Bob Dylan
'. . . . I was standing on the side of the road
Rain falling on my shoes
Heading out for the East Coast
Lord knows I've paid some dues getting through
Tangled up in blue . . .
We drove that car as far as we could
Abandoned it out West
Split up on a dark sad night
Both agreeing it was best
She turned around to look at me
As I was walking away
I heard her say over my shoulder
"We'll meet again someday on the avenue"
Tangled up in blue.
I had a job in the great north woods
Working as a cook for a spell
But I never did like it all that much
And one day the ax just fell . . .
But all the while I was alone
The past was close behind . . .
She opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet
From the thirteenth century
And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burning coal
Pouring off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you
Tangled up in blue
I lived with them on Montague Street
In a basement down the stairs
There was music in the cafes at night
And revolution in the air
Then he started into dealing with slaves
And something inside of him died
She had to sell everything she owned
And froze up inside
And when finally the bottom fell out
I became withdrawn
The only thing I knew how to do
Was to keep on keeping on like a bird that flew
Tangled up in blue.
So now I'm going back again
I got to get to her somehow
All the people we used to know
They're an illusion to me now
Some are mathematicians
Some are carpenters' wives
Don't know how it all got started
I don't what they're doing with their lives
But me I'm still on the road
Heading for another joint
We always did feel the same
We just saw it from a different point of view
Tangled up in Blue.'
- from Bob Dylan in America by Sean Wilentz; pp. 139-140: Dylan, who had heard of Raeben
from Sara’s friend Robin Fertik, sought Raeben out with the intention of learning more about
Jewish philosophy, but he ended up spending two months working at Raeben’s studio, five days
a week, from eight thirty until four. Dylan later described his fellow pupils as a thrown-together
assortment: “rich old ladies from Florida—standing next to an off-duty policeman, standing next
to a bus driver, a lawyer. Just all kinds.” Dylan does not appear to have been anyone special, at
least to Raeben, who, though he knew of Dylan’s fame, regularly berated him as an idiot (much
as he did the other students). It is unclear how much the sessions actually improved Dylan’s
sketching and painting; at neither would he ever become especially skilled. But Dylan credited
Raeben with nothing less than teaching him “how to see,” by putting “my mind and my hand and
my eye together, in a way that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt.”
Dylan has from time to time spoken of mentors whose principles or systems pulled him
out of an artistic and spiritual trough. In the first volume of Chronicles, he relates how recalling a
particular “mathematical” tone structure that he had learned years earlier from the old blues star
Lonnie Johnson helped revitalize his playing in the mid-1980s. With Raeben, he learned to
eschew conceptualization (the bane, in Raeben’s view, of the contemporary art scene), and to see
things plain, as they really are, always aware of perspective, both straight on and from above,
simultaneously. He also learned how to abandon the sense of linear time to which he had clung
automatically, and to understand the artistic possibilities of pulling together the past, present, and
future, as if they were of a piece, permitting a clearer, more concentrated focus on the objects or
objects at hand.
That summer of 1974, working mainly in a house around back on a farm he had
purchased in Minnesota alongside the Crow River (with his brother David’s house in front,
closer to the road), Dylan pored over a small red notebook, writing lyrics for a new album that
would capture the wounds, scars, and sorrowed wisdom of love. His writing included, early on,
what would become “Tangled Up in Blue,” a song he would later describe as directly beholden
to Raeben:
I was just trying to make it like a painting where you can see the different parts but then you
also see the whole of it. With that particular song, that’s what I was trying to do . . . with the
concept of time, and the way the characters change from the first person to the third person, and
you’re never quite sure if the third person is talking or the first person is talking. But as you look
at the whole thing, it really doesn’t matter.
Nor did it matter who the “she” was in the song, or how many shes there really were, or when
anything happened; the song hangs together as one that took ten years for Dylan to live and two
years for him to write.
Indeed, it appears that Raeben affected Dylan and “Tangled Up in Blue” in several ways.
Manic, brusque, and unsparing, Raeben would dress down his pupils as a means to help instruct
them, sometimes revising students’ work right on the canvas in his loose rapid style, to show
them how it was done. According to the artist John Amato, another student of Raeben’s at the
time, Dylan was one day painting a still life of a vase—the quintessential artistic effort to stop
time—and was working heavily in blue, a favorite pigment of novice students, when Raeben
looked at the canvas dismissively, telling Dylan that he was all tangled up in blue.
- from The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan (Edited by Kevin J. H. Dettmar); pp. 1-2:
David Gates’s description of Dylan as “the man who did to popular music what Einstein did to
physics,” while initially sounding like hyperbole, really isn’t. (The error, if there is one, isn’t in
the parallel between these two innovators, but in equating these fields of innovation.) Dylan
brought the long lyric line back to popular American song, much as Walt Whitman had restored
it to populist American poetry a century earlier; and against the clear-sighted, sometimes
childlike lyrics of the folk tradition, Dylan imported the French symbolists’ strategy of
suggesting rather than delineating his subjects, a style of lyrical impressionism fully consonant
with the introspective (and sometimes hallucinogen-enhanced) listening styles of the time.
Equally important as these two factors, Dylan from an early age boasted the voice of a seemingly
old man – seemingly the very voice, to steal a phrase from Greil Marcus, of “old, weird
America.” In an era when pop (and even folk) stars were, as today, meant to sing like the
nightingale, Dylan instead sang as the crow. But that croak, it seemed, contained a depth of
feeling and passion and anger and joy and wisdom and disillusionment not hinted at by the
songbirds; it came as a revelation. And it sounded like the voice of Truth.
- from The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan (Edited by Kevin J. H. Dettmar); pp. 170-172
[“Love and Theft” (2001) by Eric Lott]: Just as there’s probably no racially unmixed instance of
American culture, so there’s no mixed instance not marked in some way or other by inequalities
of power. Love is shot through with theft, and theft with love. Think about “High Water.” Where
in the long musical history by which plantation slaves invigorated Anglo-Irish folk tunes with a
post-African percussive sensibility only to be commercially represented on the US theatrical
stage by white men who gave rise to generations of “white” rural string music, eventually to be
taken up in homage to black blues musician Charley Patton by somebody (self-)named Bob
Dylan (“Hm, Bob Dylan, I wonder what it was before,” Marshall Berman reports his mother
musing when she first heard the name forty years ago) on an album called “Love and Theft” –
where in all this can you even think of escaping the rigors and mortises of racialized cultural
life in these United States?
By the same token, I’d guess that Dylan regards minstrelsy, say, whatever its ugliness, as
responsible for some of the US’s best music as well as much of its worst – without the wishful
fantasies of musical racelessness that mar Greil Marcus’s invocations of the “old, weird
America” (Invisible Republic 124). I’ve argued elsewhere that the emancipatory depictions of
Jim in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (such as when Jim and Huck are reunited on the raft
after their separation in a fog) are no less indebted to minstrelsy than the more stereotypical ones,
which is to say there’s no “transcending” or circumventing through sheer will the internally
contradictory structures of blackface feeling. Stephen Foster’s “Oh! Susanna” (1848), written in
“black” dialect with some less than palatable suggestions about African American mental
capacity, is nonetheless a great song that exhibits a good deal of sympathetic identification with
the black family separated by slavery depicted in it.
The blues formats that Dylan chooses to say something about cultural borrowing on
“Love and Theft” give rise in turn to its insistence on age and loss – lost love, lost relatives, lost
time. “Love and Theft” is preoccupied with loss and futility in direct proportion to its refusal to
give up – “never say die,” as Dylan sings on “Po’ Boy.” Song by song, the singer’s pathway
stones are announced and recuperated by the general buoyancy of his wit and his music. The
oscillation between death drive and pleasure principle isn’t unique to “Love and Theft,” of
course, but is a structuring principle of all blues; the music’s repetitions don’t aim to drown in
sorrow but to exorcise it, allow the repressed to briefly return on its way out of the psyche. The
sound of loss and trauma returning in order to be remade comes in the “dirty” tones, the falling
pitches, the flatted Es and Bs of the blues scale – and on “Love and Theft” in the voice of gravel
that intones whole realms of aging and struggle. Dylan does seem singularly intent here, though,
on capturing a state Freud termed “melancholia”: not the failed mourning of his 1917 essay
“Mourning and Melancholia,” even less a synonym for depression, but a middling state in which,
as Freud summed it up in The Ego and the Id, the lost love object is retained as a (historical)
component of the self. In these terms, the content of one’s emotional life is nothing less than the
transferential sum of abandoned or lost loves, a nexus of ghostly emotional attachments, “the
sedimentation,” as Judith Butler has put it, “of objects loved and lost, the archaeological
remainder, as it were, of unresolved grief”. Loss inevitably undergirds the self, on this view, and
if that tends in a variety of ways to haunt us it also connects us concretely and materially to the
past, to history. It thus has an immense productive aspect for thinkers and creative artists, which
is why I’d argue that the key line on the whole of “Love and Theft” is “I wish my mother was
still alive” (“Lonesome Day Blues”).
Beatty Zimmerman died in late January of 2000. To make too much of this fact would be
as foolish as thinking it had nothing to do with the feel and spiritual vibe of the album Dylan
wrote and recorded a little more than a year later. The line above seems to come out of nowhere,
at the end of a disjointed verse in the middle of the internally dissociated “Lonesome Day
Blues,” as though live and direct from the unconscious. Closer inspection reveals the
connections, which have the odd effect of making the song seem even more self-exposing.
Singing against a heavy blues downbeat, the song’s speaker sits thinking, his “mind a million
miles away.” It is on the whole a roving set of reflections on drastic loss. He left his long-time
darlin’ standing in the door; his pa died and left him, his brother got killed in the war; Samantha
Brown lived in his house for four or five months but he didn’t sleep with her eeeeven once. Then
comes this:
I’m forty miles from the mill – I’m droppin’ it into overdrive
I’m forty miles from the mill – I’m droppin’ it into overdrive
Settin’ my dial on the radio
I wish my mother was still alive
In some deep current of feeling, mother and radio are bound up with each other: it’s a genius
couplet. Both are major modes of cultural and more specifically musical transmission (which
incidentally realizes the punning intention of “droppin’ it into overdrive”). The mother is the pre-
linguistic source of all music, her heartbeat the first rhythm we hear, her hum among the first
melodies; losing her in the process of individuation is our first loss, the first love object to be
introjected as part of the ego’s melancholia and one template for our later relationships. The
radio mimics the mother’s subsequent status as ghosted, disembodied musical source (I’ll refrain
from speculating on the radio dial’s anatomical analogue), and its status as a technological
anachronism in an age of downloading, music-sharing, and iPods casts upon it a similarly
vestigial and recursive shadow (that is to say, when you hear the radio you remember the first
times you ever heard the radio; the same goes, unconsciously, for the pull—or push—of your
mother’s voice). So it’s no real surprise that the two references might come one after the other,
or, as the syntax of the line suggests, that the radio itself might remind the singer of his mama.
The phrase “love and theft” finds an especially poignant resonance in the context of Dylan’s
mother being stolen away; such is the power of her originary position, moreover, that she might
even be the long-time darlin’ the singer last left standing in the door. In any case, Dylan singing
about his mother opens rather effortlessly onto singing about music and by implication his
career, and given that doing so has helped create a powerful song on a powerful album, we might
say that loss is recuperated here by, and in the service of, a melancholic art.
It’s the memories that haunt you, things acquired, loved, and lost. “Some of these
memories you can learn to live with and some of them you can’t” (“Sugar Baby”). So many
things cluster here: the people you once clung to, the wrongs you couldn’t help (“So many things
that we never will undo / I know you’re sorry, I’m sorry too,” Dylan sings in “Mississippi”), the
very sources of your energy and your art. “These memories I got, they can strangle a man”
(“Honest with Me”), not a good thing for a singer, but understandable if what you’ve got in your
throat are traces of a thousand different songs from apartheid America. Race, memory, and
music meet in musical melancholia, where you get by with materials you barely remember
taking in the first place: you were too young, or they were too available, or both, and they work
so well, speak so solidly to your condition. You reach back to your roots, you work through your
masks, and you find yourself again in the land where the blues began.
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(as per tcaudilllg)
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