It's Like a Ghost Is Writing a Song: Luc Sante on Bob Dylan

Actually, I'm still not at ease with anything Dylan did after '66; starting even in the Basement Tapes, he put sentimental cheese in his voice, which he never really got rid of until he blew his voice out mid-nineties, at which point you have to deal with the fact that his voice is blown.

By the way, fending off the dead with a steam shovel makes perfect nonsurrealist sense (image of zombies scooped in massive shovel and dropped into a ditch, while other zombies push forward behind them), as does dumptruck unloading his gigantic, hurting, stuffed, swollen head. Both are straightforward metaphors.

In any event, Highway 61 Revisited is one of the most crucial albums ever in my life, and I'm slowly starting to pay attention to Late-Period Dylan, which I define as anything he did after age 25.

I'm curious what people think of Sante's claim in this passage:

Of Dylan's many achievements, the most fundamental was his hitching together of the folk-lyric tradition and Western modernism, connecting them at the point where their expressive ambiguities met. The merger was not entirely unprecedented, maybe—there are glimmers in The Waste Land of Eliot's St. Louis–bred acquaintance with the world of "Frankie and Johnnie," and Robert Johnson can certainly sound like a modernist, especially, as Dylan suggests, by virtue of how much he omits. But no one had previously planted a firm foot in each and assumed an equivalence between them.

I think this is very interesting to think about, and it goes a long way towards explaining why Dylan is such a central figure in 20th century culture - one whose importance extends well beyond the confines of popular music.

x-post. Hi Don.

we need to talk of "pop" as well as "folk"

I agree with this, in terms of lyrics, I think by the early 60s pop was a very distinct style from folk - even though in many ways it was an outgrowth of folk (and blues and country) - and pop was definitely an element in Dylan's amalgam of influences as well. This is complicated by the fact that in the early 60s folk was perceived as being something quite different from pop, whereas nowadays the distinction is much blurrier.

One interesting thing re: Blood on the Tracks is the actually recording of it, or rerecording of large chunks of it with that band of Minneapolis guys or whoever it was Dylan recruited. I read another interview (maybe around the time of Infidels) where Dylan was talking wistfully about what he called the "wild mercury sound" of the mid-'60s records and how he'd been trying to recapture that ever since but it was hard to get the right mix of musicians, songs, production, etc. So I think it's telling that with Blood on the Tracks -- which, yeah, is more formalist and self-conscious than the '60s stuff -- he goes off and tries to recapture some of the sparkiness missing from the words by throwing a bunch of semi-pros together and recording on the fly. He did somewhat the same thing on Desire with Scarlett Rivera. He was obviously aware of some kind of freedom or spontaneity or something that had gone missing -- that easy path to unconscious creation -- and was trying to kind of jumpstart it. (And I love Blood on the Tracks, fwiw -- I do think it's more or less a masterpiece, but it's a different, more predictable kind of masterpiece.)

I also like Sante's quote of Sam Shepard on the eternal Dylan question: "Who is this character, anyway?"

Er, yes, but I believe that what is referred to here is the folk-lyric process, which has to do with words, mainly.

cornball self-parody(!!)

[1 and 3 are Berryman on Crane, quoted from the article.]

I don't know if I can really get down with Sante's criteria for what constitutes good poetry--"sphinx-like," basically. He seems to be arguing that if you can understand it, it's not really poetry. There's a long tradition behind that, of course, but it's not exactly unopposed.

I liked Alex Ross' outsider's perspective on Dylan from the New Yorker a few years ago, which points out that, you know, some of that holy 65-66 stuff just doesn't make much sense no matter how hard you look at it:

"As I went through my Dylan records and tapes, I realized that in many cases I was only half listening to the lyrics — that the music was giving the words their poetic aura. Often, Dylan's strongest verbal images come toward the beginning of a song, and it falls to his musical sense to make something of the rest. In "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands," the eleven-minute love song that closes "Blonde on Blonde," Dylan fashions some majestic metaphors to capture the object of his affection — "your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes" — and then, in the second-to-last verse, he clouds over: "They wished you'd accepted the blame for the farm." What farm? What happened to it? Why would she be to blame for it? "Phony false alarm" is the rhyme in the next line, and it doesn't clear things up. The refrain makes another appearance — "My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums / Should I leave them by your gate? / Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?" — and by this time you ought to be losing patience with it. What are "warehouse eyes," and how can one leave them? Dylanalogists beat their heads against such questions. But the music makes you forget them. The melody of the refrain — a rising and descending scale, as in "Danny Boy" — is grand to begin with, but in the fifth verse Dylan makes its grander. As the band keep playing the scale, he skates back up to the top D with each syllable. He sings on one note as the rest of the harmony moves around him. It's as if he's surveying the music from a summit. This is a trick as old as music. In Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas," the soprano catches our hearts in the same way as she sings, "Remember me, remember me."

Would also add that Sante doesn't talk about the music at all--does the old thing of treating Dylan's lyrics as words on a page. In those terms, his analysis of that verse from Idiot Wind is pretty spot on, but what he doesn't take account of at all is the sheer force of the delivery. Also think that BOTC takes much of its force not from its personal drama but from the way it also resonates as look back in anger at the sixties.

Anyway, it's still a really good piece, of course.

and yeah, thanks Frank, this is nice. Sante is always pretty great. someone once told me that he served as partial inspiration for 'the critic' (unless i'm misremembering and it was just a bit of intra-essay self-deprecation)

i like alex ross.

I didn't totally pick up on this until I actually sat down to learn how to play the song and spent a few days memorizing all 10 verses, but "Desolation Row" takes an interesting turn in that last verse. The first nine verses are all little self-contained surrealist vignettes, with lots of great lines and casual jokes. There's no cross-referencing between them, and therefore no narrative per se, but they all seem to inhabit more or less the same magical realist universe, Dylan's trademark mish-mash of folklore, literary and early 20th century figures (Einstein disguised as Robin Hood; Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot; the Titanic; the Phantom of the Opera, etc.).

But the last verse is entirely different, shifting suddenly into the first person ("I received your letter yesterday") -- there are a few first-person references earlier in the song ("for her I feel so afraid"), but they sound like a detached omniscient narrator rather than an actor in the drama. Now, the narrator is the protagonist, and he's addressing someone very specific and "real", no fairy tale (no Cinderella or Ophelia) -- "When you asked me how I was, was that some kind of joke?" The metaphors are gone -- even "about the time the doorknob broke" sounds pretty literal -- and replaced with clear-eyed anger. The next lines give what might be the key to the preceding nine verses: "Those people that you mention, yeah I know them, they're quite lame/ I had to rearrange their faces and give them all another name." So what we have is the artist interrupted in his studio (or garret, or flat, or wherever the hell he is) by a letter from his ex. He spins rhymes and stories from it until finally he can't distance himself from it anymore, at which point he just gives in to his bitterness, and revisits the refrain one more time but even that is now personal and vindictive: "Don't send me no more letters, no/ Not unless you mail them from Desolation Row."

The question this raises for me is which came first: was the structure there the whole time, or was it imposed retroactively by the addition of the final verse? My guess would tend to be the latter, in which case the song might mark a beginning of the transition Sante talks about, from unconscious writing to self-conscious writing. Or, you know, maybe that's just more of that fruitless Dylanology.

Maybe what was new in this was a reaction against individual psychology, the confessional, romanticism, but, paradoxically, for personal reasons. I don't think jazz has that struggle going on.

It's interesting, in gypsy mothra's theory and in Sante's comparison of Tarantula and Chronicles, that the container Dylan chooses is so close to who he is: again, I is someone else.

I don't know if I can really get down with Sante's criteria for what constitutes good poetry--"sphinx-like," basically. He seems to be arguing that if you can understand it, it's not really poetry. There's a long tradition behind that, of course, but it's not exactly unopposed.

No, I don't think that that is what he meant. After all, "To live outside the law you must be honest" makes all kinds of sense. Rather, the distinction is between effects that arise on their own--not dropped from the sky, obviously, but from the release of the unconscious that results from banging against the walls of form, something like Manny Farber's termite having to eat its way forward--and effects that are laboriously striven for. If you say, "I'm gonna write a poem that will make people cry," you will probably end up making them snort. Half of art consists of telling to conscious mind to look at the birdie, over there, so that the unconscious can sneak out. The unconscious on its own produces much more dross tan gold, of course, so that you need form to rein it in and give it tension.

Only problem, and it's a small one is, you can't claim all of Dylan's interviews are part of his mystique building schtick and then use examples from his interviews to prove your theories on his lyrics. Unless you have some sort of Dylan decoder ring.

I think David here is confusing "mystique" and "mystery." Dylan is no slouch at the mystique-building game, from I Was a Teenage Railroad Tramp in 1962 to the Professor Irwin Garbo of the circa-1965-6 interviews to the Grand Guignol of the Rolling Thunder business, but what makes Dylan a mystery is not willed, I think. He may have wanted to possess the authority to sing "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" with complete credibility when he was 19, but so did a lot of other 19-year-olds then, and their wishes did not put them on horseback. The mystery of how he was able to achieve that authority is impervious to his attempts at various points to fabricate such authority. I don't, in other words, think Dylan is any better at figuring such things out than we are.

Definitely. And I think that bothered him for a long time -- people keep asking you for answers, and you don't know, and you try to tell them that one way or another but they don't believe you or call you disingenuous so you try saying it again another way (like, with Self-Portrait) and then they just think you're being a dick, and you are, because by now you're pissed off and bored with the whole thing. It seems like maybe Chronicles means it doesn't bother him as much anymore, like he's had enough time and distance to contemplate the mystery himself (the mystery of himself) without bitterness -- it's his own work of Dylanology. And he still doesn't have anything definitive to say, but he sure knows more about it than anyone else.

any idea where I could find the initial Sante article?

it's collected here. can't recommend the book enough.

writing for pitchfork - https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-kinks-something-else/

Thanks

Not sure which thread serves Luc Sante better so posting this again: https://brooklynrail.org/2021/05/books/Adele-Bertei-with-Luc-Sante

Thanks! Looks promising, though they got IDs of left and right pix backwards, and don't yet see their mention of her *latest* book, Peter and the Wolves, re Laughner: https://www.adelebertei.com/

I wonder if Frank is still so dismissive of Dylan after the 60s? Will ask (I know he liked Chronicles, and said so on that year's Rolling Country, I think).

"mind of a DJ" was his (approving) line, on whichever thread.