Bob Dylan Turns 70

One of the most influential songwriters in American song history turns 70 today. Gotta say that I've spent countless hours listening to, and obsessing on, his music. I continue to be heavily influenced by it, and no doubt always will be. Here's one of the most astonishing live versions of one of his greatest songs. It's haunting and beautiful, what great art always should strive for.

Positively Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan Revisited: 13 Graphic Interpretations of Bob Dylan's Songs
W.W. Norton, Inc.
Publication date: November 16, 2009
ISBN: 9780393076172
$24.95

Reviewed by Kyle Semmel

A fascinating new book hits bookstore shelves today: Bob Dylan Revisited: 13 Graphic Interpretations of Bob Dylan's Songs. It presents on the page what musicians, including Dylan, have long since done on the stage: reinvent the songs. In the book—which is, according to a press release, "fully authorized by Bob Dylan and SONY Records"— thirteen graphic novelists interpret Dylan's classic tunes by creating panels of original artwork based on the lyrics.

And it's cool, both as a tribute to Dylan and as a collection of graphic "stories" that can be enjoyed with or without knowledge of the man who wrote the songs. (As the press release succinctly puts it, "Fans will relish this chance to appreciate Dylan's work in a new context, while a new generation will be introduced to his lyrical genius with mesmerizing original art.")

Thierry Murat's vision of "Blowin' in the Wind" is a social-realistic interpretation quite in the spirit of Dylan; Murat even alters the lyrics to craft a new refrain (something I imagine Dylan himself might admire): "all that I know, the wind whispered to me." The panels make ample use of shading in dark charcoal; when they are coupled with snatches of Dylan's sharp lyrics—"how many deaths," "how many tears," "how many wars,"—the drawings become bold and stirring, even downright haunting.

There's an echo of this haunting spirit in Lorenzo Mattotti's mindtrip of "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," perhaps the most powerful interpretation in this collection. It's a colorful rendition: Edvard Munch meets Blue Man in a dark nightmare of our times. Unlike Murat, Mattotti sticks to Dylan's lyrics completely—and does so to great effect. This is a song where words come alive: "I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken" is accompanied by the image of a blindfolded man whose tongue is sheared in half by a bodyless hand (Here, it's impossible not to recall the line in Dylan's "Political World" from Oh, Mercy: "We're livin' in a time/ a man commits a crime/ the crime don't have a face.") In another panel, the horrendous "heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin'" depicts a faceless individual begging for food while two suited men enjoy a hearty laugh, unseeing the suffering. There's absolutely no safe place in this song—even the one bright space of "I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow" is weighted down by what's wrapped so bleakly around it—and Mattotti uses the hard, brutal lyrics as a springboard to the rawest images. In doing so he creates a visual sense of menace. The colors reflect the mood.

Overall, the mood this book offers is a grim one. Fans of Dylan's music know that when he's at his best, his lyrics and his songs offer more darkness than light (light's in there, but you've got to look hard for it, it don't shine bright). And this collection spares no darkness. Nicolas Nemiri's "I Want You" is noirish; there's a lone shadow man—a classic Dylan image. François Avril's "Girl from the North Country" gives us another stoic man, this time one who leaves his girl to ride off into a snow-blanketed landscape on a horse. (And no, that's not part of the original song.)

The shortest interpretation is Jean Claude-Gőtting's "Lay Lady Lay," a starkly-imagined charcoal set of panels that, removed from the lyrics, would seem to be paintings of Depression-era America. It's a simple translation of the song: a hard-working man returns home to his loving wife. In Claude-Gőtting's hand it is a deeply moving portrait of a relationship, with zero trace of the Hallmark silliness—probably thanks to the duskiness of the panels—that could be associated with this kind of interpretation. The interpretation may be short, but it perfectly gets at what makes this book—and Dylan—so special: a deep and lasting, real and recognizable sense of humanity. Dylan's view of humanity may be dark—it may have, to quote a phrase, "gone down the drain"—but he knows what real people go through every day, and this knowledge of people is embedded into the core of all that he produces artistically.

And in this book the interpreters of his songs, no matter where they take them, understand this—from the surrealistic visions of "Desolation Row" and "Tombstone Blues" to the in-your-face realness of "Hurricane" and "Blind Willie McTell." You cannot listen to Dylan's music, or read this book, without seeing that above all these songs touch on what it means to be human. There's an urgent, though subtle call for empathy in Dylan's lyrics; and the visual images in Bob Dylan Revisited: 13 Graphic Interpretations of Bob Dylan's Songs make you feel exactly what that wonderful scratchy sung voice of Dylan's makes you feel: The world may be dark, but you are not alone.

Bob Dylan is one of the most significant American artists of our time. And his iconic songs will remain long after everyone reading this post today—Monday, November 16, 2009—is gone. Bob Dylan Revisited: 13 Graphic Interpretations of Bob Dylan's Songs is a brilliant picture book for grown-ups with grown-up concerns, hopes, and fears. The images pull you in, the lyrics knock you out. You can read the book in one sitting, maybe on one Metro ride to work, and the effort will be rewarded. You can open up to any song at any time of day. You can skip around at your leisure. You can read it however you want. But one thing you can't do, I assure you, is forget this book.


Kyle Semmel is the publications and communications manager of The Writer's Center. Follow his tweets at http://twitter.com/writerscenter.

To whet your appetite, here's the list of interpreted songs:
"Blowin' in the Wind" interpreted by Thierry Murat
"A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" interpreted by Lorenzo Mattotti
"I want You" interpreted by Nicolas Nemiri
"Girl From the North Country" interpreted by François Avril
"Lay Lady Lay" interpreted by Jean-Claude Gőtting
"Positively 4th Street" interpreted by Christopher
"Tombstone Blues" interpreted by Bézian
"Desolation Row" interpreted by Dave McKean
"Like a Rolling Stone" interpreted by Alfred
"Hurricane" interpreted by Gradimir Smudja
"Blind Willie McTell" interpreted by Benjamin Flao
"Knockin' on Heaven's Door" interpreted by Jean-Philippe Bramanti
"Not Dark Yet" interpreted by Zep

On Dylan: Culture Swap, Part II

So much has happened since I first shook hands with my colleague, Kyle Semmel, and agreed to do this Culture Swap on Bob Dylan.

The most eye-opening revelation was how different and not so different Dylan turned out to be. Though he's a Mid-westerner by birth (Duluth, Minnesota, 1941), he moved to New York City and began performing in the folksy clubs in Greenwich village in the early 1960s.

This fact struck me because as a native New Yorker it was in Greenwich Village that I felt very much in my element. So on this fact, there's an affinity with Dylan, on the identity of place.

Since my last post on Bob Dylan, I’ve put a few songs of his on my MP3 player, spent several hours reading and listening about his impressive body of work than spans more than fifty years. And it's impact on the music, literary, film, and art world. And that he's still creating, breathing, building bridges, sharing new ways of spreading his "humanist" philosophy.

Something else I discovered: many of my favorite folks singers—Nina Simone, Odetta—they each covered some of Dylan’s songs. (I'm sure several others have...) It’s hard not to be moved by some of his stirrings lyrics. I currently have his song “Hurricane” on repeat in my MP3 player, which was, of course, about the famed boxer, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter. I believe actor Denzel Washington played him some years back. Take a visual listen“Hurricane,”

All of rubins cards were marked in advance
The trial was a pig-circus, he never had a chance.
The judge made rubins witnesses drunkards from the slums
To the white folks who watched he was a revolutionary bum
And to the black folks he was just a crazy nigger.
No one doubted that he pulled the trigger.
And though they could not produce the gun,
The d.a. said he was the one who did the deed
And the all-white jury agreed.

His obvious concern for justice and sensitivity for the underdog is affecting. And to learn that this came from a twenty-something-year-old from Minnesota is remarkable. I have found that georgraphy plays such a big role in one's identity politic. And so much of the "tumult" of the 1960's seems to have taken place in the urban cities and the South. But, no one talks about the Mid-west where Dylan is from. Add to that, so many artists steer clear of being “political.” It’s too costly for show business.

His accolades are unrivaled: best selling recordinga artist of all time. He's done thousands of shows. Written untold scores of songs. In 2008, Bob Dylan was awarded a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation for his “profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power."

Dylan's a "Renaissance" man, as he is also an accomplished painter. Check some of his work out here.

So, what was the point of all of this cultural swaping. And, what will become of our collective cultural enlightment, now that I've listened to Dylan and I believe Kyle is listening to a couple of my beloved artists. Does it all end once I click on the "publish post" button?

I think the real value of this exercise is to wake up the humanist in us all. In my first post, I raised the question, can someone who loves Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, and Prince also enjoy Bob Dylan...My answer is a resounding "yes."

Drop me a line if you have a culture swap story you'd like to share with us here in Blog-o-sphere and at the Writer's Center.

Signing off,
Abdul Ali
thecarousel@writer.org

Another Side of Bob Dylan?

Due to a tremendous craziness at the Center today, thankfully having nothing to do with soy bombs, Abdul wasn't able to get a Dylan post today. He'll have it, he assures me, tomorrow.

But no problem! We've got something to make you...well, dance. My suggestion is crank up the volume on "Rainy Day Women."

Rather than write much more on Dylan myself, I decided to use a fantastic anecdote from Richard Currey. (Seriously, you'll love this. Skip what I'm writing if you have to. Read Richard's story below.)

After reading this blog yesterday, he e-mailed and told me about this funny story involving his daughter and Dylan. Of course I had to ask him to tell me the whole story--and to tell all of you readers of this blog, as well. This is Currey on Dylan and his daughter Aja. This is a true story; it happened one night at a Dylan show:

It was a great show, with Dylan doing a long array of his best-known material, many in slightly different ways -- "Like A Rolling Stone" acoustic, guitar and harmonica, alone on the stage, in the manner of his first couple albums. On the other hand, "A Hard Rain" was done with the full band in a kind of rave-up/rocker mode. So the show closes, and Dylan (who, in his classic manner, did not speak during the show, did not introduce songs, did no get-familiar-with-the-audience chatting, indeed did not much look at us) gives a little wave and leaves the stage. Thunderous standing O. Which goes on and on. And then gave way to rhythmic clapping. Dylan and the band re-emerge, take up positions, and kick in to "Rainy Day Women" (aka "Everybody Must Get Stoned"). So it's rollicking high-energy in the auditorium, and -- abruptly -- Aja bolted, racing forward. ALONE. It's not like the stage was being charged or anything.

So we have this one teenaged girl hauling ass for the stage. I shouted after her, my father protect-your-child mode alerted, but she didn't hear and didn't turn around --and probably would not have even if she had heard me. The security thugs saw her coming, and went shoulder-to-shoulder in front of the stage. She got to the phalanx, and by now Bob's looking down at the scene. She yelled something up at him. He sang a verse, and then stepped back from the mike and waved her up. The thugs look up. Dylan waves at them: Let her up. With that, a couple of the security guys gave her a lift and she hit the stage and ripped into a great dance. And Bob danced with her, playing the guitar, but dancing! And, as they say, the crowd went wild.

The musicians were loving this, and the music really pulsed. But now a lot of folks have pressed forward, and the guards let several more up, maybe 10 or 15 or so, and now the other musicians are dancing with the folks from the crowd, playing and dancing. The music finally winds down and I see Dylan lean in close to Aja but I can't see much from where I am halfway back in the hall, then Dylan turns, mumbles a quick thank you into the mike and leaves with the band. I made my way to the back wall of the auditorium, hoping my kid would emerge out of the crowd. And, after a while, she did, looking flushed and, well, deliriously happy. She stepped up to me and we're both grinning at each other, and she holds something up. A guitar pick. "Bob gave this to me," she said. I asked her what she had yelled up to him when the guards first stopped her. "I just said, 'Bob, I love your music!"

She kept the guitar pick and ticket in a shadowbox in her room for years. She still has it. She's 27 now, and feels an ownership in the import and pleasure and connection in Dylan's words and music as much as I do. But very much on her own terms, in the context of her own generation's issues, and in light of her own experience with ... well, with Bob himself.

Dylan Matters

In an earlier post Abdul referred to Dylan as a poet, alluding to the fact that I'd called him that. To be honest, I don't remember doing that. The truth is I don't think of Dylan as a poet (nor would I think Dylan himself). Dylan's a songwriter, and it's his songs that touch me deeply, not his "poetry."

But heck, today marks the start of National Poetry Month, so it's probably rotten of me to call Dylan more a songwriter than a poet. He certainly has done great things with language, and you could probably make an argument--somebody could, anyway--that the troubadours in the middle ages were poets in the same way that Dylan is today. But that's another day's discussion.

(Remove the music from Dylan's "poetry," his lyrics, and I'm not sure you'll find the same kind of life as in, say, a poem by Pablo Neruda or Emily Dickinson. It's just different. But this demands the question: What makes poetry poetry? But I'm not going to really ask it here. Someone else can answer that.)

Barbara's letter to Abdul on Monday got me thinking about how I got into Dylan back in college and what that experience has meant to me creatively. More than any other "writer," Dylan's songs/music have been a powerful creative engine for me. I can honestly say that his music has had a larger impact on my creative writing than any of the writing from any of the great authors I've followed over the years: Herman Hesse, Thomas Mann, Gunther Grass, James Baldwin, John Irving, Joyce Carol Oates, Don Delillo, Herman Melville, etc.--all have influenced me during different phases of my life.

Dylan's impact has been longest, and I think it's because his musical repertoire is so vast. I loaned three albums to Abdul, one early album (Another Side of Bob Dylan), one middle album (Blood on the Tracks), and one fairly recent album (Time out of Mind). The reason: he would get a good sense of the changes Dylan has undergone in his career. More than any other songwriter of his generation I can think of, with the possible exception of Tom Waits (and somewhat grudgingly, for me, Paul McCartney), he has had a career that was continually being developed. From his early days singing folk ballads a la Woody Guthrie, to his mid-sixties rock phase, the 70s born again phase, etc., Dylan has reinvented himself throughout.

(Here I need to pause to declare: Some very good books have been written about this, and more will be written. Write on you Dylanologists!)

That appeals to me. His voice appeals to me too. I can't sing, but I've had a long and rocky apprenticeship as a writer, and I definitely understand what it's like when someone says "he can't sing." Used in a writing context, it's like saying "I don't like so and so's voice."

So it's inspiring. David Berman, lead singer of another of my favorite bands, The Silver Jews, wrote in one of his songs "all my favorite singers couldn't sing." And I realize that's true with me too, with "sing" being highly subjective here. Speaking broadly, most of my favorite singers are people many others would say can't sing: Tom Waits, Will Oldham (AKA Bonnie Prince Billy), Leonard Cohen, John Prine. It's a scratchy quality in their voice, a deep gruffness that I find mesmerizing (Lucinda Williams has this quality too, but I suppose most people would say she can sing). It helps also that they write beautiful lyrics.

Following Matt's comment on the blog post Monday, I too have seen a number of Dylan shows, including great shows from Zurich to Stuttgart (where I slept in the train station following the show). There's definitely a good mix in the crowd these days, and I think of all the songwriters of his generation--and yes, I'm probably hopelessly behind the times in my musical tastes--Dylan will "live" the longest. Much of that has to do with marketing, but I won't go into that now.

Look for another Dylan post from Abdul tomorrow, a follow up to his earlier post. And on Friday I'll discuss something else Dylan related. I'm not sure what yet.

Later this month he'll release another album--this was a surprise album, that's for sure. It's called "Together Through Life."

Bob Dylan Week! Barbara Esstman's 115th Dream

Dear Abdul,

I hate to sound like your grandmother, though I’m old enough, and I won’t tell you that we walked ten miles to school through snow drifts, because we didn’t. But I did grow up in the ‘60s before PC’s, cell phones, blow-dryers, pantyhose, The Pill and other things we now take for granted. People believed the Cleavers were realistic role models; “drugs” meant aspirin; grass was mowed; and every bride was assumed to be a virgin unless she was about to go into labor, right there at the altar.

As pop art always reflects the culture, all songs on the radio were approximately three minutes long and as neat and contained as the Eisenhower administration. Their main concerns were puppy love, teen angels and directions to where the boys were, a strategic bit of info for those of us attending all-girl schools. Although the first crossover black artists were inspiring white kids to discover that their rears were moveable pieces of anatomy, Leslie Gore’s “it’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to” was the closest thing we had to women’s lib.

Typical lyrics: Do-wah-diddy-diddy; rama-lama-ding-dong; shimmy-shimmy-coco-pop. Maybe they were Zen koans, but I doubt it.

Anyhow, then came Dylan.

Don’t get me wrong – he was an acquired taste, and you had to get over the shock. Normal males had crew cuts; they wore skinny, proper suits with skinny, proper ties; they opened doors for females and walked on the street-side so they could stop out-of-control Mack trucks from running over their dates. Bob Dylan was another kind of animal, one you didn’t take home to Mother, not unless you wanted to be grounded for the next month or maybe the rest of your life.

Dylan didn’t sing like anyone else, either, not in that era of love songs as safe and approved of as hymns sung by a local choir. He growled. He yowled. He slid off the notes, not with the exquisite finesse of Billie Holiday skating down their edges, but more like a Chevy fish-tailing in mud. He mumbled on and on – and on – with no respect for diction or the three-minute time limit, and we first got into his music through tidier covers by less alarming artists.

But if that was the safe entrance, it was still the opening into a wider mind who slung language like Salvador Dali melted clocks and who wasn’t afraid of jumping the paddock fence. We started thinking about peace and war instead of our next date. We became aware of being caught up in the times that definitely were a-changin’. We learned to recognize when we had the Memphis blues, even if we’d never been to Mobile or Tennessee.




He became the sound track for our lives. We swung our hips like Rainy Day Women and found this a great improvement over the Good Girl Walk. We fell in love to “Lay, Lady, Lay” and yeah, got laid to it. We sent lovers away from our windows and told them not to think twice about our geranium smiles. We divorced to “I Shall Be Released” and resolved not to work on Maggie’s farm no more. We protested the war and marched for civil rights because, damn, we wanted all those white doves to sleep in the sand and everyone to get down those roads and be a man – even the women.
It wasn’t just the songs; it was how Dylan wandered around in them, kept taking them apart and putting them back together in different ways. Not the usual rote where all patterns repeated in proscribed, expected ways. More the Confucian wisdom of “There are many ways over the mountain.” Variations on a theme that let us explore the many ways a thought or feeling could work and how we could move around inside them. He punched open our Skinner baby-boxes so we could look out into larger, richer, wilder space. Even if we didn’t escape right away, we at least got familiar with the territory and knew it was out there when we were ready.

So we still make pilgrimages to his concerts, though the audience is a regular AARP convention and most of them can’t find their cars in the parking lot after. Dylan’s still stiff and weird, and God knows what key he’s singing in. I understand how you wouldn’t “get” him now. But a lot of us did, at just exactly the right times of our lives.


Barbara Esstman, MFA, is a National Endowment for the Arts, VCCA and Virginia Commission for the Arts fellow and a Redbook fiction award winner, among other distinctions. Her two novels, The Other Anna and Night Ride Home, were published by Harcourt Brace and HarperCollins and are in numerous foreign editions. Both books were adapted for television by Hallmark Productions. She co-edited an anthology, A More Perfect Union, published by St. Martin's Press, and has taught extensively in universities. The next workshop she will teach at The Writer's Center is Advanced Novel & Memoir, beginning April 8. Click here for details on this workshop and her Query Letter workshop upcoming also in April.