Bob Dylan (23 page)

It’s long been obvious that Bob Dylan can no longer be listened to as any sort of avatar; “Blind Willie McTell” makes it clear that his greatest talent is for bringing home the past, giving it flesh—proving, as the ethnologist H. L. Goodall, Jr., puts it, that “in addition to the lives we lead we also live lives we don’t lead.” Art is made partly to reveal those lives—to take their lead. And this is what happens in “Blind Willie McTell.”

Those slow first notes raise a sign: “Seen the arrow on the door-post / Saying, ‘This land is condemned / All the way from New Orleans / To Jerusalem.’” “From New Or-lee-ans to Jer-u-sa-lem,” Dylan sings, drawing out words until the line they trace seems to circle the globe. The sign sparks a quest, and the only active incident in the song: “I traveled through East Texas / Where many martyrs fell.” Everything else in “Blind Willie McTell” is passive, a witnessing: I saw, I heard. Or an imperative, a demand that the listener witness, too: see, hear,
smell.
As one scene after another opens and fades, the senses are alive, but only to transgression. There’s no hope of action or change; all is crime and failure, “power and greed.” In Revelation, the last book of the New Testament, the Lamb of God opens the seven seals of a book, and terrible visions burst out with every loosening; it’s only the seventh seal that can reveal God’s final resolution. In “Blind Willie McTell” the first visions are present, brought down to the ground and into the everyday, but the seventh seal is missing. There is only a plainly irreligious affirmation, which can’t be fitted to the forgiveness or even the knowledge of any sin. I’ve traveled, the singer says, I’ve seen, I’ve heard, but I know nothing. Or almost nothing. I know one thing: “I’ve traveled through East Texas / Where many martyrs fell / And no one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.”

As Dylan sang in 1983, Blind Willie McTell was twenty-four years dead. His work is found on archival albums; he sang sacred songs, dirty songs, story songs, rags, blues, whatever people on the street would pay him to play. Most famously he wrote and sang “Statesboro Blues,” a 1971 hit for the Allman Brothers. He played twelve-string guitar—which he first heard played, he said, by Blind Lemon Jefferson, who indeed traveled out from his birthplace in East Texas, though he fell in Chicago, according to legend freezing to death on the street. McTell had a light, romancing tone, altogether inappropriate, one might think, for a Bob Dylan song about the resistance of Judgment Day; about the way, as the believer waits for it, Judgment Day recedes.

Perhaps the most entrancing challenge in “Blind Willie McTell” is to hear in its namesake’s music what Bob Dylan heard. In Dylan’s song, revelation struggles to rise out of every scene the singer witnesses, but only the profane refrain that ends each verse—“No one can sing the blues like . . .” “But nobody can . . .” and once, startlingly, “I KNOW NO ONE . . .”—can take the witness from one place to another. As revival tents are taken down, folded, stowed, and driven off to the next town, the singer hears only an owl, perhaps imagines it himself: “The stars above / The barren trees / Were its only audience.” He sees a harlot and a dandy, “bootleg whiskey in his hand,” and for that line Dylan’s voice reaches a pitch of disgust and pain not matched for lines formally describing things far worse: “See them big plantations burning,” he sings with almost laconic nostalgia, “Hear the cracking of the whip / Smell that sweet magnolia blooming / See the ghost of slavery ships.”

But those lines need no more disgust. They take you into some immobile past-present that can never be escaped; they make you put your hands into a wound that will never be closed. One hundred and twenty-six years ago, in his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln imagined that the Civil War might “continue . . . until every drop of blood drawn by the lash, shall be paid by another drawn by the sword.” But the debt hasn’t been paid, and “Blind Willie McTell”—most of all in the old and wearied tones of
Dylan’s voice—says that it can’t be. The singer can’t pay it, and neither can Jesus. That the singer has found something Jesus can’t pay for is in some way his truest testament of faith, his proof that he took his faith to its limits, and found those limits in the crimes of the world.

One phrase seems to hide silently behind all the lines of the song: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”—Ecclesiastes 1:2. It isn’t surprising, then, that “Blind Willie McTell” quotes the same source, with “God is in his heaven,” or that Dylan changes the words that follow in the Bible from “And thou upon the earth” to “And we all want what’s his,” turns the words sour, insisting that we have cut ourselves off from God, seeing in his face only our own greed and lust for power. But Ecclesiastes is more than a reference in “Blind Willie McTell”; “Blind Willie McTell” is a version.

Both the song and the lamentations of Ecclesiastes, “son of David, king in Jerusalem,” are about the absolute rebuke the world offers every believer—every believer in anything, be it Yahweh, Jesus, earthly justice, money, love, or simply a world better than one finds when one looks, when for an instant one can glimpse not only power and greed but intimations of honor and right. “I have seen the task which God have given to the sons of men to be executed therewith,” Ecclesiastes said. “He hath made everything beautiful in its time; also he hath set the world in their heart, yet so that man cannot find out the work that God hath done from the beginning even to the end . . . And he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” Perfection has been laid in the heart as a rebuke to all, because not even the best are worthy of it. Even the best of humankind sense perfection first and last as suffering, because it is given to them to feel “the evil work that has been done under the sun.” “There is nothing new under the sun”; but for the witness every crime is new. Against this, Dylan offers only “Nobody can sing the blues / Like Blind Willie McTell”—but in the constant renewal of the way he sings the phrase, in the infinite reserves of spectral comradeship he seems to find in it, it is for as long as the song lasts, somehow enough.

Always slowly, with Dylan’s piano keeping a tricky, unsettled time, sometimes flashing up and rattling as if the Mississippi bluesman Skip James is back from the dead to play the keys, “Blind Willie McTell” rides the bones of the melody of “St. James Infirmary,” the standard perhaps done best—certainly most delicately, and most harrowingly—by Bobby Bland. It’s a source Dylan acknowledges in his last verse, as the singer finds himself in “the St. James Hotel”—though perhaps there is a second source. Closer in spirit is an early blues recording by the obscure singer Richard “Rabbit” Brown, a man whose most notable brush with common knowledge came in 1962, when he was cited as a favorite in the notes to Bob Dylan’s debut album. Set down in 1927, the year McTell too first recorded, though Brown never recorded again, Brown’s song is called “James Alley Blues,” after the New Orleans street where he grew up.

Dylan’s recasting, or rereading, of “James Alley Blues,” if that is what “Blind Willie McTell” is, breaks down any useful genealogy of what comes from what in American music. The melody is not similar; no analogue of either Brown’s weird percussive guitar figures, or of his comedy (“’Cause I was born in the country, she thinks I’m easy to rule / She try to hitch me to her wagon, she want to drive me like a mule”), is present. But the spirit is: Brown’s preternatural, bottomless strangeness, seemingly the voice of another world, right here, where you live, the prosaic dissolved by a faraway ominousness, a sense of the uncanny, an insistence on paradox and curse.

Dylan was singing “James Alley Blues” in 1961, when he taped a poor rendition in a friend’s apartment; he may not have listened to it since, but no one who has heard “James Alley Blues” forgets it. As Brown must have with that song, the power of which has very little to do with words, Dylan saw all around his life with “Blind Willie McTell,” and as one listens one is given entry to all the lives moving in the song; one is drawn in. The song is rich enough to pull a skeptic close even to Dylan’s acceptance of Jesus Christ, for the song is undeniably the fruit of that event, and rich
enough to lead one to the sort of sights the singer witnesses, with little more than the song itself as a companion—as, finally, the singer, a solitary, cut off or cut loose from God, has no more than his memories of an old blues singer.

 

Bob Dylan, “Blind Willie McTell,” recorded 5 May 1983 with Mark Knopfler, guitar, included on
the bootleg series volumes 1-3 [rare & unreleased] 1961-1991
(Columbia, 1991).

 

———. “Blind Willie McTell,” recorded April or May 1983, included on
The Genuine Bootleg Series
(bootleg). A pressing vocal, searching for effects, with doggedly conventional backing by a full band: a producer’s record. Nice harmonica, though.

 

———. “Blind Willie McTell,” recorded August 1997, included on augmented editions of
Time Out of Mind
(Columbia, 1997/1998). A live “field recording”—as if from the crowd. Stirring, harsh, and passionate, but never on an even keel. Half of a line—“Well, I’ve traveled”—might come out deep and confident, with the next half—“Through East Texas”—pleading, beaten down. With “Jerusalem,” as it is on the Knopfler studio version, changing, as it almost always would on stage, into “New Jerusalem,” which can be anywhere; see the 15 March 2009 post on
rightwingbob.com
.

 

———. “James Alley Blues,” recorded by Tony Glover in Bonnie Beecher’s apartment in Minneapolis, May 1961; see
The Minnesota Tapes, disc 1
(bootleg). Recorded 12 April 1963 in Eve and Mac MacKenzie’s apartment in New York; see
I Was So Much Younger Then
(Dandelion bootleg).

 

Richard “Rabbit” Brown, “James Alley Blues” (Victor, 1927). Included on
Anthology of American Folk Music
(Folkways, 1952; Smithsonian Folkways, 1997), and, with Brown’s four other recordings, on
The Greatest Songsters (1927-1929)
(Document, 1990). Other notable recordings of “James Alley Blues” include Jeff Tweedy, Roger McGuinn, and Jay Bennett on the anthology
The Harry Smith Connection
(Smithsonian Folkways, 1998), and David Johansen and the Harry Smiths, on
David Johansen and the Harry Smiths
(Chesky, 2000).

December 1991

 

6) Brian Morton:
The Dylanist
(HarperCollins). In this novel about a young woman growing up through the lives lived and surrendered by her parents, ex-Communists who still believe, what begins in mildness turns graceful and then quietly hard. Bob Dylan is Sally Burke’s talisman—she’s a Dylanist, a young union organizer tells her (“You’re too hip to believe in anything but your own feelings”) as she revels in a bootleg copy of the incomprehensible, never-released basement tapes tune “I’m Not There.” “This,” she says, “may be the greatest song ever written,” and she’s right, but she grows past Dylan, too, in her late twenties: “When she looked at his records, she could never find anything she wanted to hear.” In the end who she is is more fated, a life made of a contradiction Dylan might have escaped, and even her parents, but she can’t: “She would never find a home, as they had, in the effort to transfigure the world. But in her belief that she lived in a world that needed to be transfigured, she’d probably always be homeless.”

 

January 1993

 

1) Lou Reed: “Foot of Pride,” at Columbia Celebrates the Music of Bob Dylan, Madison Square Garden, New York, October 6 (radio and pay-per-view TV broadcast). In Bob Dylan’s original from 1983, this long and muscular song sounds vaguely influenced by Lou Reed. In Reed’s version Judgment Day looms—backed by Booker T., Duck Dunn, and Steve Cropper, the MGs minus the late Al Jackson—and he leads the charge. All debts are paid before the first line closes; from then on the tune is Reed’s more than it ever was Dylan’s. All those years of clunky talk songs—here Reed grabs
a note, rings it, wrings it: like Jimi Hendrix said, he’ll kiss the sky. For the first time in an era Reed
sings,
heading into each chorus like Jan Berry, if Jan Berry were to finally solve Dead Man’s Curve—as written the chorus is so strong each one seems as if it has to be the last, because nothing could follow it. Lou, you’ve got to put this out.

 

Bob Dylan, “Foot of Pride,” from
the bootleg series volumes 1-3 [rare & unreleased] 1961-1991
(Columbia, 1991).

 

Lou Reed, “Foot of Pride,” included on Bob Dylan,
The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration
(Columbia, 1993).

Artforum
February 1993
with
Roots and Branches
Image
(
San Francisco Examiner
)
17 January 1993

 

2) Bob Dylan:
Good As I Been to You
(Columbia). Solo versions of very old ballads and prewar blues standards, released last November 3, which just happened to be Election Day: “other people’s songs,” but these songs are as much Dylan’s as anyone else’s, and he sings them with an authority equal to that he brought to Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” in 1962. The authority is not the same, though; there’s more freedom in it now. “Little Maggie” is always played for its melody, but Dylan goes for its drama, the drama of a weak, scared man in love with an unfaithful drunk. The music is cut up, stretched, snapped back: each line opens with a stop, and at its end just fades out. The more historical numbers—the likes of “Canadee-I-O” and “Arthur McBride,” 18th and 19th century tales of, to be blunt, imperialist class war and primitive capitalist exploitation—are personalized, Dylan inhabiting the first-person narratives as if he lived them twice. As the rough, tested character of the voice and the darkness of the melodies hidden in the guitar link the undatable past of “Blackjack Davey” to the early twentieth century of “Sittin’ on Top of the World,” you hear the old songs resolve themselves into a single story: variations on the tale of innocents setting out on long journeys into the unknown and the terrible betrayals they find when they reach their destinations. It’s only after a time, when the melancholy and bitterness seem too great for one voice, that you hear them as history, as more than one man’s plight. Finally all of the story is shared, the singer only its mouthpiece, medium for
private miseries within the great sweep of disaster; these songs are as much yours as anyone else’s. As for the guile, the slyness, the pleasing cynicism of the singer’s voice, he gets to keep that—leaving you to wonder why, at just this moment in time, one person who has in stray moments seen as clearly as Natty Bumppo is offering
this
story as a version of American legacy.