By Stuart Walton.
Bob Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song (Simon & Schuster, 2022)
When the penny eventually dropped, and we realised there wasn’t going to be a subsequent volume to Bob Dylan’s 2004 memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, that book became all the more valuable an insight into the craft of the great songwriter at key points in his recording career. What Dylan had to say on the page became as fascinating in its self-disclosure as many of the songs themselves. In a career that has seesawed relentlessly between living legend and frowsty old nuisance, all through the long interludes when a candid interview seemed beyond both effort and inclination, it was surprising to discover how much genuine revelation there was in Chronicles, particularly with regard to the recording of the 1989 album, Oh Mercy.
The present work quickened pulses all over the ranch when its arrival was heralded by the publisher several months ahead. Dylan had composed a series of reflections about individual songs of the twentieth century, sixty-six of them, together with supplementary short essays about the times in which they were recorded, the careers of the artists, and the present condition of the United States. The book is evidently the work of nearly twelve years, one of those projects that might only have seen the light in unfinished format in some future catalogue raisonné, and yet here it is, a hefty hardback full of painstakingly researched pictures, with decorative page-frames, vignettes and an acknowledgement note, in which the author thanks those who encouraged him to stick with it, as though there were indeed moments when he wondered exactly who cared, or whether indeed he was writing it for them or just reminding himself of what he had always thought. The pictures are uniformly delightful — Elvis browsing in a record store, a Severin Roesen laden still-life of fruits and wine, a Cézanne bowl of apples, Jack Ruby and Julie London, roulette wheels and pork cuts, gunslingers and sailors on furlough. They are ill served, though, by not being captioned, either on the page or in the picture credits.
Dylan has left it to Simon and Schuster’s blurb-writer to provide something like an introduction to the text, which otherwise just starts with his first selection. The format has obvious echoes of the writer’s Theme Time Radio Hour of the late 2000s, in that it will introduce readers to many songs they won’t have heard — and, in some cases, won’t ever need to hear again — but here there are no linking themes, nothing to govern the running order, except a faint feeling towards the end that the absolutely classic material has been saved for the final stages of the party, to revive flagging spirits before the snowbound trudge home.
The overwhelming majority of the songs chosen are from the American tradition, with country, blues, bluegrass, hillbilly, big band jazz, easy listening, a little soul, and the crooners of the postwar years favoured. There are three British selections — Elvis Costello’s ‘Pump It Up’, ‘My Generation’ by the Who, and the Clash’s ‘London Calling’. Four artists appear twice: Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Bobby Darin. Many reviewers of the book have fallen headlong into the endemic trap of reviewing list books, by enumerating all the items not included, an endeavour always holed below the waterline by its own missing parts. There is, therefore, no need at all to raise the alert for readers who might legitimately have taken an interest in what Dylan had to say about Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Janis Joplin, Bobby Vee, Woody Guthrie, Big Joe Turner, Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, or Leo Soileau and His Four Aces. The Monkees don’t get a look-in. It would have been priceless to hear what Dylan makes of Orville Peck. There is nothing by Bob Dylan, other than a stage whisper about the verse intonations in ‘Pump It Up’ exactly replicating the contours of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’.
The title has bewildered some and incensed one or two. Its deliberate ambience of the academic treatise is as oblique as Dylan has always enjoyed being, but what needs clarifying is that the title is not intended as a body of theory about songwriting and its practitioners. This is not a work of musicology, nor was meant to be. The philosophy invoked is what’s in the songs themselves, what they have to say about life, love, death and America, and the crimes and misdemeanours — and occasional fleeting joys — visited on human experience by those world-structuring principles. ‘Modern’ is to be understood as the era that begins with the advent of the commercial recording industry, petering out some time before the invention of the Walkman.
Each song is subjected to an impressionistic gloss, delivered in the second person, in which Dylan gives a precis of the lyric while addressing the paradigmatic individual — somebody like the reader, probably — who has been in this predicament themselves. Imaginative background biographies are sketched in, a detailed picture built up of the CIA man, the poor little fool, the big boss man, the midnight rider, and the stranger in the night. Some of the entries leave it at that, but others are followed by a deeper reflection on the cultural context in which the song was released. Many of these develop into senior-moment broadsides about the state of the world, the issues of the day, identity politics, food fashion, and what’s gone wrong with the movies. You might as well prepare for this stage of life yourself, by the way, as is made hauntingly clear by the 1928 recording, ‘Old and Only in the Way’ by the North Carolina banjoist, Charlie Poole, who escaped it by succumbing to a drinker’s coronary seizure on the cusp of middle age. The tone of these is self-consciously Grampa Simpson, except that sometimes the congenial grousing becomes more livid, as our thoughts turn to war, to the derogation of popular music by those who don’t understand it, and to divorce lawyers, a diatribe every bit as heartfelt as a twice-divorced man might write.
There can never be such a thing as a musical science, Dylan argues, because music cannot be fully grasped on the purely technical level. In science, one and one will always be two, but in music, as in the other arts, they might very well make three. This passage, coming late in the book, indicates that this is an attempt to convey what happens to the listener on hearing these songs, or what academic critique knows as reception theory, as opposed to an aesthetic investigation of their form and technical content. The single greatest vocal performance in the book, therefore — Nina Simone’s inaugural recording in 1964 of the Benjamin-Ott-Marcus song, ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’, an agonised plea to a fractious and dissatisfied lover — passes by with barely a glance at the spine-chilling rendering itself. Instead of Simone’s croaks and mumbles, her open-throated soul vowels and wounded cries, her deep billowing vibratos, the strange desolate slurring on ‘misunderstood’, there is an oddly elliptical disquisition on Camus and a consideration of the failed attempt by Esperanto to end the linguistic division of Babel. Perhaps some songs speak for themselves in the playing, but in a context in which it looks as though we are going to talk about them, it seems perverse to let them slip by, a little like talking all over the track that somebody wanted you to hear.
Art gains nothing by being understood, Dylan suggests, only from being appreciated or interpreted, but it is hard to see how the latter enterprise could take place without a degree of understanding. In any case, in the great majority of these commentaries, he demonstrates a multi-dimensional comprehension of the artistic and cultural ripples that spread out from their original releases, even those that predate him. A certain style of what Hegel knew as determinate negation, defining entities by what they are not, and which was abundantly deployed in Chronicles, makes appearances here. On the overlooked Jimmy Wages tune, ‘Take Me From This Garden of Evil’ (1956): ‘Nothing artificial about this song, nothing manufactured or contrived about it. Nothing cosmetic or plastic here … No racial bloodlines here. This song is no joke.’ This is true enough, but the circling round it seems to evade its peculiar hybridity of gospel sentiment and breakneck rockabilly, by an artist born in the same year and town as Elvis, but lacking even a fraction of his vocal flair.
At its best, the book summons an entire lacerating analysis from a glancing allusion. The western swing artist Webb Pierce’s 1953 recording, ‘There Stands the Glass’, one of country music’s numerous drink threnodies, is glossed with an anachronistic scenario that sees the singer having returned from committing crimes against humanity in an east Asian setting that resembles Vietnam, and resorting to booze — ‘fill it up to the brim, till my troubles grow dim’ — to dissolve the nightmares. This is an altogether more angular interpretation than might have been distilled from the lovelorn lament of a lonely soul, but it persuades the song to serve a hermeneutic purpose that it could easily have accommodated, had it been recorded a good fifteen years later. Similarly, Elvis’s ‘Money Honey’ from 1956 generates a reflection on filthy lucre and the emptiness of accumulation. ‘Because no matter how many chairs you have, you only have one ass.’ If the elderly Dylan himself has cultivated the aura of music’s shabbiest multi-millionaire, it may well be in the interest of making observations such as these without provoking scornful hilarity.
Elsewhere, the bleakness of his vision, a constant theme since his early days, is allowed full rein. The horripilating hell of the present world, savagely arraigned in the Temptations’ 1970 hit, ‘Ball of Confusion’, strikes a chord in the author of ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’. ‘The hostility and disorder are like a horrible dream, you feel singled out and closed off … Everything is iffy and unsafe. You’re smack dab in the middle of it, you’re an easy mark, and you keep appealing to the great Googa Mooga begging him for an escape route.’ If it’s all enough to make you cry, here comes the great sob brother Johnny Ray delivering ‘The Little White Cloud that Cried’ in 1951. His unabashed misery on one track after another, and live performances made melodramatic by tearful tantrums of despair, earned him a reputation for authenticity that obscured his calisthenic vocal range, but Dylan catches both. He then offers us a substantial repertoire of songs in which the singer succumbs to tears, which is only missing Melanie’s Euripidean breakdown on ‘Momma Momma’ from the 1973 album, Please Love Me.
If the problem with any list book is that it doesn’t make for sustained momentum in the reading, the pleasure to be had from this one lies in Dylan’s disinclination to say the obvious thing about most of the choices. He is still capable of spinning a neat dialectical reversal. Bobby Darin’s bipolar career, oscillating between dream lover and big band panjandrum, inspires the observation that the chameleon is only a chameleon if you catch it in the act of changing colour. Gypsies, tramps and thieves sound like three types of people you might want to have dinner with. The haunting, monotonal melody of Rodgers and Hart’s ‘Where or When’, in the 1959 version by Dion and the Belmonts, a strange song about a state of déjà vu that has dilated from a fleeting moment to the whole context of a love affair, evokes ‘life in the wasteland, where there’s no tomorrow and it always seems like only yesterday’. And the imagistic flights are legion, even where debatably applied. Warren Zevon’s artistry ‘jumps out at you like spring-loaded snakes from a gag jar of peanut brittle’.
The controversial aspects are not at all in the selections themselves, but in the politics of musical fashion — the notion that the Clash were crapping gleefully on the Beatles’ legacy is an even more incendiary squib in the USA than it is in Britain — or in the present-day culture wars. Generations of cultural studies scholars to come will have to decide how serious is the observation that women had it made when they were amply provided for in their concubinage to polygamous rich male potentates, instead of fiercely declaring their independence from poor guys who now spend their time ‘dodging the shrapnel from the smashed glass ceiling’. And… breathe.
Nowhere in The Philosophy of Modern Song does it say that these are the sixty-six greatest songs ever recorded. This isn’t a league table. That said, its most gratifying moments often come when Dylan pays fulsome tribute to an artist either underappreciated or else not taken sufficiently seriously. His laudation of the Platters’ lead vocalist Tony Williams as ‘one of the greatest singers ever’ is right on the money, as is his extended encomium to Ricky Nelson. Represented here by ‘Poor Little Fool’ (1958), Nelson was already a household name from his family’s radio and TV shows before he embarked on a recording career as he entered manhood. He would steal every scene that Dean Martin hadn’t already pilfered in the Howard Hawks horse-opera Rio Bravo (1959), the clean-cut regular teenager who is good at sports, good at shooting, and good at being told what to do. Perhaps he was too perfect. Probably the most handsome young man in America in the late 1950s, blessed with a vocal tone of astounding purity, his career would founder not merely in the choppy backwash of Elvis’s gyrations, but possibly because Ricky doesn’t feel like a grown man’s name. He dropped the diminutive ‘-y’ far too late, and would perish when the DC-3 in which he was being flown to a New Year’s Eve performance in Dallas crashed in flames outside De Kalb, Texas. He was forty-five.
Unless you have always preferred peace and quiet to the blaring radio, the thudding of bass amplifiers, the hissing of summer earbuds, the ‘yeah yeah yeah’, the ‘shooby-doo-boo’, and the five hundredth conjuration of the house in New Orleans, we all have a philosophy of modern song in us. Its components will mostly repel and alienate everybody around you, apart from one or two of your best mates, and even they politely tolerate, more than actually understand, your tenacious affection for Meat Loaf, your obsessive completism over the British band James, and your unkillable contention that the greatest Christmas song ever is ‘Listen, the Snow is Falling’ by Yoko Ono. What Bob Dylan has done is not try to impinge a canonical playlist on his audiences, as though these songs traced a definitive line through the vicissitudes of twentieth-century pop music, but reflect sensitively, archly, polemically, and sometimes persuasively, about musics that have moved him.
Come on-a his house, but be prepared to wrestle him off the decks by song 67.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stuart Walton is the author of An Excursion through Chaos: Disorder Under the Heavens (2021), as well as studies of the emotions, the five senses, the history of intoxicants, and Theodor Adorno. His novel, The First Day in Paradise, was published in 2016.
