Bob Dylan turns 70 tomorrow. I recently found myself pondering the more important factor in life, time or space. Dylan's birthday has helped clarify the question for me. They’ve seen Dylan in Budokan and the Isle of Wight and Beijing, so being born in the USA was not critical to coming to his music. But being born at another time could have cost me the most profound listening experience of my life…of having the man’s music cover 45 years of my time on earth. Of all his prolific output, I will always regard Blood on the Tracks as the best…and not just his best, but the best music from anyone not named Beethoven. In it he takes the single most compelling subject in music and poetry—love—and Shakespeares it…tossing, turning, teasing, and torqueing it from every possible angle. And his singing (the fontanelle of his talent for his laziest critics) has never been more evocative.
Yet, for all my esteem for Blood on the Tracks, John Wesley Harding has always been, for me, his most perplexing album. JWH is both a definitive album and a transitional album. It’s an album that points to his past and his future, while coyly delineating where he has always been—or not been, as he would put it later in I’m Not There.
JWH begins with the title song, setting out the tale of a Robin Hood style outlaw who “traveled with a gun every hand,” yet “was never known to hurt an honest man.” Harding could be a wily folk singer who aroused masses with his civil rights and anti-war anthems before shockingly and successfully switching to rock ‘n roll. “He was never known to make a foolish move.” But no later than the second song, the album takes a decidedly anti-heroic posture. In As I Went Out One Morning, the narrator comes upon “the fairest damsel that ever did walk in chains.” She begs him to save her, but after barely offering her a hand, he says, “She took me by the arm/I knew that very instant/She meant to do me harm.” In the end, the narrator accepts without challenge her captor’s apology for the inconvenience as he leads her away.
Seven of the songs that follow are equally devoid of heroism. In I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine, St. Augustine's vain attempt to warn people that they can no longer wait for martyrs to come to their rescue meets with a cruel fate with the narrator playing a key role: “I dreamed I was amongst the ones/That put him out to death/Oh, I awoke in anger/So alone and terrified/I put my fingers against the glass/And bowed my head and cried.” The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest details the sad end to an act of generosity. The Drifter’s Escape is a Kafkaesque tale of justice gone mad, only to be put momentarily right by a random act of God, which sends the angry mob to its knees in confused prayer. In Dear Landlord, the narrator pleads with his keeper, his lord and his master, to take from him all he has to give and forgive him for his dreams because they’re beyond his control. In I Am A Lonesome Hobo a man who once “was rather prosperous,” had “fourteen carat gold in his mouth” and “silk upon his back,” is left to wander the back roads without family or friends. And in I Pity the Poor Immigrant, the immigrant, that symbol of up-from-the-bootstraps-huddled-masses sentimentality is portrayed as a lying, cheating, greedy, bloodthirsty coward.
Dylan is no stranger to bleak landscapes populated with bullies and their victims—Desolation Row, Highway 61, Gates of Eden, etc. But in his pre-JWH apocalyptic visions, Dylan as a prophet of doom was more in the mold of Jeremiah whose prophecies were less about final judgments than they were warnings about the behaviors that lead to perilous, potentially fatal states of human existence. But the songs that make up the major mid-portion of JWH are stark and final. The people in these songs—who seem more pitiful than either good or bad--are beyond redemption, forgiveness or salvation.
Looming over this particular set of songs is that masterpiece, All Along the Watchtower*.
“There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief/
“There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth
/None of them along the line know what any of it is worth”
“No reason to get excited,” the thief, he kindly spoke
“There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late”
All along the watchtower, princes kept the view/
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too
Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl/
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl
.
Hemingway once famously did (or did not) boast to friends that he could write a short story in six words, and then produced:
Baby Shoes. For Sale. Never Worn. Dylan doesn’t quite beat the master of brevity at his game, but in the mere dozen lines of Watchtower Dylan serves up a philosophical dissertation, a movie treatment, a novel outline, a religious tract, a political discourse, a marketing brochure for a gated community, a poem, and a song that can and has been bent into myriad shapes.
It begins with a joker who has lost his sense of humor, putting him square into the company of the piteous cast of characters who populate most of JWH. Rather than heed his calling and mock the businessmen and plowmen who have ruined his world, the joker can only lament his sorry plight. The thief tells the joker that neither of them can afford any longer to rob people of their innocence by pointing out the absurdity and/or unfairness of life: There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate.
An outlaw from an earlier Dylan song had said, “To live outside the law you must be honest.” At first listen it seems that this thief is echoing that as he says, “So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.” But on further reflection this thief is betraying the earlier one because this thief is ready to turn his back on that commitment to honesty, which seems to have landed them both alone in the wilderness. Now Dylan's alter egos only want to come in from the cold, so they ride hard for refuge toward a walled, ordered city, which offers the illusion of safety: “Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.”
By the 10th song on the album, The Wicked Messenger, Dylan is openly admitting that there is no fight in him any more…that, like the joker, there really is too much confusion and he can’t get no relief: Oh, the leaves began to fallin’/And the seas began to part/And the people that confronted him were many/And he was told but these few words/Which opened up his heart
/“If ye cannot bring good news, then don’t bring any.”
And then he sets about to do just that. The last two songs on JWH, Down Along the Cove and I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight are nothing but good news songs.
Down along the cove/We walked together hand in hand/Down along the cove/We walked together hand in hand./Ev’rybody watchin’ us go by/Knows we’re in love, yes, and they understand
Shut the light, shut the shade/You don’t have to be afraid/I’ll be your baby tonight
These songs would set the tone for the retreat and domesticity that would dominate the albums to follow—most notably Nashville Skyline and New Morning. Dylan, alternately the joker and the thief throughout his career, was now safely behind the walls of the Watchtower, content to let princes keep the view.
So what’s the moral of this story? What’s the moral of this song? Why spend so much time on what is essentially a review of a 34-year old album? Just what am I trying to get at here?
Blood on the Tracks comes about when Dylan’s personal domestic bliss is shattered by divorce. Then comes his re-engagement of the larger world outside—witness the cry for justice for Hurricane Carter on Desire and the return to the road on Street Legal in Señor (Tales of Yankee Power): Señor, señor, do you know where we’re headin’?/Lincoln County Road or Armageddon?/Seems like I been down this way before/Is there any truth in that, señor?
But it doesn’t end there either because then comes his spiritual journey through Christianity. To later be followed by radically new musical directions, then contemplations of mortality, and lately exhumations and celebrations of dead songs and letters. Dylan, as he said when he was so much younger, has lived drifting in and out of lifetimes unmentionable by name. In this, he is the ultimate Love’s Body hero:
“Meaning is a continuous creation, out of nothing and returning to nothingness. If it is not evanescence it is not alive. Everything is symbolic, is transitory, is unstable…Meaning is not in things, but in between; in the iridescence, the interplay; in the interconnections; at the intersections, at the crossroads.”
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Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body