Dylan's Autobiography of a Vocation

Front matter

A Reading of the Lyrics 1965-1967

Louis A. Renza

A Reading of the Lyrics 1965-1967

Contents

Preface viii Acknowledgments ix Dylan 1965 xi Introduction xii 1 Return to Me: Bringing It All Back Home 1 2 Rebel without a Cause II: Highway 61 Revisited 31 3 Reflections on Self-reflections: Blonde on Blonde 59 4 Fire Down Below: The Basement Tapes 91 5 Confessions of a Cowboy Angel: John Wesley Harding 125 Epilogue 153 Notes 159 Bibliography of Works Cited 182 Permission Acknowledgments 187 General Index 193

Index of Bob Dylan Songs and Albums 198

Preface

The best way to read this book is to listen to Bob Dylan’s rendition(s) of the songs in question, or else to have reacquainted oneself with their lyrics at bobdylan.com. Even so:

Caveat One:

One will likely register a sharp disjunction between my seriatim explications of Dylan’s songs and how one hears them as vocal-musical performances. Many very able critics/commentators, some of whom I reference to frame my deviant perspective, have discussed the songs in that context. I recommend their many published books, articles, and online discussions to the reader looking for what the songs might mean as performed lyrics or as “songs; the topics and themes with which anyone can approximately identify.

Caveat Two:

The present book is as much a critical detour from the “probable” as it is an attempted “possible” explication of Dylan’s songs between 1965 and 1967. Poe perhaps best states an important criterion of the critical poetics to which I try to adhere. In Eureka, his theory of the Universe, he states this principle as “the straightest and most available of all mere roads” to what he deems “the Truth,’ namely that of “a perfect consistency.”

I would only amend “consistency” here to mean a singular line of subjectively qualified thought. Focused primarily on his songs, I consider this book an extended surmise about Dylan’s existential unconscious as a songwriting self. One can summarize the book’s thesis using any number of lines from his songs. I prefer: “Someone else is speakin’ with my mouth, but I’m listening only to my heart” (“I and I”); or “Feeling like a stranger nobody sees” (“Mississippi”).

— Louis A. Renza

Acknowledgments

Without Jeff Rosen and his office's consent, I could not have referred to Bob Dylan’s considerable body of lyrical work the way I have. Jeff Rosen deserves profound praise from all Dylan scholars for the way he oversees Dylans multifaceted artistic canon. I also wish to thank David Beal at Special Rider Music for gaining my permission to quote and refer to Dylan’s songs and other written materials.

Much more than the usual, obligatory thanks go to my editors at Bloomsbury Press, Leah Babb-Rosenfeld and Susan Krogulski. Both kept me on the straight and narrow, encouraged me about my project from day one, and were always cooperative in addressing my stream of practical queries. As anyone can appreciate by just browsing sections of this book, my style, like some Ouija movement, lurches toward the tryingto-say-too-much-in-a-sentence-or-two. I therefore wish to thank Grishma Fredric and the copy editor Sundararajan Vidya at Bloomsbury Press for whatever clarity manages to wend its way successfully to the book’s readers. All remaining rhetorical or ideational confusions are mine.

I must hold up Robert and Ralph Colucci as the tutelary spirits of this book. Listening to their stunning conversations about Dylan in the very early 1960s (all of us approximately the same age as Dylan) seeded my wonder at his poetic genius and spiritual trajectory. My subsequent, relatively recent discussions with Bobby C. provided the booster I needed to write the book in deed. And how can I fail to mention the many Dartmouth College students who took my course on Dylan’s works, which I taught from the early 1970s through 2010? Their numbers obviously preclude my referring to them by name, but they know who they are and should happily, I hope, recognize how many of the ideas they shared in classroom discussions and private exchanges significantly contributed to what I have here written about Dylan's songs.

Special mention goes to my niece Alexandra Rahmann, Tom Atwood, George Ramos, Tyler McIntyre, Halley Moore, Tom Sorci, Paul Sherwin, Jack Morgan, David Harris, Bob Coyle, Robert C. S. Downs, and Jessica Guernsey for their long-term support and help with my various Dylan projects over the years. Many others also encouraged me along the way, among them Da-Shih Hu for showing me how mind and act are indecisively yet provocatively twinned; and Michelle Angers for having invited me to Colby-Sawyer College, April 1998, where I gave a version of the “Desolation Row” discussion included in the present book.

Dartmouth College deserves my appreciation as well for affording me with the opportunity to teach Dylan’s lyrics as long as I did. In addition, the Dartmouth College Humanities Forum sponsored my talk “Bob Dylans 116 Dream,” April 2008, and before then, the College facilitated my directing a 2006 Conference on Dylan's x Acknowledgments works. All the attending speakers and respondents at that Conference helped vitalize my thoughts about Dylan’s works. Not least among these scholars, I wish to cite (alphabetically) Bryan Cheyette (who did not give a paper but whose prompting was instrumental in my making the Conference more than a whim) and the esteemed Dylan scholars Aidan Day, John Hinchey, and Christopher Ricks. And my deepest scholarly appreciation must go to Michael Denning for his prior and subsequent thoughts on Dylan and recommendations regarding this book’s very occurrence.

Most important acknowledgments are due to the most personal influences on my work: Crista, my wife, literally Without Whom Not, and who read my manuscript and listened to my theories with the greatest love and patience; my longtime friend and constant Dylan aficionado John W. Price; frequent conversations with another former student and now excellent scholar in his own right, Jed Dobson; and my continuing salutary friendship with Bob and Sylvia Drennan. Bob understands Dylan’s works as well as anyone I know, and provided me with insightful comments galore before and after reading my manuscript.

Like most Dylan critics, I above all give thanks to Bob Dylan for his songs. Wherever and whoever he is, may he and his stay forever.

— Louis A. Renza

Dylan 1965

Dylan Goes Electric At Newport

NEWPORT, RI—JULY 25: Bob Dylan plays a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar for the first time on stage as he performs at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965 in Newport, Rhode Island. (Photo by Alice Ochs/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)