Listening to Bob Dylan

Larry Starr

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780252086021, 9780252043956
• eBook ISBN: 9780252052880
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

Venerated for his lyrics, Bob Dylan in fact is a songwriting musician with a unique mastery of merging his words with music and performance. Larry Starr cuts through pretention and myth to provide a refreshingly holistic appreciation of Dylan's music. Ranging from celebrated classics to less familiar compositions, Starr invites readers to reinvigorate their listening experiences by sharing his own—sometimes approaching a song from a fresh perspective, sometimes reeling in surprise at discoveries found in well-known favorites. Starr breaks down often-overlooked aspects of the works, from Dylan's many vocal styles to his evocative harmonica playing to his choices as a composer. The result is a guide that allows listeners to follow their own passionate love of music into hearing these songs—and personal favorites—in new ways.

Reader-friendly and revealing, Listening to Bob Dylan encourages hardcore fans and Dylan-curious seekers alike to rediscover the music legend.

1

NOT BY WORDS ALONE

Bob Dylan won a Nobel Prize in 2016—for literature. This is now common knowledge. Still, it must be asked: Would anyone on the Nobel Prize jury even have heard of Bob Dylan were it not for his achievements as a performing songwriter?

Dylan himself articulated this paradox directly when he concluded his own Nobel lecture by observing that “songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read. … And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to [my] lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days.” There is an ironic poignancy in these words, as the world-famous winner of one of the world’s ultimate prizes humbly pleads with us at last just to listen to his work. This book will take Bob Dylan at his word: that is to say, not by words alone.

Consider the question “How does it feel?” By itself it’s an everyday, unremarkable expression: one friend asking about another’s emotional well-being; a salesperson hoping that the new shoes are fitting properly; a doctor or dentist assessing a patient’s condition. Now imagine these same words being sung at you intensely by another person: “How does it feeeeel?” This is no longer that everyday question. Shaped by a familiar melody, rhythm, and vocal color, this can be one thing only, an evocation of Bob Dylan performing his iconic “Like a Rolling Stone.”

That little exercise demonstrates something more than Bob Dylan’s enormous impact on contemporary culture. It reveals the extent to which the very identity of Dylan’s work is defined by music and musical performance. The words “How does it feel?” become “Like a Rolling Stone” only when Dylan’s characteristic melody, rhythm, and vocal style are synthesized with them, becoming parts of an inseparable whole. The present book seeks to restore music and musical performance to their rightful positions, as central, essential aspects of Bob Dylan’s art.

Long before he was awarded the Nobel Prize, the widespread tendency was to regard Bob Dylan primarily or even exclusively as a poet, or as a writer of lyrics. But Dylan’s lyrics in isolation cannot properly represent his achievements or his work. “How does it feel?” provides a concise illustration. For a more substantial example, we might look to the 2006 edition of The Oxford Book of American Poetry, in which Dylan’s arrival as a significant literary presence was certified with the appearance of his lyrics for “Desolation Row.” The venerable anthology presents “Desolation Row” as a ten-stanza poem. But the presentation perpetrates a major distortion. The many listeners who have heard Dylan’s own original recorded performance of “Desolation Row” on his celebrated album Highway 61 Revisited (1965) know it as a twelve-stanza song, two complete stanzas of which are played on Dylan’s harmonica. The two missing stanzas are not so much as acknowledged in The Oxford Book of American Poetry. But does it make any sense to ignore two major sections of a major work simply because those sections are performed without words?

Music, no less than lyrics, deserves pride of place in any thorough consideration of song, and Dylan’s art achieves its total impact only as a complete package—as a personal, unique synthesis of words, music, and performance. The mission of this book is to illuminate that complete package through the examination of readily available Dylan recordings.

It is necessary to rely on recordings, because the published Bob Dylan songbooks are as insufficient in their own way for this purpose as the anthologies of his lyrics. The songbooks simplify, sometimes drastically, the rhythmic and melodic freedom that characterizes Dylan’s vocal performances and may omit some of his most colorful chord choices. The published vocal line for “Like a Rolling Stone” that appears in the so-called Definitive Bob Dylan Songbook hardly represents the varied ways Dylan sings that pivotal phrase “How does it feel?” Nor does that same Songbook offer a hint of the expressive, unusual, and dissonant guitar chord that accompanies the beginning of each vocal stanza in Dylan’s original recorded performance of “Girl from the North Country” on the album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963).

There is, unfortunately, no Nobel Prize for songwriting. Song is an essential aspect of culture worldwide, and a prize in that area would clarify that song is a genre different from literature or musical composition; it is an art form of its own, drawing on elements of both, but distinct from either. Yet were Bob Dylan to have won a hypothetical Nobel for songwriting, that in itself would also have been insufficient, because his art is that of a performing songwriter. This is something yet again, contributing a third indispensable element to a distinctive, remarkable amalgam.

Bob Dylan, Musician: Singer, Instrumentalist, Composer

Bob Dylan is a singularly versatile and expressive singer, a man of many voices. He can be a chanting folksinger (“Masters of War”) or a hectoring rock shouter (“Like a Rolling Stone”) or a country crooner (“Lay, Lady, Lay”), and this list is just for starters. His voice can shape-shift, chameleon-like, from one track to the next on a single album. Is the energetic, amused narrator who sings the story-song “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” on the album Blood on the Tracks (1975) really the same person as the pain-struck, mournful vocalist on the immediately following track, “If You See Her, Say Hello”? And these two songs were recorded on the same day.

Dylan has employed his harmonica as yet another, alternative, “singing” voice throughout his long career. As an instrumentalist, he has also elected to use both acoustic and electric guitar in multiple ways. Sometimes he chose the piano rather than the guitar for certain songs, a choice that decisively influenced the expressive character of those selections; an essential contribution to the unusual dark mood created by “Ballad of a Thin Man” from the album Highway 61 Revisited is surely Dylan’s hard-edged piano playing. Bob Dylan’s song lyrics are vividly enhanced, colored, and even tweaked by his musical settings and performances, and vice versa, resulting in complex yet unified examples of songwriters’ art.

Why is it then that we so often encounter claims that Bob Dylan has a “bad” voice, that he “can’t really play” his instruments, or that his music by itself is “boring”? It is important to debunk the assumptions underlying such statements.

Admittedly, Bob Dylan does not possess what is typically called a “beautiful” voice. But there is a crucial difference between having a “beautiful” voice and being a distinguished singing musician. To assume that an attractive vocal instrument automatically produces beautiful music makes about as much sense as to assume that playing an exquisitely fashioned violin, or guitar, automatically renders the performer a fine musician. Conversely, generations of rural musicians have coaxed wonderful music from well-worn fiddles and banjos. If someone has “beautiful” hands, would we suppose her automatically to be a skilled craftsperson? It is important not to confuse a surface attractiveness with artistic beauty. Artistic beauty is a much deeper, more complex quality.

A very gifted young student of opera pleasantly surprised and educated me when she proclaimed Bob Dylan a “great singer” and offered in explanation, “It’s not the instrument you have, it’s what you do with your instrument.” I can see no way to improve on that formulation.

Many of the most remarkable and influential singers of twentieth-century popular music did not possess inherently “beautiful” voices. Perhaps the obvious and outstanding example is Louis Armstrong, a great singing musician who was capable of “playing” his voice with the same expressiveness and imagination with which he played his trumpet. Billie Holiday had an idiosyncratic vocal instrument with a limited range, but she employed it to create performances of enduring poignancy. And the singer whom every creator of the “Great American Songbook”—Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and others—most wanted to perform his songs? That was Fred Astaire, a man with a “small,” not obviously distinguished voice, who could also draw from his dancing vocabulary a feeling for vocal rhythm and phrasing second to none.

Similar reasoning applies in evaluating Bob Dylan, not only as a vocalist, but as an instrumentalist. I have spoken with skilled musicians who have spent productive lifetimes working in popular idioms, and they all offer slight variations on the same idea: that Dylan may be an idiosyncratic guitarist, harmonica player, and pianist, but his instrumental work is inevitably well suited to the purposes of his songs and that work is powerfully effective as he employs it. The musical distinction of Bob Dylan’s performances on all his instruments, including his voice, will be demonstrated with many examples in the chapters to follow.

Now what about Dylan’s music itself? Are the songs of any interest if divested of their lyrics? The notion that his music is “boring,” or lacking in some other way, in and of itself will set us off on a track that is irrelevant to a consideration of his songs as integrated wholes. But besides that, the notion, as a wholesale generalization, is simply not true.

The specific characterization of Dylan’s music as boring appears in print at least as far back as 1982, in a book by Betsy Bowden called Performed Literature: Words and Music by Bob Dylan (second edition, 2001). Dr. Bowden surely deserves recognition insofar as hers is one of the earliest books to consider Dylan seriously as a performer—although the word literature in her title warns, accurately, of trouble ahead. The “boring” complaint comes on the first page, but it is never clear exactly to what she is referring. To perform Dylan’s songs without words, substituting one or more instruments for the vocals, is to present them as they were never intended to be heard. It is bad enough to hear the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” as elevator music, but just to imagine “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” in that guise is sufficient to ruin an entire day. Nevertheless, Dylan has written some memorable melodies; “Mr. Tambourine Man” is a well-known example. If, however, Bowden means that the accompaniments to Dylan’s sung melodies are musically uninteresting, her criticism has yet less validity. Even song accompaniments by the greatest composers of art songs—Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and others—can seem uninteresting, or even incoherent, if divorced from the vocal lines they were designed to partner.

On the other hand, there are Dylan songs in which the music is the most interesting aspect of the whole. The lyrics to the song “You’re a Big Girl Now,” from Blood on the Tracks, are essentially a collection of clichés (including the song’s title). Here are the opening lines:

Our conversation was short and sweet.

It nearly swept me off-a my feet.

This scarcely seems Nobel Prize–worthy literature. What more than redeems the lyrics, however, is the underlying music, which employs two chords that are totally unexpected—first, in terms of their relationship to the home key established by the instrumental introduction, and second in terms of their relationship to the vocal line itself. There are more traditional choices of chords that might be paired with the opening vocal melody, but “You’re a Big Girl Now” is not a three-chord song. (Dylan could vary the chord choices in live performances of the song, as the 1976 album Hard Rain documents.)

In “You’re a Big Girl Now,” the sense that there is something amiss is deliberate, of course. It allows the music to foreshadow an emotional coloring that becomes apparent in the lyrics only later: the word sweet is actually being employed ironically, and the singer has been “swept” off his feet not by a rush of positive feelings, but because he has literally been dumped by the “big girl.” There are many such instances in Dylan’s work, where the music is doing the heaviest lifting to project the deeper meanings of the song.

Exhibit A: “Like a Rolling Stone”

Bob Dylan as vocalist, as instrumentalist, and as composer are all on splendid display in his original 1965 recording of “Like a Rolling Stone.” This performance has been so widely heard, discussed, and celebrated that it is difficult to move it beyond the comfortable status of an old favorite. “Like a Rolling Stone” is most likely a song that we enjoy recognizing, but to which we no longer pay much serious attention. While really listening to this record again, as if for the first time, may prove a challenge, it is a worthwhile undertaking. If we make the effort to defamiliarize ourselves with “Like a Rolling Stone,” the radical artistry of Dylan’s performance may reassert itself to the forefront of awareness.

It is useful to separate out particular high points of musical performance in “Like a Rolling Stone” for examination, but such a process inevitably leads to a certain artificiality, since vocals, instruments, and compositional choices were all intertwined in the creation of such a recording. The lyrics are of necessity involved as well; it makes no more sense to exclude them from consideration than it does to discuss the lyrics independently of the music. I will attempt to deal with these complexities as gracefully as possible, remaining aware of the severe limitations that accompany any attempt to describe musical experience in prose. By no means will a complete analysis—if there could ever be such a thing—be the goal. I will point out certain prominent features of the recording, hopefully encouraging the reader to discover many other analogous features, and allowing space to uncover much else that doubtless has eluded my own attention.

To begin at the beginning, was there ever an opening vocal line for a song that commences as innocently and ends up as accusingly as this one? “Once upon a time,” sung on a repeated note, seems momentarily noncommittal. But all too rapidly, further repeated notes, intoned by Dylan like accelerating hammer strokes, achieve their finger-pointing impact. This is not simply a matter of lyrics; it is all about sung rhythm, and the effect is something like this:

Once upon a time you dressedsofine, youthrewthebumsadime inyourprime

And then, an uncomfortably long pause, to allow the developing verbal and musical tone of the song to register for a moment, prior to the wallop of a punchline: “didn’t you?” Here, for the first time, the vocal line leaps up in pitch, with Dylan maximizing the change through increased volume and heavy accentuation. In terms of both music and lyrics, the opening idea could have ended with “in your prime.” With “didn’t you?” that opening idea abruptly becomes a question rather than a statement, and the melody line is left hanging in the air just as the aggressive question in the lyrics aims a metaphoric poisoned arrow. This is one of those moments that can never be more effective than it is in the surprise upon our initial hearing of it—although, to be sure, it retains its punch with repeated listenings.

The opening vocal line of “Like a Rolling Stone” presents in miniature Dylan’s basic strategies for building the entire six-minute song. Musically, the repetition of individual notes, then of vocal phrases, and then of entire stanzas, is given impetus, variety, and intensification by means of Dylan’s vocal delivery. Leaps up or down in the melodic line occur sporadically on important words, the upward leaps underlined by strong vocal accents. Bob Dylan employs his voice as a powerful rhythm instrument, as well as a pitch instrument. And the savvy employment of pauses in the line proves a source of both tension and release as the song progresses. The first vocal phrase is unique in that it turns what could have been a finished statement into a question. Later phrases utilize pauses to make us wait anxiously for what we know must be significant endings to ideas. A ready example is provided by the opening of the second stanza, with music directly parallel to that which opens the first:

Ah, you’ve gone to the fin-est school, all right, MissLonely,

butyouknowyouonlyusedtoget … JUICED IN IT!

Before proceeding with some additional examination of Dylan’s artistry in “Like a Rolling Stone,” I should acknowledge that I didn’t actually begin at the beginning. Dylan’s vocal entrance is preceded by a striking instrumental introduction, starting with a drum stroke and prominently featuring both organ and piano. It was an extraordinary sound for its time, and it’s important to remember that it was Dylan’s own choice—part of his compositional process, the academics might say—to employ such a large ensemble and to have it open the performance. It’s as if a dense, even overpowering, musical environment is introduced, providing a background of near-chaotic intensity, over which Dylan’s voice nevertheless predominates as he denounces pretension and hypocrisy. That his voice can in fact predominate is a tribute to his vocal prowess and expressiveness. It is also, however, a tribute to the role played by expert engineering and production in the making of this recording, a role that should never be underestimated. We know from accounts of those present at the recording session that Dylan had some input into these aspects as well, insisting early on, for example, that the organ be more prominent in the mix.

In its overall structure, “Like a Rolling Stone” consists of four long stanzas, each ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Not by Words Alone
• 2 Folksinger, Bluesman, Rocker, Crooner
• 3 His Other Voice
• 4 Bob Dylan as Composer, I
• 5 Bob Dylan as Composer, II
• 6 Accompanying Bob Dylan
• 7 Arranging an Album
• 8 Bob Dylan in Live Performance
• 9 Bringing It All Back Home
• Acknowledgments
• A Very Selective Bibliography
• Subject Index
• Song Index
• Back Cover