Why Bob Dylan Matters

my name is Peter Knox I'm the director of the Baker dord Center for the Humanities here at Case Western Reserve which is sponsoring this event this evening together with our friends at Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and in particular I want to thank Jason Hanley Andy leach and John Goerke at the rock hall for helping to make this evening go smoothly as many of you know we had to change venues because of the demand for this event and there are always challenges that go along with that and we're very grateful for our friends for helping to make that possible thank you for coming my academic home is Classical Studies so it's a particular interest to me that the resurgence of interest in Bob Dylan as literary figure has at its core many of my friends and colleagues in the field of classical studies and there are very good reasons for that which you will hear something about this evening but I'm not going to take your time with my ideas on the subject I'm here to introduce our panel this evening Daniel gold mark my friend and colleague here at Case Western Reserve University in music of the music department who is also the director of our Center for popular music studies daniel has published numerous volumes and articles and delivered papers on jazz cartoon music history of the music industry and subjects related to popular music in general on the far end of the podium to my right to your left is Thomas palaima coming to us from the University of Texas where he is the Robert M Armstrong Centennial professor he is a classical scholar of distinguished distinction and a Dylan ologist as well he received a MacArthur Genius award for his work on early Greek which is clearly related to Bob Dylan he is a frequent contributor to the Austin american-statesman and other news media on topics related to contemporary issues including Veterans Affairs and and politics and the occasion of our coming together this evening is the publication of a new book on Bob Dylan by my old friend and colleague Richard Thomas seated in the center here who is the George George Martin Lane professor Richard is the George Martin Lane professor of the classics at a small College in Massachusetts outside Boston called Harvard he is also an extremely distinguished scholar in the field of Latin literary studies having published a the go-to commentary on Virgil's George --ax a volume on Virgil called reading Virgil and it's Tex Virgil and the Augustan reception and he is one of the co editors of the three-volume Virgil encyclopedia but he is a Dillon ologist of extinction I was about to say extinction coefficient co-editor of the online volume on the performance artistry of Bob Dylan his recent book which will actually not be published until next week why Bob Dylan matters the title is intended to imply the answer to the question that a lot of people raised not so long ago when Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature copies of it I understand are available in the foyer for purchase and Richard will be available to sign after our conversation this evening the Baker Nord Center is non-commercial and we have no stake in Richard sales but holiday season is approaching and for that very special someone who has everything else there will be copies available so Richard will say a few words about how he became interested in Bob Dylan about his course at Harvard which was covered in the New York Times in an article about the coolest class at Harvard a Freshman Seminar called familiarly Bob Dylan 101 personally I always thought his coolest class was Latin prose composition but and we'll have time for some Q&A afterwards so in the meantime please join me in welcoming our panel this evening thank you Peter on behalf of the panel and it's great to be here I'm going to talk for just 10 or 15 minutes so and I want to talk about the book but also talk a bit about how I came to to write the book and and how important Dylan is really to the humanities and so it's appropriate that we are we are being supported not just by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame but in particular by the bacon Nord Humanities Center so I like many of you started listening to Bob Dylan I sang blowin in the wind when I was 14 in 1963 1964 in my school choir and and I've been with Dylan ever since Dylan was a I was a fan probably through into the 70s when I started seeing Roman Greek and Roman lyric poets as being similar to Dylan in terms of a lot of the themes love last death grief human things that basically we all share and that artists who can capture those human things in the highest with the highest aesthetic art basically talked to and that's what the humanities is the humanities is the expression of what it is to be a human being at the highest level and therefore sublimating universalizing that experience and whether we realized it I didn't back in the 60s and 70s whether we realized that that's what Dylan was that is what he was so Dylan looked like a lot of my poets young Roman poet Catullus who writes basically about about a love affair that goes wrong and and also writes about the death of his brother I don't think Dylan was reading the classics at that point but I think he was he was very much affected by in a part of that stream as I call it in the book a tradition the stream that flows from Houma and I'll end my remarks with Homa the first poet of the West so it was really in in 2001 when love and theft came out and the song loons and a blue suddenly had two lines from the Virgil the aforementioned poet on whom I work I'm going to tame bring got to get my notes here because I'm but but basically at that point bring peace to the people and gonna tame that gonna tame the proud and that that was straight out of this passage of any at-6 of Virgil and so I suddenly thought I've been thinking since about 1997 with time out of mind that some of the songs Highlands and others the way Highlands is channeling Robert Burns from 18th century but then Dylan Dylan's famously said you know I'll start out with the folk line and then then see where it goes and anything can happen so I think that process was happening already in 1997 and in the Ed Bradley 60 Minutes interview in which Bradley starts quoting it's alright MA and says to do and so where does that where does that come from where does that music that poor tree those words come from and Dylan I'm sure most of you saw Dylan said I don't know I don't know where that comes from and Bradley said can you still do that and Dylan says no I can't but I can do other things and I think some of the other things that he was doing since 97 and particularly 2001 is basically consciously doing not what he had done in the 60s and 70s where he's accidentally coinciding with these with a lot of these authors but consciously actually reading and and integrating the lyrics of my poetry basically the Greek and Roman poets who also at the center of the humanities in their art states what it means to be a human being what it means to lose your companion in battle the the Iliad what it means to look for homecoming and not be able to find homecoming in the Odyssey all of Greek tragedy and so that's a tradition that Dylan is in and is in consciously so I want to just say a few point to a few things in the books at first of all on page 194 the book by the way I was um since I was teaching on the day that the Nobel was awarded October 13th 2016 I had two agent and I was in the New York Times I think Jeff rose and Bob Dylan's manager immediately called the New York well that New York Times would have called him and he immediately said talk to Thomas because what the Bob Dylan office obviously would have liked is what they got namely Dylan taught in Harvard seminar and that I think was a very a very clever way of beginning the combat to those who said Dylan doesn't deserve a Nobel you know he does songs he doesn't he's not a poet he's not literary so I think that that was very deliberate so I agreed to write this book and and wrote it in about nine or ten months I'm not sure entirely how it happened and my wife who's sitting here well you can talk to her about what an unpleasant nine months it was from her Specter but anyway it happened and I'm I'm very happy with it so basically I talked about intertextuality but by which I mean it's a fairly recent term but and it means different things to different people but let me just quote TS Eliot the first the first bit will be familiar immature poets borrow mature poets steal bad poets deface what they take and good poets make it into something better or at least something different the good poet welds his theft into a hole of feeling which is unique utterly different from that from which it is torn the bad poet throws it into something which has no contagion and this is important a good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time or alien and language or diverse in interest so that this is Elliott in nineteen twenty and of course Dylan in desolation row already has Elliott in that in that song has the love song of effigy proof wrote in that song along with Ezra Pound and so but Dylan was already doing this was Arthur Rambo for instance chimes of freedom or mr. Tambourine Man those are songs which are basically taking the symbolism the surrealism the incoherence as a marvelous sort of lack of of temporal and other logic and sort of putting it into his songs so so yeah so it's already been there but so Rome is important to to Dylan and some of you may know that this starts really in his sophomore year in 1957 when he essentially walks into a Latin class as a sophomore at Hibbing high why he walked into that Latin class I don't really know of course Dylan doesn't tell you anything about why he did anything or why he writes anything Dylan's school records disappeared from a very meticulous school office and so nobody even knows what Dylan took but Dylan in his yearbook in 1959 has three details the first one is well know and to join Little Richard the second one is Latin club sophomore year and the third one is American Studies or social studies so those three details and um and so I got to thinking that Dylan I started Latin in 1959 when I was nine years old Dylan starred in 1957 when he was 15 16 years old so that was a bond that nobody who's written on Dylan extensively has that bond so I'm doing Bob and I are pretty close right now he may not know that yet but I hope you read the book but um but there was just something you know I know why I did do it did Latin in 1959 it was partly I liked languages but it was apparently also I I liked movies about Romans and Christians and and Dylan was watching those same movies in in the mid-50s or so so that Hollywood particularly with McCarthyism was produced it was using Rome as a metaphor so Roman oppression of Christians as a metaphor for what McCarthy and the right was doing to Hollywood blacklisting Hollywood directors and actors and so on so it was a seifish topic that Dylan of course had an uncle who owned a theatre the Libba and Dylan went free and Dylan vez saw all his movies and he talks in chronicles his memoir which Israeli a novel or thought Dylan song and prose whatever you want to call it but Dylan talks about these movies and he clearly this if anyone's been to Hibbing Minnesota okay you should go it's a wonderful right yeah it's a wonderful place and you really get a sense of Dylan what it was like for this kid who must have known from early on he was a genius that there was something about him which is why he didn't talk about what he's feeling I spoke to a girl who was a girl she's now 76 now that who was in in Latin club with him and and Dylan's father got her father to give barb a ride back to the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis about a four four and a half hour drive and Bob she said he just sat in the back seat with his guitar between his knees and he didn't say one word the whole time now and that's because Dylan Dylan it's inside and it comes out in the art so anyway he um he wrote a song you know he went in 1962 and of 1962 he went to to England to film the BBC show which sadly the BBC didn't keep the the tape madhouse on Castle Street and he did his first trip to Europe that was his first trip out of the u.s. to the UK and he went to Rome and and I think it's Rome has always been there and he had he came back Suze Rotolo was in Italy and that's why we had these great songs boots of Spanish leather she gave us those songs Dylan was pining away in the village and writing these fantastic songs in her absence so he went there and he came back in 1963 in January at Gerdes folk city he sings a song that's never recorded it's on the so called banjo tapes a bootleg tape and it's a song called going back to Rome and and basically it it it goes like I going back to Rome that's where I was born so that's where I was born he's up and said he was born in the wrong place to the wrong parents but saying he was born in Rome and I'm going back to Rome a month after returning from it and I think he's always gone to Rome so that before 2001 before love and theft came out he he of course had that Rome press conference in which he again says there were people here before me a long time ago in this city who were much wise and were going walking the city and a month later out comes his album with lines of virgil on it so he's planting his clues none of the journalists get them because he's some because of his elusiveness so that's Latin and that's that's virtual I'd like now to quickly end with a bit on on home app and end up my situation so in around 2010 Bob Dylan he had read the Odyssey in in school he claims he had in a Nobel lecture but in about 2010 he read the Odyssey and he started becoming Odysseus literally becoming Odysseus by putting songs putting lines of Homer into songs so workmen days working man blues number two had had some Ovid in there no one could ever say that I took up arms against you the printed lyrics that's gone completely and what's there in its in its place is a lie is this stanza I'll be back home in a month or two when the frost is on the vine I'll punch my spear right straight through half ways down your spine I'll lift my arms to the starry skies and pray the fugitive prayer I'm guessing tomorrow the Sun will rise I hope the final judgments fair so in Odyssey book 10 Odysseus says to the king who's entertaining him describes how he killed a deer square in the back burn halfway down the spine and my bronze spear went punching clean through he dropped in the dust groaning gasping out his breath that's Homer and essentially basically the words of Odysseus not the narrative but just the words of Odysseus are taken over by by Bob Dylan who then I had written all at this book by June 5th and then the nobel lecture came out if you haven't heard it listen to it with the musical score of the jazz pianist lightly in the background but one of the three books All Quiet on the Western Front Moby Dick and then finally the Odyssey the books at Dylan torque set about being a formative and he says of Odysseus he's always been warned of things to come teaching things he's not told to taking two roads that they're both bad both hazardous or you could drown on one on the other you could starve he goes into the narrow straits meats so he's describing her dishes but then in the next paragraph and a lot of ways some of these same things have happened to you and the you there has to be Bob Dylan you to have had drugs dropped into your wine you to have shared a bed with the wrong woman plenty of those right you two have been spellbound by magical voices sweet voices and strange melodies and you've had close calls as well and you too have rambled this country all around and you've also felt that ill wind that one that blows you no good and and that's not all of it and I think he's here basically saying that we all have a bit of Odysseus in us and I think he's also channeling the great modern Greek poet Constantine kavafis poem if Iike so don't be in too much of a hurry to reach Ithaca it's the journey that is important and so Bob Dylan is still on that journey we saw him in Akron two weeks ago I'll see him in New York at the end of the tour in eight days and so I think my time is up so I I guess we move to the next phase of this appointment I just want to tell you all what a magnificent presentation that was by Richard and encourage you to buy the book and copies of it for friends it's a magnificent study that really gets you inside one of the things Richard didn't mention so I'll mention it here just how much hard work it takes to create a the perfect songs that Dylan creates and Richard lets us inside that by showing the degree to which Dylan is operating like Virgil and and unlike Horace and so forth making old things new putting things the art of intertextuality is to give give us connections to things that we may only understand subliminally are from elsewhere but they're but they but they allow us to do exactly what we're doing with our lives as we move through them the you mentioned that he was you were talking to this young high schools buddy a woman a girl but she's now 76 but she's not 76 in in Bob Dylan's memory and the people I have my good friend from high school here Brian Corrigan I've known him since we were six years old together at Assumption school but but the Brian I see here is the composite of all those Brian's and all those years in the past and that's what Dylan has been trying to capture that there's this human side those of you who have you know remember blood on the tracks and the you know tangled up in blue and now I'm going on back again I've got to get to them somehow and in a new lyric he says yesterday is dead and gone but tomorrow might as well be now another and another time he says with Minh other-- comment he's not entirely reticent about what he's doing but he said with blood on the tracks especially tangled up in blue I I succeeded in what I wanted to do I put yesterday today and tomorrow in the same room and that's how our memories function we alight I think of the time I met you at st. Andrews for the first time and when we were talking together but but but I also remember they this show we've just shared in Akron and the time you came down to Austin to see Bob at the backyard and so when we look at other people in our lives we're always seeing them at different points and so one of the one of the great creations great achievements of Dylan and Richard points this out in his book and maybe we can investigate it further it is the way he said at that juncture he wanted his songs to be like paintings because he's also a painter and he has this tremendous capacity to see things to see human beings and really tried to question what they are but he said you know he was able to he wants his songs to be but like like paintings and if you think of his best songs they're vivid in a way that Faulkner's vivid or Hemingway is vivid you know in a great in a direct way but he also said he wanted to essentially break up time and when you look at it you know as an isolated comment with and don't think about it it may sound like utter ly fantastic but what a great genius and a great poet will often do is reduce things that or well they'll be able to speak the things that are ineffable speak things that almost can't be articulated and they'll be there symbolically or something like that and the other thing is that that they will create images for us that we can retain the last thing I'll say and be and then maybe we can start maybe this will be a trigger besides being a literary artist and with Homer Richard was getting onto this Dylan is also and what his first inspiration was the great Woody Guthrie that is somebody who was coming out of the folk music tradition the folk music tradition that can be connected with people who are ill and things are remembered in memory and are carried on through time with with variants so he you know he learned all that but our popular music and it's great to have the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame here in Cleveland because popular music is the way that most Americans and probably most human beings who have ever walked on the face of the earth have taken in poetry I'm reminded of this because Wilfredo I do a lot of research with war poets Wilfred Owen's the first edition of Wolford Owens poems was in 300 copies the greatest poet of the First World War who gives us vividly how ghastly it is to be fighting in trench warfare 300 copies and by 1928 when they decided to do another edition it had sold fewer than 2,000 copies so popular music is where it's at to communicate some of the things that that people who are just mere literary poets what want to tell us but but don't have the opportunity because they can't reach us you you can probably talk about this more but I'm think that you'll sing om use right I mean these opening words you know from Homer I mean it's all about it's not just about popular music it's about music in general I had a question though that I want to specifically about the book you know I and I've read the book forgive me I know none of you have yet you will the book brings together a lot of themes of then and now both for Dylan but also you know because you're looking at all of these poets that Dylan is drawing on and so this book to me seems as much of a memoir as anything else and I'm wondering if you want to talk them if you can talk about this specifically Richard in particular how much of it is a memoir of your experience with Dylan because you there is a great deal of you in this book and I think for everybody I would imagine everybody here their own experience of Dylan of course is their personal engagement with it's not just oh I heard that Dylan did these things and that made him great it's he had an effect on me as a person so can you talk about that and how's that yeah yeah so the first chapter which is about I use the word together through life which of course Bob Dylan used for the album of 2009 and I think Dylan is they're talking about together through life with his fans when when in Mississippi he sings I've got nothing but affection for all those who've sailed with me he's talking about us guys I mean I think Dylan needs his audience as much as as we need him as a symbiotic thing he said you know there's nothing worse than performing but there's nothing else that I want to do than perform so so yeah the early bits of the book in particular were were personal about bringing blonde on blonde and songs of Leonard Cohen the only two albums I bought from New Zealand and so I decided there's so much on dill and everyone knows what is to be known about Dylan except the Latin club I found a very interesting document there so I thought I would do the summary of of Dylan's sort of career partly through my experience with them and it's it is personal I hope it's also interesting and it's always focused on Dylan but um but yeah and Dylan Dylan's again Dylan's Nobel where he's where he tells his story and he says it starts with Buddy Holly talking about seeing Buddy Holly at the the loser Amory days before Buddy Holly's plane went down and and that Buddy Holly looked at me he was just feet away and something was transmitted and doing you know he talks about Transfiguration later on this this hell's angel whose name happened to be Bob Zimmerman who was killed in a cycle crash and 63 not quite 66 when Dylan's crash whatever that was happened so and Dylan talks about acquiring the vernacular of the folk music I knew John the Revelator I knew you know the characters from folk and I think that Dylan a tree becomes them as he's become home I think he he populates literature and he populates song and the characters of song and in the process gives us his new genres so that folk rock comic country rock I mean what he's doing now integrating in a setlist see American standards that rock and roll came to destroy Bob Dylan is now rescuing them I think he's he's preserving the classics I think he sees his mission as as preserving culture I think that's what's interesting about the classical texts too and because you mentioned memoir I'm a Cleveland boy sumption school and st. Ignatius I owe it to my brother who's sitting here in the second row that that I my whole life was changed I was asked about about 10 years ago to list the 10 most important books and I said well I'm from a different generation can it be books movies and records but the two the two records that I listened to one before high school because of my brother was bringing it all back home I still have the mono role copy that has Michael palamas signature on the back but he's not getting it back if Exige my son who just graduated from Berklee College of Music has has it now and that's a that's another story but but rather than talk about my own response to Dylan I had asked permission at the start to to read you something how many of you have read Michael decapitate through the windshield as anyone here read it yes it's a tremendous book written by a native Clevelander who in was born in 62 in 1982 was driving a cab in the area we now called the Tremont district and as I said if you can imagine Charles Bukowski with the sensibilities of Tim O'Brien writing what Travis Bickle would have seen through a windshield of a taxi driving around Cleveland that's what Michael decapitate captures in a dylan-esque way absolutely human nobody has made fun of nobody as sad sad or satirized everybody is taken for who they are but here I was reading a besides through the windshield he's written just a couple other short little novellas one is called radiant fog and this is he's 15 years old he's a Clevelander so this is 1977 and it's his memoir when I was 15 I walked into one of the mall record stores where a harmonic was playing and looked up as though I was in church you know how you look up by reflex just like that the record as it turned out was blood on the tracks and the song was tangled up in blue I later found out from the words though I heard instantly in the music that the record was about the road it was about a life lived from place to place person to person job the job but ultimately alone it was about being honest rather than good it accepted the nature of time and change an imagined life as a series of episodes and entanglements which add up to an idea the harmonica poured its heart out and the music glittered like sunlight on the spokes of a wheel or the surface of a stream that moment moment was one of those recognitions about how things are and are going to be and that simple yet vaulting song has been like a church to me ever since spring time always brings me back around the blood on the tracks which is about the presence of the past as much as anything else the bear branches down the street are pricked by a needle work of new leaves and the blue sky is a color you look into rather than ant yesterday a Friday I played the record before I left the house I took the train to work and sat outside the read for half an hour when I got home my room was cool with late afternoon shadow and the sky was bright above the alley I said an ashtray on the trunk by the window started blood on the tracks put my feet up on the desk and let it roll it was hard to take these things get harder as you get older maybe because you realize they're out of your reach you realize how difficult they were to achieve how transparent what a miracle they are Beauty walks or razor's edge someday I'll make it mine and that cut that that encapsulate the skies a wonderful author and it encapsulate says reaction to Dylan but talks about some of these qualities that we've been talking about that there's a visual Ness of Dylan because he can see things and I'll just stop this this little excursus with with the Greeks used the perfect of the verb I see to mean I know that was their basic definition of knowing namely I saw something in the past and I retain it now and it's still valid in the present Aidan and Ida and they even pun with Oedipus yeah and that he's somebody who sees and therefore has to blind himself because of the terror but of the knowledge that he that he finds out and I think that there's that aspect in in Dylan as well I really think he's very very visual and that he's learned how to he says he wants his songs to be like paintings but I think it's the paintings in his mind that have turned into song if you understand what I mean so when you listen to him again just think of the images he's conjuring up no matter what song you put on the under seat in the CD player he's doing painting lessons right around that album so I was able to to get access to some of the archives in Tulsa and particularly around tangled up and blue as tom says I thought I just I was interested in in this partly because I was juxtaposed in Virgil we are told we have the Virgil's life virtual diet in 19 BC but we're told he in the morning he would do a bunch of verses and then the afternoon he'd Whittle them down and lick them into shape and get them just right so tangled up and blue was at one point called dusty sweat bucks blues good thing he kept working on it right then carnation blues was one and then he eventually got too tangled up from blue and one page is five by three notebook with tiny hand of these drafts and it's you can see from us he said oh I did blowing in the wind in ten minutes they told Lana Co and I did I and I and 15 minutes don't believe it for a minute I mean that's what people like Bob Dylan say but this is just a few lines from tangled up and blue and it seems to be a play of some sort seems to be involved so-called for you backstage at night but it was too easy for you to leave the second act had just begun when Adam first meets Eve so you can hear the melody and the rhythm saw there I drifted into the audience of cattle dealers and pimps blue smoke rising from the something I tried to catch a glimpse illegible we you I got too overly involved cold for you backstage at night I think you were in a trance the Prince of Darkness blew his lines so I thought I'd take a chance so you can all hear that that the greatest song of the seventy is basically there but it's nowhere it's nowhere now being there yet and he's just working on it and working on it and working on it and then even the New York version finished in September of 74 he's not happy with so he goes back to Minnesota I was in Ann Arbor my first semester New Zealand on my own and Anna but but going into the record store on South University to get the album that was coming out in December 74 and I went back day after day and it didn't appear and we didn't know that it had been withdrawn and would come out in January 75 I made a lot of friends I ended up in bar late night bars with some of them through that process but it was Bob Dylan who was the the glue as he is for all of you but that I think we need to go to Danielle but you know you're it's it's your all show although you're mentioned the archives I mean I think I assume most people are aware that Dylan donated so I'm sorry sold thank you I'm sorry they a quiet the word I was gonna use was acquired yeah most of musicians these days do not donate sold his materials to the archive in Tulsa can you just talk a little bit about your experience working with them I mean I don't imagine anyone here anyone has anyone made that trek yet no yeah so for someone who's as dedicated to this as you was it just paper or was it revelatory or somewhere in the map it started so a Japanese when I was in The New York Times for the seminar Japanese film crew four of them came over and they followed me down to Florida just to film me walking in and out of the concert and none of that made it onto the into the final version so I don't know what this cost them but they also went to the archives and they were allowed to film this notebook and and I got permission from the Dylan people to to use it in my course first of all but then in the book so I've since been to the archive it's only just opening to scholars you have to fill out forms you have to have you know evidence of where you're going to publish it but 6,000 pieces most of it is material like this drafts of songs is a jacket that he wore at Newport in 65 when he went electric but there's very few there are very few sort of museum pieces like that it's it's notes it's thousands of hours of recordings every concert since 2002 has been recorded so do we know what sony's gonna do with that archive once you know Bob Scott there'll be years of bootleg great bootleg coming of course a lot of it's out so it's a great resource and um and the Woody Guthrie archive is there along with Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs but the Bob Dylan center will be downtown and things will rotate out of the archive and so the public will have access to some of the archival material but it's a it's you know decades more of scholarship by us Dylan ologists from precisely that passage that I read there read sure he got it he waited til he got it right and and he got it right right I mean tangled up and blue is a perfect song even in the various versions and of course he then when he goes out of the studio it the process doesn't stop writing right so her eyes were blue her hair was too and if you see her say hello so it continues and I mentioned putting Homer into working man blues number two instead of Arvid so it's it's just his mind that is constantly moving and making associations and always sort of ahead of us stay with tangled up in blue you know she was working in a topless place I stopped in for a beer iced kept looking at her face in the spotlight so clear she she was working in the blinding light I stopped in to a for a drink I could have kept looking at her face so white I didn't know what to think and then Mike one of my favorites she was working in the Tropicana I stopped in for a beer I told her I was going to go to Atlanta she said no you're gonna stay right here and so he keeps doing this I mean he he never stops thinking and tinkering and and a lot of it has to do with you know if you're looking at something and you just do this you see it from a different perspective and Richard mentioned the archives we had Michael shakin it down to UT last spring for a big humanities lecture he's that the archivist and he had worked with the with Pennebaker who had done don't look back the famous film of the Dylan 1965 tour of England and and I I'm really glad in many ways that they chose as the the archivist somebody who engages in film and music not just somebody dealing with the printed text but he has a very open attitude even encouraging things like being able to get college students to come up with projects and have small fellowships where they can come so the the vision of it is not to be a very close thing but to be very very open and the last thing I wanted to say triggered by by by Richard going back to you know talking about Woody Guthrie in the early days Dylan's career is fifty years long now and if he's always had a fascination for different names masks faces different characters he plays nobody right in Sam Peckinpah is right yeah Pat Garrett and ability to kid and alias alias yeah yeah it can't even be nobody that would be too addition so so he has to be alias but but during that time he's had at least twenty different musical phases right but each one has been full bore passionate you know it's like it's as if we not only have a genius but a genius who has maintained a childlike enthusiasm for whatever is new that he wants to grab at the moment so P then we now have the gospel bootlegs out and I mean I've listened to them and they're just absolutely fabulous but I was talking to Australian film crew earlier today about Dylan's criminal music thinks were three writes about criminals often glorifying them that a horror of the rest of us but he's trying to get inside what must have been to be Joey Gallo and there but for the grace of God you know not if we weren't born in the Mafia families we don't know what it's like but if we had been we may have turned out like Joey Gallo so he wants us to know I'm glad you brought the identities because that was something I want to ask about although I very quickly want to say the fact that Dylan sold his materials and had a good at a very good price if you go back and see the article but I mean even here in Cleveland with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's Library Archives I mean they have wonderful collections of various folks and it seems like the folks now and but those were you know people like commandeered again and a lot of people from the 1950s who started you know who basically helped start the our music industry now you have folks like Dylan Lou Reed there's a lot of artists from the 60s and 70s or their descendants or their heirs who are trying to keep their legacy alive separate from the music itself so I find it very interesting that Dylan was able to carve out this space not that he needed to I don't think that anyone was gonna doubt that he was going to persist for a year you know forever but but I want to go back to something you said about about identities because there are all these periods in Dylan's life you know we can go very traditional and say you know there's the early period and then there's the you know the first electric period and then there's the post accident and blah blah blah but you spend a lot of time talking about very recent Dylan's I mean the book really I mean you look to early songs but it's albums of the last 20 years or so that I think you spend a lot of time on so I want if wonder if you two and then I think we're gonna probably move on to some questions if you two can talk just for a minute about maybe how you think of the way that his life divides up and maybe why that focus I mean starting from the back I think there's no greater album than tempest who's who listens to Tempest okay so just probably about 10% of you get it listen to it it's some is fantastic it's just um and I have my young 18 year olds think it's fantastic do I mean I I listen to all of the old stuff um but but there's this phase since um since 2001 that has produced particularly modern times and tempest 2006 and 2012 that are just phenomenal and and also Dylan in performance is now doing only tangled up and blue from the 70s and then he's only doing pre blonde on blonde 60s things Jerry in the first set then he's only doing songs mostly from tempest early Roman Kings in particular pay in blood so those are songs that he thinks are right for him and it's interesting that yeah the 70s are gone and the eighties that go on to there would be another interesting discussion Tom quickly i I think every period of Dylan is fantastic and if not it's not you know but but the more recent stuff as Richard points out in his book the the turning point really was blood on the tracks working with a visual artist Rabin who was a tuning him to really looking at things and trying to figure out what things were and how to how to how to paint them and then also the realization that that songs do not have to be coherent narratives because Dylan was a great movie fan things songs like like hurricane actually match hurricane Carter's own account they called the sixteenth round with a jolting first scene pistol shots ring out in the barroom night enter Patti Valentine from another hall from the upper hall she sees a bartender in a pool of blood she says my god they've killed them all I mean that's the opening of a fantastic motion picture if you think about it but now you know I agree tempest has blockbusters I remember writing Jeff Rosen when I put it on I said I can't listen to a long and wasted years you know we held each other and cold and frosty morn we held each other because our souls were torn so much for tears so much for the long and wasted years and that's just the end of it but the rest of the song is taking you from different places different times even maybe different persons because at the same because what what Richard started with Dylan is a humanities education in himself he's a humanities education and himself and if we devalue Dylan it's because in this in this mindless and heartless society of ours where the S sign with two vertical strokes seems to be what matters at every turn that that the the the and devalues the humanities in general that that would be why we wanted to neglect Bob Dylan but until then you know just have your kids listen to Dylan as I I used to sing nursery but Dylan to my son as nursery rhymes and and you know your kids just get fixed so in Delia he shot poor Delia down with a cruel 44 but he had concert variants a smokin 44 or cold blue steel 44 and if I sang the variants my son would say no dad Dylan sings it the other way and I didn't have the heart to say no no James he sings it all three weeks long and wasted years he's saying to the woman those years were wasted how different is that from you just kind of wasted my precious time not wasted wasted repeated and the same to but in Tempest the brutality of that song of that twenty whatever year old has retreated and is an empathy so the wasted years there's a sorrow about it which is not there in don't think twice so but again the whole the whole life the whole career is a continuum and I used to think the 80s he went off but you go back to YouTube and it's it's all good as Bob said want to think about Bob Dylan Bob Dylan's genius from the start somebody asked me the other day are there songs that don't have their titles taken from words in the song Dylan positively Fort Street positive before said we don't even know where it takes place or she belongs to me and so on so Dylan in just small ways if we were listening to him we would realize well the song title is this and the song is that and it causes your mind to try to have to connect it what does he mean by calling calling this song she belongs to me or love - zero / No Limit and it's a mathematical formula but I'm sure some people like to get some questions and so I believe Peter Peter has the mic we raise your hand if you have a question raise your let him bring the mic to you because otherwise you will not be heard on well you won't be heard by any of us my question is about Dylan and Homer so a criticism of Bob Dylan is that his reluctance to reproduce songs as they might exactly sound an album live so that you can hear for example the man and me you played on your album and you go and hear it live and it sounds nothing like it that he's almost defiling his own greatness like something he got so right but how would you compare that to you know the unwritten nature of Greek oral poetry and that Bob Dylan is so reluctant to give the same performance more than once Bob Dylan has talked about the studio the purpose of the studio album is to get the song down to get copyright and he said I'd never go back and listen to it again if however you heard don't think twice it's all right when you were 16 and it reminded you of a relationship and Bob Dylan does a completely different arrangement of it he's doing something to you by doing something to that song because that song in its arrangement precise arrangement was what triggers off your memory of joy grief whatever and so I went to a show in Florida and came out and was listening to right after Nobel and this guy was saying I slept in my car to do this no country rock what a prick and he was and he was angry I mean he was angry something had been damaged in a bit Dylan you know that's Dylan Dylan doesn't doing cares but he cares about his art and mostly his art in performance the recent in Akron they tangata for blue is unrecognizable the arrangement of it it's um and so he's doing that to me because I was 23 when that came out but you have to learn to go along with it and see what his art is I think aural poetic tradition is that aural poetic tradition is not based on pure memorization you know it's based on having structure and and phrases that one can put into particular spots so that Homer again we have a written down version but the performed versions would have been different and changed at all moments so that Dylan is really operating as the ancient oral poets would be Orestes Scottish and Irish and other balladeers would be changing leaving in creating new verses because of the nature of the particular audience or because their own mentalities had changed about that particularly wanted to sing about and the repertory is out there and you grab bits and pieces so the oral poets were doing a kind of intertextuality that we can see in literature because we have fixed texts still discovering Bob Dylan I absolutely love his music my husband loves his music lately about three four years ago I discovered this when I saw it on television of all things Rhiannon Giddens Elvis Costello I thought it was phenomenal when the poetry from I guess the big pink period came to being discovered and re-recorded with younger artists I just want to know what you think of that album and I have to admit I do like the song married to my hack I think that's fun which album music from big pink tapes did you hear those have been around tree with roots and so and those have been around as sort of non legal boots for some time that's I think that's a great question it's a fantastic period where particularly the Americana of those songs that Dylan is exploring getting really deep into the 19th century into the 18th century with which he does a bit on self portrait and another self portrait same sort of periods so copper careful about about avoiding whiskey taxes in 1785 so you know Dylan is the the Civil War all of that but dosa those are fantastic tapes and that they were never you know of course in 75 single album of the Basement Tapes came out but but your yeah your touch she's talking about lost songs the basement it's the basement tapes continued oh right yeah and I could just say one thing about that because I mean I think what's interesting about the basement tapes that they've been such a focus they've been such a focus for musicians for so long so the first time around you have so many artists who take these songs and bring them to a wide population not you know probably knowing maybe not knowing that they were doing songs I mean Fairport Convention and oh god who did man who did Quinn the Eskimo the first to who a big hit with that um man for a minute that's right man for a minute I mean so there's all of these artists but then you know 20 odd years later you have like you say Rhiannon Giddens who just won a MacArthur I think and Elvis Costello and others who are rediscovering the songs and if anything to me it just shows you know sort of the permanence of Dylan as poet that that those songs can't be brought back so far it's not that long but really can be given a new life with the new artists stories that he didn't cover or try to cover his stories in different ways and Dylan himself as you know I was just listening this afternoon I have three you know boots from 1988 acoustic out of 45 songs five were written by Bob and these were all things he performed in concert he was performing 40 traditional folk songs fanariotov the Buffalo blackjack Davey just on the rows and the Brier on and on and on and on and when he needs to regenerate he goes back to that music and nothing is clearer to me than what had the precede 97's time out of mind was Dylan in 92 and 93 releasing two albums that were entirely true additional Irish Scottish folk music and blues music but even blues music by the black fiddle band the Mississippi shakes who the heck had ever heard of the Mississippi sheiks before then maybe somebody who is a confirmed ethnomusicologist or somebody but even Dylan you know Dylan Delano Files had no idea that this music was out there and when you listen to what Bob does with Stephen Foster's hard times if you listen to Stephen Foster's hard times it's like camptown races but when Dylan sings it it is so embedded with pathos for the poor for the the poor wandering figures who are not part of the of the wealth of society that it just breaks your heart and but Dylan goes into it in order to to see what's inside himself and to pour himself into it so the what these artists are doing 'men the example of Bob they're doing the Bob what Bob does to others and and this is almost like Jesus Christ do unto others what they would do unto you and he had his gospel faced tempest of the song teen angel Joni Mitchell what was that coming from teen angel starts out it was late last night when the bus came home enquiring about his lady that's the first line of Woody Guthrie's Black Jack Davy which which Dylan covers himself but that song it's late last night when the boss came home inquiring about his lady the only art so he got she's gone with a black jack Davey so the boss rides after them finds in the in the Guthrie song fine see the gypsies strumming his big guitar and they and the lady has left and was going to go off with the Gypsy even abandoning her baby you know so that's the end of song so Dylan starts teenager which is nine minute ballad with that situation in has the has the bus riding out hiring men the cheapest labor that money could buy you know as many sort of contemporary capitalists as there comes upon Henry Lee the leader of the gang clan has sort of taken the lady and at the end of it is a combination of the death scenes of a fellow and Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet with all three sort of dead in this Shakespearean sea in which with dialogue that goes back and forth I'd have given you the planets and the stars and the planets too but what good would these gifts do you with these fantastic lyric and again starts with a woody guthrie line but has become something that only Bob Dylan could do because it's the traces of other literature's Shakespeare and so on and other folk songs are all there and so I think I don't know the album you started out with I mean I yeah okay well I'll put it on my list in the back the Bob Dylan Christmas album matter yeah it does here comes Santa I have a theory about here comes Santa and you have to see the video of here comes Santa and it's basically you'll see in the video that a young woman comes running down the stairs and then a man comes a young man who looks like Bob comes running down the stairs then older man comes down and he's clearly the father throwing things at him maybe throwing a reader's digest Adam taking you back to motorcycle in the 60s and so I think I think that particular song I think that yeah I mean and and the they I love that song I make my children listen to it every Christmas and my wife so she'll tell you about it but he did that he gave all of the proceeds of that to charity right so but I think he wants you know there the polkas to Christmas pocus that he's hearing up in northern Minnesota with all of these Polish miners and stuff so it's it's we haven't got nod to his religion we were partly expecting that but I think it's yeah I mean I think it all matters and I think Christmas matters to him you know he I'd not I think he was born again for about a ten month period I mean he came out of that but I think Jesus has always been there with the Hebrew Bible collection of from various singers and blues singers and folk guys but the one thing I have that's not from from a established artist is Bob Dylan's Christmas album signed to his dear father by my son so it matters a lot to me how many of you gentlemen met Bob Dylan and had a conversation with him and if so what did he have to say to you neither Tom nor I have a Bob doesn't meet the the only plus the only Dylan ologist I know who has was Christopher Rick's who author of Bob Dylan's visions of synths of Rick's who's a great English literary critic and editor works on tennis and TS Eliot and so on and this was some years ago when when Rick's Rix's a professor at Boston University and Bob was playing in 2004 the college tour and I think that's the context in which Rick's met and backhand Rick's tells of sort of having this conversation and Rick sees a very cultured Englishman said you know my mother always taught me to talk about books with people so they talked about Shakespeare and it was time to go and they taught of course Richard the third with Olivia at Laurence Olivier their evil Hunchback of RIT in that movie at the end has just gesture like this and Rick's tells of sort of it was clearly time to go but do you shake the guitar hand of Bob Dylan and so he he sort of put out his hand and Dylan went like this so Dylan even in alluding to literature even as he's doing that but I Dylan yeah I don't think do you know people have to know one person and Austin a rather wealthy couple who planned their European vacations every year by going to Europe and figuring three tour dates when Bob's touring Europe and about five years ago she went to a cardiff wales a smaller smaller sized town and was walking around you know got there ahead of the concert obviously and I was walking and she saw somebody up ahead with socks and the sweatpants and a hood up and about halfway down the block and she just instantaneously said Bob cuz that's what he does he goes out in disguise and walks around towns and he turned around and it was him and she went forward and he said do I know you and he said no but I'm a great fan of yours all where are you from she said I'm from Austin oh that's where Charlie sexton's from does Charlie know you I'll let Charlie I'll bet but he was really engaging and then he then she she said I'm going to the concert tonight and you know it's my son's birthday so good could you play did you write forever young you wrote forever young for his children and he said yes but that was a long time ago and he said could you play that for my son because it's her birthday and he and he kind of did this and then she then he said then she said can I take your picture and he really nodded at that and so she tried to save the situation she said oh you believe like the Native Americans that if I take a picture of you I'll steal your soul and he looked and he said like this and then he just turned and walked away but but she immediately ran back to her hotel room and got on the internet and and emailed me and Gavin Garcia whom you know because she said she wanted to get it all down just exactly it but that's it that's my that's my vicarious link to Bob Dylan but but again it was purely human he didn't have to stop and talk he didn't have to engage in the questions and he and he wasn't dismissive but he just gave these little nods when no that's not but oh this was last there's a another guy in town who was there was a pool among Dillon fans to guess the set lists at the time you know what would be on the next set list at a time when Dillon played a radically different set list every night and so when she wrote back he put immediately on for the next night Forever Young which Dillon hadn't played in months and he played it the next night at the next stop so I have nothing I think we have one in the back when he's touring like when he was in Akron the other day does he talk to the audience does he converse with the audience in the book about this he um you know he used to do vaudeville jokes you know Larry Campbell likes to wear likes golfing and so when he goes he goes on tour he wears two pairs of pants in case he gets a hole-in-one so use that he went through a period of that but now and I have a I have a view of as I've already alluded to about the concerts I think they have a triadic structure he says in a couple of interviews I've been thinking and triads and and the interviewer says oh you mean like Sinatra's yesterday today and tomorrow and Bob says no I mean more like Aeschylus's arrastia the three Greek tragedies or and and so yeah 60s to begin with one song from 70s and the latest of and so and I think that he it's it's a concert it's like opera so he doesn't talk he's a singer he's not why would the singer talk it's a performance it's a play and I think it goes with the fact that you now if you go out you're not allowed to come back until there's a break between songs no cell phones not even for calling so that I've seen people get thrown out for just looking at their cell phone and it makes it a much more serious concert going experience you don't have people who are who are there so they can say to their friends though I went to a Bob Dylan concert but they're sort of talking through this fantastic music so I think I think for all of those reasons I think we're not gonna we're not gonna hear him talking again if they're very much like watching a silent film or something in other words he'll gesture at a key moment and these are meaningful they they they attach themselves to the songs he's singing so yeah there's nothing remembered the Christian phase he would he would preach from the in between in between songs we could clearly go on for quite a while here what I'm going to do is I'm going to invite one last question here and then I'm going to invite you all to take your questions to our panelists after the talk or out in the hall where Richard will be signing copies of his book so one more question here like to thank all of you gentlemen for speaking with us tonight so you wonder did you get a question about Dylan's faith or his religion this isn't so much about what you think about what his faith is but thinking about him and using the language of religion and you talked about how earlier in his career perhaps he didn't he wasn't aware that he was doing something like Homer or like Virgil but now he's more conscious of it so I think about lines like you know the first one now will later be last a gospel line and was that sort of he was inspired by that or now you think of something like spirit on the water darkness on the face of the deep or one sweet day I'll stand beside my king is that similar to you and what your comment on that in terms of is he trying to in some way create Scripture or sacred texts or is he still being influenced by that and and where does that play out I guess I think the songwriter is using those texts to create songs whose singer has connections to Hebrew and Christian Bible and and that sing it so we have a it's not dark yet so I was born here and I'll die here against my choice so what it's in the book of Daniel and in the Kabbalah that birth is unfair because in being born we're destined to die so quite a Jewish thought the next song called is bound I went to church on Sunday as she walked by so here's a church-going Christian next song so I think when what I encourage with my students is to think in terms of the songs as songs you know but as you would read a novel not necessarily identify a character in a novel with the novelist so I think we really need was Dylan to realize that he's doing that I believe he has very deep faith I happen to know a rabbi who who's occasionally Dylan visit so I think but I think it's almost his practice is almost irrelevant to that I mean that sounds sacrilegious but I think I think he's a songwriter and he insists on on its being the song and we want to know what Bob Dylan is because he's such a effing attractive person even at 76 that we want to know what Bob's thinking through these powerful songs that's not so richard says I think Dylan has a deep deep deep deep deep almost unfathomably deep reverence for the human experience and he's been exploring it in every way shape or form and when you think of something like a mid-career before it not not in though the the so-called gospel face like shelter from the storm right and it was used as the theme song in what was it but why um what was the name of the movie with Tom Hanks what was it called yeah Barry McGuire so Jerry McGuire Jerry Maguire Barry McGuire is about Eva destruction or something like that right so and Dylan believes that too one of the quotes I was reading says he thinks that we're even just constantly moving towards the apocalypse as human beings but if you think of shelter from the storm you know she took down my crown of thorns come in she said I'll give you shelter from from the storm it a little tilt build they gambled from my clothes you know they I offered up selfish they offered and they gave me a leaf lethal dose I mean it's just a really an amazing amazing song so that and he's able to even I consider you know when we talk about him being Homeric the Greek said is this term we're we're professors and he says you know you've been with their professors and they all like your looks right with great lawyers you disgust leopards and crooks but but the professors have passion because you know we we live with the with the with the knowledge that we are constantly investigating and when we get it in front of a group like you we're just having questions like this having people be attentive to something we think about of course we want to professed speak forward but Dylan is not sure is not a professor he's a prophet ace he's a prophet tastes like an Old Testament prophet he's a you know he's a speaker 4th of truths and you get on the truth in your book and that's the one thing we haven't covered yet truth to Dylan the Tim O'Brien to people who really understand is not factual information which which quickly evaporates truth is something that's essential to the human experience and that's why if you mount most of you have read Tim O'Brien where he says fiction is the only truth because you're gonna try to explain to somebody what it was like to be in a firefight in Vietnam or to walk out through a minefield every day wondering whether you were going to get blown up there's no way of it communicating that except by going off into the realm of what we call untruth and Dylan feels the same way you know people excoriated him because of Rubin hurricane Carter oh you can disprove all the facts in the Rubin hurricane Carter he just not at one point when he was asked that he goes shrugged and said well so give him another name no they could not be about Rubin hurricane Carter because essentially I'm talking about what it's like to be a black man in the United States there's a Rubin hurricane Carter may have been guilty of sin but but it doesn't mean that blacks are not you know as we all know so I think we should at this point because we could go on for quite a long time I want to say thank you to all of you for coming and I hope to see you again at future events at the Baker Nord Center and please join me in thanking our panel

Channel: Case Western Reserve University

Views: 158,554

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Id: Rymcu2h2J0E

Length: 77min 27sec (4647 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 14 2017