Dylan's Visions of Sin (78 page)
Read Dylan's Visions of Sin Online
Authors: Christopher Ricks
75
As against the affable warmth, the forget-it extravagance, in
I Shall Be Free No. 10
:
Now I gotta friend who spends his life
Stabbing my picture with a bowie-knife
Dreams of strangling me with a scarf
When my name comes up he pretends to barf
I’ve got a million friends!
76
Not Dark Yet
: “I know it looks like I’m movin’ but I’m standin’ still”. This, as
contemplation, not as confrontation.
77
Press conference / interview with Ralph J. Gleason,
Rolling Stone
(14 December 1967, 20 January 1968).
78
Paul Zollo,
Songwriters on Songwriting
(1997), p. 79. Zollo: “In your songs, like his [Guthrie’s], we know a
real person is talking, with lines like, ‘You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend’.” Dylan: “That’s another way of writing a song, of course. Just
talking to somebody that ain’t there. That’s the best way. That’s the truest way.”
79
OED
, 2b: “To deprive of the power of escape or resistance, as serpents are said to do through the terror produced by
their look or merely by their perceived presence.”
80
On a different occasion this would be a charge more likely to be pressed against another than against oneself. “I hurt easy,
I just don’t show it / You can hurt someone and not even know it” (
Things Have Changed
). The rhyme reasons differently.
81
See this page
on the simply knotty lines in
Hattie Carroll
: “And handed out strongly, for
penalty and repentance / William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence.”
82
William James on the artist-entertainer Shakespeare:
He seems to me to have been a professional
amuser
, in the first instance, with a productivity like that of a Dumas, or a Scribe; but possessing what no other amuser has
possessed, a lyric splendor added to his rhetorical fluency, which has made people take him for a more essentially serious human being than he was. Neurotically and erotically, he was
hyperaesthetic, with a playful graciousness of character never surpassed. He could be profoundly melancholy; but even then was controlled by his audience’s needs . . . Was there ever an
author of such emotional importance whose reaction against false conventions of life was such an absolute zero as his?
(To T. S. Perry, 22 May 1910,
The Letters of William James
, 1920, vol. II,
see this page
)
William James’s love of Shakespeare: love minus “an absolute zero”. An interviewer asked Dylan: “Are you trying to say something when you write or are
you just entertaining?” And he: “I’m just an entertainer, that’s all.” Sure. Los Angeles (16 December 1965);
Bob Dylan in His Own Words
, compiled by Miles
(1978), p. 77.
83
Preface to Shakespeare
(1765).
84
Thomas Campbell,
Farewell to Love
(1830).
85
New Bearings in English Poetry
(1932),
see this page
.
86
In reply to Anthony Scaduto: “I told him once more that I would not delete the references to his family and Bob replied . .
.”
Bob Dylan
(1971, revised edition 1973),
see this page
.
87
See what a difference it makes when Scaduto, variously misquoting
Positively 4th Street
, does without “You’d
know”: “There is no line in all pop music filled with more hate than the last line of the song, which sums it up:
If you could stand in my shoes you’d see what a drag it is to
be you
.” Not “in my shoes”, but “inside”. Not “you’d see what a drag it is to be you”, but “You’d know what a drag it is / To see
you” (Scaduto,
Bob Dylan
,
see this page
).
88
Press conference / interview with Ralph J. Gleason,
Rolling Stone
(14 December 1967, 20 January 1968).
89
Those for whom the friend sounds just like a woman could find support, albeit jokey, in the fact that the next song in
Lyrics
1962–1985
(the previous one on
Biograph
),
Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?
(where “You” is assuredly a woman), can be heard to end, in the only released
performance, with four lines not printed in
Lyrics
: “You got a lotta nerve / To say you are my friend / If you won’t come out your window / Yes come out your window”. Dylan
is fooling around, but the guest-appearance of the first two lines there may say something about how to envisage the friend. Michael Gray mentions “the ‘Good Luck!’ that the woman
is permitted to actually say”, following this with “she . . . her . . . her . . . her”, but a footnote now says: “I no longer assume the ‘you’ to be a
woman” (
Song and Dance Man III
, 2000,
see this page
).
90
Interview with Scott Cohen,
Spin
(December 1985).
91
A student essay (
not
from the university where I teach): “Tragedy makes you cathart.”
92
Note to
Positively 4th Street
in
Biograph
.
93
“this land is your land & this land is my land – sure – but the world is run by those that never listen to
music anyway” (
Tarantula
, 1966, 1971,
see this page
).
94
There is poignancy in the contrast of the hotels (the Chelsea Hotel, recalled two thirds of the way through
Sara
, the St.
James Hotel as the penultimate moment of
Blind Willie McTell
).
Sara
is a song that asked of Dylan not that he be himself (a true thing to be) but that he be autobiographically himself
(which is less true to his genius and how it sees truths). This meant claims and disclaimers (“Sara, Sara, / You must forgive me my unworthiness”):
I can still hear the sound of those Methodist bells
I’d taken the cure and had just gotten through
Stayin’ up for days in the Chelsea Hotel
Writin’ “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” for you
Granted, “Those Methodist bells” are other than “the undertaker’s bell”; Sara’s “arrow and bow”, two lines after “your
door”, other than “the arrow on the doorpost”; “Wherever we travel”, other than “I traveled”; and “an old ship”, other than “slavery
ships”. Nevertheless, “I’m gazing out the window / Of the St. James Hotel”, writing
Blind Willie McTell
for Blind Willie McTell. On Dylan, McTell, and the blues song
St. James Infirmary
and what it meant to McTell and others, see Michael Gray,
Song and Dance Man III
, chapter 15.
95
Those of us who wonder about Dylan the ten-o’-clock-scholar may recall Milton,
L’Allegro
, 49–52:
While the cock with lively din,
Scatters the rear of darkness thin,
And to the stack, or the barn door,
Stoutly struts his dames before
This, three lines after Milton’s “at my window”. McTell sang of the Atlanta Strut, and in
Sugar Baby
Dylan sings of “the Darktown
Strut”.
96
His pseudonym when recording in January 1963 with Richard Farin˜a and Eric von Schmidt.
97
In performance he sometimes abbreviates, combining lines from the third and fourth verses into one verse. I wish that he
didn’t exercise his prerogative just here.
98
Rolling Stone
(22 November 2001).
99
Words and music by Abel Meeropol (“Lewis Allan”). See Nancy Kovaleff Baker,
American Music
, vol. 20 (Spring
2002).
100
In his poem
Doctrinal Point
:
Magnolias, for instance, when in bud,
Are right in doing anything they can think of;
...
Whether they burgeon, massed wax flames, or flare
Plump spaced-out saints, in their gross prime, at prayer,
Or leave the sooted branches bare
To sag at tip from a sole blossom there
They know no act that will not make them fair.
They know no act that . . . I know no one can . . .
101
“I paid ten shillings for a blind white horse” (or “for an old blind horse”), from “My mother said
that I never should / Play with the gypsies in the wood” (
The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes
, ed. Iona and Peter Opie, 1951,
see this page
).
102
Quoted in the sleeve-notes to
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
. These were not included in the collected lyrics.
103
Arthur Eddington,
The Nature of the Physical World
(1928).
104
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, eleventh edition.
105
The Waste Land
. Eliot’s preceding line has “Your arms full”; Dylan’s succeeding line has “a
stick in his hand and a pocket full of money”. Michael Gray is good on the cherry riddle that supplies both “a stick in his hand” and the money (a groat in the riddle), though I
wish that he didn’t call the line from the riddle “this obscure, innocuous quotation” (
Song and Dance Man III
, p. 670).
106
These are all from
The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang
(1994, 1997–).
107
The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang
.
108
For brandy / sugar candy, see
The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes
,
see this page
:
Over the water and over the lea,
And over the water to Charley.
Charley loves good ale and wine,
And Charley loves good brandy,
And Charley loves a pretty girl
As sweet as sugar candy
109
The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes
,
see this page
: “The cat’s in the
well”.
110
OED
, a quotation from 1887,
Handy-Bandy
.
111
The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes
, pp. 232–3:
Handy spandy, Jack-a-Dandy,
Loves plum cake and sugar candy;
He bought some at a grocer’s shop,
And out he came, hop, hop, hop, hop
112
Song and Dance Man III
, pp. 668–9. Furthermore, in
The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes
this riddle is on
the page facing “Handy dandy, riddledy ro” (
see this page
), because of the alphabetical sequence “halls”, “handy”.
113
Michael Gray, hard-boiled as ever, says “the solution is merely ‘an egg’” (
merely
, eh), and goes
on to speak ill of the riddle and its “earthbound explanation for the break-in”: Dylan, praise be, “strips away the old Classical Greekery”, the “florid or portentous
Victorian formalism”, the “vicarishly nineteenth-century versifying tone” and the “purring poesy”. Like Gray, I think
Handy Dandy
is terrific (though I find it
scary, not “good-natured” or full of “refreshing sunlit glimpses”), but do we have to bad-mouth the egg riddle in order to good-mouth the song?
114
Geoffrey Madan’s Notebooks
, eds. J. A. Gere and John Sparrow (1981),
see this page
.
115
Matthew 6.
116
Samuel Butler’s Notebooks
, eds. Geoffrey Keynes and Brian Hill (1951),
see this page
.
Butler, in passing, tilts at
The Whole Duty of Man
, a devotional work from 1658.
117
OED
, 16e, “string: a continuous series of successes or of failures”. (A long string particularly proffers
this, and Dylan sings the word “long” with relish.)
118
“Socialism, hypnotism, patriotism, materialism”, he sings in
No Time to Think
, immediately following this
with “Fools making laws for the breaking of jaws”. The Queensberry Rules in boxing, for the heavyweight champion?
119
As printed in
Lyrics 1962–1985
, the last line of the penultimate verse had accommodated a “but”
(“You may call me anything, but no matter what you say”), in anticipation of, and instead of, the start of the final refrain, but this is not what he sings.
120
Samuel Butler’s Notebooks
,
see this page
.
121
In his edition of
Poems and Ballads & Atalanta in Calydon
(2000), Kenneth Haynes notes: “Dolores is
Swinburne’s anti-madonna; her name derives from the phrase ‘Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows’.” The subtitle of
Dolores
is
NOTRE-DAME DES SEPT
DOULEURS
.
122
OED
, 7b (a preparation of the metal, used in medicine), to be kept carefully separate from
OED
, 10b (the
euphorbiaceous poisonous plant
Mercurialis perennis
).
123
On the rhyme on “rhymes”,
see this page
.
124
There are, for instance, four questions in lines 73–80, one of them tilting at credulous presumption: “What spells
that they know not a word of”. Later (lines 393–6): “Who are we that embalm and embrace thee / With spices and savours of song? / What is time that his children should face thee?
/ What am I, that my lips do thee wrong?”
Who among them
. . .
125
A unique colouring is given to this rhyme, since alone of these insistences that shape the song, this one picks up a preceding
rhyming (with the word “kiss”, and its likeness to rhyming itself) from earlier in the verse: “The kings of Tyrus with their convict list / Are waiting in line for their geranium
kiss / And you wouldn’t know it would happen like this / But who among them really wants just to kiss you?”, into “Who among them do you think could resist you?”
126
Wilfred Mellers:
Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands
stands with
Mr. Tambourine Man
as perhaps the most insidiously haunting pop song of our time. It’s impossible to tell from the
verses whether the Lady is a creature of dream or nightmare; but she’s beyond good and evil, as the cant phrase has it, only in the sense that the simple, hypnotic, even corny waltz tune
contains, in its unexpected elongations of line, both fulfilment and regret. Mysteriously, the song also effaces Time. Though chronometrically it lasts nearly 20 minutes, it enters a mythological
once-upon-a-time where the clock doesn’t tick.
