Voice Without Restraint

Bob Dylan's Lyrics 1961 - 1979

John Herdman

• Publisher: The Magic Road
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781914090332
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música pop

Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in June 2016, and seldom in recent years has it been more richly deserved.

That a song writer's lyrics should be regarded as literature was an idea at which many were surprised.

Others have felt that to isolate the lyrics of a song from its musical context is unreal. Ultimately that is true: a song is an indefeasible whole, an inseparable marriage of words and music which achieves its overall emotional effect by that symbiosis and not otherwise.

Yet it can also be said that the two components can be separately considered as two elements in the artist's creative utterance, and discussed as such.

The evidence of Dylan's manuscripts supports the view that in writing his lyrics his way of going about things is not always widely different from that of a poet.

Bob Dylan commented on the Nobel Prize in Literature which was awarded to him "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition": "When I first received this Nobel Prize for Literature, I got to wondering exactly how my songs related to literature. I wanted to reflect on it and see where the connection was."

Voice Without Restraint, refers to and is from the song "I dreamed I saw St Augustine" on John Wesley Harding, and is a phrase chosen to evoke the full-blooded commitment to his artistic utterance which is the hallmark of Bob Dylan's voice – in all senses.

Chapter One

Introductory

In probably the most lucid passage in Bob Dylan’s novel Tarantula ― a work of which lucidity is not the prime characteristic ― a “butter sculptor” named Snowplow Floater delivers a funny and extremely cutting dismissal of a critic of his work.1 It is a passage which any prospective critic of the songs of Dylan would do well to read, and one calculated to make him think twice before starting. “Do you know what it feels like to make some butter sculpture?” Floater demands, “do you know what it feels like to actually ooze that butter around & create something of fantastic worth?” He announces his indifference to the critic’s opinions, telling him that he takes himself too seriously and will end up in hospital with an ulcer; “― just remember, tho”, he advises him before signing off, “when you evaluate a piece of butter, you are talking about yourself, so you’d just better sign your name…” Elsewhere in the same book Dylan suggests that “nothing is worth analyzing ― you learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past”.2

He is right to be wary. “The point is not understanding what I write but feeling it”, he once told an interviewer,3 and this protestation voices a basic truth: Dylan’s art must be “understood” primarily on the nerves. The attempt to substitute a cerebral comprehension for a felt response, which is really what Dylan is condemning, in fact makes real understanding impossible. But true understanding does not negate feeling; on the contrary, it arises entirely from it. The question of the ultimate value of criticism applies, of course, to all art, though it may seem especially pertinent and pressing when we are dealing with an art that is as immediate as Dylan’s. I have no doubt, though, that it has value. As is the case with all artists, there are doubtless some aspects of Dylan’s creation which were unconscious and spontaneous in the making, others which were quite deliberate and even calculated; but in no case is the process magical by which feelings and emotions are translated into symbols apprehensible by the senses; this occurs in concrete, specific ways, even though the process may have been instinctive or subliminal for the artist. In criticism, besides, we define the content of art first of all by defining our response to it. It is how the artist impels our response that is of primary interest; and in understanding how we respond we make that response richer and more conscious ― which does not mean less feeling. Understanding as a substitute for feeling could only be misunderstanding.

The present study owes a great debt to Michael Gray’s Song and Dance Man - The Art of Bob Dylan, which is far and away the best and most serious extended examination of Dylan’s work that we have. Gray established beyond question that Dylan’s creative importance could be demonstrated by critical analysis, and also provided invaluable material on his background in the folk tradition, pop music and the rock revolution. The form of my own book is therefore very much determined by what Michael Gray has and has not already done. In the first place, Song and Dance Man takes the story only as far as 1970*, and I want to bring it up to date by examining the very important work of the past decade which takes in, I believe, one of the peaks of Dylan’s achievement. I shall not disregard the earlier years, about which, as with the work of any great artist, there will always be more to say, but proportionately the study will be weighted more on the side of the later albums. I shall also concentrate much more upon Dylan’s own output than upon his background, mainly because of the work already done in this field by Michael Gray and others but partly also because I think there is still too much stress laid on Dylan as a representative figure of his time and too little on the songs which make him pre-eminent and for which, more than for any “public” role, he will in the long run be remembered.

This book, again, is primarily a study of the lyrics rather than the music. In examining Dylan’s hybrid art some degree of specialisation is probably inevitable, and for my own part I readily admit that I lack the expertise and the critical vocabulary to discuss the musical aspects adequately. I think, that is, that I understand on my nerves what Dylan is doing musically but I cannot intellectualise my response. What is important when dealing with one particular aspect of an artist’s work is not in the process to falsify the other aspects. Dylan is primarily a song writer and not a visual poet and his lyrics cannot be dealt with in the same way that one would deal with poetry intended for the eye. As Michael Gray has put it, “it ought to be kept in mind that the selection and organisation of Dylan’s language is governed by the artistic disciplines of a medium not solely linguistic or literary … Structurally the words of a song differ necessarily from those of a poem. They are not the sole arbiters of their own intended effects, rhythmically or in less technical ways.”4 In considering the sense of the lyrics (which is something more than their “meaning”) I shall therefore always ask myself: what is the voice saying, what is the music saying? Does my understanding square with that? And, of course, all my impressions come first of all from listening to Dylan, not from reading him.

George Steiner, in the course of an examination of the decline of verbal culture in the West attendant upon the decay of religious belief, has suggested at some length that we have entered a period in which “a sound-culture seems to be driving back the old authority of verbal order.”5 “The literacies of popular and classical music”, he shows, “informed by new techniques of reproduction not less important than was the spread of cheap mass-printing in its time, are entering our lives at numerous, shaping levels. In many settings and sensibilities, they are providing a ‘culture outside the word’.”

Steiner indicates, too, that this development may represent a natural turning-back towards elements which form the very foundations of human culture. “Conceivably, an ancient circle is closing. Lévi-Strauss has asserted that melody holds the key to the ‘mystère suprème de l’homme’. Grasp the riddle of melodic invention, of our apparently imprinted sense of harmonic accord, and you will touch on the roots of human consciousness. Only music, says Lévi-Strauss, is a primal universal language, at once comprehensible to all and untranslatable into any other idiom. Speech comes later than music; even before the disorder at Babel, it was part of the Fall of man. This supposition is, itself, immemorial.”

It is within this context, the context of Marshall McLuhan’s “global village” dominated by electronic communications, that the art-form developed pre-eminently by Dylan takes on its importance. For it is precisely by joining itself once more to music that verbal culture may assure its own continuance. Nietzsche showed in The Birth of Tragedy that the emergence of Western literary forms was fundamentally involved with “the spirit of music”. It seems clear that there is a connection between the present attenuation and exhaustion of these forms and their almost total divergence from their musical roots. The popularity of poetry readings may stem from a sense of the inappropriateness to contemporary social conditions of a literature based entirely on the private response of individual reader to writer. Yet the limitations and snares of this cult are immense, and arise from the unsuitability of the reading as a medium for the communication of visual poetry whose structure is primarily determined by the conditions of print. The restoration to the ear of a more important role among the senses, which has been effected by the coming of the electronic media and which to some extent counters the long dominance of the eye, has been the occasion for the word to resume its old association with the principle of melody. Dylan’s art combines literary and musical elements in an inseparable whole and in conditions of the most intimate inter-dependence, in a way that has not been familiar in the literate culture of the West since before the invention of printing.

That is not of course to deny that Dylan has had his precursors in the popular music of this century, not to mention the oral traditions of non-literate peoples. The point is that his relation to the traditions of “high” or “élite” art is quite different from - and closer than - those of such precursors. Again, it is true that in his own day he has been only half a step ahead of a host of excellent song-poets and writers of rock lyrics ― Jagger and Richards, the Beatles, Joni Mitchell, Robert Hunter, Van Morrison, Randy Newman, Bruce Springsteen and many more. Yet on the one hand it is more than doubtful whether any of these could have done what they have, in the way that they have, without the example of Dylan; and on the other, Dylan remains the best: the most complex and varied, the most widely ranging, the most self-renewing, the deepest. Among all these practitioners of a new and thriving art-form, his stands out as the paradigmatic case. He is the major individual artist who has taken command of the central form of his time, and never can there have been a form which made the work of such an artist available to so huge and so far-flung an audience.

It is not only in the form of his art that Dylan reflects the changing cultural conditions of which Marshall McLuhan was writing in the sixties; he reflects them also in the character of his sensibility. McLuhan is constantly at pains to stress the simultaneity of perception, the consciousness of different levels of experience co-existing, which he believes links “electronic man” with his preliterate ancestors: “Paradoxically, at this moment in our culture, we meet once more preliterate man. For him there was no subliminal factor in experience; his mythic forms of explanation explicated all levels of any situation at the same time.”6 Dylan’s songs, in the mosaic structure which they so often exhibit, vividly communicate just such a multi-layered explication, and Dylan has said more than once that such a habit of mind is natural to him. Talking to Playboy, for instance, about an abortive documentary called Eat the Document made about him in 1966, he observes, “… the more I looked at the film, the more I realized that you could get more onto film than just one train of thought. My mind works that way, anyway. We tend to work on different levels.”7 And replying to a Rolling Stone question about the different levels noticeable in his songs, he replies, “That’s right, and that’s because my mind and my heart work on all those levels. Shit, I don’t want to be chained down to the same old level all the time.”8 Dylan’s sensibility is not mainly linear and sequential, that is, not based on a mode of perception in which the claims of the eye override those of the other senses; its bias is rather spatial.

Dylan’s art has strong links too with the conditions under which in preliterate cultures, oral poetry was composed. Albert B. Lord has written of these conditions: “Our oral poet is composer. Our singer of tales is a composer of tales. Singer, performer, composer and poet are one under different aspects but at the same time. Singing, performing, composing are facets of the same act.”9 With some qualifications, this is true of Dylan: certainly the different functions which Lord enumerates come together in him as in the traditional “singer of tales”. Although he composes before he performs, he always in some sense recreates, hence re-composes, his songs in performance. Unlike an oral maker he writes his songs, but he does so with a re-creative process in mind, and as David Buchan says, “Oral composition is … an essentially re-creative process.”10 Speaking of the conditions which obtain when literacy is beginning to overtake the old oral tradition, Buchan notes that “it is possible, at a certain point in the tradition, for a person to be both literate and an oral composer. It is only when a person ceases to be re-creative along traditional lines and accepts the literate concept of the fixed text that he or she can no longer be classed as oral.”11 Dylan, placed at a time when an aural mode is beginning to make great inroads upon the assumptions of literacy, works in a similar border-land. In performance he is not tied to any fixed text, but the fact of recording does give certain performances the status of permanency which was denied to the oral makers. His lyrics, again, do appear in print, though the text cannot be regarded as fixed in a strict sense, and this method of publication is in any event very secondary to the aural forms of performance and recording. The fluid, provisional nature of Dylan’s songs makes them, in their literary aspect, a notable and important departure from literate tradition. They can be, and are, altered and renewed again and again to conform with new moods, new times, new preoccupations. This quality is entirely dependent on their being cast in an aural rather than a visual mode (unlike contemporary classical music, which remains tied to an established textual form).

Another point which follows from the particular cultural conditions under which Dylan is operating is that his work cannot be abstracted from the way in which he interprets it in performance: the “interpretation” is part of the creative essence. Words and music are alike inseparable from their relation to Dylan’s voice; performed by others, his songs can sometimes virtually disappear, or at the least become something different and less. They can be said to exist fully only in performance or recording by Dylan. Not only do words which may seem to have a kind of half-life on the page come into their full being when he sings them, but the music is devitalized if we fail to listen to the words it is carrying - and this is something which differentiates Dylan from the majority of rock artists. Ellen Willis makes the point well when she indicates that, “Words or rhymes that seem gratuitous in print often make good musical sense and Dylan’s voice, an extraordinary interpreter of emotion … makes vague lines clear.”12 What Dylan “means” in a song, also, is not always what the words say: the sense may be conveyed through tensions between words, expression and musical mood. Dylan’s voice does not just interpret his lyrics, it gives them life. His marvelous timing and breath-control, his capacity for drawing out lines almost to breaking-point, his emotional subtlety and inspired phrasing, make it one of his greatest artistic assets. Its interpenetration with his literary talents must always be kept in mind when thinking about the lyrics.

What is most undeniable about Dylan’s achievement over the years is his astonishing ― seemingly almost limitless ― emotional range, and his power of creative renewal, what Jon Landau has cal...