Hero Blues: Bob Dylan's Philosophy Twists Popular Song

Abstract

Hero BluesBob Dylan's Philosophy Twists Popular Song Tim Riley (bio) Throughout his sixty-year-plus career, Bob Dylan has combined an "incredible skill with a wildness of spirit," as magician Penn Jillette recently put it. He towers above others—Bruce Springsteen, John Prine, Leonard Cohen, and Joni Mitchell—through volume, range, and brash unpredictability. In the past decade he has retooled Frank Sinatra crooning (Triplicate) and wrung suspicious reverie from Covid crazy (Rough and Rowdy Ways). In this latest book, he submits essays on sixty-six recordings, having his say about cherished records in a voice that favors wildness over skill. Dylan has great ears and great taste: he spotlights many performers who don't get enough credit and rescues others from silence. But his off-the-cuff style inadvertently reveals a reactionary sensibility and undercuts his credibility. Framed by photographs chosen by Parker Fishel and David Beal, in a plush design by Coco Shinomiya, the layout seems both overliteral and didactically allusive. It's this season's Drunk-Uncle Coffee-Table Item, designed for display. Clichés pile up and ricochet off one another, with the occasional flicker of light. In describing "Nelly Was a Lady," by Alvin Young-blood Hart, Dylan writes: "In this song the fire's gone out and your life is missing," a turn that echoes his best critic, Greil Marcus. (In fact, skip this title in favor of Marcus's Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs.) Hank Snow's "I Don't Hurt Anymore" will "tear your heart out"; "Feel So Good," by Sonny Burgess, comprises "the sound that made America great." Some platitudes explode into shrapnel (applause for "a hallucinogenic amalgamation of succubus and thaumaturge") but not often enough to justify the logorrhea. With a rock band behind him, guessing at where he'll land, Dylan's lyrics can prove wildly entertaining: fencing with meaning, spinning language into twaddle at a furious rate, his performances give the ear a wild ride even in slower numbers. As prose, most of this blurs into wobbly beatnik squawk. About Pete Townshend's "My Generation," Dylan writes: "People are trying to slap you around, slap you in the face, vilify you. . . . They don't like you because you pull out all the stops and go for broke. . . . They give you frosty looks and they've had enough of you, and there's a million others just like you, multiplying every day." A little of this goes on far too long. In song, Dylan twists clichés with a snap or a snarl; here they just crowd into one another. For pages on end, his style turns mannered. What works as scattershot vocal delivery doesn't translate into prose. What's worse, he solved this problem in Chronicles: Volume 1, his absorbing 2004 "memoir," which this effort somehow diminishes. Dylan doesn't respect the experience of reading the way he does the experience of listening. Some sequences toss up unexpected meanings, like the way Johnnie and Jack's "Poison Love" follows the Temptations' "Ball of Confusion," or how Rosemary Clooney's "Come on-a My House" provides comic relief after Jimmy Webb's "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" (no mention of Glen Campbell, a slight). But overall, Dylan avoids building many of his ideas—he tosses them out as if they're gold coins. He starts with Bobby Bare's "Detroit City" and ends with Dion and the Belmonts' version of "Where or When," but randomize the essay order any which way and you'll get much the same effect. Many ideas collapse into hyperbole. "The greatest of the prayer songs is 'The Lord's Prayer.' None of these [other] songs even come close," Dylan writes. He calls Tony Williams, the euphoric vocalist from the Platters, "one of the greatest singers ever. Everybody talks about how Sam Cooke came out of gospel to go into the pop field. But there's nobody that beats this guy." Dylan does this repeatedly for emphasis (Jackson Browne's "greatest song," or Sonny Bono's "greatest achievement"). But this Williams essay crashes into an iceberg of bad taste, "[Williams] took his spirituality with him into...