Suggested possible call-outs:
With these three items staring at me, the question naturally arose: how much more Shakespeare might be in the Basement Tapes? Maybe every wacky Dylan song on the Tapes encapsulates a nugget of Shakespeare?
...I now reach for a Shakespeare concordance (Google be praised!--there is one online!) to start looking for word-matches with Dylan. It is tedious slogging...
...Timon of Athens has more instances of "dog" than any other Shakespeare play, generally a speaker using "dog" to insult someone, which rather fits Tiny Montgomery drawling "gas that dog." No need to call PETA.
Dylan's "Odds and Ends" begins it's second stanza: "You take your file and you bend my head" and I'm guessing you can guess where this oddity originates.
...here I"ll stop calling Dylan's lyrics curious, weird, odd, bizarre, peculiar, goofy or non-Euclidean, and merely note when they are normal, which is almost never.
...when Dylan asks his Molly, "What's the matter with your mound?" the answer might be that there are asp-fangs latched onto it.
As to the "herd of moose" in the song, I'm still trying to locate the democratic critters...
... for now suffice to say: a) Dylan's "cheeks in a chunk" belong to the dead Lord Salisbury in Henry VI Part 1, b) the mythical alter ego of the "big dumb blonde" (Venus, if you must know) can be ascertained by searching "gorge" in the concordance and matching "wheel" to "tires" (ah, more wordplay), c) "Turtle, a friend of hers" is yet another punning reference, to the short bird-poem "The Phoenix and the Turtle" (electrifying, since the poem is a pet concern, and funny as Bob cracks an egg joke), and d) the metaphoric "Million Dollar Bash" is plainly the collected works of Shakespeare, and the song a sly fanfare thereof.
What the heck WAS Dylan trying to do in baking this bountifully bent batch of Bard bits?
...a routine disclaimer: this essay contains no accusation that our 60s legend shoplifted stuff. His Shakespeare sources having gone almost undetected for 47 years, it is obvious Dylan metabolized his materials well. And of course Shakespeare too was a consummate borrower.
The first big sideways discovery was that the lyrics to "Duquesne Whistle" are basically a commentary on, or reference to--heck, let's muster bafflegab and call it a McLuhanesque extension of--that Basement Tapes peripheral "Mighty Quinn"...
Why else would Dylan caricature Prince Hamlet blaming Ophelia for her own drowning?
More astonishingly, (the Beatles') "Come Together" artfully and playfully recognizes two related Shakespeare sources that Dylan uses--can you spot them?
The Shakespeare in Bob Dylan's basement
-or-
Who is the Mighty Quinn anyway? (a rascal from Quebec??)
...and, um, why did Dylan perform a sex-change operation on him before slipping her across the border?
Now, when someone offers me a joke,
I just say no thanks,
I try to tell it like it is,
And keep away from pranks.
- Bob Dylan, "Going to Acapulco" 1967
Any attempt to render sense from the published lyrics to these (Dylan's 1967 Basement Tapes) songs just strikes me as against the whole spirit of the sessions.
-Clinton Heylin, Revolution in the Air
The why is plain as way to parish church:
He that a fool doth very wisely hit Doth very foolishly, although he smart,
Not to seem senseless of the bob...
- Shakespeare, As You Like It
He got the voice that speak in riddles...
-John Fogerty, "Old Man Down the Road" 1985
The lights of my native land are glowing,
I wonder if they'll know me next time 'round.
-Bob Dylan, "Duquesne Whistle" 2012
You ain't never going to figure out what Bob's going to do next. Only God knows what's going on in his mind.
-Ronnie Hawkins OC, 2014
Behold the sizzling 60s, now largely reduced to a dusty diorama of hippies and Woodstock (or in the April Walrus magazine, a rehash of the Port Huron Statement in dishwater-dull terms). But poke around the area, hotspots may surprise you.
For starters, try a little-visited YouTube snippet of the Beatles in studio circa January 1969, messing briefly with Bob Dylan's "Please, Mrs. Henry"--just a minute-long audio-clip with a photo slapped on, but it features John strumming guitar and mock-rasping a bit of the chorus--"Please, Mrs. Henry! Mrs. Henry, please!"--a few people chatting around him, then George talking about "playing the tapes" (those famous long ago Dylan Basement Tapes) and almost-laughing, "The words!..."
Ah yes, the words. Stuff like "I'm a thousand years old, I'm a generous bomb/ I'm T-boned and punctured, I've been known to be calm"--to quote the song's romping discombobulation (which the Beatles only toyed with, though "I Am the Walrus" approaches its zany spirit).
What can possibly be said about those Bob Dylan lyrics? In fact two entire books have recently been devoted to the Tapes, one by senior rock-music critic, Greil Marcus, who wrote the liner-notes to the official Basement Tapes album finally released in 1975. His book The Old, Weird America wraps the songs in every tangent from "the great Harvard scholar" F. O. Matthiesson to Appalachian coal-mining history, but neither it nor Sid Griffin's Million Dollar Bash get very far into the screwball lyrics, whose mystery endures. A befuddled critic today might still echo George Harrison's speechless wonder at them. Or like Dylanologist Scott Heylin postulate they have no rational meaning. Or maybe they are "automatic writing" or "patched together out of scraps."
The story behind the Basement Tapes is that Bob Dylan, after a July 1966 motorcycle accident and/or collapse from overwork and drugs, retreated to his home in upstate New York, and for much of 1967 recuperated by woodshedding with his 80%-Canadian back-up band from an arduous 1965-66 world tour, in the basement garage of their nearby West Saugerties house, dubbed Big Pink (and iconicized in 1968 when the band became the Band and released their first album Music from Big Pink).
The Saugerties crew fixed up Big Pink's basement for sound-recording (another YouTube clip has Robbie Robertson recalling how this pioneer home-studio came about) and cellarside they recorded a staggering number of songs. The casual sessions (often attended by a dog named Hamlet) began with covers of old American folk tunes, and over time drifted to Dylan originals with a similarly antiquated "Americana" flavor, as well as stray tidbits from the Band, for a total of 100+ songs.
Mostly it was done for the sheer joy of making music, although it is now credited with starting the roots-music and alt-country genres. But Dylan also had the idea of putting 14 of his songs onto a demo-tape and circulating copies for other artists to record. The Beatles, as noted, didn't bite. But another British band, Manfred Mann grabbed "Mighty Quinn" (aka "Quinn the Eskimo") from the tape and made a big hit of it (#1 in Britain).
Which is where your Edmonton kibitzologist comes in--on Christmas 1967 at the age of 14, I received a tiny portable reel-to-reel tape recorder, and one of the songs it soon captured from the radio was "Mighty Quinn."
Aside from being a catchy singalong song, two things stood out: first, its odd lyrics, e.g. "Let me do what I wanna do, I can't decide on my own"--huh? Actually, the end-lyric is "I can't decide 'em all" as research determined, but the correction clarifies nothing, the words remaining as cryptic as the following line: "Just tell me where to put 'em, and I'll tell you who to call"--huh?? Again, the chorus of "You'll not see nothing like the Mighty Quinn" to my young ears sounded like "You'll Nazi nothing."
The second eyebrow-raiser was flipping through a purloined-from-dad Playboy mag
Despite being a junior music fanatic, at that age I was unaware of Dylan's authorship, and barely registered Dylan himself, despite digging his midsize hit "Rainy Day Women #12 and #35" a year earlier (which also stumped me with its chorus of "But I would not feel so all alone/ Everybody must get stoned!")
Succeeding years, however, especially college with its discovery of the tabloid Rolling Stone, planted Dylan firmly in my consciousness, up to the mandatory heavy contemplation of his lyrics. It was a jolt, for instance, when I read Joseph Conrad's Victory and realized Pedro in the novel matched "faithful slave Pedro" in Dylan's "Tombstone Blues" (albeit Conrad's Pedro lacks a "fantastic collection of stamps/ To win friends and influence his uncle"). And a bigger triumph deducing that the highway in "Highway 61 Revisited" neatly symbolizes faith.
But Dylan wasn't my light on the road to Damascus; critic H. L. Mencken supplied that. Still, fate delivered plenty of Dylan epiphanies to tuck into my karma, from seeing him in concert in Nuremburg in 1978, to reading a Rolling Stone item about a costume-party where attendees came as something in a Dylan song (hugely successful, e.g. a partygoer who "dressed/ With 20 pounds of headlines stapled to his chest") to debating another aficionado as to which Dylan album was best--he chose Blonde on Blonde, I voted the Basement Tapes. On such questions reasonable fanatics may differ.
But like many of the hypnotized, I fled Dylan after his late-70s leap to Christianity. My love of literature, however, eventually led (long story) to becoming an amateur Shakespeare shamus, mainly of his lesser-known play Troilus and Cressida. Which is how I happened to wake one morning in August 2012, a week after downloading the 1975 Basement Tapes, with a peculiar line from its "Crash on the Levee" serenading my groggy brain: "You can train on down to William's Point/ You can bust your feet, you can rock this joint"--and wondered, did this refer to William Shakespeare?
A preposterous connection. And yet the song's minimal lyrics do seem to be a distorted echo of Prince Hamlet lashing out at his mother: "Mama, don't you make a sound"--and/or Ophelia: "If you go down in the flood, it's gonna be your own fault"--although the scrambled state of the words (bookish Dylan playing hillbilly-illiterate, it seems) keeps a clear verdict just out of reach. But really, what the heck is "It's king for king, queen for queen/ Gonna be the meanest flood anybody's seen" doing on an all-American levee? Eh?
Furthermore, as any Bobphile knows, Ophelia has already had a surreal cameo as an "old maid" in 1965's "Desolation Row." And in Dylan'sTarantula (a stream-of-anything book also from the mid-60s) he taunts a middlebrow for getting good grades in easy literature, but not in Hamlet, indicating Dylan knows its status as a enigmatic "problem play" among the profs. Again, "Shakespeare he's in the alley/ With his pointed shoes and his bells" saunters through "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" in 1966, the same year Dylan, on the European leg of that grueling concert tour, visited Hamlet's Kronborg Castle, where, as Howard Sounes notes in his Dylan-bio Down the Highway, "Bob was interested to learn all he could about the fabled Prince of Denmark." So, if every auteur from Goethe to Lincoln to Kurosawa has succumbed to Shakespeare-fascination, why not Dylan? And why not another go at Hamlet in 1967?
But while glumly contemplating how short the song is (under two minutes) and the need for more evidential verses, I notice only one song on the Basement Tapes is shorter, the rousing opener "Odds and Ends" at a mere 1:48; a favorite song among favorites, but now idly rehearsing its lyrics in my head, it hits me like a wallop: Dylan berating a lady (again) sounds like Prince Troilus watching Lady Cressida in the climactic tent-scene in Troilus and Cressida.
"I stand in awe and I shake my face/ You break your promise all over the place" (as the song starts) perfectly describes Troilus's initial shock, the idiosyncratic "shake my face" depicting his subsequent rage and hinting at you-know-who. And the couple did pledge love-vows to each other.
Going to Dylan's official website to verify the "Odds and Ends" lyrics delivers a second, larger wallop: the revisionist Dylan, who often tweaks his poetry in perplexing ways, has changed the intro line--instead of awe and shaken face we get "I plan it all and I take my place." This is now CLEARLY the Troilus and Cressida tent-scene.
For those unfamiliar with the play, Troilus and Cressida is Shakespeare's reconfiguration of the Trojan War tale, borrowing heavily from medieval sources (especially Chaucer) who added a love-story to the skeleton of Homer's Iliad. In Shakespeare's version, as the long war festers, on the Trojan side Lady Cressida's uncle Pandarus arranges a tryst between her and Prince Troilus, but the day after it is consummated Cressida is traded to the Greeks in exchange for a Trojan prisoner. In a hasty farewell, Troilus tells Cressida he will come to the Greek camp and surreptitiously visit her (the plan). When a group of Trojan warriors goes to the Greek camp to watch a single-combat, Troilus slips away to, nope, not have a romantic moment with her, but merely eavesdrop--"take my place" unseen in the tent where she stays. What he sees (as per Dylan) is Cressida flirting with her Greek guardian Diomedes. Cue the jealous fury.
Atop these two play-echoes, I recollect a third, well-known hint of Shakespeare in the Basement Tapes song "Tears of Rage"--"What dear daughter 'neath the sun/ Would treat a father so?/ To wait upon him hand and foot/ Yet always answer 'no'"--this is widely seen as a reference toKing Lear. With these three items staring at me, the question naturally arose: how much more Shakespeare might be in the Basement Tapes? Maybe every wacky Dylan song on the Tapes encapsulates a nugget of Shakespeare?
The next step is familiar: just as I consult a Bible concordance to ferret out religious allusions in Shakespeare (Troilus and Cressida is riddled with them), I now reach for a Shakespeare concordance (Google be praised!--there is one online!) to start looking for word-matches with Dylan. It is tedious slogging and 19 times out of 20 a searcher draws a blank, but slowly bits of Shakespeare begin to emerge. One of the first is the rocked "joint" from "Crash on the Levee"--it connects with (causes?) "the time is out of joint" in Hamlet. As the song contains zero indication what "joint" Dylan is singing about (let's not speculate in the marijuana direction) the word is added to our Hamlet hints, filed under wordplay, alongside a certain levy/levee pun.
"Odds and Ends" yields even better links to Troilus and Cressida. Its chorus of "Odds and ends, odds and ends/ Lost time is not found again" resonates with the play's "Speech on Time," and more deeply with the "arrival scene" in which the traded Cressida is led to the Greek camp, where resident highbrow Ulysses proposes that the Greek princes greet her with each a kiss. Three princes, old Nestor, Achilles and Patroclus do so, Patroclus most suggestively, explicitly acting Paris embracing and kissing Helen, the very cause of the war. Next comes Menelaus, the cuckolded husband who began the mobilization of a thousand ships to get his Helen back:
Menelaus: I'll have my kiss, sir. Lady, by your leave.
Cressida: In kissing, do you render or receive?
Menelaus: Both take and give.
Cressida: I'll make my match to live,
The kiss you take is better than you give,
Therefore no kiss.
Menelaus: I'll give you boot, I'll give you three for one.
Cressida: You are an odd man; give even or give none.
Menelaus: An odd man, lady? Every man is odd.
Cressida: No, Paris is not, for you know 'tis true
That you are odd and he is even with you.
Menelaus: You fillip me o' the head.
Cressida: No, I'll be sworn.
A "fillip" means a tap, on the head indicating Cressida has posed a riddle; her reply is a puzzle too; one solution being that her odd/even riddle is easy, another overlooked possibility that she would marry before she kisses. Either way, her odd/even riddle has a plain answer: Paris is a rapist, and Menelaus is ditto for attempting a kiss. But while this is clear enough, the academic dimwits, most of whom hallucinate Cressida as a coy slut here, have altogether missed the veiled accusation of rape for 405 years. You saw it first in this newspaper.
Dylan's "Odds and Ends" begins it's second stanza: "You take your file and you bend my head" and I'm guessing you can guess where this oddity originates. Other intimations of the play also speckle "Odds and Ends" but by now I'm chomping toward the rest of the Basement Tapes.
To make a long research short, every Dylan song on the 1975 album shows signs of tapping into Shakespeare, as do peripheral Basementsongs li
Likely there are more parallels, but frankly I haven't read the play. Still, I'll bet Dylan's curious and inexplicable listing of the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) in the song comes from the discussion between poet, painter, jeweler, merchant and mercer which opens the play. But here I"ll stop calling Dylan's lyrics curious, weird, odd, bizarre, peculiar, goofy or non-Euclidean, and merely note when they are normal, which is almost never.
A major connection would be Dylan's song "Lo and Behold" with Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. The two are linked by such words as hook, behold, shame and seat, which quickly raise parallels. For example, Dylan's lines:
The coachman, he hit me for my hook,
And he asked me my name
I give it to him right away,
Then I hung my head in shame
This evokes Cleopatra's talk of catching Antony on a hook, Antony being chided for submitting to her, and hanging his head at the reproof. Again, "I give it to him right away" suggests Antony whipping Thyreus (and asking his name just before).
Yet again, Dylan's "count up to thirty" and "6:30 flat" signal the couple's end in 30 BC; his mock-illiterate "of course I knew she will" (changed to "would" on website) suggests Shakespeare's name again; Dylan's "found myself a vacant seat" replicates Cleopatra's upstaging of Antony in scene II ii (where Antony "did sit alone" and there was almost a "vacancy"--nice pun!--of atmospheric air gone with the crowds to see Cleopatra); and finally, the chorus's plea of "Get me out of here, my dear man!" is easily Antony's plea to a servant to help finish his (Antony's) botched suicide.
Oh yes: and when Dylan asks his Molly, "What's the matter with your mound?"--the answer might be that there are asp-fangs latched onto it. Let Greil Marcus (who pontificates on this song in terms of a train trip, de Tocqueville and democratic etiquette) take note of all this. As to the "herd of moose" in the song, I'm still trying to locate the democratic critters--the Egyptian fleet at Actium perhaps?
Going down the list of other Dylan songs on the Basement Tapes, our entry-level "Please Mrs. Henry" connects to and contorts Henry IV Part 1, with Falstaff naturally being the "generous bomb" (link-words are eggs, knees and of course Henry; Falstaff also encores as "Vice-president" in Dylan's "Clothes Line Saga"--a rejigging of Shakespeare's laundry-rich Merry Wives of Windsor); "Apple Suckling Tree" echoes Taming of the Shrew (link-words: Bartholomew, seven years); "You Ain't Going Nowhere" channels The Winter's Tale (Dylan's "Get your mind off wintertime" proving to be as good a joke as his "railing's froze" pun); "Going to Acapulco" starts from As You Like It (and it is "plain as way" and/or "plain as day" that Dylan's Rose Marie parallels Shakespeare's Rosalind, with the Forest of Arden being "big places"--not to mention a certain time-joke; but more on Dylan's vast array of time-jokes anon); "Yea, Heavy and a Bottle of Bread" taps Measure for Measure, etc.
As I'm figuring that Dylan has a one-play-per-song program, however, "Million Dollar Bash" arrives echoing a variety of plays and poems. Another long story, but for now suffice to say: a) Dylan's "cheeks in a chunk" belong to dead Lord Salisbury in Henry VI Part 1, b) the mythical alter ego of the "big dumb blonde" (Venus, if you must know) is ascertained by searching "gorge" in the concordance and matching "wheel" to "tires" (ah, more wordplay), c) "Turtle, a friend of hers" is yet another punning reference, to the short bird-poem "The Phoenix and the Turtle" (electrifying, since the poem is a pet concern, and funny as Bob cracks an egg joke), and d) the metaphoric "Million Dollar Bash" is plainly the collected works of Shakespeare, and the song a sly fanfare thereof.
Having unearthed this great tangle of Shakespeare roots, however, I am loath to merely hatch what English Department bores call a source study, suitable for burial in a dreary scholarly journal. Moreover, since Dylan was recently accused of plagiarizing a yakuza (Japanese gangster) book, let me issue a routine disclaimer: this essay contains no accusation that our 60s legend shoplifted stuff. His Shakespeare sources having gone almost undetected for 47 years, it is obvious Dylan metabolized his materials well. And of course Shakespeare too was a consummate borrower.
Rather, as a critic I grasp for the overarching artistic intent and total effect in all this. What the heck WAS Dylan trying to do in baking this bountifully bent batch of Bard bits? Maybe just scrambling his poetic ingredients in the disorienting manner of French poet Rimbaud and American dice-o-matic William Burroughs? (as Dylan has done before). Or launching a sort of avant-garde "Cheech and Chong puff Shakespeare up in smoke"?
Months later another possibility clicks: one of Dylan's early heroes was Hank Williams Sr., whose adept wordcraft earned him the title of "the hillbilly Shakespeare"--and Dylan, after an especially potent toot and/or annoyance at being compared with Shakespeare himself, may have decided to REALLY produce some hill-Will. Or perhaps Dylan was just doing a relatively easy writing exercise??
Failing an ESP into Dylan's brain, does he at least display some critical awareness of what Shakespeare is about? Is there ANY conception of Shakespeare behind the unrelenting surrealism, absurdity and hick-schtick?
Such open-ended questions take me hither and yon--including the three-decade gap since "Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar" floored me. A big game of catch-up, but at least I'm aware Dylan has gotten good reviews in recent years, and is considered a long-distance runner. Nosing around, indeed, I find plenty of Dylanology both online and in old-fashioned books (and for the worshipful a "box set" of replica Dylan mementos). Even scouting Dylan's 60s heyday, an area I thought I knew fairly well, turns up surprising discoveries.
My procedure, if it can be called that, is to digress and approach things sideways, a time-consuming but rarely unrewarding tactic. For example, pulling a Penguin edition of Erasmus's Praise of Folly from my shelves circa 1999 (where it did little but gather dust for 20+ years) gave me a prime clue what Cressida means when, after initial resistance, she finally accedes to uncle Pandarus's entreaties to have a fling with Troilus, telling Pandarus, apropos the pending adultery, "I dedicate my folly to you"--a statement that flabbergasted one Victorian editor of the play. Erasmus in fact dedicated his Folly (a satire) to Sir Thomas More, so Cressida is winking that she will be a bad girl for satiric purposes. You read it first in this newspaper.
With the Basement Tapes, the crabwalk includes downloading Dylan's 2012 album Tempest. And hitting the jackpot. The title, of course suggests Shakespeare's The Tempest (and a key line in the Sonnets). But aside from digging the latest Dylan, my main reasons for buying the album were a) its single, "Duquesne Whistle" is a seductive jig (with a freaky video), and b) I was curious about the album's notably late-arriving John Lennon tribute "Roll On, John" and Dylan's exact relation to Lennon (you will recall that as Dylan and crew were setting up at Big Pink, the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's, featuring Dylan's face among luminaries on the album cover).
The first big sideways discovery is that the lyrics to "Duquesne Whistle" are basically a commentary on, or reference to--heck, let's don bafflegab and call it a McLuhanesque extension of--that Basement Tapes peripheral "Mighty Quinn" (two Dylan versions of "Quinn"--mournful as Manfred Mann's is cheerful--have shuffled onto compilation albums over the years, but not the 1975 Basement Tapes, whose cover-art nevertheless features an "Eskimo" in its freak-show tableau). Indeed "Duquesne Whistle" would better be titled "Da Quinn Foshizzle." But this conclusion rather catapults over a long zig-zag trek through scads of "Quinn" and "Duquesne" evidence, gathered while bouncing haphazardly between other Dylan areas.
First came a Shakespeare-test for "Mighty Quinn." Result: "despair" a multiple hit, and "mighty" snagging Shakespeare's "a mighty queen"--bingo!--among many clear links to Richard III, the infamous medieval British king whose remains were recently discovered under a parking lot. But from there to "Duquesne Whistle" is such a wild hopscotch of clues I can scarcely remember which one first hitched "Quinn" to "Duquesne"--despite having cited clues on my blog and Twitter.
Perhaps the linkage came in November 2012, when I tweeted that the guitar-figure that graces the slow intro to "Duquesne Whistle" is a near-identical melody to the perky flute-figure which opens Manfred Mann's "Quinn" (so memorably perky that Wikipedia mentions it) and that this bracing woodwind is the "whistle" that is "like a time-bomb in my heart" to Dylan. "Listen to that Duquesne whistle," indeed. "Blowin' like it's gonna blow my blues away... blowin' like it never blowed before"--Dylan no doubt wryly describing his own mopey and fluteless original.
But other clues arrive with glacial slowness. It is January 2013 and many earfuls of Manfred Mann, for instance, before a frustrating, unconnected-to-anything line in "Duquesne Whistle"--"I can hear a sweet voice gently calling/ Must be the mother of our Lord"--which I initially quick-pegged as an offhand Christian quip, till my slow-brains realized Dylan had sort of shelved Christianity in the 80s (hey, if there had been a media frenzy over this...) finally yielded to another listen. As Manfred Mann sings "When Quinn the Eskimo gets here/ Everybody's gonna jump for joy"--there it is!--a high, pure, aah-ing voice sliding in harmony behind the lead singer. Bingo again.
But why would Dylan be rehashing the 45-year-old "Mighty Quinn" in "Duquesne Whistle"? And the goofy questions this raises--e.g. would Quinn be "you old rascal, I know exactly where you're going"?--and where is the rascal going exactly?--and why does Dylan promise "I'll leave you there myself at the break of day"? Again, doesn't the "Duquesne" question "I wonder if that old oak tree's still standing" allude to "that old oak tree" in Tom Jones's hit "The Green, Green Grass of Home"?--a 1967 (hm!) song that starts with "...as I step down from the train"--and how significant is that?
Answers eventually come, surprisingly tidy ones, but not from these songs, and only indirectly from Shakespeare. Rather, they emerge from Dylan's new Lennon tribute "Roll On, John" and another wayward digression: an anti-documentary film-sequence of Lennon and Dylan cruising stoned in the back of a limousine through London in May 1966.
The limo sequence is part of a film about Dylan and the Band's harsh '65-66 tour, titled Eat the Document, instigated by Dylan, commissioned by ABC but rejected by them as incomprehensible (or scandalous) when completed, and never generally released. But it has occasionally been screened, and parts, including the limo-ride have wandered onto YouTube. Most Dylan and Lennon biographers mention the backseat summit, but ascribe little significance to it. Nor did I initially (and have left posted an Oct. 26, 2012 tweet dismissing it as "stoned-banal" to prove just how wrong critics can be).
What I discovered--gobsmacked--on repeated viewing is that Dylan is kicking around pretty much all the ingredients of "Mighty Quinn" in the limo. Probably the song wasn't written at that point, more likely Dylan watched the limo-sequence afterward--he was actively involved in the film-editing after his motorcycle accident--and the pieces of the song came together in his head somewhere between the cutting-room and Big Pink.
The limo sequence starts with Dylan asking Lennon, "Are you excited?" (jumping for joy maybe?) Then Dylan addresses the limo-driver: "Tom, y'gotta sleep, y'gotta sleep" ("nobody can get no sleep" and "everybody's gonna wanna doze" of course inexplicably appear in "Mighty Quinn"--the limo-ride taking place in the early morning after a Dylan concert and a night of partying). Then Dylan looks out the window and comments, "There's the mighty Thames, that's what held Hitler back..." (incredulous "What?!" from someone on the film-crew side)... yes, the mighty Thames. Winston Churchill said that." (Winston was John Lennon's middle name, he was born during the Blitz and named after Churchill). A few minutes later Dylan cites "the mighty Thames" a third time).
All this may pop a hypothesis or two. Maybe John Lennon is the Mighty Quinn?? And maybe that "You'll not see nothing" in "Mighty Quinn" actually IS a deliberate Nazi pun from our serial punster? In the limo Dylan wishes out loud that he could speak English, praising Lennon's ability to speak American, which brings us again to "You'll not see nothing"--which clearly melds Brit-phrasing and all-American double-negative (although double-negatives do occur in British; checking H. L. Mencken's The American Language reveals that Shakespeare commits one in--ding!--Richard III). One might also note, as our Grade 8 teacher did, that the two negatives cancel each other, so "you'll not see nothing" means you will see something.
Or how about Dylan's intent questioning of Lennon on the name of the Beatles' publishing company, Northern Songs (there is some frustratingly vague discussion of Lennon's suggestion--joking?--that an unspecified Dylan song would go well in the Northern Songs catalog). Then later in the ride comes Dylan's mock-question "So, you're just a new cat (pause) from Canada?" (Lennon promptly concedes he is from Quebec; something about the flatness of this exchange suggests it is rehearsed, tired, or just stray cannabis--both Lennon and Dylan of course came from northern hometowns). Not too hard to see where surrealist Dylan might take all this northness. Or consider how Dylan praises Lennon's acting ability, and mock-proposes to turn driver Tom into a Hollywood star. From there it is a short absurdist hop to transfiguring Lennon into a kraft durch freude film Eskimo.
Indeed, the Quinn-is-Lennon idea, having soaked in for a year, just seems right (hey, all the pigeons DID run to the Beatles,right?) and it surely explains the juxtaposition of pigeons with a John Lennon poster in the opening frames of the "Duquesne Whistle" video. What the theory also does is foreshadow and organize the "Roll On, John" tribute that closes the Tempest album. For if Dylan in "Duquesne Whistle" announces he is taking Quinn-Lennon to a definite destination, "Roll On, John" is where he makes the surreal delivery. To Canada.
Yes, Canada. Where else would our unlikely undertaker take a Liverpuddlian quasi-Inuit for a decent burial? And although it has escaped the notice of the critics, "Roll On, John" is a journey-song, whose Canadian destination Dylan hints at repeatedly.
1) The chorus's refrain of "moving on" may well refer to Canadian Hank Snow's country hit "I'm Moving On" (never mind that Yoko wrote a song with nearly the same title) and a doubly Canadian reference may be signaled when Dylan urges John to "roll through the rain and snow."
2) Many critics, in their haste to belabor the obvious, have noted that "Roll On, John" contains a gamut of Lennon lines (and borrowed lines from elsewhere) but fail to guess that Dylan might twist lines to bring out odd meanings. Dylan? Jokerman? Twist things??
In fact "Come together right now over me" is a straight Lennon quotation, but in the geographic context of "Roll On, John" (which repeatedly stresses location, from "the red-light Hamburg streets" to "you've been cooped up on an island far too long"--which might be Britain, Manhattan, or a Long Island pun), from Dylan's Yankee perspective "over me" is Canada. Check a map and see. And note again those "native land" lights in the topside epigraph.
3) At 5:49 of the song Dylan expands the chorus's "moving on" phrase to "moving on north"--although you need a top sound system and sharp ears to hear the understated addition.
4) Adding to his vast hoard of ultra-baffling lines, Dylan instructs Lennon to "Take the right-hand road and go where the buffaloes go." Right-hand road? Buffaloes?? In a rambling rhapsody on the Atlantic website (where he calls Dylan a "Holocaust-denying maggot") Dylan-stalker A. J. Weberman asserts that "right-hand road" shows Dylan waxing right-wing, and for perhaps the fifth time in his long kabbalistic kareer our happy crackpot may actually be in the vicinity of the truth. Surely the educated Bob, who tracks everything from yakuza memoirs to Falstaff's thousand-year old origins (including medieval drama's Vice figure) would know that Canada in 2012 has a Conservative government. Again, from Wood Buffalo Park to Buffalo aircraft to Buffalo Springfield, Canada has clearly attained global dominance in shaggy bovines...
I could further explain why Dylan's appropriation of Blake's "Tyger, tyger, burning bright" for the "Roll On, John" climax is also Canadian (and jaw-dropping), but the word-count grows alarmingly high, so let's make it a wrap. An appalling amount of stuff remains to be sorted out, e.g.the time jokes (hint: "quarter to three" in "Going to Acapulco" and its "soft gut" are both filched from Shakespeare's "Seven Ages"). Again, there's the status of Dylan's "This Wheel's on Fire" as a grab-bag of the Tragedies (e.g. "confiscate your lace" from Othello, "unpack" from Hamlet, "wheel's on fire" from King Lear and/or G. Wilson Knight's study of the Tragedies, The Wheel of Fire).
Yet again, a half-essay must be written on Dylan deriving "I Shall Be Released" from Richard II (and how, as with "Odds and Ends" and Troilus and Cressida, his distillation proves Dylan a razor-sharp critic). Indeed, I would argue that in "Crash on the Levee" Dylan has, implicitly at the very least, solved the centuries-old mystery of Hamlet, perceiving that the play is no tragedy (as Voltaire also argued) and that Prince Hamlet is no tragic hero but a downright vicious schmuck--which is how Dylan plays him. Why else would Dylan caricature Hamlet blaming Ophelia for her own drowning? And then sneering, "You're going to have to find yourself another best friend somehow"--a downright spiteful, nay lunatic thing to say. Isn't it time we scholars stopped making excuses for the unhinged Prince of Denmark? (Voltaire notably didn't go quite so far; instead veering off into the notion that Shakespeare was a wild barbarian who ran amok over the rules of drama. The French satirist never quite caught Shakespeare's deadpan satire of nutbar Hamlet, as Dylan does).
But all this will require two or three more essays to delineate, considering the plethora of satellite concerns, like Dylan and Lennon's obvious rapport (versus Atlantic critics who argue the infatuation was nearly all on Lennon's side) followed however by the two drifting apart in the 70s--an on-off relationship not much studied, although a late-breaking brain spasm jolts me to the realization that the Beatles' hit song "Come Together" is OBVIOUSLY (how did we miss it??) Lennon's absurdist response to Dylan's absurdism, from the flat-top guitar to the "joker" selfie. More astonishingly, "Come Together" artfully and playfully recognizes two related Shakespeare sources that Dylan uses--can you spot them? (hint: knees, and hair used as a regal pun). Compare Robbie Robertson's puzzled reactions to Dylan's lyrics, also artful and playful, but less perceptive methinks (albeit Dylan may have discussed Shakespeare with Lennon but not Robertson--perhaps?)
Then there is Joni Mitchell's recent accusation--as mysteriously dropped as raised--that Dylan is all fake; mostly off the mark, but having a dash of truth, and being climax to some extensive historical interplay between the two songwriters (including a sort of absurdist dialogue-of-lyrics, unless I'm just hallucinating).
Moreover, Mitchell likely nurses some puzzlement and suspicions about the Basement Tapes. After all, she has publicly sung "I Shall Be Released" at least twice--a song rated #6 among Dylan's "Top 100" songs by Rolling Stone's assembled poohbahs--and she must have wondered at "I see my light come shining/ From the west unto the east." Not a Cold War metaphor, Ms. Mitchell (and poohbahs). A crucial Shakespearean one.
Again, much else on the Tempest album also deals with John Lennon, e.g. the gender-bent (like Mrs. Henry or Sweet Loretta Modern) "fairy queen" in "Soon After Midnight"--is she mighty?--or "that woman in my bed" in "Duquesne Whistle"?--did she emerge from John and Yoko's tongue-in-cheek press release announcing both were about to undergo sex-changes? Did Dr. Robert perform the operation on John? Okay, admittedly other candidates for "that woman" exist, Dylan having left the options cutely ambiguous.
Then there's the eyebrow-raising researches of another Dylan sleuth, Scott Warmuth, hero of David Kinney's new-published book The Dylanologists, who has uncovered (slowly as myself) reams of Hemingway and other literature between the lines of Bob the Borrower Bee.
Nor should we forget Dylan's long-simmering hostility to the media and celebrity-journalism (check Tempest throughout, e.g."They chirp and they chatter/ What does it matter?" Or "rags on your back" if you catch THAT double-meaning). Or the possible upshot of Tempest's best song "Scarlet Town" (a defense of surreal folk music?--a veiled rejoinder to Joni?)
Or Dylan's epilogue to the Shakespeare project in a suddenly less mysterious "All Along the Watchtower"--cue the Bard as "the thief he kindly spoke"--and maybe the critics as "plowmen dig my earth" eh? (you read it first in this newspaper). Or a full decoding of "Mighty Quinn"--line by line, including variants (the animal-noises variant arguably tags the animal noises on the Beatles' "Good Morning")..
And so on, until a final wallop floors me: finding Dylan in John Fogerty's "Old Man Down the Road"--a discovery that kills an orderly end to this essay (but check the official video of Fogerty's hit; isn't that dude in black a Dylanoid doing "I Walk the Line"?) Finally, any Dylan follow-ups will have to answer aggrieved experts and irked layfolks (hey, everyone is a licensed critic) who will insist that some or all of the above is a load of hooey.
Before such accusations fly, yes, I do admit failure in divining Dylan's general strategy in contriving his musical cryptograms, unless it is--let me take a wild stab--satiric intent. In the all-important matter of pigeon-holing, Dylan ultimately does seem to be a satirist.
But having let this essay lurch schizophrenically
Try this logical inference from "Roll On, John": if John Lennon a) rolls on, and b) burned so bright, as Dylan keeps telling us in the chorus, then Lennon, like King Lear, was bound to be a wheel of fire, wasn't he not?
Jens Andersen launches tweets from @frameofmind, where he salutes Dylan with a triple-negative in his bio. Scrambling to research this article, he somehow acquired two different editions of Andy Gill's Classic Bob Dylan--The Stories Behind Every Song 1962-1969, both illustrated with a picture of Hubert Humphrey as Vice-president ("No, no, NO!") and is offering the oversize book (and a big call-out) as an alleged "prize" to the first tweep to tweet the correct deduction of which Shakespeare play and whose point-of-view is taken by the Dylan song "I'm Not There" (saying, "This is an easy one, folks!")
