(Note–Bob Dylan’s 85th (!) is tomorrow. A Great many words have been written about him, but I feel that this essay by Dale, which first appeared in Literally Stories UK, is as fine as anything you will find in print!-Leila)
Bob Dylan is a bard of the old school, and also of the school that never gets old. Long after every single Hollywood movie ever made will be penned by androids, computers, zombies, vampires, and “AI,” scattered humans everywhere will still be searching out the work of Bob Dylan, whether to read or listen to it. When Dylan released “Murder Most Foul,” his longest song, in the middle of the Covid Pandemic, he proved every critic who’d ever said he didn’t deserve the Nobel Prize in Literature wrong.
With a terrifying title from Shakespeare, this long song and short fiction is a mini-novel about the Kennedy assassination. And all assassinations, and all murders ever committed, now and in the future. Almost as if to prove that he’s a poet and story-teller more than a musician, Dylan doesn’t even sing this song. He speaks it. He tells the tale like an ancient bard, maybe even going as far back as Homer.
Dylan is often compared to Shakespeare, and for good reason. It could be that a more apt comparison is with the older writer. Homer, like Bob, spent his life traveling from town to town and speak-singing his story-songs to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument. This image of Homer has been accepted for so long that it’s become a fact of fiction that tells the truth, as real as any other Greek mythology, from Zeus to Athena.
Dylan has always cited literary writers as some of his most important, if not his most important, influences. He claimed that “Blood on the Tracks” was inspired by Anton Chekhov’s short stories. He listed his two favorite writers as Emily Dickinson and Arthur Rimbaud. He read T.S. Eliot and James Joyce in high school. He resurrected Charles Baudelaire in “Idiot Wind.” He said that all writers and artists should read John Keats and Herman Melville.
He acknowledged Walt Whitman’s genius. He went to the grave of Jack Kerouac and read Kerouac’s poetry aloud with Allen Ginsberg. He wrote his songs on a typewriter. He created an absurdist book of prose poems, and he composed a memoir that isn’t his best work but is highly readable, filled with signs of the times, then and now.
Someone once compared Bob Dylan to Ernest Hemingway, another writer for whom Dylan has expressed his approval. Both writers diagnosed their times, and fought the wars of their times. While Hemingway went to Italy as an ambulance driver, Dylan went to Mississippi as a liberal Jew who stood out in an open field and sang Civil Rights protest anthems, surely as dangerous as Hemingway heading to the front as a non-combatant who wanted to help injured soldiers.
Dylan has already entered the canon of great American authors. When we look back at history, we see that there are many authors who did not deserve the Nobel Prize, and many authors who did deserve it who didn’t receive it (James Joyce, Leo Tolstoy, and Jorge Luis Borges are a famous three of these). A hundred years from now, Dylan will be seen as a writer who deserved this prize, and then some. His humanity, and his ways of expressing it in English story-language, will last a very, very long time, even, or especially, as the rest of the mainstream world continues to become more and more robotic, tyrannical and inhuman.
The forewarned Bonus Material
Happy Birthday Bob D a Prose Poem
I believe that the first two dorky looking guys to make being dorky looking guys cool were you and Buddy Holly. Can’t imagine Steve Reeves singing Peggy Sue on AM or Dash Riprock getting all Positively Fourth Street on the weird radio. Thank Zimmerman you have traveling angels on your side. Seems an obscenity that all that time flew by. But if I could play God and select people to have it all to do again, far off, in distant years, to clean up the future, amongst such I’d have you and Buddy headlining a cold winter night concert in Clearlake, Iowa. And I would replace the airstrip with a seven star hotel, a temporary home til just spring, inhabited by goatfooted balloonmen and bellboys, fey and wee.
Saragun Springs 
Dale
Despite the oddity that somehow got in, this piece deserves to be around and not buried under the onslaught of verbal crapola that has always been around but has finally located an inescapable host to latch onto. This is the type of stuff that used to appear in The Rolling Stone before it turned into the thing it said it would never become. I’m all for lists, but creating insincere, politically correct top 500 lists that exist to piss people off is a long long fall from the days of Hunter S. Thompson.
Leila
Happy Birthday Ever Bob–and readers should return tomorrow for the real thing.
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LA
What a wonderful prose poem this is! How many writers can go from hilarious to hauntingly beautiful in a heartbeat like that? Almost none, and only the best. (For some reason Tennessee Williams suddenly springs to mind.)
This prose poem is even better (far better) than most of the prose poems in Bob’s book Tarantula. (Sorry Bob but ya know it’s true.)
I’m sure mr. eec is also smiling somewhere with Buddy…
DB
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SAD what Rolling Stone turned into especially when they said they wouldn’t!
A guitarist friend of mine has an original Rolling Stone with Joe Cocker on the cover back when it was published as a newsprint, newspaper format…
RS is just one more proof that you can’t sell out and save your soul simultaneously.
And Bob Dylan has never never never never never ever sold his soul to the corporate overlords and not even close…
Thank you Mister Zimmie!
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A fitting homage to my favorite songwriter of all time. His repertoire is impressive by any standard. On my cable Music Choice they just played, “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35”; an hour ago they played “Shelter from the Storm,” which I consider the best track off the 1974 album, “Blood on the Tracks.” When it came out, a college housemate had the album and I used to do acid and play the album in the living room of our home.
When Dylan came out with his “Saved” gospel album more than 15 years later–I had finally graduated by then–a friend tossed the album across the room in anger, incensed that Dylan had failed him. Apparently our idols must never evolve, but should remain static in our memories. The same may be said for the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, when Dylan “went electric,” thus forsaking his folk roots. He just keeps on keeping on.
A small factoid, closer to my home, is that Dylan appeared at the Mississippi River Festival (MRF) on the campus of Southern Ill. University in 1969, only his second public appearance since his 1966 motorcycle accident. He joined the evening’s headliners, “The Band,” for an encore and played three songs himself. “He had to show his union card to gain access to the stage).
Dylan, like his fellow Farm Aid participant Willie Nelson, seems to go on and on, to last forever. What is the best Dylan Song? I would say, “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” but things are rough; you know, the pumps don’t work; cause the vandals tookk the handles. Excellent essay, Dale!
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Hi Bill
THANKS for this wonderful little micro memoir you composed!
If you can revise it a little bit and send it in to Saragun as an official submission, we can call this thing creative nonfiction and give it its own day as an official Saragun publication.
Add a little more intro material to the opening, and a little more conclusion material to the ending, and something in the middle maybe, is all it would take.
Either way, this is truly excellent commentary and I thank you.
Dale
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PS Bill,
To briefly elaborate one of your brilliant points:
For those who think they don’t like Dylan’s early ’80s religious albums+++, see these half dozen songs (just for starters):
Pressing On; Gotta Serve Somebody; Slow Train; In the Summertime; Man Gave Names to All the Animals; Lenny Bruce.
Just for starters!
D
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Really pleased to see this tribute to Dylan posted today. Ever since my mid-teens when I heard the Freewheelin’ album for the first time, the guy has been a central influence in my life, as he has been for so many others. I hope he’s on the loudspeaker at my funeral. thanks – mick
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Hi Mick
I totally know what you mean.
My family has been instructed that once I pass out of this vale of tears (and laughter), PLAY DYLAN LOUD.
And Leonard Cohen, and the Grateful Dead, and the Beatles, and Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash, and many others….
But Dylan in the middle, at the center of the circle.
And scatter my ashes over the Mississippi River!
Dale
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