A Giant on the Earth in These Days: Bob Dylan at 80

Whenever I am unimpressed by the latest hyped novel, film or musical act – which is something that seems to happen increasingly often – I find myself lamenting that there do not seem to be any artistic greats among us nowadays. I begin my own novelette, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, with a well-known quote from Genesis: “There were giants in the earth in those days”. Regardless of what the Nephilim truly were in the Bible – fallen angels, an ancient race, or heroes among men – the verse continues to resonate. As our culture falters under the weight of economic depression, societal deconstruction and artistic philistinism, we find ourselves looking desperately for icons who could explain it all. But whether they died out or we drove them away, the giants who could stand astride a culture seem to have vanished from the earth.

However, with Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday arriving this Monday, it is well to remember that one such great is still among us. Dylan’s legend is gigantic but, remarkably, his talent keeps pace with it. From the astonishing lyricism of the freewheelin’ folk songs of the early Sixties to last year’s remarkably fresh Rough and Rowdy Ways album – which contains the song ‘Murder Most Foul’, a show-stopping meditation on American decline and hope – Dylan has always been there to provide genuine artistic insight into our world. “I contain multitudes”, as Walt Whitman wrote – and Dylan is one of the rare few who has not only faced the yawning cultural pit, but has proved equal to the task of filling it with courageous art.

This adventure hasn’t always been smooth, and there are plenty of failed experiments in Dylan’s career that people use to try to diminish his achievement. Some criticisms are merely ignorant and superficial – his supposedly ‘nasal’ singing voice, for example, is in fact remarkably adept at interpreting songs – but others carry more weight. With that in mind, I have decided to comment on an underappreciated aspect of Dylan’s career: his forays into the written word.

In 2016, the announcement that Dylan had won the Nobel Prize for Literature was scoffed at in some quarters. Certainly the prize was heavily influenced by Dylan’s genius lyricism in his songwriting, but at the time I had already read both of Dylan’s published works and had been impressed by both, and I saw the scoffing as unwarranted. What follows are two book reviews from my Goodreads profile: a reappraisal of Dylan’s much-maligned 1966 novel Tarantula, and a further review of his 2004 autobiography Chronicles: Volume One. I hope these two pieces of writing go some way towards paying tribute to just one of this giant’s multitudes.

Bob Dylan, Tarantula (London: Harper Perennial, 2005), 116pp. Originally published 1971.

It’s not that bad, you know. I mean, sure, when the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Bob Dylan in October 2016 they probably didn’t have Tarantula, the songwriter’s only published ‘novel’, in mind as an example of his excellence. It is a rambling, nonsensical stream-of-consciousness piece of absurdity and only for the most patient or obsessive of Dylan fans.

It does have a certain rhythm to it, even if it doesn’t always make sense, though we can’t blame the usual precariousness of translating song lyrics to prose for the strangeness of Tarantula. Whilst Dylan’s imagery does suffer from the lack of the “dobro’s F hole twang & climax from disappointing lyrics” (pg. 14), there is a lot of stuff in here that’s just plain baffling. A magazine article once highlighted the ‘unintelligible’ line, “now’s not the time to act silly, so wear your big boots & jump on the garbage clowns” from page 2 of Tarantula. I assume they chose this early example because they didn’t want to read any further; there’s certainly plenty of other choice absurdities (my favourite is “little girls hide perfume up their shrimps & there are no giants – the warmongers have stolen all our german measles & are giving them to the doctors to use as bribes” from page 58). There’s also evidence that Dylan didn’t want the book published at all, so we shouldn’t judge him too harshly for it. But, clearly, anybody looking for a fearsome piece of poetry along the lines of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ or the eloquent phrasing of ‘Lay Down Your Weary Tune’ (both written around the same time as Tarantula) is going to find slim pickings.

That said, some nuggets do emerge from the stream-of-consciousness style. The book defies rigorous analysis, but “if youre going to think”, Dylan advises, “dont think about why people dont love each other – think about why they dont love themselves – maybe then, you will begin to love them” (pg. 109). Riffing on Woody Guthrie, Dylan writes “this land is your land & this land is my land – sure – but the world is run by those that never listen to music anyway” (pp75-6). Such thoughts are in short supply here, but the rampant procession of song lyric snippets and literary references and the usual mid-Sixties Dylan stuff of lawyers and senators and mayors and garbage men all makes you realise just how much stuff we’ve got swimming around in our brains. In the introduction – or rather, the disclaimer – we are told the book is “about Bob Dylan thinking aloud” and there is more to this than apologia. As early as page 2, Dylan is talking of “bombing out your young sensitive dignity just to see once & for all if there are holes & music in the universe”, an image the streaming prose returns to on page 68, when in the “vast desert” of his head he “lets yokels test bombs in his brain”. There’s certainly value in letting a talent like Dylan use your head as a nuclear lyrical testing ground, banging away like Curtis LeMay. Like the animal of the same name, you’re instinctively scared of Tarantula, but a calmer and closer look reveals it’s rather more graceful than you first thought. But you still wouldn’t like to get too close to it.

I’m not inclined to be harsh on the flailing, hit-and-miss Tarantula because it’s clear Dylan doesn’t take himself too seriously (“Take it easy & dont scratch too much” is his life advice on page 109). The book is mischievous, playful – not artsy or pretentious. There’s a Loki vein of mischief in Dylan’s book (as in much of his music), challenging and ridiculing those who would define or label or analyse him. “To my students”, he addresses on page 107, “i take it for granted that youve all read & understand freud – dostoevsky – st. michael – confucius – coco joe – einstein – melville – porgy snaker – john zulu – kafka – sartre – smallfry – & tolstoy – all right then… now i’m giving you my book – i expect you all to jump right in – the exam will be in two weeks”. Here, Dylan is remarking on the disposability of his book. Why the hell, he asks impishly, are we reading this when we’ve still not read Sartre? You’ve got to admit, he has a point.

Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (London: Pocket Books, 2005), 293pp. Originally published 2004.

“I know that he wanted to understand me more as we went along, but you can’t do that, not unless you like to do puzzles. I think in the end, he gave up on that.” (pg. 218)

One of the few artists of the 20th century who truly stands apart, it is difficult to pin Bob Dylan down and drag him back to the more regulated cultural strata where we can understand and quantify him. This is the case even when he is speaking directly and disarmingly, as he is here, in the first (and, to date, only) volume of Chronicles, his autobiography. Like the producer Daniel Lanois, whom Dylan is referring to in the lines I’ve quoted above, eventually we give up. We cede the ground and, without irritation, just let this singular artist do his own thing.

Chronicles: Volume One is an unconventional memoir. Its five chapters deal with three different periods of Dylan’s long career: the first two with 1961, before he became famous; the third in 1970, during a fallow period; a fourth in 1989, as he tries to engineer a new sound; and then finally a fifth back in 1961-2, with Dylan on the cusp of his unique fame. The content and sequence betray in part the origins of the book (it started with Dylan writing liner notes for re-issues of the relevant albums – Bob Dylan in 1962, New Morning in 1970 and Oh Mercy in 1989), but you also get the feeling that Dylan wouldn’t have it any other way. We get nothing on the insane run of creativity from 1963-66, or on the Blood on the Tracks album, but he does briefly discuss his time rapping with Kurtis Blow in the Eighties, of all the things (pg. 219). Like Lanois, you want to understand him more as you go along, but you do have to puzzle it out.

Nevertheless, Dylan manages to cover an astonishing variety even within these peculiar parameters. I first read Chronicles about ten years ago and, thinking back on it, I seemed to remember a powerful piece of writing about Dylan’s encounter with Harry Belafonte; that barely struck me this time around. In contrast, I had all but forgotten that Dylan discussed his tour with Tom Petty (even though I was then, and remain, a huge Heartbreakers fan); this time around I found that discussion fascinating. Dylan manages to touch upon, at natural points in the narrative, various personalities he met over the years, whether trifling encounters with the likes of Jack Dempsey, Robert Graves or John Wayne, or with those who had a deeper influence on him, like John Hammond, Dave Van Ronk and Woody Guthrie.

Dylan is particularly good at explaining the influence of various musicians on his own creative outlook; Guthrie especially, though Chronicles also ends with an energizing one-two punch combo about Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Robert Johnson. He’s less good at explaining his own creativity, particularly as it appears so feverish (a passage in the chapter on Oh Mercy, where Dylan tries to explain the new songs and vocal techniques he is developing, is clearly reaching for something ineffable but struggles to reach the reader). I’ve long been trying to formulate an adage that the difference between great writers and average writers is that average writers are trying to explain simple things in a complex way (through big words, fancy techniques, etc.) whereas great writers are trying to explain complex things as simply as possible. I felt something similar in reading Dylan as he tried to express his creative direction: normal artists are trying to be special, whereas Dylan, feverishly atop the strange artistic hierarchy, is a special one trying to be normal.

Certainly, one of the most striking aspects of Chronicles, and Dylan’s personality in general, is his determination to be normal and conventional. In conversation, I often use “catch rainbow trout”, a lyric from ‘Sign on the Window’, one of his New Morning era songs, as a byword for the sort of domestic contentment Dylan is striving for. He wants out of the “rat race” (pg. 114) but is also “fantasizing about… a nine-to-five existence, a house on a tree-lined block with a white picket fence, pink roses in the backyard… That was my deepest dream” (pg. 117). In the Eighties, he buys ‘World’s Greatest Grandpa’ mugs (pg. 209). He never wanted to be a countercultural icon in the Sixties – “I had no ambitions to stir things up. I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick” (pg. 35) – and bristles at the attempts to get him to lead a movement (pg. 119). By 1970, he’s completely fed up with the hippies and gatecrashers: “I wanted to set fire to these people” (pg. 117). While never a reactionary or a get-off-my-lawn type, he’s also not the rebel agitator, “the Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest”; “whatever the counterculture was, I’d seen enough of it” (pg. 120). He stands astride the divide, while also hoping people with dirty feet don’t use him as a bridge – or set fire to said bridge.

For someone with such a strange position in our culture, and who remains so enigmatic even as he carries us across the pages of a dedicated autobiography, Dylan is remarkably self-aware. He says it’s “nice to be known as a legend, and people will pay to see one, but for most people, once is enough” (pg. 147). It says a lot that, even on a second read, his legend takes on new and ever more inscrutable dimensions – most ‘legends’ don’t even stand up to a single glance. Chronicles can sound like a performance at times (“The last time I’d seen her, she was heading West” (pg. 60)), but when this happens it never appears to be out of conceit, a desire to wow the audience with stream-of-consciousness verbosity. Instead, whenever he eludes discussion of more conventional memoir topics like his family (his wife is mentioned but never named) or his relationship with Suze Rotolo (the lady on the cover of the Freewheelin’ album), it has the appearance of practiced shields and well-oiled countermeasures. He’s been throwing up these puzzles and magic signs to bamboozle interlopers for a long time now.

And why not? The interest in Dylan ought not to be in his Minnesotan hometown or his children, but in his unique creative take on things. The literary quality of Chronicles is rarely overt (an exception being “sometimes all it takes is a wink or a nod from some unexpected place to vary the tedium of a baffling existence” on page 43), but it takes technical skill to establish this voice and maintain it during a non-linear narrative. To do so with some occasional genuine insight, and maintaining the reader’s interest, is impressive. When someone comes into writing from a different artistic realm – music having its own unique language – and proves capable of writing well, it’s always an experience to be grateful for. When the world’s most renowned songwriter describes songs as “like strange countries that you have to enter” (pg. 165), you sit up and pay attention. When he describes his legendary image as “a fictitious head of state from a place nobody knows” (pg. 147), you realise he’s been to so many of those strange countries which nobody knows, and has been crowned there. Our enduring fascination with his remarkable far-off conquests is never puzzling – how could we not be fascinated? – even if, partly by design, the man behind the legend remains so.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy some of my other book reviews on my Goodreads profile. I have also written a novelette called Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, inspired in part by the Genesis verse with which I opened this post. It can be found here.

The image of Bob Dylan used at the top of this post is in the public domain and was accessed via Wikimedia Commons. The book covers of Tarantula and Chronicles: Volume One are the property of their respective publishers and are considered fair use for purposes of review.