CHAPTER 2
“singing our songs”: T. E. Førland, “Bringing It All Back Home,” 351, also good on Dylan and the protest tradition.
“conscience of Young America”: Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One, 133. For the record, the degree was awarded by President Robert F. Goheen, a classics professor, as in June 2004 at St. Andrews University, where he received his other honorary doctorate from classicist and chancellor Sir Kenneth Dover.
tape of the show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4nA3 QwGPBg&sns=em.
the album represented: Jonathan Cott, Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, 260.
Blood on the Tracks: Mary Travers interview, http://www.bloodonthetracks.net/About-Bob’s-Album.html.
the album’s songs: Clinton Heylin, Behind the Shades Revisited, 466.
CHAPTER 3
from Rolfzen’s talk: Greil Marcus, “A Trip to Hibbing High.”
“long-lost friend”: L. Tuccio-Koonz, “Mark Twain Fan.”
friend John Bucklen: Heylin, Behind the Shades Revisited, 16.
“run away from yourself”: Ibid., 4.
Friends of Chile: Heylin, Revolution in the Air, 148–50, for an account of the song. Dylan’s parents were present at the Carnegie Hall show.
for his last year: Heylin, Behind the Shades Revisited, 28.
King of Kings: Drawn from John 19:24–25.
the Black Sea: The subject of Chapter 8.
they belong together: T. E. Strunk in “Achilles in the Alleyway” even hypothesized that Dylan in the 1960s and ’70s was actually reusing the poems of Catullus. While the Roman poet and the songwriter often end up in the same place, in my view that comes from a shared lyric attitude and shared themes, rather than through any intertextual nexus.
“open-stage policy”: A. Carrera, “Oh, the Streets of Rome,” 88.
“Girl leaves boy”: Not printed in Terkel’s publication of the interview, and therefore not in Cott’s Essential Interviews. Audible at minute 33.22 of the taped version on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4nA3QwGPBg&sns=em.
the first time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-KEiBBg0sg.
end of the year: Heylin, Revolution in the Air, 418.
“pack of wild geese”: Ibid., 419.
“every time I sing it”: Cott, The Essential Interviews, 262.
antiquity of the song: Ibid., 263.
CHAPTER 4
“better shelves”: Suze Rotolo, A Freewheelin’ Time, 99.
the Greek historian (36): Thomas, “The Streets of Rome.”
First Gulf War: Cott, The Essential Interviews, 385.
“believe in reincarnation?”: Cott, The Essential Interviews, 194.
journalist Mikal Gilmore: Cott, Ibid., 411–28.
scripture in his life: Douglas Brinkley, “Bob Dylan’s Late-Era, Old-Style American Individualism.”
the following caption: The quote is tucked away as a caption to one of the photos included in the AARP The Magazine. On a table there are three old-looking well-used books, with a fourth open but not legible: http://www.aarp.org/entertainment/music/info-2015/bob-dylan-photos.html#slide12.
CHAPTER 5
Dylan to John Hammond: Heylin, The Recording Sessions, 8.
Cecil Sharp in 1917: Heylin, Revolution in the Air, 116.
justice of her case: Ibid., 117.
London at the end of 1962: Heylin, Revolution in the Air, 124.
“impersonating Bob Dylan”: Sean Wilentz, Bob Dylan in America, 118.
New York in early 1963: Rotolo, A Freewheelin’ Time, 199.
“‘look at Rimbaud and Verlaine’”: Heylin, Behind the Shades Revisited, 101.
biography Shelton was writing: Robert Shelton, No Direction Home, 392.
“writing I’m gonna do”: Heylin, Revolution in the Air, 181.
“to the highest degree”: Shelton, No Direction Home, 294.
as Van Ronk remembers it: Dave Van Ronk, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, 4.
politics of Dylan’s art: Marqusee, Chimes of Freedom, 93.
“harvest of vitriolic verse”: Paul Schmidt, Arthur Rimbaud, 75.
CHAPTER 6
finds fault with the scene: Heylin, Revolution in the Air, 416.
the new millennium: The title is stolen from Eric Lott’s treatise of 1993, Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class.
“fatalism of classic blues”: Cott, The Essential Interviews, 394–95.
Virgil and Bob Dylan both matter: Thomas, “Shadows Are Falling,” for a more detailed study of the shared melancholy of Dylan and Virgil.
CHAPTER 7
“Lonesome Day Blues”: http://dylanchords.info/41_lat/lonesome_day_blues.htm.
months after its release: Cott, The Essential Interviews, 426.
popularity as being: Tacitus, Dialogue on Oratory, 13.
as Suetonius reports: Suetonius, Life of Virgil, 11.
true for many songs: Ibid., 26.
Bob Dylan, 2004: Cott, The Essential Interviews, 438.
Bob Dylan, 1977: Heylin, Revolution in the Air, 181.
“overflow of powerful feelings”: William Wordsworth, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.
in a single session: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1964/10/24/the-crackin-shakin-breakin-sound.
after the stay in Toronto: Heylin, Revolution in the Air, 176–81, for good detective work on this song.
his own virtuoso sentence: Neil McCormick, “Bob Dylan: 30 Greatest Songs.”
CHAPTER 8
puts it well: See Wilentz, Bob Dylan in America, 314–19, for an excellent detailed reading of “Nettie Moore.”
the songs of Modern Times: See Thomas, “The Streets of Rome,” for all the Ovidian lines; Robert Polito, “Dylan’s Memory Palace,” for a recent treatment of Timrod and Ovid.
release of Shadows in the Night: Robert Love, “Bob Dylan Does the American Standards His Way.”
“from their crumbling sepulchers”: Ovid, Amores 1.8.17; see Polito, “Dylan’s Memory Palace” for other uses of Ovid’s Amores.
had become part of: T. S. Eliot, “Philip Massinger.”
CHAPTER 9
comeback album, Time Out of Mind: Interview with Jon Pareles in Cott, The Essential Interviews, 392.
on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UXeXdPv7rA.
recalls Dylan saying: Heylin, Behind the Shades: The 20th Anniversary Edition, 717.
Great American Songs: a blues: Fricke, “Bob Dylan: Shadows in the Night.”
interview with Robert Love: Love, “Bob Dylan Does the American Standards His Way.”
one way or another: Ibid.
puts together a show: Ibid.
“A certain kind of drama”: Ibid.
with a perceptive observation: Heylin, Still on the Road, 470.
“where the sound’s most powerful”: Flanagan, “Q & A.”
“and a sense of purpose”: Edna Gunderson, “Dylan Sets the Tone for the Wonder Boys Soundtrack.”
various phases of his life: Dylan addressed the issue of such change at a show at the Fox Warfield in San Francisco on November 12, 1980. In a long introduction to “Caribbean Wind” he started talking about Leadbelly: “At first he was just doing prison songs, stuff like that. The same man that recorded him also recorded Muddy Waters before Muddy Waters changed his name. He’d been out of prison for some time when he decided to do children’s songs. People said all right, did Leadbelly change? Some people liked the old ones, some liked the new ones. Some people liked the prison songs and some people like the children’s songs. But he didn’t change, he was the same man.”
he went off topic: Love, “Bob Dylan Does the American Standards His Way.”
Robert Love asked him: Ibid.
CONCLUSION
Bob Dylan for the Nobel: Gordon Ball, “Dylan and the Nobel.”
“Nobel Committee has gone electric”: Nancy Wartick, “Readers Go Electric.”
“an insult to real poets”: Irish Times, October 13, 2016.
“matters where it takes you”: Heylin, Revolution in the Air, 93–94. In 1965 Dylan had said, “I wrote it at the time of the Cuban crisis.” Heylin pointed out that the song was first performed at Carnegie Hall on September 22, 1962, before the U-2 spy plane took photographs of missile sites in western Cuba. Dylan’s original memory may not be so faulty. Cuba had been a building crisis through the summer.
“seen such applause before”: David Gaines, “The Bob Dylan Nobel.”
might suggest mass incarceration: 200 per 100,000 when Dylan wrote the song, now almost five times that number.
Dylan’s Nobel Banquet Speech: Delivered by U.S. Ambassador to Sweden Azita Raji, December 10, 2016.
in Los Angeles on June 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Tl cPRlau2Q
already saw: in Chapter 8.
“less and less artistic power”: Michael Gray, Song and Dance Man III, 877.