Music Honors Thesis, Written for the NYU English Department
May, 2009

IT AIN’T ME BABE:

Narrative Impositions, and Bob Dylan’s Struggle to Be Free

By

Sara Liss

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of

the Requirements for

Departmental Honors in

English and American Literature

New York University

03/25/09

Advisor: Professor Perry Meisel

Chapter One: Dylan’s Narrative of Self

In his recent autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One, Bob Dylan begins on a strange note: only moments after signing a contract with Leeds Music, Dylan is mistaken for an aspiring boxer by heavyweight Jack Dempsey.  The irony of this moment- the one chosen as the opening to Dylan’s autobiography- rests far more deeply than in the hilarity of the small-framed youth being confused for a fledgling heavyweight.  In fact, this moment of mistaken identity is especially poignant as the front-piece for Dylan’s Chronicles, and serves as an equally precise introduction to his musical career by extension.

From the moment he entered the public arena, Bob Dylan has been a constant victim of symbolic misinterpretation and metaphorical misreading.  It is difficult to locate a time in his career when he isn’t being called something: prophet, messiah, voice of a decade, conscience of a generation.  These labels only reveal a snapshot of the terms that have been casually placed onto Dylan since his inception as a public figure.  Yet despite the relentless naming of the artist, Dylan has always pushed away from constrictive titles, and has always attempted to reinvent himself against outside labels.  

In his 2003 essay, “The Narrative Creation of Self,” Jerome Bruner describes the process of ‘creating the self’ through a Freudian lens.  He writes,

Sigmund Freud, in an interesting book too seldom read, remarked that each of us is like an entire cast of characters in a novel or play.  Novelists or playwrights, he wrote, construct their works of art by splitting up their interior cast of characters, putting them on the page or onstage to work out their relations with each other.  Those characters can be heard in the pages of any autobiography… We go on, constructing ourselves through narrative.

(12)

Describing the process in literary terms, Freud (as interpreted by Bruner) explains that each individual constructs his ‘self’ through the “art of narrative” (12).  Namely, each person creates his self-identity through a collection of stories that he tells himself, thereby constructing a ‘self’ through collected memories, experiences, and encounters. 

In the case of Bob Dylan the person, this self-told narration of stories to form ‘Bob Dylan’ the self, has been grossly interrupted and interjected upon by an endless sea of fans, critics, and followers.  As attested by Elizabeth Thomson and David Gutman in the introduction to a compilation of essays entitled The Dylan Companion: “Dylan has told his own story in so many songs.  Through them, we each find our own Bob Dylan[1]” (xxix).  Thomson and Gutman point to the imposing and constant involvement of outsiders within Dylan’s formation of his musical self.  It seems that every stage of his career- every contributing “story” of his narrative- has been symbolically read and metaphorically interpreted by outsiders.  Thomson and Gutman concisely describe this phenomenon: “…Each musical advance [is] seen to have a fresh ideological dimension” (xxv).  Thomson and Gutman succinctly identify the ideological intrusions that Dylan’s followers have always made upon him and his music.

Perry Meisel, in his essay, “Dylan and the Critics,” comments further on the manner that outsiders have typically read Dylan.  Meisel states: “For Dylan’s political observers, everything is social allegory” (101).  Yet beyond his observers reading his every action and song as “social allegory”- which is itself a reductive and simplistic way to read an artist whose literary consciousness is especially heightened- Dylan has had the added burden of being read typologically.  Meisel notes that within central moments of Dylan’s career, evident particularly in his conversion to electric music from Folk, “Dylan was being read typologically” (103).  And this reading has been invasive, reductive, and at times, burdensome for Dylan the musician, Dylan the person, and Dylan the self.   

            Yet even while being read insistently typologically, Dylan’s preoccupation has always been one of rewriting.  Meisel further explains that Dylan has always been an assertive user of Freudian “deferred action.”  Namely, Dylan continuously revisits, reshapes, and reinvents past moments, creating an uneasy, non-cohesive temporality for his artistic trajectory.  In incessantly rewriting and reshaping his own narrative self, Dylan successfully baffles and confuses his followers and critics, thereby evading symbolic readings. When Dylan’s followers worshiped him as a Folkie, Dylan plugged-in and became an electric rock-n-roller; when his fans determined that he was a rocker, Dylan became country; when Dylan’s audiences expected his cowboy hat and Western drawl, Dylan converted to Fundamentalist Christianity.  Meisel asserts, “This is typology demystified” (115).
            Over forty years after the onset of his career, Dylan remains a step ahead of the game, eternally escaping symbolic impositions.  I was fortunate to catch him in concert during his 2006 tour, after his release of the album Modern Times.  He played mostly songs from the new album, and I recall waiting anxiously for him to play one of his “classics.”  After about a minute and a half into one of his songs, I realized that he was playing one of my favorites: “Like a Rolling Stone.”  Though I enjoyed the performance, I vividly remember a moment of utter uneasiness and uncertainty, discomfort that a song that I thought I knew so well could suddenly be strange and unfamiliar to me once again.  It is only now, after my work with this paper, that I suddenly understand that in that moment, Dylan secured another small victory over a reductive fan.   

            My purpose in writing this paper is discovery; I want to understand why Dylan has always been prone to overzealous interpretations and enslaving titles, and how he has always managed to somehow break free.  Despite the difficulty in finding definitive answers to these quandaries, I have located and analyzed key moments of tension in Dylan’s career.  Within this exploration, I account for a most apparent obstacle within my paper, which is my own tendency to interpret, analyze, and even symbolically read Dylan.  Knowing that I can be dangerously close to performing the very labeling I critique, I aim to remain as objective and centered on textual history as possible throughout my investigation, in order to best avoid reductive judgments. 

            In conducting my research, I have selected a few moments within Dylan’s career to close-read: his induction into the Folk music scene and subsequent emergence as a public figure, his conversion to electric music, his establishment of a family, and his conversion to Christianity.  I choose these moments because they were well-representative of his fans’ readings and of his own rewritings of his musical and personal narrative. 

I attempt to incorporate as much of Dylan’s own voice as possible, pulling from his recently published autobiography and continuously extrapolating from his vast sum of songs.  His autobiography has proven most useful for me, as Meisel describes it as a moment where “Dylan must also approach himself as a critic, puzzled, on the outside looking in.  Even Bob Dylan wants to know who Bob Dylan is” (116).  In utilizing many of Dylan’s own words in order to revisit retrospective moments of his career, I hope to remain as far as possible from typological, oversimplifying conclusions.  Finally, I attempt to study Dylan through his eternal self-revision.  Meisel succinctly affirms: “Dylan’s career is not one of progression or decline but of retrospection.  This is not a Christian or typological Dylan; this is a Freudian- a Jewish, a Talmudic- Dylan” (116).  Utilizing my Orthodox Jewish upbringing, and my Yeshiva High School Talmud interpretive skills, I endeavor to weave the biographical and the musical, and to read Dylan through a lens of shifting narrative and reinvented self.

Chapter Two: The Classic Dylan

Albums: Bob Dylan-1962, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan-1963, The Times They Are A-Changin’-1964

            To properly assert a close reading of Bob Dylan as an eternally changing self, I must first establish a foundational Dylan, a figure that can serve as a comparative foreground for all future change.  It is at the onset of Dylan’s career that such a metaphorical figure begins to emerge, one that temptingly calls out for classification and the unpacking of symbolism.  This figure of Dylan, which I have labeled “Classic Dylan,” is the Dylan that is conceived of as the truest Dylan, and is thus the canvas upon which all future marks and taints are laid.   Classic Dylan is most notably classified as a Folk Dylan, an acoustic Dylan, a Dylan who came from nowhere and wandered into Greenwich Village, New York City, in search of folk great Woody Guthrie. 

When Dylan arrived in New York, he landed amidst a reviving folk music scene, and seemed as though he was quite literally stepping into the space left by Guthrie after his career was cut short due to an unfortunate development of the degenerative Huntington’s chorea disease.  As Daniel J. Gonczy notes in his essay, “The folk music of the 1960’s: its rise and fall,” “When Dylan made his New York debut at Gerde’s Folk City, ‘Sid Gleason [a long-time admirer and friend of Guthrie] gave him one of Woody’s suits to wear for the occasion.  It was a symbolic investiture whose meaning was lost on no one’” (10).  Gonczy’s statement elucidates an immediate symbolic reading of Dylan’s actions, his clothing, and his general behavior.  As such, Dylan’s unveiling in New York revealed an alignment with an ancient Folk tradition, and he would seemingly narrate a persona to effectively match the ongoing tale of which he was now a part.

Dylan’s folk character incorporated all elements of the young musician- his accent, his dress, his narrated background- and was thus sincerely convincing, and early Dylan emerged as an undeniable folk personality.  As Jim Miller asserts in his essay “Bob Dylan”: “…Dylan almost obsessively identified with Guthrie.  He would listen to Guthrie’s famous Dust Bowl ballads endlessly, mastering his Oklahoma twang, mimicking his vocal style, admitting to one Minneapolis friend that ‘he was building a character’” (21).  Dylan’s assumed character was inspired by a handful of Folk influences, one of which was ‘Ramblin’ Jack’ Elliott, who was also a friend and admirer of Guthrie.  Elliott proved to be a powerful role model for Dylan, as he had similarly “…invented a new alter ego for himself by donning a cowboy hat, affecting a Western drawl and mastering Guthrie’s musical style” (22).  Yet Elliott’s inspiration for Dylan did not end there, and neither did the notable comparisons between the budding Folk musician and the already established one.  Miller further affirms, “Elliott was a native of Brooklyn and the son of a Jewish doctor.  His ‘Ramblin’ Jack’ character belies the myth that folk music is somehow more honest than pop.  At the same time, to an understudy like Dylan, ‘Ramblin’ Jack’ offered living proof that fiction masks and folk music could perfectly well coexist” (22).  Ramblin’ Jack was a commanding icon for Dylan because he taught him that becoming convincingly ‘Folk’ could be achieved through deeply constructed tales- changed wardrobe and accent, and an entirely new personal history as well.  And so Dylan adopted a Folk persona that was deceptively pure; for at the heart of Dylan’s character was an untarnished and authentic ‘Folkie,’ but one that was contrived and manufactured.

Still, Dylan’s enrollment within the Folk music scene seemed real.  In the opening chapter to Chronicles, “Markin’ Up the Score,” Dylan describes a sincerity in his early music, one accompanied by an eagerness to ‘just play.’  Dylan somewhat belabors this point.  In anecdote after anecdote, Dylan attests that he “would have gladly signed whatever form… put in front of [him],” that he “wanted to play for anybody,” that he “needed to play for people and all the time” (6 and 16).  Dylan’s insistence on his musical fervor early in his career again highlights his alignment with Folk, as he demonstrates a zeal and genuine love for playing Folk music.

As Dylan describes his first musical job at the day show at New York’s Café Wha?, his descriptions seem equally belabored and mundane.  He depicts a banal picture of menial work at a New York City club: “The best part of working with him, though, was strictly gastronomical- all the French fries and hamburgers I could eat” (13).  In this moment of his narrative as a rising folk singer, Dylan does not claim to contain a remarkable talent or an incredible gift; he is rather an ‘average American boy’ who “pour[s] Coke into a glass from a milk pitcher,” partakes in ‘average American’ rituals, and tries to soak up every inspiration that the music and environment surrounding him have to offer (13).  By pointing to the ordinariness of his initial years as a young musician, Dylan successfully links himself to the purity and genuineness of Folk.  He claims to be enthusiastic and eager, and is therefore able to learn from the musicians that he closely follows around New York and by extension, from the great tradition before him.  Early Dylan incessantly mimics the customs and rituals all around him, effectively gaining entrance into a movement whose admission fee is paid with honest yearning.

Dylan’s first album, the self-titled Bob Dylan, perfectly illustrates his ability to ally himself with an ongoing Folk tradition.  Almost every song on the album is a pre-existing, well-known American Folk or Blues song that Dylan adopts as his own.  The only song on the album whose tune and lyrics are written entirely by Dylan is entitled “A Song to Woody.”  Though the words of the song are not reminiscent of any particular long-standing Folk tune, “A Song to Woody” points to Dylan’s ability to submit himself to Folk tradition through his gratitude and appreciation of Folk heroes.  Dylan sings: “Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, but I know that you know
 / All the things I'm a-sayin' an' a-many a times more. 
 / I'm a-singin' you this song, but I can't sing enough, / 'Cause there's not many men who done the things that you done[2]” (1962)[3].  Dylan sings with a Western twang, and pronounces many words without their final ‘g’s (sayin’, singin’, etc.), mimicking a “genuine” Western accent.  The song also emphasizes Dylan’s complete submission to and appreciation for Woody Guthrie, and stands as a pseudo-ode for all that Guthrie has accomplished in his cut-short life.  Again, Dylan demonstrates that he is eager and willing to accept the responsibility of a great tradition, all in order to ‘just play’ Folk music.   

Yet even while Dylan firmly establishes himself as a part of a lasting Folk tradition through symbolic and readable gestures- his wearing of Guthrie’s suit, his album of existing folk songs, his self-depictions as an ‘average’ American boy- he simultaneously departs from the Folk scene as he renders himself a member of it.  Scattered throughout the first chapter of his book are moments of purposeful divergence from traditional Folk.  When asked by Columbia Records’ head of publicity who he sees himself as similar to musically, Dylan answers “nobody” (8).  He further asserts that this establishment of himself as singular and unique is truer than any other statement that he made on that first day in the recording studio.  The implications of Dylan’s assertion that “the rest of it…was pure hokum-hophead talk,” are consequential, for only several moments earlier, Dylan answers questions about where he came from, what his parents’ professions are, and what kind of music he plays (8).  Dylan notably lies about his childhood, his father’s occupation, and his birth-town.  When Dylan answers, as one of his final responses in the series of initial questioning, that he plays Folk music, and that Folk music is “handed down songs,” it is unclear whether these answers are similarly counted amongst his alleged “hokum-hophead talk” (7-8).  This early nostalgic episode of Dylan’s formation of his career indicates that his ties with Folk are murky; he both strives to become a member of the genuine Folk tradition, but also plants seeds of singularity within his narrative. 

It is not surprising then, in unpacking the music of his first album, that each song potentially abandons ancient folk tradition even while it is a testament to it.  The song “Man of Constant Sorrow,” for example, perfectly illustrates this concurrent alignment and departure.  “Constant Sorrow” is a well-known American Folk song that has been interpreted and covered by many different Folk artists since it was written at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.  Dylan’s cover of the song seems to perfectly fit within the song’s musical trajectory, yet it contains several crucial distinctions from earlier well-known versions.  Firstly, though the song’s title implies a certain morosity of topic- constant sorrow- the tune is almost always played whimsically and upbeat, utilizing Folk’s often comedic and ironic outlook on serious subject matter.  Dylan’s version, however, elucidates the melancholic quality previously hidden in earlier recordings of the song.  His tune begins each line in the same manner as the popularized version of “Constant Sorrow,” but continues with a use of minor chords, creating a mournful elegiac out of a previously light-hearted, satirical song.  Furthermore, Dylan moderately changes some of the lyrics of the better-known versions of the songs, with only a few select modifications scattered throughout the verses.  The first lines of the traditional song are as follows: “I am a man of constant sorrow / I’ve seen trouble all my days. / I bid farewell to old Kentucky / the place where I was borned and raised.”[4]  Dylan however, sang the last lines of this opening stanza as “I’ll say goodbye to Colorado / where I was born and partly raised.”  Dylan’s particular change in lyrics, from ‘Kentucky’ to ‘Colorado,’ is somewhat odd; for just as he lied about his geographic origin in his initial interview with Columbia’s head of publicity, (he claims to be from Illinois instead of Minnesota), Dylan similarly chooses a state that he was notably not from.  Despite his change of lyrics to a more personal interpretation of a traditional song, Dylan was not born nor ‘partly raised’ in Colorado.  His choice to change the location in the song, then, is apparently a gesture to depart from a setting that has historical and far-reaching Folk ties.  And in comparable manner, Dylan changes the classic Western pronunciation of “borned” to “born” to similarly muddle any cohesion of Folk geography and tradition within his music. 

In similar vein, Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, is strewn with alignments and departures from traditional Folk music, mostly through its growing political preoccupation.  Though Folk has always been political in nature, and has often questioned social norms and standards, (Woody Guthrie himself was perceived of as an extremely controversial figure and was even banned from several music festivals and shows), Folk operates under a banner of constant and unshakeable American faith.  Even if Folk’s lyrical and musical content is of tragic and severe nature, the ‘simple’ American individual often emerges a hero, and all problems can be easily blamed on a corruption of pure American values.[5]  Traditional Folk music is therefore optimistic in nature, and copes with difficult subject matter through the use of humor and irony, and by ensuring that faith and hope are never lost throughout the narrative of a song.

Dylan’s Freewheelin’ is certainly scattered with humorous and ironic edge, but the album seems to challenge unbreakable faith more so than it establishes it.  The album’s famous opening track, “Blowin’ In The Wind,” impeccably demonstrates a reimagining of political Folk music without its ever-present hope.  “Blowin’ In The Wind” can be read as a response to the Civil Rights anthem “We Shall Overcome,” and can even be musically understood as an interlude or bridge to the song.[6]  “We Shall Overcome” is a powerfully optimistic song that became the mantra of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, and is especially linked to the revived Folk music scene.  The song was originally an Afro-American hymn entitled “I Shall Overcome,” but was rewritten in the 1940’s as a unionizing song.  Some twenty years later, Pete Seeger, who was recognized as one of the generational leaders of the revived Folk music scene, again rewrote the lyrics in order to impart the song to Civil Rights militants who were founding the convention of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).  The song was passed throughout the Folk movement orally and “acquired the aura of a ‘real’ folk song” (quote and history from The Dylan Companion, 25).  “We Shall Overcome” was effectively Folk because of its history and transmission, but it was also Folk in that it questioned the social conditions in which the song was written- namely, that there existed adversity and inequality that had to be overcome- yet it confidently asserted that by believing “deep in our hearts...we shall overcome someday.”  Dylan’s “Blowin’ In The Wind,” by contrast, shakes this faith to its core.  As affirmed by Miller in his essay, “Blowin’ In The Wind” was not an “uplifting affirmation of faith,” but was instead “a series of questions, with no answers offered” (25).  Dylan asks: “How many times must a man look up /
Before he can see the sky?
/ Yes, 'n' how many ears must one man have
/ Before he can hear people cry?
/ Yes, 'n' how many deaths will it take till he knows /
That too many people have died?” (1963).  Dylan’s questions implicate individuals within difficult and unfair social conditions.  But rather than offer optimism and faith as his answers, Dylan’s refrain states: “The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind
/ The answer is blowin' in the wind.”  Dylan offers no hope in solving the queries he raises; he only means to create awareness through his song, and certainly veers away from unwavering faith. 

Again, Dylan’s departure from a tradition of Folk is subtle, and veiled within his concurrent alignment with the same tradition.  This serves to again complicate any cohesion and unity of genre within Dylan’s music, and functions to effectively ask real and deep questions, ones that cannot be easily ignored or answered through any blind faith.   

Yet even despite Dylan’s change of lyrics and tune, and despite his breaking of faith, Dylan’s absolute deviation from traditional Folk music lies in something entirely other: his voice.  Early in his career, Dylan admits that he has created a Folk character that sings and pronounces similarly to Guthrie and former folk musicians.  And despite the obvious irony of Dylan constructing and manipulating a persona that is convincingly and allegedly “genuine” (and therefore Folkie), Dylan still maintains an aspect of himself that can never wholly align with Folk tradition.  Dylan’s voice is forever other and strange, and brings with it endless challenge.  Miller comments on Dylan’s voice in his early musical career: “The music is compelling because Dylan’s voice is compelling- here is the key to his musical greatness… His voice is raw, histrionic, utterly unnatural and perfectly unsettling” (23).  And what is unsettling about Dylan’s voice is how entirely different and unique it is when held against an ancient Folk tradition.  It is not smooth or easy to listen to; it does not easily transmit lyrics and tune, and it therefore makes it impossible for Dylan to entirely blend in to any tradition, especially that of the ever-transmitted and orally passed-on Folk.  Underlying the ritual of Folk is that it is a music ‘for the people’ that can share and become unified through its enactment.  But Dylan’s arresting and strange voice is foreign and impossible to replicate, and therefore breaks this most crucial unifying and inheritable tradition of Folk.  Even while Dylan’s early music continued to raise awareness and attention of those that listened to it, and undeniably began a movement surrounding it, his music also never created easy unity and cohesion.  Dylan’s voice ensures a lasting challenge, and guarantees that there are no simple answers to any questions that he raises. 

Chapter Three: Electric Dylan

Albums: Another Side of Bob Dylan- 1964, Bringing it All Back Home- 1965, Highway 61 Revisited-1965, Blonde on Blonde- 1966

            Newport Folk Festival, 1965: Bob Dylan takes the stage.  It is his third appearance at the annual festival, and the crowd is filled with anxious fans.  In 1963 and 1964, Dylan played on stage while sitting in a chair, one microphone aligned with his mouth and harmonica, and one aligned with his acoustic guitar.  But this year, things are different.  Still wearing a harmonica around his neck and a guitar around his shoulder, Dylan famously plugs in, and plays his first-ever electric set to a live audience.  The crowd, both shocked and hurt, boos.

            This moment of ‘plugging in’ is perhaps the single most famous moment of Bob Dylan’s entire musical career, and the controversy surrounding it is incalculable.  Even the moment of the ‘plug-in’ itself seems fraught with difficulty: there has been much recent debate over whether the crowd at Newport actually booed Dylan, or whether they booed at the festival’s poor sound quality, the festival’s manager, or something else entirely.  Much of this debate has been sparked by the 2007 release of live footage of the festival, recorded and then produced by director Murray Lerner.  Lerner’s documentary, The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival 1963-1965, does nothing to clarify the crowd’s true reaction to Dylan’s plug-in, and Lerner himself further admits that he does not know exactly what happened on that day in 1965.  He states instead, “People remember hearing what they thought they should hear.[7]”  Some attendees of the Folk festival claim that Folk great Pete Seeger had to be restrained, so as not to chop down the electric wiring system with his axe, though this rumor has never been substantiated by Seeger himself.

            Regardless of the actual reaction of fans and Folkies at Newport 1965, the undying rumors and ageless ‘lore’ point to the significance of Dylan’s conversion to electric.  In reflecting on his plug-in, some critics argue that this moment was the true foundation of Dylan’s career, as it set the tone for all of the music and performances that he conducted thereafter.  Others argue that going electric was a disruption and symbolic death of Dylan’s career, as it forever removed him from the Folk scene that he had seemingly been a part of for several years prior.  Dylan’s plug-in- with all the controversy, debate, and rumors that it has incited- warrants further analysis, and requires a critical flashback to Dylan’s relationship with Folk music before he ‘went electric.’ 

            In the previous chapter, I established that Dylan’s alignment within a Folk tradition occurred alongside a concurrent departure from one, and that his membership within the Folk community was always complicated.  As Dylan’s career progressed, and his alignment with and departure from the Folk scene both intensified, it seemed that Dylan was looking to gain something nuanced and specific from Folk music: literary knowledge.  In his autobiography, Dylan describes spending his early months as a musician reading books of poetry, philosophy, and history.  Dylan narrates: “It was said that World War II spelled the end of the Age of Enlightenment, but I wouldn’t have known it.  I was still in it.  Somehow I could still remember and feel the light of something about it.  I’d read that stuff.  Voltaire, Rousseau, John Locke, Montesquieu, Martin Luther- visionaries, revolutionaries… it was like I knew those guys, like they’d been living in my backyard” (30).  It seemed that Dylan imagined himself as a part of a critical ‘enlightened’ time period, and it was therefore necessary for him to arm himself with as much knowledge as he possibly could.  In page after page, Dylan narrates long accounts of the books and volumes surrounding him in his friend’s home, continuously “name-dropping” famous authors, philosophers, and historical figures.  As Dylan utilized every available opportunity to read, he states that was “looking for the part of [his] education that [he] never got” (36). 

            Yet the kind of knowledge that Dylan was accumulating is important to note.  For Dylan, the relationship between his apprenticeship in Folk and his inquisitive quest for literary knowledge was inseparable.  Dylan understood Folk music as a most crucial component in his literary, lyrical education.  He explains that Folk embodied and articulated many qualities associated with literature: “The folksingers could sing songs like an entire book, but only in a few verses.  It’s hard to describe what makes a character or an event folk song worthy.  It probably has something to do with a character being fair and honest and open.  Bravery in an abstract way” (39).  For Dylan, Folk music provided a crucial foundation for his literary knowledge and for his wider musical trajectory, as he aimed to continuously articulate his understanding of the environment surrounding him.  Dylan further narrates in his autobiography: “The books were something.  They were really something.  I read a lot of the pages aloud and liked the sound of the words, the language.  Milton’s protest poem, ‘Massacre in Piedmont.’  A political poem about the murder of innocents by the Duke of Savoy in Italy.  It was like the folk song lyrics, even more elegant” (38).  Dylan further equates his knowledge of Folk with his aspiring love for “the sound of the words” and appreciated that a strong foundation of Folk literary knowledge was crucial if he hoped to someday be a skilled musician and lyricist.  And by studying literary conventions, poetic mediums, and Folk traditions, Dylan began to lay a strong and unique groundwork for his musical knowledge. 

Dylan began learning of ways to combine his newfound knowledge with his desire to ‘just play’ music.  In one anecdote in his autobiography, Dylan attests, “I memorized Poe’s poem “The Bells” and strummed it to a melody on my guitar” (37).  It seemed that Dylan’s literary Folk knowledge would be pointedly helpful for him in his eventual plans to write his own music and determine a unique musical career.  Instead, his fans and critics understood his Folk apprenticeship as a gesture towards a deep alliance with the Folk music scene.  In his essay, “When the Times a-Changed,” Andrew Motion describes the symbolic meaning that was ascribed to Dylan’s early career: “Dylan, whose early songs had massively intensified certain aspects of the folk inheritance (in particular, the value it attached to protest songs), had been given the combined role of messiah and guru” (312).  Even as a fledgling musician, Dylan felt weighted by a deep responsibility towards a scene of followers and fans for whom he did not necessarily feel any commitment.  Dylan attests, “I wasn’t too concerned about people, their motives, I didn’t feel the need to examine every stranger that approached” (56).  And just as Dylan stopped ascribing meaning to the people surrounding him, he similarly hoped that the meaning others ascribed to him would cease as well; in particular, Dylan opposed the accusations that fans and followers later made about his seeming departure from Folk.  Dylan comments on these accusations: “If I was building any new kind of life to live, it really didn’t seem that way.  It’s not as if I had turned in any old one to live it.  If anything, I wanted to understand things and then be free of them” (61).  Dylan did not recognize himself as abandoning any tradition, but understood that he was merely trying to utilize the Folk literary knowledge he had gained up until that point as a means of being as free, open, and honest within his music as he possibly could.  Dylan articulates this desire for unencumbered artistic freedom: “Picasso had fractured the art world and cracked it wide open.  He was revolutionary.  I wanted to be like that” (55).  For Dylan, the Folk literary knowledge that he had studied offered him a necessary foundation for the eventual “revolutionary” and novel music that he hoped to create.  He never intended a strict allegiance to any specific musical tradition; he merely recognized Folk as the best way to build a strong literary musical foundation for his career. 

 Still, Dylan was far from unappreciative of Folk music and all that it had taught him.  His first album, Bob Dylan, had included a meaningful debt of gratitude towards Woody Guthrie: “I'm a-singin' you this song, but I can't sing enough, / 'Cause there's not many men who done the things that you done[8]” (“A Song to Woody,” 1962).  In his fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, Dylan similarly shows a genuinely cordial and loving attitude towards Folk.  In his opening song, “All I Really Want to Do,” Dylan sings: “I ain’t lookin’ to compete with you / beat or cheat or mistreat you / simplify you, classify you / deny, defy or crucify you / all I really want to do / is, baby, be friends with you” (1964).  Again, Dylan uses language such as “ain’t” and “lookin’,” implying an ardent association with Folk[9].  Furthermore, this song is played acoustically, with a simple and straightforward four-chord tune.  Dylan sings with a heavy twang, and when he sings the word “do” in the refrain, he makes his voice high-pitched and whimsical, and sounds as though he is howling.  Yet as his guitar strumming, pronunciation, and intonation imply a strong union with Folk music, his words imply that he wants to “be friends” with Folk, but not align himself more deeply than that.  Furthermore, they imply that despite the symbolic treatment of his career within the Folk scene, Dylan is not trying to “simplify, classify, deny, defy or crucify” anything surrounding him.  As the first song on an album whose title implies a novel change in Dylan’s career, “All I Really Want to Do” perfectly illustrates Dylan’s eternal appreciation and gratitude towards Folk music, while still demonstrating that this moment will introduce “Another Side”- perhaps a revolutionary one- to Bob Dylan’s career.

            And this new side of Dylan’s music arose from the changing environments surrounding Dylan and the rest of young America in the mid- ‘60’s, as the country entered war, began to fight nationally for Civil Rights and Gender Equality, and experienced an unprecedented public presence of young people.  Dylan describes the revolutionary atmosphere of the world at the time:

If you were born around this time or were living and alive, you could feel the old world go and the new one beginning.  It was like putting the clock back to when B.C. became A.D.  Everybody born around my time was a part of both.  Hitler, Churchill, Mussolini, Stalin, Roosevelt- towering figures that the world would never see the likes of again, men who relied on their own resolve, for better or worse, every one of them prepared to act alone, indifferent to approval- indifferent to wealth or love, all presiding over the destiny of mankind and reducing the world to rubble… Whether they parted their hair in the middle or wore a Viking helmet, they would not be denied and were impossible to reckon with- rude barbarians stampeding across the earth and hammering out their own ideas of geography.

(29)

Dylan explains that within this era, bold and brazen leaders who were not afraid to act independently, vehemently, and often unfavorably, determined the trajectory of world history.  As Dylan furthered and strengthened his early musical ability, he recognized that he too, needed to act with fervent independence: “Sometimes you know things have to change, are going to change, but you can only feel it… but you don’t know it in a purposeful way.  Little things foreshadow what’s coming, but you may not recognize them.  But then something immediate happens and you’re in another world, you jump into the unknown, have an instinctive understanding of it- you’re set free” (61-62).  Armed with his knowledge of a literary Folk tradition and with his desire to grow with the revolutionary changes surrounding him, Dylan was prepared to “jump into the unknown” and be “set free.” 

Not surprisingly, it was around this time that Dylan had begun to write his own songs.  Yet even as he did this, he did not recall this gesture as necessarily novel: “I can’t say when it occurred to me to write my own songs… Opportunities may come along for you to convert something- something that exists into something that didn’t yet… Sometimes you just want to do things your own way, want to see for yourself what lies behind the misty curtain” (51-52).  Dylan describes his new ambition to write songs not as a creation or innovation, but rather as a “conversion,” an opportunity for him to both act independently, and to utilize an existing tradition.  Again, this moment within Dylan’s early career marked a delicate balance between his own vision and the existing traditions of Folk music.  As such, Dylan’s blossoming independence as a musician was so subtle that it went mostly unnoticed by his fans.  Richard Farina comments on this subtlety in his essay, “Baez and Dylan: A Generation Singing Out:” “In no time at all, Dylan virtually abandoned established material for songs of his own composition.  The transition from one to the other was nearly imperceptible since he had the good sense to keep his overall cadence within the framework of familiar traditional music” (85).  Though Dylan successfully combined his knowledge of Folk with his desire for individuality, the subtlety and tranquility of his transition would prove to be problematic for him later in his career.

            For even while Dylan respectfully moved away from the Folk music scene, he was notably limited by any association he had initially had with it.  In his essay, Andrew Motion quotes a note written by Dylan in Biograph[10]: “There was just a clique, you know.  Folk music was a strict and rigid establishment.  If you sang Southern Mountain Blues, you didn’t sing Southern Mountain Ballads and you didn’t sing City Blues.  If you sang Texas Cowboy songs, you didn’t play English Ballads.  It was really pathetic” (313).  Dylan outlines his frustrations with the rigidity and restrictive confines asserted upon him by the Folk music establishment.  What began as Dylan’s idealistic gaining of knowledge from the traditions of Folk, seemed to culminate in his feeling enslaved by the knowledge that he had initially sought, recognizing that he would not be able to expand upon his musical repertoire if he could not break free of the Folk scene.  As Motion quotes Dylan: “I knew what was going to happen all the time…I knew how many encores there was, which kind of songs they were going to clap loudest at, and all this kind of thing’ (313).  As Dylan had spent the early years of his career contriving a Folk character, manipulating the Folk image, and playing Folk songs- all for the purpose of eventually using this knowledge for a diverse and unique musical career- he suddenly found himself deeply trapped inside of a severe and inflexible Folk prison.  All subtlety and gentleness of his initial attempts to transition away from Folk had gone unnoticed by his fans and critics, and it seemed that Dylan had no choice but to be more deliberate and noisy in his strive for freedom.

Dylan’s next album, Bringing It All Back Home, released in 1965, was electric, and as Andrew Motion concisely articulates, “Electricity offered a way out,” and provided Dylan with the vociferous declaration he needed to break free of the Folk scene (314).  The third song on the track, and one of the songs that Dylan famously ‘plugged in’ for at Newport Folk Festival, was Dylan’s overt demand for meaningful freedom from Folk rigidity.  In “Maggie’s Farm,” Dylan angrily sings: “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more / No, I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more / Well, I try my best / to be just like I am / but everybody wants you / to be just like them / they sing while you slave and I just get bored / I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more” (1965).  Dylan announces, over and over again, that he will no longer be a slave to Maggie and her family on their farm- an obvious knock at the romanticized Folk lifestyle.  Dylan’s words are strong and his voice sings irately and incessantly; he attests that he feels enslaved by everyone’s desire for him to “be just like them,” when all he wants is “to be just like I am.”  Dylan certainly expected a reaction to this song- anger, or perhaps just shock- as he played it live for the first time at the Newport Folk Festival, where he had previously played only acoustic Folk songs. 

            Dylan is similarly overtly angry and frustrated in a song entitled, “Positively 4^th Street,” which he wrote around the time that he released his next album Highway 61 Revisited.  Dylan sings:

You got a lotta nerve / to say you are my friend / when I was down / you just stood there grinning. / You say I let you down / you know it’s not like that / if you’re so hurt / why then don’t you show it. / You say you lost your faith / but that’s not where it’s at / you had no faith to lose / and you know it. / I know the reason / that you talk behind my back / I used to be among the crowd / you’re in with.  When you know as well as me / you’d rather see me paralyzed / why don’t you just come out once / and scream it.

(1965)

The harsh lyrics of this song reveal Dylan’s seeming abandonment of any subtlety in expressing his frustrations with the judgments cast upon him by his Folk fans and critics.  Dylan berates his listeners for claiming to be his friend and ally, when they did not stand by him and defend him in difficult times.  He continues by criticizing them for asserting that he has “let [them] down,” or that they have “lost [their] faith” in him, as he doubts their initial faith in him altogether.  Dylan continues by attesting that “you” has abandoned him because he has left the crowd that they once shared, and would therefore rather see him “paralyzed.”  Dylan interestingly uses the word “paralyzed” here to express his inability to utilize Folk music in an unencumbered and free way; Dylan had always hoped to use Folk in order to write Folk and non-Folk songs in the greatest literary and lyrical manner possible.  It seemed to Dylan, however, that his fans and critics preferred that he remain stagnant in his literary Folk knowledge, and stuck deep inside his contrived Folk character.  Finally, Dylan airs his grievances over the sly and conniving nature of his fans’ relationship with him, as he wishes they would “come out… and scream” their true opinions of him, instead of hiding what he imagines they’re thinking.

            When Dylan set out on a World Tour in February of 1966, he was finally met with the rage and hostility that he imagined his audiences feeling towards him.  At a show in Manchester, at the Free Trade Hall, Dylan opened with seven acoustic songs before plugging in and continuing his set with loud, rackety, and uneven playing.  Andrew Motion describes the juxtaposition in Dylan’s singing: “Dylan’s voice, at once thin and robust, and full of relish for its extraordinary habit of seeming to italicize individual words, sounds weirdly disembodied- lost in space” (313-314).  Dylan created an uneven and deep juxtaposition within one musical set not to erase Folk from his repertoire, but to openly demonstrate to his listeners that it was possible to utilize Folk influences within electric and to still create unified music.  Motion further explains that Dylan felt it necessary to prove this cohesion in a seemingly extreme and over-the-top expression: “Maybe the pressures surrounding the concert made Dylan exaggerate the two sides of his personality.  It’s certainly true that the second half is as earthy as the first half is ethereal: loud almost to the point of brutality creating a background cascade from which Dylan’s voice rises with surprising authority. And with surprising subtlety” (314).  Motion’s descriptions of Dylan’s “exaggerated” personality perfectly demonstrate Dylan’s noisy protest to the previous misunderstandings and enslaving judgments of his fans; by enacting an over-the-top Folk, and then an inflated electricity, Dylan made it impossible to ignore his vision of Folk leading into, and existing concurrently within electric.   

Yet despite Dylan’s best attempts to overtly utilize Folk knowledge for electric music, his audience did not seem to understand his efforts, and responded with deep contempt to Dylan’s electric set:

Through the whole of this second part, in the breaks between the eight songs, we hear dissent gradually accumulating, rising through catcalls and slow hand-claps to general barracking until the climactic ‘Judas!’… His silence following the accusation is shocked.  Eventually, he comes to microphone and slowly drags out: ‘I don’t believe you. [Pause] You’re a liar.’  Then he smashes off into ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ the song that foretold all his trouble.

(Motion, 314)

The crowd’s reaction, though harsh and severe, is perhaps not surprising considering the delicate and nuanced goal that Dylan attempted that night in Manchester, and considering the way in which they had misunderstood Dylan’s goals up until that point.  What seems more unusual, however, is Dylan’s reaction towards them.  Dylan addresses the crowd as a single, unified entity, referring to them as “you.”  Before this moment, Dylan has repeatedly addressed his listeners and followers as “you” in many of his songs, and has also demonstrated a particular ability to create personal connections to his audiences throughout his performances.  This is especially evident in footage from his 1963 and 1964 performances at Newport Folk Festival, where Dylan’s gaze is captivating, his stance inviting, and his musical performance engaging[11].  When he then refers to his audience in the singular and accuses them of being ‘a liar’ at his Manchester show, it is possible to understand Dylan’s reaction as a loss of faith in his fans.  While Dylan initially attempted to be subtle about his growing independence, he believed that his fans would eventually understand his gestures towards freedom, and not entrap him within symbolic readings of his Folk alignment.  When that failed, however, and when even his overt attempts to utilize Folk for electric were equally unsuccessful, Dylan could no longer believe in his fans.  In Manchester, he addressed them in the singular to emphasize the closeness he had felt to them, the relationship he assumed they had had, and to underline the deep shattering of his belief in them.

Yet Dylan still did not give up on his attempt to openly apply his Folk knowledge towards electric music.  His next album Blonde on Blonde, which was released in the same month as the Manchester show, is filled with a mixture of harsh-sounding, electric pieces, and lingering Folk influences.  Andrew Motion describes the album in the following terms: “It’s a sound that reinforces the paradoxes of his lyrics: driving but deliberate, visceral but airy, scrupulous but startling, exploratory but stunning” (313).  As Motion describes, Blonde on Blonde is an album that combines many of the nuanced goals that Dylan was seemingly trying to accomplish at the time, and this becomes evident within the album’s individual songs.  In “Pledging My Time,” for example, Dylan sings: “Won’t you come with me, baby? / I’ll take you where you wanna go / And if it don’t work out / You’ll be the first to know / I’m pledging my time to you / Hopin’ you’ll come through, too” (1966).  It seems from this song that Dylan has not entirely lost faith in his listeners, and he still wishes to devote himself to them, “hopin’” that they’ll eventually “come through, too.”  Similarly, Dylan sings in “I Want You,” “The guilty undertaker sighs / the lonesome organ grinder cries / the silver saxophones say I should refuse you / the cracked bells and washed-out horns / blow into my face with scorn / but it’s not that way / I wasn’t born to lose you / I want you, I want you / I want you so bad / Honey, I want you.”  Here, Dylan highlights a musical clash that has occurred between the song’s singer and the song’s “you,” reminiscent of Dylan’s musical clash between his own vision and that of his Folk followers.  Yet even though “washed-out horns blow into [his] face with scorn,” the song’s singer still desperately wants “you.” 

            Much of Blonde on Blonde continues in similar vein; the album is full of intimate love songs between a subject and a “you,” where the subject continuously emphasizes how much he longs for “you.”  In many songs, the singer articulates a certain regret and apologetic tone at the seeming rift that has occurred in his relationship with “you.”  It seems from Blonde on Blonde that despite his many frustrations, Dylan was willing and perhaps, eager, to reach his goal of employing his Folk knowledge for a wider musical trajectory, and he believed that his fans and critics would understand the vision he contained.  Eventually, many began to realize this vision, but Dylan’s career was far from free of deep misunderstandings and profoundly misplaced symbolic impositions.

Chapter Four: Time Moves Slowly in the Middle Period

Albums: John Wesley Harding (1968)- Street Legal (1978)

As time progressed, Dylan’s assertion of his individualized and unique musical identity became unarguable.  Though some of his fans and critics continued to hold any and all of his musical releases against the Folk canvas that he initially laid in the early 1960’s, many followers were also willing and open to move forward in time with Dylan.  His albums were continuously met with approval (even if they were judged as not ‘as good’ as his first albums) and it seemed as though his fans were becoming more and more obsessive in following his career.  As I described earlier, Dylan was already weighted with “the combined role of messiah and guru,” and plagued with titles such as ‘prophet’ and ‘conscience of a generation’ in his early career, and his fans and followers only strengthened these perceptions as Dylan continued to release and play music[12].

But Dylan’s personal life had vastly changed since he set out as a fledgling musician, and he grew increasingly hostile toward and annoyed with the titles being given to him.  Dylan had gotten married in 1965 to Sara Lownds, and began having children almost immediately.  Though he continued to remain within the music scene, producing, recording, and performing, his main objective at the time shifted from ‘just playing music,’ as it had been in the early 60’s, to raising and protecting his new family.  And he therefore had a newfound difficulty with the obsessive following and symbolic impositions that fans continuously ascribed to him.  Dylan attests in his autobiography: “I wasn’t going to acknowledge being an emblem, symbol or spokesman either… I… had a family to feed” (128).  As a newly self-proclaimed ‘family man,’ Dylan had even more of a desire to remain outside the confines of his fans and critics’ establishments of him; Dylan fervently wanted to determine his own trajectory, just as he always had, but this time it was his personal trajectory above his musical one.

And just as Dylan had done numerous times before, he again reflected his desire to be free within his music.  Dylan explains that “the events of the day, all the cultural mumbo jumbo were imprisoning [his] soul” and he became “determined to put [himself] beyond the reach of it all,” for Dylan was “a family man now, didn’t want to be in that group portrait” (109).  And so, when Dylan released his album New Morning in 1970, he was adamant that the album’s political and cultural ramifications were nearly non-existent.  Dylan states his purposes in writing the album: “To be sure, the album itself had no specific resonance to the shackles and bolts that were strapping the country down, nothing to threaten the status quo.  All this was is what the critics would later refer to as my “middle period” and in many camps this record was referred to as a comeback album- and it was.  It would be the first of many” (141).  Dylan describes New Morning in almost anti-political terms, and seems to agree with the critics’ labeling of the album as a “comeback album” in his “middle period.”  Dylan’s insistence that New Morning was the comeback album of his middle period emphasizes the lull that he was trying to establish within his career at that moment in time.  For if New Morning was a comeback within a non-political, intermediate, middle period, then it seems that Dylan was precisely attempting to come back as a somewhat mundane figure, not as a prophet, not as a messiah, and certainly not as the conscience of a generation. 

This banal establishment of his career at that time is well reflected in the song “Time Passes Slowly” on New Morning.  Dylan sings “Time passes slowly up here in the mountains / We sit beside bridges and walk beyond fountains / Catch the wild fishes that float through the stream / Time passes slowly when you’re lost in a dream. / Ain’t no reason to go in a wagon to town / Ain’t no reason to go to the fair / Ain’t no reason to go up there, ain’t no reason to go down / Ain’t no reason to go anywhere” (1970).  Dylan describes a slow and serene passage of time; the song’s speaker feels no need to “go anywhere,” and instead enjoys his ordinary lifestyle up in the mountains, living “lost in a dream.”  The song seems to reference certain aspects of Folk lifestyle- its repetition of the word “ain’t” and its descriptions of rustic mountain living- but the song also contains intermittent splashes of electric guitar woven throughout each verse.  Still, the tune is played on a piano, not on an acoustic or electric guitar, and it is sung in a bluesy, melodic voice.  In this way, “Time Passes Slowly” utilizes both Folk and electric influences, but ascribes to neither genre.  The song remains then, a story about time passing slowly, and a nonentity in terms of its generic placement.  And it thus seemingly embodies Dylan’s desired “middle period” of serenity, non-identity, and family belonging. 

Still, despite Dylan’s best attempts to remain below the radar and free from imprisoning titles, his followers and fans seemed more ardent than ever to turn Dylan into their generational savoir.  In anecdote after anecdote in his autobiography, Dylan describes the daily harassment and stalking of his fans.  No matter where he moved his family- upstate New York, Manhattan, California, etc.- Dylan’s fans found him, and seemingly tried to swallow him whole.  Relentless followers continuously trespassed onto his property, crazed fans repeatedly camped outside his home, passersby’s stared and pointed or tried to photograph Dylan and his family.  And Dylan could therefore not help but feel that his identity had once again been robbed from him, and that he was not afforded any opportunity to live his own life.  Dylan articulates feeling entirely deprived of an independent identity:

A few years earlier Ronnie Gilbert, one of the Weavers, had introduced me at one of the Newport Folk Festivals saying, “And here he is… take him, you know him, he’s yours.”  I had failed to see the ominous forebodings in the introduction.  Elvis had never even been introduced like that.  “Take him, he’s yours!”  What a crazy thing to say!  Screw that.  As far as I knew, I didn’t belong to anybody then or now.  I had a wife and children whom I loved more than anything else in the world.  I was trying to provide for them, keep out of trouble, but the big bugs in the press kept promoting me as the mouthpiece, spokesman, or even conscience of a generation.  That was funny.  All I’d ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities.  I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of…. My destiny lay down the road with whatever life invited, had nothing to do with representing any kind of civilization.  Being true to yourself, that was the thing.  I was more a cowpuncher than a Pied Piper.

(115)

Dylan flashes back to an early moment in his career when he was introduced as ‘belonging to’ the crowd for which he was about to play, and claims that he did not see the “ominous forebodings” of such an introduction.  Dylan writes this chapter of his autobiography in an incredibly angry and irate tone because suddenly, his fans’ symbolic impositions affect not only Dylan himself, but his wife and children as well.  And for Dylan, who repeatedly belabors the description of himself as a ‘family man,’ this is intolerable.  It is at this moment- of his family’s loss of self-determined liberty- that Dylan seems to lose his connection to his followers.  Dylan proclaims: “I don’t know what everybody else was fantasizing about but what I was fantasizing about was a nine-to-five existence, a house on a tree-lined block with a white picket fence, pink roses in the backyard.  That would have been nice.  That was my deepest dream.  After a while you learn that privacy is something you can sell, but you can’t buy it back” (118).  There are several interesting points to note within this anecdote.  Firstly, Dylan specifically mentions that he does not “know what everybody else was fantasizing about;” this is similar to the aforementioned note that Dylan “had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that [he] was supposed to be the voice of” (118 and 115).  Namely, at this point in his career, Dylan vehemently moves away from any label of “voice” or “conscience” of a generation.  He determines right here that he does not know, and does not seem to care, what anyone else around him thinks or wants, and can only speak for his own desires.  Furthermore, Dylan is forlorn over his vanished privacy and notices he has sold it and can now never buy it back.  In stark contrast with the other statements in this chapter of Chronicles, Dylan seems genuinely heartbroken over his lost privacy, and not merely furious or enraged. 

What is finally interesting within Dylan’s descriptions are those of his newfound ‘family man’ desires.  He portrays entirely clichéd images in articulating his wants, right down to the “tree-lined block,” the “white picket fence,” and the self-proclamation as a “cowpuncher.”  This utilization of hackneyed American longings is far too reminiscent of Dylan’s early descriptions of his ‘ultra-American’ yearnings as a fledgling Folk musician, eating hamburgers and french-fries and pouring coca-cola from a milk pitcher[13].  Again, it seems that Dylan is attempting to build some sort of character for himself, but this time, the character is not one that is musically-based (as his Folk character was) but one that is family-based, the ultimate American family man who lives to protect, provide for, and shield his family.  And just as Dylan had used his Folk character to align himself with a certain Folk tradition, so too does ‘Family Dylan’ utilize a character in order to gain membership within a tradition of the American family, in the hopes of gaining independence and freedom for himself and for his family.

Dylan attempts to lock in this freedom in his song “Sign on the Window,” also on the album New Morning.  Dylan sings: “Build me a cabin in Utah / Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout / Have a bunch of kids who call me ‘Pa’ / That must be what it’s all about / That must be what it’s all about.”  In similar style to several other songs on New Morning, “Sign on the Window” has many references to Folk influences; the singer speaks about catching fish in a cabin in Utah, and having children who call him “Pa.”  But again, the song is played on piano and its tune is not particularly reminiscent of classic Folk songs or of typical electric rock and roll songs.  The song therefore stands as a brick in the foundation of a new tradition- one of family- and Dylan attests twice that having kids who call him Pa “must be what it’s all about.”  And so New Morning, as a representative album of the middle phase of Dylan’s career, veers away from any political or cultural symbols, evades any real generic labeling, and establishes and upholds Dylan’s hackneyed desires to be a family man, to remain far away from the limelight, and to gain freedom for himself and for his new family. 

Chapter Five: Born-Again Dylan

Albums: Slow Train Coming-1979, Saved- 1980

As Dylan attempted to establish himself as a family man throughout his middle period, taking all measures to keep his family out of the spotlight, he quickly realized that freedom would be harder than ever to secure.  For unlike the previous moments in his career where his music was confined by fans, now Dylan himself, and his family by extension, was entirely enslaved by fervent followers and harsh critics.  It seemed that there was nowhere for them to hide, no place safe from scrutiny, and no space free of constant surveillance.  And so though Dylan argued for freedom within his music (as I demonstrated through the album New Morning) he would also have to push for freedom outside of his music, since his personal life was now largely affected by his celebrity.

Dylan therefore began to think of personal gestures and actions in order to throw off and muddle his followers, to distract them from their constant scrutiny of his life.  Dylan describes his initial brainstorming to create a diversion for his fans: “There aren’t any rules to cover an emergency of this kind.  This was a new thing for me and I wasn’t used to thinking this way.  I’d have to send out deviating signals, crank up the wrecking train- create some different impressions” (120).  Dylan explains that he planned to “create some different impressions” by “crank[ing] up the wrecking train.”  What is notable about his line of thought is that Dylan entirely reuses the same reasoning that he had utilized in earlier moments in his career, reminiscent of when he plugged in and went electric. By suddenly going electric, Dylan had determined to break free of rigid Folk confines by muddling any cohesion within his musical career, and leaving his fans and critics annoyed and scratching their heads.  Using the same exact element of shock and confusion, Dylan determined to gain freedom for his family from the shackles of celebrity by again creating “different impressions” and puzzlement for his fans. 

And Dylan began to implement this mode of thought in small, personal gestures.  He narrates, “At first I was only able to do little things, local things.  Tactics, really.  Unexpected things like pouring a bottle of whiskey over my head and walking into a department store and act pie-eyed, knowing that everyone would be talking amongst themselves when I left” (120).  In this anecdote, Dylan explains that he began to act in erratic, almost crazy ways, in order to throw off any expectation of generational guru and messiah that his fans had gained of him, and in order to desist the growing obsessions that those around him had accumulated.  Even though it meant that his followers would see him in a negative, troubled light, Dylan was willing to subject himself to such a view so long as it ensured freedom for his family. 

But this sacrifice was not nearly as big as the artistic sacrifice that Dylan was prepared to make.  He states: “My outer image would have to be something a bit more confusing, a bit more humdrum.  It’s hard to live like this.  It takes all your effort.  The first thing that has to go is any form of artistic self-expression that’s dear to you.  Art is unimportant next to life, and you have no choice.  I had no hunger for it anymore, anyway” (121).  Dylan explains here that he had to give up “any form of artistic self-expression” because “art is unimportant next to life.”  This statement marks a drastic shift from the earliest moments of Dylan’s career where he felt entirely connected to and protective of his artistic self-expression.  Here, Dylan is wiling to sacrifice his musical articulation in order to protect his personal life.  In a final moment of desperation and of frustration, the seemingly ever-connected musician declares his disconnect, his lack of hunger, and his relinquishing of a genuine musical career. 

Yet it seems a bit odd for someone to openly declare that they have grown disconnected; Usually, disconnection is thought of as occurring subconsciously, without the awareness of the subject, and certainly without his declaration to the world about it.  It appears then, that the ‘disconnected Dylan’ is a contrived character as well, occurring sometime after ‘electric Dylan’ and coinciding with ‘family Dylan.’  If Dylan is disconnected from his music, then he also owes no allegiance to his ever-present fans, and can more easily slip into a space of familial isolation and freedom.

As Dylan continues to describe tactics that he used in order to confuse and baffle his fans and critics, he mentions one that seems very odd and a bit out of place.  Dylan writes:

I went to Jerusalem, got myself photographed at the Western Wall wearing a skullcap.  The image was transmitted worldwide instantly and quickly all the great rags changed me overnight into a Zionist.  This helped a little.  Coming back I quickly recorded what appeared to be a country-western record and made sure it sounded pretty bridled and house-broken.  The music press didn’t know what to make of it.  I used a different voice, too.  People scratched their heads.

(122)

In previous anecdotes, Dylan acts in unpredictable and crazy ways in order to throw off his followers; here, Dylan acts with religious fervor.  Though he was born and raised in a Jewish household and though many of his songs can be read as containing religious ideas and undertones, Dylan had never publicly behaved in any overtly religious manner.  Yet suddenly, he went to Israel and wore a skullcap at the Western Wall, the holiest site in the world for Jewish people.  He then attests that this gesture “helped a little” with his plan to evade celebrity and enslaving scrutiny.  Furthermore, Dylan returns home and records a country album, one that seems to have no place within his Folk persona, his rock and roll trajectory, or to his newfound Jewish identity.  In this moment of his text, Dylan has established religion as a means of creating a shocking turn-around of identity and as a way to escape rigid labeling.  What followed several years later then, is not shocking when understood within this trajectory- of Dylan doing everything within his power to create an identity turnaround- though it was certainly considered one of the most shocking and strange moments of his entire musical career. 

In 1979, Bob Dylan converted from Judaism to Christianity and released several albums with deep Christian imagery, messages, and themes.  The response to Dylan’s conversion and newfound Christian musician persona was one of complete shock, disapproval, and hurt.  No fans booed him as they had when he went electric, but critics were relentless in their severe and unforgiving reviews of his albums.  In his review, “Amazing Chutzpah,” written shortly after Dylan released Slow Train Coming­- the first of Dylan’s Christian albums- Greil Marcus asserted that “What we’re faced with here is really very ugly” (238).  Like many other critics at the time, Marcus was deeply outraged with Dylan’s conversion, but what he and many others found specifically “ugly” within Dylan’s new Christian music is extremely notable and interesting.

It seemed that despite their initial shock, most of Dylan’s fans and critics were not angered by his conversion to Christianity, per se; they were instead enraged by the seeming loss of a figure that had previously always challenged and defied the accepted ‘truths’ surrounding him.  The Dylan that sang on Slow Train Coming, they felt, was disconnected from any notion of truth, and was blindly following a tradition that he seemed to have challenged and confronted very little.  In his 1980 review of the album,  “G-d and man at Columbia,” Kurt Loder describes Slow Train Coming as containing a thoughtless and incognizant self-righteousness.  He wrote:

Though producers Jerry Wexler and Barry Beckett gave Dylan one of the cleanest sounds of his career- and Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler contributed the most lyrical and electric guitar lines ever to grace a Dylan album- the result seemed curiously embalmed: a record bereft of the rhythmic exuberance that has always characterized this artist’s best work.  The songs themselves were graceless and chilly in their self-righteous certitude.

(243)

Loder articulates a certain element that is missing from Slow Train Coming, and asserts that the album is “embalmed” and “chilly” in its certitude.  He further comments on this disconnected certitude by labeling Dylan a “Spiritual pamphleteer,” and asserting “Dylan hadn’t simply found Jesus but seemed to imply that he had His home phone number as well” (244).  Loder is particularly miffed with the arrogance exuded in Slow Train Coming, because Dylan seems to haughtily preach a religious view that he has not challenged or deliberated in any genuine way, and still advocates for it in an assured and overconfident manner.

Greil Marcus further comments on his disappointment in Dylan, not for converting, but for ardently promoting a view that does not seem to genuinely belong to him.  Marcus states: “Throughout his career, Dylan has taken Biblical allegory as a second language… What is new is Dylan’s use of religious imagery, not to discover and shape a vision of what’s at stake in the world, but to sell a prepackaged doctrine he’s received from someone else” (238).  Marcus does not recognize Dylan’s use of religion as a novel gesture, but feels that the novelty lies in his thoughtless selling of a “prepackaged doctrine he’s received from someone else.”  And since they lack any real thought or consideration, “Dylan’s new songs have nothing of the sanctified quest in them: they’re arrogant, intolerant… and smug” (238).  Marcus’s final point is that Slow Train Coming does not provide any true redemption for his listeners because it is poorly introspected, religiously thoughtless, and disconnectedly self-righteous.  

Another critic, Ron Rosenbaum, also felt that Dylan had lost some essential part of himself within the album.  In his 1980 review entitled “Born-Again Bob: four theories,” he discusses four possible reasons why Dylan may have converted to Christianity.  Rosenbaum argues that Dylan likely converted to combat some personal hardships that he had recently gone through- a divorce from his wife of twelve years, the recent passing of his father.  He also argues that Dylan possibly converted in order to evade Jewish followers who were harassing him to align himself more closely with Zionist groups, with whom he had previously indicated some ties.  None of Rosenbaum’s theories are particularly compelling enough to explain so radical a change, but they perfectly express the genuine sadness experienced by many Dylan followers and critics at the time.  Rosenbaum states:

Up until now, with all his changes, the actual Dylan has still preserved some element of that symbolic ‘Dylan’; until now he was one of the last formative figures of the Sixties to survive the Seventies without succumbing to some conversation experience.  Why did he have to do it now, with just a few months left in this depressing decade?  And why, of all things, did he have to convert to Christianity, at precisely that moment when the self-consciousness of Jews is even more acute?

(234)

Rosenbaum’s articulated despondency over Dylan’s conversion highlights a crucial point.  For the first time in his career and since he wandered into New York City in Woody Guthrie’s suit, Bob Dylan seemed to have lost all traces of a “symbolic Dylan.”  He no longer seemed to contain that readable and analyzable edge.  It was precisely by converting to Christianity, then, that Dylan’s ploy to evade symbolic misinterpretation and vehement obsession from followers was most nearly realized.

It is necessary to read closely in understanding Dylan’s conversion to Christianity- the moments preceding the conversion, how the conversion operated for Dylan, the lyrical and musical content on Dylan’s Christian albums, and how his fans ultimately received Dylan’s newfound Christianity.

Despite the initial reaction of critics and reviewers, Dylan’s conversion was not without introspection or previous thought.  Greil Marcus had stated in his review, “This is not the music of a man who’s thinking something through, but of a man who’s plugging in” (239).  Marcus equates the moment of Dylan’s conversion with that of his electric plug-in, and determines that both are incidents of Dylan behaving irrationally, thoughtlessly, and with brazen recklessness.  But Marcus’s comment does not indicate an understanding of Dylan’s intentions; instead Marcus demonstrates that just as he has seemed to misread Dylan’s conversion to electric, he is similarly misreading Dylan’s conversion to Christianity.  For Dylan’s Christianity is intently premeditated and carefully calculated, albeit on a strange note.  As I mentioned in the previous chapter and earlier in this chapter, Dylan had been feeling particularly harassed by his followers, and began to declare his disconnect from music in the years prior to his conversion.  In one anecdote of his autobiography, Dylan flashes back to a moment in his childhood and describes his non-speaking role in a town play about the last days of Christ.  Dylan was assigned the part of a Roman solider and states that he “felt like a part of everything, in the center of the planet, invincible” in his small, well-costumed role (125).  Dylan continues the anecdote by juxtaposing his current feelings:  

I wasn’t feeling so invincible at the moment.  Defiant, maybe… Truth was the last thing on my mind, and even if there was such a thing, I didn’t want it in my house.  Oedipus went looking for the truth and when he found it, it ruined him.  It was a cruel horror of a joke.  So much for the truth.  I was gonna talk out of both sides of my mouth and what you heard depended on which side you were standing.  If I ever did stumble on any truth, I was gonna sit on it and keep it down.

(125)

Dylan articulates feelings of helplessness and of frustration.  But what is particularly interesting about his frustration is his disinterest in “truth.”  It seems that Dylan has reached a point where he is deeply concerned about the negative effects that truth potentially carries with it.  In stark contrast to earlier moments in his career where Dylan attested that he had written “songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities,” suddenly Dylan is giving up on expressing the truth, and plans to “sit on it and keep it down” (115 and 125). 

            It is with this disinterest in truth that Dylan converts to Christianity.  For the first time, critics are baffled by Dylan’s seeming disingenuousness, his smugness, and his alienating disconnect.  Marcus references the lack of real truth in the album: “Dylan’s received truths never threaten the unbeliever, they only chill the soul, and that is because he is offering a peculiarly eviscerated and degraded version of American fundamentalism” (239).  Marcus rightfully points to the “received truths” on Dylan’s album; he describes their ‘chilliness’ and further articulates that they elucidate an empty and tainted version of ‘American fundamentalism.’  What Marcus fails to realize though, is that Dylan is not interested in truth in this album, nor is he interested in connecting with his fans.  Dylan preaches a version of religion that is purposefully alienating, arrogant, and distancing.  When his critics berate him for “los[ing his] nerve” and attest that they cannot “see the glory of [his] bloody minded G-d,” Dylan’s pointed alienation is only further realized as his followers and critics declare that they cannot join him on this most recent journey into Christian ‘fundamentalism’ (Fran Landesman, 243). 

            It seems that Dylan’s arrogant and ingenuine ‘truths’ create some desired alienation for his fans, and that Dylan can perhaps finally achieve some of the freedom he’s always longed for.  But what is particularly profitable about his conversion to Christianity is far deeper than mere alienation and distancing; Dylan’s use of Christianity and of religion in general is what allows his campaign for freedom the success it had previously lacked.  For inherent within the composition of religion are ideas about servitude and submission, ideas that Dylan expresses deep interest in throughout Slow Train Coming.

In the album’s first song, “Gotta Serve Somebody,” Dylan sings: “You may call me Terry, you may call me Timmy / You may call me Bobby, you may call me Zimmy / You may call me R.J., you may call me Ray / You may call me anything but no matter what you say / You’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed / You’re gonna have to serve somebody / Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord / But you’re gonna have to serve somebody”  (1979).  In this verse, Dylan points to the many names that he has gone by throughout his life.  Though the names he references are literal, they hint to the symbolic naming and labeling that Dylan has undergone throughout his career.  But unlike Dylan in previous moments of his career, the Dylan that sings on Slow Train Coming is empowered through this symbolic naming, for he gives permission to his listeners in naming him.  He begins each line with “you may call me…” implying that he has moved beyond the rigidity of being named by others and no longer feels confined by his fans’ labels.  The singer closes the verse with the refrain and elucidates ideas about servitude.  Namely, Dylan’s notion that “you’re gonna have to serve somebody” raises an important question to each of his listeners, critics, and followers, and that is- “Who have you been serving?”  It seems that the answer up until this point has been that his followers have placed him at the center of their servitude, submission, and obsession.  Dylan allows his listeners to imagine that until now, they’ve been serving a false god or “the devil,” and that they now have the option to serve “the Lord.”  The song contains intermittent gospel-style female vocalists, affirming Dylan’s change in servitude and continuously referencing the ‘higher authority’ that is Dylan’s new center of worship.  

 Throughout Slow Train Coming, Dylan further points to his new focus of reverence.  In “When You Gonna Wake Up” Dylan sings: “There’s a Man up on a cross and He’s been crucified / Do you have any idea why or for who He died? / When you gonna wake up, when you gonna wake up / When you gonna wake up and strengthen the things that remain?” Dylan highlights the crucifixion of Christ, and questions his followers for seemingly not recognizing that He has died for them.  The song’s singer repeatedly attempts to “awaken” his listeners and strengthen their lagging faith in their ‘real’ savoir. 

            But beyond placing a new center of worship for himself and for his followers, Dylan’s newfound Christianity allows him a mode of escape from all of the critiques, symbolic impositions, and impossible expectations that Dylan has always been subjected to by his fans.  For if Dylan now worships a higher authority, and his albums are alienating and distancing, then he has finally grown above the influence of outside opinions of him.  And this is perhaps the most powerful gain that Dylan receives from his newfound faith.  In “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking, Dylan sings: “Gonna change my way of thinking / Make myself a different set of rules / Gonna put my good foot forward / And stop being influenced by fools… You can mislead a man / You can take ahold of his heart with your eyes / But there’s only one authority / And that’s the authority on high.”  Here, Dylan acknowledges that he has contrived a change in his thinking and in his “rules,” but one that will allow him to cease the “influence [of] fools” upon his life.  He further attests that though others have had the past potential to “mislead” him and “take ahold of his heart,” he now only recognizes the authority of “the authority on high,” and is therefore above the influence of fools. 

            Dylan hammers in his brand new strength and independence in “I Believe in You,” where he prays to keep this victory: “Don’t let me change my heart / Keep me set apart / From all the plans they do pursue / And I, I don’t mind the pain / Don’t mind the driving rain / I know I will sustain / ‘Cause I believe in you.”  Dylan sings this song with affected tone; in parts of the tune his voice seems emotional and tearful, in others his singing sounds triumphant and uplifted.  Dylan begs the song’s subject to not let him change his heart because his new faith “set[s him] apart from all the plans they do pursue.”  With faith in “you,” Dylan can withstand any pain and hardship, and can remain separated from “their” plans for him.  What is most notable about Dylan’s language here is that in stark contrast to his past songs, Dylan’s listeners have shifted from “you” to “they;” Dylan does not sing this song directed towards his followers, but he sings it directed toward G-d, his new focus of reverence.  This shift in musical subject demonstrates Dylan’s ultimate disconnect from his followers and his final attempt to remain far away from their influence on and subjugation of him.

            When Dylan released his next Christian album in 1980, Saved, the album’s title seemed to have more meaning than one.  By 1980, Dylan’s critics were fed-up and annoyed, and could not understand why the artist had given up so much of his past self to convert to Christianity.  His fans and followers felt abandoned and alone, and even those who tried to see some positive aspects in Dylan’s conversion, were still waiting for him to return to the old visionary that he had once been.  It seemed that Dylan was free.  In the albums title track, Dylan ecstatically sings: “For so long I've been hindered / For so long I've been stalled / I’ve been saved / By the blood of the lamb / Saved / By the blood of the lamb / Saved / Saved / And I’m so glad / Yes, I’m so glad / So glad / I want to thank You, Lord / I just want to thank You, Lord / Thank you, Lord.”  Dylan’s celebrated save is notably more than just his soul’s religious redemption; Dylan has been “saved” from eternal damnation, “saved” from obsessive fans, “saved” from overzealous followers, “saved” from symbolically imprisoning titles (saved, saved!).  Dylan’s repetition of the word “saved,” his many “thank you, Lord’s,” accompanied by reiterative, enthusiastic female vocalists and an upbeat, triumphant piano tune all concretize Dylan’s glee at his spiritual, physical, and mental salvation.  The sacrifice, or “blood of the lamb” that Dylan made in order to save himself, seems to be his artistic self-expression, and his genuine connection to his music.  Though this was certainly a large and unfortunate sacrificial lamb for Dylan to offer up, he had done it willingly, knowing that “art is unimportant next to life” (mentioned above, found in Chronicles, 121). 

            Yet though his conversion to Christianity seemed to be Dylan’s best attempt at genuine freedom and independence from other peoples’ enslaving ascriptions of meanings, it also seemed to have arrived a bit too late.  Dylan’s personal life had already been destroyed by the constant invasions of his privacy, and his wife and children had moved out of his home.  Dylan claims earlier that his “wife, when she married [him], had no idea of what she was getting into,” but he was clearly distraught about losing the family life he had worked so hard to protect (119). 

            Yet even beyond the too-late arrival of some freedom, it would also become clear that Dylan would never really be free from the symbolic interjections of his fans and critics.  In the very same review in which he had berated Dylan’s Christianity in strong, harsh language, Ron Rosenbaum wrote:

He hasn’t really changed at all.  Remember how outraged all the folkies were when Dylan made the ‘drastic’ conversion from folk guitar to electrified rock-‘n’-roll?  Remember how all the rock-‘n’-rollers were enraged when he converted from electric to Nashville country?  And hasn’t he always taken the stance of a biblical prophet using the world and fables of Both Testaments to convey his outrage?  Aren’t the new songs in some ways the second coming of the critical social conscience his original disciples have been praying for?

(236)

In a complete turnaround from alienated and disconnected to understanding and forgiving, Rosenbaum suddenly articulates an opinion that dismisses “born-again Dylan” as any kind of new or legitimate figure.  For Rosenbaum, and likely for many fans and followers after their initial shock, Christianity was just another stage in Dylan’s symbolic trajectory.  No matter how shocking, how alienating, and how disconnectedly arrogant Dylan seemed, his fans, critics, and followers still interpreted him as the “biblical prophet” and “social conscience” of their generation.  And just as he had experienced with his novel Folk, his shocking rock-and-roll plug-in, and his isolated family-man persona, Dylan tasted a freedom that was fleeting, temporary, and ephemeral. 

Chapter Six: Wrapping Up Dylan

            In thinking of ways in which to ‘wrap up’ Bob Dylan, it seems that no summary or conclusion can be even remotely accurate or just.  The ever-changing, ever-rewriting, and ever-evading artist eternally shies away from any definitive finale.  Thomson and Gutman point to the impossibility of resolution within Dylan’s biography, in their introduction to The Dylan Companion: “If it is true that a portrait is never finished and can only be abandoned, it is especially true of the living, still-productive subject” (xix).  What is especially difficult about summing up the “living, still-productive” Dylan, is that his productivity lies entirely in the preoccupation of shifting and editing his own narrative trajectory. 

            For even now, forty-eight years after he first arrived in New York as an emerging Folk musician, Dylan has never ceased to shock his audiences and followers, and his bizarre behavior has yet to slow down.  In 2002, Dylan returned to the Newport Folk Festival to make his first reappearance there since his plug-in in 1965.  Dylan baffled fans by coming onto the stage wearing a fake beard and long, stringy wig under a large cowboy hat.  He made no acknowledgement of the particularity of the moment (nor of his strange costume) and left his audience entirely jaw-dropped and perplexed.  In 2004, Dylan made his first-ever appearance in a television commercial, when he made a cameo and provided the music for a Victoria’s Secret ad that promoted their new ‘Angels line’ of lingerie[14].  The press’s reaction to these events was entirely reminiscent of their response to every other shocking moment throughout his career: one of disappointment, disapproval, and downright confusion.  After all these years, the only thing predictable about Dylan’s career is the reaction that his fans, followers, and critics. 

            What remains to talk about, then, is Dylan’s writing and rewriting.  Indeed his strange and arresting behaviors have not ceased, but neither has his writing.  Dylan still produces new music and new albums, and his live performances are varied each time he plays.  As with my experience at his 2006 concert, Dylan can play the same song a hundred different ways, rendering it unfamiliar, strange, and new each time he replays it. 

This preoccupation of eternally changing what once seemed constant is a habit his critics have finally found difficult to overlook: “…Dylan plays on, fighting against the monotony in a genre whose constraints preclude any real escape” (Thomson and Gutman, xvi).  By continuously reimagining and reinventing what once was, Dylan perpetually evades the constraints that are relentlessly bestowed upon him.

Dylan’s autobiography similarly provides a revisited history, as it muddles any cohesion of temporality and ‘actual fact’ throughout.  Chronicles: Volume One poignantly demonstrates that fiction and retroactive imagination are as much a part of Dylan’s narrative as are fact and historical truth.  He subtitled his autobiography “Volume One,” intimating that this is just the first of his documented revisits, and there will certainly be more to come.

It is then our task to be persistent, constant readers of Dylan.  As he tirelessly confuses, shocks, and surprises us with a rewriting of his narrative trajectory, we must continuously halt in our own reading of narrative, and revisit what we once assumed was unbreakable, lasting truth.   It is only with this relationship of endless rewriting and incessant rereading that any understanding of Dylan is elucidated. 

Works Cited

Bob Dylan. Another Side of Bob Dylan. Columbia, 1964.

--- Biograph. Columbia, 1985.

--- Blonde on Blonde. Columbia, 1966.

--- Bob Dylan. Columbia, 1962.

--- Bringing It All Back Home. Columbia, 1965.

--- Highway 61 Revisited. Columbia, 1965.

--- New Morning. Columbia, 1970.

--- Saved. Columbia, 1980.

--- Slow Train Coming. Columbia, 1979.

--- The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. Columbia, 1963.

--- The Times They Are a-Changin' Columbia, 1964.

Bruner, Jerome. "The Narrative Creation of Self." The Handbook of Narrative and Psychotherapy: Practice, Theory, and Research. Ed. Lynne E. Angus and John McLeod. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, Inc, 2003.

Dylan, Bob. Chronicles: Volume One.  New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc, 2004. 

Dylan, Bob. Lyrics: 1962-2001. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc, 2004.

Festival! - The Newport Folk Festival. Dir. Murray Lerner. Perf. Son House, Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan. DVD. Eagle Vision Media, 2005.

Farina, Richard. "Baez and Dylan: a Generation Singing Out." The Dylan Companion. Ed. Elizabeth Thomson and David Gutman. New York and Washington D.C.: First Da Capo Press, 1964. 81-88.

Gonczy, Daniel J. "The Folk Music of the 1960s: Its Rise and Fall." The Dylan Companion. Ed. Elizabeth Thomson and David Gutman. New York and Washington D.C.: First Da Capo Press, 1985. 4-17.

iTunes Music Store, Apple.  Under “Bob Dylan,” “Albums.”

Landesman, Fran. "Sorry Bobby." The Dylan Companion. Ed. Elizabeth Thomson and David Gutman. New York and Washington D.C.: First Da Capo Press, 1980. 242-243.

Lerner, Murray. "Exclusive: Dylan At Newport - Who Booed?" Interview with Mojo Magazine 25 Oct. 2007, available at http://www.mojo4music.com/blog/2007/10/exclusive_dylan_at_newport_who.html

Loder, Kurt.  “G-d and Man at Columbia." The Dylan Companion. Ed. Elizabeth Thomson and David Gutman. New York and Washington D.C.: First Da Capo Press, 1980. 243-246.

Marcus, Greil. "Amazing Chutzpah." The Dylan Companion. Ed. Elizabeth Thomson and David Gutman. New York and Washington D.C.: First Da Capo Press, 1998. 237-240.

Meisel, Perry. "Dylan and the Critics." Raritan 26.3 (Winter 2007): 101-119.

Miller, Jim. "Bob Dylan." The Dylan Companion. Ed. Elizabeth Thomson and David Gutman. New York and Washington D.C.: First Da Capo Press, 1988. 18-32.

Motion, Andrew. "When the Times a-Changed." The Dylan Companion. Ed. Elizabeth Thomson and David Gutman. New York and Washington D.C.: First Da Capo Press, 1998. 312-315.

The Other Side of the Mirror: Live at Newport Folk Festival 1963-1965. Dir. Murray Lerner. Perf. Bob Dylan. DVD. Sony, 2007.

Rosenbaum, Ron. "Born-Again Bob: Four Theories." The Dylan Companion. Ed. Elizabeth Thomson and David Gutman. New York and Washington D.C.: First Da Capo Press, 1979. 233-237.

Shelton, Robert.  “Trust Yourself.” The Dylan Companion. Ed. Elizabeth Thomson and David Gutman. New York and Washington D.C.: First Da Capo Press, 1980. 291-295. 

Thomson, Elizabeth and Gutman, David. "Introduction." The Dylan Companion. Ed. Elizabeth Thomson and David Gutman. New York and Washington D.C.: First Da Capo Press, 1990. xvi-xxix.

Van Gelder, Lawrence. "Arts Briefing." The New York Times 7 Apr. 2004. Accessed 23 Feb. 2009, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/07/theater/arts-briefing.html?scp=8&sq=bob%20dylan%20victoria's%20secret&st=cse

---

[1] Thomson and Gutman write this statement while summarizing the essay, “Trust Yourself” by Robert Shelton, a well-known Dylanologist and contributing essayist to their compilation. 

[2] All song lyrics quoted within this paper are taken from Bob Dylan: Lyrics, 1962-2001.

[3] Throughout this paper, I include the year for songs that I use to introduce musical albums.  If there is no year mentioned, the song was written the same year as the one I mention before it. 

[4]Based on the versions by Emry Arthur, recorded in the late 1920’s and the Stanley Brothers, recorded and popularized in the early 1950’s.

[5] I have noticed this to be true about several different Folk songs.  It is very apparent in Woody Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre,” which tells the tale of the Italian Hall Tragedy of Calumet, Michigan.  The song’s conclusion, (which is not based on actual historical evidence), blames “thugs and scabs” for the deaths of over 70 people who were crushed to death when someone falsely shouted “fire” at an over-crowded Christmas party.

[6] This is an observation that Professor Perry Meisel pointed out to me in a conversation that we had, as well as one that he makes in his essay, “Dylan and the Critics” (117).

[7] As quoted by Mojo Magazine, in an October 25^th, 2007 interview with Lerner entitled, “Exclusive: Dylan At Newport- Who Booed?”

[8] Discussed in Chapter Two, pg. 10

[9] See Chapter Two pg. 10 for explanation of Folk pronunciations

[10] Biograph is an album compilation of Dylan’s music, spanning from 1962 to 1981, and it was released in 1985. (-iTunes Music Store)

[11] Footage seen in the Documentary Festival! - The Newport Folk Festival

[12] The description of Dylan as “messiah and guru” is described by Andrew Motion in his essay, “When the Times a-Changed.”  The other terms ‘prophet and conscience’ are terms that I have continuously come upon in essays and reviews of Dylan’s career, as well as in Dylan’s autobiography. 

[13] See Chapter Two pg. 9

[14] From the New York Times ‘Arts Briefing,’ published Wednesday, April 7, 2004.