The Celestial Monochord

 

You may have seen the essays and comments about Bob Dylan’s “Hollis Brown” here and here. Well today, Jerry Clark played three records on KFAI to illustrate some of those ideas — and gave The Celestial Monochord a big juicy plug, too.

You’ll be able to hear the June 21 show online (for the next two weeks only) by streaming it from here. I think the Celestial Monochord section starts somewhere after 1:16 and ends around 1:38.

Jerry begins with “Pretty Polly” (which Greil Marcus says inspired “Hollis Brown”), playing a version by Ralph Stanley.

He then plays “Poor Man” by the Louisiana Honeydrippers. Jerry contends it was certainly a more direct inspiration for Bob Dylan’s song — I’ll be damned if he doesn’t turn out to be right about that.

He then plays an unfamiliar recording of Dylan doing “Hollis Brown.” At the end, Jerry and host Dakota Dave Hull ruin my reputation with very kind words and high praise for me and The Celestial Monochord. (When you stream the audio, you can skip right to that part if you want.) Thanks, Jerry and Dave!

Listen to this episode and, come to think of it, every episode you can of Dave Hull’s radio show, where Jerry is a frequent guest. I always learn enormously from it and I enjoy it mightily. I’ve heard rumors that radio used to be good — that it used to be kinda like this. Nah, couldn’t be!

 

Daniel Kramer (?) photo that’s almost as good as a painting

 

This week, Governor Tim Pawlenty said he’ll finally sign a bill establishing a state poet position in Minnesota.

That’s a reversal of Pawlenty’s stand on the issue. The poet laureate position would cost nothing (it would be unpaid — who ever heard of a paid poet?), so the governor’s previous opposition seemed to stem from his simply being a jackass. Explaining his 2005 veto of a similar bill, he warned “We could also see requests for a state mime, interpretive dancer or potter.” Anyway, for whatever reason, it now seems the state will have its poet.

Bob Dylan is among the writers who’ve been suggested for the first Poet Laureate of Minnesota. When you consider the wet blankets who are the more likely choices — the bland and obvious Patricia Hampl and Robert Bly — the choice of Bob Dylan would be wonderful. I would be delighted. But then, not everything is about my happiness.

There are some philosophical and logistical problems with His Bobness occupying the role. For starters, I don’t think Dylan would accept, and if he did, I don’t think he would show up and read Robert Frost to third-graders with the gusto that Bly would bring to the task.

Back when my wife was teaching poetry at the University of Minnesota, students would frequently bring in favorite “poems” that turned out to be Bob Dylan songs — or Patti Smith or Leonard Cohen or Doors songs — stripped of their music. Oddly, any suggestion that these were not really poems, but rather lyrics to songs, was interpreted as denying their quality. To say that Dylan is a lyricist and not a poet was to say that he isn’t very good at what he does.

As I remember it, my wife seemed most concerned that her students didn’t know bad poetry when they saw it. I was more troubled by the idea that a great lyricist needs to be confused for a poet to get any respect.

Around the same time, we went to the opening of an exhibition of photographs by a friend of ours. During the Q&A session, someone gushed that his photographs were so wonderful they almost looked like PAINTINGS. I thought I saw our friend suppress a cringe. A great photographer is not merely a frustrated painter, an artist who can’t draw. Painting and photography share certain principles, potentials and limitations, but photography can do many things — and mean in many ways — that painting can never hope to do or mean. Still, we don’t think of Jackson Pollock as just a rotten photographer.

Similarly, the writing of song lyrics is an art that shares a few devices with poetry — rhyme, lines, metaphor — but its essence is entirely different. Lyrics stand in relation, like plot stands in relation to character and setting in a novel. Isolating plot from all the other elements of a novel leaves you with … well, Cliff Notes. Even if it’s a good plot.

Certainly, you can isolate lyrics from their music to see if they “stand on their own” — but that’s not a test of their quality. Great lyrics can sound horrid without their music, and horrid lyrics can be OK on their own. Stripping the music away from song lyrics is like stripping a poem of its verbs. The poem might still work well on some level, but only by accident. To be a good poem, you don’t have to hold up without your verbs.

Or … well, how about yet another comparison … how about lyrics as film, and music as projector? We would never say a film isn’t great on the grounds that it doesn’t “stand on its own” as a spooled-up strip of plastic in a can.

At the recent Dylan symposium in Minneapolis, Anne Waldman read a quote from Bob … I wish I could locate it now, instead of repeating it from memory. Its essence was like this: “I decided I didn’t want to write novels or poems or plays. Those had already been done, and I wanted a fresh field. I wanted to write songs. Nobody had ever written songs before. Not REALLY.”

I took this desire to “really” write songs as meaning that no writer of popular songs had ever taken full advantage of the full set of literary techniques and attitudes available to poets and other writers — all the approaches to metaphor and image and plot and, most of all, meaning. Dylan exported, if you will, all of that poetic language and vision from poetry to popular song.

There may have been a time when Dylan seemed to severely test the boundary between poetry and lyrics — a moment of confusion. But I think he is a victim of his own success. Much of the rest of the songwriting world has learned the lessons he had to teach, adopted some of his approach, and now nobody doubts that Stop Making Sense and The Missing Years and Mule Variations are collections of songs, not poems set to music.

I’ve fidgeted with these ideas for quite a while because of Dylan’s nomination for the Nobel Prize in literature. The day that Dylan’s Nobel is announced will be one of the happiest of my life. I would be beside myself with joy. But if I were on the Nobel selection committee — not a very plausible counter-factual here, folks — I would vote against him.

I’ve been on committees, and it takes a very peculiar state of mind to serve on them well. You have to think like a committee member, tracking where your power is and where it is not, remembering that everything you do can undermine your own best intentions. As Bob himself said, ” A lot of things can get in the way when you’re trying to do what’s right.”

As a committee member, I would have to acknowledge that literature is something you write down on a piece of paper and then pass around for others to read. Dylan has done some of this, but his best work — the work we love him for — is sung. The experience of sitting alone in silence, reading, is the essence of literature, and this isn’t where Bob has made his contribution.

Picasso didn’t win the Nobel Prize for literature either, but not because he didn’t “deserve” it — he just didn’t write literature. Probably, there should be another category of Nobel Prize that gives other kinds of artists their due, but at present, there just isn’t. If only there were a Minnesota State Lyricist … or Mime …

And so (remembering that brevity is what I love most about poetry), I’m afraid I have to vote for my own misery — more accolades for the poet responsible for Iron John, another snub to the lyricist responsible for Idiot Wind and Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.

 

Editor’s Note: In addition to the comments below, here’s a discussion on the subject.

 

Dave Marsh and the notes he didn’t use

 

The Dylan symposium held late last month in Minneapolis could have been called “The Geography of Bob Dylan.”

Organizer Colleen Sheehy told me that her original idea had been to stage a Minnesota-focused symposium on Dylan, to bring it all back home. But as things developed and grew, it was clear that the geography had to be extended south down Highway 61, and east to Greenwich Village, and across the globe. Nearly everything I saw in the four days of the symposium was focused on location, location, location.

Not long into the first day of the symposium, music writer Dave Marsh realized he needed to rethink the presentation he was scheduled to give the next day. He had planned to argue, as he’d been doing for much of the last 30 years, that Bob Dylan didn’t just happen to come from the Midwest — he HAD to come from here. The Midwest matters if you want to understand Dylan’s art.

But now, after seeing the first couple hours of the symposium, it had sunk in that he no longer needed to make this argument. The geography of the symposium was already centered squarely on Minnesota. Knocked off the mark he’d long ago grown used to occupying, Marsh seemed forced to reach into fresher, less familiar material. Throughout his presentation, his emotions seemed raw and his voice wobbly.

Here’s what my notes and memory can recover of one of the symposium’s most moving moments.

Marsh went back to his initial response to Dylan’s music, back when Marsh was a kid growing up in Michigan. He associates the very first line of With God on Our Side with the largely invisible experience of growing up in what is now known as “flyover country.”

My name it is nothing
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest

There’s an emptiness to America’s imagination with respect to the Midwest — it’s blank in a way The West isn’t blank, in a way The South isn’t blank. Marsh invested his hopes in Dylan, in the possibility that Dylan could help fill in that blank.

It wasn’t just the place, it was the times. Growing up in the Midwest in the mid-sixties, there were huge slabs of the imagination that were forbidden zones, very many impermissible thoughts. Dylan, Marsh said, was a giant act of permission.

Bruce Springsteen famously said that Dylan freed the mind the way Elvis freed the body. Marsh says Dylan provided a way for a Midwesterner to imagine freedom. The syntax of freedom, he said, is especially hard to hear when you haven’t ever been particularly oppressed. Dylan provided Marsh with a way to imagine his own liberation from confines that Marsh himself had had trouble identifying. Marsh wouldn’t have known the route out of town if Dylan hadn’t taken it first.

Finally (maybe in the Q&A session), Marsh talked about seeing in Dylan’s demeanor — his way of occupying his own mind and body — a familiarity that might be unseen to somebody who didn’t grow up in the here. I’ve long felt this too.

In the old footage of Dylan’s 1960’s press conferences, and in his later interviews, Marsh and I recognize the Midwestern sense that there are simply some things that are none of your f—ing business. When all the reporters snicker, Marsh and I often think he’s not being ironic. It isn’t funny. People said Dylan had given up singing protest songs, but we wonder what they were talking about. Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream protests absolutely everything that ever happened on this continent in the last 500 years. Are they hearing a different song, or are they just coming from a different place?

I’m anxious to see how Marsh’s extemporaneous talk will appear in the book based on this symposium. It was one of the high points … certainly, Marsh has a very deep reservoir of history with Dylan’s music, and decided to use his spot for a heart-to-heart, turning over fresh soil along the entire row.

 

Editor’s Note: This is part of a series of entries about the Bob Dylan symposium held in Minneapolis from March 25 to 27, 2007. An authoritative book based on the conference is planned for early 2008, so I won’t try to do justice to the conference or the papers delivered there. I’ll just try to explain the most interesting stuff that wound up in my notepad.

 

 

Editor’s Note: The following is a “guest entry” by Lyle Lofgren, written in response to my “Hollis Brown’s South Dakota.” Lyle is a member of the legendary Minneapolis stringband The Brandy Snifters (whose members also include Jon Pankake) and he’s a frequent contributor to Inside Bluegrass. Thanks, Lyle!

 

__________

I’m convinced that “Hollis Brown,” like “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” is based on a real incident that Dylan read about in a newspaper. Hollis Brown might not have been his real name and it might not have happened in South Dakota, but the isolation there provides a perfect poetic landscape. A major difference between the two songs is that the Hattie Carroll story, which happened at a time of national racial conflict, was widely reported. A Hollis Brown story would have been only of local interest because it’s so common. Horrifying murder-suicides happen all the time.

When I was only a few weeks old, in 1936, my small community of Harris, Minnesota, was startled when the Albin Johnson farmhouse burned down in the middle of the night. Inside were the bodies of Mrs. Johnson and her seven children. Their heads were missing, later found buried in a field. Albin himself was never found, although there were reports from Montana and Canada of someone who looked like him. I haven’t bothered to check the newspaper accounts, but I’ll bet it was not front-page news in the metro newspapers, even though locals were still talking about it when I was old enough to understand what they were saying.

I grew up on a dairy farm where we had little cash, though we didn’t need much because my grandfather had already paid for the farm. The truly poor people in the neighborhood were those with mortgages, because cash flow is a serious problem on a farm. People who lived in the country but worked in town were in even worse shape, because a downturn in the farm economy amplifies small-town unemployment. The government had no safety net for small farmers, small-town merchants, or the rural poor — until the late 1950s, they couldn’t even get social security, assuming they lived until age 65.

This left only two support avenues: family and church. But in a rural community, you couldn’t ask for help from either: everyone knows you and your history, so, paradoxically, failing is an unforgivable sin. If you have any pride, you can’t ask, and if you don’t have any pride, they won’t help. Besides, the churches at that time were obsessed with sending missionaries to convert the world, and so couldn’t be bothered with local poverty.

Perhaps the strongest message society sent to the individual was that the basic definition of a man’s worth (a woman’s place was in the home) was his ability to provide for his family. If you failed at that, you failed the test of life. Some failed men pulled up stakes and took their families west for a new start. Others moved west without taking their families, although most did not follow Albin Johnson’s example of killing them first. Others, such as my cousin (twice removed), killed only themselves, leaving the families to survive somehow. None of those options made the newspapers at all — only the Hollis Brown solution could rate a sidebar on an inside page.

I regard “Hollis Brown” as one of Dylan’s best early compositions. I wish more people would sing it, as it should enter the body of traditional ballads alongside its tune-mate “Pretty Polly.” I would argue, though, that the stories are completely different. “Pretty Polly” is a standard pregnancy ballad of a callous murder, but the story, although first person narration, never gets inside the murderer’s brain. You’re correct in identifying the song’s empathy. Dylan’s song expresses a sense of doom and desperation that’s not like any other composition I’ve heard.

It might be interesting to compare an analogous song, “The Murder of the Lawson Family,” by the Carolina Buddies (Columbia 15537-D, recorded in March 1930). The song is based on a true story: on Christmas Day, 1929, Charlie Lawson murdered his wife and 8 (not 6) children near Lawsonville in Stokes County, NC. The waltz tune is close to that used for “Fatal Flower Garden” in the Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music.

1. It was on last Christmas evening,
    a snow was on the ground,
    near his home in North Carolina
    where this murderer, he was found.

2. His name was Charlie Lawson,
    and he had a loving wife,
    but we’ll never know what caused him
    to take his family’s life.

3. They say he killed his wife at first,
    and the little ones did cry,
    “Please, Papa, won’t you spare our lives,
    for it is so hard to die.”

4. But the ragin’ man could not be stopped,
    he would not heed their call
    and kept on firing fatal shots
    until he killed them all.

5. And when the sad, sad news was heard,
    It was a great surprise.
    He killed six children and his wife,
    and then he closed their eyes.

6. “And now farewell, kind friends and home.
    I’ll see you all no more.
    Into my heart I’ll fire one shot,
    then my troubles will by o’er.”

7. They did not carry him to jail,
    No lawyers did he pay.
    He will have his trial in another world
    on the final judgement day.

8. They all were buried in a crowded grave.
    While the angels watched above.
    “Come home, come home, my little ones,
    to the land of peace and love.”

This is almost the epitome of a conventional topical song with 19th century themes. Insanity is implied, but, in spite of the imagined dialogue, the composer never gets close to understanding what happened. It even has a happy ending in heaven. When I sing this song, it doesn’t disturb me. I’m quite sure that, at the time he composed “Hollis Brown,” Dylan had not heard the Carolina Buddies song (tape dubs of it didn’t circulate much until late in the 1960s), but even if he had, there’s no relation between the two.

In “Hollis Brown,” Dylan’s choice of subject matter, and his diction, owe a lot to Woody Guthrie, but the artistic stance is Dylan’s own (I regard Dylan’s “Song to Woody” as being, on one level, a declaration of independence). If Woody had written the song, he would have emphasized the class and economic conditions that led to Brown’s plight, such as the rapacious bankers or the railroad tycoons. Dylan’s version has no social or political commentary, but instead shows you alienation and depression from the inside. It’s a second-person ballad that sounds like first person.

The last verse,

There’s seven people dead on a South Dakota farm (2)
Somewhere in the distance there’s seven new people born

is probably the coldest piece of poetry I’ve ever heard, and it goes far beyond the “limits of empathy.” It implies that, not only was Hollis Brown a failed breadwinner, he was a failed evolutionary experiment. Intentionally wiping out everyone in your progeny is a special kind of failure. Woody’s socio-political explanations could never encompass such an idea.

I can’t imagine how Dylan got the inspiration to suddenly shift from a view inside a doomed man’s brain to God’s view: it’s over for them, but life renews itself, and there’s always a new throw of the dice. The denouement reminds me of James Joyce’s description of the artist’s role after the work is done:

“The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”

But as a listener, I can’t be that indifferent, particularly given the coincidence of my birth with the Albin Johnson family deaths, with the implication that maybe I was one of the new people to take their places. You can imagine how impressed I was by Dylan’s last verse.

 

(author C. P. Lee contemplates the world’s largest man-made hole
— all photos by The Celestial Monochord)

 

See also Part One

 

The Minneapolis leg of the exhibit “Bob Dylan’s American Journey” — and only that leg, if I understand right — begins with plenty of vivid stories and poignant artifacts about Dylan’s early life in Hibbing and Minneapolis.

But even after studying that material at the Weisman Art Museum for a couple of hours, I still somehow didn’t “get” Dylan’s home town of Hibbing. I had to travel there physically to understand that it’s a stunning place that really MATTERS if you’re to understand Bob Dylan. It was not the anonymous little speed-zone I had imagined — if you grew up in Hibbing, you grew up in an absolutely singular place of brutal extremes and mind-bending ironies. You grew up in Dylan Country.

(the pit of the Hull-Rust-Mahoning Iron Mine)

Consider the world’s largest man-made hole. This open pit, the result of iron strip-mining, is not an attraction near Hibbing so much as it is a boundary at the ever-shifting town limits. It’s part of Hibbing. Nearly four miles long, two miles wide, and 180 yards deep, it supplied a quarter of the iron mined in the 1940’s for WWII.

Every Wednesday at 11 a.m., the mine conducts dynamite blasting — colossal explosions that bow the windows along the town’s main street and rattle Abraham Lincoln’s photo hanging on the wall in the high school classrooms. When Dylan was living here, the blasts were a much more frequent than that — it’s reasonable to imagine Dylan’s first reading of Walt Whitman interrupted by a bone-rattling dynamite explosion that was literally an act of war.

  
(North Country Blues: streets going nowhere, doorsteps without doors)

Before Dylan was born, the pit grew so big that the whole town had to be lifted off its foundations and physically moved a couple miles down the road to a brand-new Hibbing. The Hibbing that Bob’s mother knew was known to Bob as a wasteland — a grid of streets that went nowhere, front porch stairs that led to no porch and no home, foundations with no buildings on top of them. The place looked like Yucca Flats after the blast.

(on a glass table, the mine’s main product — taconite pellets)

Understandably, the politics and culture that led to these events — and to possibly the most spectacular public school in the United States (the subject of my previous entry) — were themselves singular and extreme. They’re unlikely to be central to any tour you’ll receive if you visit Hibbing, but be sure to ask about the political culture of the region.

If there is a more leftist rural population anywhere in the United States, I would like to know about it. When Greil Marcus was told, a few years ago, that there are communists and socialists in the working-class bars along Hibbing’s main street having arguments that’ve gone on for 100 years, he immediately planned his first trip to the Iron Range. It is no more a coincidence that the region produced Bob Dylan than Gus Hall, or that it was the epicenter of support for Paul Wellstone.

(the main drag of Hibbing, Minnesota)

Besides the iron mine and Hibbing’s high school — both jaw-dropping sights — there’s plenty more in Hibbing for a Dylan fan to see. There’s the home of Echo Helstrom, who Dylan says brought out the poetry in him. There’s the auditorium where Dylan played his first paying gig. There’s the Moose Lodge where Dylan used to practice on their piano. There’s the hotel where Dylan had his bar mitzvah. There’s the synagogue he attended. And, of course, there’s his boyhood home. After all this, you’ll want to drink and think. The natural place would be Zimmy’s, a Bob Dylan-themed bar and restaurant.

I’m embarrassed to say that I lived in Minneapolis for 19 years without very much questioning the prevailing impression that Dylan grew up in some forgettable little town — it hardly mattered which. (In fact, I’m embarrassed by thinking ANYBODY grew up in such a place.) I’m thankful to the organizers of the Dylan Symposium (particularly Colleen Sheehy) for providing the incentive to go to Hibbing personally. In my experience, that’s the only way its importance can “sink in.”

Until you can get there, look for a great article by Greil Marcus about Hibbing High School to appear soon (I think in the spring issue of Daedalus).

 

Editor’s Note: This is part of a series of entries about the Bob Dylan symposium held in Minneapolis from March 25 to 27, 2007. An authoritative book based on the conference is planned for early 2008, so I won’t even try to do much justice to the conference or the papers delivered there.

Instead, I’ll try to explain the most interesting stuff that wound up in my notepad, with little of The Celestial Monochord’s customary contemplative ruminations. The writing on the symposium will be a little more like “covering” an event, citizen-journalist style.

 

(a bas relief in the Hibbing High School library
— all photos by The Celestial Monochord)

 

See also Part Two

 

During 19 years in Minneapolis, I had never been to Hibbing. My first trip was on Saturday, the day before the start of the Bob Dylan symposium, the day 60 symposium participants took a tour bus to Bob Dylan’s home town.

During my life in the Twin Cities, I’d always figured that I’ve already been to — and through — hundreds of small towns across the Upper Midwest. I knew it would be false to say that all small towns are the same, but one does start to “get the idea” after the first 200 or so. I figured Bob Dylan came from one of those places.

But I was wrong. I was not prepared for Hibbing, and immediately regretted not having visited the place during the previous two decades. It is a startling place in its own right — the most singular small town I’ve ever been to, even outside of its connection to Bob Dylan.

Consider Hibbing High School, the public school that Dylan attended. I don’t know if there’s a more spectacularly opulent or elegant high school — public or private — anywhere in the world. There might be. It seemed perfectly reasonable when Greil Marcus said, in his keynote address the next day, “It is the most impressive public building outside of Washington DC that I have ever seen.” Marcus is often said to write opaque prose, but he kept that sentence simple.

(a fallout shelter sign at Hibbing High School)

Hibbing High School was built in 1920-1922 for just under $4 million. This figure is not adjusted for inflation — in 1920 dollars, it cost about four million dollars. There is a grand marble staircase inside its front entry, flanked on either side by imposing brass hand railings and hand-painted murals depicting the histories of Minnesota and the United States.

The walls of the school library are decorated with about eight hand-carved bas reliefs depicting children joyously singing and playing musical instruments. The most striking artwork in the library is an enormous hand-painted mural depicting the process of iron mining, with workers representing all the ethnic groups living in northern Minnesota at the time. On either side of the mural are lines of poetry.

(a chandelier in Hibbing High auditorium)

Adjacent to the library is an 1800-seat auditorium at least as opulent, stately, and big as any of the dazzling old theaters in the Twin Cities — the State, the Orpheum, the Fitzgerald. Its exit signs are made of hand-cut stained glass. Its seven-foot diameter chandeliers were imported from Austria and cost $4,000 each in 1920 dollars. The factory that made them was destroyed in WWII — they are irreplaceable.

(a view from the stage of the Hibbing High School auditorium)

This is the auditorium where young Bob Zimmerman pounded out a Little Richard song, and the audience greeted him with such loud boo’s that the principal closed the curtains on this performance. Or so the story goes.

Neither this school nor the rest of Hibbing (which will be the subject of my next entry) provided any simple keys to how Zimmerman became the Dylan we know. I found no easy way to map the town’s coordinates directly onto Dylan’s later art — it’s not as if Zimmerman lived at the corner of Subterranean Homesick Boulevard and Tears of Rage Street. Well … not literally.

What was plain to everybody on that bus tour was that Bob Dylan DID NOT come from an ordinary place, some anonymous little nowhere. Hibbing is, in a number of ways, a jaw-dropping place that has to be seen up close if it — or Bob Dylan — are to be understood.

(Greil Marcus, March 25, 2007)

Standing in the auditorium, I wondered if I would ever find attention span, intelligence, and room-of-my-own enough to sort out what this astounding experience might mean. Luckily, the very next morning, on the first day of the Bob Dylan symposium in Minneapolis, Greil Marcus delivered a keynote address that felt like some kind of deja vu in advance — its title was Hibbing High School and “The Mystery of Democracy.” Marcus had already been there, with his formitable concentration and intelligence very much in attendance.

When that address appears in print, I urge you to read it with all the attention you can give it. Even more emphatically, I urge you to GO TO HIBBING. It will take you back to the beginning — back to Dylan’s and back to square one in your thinking about him.

 

See also Part Two

 

Editor’s Note: This is part of a series of entries about the Bob Dylan symposium held in Minneapolis from March 25 to 27, 2007. An authoritative book based on the conference is planned for early 2008, so I won’t even try to do much justice to the conference or the papers delivered there.

Instead, I’ll try to explain the most interesting stuff that wound up in my notepad, with little of The Celestial Monochord’s customary contemplative ruminations. The writing on the symposium will be a little more like “covering” an event, citizen-journalist style.