IT TAKES SOME GETTING USED TO , Bob Dylan, Rough and Rowdy Ways
by Stephen Scobie
When I first listened all the way through to Bob Dylan’s new album, Rough and Rowdy Ways (RRW), I felt a bit like the English poet Basil Bunting encountering Ezra Pound’s Cantos:
There they are, you will have to go a long way round
if you want to avoid them.
It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,
fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!
The album is so epic, so immense, that it seems impossible to write any kind of conventional “review,” any neat summation of themes, any reductive analysis or critical evaluation. It’s just too big; it takes some getting used to.
So this article is not a review. It doesn’t pretend to have a coherent, unified viewpoint, from which every odd detail can be slotted into place. Rather, it is a series of rough notes on individual lines and phrases which particularly struck me in the course of my first few listenings.
Many of these notes involve quotations: identifying sources, references, echoes, allusions. Much of this work has already been done by assiduous commentators on the internet; I cannot claim credit for being the first to discover and point out most of the identifications (though I do think I have pinned down a couple of references which I have not yet seen identified on the web).
Nor do I intend to pay any attention here to the vexed problems of allusion, intertextuality, or plagiarism, which I have extensively addressed elsewhere. Certainly, I make no pretense at completeness. There are many references which I have omitted, knowingly or unknowingly. Some I may have added in, hearing echoes where none is intended. This is not a coherent argument: these are first-draft impressions, preliminary reactions, rough and possibly even rowdy.
Packaging
Could scarcely be more minimal. The musicians are barely listed; the production (presumably by Dylan himself) not at all. The front cover photograph is by contemporary English photographer Ian Berry, The original image was in black and white; the sepia coloring enhances the illusion of a time past – suggesting some 1920s juke joint in the Deep South, but actually taken in London in 1964. The packaging includes the hagiographic pose of JFK, but not the lurid image which accompanied the pre-release of “False Prophet,” showing a skeleton in a top hat wielding a hypodermic needle. There is a photo of Jimmy Rodgers, but none of Dylan himself.
Title
The title is rather odd. “My Rough and Rowdy Ways” is a 1929 song by Jimmy Rodgers. Dylan is a big fan, having produced a whole tribute album to the “singing brakeman.” But RRW, other than the title and inside cover photo, contains (as far as I can tell) no other reference or quotation from Rodgers. Neither is it especially rough -- the production is meticulous – or rowdy – even at its most energetic, it’s not going to have your neighbours banging on the wall. That’s not a criticism: the music is excellent. But quietly excellent.
“I Contain Multitudes”
The Walt Whitman quote, or at least the idea of it, has been hanging around Bob Dylan critical circles for a long time. I’m not sure if anyone has actually used the line, though it wouldn’t surprise me if someone has. Anyway, Dylan has now done it for them. But it’s one thing to have this Whitmanian (Whitmaniac?) virtue ascribed to you by a critic; it is quite another thing (as Walt himself must have known) to claim it for yourself. It may be useful for sidestepping accusations of inconsistency or self-contradiction; but identifying yourself with Whitman does carry elements of bragging and egotism. So, as we will see, such claims are occasionally undercut by wry self-deprecation or deliberate exaggeration.
Today and tomorrow and yesterday too
Possibly a distant echo of Macbeth – “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow … all our yesterdays”? There is an air of Shakespearean tragedy all over this album. Lady Macbeth will appear close to the end, over an hour from now.
Follow me close, I’m going to Bally-na-Lee Where? After the obvious Whitman reference, here comes Dylan in the third line throwing a curve ball to all potential transcribers and annotators. Where is this place, and how do you even spell it? Turns out it’s a village in Ireland, associated with a 19th century Irish poet, Antoine O Raifteiri, whose work Dylan has reportedly discussed with Shane MacGowan, lead singer of The Pogues. As such – a distant location, out on the edge, with a few literary ghosts – perhaps it functions as a bookend to the penultimate song of the album – Key West.
I fuss with my hair, and I fight blood feuds
Sets up the first of a series of rhymes for “multitudes.” I wrote above about Dylan using self-deprecating humour to undercut the possible arrogance of equating himself with Walt Whitman. The line juxtaposes the trivial with the profound. “Blood feuds” is only the first of a long series of images of justice as vengeance, judgments rendered as acts of extreme and personal violence. (This theme has become increasingly prominent in Dylan’s work over the last twenty years.) It pierces to the heart of the debate between public justice and private revenge, society’s transition from the endless extension of “blood feud” to the rule of law, in which the state claims a monopoly on violence. This debate continues to this day, but was most memorably articulated by, yes, Hamlet – “Murder Most Foul.”
Yet here, this intensely serious theme is casually paired with “I fuss my hair.” Now, I would readily agree that there are few heads of hair in the world more worth fussing with than Bob Dylan’s, especially circa 1966 (as ultimately portrayed by the late Milton Glaser). But it scarcely equates with “blood feuds.” The coupling here urges you to see an element of irony in Dylan’s commitment to revenge. The language of “blood feuds” is always, knowingly, a bit over the top.
OK. But it turns out we’re not yet quite finished with “fuss.” But for that, you’ll have to wait until I get to “Mother of Muses.”
Got a tell tale heart like Mister Poe
Volume 8 of Dylan’s “Bootleg Series,” which covers the years around Time Out Of Mind, is entitled Tell Tale Signs (2008). In Poe, the “heart” belongs to the victim of murder, whose beating heart remains audible as an accusation beyond death. In Dylan, the role of victim is ascribed to the singer himself, the author of the “signs,” and the signs are the songs, or at least the alternative takes and rejected drafts of songs which, once buried, are now permitted to sound beyond the walls of their tombs.
Red Cadillac and a Black Moustache
Classic rock and roll song by Warren Smith (1957), covered by Dylan (2001). The recording was used as a TV commercial for
Cadillac cars and trucks. Dylan has cheerfully allowed his songs to be used to advertise all kinds of products, from Victoria’s Secret lingerie to (just this last weekend) Travelers Insurance golf tournament. Purists have been distressed, but hey, why not? If you contain multitudes, why shouldn’t that include salesman for ladies’ underwear? But the Cadillac will also show up later on RRW, as will “red.”
I’m just like Anne Frank, like Indiana Jones
And them British bad boys, the Rolling Stones
This is the first, and perhaps the most unsettling, instance of a device which Dylan uses throughout RRW, and which eventually consumes it entirely: a list of culturally well-known names (authors, singers, titles) arranged in groups of two or three, held together by rhyme, as if each pairing was a mini-collage, in which the significance was to be found not in the terms themselves but in the very act of their juxtaposition. Sometimes the names in the list support each other; at other times they seem bizarrely incongruous, even indeed in violent conflict with each other – as here.
What do these three names possibly have in common with each other (aside from the tenuous link that Indiana Jones fought Nazis)? Indeed, the placing of Anne Frank’s name in this company may be regarded as offensive. Or the lines may be subject to the criticism leveled by Samuel Johnson against John Donne: “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.”
In the next lines, Dylan ventures that all these characters “go right to the edge … go right to the end.” Fair enough: but the question remains: of all the characters in human history who have gone to the edge, why these three? In his New York Times interview with Douglas Brinkley, Dylan admits that basically, he just doesn’t know:
Those kind of songs for me just come
out of the blue, out of thin air… There
are certain public figures that are just
in your subconscious for one reason or another. None of those songs with
designated names are intentionally
written. They just fall down from space. I’m just as bewildered as anybody else as to why I write them.
Or in other words: I contain multitudes.
Everything’s flowing, all at the same time
In Greek, panta rhei: all things are in flux, unstable, impermanent. Central tenet of the Greek philosopher Heroclitus. In 1919, faced
with the complete collapse of European civilization over the previous five years, Ezra Pound, already “fighting in the Captain’s tower,” wrote: “’All things are a flowing,’ / Sage Heraclitus said.”
I live on a Boulevard of Crime
This was the name colloquially given in the mid-19th century to the stretch of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris housing the popular theatres – tragedies, comedies, melodramas, musicals, mime shows. Its name came from the prevalence of petty crime: pickpockets, muggings, blackmail. It was the setting (though that is far too weak a word) for the film Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise), written by Jacques Prévert, directed by Marcel Carné, filmed more or less clandestinely in Nazi-occupied Paris, released after the war to become one of the great classics of French cinema – and also, as it happens, to become one of Bob Dylan’s all-time favourite movies. It is a dominant influence on mid-70s Dylan, especially on the Rolling Thunder Revue and Renaldo and Clara. The aim of that movie, Dylan once told Allen Ginsberg, was to “stop time.” What art could do, then, was to counter the sense that all things are flowing. Indeed, throughout RRW, Dylan offers various images of time suspended, time cancelled. And here comes the first one:
I sleep with life and death in the same bed
Red blue jeans
Has “blue jeans” become such a generic term that their colour doesn’t matter? Are “red blue jeans” what you wear when crossing the Red River in red Cadillac?
I play Beethoven’s sonatas, Chopin’s preludes
I look forward to hearing the bootlegs.
“False Prophet”
The words of the song are always disclaimers, in the negative – “I ain’t no false prophet” – but the title remains obstinately affirmative, in the positive – “false prophet.” Is the singer saying that he is a prophet, but not a false one? Or is he saying that he’s no prophet of any kind, false or otherwise? Which double negative takes precedence: “ain’t no” or “no false”? Remember the very early Dylan song “Long Time Gone,” with its evocation of the Prophet Amos: “I know I ain’t no prophet / And I ain’t no prophet’s son” (for a detailed exploration of that early song, see my book Always Other Voices).
And while we’re on the topic of ambiguous claims to authority and authorship, let’s acknowledge the wholesale appropriation of the musical arrangement (which is wonderful) from Billy (the Kid) Emerson, 1954. Love and Theft. Billy, you’re so far away from home.
I opened my heart to the world and the world came in
When I first listened to the album, I heard this as “the world caved in.” I have since seen at least one internet posting with the same mistake. I’m not at all sure I don’t prefer it.
My fleet footed guides from the underworld
“Fleet footed” is a classic poetic epithet, often apped to Hermes/Mercury, messenger and trickster. But it is also, of course, self-quotation. In 1965 “Maggie comes fleet foot” in the underworld Subterranean homesick blues.
I’m first among equals, second to none
The last of the best, you can bury the rest
Bury ‘em naked with their silver and gold
OK, this is a tricky one. I see an odd string of references here, but I acknowledge that I may be letting my fancy run away with me. These links may exist more in my imagination than in any legitimate reading of the text. But I can’t resist them.
To begin with, “first among equals,” or in its Latin form, “primus inter pares,” is an equivocal concept, both self-aggrandizing (first) and modest (among equals). It’s not a stable condition: many or even most “first among equals” relationships have ended up in civil strife and the attempted dominance of the one. One example would be the Roman triumvirate of Pompey, Julius Caesar, and Marcus Lucinius Crassus. Dylan’s keen interest in Caesar is evident throughout RRW, but for the moment, my interest is in Crassus, the richest man in Rome. (For my generation, the definitive portrait is Laurence Olivier’s towering performance in Stanley Kubrick’s film Spartacus (1960).)
But before I get back to Crassus, what about Dylan? If the narrator of this song regards himself as first among equals, who are “the rest”? If he is “the last of the best,” then who remains to be buried? And one possible answer, though I feel rather queasy advancing it, is “them British bad boys, the Rolling Stones.” That use of “bad boys” seems rather condescending, more part of the Stones’ early-60s publicity image than of their mature accomplishment. But there is the unavoidable able fact that both Dylan and the Stones lay claim to the use of the proverb (not to mention Muddy Waters; not to mention Jann Wenner). If Dylan is “the last of the best,” last left standing of the rock gods of the 60s, can he finally “bury” them bad boys with their “silver and gold”? After all, the Stones did in 1969 release a song called “You got the silver, you got the gold” (notable in that the lead vocal is by Keith, not Mick).
And here is where these two stray threads of association I have been uneasily following suddenly loop back together. In the early 1960s, the Rolling Stones are “them British bad boys.” In 1965, Dylan records “Like a Rolling Stone.” In 1969, the Rolling Stones record “You got the gold.” In 1960, Olivier defines Crassus. The film, however, does not include Crassus’ death. In legend, after (let us hope, after) Crassus was killed in battle, his victorious enemies mocked his status as the richest man in Rome by pouring molten gold into his mouth. On RRW, Dylan sings “Bury ‘em naked with their silver and gold,” and then, just two verses later, he adds:
Open your mouth, I’ll stuff it with gold.
I’m just here to bring vengeance on somebody’s head
Somebody’s. Could be anybody’s. Blood Feuds aren’t particularly discriminating.
The city of God is there on the hill
Conflation of several texts:
-- City of God, 5th century AD treatise by Saint Augustine of Hippo (I dreamed I saw… )
-- “A city set on a hill cannot be hid” (Matthew 5.14)
-- sermon on this text by John Winthrop, preached in Boston in 1630, widely quoted (and, arguably, misinterpreted) by Ronald Reagan, and by all of his successors. For its connections to Dylan’s Basement Tapes, see Greil Marcus, Invisible Republic.
I’m nobody’s bride
Hard to see Bob as a bride, even in the context of time running backward, or waiting at the altar. But stranger things have happened – see another strange wedding in “Key West.”
Can’t remember when I was born and I forget when I died
Definitive statement of being beyond or outside of time. Maybe it comes from some old blues – wouldn’t surprise me – but so what? He knows what to do with it: place it at the end of a song in which he claims that he is/is not a false/not false prophet.
“My Own Version of You”
I have by now read on line several dozen reviews of RRW, and when they come to this song, they invariably mention Frankenstein. Fair enough – but the reference exists only in the cultural intertext, not in the text itself. The name “Frankenstein” is never mentioned in the actual song. I’ll try to stay away from it for as long as I can.
I’ve been visiting morgues and monasteries
Compare “Thunder on the Mountain” (2008): “Gonna raise me an army, some tough sons of bitches / I’ll recruit my army from the orphanages.” I know it’s a tenuous echo, but hey, any excuse to quote that rhyme! “Brando / commando” is pretty good too.
Lookin’ for the necessary body parts
Limbs and livers and brains and hearts
In medieval troubadour poetry, there was a rhetorical convention in which the poet assembled an idealized lady by combining features from several famously beautiful women: one woman’s eyes, another woman’s hair, another woman’s lips. However, it never got down to the anatomical level of livers and hearts. Leave it to Dylan to make the rhetorical conceit literal.
I wanna create my own version of you
It is of course a highly problematic wish, even before it gets literalised into livers and brains. The narrator refuses to accept his lover as she is, but rather regards her as material to be shaped according to his own desires. Later, he phrases it as:
I’ll bring someone to life, someone for real
Someone who feels the way that I feel
But how can she be alive or real if her existence depends on replicating his feelings?
It must be the winter of my discontent
Shakespeare again, first line of Richard III. But the original is “our,” not “my”: it expresses (and derides) the collective delight of the victorious York dynasty in deposing its enemies, a delight which Richard does not exactly share. For him, the discontent still exists, and he will follow it through until he himself attains the crown – by way of means of, to switch plays, murder most foul. And Richard’s “discontent” goes deeper than his regal ambition: it is, fundamentally, rooted in his own physical deformity, the hunchback, which is the main topic of the rest of this opening speech. Maybe he should look for repairs in some morgue or monastery.
I pick a number between one and two
And I ask myself what would Julius Caesar do?
There is of course no whole number between one and two, so the line expresses a paradox, or an impossibility. Or a preference for fractions. The following phrase is commonly used as “What would Jesus Christ do?” Dylan exchanges one JC for another. And if we again think of the Shakespearean tragedy, note how these references – Macbeth, Hamlet, Richard III, Julius Caesar -- are all plays dealing with the violent overthrow or assassination of a monarch. Lying in waiting for JC is JFK. And William McKinley.
Leon Russell / Liberace / Saint John the Apostle
Another unlikely trio, where the bizarreness of the combination (and the delight of the rhyme) is probably more significant than any precise association for each of the names.
I’ll be at the Black Horse Tavern … Two doors down, not that far to walk
Would a black rider drink in a Black Horse Tavern? Or if he were in Greenwich Village, might he not walk (not that far) to the White Horse Tavern, where in 1953 a certain Welsh poet called Dylan quite literally drank himself to death? Riding a pale horse.
You can bring it to St Peter, you can bring it to Jerome
You can … bring it all the way home
A somewhat less incongruous pairing, between the founder of the church and the translator of the Scriptures. So the singer is “bringing it all back home,” to an album title from 1965.
Can you tell me what it means, to be or not to be?
Hamlet again, with a question which remains as inscrutable as Mona Lisa’s smile.
Can you help me walk that moonlight mile?
There are probably dozens of references for “Moonlight Mile,” but my favourite would certainly be the sublime 1971 recording by them British bad boys, the Rolling Stones.
I can see the history of the whole human race
Most of which – the crusades, England, America – seems to deal with slavery, and thus with the question of what it means to be “human.” Did Jefferson consider his slaves as “human”? Which is, in turn, the question of Frankenstein: is his creature “human”?
Trojan Women
Greek tragedy by Euripides, notable for its focus not on the heroes of war but its victims.
Some of the best known enemies of mankind …
Mr Freud with his dreams, Mr Marx with his axe
See the rawhide lash rip the skin from their backs
Even by the standards of recent Dylan, this is a remarkably violent, even sadistic image. It’s one thing to disagree with Freud or Marx; it’s quite another thing to conjure up and appear to take relish in such specific and grisly punishment.
Yet the singer immediately does an about-face, evoking an immortal spirit, [which] creeps in your body the day you are born. Or, perhaps, at the moment when some strange creator brings you to life with a blast of electricity?
The whole song is caught up in what Leonard Cohen called “the tangle of matter and ghost.” It longs for the “immortal spirit,” but it keeps on snagging on the crudely material: bodies which can be ideally assembled, or else flogged apart.
“I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You”
The first thing to say about this song is that it’s simply gorgeous, the loveliest love song that Dylan has written in many a long year. It contains one of RRW’s most beautiful lines – My mind’s like a river, a river that sings – and to match Dylan’s vocal performance, I’d have to reach back as far as “Pretty Saro” (1969). But it is also part of this album, so some questions do arise.
Before I even get to the title, and before Dylan sings the first line, there is the backing vocal. Dylan has in the past, notably in the late 70s, utilized a choir of female voices to sing a wordless hum in the background; but I don’t think he has ever used a choir of male voices. They provide a lovely, lilting tune, which is the “Barcarolle” from Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann (1881). One of these tales is about a man who falls in love with an automaton, a woman who turns out to be a mechanical toy. Suddenly, all the issues from the previous song, about the artificial creation of a supposedly ideal lover, come back into play. And they point to the oddity of the title:
I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you
The romantic ideal of falling in love is that its experience is emotional, instinctive, spontaneous. It is not the cold, logical, rational decision implied by “made up my mind.” You don’t make up your mind to fall in love: you just do it. If you have to think about giving a gift, is it really a gift?
(Several critics have alreasy suggested that this song may enjoy the same popular romantic success as “Make You Feel My Love” (1997) – but I dislike that song, and have the same reservations about the note of deliberation, even coercion, in the title.)
I saw the first fall of snow
Nothing on the whole album is as beautiful as the slowness (snowness?) with which Dylan sings this line.
Salt Lake City to Birmingham….
This list of American cities sounds like a tour schedule. Of course, the “you” being addressed could just as easily be the audience as a single lover.
If I had the wings of a snow white dove
Opening line of the folk classic generally known as “Dink’s Song.” Among many, many versions, listen to Oscar Isaac in Inside Llewyn Davis (2014). Dylan was singing it as early as 1961, when he introduced it as a song he had heard from an old woman called Dink. Unfortunately, John Lomax said the same thing in 1906.
“Black Rider”
Generally seen as an emblem of death. He is the third of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; he rides a black horse, and his name is Famine. Title of a 1990 musical collaboration beween William S. Burroughs and Tom Waits.
(I have another, stray, wholly personal association. When I was guest-teaching in Kiel, Germany in the 1990s, I spent a lot of time on public transit. The Kiel buses all had notices denouncing people who tried to ride without paying the fare – they were known colloquially as “black riders” (schwarze Reiter). I don’t know whether the phrase was common elsewhere in Germany. I wrote a poem about a black rider, but alas, I can no longer find a copy of it.)
Another vengeance and violence song. But the threats are not from Death but against Death. The threats range from the understated but ominous – I don’t want to fight, at least not today // One of these days I’ll forget to be kind – to the gruesome – I take a sword and hack off your arm. Perhaps the most startling jibe against the supposed power of Death is The size of your cock won’t get you nowhere. Dylan is no stranger to expletives – he was among the first mainstream singers to use “shit.” and even “nigger,” in his recordings – but the crudity here seems calculated to shock, and to increase the disrespect being shown to the Black Rider.
But at the same time, the song shows some kindness, even sympathy, towards the Black Rider:
Be reasonable, mister, be honest, be fair
Let all of your earthly thoughts be of prayer.
He even offers to sing Death a song, though it is introduced, incongruously, as something he will perform Some enchanted evening. Dylan has, of course, sung this song, on Shadows in the Night (2015), but it is fair to suppose that this is the first time Rodgers and Hammerstein have ever been juxtaposed so closely with an anatomically challenged Death.
Black Rider, Black Rider, you’ve been on the job too long
Poor old Death, suffering from job overload. This Covid virus must have plumb worn him out. “Been on the job too long” is a traditional folk line, which crops up in many songs – such as “Duncan and Brady,” a murder ballad which Dylan performed with harsh ferocity in 1992 (eventually released on Tell Tale Signs (2008).
Which leads to another possibly fanciful thread of associations. In 2014, a bunch of musicians were commissioned to complete a set of lyrics written by Dylan around 1967 but never set to music. Among the performers was the resplendent Rhiannon Giddens; and among the songs she completed was one which Dylan called “Duncan and Jimmy.” (Brady disappears, having been shot by Duncan in the original folksong.) So, just as Offenbach’s automoton provides a subterranean link between “My Own Version of You” and “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Love you,” Giddens’ “Duncan and Jimmy” provides a link between the allusion to “Duncan and Brady” and the song which immediately follows it on RRW: “Goodbye Jimmy Reed.”
“Goodbye Jimmy Reed”
OK, I can’t help but notice the close echo between “Jimmy Reed” and “Jimmy Dean” – who otherwise does not appear on RRW.
Jimmy Reed was a blues singer and guitarist whose influence, especially in the 1950s and 60s, exceeded his popular success. He died comparatively young (just over 50) from epilepsy. On this song, Dylan not only pays tribute to Reed, but also discreetly shows Reed’s continuing legacy by quoting himself: the opening guitar lick is highly reminiscent of “Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat”; and buried way deep in the production are some harmonica flourishes which can only be by Bob. Of all the songs on RRW, this is the one that most begs to be unleashed in performance. Let Charlie Sexton loose!
Put a jewel in your crown and I’ll put out the light
“The Jewel in the Crown” was the popular description of the place of India in the British Empire, and was used in the novels of Paul Scott – but it’s hard to see any relevance for such an allusion here. More interesting is the close repetition of “Put,” twice in one line, which may recall “Put out the light, and then put out the light,” the words with which Othello, murder most foul, strangles Desdemona. Again, Shakespeare lances the wound between justice and vengeance, public law and personal violence.
I can’t play the record ‘cos my needle got stuck
In contrast to the blunt “cock” of the previous song, Dylan returns here to the rich tradition of blues euphemism, delicate indelicacies. This wonderfully oblique confession of impotence is immediately followed by I break open your grapes, I suck out the juice, for which I scarcely dare to offer any explication, for which I scarcely dare attempt explication, except to choke and gasp some more at the completed rhyme:
I need you like a head needs a noose.
You could write a whole textbook on sexual pathology based on these three lines.
Can you hear me calling you from down in Virginia
Direct quote from Jimmy Reed.
“Mother of Muses”
Mother of Muses, sing for me
The mother of the Muses was Mnemosyne. Perhaps Dylan was wise not to include the actual name in his text, where he would have had to sing and pronounce it! But the odd thing about Dylan’s line is that it reverses the usual order, gets things backward. The Muse does not sing for the singer; the singer sings for the Muse. The Muse is the inspiration, not the performer.
Sing of Sherman, Montgomery and Scott
And of Zhukov and Patton
A roll-call of military heroes is of course a common device in epic poetry. Homer is full of such lists. But this is a very eclectic and wide-ranging list, including Generals from Britain, America, and even Soviet Russia. Sherman’s march through Georgia will reappear at the very end of the album. There is a sly joke that one General (Patton) is perhaps best known for his film portrayal by an actor with the same name as another General (Scott). As for the original Scott: Winfield Scott was in charge of the US Army in the mid-19th century, in the years leading up to the Civil War. He is credited with transforming that army into a disciplined, professional fighting force, ultimately superior to the less organized troops of the Conferacy. His insistence on small points of discipline gave him his popular nickname: “Old Fuss and Feathers.” Did he perhaps fuss with his hair?
Who cleared the path for Presley to sing
Who carved the path for Martin Luther King
Well, in the long run, yes. insofar as they were all fighting for freedom. But I kind of doubt what any of them would have made of Elvis. Does the repeated “path” echo Dylan’s early song “Paths of Victory”?
Calliope … don’t belong to anyone, why not give her to me?
Calliope, Muse of Epic Poetry. The list of Generals is certainly Calliope’s territory. And nowadays, the epic is not much in fashion, despite a few magnificent attempts to render Homer into contemporary poetics: Christopher Logue, Alice Oswald. The post is open: why not Bob?
I’ve already outlived my life by far
As a 76-year-old man listening to a 79-year-old singer, I very much appreciate this line.
“Crossing the Rubicon”
I crossed the Rubicon on the 14th day
Of the most dangerous month of the year
What would Julius Caesar do? Well, one answer is that he would lead his army across the River Rubicon, thus precipitating Civil War in Rome. So this action has become emblematic of a decisive and irrevocable act, a calculated risk, a breaking of taboos. In Caesar’s case, it worked – but there are no guarantees for prospective crossers.
Why the 14th day of an unnamed month? The best known historical reference for that date would be July 14th: the storming of the Bastille, the beginning of the French Revolution, an ideal example of Rubicon crossing. And July is, of course, the month named in honour of Julius Caesar – who actually crossed the river in January. But there is also September 14th, 1901, date of the assassination of William McKinley: see below, the opening lines of “Key West.”
I painted my wagon, abandoned all hope.
“Paint your wagon” is a colloquial phrase for getting things ready to be done, deciding to act – not quite as drastic as crossing the Rubicon, but getting there. Also the title of a 1969 movie musical starring, incongruously, Clint Eastwood. And remember the “painted wagon” in “Senor” (1978).
“Abandoned all hope” comes from Dante’s Inferno: it is the inscription above the Gate of Hell. Translations vary between “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” and “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”
Well, the Rubicon is a red river
But it’s not the only one. There is a Red River in Dylan’s home state of Minnesota. There is a great 1948 western movie called Red River, whose plot has several echoes in RRW. In 1997, Dylan recorded a wonderful song called “Girl from the Red River shore.”
I can feel the bones beneath my skin
It’s a bit of a stretch, but I cannot resist the echo from T.S. Eliot, “Whispers of Immortality,” “Webster was much possessed with death / And saw the skull beneath the skin.”
And here again are the threats of violence –
I’ll make your wife a widow
You’ll never see old age….
I’ll cut you up with a crooked knife
And yet here too, in the midst of these threats, we come to the most explicitly redemptive lines on the whole album:
I feel the Holy Spirit inside
See the light that freedom gives
I believe it’s in the reach of
Every man who lives
-- punctuated by an almost off-microphone O Lord!
Mona, baby, are you still in my mind?
Are we all the way back to 1966, “Memphis Blues Again,” “Mona tried to tell me / To stay away from the train line”? Or is it Lisa again?
“Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”
Key West is, Dylan’s song tells us, “on the horizon line.” It’s as far as you can go in one direction of America: the limit, the end. But like a horizon, it recedes: it is always just beyond reach. It is posited as an ideal, never quite attainable, but possibly imaginable in one particular place: Key West.
Historically, Key West has long been seen as a refuge, for pirates (such as one 18th century predator named Black Caesar!), or for writers, from Ernest Hemingway to Wallace Stevens. (There is no doubt a whole article to be written on the links between Dylan’s song and Stevens’ poem “The Idea of Order at Key West,” but I’m sorry, I don’t feel up to attempting that one.) The New Basement Tapes, the 2014 collection of songs based on texts written by Dylan in 1967 but left unfinished, contains one track entitled “Florida Key,” which also evokes the idea of an ideal destination.
But before we even get started, and despite the dreamy music in the background, there is a violent interruption:
McKinley hollered, McKinley squalled,
Doctor said McKinley, death is on the wall
The first two lines of Dylan’s song are the same as the first two lines of “White House Blues,” a 1926 song by Bill Monroe, lamenting the death of William McKinley, 25th President of the United States, who was assassinated in Buffalo, NY, on September 14th, 1901. (See “Crossing the Rubicon” for another 14th.) I am not aware of any special connection between McKinley and Key West He appears here mainly as a signpost towards that huge song looming just ahead, “Murder Most Foul,” where his memory will hang in the background list of the four assassinated Presidents: Lincoln, Garfield. McKinley, Kennedy. Still, it is an odd way to begin a song about an idyllic ideal. As if, before the “idea of order” has even been established, it has to be brought violently back down to earth, Later in the song, there will be another violent interruption.
Down in the boondocks
See “Murder Most Foul.”
I’m looking for love, for inspiration
On that pirate radio station
Coming out of Luxembourg and Budapest
Key West always welcomed pirates, such as Black Caesar. The term “pirate radio station” dates from Britain in the 1950s, when Radio Luxembourg operated outside the tight constraints of BBC regulation. Many a British teenager lay awake at night listening to Radio Luxembourg beneath the pillows. Later, the most famous pirate station was Radio Caroline, operating from a ship in the North Sea, forever patrolling just outside British territorial waters. I am not familiar with the history of pirate radio in Hungary, Maybe it’s just that Budapest rhymes with Key West.
Down in the flatlands
Not quite “Lowlands,” but almost.
Key West is the place to be
If you’re looking for immortality…
If you lost your mind, you’ll find it there
At the expense of a somewhat clumsy rhyme, this is the song’s most direct statement of the ideal waiting on, or beyond, the horizon line.
Like Ginsberg, Corso and Kerouac
Allen, Gregory, Jack. A triumvirate of the Beat Generation. In 1954, Ginsberg recorded a song playing variations on “When the Saints Go Marchin’ in.” It’s called “Walking at Night in Key West.”
Like Louis and Jimmy and Buddy and all the rest
Take your pick. I guess Armstrong, Reed, and Holly, but the possibilities are endless.
Got my right hand high, with the thumb down
Again, justice as violence. Thumb down is now generally accepted as a sentence of death. It was not ever thus. In Roman times, and right up until just a couple of hundred years ago, it was the other way round. Thumbs down asked the victorious gladiator to plunge his sword or spear into the ground, sparing the defeated opponent. Thumbs up signaled that the death blow should come higher, into the heart or neck.
Down on the bottom
The New Basement Tapes also contains a song balled “Down on the Bottom.” Perhaps Dylan did scavenge some lines from his earlier, forgotten, and newly rediscovered self.
I’ve never … wasted time with an unworthy cause
Recall “Restless Farewell” (1964): “The cause was there before I came.”
Newton Street, Bayview Park….
Most of the street names in this song do show up on Internet searches of Key West street names. Bayview Park is actually on Truman Avenue. The only one I haven’t found is, perhaps unsurprisingly, History Street. President Truman did have a Southern White House in Key West. But he is one of the few Presidents named on this album who was not assassinated.
Twelve years old, they put me in a suit
Forced me to marry a prostitute
What?? This is clearly a fiction, which (like “I shot a named Grey” in “Tangled Up In Blue”) is so obviously outrageous that it can only be seen as disrupting and blocking any autobiographical reading. Like the first (McKinley) verse, it comes as a violent disruption of the ideal – which it then attempts to redeem: we’re still friends.
Intermission
So we come to the place where, if you’re going to listen to RRW all the way through, you have to get up from your chair, take out the first CD, fetch the second, put it on, settle back for another 17 minutes. Many people, I suspect, may let it pass, treating RRW as a 9-song CD, ending with “Key West” – which gives that song a special emphasis, as the “last” song on the album, a position usually reserved by Dylan for definitive statements, from “Restless Farewell” to “Desolation Row” to “Dark Eyes” to “Ain’t Talking.” And, of course, “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” the only other song to occupy the whole of a single LP side, or a single CD. “Murder Most Foul” is thus both an end and a new beginning. It was the first song from the album to be released, and it was a bombshell. There had been no advance publicity, not even rumours of its existence. I remember getting up one morning, checking my computer, and starting to play a song logging in (surely a mistake!) at 17 minutes, (Actually a few seconds shorter, but 17 sounded conclusive.) I understand that, technically, it could have fit on a single CD. Setting it apart on a separate disc was a deliberate choice, giving it even greater prominence – which I, as listener, reinforce every time I get up to change the disc.
“Murder Most Foul”
As has been widely acknowledged, the title comes from Hamlet: Act One Scene Five. Hamlet confronts his father’s Ghost. The Ghost enjoins him: “Revenge my foul and most unnatural murder.” Shocked, Hamlet exclaims “Murder!” and the Ghost drives the point home: “Murder most foul, as in the best it is, /But this most foul, strange and unnatural.” “Foul” – three times in three lines. Not just murder, but something unnatural. What the Ghost is hinting at, but even he dare not say it, is incest. If Gertrude became Claudius’ mistress when still married to his brother, then she is guilty of incest – foul and unnatural. Yet the Ghost goes on to admonish Hamlet to do nothing against his mother – which puts him in an impossible position. He cannot make any public accusation against Claudius, since that would implicate Gertrude too, So the only way Hamlet can revenge his father is by acting in secret, by pursuing his revenge privately. And that is the one thing that Hamlet cannot bring himself to do. Hence his famous delay, his inability to act. Hamlet’s tragedy is that fate places him in the one situation in which his finest qualities conspire against him. He knows that an essential part of civilization is that the state assume a monopoly of violence: that “blood feuds” are settled by law, not by private violence. Yet the Ghost’s instructions are pushing him back to the role of Revenger, which he cannot assume. And this is the sticking point that Dylan comes back to in RRW, again and again, in all the references to private violence, which he (or his narrator) appears to indulge with such relish.
‘Twas a dark day in Dallas
Personal disclosure required. I don’t see how you can react to this song without taking a position on all the conspiracy theories around Kennedy’s assassination. On the one hand, I have never been a big fan of conspiracy theories, whose promoters decidedly tend towards being nuts. On the other hand, I have never been fully convinced by Oswald-as-lone-assassin. Dylan (or the speaker of this song) is clearly convinced that Kennedy died because of some conspiracy, and I am prepared to accept that as the narrative basis of the song. But I will not go through “Murder Most Foul” in as much source-hunting detail as I have done with the nine previous songs. If you want footnotes on “Dealey Plaza” or “Zapruder,” there are plenty of places you can find them. “Conspiracy” includes “piracy.”
Similarly, I am not going to try to comment on every reference or dropped name in this song. As Eyolf Ostrem says, in an excellent on-line review,
I see them as a whole …where a seemingly endless row of characters pass before our eyes and ears in a procession. One by one they step into the light before they recede into the multitude again, but the remaining impression is that of the procession itself, not of the individual participant.
So I will highlight a few references, but make no attempt at completeness. However, looking at the vast array of works listed in the second half of this song, and asking who gets in and who gets left out, there are a few general comments I want to make. The immediate critical consensus was that the works listed in the second half of the song were in some way a cure, a counterbalance to the deeply pessimistic view of American culture brought on by the Kennedy assassination. So, to be blunt, who gets in and who gets left out? And let’s focus first on who gets left out.
The list is confined to music and movies. No novelists. No poets. No painters.
The majority of songs referred to come from before 1963: in other words, they are songs which JFK himself could plausibly have heard and enjoyed. There are a few exceptions: The Who, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, and of course Wolfman Jack. I find it hard to explain these exceptions, but the general principle holds. If the musical tradition is to be advanced as a redemption of our current cultural malaise, then it is a tradition which more or less predated Kennedy’s death.
And there is no mention at all of folk/protest music of the 1960s. A passing mention of Tom Dooley; possibly Jean Redpath. Woody Guthrie is not mentioned by name, but by the title of one of his songs. No Pete Seeger. No Joan Baez. No “We Shall Overcome.”
Wait a minute, boys
This is a common phrase, and needs no “source,” but a surprising number of Dylan followers have jumped to its use in “Hurricane” (1975).
We’ve already got somebody here to take your place
The most direct statement in the song of conspiracy theories implicating LBJ.
Wolfman
Wolfman Jack was the most famous radio DJ of the early 70s, culminating in his semi-fictitious portrait of himself in George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973).
Hush, little children… The Beatles are coming, they’re gonna hold your hand
“I Wanna Hold Your Hand” was one of the first Beatles mega-hits. Dylan casts them in an innocuous role: “hold your hand” like a parent rather than a boyfriend. Again, unlike “them British bad boys, the Rolling Stones” (though I do remember some of my more subversive fellow students singing it as “I wanna hold your gland”).
Ferry ‘cross the Mersey and go for the throat
Another innocuous Liverpool group, Gerry and the Pacemakers, immediately followed by another stab of vengeance.
Woodstock… Altamont….
Emblematic moments, high and low, for the 1967
Summer of Love. Dylan actually attended neither.
Good times….
It sure takes a lot of gall
to rhyme
Let the good times roll
with
Grassy knoll
l
Living in a nightmare on Elm Street
Elm Street, Dallas, is the actual location of Kennedy’s assassination. A white cross in the roadway marks the exact spot at which he was hit. In 1984, Nightmare on Elms Street was the first of a series of highly successful horror movies. In the next line, Dylan puns on the name in “Deep Elem Blues,” a traditional American song, widely recorded, by everyone from The Grateful Dead to Dylan himself (in 1962),
Frankly, Miss Scarlett, I don’t give a damn
Last line of Gone with the Wind (1939). Actually, in the movie Gable says “my dear,” not “Scarlett”; he also, to placate censors, laid the stress on “give,” not “damn.”
That magic bullet of yours has gone to my head
I’m just a patsy, like Patsy Cline….
Got blood in my eye….
OK, now the references are coming thick and fast, it’s hard to keep up with them. The “magic bullet” is the description for one of the shots that killed Kennedy; for conspiracy theorists, it is “magic” because, in order to inflict the wounds in a way consistent with the demands of the single assassin scenario, it would have had to behave in ways that, forensically, seem highly unlikely. Dylan then offers a black joke on the double meaning of “gone to my head,” followed by an even nastier twist on the name of country singer Patsy Cline. But it was Oswald, not Kennedy, who said, “I’m just a patsy.” So who is the singer here? “my head” is Kennedy; but “patsy” is Oswald. Then we are back to “blood in my eye,” which sure sounds like Kennedy, except that it’s also the title of a 1974 song by the Mississippi Sheiks, memorably covered, in 1993, by Bob Dylan.
I said the soul of a nation been torn away
And it’s beginning to go into a slow decay
Whatever one’s views on the conspiracy theory of the Kennedy assassination, most people will agree that it was a shattering moment, and that nothing in American political or cultural life has been the same since. In recent years, Bob Dylan’s world view has perceptibly darkened. He sees his nation in a “slow decay”; he sees us living in a “World gone wrong.” Maybe all that’s left is the music.
Wolfman Jack, he’s speaking in tongues
He’s going on and on at the top of his lungs
Play me a song, Mister Wolfman Jack
Play it to me in my long Cadillac
Way back at the beginning, third verse of the first song, Dylan had pictured himself in a “Red Cadillac”; black is more Presidential. Certainly it seems to be JFK who is calling in requests as the Wolfman goes on and on. The list has now more or less consumed the song. If you want to remember, you better write down the names.
And they come, thick and fast, going on and on. Oscar Peterson, Stan Getz, Charlie Parker, Jelly Roll Morton, Bud Powell…. You see what Ostrem means by “the procession itself, not the individual participant.”
“Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”
The classic version is by Nina Simone, but there is also a fine performance by Eric Burdon and the Animals, who had stunned Dylan with their version of “House of the Rising Sun.”
Far away down Gower Avenue
Personal confession: for many years, I misheard this as “your avenue,” and even built whole interpretations on that mishearing. Although Dylan here associates the phrase with The Eagles and Carl Wilson, it is actually by Warren Zevon, during the inspired fade-out of “Desperadoes under the Eaves.” The omission of Zevon’s name here is all the more surprising because Dylan was a great admirer of Zevon, playing several of his songs in concert after his death.
Take me back to Tulsa, to the scene of the crime
The most obvious “crime” associated with Tulsa is the infamous race riot in 1921, where as many as 300 Blacks were killed by white mobs. More recently, it has become the home for major archives and study centers devoted to Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. Of course, Dylan may also have been thinking about Gene Pitney’s 1963 hit “24 Hours from Tulsa.”
Birdman of Alcatraz
Probably best known now by the 1962 film, starring Burt Lancaster and directed by John Frankenheimer.
Play Buster Keaton, play Harold Lloyd
Two of the biggest silent screen comedians – but curiously no mention of the biggest of them all, with whom the early Dylan was often compared: Charlie Chaplin.
Play “Pretty Boy Floyd”
Epitome of the American “good outlaw,” the Robin Hood figure who steals from the rich to give to the poor. Immortalised in song by Woody Guthrie. The 1988 tribute album A Vision Shared features a fine performance of “Pretty Boy Floyd” by Bob Dylan.
Play “Down in the boondocks” for Terry Malloy
“Down in the boondocks” is the first in a series of “Down in… “ locations for Key West in the previous song. It’s the title of a 1965 song, written by Joe South, sung by Billy Joe Royal, and containing, so one web site informs me, a “sampling” from Gene Pitney’s “24 Hours from Tulsa”! Terry Malloy is the name of the character played by Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, directed by Elia Kazan (1954). At the end of the film, he gets spectacularly beaten up, which was somewhat of a Brando specialty. It is Brando’s second appearance on RRW, after “My Own Version of You.” Again, the choice is a bit odd: Keaton, but not Chaplin; Brando, but not James Dean.
Merchant of Venice…
Play “Stella by Starlight” for Lady Macbeth
Shakespeare again, bookending his earlier appearances. I’m afraid I don’t see any special relevance in Merchant of Venice, but Lady Macbeth is more promising. The song “Stella by Starlight,” by Victor Young was written for a 1944 haunted-house ghost movie called The Uninvited. Lady Macbeth has to deal with ghosts, uninvited guests at a banquet, and, of course, the assassination of a political leader.
Memphis in June
1945 song by Hoagy Carmichael. Previously quoted by Dylan in “Tight Connection to My Heart” (1985).
Play Moonlight Sonata in F Sharp
In the first song on the album, Dylan did promise to play Beethoven Sonatas. This one would be especially challenging, since it’s in C Minor.
“Dumbarton’s Drums”
A traditional Scottish folk song, and indeed the closest this list comes to 1960s “folk.” Dylan may have learned it from Jean Redpath, whose exquisite version can be found on You Tube. Redpath was a young Scottish singer who hung around Greenwich Village in 1961-62. Dylan biographer Ian Bell tactfully observes that the two of them “briefly become more than friends.”
But what are Dumbarton’s drums doing here, wedged in between two references to the American Civil War?
Play “Marching through Georgia”….
Play “The Blood Stained Banner”….
As if carefully balancing sides, Dylan gives us one image from the North and one from the South. “Marching through Georgia” celebrates Sherman’s decisive victory over the Confederate army – the ultimate triumph of Old Fuss and Feathers, as celebrated in “Mother of Muses.” ”The Blood Stained Banner” is an actual flag, the last of several designs used by the Confederate States of America. It was the subject of a 1990 song unabashedly celebrating the Confederate cause, written by Phil Driscoll. If you follow that name on You Tube, you will discover a rather splendid 8-minute version of Dylan’s “Serve Somebody.”
Dylan has long been interested in the Civil War, describing it in Chronicles as the “all-embracing template behind everything that I would write.” So it is only fitting that these two references should be the final context in which he places the life, and death, of an American President.
…. Play “Murder Most Foul”
So the last song on the list, the last song that Dylan asks the Wolfman to play for the dying President, is the song we have just been listening to, for almost 17 minutes, on its separate CD. “Murder Most Foul.” No wonder records, tapes, and discs have always been circular. Repetition is their essence, going round and coming round. Time to start again: “Today and tomorrow and yesterday too.” Where will the circle take us this time?