By Mark Butler.*
SOME time in 1970, while I was still pretending to be a student at Macquarie University, I gave a lecture outlining my belief that Bob Dylan would one day be seen as a great poet on the same level as Eliot, Yeats and Auden, at that time my touchstones for poetic greatness.
To make my case I brought along a portable turntable, amplifier and speakers, on which and through which I played tracks such as Subterranean Homesick Blues, Stuck Inside of Mobile, It’s Alright Ma (I’m only Bleeding), and All Along the Watchtower, drawn from Dylan’s monumental 60s quartet of Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, and John Wesley Harding, finally homing in on Desolation Row and its mythic power, a power only great art possesses.
I don’t know if I convinced the audience but time has agreed with me, as has the Nobel Prize committee. Besides I suspect any lingering doubts about his status were blown away by his astonishing late-career masterpiece, the 17-minute Murder Most Foul, which he released online as a single in 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, remember, a point Greil Marcus hammers in his latest book on the bard, Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs (Yale).
That Murder Most Foul quickly shot to number one on the singles chart in the US is just one of the extraordinary things about it. In a statement released at the same time, Dylan was quoted as saying it was “a gift to fans for their support and loyalty over the years”, which sounded like the kind of message a hostage would send out, but no matter, he’s like that.
Marcus also quotes the best comment I have seen about the song, by Esquire magazine’s Charles Pierce, who wrote: “It’s a walk down the full length of desolation row …” You bet it is, and as his theme Dylan chose the event that marked the beginning of the end for the US, president John F Kennedy’s assassination.
Marcus is one of the most diligent and certainly one of the most perceptive Dylan scholars, as Invisible Republic, his book about the Basement Tapes, comprehensively demonstrated. His thesis then, that Dylan’s work can only be fully understood by placing him in his correct place in the firmament as the crowning embodiment of the Anglo-American folk music tradition, is even more valid in the wake of Murder Most Foul. It’s all in there.
The seven songs mentioned in the title of Marcus’s book are Blowin’ in the Wind, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, Ain’t Talking, The Times They Are a-Changin’, Desolation Row, Jim Jones and Murder Most Foul.
“Jim Jones? Who or what is this Jim Jones? What album was that on? Surely not the Mr Jones?” I hear you ask. No, he’s the bloke bound in chains for Botany Bay, the same Jim Jones earnest Australian folk singers have warbled about for decades, the narrator of a song deeply rooted in that same Anglosphere folk tradition, with its rousing last verse:
And some dark night, when everything
Is silent in the town,
I’ll shoot those tyrants one and all,
I’ll gun the floggers down.
Oh I’ll give the land a little shock,
Remember what I say,
They’ll yet regret they sent Jim Jones
In chains to Botany Bay.
It was a revelation to learn from Marcus that for one year, 1993, Jim Jones was regularly on Dylan’s set list, although never officially recorded. He hasn’t played it since. And of course Marcus obtained live recordings of most of those performances and listened to them obsessively so that we don’t have to.
I found the chapters on Blowin’ in the Wind, Hattie Carroll, Ain’t Talking and Jim Jones to carry the most weight, but he is never less than interesting about the others as well. At the very least you will re-listen to those songs with your ears tuned to hear new and different frequencies.
On the downside, Marcus can drift into pointless excursions, most annoyingly in his otherwise excellent chapter on Hattie Carroll, when he tries to draw a direct link between that song and Laurie Anderson’s O Superman!. But the breadth and depth of his knowledge is such that you forgive him for those moments.
Especially as his footnotes are always from the top shelf. This, about the villain of Hattie Carroll, is a ripper: “He never escaped the song. He died at 69 in 2009. To the end he cursed Dylan for making sure his name would outlive him. ‘He’s a no-account son of a bitch ‘ he said 40 years after Dylan in his way, imprisoned him. ‘He’s like the scum of a bag of the earth.’ “
Another of the book’s strengths is that underlying each chapter is a sub-theme exploring notions of authenticity and plagiarism, including lengthy quotes from folk purists and Dylan (mainly from his Chronicles: Volume One, which this book has inspired me to re-read). This is necessary, for the subject always comes up, usually wrapped in Joni Mitchell’s blunt but wrong-headed accusation that Dylan is a plagiarist.
I call that accusation wrong-headed because if Dylan is a plagiarist, so is every musician who has played or written a 12-bar blues song. For that matter, so was Robbie Burns, who drew much of his inspiration from Scottish folk songs.
And while some critics have claimed that Dylan’s When the Boat Comes In ripped off the Weil/Brecht song Pirate Jenny, about a vengeful domestic servant awaiting the arrival of “the black freighter” so she can pass the death sentence on her cruel employers, it could be said that Weil/Brecht drew on Jim Jones for theirs, for it was well known internationally. And so it goes: that is the nature of folk music.
Dylan has never hidden his sources; indeed, his Theme Time Radio Hour series was basically an audio confession. Here are my influences, he seemed to be saying, and the unspoken part was, “And look what I have done with them.” And, as is the case with Burns, that is all that matters. I mean, which is better, Lord Randal, or the epic song Dylan made from it, A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall?
And plagiarism really is beside the point. As Marcus makes plain, Dylan’s singular genius has been to absorb all that has gone before him in popular music and remake it as high art. That he is still doing it in his 80s is a rare achievement and places him securely in the topmost echelon of any pantheon of poets.
Case closed.
