I went through a pretty big Bob Dylan phase. Actually, I never got out of it.
It started with Freewheelin and Bringing It All Back Home. Then I liked Another Side of Bob Dylan and Highway 61 Revisited. When I was a teenager, I watched the documentary Don’t Look Back more times than I can count. My favorite song was It’s Alright Ma’, (I’m Only Bleeding) and Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat. I went to see him perform twice.
In Steve Almond’s Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life, #3, he writes about how he became a music critic. His first review was of a Dylan concert. He writes, “Dylan had just released Knocked Out Loaded and would soon join the Traveling Wilburys. It was not a good time for him, though I didn’t know that. I found a seat on the grass and started scribbling adjectives that seemed to bear some relation to the songs he was performing, the names of which I didn’t know. I also included observations of significant physical detail, such as, ‘Dylan stares at crowd’ and ‘Dylan turns away from crowd’ and ‘Dylan appears to need a blood transfusion.’”
In my early twenties, I fell in love with Desire. I wrote essays about the songs Isis and Sara. I wrote an essay about Dylan’s concert tour Rolling Thunder Revue and used Sam Shepard’s Rolling Thunder Logbook as my main reference. The book is written like flash fiction and each section is a snapshot of the amazing tour.
In one section, Shepard writes, “Dylan has invented himself. He’s made himself up from scratch. That is, from the things he had around him and inside him…The point isn’t to figure him out but to take him in. He gets into you anyway, so why not just take him in?…What happens when someone invents something outside himself like an airplane or a freight train? The thing is seen for what is. It’s seen as something incredible because it’s never been seen before, but it’s taken in by the people and changes their lives in the process. They don’t stand around trying to figure out what it isn’t, forever. They use it as a means to adventure.”
In this way, Stephen reminds me of Dylan. They both invented themselves, they both invent things. They create something and have the ability to move on from them. In a recent interview Stephen Elliott said, “I want to create new things. Like when I created The Rumpus, I said I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know if I would make any money at it. I like to start things, see what happens, and let them become something else. Because it can always become something else.”
I saw Stephen in New York on Wednesday. If Stephen is in the same city as me, I pretty much have to see him. It’s become a personal rule. It’s not often you get to hear Stephen’s voice.
For awhile I liked songs like Moonshiner and Song to Woody. I read Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory because Dylan did. My three favorite Guthrie songs are Little Black Train, Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet, and Along in the Sun in the Rain.
Then I started listening to Time Out of Mind, World Gone Wrong, and Love and Theft. I can’t seem to get away from the songs Love Sick and Cold Irons Bound and it’s been six years. In Kara Hadge’s Last Book I Loved, she writes that Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem “is for all people who have lost their sense of place or sense of time or sense of self.” Dylan’s songs Love Sick and Cold Irons Bound function for me in a similar way. I have lost my sense of place, my sense of time, and my sense of self. I have lost these things to love. The singer in Love Sick and Cold Irons Bound has lost, too.
He sings, I see, I see lovers in the meadow. I see, I see silhouettes in the window. I’ll watch them ’til they’re gone. And they leave me hangin’ on to a shadow. He sings, Sometimes the silence can be like thunder. Sometimes I wanna take to the road and plunder. Could you ever be true? I think of you and wonder.
In Cold Irons Bounds, he evokes a similar mood with the music and with the lyrics. The mood is eerie, cold and bleak. He sings, My love for her is taking such a long time to die. And I’m waist deep, waist deep in the mist. It’s almost like I don’t even exist. He ends with these lines, You’ve no idea what you did to me. I’m twenty miles out of town and Cold Irons bound.
There’s another Dylan song that I like right now titled It’s Not Dark Yet, which is an optimistic song in comparison to the last two. The singer knows it’s obviously too late and that he will lose. He will lose the one he loves and he will lose himself. When you lose yourself, you lose everything.
He sings, She wrote me a letter and she wrote it so kind. She put down in writing what was in her mind. I just don’t see why I should even care. It’s not dark yet but it’s getting there. He knows that what this woman gave him is meaningful. He understands that on an intellectual level. Yet he can’t help feeling the letter is meaningless. The unraveling is happening.
When it is dark, when that time has finally come, he will not care about her letter and there will be no woman writing him a letter. He will be alone, without a sense of place or time or self. He will be like the singer in Love Sick. He will be walkin’ through streets that are dead. He will be like the singer in Cold Irons Bound. He will be all used up. He will be where I am. Or where a part of me still is anyway.
