Dylan and the Beats: Part Four

We last left our heroes - the Spirit of the Beat poets moving through the creative genius of Bob Dylan in 1965 - during the creation of his masterpiece: Bringing It All Back Home. But then there was only time to consider the bold break Dylan was making with the constraints imposed upon him by the commissars of the folk music. To be sure, Electric Dylanland was saturated with Beat attitude and poetry along with snarling Fender guitars, honking harmonicas and rock and roll drums.

But side one of this magnum opus is only part of an equally fascinating and Beat-infused side two... for those who remember flipping their vinyl album over, side two of Bringing It All Back Home opens with "Mr. Tambourine Man." Not the great jangly rock and roll version covered by the Byrds and reduced to one verse, but the totally trippy, four verse acoustic acid sounds that float towards you like fog or incense and invite you to follow wherever the Spirit might lead.

Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you

There are cries of loneliness in this song as well as the ache of waiting for the muse of creativity, too. Many have obsessed on the tune's heavy drug images - and it would be foolish to deny them - but to my mind "Tambourine Man" is what Jack Kerouac's On the Road would have sounded like if he'd mixed it with guitars and replaced the Benzedrine with pot. It is a gentle ode to searching for integrity and joy amidst a life that can often drain you of hope and beauty. A crazily Beat song with Bruce Langhorne's haunting electric guitar whispering in the background.

+ After all, Dylan began writing this song on his own 1964 road trip to New Orleans - and there is just a little melancholy after Mardi Gras happening here - along side the jingle jangle lines from Lord Buckley that weird Beat comedian whose image grace's the album's front photo montage.

+ And there is a wonderfully ironic playfulness to the song that follows all Dylan's wildass rock and roll on side one: as one critic noted "Tambourine Man is rock's most feeling paean to psychedelia - and creativity, too - all the more compelling in that its done acoustically."

But the man doesn't stop here: rather he barrels ahead with three other very long, acoustic tone poems that batter the senses with images and challenge the ears with new ways of thinking about American folk music:

+ "Gates of Eden" is apocalyptic in the way it challenges the innocence of the 60s. Christopher Ricks in Dylan's Vision of Sin writes that no sooner does the master invite you on the joyful trip of "Tambourine Man," than he reminds you:

Of war and peace the truth just twists
Is curfew gull just glides
Upon four-legged forest clouds
The cowboy angel rides
With his candle lit into the sun
Though its glow is waxed in black
All except when 'neath the trees of Eden.

Each verse - and there are 8 of them - grows bleaker with stinging surrealist commentary on the state of the world until he brings it all to a crashing halt with the final two stanzas:

The foreign sun it squints upon
A bed that is never mine
As friends and others, strangers
From their fates try to resign
Leaving men holy and totally free
To do anything they wish to do but die
And there are no trials inside The Gates of Eden

At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempts to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means
At times I think there are no words
But these to tell me what's true
There are no truths outside The Gates of Eden

+ Then there is "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleedin'" - a lament that lambasts all the forces that suck life out of our creative souls. Dylan wants us to know without ambiguity that often our fiery insistence on this or that type of political engagement becomes just as corrupt and brutal as the evil we were fighting. Like the prophet Jeremiah, Dylan wails about the sickness of the human condition much like Allen Ginsberg with a ferocious guitar:

Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child’s balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece the hollow horn
Plays wasted words, proves to warn
That he not busy being born is busy dying

And then over and over again, that freakin' tag line: It's alright ma... The whole song - all 15 verses and four interludes - whispers and sneers that it AIN'T alright only to be followed by his tender assurance. The last cluster has been my favorite in this song for 45 years:

Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn’t talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony

While them that defend what they cannot see
With a killer’s pride, security
It blows the minds most bitterly
For them that think death’s honesty
Won’t fall upon them naturally
Life sometimes must get lonely

My eyes collide head-on with stuffed
Graveyards, false gods, I scuff
At pettiness which plays so rough
Walk upside-down inside handcuffs
Kick my legs to crash it off
Say okay, I have had enough, what else can you show me?

And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine
But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only

I don't think there has been any contemporary rock song that nails the bitter sorrow of life driven by the bottom line better than "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleedin.'"

+ And just when you thought it couldn't get any harder, Dylan closes this album with the perpetually sad: "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." There is so much we must learn to say good bye to: lovers, security, old friends, old notions of self, old habits and addictions, innocence, health - no wonder so many stay locked in nostalgia: the past is always easier than moving toward the frontier. So Dylan aches with us as we move towards reality - there is NO sentimentality here - and his poetry won't let go of you even when the music is over. He begins by saying:

You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last
But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast
Yonder stands your orphan with his gun
Crying like a fire in the sun
Look out the saints are comin’ through
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue

And finishes like a man well-acquainted with grief...

Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you
Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you
The vagabond who’s rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore
Strike another match, go start anew
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue

Small wonder that he returned to the stage at the Newport Folk Festival and sang "Baby Blue" after being booed for going electric. People loved - and hated - this album. They didn't know what to do with the rock and roll on side one and were overwhelmed with the intensity of the poetry on side two. It was like NOTHING anyone had ever heard before.

I remember buying this record - I still have the original although I've replaced it with CDs, too - and feeling like I had found my dearest lost friend. The rock and roll was edgy, rough with a hip political sensibility: ain't NOBODY gonna make me work on Maggie's Farm no more. And then side two... it was trance-like - prayer-like - heart-breaking and beautiful all at the same time.

And then the public confusion with Dylan turned to rage when he shared Highway 61 Revisited... but that is for another time.