Can't believe how oddly and easily this idea came to me. As part of immersing myself in Dylan I downloaded Blonde on Blonde, and one day (in February or March?) the line in "Absolutely Sweet Marie" about "The Persian drunkard he follows me" just suddenly CLICKED. Hey, that would be Omar Khayyam!
Now, I've known since Day One (1970s) that, in "Absolutely Sweet Marie" the "riverboat captain/ He knows my fate" is actually Mark Twain (I've read Letters from Earth etc.), and so with two scribes aboard the song/poem, another idea next-instantly occurred, namely that Marie herself might be a literary person. And simultaneously, all the nudge-wink stuff in Dylan's cryptogram ALSO clicked as being not about some slutty nympho hussy (check the standard interpretations, anywhere) but the reverse: some prim, chaste chick who scarcely talks about sex at all--"You see you forgot to leave me with the key/ So where are you tonight, Sweet Marie?" Emily Dickinson.
But the truth is I know Dickinson perhaps only from a single poem (that one with "Because I would not stop for death/ Death kindly stopped for me"--exact wording not guaranteed). But just how I could generalize from THAT to the overall chasteness of her verse is a bit of a mystery. Maybe I read some notes in an old Norton Anthology?? Anyway, being a professional digressor (I'm SUPPOSED to be digging into Dylan's roots in Shakespeare, which itself is a digression from my Shakespeare work) I just HAD to stray into a few explorations of Dickinson, to see if I couldn't reinforce this Dylan hunch a bit.
A couple of the results I posted a few days ago on @frameofmind on Twitter (to the usual silence, and presumably incomprehension) but let me repeat them a little more extensively here.
When Dylan sings "I'm just sitting here, beating on my trumpet/ With all these promises that you left for me" and again "Six white horses that you did promise/ Were finally delivered down to the penitentiary" doesn't THAT suggest the hint of eroticism, ending in penitence, displayed in THIS Emily Dickinson poem about promising:
http://www.repeatafterus.com/title.php?i=1148
The suspicion is strengthened by the appallingly deep scholarship in Clinton Heylin's Revolution in the Air, where Heylin reveals that in Dylan's original notes for the song, the lyric is actually "the promises you left, that (he) gave to me"
It's pretty easy to perceive an overlapping "he" in both Dylan and Dickinson, eh? And, Jesus, on Dickinson's side it's literally six stanzas/horses of percolating eroticism (by Victorian standards) before Dickinson gets to ye olde Christian penitence.
I'd say Dylan is a pretty good critic of poetry...
PS: I listed "sex" in the labels for this post, at the risk of attracting all those Russian porn surfers again. Take a hike, creeps! But nah, nobody is reading my cyber-blather, except bots methinks.
PPS: (Aug. 1) Likely it would be NSA/KGB security-bots, surveying every drop in the internet-ocean, attempting to see if this poetry stuff is terrorist or what... hm hm... just re-read that Dickinson "Promise This" poem and did a further *CLICK!* to her "Belt your eye" and Bob Dylan's "Me with my belt/ Wrapped round my head" in "Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat" (also from Blonde on Blonde) ... http://www.bobdylan.com/ca/node/25814
Any deniers left?
Saturday, May 18, 2013
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
How an intellectual clears the sidewalk
Fussily, to put it briefly.
Which might be why the blog has suffered of late, for a dump of snow seems to have arrived every second day here in Edmonton this winter, and I seem to be constantly outside with a shovel, doing the long, long sidewalk on our corner lot, which may be the death of my writing career.
But I do get a bit of brainwork done between times, albeit all too little, slowly, and somehow the sidewalk always seems to suffer. Snow must be cleared promptly to be done easily; if you wait, the white stuff is stomped down and glues to the walk, and/or melts/refreezes at this time of year, which is even worse. And so if I struggle, as I do, to complete my Bob-Dylan-surrealizes-Shakespeare article (hideously overdue) or skim the rags to reconnoiter the issues--getting maybe a handful of global warming items that might be the seed of something--the sidewalk is maybe developing ice-patches, injuries and lawsuits...
Even writing the above intro has cost a half hour of potential work time in the taxi, where I spend 60+ hours a week. You just can't win. And God knows how many global-warming articles are scattered around this anarchy of an office.
Which might be why the blog has suffered of late, for a dump of snow seems to have arrived every second day here in Edmonton this winter, and I seem to be constantly outside with a shovel, doing the long, long sidewalk on our corner lot, which may be the death of my writing career.
But I do get a bit of brainwork done between times, albeit all too little, slowly, and somehow the sidewalk always seems to suffer. Snow must be cleared promptly to be done easily; if you wait, the white stuff is stomped down and glues to the walk, and/or melts/refreezes at this time of year, which is even worse. And so if I struggle, as I do, to complete my Bob-Dylan-surrealizes-Shakespeare article (hideously overdue) or skim the rags to reconnoiter the issues--getting maybe a handful of global warming items that might be the seed of something--the sidewalk is maybe developing ice-patches, injuries and lawsuits...
Even writing the above intro has cost a half hour of potential work time in the taxi, where I spend 60+ hours a week. You just can't win. And God knows how many global-warming articles are scattered around this anarchy of an office.
Monday, January 14, 2013
Who is the "Mighty Quinn"?
The following blog-post is, for the moment, ONLY an **extended intro** cum teaser. But the entire article WILL get plunked here, maybe two or three days after making a debut in dead-wood media, thereby generating some do-re-mi for both the papers and your beleaguered racketeer of writing. Stay tuned... can't believe this stretch-essay has incubated over five months... *sigh* ...
May, nine months... *siiiiiiiigh*...
July, 11 months...
March, 2014 19 months...
My THIRD August: Okay, sneak preview (30%?) of this stinking, overlong yet way-too-short albatross... now (Aug. 29) SENT OUT... and waiting for editorial blessing (doubtful, given 6,300 words...) Yep, as journalism it went over like a uranium blimp...
FOURTH August (2015): Wait for the book (not the movie, because there won't be one).
Suggested call-out from article (one of a bunch):
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-
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
Bob is not authentic at all. He's a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception.
Joni Mitchell, 2010
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, LSD 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 remain 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 Nuremberg 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 to King 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.... (to ...Dylan's "You take your file and you bend my head" etc.)
* * *
(main body of essay with another ton of detail)
* * *
Oh yes, the no-longer-secret identity of Quinn, not that anyone cares... the evidence is more interesting than the mere fact in any case...
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=17730345#post17730345
Damn!--not sure WHY an end-jam of words is occuring on this blog-post (verbiage overload??) but doing a cut-and-paste to the Straight Dope page SHOULD be possible...
(July 1, 2016, Quinn-page still there... all quiet... now an ancient, academic question, like the color of F. Scott Fitzgerald's undershorts...)
May, nine months... *siiiiiiiigh*...
July, 11 months...
March, 2014 19 months...
My THIRD August: Okay, sneak preview (30%?) of this stinking, overlong yet way-too-short albatross... now (Aug. 29) SENT OUT... and waiting for editorial blessing (doubtful, given 6,300 words...) Yep, as journalism it went over like a uranium blimp...
FOURTH August (2015): Wait for the book (not the movie, because there won't be one).
Suggested call-out from article (one of a bunch):
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
Bob is not authentic at all. He's a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception.
Joni Mitchell, 2010
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, LSD 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 remain 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 Nuremberg 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 to King 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.... (to ...Dylan's "You take your file and you bend my head" etc.)
* * *
(main body of essay with another ton of detail)
* * *
...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)...
* * *
(end-matter)
* * *
(end-matter)
* * *
That's it for now; still less than half the essay. As I said, the whole stinking mess will get dumped here after publication...Oh yes, the no-longer-secret identity of Quinn, not that anyone cares... the evidence is more interesting than the mere fact in any case...
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=17730345#post17730345
Damn!--not sure WHY an end-jam of words is occuring on this blog-post (verbiage overload??) but doing a cut-and-paste to the Straight Dope page SHOULD be possible...
(July 1, 2016, Quinn-page still there... all quiet... now an ancient, academic question, like the color of F. Scott Fitzgerald's undershorts...)
Saturday, October 20, 2012
Deconstructing deconstruction
Oh yeah, this baby is going to be FUN! Just you wait! =]
Damn! People are actually visiting the blog! Gotta get this show on the road... =[
Damn! People are actually visiting the blog! Gotta get this show on the road... =[
Thursday, October 18, 2012
_The Sand Pebbles_ As a Recurring Absence
Glossy magazines, unlike underground comix, continue to thrive. And so, lacking a venue that carries the latest Crumb cartoons, I find myself at Safeway surveying the magazines. And lacking anything else new and noteworthy, I find myself eyeing the military titles. Are there more than before? Or is this just another of the countless areas I can't keep track of?
One grabs my eye
One grabs my eye
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Summary: Dylan's Basement-borrowings from Shakespeare
Judging from my finds so far, Bob Dylan had a pretty definite "let's paraphrase Shakespeare crazily" program in mind on the Basement Tapes. Condensed results to date, from around the blog here, and from my haphazard Twitter and Facebook posts:
"Odds and Ends" -- from Troilus and Cressida (tent scene)
"Crash on the Levee" -- from Hamlet (Prince Hamlet versus mom and Ophelia)
"Please Mrs Henry"-- from Henry IV, Part 1 (Falstaff freestyled; from Merry Wives too??)
"Tiny Montgomery"-- from Timon of Athens (title, etc)*
"Apple Suckling Tree" -- from Taming of the Shrew (Bartholomew, seven years)
"Wheels on Fire" -- Othello (title/scholarly tome) (May 22, 2013: woops! Nope!*****)
"Lo and Behold" -- Antony and Cleopatra (mound! 30 BC! etc)**
"Million Dollar Bash" -- Midsummer Night's Dream?? (title, later: or general overview??)***
"Going to Acapulco" -- As You Like It (Arden is "big places" etc)...
"You Ain't Going Nowhere" -- A Winter's Tale (cold weather, "railings" pun, aged bride coming, etc)
"Yea, Heavy and a Bottle of Bread" -- Measure for Measure (bread, smell, general dissipation--it's maybe the most complicated yet!)****
"Open the door, Homer" -- Richard II, bit o' King Lear too?? (man...)
"Mighty Quinn" -- Richard III, (far more clearcut, thankfully)
"I'm Not There"-- Romeo and Juliet, ("gone" from dead Romeo, e.g. scene V iii)
"Tears of Rage" -- King Lear ("rake your name in sand"?)
"I Shall Be Released" Richard II("light" from west to east, Mowbray "framed" etc.)(June 1; excuse slowness)
Man, gotta sort all this stuff out... if you're really interested, imaginary reader, snout around the blog etc. for the tedious details, or ask me...
*Just on a hunch, from Dylan's "gas that dog" I checked "dog" in the Shakespeare Concordance. Slight surprise: Timon of Athens has more uses of the word "dog" (14) than any other play, and 13 of the 14 instances have the same cadence as Dylan's usage; only "unpeaceable dog" doesn't. Check the others if thou doubtest:
http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/search/search-results.php?link=con&searchtype=exact&works[]=timonathens&keyword1=dog&sortby=WorkName&pleasewait=1&msg=sr
** (Oct. 11) Put some of the evidence/argument on youtube (of all places) with a little swipe at the adjoining Alan J. Weberman uber-sophistry. Heh. =]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKdiLurvimA
(Oct. 21) Put a load of detailed additions onto Twitter; keywords: hook, vacant seat/vacancy, shame, name, hat/helmet. Really, this is about the most open-and-shut case of borrowing in all the songs.
*** (Oct. 11) Okay, a little searching of my e-self TOTALLY drew a blank. Is my e-face red? But hey, check THIS possibility for the mysterious "cheeks in a chunk"
http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/search/search-results.php?link=con&searchtype=exact&works[]=henry6p1&keyword1=cheek%27s&sortby=WorkName&pleasewait=1&msg=sr
A fairly direct hit methinks, although I don't think the whole song "reduces" to Henry VI. More like the song is some sort of bizarre pan-Shakespeare fanfare, possibly directed like a bullet at Weberman ("Along came Jones and emptied the trash"). In fact it is easy to imagine Dylan writing the tune and muttering under his breath, "Interpret THIS, you dumb bastard."
Dec. 23 postscript: a little research suggests Dylan didn't know Weberman until a year or two later. Damn!--and the line seemed like such a perfect reference too (now about the Lieber and Stoller possibilities...). But still: I now HAVE figured out exactly WHO the Shakespearean "big dumb blonde with her wheel gorged/in the gorge" is. Oh yes! Beg me to tell you, o whizbot following this blog! =]
Oct 21, 2013 The "wrist" is easy to find in Hamlet...
* * * *
Okay, I'll try to be organized and make this post Clearinghouse Central for all the emerging Dylan-Shakespeare stuff (and date each item) as I dig it up. We're still only at the tip of the iceberg, I'm guessing... and never mind that this mixaphor implies digging the water around an iceberg, dammit. =]
* * * *
**** This song ("Yea, Heavy") submits well to word-checking on the Shakespeare concordance (trouts, catch, etc.) but I'm also picking up distinct echoes of Love's Labor Lost in the song (e.g. pipe). Hm--"the comic book in me" might be two? Nice joke. But alas, while I've read Measure for Measure (big help) I'm unfamiliar with Love's Labors Lost...
*****Proof it pays to be thorough: further dips into the concordance (favors, unpack) hit Titus Andronicus and Hamlet respectively, and as I've possibly mentioned elsewhere (others Dylanologists have too) The Wheel of Fire is a prominent study of Shakespearean tragedy, therefore the song is quite arguably a tragic mishmash. Yeah, THERE is a great two-word blurb, eh?--tragic mishmash. Parallelly (is that a word?) "Yea, Heavy and a Bottle of Bread" may be a general mishmash of the comedies? Onward to the tedious research.
June 14, 2013 Initial indications: "Long-Distance Operator" rooted in Cymbeline (operate, thousands) and Minstrel Boy" in Love's Labor Lost (coin, twelve, roll and the suggestion of "toil"), Romeo and Juliet (minstrel in a money context), and Rape of Lucrece (?--Mocking-bird). Needs some work and nailing-down, but really, who has the time... and my initial ridiculous guess was "Twelve forward gears" MIGHT be a reference to sonnet-structure. And/or the song is about John Lennon. File all that under "a headful of ideas that are..."
circa Oct 7, 2013 (check Twitter @frameofmind...) "Don't Ya Tell Henry" taps Henry V (and makes a sort of surreal "sense" or two of "Apple's got your fly!"
"Odds and Ends" -- from Troilus and Cressida (tent scene)
"Crash on the Levee" -- from Hamlet (Prince Hamlet versus mom and Ophelia)
"Please Mrs Henry"-- from Henry IV, Part 1 (Falstaff freestyled; from Merry Wives too??)
"Tiny Montgomery"-- from Timon of Athens (title, etc)*
"Apple Suckling Tree" -- from Taming of the Shrew (Bartholomew, seven years)
"Wheels on Fire" -- Othello (title/scholarly tome) (May 22, 2013: woops! Nope!*****)
"Lo and Behold" -- Antony and Cleopatra (mound! 30 BC! etc)**
"Million Dollar Bash" -- Midsummer Night's Dream?? (title, later: or general overview??)***
"Going to Acapulco" -- As You Like It (Arden is "big places" etc)...
"You Ain't Going Nowhere" -- A Winter's Tale (cold weather, "railings" pun, aged bride coming, etc)
"Yea, Heavy and a Bottle of Bread" -- Measure for Measure (bread, smell, general dissipation--it's maybe the most complicated yet!)****
"Open the door, Homer" -- Richard II, bit o' King Lear too?? (man...)
"Mighty Quinn" -- Richard III, (far more clearcut, thankfully)
"I'm Not There"-- Romeo and Juliet, ("gone" from dead Romeo, e.g. scene V iii)
"Tears of Rage" -- King Lear ("rake your name in sand"?)
"I Shall Be Released" Richard II("light" from west to east, Mowbray "framed" etc.)(June 1; excuse slowness)
Man, gotta sort all this stuff out... if you're really interested, imaginary reader, snout around the blog etc. for the tedious details, or ask me...
*Just on a hunch, from Dylan's "gas that dog" I checked "dog" in the Shakespeare Concordance. Slight surprise: Timon of Athens has more uses of the word "dog" (14) than any other play, and 13 of the 14 instances have the same cadence as Dylan's usage; only "unpeaceable dog" doesn't. Check the others if thou doubtest:
http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/search/search-results.php?link=con&searchtype=exact&works[]=timonathens&keyword1=dog&sortby=WorkName&pleasewait=1&msg=sr
** (Oct. 11) Put some of the evidence/argument on youtube (of all places) with a little swipe at the adjoining Alan J. Weberman uber-sophistry. Heh. =]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKdiLurvimA
(Oct. 21) Put a load of detailed additions onto Twitter; keywords: hook, vacant seat/vacancy, shame, name, hat/helmet. Really, this is about the most open-and-shut case of borrowing in all the songs.
*** (Oct. 11) Okay, a little searching of my e-self TOTALLY drew a blank. Is my e-face red? But hey, check THIS possibility for the mysterious "cheeks in a chunk"
http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/search/search-results.php?link=con&searchtype=exact&works[]=henry6p1&keyword1=cheek%27s&sortby=WorkName&pleasewait=1&msg=sr
A fairly direct hit methinks, although I don't think the whole song "reduces" to Henry VI. More like the song is some sort of bizarre pan-Shakespeare fanfare, possibly directed like a bullet at Weberman ("Along came Jones and emptied the trash"). In fact it is easy to imagine Dylan writing the tune and muttering under his breath, "Interpret THIS, you dumb bastard."
Dec. 23 postscript: a little research suggests Dylan didn't know Weberman until a year or two later. Damn!--and the line seemed like such a perfect reference too (now about the Lieber and Stoller possibilities...). But still: I now HAVE figured out exactly WHO the Shakespearean "big dumb blonde with her wheel gorged/in the gorge" is. Oh yes! Beg me to tell you, o whizbot following this blog! =]
Oct 21, 2013 The "wrist" is easy to find in Hamlet...
* * * *
Okay, I'll try to be organized and make this post Clearinghouse Central for all the emerging Dylan-Shakespeare stuff (and date each item) as I dig it up. We're still only at the tip of the iceberg, I'm guessing... and never mind that this mixaphor implies digging the water around an iceberg, dammit. =]
* * * *
**** This song ("Yea, Heavy") submits well to word-checking on the Shakespeare concordance (trouts, catch, etc.) but I'm also picking up distinct echoes of Love's Labor Lost in the song (e.g. pipe). Hm--"the comic book in me" might be two? Nice joke. But alas, while I've read Measure for Measure (big help) I'm unfamiliar with Love's Labors Lost...
*****Proof it pays to be thorough: further dips into the concordance (favors, unpack) hit Titus Andronicus and Hamlet respectively, and as I've possibly mentioned elsewhere (others Dylanologists have too) The Wheel of Fire is a prominent study of Shakespearean tragedy, therefore the song is quite arguably a tragic mishmash. Yeah, THERE is a great two-word blurb, eh?--tragic mishmash. Parallelly (is that a word?) "Yea, Heavy and a Bottle of Bread" may be a general mishmash of the comedies? Onward to the tedious research.
June 14, 2013 Initial indications: "Long-Distance Operator" rooted in Cymbeline (operate, thousands) and Minstrel Boy" in Love's Labor Lost (coin, twelve, roll and the suggestion of "toil"), Romeo and Juliet (minstrel in a money context), and Rape of Lucrece (?--Mocking-bird). Needs some work and nailing-down, but really, who has the time... and my initial ridiculous guess was "Twelve forward gears" MIGHT be a reference to sonnet-structure. And/or the song is about John Lennon. File all that under "a headful of ideas that are..."
circa Oct 7, 2013 (check Twitter @frameofmind...) "Don't Ya Tell Henry" taps Henry V (and makes a sort of surreal "sense" or two of "Apple's got your fly!"
Saturday, October 6, 2012
What's the big idea?
The problem isn't easy to put into words, although Rushdie's "God-shaped hole" may be a convenient shorthand. Remember shorthand? Or longhand? Reading the fresh obituary of R. B. Greaves today, it occurs to me that in his oldies hit song "Take a Letter, Maria" his "good secretary" likely took the fateful letter in shorthand, although, being 1969, she may have had a dictaphone or something more advanced.
Details. The quaintness of the technology, however, pales next to a certain political incorrectness in the song, namely the singer's suspiciously quick turnaround (as the systems-analysts call it) from the cheating wife to the charming co-worker. What?--no time to grieve the loss of your helpmeet and/or wax existential on the dissolution of holy matrimony? (editorial note: my computer's spellchuck accepts "turnaround" but not "helpmeet"--the times they are a-changing, and not necessarily for the better.
And who is to say that the wife was merely a slut as the song insinuates? Perhaps she had been abused (a feminist or four might argue) or her complacent hubby had begun to take things for granted? Again, who is to say that the secretary would automatically accept the singer's climactic dinner invitation and supply him with a happy ending? She may have filed a sexual-harassment claim instead. Ah, competing narratives. Where do they all come from? All the hidden subtexts, where do they all belong?
"Supposing truth to be a woman..."
Really, we could begin almost anywhere in the ubiquitous media, e.g. yesterday's Globe and Mail repeatedly pushed my buttons--e.g. their alert journalist who raised "problematic feminist ramifications" (LOVE those polysyllables!) in the current-craze Shades of Grey novels. But I have the uneasy feeling I've been picking on the old Mop and Pail a little too much recently, so I pull a random National Post from the heap instead, knowing from experience I can find a Swiss-cheese of God-holes there too, in support of my theme.
July 26, 2012: The smiling face of Clara Hughes is splashed across the front page, dominating the top half...
* * * *
Whaaaaaaat?! ANOTHER incomplete teaser??? Yep, stay tuned, folks.
Details. The quaintness of the technology, however, pales next to a certain political incorrectness in the song, namely the singer's suspiciously quick turnaround (as the systems-analysts call it) from the cheating wife to the charming co-worker. What?--no time to grieve the loss of your helpmeet and/or wax existential on the dissolution of holy matrimony? (editorial note: my computer's spellchuck accepts "turnaround" but not "helpmeet"--the times they are a-changing, and not necessarily for the better.
And who is to say that the wife was merely a slut as the song insinuates? Perhaps she had been abused (a feminist or four might argue) or her complacent hubby had begun to take things for granted? Again, who is to say that the secretary would automatically accept the singer's climactic dinner invitation and supply him with a happy ending? She may have filed a sexual-harassment claim instead. Ah, competing narratives. Where do they all come from? All the hidden subtexts, where do they all belong?
"Supposing truth to be a woman..."
Really, we could begin almost anywhere in the ubiquitous media, e.g. yesterday's Globe and Mail repeatedly pushed my buttons--e.g. their alert journalist who raised "problematic feminist ramifications" (LOVE those polysyllables!) in the current-craze Shades of Grey novels. But I have the uneasy feeling I've been picking on the old Mop and Pail a little too much recently, so I pull a random National Post from the heap instead, knowing from experience I can find a Swiss-cheese of God-holes there too, in support of my theme.
July 26, 2012: The smiling face of Clara Hughes is splashed across the front page, dominating the top half...
* * * *
Whaaaaaaat?! ANOTHER incomplete teaser??? Yep, stay tuned, folks.
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Choose sides! Choose sides! (Iraq 2003)
Another oldie-essay, written in 2003 about the time the U.S. military was reaching Baghdad. The Globe and Mail Book section at the time had a regular feature called "Three for Thought" wherein freelance writers would recommend three books on a subject. Margaret Atwood had already done a war-related piece, but I found it a bit tepid, and her three books academic and uninspiring, so I set myself the task of cobbling together something a bit more galvanic. Something to commemorate great war-literature. Something to get my moribund writing career restarted.
The following was what I (typically) wasted too much time composing. I mailed in and waited. Nada. Not even a "sorry but it doesn't meet our needs" letter. Well, what the hell. One for the alumni of Hard Knocks College. But it may still have some residual relevance as an Iran conflict looms, so here it is:
* * *
(Once again, gotta find the lamentable thing. Hey, I'm beyond embarrassment...)
The following was what I (typically) wasted too much time composing. I mailed in and waited. Nada. Not even a "sorry but it doesn't meet our needs" letter. Well, what the hell. One for the alumni of Hard Knocks College. But it may still have some residual relevance as an Iran conflict looms, so here it is:
* * *
(Once again, gotta find the lamentable thing. Hey, I'm beyond embarrassment...)
Monday, September 24, 2012
A Question for Robbie Robertson
So, if you are a devotee of the Basement Tapes, and are following my Dylan-Shakespeare thing (you are, right?--closely, minutely and obsessively, right?) perhaps this question may have occurred to you too: when Dylan on the "Crash on the Levee" sings:
"Swamp's gonna rise, no boat's gonna row,
You can train on down to William's Point..."
...is Robbie Robertson behind him aware that they are doing a Shakespeare mash-up? (or "surrealization" as I called it). Or is he just thinking, "Well, well, another screwball Dylan tune, pass the doob... man!... hee hee!"
One tantalizing bit of evidence on the Tapes album indicates Robertson is thinking SOMETHING about the screwiness, else why would he sing, on his own song "Yazoo Street Scandal":
"Sweet William said, with a drunken head,
If I had a boat, I'd help you float..."
Unless you argue that the entire album is just 100% surreal nonsense with an Americana flavor (a tenable thesis, I must admit, with a rueful chuckle) Robertson must be either a) aware that Dylan is reconfiguring Hamlet, or b) groping at Dylan's meaning and riffing around with it. Offhand I'd guess Robertson DOESN'T see the Hamlet connection, but I bet he is smart enough to be puzzling about incongruities like:
"King for king, queen for queen,
Gonna be the meanest flood anybody's seen..."
Yep.
* * * *
Sept 30 footnote: FINALLY scouted the lyrics online; here are two results:
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/band/yazoostreetscandal.html
http://www.elyrics.net/read/b/band-lyrics/yazoo-street-scandal-lyrics.html
Man oh man oh man.
I know how altogether RIDICULOUS it is to even ATTEMPT an analysis of these wacky lyrics, but let's try to reduce the murk just a little. First comes determining just what the lyrics ARE. Note the disagreements between the two transcripts (e.g. I dibs "Eliza" rather than "Delilah") and, heck even where the two sources agree I'm inclined to raise question-flags. For example, is it really "widow"??--my ears have heard "winner" all these decades, and "winner" gives a nice Civil-War flavor to the nasty laugh at Cotton King. On the other hand, this is mighty intuitive, and anything but conclusive.
Now look at the line that BOTH obviously struggle to hear: "Think what you want/"Take once for all" respectively. After about 10 listens each to the Basement Tapes version and the Big Pink outtake (very similar) I'd say the actual line is "Cain't want the war" but I'll admit that the vocals are strained and I'm groping. Nor is the context much help.
* * *
(just a little more to wrap up this inconclusive turkey...)
"Swamp's gonna rise, no boat's gonna row,
You can train on down to William's Point..."
...is Robbie Robertson behind him aware that they are doing a Shakespeare mash-up? (or "surrealization" as I called it). Or is he just thinking, "Well, well, another screwball Dylan tune, pass the doob... man!... hee hee!"
One tantalizing bit of evidence on the Tapes album indicates Robertson is thinking SOMETHING about the screwiness, else why would he sing, on his own song "Yazoo Street Scandal":
"Sweet William said, with a drunken head,
If I had a boat, I'd help you float..."
Unless you argue that the entire album is just 100% surreal nonsense with an Americana flavor (a tenable thesis, I must admit, with a rueful chuckle) Robertson must be either a) aware that Dylan is reconfiguring Hamlet, or b) groping at Dylan's meaning and riffing around with it. Offhand I'd guess Robertson DOESN'T see the Hamlet connection, but I bet he is smart enough to be puzzling about incongruities like:
"King for king, queen for queen,
Gonna be the meanest flood anybody's seen..."
Yep.
* * * *
Sept 30 footnote: FINALLY scouted the lyrics online; here are two results:
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/band/yazoostreetscandal.html
http://www.elyrics.net/read/b/band-lyrics/yazoo-street-scandal-lyrics.html
Man oh man oh man.
I know how altogether RIDICULOUS it is to even ATTEMPT an analysis of these wacky lyrics, but let's try to reduce the murk just a little. First comes determining just what the lyrics ARE. Note the disagreements between the two transcripts (e.g. I dibs "Eliza" rather than "Delilah") and, heck even where the two sources agree I'm inclined to raise question-flags. For example, is it really "widow"??--my ears have heard "winner" all these decades, and "winner" gives a nice Civil-War flavor to the nasty laugh at Cotton King. On the other hand, this is mighty intuitive, and anything but conclusive.
Now look at the line that BOTH obviously struggle to hear: "Think what you want/"Take once for all" respectively. After about 10 listens each to the Basement Tapes version and the Big Pink outtake (very similar) I'd say the actual line is "Cain't want the war" but I'll admit that the vocals are strained and I'm groping. Nor is the context much help.
* * *
(just a little more to wrap up this inconclusive turkey...)
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