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Shakespeare in the AlleyShow One - Introduction |
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SHAKESPEARE IN THE ALLEY: SHOW 1The text you find here does not always reflect exactly what the recorded show includes. Usually I have to cut out some of this to fit into one hour and sometimes I edit as I record. Still this is of some value as a reference. Shakespeare in the alley. That’s how I see Bob Dylan—and how he sees himself, i.e., as a poet. In this opening show I hope to give you a quick preview of the series and a taste of what radio can do to bring insight into Dylan as poet, because his poetry is not for the page but for performance—and radio lets me quote the performance. I intend this series for those already steeped in Dylan’s lyrics and for those who want to get to know the man and his work better. The companion web site will provide supplemental information for those who are interested. I take my title for the series, Shakespeare in the Alley , from the opening line of that verse from “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” which opens the show. That’s where we find Dylan in the opening scene in Pennebacker’s documentary Don’t Look Back—in the alley. Along with Allen Ginsberg, the Beat poet. It’s the only overtly staged scene in this otherwise candid documentary which captures Dylan’s final acoustic tour, a tour of England in 1965. It’s the first music video, years before MTV is conceived. Dylan stands in a London alley dropping poster boards with key words from the song “Subterranean Homesick Blues” scrawled on them: blessed, suckcess, candle, scandal, vandals, handles. As it ends, the bearded Ginsberg and Dylan disappear down the alley.
This is what a Shakespeare in the alley sounds like, what poetry from the streets sounds like. It was the beginning of something new—and a return to something really old: the union of poetry and music. But let me pause to respond to a question you may be asking, gentle listerner. Is this comparison of Dylan to Shakespeare merely fatuous? Consider this: the original Shakespeare also worked in the entertainment field, creating poetry for performance. Only later did the literary crowd begin to see that these lines written for performance on stage as great poetry. Bootleg copies of Shakespeare’s plays began to appear in print even before more legitimate forms were published. And all this happened again with Dylan in the 60s, but this time with popular music as the medium. Instead of stage performances of Shakespeare plays being recreated from memory by actors, however, there were recorded versions of Dylan songs not yet released, bootleg copies they came to be called. These bootlegs took the form of records and tapes and then photo copies of a book called Tarantula. Both Shakespeare and Dylan transformed the performance medium he chose to work in, creating poetry of a new kind, expanding audience expectation, and inspiring other writers to use the form for higher artistic purposes. Yes, with Dylan poetry came to the stage, to the record, and to the radio. He adopted the forms of folk music, of blues, of rock’n’roll, of country music. He turned what used to be just entertainment into something far more artisitic. The question I want to explore with you, gentle listener, is not the oft asked one, Is Dylan a poet? That question is not in need of an answer. Dylan himself made that clear in 1964 in the hilarious “I Shall Be Free #10” on Another Side of Bob Dylan.
That was 1964. In 1965 Dylan said, “I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.” Clearly he was seeing himself in a different way than most song writers—and was seen by his audience in a different way. ~THE QUESTIONS AND THE SHORT ANSWERS***************** Sometimes he reaches out to his audience with humorous word play and musical forms, as in this song on Another Side of Bob Dylan, released in 1964:
At other times he uses the 12-bar blues form to plead with his audience to see the sorrows of life. We can hear that pea in “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” from the 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home:
Many of Dylan’s songs are filled with warnings about lost trains and windows filled with frost, but there are times when he is not so pessimistic. After a long period of negativity, we find him accentuating the positive, as on this song from Planet Waves, released as he returned to the stage in 1974 after eight years of solitude: FINAL VERSE OF “ON A NIGHT LIKE THIS” FROM Planet Waves
What kind of poet is Bob Dylan? A democratic poet, a poet who connects to an ever-growing and diverse audience, but one who is never satisfied to keep repeating what he has been doing, always restless to move on to the next phase of whatever life brings, one who knows that “he not busy being born is busy dying.” ~THE SECOND QUESTION The second question I will be exploring is this: how can we deepen our appreciation of his poetry? Most obviously by listening, not just hearing. Some of us have heard Dylan songs so many times that they only evoke memories. They serve to replay the past, and Dylan has never been about the past, or even the future. But Dylan songs are about NOW, a word that echoes through that most famous Dylan song: “Now you don’t feel so proud, now you don’t talk so loud, about having to be scrounging your next meal. How does it feel to be on your own like a rolling stone.” One way to begin to really listen to Dylan’s songs is by comparing songs on similar themes. “Like a Rolling Stone” is not an isolated expression of the theme of the frightening experience of independence, it is one of many such explorations and by comparing it to “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and “Tangled Up in Blue” and “Sugar Babe” and “Please Crawl Out Your Window” and many more we can deepen our appreciation of this artist who, like Shakespeare, chooses to write for a diverse audience, to work in a popular medium, a performance medium, an entertainment medium. Yet his work has a depth and honesty not usually associated with such a form. That’s why so many were blown away when they heard this song coming out of their radio or record player in 1965:
This song has been performed countless times by Dylan in live performances over the past four decades, usually as an encore. The audience response suggests that there is an identification with both the speaker and with Miss Lonely. It is a poem which reaches deep within us, we who have been juiced in school for so many years. But more of that in later shows. ~THE THIRD QUESTION This is a great example of the power of his rhyme, suggesting the link of the personal to the political, with an idiot wind blowing thorough it all. This kind of pointing, as T. S. Eliot said, is the ultimate critical act. That’s what I’ll be doing throughout the series of shows, point to some of the effects Dylan achieves in his performances of his songs. ~ALLUSION -IMAGERY
When Shakespeare evokes old age by comparing it to the bare branches of autumn trees, stripped of leaves, or in his words, “bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang,” we tend not only to see the image but perhaps even hear the whistling of the wind through them, replacing the song of departed birds. When John Keats speaks of bursting “joy’s grape on our palette fine” he appeals to several of our senses, asking each of us to imagine pushing with our tongue until that imaginary grape explodes, pouring juices down our throat. When Ezra Pound writes the words “Petals on a wet, black bough,” he wants us to see those petals. But when Dylan sings “I saw a white ladder all covered with water” or “I saw a white man who walked a black dog” he does not evoke a visual image so much as a concept. When he tells Baby Blue, “The carpet too is moving under you,” we don’t so much see an image as conceive of the double word play: Baby Blue feeling the excitement of being on a moving carpet—a magic carpet—but also feeling disoriented as if the rug is being pulled out from under her. This “image” comes just before the final verse of the song. Listen to it and notice how this kind of imagery makes you think more than see or hear:
So much for the short answers. We have much to talk about and much to reminisce in this series about this modern American Shakespeare in the Alley. While his fame grows out of his work in the 60s, he is still a creative artist now, a we hear the same themes running throughout his 40 plus years of writing. Let’s examine a couple of these recurring themes. ~DYLAN TODAY STILL ON THE SAME THEMES**************** SHORT VERSE FROM “SUMMER DAYS” ON L&T:
That “something” which goes on is his creation of powerful poetry, a democratic poetry heard on the streets, in the cars, from the stereo as well as the stage. Poetry that speaks to in universal images about universal themes, themes which recur through the previous four decades of Dylan’s work. While Dylan is famous for his many changes in lyrical and musical style, those underlying themes remain the same. For example, the theme of being “stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again,” a 1966 song, becomes “There must be some way out of here” in the 1968 “All Along the Watchtower” and on Blood on the Tracks in 1975 we hear it in “Idiot Wind”: “Well, I'm livin' in a foreign country but I'm bound to cross the line.” In 1978 it comes out this way:
Dylan’s ever the voice of the exile, the outcast, the alienated, the drifter, the joker, always searching for but never quite finding that perfect place, that perfect mate, or, as he says in one interview, “Salvation.” He’s still there in the 1997 album which returned him to center stage, Time Out of Mind:
In 1965 we tended to put too narrow an interpretation of being “stuck inside of Mobile.” With tunnel vision we tended to see the songs in terms that were more social than spiritual, more political than poetic. But as the decades passed, we began to see that Dylan’s concerns from the beginning were more spiritual than social, more poetic than political, more existential than economic. The underlying feeling in “Not Dark Yet” is much the same as that in many earlier songs, that feeling of being stuck inside with not enough room to be anywhere. He is speaking of the human condition, not the political condition. It’s a feeling which has driven him and many others almost insane:
This song, like so many of the others just quoted, expresses a bleak view of the human condition, but the expressing of it helps. As U2’s Bono said in Rolling Stone, that popular music magazine named after a Dylan song, "His words have always had an almost biblical uprightness. No matter where you are in your life, there's a Dylan record that helps you map out the locale." Dylan himself has never been so sure if it helps or not. We hear this in the final verse of “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry”:
We all have our train get lost, and Dylan helps us by expressing that feeling of lostness. Just knowing we aren’t the only one feeling lost helps. His songs touch a nerve in the universal psyche. Dylan resisted being labeled the “spokesman of a generation” in the sixties because, like all great poets, he speaks not just about the present political posturing but about the universal human condition. This is one major quality which places him in the category with Shakespeare. ~DRAMATIZING THE UNIVERSAL THEME: “TO RAMONA”**************
Dylan has always stood, in people’s mind, for rebelliousness in some form or another: “Do your own thing,” was one of the sayings in the 60s. But he was looking deeper into the underlying issues. Being yourself involves the scary step into freedom. And there is a strong argument that freedom is really the last thing most of us really want. Erich Fromm argued this in his examination of Nazi Germany. In his book Escape from Freedom, he argues that most of us prefer the security of conformity to the risk which comes with freedom. Dylan agrees with Fromm that freedom is the greatest challenge facing us; many of his songs attempt to coax or to push or to persuade us to face our freedom. “To Ramona” is one of those.
Prufrock fears rejection and so is unable to make decisions, to face freedom. He escapes freedom by trying to convince himself that it would not have been worth it, after all. His monologue allows us to hear him and to judge him and then to ask ourselves “Am I like that?” In “To Ramona" we hear not Ramona speaking but the voice of one who calls for her to renounce her “escape from freedom” and face up to reality. The song is addressed to a southerner who has come north to the city and escaped into a fast crowd of political protesters and doomsday hucksters.
Others tell us what we need from their rational, or rationalized, viewpoint. But what we must do, as he tells Ramona, is to feel the truth in our guts. He’s telling us not to let people's games and images catch us up in a phony view of the world. Almost sounds like Holden Cauldfield. It’s easy to read the third verse as addressed to a specific young woman who has left the South and moved to Greenwich Village in the early sixties, who is now caught up in the political agendas of the time. “I can see that your head has been twisted and fed with worthless foam from the mouth.” She has lost contact with her own identity. But there is a larger context: the whole American dream of a democratic country where everyone is free and equal. In the 2001 Rolling Stone interview Dylay said this, “Every one of the records I've made has emanated from the entire panorama of what America is to me. America, to me, is a rising tide that lifts all ships, and I've never really sought inspiration from other types of music.” Dylan explores the contradictory logic of some of our American ideals and ideas in the next verse of “To Ramona”.
This verse explores two issues central to a society based on individualism and equality. In the first half, he explores a contradiction embedded in the concept of equality: you say that you are no better than others, but if that’s so, what have you got to win or lose? Equality of rights cannot be extended to equality of ideas. In the second half of this verse Dylan uncovers the classic contradiction of American individualism—trying to find our own identity and individuality by becoming like others. “I want to be different, like everybody else,” we say. And Ramona’s sorrow stems from the hype of others who tell her that “you gotta be exactly like them.” This song, released in 1964 on Another Side of Bob Dylan, quite early in Dylan’s career, reveals his ability to convey a complex theme through simple images and language and a dramatic situation, all accessible to a wide audience, the democratic audience which many artists have longed for. As we turn to the final verse of “To Ramona,” I want you to recall the opening verse in which the speaker comforts Ramona and tells her, "The pangs of your sadness/will pass as your senses will rise." The verb “to pass” echoes the King James Bible, where repeatedly we hear the expression “and it came to pass.” Dylan uses this verb again in the final verse, contributing to the song's poetic unity. In addition, this final verse gives us the paradox of words which help by saying that words can’t help.
While this might at first seem to conflict with Dylan's giving advice, it actually reinforces his major point: no one can make up your mind for you. When it comes to being, in the existential sense of that basic verb, you are on your own—like a rolling stone. The Spanish philosopher Ortega calls this the "great platitude," the perception of what he calls "radical reality.” In his book Man and People, he puts it this way: 0We must each realize that life is untransferable and that each man has to live his own; that no one can take over his task of living for him; . . . that no one can replace him or surrogate for him in feeling and wanting; that, finally, he cannot make his neighbor think for him the thoughts that he has to think in order to orient himself in the world . . . and thus find his right line of conduct—hence , that he must be convinced or not convinced, must see truths and see through nonsense, on Or, to put it metaphorically, as Dylan does in the 2001 Rolling Stone interview, the “truth is, it's my job to drive my own car, if you know what I mean.” This leads Ortega to an inevitable conclusion that is at the heart of so many Dylan songs: “It follows, that since human life is in the strict sense untransferable, it is essentially solitude, radical solitude.” Not only “To Ramona” but many Dylan songs focus on the desire to escape this radical solitude. In “Visions of Johanna” Louise and her lover sit in their loft late at night. The unnamed lover is the speaker:
Dylan is portraying people who feel trapped in this radical solitude, unable to connect with one another or with that elusive and ethereal world of the ideal represented by Johanna. Yet our sense of solitude, and even the acceptance of it which Dylan preaches, does not deny our need for others. It’s not Louise OR Johanna but Louise AND Johanna which the speaker wishes for. Dylan’s song teaches acceptance of radical solitude AND the need to connect. We hear it in the final verse of “Obviously Five Believers”:
Yes, “I could make it without you if I just didn’t feel so all alone.” That struggle to escape aloneness is explored in many of Dylan’s songs besides “To Ramona.” One we will focus on next week is the haunting and famous “Just Like a Woman,” first released on Blonde on Blonde, the 1966 double album. ~ARTIST/AUDIENCE: THE RELATIONSHIP
Many of Dylan’s songs use specific sources like this, others just borrow images. In “Blowin’ in the Wind” we hear echoes of old ballads and the Bible: the white dove that sleeps in the sand, the cannon balls that fly, the mountains washed to the sea. And the melodies are mostly borrowed with little or no alteration. Wilfred Mellers, the British musicologist, says that Dylan’s first great original melody is “Mr. Tambourine Man,” which appears on Dylan’s fifth album. And as for the pose of being “just folk,” certainly one of Guthrie’s trademarks, Dylan even includes that pose in “I Shall Be Free # 10” on the 1964 album Another Side of Bob Dylan:
Yet there is paradox here. Obviously many find that listening to Dylan is more valuable than listening to just anyone. He is saying that we each experience life from that central place of identity, from a radical solitude, but his act of writing and performing songs is, by its very nature, an attempt to communicate to an audience. But what kind of audience? This relationship of artist to audience is complex for a democratic poet, one who seeks to speak not to a limited, elite audience but to a wide and diverse one. I have used T. S. Eliot as the example of the elite artist. His early poetry, especially that seminal poem The Waste Land which echoes through the twentieth century, influencing all the poets writing in the English language, excludes a wide audience by its extensive use of obscure allusion. But Eliot underwent a radical change between 1922 when he published The Waste Land and 1933 when he lectured at Harvard. In those lectures he sounds as if he almost regrets the effects of The Waste Land and is questioning the kind of relationship to audience which its form requires. His Harvard audience was probably either shocked or amused, certainly bemused when they heard these words: "I myself should like an audience which could neither read nor write." Even more surprising is his declaration that he aspires to "the condition of the music-hall comedian.” He goes on to elaborate: In a later lecture Eliot uses the same startling image of the poet as music-hall comedian to make further comments on the relation of the artist to his audience: Every poet would like, I fancy, to be able to think that he had some direct social utility. By this...I do not mean that he should meddle with the tasks of the theologian, the preacher, the economist, the sociologist or anybody else; that he should do anything but write poetry, poetry not defined in terms of something else. He would like to be something of a popular entertainer, and to be able to think his own thoughts behind the tragic or comic mask. He would like to convey the pleasures of poetry, not only to a larger audience, but to larger groups of people collectively; and the theatre is the best place in which to do it. There might, one fancies, be some fulfillment in exciting this communal pleasure, to give an immediate compensation for the pains of turning blood into ink. As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing. All the better, then, if he could have at least the satisfaction of having a part to play in society as worthy as that of the music-hall comedian. This description of the kind of relationship which Eliot wants with his audience is spoken within a specific personal and historical context which must be kept in mind. Eliot is at the point of committing himself to an experiment in the use of verse in theatre; that has to be justified. He seems dissatisfied with the response to The Waste Land, with its effects on its audience, an audience restricted not only to those who can read but who are highly educated. He is speaking to a Harvard audience during the midst of the depression, a time when the arts were frequently asked to justify themselves, explain their "use." But after all this is taken into account certain important points about the function of art and the relationship of artist to audience seem to apply universally: -first, the artist wants to feel useful to society;
Dylan fights the separation by presenting himself as an entertainer, telling one interviewer, “I’m just a song and dance man.” His performances give communal pleasure which are also useful to society. Performing behind his Bob Dylan mask, he gives us poetry disguised as song. Thus he begins as music-hall comedian, only gradually did his audience begin to recognize that he was primarily a poet. Dylan arrived on the scene with a big advantage over his predecessors. Unlike Walt Whitman, Woody Guthrie, and Allan Ginsberg, he had the opportunity to perform for audiences all over the world—plus, there was an established system for recording those performances and distributing the results. When Whitman self-published his Leaves of Grass in the late 19th century he could hardly be expected to reach the large audience for which he longed. When Woody came along in the ‘40s and ‘50s, the time was not right, politically or otherwise. There was no chance that “This Land is Your Land” would become a national song then. The “Red Scare” interrupted the growing folk revival, postponing it until the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. When Dylan arrived in Greenwich Village in 1961, the Kingston Trio and Joan Baez had paved the way. Dylan’s emergence as a song writer who would transform the medium itself, like Shakespeare’s as a playwright who did the same for theater, was a result of genius arriving in the right place at the right time. As with Whitman and Guthrie, so also with Allen Ginsberg, the central firgure in the Beatnik scene. His most famous poem, “Howl,” begins with these words: “I saw the best minds of my generation..xxx. Certainly the Beatniks had an impact on American culture, but it was not widespread until the changes of the 60s. It did not reach beyond the a Beatnik subculture until after Dylan’s movement into the mainstream of popular music in the mid-sixties. On the line notes to the Desire album written December 1975, Ginsberg called Dylan’s songs (quote) “ the culmination of Poetry-music as dreamt of in the 50s and early 60s.” As Ginsberg implies, Dylan goes beyond the other democratic poets by melding music and words in a popular medium, thereby reaching a much wider and more diverse audience—while at the seame time connecting with them at a deep level. When Dylan arrived in New York City in 1961 both he and the situation were right. Just as London was fertile ground for the genius who came up from Stratford-on-Avon as the 16th century was coming to an end, so Greenwich Village was for this 19 year old Minnesota boy who drifted in as the post-war era gave way to the youth culture produced by the baby boom. John Hammond signed Dylan to a Columbia recording contract soon after his arrival in New York.
That 1964 recording of “To Ramona” is now available on Columbia’s official bootleg series, vol. 6, released in 1998. The fact that it circulated in unofficial bootleg LPs and CDs for three decades before this official release illustrates how different Dylan’s environment is from that in which Woody Guthrie was working. Dylan’s democratic poetry reaches a wide audience, one which began to pick up on the poetry of his lyrics early on, thus making possible his growth and development as an artist. For the relationship of artist to audience is symbiotic: each feeds off the other, each helps the other to grow. Dylan’s message to Ramona is meant for us all: you have to face the freedom of radical solitude—but somehow speaking of it helps. Dylan’s words do not, in fact, turn into a meaningless ring, not if we have ears to hear. Encouraging that ability is the purpose of this series of radio shows. But our time is up. I hope you will join me again next week when I look further into this idea of radical solitude and our attempt to escape it as explored in one of Dylan’s finest love songs, “Just Like a Woman.” It is a more complex exploration of the idea of escape from freedom because it’s not just the “she” spoken of but also the “I” who speaks that has to face radical solitude. So join me, please, next week, for another look at the work of this Shakespeare in the alley. Until then, this is Bill King, who, like Dylan himself, is so glad you came around.
Chapter one ofThe Artist in the Marketplace, my dissertation on Dylan's poetics, is online. Click on the title. back to topMike Marqusee
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