Positively Fourth Rate
"If you look through what has
been written about Bob Dylan in
the past thirty-odd years, you
notice a desire for him to die
off," writes Alex Ross in a long
disquisition on the Maestro and
"the informal discipline of
Dylanology" in the 10 May issue
of The New Yorker.
While The New Yorker famously
(and falsely) prides itself on
fact checking, it once again got
it all wrong: If you look
through what has been written
about Bob Dylan in the past
30-odd years—including, and
perhaps especially, the very
piece you are now reading—you
nurture a desire for
Dylanologists to die off.
Preferably by being thrown into
a lake of fire, or some other
torment of hell that calls to
mind Dylan's late, lamented
Let's make sure that the blame is
properly directed. It may be too
much to ask that the artist formerly
known as Robert Zimmerman
publicly apologize for dropping
such tuneless turds as Self-Portrait,
Saved, Shot of Love, and all the
pre-electric LPs into the punch
bowl of popular music. Perhaps
it's even too much to ask that
he wear a hair leisure suit and
walk six crooked highways to pay
penance for participating in the
Traveling Dingleberrys and,
hence, extending the half-life
of Electric Light Orchestra
leader Jeff Lynne's career
beyond the sonic nuclear
cataclysm that was the Xanadu
soundtrack (to be fair, any
movie that climaxes with
hoofer Gene Kelly reciting a
Samuel T. Coleridge poem
while roller skating deserves
an ELO soundtrack).
But certainly we can hope that
Dylan, who on his only
indisputably great LP—1979's
Slow Train Coming—asked "his
so-called friends … to imagine
the darkness that will fall from
on high / when they will beg God
to kill them and they won't be
able to die," might at least
feel really bad about the
critical demimonde he has
inspired. In a world where
a gun manufacturer can be
held liable even for crimes
committed with another company's
weapon, that doesn't seem to
be an extravagant request.
The two worst tendencies of
Dylanologists are on full
display in the latest flapping
of critical gums on the subject:
to wit, Ross' New Yorker article
and, in the May issue of The
Atlantic Monthly, a collection
of natterings by Francis Davis,
recent recipient of "an
ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award"—and
possible winner of $10 million
in the latest Publisher's
Clearinghouse Sweepstakes.
The first of these is that
Dylanological analysis—like
the return of the savior Dylan
once apparently believed in –
comes like a thief in the night,
without warning or apparent
provocation. Neither Ross' nor
Davis' offerings have or stress
any particular relevance to
contemporary events (not even
Dylan's summer tour with Mr.
Edie Brickell). Davis hangs his
article only on the peg of
listening "last fall to Live
1966 … the first authorized
edition of a performance in
Manchester, England, that has
been obtainable on one bootleg
or another almost continuously
since at least 1971." Ross,
filling the "Reporter at Large"
slug in The New Yorker, notes
vaguely that he's been to "ten
Dylan concerts in the past year,
including a six-day, six-show
stretch that took three thousand
miles off the life of a rental
car" and allowed the writer to
supplement his salary by selling
Rainforest Crunch and
commemorative Jerry T-shirts in
concert-hall parking lots.
Because there is no clear
indicator of when Dylanology may
appear, there is simply
no way to avoid it other than
to stop consuming all media
(a choice, to be sure, not without
certain virtues, particularly
when it comes to middlebrow fish
wraps like The New Yorker
and The Atlantic).
The other, far more ominous
trait of Dylanology is that,
despite its putative focus on
the man who once wrote a song
about how "Man Gave Names to All
the Animals," it really acts as
a cheap cover for
autobiographical musings about
the inevitably uninteresting
life of the critic. In essence,
then, Dylanology is always
already dishonest even as it
seeks to explicate the work of
the one rock-star-cum-poet who
is himself supposedly
incorruptible. (Certainly
Dylan's discography suggests a
performer either uninterested in
or incapable of pandering to
audiences, though songs such as
"Wiggle Wiggle," the lead track
on 1990's Under the Red Sky—a
disc rumored to have been
shipped directly to
America's cutout bins –
hint at a certain contempt
for anyone with hearing).
Davis gets right to his own
story. Or at least he does so
after he drags in the
vision-impaired poet Robert
Creeley for a bit of gratuitous,
pretentious name-dropping
(another recurring motif of
Dylanology). "As a college
student," writes Davis, "I was
one of those who stayed up late
debating the meaning of Dylan's
lyrics…. I remember that when
John Wesley Harding was
released, an agitated fellow
English major spotted me in a
classroom and barged right in,
interrupting the lecture to ask
me what symbolism I found in the
trees behind Dylan on the
cover." Davis' appraisal of
Dylan's oeuvre—BD's "creative
peak lasted only three years,
roughly from the Mississippi
Freedom Summer to the Summer of
Love, or from Bringing It All
Back Home to John Wesley
Harding"—pretty much gives
away Davis' latent message:
Dylan was greatest when
I was young. And so
were the Lemon Pipers.
Ross is a bit more subtle on
this score. He spends most of
his article making fun of
professional and amateur
Dylanologists, only affecting
respect for the insufferable
Boston University professor
Christopher Ricks, "a legendary
close reader of canonical
English poetry" whose comments
are about as interesting and
insightful as Bob's own liner
notes to the At Budokan album.
"The more I think about it,"
wrote Dylan back in 1978, "the
more I realize what I left
behind in Japan—my soul, my
music, and that sweet girl in
the geisha house." "How many
times can you tell somebody not
to think twice?" Ricks asks Ross.
"You can say 'It's all right'
over and over. That's comforting –
but not 'Don't think twice.'
I'd start to think."
It's not until the last page of
his long, relievedly
cartoon-heavy piece that Ross
announces that what he really wants
to talk about are his own back pages.
"I'd been a fan, I suppose,
since Dylan's music first hit
me, a few years ago, while I was
staying in a friend's apartment
in Berlin. Highway 61 Revisited
was one of the few records my
friend owned, and after a couple
of days I'd fallen for it….
I've since found that my belated
conversion to Dylan matches up
all too well with the latest
research into rock fandom
[fasten your hard hats—we're
entering a gratuitous,
pretentious name-dropping zone]:
Daniel Cavicchi, in a
disquieting new study, divides
fans into categories out of
William James's Varieties of
Religious Experience, noting
that one kind of fan undergoes a
sudden conversion, or
'self-surrender,' often in a
state of isolation or in a
foreign land." Should we care
about his Damascus Road
experience, especially in an
article claiming (boldly!
shockingly! originally!) that
"Decades of Dylanology have
missed the point—the music is
the message" (even as he grants
that "this is not to say the
music is everything").
It is perhaps Ross' reticence to
cop to the fact that he, too, is
just another jerk-off
Dylanologist that explains his
contempt for the acknowledged
founder of the field: A. J.
Weberman, whom Ross dismisses
simply as a "creep … [who]
fished through Dylan's trash on
MacDougal Street." To be sure,
Weberman did literally explore
Dylan's Greenwich Village
garbage and enjoyed a
high-profile stint as
"garbologist" to the stars. By
1968, Weberman was publishing
his explications of Dylan's lyrics in
Broadside (the same folk mag
that first published Dylan in
the early '60s); by the early
'70s, he was teaching college
courses on the subject. It's
also true that Ross is not alone
in his disdain for the very man
who coined the term "Dylanology."
Weberman is similarly reviled by
all other Dylan critics
(biographer Bob Spitz, in a
relatively tender treatment,
calls him a "parasite," "a
likely straitjacket candidate,"
and a "nutcase").
Such contempt, however, stems
not from Weberman's apparent
insanity, which is on glorious,
Java-appleted display at his Web
site. The site is dedicated to
deep—and deeply disturbed –
explanations of the secret
meanings of Dylan's songs, most
of which turn out to be about
Dylan's purported heroin
addiction, hidden HIV infection,
and highly ambivalent—and
largely imaginary—relationship
with none other than A. J.
Weberman. "I know one dude who
is not happy about the
proliferation of the internet,"
writes Weberman, already
sounding far more interesting
than Professor Ricks. "It is a
dude who, despite the fact that
he has contracted AIDS from IV
drug use, continues to shoot up,
it is a dude who bares his
innermost thoughts in his poetry
then blames me for interpreting
it…. It is a dude who will
never come to peace with me
because he refuses to negotiate,
it is the object of my never
ending obsession, it's Dylan.
Dylan should ask himself—'Was
it worth shooting up even though
I got AIDS from doing so?' Who
tried to stop me from shooting
up? Who wouldn't take a bribe?
Who will be there if the flesh
falls off my face? Ah fuck it."
No, the contempt for Weberman
flows from the fact that in his
most eccentric, solipsistic
moments—especially in his most
eccentric, solipsistic moments –
he remains the absolute
apotheosis of a Dylanologist. To
him, Dylan is always newsworthy;
indeed he is at the very center
of meaning and significance.
And to discuss Dylan is nothing
more than a patently transparent
way of talking about one A. J.
Weberman. And in sharp contrast
to the lesser Dylan explicators,
Weberman's invented autobiography
at least offers the entertainment
value of stark, raving insanity.
Ah fuck it, indeed. Weberman
brings it all back home. No
wonder the other Dylanologists
want to look away.
Nick Gillespie is editor-in-chief of reason. This story originally appeared in Suck, and can be viewed in that format here.