinteresting section of the audience. GroupTwo consists of the more mainstreamconcertgoer, for want of a better expression,less Dylan-biased and probably moreobjective as a result. Greatest Hits is prob-ably a prominent album here and a keyinfluence in the decision to buy a concertticket. A rifle through the record collectionof a member of Group Two might result inyou also finding Freewheelin’, Highway 61Revisited, Nashville Skyline (though thatone was a mistake) and Blood On TheTracks, amongst a well-rounded collectionof other classic rock and pop albums fromThe Beatles, Wings, ELO, Led Zeppelin,Supertramp and Van Morrison to DireStraits, U2, REM, Oasis and RobbieWilliams.

Both groups have their place, ofcourse. However, the hardcore extremistmembers of Group Two are those peoplewho stand and stare in genuine disbelief atthe gravel-voiced performer on the stagetearing shreds out of his classic material. ADylan show is asking for certain reactionslike this but Brighton seemed to havemore that its fair quota and I hoped thatthis wasn’t to become a trait of all theBritish shows. What can I say about the

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far-Group-Two extremists? They are fullof authentic incomprehension as to whythe 60-year old singer is not reciting‘Masters Of War’ in exactly the same waythat he did in 1963. For their benefit, thereare two reasons why this is the case, as faras I can see: firstly; age, weathering anderosion mean that he is purely and simplynot able. Such a circumstance is not exclu-sive to Dylan; all of his contemporarieswill have seen the tones and characteristicsof their voices change with the passing oftime, just listen to any recent or latter-daylive performances by the likes of NeilYoung, Brian Wilson, George Harrison,Van Morrison, Rod Stewart and EricClapton. None of these are as extreme asan example as Dylan, maybe, but they haveall experienced a reduction in their vocalrange and impact, such is the reality ofnature and mortality. I could go intofurther examples but don’t even get mestarted on Keith Richards and RonnieWood. The second reason why he ‘doesn’tsing them like he used to’, of course, is thathe has no intention of doing so, even if hecould. Dylan has never sung them like heused to, such is the appeal of the artist. In1966, for example, Bob had no interest inperforming ‘One Too Many Mornings’ inthe same way that he did in 1965 so whywould he want to put in a 1965 styleperformance in 2002? Is anyone reallyattending Dylan shows so blindly as toexpect him to do that?

For those of us who had been to showsalready in Europe (and there were a greatmany, it seemed), there was little in theway of songs that we had not heardperformed already. ‘If Not For You’ at

number two was a welcome surprise butonce again, the “Love And Theft” tuneswere the most intelligently and expertlyexecuted. Having said this, the opening ofthe electric section of the set with ‘TweedleDee & Tweedle Dum’ understandablydisappointed many first-timers who hadread elaborate and tantalising tales fromEurope of ‘Solid Rock’. ‘I Shall Be Released’was the one moment when Group Oneand Group Two were is rapturous unison;its unexpected inclusion pleasing theformer and its familiar structuring(mainly due to the watchful and powerfulvocals in the chorus of Larry and Charlie)and professional presentation appeasedthe latter. By the time the house lightscame up, Dylan had won over most ofthose present, on balance, but it was aclose run thing. The whole business endedwith Bob smiling (as he had done allnight) and blowing kisses into the audi-ence that looked far more spontaneousthan they would on the dates to come.Most seemed to then disappear either intoBrighton town or out of the city in theircars although not before sitting in anincredible traffic jam that had more incommon with Manhattan that Sussex.Afternoon drinking had meant that I wasin no position to take the car to Bath so Imanaged to avoid the chaos but onceagain, I was in for another uncomfortablenight.

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‘How far is Bournemouth, Englandfrom Brighton, England?’‘What does your travel guide say?’‘You know, I don’t think that it has anyinformation on, like, either of them.’‘That’s no use at all.’‘Maybe these places are just not signifi-cant enough to be included. Where isthat you live?’‘In Bath, it’s not too far from here either.’‘Of course.’‘So you’ve heard of Bath then?’‘Sure, Oh my God, everyone knowsabout Bath, Wales.’‘Evidently.’‘Oh my God, that must be in my book.’‘I’m sure it is but it’s probably calledAqua Sulis.’‘What?’‘It doesn’t matter.’‘So, is Bournemouth, like, anotherseaside place?’‘It is.’‘Like Brighton.’’‘Yes, I suppose so.’‘So, is it, like, far?’‘No, it’s just along the south coast. Itwon’t take us long to drive there.’‘Another south coast show?’‘That’s right.’‘Oh my God.’‘What is it now?’‘This must be like the closest that, like,Bob has been to the Isle of Wight sincethe festival.’‘Really?’

‘Yeah.’‘I see.’‘He must have, I don’t know, justremembered it or something’‘Well, he played a couple of nights inPortsmouth the last time he was here.’‘So.’‘Well, that’s fairly close to the Isle OfWight. You can get the ferry from there.’‘Really? Oh my God.’‘Did you not come to the UK in 2000?’‘What, are you kidding me? Of course.’‘You just missed out on the Portsmouthshows?’‘I caught all the shows that year.’‘Is that right?’‘Yeah. You know, it must be great to livein England where you can get betweenshows in absolutely no time whatsoever.It’s so, like, tiny.’‘Do you think so?’‘Oh my God, yes, I tell you, nobody hasexperienced what it’s like to be on theroad until they have tried travellingthrough the desert in the States.’‘You must have done that hundreds oftimes.’‘Are you kidding? I must have spent halfof, like, my entire life in a truck at ahundred and ten degrees going throughthose places.’‘Going to see Dylan?’‘The Dead, mainly.’‘Of course.’‘So, how far away would you say we arefrom Bournemouth?’’‘About an hour.’‘Great and it’s the fifth day of May sothat means he’s going to play ‘Isis’’‘I’ll bet you fifty quid he doesn’t.’

Bournemouth 5/5/2002

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We drove on towards Bournemouthfor a few minutes in silence with theCanadian taking the time to carefullydigest what had just been said. Every sooften he would frantically ruffle the pagesof his trusty manual until he came to apage of interest, look at it for a second andthen scamper through it again. It was hotin the car and there were immense puddlesof stinking sweat pouring from the face ofthe Canadian. If there had been any dogsin the immediate area then they wouldhave been lapping at his jowls with theirsmelly tongues. However, the immediatearea was apparently free of dogs so no suchscene occurred. Nevertheless, the windowswere rolled right down to help the overallfreshness. It would sicken a man to bewithin close proximity to the Canadian fora good period of time without thewindows being open as the smell was not agood one: a nasal offending soup of lemonzest and common urea. Not for the firsttime on this trek, I put it to the back of mymind though I had noticed earlier that hehad been wearing the same t-shirt sinceParis. I’d do anything in this God almightyworld if the Canadian would just changehis vest. We drove on. My cassette playerwas broken and I had no yearning to hearthe Canadian’s opinions on whatever maybe playing on the radio so, in an attemptto relieve the boredom of the journey, Idecided to carry on with the conversation:

‘So, how long have you been on the roadnow?’‘Oh my God, I don’t know, I’ve done thelast couple of Dylan tours, you know, aswell as the Lesh one we talked about.’

‘That must all add up.’‘How do you mean?’‘Well, how many months of the year doyou spend living like this?’‘I’ve kind of done seven or eight monthsof the year since about ninety-seven.’‘Wow.’‘You kind of get used to it.’‘It must be expensive.’‘I guess so, but, you know, I never reallyworry about that sort of thing.’‘Really?’‘I just kind of always manage.’‘How do you get your tickets?’‘I, like, buy all of them up at the begin-ning.’‘So, you only spend about four monthsof the year at home?’‘God, I guess, something like that.’‘You must have the greatest job in theworld.’‘I don’t get it.’‘Well, you know, your boss must be avery nice guy.’‘Why?’‘Why? Because you must only be able towork a maximum of four months a yearand in that time, you earn enoughmoney to keep you in concert tickets,travel tickets and hotel rooms for therest of the year. Where can I get a joblike that?’The Canadian laughed but didn’tanswer and I was getting the feelingthat this was a subject that he didn’treally want to go into any further so,confident of bringing him back to itlater, I let it go for the time being.Sleeping in the car had made my back-ache and this, along with the conversa-

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tion and pong was more than enough tomake me approach Bournemouth atgreat speed.‘At least, you, like, got to stay at yourown quarters the other night.’‘That’s true.’‘Isn’t it interesting, the term quarters?’‘Why is that?’‘Well, you know, I said that you wereable to sleep in your own quarters theother night.’‘You did.’‘Isn’t language, like, funny? Technically,you see, by making the word quarter aplural, you suggest more than onequarter. A half, for example; I reallyshould have said, you spent the night atyour half!’

The Canadian looked pleased withhimself at this bit of phonologicalnonsense and sat smiling happily like adog with its tongue out waiting for somecongratulations from its master. He waslaughing a pathetic, enthusiastic laughthat ran itself out after about thirtyseconds. By the time he had calmedhimself down, we had reached the trafficleading into Bournemouth centre and Iwas massively grateful that the noises of abusy town were spilling into the openwindows and drowning out the twitteringin my left ear.

The Bournemouth show was one ofthe best of the whole tour as once again, allthe parts that needed to gelled togetherwith ease. Dylan and the band played withconfidence and banged through a great setthat had the whole venue on its feet anddripping with sweat long before the final

chords of ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ hadvibrated around the building. Even moresurprising than hearing ‘If Not For You’ inBrighton was hearing it again thefollowing night. Some expressed theopinion that this was a veiled tribute to thelate George Harrison, an idea admirableenough that even those among us whowere not so persuaded were happy to goalong with the notion. By this stage of thetour, I had gone past the point of analysingthe show as a whole because I was toofamiliar with the structure and form.Instead, I was looking out for the littlemoments here and there that makes anevening special. There were a couple ofsuch moments in Bournemouth: ‘A HardRain’s A-Gonna Fall’ featured the bestaudience participation since ‘When I PaintMy Masterpiece’ in Brussels when duringwhat seemed like a microphone failure, weall got involved and yelled out a chorusthat held everything together. Another wasthe first-class rendition of the eternallybrilliant ‘Not Dark Yet’.

Afterwards, the Canadian said that hehad made up his mind to give Cardiff amiss. He didn’t have a ticket and instead,he wanted to use the couple of days tohitchhike to Newcastle. I told him that wecould probably secure him a Cardiff ticketif he wanted one but his mind was madeup on making his way to the North East bythe ropiest of methods. He had foundsomeone who was to give him a lift as faras Cheltenham and left straight after theshow. I don’t know what his travel guidewas telling him but if I was travelling fromBournemouth to Newcastle thenCheltenham wouldn’t be on my route but

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what did I know? I hadn’t travelledthrough the American deserts with just aGrateful Dead ticket and two dollars in mypocket, after all.

The Bank Holiday Monday train fromBath to Cardiff managed to make a fifty-five minute journey feel like five hours. Aswell as the familiar stop-start business andthe worry that you might not actuallycome out the other side of the Severntunnel, the train was full of footballsupporters who were descending on theWelsh capital for a big match at theMillennium Stadium. Cardiff CentralStation was heavily policed on our arrivalwith everyone getting the eyes from thehigh number of guards. No football forme, Officer, I’m here to see Bob Dylan.

Dylan has a reasonably interestingrelationship with Wales, if you are willingto clutch the right straws. The footage ofBob and Johnny Cash in Eat TheDocument was taped backstage at theCardiff Odeon and if that isn’t a desperateenough connection, how about the vaguestory that Tommy Farr, the heavyweight-boxing champion from Tonypandy, has ason who compared at the Isle of Wightfestival in 1969. That’s probably going a bittoo far so I’ll stop this nonsense right now.Of course, many popular sources will haveyou believe that Robert Zimmermanchanged his name after being inspired byWelsh poet Dylan Thomas although, asalways is the case with Dylan, there are

conflicting opinions. I suppose that Bob’sawareness of the poet at least means thathe knows Wales exists which has to be astart. All too often, an unfortunate trait ofmusicians from the United States, whovisit places like Wales tend to be ignorantof the fact that they’re not in England. Ican’t say that this sort of thing overlyupsets me but if there is one thing likely todisturb your Cardiff audience (or the onesin Glasgow, Edinburgh, Belfast, Dublinand the like come to that), it is when theheadline act walks up to the microphoneand shouts:

‘Hello England!’

There are many examples of thishappening, far too numerous and tediousto bother discussing in these pages butperhaps even more awful, there is also thesituation where the artist has beenreminded mid set to make reference totheir location and then go on to make amess of it. If in doubt, just don’t botherand say nothing. On July 23rd 1995,Michael Stipe of REM finished up anotherwise thoroughly enjoyable show atCardiff Arms Park with the words ‘Thankyou very much, this is the first time forREM in Wales and we’re very happy to behere.’ At the time, of course, thesecomments were greeted with thecustomary elation and enthusiasticresponse but spoiled somewhat when youremember later that REM not only playedat the Newport Centre in Gwent in 1989 aspart of their Green World Tour but alsoplayed a small show at a Cardiff club in themid-Eighties. None of this really matters,

Cardiff 6/5/2002

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of course, and it is understandable that arock star from Georgia who has toured allover the world many times may not beable to recall every country that he hasever played in but to the locals, it’s a littledisappointing. You pay your money afterall; surely it’s not too much to ask that themen on stage have at least a vague idea ofwhere they are.

For me, as someone born and raised inWales, the best thing about Dylan is thathe actually bothers to come here at all.This is especially good news for the youngDylan fan of which there seemed to be agreat many in Cardiff. Obviously, theparental and financial restrictions on theshoulders of the young music fan makecan make it difficult to see their favouritebands in concert. I’m sure this can be diffi-cult for those growing up in the big citiesbut for the children of the provinces, it canbe especially stifling. I don’t want to getimaginary violins sounding off in thereaders ear or anything like that but whenyou live somewhere like the Welsh Valleysor other similar remote areas, your heroescoming to the UK can be depressing ratherthan exciting because the one-night-onlyat Wembley Arena might as well be atMadison Square Garden for all the chanceyou’ve got of being there. It is, after all, notunreasonable for a mother not to let her14-year old son travel alone to a midweekconcert in London. It’s difficult to knowexactly how much input an artist has onhis touring nightly spots or if he is simply‘hired’ by the promoter but the concept ofa Never Ending Tour certainly lends itselfto the idea of playing everywhere and notjust the major city spots.

The mass of football supporters meantthat my usual bars of choice were eitherfull of nylon and chants or closed to avoidany potential trouble. So, under protest,Norm and myself popped into what usedto be the Owain Glyndwr for a quick pint.I say under protest because this oncewonderful establishment rather sadlybecame one of those awful chain pubs afew years ago. The worse example imagi-nable of such a phenomenon ripping thecharacter right out of British city centrepub culture.

At around five o’clock we left andheaded off towards the CardiffInternational Arena, one of the mostcomfortable venues on the circuit. As wellas being big enough to hold nights likethis, the CIA, to give its James Bond title,still manages to provide the intimacy of atheatre setting. Although I had been to theplace many times before, including threeprevious evenings with Dylan, never had Iexperienced the sort of disorganisationthat was occurring. Problem number onewas that there was no monitoring of thelines outside and by the time we arrived,there were two very separate queues thathad formed at opposite ends of thebuilding. No major disaster, maybe, but itstill didn’t stop everyone checking theirtickets a thousand times to make sure thatno specific entrance door was stipulated.The last thing you need is to queue forninety minutes only to be told that you arein the wrong place and should go to theback of the other line. The security peoplewere on first-rate form by the time thedoors were due to open. A tiny but stockypit-bull type man in a green jacket that

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made him feel important came down towhere we were standing (about tenth inline) and told us that if we wanted thedoors to open then we would have to moveback.

‘That’s great,’ the lady behind me said,‘but there’s nowhere to move back to.’‘Madam, don’t mess me about just takea step back.’‘Then she’ll step on my feet,’ said theman behind to much laughter as thesecurity man turned bright red withfury.‘Look,’ he persisted, ‘if you don’t dowhat I say then I’ll tell him to cancel theshow.’More laughter.‘I can’t see him listening to yousomehow.’Yet more laughter but this time morerobust than before.‘I’ve got an idea for you,’ the lady said,‘why don’t you go to the back of the lineand ask them to take a step back andthen we can all do the same? Thatwould be the thing to do if you want usto move backwards. I can see you’re aclever boy.’

With that, the chubby little manturned on his heel in a sulk and headedback into the reception area. He wasmuttering something about getting “TheGaffer” but thankfully, he didn’t comeback at all. That wasn’t the end of it,though, as there was a good example whenthe doors finally opened of absolutely nocommunication between Dylan’s peopleand the local staff. Apparently, it’s

common practice to give up tour ticketupon entering the building only to beasked for it ten feet later. It was all a messbut it resulted with Norm getting throughwithout anyone asking for his ticket at all.Lucky, I thought, the Canadian and hisbloody rucksack are not here and insteadare busy heading north in dangerousfashion. Also successfully in was little manwho had stood outside with the words “Ineed free Bob Dylan ticket please” writtenon a piece of cardboard. He had beenstanding there for about two hours andwhen the doors opened, sure enough, oneof the touts gave him one. He looked trulyexcited and his boyish face was beaminglike a child with a brand new Christmasbicycle. Those in the queue were pleasedthat this scruffy-looking boy with nomoney was now able to see the show but Iwonder how many of them would havebeen as happy had they known that thecunning wee bugger had successfullypulled the same stunt in Brighton andBournemouth?

The show was enjoyable though Dylanseemed grumpy throughout and somescrupulously crazy notes bounced fromthe stage at times. Again, the main reasonfor this seemed to be the occasional lack ofunderstanding between Jim Keltner andTony Garnier and not Dylan’scurmudgeon mood. Unlike Brighton, thekisses blown to the audience at the end ofthe second encore did not appear to bedelivered spontaneously but with a sadelement of obligation. Visions of Johannawas the highlight of an evening that Ifound myself comparing not to last nightin Bournemouth but the mind-blowing

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Cardiff show of September 2000. That wasa fine evening that, for me, no Dylan showsince has ever quite reached, no matterhow brilliant. I can still vividly recall aconversation that I had with a Swanseaman after the show who told me throughone of the biggest grins that I have everseen that the show we had just witnessedwas his one hundred and seventh Dylanconcert since 1965 and not once did heever see Dylan playing better. I don’t needto record the reasons as to why that nightwas so special because Paddy Ladd

managed to sum up everything that I feltabout the evening with incredible accu-racy in his Isis Anthology article. A delayedtrain meant that the sprint back to thestation was unnecessary but the ten-minute chunk of exercise tired me out tothe point where I was coughing like a sickone, completely put to shame by a manthirty-seven years my senior who puts intwo and a half hours of physical workevery night. God speed Bob Dylan downthe M4.

Charleston, South Carolina 17th Aug 2004