Dylan at 80: It’s Not Dark Yet
Roderick McGillis
For Bob Dylan – from one old guy to another with thanks for the memories
Grant me an old man’s frenzy,
Myself I must remake
Till I am Timon and Lear
Or that William Blake
Who beat upon the wall
Till truth obeyed his call
(“An Acre of Grass”)
W. B. Yeats wrote “An Acre of Grass” in 1936, at the age of 71. His reference to William Blake might bring to mind a letter Blake wrote just four months before his death at the age of 70. Writing to George Cumberland in April of 1827, Blake wrote:
I have been very near the Gates of Death & have returned very weak & an Old Man feeble & tottering, but not in Spirit & Life not in The Real man The Imagination which Liveth for Ever. In that I am stronger & stronger as this foolish body decays.
After referring to politicians and those who conform to conventional beliefs, Blake says:
“God keep me from the Divinity of Yes & No too The Yea Nay Creeping Jesus from supposing Up & Down to be the same Thing as all Experimentalists must suppose.” What captures my enthusiasm is the enthusiasm both Yeats and Blake bring to their old age. This is a defiant enthusiasm. Age may wither the limbs, as Blake asserts, but it need not weaken the creative energy of the artist. I say “may not” because we have examples of writers whose later work pales alongside the work of their youth. Who reads Wordsworth’s The Excursion or his sonnets on gypsies or on capital punishment these days? Or how about the later novels of Faulkner? Writers like Blake and Yeats stand out for the strength of their later work.
I say the same about Bob Dylan who turns 80 in May of 2021. In September, 1997, when he was 56, Dylan released the album Time Out of Mind. Since then, he has released five more albums of original songs, the most recent, Rough and Rowdy Ways, on June 19, 2020 when he was 79. These six albums comprise the work of Dylan’s senior years, and they offer cogent reflection on time and mortality in the spirit of both Blake and Yeats. These albums are nicely balanced by the six early albums that contain what became known as the “voice of a generation.” I exclude his first album simply because it contains mostly covers rather than original songs. Those six early albums, beginning with The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in 1963 and ending with Blonde on Blonde in 1966, are the work of an artist intensely connected to the zeitgeist. These are the work of a young person wise beyond his years, a young person fiercely committed to the contemporary urgency of change and, yes, civil rights. And then, after the first three albums of protest, we have three albums that delight in verbal dexterity. Noteworthy perhaps is that Dylan issued six albums in just four years, whereas he issued the six later works over the course of twenty-three years. He may have slowed down, but he hasn’t lost the frenzy when the creative juices are flowing.
You think I’m over the hill
You think I’m past my prime
Let me see what you got
We can have a whoppin’ good time
(“Spirit on the Water” 2006)
The later songs differ from the songs of the 1960s, not so much in their folk and blues roots or even their Beat sensibility, but in the intensity of the later songs’ connection to the American songbook, in an expanded sense. The album Love and Theft (2001) is something of a survey of musical Americana, from Charlie Patton to Frank Sinatra. The later songs also have what Yeats calls a “frenzy.” By this I mean these songs express a fierceness that closes in on anger, and at times threatens violence.
In contrast to the early songs’ call for change – don’t criticize what you can’t understand – the later songs express a rage against the dying of the light. Take the theme of the urgency of change, for example. In the early songs we have of course the anthem, “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” From the later album, Together Through Life (2009), we have “I Feel a Change Comin’ On” which is more elegiac and inward than anthemic. The repeated line, “the fourth part of the day is already gone,” taken from the 9th chapter of Nehemiah, rings a note of endings. Also on this album is the song, “It’s All Good,” co-written with Robert Hunter. Here is a song about the rottenness in the state of things. Dylan sings of “Big politicians telling lies,” “The widows cry, the orphan’s plea/Everywhere you look, more misery,” and still “It’s all good.” The irony here is bitter. Bitterness threads through these albums. These songs are acutely aware of mortality; it may not be dark yet, but it’s getting there. The change coming on has to do with death. In “Working Man Blues #2” from Modern Times, the singer notes that
No man, no woman knows
The hour that sorrow will come
In the dark I hear the night birds call
I can hear a lover's breath
I sleep in the kitchen with my feet in the hall
Sleep is like a temporary death
This sleep may be small, but the Big Sleep is not far off. This same song may be about the working person, but it contains the anger and perhaps bitterness I am noticing as old age strengthens its grip. “Countless foes” set out to do harm, and they will “break your horns and slash you with steel.” Also apparent is the elegiac mood captured in the sound of this song as well as in its lyrics: “the place I love best is a sweet memory.”
A fine example of the intricacy and mystery of these late songs is “Black Rider,” from Rough and Rowdy Ways. The Black Rider of the title is an elusive figure that may represent one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse since one of these horsemen, commonly thought of as Famine, rides a black horse. Dylan’s song, however, does not identify the horse as black, but rather the rider. The blackness of the rider may indicate that this is the Devil or Death itself. In any case, the allusion is to the Apocalypse, the end of things. The end of things brings Revelation, an uncovering that reveals nothing more than a deepening of mystery. And the song is mysterious for sure. The singer addresses the Black Rider, and at one point says:
Black rider, black rider, tell me when, tell me how
If there ever was a time, then let it be now
Let me go through, open the door
My soul is distressed, my mind is at war
Don't hug me, don't flatter me, don't turn on the charm
I'll take a sword and hack off your arm
Whatever this may mean, it certainly has that conflicted feeling. The singer is troubled, or as he says “distressed.” He wishes to go through the door, a door that leads – where? Is this a cry akin to the cry of the old man in Chaucer’s The Pardoner’s Tale:
Ne Deeth, allas, ne wol nat han my lyf.
Thus walke I lyk a resteless kaityf,
And on the ground which is my moodres gate,
I knokke with my staf bothe erly and late,
And seye, "Leeve mooder, leet me in!
Lo, how I vanysshe, flesh and blood and skyn!
Allas, whan shul my bones been at reste? (471-447)
This old man has been knocking on Heaven’s Door, but in vain.
“Black Rider” is a song drenched in age. Like other songs on this album, it alludes to Roman times. Indeed, the Romans seem to have been on Dylan’s mind for some time, as his “Early Roman Kings” or allusions to Ovid in “Ain’t Talkin” testify (see Thomas, Why Bob Dylan Matters for Dylan’s allusions to classical literature). Here in “Black Rider” we have the startling lines:
Black rider, black rider, hold it right there
The size of your cock will get you nowhere
I'll suffer in silence, I'll not make a sound
Maybe I'll take the high moral ground
Some enchanted evening, I'll sing you a song
Black rider, black rider, you've been on the job too long
This verse contains at least three allusions, one of which is to the Roman poet Juvenal’s ninth Satire. Here, among other things, Juvenal takes note of aging and the debilities brought on by aging. This satire is a dialogue between the poet and Naevolus, a male prostitute who has fallen into a depression at his way of life. Naevolus laments that
Fate rules human life, even those parts hidden beneath
The folds have their fate. Yet if the stars abandon you,
The immeasurable length of your mighty cock won’t
Help, even though Virro with drooling lips sees you
In the nude, and his host of flattering notes assails you
Endlessly (Virro is Naevolus’s patron)
Dylan echoes these lines in his own lament at the Black Rider who haunts him and maybe taunts him too.
Dylan’s verse, the final verse of the song, also alludes to two older songs: Roger and Hammerstein’s “Some Enchanted Evening,” and the traditional folk song, “Duncan and Brady.” Dylan has recorded versions of both these songs. The first, “One Enchanted Evening,” is a standard love song, but one that contains the lines: “Who can explain it, who can tell you why?/
Fools give you reasons, wise men never try.” Ostensibly about the mystery of love at first sight, the song holds in it the possibility of living alone; it also asserts the wisdom of accepting mystery. Life’s a mystery and that’s that. As for “Duncan and Brady,” the song recounts the shooting of the policeman Brady by the bartender Duncan; both have “been on the job too long.” The theme here is mortality and, yes, aging.
Dylan’s late songs may focus on mortality and aging, but they do not have the overt despair we hear in Chaucer’s old man. Rather, they have a stubborn insistence on carrying on, in grinding on, as the singer puts it in “Pay in Blood.” Along with his namesake, Dylan Thomas, Bob Dylan asserts, “Old age should burn and rage at close of day.” Just take a look at “Pay in Blood” from the 2012 album Tempest.
Well, I'm grindin' my life out, steady and sure
Nothin' more wretched than what I must endure
I'm drenched in the light that shines from the sun
I could stone you to death for the wrongs that you done
Sooner or later, you make a mistake
I put you in a chain that you never will break
Legs and arms and body and bone
I pay in blood but not my own
Night after night, day after day
They strip your useless hopes away
The more I take, the more I give
The more I die, the more I live
The song goes along for nine more verses. The three quoted above, are oblique, but they just might suggest an old person’s rage at age itself. The past may have had its wrongs, but the present has its chains, its aches and pains, its ever-present reminder of mortality, but these challenges only serve to make life more precious, more intensely felt. Life may be a grind, an endurance test, but the more it offers wretchedness, the more it gives life and life only. The constant refrain is, “I pay in blood but not my own,” reminding us that this guy will carry on in his frenzy of living taking advantage of others whose blood is there for the asking or for the taking. Dylan once sang about his thought-dreams that merited the guillotine, and concluded, “But it's alright, Ma, it's life, and life only.” It may be life, but does life merit respect? Here’s “Pay in Blood,” some forty-seven years later:
How I made it back home? Nobody knows
Or how I survived so many blows?
I been through hell, what good did it do?
You bastard! I'm supposed to respect you.
---
This is how I spend my days
I came to bury, not to raise
I'll drink my fill and sleep alone
I pay in blood but not my own
Once again, rage against the dying of the light. Dylan has remarked that he delights in chaos, and what else is a life lived but a life surviving chaos?
Old age inevitably brings its challenges. Bette Davis tells us that getting old “ain’t for sissies.” This is the same Bette Davis who makes an appearance in Dylan’s “Desolation Row” (1966). Davis’s warning about old age makes for sober reflection. If one is going to grow old, and not many can avoid this, then one better be prepared to rail and rage and threaten. Dylan remains defiant, as these lines in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” demonstrate:
I got both my feet planted square on the ground
Got my right hand high with the thumb down
Once again, we have an allusion to Juvenal: “Now they give shows of their own. Thumbs up! Thumbs down! And the killers, spare or slay, and then go back to concessions for private privies” (Juvenal, Satire III). Dylan’s pirate signals thumbs down to the way things are, but he also sings of a place where, if you’ve lost your mind, you’ll find it there. And the thumb down itself is ambiguous. We may be quick to think this gesture means disapproval, but apparently scholars disagree as to whether in ancient Rome, at the gladiatorial contests, the thumbs down gesture meant “Kill him” or “Spare him” (https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/thumbs-up.html). The ambiguity serves Dylan well, and Key West may just be the place to sort out this ambiguity. Key West is a place of rest after a long journey.
The singer may rail and rage and threaten, but he also sings of hope, of something better than the den of iniquity we have here. Both Key West and the Scottish Highlands in an earlier song from Time Out of Mind, are places of rest, respite, release, and repair from the rigours of life.
Feel like a prisoner in a world of mystery
I wish someone'd come and push back the clock for me
Well my heart's in The Highlands wherever I roam
That's where I'll be when I get called home
The wind it whispers to the buckeye trees of rhyme
Well, my heart's in The Highlands
I can only get there one step at a time
“When I get called home” is a reminder of the fragility that is the human condition, and the singer is on his way there “one step at a time.” Things have changed, like that lucky old sun that is not what it used to be, and the horizon beckons.
The sun is beginnin' to shine on me
But it's not like the sun that used to be
The party's over and there's less and less to say
I got new eyes, everything looks far away
Well my heart's in The Highlands at the break of day
Over the hills and far away
There's a way to get there, and I'll figure it out somehow
Well I'm already there in my mind and that's good enough for now
These lines and others have an elegiac sound.
Elegy runs through so many of the songs on these last six albums, but never so strongly as in “Murder Most Foul” from Rough and Rowdy Ways. This seventeen-minute song is an elegy for a nation. The assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 is the occasion that initiates the decline of a nation, and it is fitting that Dylan takes his title from Hamlet, the play that deals with something rotten in the state and the assassination of a King. This death signals the beginning of an end:
What's new, pussycat? What'd I say?
I said the soul of a nation been torn away
And it's beginning to go into a slow decay
And that it's thirty-six hours past Judgment Day
The repeated calls to “play” songs and films and artists as varied as Stan Getz and Dickey Betts, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, Stevie Nicks, and so on and so on serve to provide the elegiac chorus lamenting the death of the president. This chorus of film stars, singers, musicians and composers, gangsters, people real and people fictional, films and songs both familiar and obscure provides a cultural backdrop to a death that points out just how rotten things have been in a nation blessed with such a rich cultural production. The lament is all the stronger when one realizes just how rich American culture is. This culture embraces not only its own past, but also cultural aspects from abroad, from that ferry cross the Mersey to Billy Joel by way of Wordsworth and Herodotus (”Only the Good Die Young”). If one wonders why it took Dylan so long to lament the deaths of Kennedy and John Lennon (“Roll On, John” from Tempest), then just consider that “age cannot wither” these cultural figures, “nor custom stale” their “infinite variety.” Like Dylan himself, these cultural figures contain multitudes. Here’s Dylan from the song with that title:
You greedy old wolf, I'll show you my heart
But not all of it, only the hateful part
I'll sell you down the river, I'll put a price on your head
What more can I tell you? I sleep with life and death in the same bed
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Age brings the realization that life and death are folded together, intricately connected, intimate bedfellows.
Dylan’s penultimate album takes its name from Shakespeare’s final play, although it drops the definite article. The dropping of the article signals that this album is tempestuous, like life. Chaos reigns as it did on the Titanic, the subject of one of the album’s songs. Among other songs, “Narrow Way” sounds the aging singer’s defiance:
This is hard country to stay alive in
Blades are everywhere and they’re breaking my skin
I’m armed to the hilt and I’m struggling hard
You won’t get out of here unscarred
It’s a long road, it’s a long and narrow way
If I can’t work up to you
You’ll have to work down to me someday
The song’s title carries an allusion to Matthew 7:14 where we read of the straight gate and narrow way that lead to life. Dylan casts this allusion in a chorus that quotes the Mississippi Sheiks song, “You’ll Have to Work Down to Me Someday.” Ostensibly, this song is about the singer leaving his lover who treats him badly, but it reverberates with the sadness of endings, departures, and separation, even if this separation “takes my life.” Dylan’s version carries a bitterness not in the original.
Endings and departures are the subject of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In the play’s epilogue, Prospero takes his farewell in words suitable to the aging Dylan in these last albums.
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
We have in these lines something of the assault we can find in Dylan’s songs. There is also a hint of the Dylan who hopes to please, hopes to find release from despair, and hopes for his listener’s indulgence.
I began with W. B. Yeats’s “An Acre of Grass.” I end with the same poet’s “What then?”:
‘The work is done,’ grown old he thought,
‘According to my boyish plan;
Lest fools gage, I swerved in nought,
Something to perfection brought’;
But louder sang that ghost, ‘What then?’
I swerved in nought is a fitting epitaph for Dylan’s career. And so thank you Bob Dylan for years of song, years of contemplation, years of rage, and years of hope.
Thomas, Richard F. Why Bob Dylan Matters. New York: Harper Collins, 2017.
