Prizes have always been given for literature and inevitably institutions like the Swedish Academy came into being to celebrate the intellectual accomplishments of scientists and artists. The announcements of the Swedish Academy are nothing more than a one-sentence rationale on the significance of the artist\u2019s work. In 2016 the Nobel Prize for Literature prize was awarded to Bob Dylan “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.\u201d The rationale is not ambiguous, and those interested in its veracity can nod heads in agreement or disagreement,\u00a0 but one thing is clear. Never before had a performing musician been awarded the Nobel. The Swedish Academy, typically perceived as staid, had broken with tradition and recognized the obvious.<\/p>\n
Professor Sara Danius, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, told journalists that the Academy had broken no tradition by making the award to a working musician. Her press conference comparison was the literature of Homer and Sappho, \u201cwho wrote poetic texts meant to be listened to and performed, often with musical instruments\u2026.Dylan can be read and listened to.\u201d<\/p>\n
Do the distinctions between reading and listening, or poetry, recital, setting words to music hold water? Both are forms of communication; authors regularly read excerpts of their works to audiences. For most of human history, there was only oral tradition, tall tales told at castle banquets or around campfires. Long-distance communication was the sound of a drum, or a runner with a memorized message. Later, stories or song could be transcribed and printed onto papyrus, then later into books, then later printed in multiple copies by machinery. Only in the last one hundred forty years has the oral and musical tradition become realized in the form of sound recordings. Somehow, by force of their literary integrity and their close relation to human emotions and aspirations, the work of literati like Homer and Sappho has survived all these centuries. Perhaps Professor Sara Danius, by simplifying the distinction between reading and listening, was taking it easy on a press whose function is daily dispatches.<\/p>\n
Bob Dylan has been performing since he was a kid learning his craft in the weary proletarian town of Hibbing, Minnesota, then wandering the USA and the world over for over five and half decades of composing, performing, and publishing. One of those publications is Bob Dylan, The Lyrics: 1961-2012<\/i> (Simon & Schuster). Another is his crypto-incisive autobiography Chronicles, Volume One <\/i>(2004).<\/p>\n
Chronicles <\/i>is no straight-line chronology any more than his songs are straightforward. It is rather a discussion of how the man thinks, how he situates his songs. He wrote:<\/p>\n
\u201cI had nothing to do with representing any kind of civilization\u2026. I was more a cowpuncher than Pied Piper.\u201d<\/p>\n
Straight-talk from this particular cowpuncher is testament-style prophesying with lines like \u201cEven the President of the United States must sometimes have to stand naked,\u201d a statement that never seems to lose its contemporaneity.<\/p>\n
Dylan is a prodigious reader and listener, who pays homage to writers, musicians, and song writers who influenced his thinking. They are people as disparate as Cecil Taylor, with whom he once played \u201cWater is Wide\u201d at a coffee house on Bleecker St. in Greenwich Village (\u201cCecil could play regular piano if he wanted to,\u201d he says). One afternoon he dropped into the Blue Note club to listen to Thelonious Sphere Monk working out ideas at the piano. When Dylan told the Monk he played folk music, Monk\u2019s response was, \u201cWe all play folk music.\u201d Out of this minor chord, Dylan writes an astute literary statement, \u201cMonk was in his own dynamic universe even when he dawdled around. Even then he summoned magic shadows into being.\u201d Now ain\u2019t that provocative and insightful?<\/p>\n
The jazz influence was not only from his earliest years in New York City. Chronicles<\/i> recounts the time in 1987, while while rehearsing for shows with the Grateful Dead, that \u201cMy own songs had become strangers to me.\u201d Dylan writes about himself as if he had assumed the power of\u00a0a two cylinder back-yard lawnmower. Then one night while taking a break from the rehearsals he went for a walk. He found himself in a small bar listening to a piano trio with a vocalist who reminded him of Billy Eckstine. The unnamed vocalist had a natural energy that opened a mental gate for Dylan, rejuvenated his lost power. He never identifies the vocal technique he recognized and adopted from that anonymous singer but he says, \u201cSomething became unhinged\u2026.I had that old jazz singer to thank.\u201d In spite of the influence of the jazz world on Dylan, his influence on the jazz world has been negligible. A few people have recorded individual compositions, but only one group, \u201cJewels and Binoculars\u201d has paid significant attention to Dylan\u2019s music. At one point in time, the intricate songs of people like Harold Arlen, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Johnny Mercer were important vehicles for many jazz musicians. \u201cJewels and Binoculars\u201d returned to that tradition. Between 2000 to 2008, the band had a good run, putting out three CDs of Dylan\u2019s music, and performing regularly.<\/p>\n The band was composed of\u00a0 Lindsey Horner (leader, bass, principle arranger), Michael Moore (reeds), and Michael Vatcher (percussion). Their music was sometimes straight renditions of the melodic content, but much of it was extensive extemporization, with occasional drifts into outright transformation. There were emotionally-drenched versions, such as \u201cWith God on Our Side\u201d\u00a0 or near-to-unrecognizable takes on compositions, such as \u201cHighway 61 Revisited.\u201d Aside from their stunning renditions of the music of Bob Dylan, \u201cJewels and Binoculars\u201d showed that Dylan\u2019s poetry and music contains the structural elements that permit substantial improvisation independent of the words themselves. (Read below Misterioso\u2019s recent interview with\u00a0 Lindsey Horner on how the music was arranged).<\/p>\n Dylan\u2019s encounters with the jazz masters is written as a minor side of his influences. He spends chunks of the book discussing Robert Johnson, who influenced the writing of \u201cHighway 61 Revisited,\u201d like this: \u201cThe stabbing sounds from the guitar could almost break a window. When Johnson started singing, seems like the guy could’ve sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor.\u201d He writes about the Staple Singers, how Woody Guthrie painted with words and \u201cmade every word\u201d count.\u201d There\u2019s the tale of intense struggle writing the songs for a failed Archibald MacLeish play, the heart-rending, brutally emotional, and structurally simple songs of Johnny Cash and Hank Williams. This is a book to be read slowly, a kind of a map but not a guidebook on American culture. Who talks anymore about seminal characters like Dave van Ronk anymore but Bob Dylan? This cat Dylan has no answers but his poetry poses questions whose answers are to be found within yourself, makes each person who listens into their own oracle (\u201cDon\u2019t follow leaders, watch your parking meters\u201d).<\/p>\n The structure of Chronicles<\/i> is akin to an extended improvisation in which the creative musician, no matter how he far he explores, comes back to the \u2018one\u2019. There is call and response between page one and the last few pages. Chronicles<\/i> begins with discussion of Lou Levy, the man who was his first publisher. Paragraph one deals with Levy taking Dylan to see the recording studio where Bill Haley and His Comets recorded \u201cRock Around the Clock\u201d and having lunch at boxer Jack Dempsey\u2019s restaurant just after Dylan had signed his first recording contract. In its last pages Chronicles<\/i> ellipses back to the beginning, with Levy asking Dylan if he wrote any songs about baseball players. The talk of baseball leads to running the names of great Americans who came from the Minnesota that Dylan had just left, people such as Charles Lindbergh, Babe Ruth, and Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.<\/p>\n He says of his future:<\/p>\n \u201cIt was strange world that would unfold, a thunderhead of a world with jagged lightening edges. Many got it wrong and never did get it right. I went straight into it. It was wide-open thing for sure, not only was it not run by God, but wasn’t run by the devil either.\u201d<\/p>\n How true, how true, and therein lies, in succinct form, the allure of Dylan\u2019s poetry as song form, open ended like a Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization<\/i>, something that never goes away and provides no answers, only suggestions at solutions.<\/p>\n From day one, Dylan has been a controversial character, frequently portrayed in the media as a self-contrived ego-maniac. He appears to be naturally aloof, alive and well only in the world of music and art. Yet in reading his rare public interviews and speeches he has been exceedingly straightforward, genuinely grateful of the chance to speak to a thoughtful audience or interviewer, thankful to his sponsors.<\/p>\n For the rest of the world, it\u2019s a \u2018leave me alone, I\u2019m a private man\u201d attitude. It\u2019s his ideas, the provocative songwriting that no one can successfully interpret except for themselves, his imagery formed from the natural world of harsh winters in rural Minnesota and the towering intellectual hammer of urban New York City, incantations that leave no answers to those questions he posed in the beginning of his career with songs like \u201cA Hard Rain\u2019s A-Gonna Fall\u201d, \u201cBlowing in the Wind\u201d, and the late-in-the-game \u201cTempest\u201d, a long-form, forty-five verse song on the sinking of the Titanic.\u00a0 Witness this:<\/p>\n \u201cThe ship was going under<\/p>\n The universe had opened wide<\/p>\n The roll was called up yonder<\/p>\n The angels turned aside.\u201d<\/p>\n The above citation from \u201cTempest\u201d is an example of Dylan\u2019 simple and traditional verse form, sea-chanty stuff. The precision to be found in Dylan\u2019s songwriting is structural acuity, a devotion to meter in which the free flow and frequently cryptic lyric fits the song-form, akin to the complexity of rigged sails on an ancient mariner\u2019s vessel that become adjusted according the thrust of wind and direction of the sea.<\/p>\n In one of his rare contemporary interviews Dylan stated,<\/p>\n “What I do that a lot of other writers don’t do is take a concept and line I really want to get into a song and if I can’t figure out for the life of me how to simplify it, I’ll just take it all — lock, stock and barrel — and figure out how to sing it so it fits the rhyming scheme. I would prefer to do that rather than bust it down or lose it because I can’t rhyme it.\u201d<\/p>\n In an early 1964 interview with music critic Nat Hentoff, Dylan stated,<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s hard being free in a song\u2014getting it all in. Songs are so confining. Woody Guthrie told me once that songs don\u2019t have to rhyme\u2014that they don\u2019t have to do anything like that. But it\u2019s not true. A song has to have some kind of form to fit into the music. You can bend the words and the meter, but it still has to fit somehow. I\u2019ve been getting freer in the songs I write, but I still feel confined. That\u2019s why I write a lot of poetry\u2014if that\u2019s the word. Poetry can make its own form.\u201d<\/p>\n Just one example only: try reading these two lines aloud without reference to the music:<\/p>\n \u201cAin\u2019t it just like the night to play tricks when you\u2019re trying to be so quiet?<\/p>\n We sit here stranded, though we\u2019re all doin\u2019 our best to deny it.\u201d<\/p>\n –Visions of Johanna<\/em><\/p>\n Reading it straight in plain voice, the two lines resolve simply and elegantly, even more simply when read as four lines. Dylan\u2019s sung metric throws the ordinary meter off by causing an internal split-emphasis within each of the two lines. The setting of\u00a0 \u201cVisions of Johanna\u201d is night-time in New York City, but any restless night will do. With the emphasis on the word \u2018tricks\u2019, it is rendered it as mysterious as an aurora borealis. Imagine being around a campfire a’way north of Minnesota on a windless star-studded night, where\u00a0the northern lights do indeed play tricks on human consciousness, maybe making us lonely, speculating how infinitesimally small we are in the universe, driving a being into melancholy or to the state of wonderment.<\/p>\n There was surprise reaction when the Swedish Academy made their announcement and joyful response in many circles. Perhaps the most laudable and fun-poking comment was made by Leonard Cohen: Bob Dylan\u2019s winning the Nobel Prize for Literature \u201cis like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain.\u201d On a personal note, I was driving down a long road with a German pianist, who exclaimed \u201cFantastic!\u201d We laughingly spent the rest of our road trip fitting Bob Dylan expressions into our own free-roaming conversations.<\/p>\n What should have been a resounding hurrah that echoed across mountain valleys and transmitted like traditional African drumming or Native American smoke signals became a cold wind from big media. Multitudes of journalists went over the top in slagging the Nobel Committee, and then in slagging Dylan himself. Dylan didn\u2019t immediately respond to the news.\u00a0There was a sound of silence. With no genuflections or sound bites of gratitude from Dylan, the New York Times, Washington Post and the Guardian published articles calling Dylan ungrateful, snobbish, and arrogant.<\/p>\n Can\u2019t a man enjoy a little peace, savor the honor, reflect a little, and get back to work?<\/p>\n The couth-less points of view in the press ran something like this: songs are not literature; he has no gratitude for being awarded the Prize; other writers are more deserving; and that most pedantic of arguments, he doesn\u2019t need the money. The last of these is not worth commenting on except that it appeared so frequently, particularly in readers\u2019 comments. The logic is that only a poverty-stricken writer should get a literary prize. It is almost embarrassing to point out that prizes such as the Nobel are based on a life-time of influential achievement, not on an artist\u2019s or scientist\u2019s ability to buy a cup of coffee. Writing in 2013, Peter England, former Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, stated, \u201cThe prize is always based on an overall assessment. It’s a life’s work that is rewarded, not individual books\u201d.<\/p>\n The argument that other writers are more deserving happens every year, a tiresome buzz saw, a mosquito-like annoyance that just won\u2019t fly away. There are plenty of writers around the world from different countries writing in a plentitude of languages who turn out great literature. The deliberations of the Swedish Academy are secret so no comparison to other nominees can be made, only guessed at. It\u2019s a dynamic that creates endless speculation resulting in\u00a0some very good writers\u00a0getting the benefit of\u00a0publicity.<\/p>\n Some journalists\u00a0slagged Dylan because\u00a0he held off from a public expression of acceptance and gratitude. The Swedish Academy itself kind of shrugged their institutional shoulders when he didn\u2019t immediately return phone calls. This institution deals with all kinds of personalities and they are quite used to intellectuals\u00a0who do not fit the norm. But the American and British press became empty-headed with his presumed ingratitude. The issue reduced itself to \u2018If we can\u2019t get the goods from Bob Dylan\u2019 mouth, we still need a story. How dare he deny us? We need a story and we want it this instant!\u2019<\/p>\n Maybe Bob Dylan was recovering from dental surgery, maybe he was in the midst of writing new songs, re-rigging old ones, buying a new hat (he has great taste in lids). Maybe he was motoring on a Triumph savoring some Americana on a back-road. In a 1964 New Yorker Magazine article by the music critic Nat Hentoff, Dylan stated, \u201c\u2026Being noticed can be a weight. So I disappear a lot. I go to places where I\u2019m not going to be noticed.\u201d<\/p>\n The Swedish Academy calls the winner of a prize a half-hour before their press conference announcements, but where is the law or decorum that says you have to answer the phone just because it\u2019s ringing? Was it a home phone with no one on the property,\u00a0or did the mobile call screen read \u201cSwedish Academy\u201d or \u201cUnknown Caller?\u201d Neither Dylan nor the Swedish Academy has ever\u00a0 told the story, and why should they?<\/p>\n Can\u2019t a man just enjoy a little peace when he\u2019s disappeared himself?<\/p>\n It\u2019s all immaterial, because Bob Dylan seems to be just one of those people who does things on his\u00a0own time and at his own speed. He learned early in the game that press reviews don\u2019t necessarily sell recordings or tickets. He also found out that ignoring the press -or even giddily provoking them- got him stories anyway. One of the ways he learned this can be seen in the main film about his early career, D. A. Pennebaker\u2019s 1967 Don\u2019t Look Back<\/i>.\u00a0In London, England, Dylan at age 23 queries reporters and determines that most of the them hadn\u2019t listened to his music. Instead, they asked inane questions about his being a leader of a social movement. At one press conference Dylan simultaneously charms and\u00a0lampoons the reporters by holding a mock-up of a huge light bulb. The British press corps obliges, dopily trying to discern the symbolism of the prop. It was positively beatelesque, absurd in the way the same press pestered John-Paul-George-Ringo with inane questions about their haircuts, but never\u00a0 about their music.<\/p>\n Take the dynamic forward fifty years to 2016-12-09 when under the headline \u201cDylan, Polite? It Ain\u2019t Him, Babe.\u201d Sarah Lyall, a veteran New York Times journalist wrote, \u201cHe did not attend the traditional news conference. He did not deliver the traditional lecture. He did not make the traditional visit to a local school, or take part in the traditional fancy dinner with the Swedish Academy\u201d.<\/p>\n The headline is pure dupery. On the rare occasions when Bob Dylan addresses the public, he is extraordinarily polite and gracious, as if he knows what really counts to the human heart. Witness his interview with the American Association of Retired People, where speaking of his\u00a0 CD Shadows in the Night<\/i> he states,<\/p>\n \u201cIf it were up to me, I\u2019d give you the records for nothing, and you give them to every [reader of your] magazine.\u201d<\/p>\n Here is an excerpt from the speech Dylan had delivered on his behalf by the United States Ambassador to Sweden Azita Raji at the Nobel Banquet:<\/p>\n \u201cI extend my warmest greetings to the members of the Swedish Academy and to all of the other distinguished guests in attendance tonight. I’m sorry I can’t be with you in person, but please know that I am most definitely with you in spirit and honored to be receiving such a prestigious prize. Being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature is something I never could have imagined or seen coming.\u201d<\/p>\n The key word in Lyall\u2019s article is not \u201cpolite.\u201d It is the four-times mentioned word \u201ctraditional.\u201d There is zero content in the article about his music. The veteran journalist is more interested in following -in lock step- the half-century old journalistic stereotype of Dylan\u2019s symbolic value, studiously ignoring the reason for Dylan\u2019s being awarded the Prize.<\/p>\n In his speech at the MusiCares Person of the Year 2015, Dylan does his own four-play on the word, saying,<\/p>\n \u201c[My] songs didn’t come out of thin air. I didn’t just make them up out of whole cloth. Contrary to what Lou Levy said, there was a precedent. It all came out of traditional music: traditional folk music, traditional rock & roll, and traditional big-band swing orchestra music. I learned lyrics and how to write them from listening to folk songs. And I played them, and I met other people that played them, back when nobody was doing it. Sang nothing but these folk songs, and they gave me the code for everything that’s fair game, that everything belongs to everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n Being a public figure, Dylan becomes fair game for speculation, and that includes the charge that he is not polite, a code word for his unwillingness to play the contrived game of public relations. Dylan has the public reputation as a fiercely private man, a man of supreme ego who shields himself from public view. It all becomes clear in his discussions of invasions of privacy while raising his family in Woodstock, NY. Delusional hordes would gather outside his home demanding that he come forth and lead them to some vague political goal as if he were a messiah who wrote songs to stir them up. In spite of such adulation, he states again and again that he is just a song writer and that what he has accomplished comes out of the great canon of art, literature, and song that comes before him. That may be what Dylan really thinks, but the incidents that he points out mean just one thing: Dylan\u2019s writing and recordings get under peoples\u2019 skin.<\/p>\n He put it succinctly in his speech to Musicares:<\/p>\n \u201cWell you know, I just thought I was doing something natural, but right from the start, my songs were divisive for some reason. They divided people. I never knew why. Some got angered, others loved them. Didn’t know why my songs had detractors and supporters. A strange environment to have to throw your songs into, but I did it anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n The strangest -and strongly stated- notion among all the negative press was that songs cannot be literature. Rolling Stone magazine printed a cranky rant that contains within it its own seeds of destruction: \u201cOf course it’s not poetry, not even sung poetry. It’s songwriting, it’s storytelling, it’s electric noise, it’s a bard exploiting the new-media inventions of his time (amplifiers, microphones, recording studios, radio) for literary performance the way playwrights or screenwriters once did.\u201d But here is the illogical oddity: the title to the article is \u201cWhy Bob Dylan Deserves His Nobel Prize.\u201d<\/p>\n Rolling Stone Magazine carries no pedigree for the academic literati, but some intellectuals who should have known better twisted their thinking into a Gordian Knot over songs as literature. Representative of such a response was an article under a New York Times headline \u201cWhy Bob Dylan Shouldn\u2019t Have Gotten a Nobel.\u201d Author and editor Anna North wrote, \u201cBob Dylan does not deserve the Nobel Prize in Literature\u2026the Nobel committee is choosing not to award it to a writer.\u201d<\/p>\n The thrust of her argument is contained in, \u201cYes, Mr. Dylan is a brilliant lyricist. Yes, he has written a book of prose poetry and an autobiography. Yes, it is possible to analyze his lyrics as poetry. But Mr. Dylan\u2019s writing is inseparable from his music. He is great because he is a great musician, and when the Nobel committee gives the literature prize to a musician, it misses the opportunity to honor a writer.\u201d North goes on to suggest several writers who could have been given the prize in lieu of a musician.<\/p>\n Some things haven’t changed. Bob Dylan is still getting stones thrown at him for playing a guitar.<\/p>\n North has a distinctively-twisted logic, to which an Alexandrian blade could be swung with nonchalance to sever it. Consider several easy-to- answer questions.\u00a0Is the domain of Bob Dylan\u2019s work founded upon words? Does he compose in traditional and non-traditional poetic forms? Does he have a profound body of work written over the course of more than half a century? Has Dylan \u201ccreated new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition?\u201d\u00a0The answer to each question inevitably, “Yes.” It just won\u2019t do to confound the issue of writing by introducing the concepts of singing and music. If an equivalent of the Nobel Prize for Literature had existed 2,700 years ago, that blind man Homer may not have been crowned by laurel leaves, he would have been eliminated from consideration by some cantankerous critic for daring to sing.<\/p>\n The Nobel Prize for Literature gets cage-rattling press every year from all kinds of folk weighing in on who should have won. If Bob Dylan had confined his work strictly to the written form, not by a country mile would he be known to millions of people worldwide. Contemporary poets are not particularly well known except to the literati and academia. But as a poet who sings and performs his work as music Dylan commands an international stage with millions of people of all cultures and nationalities, something that very few poets can claim.<\/p>\n When thinking\u00a0of the brilliant authors who have won the Prize, like Hesse, Hemingway, Mahfouz, Camus, Pasternak, Llosa, Neruda, Mo Yan, M\u00e1rquez, lifelong readers will remember the names of their books and the wonderful stories they have told. But recalling individual lines from their writing is rare, other than perhaps phrases from from T.S. Elliot (\u201cIn the room the women come and go\/ Talking of Michelangelo\u201d) and the non-Nobel contender who wrote, \u201cThere was only one catch, and that was Catch-22.\u201d<\/p>\n With Bob Dylan there are dozens of lines that can easily occur to any lover of music, song, and literature, phrases that plug into the mind and never leave. Bob Dylan’s sung\u00a0poetry simply has entered the international public consciousness, maybe like no other writer of the last century has. Consider the following lines as a sample of what multitudes can sing from memory:<\/p>\n “There’s no success like failure and failure’s no success at all.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou don\u2019t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHe not busy being born is busy dying.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTangled up in blue.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cManipulator of crowds, you’re a dream twister.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf it keep on rainin\u2019, the levee gonna break.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHeard ten thousand whisperin’ and nobody listening.\u201d<\/p>\n Enigmas amplified, luciferous, timeless, unforgettable stuff formed in the crucible of modern literary thinking is the literature of Bob Dylan.<\/p>\n Sources:<\/p>\n –http:\/\/www.nobelprize.org\/nobel_prizes\/literature\/laureates\/2016\/<\/a><\/p>\n –http:\/\/articles.latimes.com\/2004\/apr\/04\/entertainment\/ca-dylan04<\/a><\/p>\n –https:\/\/www.nobelprize.org\/nomination\/literature\/questions-peter-englund-2013.html<\/a><\/p>\n –https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/12\/09\/arts\/bob-dylan-nobel-prize-sweden.html<\/a><\/p>\n –http:\/\/www.aarp.org\/entertainment\/style-trends\/info-2015\/bob-dylan-aarp-the-magazine-full-interview.1.html<\/a><\/p>\n –https:\/\/www.nobelprize.org\/nobel_prizes\/literature\/laureates\/2016\/dylan-speech.html<\/a><\/p>\n –http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/entertainment\/music\/posts\/la-et-ms-grammys-2015-transcript-of-bob-dylans-musicares-person-of-year-speech-20150207-story.html<\/a><\/p>\n –http:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/music\/features\/why-bob-dylan-deserves-his-nobel-prize-w444799<\/a><\/p>\n https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/10\/26\/opinion\/the-meaning-of-bob-dylans-silence.html<\/a><\/p>\n https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/10\/13\/opinion\/why-bob-dylan-shouldnt-have-gotten-a-nobel.html<\/a><\/p>\n Note from Laurence Svirchev:\u00a0the best essay on Bob Dylan I read while researching this article was by a 1964 piece by Nat Hentoff, a writer known to anyone who reads the jazz literature:<\/p>\n http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/1964\/10\/24\/the-crackin-shakin-breakin-sounds<\/a><\/p>\n Supplement: Interview with\u00a0 Lindsey Horner<\/b><\/p>\n Laurence Svirchev: How did you arrange \u201cHighway 61 Revisited\u201d?<\/p>\n Lindsey Horner: Whenever I did an arrangement, I took a large piece of score paper, the kind you would use to write for an ensemble like an orchestra or big band, and wrote all the words down starting on the left side of the paper. As you might imagine, sometimes this took up quite a bit of room. I would then start paying attention to the meter and rhythm of those words and see what kind of ideas would emerge. Sometimes it would be a melodic line, sometimes a bass figure, sometimes a harmonic progression or sound. The only thing I didn\u2019t pay any attention to was the original version as I had no interest in \u201ccovering\u201d the tune. I preferred to re-imagine and re-interpret it. Ideas would always come without exception and without having to wait too long, so strong are Dylan\u2019s words and ideas.<\/p>\n In the case of Highway 61, the short, vernacular nature of the phrases being used to describe biblical and absurdist events suggested a descending, chromatic bass line that never comes to rest until the \u201cHighway 61\u201d at the end of each verse. It\u2019s a 16 bar blues which draws out the lines longer than the more usual 12 bar blues would do. Sometimes we would extend the end\/beginning so that it would be 18 or 20 bars. We ended up playing it in Gb for no particular reason that I can remember other than that it seemed to sound good there and was fun to play.<\/p>\n LS: How did you arrange “Dark Eyes”? In some of the songs on the three CDs, I hear Michael Moore kind of trailing off at what would be the end of a sung phrase, leaving the last few words implied. I also hear you and Michael Moore alternating what would be the sung lines in the original. That lends a nice tension-relaxation to the music.<\/p>\n LH: I hear \u201cDark Eyes\u201d as being in the tradition of an Irish or Scottish ballad, like \u201cA Hard Rain\u2019s Gonna Fall\u201d, \u201cFarewell Angelina\u201d or \u201cThe Times They are a-Changin\u2019\u201d. I had done the arrangement with the Irish singer\/songwriter, Susan McKeown on our duo record, \u201cMighty Rain\u201d back in 1997. Apart from the incredible and expressive lyrics, I took inspiration from Dylan\u2019s guitar part which is one of his more interesting ones, almost like something that Richard Thompson or some other brilliant guitarist might come up with. I imagined what it would sound like on harp, out of the bardic tradition. Michael Vatcher had that odd, zither-like instrument that he used in a very unique manner and he ran with it.<\/p>\n LS: \u201cBlind Wille McTell\u201d & \u201cWith God on Our Side\u201d hit the emotions pretty hard. \u201cWith God on Our Side\u201d actually sounds like there is a battle going on. What made you treat them that way?<\/p>\n LH: \u201cBlind Willie McTell\u201d is a true American masterpiece and one of Dylan\u2019s greatest songs – not just one of his best songs, but one of the greatest, like \u201cBlowin\u2019 in the Wind\u201d or \u201cLike a Rolling Stone.\u201d It\u2019s more than a song, it\u2019s a cultural touchstone and work of art. Many people are mystified that he left it off the album for which it was intended (\u201cInfidels\u201d). But to me, that sums up just how many great songs he writes. He has probably thrown out scores of songs any one of which are better than other artists\u2019 best work, as the continuing Bootleg Series attests.<\/p>\n Bill Frisell played on a few compositions like \u201cBlind Wille McTell\u201d for the third CD. I wanted the vibe of the tune to come through and to give space for Bill\u2019s guitar to state the melody freely. When we played it in trio, same thing. I wanted it to be unhurried and weighty and to have something of the \u201ccumulative effect\u201d that the verses of Dylan\u2019s version have.<\/p>\n Doing \u201cWith God on Our Side\u201d that way was Michael Moore\u2019s idea and I think he wanted the fact that it is all about war and the justifications thereof to be readily apparent.<\/p>\n LS: Did you arrange specific instrumentation for Michael Moore and Michael Vatcher? Vatcher has an unorthodox sound on the kit and he also uses all sorts or ornamental percussion devices right out of the folk tradition.<\/p>\n LH: Sometimes I\u00a0might suggest, \u201cI hear this on alto\u201d or \u201cmaybe play cymbals on this section\u201d, but for the most part I let the guys figure out what worked best, like the collaborative effort the band was at its\u2019 best. If something wasn\u2019t working or didn\u2019t feel right, we\u2019d try something else – or drop it altogether. Michael Vatcher is a somewhat unconventional drummer (I think he\u2019d agree with that). He\u2019s also a big guy and one thing I noticed about him was how good the drums sounded when he really hit them hard. I think that was something he didn\u2019t get much chance to do in other contexts and I encouraged him to do that (check him out on \u201cFather of Night\u201d and \u201cHighway 61\u201d, for example).<\/p>\n LS: I\u2019m interested in what you hear in Dylan\u2019s music out of the European tradition transposed to America. From what I read in your biography, you might be the best musician I know of to articulate that, given your vast experience with folk music. This includes the structural elements.<\/p>\n LH: As I hear it, Dylan steeped himself in the full range of American music, especially that which came from the British Isles, (England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales) and the blues. There\u2019s a very telling segment in the Scorcese documentary where he openly and affectionately credits the Clancy Brothers for introducing him to that ballad tradition and all that lay behind it. Liam Clancy confirms this and says something to the effect that, \u201cWe gave him what we knew and he gave it back to us transformed\u201d. A number of his early songs are actual traditional tunes that he has put his new, astonishing poetic words to (\u201cHard Rain\u201d, \u201cRestless Farewell\u201d, \u201cFarewell Angelina\u201d, etc), and then there is \u201cWhen the Ship Comes In\u201d, an amazing and overlooked tune that Liam Clancy himself sang in concert until his dying day. This is clearly a \u201cmodern traditional\u201d ballad out of that tradition, imagery completely modern and utterly timeless – like all great folk tunes.<\/p>\n Lindsey Horner\u2019s Website:\u00a0http:\/\/www.lindseyhorner.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n Jewels & Binoculars’\u00a0“Ships with Tattooed Sails” is available from Mr. Horner’s website and<\/p>\n https:\/\/www.cdbaby.com\/cd\/jewelsbinoculars<\/a><\/p>\n Jewels & Binoculars “Floater” (Ramboy 20):<\/p>\n http:\/\/www.ramboyrecordings.com\/ramboy20\/ramboy20.htm<\/a><\/p>\n “Jewels & Binoculars” (Ramboy 15):<\/p>\n http:\/\/www.ramboyrecordings.com\/ramboy15\/ramboy15.htm<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cFolk songs transcended the immediate culture\u201d -Bob Dylan<\/p>\n \u00a9Laurence@Ssvirchev.com<\/p>\n Give or take a few hundred, two thousand seven hundred years ago there was a blind man who rambled through kingdoms, mountains, and plains, probably swayed to the rhythm of waves on the Mediterranean Sea. He earned his bread, vegetable, . . . → Read More: Bob Dylan & The Nobel Prize for Literature<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","odd"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1568"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1568"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1568\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1592,"href":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1568\/revisions\/1592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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