Before turning to the seven missions of Bob Dylan’s career, let’s take a moment to examine how our Nobel laureate goes about his job. I held out on this in the first edition; electing to use this material in a capstone manner. Not so this time. We now pause to explore the methodical qualities of this lifework. By identifying the artist’s stylistic signatures beforehand, we’re better prepared to appreciate Dylan’s art as it unfolds before us. Here we consider the why and how of “Bob’s Way.”
Our starting point involves a simple observation: this is functional art. Dylan surely subscribes to the “you use art, art doesn’t use you” school of thought. That is, when this artist has something to say—and that is a very important standard for Bob Dylan—he uses his art to say it. He formulates a plan to achieve that task, too. Each mission deployed a strategically conceived character (The Look) that personified that particular objective, and in turn, dictated the songs and set (The Show). Dylan’s attention to detail is impressive. He offered a practical view of his songwriting’s origins to Spin’s Scott Cohen:
I began writing because I was singing. I think that’s an important thing. I started writing because things were changing all the time and a certain song needed to be written. I started writing them because I wanted to sing them. If they had been written, I wouldn’t have started to write them. Anyway, one thing led to another and I just kept on writing my own songs, but I stumbled into it, really. It was nothing I had prepared myself for, but I did sing a lot of songs before I wrote any of my own. I think that’s important too.
He reinforced that stance with Newsweek’s Hubert Saal in 1968 (“I write the songs because I need something to sing”), in Scorsese’s film (“I wrote the songs to perform the songs . . . in a language I hadn’t heard before”), and on the BBC’s The Bob Dylan Story (“I had to write what I wanted to sing because what I wanted to sing nobody else was writing”).
What he “wanted to sing” was contingent upon a given time frame’s mission and the public image associated with that undertaking. The Look—topical troubadour, rebellious poet, paternal recluse, vaudevillian showman, poetic preacher, celebrity icon, or seasoned rounder—drove the systematic application of a cultivated musical instinct. This is a fluid creative process. One secret to Dylan’s longevity involves the changing nature of his work. Only during the confused happenings of the 1980s do we see any sign of a stagnant Bob Dylan Jukebox. Change is this artist’s creative lifeblood and it sustains his career.
Dylan discussed his mode of operation with AARP in 2015: “It starts like this. What kind of song do I need to play in my show? What don’t I have? It always starts with what I don’t have instead of doing more of the same.” He explained, “I need all kinds of songs—fast ones, slow ones, minor key, ballads, rumbas—and they all get juggled around during a live show.” But these songs aren’t written in a random fashion; they serve a specific objective, an “idea.” For Dylan, “It’s the idea that matters.” Bob continued: “The idea is floating around long before me. It’s like electricity was around long before Edison harnessed it. . . . Pete Townshend thought about Tommy for years before he actually wrote any songs for it.” Dylan aspires to write songs “that have the feeling of a Shakespearean drama” and that ambition is powered by “the main idea” that inspires the effort. He concluded: “Inspiration is what comes when you are dealing with the idea. But inspiration won’t invite what’s not there to begin with.”
At the heart of this artistic enterprise is Dylan’s creative nexus. A mission-show-songwriting nexus generates this Iron Ranger’s art. The lifework features seven independent manifestations of this approach that involved missions of discovery (1961–1964), rebellion (1964–1966), recovery (1966–1974), along with two periods of reorientation (1975–1978 and 1982–1992) and service (1979–1981 and 1993 to date). Each mission prescribed the content and style of that era’s edition of The Show. Dylan strategically cast The Look in pursuit of an “idea” and his pen dutifully followed that lead. As he told Playboy’s Ron Rosenbaum, “You must have a purpose. . . . You must know why you’re doing what you’re doing.” Bob reiterated that point for Robert Hilburn in 1978: “So, you have to learn to trust your own judgment. You have to remember what your purpose is and walk that thin line.”
This is orchestrated art. When Bob conceptualized an idea, he selected the tools required for that mission, applied his superior concentration to those materials, and systematically assembled his work. If an idea required a certain musical approach, Dylan was prepared. If it needed a specific songwriting vernacular, Dylan was prepared. He engaged his creative world through his highly cultivated toolbox. Those formative years on Seventh Avenue initiated an expansive repertoire that Bob methodically deployed through the nexus.
Early in his career, Dylan developed an observational technique that fueled his work. He mastered that procedure in New York City and Chronicles tells the story. There he explains that he “needed to learn how to telescope things, ideas,” since they were often “too big” to consider “all at once.” He intuitively understood that if he could zoom in on an idea, he could harness those observations and convey their essence in some manner (e.g., poetry, song lyric, or a story).
The pivotal element of this technique involved Dylan’s willingness to “disorientate” his thinking. Learning involves the resolution of confusion and the enterprising young artist understood that principle. Therefore, in order to assimilate new information in a useful way, he was willing to lose himself in his subject matter (the idea), wrestle with that experience, and emerge with a new, potentially useful, perspective. It’s a straightforward process of telescoping, deconstructing, and assembling.
Dylan’s telescoping technique constitutes the inventive core of his creative process. He may zoom in on a group of short stories, break them down in some idiosyncratic way, and reconstruct those findings via a series of melodramatic love songs. Or he may telescope old newspapers for sentiments he can apply in a current topical song. Or he may lose himself in the Bible, wallow in the Word, and generate faithful gospel songs afterward. In all cases, he invites confusion, embellishes it, and patiently resolves it. The results not only render yet another tool for his ever-expanding toolbox, they offer a striking depth of expression.
To that end, when Melody Maker’s Neil Hickey asked Bob for the “source of information” for his songs, Dylan replied: “You learn from talking to other people. You have to know how people feel.” Suze Rotolo described Dylan’s approach to Anthony Scaduto: “Dylan was perceptive. He felt. He didn’t read or clip the papers and refer to it later, as you would write a story, or as other songwriters might do it. . . . It was more poetical. It was all intuitive, on an emotional level.” Dylan told Rosenbaum: “I’d say people will always believe in something if they feel it to be true. Just knowing it’s true is not enough.” Remember, Bob aspires for “the feeling of a Shakespearean drama” and claims all of his “feelings come out of America.” Consequently, Dylan telescopes human relations and generates stylized accounts of their emotional qualities. The man is more than a methodical operator; he’s an emotional anthropologist.
He’s also a world-class ragpicker. Bob telescopes his world and archives the results. He divulged to Hilburn that he learned the tactic from Buddy Holly. Whatever Dylan sees, hears, reads, smells or tastes is a potentially utilitarian experience, as these classic 1978 comments to Playboy reveal:
It’s the sound of the street with the sunrays, the sun shining down at a particular time, on a particular type of building. A particular type of people walking on a particular type of street. . . . The sound of bells and distant railroad trains and arguments in apartments and the clinking of silverware and knives and forks and beating with leather straps. It’s all—it’s all there . . . it’s the sound and the words. Words don’t interfere with it. They—they—punctuate it. You know, they give it purpose. [pause] And all the ideas for my songs, all the influences, all come out of that. All the influences, all the feelings, all the ideas come from that. I’m not doing it to see how good I can sound, or how perfect the melody can be, or how intricate the details can be woven or how perfectly written something can be. I don’t care about those things.
Bob Dylan is a receptacle. His inventive process begins with everyday events: the activities on a crowded street, the sounds of a bustling city, overheard conversations, anything. Radio taught him to listen for nuances: keys jingling, clinking knives, cows mooing, or a heated argument in the apartment next door. As he explained to Bill Flanagan in 1986:
A lot of times you’ll just hear things and you’ll know that these are the things that you want to put in your song. Whether you say them or not. They don’t have to be your particular thoughts. They just sound good, and somebody thinks them. Half my stuff falls along those lines. Somebody thinks them. . . . I didn’t originate those kinds of thoughts. I’ve felt them, but I didn’t originate them. They’re out there, so I just use them.
Bob continued: “Not a whole lot of real thought goes into this stuff. It’s more or less remembering things and taking it down. Sometimes you’re just taking notes on stuff and then putting it all together.” He was direct with Time’s Denise Worrell: “I just jot down little phrases and things I overhear, people talking to me, stuff like that.” Dylan admitted to Hilburn in 2001: “I look at people as ideas. . . . That’s the way I see life. I see life as a utilitarian thing. Then you strip things away until you get to the core of what’s important.” And for Bob Dylan, that “core” involves human emotions.
Just as he reports in Chronicles, a scene from a play, a pitiful man and his dog on the street, anything can inspire an idea. Dylan reiterated that point on Theme Time Radio when he was asked “How do you start a song?” Bob replied, “Look around.” Rotolo kept it simple for Bob Spitz, “He was influenced by everything and everybody.” Moreover, he used that material “to produce something uniquely his own.” Sybil Weinberger described our ragman to Shelton: “When we walked down the street, he saw things that absolutely nobody else saw. He was so aware of his surroundings . . . it was almost like he couldn’t write fast enough. He would get thoughts and reactions and he would stop on a street corner and write things down. . . . He would reach for that little spiral notebook and write about animals on the street or a newspaper headline.” As always, the artist was stocking his toolbox.
When he telescopes his world in pursuit of a specific idea, Dylan turns to that trusty toolbox to meet the needs of the moment. And this ragpicker has one well-stocked repertoire of natural sights and sounds, overheard conversations, scenes from movies, old folk songs, and everything else the man’s ever experienced. It’s all there to be used. Dylan told Mikal Gilmore in 2012, “You make everything yours.” When Gilmore asked if he was conscious of using these materials, Bob replied: “Well, not really. But even if you are, you let it go. I’m not going to limit what I can say. I have to be true to the song.” This is the “folk process.” Everything belongs to everybody. Artists aren’t stealing when they use existing materials; they’re honoring the original work. So, Dylan demonstrates his devotion to American Song by using it and anything else he knows to serve his idea (read: mission).
(Once Dylan knows something, it goes in the toolbox. Obviously, the artist that once claimed he was singing on Bobby Vee records is not shy about using those tools. Subsequently, Bob created an industry. There is a legion of writers dedicated to unearthing the sources of Dylan’s material. Leading the way is a determined Michael Gray; doggedly tracking lyrics, story lines, melodic passages, and everything else down to their “original” sources. His is an amazing work. Moreover, a 2016 Rolling Stone “album guide” offers a section that cites the various sources of Dylan’s songs (e.g., a 1961 issue of Time magazine; the movies Bronco Billy, A Streetcar Named Desire, and The Maltese Falcon; writers Henry Timrod, Junichi Saga, and Jack London). The biographers, my neighbors—everybody—hunkers down, pulls their green eyeshades tight, and searches for the sources of Dylan’s ideas. There are moments when all of this devolves into a game of “gotcha” that gets more than a little bit tiresome.)
When something inspires an opening idea, as Weinberger indicates, Dylan’s off to the races. Creativity is a slavish journey without a map. One thing is certain: the results don’t have to be perfect. Those last words to Rosenbaum may be the most significant statement Bob has ever made about his work. It’s not about perfection. For this Iron Ranger, it’s about greatness, not perfection (he said that on Theme Time, too). The strategy, then, is without mystery: absorb life, file away your experiences, and see what happens when the right time comes. Be patient and accept the results. And don’t ever sweat the details. Just run with it.
When Dylan discussed his working method with Shelton in No Direction Home, the biographer asked if he purposefully broke the established rules of songwriting as an act of rebellion. Bob responded: “It’s not a question of breaking the rules . . . I don’t break the rules, because I don’t see any rules to break. As far as I’m concerned, there aren’t any rules.” He explained: “My thing is with colors. It’s not black and white. It’s always been with colors, whether with clothes or anything. Color . . . sometimes it gets fiery red . . . at times it gets very jet black.” For the stealth artist, it’s all about ambiguity—not rules or definitions. Human emotions are not “black and white.” Feelings have their own “colors.” The laureate telescopes people, sounds, Moby Dick, a Hank Williams song, and everyday observations and reveals their emotional colors via a method with but one rule: there are no rules. It’s a methodically ambiguous process free of definitions. As he told Neil Hickey in 1976, “definition destroys.”
Again, Dylan thoroughly explained his outlook in 1966, telling Shelton in Younger Than That Now: “Hey, I sing honest stuff, man, and it’s consistent. It’s all I do. I don’t give a damn what anybody says. Nobody can praise me and have any effect on me and nobody can criticize what I do that’s going to have any effect on me. Nobody. I’m not going to read anything for me or against me that can possibly have any effect on me.” He told Hilburn in 1984, “You get to where the praise doesn’t mean anything because it’s often for the wrong reason, and it’s the same with the criticism.” Bob surely demonstrated that attitude during the 2004 60 Minutes interview when he refused any credit for his achievements.
So the artist gazes inward. In 1965, Dylan admitted to Melody Maker, “My songs are just me talking to myself.” He told Gilmore in 2001, “I have to impress myself first, and unless I’m speaking in a certain language to my own self, I don’t feel anything less than that will do for the public, really.” Bob concluded in the 1966 Shelton interview, “All you really have to please is yourself in any arena of life.” One thing is certain, it’s not about the audience, as Dylan explained to John Cohen and Happy Traum, “The most you can do is satisfy yourself. If you satisfy yourself then you don’t have to worry about remembering anything. If you don’t satisfy yourself, and you don’t know why you’re doing what you do, you begin to lose contact. If you’re doing it for them instead of you, you’re likely not in contact with them. You can’t pretend you’re in contact with something you’re not.” It’s all about the idea, the purpose—not any audience.
Dylan cut to the chase for Jim Jerome: “I don’t care what people expect of me. Doesn’t concern me. I’m doin’ God’s work. That’s all I know.” And, as we observed from the outset, God’s work involves an audience of one. He confessed to Toby Creswell: “I wanted to be a star in my own mind, I wanted to be my own star. I didn’t want to be a star for people I didn’t really identify with. For me what I did was a way of life, it wasn’t an occupation.” The Bearded Lady taught her protégé well: Bob fully understands how to stay within himself. This artist writes for himself—just as his mother predicted.
In so doing, Dylan invokes the classic American voice: He speaks as an individual. He’s not a spokesperson. Bob declared to Gilmore in 1991: “If I’m here at eighty . . . I’ll be doing the same thing I’m doing now. This is all I want to do—it’s all I can do. . . . See, I’ve always been just about being an individual, with an individual point of view.” He told Paul Robbins in 1965: “All I can do is be me—whoever that is . . . I’m not going to tell them I’m the Great Cause Fighter or the Great Lover or the Great Boy Genius or whatever. Because I’m not, man . . . that’s all just Madison Avenue selling me.”
Dylan is adamant about this. He summarily dismisses any attempt to label him a spokesperson for any cause, generation, or time frame. His sense of humor is evident when he lampoons all of his media titles in Chronicles (e.g., “archbishop of anarchy”), but his contempt for the public’s 1960s nostalgia is complete. Dylan flat-out despises these media labels and those who propagate them. Again, his honest art addresses an audience of one. Beatty surely knew her child.
So it stands to reason that the Minnesotan would admire artists with strong individualistic orientations, as he conveyed to Rolling Stone’s Jonathan Lethem:
If you think about all the artists that recorded in the Forties and the Thirties, and in the Fifties, you had big bands, sure, but they were the vision of one man—I mean, the Duke Ellington band was the vision of one man, the Louis Armstrong band, it was the individual voice of Louis Armstrong. And going into all the rhythm & blues stuff, and the rockabilly stuff, the stuff that trained me to do what I do, that was all individually based. That was what you heard—the individual crying in the wilderness. So that’s kind of lost too. . . . I’m talking about artists with the willpower not to conform to anybody’s reality but their own. . . . It’s a lost art form. I don’t know who else does it beside myself, to tell you the truth.
Dylan appreciates strong-willed artists. They were his inspirations and nothing has changed. Bob Dylan is that lonesome voice from the Mesabi Outback. He’s crying in the wilderness all by himself.
I find that attitude most revealing. The Iron Ranger who was booed when he was a teenager brought that artistic Teflon into adulthood. When he was booed at the 1965 Newport Festival, a subsequent show in Forrest Hills, and throughout the 1966 tours of England and Europe, Dylan took it in stride. As he revealed to Hilburn in 2001, “You can’t worry about things like that. Miles Davis has been booed. Hank Williams was booed. Stravinsky was booed. You’re nobody if you don’t get booed sometime.” He was more philosophical in his 1965 interview with Joseph Haas: “I think there’s a little boo in all of us.” Yes, indeed, we’re talking about an artist with the “willpower” to avoid conforming to “anybody’s reality” but his own. That mindset set the table for a lifetime of orchestrated art.
While that philosophy is a constant, the technique has changed over the years. When Newsweek’s David Gates inquired in 2004 if the songwriter still followed his “original mode of creation,” Bob answered: “No, not in the same way. Not in the same way at all. But I can get there, by following certain forms and structures. It’s not luck. Luck’s in the early years. In the early years, I was trying to write and perform the sun and the moon. At a certain point, you just realize that nobody can do that.”
The most thorough discussion of the laureate’s songwriting evolution appears in the 1978 interview with Jonathon Cott. There Dylan claimed: “Right through the time of Blonde on Blonde I was doing it unconsciously. Then one day . . . the lights went out. And since that point, I more or less had amnesia. . . . It took me a long time to get to do consciously what I used to be able to do unconsciously.” Bob tried to discover “the simplest way I can tell the story and make this feeling real” (always: emotions). It was quite the struggle. His career was on the line. With art instructor Norman Raeben’s assistance, the reorientation worked, as Bob reported, “I had the good fortune to meet a man in New York City [Raeben] who taught me how to see. He put my mind and my hand and my eye together in a way that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt.”
Dylan claimed he forced his way through his new technique while writing Blood on the Tracks. It all seemed to work. He resolved: “Doing it unconsciously was doing it like a primitive, and it took everything out of me. Everything was gone, I was drained. I found out later that it was much wiser to do it consciously, and it could let things be much stronger, too.” In other words, his creative nexus evolved from a gut-level form of calculated expression—a central characteristic of Dylan’s opening missions—to a more consciously cerebral form of calculated expression.
Bob Dylan ventured from primitive unconscious assembly to systematic conscious assembly at that pivotal point in his career. It was nothing less than a game-saving occurrence. The artist reinforced that point in his 60 Minutes interview with Ed Bradley. When Bradley asked if Bob could still write songs like he used to, Dylan responded no, “but I can do other things now.” Yes, he can. Still, whether his songwriting was raw and impulsive (he’s often referred to it as “vomit”) or systematic and calculating, it was strategically assembled. This is orchestrated art.
The third element of Bob’s telescoping technique (assembly) involves a direct application of Dylan’s encyclopedic knowledge of what the Swedish Academy deemed the “great American song tradition.” Once the songwriter zeroes in on an “idea” and deconstructs vital portions of that subject he recasts that material in terms of American Song, as he explained to Hilburn in 1978:
My music comes from two places: white hillbilly music—Roscoe Holcomb, stuff like that—and black blues—people like Son House, Charley Patton, Robert Johnson. These are the two elements I’ve always related to best, even now. Then, all of a sudden in the ’60s, I heard Woody Guthrie, which just blew my mind—what he did with a lyric. So, I stopped everything and learned his songs. That’s what kept me going. I wanted to see how far I could take those elements, how well I could blend them together. Sometimes my music has gone a little to one side, then it drifts back to the other, but I’m always headed in the same direction.
Bob elaborates on his musical influences in the BBC’s The Bob Dylan Story: “The music I heard was Frankie Lane, Rosemary Clooney, Dennis Day or the Mills Brothers . . . when I hear stuff like that it always strikes a different chord than all the rock and roll stuff does . . . stuff like Mule Train . . . the old hillbilly stuff . . . and then I heard Woody Guthrie . . . and then it all came together for me.” Dylan summarized the impact of these vast influences to Hilburn in 1984:
At a certain point, though, I realized I had found something musically that no one else had found. I just stumbled onto it because I had been doing the regular stuff for a long, long time. . . . When I started, I combined other people’s styles unconsciously. . . . I crossed Sonny Terry with the Stanley Brothers with Roscoe Holcombe with Big Bill Broonzy with Woody Guthrie . . . all the stuff that was dear to me. Everybody else tried to do an exact replica of what they heard. I was doing it my own way because I wasn’t as good technically as, say, Erik Darling or Tom Paley. So I had to take the songs and make them mine in a different way. It was the early folk music done in a rock way, which was the first kind of music I played.
Dylan’s devotion to American Song is unequivocal. Again, as “primitive” and “restricting” as it may appear, this Nobel laureate is, beyond a doubt, a distinctively American artist. Each mission of his historic career deployed American Song in that critical third stage of an idea’s development. Whether he uses folk, country, swing, rock and roll, or the rich sounds of American Standards, this “musical expeditionary” wraps his lyrics in the warm blanket of the “great American song tradition.”
Let’s take a moment to explore the various inspirations that shaped this fiercely independent artist. A 2004 interview with Hilburn yields compelling insight into Dylan’s nonmusical influences. As Beatty reported, Bob toyed with words long before he ever played the first musical note. Dylan told Hilburn that he consumed Poe, Byron, Keats, Donne, and other “hard-core poets” the way some people devour Stephen King. That set the poetic table for Dinkytown’s and The Beats’ influence. The Beats, in particular, fascinated the youngster (“The idea that poetry was spoken in the streets and spoken publicly, you couldn’t help but be excited by that”); telling Hilburn that the poetry he heard in New York from Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso had a direct impact (“those guys were highly influential”).
François Villon joined the mix as Dylan admired his ability to rhyme “hard-core street stuff.” Villon inspired Bob to do the same thing in his songs. As he explained to Hilburn, “I’d see Villon talking about visiting a prostitute and I would turn it around. I won’t visit a prostitute, I’ll talk about rescuing a prostitute. Again, it’s turning stuff on its head, like ‘vice is salvation and virtue will lead to ruin.’”
Robert Johnson also contributed to these poetic revelations. Johnson amazed Dylan with lyrics that came “out of nowhere” with stunning originality. Here again Bob reiterated that it’s “important to always turn things around in some fashion.” Hilburn clearly captured the laureate’s poetic baseline. Villon, Johnson, and the “hard core poets” lit a songwriting flame.
Bob told Scott Cohen: “I was 18 or so when I discovered Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Phillip Whalen, Frank O’Hara, and those guys. Then I went back and started reading the French guys, Rimbaud and Francois Villon; I started putting tunes to their poems.” He described how the folk and jazz scenes were “connected” and that he heard poets reading their work with support from jazz combos. Dylan reasoned, “My songs were influenced not so much by poetry on the page but by poetry being recited by the poets who recited poems with jazz bands.” Since there are no rules, our ragman freely blends different musical styles, songs and poems, and words and music in pursuit of some controlling idea.
These insights are complemented by the comprehensive account of Dylan’s songwriting influences presented in Chronicles. There Bob discusses the confluence of influences that involved Hank Williams, Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie, Arthur Rimbaud, and the song, “Pirate Jenny.” It all starts with Hank Williams and his “archetype rules of poetic songwriting.” Bob writes that Hank’s “architectural forms are like marble pillars” that provide a “structure of songwriting” that makes “perfect mathematical sense.” Dylan “internalized” those prescriptions and made them the basis of his work.
Bob also claims that if he hadn’t heard Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “Pirate Jenny” at the Theatre de Lys the idea of songwriting might never have crossed his mind. He didn’t realize this type of song “could be written.” “Pirate Jenny” displayed a form of “free verse association” and “disregard” for standard “melodic patterns” that opened a new avenue for Dylan. He also appreciated the use of a single line or phrase to punctuate a verse (Bob calls this a “ghost” chorus). Since he certainly realized that the types of songs he wanted to sing didn’t exist, Dylan saw rich potential in the “Pirate Jenny” framework.
Joining “Pirate Jenny” is, once more, the Delta poet. Chronicles reports that Dylan was transfixed by Robert Johnson’s “startling economy of lines” and “highly sophisticated” songwriting. The music altered his reality. Sean Penn reads: “Johnson’s words made my nerves quiver like piano wires. They were so elemental in meaning and feeling and gave you so much of the inside picture.” The aspiring songsmith thoroughly studied the Mississippian’s “lyrics and patterns, the construction of his old-style lines and the free association that he used, the sparkling allegories, big-ass truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction.” Dylan admits that if he hadn’t heard Johnson’s records there might have been “hundreds of lines” that “would have been shut down,” since he “wouldn’t have felt free enough or upraised enough to write” that type of song. Williams’s “mathematical structures,” Johnson’s “code of language,” and the “Pirate Jenny” song structure launched a groundbreaking career.
Suze Rotolo also contributed to this onslaught of influences. She introduced Bob to Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry. When the hungry artist digested the Frenchman’s phrase “Je est un autre” (“I is someone else”), “the bells went off.” The songwriter had concocted his own recipe. There were no rules. Everything served the idea, and from there, the work. Penn reads: “[Rimbaud] made perfect sense. . . . It went right along with Johnson’s dark night of the soul and Woody’s hopped-up union meeting sermons and the ‘Pirate Jenny’ framework. Everything was in transition and I was standing in the gateway. Soon I’d step in heavy loaded, fully alive and revved up.”
There can be no doubt that Dylan’s acceptance speech for MusiCares 2015 “Person of the Year” award is the most thorough articulation of his inventive method and its reliance on the “great American song tradition.” It also echoes what we’ve established thus far. The laureate first cited direct connections between American Song and the Dylan canon: “These songs didn’t come out of thin air. . . . It all came out of traditional music: traditional folk music, traditional rock ’n’ roll and traditional big-band swing orchestra music.” Bob announced that he learned how to write songs “from listening to folk songs” and that those tunes provided “the code for everything that’s fair game, that everything belongs to everyone.” Dylan acknowledged that if you sang “John Henry” as often as he did, “Blowin’ in the Wind” would come to you, too. He confided that if you played “Key to the Highway” often enough, “Highway 61 Revisited” just might knock on your door as well.
Bob recited the folk lyrics that inspired “Boots of Spanish Leather,” “Maggie’s Farm,” and “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.” He revealed that “The Times They are A-Changin’” emerged from a penchant for the “come all ye” lyrical genre. The MusiCares “Person of the Year” reasoned: “You’d have written them too. There’s nothing secret about it. You just do it subliminally and unconsciously, because that’s all enough, and that’s all I sang. That was all that was dear to me. They were the only kinds of songs that made sense.” Dylan concluded: “All these songs are connected. Don’t be fooled. I just opened up a different door in a different kind of way. It’s just different, saying the same thing. I didn’t think it was anything out of the ordinary.” This is Bob’s Way.
That is, Dylan just turned things around in some manner and that transformed an old lyric into a new one. Since these songs belong to “everyone,” it’s all “fair game.” Bob was coldly honest: Devotion is the key to unlocking the lyrical door. Love the songs, friends, and they just might love you. I think it’s noteworthy that he shared these thoughts on an occasion that celebrated him. Yep, our Iron Ranger just turned things around yet again: Bob Dylan was celebrating his hero, American Song.
So it all comes down to art by assembly, as he explained to Hilburn in 2004, “Songs don’t just come to me. They’ll usually brew for a while, and you’ll learn that it’s important to keep the pieces until they are completely formed and glued together.” That’s the name of the game. Telescope those old songs or Moby Dick or Ralph Waldo Emerson or Mighty Mouse or Magna Carta, break them down into their essential qualities, and glue it all together through American Song. Make a blues tune out of Magna Carta. Turn Emerson into gospel number. Lampoon Moby Dick (he did). It’s all a process of assembly. Let’s take a few moments to consider several examples of this inventive method as it manifested in his songwriting, studio work, and painting.
In terms of his songwriting, Mikki Isaacson told Scaduto: “He had a spiral notebook, a small steno book, and he must have had four different songs going at once. He would write a line in one and flip a couple of pages back and write a line in another one. A word here and a line there, just writing away.” David Hajdu describes the Minnesotan sitting on the floor strumming his guitar saying whatever came to mind and, if Bob liked something, “he scrawled it down hurriedly, so as to stay in the moment, and he would do this until there were enough words written for a song.” Clinton Heylin notes Allen Ginsberg’s recollections of Dylan rushing back and forth from the studio to the control room rapping out lyrics, listening to the playback, and tweaking the results. Suze Rotolo writes about Dylan working on “a typewriter, in a notebook, on scavenged sheets of paper, and on napkins, just like the poets.” Finally, Robert Hilburn’s 2004 interview closes with Bob demonstrating his MusiCares technique in which he repeats a musical passage from an established song as the pathway to constructing a new composition. Whether he’s flipping through his notebooks, inducing a rhythmic trance, rushing around the recording studio, scribbling on napkins or reworking old tunes, Bob Dylan is assembling his work.
This methodology is also evident in the recording studio as a 2008 Uncut interview with participants from various Dylan sessions indicates. There we learn that the assembly process opens by establishing a musical mood. The Oh Mercy engineer, Malcolm Burns, recalled how Bob prepared the technicians by sending them a cassette of Al Jolson music before the sessions. Engineer Chris Shaw remembered Dylan bringing “reference tracks” to the Love and Theft and Modern Times sessions. Echoing the MusiCares speech, by playing old material by Muddy Waters and others, Bob was “trying to get the band to play songs the way he heard them.” Dylan was constructing new songs out of old ones.
The article also offers multiple examples of the songwriter’s writing-by-assembly technique. Oh Mercy’s Mason Ruffner reported: “Bob was doodling a lot with the lyrics. . . . Always making changes and additions and subtractions. . . . His concentration is unbelievable.” Engineer Mark Howard recalled: “He would always be working on his lyrics. He’d have a piece of paper with thousands of words on it, all different ways, you couldn’t even read it. Words going upside-down, sideways, all over the page . . . he’d sit chipping away at the words, pulling in words from other songs.” Under the Red Sky’s Robben Ford described Dylan jamming with the band until he heard something he liked and then inserting it in the lyrics. David Lindley remembered: “Dylan would organise stuff as we were going along, as he heard certain things. He’d shuffle verses around a lot. It was amazing to watch. Shooting from the hip.” And Time Out of Mind’s Jim Dickenson added: “I was impressed that he had hand-written lyric sheets. He said he’d been working on some of the songs five or six years. He’d lean over this steamer chest and work on his lyrics. With a pencil—because he was erasing stuff. That really touched me to see that.”
The assembly process doesn’t stop there. Chris Shaw noted that once a track was completed Bob would rearrange it and rerecord it. He’d change the tempo or have the musicians switch instruments or shift the key. He would literally turn the song inside out. He’d do a song over and over. And all of the recording was live. Shaw explained: “Everything is always live. He might edit the structure, switch verses around because it tells the story better, but we never go in and do these micro-edits or tuning or other tweaking people do.” Again, the objective is greatness not perfection.
It’s all a dynamic process of assembly. In fact, a song is never finished. It forever remains a work in progress, as Dylan told Shaw, “Well, y’know, a record is just a recording of what you were doing that day.” Subsequently, Bob described his studio recordings as “demos” to Greg Kot in 1993; he called them “blueprints” to Jon Pareles in 1997; and he told Lynne Allen that his albums are “measuring points for wherever I was at a certain period of time.” The songs are alive. Their flexibility is stunning. This is an extraordinarily systematic artist.
The best examples of Dylan’s art by assembly involve his painting. The 2014 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London entitled “Bob Dylan: Face Value” is most certainly one. This exhibit consisted of 12 pastel portraits of people who do not exist. Each painting is an assembled composite: one person’s eyes are paired with another person’s nose and both are placed on yet another individual’s face and so forth. This is art by assembly! The fact that each painting offers a facial expression reveals that those features were arranged for the audience.
Another compelling example of Dylan’s art by assembly emerged during an early interview with Cohen and Traum. It, too, involves painting. Dylan reported:
It’s like this painter who lives around here—he paints the area in a radius of twenty miles, he paints bright strong pictures. He might take a barn from twenty miles away, and hook it up with a brook right next door, then with a car ten miles away, and with the sky on some certain day, and the light on the trees from another certain day. A person passing by will be painted alongside someone ten miles away. And in the end he’ll have this composite picture of something which you can’t say exists in his mind. It’s not that he started off willfully painting this picture from all his experience. . . . That’s more or less what I do.
Like that local painter, Bob telescopes and collects materials to be assembled when the time is right: a colorful street personality, a scene from a movie, a line from an old book, a story from a traditional folk song—anything. Like his painter, Bob hooks it all up. His 1978 Playboy interview explains how he goes about that task. He claimed that some lines work better in poems, other lines are better suited in songs, some lines are just tossed off, and others are to be avoided. It’s a dedicated process of assembly. Once Bob Dylan determines that he has something to say, he uses his art to say it.
With that, here he is in all his glory: our Nobel ragpicker. He rummages through the dust bins of life, pulls what he might be able to use, and files it away. When an idea strikes and a particular role emerges for that specific mission, this ragman scours his collection for workable material. His working method may have evolved from primitive practices to a more structured enterprise; nevertheless, his method of assembly remains. It’s in his songwriting, his painting, his autobiography, his iron art, and his radio program. In every case, the artistic objective involves the pursuit of greatness, not perfection.
All of which is done in service of the work. It’s not about Bob. It’s about the work. Dylan was adamant in his 1992 interview with Hilburn: “What’s important isn’t the legend, but the art, the work.” He was even more direct in 2004: “The songs are the star of the show, not me.” He actually downplayed his role in these 1986 remarks to Flanagan: “Well, songs are just thoughts. . . . I’m a messenger. I get it. It comes to me so I give it back in my particular style.” Our messenger offered another take to Melody Maker’s Shelton: “It’s not for me [the audience’s adoration]. It’s the songs. I’m just the postman. I deliver the songs. . . . That’s what all the legend, all the myth, is about—my songs.” Bob Dylan is passionately devoted to those songs.
At the end of the artistic day, Dylan’s not a spokesperson or a cultural leader; he’s just an individual artist with an idea. His songs serve The Show. The Show follows the mission. The mission projects another individual cry from the wilderness. The postman is on that day’s route. Throughout, he remains focused while he “walks that thin line,” as he observed in the Biograph notes, “You got to be strong and stay connected to what started it all, the inspiration behind the inspiration, to who you were when people didn’t mind stepping on you.” Dylan’s art serves the idea, the purpose, the mission; not the media, the industry, or the audience. He’s one willful emotional anthropologist.
So as we march through the seven missions of Dylan’s career, note the systematic appearance of stylistic signatures that flow from the influences that shaped Bob’s Way. Watch a topical troubadour or a rebellious poet or a passionate preacher or a seasoned rounder turn things around through a “Pirate Jenny” ghost chorus, a Delta poet big-assed truth, some straight talk from the Dust Bowl, or a dose of French color. Don’t be surprised if you hear from the Bearded Lady or Atlas the Dwarf, either. They’ll all be there. All of his inspirations have their own place in this Iron Ranger’s toolbox. Dylan’s devotion sustains him. It’s as if the man practices creative reincarnation: old art births new art; creativity without walls. It’s more than a chain, it’s a cycle. And it earned the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature.