Bob Dylan:

Songs of Both Innocence and Experience?

‘Anything I can sing I call a song. Anything I can’t sing I call a poem. Anything I can’t sing or anything that’s too long to be a poem, I call a novel’.

(Album cover notes, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan CBS 1963)

(Above is my treasured, though somewhat battered, album!)

In 1963 I was not expecting a one time youthful rock & roller turned protest/folk singer to become a Nobel Laureate over half a century later for " having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition"... and it’s reasonable to assume neither was Bob.

I imagine most of us interested in (or indeed studying) music and literature in the 1960s welcomed the simplicity of Dylans definitions on the album cover of Freewheelin’, even though we already suspected that Dylan’s work was actually operating on many complex levels simultaneously. On reflection and with the knowledge of how his writing and performances developed, I think he meant the emphasis to be on what he defined as poetry, song and prose. It’s surely no accident that I occurs six times in the above quote.

That award for ‘Literature’ was probably designed to create controversy... and it did – yet the rich tradition of the wandering minstrel, the rambling song and dance man, the performer or sooth-sayer with ‘no direction home’ is central to our understanding and appreciation of innovative poetry and song.

‘I sing of arms and the man...’ writes Virgil at the beginning of The Aeneid and he is borrowing this from Homer who asks his muse to ‘sing’ at the opening of The Iliad. Homer, in turn, is borrowing from the even more ancient, travelling and singing poets of Greece whose improvised poetic narratives are believed to have been sung to a lyre accompaniment (hence the terms ‘lyrics’ and ‘lyrical’). These singer/poets performed from memory not from text so we might expect there to be variations, additions and /or omissions between performances plus adjustments made for different audiences and occasions.

Dylan’s work seems to me to be firmly rooted in this tradition – he’s an individualistic, creative public performer who writes and speaks in his own idiolect, expecting his audience to make its own sense of the images his words deliver. He expects us to make a creative effort to interpret what the songs he writes and sings mean to him and to us. In this, he is operating like the Rambling Romantics of my previous post but in a radically different climate.

When writing poetry and eventually printing it became possible, the traditional connection between song and poetry continued in what was called ‘folk music’. Fortunately, in the sixties, the so-called ‘Folk Revival’ brought oral poetry and song back where it really belonged and (thanks to advances in recording technology) it has returned to the public domain, while reading written poetry has, most unfortunately, become regarded as more of an ‘academic’ pursuit. Dylan made traditional ‘Folk Music’ contemporary. He used folk tunes and traditional word patterns to achieve this and got accused of plagiarism for his efforts. He ‘went electric’ and upset the folk music purists but their loss was poetry’s gain.

‘Hard Rain’, written during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, borrows the tune and form of ‘Lord Randal’, with its traditional questions and answers, to achieve a chilling dramatization of what could have happened and ‘Talking World War Three Blues’ in which Dylan, with tongue in cheek, imagines what surviving a nuclear attack might might mean to individuals satirizing the ‘make the best of it’ attitude we are encouraged to adopt to war, loneliness, desperation and existential threat.

I remember vividly the fear of conscription and/or oblivion that surged through me and my mates at school and that song summed it up … and converted me to a life-long Dylan fan.

Sadly, ‘Hard Rain’ and ‘Talking World War Three Blues’ are as chillingly relevant now (November 2024) as they were in the Cold War.

Recommended reading:

Chronicles Volume One (Bob Dylan, Pocket Books 2005)

‘Do You Mr. Jones’ (edited by Neil Corcoran, Chatto & Windus 2002}

No Direction Home (Robert Shelton, Penguin Books 1987)

A Darker Shade of Pale (Wilfred Mellors, Faber & Faber 1984)

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Guitars Past and Present

 

My first personally owned guitar was a second-hand, bright red Dallas solid which I bought from somebody somewhere in Essex (Benfleet?) in the early sixties (together with other gear for a band my friends and I were hoping to form). We used to search Exchange & Mart most weeks for this stuff and I remember two of us travelled by train to collect this particular purchase. I knew very little about electric guitars at the time but ownership of this beast soon improved my knowledge!

The action was painfully high so I inserted strips of card from a cereal box in the joint between the body and the neck to make it more comfortable to play. The tremelo arm was connected to the bridge … fine until the thing refused to return to the correct pitch which meant I was playing flat thereafter! Another strange feature was the lead socket on the guitar needed a coaxial plug (as used on TV sets) which meant if I got over excited while playing the plug pulled out and … silence. Frankly, given my lack of playing ability at the time, this was probably for the best! I’ve seen similar surviving Dallas badged instruments for sale online but they all appear to have visible conventional jack plug sockets on the face of the instrument. To be fair, I eventually developed some useful basic techniques on that guitar. I can’t recall where it finally went …

My second guitar purchase turned out to be a popular classic... though I was just looking for a robust jumbo acoustic to take to college. A friend and I went to Charing Cross Road (which was the cool thing to do at the time and I came away with a brand new Italian made Eko J54 (later renamed Ranger). I believe it cost around £26 which was paid in instalments. I still have this guitar. These instruments are survivors as the number still appearing on eBay proves. Mine received a beer glass full of cash smack on its left shoulder which was repaired in a music shop in Leeds (though the ‘scar’ is still clearly visible) and numerous other less spectacular bangs and scrapes over the last 60 years. Yet, having been used in various potentially damaging environments (including schools!) and having been renovated a bit during the Covid Lockdown, it still serves me well - particularly when I’m in the mood for Dylan or blues.

My third even more robust guitar was a 12- string Jumbo. It looked similar to the Eko but was labelled Eros (I believe these were actually produced by Eko). I bought this from a neighbour who had got fed up with tuning it. It had a huge, loud satisfying ring to it when it was accurately tuned, producing a genuine ‘chorus effect’. It was strong as an ox and really heavy. I fondly remember playing my version of Leaving On A Jet Plane on this and used it spasmodically for several years until I got tired of the wear and tear on my fingers and keeping it in tune and clean. Eventually I donated it to the bric-a-brac stall at my village’s annual ‘Open Gardens ‘ event where it was sold for £25.

My next and final purchase to date was in the 1970’s. Much as I enjoyed acoustic playing, I missed experimenting with the previous troublesome electric and eventually acquired a new Westbury Standard which I am still using. These guitars were made by Matsumoku in Japan, a factory which had previously produced Singer sewing machines. I discovered a few years ago that Westburys are much praised by vintage guitar enthusiasts. The Westbury Standard is decidedly not a ‘cheap Japanese copy’ of a Gibson (or indeed any other American brand) as its design is almost certainly original. The pickups, however were made in the USA. These are Dimarzio Humbuckers and apparently each of the pair would now be around the price I originally paid back then for the complete instrument (which aptly demonstrates why governments get so agitated about inflation). I recently came across an online suggestion that it might be worth buying a damaged guitar for its Dimarzios and dumping the guitar. This is surely not likely as no self-respecting guitar producer would fit these to an inferior model. If anyone out there has discovered a poor instrument with these fitted please put me right – then perhaps keep the thing as a valuable curiosity?

Even when played through the basic amp I originally bought with the guitar the sound was impressive but through the Vox Pathfinder 10, which I bought a couple of years ago to replace it, the sustain and overdrive effects are stunning.

Having recently bought ‘Vintage Delay’ and 'Chorus' pedals,  I can now produce the sixties sound that I so wanted in my teens!

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Update (March 2025)

 Recently grabbed myself a special offer, literally, in the shape of a Strat!

It's a Chinese-built Squier Sonic Stratocaster which has all the features of the real thing except that 'stratospheric' price!

It was playable (once tuned) straight out of the box ... and I'm still learning how to customise it but I think I'm nearly there and, as I hoped, it has already become another of my stringed friends and rekindled my enthusiasm to improve my playing. It has a tremelo system but, given my early experience with this device, I've inspected it and decided not to bother myself or the instrument with trying to set it up - particularly as the raised frets and comfortable C shaped neck make it easy to bend notes with a good deal of control and who wants a 'whammy bar' these days to play Blues and Rock with any modicum of authenticity?

(That's intended to be a rhetorical question, of course... but if anyone out there has a a valid answer it would be great to hear from you!).

More on this later ...