There are no mistakes in life some people say, And it’s true, sometimes, you can see it that way. People don’t live or die, people just float. She left with the man in the long dark coat.
— from “Man in the Long Dark Coat”

... broken idols, broken heads, People sleeping in broken beds; Ain’t no use jivin’, ain’t no use jokin.’ Everything is broken.
— “Everything Is Broken”

At times I think there are no words
But these to tell what’s true
And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden.
— “Gates of Eden”

“Mine shall be a strong loneliness dissolvin’ deep t’ the depths of my freedom an’ that, then, shall remain my song.”
— Bob Dylan

In the spring of 1964, a 23-year-old Bob Dylan and a car full of friends arrived in Asheville for the first time. After spending time in a blacks-only bowling alley, shooting pool and taking in a skin flick, they made their way down to Hendersonville and East Flat Rock to pay a visit to Carl Sandburg, whom Dylan greatly admired. Standing on the porch of Sandburg’s Connemara home, Dylan announced himself to the housekeeper: “I am a poet, my name is Robert Dylan, and I would like to see Mr. Sandburg.”

After a lengthy wait, Sandburg appeared, somewhat disheveled and in his plaid shirt and baggy trousers - his writing attire - he took one look at Dylan and said: “You certainly look like a very intense young man. You look like you are ready for anything.” They visited for about 20 minutes on the front porch and talked about poetry and folk music, which Sandburg said he regarded as kindred arts. Dylan, at some point, handed Sandburg a copy of his recently released album “The Times They Are a Changin’” and reiterated that he, too, was a poet - which, according to Sandburg’s housekeeper, got the elder poet’s attention. He promised to listen to the album Dylan had brought him as a gift and offering.

Despite their age difference, Sandburg and Dylan had much in common. Both were born of immigrants in the Midwest and both were admirers of Whitman and collectors of folk songs. After Sandburg cut the visit short, a disappointed Dylan and his musician friends drove over into South Carolina on their way to a gig in Athens, Ga., where they filled the car with rockets, whizbangs and cherry bombs from a roadside stand.

Auspiciously, on May Day on the heels of National Poetry Month, 37 years later and on the eve of his 60th birthday, Dylan returned to Western North Carolina with a hot new band to play a special concert at the Asheville Civic Center. To a sold-out arena of 5,000 or more fans, Dylan and friends held court for two and a half hours and two encores. Many attending said it was one of the best Dylan concerts they’d ever seen. It would seem that Sandburg, all those many years ago, was right in his intuitive first impression of the young Dylan - for almost 40 years now, Dylan has stood like a modern-day Atlas shouldering the poetic and political weight of both the 60s and the 90s. This “seriousness” has served both Dylan and the members of two successive generations well. Yet Dylan’s smile onstage this past Tuesday night in Asheville - following more than one brush with death in recent years - is perhaps indicative that he is giving a little rest to his self-made apocalyptic seriousness and is taking some well-deserved time to smell the roses.

In recent weeks, and in anticipation of the May day concert, I have been in almost constant correspondence via email with celebrated Irish poet and Dylan enthusiast Michael Davitt. As founder and editor of the Irish language literary magazine INNTI and one of the foremost spokespersons for the 60s generation in his native Ireland, Michael Davitt wrote to me in one of his letters just before the Tuesday evening Asheville concert: “You know that by his own admission, Dylan has been influenced by the Gaelic tradition through the Clancy Brothers and Joe Heaney. For me, Dylan is the embodiment of the reconnections of old verbal/musical energies. Bardic. He has about two dozen genres informing his Muse, and will go down, along with Whitman and Yeats, as one of the most important English language poets of recent centuries. This stuff you hear from ‘serious’ poetry folk about Dylan being a popular artist who from time to time has reached the condition of poetry is a load of bollox. Dylan is the true condition of poetry in all its spiritual and political power and directness. Poetry is about making or remaking these connections, bringing it all back home.”

These were strong words being used to define a man who, over the course of his life, has defied definition and has continuously remade himself, over and over, to stay current, to stay sane. Throughout it all, and despite all the self-generated quotes to the contrary, Dylan remain first and foremost a poet. From his early literary influences of e.e. cummings, Eliot, Kerouac, and Baudelaire, to taking the name of Dylan Thomas as his own, to the introduction to Sandburg on the Connemara porch, to his early years in northern California befriending and associating himself with Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure, to his references to himself as a “guitar poet,” to the lyrics in songs with their references to poets such as Dante, King David, Shakespeare and Rimbaud, Dylan has continuously aligned himself with poets and bards. Dylan is clearly the high-wire act of the singer-songwriter set in the last half of the twentieth century. While he has gone to great lengths in recent years to revise and rework his image as a poet with such statements as “I’m not a poet, I’m a trapeze artist,” and “I’m just a journeyman minstrel,” he is quick to follow the denials with statements that undermine the disclaimers.

“Everyone admires the poet, no matter if he’s a lumberjack or a football player or a car thief. If he’s a poet, he’ll be admired and respected. But I don’t try to adopt or imitate these other poets such as Rimbaud in my work. I’m not interested in imitation. I have my own view and my own vision, and nothing tampers with it because it’s all that I’ve got. No one frames language with the same sense of rhyme. It’s MY thing. My thing is the forming of the lines.”

These words, reminiscent of his lyrics “When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose,” and “He who is not busy being born is busy dying,” are not the words of a trapeze artist, nor are they the words of a football player or a lumberjack. They are words which could only have been spoken by a poet.
Davitt, I believe, is right. Dylan is a poet, a guitar-poet if you like, despite what he may say of himself. Like any poet worth his salt, Dylan is a walking contradiction, a master of disguise, an embodiment of paradox, and at the same time an inspiration.

“The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do for anyone but inspire them?” said Dylan in an interview done in 1977. And he has continued to inspire not only a whole new generation of singer-songwriters, but to inspire poets and writers of his own generation and older. It was a known fact that Allen Ginsberg considered Dylan to be among his greatest influences and sources of inspiration. And they remained close friends until Ginsberg’s recent death.

In the end, the proof is in the pudding. One has only to go to the lyrics themselves to find the gold in this alchemical mix of a man. Go to the lyrics in songs performed this past Tuesday night in Asheville, such as his Blake-like “All Along the Watchtower” and “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” and others like “Tangled Up in Blue,” “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,” and “Where Teardrops Fall” — classics all. And the Asheville audience responded, appropriately, raising their cigarette lighters high overhead in the darkness of the hall, shouting in unison with each soaring, seering line that has been tatooed on their psyches.

For someone who has been“trying to get as far away from myself as I can,” Dylan has come up with anything but a losing hand, as he implies in his recent Oscar-winning and Grammy nominated song “Things Have Changed.” Despite himself, he keeps coming up with great songs (too numerous to name) with memorable one-liners (too numerous to quote), as his Never Ending Tour “keeps on rollin’ on” around the world year after year ...

Paul Williams, founder of Crawdaddy magazine, has said in reference to Dylan: “If Shakespeare was in your midst, putting on shows at the Globe Theatre, wouldn’t you feel the need to be there?” His sentiments have, it would seem, taken root. Consistently selling out concerts around the world, Dylan continues to defy the odds and gravity by staying on the road, on the charts, and in the hearts and heads of people world-wide.

“I’m amazed that I’ve been around this long. I never thought I would be. I try to learn from both the wise and the unwise, not pay attention to anybody, do what I want to do. What’s important isn’t the image, but the art, the work. A person has to do whatever they are called on to do. To try to act out the legend is nothing but hype,” Dylan says about his longevity as a cultural icon.

But reading between the lines, his rare interviews also reveal not-so-guarded thoughts on his writing and his identity as a poet.

“I’m sure of my dream self. I live in my dreams. I don’t really live in the actual world. I don’t think when I write, I just react and put it down on paper. I’m serious about everything I write. Part of the secret of being a songwriter is to have an audacious attitude. What comes out in my music is a call to action!”

And it is such audacious, action-packed songs as “With God On Our Side,” “The Times They Are A’Changin’”, “I Shall Be Free,” “Masters of War,” “Desolation Row” and “Ring Them Bells” that have galvanized such a loyal and expanding fan base over the course of the last 40 years.

Despite the awards and the legendary status, Dylan continues to try to put a humorous face on his notoriety and his talents. In a recent interview he was asked by a naive member of the press: “What can you tell us about your songs?” To which Dylan nonchalantly replied: “Well, some of them are about five minutes, and some of them are about 11 minutes.” Always the trickster. Always the poet.

While some things change, other things remain the same. In his new Grammy nominated hit “Things Have Changed,” Dylan writes: “People are crazy and times are strange,/I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range;/I used to care, but things have changed.” If Dylan has changed, it sure hasn’t changed the way that he is admired by those of us who buy his records and listen to his lyrics. If anything, and despite the current stock market recession, his stock has gone up. Dylan has continued to evolve as a performer and a poet and has more than anyone in the music industry concentrated on reworking and recontextualizing songs that are known to his fans by heart. His “never-ending” tour is proof that on a nightly basis it is possible to uncover new meanings in old material, to make a folk song rock! As Tom Moon of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote recently: “The lure of a Dylan show these days is to see how far he and his band can journey from the outline of an old well-known song and still retain its character.”
This dynamic was more than evident in Asheville, to which 5,000 cheering fans will attest. Dylan and company were well-rehearsed, tight, and they rocked! Almost every lyric recognizable and clear.

“I have to get back to playing music because unless I do, I don’t really feel alive. I have to play in front of the people in order just to keep going,” says Dylan. And we believe him. Every time he shows up in Western North Carolina, it’s the concert of the year. It’s Shakespeare appearing at the Globe. And as time goes on and Dylan gets older/elder and the legend grows into myth, I predict it will be more about the actual songs, the lyrics, the poetry, than about his revered status or his image as a rock & roll musician that will preclude and secure his dominion off and on stage. It’s too bad that Sandburg couldn’t have been around to hear Dylan now. I wonder what he would think.

Well, now time passed and now it seems Everybody’s having them dreams. Everybody sees themselves walkin’ around with no one else. Half of the people can be part right all of the time. Some of the people can be all right part of the time. But all of the people can’t be right all of the time. I think Abraham Lincoln said that. “I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.” I said that.
 from: “Talkin’ World War III Blues”

 

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