Is Bob Dylan a poet?

Watching this extraordinarily evocative film of an obviously nervous and glamour-free Bob Dylan singing most of his song ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ in 1964

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeP4FFr88SQ

 

I was struck by several things. First was the extraordinary familiarity of the face and voice, and my near total-recall of the lyrics, though it’s been more than 40 years since I paid much attention to Dylan and 30 years since I got rid of my old vinyl LPs in some intercontinental move or other.

 

Second was the instant feeling of familiarity with that odd moment, the early 1960s, when the storm of cultural revolution was gathering, and the first gusts of the coming gale thudding against the windows, but we had no idea of what was going to hit us. For some reason I feel sure that the film was shot on a Saturday afternoon – but this is an English view, and probably isn’t true. In England in 1964, Saturday afternoon and evening were the one time in our workful Protestant routines when most people felt free of obligation (Plenty of us still worked on Saturday mornings, and by Sunday, most things were shut, giving a sombre air to the world, and in any case Monday was crowding close again).

 

Third is to recall how safe we all felt then. The world, for the moment,was settled. I never believe the people who claim they were perpetually terrified of a nuclear holocaust. We were all pretty sure nobody would risk it, and we were right.

 

I think it  was that feeling of safety, that this was just a game we were playing, that made us so receptive to the beguiling new music of such people, though, try as I may, I can’t think of any single person as interesting and significant as Dylan then was. Someone told you ‘you must listen to this’, you heard him for the first time and knew it mattered, though not why. Some people say it’s poetry. I’m not qualified to give an opinion. All I know is that it somehow gets past your defences  and colonises your memory, and that you wonder ever afterwards if it is profound or just hypnotic. ‘Evening’s empire has returned into sand’ (though requiring a very odd stress on the first syllable of the word ‘returned’, for it to be sung or recited properly) is a sentence so rich with evocations of crumbling pyramids and deserted ruined cities among blown dunes that you can never get rid of it once you have heard of it.

 

The fourth thing is the faces of the audience, some indifferent, one or two actually wandering off,  some captivated - yet none of them understanding that they are witnesses to the beginning of a fame and power so great that it cannot really ever be measured.

 

The fifth thing is the strange way in which the film comes to life when you can see the wind blowing, flapping a backdrop on the stage, lifting people’s hair and shaking the trees. I have never understood this, but it has always been true for me that the sight of wind blowing in some film of a far-off time makes it seem hugely immediate. You can imagine yourself there.

 

And then, a second later, it comes to you that this real moment is utterly dead, cannot be reassembled, and can only be dimly imagined at this great distance.  What you have just seen was alive and is dead.

 

Is this perhaps because of the Bible’s habit of warning of the impermanence of all things with those pitiless words ‘and the wind shall blow over it, and the place of it shall know it no more’? Possibly.

 

 

Some readers may remark that it is odd that I rather like a song which has often been said to be about drugs. Is it about drugs? Dylan denies it, and the alleged references are ambiguous at most. I hope not. If it is, then it quickly shrivels down into something much less interesting.

 

How on earth did I come to be listening to this? A series of accidents. Slothful after watching ‘University Challenge’ on Wednesday evening I went on to watch the film ‘The Help’  (about the American south in the Civil Rights era) which I had sort of meant to go and see when it came out, and hadn’t. Now the BBC was bringing it to me at home. 

 

It has some merits, and some faults, which I won't go into now. But towards the end, it features a clip of Dylan’s mournful, self-pitying little song of rejection ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ (NB *not* ‘Alright’, a stupid formulation nearly as annoying as the wholly moronic and pointless use of ‘ ‘til’ instead of ‘until’ or ‘till’).

 

Gosh, that took me back. I remembered every word, and quite a lot of how I'd felt the last time I'd heard it, decades before.  I searched for it on the web, and found it (attached to a curious little film set in a wintry 1960s London which is moving without being in any way nostalgia-inducing). And then I thought I'd look for ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ as well.

 

Meanwhile, I have finished Richard Pipes’s ‘Russian Revolution’  (the complicity of Germany in this ghastly event is far greater than even I had imagined) and obtained an English translation of Friedrich Naumann’s ‘Mitteleuropa’. And in weeks to come I hope to have a bit to say about the American novelists Anne Tyler and Marilynne Robinson.