We continue our excerpting from Victor Bockris‘ remarkable collection Beat Punks – see here – and continue with Allen’s observations on his heroes – Today, Bob Dylan
AG: Dylan is one if my heroes, he seems like a mighty, triumphant Beethovenian fist shaking at heaven always, and in his later phase, greater and greater, richer. Also, as an oral poet he’s supreme : I think he can pronounce his vowels and consonants better than any other bard.
In conversation, he’s subtle, very witty, as in songs, but more subtle, he’ll say a thing which sounds very plain and “disruptive” until five minutes later you realize he was actually saying something absolutely simple and straightforward that takes you by surprise. Like he kept telling me all through the Rolling Thunder tour that I was a king , but that I hadn’t found my kingdom. Which is like terrific, right? (Allen laughs). Total flattery and at the same time total realism. Also, I always felt that he had very shrewd judgments for me, It very often takes me years to catch up with some very casual rear. Like years ago, way back in the ‘Sixties, he asked me to write songs for him and I disdained the notion thinking that I was some kind of velvet poet. And not that he needed it, he was just encouraging me to do something. But he was being absolutely totally friendly, and I reacted paranoiacally, thinking that he was putting me on, or that he was coming on superior, whereas actually he was being totally friendly and quite humble, totally straightforward, and I didn’t take it straightforwardly. And it resulted in me learning music and working with him later and then finally writing my own songs. So at the moment, I’m dying for him to sing one of my songs.
I first met him around ’63, ’64. When I first came back from India, I met Charlie Plymell in Bolinas. I’d never heard Dylan and Plymell played me one of his first records, including the line “I’ll know my song well before I start singing”, and I burst into tears when I heard it, it seemed so clear and so heroic. “I’ll know my song well before I start singing” It sounded like the best of any great writer, Rimbaud or Shelley – some Shelleyian Promethean statement as to the role of the poet – and it seemed such a miracle that somebody had emerged self-born in the middle of America with so much awareness and such confidence and sense of prophecy, that I started crying. Then I met him by surprise – came back to New York and was staying at Ted Wilentz‘s house when he was running the Eighth Street Bookshop and Wilentz had a welcome home party and Al Aronowitz brought Dylan around. But I didn’t know until last year that Dylan had actually read some of the Beat poetry and had – quote – “his mind blown” – unquote. Which he said had happened with Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues that somebody had handed him in Minnesota. He said he didn’t know what the words meant then. but it blew his mind – I guess the open form and the American rhythm.
I think there’s a natural progression in Dylan’s work and I always think of it in terms of Yeats. Of mountain peaks and valleys, mountain peaks and valleys, with succeeding intensification and succeeding reality and succeeding genius. Seasons, you know, like A Season in Hell, seasons, different seasons, but they’re being inevitable and natural seasons and so not to be criticized from a pop point of view – “Is this going to be a bestseller or not?” I mean not from a crass, commercial point of view.
See, all through the period when he was supposed to have been so dumb, there were a series of very great songs – “Lay Lady Lay” or “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” – which are so mellow and so beautiful to hear now. that one doesn’t realize that at the time they were received with disdain, as if he’d lost his power. So after a period of hysterical crescendo in Blonde on Blonde, he came down – as was natural and healthy and inevitable – to becoming a family man and re-humanizing himself. And the result of that was some very beautiful, calm, sweet songs. And then he did what really one would have wanted him to do – a large record of all his sources – which is Self Portrait. I’m glad he gave us those footnotes, his sources.Like, you know, what more generous thing could he have done. So he replaced hysteria with generosity and some pop reviewers spit at him.
Then at the time people were saying he was at the lowest point, he wrote his most divine song, which is “Knock, Knock, Knocking On Heaven’s Door”. Everybody was yelling at him – for not being “active”? for I don’t know what – but around that time he wrote “Forever Young”, which I think will be as lasting as “White Christmas”. “Forever Young” is a fantastic anthem, which some day will be heard sung around campfires in the Sierras – (Allen sings -“Forever young, Forever youuuuuuuug…”). It’s like a beautiful thing to sing, it’s a family song, which is how it was intended, Like “Way Down Upon The Swanee River” or something. Dylan wrote something that permanently gilds the family twilight Christmas evening.
I thought the rhyme of “Idiot wind, blowing there in circles around your skull/From theGrand Coulee Dam to the Capitol” was amazing. Also, as I was doing a bit of yoga, it seemed to me he had, by his own nature, come down to some basic realization of breath (prana), and actually the whole song is about “It’s a wonder you can still breathe’. And later, “..feed yourself”.
It seemed to me to be a declaration of independence from what is called, in technical Buddhist terms, “the ego of dharmas”, that is to say, being hypnotized by one’s own outside world and past and one’s creations in the outside world. Because there’s that great line about “Being on the borderline between you and me/Finally free/You never know what pain I rise above”. Which is tremendously Bodhisattva-like. Where is “Idiot Wind”? – (Allen looks it up in a beautiful spiral-loud boxed edition of Dylan’s Songs-1966-1976 – (He) had just gotten his copy and was very pleased with it)
When I first heard him sing this – “they ride down the highway, down the tracks, down the road to ecstasy” – I thought he was referring to Kerouac – “I followed you beneath the stars haunted by your memory and all your raging glory”. So I began taking that personally, thinking he was talking about us Beatniks – “I’ve been double-crossed now for the very last time and now I’m finally free”. It sounds like his declaration of independence from his fathers.
So when I first heard that, I megalomaniacally thought he was declaring his independence from me. And then I realized that her was actually declaring his independence from all me’s. From all me’s everywhere in every direction, is that almost anybody could interpret that as being personal, in showing some real separation out into solitude on his own, and the acceptance of solitude and individuality, and actually his emergence above pain of clinging and attachment and mystification, to some kind of almost godless glory, isolate, seeing the complete nothingness of the world, the emptiness of the world.
“And you’ll never know what pain I rise above/As well as your holiness or your kind of love. He’s like disdaining all the daughters of Mara, all the temptations of the world, attachments to the world, fears. And then, “Idiot wind, blowing through the buttons of our coats/Blowing through the letters that we wrote/Blowing through the dust upon our shelves” – it’s like a universal energy, empty energy, which he’s recognized. So it seemed, psychologically, a great statement of attainment of powers, and also like a national prophecy – “Blowing like a circle around my soul/From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol”. It’s all Watergate too, is it’s the nation, the ego of the nation.
Well, it just seemed a very noble song, like a kind of nobility you don’t often see, the nobility of a great bard. Which is what the whole Rolling Thunder tour was all about.And also a very strange alchemical thing in the sense that he had to take all this money and all this machinery and all this electricity to create a ten-foot-square spot where he would be completely free to stamp his foot in time to what he hears in his own head as music, and create on the spot a new rhythm each time he played “Idiot Wind” or any other song, and play each song differently each time with all the musicians completely there in their bodies, alert, listening, sensitive, receptive, and respondent to his changes of time and beat, in the sense of elongated vowels, so they get up on stage and howl, in the sense of elongated vowels, with complete self-confidence and authority and solace, solitary loneliness, in the middle of 27,000 people and half a million dollars worth of equipment – in a ten-foot-square space where one person can totally express himself freely and actually express a good deal of the emotion of the crowd of people around him, speak for people in a sense, speak for others, speak for himself and others at the same time. So “Idiot Wind” seems to me like an acme of that,
On the Hard Rain album, even in diminished volume, there’s still the sense of slowdown of time and slowdown of the song and even the gaps in the song where there’s a moment of silence, and you don’t know whether the song is continuing , and all of a sudden it continues with the same logic as before. So he’s stepping in and out of time. It’s noticeable in the fantasticalness of his pronunciation and consonants. The thing that I kept thinking is that expression on his face that looks like paint and.or disdain, or sneer, is really just a mouth working, his face trying to pull back his teeth to pronounce his “t”s clearly enough to be heard into the microphone, to hear a single “t” or an “s” above all the roar of the other electrical instruments, to be heard as a human syllable and be understood by the ear so that music had word, it had word in there. That’s why he’s a great poet in the sense of a great orator. That’s the best oratory I’ve heard, or the best recitation of poetry. It was a great poetry reading…
In between the concerts, we made movies, almost every day there was a scene to act in , so that would take up half a day or morning – we worked very hard putting on a concert and making movies simultaneously, no chance to get up and laze around all day and not worry about anything and then jump into another concert. Dylan was actually working on the afternoon of a concert – like going out to Kerouac’s grave in a caravan and sitting there, and then having a concert in Lowell that night. Singing all the night before and having to get up at 10 a.m. or something, a lot of energy
Since the tour, he’s just disappeared from my vision. Gone back up to heaven.
to be continued