At my age I enjoy listening to the music of Bob Dylan more than ever – it’s been like fifty years now - but I have to admit I understand his lyrics less than I ever did before. Take your pick: the Old Stuff and/or the New Stuff. I’m just not that smart to follow his poetry. I know, I know if I was writing an essay in a music appreciation class, I would get it. I’ve met the challenge for my share of Shakespeare and French Poetry teachers. It’s a different story, though, when Bob’s voice comes out my car stereo. I try and try, but I can rarely piece his songs together in my head so they make sense. His lyrics fly around my head like wrappers in the wind. It's like I can't grasp hold of anything. In one of my classroom discussions, I bring up the short story “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” because the author, Joyce Carol Oates, dedicated it to him after hearing this song on the radio. I do my best not to lie to my students. I don’t explain to them I know much about the song, in the same way I let them enjoy the story without my analysis. Who am I to say? I do like Bob’s gravely voice. I love his (changing) style. He has lived his life and led his career like no one else before or since. From the very beginning he shaped his own legend when he arrived in freezing cold New York City with nothing than a guitar and fifty dollars in his pocket. He was about the same age as most of my students are now. But at age nineteen, he already carried himself with VISION. AMBITION. NO FEAR People in the coffee houses and bars where he played in the early sixties must have felt they were looking at a YOUNG man from another planet. He sounded so different from anything they had ever heard. I don’t know who he is singing about in “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” I doubt Joyce did either. Everywhere I look, someone says something different. His songs are EMOTIONAL, PHILOSOPHICAL, POLITICAL, WEIRD! More questions than answers! He’s a Sphynx. Like a famous philosopher said in a famous movie I saw, he’s like "A Mystery Wrapped In A Riddle Inside An Enigma!” That’s why I LOVE him, I tell my students. In several of my classes, we write research papers on the sixties. I hope I can convince a few of my students to write about Bob Dylan. Without him, the decade would have been a whole lot different.
Recently I read Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song. Here Dylan writes like he sings. I’ve noticed he doesn’t like to explain his own music, but as a writer of prose, he sheds important insight for the songs of others. He knows what to look for. He gets to the heart of the music. I doubt that I will ever see or hear a fraction of what he does, but reading his book, is like listening to his songs, I just want more. Early in this post, I identified the Joyce Carol Oates dedication to Bob Dylan for her story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” This is high praise coming from a Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction to a Nobel Prize Winner for Literature. Joyce knows of what she speaks. But who can Bob Dylan possibly look up to. His passion for music precedes him wherever he goes, on stage and off. From reading his Philosophy of Modern Song, it’s clear to me that he loves the music and craft of others as much as he cherishes his own. Just thinking about it makes me recall the Jimi Hendrix cover of “All Along the Watchtower.” You know, “Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.” Bob released this song on one of his more obscure albums called John Wesley Harding. When Jimi heard this song, he made it his. He took a dense, complicated folk tune and electrified it the way he only can. It just might be TRUE that more people identify “All Along the Watchtower” with Jimi than they do with Bob. Jaja. Bob might be included. He has repeatedly credited Jimi for bringing it to life. For those who are counting, Bob has performed live “All Along the Watchtower” more than any song in his canon. He plays it more in the style of Jimi than Bob. It’s his TIP of the HAT to an artist he loves and respects.
This book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, goes out to all the songs and artists Bob Loves. When I was 14, I played basketball fourteen hours a day. I grew up reading about North Carolina Tarheel Phil Ford and LSU Tiger Pete Maravich in Sports Illustrated. These guys were my b-ball heroes. I’m not sure if I remember reading much about their attitudes or their philosphies, but their dedication to their craft inspired me to leave the house early and not come back until dark. At the age of fourteen, Bobby Zimmerman must have heard Elvis for the first time on late-night AM radio signals drifting up from St. Louis. I have a feeling he put as much time into his music as I did my basketball, but he must have intuited a better understanding for the songs he listened to. I mean, at this time in the mid-fifties, he may have had little support or confirmation for the music he chose. He grew up in an all-white region of Minnesota’s Iron Range. There was a reason he wasn’t hearing Elvis on mainstream radio stations. To me, Phil Ford and Pete Maravich were basketball magicians. There weren't enough hours in the day I could practice to be like them. Bobby, however, was in a different place. When he listened to Elvis, he heard things inside his head that no one else did. He felt the magic.
In his Philosophy of Modern Song, Bobby Z analyzes everything from rhymes to syllables to the history and culture of each artist and songwriter in each essay. For Bobby Darin’s “Beyond the Sea,” he shares the French origins of the songs, the sub-context of the lyrics, and Bobby D's phrasing. This is DEEP. I would have never known or understood. But, Bobby Z doesn’t confuse me like a music teacher – instead, he can explain what he hears from the song in terms I can understand: “He [Bobby Darin] keeps it simple even when he’s singing about nothing. The sea, the air, the mountins and the flowers. It all floats. It never touches the ground (89). My favorite chapter in the book may be about the song “On the Street Where You Live” by Vic Damone. Bob understands the story behind the song. The lyrics convey a broken-hearted man who stalks the girlfriend who has abandoned him. I know Vic Damone from his marriage to James Dean’s girlfriend Anna Maria Pierangeli. In one moment, James planned to marry Anna, and in the next he was sitting on his motorcycle across the street from the church where she married Vic. Just like in the song, James must have felt pulled down a street where he didn’t belong. All the money and fame that came with is iconic Hollywood legend couldn’t compare to the loneliness of losing the Love of his Life.
The Philosophy of Modern Song begins with a full-page picture of Elvis visiting a record store. From where his eyes are directed, he looks like he's studying a Harry Belafonte album. Just below, I can see A Tribute Record to James Dean. This seems very apropos. Bobby and Elvis are kindred spirits. If Bob was to choose an Elvis photo to lead off his first book in twenty years, I can understand why he shows Elvis in a record shop rather than on stage. Without these types of visits, neither of them would become the world-changing legends as we know them today.
The book is dedicated to Doc Pomus. THIS I UNDERSTAND. My students are not going to know this name, but his influence on Bobby Z may have been on a par with Elvis. Doc was born with the name Jerome Felder and grew up in Brooklyn. Like Bobby, he was a Jew that changed his name to something HIP to to escape his dreary surroundings. At age six, sadly, he contracted polio. This was before the invention/institution of polios shots – when a large percentage of young children either had their legs amputated or they died as a result of complications. Young Jerry became a cripple and an outcast. He was bullied for being a Jew. He was beaten for his defenseless nature. He was ostracized for his love of black music. Somehow, like a story in the movies, Jerry grew up to be one of the most influential songwriters of the fifties and sixties, for he turned his misery into beautiful songs that we all can connect with it. This was a guy who for most of his an adult couldn’t walk without braces or crutches. In fact, he spent much of his time writing his songs from a wheelchair. Probably, he wrote his most famous song “Save the Last Dance for Me” at his own wedding. Who takes the time to work at his own wedding? That would be Doc Pomus because his disability prevented him from dancing with his own bride.
Anyone who hears the song will understand the anguish of Doc watching his bride happily dance with one man after another, when all he could do was watch. Sitting there at a table, he borrowed a pen and wrote out the song on the back of a wedding invitation. It took him about a half hour, but when he was done he had written the story of his life.
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