Dylan As Text, Sub-Text, Ur-Text in ‘Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown’

Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown is my kind of Dylan book: fun, funny, learned as hell as well as plain smart, and subjective in the best possible sense. Author David Yaffe clearly takes his Dylans to heart, and I say his Dylans because there’s more than one and everyone has their own.

Dylan Studies is a Never Ending Tour, to be cute about it, the critical gift that keeps on giving. Yaffe mentions the “hunger there [is] from the genre of writing Dylan arguably inspired as much as anyone — even the Beatles”, and the most recent Dylan releases alone attest to that hunger. They could fill a few shelves, or gigs or whatever, so I won’t list them here, but this genre includes and/or combines new- or old-fangled biography, lit. crit. academicism, cultural and philosophical discourse, and stylish critical prose.

Touching a bit on all these, Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown is a scholar’s personal appreciation, minus the arduous jargon and voluminous footnotes. Yaffe is not out to propose conclusions about Dylan; rather he works four approaches or angles, all of them interesting and contestable: Dylan’s singing, Dylan’s relation to race, Dylan cinema and Dylan’s so-called plagiarism.

Dylan’s voice has long been maligned, misconstrued, abhorred, un-adored, hated, berated… you get the picture. Yaffe characterizes Dylan’s vocal delivery as “adenoidal”, which is what some people get hung up on (the word itself whines). As Yaffe points out, “The biggest misconception about Dylan, among unbelievers, is that his cawing derision is somehow an impediment to appreciation.”

I know a lot of people who can’t get around that voice, and it is unfortunate, similar to someone dismissing a Jackson Pollock painting as just a big mess. It is a big mess, but not just one.

Similarly, those who “can’t listen to Dylan” because of his annoying voice are missing the point, or number of points: first, there are many distinct voices; second, each discrete voice contains nuances and subtle inflections and emphases that may be missed on first listen; and third, linked to both of these is the willed aspect of each. Dylan’s voice didn’t change because he was going through puberty. He willfully manipulated it to reflect his musical trajectory.

This vocal shape-shifting was also one way of staying out of the whole “voice of a generation” bag. What generation would want to lay claim to the Kermit-the-Frog-in-the-throat of “Lay, Lady, Lay”?

Yaffe focuses on some of Dylan’s key voices — the early “affected Oakie” as it segued into the druggy “adenoidal stream-of-consciousness vitriol” of the mid-’60s, the later affected gospel singer, the “swami making you an offer you couldn’t understand”, on into the recent wizened “ancient croak [of] the new millennium” — then delves into each and comes up with some shrewd assessments on specific songs and general eras:

“Blowin’ in the Wind” is “the song that would forever transfigure the way we would comprehend air and velocity”.

“‘Visions of Johanna’ would get naked emotion when [Dylan] could deliver it, and adenoidal mannerisms when he couldn’t. But when there was no barrier between himself and the audience…each peak [was] a plea made with what Keats called full-throated-ease, although there was nothing easy about the material or the performance”.

“If it was a blues number with allegory vaguely inspired by Moby-Dick, Dylan would dig deep into Howlin’ Wolf and Herman Melville, emerging a blues-based obsessive literature reader on amphetamines and brilliance. The mind is ever present in the voice…”.

It’s unfortunate that so many people are turned off by Dylan’s Christian era because his melodiousness, and his sense of phrasing and attack are particularly strong. As Yaffe says, Dylan was “sonically gospelized, immersed in the diction of his African American backup singers [and] pushing his voice further than it should be pushed.”

Indeed, “When He Returns” from Slow Train Coming (1979) is as much a tour de force as the later oft-acknowledged bootleg gem “Blind Willie McTell”, with Dylan pushing his range way past the rafters toward heaven, if it’s up there. It’s as if he’s pleading and wheedling for the Second Coming.

Yaffe continues: “His response was to keep pushing, and before the end of the 1980s, he will have lost an octave […] listening to Dylan in the three decades that followed Saved (1980) is to witness, bit by bit, how he could still summon his greatest powers, not only while he was losing range in his voice but because of it”.

In his chapter on Dylan cinema, Yaffe is at times as summarily astute on filmmakers as he is on Dylan.

On Martin Scorsese and The Last Waltz (1978): “With his units of cameras operated by the best in the business, an artfully lit opera set, and hot Italian blood, Scorsese could make it rain”.

On Scorsese’s orchestration, as opposed to strict directing, of No Direction Home (2005): “As he did in The Last Waltz, Scorsese takes what is normally in the background and makes it explode with fury and demand attention until it becomes foreground — yet it only enhances the narrative. He has a knack for pumping up the volume in a way that feeds the action”.

Yaffe also draws some fine correlations between Todd Haynes’ methods in the Dylan-as-“Sybil” bio-pic I’m Not There (2007) and those of Dylan himself: “Like Dylan, who especially in his later work clipped everything from Ovid to Bing Crosby […] realiz[ing] Walter Benjamin’s model of quotation as discourse, Haynes realized that rather than inventing dialogue for a realist Dylan, he could be freed by pastiche and come closer to his subject […] The idea is liberation, impersonation as freedom.”

Masked and Anonymous (2003), directed by Larry Charles and co-written by Charles and Dylan, is infuriatingly inscrutable to the uninitiated, and hilariously cryptic to those in the know. A piece of self-reflexive counter-mythologizing, somewhat spiritually akin to Orson Welles’ late work The Other Side of the Wind, with Rock Star replacing Movie Director, the film is also a weird re-historicizing in which Yaffe sees Dylan “unearthing America’s sins to a carnival audience […] Something’s happening here and we’re not sure what it is, but it includes a well-turned irony. Dylan uncovers everything in America, even the ugliest history set to the catchiest tune.”

Masked And Anonymous’s many racial allusions and explicit images of blackface minstrelsy are just partial evidence of Dylan’s long fascination with race and African American heritage. Of course, in popular music especially, he’s not alone. As Yaffe states, “Rock and roll is filled with white imitators of black style, but none had contextualized the appropriation of black culture so inimitably”.

From his early race-politic songs, such as “Only a Pawn in Their Game”, where wisely Dylan “stuck to Okie affectations” over the “racial affectations” so fully embraced by later rockers such as Mick Jagger, on through the inverted minstrelsy of his Rolling Thunder whiteface (Yaffe: “[R]eversing the poles of significance and showing the artificiality of the social constructs”), through his conversion into a full-blown yet slant-wise gospelizer, Dylan has always had a streak of blackness in his blues, so to speak.

A Profusion of Things, Ideas

Yaffe mines some intriguing territory here, especially surrounding Dylan’s Christian years, and his, um, extra-spiritual affiliations with certain African American female backup singers. But then, isn’t it mainly through the physical that we apprehend the divine?

As Yaffe has it, “Dylan was finding Jesus through the gospel singers, and the internalization altered his intonations, not only in song, but even in speech. He was no longer the Oakie-inflected bard of civil rights but a prematurely aged bluesman. He would eventually cast Christianity aside, but once he went black, he never went back.”

Though Dylan has drawn from a variety of sources his entire career, recently he has been charged an outright plagiarist, perhaps most famously by Joni Mitchell. It seems a bit of sour grapes on Mitchell’s part, though to her credit, Dylan did and does steal. As Yaffe says, “the lines between allusion and appropriation have…taken on new proportions in the case of Dylan in the twenty-first century. The millennial Dylan is not entirely a deception, but he doesn’t always come clean, either.”

In some of his earliest material, “stray lines from here or there became a part of the alchemy”, and such “borrowing” or lyrical cross-reference was innate to American popular music, especially folk and blues.

Most recently and infamously, some studious and diligent readers and listeners have detected, among other things, phrases from Marcel Proust in Chronicles Vol. One and bits of a Yakuza memoir on Love and Theft. Yaffe partially explains such material as coming from a box Dylan keeps, “containing snippets from books, movies and probably conversation–that he dips into when he needs inspiration. Many of the lines from Empire Burlesque (1985), for example, came from The Maltese Falcon”. And yet, in recent years especially, Yaffe continues, “the box [has] become quite busy indeed.”

As I see it, Dylan has always collaged together a hugely disparate assortment of source material. A hint to this method is given in Chronicles itself, in what I have to assume is original prose:

“He [artist Red Grooms] incorporated every living thing into something and made it scream—everything side by side created equal—old tennis shoes, vending machines, alligators…, dueling pistols, the Staten Island Ferry and Trinity Church…creeps and greasers and weirdos and grinning, bejeweled nude models…–everything hilarious but not jokey…I was wondering if it was possible to write songs like that.” (p. 270)

Or: “I needed to learn how to telescope things, ideas. Things were too big to see all at once…everything laying around on all the tables. You might be able to put it all into one paragraph or into one verse of a song if you could get it right.” (p. 61)

This is one key to Dylan’s songwriting, this immense profusion of “things, ideas” that can accommodate both Captain Ahab and Cinderella, or a piece of Proust and a chunk of yakuza lore. For it is not just the profusion, but also the contrast and, somehow, congruence of juxtaposed or random images — some of them already existent and so, in some sense, found — that renews and re-energizes their existence. Something like, say, “Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule.” He gets it all into a verse or song or line, and he gets it right.

Of course, this process has changed with age. What used to tumble pre-collaged out of his head he now has to put together from other, external sources, similar, in some ways, to the late cut-out method of Henri Matisse. These excavated items are no less meaningful as they achieve renewed originality in their new surroundings.

Yaffe wonders, “Were these appropriations the sign of a waning muse, or was Dylan merely doing a version of what he has always done? Sometimes Dylan leans on the box in odd ways that still indicate genius: turning strays lines…into a Bob Dylan song amounts to a kind of found object art…”

In some ways this collaging or internal quotation is endemic to the genre of Dylan writing itself. Why not steal from the best? Christopher Ricks’ Dylan’s Visions of Sin, for example, being a work of literary criticism, used (some might say over-used) this technique to exaggerate and thus underline Dylan’s attention to lyrical rhythm, assonance and euphoniousness. Yaffe uses it more judiciously, to punctuate pertinent points: “The voice could howl like a hammer and break like a little girl” or “Something’s happening here and we’re not sure what it is…” or “[Dylan’s] not selling any alibis as you stare into the vacuum of his eyes”.

I do disagree with Yaffe’s passing swipe at rock critics as “the worst species in this universe”. Just one of the worst. Criticism may be the evil twin of all art forms, but it’s still the twin, born a few seconds or minutes or even years or decades after art. Which is as it should be. All art requires feedback, outside response. Is music music if no one responds to it?

I imagine when one caveman made a sound by pounding rocks together, the caveman next to him (A rock critic. Get it?) made his own sound about it, whether a grunt of incomprehension, or an approving or disapproving moan or groan. This is different than audience reaction because it puts the second caveman in a position of assessment and evaluation, and it suggests response to form as well as affect. Thus criticism was born; crude and primitive, yes, but criticism nonetheless.

And yet I know what Yaffe means. To paraphrase Lou Reed’s rant against critics on his 1978 rock-comedy record Take No Prisoners, what artist wants to work a year on a project just to get a B+ — or a 6 out of 10? An artist like Dylan, or Reed for that matter, deserves more than a strict rock critic to suss a career that so often projects beyond the bounds of rock.

For his part, Yaffe sees Dylan as “a text, yet he is still a moving target…”, and Bob Dylan: Like A Complete Unknown follows suit. This is Dylan as shifting text, not just layered like pages, back or front, or over-laid like a palimpsest, but cross-wise, and motile as a termite.

In Yaffe’s own words: “This book is for people who want to revisit Dylan’s past in the present tense, for mongrel dogs who teach, writers and critics who prophesize with their pen, mothers and fathers throughout the land, and everyone who cares or is just curious.”

I’m in there, somewhere.