Bob Dylan’s Box of Strange and Unusual Curiosities
The Philosophy of Modern Song
review by William Routhier
When this came out I read the reviews, I got the gist, and wasn’t about to pay $45 for a coffee table book with tons of pictures filling it, the text of which that was by turns interesting, informed and utterly baffling. Surprise surprise, it’s Bob Dylan.
All this time’s gone by and I was browsing my local library and there it was.
I took it out, went through it once and did the major head scratch WTF, an experience a lot of reviewers had, but it is Bob Dylan after all, and there’s that allowance for the occasional flashes of brilliance thing in it, which were definitely there. The rest of the copious sidebar, oddball observations, well, I thought, make of them what you will. I relegated it to a cranky curiosity. This wasn’t a well-planned overview of popular music, starting with Robert Burns and tracing it through folk and the blues and the 60’s, touching bases at every notable and significant figure along the way, giving his invaluable insight, kind of like the Greenwich Village section of Chronicles. Nope. This was some kind of weird grab bag of songs Dylan liked and decided he’d write about on the tour bus, when they weren’t playing poker. That’s the only observable plan here.
But it ruminated, started brewing in me like kimchi, something of it burrowed down deep and I had to go back take a more careful look at what was going on.
The first three songs he writes about are fairly straightforward descriptions, Detroit City/ Bobby Bare, Pump It Up/Elvis Costello, Without a Song/ Perry Como. Then comes Take Me from This Garden of Evil/Jimmy Wages, the research of which is worth the price of the book. It’s a raggedy rockabilly song on Sun Records that was unreleased, so goes the note included here. Dylan unearthed it somewhere. You can hear it on You Tube. The record was apparently pressed, there’s a picture of it, just not officially distributed. This is my guess from the info supplied. On this song, Dylan starts to, shall we say, expand his use of hyperbole.
You want to be flung into a distant realm where you’ll be
redeemed, and you’ll go with anyone who’ll escort you out
of this jungle. You want to be piggy backed into another
dimension where your body and mind can be restored.
Cool! The thing is, by all indications in the song, it’s really about some girl who wants to “set his pace,” control him, and he doesn’t like it. This is the evil Jimmy fears.
I mention this not because it isn’t fun to hear Dylan take his own psychic spin on these songs, it is. I just want to show what’s going on, his method here. The title of the book should be, “Bob Dylan’s Weird and Unusual Philosophy as Seen Through the Shifting Lens of Certain Modern Songs He Likes.” And so you know what the word ‘modern’ means to Dylan in terms of songs, there’s one by Stephen Foster, written in 1849. I agree with him on that, on Foster being the first modern songwriter.
The next song, There Stands the Glass/Webb Pierce, is where it goes totally off road. The song itself is an alcoholic’s testament, he gets up in the morning and first thing, drinks.
There stands the glass, fill it up to the brim
Until my troubles grow dim, it's my first one today
I'm wondering where you are tonight
And I'm wondering if you are all right
I wonder if you think of me in my misery
That’s it. That’s the entire content of the song, with another verse about it hiding his fears, drying his tears. He’s broken up over a woman, and what’s he do? Drinks.
Dylan’s exposition starts, “The guy in this song has quite a back story.” Dylan then goes on to talk about him being betrayed by the government, how he stuck bayonets into babies bellies and gouged out old men’s eyes. Assassinated priests. Machine guns down villagers, watches his buddies rape a little girl then shoot her.
Whoa.
Ok. He’s imagining a soldier back from war who’s done unimaginably horrible things, and has PTSD, self-hatred, paralyzing dreams. And first thing in the morning, he drinks a glass of whiskey, or some kind of spirits. Certainly not beer.
But the lyrics of the song have nothing to do with a story like that. The lyrics of the song are about a guy who’s girl left him. This is the pattern you need to get used to in reading this book. It’s not about the songs per se. It’s about the thought dreams Dylan had when hearing them, which when they’re seen, might indeed make someone want to put his head in a guillotine – but, remember he’s Nobel Prize winner.
Next, there’s a section about Webb Pierce wearing “Nudie Suits,” suits for country stars, elaborately sewn flashy things with sequins and bright colors. Made cool by Gram Parsons. That’s the fun part of this book, the little side roads into music history. Dylan, who loves history, has got great stories, due in part from the research of his buddy Eddie Gorodetsky, who also supplied much of the background material for Dylan’s “Theme Time Hour” radio show.
Now Volare. Everybody knows the song, it’s mostly sung in Italian, Dean Martin did a version, along with many other singers. Volare means “Flying.” Here’s a verse.
I think a dream like this never comes back
I painted my hands and face blue
Then, suddenly, I was kidnapped by the wind
And I began to fly in the infinite sky
Flying, oh, oh
Singing, oh, oh
In the blue-painted blue sky
Happy to be up there
It’s a lighthearted, whimsical song about flying in the sky, like a children’s book, and then when you wake up, finding that same thing in your girl’s blue eyes. And here’s Dylan’s reaction.
Around the globe you skyrocket, through the labyrinth.
No wonder your happy heart sings. Sings the melodies…
ragtime, bebop, operatic and symphonic. The sounds of violins,
and it’s all in tune with your mercurial self. …You tear your own
body to pieces and throw the bits everywhere.
The tune has suddenly become a transcendent experience, mystical, psychedelic, of oneness with the cosmos and the annihilation of the ego, of the self. It’s a marvelous concept, great fun, just not really there in the lyrics. Dylan says it could have been one of the first hallucinogenic songs. In his mind, sure. For the rest of the world, a light hearted fantasy. This is where we are here – we’re not listening to Dylan’s playlist, we’re listening to Dylan’s mind as he listens to his playlist. Just to round out the weirdness, the picture accompanying the song is from the Thunderbirds TV show, the one with the puppets. This particular Thunderbird guy is peacefully flying a red and white Supercar, a puppet smile on his face.
Finally, it’s the omissions that are just plain weird. You get Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves by Cher, but no Robert Johnson, Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, The Byrds, Stones, Beatles.
Weird, but understandable when you accept that Dylan is forever mercurial and usually his own worst editor. The man who left Blind Willie McTell off of Infidels.
There’s a lot more here, I could go on for twenty pages about the various divergent excursions he takes down the particular rabbit holes of his imagination, but I leave that to the reader to discover those for themself. It’s one of those books you could have on the nightstand and pop into before drifting off to sleep, finding something every time that would coincide with one’s strangest, most disturbing and marvelous dreams.