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Shakespeare in the AlleyShow SIX: lOVE SONGS, pART I |
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summaryDYLAN REJECTS the sappiness of Tin Pan Alley love songs. creating new depth to his most common type of popular song. Some of his love songs are love songs, but some are about the, artist/audience relationship, some about spiritual love, and one, “I Want You,” is a critique of popular love song tradition, closing with a Beatles image: " Your dancing child wth his Chinese suit, He spoke to me, I took his flute..."
SHAKESPEARE IN THE ALLEY: THE LOVE SONGS Part IWelcome back, folks, to this the sixth show in the series. My theme this week is a favorite of both Shakespeare and Dylan: love. Shakespeare wrote all those love sonnets, some of which were about much more than just romantic love. “Let me not to the marriage of true minds/Admit impediments. Love is not love that changes when it changes finds.” You may not think first of love songs when you think of Dylan. Often people thing of protest songs, but in 1965 an interviewer asked Dylan, “ What does the word protest mean to you?” Dylan’s reply reveals much about the recent transition he had made. He says, “To me? Means uh…singing when I don’t really wanna sing.”
But when Dylan says “love songs” he isn’t thinking of the kind of popular love songs heard on the radio when he was growing up. Most of those love songs came out of what was called “Tin Pan Alley” the cacophonous noice created by hundreds of commercial song writers banging on old pianos in one district of New York. They turned out songs by the dozen hoping to hit it big, songs like this one from 1957, the year Dylan moved from his sophomore to his junior year in high school.
That’s the Duprees version of “You Belong to Me,” a typical kind of 50s love song.
So let’s take a look at Dylan’s kind of love songs, for he has written many. About half of his songs are in once sense or another “love songs.” This may surprise you at first, since we tend to think of other kinds of songs when his name comes up. But Dylan has always written love songs, from “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” in 1962 to “Lay Lady Lay” in 1969 to “If You See Her Say Hello” in 1975 to “Make You Feel My Love” in 1997 to “When the Deal Goes Down” in 2006
Obviously Dylan writes lots of other kinds of songs, too. We think of those first, when Dylan is mentioned, because that’s what made him stand out in the sixties. When Dylan came on the scene in 1961 over 90% of all popular songs were on the theme of love, courtship, breaking up, or getting back together. Dylan changed that. He blazed a trail which paved the way for other song writers. The term singer-songwriter did not exist before Dylan. Now it’s a category. So it’s really a rhetorical question to ask if Dylan changed popular music. American popular music has never been the same since his influence was felt. But he has always written love songs of various kinds. They stand in relationship to the rest of his work somewhat like Shakespeare’s sonnets stand in relationship to his s. In them, the artist explores this basic theme which is found in all kinds of literature. But he does not focus on this one theme exclusively. In the rest of his work, he explores many universal themes. And we will look at those too, in other shows, but this show focuses just on love songs. ~”DON’T THINK TWICE” NOT FROM TIN PAN ALLEY
Many of Dylan’s love songs echo that loner’s refrain “I gave her my heart but she wanted my soul.” As he returns to this theme he gets even more intense. Possession by others is something that he rants against. We might almost call some of his songs “anti-love songs.” Looking back at this song after knowing Dylan’s later work, we find themes and symbols which taken on deeper significance than we tended to see in 1962. Images such as light, lonesome road, and window become recurring symbols as we move through Dylan’s four decades of songs.
~ANOTHER SIDE: ”IT AIN’T ME BABE” A couple of years later another of his anti-love songs illustrates his rejection of fitting into anyone else’s idea of who he should be. By 1964 when “It Ain’t Me Babe,” comes out he had been labeled “the voice of a generation” and had already begun his unsuccessful attempt to escape that role. Thus the title of the album: Another Side of Bob Dylan. It’s the last of the four first albums on which he performs alone with just his guitar and harmonica. This song on one level portrays a romantic relationship, or rather the rejection of one; but at another level it speaks of his relationship with his audience, for they, like the “you” in the song, were wanting someone “To protect you an' defend you/ Whether you are right or wrong.” It opens with another use of the window image, and a line right out of an old folk song.
This may seem to speak more to the situation in my generation growing up in the 60’s than to the situation today. Certainly we can hear a rejection of the gender stereotype of the times, which, as Dylan told us, were a-changin’. It rejects the male white knight figure who is “never weak but always strong” who comes riding in “To protect you and defend you whether you are right or wrong.” The song was written just about the time of the publication of the first major book in the second wave feminist movement. Betty Freidan’s Feminine Mystique challenges the role females are asked to , the weak role of one who waits for the doors to be opened. But there is more than that going on here. It is also Dylan’s rejection of the role he was being asked to as the “voice of a generation.”
Here we see him rejecting more than the role of “protest singer” which his previous album, The Times They Are A-changin’ , had created. He is also rejecting all the stereotypical promises made in so many standard love songs of the ‘50s. The refrain, “No, no, no” might even be a negation of the Beatles’ refrain popular at the time: CHORUS OF BEATLES’ SONG Even Beatles’ love songs were sappy until they met Bob and he turned them on in more than one way. The last verse of “It Ain’t Me, Babe” uses images that tease us. They prefigure the psychedelic phase soon to emerge:
The common love song term “babe” acts as a double entendre suggesting a lack of development on the part of the one being addressed. His overall message to “babe” is clear: I am not the one to protect you from the truth but to tell you the truth. And that is what Dylan’s songs are always about: the truth. He makes that clear repeatedly. He says it most blatantly in “Outlaw Blues” on the next album, Bringing It All Back Home in 1965, the first album with electricity:
~LOVE SONG ON ART/ARTIST/AUDIENCE RELATIONSHIP: “SHE BELONGS TO ME” As “It Ain’t Me Babe” illustrates, many of Dylan’s love songs are not just love songs. And some which seem to be love songs are not really love songs at all. Let’s look at another song on the 1965 albu Bringing It All Back Home. The title, “She Belongs to Me,” is at first enigmatic and then, as we begin to understand the lyrics and think of what he is saying, it starts to make sense. In this case, it also alludes to the sappy love song tradition. One of the most popular love songs of the 50s was titled “You Belong to Me.” I ed a verse for you at the beginning of this show.
Since this song comes to us in the popular song medium, our first response is to see it as a love song. “She’s got everything she needs” makes us think first of our romantic ideal, the girl of our dreams, but that ain’t where this song is going. Somehow this relationship of “you” to “she” isn’t about romance:
Some of my gentle listeners may be asking, “But who’s really listening to the words? And who’s gonna stop and think about them? This is pop music heard at parties and on the radio while we’re driving around.” Well, let me tell you this, by 1965 when Bringing It All Back Home came out, people had already begun to change their way of listening. And many realized that this was not a song about romance but about the artist and his art. That the “she” was really “the artist” and the “you” was the other part of the same person. Like so many other artists, especially Romantic artists, Dylan is writing about the demands of art on the artist.
I opened the series with reference to Allen Ginsberg, who stands in the alley behind Dylan in opening scene of Don’t Look Back, a film shot in 1965 and who visits the grave of Jack Kerouac with Dylan in the Rolling Thunder Review in 1975. The artist, in the words of that other central Beat poet, Lawrence Ferlingetti, is up there like the trapeze artist, “constantly risking absurdity,” Dylan even once described himself as a trapeze artist. Ferlinghetti’s words are so apt: “spread-eagle in the empty air,” the trapeze artist is always in danger when performing “over the heads” of the audience, and with no net, with nothing to protect him. Or I should say “her,” for the artist is a female figure here (as in may other depictions).
Dylan, like Coleridge in his famous poem “Kubla Khan,” pictures, an almost religious relationship of artist to audience. Coleridge’s closing lines in his 1816 poem convey this idea, describing the way the modern artist, i.e., the Romantic artist, is viewed:
Here we see Coleridge portraying the artist as someone both revered and feared by the audience. “Beware,” they say, but also “he hath drunk the milk of paradise.” Compare Dylan’s closing verse:
Dylan and Coleridge are both describing the relationship of the audience to the Romantic (capital R) artist, and since the turn of the nineteenth century, that has been the dominant image of the artist. This love song is not really a love song at all. Dylan uses the outer form to convey an inner truth about the artist, his art, and his audience. This popular song form has been transformed into an artistic medium of much greater substance. Most love songs have one simple message: I want you (or in the case of the breaking up song, I don’t want you anymore). This song goes far beyond that. The association of Dylan with the English Romantic poets is more than superficial, as Dylan makes clear in his 2004 memoir Chronicles Vol.1. After discussing the harm that television was doing to young minds, he comments that the three minute song, standard for the radio when Dylan came along in 1960, did the same kind of harm. So he began to seek ways to create longer songs. This is what he writes in Chronicles: I had broken myself of the habit of thinking in short song cycles and began reading longer and longer poems to see if I could remember anything I read about in the beginning. I trained my mind to do this, had cast off gloomy habits and learned to settle myself down. I read all of Lord Byron’s Don Juan and concentrated fully from start to finish. Also Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. I began cramming my brain with all kinds of deep poems. It seemed like I’d been pulling an empty wagon for a long time and now I was beginning to fill it up and would have to pull harder. (56) Clearly Dylan had moved past the stage of thinking of himself as just a folk song writer. He was consciously seeking ways to break through to something new and he did. ~LOVE SONGS ABOUT THE SPIRITUAL: “OH SISTER” There are many kinds of love. The Greeks distinguished different kinds of love: the erotic, the platonic, the fraternal love; and then there was the love for humankind as a whole, which they called agape. That was their word for the kind of love exhibited by Jesus of Nazareth and Gandhi of India and Martin Luther King, Jr. of the United States of America. And some of Dylan’s “love songs” are about this kind of love. I’m not talking about songs from the so-called “Christian period.” We’ll get to that in a different show. Dylan was always concerned more with the spiritual than the political. Let’s look at a song from the Desire album released in 1976. Notice how the first verse makes you think first of romantic love, Eros as the Greeks called it, the kind which popular songs are so often about—but then it takes a turn.
That opening image created by “when I come to lie in your arms” sends us to the bedroom, of course, but then we get to “Our father would not like the way that you act” and we are thrown for a loop and have to rethink what’s going on here.
This is not from Slow Train or any of the Christian albums which came out in 1979-83, this is from the 1976 album Desire. It really shouldn’t have been such a shock when Dylan started to release overtly Christian albums a few years later—but it was. His focus was, from the first, spiritual rather than political.
It is the mystery of life and death and meaning and chaos that always was at the center of what Dylan saw. Some may think that it is pushing too far to note the allusion to Christ who stands at the door and knocks in the final verse. But not really. The ‘I’ in Dylan’s songs is often not the songwriter from Hibbing, Minnesota but some other who may be almost anyone. ~A REAL LOVE SONG: “IF NOT FOR YOU” (FROM NASHVILLE SKYLINE) So let’s look at one of Dylan’s finest love songs, a true tribute to romantic love, to eros, to a kind of whole-hearted devotion to another human being which we all aspire to but few reach.
It all sounds so simple—and it is, of course, until we see the complex design of the rhyme throughout the song. Christopher Ricks in his book Dylan’s Visions of Sin devotes almost five pages to an analysis of the rhymes and Dylan’s subtle changes from verse to verse. The second verse, as Ricks points out, sounds as if it’s the same pattern as the first but it’s not.
Then the bridge alters the pattern, and it repeated, but with variation, as Ricks points out, so that the concluding repetition of the title phrase comes next to last the first time and then returns to last on the repetition with slight alteration. Variety within similitude.
Then comes the final verse with its need to end without seeming to stop, as Ricks puts it. And to achieve this Dylan comes up with a dual rhyme, a line ending with two words that combine the two rhymes.
Here’s Ricks’s comment in Dylan's Visions of Sin (471): If the song is to end, and it must, you know, then in some way it must itself “ring true” that this is an ending, not a stopping. And this word “true” is the only rhyme-word that has returned, other than that of the refrain. “And you know it’s true” returns now as “Anyway it wouldn’t ring true”—and this with a reminder about the challenge to which all art has to rise. For the earlier rhyme on “new” (“But it would not be new’) asks to be taken in conjunction with “true,” to remind us that the challenge to the poet is to say something at once new and true. …. It’s not difficult to say something new if doesn’t matter whether it’s true, or to say something true if it doesn’t matter whether it’s new. Dylan’s song rings new and true. And it does so by courtesy of rhyme, including that dual rhyme with which it enters upon its ending. Ricks is the esteemed literary critic and Oxford Professor of Poetry. His book compares a whole sereis of Dylan songs to British poetry. Somehow he omitted my favorite comparison, that of the most famous carpe diem poem in British literature with Dylan’s song on that theme. It fits into the pattern of Dylan’s rejection of the Tin Pan Alley tradition and with phony love songs. One of his songs acts as a rebuttal of such phoniness. The purpose of social myths is to mold us to the needs of society, of civilization, of culture, asking us to forget our own nature and what we want. There is an ebb and flow back and forth between these two poles. In the 50s we were pushed toward accepting the restrictions on our behavior and thought. It was the time of Joe McCarthy and the black lists, of suburban houses made of ticky tacky, of conformity in speech and dress and political views, of the KKK and the John Birch Society. In popular music the challenge to these restrictions came in the form of Elvis the Pelvis. It couldn’t be said openly, but the underlying message of rock n roll was clear: I Want You. These three words become the title of Dylan's finest rebuttal of what I call the "True Love" myth. That’s the mid-twentieth century American social myth of love that is pure and sexless. It is eternal and never fades away. It is found in countless songs that have faded away but also in such classics of rock history as this by Buddy Holly: “NEVER FADE AWAY” This kind of vapidity, of falseness, permeated popular music up into the sixties. It conveys a naïve and even phony attitude toward love still apparent in early Beatles songs:
This verse makes me think of the injunction by the English Romantic poet John Keats, who was clearly an influence on Dylan, as we shall see in part two of this series on love songs. Keats told his contemporary Shelley to "load every rift with ore." I.e., pack in as much meaning as possible in every word, every line. The words of the first two lines in “I Want You” function not only as parts of phrases but also as independent units to create associations: Note the significance of each word:
These words create appropriate responses in and of themselves. "Undertaker" suggests one key issue, the other being guilt. This is Dylan’s mid-20th century version of Andrew Marvel’s famous poem "To His Coy Mistress." Marvel’s poem opens with these famous lines:
Therefore, the poem ends, let’s get it on NOW! Marvel doesn’t use those exact words, but he does echo that word NOW just as Dylan does. Both make the same point. Dylan’s modern carpe diem poem-song has the same message to the shy sister, the coy cutie: don’t hold back, don’t listen to all these phony views that create guilt; time is running out. The condensation of "guilty undertaker," evokes the tension between guilt which keeps the coy lady from acting and that which time inevitably brings, death. This tension gives the song an especially intense opening. The bitter irony of the lines "washed out horns/ Blow into my face with scorn," suggest a pent up and perverted sexuality, while "cracked bells" subtly but accurately connects this phony view of love with the American Dream. The line is particularly cutting because of the parallel construction: "Cracked bells and washed out horns." The final line of the stanza, "I wasn't born to lose you," completes in reverse order the life-cycle suggested by the opening reference to the undertaker. This reverse order of death to birth reinforces again the unnatural quality of the situation. Let’s listen to that first verse again: No schmaltzy metaphors, just simple statement emphasized by musical accompaniment. The chorus ends with an incomplete sound, created by ending on the third note in the scale which leaves us wanting competition, longing for a return to the tonic. This effect is further enhanced by having the last "want you" come one measure after the completion of the eight measure antecedent phrase used in the verse. Musically one wants the completion of the consequent phrase but is left with only another monotonous repetition. The song is not an attempt to express desire—except in the chorus. The verses of the song analyze the obstacles to fulfillment. Each verse speaks of what keeps us wanting, of what denys us what we want. The second verse extends the list, emphasizing the link between the phoniness of the “true love” myth and the phoniness of politics and religion:
The saviors and politicians, like the undertaker and the organ grinder, preach the same phony line, telling me that “I should refuse you.” This is the true love myth, but the truth is otherwise, as we see in the break:
There it is, the “true love” myth. The fathers have gone down without true love, but the daughters still hold out for it, for “true love.” Not so, however, for “the queen of spades” who stands in contrast to these daughters:
The contrast is a clear as black and white, hardly needing any analysis once the context is clear. But just as the second verse adds political level of meaning, the third verse adds the context of the American musical tradition. The queen of spades may be a chambermaid at one level but it is also the central figure in Robert Johnson’s famous blues song. Dylan’s song focuses on the contrast between the phoniness of much popular music (which means white music) and the reality of the blues tradition (which means black music). There’s nothing the queen of spades doesn’t see; she is not hoodwinked by the true love myth, by the false promises of drunken politicians, by phony religious views of “saviors who are fast asleep.” This helps clarify that enigmatic image which opens the last verse: "Your dancing child with his Chinese suit." This puzzled me until I began to think about Dylan's love songs as a group. With that context it suddenly made sense: it was a perfect image for popular music, perhaps inspired by the memory of the early Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show in their Nehru jackets.
Like a pied piper, the dancing child has ed "catchy tunes" on his flute and lured all the children into believing his false image of true love. But Dylan has taken that flute and used it to destroy the "True Love" myth. Why? Because the dancing child lied, creating false images of love and life; and because he took you for a ride, frustrating you, keeping you from knowing what you wanted; and because Time's winged chariot was on his side; and of course because I want you, not the image you put on to fit society's myth, but the "real gal I'm lovin'" as he says in “Bob Dylan’s Blues.” In "I Want You" Dylan uses all the conventions and associations of his trade for artistic purposes. The song is delivered so perfectly that one can listen without hearing it. The melody and accompaniment work to carry the intense lyrics so that the words are absorbed rather than understood; they come back to haunt the mind, ing around the edges of consciousness until something clicks and what he is saying becomes clear. The title is simple and in the tradition of popular music; a thousand love songs have said nothing but "I want you." But from the first line it’s clear that something beyond that is going on in this song
This song also highlights Dylan’s ability to use the vocal and instrumental arrangement to reinforce the central meaning of a song and thus contribute to its artistic success. Dylan's vocal delivery in “I Want You” closer to whining than singing and is particularly monotonous musically. One note is repeated for two, three, four bars at a time and in seven of the nine bars of the chorus. That description might lead someone who had not heard the song to think it had no melody; actually the melody, or tune, as it is popularly called, is provided in the accompaniment. It is quite possible that one of Dylan's motives for replacing his guitar-harmonica accompaniment with a band was to relieve himself, as vocalist, of the necessity of "carrying" a tune. He is freer to concentrate on delivery of the lyrics if there is an organ, guitar, bass, and drums to provide musical interest. On the mid-sixties albums Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, Dylan’s voice is almost completely independent of the music. Usually the accompaniment does more than provide musical interest of course. "My songs are pictures," Dylan said at the time, "and the band makes the sound of the pictures." "I Want You" is a good example. The monotony of Dylan's voice in "I Want You" is artistically functional. The song is about wanting and wanting and never getting. But Dylan does not convey this monotony by boring us. Monotony, or to be more precise, frustration is expressed in the voice but the song as a whole has life. Dylan achieves this effect by superimposing the instrumental melody upon the voice so skillfully that we remember that catchy tune. This “tune” is the musical representation of the stolen flute from verse five. In typical love songs, it has benn used to pervert the listener's view of love. Though not even sung, it is heard more than the words. To emphasize this effect Dylan omits it during the break, a technique which is doubly effective because it provides an interlude which is, by contrast, quite prosaic:
These daughters, like all "five-and-ten-cent women" which Dylan sings of in “Bob Dylan’s Blues,” want the protection and security only found in the phony world they create in their heads, i.e., they want to escape from freedom, from life. "I Want You" is like many other Dylan songs such as "To Ramona," "Like A Rolling Stone," and "Just Like A Woman." It is a plea for us to come out and experience life, to “please crawl out your window,” to stop swooning at silver saxophones and crying over old organ grinders and begin responding to real human experience. Dylan suggests a return to the real world, the one portrayed in the blues rather than that found in the typical popular love song. We see this in his allusion to Robert Johnson's "Little Queen of Spades" in the third verse. The Queen of Spades is no five-and-dime woman but a real gal, viewing reality without the distortions of false ideals and dream-lover images. Like Ruthie in “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again," she knows the difference between what you need and what you want. And that’s one good reason to discuss Dylan’s lyrics on the radio, because it is the way, one at least, that we hear his songs naturally. Live performance remains his favorite means, of course, but the record or CD ed on the radio or on our sound system is how we hear him most of the time. But just because it’s in this popular medium is no reason to assume that it is rude, and crude and culturally unsophisticated. Let’s close our analysis of this wonderful song by listening to it all the way through, uninterrupted. Here it is from Blonde on Blonde, the 1966 double album which came out just three months before the motorcycle accident that ended his touring for almost a decade.
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