Fifty-five years ago 16 May1966, Bob Dylan released his most critically acclaimed album ever, Blonde on Blonde, the third album in fourteen frenetic months of astonishing artistic creativity. With Bringing It All Back Home (March 1965) and Highway 61 Revisited (August 1965), Blonde on Blonde was the crown jewel of the greatest trio of recordings in the history of rock music. Eight days later, on 24 May 1966, Dylan turned 25 years old.
With Dylan, I am just a fan. Sometime in the summer of 1975, I stumbled upon his album, Blood on the Tracks. I was twelve years old. That discovery began a lifetime of unashamed adoration. That said, I am a fan who has long recognized that Dylan is qualitatively distinct from every other modern singer-songwriter. Lots of guys have been “the next Dylan” since Dylan; but there has never been been—nor will there ever be—another Dylan.
Dylan is folk, rock, jazz, Americana, blues, skiffle, hip hop, and country. Dylan writes love songs like Hank Williams did, but with deeper emotion. He performs pop songs like Buddy Holly did, but with broader appeal. He composes political songs like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger did, but they are more acute and he doesn’t scold as a matter of course. Even his early experiments with talking blues and his electrified “Subterranean Homesick Blues” show that he is attuned to the deep strain of the American experience, expressed in the present through hip hop, the great early figures of which he has praised as “poets” who “knew what was going on.”
Several “Next Dylans” such as Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp have appeared through the years. A long line of superb artists have done things similar to those Dylan has done. Not one has matched Dylan’s art. None can.
Many Dylan lyrics are not simply part of musical history, but threads woven into the very fabric of American culture. “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” is a line from “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “he not busy being born is busy dying” is from “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” just to cite two examples. He is unique—a sui generis artist—whose star will shine brightly long after other luminaries have begun to fade.
The measure of the mark Dylan’s art has left is probably best taken not by the songs most recognizably his, such as “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” or “Just Like a Woman,” to name a few. Rather, the mark of his singular genius is in those songs that everyone knows (or thinks they have heard before even when hearing for the first time), that none but hardcore fans recognize as Dylan’s.
These are songs that don’t seem so much to have been written by one man, as to have been mined from the depths of universal human experience; songs that seem always to have been; songs that feel like they are older than time, but perennially relevant. “Some people they tell me I’ve got the blood of the land in my voice,” wrote Dylan in “I Feel A Change Comin’ On.”
Take, for example, the enduring imageries of human frailty in “Chimes of Freedom,” released when Dylan was a mere 23 years old:
Far between sundown’s finish and midnight’s broken toll
We ducked inside the doorway, thunder crashing
As majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds
Seeming to be the chimes of freedom flashing
Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight
Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight
And for each and every underdog soldier in the night
And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
. . .
Tolling for the deaf and blind, tolling for the mute
For the mistreated, mateless mother, the mistitled prostitute
For the misdemeanor outlaw, chained and cheated by pursuit
And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
. . .
Tolling for the aching whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones and worse
And for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
Or consider “When the Ship Comes In” with its message of enduring hopefulness of overcoming hardship:
Oh, the fishes will laugh
As they swim out of the path
And the seagulls they’ll be smiling
And the rocks on the sand
Will proudly stand
The hour that the ship comes in
And the words that are used
For to get the ship confused
Will not be understood as they’re spoken
For the chains of the sea
Will have busted in the night
And will be buried at the bottom of the ocean
Similarly, “I Shall Be Released” (never released on a Dylan studio album), reaches for the heights of hope from the depths of despair:
Now, yonder stands a man in this lonely crowd
A man who swears he’s not to blame
All day long I hear him shouting so loud
Just crying out that he was framed
I see my light come shining
From the west down to the east
Any day now, any day now
I shall be released
And who doesn’t feel (not just hear) the lyrics of “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”?
Mama take this badge from me
I can’t use it anymore
It’s getting dark, too dark to see
Feels like I’m knockin’ on Heaven’s door
. . .
Mama put my guns in the ground
I can’t shoot them anymore
That cold black cloud is comin’ down
Feels like I’m knockin’ on heaven’s door
While these are early songs, Dylan in the middle decades of his life and into what would be the twilight of a lesser artist’s career produced such powerfully upsetting images as:
I’d go hungry, I’d go black and blue
I’d go crawling down the avenue
No, there’s nothing that I wouldn’t do
To make you feel my love
And:
In the time of my confession, in the hour of my deepest need
When the pool of tears beneath my feet flood every newborn seed
There’s a dying voice within me reaching out somewhere
Toiling in the danger and in the morals of despair
. . .
I gaze into the doorway of temptation’s angry flame
And every time I pass that way I always hear my name
Then onward in my journey I come to understand
That every hair is numbered like every grain of sand
Space alone, not inventory of such songs, limits my ability to complete the list. I haven’t accounted for, as a few examples, “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” “All Along the Watchtower,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “A Hard Rain’s A-gonna Fall,” “John Brown,” “Masters of War,” “Boots of Spanish Leather,” “Girl From the North Country,” “North Country Blues,” and “Blind Willie McTell.” All timeless; all masterpieces; all sprung from the mind of a singular musical intelligence.
As Bob Dylan enters his ninth decade, he moves ever closer to Heaven’s door. But while his flesh is mortal, his genius is lasting.
Kenneth Craycraft is a licensed attorney and the James J. Gardner Family Chair of Moral Theology at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary and School of Theology, the seminary for the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. He holds the Ph.D. in theology from Boston College, and the J.D. from Duke University School of Law.
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