First of the Month

Bob Dylan puts on a song like a suit of clothes. He does it when he plays concerts, sings his old hits as if for the first time, frequently confounding his back up band with his changes. Through the magic of YouTube, we can listen to him in the studio, recording “Positively 4^th Street” through 12 takes, each different from the other. You’re relieved when he hits the take that’s used on the record, but changing his approach, his tone, the attitude of his singing, doesn’t reveal any more about him than changing from a cashmere sweater into a plaid lumberjack shirt.

You can hear the deliberateness of the different takes. He is, and was, a professional musician, after all. He appeared to be trying to find himself inside the songs he wrote and sang, but maybe that was a put-on, like so much else he said for public consumption. In an interview for Newsweek done in February of 1968, Dylan said, “I used to think that myself and my songs were the same thing. But I don’t believe that anymore. There’s myself and there’s my song.”

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A homiletic organ part from Garth opens “Daniel and the Sacred Harp,” frames the song right away with weight, seriousness, the melody hinting at mortality with funerary allusions, surely, though Garth’s playing here takes me somewhere else, back to mass as kid, to those brief, well, I don’t have the technical terms for them, but those brief intros and outros to the segments of mass, intros and outros played on the organ, the pieces serving, I recall, as signals of transitions, this organ with just utterly massive pipes in rows that fascinated me as a kid, dozens of pipes in various sizes, many running all the way up to the high vaulted ceiling (maybe 75 feet), an entire wall of pipes behind the altar and sanctuary, so much bigger and, as I picture it now, seemingly out of proportion with the celebrant down there, to whom my brother and I were supposed to be paying attention, my own memory though being really specific now: warm and slow organ chords that somehow combined light and darkness in one, the overwhelming wall of pipes with no pattern or symmetry that I could ever discern, the organist not, I recall, ever visible from the pews, though you’d maybe catch a glimpse of her, stage left, depending on which line you were in for communion, so small-seeming, almost hiding there within the mountains of sound.

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is a brilliant collection of essays, short pieces, reminiscences, Rabelaisian lists, and so much more.[1] All devoted to (“The”) Bob Levin’s love for, and obsession with, Bob Dylan. I was struck by the book’s design. It reminded me of the early releases of Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books. Levin’s style is a smorgasbord of pithy observations and freewheeling narrative that makes reading him a pleasure. Every page is tasty.

Levin has attended more than a dozen live performances of Dylan’s, beginning in 1963 at Brandeis University, which in Levin’s telling was close to the center of one version of high American culture—a culture that Dylan would transform. It helped that Dylan was an outlier, hailing from Minnesota and born on the less than urbane side of the tracks—“Like Ginsberg, Corso and Kerouac/ Like Louis and Jimmy and Buddy and all the rest…” He belonged among the un-jocked and un-classical—the artful strivers not the upwardly mobile conformists. Levin credits Dylan with making rock ‘n’ roll respectable to the culture’s next generation of cool rulers when he chose to go electric.

Per Levin, Dylan beats Hemingway (and every other artist of the last century) as a creator and character-shaper. It was Dylan’s shape-shifting that instantiated the counterculture’s previously unimaginable range of possible selves/worlds.

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