The Best American Poetry

Bob Dylan and Israel (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

It is possible to select carefully chosen materials from Bob Dylan's life and songs to reflect your own beliefs. So it is with some hesitation that I describe Dylan's relationship with Israel. I will present all the material, sparse as it is.

In May 1971 Dylan and his then wife Sara went to Israel without their children in hopes of escaping the media frenzy in America, having a bit of a second honeymoon, and exploring Jewish roots, a subject Dylan became increasingly interested in after his father's death on June 5, 1968. On May 24th, Dylan's 30th birthday, a photographer got a shot of him praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem while wearing a kippah, the traditional Jewish head covering.The photo ended any possible privacy. At some point in late May or early June, the Dylans visited Givat Haim, a kibbutz, to explore the possibility of staying there for a while. Eve Brandstein, a member of the kibbutz, told Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin that Dylan wanted to stay in a guest house but not work on the kibbutz. The kibbutz members did not want to accept his conditions for living there and were scared their home would be a magnet for the curious.

From April 11th to May 17th 1983 Dylan spent 19 recording sessions producing his album Infidels. On April 19th he sang six versions of a new song, "Neighborhood Bully," and on May 17th, at the very last session recording the very last song, he did another take of the song, which, to me at least, indicates he wanted to get it right. "Neighborhood Bully" is a sarcastic, unvarnished full-throated defense of Israel. The Israelis, ironically called the bully of the neighborhood, have "got no place to escape to, no place to run." They are "criticized and condemned for being alive." There's no subtlety here, no nuanced view of Middle Eastern history. The persecuted Jews are in the right and are simply defending their lives. Dylan invokes the Jewish people's tragic history as a way of defending Israel:

The neighborhood bully been driven out of every land,
He's wandered the earth an exiled man.
Seen his family scattered, his people hounded and torn,
He's always on trial for just being born.

The album wasn't released until November 1, 1983, but in September that year Jesse Dylan, Bob's then seventeen year old son, had a late bar mitzvah in Israel, and his father flew over for the event. He was again photographed wearing Jewish religious items.

Dylan played his first concerts in Israel on September 5th and 7th 1987. (Probably by coincidence, his very next concert was in Basle, Switzerland, the site of the First Zionist Congress in 1897). Dylan played three concerts in Israel on June 17th, 19th, and 20th in 1993. Symbolically or not, he ended the latter two concerts with "It Ain't Me Babe," about a relationship in which he rejects the expectations placed upon him.

Those are the principal facts. There may be much more we do not know. Additionally, there was a persistent rumor that Dylan would be playing in Israel next month, but if he is the concert is not listed on his official website. He will be in the area around his 69th birthday. He's giving a concert in Greece on May 29th and Turkey on May 31st.

If Dylan seems conflicted about Jewish religious beliefs, he connects emotionally to a Jewish history punctuated by persecution. He grasps the longing for a Jewish homeland. Dylan's silence about Israel may reflect some ambivalence. Or he may just wish to keep his views private. It is significant that there are no negative songs about Israel, no comments hostile to the Zionist enterprise, no initial embrace and later abandonment of the Jewish people's heroic return to national history.

Dylan will be 70 in 2011. It's a symbolic year for him, a biblical lifespan, a time of profound reflection. Perhaps it will be a good moment to pause in his never-ending tour.

I wonder what he will find as he examines himself at 70. I wonder if after all his wandering, his endless searches, his constant need for shedding skins and acquiring identities, he finally needs a place to land, a place connected to his understanding of God, a place where history and geography can't be separated, a place where outcasts have found a haven, a place where his ancestors originated. I wonder if Israel will turn out to be his direction home.

Busy Being Dylan (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

One of the charms and one of the dangers of listening to Bob Dylan is that you begin to substitute his language for your own. Sometimes an image is so startling that you attach it to your own perception of the world. Certain songs are chains of such images, as in "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" or "Mr. Tambourine Man." Sometimes one of his cries from the heart serves as a perfect expression of our own anguish. Think of "Oh, Mama, can this really be the end/to be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again."

For whatever reason, my mind tends to retain Dylan's aphorisms. He compresses what had been either an intuitively understood but unarticulated truth in the listener's mind or a novel observation into memorable, poetic language often containing alliteration and rhyme.

Dylan's aphorisms evolved. They started out as fierce statements about the political world, as in "For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled." This aphorism is a warning, a species of "finger-pointing," as Dylan called his protest songs. These aphorisms were aimed at altering the world. Dylan later created aphorisms aimed at transforming the individual, both Dylan himself and his listeners.

Sometimes the aphorisms Dylan produced were like proverbs or maxims, a type of wisdom literature. "Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you" is an uncompromising call for an independent spirit, a warning that if you see your path you've got to be willing to follow it alone. It's a cruel maxim, in part, calling people who don't go the way you do the "dead." But the cruelty is meant to provide the listener with emotional backbone, a determination to escape from the territory of the normal.

Dylan provides life lessons in these aphorisms. "Take what you have gathered from coincidence" teaches that events appearing as accidental can form a pattern. Dylan calls for self-awareness followed by self-examination followed by self-construction. Without a pattern there is anarchy in our lives; we simply step from one experience to the next without absorbing appropriate lessons.

Many of Dylan's most memorable aphorisms included an irony in them. Often these provided life lessons as well, such as "He not busy being born is busy dying." This is vintage Dylan, imploring us to keep moving forward, to try constant re-creation, not to back off from the novel because it's frightening. It is a call for courage to test ourselves against life's limits. It is a call to drive through when our mind signals caution.

Consider another lesson: "To live outside the law you must be honest." This is a call for morality. Some people are moral, Dylan asserts, because they are scared of breaking the law. Rather, we should realize that whatever standards we live by we must be good.

Dylan famously annoyed some fans at each stage by going to a new place and then abandoning it. The annoyance is misplaced. There are times I thought Dylan was leading me astray, exploring a path that was not right for me. I didn't follow him down those paths.

But that's the point. That's the great lesson I learned from Dylan's aphorisms. The independence he championed, the emancipating proclamation of the self's right to be free, meant at the end that the real understanding of Dylan precisely meant not following him, but rather finding my own language.

For information about my book, Political Folk Music in America From Its Origins to Bob Dylan, see http://lawrencejepstein.com/folk

I've started a new blog called Jewish Observations. The first post is titled "The Meaning of Judaism." The URL is: http://jewishobservations.blogspot.com

Rhymes With Bob Dylan (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Bob Dylan structures his songs through rhymes. Given his skills, the results can be comforting, jarring, or rousing. But why do Dylan's rhymes work so well? Why are rhymes in any song often so enchanting?

Rhymes are pleasing to the ear. They are also pleasing to the brain because in a rhyme the second word becomes more familiar to us than if there had been no first word to rhyme with. Our brains like what's easy to think about and don't like what's difficult to think about. (Psychologists call this "cognitive fluency." Songwriters don't.)  Beyond the attractions of repetitive sounds, a rhyme offers the mystery of an unexpected affinity between two or more words that are seemingly different.

The coincidence of two or more words that rhyme suggests a linguistic order missing from the chaos of ordinary life. Rhymes hint at an alluring land of English, a place of beauty and design. But there's a danger to rhymes as well. Rhymes are mysterious and inexplicable. We have to confront mirror images and doubles, worlds that complicate the simplicity that the rhyme seemed to bring.

For songwriters, rhymes make it easier for audiences to memorize the material. It's no accident that nearly every popular song is written using rhymes. But rhymes can be traps, forcing songwriters to write words they don't want to all for the sake of having to rhyme.

Rhymes are often associated with simple, childlike feelings. Yet they can be a form of attack, a battering ram of words pounding away at the listener. That's why the rhymes in Dylan's protest songs work so well. They keep hitting us with their power, and the repetition forces us to confront what is being protested. The rhymes all through "The Ballad of Hollis Brown" reinforce Brown's growing despair and retrospectively explain his final, desperate action. Consider the concluding verse of the song:

There's seven people dead
On a South Dakota farm.
There's seven people dead
On a South Dakota farm.
Somewhere in the distance
There's seven new people born.

Anyone can hear obvious rhymes. It's the great lyricist who can hear what the rest of us can't. Dylan can hear that "farm" sounds like "born," and "born is the the perfect word, not only standing in contrast to the people Hollis Brown has killed but also in providing hope (for new people have replaced the dead) and a warning (don't let what happened to the Brown family happen to these newborns).

Similarly, rhyme as a form of attack works well in angry love songs. In "Idiot Wind," Dylan writes:

Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth.
You're an idiot, babe.
It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe.

Or take another pair of lines from the song:

Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull,
From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol.

The rhyme is more exact but is still unexpected. Additionally, it magnifies the subject of the song from beyond the angry subject to the singer himself and then to Washington. It's a neat shift of ascribing idiocy from an external partner to the internal self to the political.

The battering ram effect can also be seen in poignant love songs such as "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" and attack songs about so-called friends, such as "Positively 4th Street" with lines like:

I know the reason
That you talk behind my back.
I used to be among the crowd
You're in with.

Do you take me for such a fool
To think I'd make contact
With the one who tries to hide
What he don't know to begin with?

Here Dylan uses what is technically known as "feminine rhyme" in which the rhyme comes from the penultimate words (or syllables), in this case "in with" and "begin with." That is, Dylan's rhymes are far from simple. He doesn't just use traditional end rhymes. Additionally, he uses alliteration (repeating consonant sounds) and assonance (repeating vowel sounds creating internal rhymes in a line.) Here are some beautiful lines from "Mr. Tambourine Man":

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

The assonance of "fate" and "waves" and "deep" and "beneath" and the many examples of alliteration add to the rhymes and startling images to create the attractive world the tambourine man offers.

And that's why nobody rhymes with Bob Dylan.

For information about my new book Political Folk Music in America From Its Origins to Bob Dylan, visit my web page here.

Bob Dylan as Rebel (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Subtlety is a threat to minds manacled by ideology. That is why Bob Dylan so angered those people who were determined to slap a label on him. Anthemic folk singer, protest poet, folk-rock hipster. It didn't matter. They were all traps. He had to escape. Bob Dylan was a rebel.

That is to say, he was a Romantic artist. He was unrestrained by the normal inhibitions that stop most people. His caution gene had been amputated. He went where others dared not go. He was a defiant descendant of Byron, Keats, and Shelley. Like them, he filtered experience through the self. His feelings were the surest path to knowledge. If those who were angry that Dylan had abandoned his finger-pointing songs had examined his Romantic roots, they would have discovered that such an emphasis on personal emotions created a profound skepticism that a society could progress and a despair at any foolish effort to believe it could. The Romantics' artistry, in contrast, came out in their poems and in sculpting their own biographies.

The European brand of Romantic poetry Dylan inherited went through the Symbolists to T.S. Eliot to Dylan. The Symbolists searched their selves for symbols of emotional reactions to their lives. Their poems were carefully created collections of those personal symbols. Their poems were not subject to normal poetic analysis because they had no meaning outside the artist's life. All that mattered was what the poem did. The poem was a raft ride down the rapids of the artist's subconscious. If others recognized the sights and sounds along the way as they listened to Dylan, it was because, in words Terry Eagleton wrote about T.S. Eliot, Dylan "made guerilla raids on the collective unconscious."

The American Romanticism that preceded Dylan started with the Emersonian notion of the self's sufficiency. An individual's consciousness required no external resources. This American Romanticism went through Whitman to Woody Guthrie and the Beats and so on to Dylan.

But Dylan was a true rebel. Dylan rebelled against the rebels. He searched within himself and discovered a moral temperament that had dominion over the artistic temperament. Art, he concluded, was not immune from moral measure. Like the Biblical prophets, he stood in opposition, but also like them his fire and fury came from an understanding of his God-given mission. The Romantics sought spiritual reality, but in nature or Eastern religions, and, later, hallucinogenic drugs. Dylan eventually found his own way to the spiritual. God was the true north on Dylan's artistic compass. He was Abraham, not Adam. He reached toward Heaven instead of believing he could find the words to name all that is in the world.

But, like many honest, unfrightened believers before him, Dylan discovered that belief carries its own confusions. Inner peace could not be cheaply bought. He had to fight himself to discover who was this God and what did this god want of a poor singer from Minnesota. The twists and turns of his understanding of God--Jewish, Christian, a combination, an entity embracing all--has been shared with different hints at different times. Dylan had to struggle. Was he the political radical, the Romantic artist, or the believer? The radical and the artist had to rebel; the believer had to obey. Evidently, he chose to obey God's call to keep singing to as many audiences as he could, to pass on the astounding musical heritage he had absorbed, and to add more songs to his unmatched and utterly remarkable body of work.

Those tasks are the ones from which even a restless Bob Dylan has not rebelled.

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For information about my book on political folk music through Dylan, see http://lawrencejepstein.com/folk

Writing About Dylan and Folk Music (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Woody Guthrie's sister answered the phone. I told her my name, explained that I was writing a book about folk singers, and asked if I could speak with her. After three minutes, Mary Jo Guthrie Edgmon invited me over for lunch. I was in New York and she was in Oklahoma, but her humor and hospitality evaporated the miles. She told me stories of Woody's childhood, stories that I had never heard, stories that I could write about.

I've always thought of writing as a passport to a new world. Interviewing and researching let me explore that world, chart its logical and emotional geography, wander its landscape, listen carefully to its stories, rumors, and secrets. I sought out people who knew more than I did. They were shockingly abundant.

The book started out because of my interest in investigating some of Bob Dylan's principal musical and political roots. I spoke, for example, with two of Dylan's high school teachers. B.J. Rolfzen talked movingly about his memories of a young Robert Zimmerman. Rolfzen still uses the formal first name. Rolfzen and I exchanged life stories, and he sent me a privately printed memoir of his youth.

A book on folk music meant I got a chance to speak with Pete Seeger. For an audience of one, he sang a bunch of songs including one he had learned while spending a few hours in jail during his run-in with the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Peter, Paul, and Mary were all extraordinarily gracious. I spoke with Mary Travers about eighteen months before her death, and I was pleasantly amazed at her honesty and frankness. Tom Paxton had wonderful memories of Greenwich Village. I was taken with Izzy Young, the legendary proprietor of the Folklore Center, the man who sponsored Dylan's first concert. I enjoyed Izzy's stories and all the material he sent me.

Slowly the puzzle pieces began to form a picture. I kept talking to singers, writers, scholars, people with connections. The focus became on political folk music. The story I wanted to write was filled with fabulous characters, people like The Carter Family, Jimmy Rodgers, Joe Hill, Alan Lomax, Lead Belly, and Joan Baez.

And Dylan. What pleased me most was that I in exploring the folk world I could more deeply appreciate the footsteps Dylan Followed and the new paths he forged.

I was unsurprised to conclude that, finally, Dylan's greatness was beyond my critical reach. Here was a man who corners the language, captures it, and sings it for the rest of us but also a man who needs to keep a sacred corner of his own mind off limits. I was satisfied, though. Seeing Dylan in context was seeing him in a new way.

I wrote the book because I thought I had a story worth telling, and I wanted to share it.

For more information about my book on political folk music, see http://lawrencejepstein.com/folk.

Bob Dylan's Voice (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Mark Twain, in a characteristically wry observation, once noted that "Wagner's music is better than it sounds." A comparable comment can be made about Bob Dylan's voice, or, more accurately, his voices. Anyone who, without warning, first listened to Nashville Skyline and thought the vocals were the result of studio engineering knows that like the man himself Dylan's voice shifts identity. Dylan's nasal Midwestern twang lately sounds like a weathered voice that has spoken and sung and battled its way down many miles of sorrow and found, from time to time, some refuges of hope along the way.

I'm writing about Dylan's classic voice, the voice on Freewheelin' through Blonde on Blonde, the voice that made Hibbing famous. It's fair to note that it was Dylan's lyrics that captured the age. But those arresting words would not have had same impact they had if Dylan had not sung them the way he did. I always thought he sang his songs better than all the covers.

Dylan's voice had many elements. The vocal qualities that so shocked Mitch Miller and almost everyone else at CBS Records were Dylan's successful effort to inhabit Woody Guthrie's voice box. The very untutored rawness of the voice with its inherent affront to the sweet, packaged conformity of the 1950s made it the right voice to attack those who made profits from war or wanted to block the way of a new generation.

The vocal elements, though, were only part of the overall voice. The reason so many Dylan covers fail is that the singers mouth the words but lack the ability to transmit their emotional power. George Burns once noted that, "Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, you've got it made." I want to believe Dylan was sincere as he sang his songs. I believe he was, despite the fact that he sometimes dismissed this idea. But sincere or not he acted as though he was sincere. He was a great actor, that is, either because he believed in the line and could control his voice to make listeners believe he believed, or he could simply mimic and fake passion perfectly.

Beyond the vocal elements and the emotions, Dylan's voice was helped by his phrasing. Particular syllables were emphasized and forced the listener to focus on them. Sometimes the phrases were virtually spoken in a rhythm, like beat poetry or talking blues. Talking blues was developed by Chris Bouchillon who recorded "Talking Blues" in April 1926. The recording director noted that Bouchillon's pleasant voice sounded better when he talked than when he sang, and so the director suggested that Bouchillon talk while he played the guitar. Woody Guthrie made the style popular. In Woody's case, he used talking blues to de-emphasize any beauty in the songs so that listeners could focus on the social and political importance of the words.

Dylan sometimes altered normal word accents. In poetry, such an alteration of the normal word accent is called a wrenched accent. It was common in the folk ballads that made up Dylan's informal education.

Putting vocals, emotion, and phrasing together with incomparable lyrics made Bob Dylan's voice unique in musical history.

NOTE TO READERS:  My book Political Folk Music in America From Its Origins to Bob Dylan will be published on March 16th. For further information see: http://lawrencejepstein.com/folk

Will Dylan Survive? (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Salvatore Quasimodo wasn't the Hunchback of Notre Dame. He was the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature fifty years ago. Also in 1959, Robert Lewis Taylor won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Susan Kohner and Juanita Moore were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. And who made more money for RKO in the 1930s than Cary Grant or Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers? The comedy team of Wheeler and Woolsey did.

Today's success does not guarantee tomorrow's fame. Many popular artist have their hour or even decades in the spotlight and then are gone. Maybe public tastes have so shifted that the artists no longer resonate with audiences. Maybe the artists represented a particular era, that that era has receded from the public's attention. Maybe the artists weren't as good as they seemed to be when they were famous.

It is hard to imagine that Bob Dylan will be forgotten in fifty years. He is clearly the best songwriter of the second half of the 20th century. A convincing argument can be made that he is the best songwriter in American history. His talent certainly deserves survival. But, sad to say, talent is not enough either to become famous or to survive. No one is certain where Dylan will be unrecognized, known just by his name and a brief identifier, or be seen as the dazzling songwriter he is now. I assume that an artist like Dylan must be concerned about this. After all, his legacy continues in his children and his music. But family provides only a private memory. If he also wants a public memory, I have a suggestion.

The suggestion is based on the career of Woody Guthrie. Woody was not well-known even as he was producing his rousing songs. Two particular efforts, beyond his sheer talent, helped propel him to ongoing fame. Pete Seeger was responsible for the first effort. A blacklisted Seeger was forced to play not in night clubs but in camps and schools. The pay wasn't so good, and while the audience was enthusiastic it was young and unsophisticated. But the nimble Seeger had stumbled onto a great opportunity. Those impressionable minds heard Seeger sing Woody's songs, and, having heard them as children, they carried the songs into adulthood.

The second effort involved a man who deserves wider recognition. Howie Richmond had worked as a press agent for Frank Sinatra. He knew his way around the business. In 1951, Richmond was serving as Woody's music publisher and listened as Woody tape recorded hundreds of songs. Richmond's incredible ear picked out "This Land is Your Land." He made copies of the song and sent them free to school publishers that produced songbooks for young people. The publishers then sold the books to schools. It took about a decade and a half, but by then the song had been sung by untold numbers of young people, as it continues to be sung even now.

Howie Richmond had discovered the key to continuing fame. Dylan needs to use that key. The crucial first step for him to take to ensure survival of his material is to choose the most appealing (that is emotionally moving and easy to sing) songs for young people and make those songs available for free to schools, camps, and anyplace else where children gather.

Will Dylan survive? Look to America's children for the answer.

Dylan's Christmas Album (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

No one ever made a living betting on what Bob Dylan will do next. But a Christmas album? The balladeer of anthemic protest, the poet master of surreal imagery has recorded Christmas In The Heart, a collection of familiar Christmas tunes filtered, as an ad appropriate to the pre-rock feel of the album might put it, through Bob Dylan's unique vocal stylings.

I'm with those who applaud him for his giving all his profits in perpetuity to a variety of hunger charities. (Some places couldn't resist this. The Brisbane Times headlined their review: "Yule be surprised what Dylan has done for a good Claus.)

But I don't know how to review the album. Instead, let me made a few observations. First of all, this whole project is sincere. This is not some sort of in-joke or ironic post-modern creation. Dylan's not wearing a Santa Claus mask. I'm not sure what to make of a contented Bob Dylan. He seems to have found his direction home. I'm glad for him. but it was the little boy lost who fashioned so many rhyming guideposts for our journey through life. It was in moments of contentment that Dylan's songwriting suffered. Dylan's voice, even as its cheerful, still strikes me as more appropriate for melancholy than joy. His voice was built for a blues sound wailing despair or unleashing sarcastic anger. But it is cruel to wish someone sadness so there will be more songs, and doing so would certainly not be in the spirit of the album. I therefore limit this comment to an observation that doesn't cross the border into a hope.

There is no clear way to provide an analysis of the material, pondering its reverberating layers, dissecting its sources and allusions, locating its place in the ongoing Dylan narrative. The sole possible exception is the to consider the album's title. At first glance, Christmas In The Heart seems innocuous, sentimental, and familiar. but, and maybe only because this is Bob Dylan, it is tempting to unpack its meaning. For example, if Christmas is in the heart, it's inside us, a feeling more than a holy day. In that case, this is a spiritual Christmas rather than a religious one. On this reading, Dylan sees in Christmas a time for charity, for joy, for a celebration of life. This is Christmas in the Heartland.

And if that is so, then this is an American album more than a Christian album. For those alert to every twist and turn in the ongoing saga "Is He a Jew or a Christian?" this album provides less data than its subject matter might suggest. The album is about a good-hearted singer content to be a loyal citizen in the Land of the Great American Songbook and singing his heart out with some seasonal standards to help those in need.

Of course, don't get used to this Bob Dylan because who knows where he'll go next? It's okay to anticipate, but I wouldn't place any bets.

Bob's Nobel: A Modest Proposal (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

So once again Bob Dylan didn't receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Oh, sure, he can take solace from the fact that a few other literary artists didn't get it, folks like Tolstoy, Ibsen, Proust, Joyce, Zola, Twain, Chekhov, Auden, and Borges, among others. But I don't think Bob should give up. He has until next February 1st when the nominations close and until early next October when the Prize is announced. He should begin preparing now.

To nudge Bob along, I have come up with a few suggestions for what he can do to improve his chances. I urge readers to supplement these ideas with others. Bob, it's time to get to work. Here's what you can do:

1. Make fun of mathematicians. There is no Nobel Prize in Mathematics. The standard rumor about this is that Nobel didn't want such a prize because it might go to a Swedish mathematician named Mittag-Leffler who supposedly had an affair with Nobel's wife. This is a good rumor, but it's considerably weakened by the small fact that Mr. Nobel never married. Never mind. The reason doesn't matter. Just start making fun of people who use numbers instead of words.

2. Buy a house near the Swedish Academy. These people decide who wins the Literature Prize, Bob. Get to know them. Start a never-ending tour just of Sweden. Start casually inserting the Swedish words "ombudsman' and "smorgasbord" frequently in conversation. Drop hints about how you love Swedish meatballs.

3. Write an album of songs that will help your cause. Include titles like "The Gates of Sweden." Avoid titles like "Stuck Inside of Stockholm With the Memphis Blues Again."

4. Rediscover your Hibbing roots. Note how its climate always reminded you of a Scandanavian country, but in a nice way. I mean the football team for the state is named the Minnesota Vikings. Come on, Bob, the Vikings. It's perfect. Get a helmet. Wear it at concerts. See #3 above about songs.

5. Use your connections. Shmooze with Carl XVI Gustav of Sweden. He is the King, after all. And he did present you a music prize in 2000. I know you didn't speak when you got the award, but the times they are a-changin' Bob. You've got to talk yourself up now.

So, Bob, there you go. Your fans are rooting for you. Don't think twice. It's all right.

Bob Dylan On the Watchtower (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

In "All Along the Watchtower," Bob Dylan envisions America's decline and accepts the role of warning people about it. The song opens with Dylan having a conversation with two parts of his self. The joker thinks life is absurd. The thief part of his self--the part that steals lines from other singers and poets and ideas from the cultural air--reassures the joker that confusion is not their fate. They will see clearly and sing out a warning to the people.

Dylan sees American social collapse as strikingly similar to the collapse of Babylon in the Bible. Babylon was bloated with wealth, weakened by self-indulgence, and ready to fall. The comparison is not unique to Dylan. F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, called New York City "Babylon on the Hudson." Dylan seeks guidance from the Biblical prophet Isaiah who foretold the fall of Babylon in the Book of Isaiah, Chapter 21. Here are the pertinent lines from the King James translation, the one I assume Dylan used:

5 Prepare the table, watch in the watchtower, eat, drink: arise, ye princes, and anoint the shield.
6.For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth...
8. and he cried, A lion...
9. and, behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of horsemen. And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen.

Dylan uses all this imagery in the next part of the song. There's the watchtower, the princes, the lion--in the form of a wildcat, and two riders. Dylan assumes the role of the watchman, the sentinel prepared to maintain a watchful eye and proclaim exactly what he sees. (Dave Van Ronk correctly noted that a watchtower has no wall to walk along, but the image of walking is more resonant than standing because the movement demonstrates the watchman's anxiety.)

Women and barefoot servants are not included in the Biblical verses. Why did Dylan include them? "The women came and went" echoes T.S. Eliot's refrain from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock": "In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michaelangelo." I think Dylan is describing the anxiety of relationships, the difficulty for men to prevent women from going, as a metaphor: the decaying of relationships exemplifies a decaying society. The "barefoot servants" I take to be an attack on the thoughtless rich, the princes in the society who need their servants so servile and poor that no shoes are allowed or allowable.

Beyond Isaiah and T.S. Eliot, Dylan finds another poet in the tradition he follows. He ends the song with the title word of Allen Ginsberg's angry poem about what he sees as the sad fate of the weak, the innocent, the outsider, and the artist in America. Buoyed by the company of a Biblical prophet and two iconic modern poets, Dylan is ready to take his place on the watchtower.

The song, though, is incomplete. It does not adequately confront Dylan's own paradox: he's a paradigm of the wealth and self-indulgence he sees as dooming the society even as he's an artistic prophet who can see the fall caused by such behavior. In that sense, the song is a call from the depths of his soul to save himself as well as the society.

When Dylan Spoke For God (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

A deeply religious person is a tourist in life, thinking eagerly about returning home to God. A less religious or secular person is a traveler, unsure of any desire to return home, uncertain if there is a home. Put another way, from a religious perspective, we are all unwilling immigrants in the land of the living, exiled from paradise and placed into the broken and happily temporal world where we must struggle against the temptations to do evil and instead choose to do good. To the religious person, there are signs of truth everywhere. To the secular, reality is only reality without intimations of Godly designs or Heavenly destinations.

In "I Pity the Poor Immigrant" Bob Dylan wonders what God thinks of all this. Indeed, the song is told from God's point of view. The tune is taken from the folk song "Tramps and Hawkers" which celebrates life on the open road. The language for "Poor Immigrant" is taken from the 26th chapter of Leviticus in the King James translation. For example, Leviticus 26:20 reads: "Your strength shall be spent in vain: for your land shall not yield her increase" and Leviticus 26:26 reads: "Ye shall eat, and not be satisfied." Leviticus 26 is about the blessings of obedience to God and the costs and consequences of disobedience. This song is about those who disobey. Dylan sings for God and sends a warning.

"God" expresses pity in the first two lines, but then spends the rest of the song--with a few repetitive invocations of pity--detailing how the "immigrant" uselessly disobeys. That immigrant employs his every power to cheat and lie, but all to no avail; loneliness is the only result. The godless hate their lives, but, trapped in a choice between two forms of torture, fear death as well. The immigrant worships money and, God laments, "turns his back on me." After a review of the mistakes the immigrant makes, Dylan speaking as God ends with: "I pity the poor immigrant/When his gladness comes to pass." The dire prediction in this line, with its suggestion of a harsh judgment to come, drains the expressed pity of mercy.

Given Dylan's later talk about the Devil, some have interpreted the song as the immigrant being under the spell of the Devil. I see instead an immigrant making a free choice between good and evil and choosing evil. That is, the song takes a traditional Jewish view and not a Puritanical view of evil. This is somewhat surprising given the Christian imagery that suffused Dylan's previous album, Blonde on Blonde. But much had taken place in Dylan's life between that album and John Wesley Harding such as his motorcycle accident, recovery, and the beginning of his family.

Such a reading of evil from a Jewish perspective is helpful in understanding why Dylan takes quotes from the Hebrew Bible (if still using the King James translation.) It is also helpful in explaining the only confusing line in the song: "Whose Heaven is like Ironsides" (the "I" is capitalized in the lyrics section of bobdylan.com). With a capital "I" and in the plural, the word refers to soldiers who served under Oliver Cromwell. The iron in them referred both to their implacable method of fighting and to their dogmatic Puritanism. Interpreted that way, God in the song is saying that the Puritan vision of Heaven is incorrect. That is, the song may be an attack on the very strain of Christianity that Dylan would later embrace. In this song, Dylan allies himself with the Hebrew prophets who spoke on behalf of God to warn the people that they must follow God's ways.

But this is only one song in the ongoing competition for Dylan's soul between two forms of religious strictness and between such strictness and the alluring wild life of a romantic artist.

"The Dylan Watch" (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

 Highway 61 Revisited: Bob Dylan's Road from Minnesota to the World. Colleen J. Sheehy and Thomas Swiss, Editors. University of Minnesota Press, 2009. $22.95.

This is an uncommonly intelligent collection of 20 essays about Bob Dylan's origins and influence. Some readers will wish that a more discernible thematic thread ran through the book, but no serious Dylan reader will be disappointed in the scope or quality of the material.

The book is dedicated to B.J. Rolfzen, Dylan's influential high school English teacher. Greil Marcus' opening essay is a model of good writing about Dylan. Rolfzen, it is clear, loved poetry. He once told me, "I used to read names on tombstones and repeat the names in claass. I liked the sound of the names." Marcus mentions a paper Dylan wrote about The Grapes of Wrath. Rolfzen told me he gave Dylan a "B" and still regrets it. Anyone who wishes to see Rolfzen in action should view Mary Feidt's wonderful documentary Tangled Up in Bob.

There is an intriguing article by Anne Waldman on Dylan's relationship to the Beat poets. Waldman and Allen Ginsberg were among those who accompanied Dylan on the Rolling Thunder Revue.

There are four essays that connect Dylan to race in America. There is a wider point to be made here, one that might have been included in a more expansive approach to Dylan and otherness. Dylan saw African-Americans as only one group of others he was drawn to explore. He famously looked at other religions. In the very album from which the book's title is taken, Dylan examined his feminine side.

David Yaffe's essay reviewing Dylan's connection to race is particularly compelling. Yaffe ends his essay with a revelatory pun tying together Dylan's fascination with blackness in America and a song title from his album Time Out of Mind. Seeking a summary of Dylan and race, Yaffe writes: "He's not dark yet, but he's getting there."

This book asks new questions and, most significantly, amply illustrates that Dylan scholarship can be lively without being trivial and serious without being pedantic.

"The Dylan Watch" (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

In this post, I want to offer an alternative way of viewing three songs on Dylan’s album Highway 61 Revisited. Those songs can be seen as a dialogue between different parts of Dylan’s self.

Many interpreters understandably consider "Like A Rolling Stone" as a mockery of some woman. Candidates have included the pop actress Edie Sedgwick, Joan Baez, and others. But, especially in the context of other songs on the album, it is also possible to view the song in another way completely.

This alternative interpretation is that a new creative part of Dylan, formed by a reaction to maddening internal confusion and the roar of demands from the world, is angrily snarling and singing to the old Dylan, the one who was sure of himself and clear about his identity as king of the folk singers.

What makes the song particularly intriguing is that the new Dylan refers to the old Dylan as a woman. The old Dylan is "Miss Lonely." Why a woman? One interpretation is that this newer creative self sees self itself as fragmented and is allowing one part of the self to explore another. Additionally, within a self are all sorts of “others” that the uncreative self suppresses. So the new self notes the existence of a feminine side.

In one verse, the new Dylan sings to the old Dylan about Albert Grossman. Dylan's enigmatic manager is called his "diplomat" in the verse, and the concluding line is about Grossman's supposed taking of Dylan's money:

You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
Ain't it hard when you discover that
He really wasn't where it's at
After he took from you everything he could steal.

At the end of the song, Dylan pleads with his former self to go see someone who used to amuse him with language: 

You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can't refuse

Who is “Napoleon in rags”? He is Dylan (the “Napoleon” of singers) before the fame and before the money, when he lived in “rags” but was pleased with himself, when he was excited by his bursts of creative language, a Dylan driven by artistic motives not business interests.

In 1970, Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston interviewed Dylan and asked about the identity of Queen Jane in the song "Queen Jane Approximately." Dylan answered in what must have appeared to be one of his whimsical and nonsensical responses. He said: "Queen Jane is a man." But he was having fun with them by sneaking in the truth in a barrage of evasive responses.

In the song, the new Dylan is speaking to the old Dylan, again represented as a woman. In this case the king of folk music is appropriately a Queen. The "approximately" in the song’s title is there because such a feminine representation is not precisely his former self. The speaker mentions the exhaustion Dylan must feel about his self and his songs ("you're tired of yourself and all of your creations") and the anguished folk crowds angry that he is not singing protest songs ("all of your children start to resent you"). The speaker then invites "Queen Jane" to see him, to get away from the “bandits” in the commercial world in which “Queen Jane” lives out a musical life. The speaker is Dylan’s untainted creative self urging the successful Dylan to return.

Dylan’s dialogues with his self continue in another way on the album in "Ballad of a Thin Man."

Most critics see the song as an attack on journalists, who don't understand Dylan at all but continue to write about him. This is certainly plausible--especially considering the mention of a pencil in the first verse--but the song seen in its entirety leads to a very different interpretation.

In this interpretation, the new genuine and creative Dylan calls the old, confused Dylan “Mr. Jones” and sees him as someone who doesn’t understand the homosexuality around him and is confounded by it. The language of the song is filled with very explicit gay imagery:

Well, the sword swallower, he comes up to you
And then he kneels.
He crosses himself
And then he clicks his high heels
And without further notice
He asks you how it feels
And he says: "Here is your throat back
Thanks for the loan."

Given this imagery, it is more sensible to understand the "bone" the geek hands Mr. Jones and the "pencil" in Mr. Jones' hand as he walks into the room as phallic images.

The new Dylan is angry at the old Dylan for not understanding what is happening to him, for not comprehending the warping of his own creative core, the part of himself that was genuinely thrilled by the creative possibilities of combining language and music. The song is a cry from within mourning for what has happened to that part of Dylan’s self.

"The Dylan Watch" (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

This is the story, so far as I know never told, of Bob Dylan's first meeting with Woody Guthrie. I tell it now in honor of Dylan's new album and in memory of Mark Eastman, the man who told me the story and who died on October 4, 2008. I cannot verify the facts, so I will let readers decide for themselves.

Heading to New York for the first time, Dylan found his way first to Madison, Wisconsin and then to Chicago. Once there, Dylan headed immediately to see Kevin Krown. The two had met in the summer of 1960 in Central City, Colorado, and Krown had told Dylan to stop by if he was ever in Chicago.

Mark Eastman was a friend of Krown's. Eastman recalled that Dylan arrived at a dorm in Chicago looking like a "lost soul carrying a guitar." He was very shy, Eastman said. "He seemed like a little lost boy, with a frail quality, like he couldn't cook a cup of soup. He was in constant motion."

At some point, Dylan, Krown, and Eastman determined to head east to meet Woody Guthrie, and they did so several weeks later. Eastman and Krown hitchhiked to New York, and Dylan got a ride in a '57 Impala. Krown had a friend who had a vacant apartment in midtown, and the people said they could stay there. The three--and a fourth person whose name Eastman didn't recall--met at the apartment.

Dylan probably arrived sometime after the snowstorm on January 20, 1961. Eastman recalled there was snow on the ground when he got there and that he would have gone to New York on Fridays and weekends. Therefore, Dylan most likely arrived in New York on Friday, January 27th.

On the day after they got to New York, Dylan, Krown, Eastman, and the mysterious fourth person took a bus trip of about an hour and a half to Greystone Hospital to visit Woody Guthrie. Eastman said, "We walked into the floor where someone asked for Woody." There were "chairs along the wall, attendants in green mopping the floor." Eastman looked at the patients wandering around and felt depressed. "We sat down on some chairs in the corner of the room. Finally an attendant walked out with Woody, whose body was bent in strange angles. He almost looked like a prisoner from Auschwitz. However, he seemed happy and excited to have company. It was hard to understand Woody. Dylan played him some songs. Woody was very interested. He really bonded with Dylan. It seemed as if everyone present paid attention and felt that something significant was happening. The mopping of the floor stopped. I remember Woody asking the attendant to bring out how own guitar. Somehow even under the terrible weight of the crippling effects of Huntington's disease, Woody hammered out some chords to This Land is Your Land, and Bob and he sang the song together.

"As we were getting ready to leave, Woody wrote a few words for each of us." Eastman couldn't recall all the words Woody wrote on his. From other evidence, it seems that on Dylan's Woody wrote, "I ain't dead yet."

Eastman continued his story: "That evening we went to a party in Greenwich Village near NYU. Dylan played a couple of songs, but he wanted to leave. So he and I left and walked down the street [MacDougal] and went into The Commons or some other club. Dylan convinced the guy to let him play and a basket was passed around." The Commons, later named the Fat Black Pussycat, is the most likely place they went.

Bob Dylan had arrived.

"The Dylan Watch" (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Bob Dylan is on what must seem to him to be  be an ever-quickening nonstop journey to his next birthday. He'll be 68 on May 24th. Such an age might prompt him to consider retirement. But age seems to have sped up his pace, as though some hyper-awareness of the ever-reducing time he has left requires a defiant burst of creative activity. But then throughout his career the palpable presence of death-- sometimes menacing, sometimes alluring--has always brought out his fiercest yearning for creation. It still does. He has a new album coming out later this month. He's working on a second volume of his memoirs. He tours as though on a mission.

Why does he keep going? I'd like to believe he's trying to demonstrate that artistry endures through life, that behind his weathered face and dissipated voice is a soul that still houses a yearning youth with a fire in every vein. And if he doesn't quite have the agility of youth, he has the cagey mind of the experienced and determined.

In his youth the flashing images burning in his mind found their way into memorable songs during extraordinary moments in social history. He changed the age enough so that he now paces nervously in the penthouse of what Leonard Cohen has called the "Tower of Song." It's enough for several lives. But Dylan never did like limits imposed on him. He wants to see just how far the human spirit can stretch, to explore all the still dark corners of his seemingly boundless mind.

So others can sum up his achievements. I want him to rage against the dying of the lyric. I hope when he's 120 he'll be refusing interviews and be pessimistic about the world and still be struggling to find love.

For him, there are always the songs. Art is all that lasts. That's the love that won't desert him, won't be faithless, won't break his heart with slick words or empty promises. And so Dylan the artist won't stop looking for ways to produce that art. For him the rest is very far from silence.

"The Dylan Watch" (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Clinton Heylin is the author of Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, which I find the most useful of all the Dylan biographies. Among his other groundbreaking books, Heylin took on the jaw-dropping task of compiling a day-by-day Dylan chronology through the mid 90s and detailing Dylan's recording sessions through 1994. Heylin has made a compelling case to be considered the best Dylan researcher in the world.

In his new book, Revolution in the Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan, 1957-1973 (Chicago Review Press), Heylin discusses Dylan's first 300 songs. The book is informative on every page. The songs are placed in the order in which they were written, not released. When the information is available, Heylin lists where the lyric for each song is published, its first known performance,and studio recordings and then offers some background and assessment. In many cases, the songs are either rumors or barely-known, such as the first song in the collection "Song to Brigit" written, according to guesswork, when Dylan was 15. Here is where Heylin shines, unearthing valuable information and compiling it in a way that makes the book an indispensable reference work for anyone seriously interested in Dylan.

I do have some quibbles with the book. I don't like Heylin's unpleasant penchant for denigrating other Dylan researchers. I wish that some of the songs were accompanied by more complete or revealing stories. For example, Heylin notes that Dylan wrote Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues in one night after Noel Stookey (Paul of Peter, Paul & Mary) showed him a newspaper story. But there's an important addition to the story. Stookey told me that it was because Dylan could write such a song and not just sing traditional songs that Stookey told Albert Grossman, his manager and soon Dylan's, to keep an eye on the young man. Similarly, there's more interesting material about "Blowin' in the Wind" than presented here. I differ with some of Heylin's analyses. I find him too willing to conclude that Dylan was simply after a feeling, an assertion that renders analysis at best useless and at worst an interference with the purity of the feeling.

But these are good kinds of arguments to have with a book. Heylin is himself argumentative, so he invites such wrestling with his work. What's important is that the book makes the wrestling worthwhile.

"The Dylan Watch" (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

In a recent comment, David Lehman asked about Dylan's relationship with Archibald MacLeish. In Chronicles, his autobiography, Dylan reported that he had just returned from his father's funeral when he found a letter from MacLeish asking him to write some songs for a new play. The play was Scratch, an adaptation of Benet's story, "The Devil and Daniel Webster." Since Dylan's father died on June 5, 1968, it was sometime after that when Dylan and his wife drove from Woodstock to Massachusetts to see "Archie," as Dylan called the poet, someone he thought at the heights of American poetry.

The meeting itself did not go all that well. MacLeish did most of the talking. He was respectful and careful to mention that he thought Dylan a serious poet. But Dylan must have been shocked to discover that MacLeish still thought of him as a protest singer. Dylan immediately grasped that there would be no artistic relationship, although he did end up writing three songs for the play: "Father of Night," "Time Passes Slowly," and "New Morning." They didn't work for the show, which, Dylan wryly noted, closed after two days.

   
photo by Ken Regan, 1975

At least the meeting went better than the one Dylan had with Carl Sandburg in February 1964. The poet wouldn't let Dylan past the porch of his ranch in Hendersonville, N.C. In the twenty minutes Sandburg gave him, the poet said he had not even heard of Dylan. And Dylan tried to meet other poets as well, especially the Beats. Dylan was particularly taken with Allen Ginsberg, whom he had first met on December 26, 1963. Dylan liked Ginsberg, who lived outside the rules of society, was naive in his idealism, and didn't try to use Dylan. He let Dylan be himself. He was kind.

It is easy to suggest that Dylan wanted to meet famous poets because they had the authority to grant him, by association, an authentic poetic identity. But I think there was a deeper reason for his interest. Dylan was in search of models and mentors. He had to be overwhelmed by his own talent and by the reaction to it. He needed to speak with people who had the same sort of access to language he did. There weren't many people with as congenial a relationship to English who had also achieved widespread recognition. Only they could help him understand how an artist survives and deals with fame. Sandburg wouldn't listen. MacLeish couldn't understand. Only Ginsberg among the poets was a genuine teacher, someone who had an intense intelligence combined with a willingness to listen and take seriously what others said. He gave Dylan an education. He helped Dylan acquire a secure sense of what a poetic self was and the way to maintain the integrity of that self in a very strange world.

The Dylan Watch (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

    In "Red River Shore," Dylan sings of a wise woman he wanted to wed who offered him the best advice she had: "Go home and lead a quiet life." Whether real or symbolic, the woman's advice must have been considered close to sacred.

   But what is "a quiet life"? The term is often used spiritually to mean a life apart from the wicked world, a life that sees politics as unable to overcome the tragic flaws of human nature, and so a life without faith in politics but rather in artistic creation or the redemption offered by God or both.

    "A quiet life" had undeniable virtues for Dylan. It is a life that provides escape from the expectations of crowds, managers, critics, and fans. It is a life in which failed marriages, failed loves, failed friendships, and failed songs swirl into meaningless and are replaced by a divine presence, relationship, and life that has supreme meaning and is supremely safe.

    However, the arc of Dylan's career doesn't lead from intense social involvement and a quest for fame to social isolation. There is a constant tension, as if the need to express an opinion and the need for fame were at one end of the spectrum with the need for anonymity at the other with Dylan rushing passionately between the two, as if trying to prove Frost wrong, that he can go down two roads simultaneously.

    And Dylan has been lucky when he rushed back toward fame. He has retained his audience and critical support, his health, and his determination. Not everyone famous, though, wanted to leave fame and then return to it. Greta Garbo is perhaps the most famous of the well-known in search of a quiet life, although she didn't say what is often ascribed to her. Instead of "I want to be alone," she said, "I want to be let alone," which is less about becoming a hermit and more about the exhaustions of fame. But my favorite example is Gardner McKay, a television actor in the 1960s show Adventures in Paradise. After three years, McKay voluntarily left 20th Century Fox. Marilyn Monroe wanted the handsome actor to star with her in a film, a role that would have offered enormous fame. McKay declined. He ended up as an agronomist's assistant in the Amazon rain forest and died in 20001.

    Dylan's retreats to the quiet life were often hardly quiet. Highway 61 Revisited was a very public struggle to find hidden selves separate from the identity fame had given him. He has not given up touring or making records or painting or writing. He seems to need both the recognition and the quiet.

    Of course, he has written extensively about the quietest of lives. The anticipation of death has been on his mind constantly from the very beginning of his writing career. Maybe Heaven was the "home" the woman from the Red River Shore invited him to inhabit.

The Dylan Watch (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

    This is a post about Bob Dylan and Judaism.

    Were Dylan more of an ordinary person, an ordinary analysis might suffice. Such an analysis would include the normally revealing facts that Robert Zimmerman was born to Jewish parents, raised as a Jew, given a lavish Bar Mitzvah, and attended Camp Herzl in Webster, Wisconsin for four consecutive summers, from 1954-1958. As the camp's name suggests, it was Zionist, no surprise given that both Zimmerman parents were active in Jewish organizations. When Bobby Zimmerman first went to the University of Minnesota he stayed at the house of a Jewish fraternity, Sigma Alpha Mu. His first marriage was to a Jewish woman. He visited Israel's Western Wall and reportedly sought to live on a kibbutz. He remains connected to the Lubavitch movement.

    Dylan, that is, sounds like a middle-class Jewish success story, that of a man who, because of his enormous talent and hard work, was on extraordinarily intimate terms with both America's musical traditions and the English language. But there was also an inner religious torment unnoticed by the surface analysis. All minority group members must navigate the general human struggles of maturing, but minorities must add sometimes multiple struggles about such issues as self-acceptance and desiring the sometimes contradictory goals of acceptance by a wider group and maintaining the born self. Bobby Zimmerman's self-administered ethnotherapy was to develop an American self, "Bob Dylan."

    It would be cheap and easy to claim that Dylan's religious search came solely because his efforts to deal with anti-Semitism and minority status led at one point to his dealing with what he saw as the contradictions of being both Jewish and American by denying his Jewish self and fiercely embracing some sort of fundamentalist Christianty. Dylan's religious search was genuine. He deserves to have his quest taken seriously. But, ultimately, his attachment to Christianity was as problematic for him as his attachment to Judaism.

    It is not possible to say precisely what his religion is, or what mixture it is, or what its shape is. All we can say is that Dylan orients his life toward a sacred reality. He seems to feel a personal, direct relationship to God, perhaps even to have "conversations" with God. He seems to feel guided by God, blessed by God, and morally indebted to God.

    The ancient Israelites introduced the world to the idea of a single, personal, moral God. In that basic sense, Dylan is certainly Jewish. Additionally, the word "Israel" means someone who wrestles with God, not someone who obeys God or even believes in God. Has anyone more publicly wrestled with God than Bob Dylan? The wrestling has sometimes produced untraditional and even questionable results, but no one can doubt that it has also produced an enduring and uniquely magnificent body of art.

The Dylan Watch (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

William Zantzinger died on January 3rd, almost 46 years after he was held responsible for the February 9, 1963 death of an African-American barmaid named Hattie Carroll. Bob Dylan transformed Zantzinger into a national villain and a symbol of why a civil rights revolution was needed. Dylan's memorable song "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" was recorded on October 23, 1963 and released on January 13, 1964 on his album The Times They Are a-Changin'.

However vicious, repulsive, racist, and cruel Zantzinger may have been, the facts of Hattie Carroll's death don't completely cohere with the way the song presents them. Zantzinger was at a fancy event dressed up and carrying a toy cane. According to news reports, a drunken Zantzinger hit several employees with the cane and repeatedly used racially derogatory words. At one point he went to the bar and asked Hattie Carroll for a drink. She was evidently too slow for him, and he began calling her racially insulting names and hitting her on the shoulder with the cane. Carroll, whose heart was enlarged and who had hypertension, went to the kitchen. She left and later collapsed and died of a stroke. The medical examiner thought Zantzinger's nasty language had bothered her as the caning. A three-judge panel concluded that the caning itself could not have caused her death and so reduced the charges to manslaughter. Zantzinger was sentenced to six months in jail. In the song, Zantzinger's sentence has much to do with Zantginger's high political connections. In fact, his father had served a single term as a state legislator and been on the Maryland Planning Commission.

Writing for the January 26, 2009 issue of The New Yorker, David Simon (creator of The Wire) notes that he interviewed Zantzinger 25 years after the death. The most interesting part of the interview is that Zantzinger claims he was going to sue Dylan. He told Simon, "Scared that boy good." Zantzinger claimed his lawyer had contacted both Dylan and Columbia Records but refrained from the suit because Zantzinger had had enough of courtrooms.

But there is a lingering question. It was just about the time of the album's release and its immediate aftermath--the very time that Zantzinger's lawyers would most likely have threatened Columbia and Dylan with a lawsuit--that Dylan began to move away from explicitly political songs.

His reasons for doing so--the desire to explore the personal and a refusal to be owned by any movement--continue to make the most sense, and there is no reason to conclude Dylan ever lacked courage or felt legally or artistically threatened by a possible lawsuit. Indeed, Dylan was always a particularly courageous artist. But it would be interesting to see Columbia's legal file on the matter. And I wonder if the realization that the political songs could not be written without sometimes getting a nasty reaction and potential confrontation also contributed in some way to Dylan's move away from those explicitly political songs.