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For our latest round of chasing shadows, I want to enlist the help of another beloved Dylan-adjacent artist: Bruce Springsteen. We begin at New York City’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel on January 20, 1988. A dapper 38-year-old Springsteen swaggered up to the podium to deliver a beautiful speech for Dylan’s induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Someone on the production team must have missed a cue because the first minute of the speech is shot entirely from behind. Not that I’m complaining. If you’re like me and have listened countless times to Born in the U.S.A. while staring at the album cover, then you’d know that ass anywhere!

The beginning of the speech perfectly captures Dylan’s magnetic appeal for teens in the mid-1960s:

The first time that I heard Bob Dylan I was in the car with my mother, and we were listening to, I think, maybe WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody kicked open the door to your mind, from “Like a Rolling Stone.” And my mother, who was—she was no stiff with rock and roll, she liked the music, she listened—she sat there for a minute, she looked at me, and she said, “That guy can’t sing.” But I knew she was wrong. I sat there, I didn’t say nothin’, but I knew that I was listening to the toughest voice that I had ever heard. It was lean, and it sounded somehow simultaneously young and adult.

The most frequently quoted passage from the speech puts it even more succinctly: “Dylan was a revolutionary: the way that Elvis freed your body, Bob freed your mind. He showed us that just because the music was innately physical, it did not mean that it was anti-intellect. He broke through the limitations of what a recording artist could achieve.”

Here’s the part of the speech that I really want us to think about: “When I was a kid, Bob’s voice, somehow, it thrilled and scared me. It made me feel kind of irresponsibly innocent. And it still does. It reached down and touched what little worldliness I think a 15-year-old kid in high school in New Jersey had in him at the time.”

It’s an endearing reaction, but also a puzzling one. I’ve listened to Highway 61 Revisited more than any other Dylan album, but if you ask me “How does it feel?” I would never answer: irresponsibly innocent. What does that mean?

Think of “I Contain Multitudes”: “I sing the songs of experience like William Blake / I have no apologies to make.” Just so: the songs of experience, not the songs of innocence. Dylan chronicles the fallen world outside the gates of Eden. He gives us shadows from “the broken mirror of innocence,” as he puts it in “Every Grain of Sand.” What does Springsteen see and hear that I’m missing? And how does his contrasting sensibility come through in his own music? Is Bruce looking into the broken mirror of Bob and seeing his own reflection?

The more I’ve pondered Springsteen’s “irresponsibly innocent” response to Dylan, the more I’ve found myself gravitating in an unexpected direction—toward the circus. Carnivals, circuses, amusement parks, and fairs were formative influences for both Dylan and Springsteen as kids. As adult artists, they’ve both made integral use of the circus in their work, though they tend to emphasize different aspects of the subject. I want to focus mostly on carnivalesque Springsteen, but in order to get there we first need to follow Dylan to the circus.

Wild Bobby’s Circus

In both Chronicles and No Direction Home, Dylan recalls the childhood thrill of attending the circus whenever it rolled through his hometown of Hibbing. The shape-shifting strangeness and itinerant freedom of carnival life left a lasting impression on the youngster, and we can trace this circus influence across his later art in multiple genres, all the way from “Dusty Old Fairgrounds” (1963) through The Philosophy of Modern Song (2022). For Dylan, the circus is a space for self-exploration, fluid identity, transgressing social norms, and constant movement.

I recently taught I’m Not There and was reminded of how central the circus is to Todd Haynes’s vision of Dylan, particularly for the scenes set in Riddle Township. The circus is a recurring reference point in Dylan’s own films, too. Think especially of Masked and Anonymous, where the carnival is an omnipresent backdrop to the action. Michael Glover Smith informs us that, as far back as 1967 while editing Eat the Document, Dylan was simultaneously shooting a separate film labeled in the archives as Bob Dylan’s Circus Movie (Smith 160).

Dylan essentially mounted his own traveling circus in 1975 called the Rolling Thunder Revue. In Scorsese’s RTR film, Allen Ginsberg describes the concept as “something like a con man, carnie, medicine show of old, just get in a bus or carriage and go from town to town.” That’s exactly how Joni Mitchell experienced the tour. In her introduction to “Coyote” in Montreal, she told the audience, “I came to this tour in New Haven, and I just hitched along for the rest of the distance. It’s kind of like running away from home to join the circus.” For Mitchell fans, New Haven is important as the night Joni joined the circus. For Springsteen fans, that same show is memorable as the night Bruce first met Bob.

In his memoir Born to Run, Springsteen offers this profound tribute to Dylan:

Bob Dylan is the father of my country. Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home were not only great records, but they were the first time I can remember being exposed to a truthful vision of the place I lived. The darkness and light were all there, the veil of illusion and deception ripped aside. He put his boot on the stultifying politeness and daily routine that covered corruption and decay. The world he described was all on view, in my little town, and spread out over the television that beamed into our isolated homes, but it went uncommented on and silently tolerated. He inspired me and gave me hope. He asked the questions everyone else was too frightened to ask, especially to a fifteen-year-old. “How does it feel . . . to be on your own?” (166)

Young Springsteen turned to Dylan as a guide for navigating his way through adolescence in a world gone wrong:

A seismic gap had opened up between generations and you suddenly felt orphaned, abandoned amid the flow of history, your compass spinning, internally homeless. Bob pointed true north and served as a beacon to assist you in making your way through the new wilderness America had become. He planted a flag, wrote the songs, sang the words that were essential to the times, to the emotional and spiritual survival of so many young Americans at that moment. (167)

Dylan inspired Springsteen with his authentic and unsparing vision of contemporary America. On the practical level of songcraft, Dylan also taught Springsteen how to use the circus as a vehicle for expressing a distinctly American vision. The template is Highway 61 Revisited.

Dylan’s groundbreaking 1965 album presents a kaleidoscopic mashup of history, literature, myth, and fever dream, depicting mid-sixties America as a surreal circus. The first line of the album is “Once upon a time,” but what follows is less fairy tale than freak show, where deflowered Ophelia and slipperless Cinderella cavort with a rogue’s gallery of geeks, gropers, swindlers, and sword swallowers.

“Ballad of a Thin Man” plunges the clueless Mr. Jones into a bizarre circus side show, like a combination of Tod Browning’s Freaks, a sadomasochistic dungeon, and a queer bathhouse. “You know that something’s happening here / But you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mr. Jones?” But Dylan seems to know. Black Panther Huey P. Newton believed he knew, too. He heard the song as an astute allegory for American race relations (Seale 183-87). Todd Haynes deftly incorporated both the circus imagery and social commentary of “Ballad of a Thin Man” in this sequence from I’m Not There:

The culmination of Dylan’s carnivalesque approach on Highway 61 Revisited comes in the closing song “Desolation Row.” He establishes the theme in the opening verse:

They’re selling postcards of the hanging

They’re painting the passports brown

The beauty parlor is filled with sailors

The circus is in town

Desolation Row doubles as a carnival midway, and each verse features a new booth or tent populated by sordid characters engaged in unsavory acts.

As many Shadow Chasing readers will know, the first verse of “Desolation Row” alludes to the notorious 1920 lynching in Duluth, Dylan’s birthplace. Three Black employees from a traveling circus were falsely accused of raping a white woman. An angry mob stormed the jail, abducted the prisoners, and hung Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie from lampposts downtown. And yes, photos of the gruesome scene were turned into postcards for sale. Dylan took Highway 61 back home, following in the footsteps of those murdered circus workers, to reckon with ghosts that continued to haunt 1965 America.

Meanwhile, down the Jersey Shore in 1965, 15-year-old Bruce Springsteen joined The Castiles and soon began his first experiments with songwriting and performing in a band. Dylan would serve him well as visionary mentor and pole star. Highway 61 Revisited not only set a high standard, but it also provided a blueprint for transforming the circus into a grand metaphor for America. Springsteen would take those lessons, adapt them for his own artistic vision, and apply them locally to Asbury Park, turning the carnival into a grand metaphor for his search for love.

Carnival Boys & Jersey Girls

Springsteen’s pursuit of love at the carnival was vexed from the start. However, it’s useful first to establish a baseline for the ideal, and there’s no better example than his gorgeous cover of Tom Waits’s “Jersey Girl.” Springsteen regularly showcased this ballad during his Born in the U.S.A. stadium tour. Growin’ up in rural Tennessee, I never got anywhere near that tour. But I fell in love with “Jersey Girl” from the box set Live 1975–85, where Springsteen serenades thousands of adoring fans at Meadowlands Arena in East Rutherford, NJ. If this doesn’t melt your heart, well then, I’m sorry, but I don’t think we can be friends:

Tonight I’m gonna take that ride

Across the river to the Jersey side

Take my baby to the carnival

And I’ll take her on all the rides

’Cause down the shore everything’s all right

You and your baby on a Saturday night

Nothing matters in this whole wide world

When you’re in love with a Jersey girl

According to Brucebase Wiki, Springsteen’s first public performance of “Jersey Girl” was at the wedding of his drummer Max Weinberg. What a perfect wedding song! “Jersey Girl” expresses a beatific dream of romantic love, where the carnival serves as Garden of Eden and our Jersey Adam and Eve never fall from grace. Springsteen’s own characters usually aren’t so lucky.

His first songs about the carnival appear on his second album, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle (1973). Hmmm. Wild + Innocent = Irresponsibly Innocent? Maybe Springsteen really was looking in Dylan’s mirror and seeing his own reflection.

Consider “Wild Billy’s Circus Story.” This song isn’t about pursuing love at the carnival so much as running away to find freedom on the road. This dilemma—staying vs. going—becomes a dominant tension animating all of Springsteen’s circus songs.

“Wild Billy’s Circus Story” spotlights a bizarre cast—the fire eater, the human cannonball, the ringmaster, the barker, and clowns—together with a roll call of eccentrics who would feel right at home on Highway 61 Revisited—Fat Lady, Big Mama, Missy Bimbo, Samson, Tiny Tim, Margarita, and the Flying Zambinis. The music also conjures up the circus, thanks to Danny Federici’s accordion and Garry Tallent’s tuba, leading the procession through Wild Billy’s hometown, like the Pied Piper passing through Hamelin.

In his memoir, Springsteen recalls the song’s initial inspiration:

“Wild Billy’s Circus” was a black comedy based on my memories of the fairs and the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus that visited Freehold every summer when I was a kid. They’d set up a midway and pitch their tents in a field across from the racetrack not far from my house. I was always curious about what was going on in the dim alleys off the midway. As I walked by, my hand enclosed in my mother’s, I felt the musky underbelly to the shining lights and life I’d just seen in the center ring. It all felt frightening, uneasy and secretly sexual. (192)

The fantasy here is to pull up stakes and hit the road, leaving one’s humdrum world behind in pursuit of novelty, adventure, and illicit sex. As Springsteen well knows, this is the same allure for the road life of a rock star. He told biographer Dave Marsh: “‘To me, the idea is you get a band, write some songs, and go out to people’s towns. It’s my favorite thing; it’s like a circus. You just kind of roll on, walk into somebody’s town, and bang! It’s heart to heart. Something can happen to you; something can happen to them’” (367).

When it comes to carnival songs, Springsteen’s first major triumph was “4^th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy).” The song is steeped in symbolism. The setting on July 4^th marks it as a declaration of independence. The place the singer wants to leave behind is Asbury Park, at least on the literal level. But Springsteen transforms this beach town into a mythological realm. He announces those ambitions unmistakably in the opening lines: “Sandy, the fireworks are hailing over Little Eden tonight / Forcing a light into all those stony faces left stranded on this warm July.” Asbury Park is Little Eden on Independence Day. The symbolism tugs in seemingly opposite directions: one way toward freedom from stifling mediocrity, the other way toward exile from paradise.

Should I stay or should I go? That is the question for both “Wild Billy’s Circus Story” and “4^th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy).” Movement vs. paralysis. But there’s a crucial distinction between the two songs. In “Wild Billy,” the circus is nomadic, here today and gone tomorrow. Joining the circus is Billy’s escape route out of Asbury Park. In “Sandy,” however, the carnival is a permanent fixture on the Jersey Shore. Join this circus and you ain’t goin’ nowhere. Call it independence or call it banishment, leaving Little Eden requires turning your back on the carnival lights and heading into the darkness on the edge of town. Springsteen sets up this exodus in the first chorus:

Sandy, the aurora is rising behind us

This pier lights our carnival life forever

Oh, love me tonight, for I may never see you again

Hey Sandy girl

My, my baby

Notice that the aurora is behind them, meaning that they’re not walking toward the carnival but away from it. The singer seems determined to leave, but at this point he doesn’t expect her (or even invite her) to join him.

Springsteen’s vocals are irresistibly seductive on “Sandy.” But lyrically he paints a deromanticized portrait of the Jersey Shore. The carnival isn’t a place for finding idyllic love: it’s a meat market for one-night stands. Asbury Park is the turf of “switchblade lovers, so fast, so shiny, so sharp,” where “the boys from the casino dance with their shirts open like Latin lovers on the shore / Chasing all them silly New York virgins by the score.” The singer himself is a hustler, confessing his sordid history of meaningless hookups on these familiar hunting grounds:

I just got tired of hanging in them dusty arcades

Banging them pleasure machines

Chasing the factory girls underneath the boardwalk

Where they all promise to unsnap their jeans

The singer mentions other conquests, including his boss’s daughter and a local waitress, but he’s not really bragging. His tone is melancholy, remorseful, and weary. The cheap thrill is long gone, and now he’s just going through the motions. Springsteen uses amusement park imagery to communicate the tedious cycle of loveless sex:

You know that Tilt-A-Whirl down on the south beach drag

I got on it last night and my shirt got caught

And they kept me spinning, babe

Didn’t think I’d ever get off

Why would the singer make all these incriminating confessions to his girlfriend? Maybe I’ve been wrong all this time in assuming that Sandy is simply his Jersey girl du jour. Maybe she works on another level as allegory for the Jersey Shore itself. After all, what better name to give a beach than “Sandy,” eh?

Having kept his distance earlier in the song, the singer dips his toe in the sea of love. He tentatively suggests that she might want to join him, leaving this lonesome spectacle behind in search of something real: “For me this boardwalk life’s through, babe / You ought to quit this scene too.” Notice the different phrasing in the final chorus:

Sandy, the aurora is rising behind us

This pier lights our carnival life forever

Oh, love me tonight

And I promise I’ll love you forever

Oh, I mean it Sandy girl

My, my, my, my, my baby

Yeah I promise Sandy girl

Sha la la la la baby

Sounds like a dream come true, with two lovers taking vows and walking into eternity on Sandy’s strand. Farewell Asbury Park!

But I can’t get past the fact that they’re walking away from the light, and all its associations with divine love for a Catholic schoolboy like Springsteen. His lyrics at London’s Hammersmith Odeon in 1975 add to the foreboding: “Sandy, the angels have lost their desire for us / I spoke to ’em last night / They said they won’t set themselves on fire for us anymore.”

Furthermore, if Sandy does indeed represent the Jersey Shore, then I suppose the singer isn’t committing himself to going but to staying. Maybe it’s like Mephistopheles’s description of hell in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, where damnation isn’t a place so much as a condition that you take with you wherever you go.

Faustus: Where are you damn’d?

Mephistopheles: In hell.

Faustus: How comes it, then that thou art out of hell?

Mephistopheles: Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.

Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God,

And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,

Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,

In being deprived of everlasting bliss? (Marlowe 1.3.77-84)

In other words, you can take the boy out of Asbury Park, but you can’t take Asbury Park out of the boy.

Born to Run

Springsteen’s carnivalesque masterpiece is “Born to Run.” Once again, he crafts a personal story with autobiographical roots and a local address, then turbocharges it into myth. Instead of Little Eden, Asbury Park is now Little America: “In the day we sweat it out on the streets of a runaway American dream / At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines.”

For “Sandy,” the competing impulses of staying vs. going remain in suspended animation. In “Born to Run,” however, the undeniable and unequivocal driving force is escape. In this case, the singer doesn’t want to go alone—he wants his lover to come with him:

Baby, this town rips the bones from your back

It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap

We gotta get out while we’re young

’Cause tramps like us

Baby, we were born to run

The singer’s bike is built for two, and he dare not attempt this journey by himself.

Wendy, let me in, I wanna be your friend

I wanna guard your dreams and visions

Just wrap your legs ’round these velvet rims

And strap your hands ’cross my engines

Together we could break this trap

We’ll run ’til we drop

Baby, we’ll never go back

One of the most interesting interpretations of “Born to Run” that I’ve come across appeared in Monmouth magazine in 2023. Monmouth University is the closest college to Asbury Park. It’s also now home to the Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music. Monmouth is the alma mater of Carlee Migliorisi.

As a student archivist at the Springsteen Center, Migliorisi came across an out-of-print 1975 copy of Crawdaddy with a profile of the Boss by Peter Knobler. The journalist visited the room in Long Branch where Springsteen wrote “Born to Run”—presumably the same spot Dylan was looking for when he got busted in 2009 by the local police as a suspicious vagrant. Knobler’s detailed description of Springsteen’s room noted that a poster of Peter Pan and Wendy Darling hung above the bed where the song was composed.

Migliorisi pieced together the circumstantial evidence to speculate that the Wendy in “Born to Run” was inspired by the Wendy on the poster. “‘I think Wendy is more of a symbol. When you look at the lyrics, ‘Wendy, let me in / I want to be your friend / I want to guard your dreams and visions,’ to some extent, that is what Peter Pan is trying to do in the beloved classic story. . . . He doesn’t want Wendy to grow up.”

Love it! And there’s no better poster boy for “irresponsible innocence” than Peter Pan, right? But this story gets even cooler. Earlier this year Migliorisi got an opportunity to interview Springsteen for Salon. Of course, she couldn’t resist asking him about Wendy. Imagine her joy when the Boss confirmed her theory. He confided,

In a lot of my songs, I had a lot of different names for characters before reaching the final ones. When I was working on “Thunder Road,” it took me trying a few names before I landed on Mary. In this case, I was writing the song in my room and looking for a generic name, and I looked up and said, “Oh yeah, Wendy.”

Migliorisi asked the right follow-up question: does that make the singer Peter Pan? Springsteen stopped short there: “No, not really, but there’s a little bit of a Peter Pan subtext in ‘Born to Run’ if you look for it. It’s a song about searching for something better and running away. There’s this youthful eternity that you’re in pursuit of.’” I’m still counting that a win for Team Carlee! For an emerging Springsteen scholar, it’s hard to imagine a better fairy-tale ending.

“Together we could break this trap.” We: plural. He hopes what they have is the real thing, not just another boardwalk fling. He begs her to put their love to the test away from the garish carnival.

Baby, I’m just a scared and lonely rider

But I gotta find out how it feels

I wanna know if love is wild

Baby, I wanna know if love is real

How does it feel? It’s the quintessential Dylan question, and here we find it embedded in Springsteen’s greatest anthem. His answer is that it feels like love—maybe—if only he knew how love feels. Still, he’s willing to stake everything to find out with Wendy. Windy? Sandy and Windy sums up the Jersey Shore pretty effectively. But it remains to be seen if the answer is blowin’ in the Asbury Park wind.

The singer’s epic battle for love is as geographically specific as the postcard on the cover of Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.:

Beyond the Palace hemi-powered drones

Scream down the boulevard

The girls comb their hairs in rearview mirrors

And the boys try to look so hard

The amusement park rises bold and stark

And kids are huddled on the beach in a mist

I wanna die with you Wendy on the street tonight

In an everlasting kiss

The beach, the amusement park, the Palace—it’s pure Americana and it’s unmistakably Asbury Park.

What do love, happiness, and contentment truly feel like? He doesn’t have a clue, and there are no reliable road maps for getting there. But he no longer believes they’ll find love in this “town full of losers.” All they can do is follow their hearts—“two hearts are better than one”—and get their asses out of Asbury Park pronto:

Together Wendy we can live with the sadness

I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul

Someday girl, I don’t know when

We’re gonna get to that place

Where we really want to go

And we’ll walk in the sun

But ’til then tramps like us

Baby, we were born to run

This is the song and the album that changed Springsteen’s life, as he acknowledges in titling his memoir Born to Run. There he reflects: “In these songs were the beginnings of the characters whose lives I would trace in my work (along with the questions I’d be writing about—‘I want to know if love is real’) for the next four decades” (221). His artistic achievement in 1975 proved a crucial turning point—the end of something, and the beginning of something else—“where I left my adolescent definitions of love and freedom; from here on in, it was going to be a lot more complicated. Born to Run was the dividing line” (222).

Okay, you make it out of town, leave the carnival lights behind, cross the border . . . and then what? That’s the question Springsteen was forced to confront after his breakout hit. Because if you are “born to run,” then restless movement is your birthright and no destination feels safe, secure, or permanent. Adam raised a Cain. Out there on the road, east of Eden and west of Asbury Park, that way madness lies, where inner demons come out to play and whisper in your ear. As Springsteen told Dave Marsh, “‘I realized that you will die out there, simple as that. I understood that underneath this illusion of freedom was an oppressiveness that would kill me’” (479). Enter Darkness on the Edge of Town. Welcome to Nebraska. Watch your step as you descend into Tunnel of Love.

Tunnel of Love

A dozen years down the road from Born to Run, Springsteen followed his characters into their middle-aged domestic lives. They have left Asbury Park, but it hasn’t left them. Tunnel of Love (1987) was Springsteen’s first album as a married man. The characters in these songs are still asking is love real, or is it like a carnival ride you hop on and off with one partner after another. As he put it in his memoir, this new material “wasn’t centered around the man on the ‘road’ but the questions and concerns of the man in the ‘house.’ Tunnel of Love captured the ambivalence, love and fear brought on by my new life” (348).

“My first full record about men and women in love would be a pretty rough affair,” admits Springsteen.

I was no longer a kid and now neither were the people who populated my new songs. If they didn’t find a way to ground themselves, the things they needed—life, love and a home—could and would pass them by, rushing out the windows of all those cars I’d placed them in. The highway had revealed its secrets and as compelling as they were, I found its freedom and open spaces could become as overpoweringly claustrophobic as my most clichéd ideas of domesticity. All those roads, after all those years, when they converged, met down the end of the same dead-end street. (349)

Searching for a guiding metaphor for marriage, Springsteen turned again to the carnival, specifically a dark ride called the Tunnel of Love at the Palace. The video for “Tunnel of Love” was shot there and at the Casino in Asbury Park.

You will immediately recognize the Palace as the same amusement park the singer and Wendy were running away from in Born to Run. But instead of finding sanctuary in Neverland, Peter Pan’s utopia of eternal youth, Springsteen’s characters find trouble in the heartland. They have grown noticeably older, anxious, suspicious, and restless.

As the name suggests, the Tunnel of Love is basically an excuse for couples to sneak off and make out in secluded darkness. But in Springsteen’s reimagination, the Tunnel of Love takes his couple on a psychological descent into the dark side of adult relationships: “Then the lights go out and it’s just the three of us / You and me and all that stuff we’re so scared of.”

The promise of “Born to Run” was that the lovers would eventually find contentment and walk in the sun. Not so for the couple in “Tunnel of Love,” who are lost in the dark: “There’s a room of shadows that get so dark brother / It’s easy for two people to lose each other / In this Tunnel of Love.” It’s not just that these lovers are drifting apart. The bigger problem is that they’re losing faith that love can be real and lasting.

It ought to be easy, ought to be simple enough

Man meets woman and they fall in love

But the house is haunted and the ride gets rough

You’ve got to learn to live with what you can’t rise above

If you ride on down, down in through this Tunnel of Love

Springsteen doubled down on the carnival imagery on the Tunnel of Love Express Tour in 1988. Each concert began with a performance schtick, where band members came out on stage, handed a ticket to a carnie manning a booth at stage left, and then assumed their position on stage. When Patti Scialfa came out, she carried a bunch of heart-shaped balloons which she released into the air. The last customer was the Boss himself, who would hand over his ticket, throw a bouquet into the crowd, and launch into the opening number: “Tunnel of Love.” Here’s a video documenting the routine from August 1988 at Camp Nou in Barcelona. Also notice the scintillating stage chemistry between Bruce and Patti on their duet. More on that to follow.

“Tunnel of Love” is the first song on the second side of the album (the same position occupied by “Born to Run”). The four songs that follow—“Two Faces,” “Brilliant Disguise,” “One Step Up,” and “When You’re Alone”—read like a series of warning labels for marriage. Caution: may cause lying, cheating, deception, suspicion, self-loathing, and depression.

But cynicism isn’t Springsteen’s brand, is it? After a run of songs dominated by brooding pessimism, he recovers a measure of hope in the album’s closer “Valentine’s Day.” This is my personal favorite love song that Springsteen ever wrote.

The vibe is nocturnal and lonely. Indeed, the whole song—vocals, guitar, mandolin, bass, keyboards, harmonica, percussion—are played by Springsteen from the solitude of his multi-track home studio. The steady melody, slowly building in volume and intensity as more instruments get layered in, sounds like a circus calliope coming back to life. The music also feels like an echocardiogram of the singer’s damaged heart, battered but still beating, cold but gradually thawing as he dares to love again.

He lays his money down, buys another ticket, and takes another chance (with a different partner?) on the Tunnel of Love. The scared and lonely rider of “Valentine’s Day” is working his way back to the woman who jump-started his stalled heart:

I’m drivin’ a big lazy car rushin’ up the highway in the dark

I got one hand steady on the wheel and one hand’s tremblin’ over my heart

It’s poundin’ baby like it’s gonna bust right on through

And it ain’t gonna stop ’til I’m alone again with you

It’s a dark ride, but the singer of “Valentine’s Day” is headed toward the light of love. It’s parental love: “A friend of mine became a father last night / When he spoke in his voice I could hear the light.” It’s spiritual love: “Honey, last night I dreamed my eyes rolled straight back in my head / And God’s light came shinin’ on through / I woke up in the darkness scared and breathin’ and born anew.” But most of all, it’s the feeling he gets whenever he’s with this special woman, the very feeling that made him hop in his car and drive all night to be with her on Valentine’s Day.

How does it feel? It feels like love.

He had almost given up on the search, with some imagery that suggests suicidal despair. But his new lover has dredged him from the Sandy river bottom and restored him to the Windy fields where he is born anew:

It wasn’t the cold river bottom

I felt rushing over me

It wasn’t the bitterness of the dream

That didn’t come true

It wasn’t the wind in the grey fields

I felt rushing through my arms

No, no, baby

Baby it was you

So hold me close

Honey, say you’re forever mine

And tell me you’ll be my

Lonely valentine

It’s hard to disentangle Tunnel of Love from the drama of Springsteen’s tumultuous love life around that time. He tied the knot with West Coast actress Julianne Phillips in 1985, but a few years later their marriage was in trouble. Somewhere during this period, Springsteen’s friendship and musical collaboration with Patti Scialfa developed into something more.

Like Springsteen, Scialfa is part Irish, part Italian, and all Jersey. They grew up near each other—he’s from Freehold (Freehold High class of 1967) and she’s from Deal (Asbury Park High class of 1971)—and both cut their chops in bar bands on the Jersey Shore. Bruce first met Patti in 1974, when she was 17 and he was 21. He had placed an ad to audition backup singers for the E Street Band. “She was lovely and very good but we ended up going with our regular lineup, not quite ready to break up the ‘lost boys’ yet” (371). Note that reference to Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, and score another point for Team Carlee!

The future couple next ran into each other a decade later at the Stone Pony in 1984. She caught his eye and ear as a singer in the house band, playing a rousing cover of the Exciters’ “Tell Him.” “We found ourselves standing in a buzzing crowd at the back bar as I introduced myself to her and the rest was a long, winding semi-courtship” (372). In his memoir, he concludes his first chapter devoted to Patti (titled “Redheaded Revolution”) with this touching observation: “The night I fell in love with Patti’s voice at the Stone Pony, the first line she sang was ‘I know something about love . . .’ She does” (373).

There’s a section in “Valentine’s Day” where the singer chooses love over solitude, and that could come across as a recommitment to his marriage: “They say he travels fastest who travels alone / But tonight I miss my girl, mister / Tonight I miss my home.” However, an alternate interpretation—and given the personal context, a more persuasive reading—is that the singer is pining for a Jersey Girl who will lead him away from his current home and back toward his roots.

Bruce and Patti’s wild ride went public during the Tunnel of Love tour in 1988. During the European leg, paparazzi caught the new couple in various stages of undress and intimacy, and by the end of that tour they were scarcely attempting to hide their budding romance. Julianne Phillips’s publicist announced her split from Springsteen in June 1988, and the couple formally divorced in March 1989. Bruce and Patti had their first of three children together in 1990, and they’ll celebrate their 35^th wedding anniversary later this summer.

Irresponsibly Innocent

Springsteen couldn’t have foreseen where this would all lead back in 1988, but in retrospect we can connect some of the dots for him. On January 6, he announced his fateful tour, which would begin the following month, and which would essentially end his marriage with Julianne Phillips. Two weeks later, on January 20, Springsteen inducted Dylan into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Want to guess who attended with him? Patti Scialfa! I didn’t realize this until I was doing research for this piece and caught a glimpse of her during the all-star jam led by Mick Jagger on “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”

If you want to know how it feels to be irresponsibly innocent, don’t listen to Highway 61 Revisited. Listen to “Valentine’s Day” from Tunnel of Love. Watch Bruce and Patti’s duets during the 1988 tour. Or just witness the love beaming from Springsteen below, as he stands between two of his brightest beacons, with his favorite Jersey Girl by his side.

Despite his desire to run off and join the circus as a young man, and his determination to escape the death trap and suicide rap of his hometown, Springsteen has remained remarkably faithful to the Jersey Shore. He has made Jersey the center of his artistic cosmos. He raised his family in Rumson and currently lives on a horse farm in Colts Neck, both just twelve miles from Asbury Park.

His early songs depicted the Shore as a neon cage, but his musical odyssey brought him back home time and again to the aurora of this carnival life on the water. The pathway hasn’t always been smooth. He has stumbled and fallen behind at times. But after several tries and against great odds, he found the love he was looking for, not at the circus but damn close to it. What an unlikely American Dream come true. Surely by now the most famous living Jersey Boy has earned the right to a little irresponsible innocence.

Baby, I’m just a scared and lonely rider

But I gotta find out how it feels

I wanna know if love is wild

Baby, I wanna know if love is real

Works Cited

Brucebase Wiki, http://brucebase.wikidot.com//

Dylan, Bob. Official Lyrics. The Official Bob Dylan Website,

https://www.bobdylan.com/.

Marchetti, Tony. “Song Sleuth.” Monmouth (Fall/Winter 2023), https://www.monmouth.edu/magazine/song-sleuth/.

Marlowe, Christopher. The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, https://www.owleyes.org/text/faustus.

Marsh, Dave. Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts. The Definitive Biography, 1972-2003. Routledge, 2004.

Migliorisi, Carlee. “Bruce Springsteen draws a line from ‘Peter Pan’ to ‘Born to Run.’” Salon (4 March 2026), https://www.salon.com/2026/03/04/bruce-springsteen-draws-a-line-from-peter-pan-to-born-to-run/.

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Netflix, 2019.

Seale, Bobby. Seize the Time: The Story of The Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton. Black Classic Press, 1970.

Smith, Michael Glover. Bob Dylan as Filmmaker: No Time to Think. McNidder & Grace, 2026.

Springsteen, Bruce. Born to Run. Simon & Schuster, 2016.

---. Induction Speech for Bob Dylan (20 January 1988). Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, https://rockhall.com/inductees/bob-dylan/.

---. Springsteen Lyrics, https://www.springsteenlyrics.com/.

In her book Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell, Ann Powers hesitates to apply labels like “genius” to her subject. But the glass slipper of greatness fits fo this rendition of “Coyote”:

Performances like this one make me put aside all doubts about Joni’s exceptional status. From the deftness of her fingers on the fretboard to the absolutely casual, slightly shy air with which she shares the song’s loving and acerbic lyrics—inspired by the tour’s official chronicler, the playwright Sam Shepard, as the boys clearly knew—it’s a rare chance to witness a woman’s spontaneous and total ownership of a room full of sheepishly awestruck men. (26)

It’s hard to watch this 1975 footage without having flashbacks of another party a decade earlier at London’s Savoy Hotel and conclude that Dylan just got Donovan’d.

Many readers of Shadow Chasing will already be familiar with certain sordid details behind this song. Playwright Sam Shepard was invited by Dylan to assist with the film Renaldo and Clara. He left his wife and son back home at his California ranch and hopped aboard the Rolling Thunder Revue. Almost immediately he began sleeping with tour manager Chris O’Dell. Joni Mitchell joined the tour at New Haven on November 13, 1975, and a couple nights later she fell for Shepard’s charms. About a week later, she began writing a song inspired by their affair.

She first sang a two-verse version of “Coyote” during her RTR set in Augusta, on November 26. As the tour crossed into Canada, she continued to workshop the song. By Toronto (December 1 & 2) it had three verses, and by Montreal (December 4) her creature had all four legs. She eventually gave “Coyote” pride of place as the opening track on Hejira (1976), which is my personal favorite Joni Mitchell album.

“Coyote” is a great song about fucking—but more importantly it’s a fucking great song. Sexual confession is actually only a small part of its grandeur. “Coyote” is about sex about as much as “Mr. Tambourine Man” is about drugs. Yes, that’s part of it, but ultimately the least interesting part. As Shepard writes in Rolling Thunder Logbook, “The purpose of this book isn’t to reveal a plodding blow-by-blow account of the sequence of events or to play peekaboo with the private lives of the stars but just to give the reader a taste of the whole experience. If that happens, the book is alive” (1). The same holds true for “Coyote.” Sure, the song is fueled by lots of sex and drugs, no question about it. But its real animating force, what gives it life, is the spirit of artistic inspiration and collaboration. In Shepard’s words:

I found myself in the midst of all these traveling people as a collaborator in a whirlpool of images and shifting ideas. All of us working together for the same purpose—to try to live in a constant movement on the road for six weeks, traveling by land, putting on music, filming this music in the surroundings of broken American history in small New England towns in the dead of winter. Whatever the reasons were behind this reason doesn’t seem to matter. All that matters is that it happened. (1)

“Coyote” may have started as a song about a fling, but it quickly developed into much more. Mitchell uses her tryst as spur for a meditation upon wanderlust, self-destructive cycles, archetypal conflicts, personal emancipation, musical experimentation, empathic identification, and the world-shaping powers of art. She starts with the raw materials for a conventional road song but then spins straw into gold. “Coyote” depicts a road trip within, perfectly encapsulated by the cover art for Hejira depicting a freeway leading into the dark heart of the artist.

Pre-Order Dylan in Cincinnati

Prelude: Cowboy Mouth

In order to appreciate what Mitchell was getting herself into, it’s helpful to first consider Shepard’s encounter four years earlier with Patti Smith, another affair that proved highly inspirational artistically. As she recounts in Just Kids, Smith first met Sam Shepard when Todd Rundgren took her to a Holy Modal Rounders show in the basement of the Village Gate. Shepard was drummer for the band. By the early seventies he had won multiple Obies (the Off-Broadway Theater Awards) as a playwright. Smith knew none of this when she met him after his set. He introduced himself by the alias Slim Shadow.

She didn’t need his résumé to know how he made her feel: “I fixed on the drummer, who seemed as if he was on the lam and had slid behind the drums while the cops looked elsewhere. Toward the end of their set he sang a song called ‘Blind Rage,’ and as he slammed the drums, I thought, This guy truly embodies the heart and soul of rock and roll. He had beauty, energy, animal magnetism” (171). As it turns out, that animal was a coyote.

During their first encounter, Smith pitched the idea of writing an article about him for Crawdaddy. “Slim seemed entertained by this idea. He just nodded while I started my pitch, telling him about his potential, how ‘rock and roll needs you’” (171). They went back to her place to talk it over. “Slim was a good talker. In a happy role reversal, it was he who was the storyteller. It was possible his tales were even taller than mine. He had an infectious laugh and was rugged, smart, and intuitive. In my mind, he was the fellow with the cowboy mouth” (171).

Pretty soon they were rolling in the sheets at the Hotel Chelsea. And who could blame them? Have you ever seen a sexier couple?

Then again, I suppose Shepard’s wife might have seen it differently. It’s much easier to crush on Sam and Patti in the picture above if you haven’t seen the picture below:

But hey, these are free-loving bohemians we’re talking about. Smith settles her accounts in Just Kids:

Sam and I had a long discussion about our life together. By then he had revealed to me that he was married and had an infant son. Perhaps it was the carelessness of youth but I was not completely cognizant of how our irresponsible ways could affect others. I met his wife, Olan, a young and gifted actress. I never expected him to leave her, and we all fell into an unspoken rhythm of coexistence. (179-80)

Let’s shift the focus to their art. Smith recalls how she and Shepard co-wrote the one-act play Cowboy Mouth in a single evening:

One night we were sitting in silence, thinking the same thing. He leapt up and brought his typewriter onto the bed.

“Let’s write a play,” he said.

“I don’t know anything about writing plays,” I answered.

“It’s easy,” he said. “I’ll start.” He described my room on Twenty-third Street: the license plates, the Hank Williams records, the toy lamb, the bed on the floor, and then introduced his own character Slim Shadow.

Then he shoved the typewriter my way and said, “You’re on, Patti Lee.” (184-85)

She named her character Cavale, after Albertine Sarrazin’s book La Cavale, “which is the French for escape” (185). It’s worth noting that Mitchell also selected a foreign term to communicate a similar theme for her 1976 album. “Hejira” is an Arabic word referring to the prophet Muhammad’s journey from Mecca to Medina. Mitchell associates the concept with escape, defining her album title as “running away with honor.”

Dylan fans will recognize the title Cowboy Mouth as an image from “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” Dylan is explicitly mentioned within the play when Cavale tells Slim: “I can’t be the saint people dream of now. People want a street angel. They want a saint but with a cowboy mouth. Somebody to get off on when they can’t get off on themselves. I think that’s what Mick Jagger is trying to do . . . what Bob Dylan seemed for a while” (156).

The only public performance of Cowboy Mouth took place at the American Place Theatre in Hell’s Kitchen on April 29, 1971. Shepard played his alter-ego Slim Shadow, and Smith played her avatar Cavale. In the published script, Slim is described as “a cat who looks like a coyote, dressed in scruffy red,” and Cavale is described as “a chick who looks like a crow, dressed in raggedy black” (145). Cowboy Mouth was paired on the bill with another Shepard one-act called Back Bog Beast Bait. It features a character named (of course) Slim who transforms at the end of the play into (do I even need to say it?) a coyote.

I don’t know if Mitchell knew these plays, but if not then it’s an uncanny coincidence, since she likewise identifies Shepard with a coyote and herself with a crow in “Black Crow,” both songs on Hejira. She even dresses the part for photos inside the album:

And get this: the name of Mitchell’s lyrics publishing company is Crazy Crow Music.

Patti Smith’s summary of Cowboy Mouth reveals its nakedly autobiographical sources: “In the play, Cavale tries to recreate Slim into her image of a rock and roll savior. Slim, at first intoxicated with the idea and beguiled by Cavale, finally has to tell her that he can’t realize her dream. Slim Shadow goes back into his own world, his family, his responsibilities, leaving Cavale alone, setting her free” (185).

Reflecting on the play’s composition, Smith observes, “We just told each other stories. The characters were ourselves, and we encoded our love, imagination, and indiscretions in Cowboy Mouth. Perhaps it wasn’t so much a play as a ritual. We ritualized the end of our adventure and created a portal of escape for Sam” (185). This description that applies equally well to Mitchell’s “Coyote.”

Shepard was the first to bolt, escaping first from Smith in 1971 and later from Mitchell in 1975. But neither woman expected their cornered coyote to react any other way, and both artists were able to use their experiences for artistic inspiration. “Experiencing the play taught me things about myself,” Smith writes in Just Kids. “I couldn’t imagine how Cavale’s image of a ‘rock ’n’ roll Jesus with a cowboy mouth’ could apply to anything I was doing, but as we sang, sparred, and drew each other out, I found myself at home onstage. I was no actress; I drew no lone between life and art. I was the same on- as offstage” (186). Soon she would spread her wings as a performer, putting music to her poetry and soaring as a groundbreaking rock and roll savior in her own right.

Maybe Smith couldn’t envision that future for herself yet, but apparently Shepard could. Before he left New York City for Nova Scotia (the Bay of Fundy referenced in “Coyote”), he gave Patti some money and told her, “‘You know, the dreams you had for me weren’t my dreams. Maybe those dreams are meant for you’” (186). The end of one adventure marks the beginning of another; the death of a relationship can play midwife for the birth of art. Smith bears witness to this genesis in Just Kids, and so does Mitchell in “Coyote.”

According to Patti Smith’s Substack, she is the one responsible for Sam Shepard’s involvement in the Rolling Thunder Revue. Smith turned down Dylan’s invitation to join RTR, but when she learned that he was also recruiting a film collaborator, she recommended Shepard. She even accompanied him to meet Dylan and discuss Renaldo and Clara prior to the tour.

Time to pass the typewriter. You’re on, Roberta Joan.

“Coyote”: First Verse

The first few times she played it, “Coyote” only had two verses. But from the start, and in every version thereafter, it begins the same: “No regrets Coyote.” That’s a crucial point to establish at the start.

In other words, what we’re about to hear is not the sob story of a woman scorned. No recriminations, no sulking, no apologies, no moral hangovers. The singer isn’t jaded, but she’s also not naïve. These things happen on the road, when passionate, creative people are crammed together in close quarters, amped up on adrenaline, pills, and powders, away from their homes and domestic duties, eager to connect with other smart, beautiful, interesting, available partners. Mitchell will have many thoughts to share on this topic, but it’s important that the first thing she wants to get straight is that she has no regrets.

In her colorfully titled memoir Miss O’Dell: Hard Days and Long Nights with The Beatles, The Stones, Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton, and the Women They Loved, Chris O’Dell pinpoints November 15 as the precise evening that Shepard and Mitchell first hooked up. She remembers it because, after several nights in a row sharing her bed, Shepard went missing after the Niagara Falls show. What interests me most about this isn’t the sex (see above). Instead, I’m intrigued by what happened the very next day. With no concerts scheduled on November 16, the troupe took a trip to the Tuscarora Indian Reservation. You can see Joni seated at the table behind Bob when he launches into “The Ballad of Ira Hayes”:

Sam Shepard arrived on the tour already packing coyote associations. But would Mitchell have known about this baggage? Cowboy Mouth and Back Bog Beast Bait were unpublished and scarcely known beyond the New York fringe theater scene. Mitchell probably had little forewarning that Shepard would be part of the RTR ensemble, and she surely couldn’t have foreseen sleeping with him. So unless he worked coyotes into their conversation while chatting her up the night before, she must have connected him independently with the trickster figure of Coyote, rather than borrowing the idea from Shepard’s previous work.

I’m not aware of Coyote playing a prominent role in Tuscarora myth, nor do I imagine that Mitchell did advance homework on the Tuscarora Nation. However, in the U.S. and Canadian West—Shepard country, Mitchell country—Coyote is central to the lore of Native American and First Nation tribes. There is good cause to think that Mitchell was familiar with the arch trickster from those myths close to home. Could this trip to an Indian reservation have dislodged something in her memory, prompting her to link Coyote with the nomadic horndog she shagged the night before? Maybe he wasn’t the only one picking up scents. Let’s just hope she washed her hands first.

After the opening disclaimer—No regrets Coyote—the next thing Mitchell insists upon are the fundamental differences separating these star-crossed lovers:

We just come from such different sets of circumstance

I’m up all night in the studios

And you’re up early on your ranch

You’ll be brushing out a brood mare’s tail

While the sun is ascending

And I’ll just be getting home with my reel to reel

She foregrounds tension from the start, and it manifests on multiple levels: man/woman, day/night, American/Canadian, rancher/musician. But opposites attract, and there may be a Jungian anima/animus dynamic drawing these two into their fateful dance. Their relationship is one of simultaneous repulsion and attraction:

There’s no comprehending

Just how close to the bone and the skin

And the eyes and the lips you can get

And still feel so alone

And still feel related

Like stations in some relay

Despite the nocturnal collisions of their bodies, there’s an emotional distance between them that seems unbridgeable.

In the controlling metaphor of “Coyote,” Mitchell compares relationships to hitchhiking, temporarily sharing a ride with a stranger: “You just picked up a hitcher / A prisoner of the white lines of the freeway.” Such fleeting connections are expressions of free love, rejecting the bourgeois constraints of monogamy. In early drafts she sang, “He’s got a woman at home / One for the night and now he wants one for the day.” Later she refined this into more specific allusions: “Now he’s got a woman at home / He’s got another woman down the hall / he seems to want me anyway.” This exhausting game of musical beds eventually feels like yet another prison she must escape—another cavale, another hejira.

The singer describes herself as “a prisoner of the white lines of the freeway.” She is referring to her compulsive wanderlust, her constitutional inability to stay put and settle down for any length of time. But she is also referring to the captivity of drug abuse, where the white lines of the highway double for Mitchell’s escalating cocaine habit in the mid-seventies.

“Coyote”: Second Verse

The second verse takes the story on the road. Mitchell begins with a symbolic house fire:

We saw a farmhouse burning down

In the middle of nowhere

In the middle of the night

And we rolled right past that tragedy

’Til we turned into some roadhouse lights

The burning house serves as harbinger for the fiery desire she experiences that night at the roadhouse with Coyote:

Where a local band was playing

Locals were kicking and shaking on the floor

And the next thing I know

That Coyote’s at my door

He pins me in a corner and he won’t take no

He drags me out on the dance floor

And we’re dancing close and slow

You can tell where this is leading, and she can too, but she goes along for the ride:

Why’d you have to get so drunk

And lead me on that way?

You just picked up a hitcher

A prisoner of the white lines of the freeway

Coyote can come across as a predator and the singer as his prey. Mitchell knows that it’s really more complicated than that, however. She’s knows the steps to this dance. She’s been on this trip before—and this wheel’s on fire. The flame is the torched house; the flame is runaway desire; the flame is wanderlust; the flame is ego—and all of it burns inside the singer. Eventually this endless cycle will get recycled into “Coyote,” the song spinning on her reel to reel in the first verse. Sounds like Joni chased down another great one. Makes you wonder: who is the real Coyote of this song? Maybe it’s this Crazy Crow.

Coyote: Third Verse

Mitchell only sings two verses in the filmed rendition at Lightfoot’s house, but we know that she had already written a third verse by that time because she sings it in her RTR sets in Toronto on December 1 & 2. In her intro before the second show she tells the audience, “This is a new song. It isn’t quite finished. There’s another verse to be added. It’s about a coyote.”

Coyote starts off as a representation of Shepard, but it doesn’t end there. The song has multiple layers, and Coyote wears a coat of many colors. That’s a hallmark of Mitchell’s songwriting approach, where she stages dramatic conflicts between composite characters drawn from both external experiences and internal struggles.

Reflecting on her creative process with Melody Maker in 1970, she told Jacoba Atlas, “Even if I’m writing about myself, I try to stand back and write about myself as if I were writing about another person.” She gives an example of an unnamed song about “a triangular story,” which was “written about one person and myself and still another rolled into one. To give the person more dimensions.” She admits that this creative process can feel “almost schizophrenic. You lay out a case and argue with yourself about it and with no conclusions.” For a perfect example of these songwriting dynamics at play, listen to “Coyote.”

Forget love triangle—this song is more like a love pentagram. There’s Joni & Sam, of course. Then there’s the woman at home and the woman down the hall. But I spy another shadowy figure tangled up in Coyote.

Consider the third verse. The singer sees a coyote chasing after a hawk in a Canadian field, and she recognizes something of her own situation in the encounter. The coyote is following his nature, and so is the hawk. They are both players in an endless drama with innumerable acts. In some the coyote catches the hawk, in some the hawk gets away, but always there is the dance between them, like the two lovers in the song:

I looked a coyote right in the face

On the road to Baljennie near my old hometown

He went running through the whisker wheat

Chasing some prize down

And a hawk was playing with him

Coyote was jumping straight up and making passes

He had those same eyes just like yours

Under your dark glasses

And every night, variations on the same drama play out on dance floor, tour bus, or seedy motel:

Privately probing the public rooms

And peeking thru keyholes in numbered doors

Where the players lick their wounds

And take their temporary lovers

And their pills and powders to get them through this passion play

But this is the pageant that she auditioned for, and she is only performing her part, same as him.

No regrets, Coyote

I’ll just get off up aways

You just picked up a hitcher

A prisoner of the white lines of the freeway

Remember that Shepard and Mitchell were both hitchers on someone else’s caravan, namely Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue. In Mitchell’s introduction to “Coyote” in Montreal, she told the audience, “I came to this tour in New Haven, and I just hitched along for the rest of the distance. It’s kind of like running away from home to join the circus.” When Shepard got the invitation, he immediately accepted. He recalls in Rolling Thunder Logbook: “That’s how it works, right? Dylan calls you and you drop everything. Like the lure of the Sirens or something. Everybody dropping their hoes in mid-furrow and racing off to the Northeast somewhere” (6).

As RTR crossed the Canadian border and headed west, it’s worth asking: which freeway is the singer of “Coyote” imprisoned on? Because of my general ignorance of Canadian geography, I always assumed that “the road to Baljennie near my old hometown” referred to a highway the tour bus passed along the way. However, now that I actually bother to look it up on a map, I realize that the stops in Quebec City, Toronto, and Montreal were 2,000+ miles away from Mitchell’s hometown in Saskatoon. Therefore, the third verse must be drawn from memory, using this real-life road as a pathway into the past and into the self, much like Dylan’s use of Highway 61. Imagine my delight, then, when I discovered that the road one would take from Saskatoon to Baljennie is Highway 16! How perfect that the road which leads Mitchell back home, the road that leads within, is a mirror inversion of Dylan’s famous highway.

Now let’s dig deeper into the title figure. In The Coyote Reader, anthropologist William Bright subdivides his study of Coyote into chapters devoted to his dominant traits. Bright analyzes Coyote as trickster, wanderer, bricoleur, lecher, thief, outlaw, clown, horny old man, and survivor. Although some of these traits certainly apply to both Shepard and Mitchell, I must say that the person who most resembles this profile of Coyote is Bob Dylan.

If there is a “triangular story” being told here, I’m less interested in the sexual triangle—where Joni is competing with Chris and O-Lan for Sam’s affection—than the creative triangle—where Joni and Sam are both competing for Bob’s collaboration.

Dylan and Mitchell backstage during the 1975 leg of RTR. Photo by Ken Regan.

According to Mitchell’s biographer David Yaffe,

One of the motivations for joining the Revue […] was getting closer to Bobby. At last, a peer, someone who would understand greatness as only a great person could. […] In fact, Joni recalled only two conversations with Dylan in total for the whole tour. If you’re Joni Mitchell and you can’t have the conversation you thought you’d get, what can you do but write a song? In this case, the song was “Talk to Me,” which she would perform on her Hissing of Summer Lawns tour the following year. (202)

During her 1976 tour, she featured “Talk to Me” as part of a three-song medley including “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter” (also inspired by Shepard) and—you guessed it—“Coyote.”

Please just talk to me

Any old theme you choose

Just come and talk to me

Mr. Mystery talk to me

“Coyote”: Fourth Verse

Mitchell told the Montreal audience on December 4: “I’ve got a tune that has been growing. It started off with two verses, and a couple nights later I added another one. And last night I got a fourth one. I think it’s finished, but I don’t know. Maybe there’s a couple chapters to go. But it’s called ‘Coyote,’ and it goes like this….”

Check out the RTR-specific alternate ending to this version of the song:

From Louie on the balcony and the ladies in the show

And from me Coyote

The flame you typed up in an Eskimo

Me the hitcher

Me the victim

The prisoner of the fine white lines

Of the free freeway

Love that shout-out to Louie Kemp. It’s also interesting that she refers to herself as a victim here. She soon dropped that reference, and I can see why. The protagonist may have briefly felt like Coyote’s quarry. But by the time Mitchell transformed raw experience into polished art, she was certainly nobody’s victim: she was an absolute master at the top of her craft.

The fourth verse showcases Mitchell’s songwriting genius. Having depicted Coyote as an incorrigible womanizer in the second verse and an archetypal antagonist in the third verse, she now reimagines their encounter from his parallax view:

Coyote’s in the coffee shop

He’s staring a hole in his scrambled eggs

He picks up my scent on his fingers

While he’s watching the waitress’s legs

These are the most sexually explicit lines of the song, and probably in all of Mitchell’s work. Needless to say, that scent doesn’t come from fingering a guitar but a guitarist. However, the raunchiness can obscure Mitchell’s serious artistic achievement here. She has made the leap of empathy and identification. As she would later declare in the song “Hejira,” “I see something of myself in everyone.” In this fourth verse, she tries the mask of Coyote on for size. She sees through his eyes and sniffs through his snout.

Coyote smells last night’s prize while sizing up tonight’s target. But more than anything he’s eyeing the exit and plotting his escape—another cavale, another hejira. When it comes to fight or flight, it’s in his nature to choose the latter:

He’s too far from the Bay of Fundy

From appaloosas and eagles and tides

And the air-conditioned cubicles

And carbon ribbon rides

Are spelling it out so clear

Either he’s going to have to stand and fight

Or take off out of here

Mitchell’s depiction of Coyote’s dilemma squares with Shepard’s confession of his growing frustration with the film and tour. As he vented in Rolling Thunder Logbook,

Feel myself nose diving into negativity. Just wanna go back home. Be in the mountains, Near horses. Near my woman. Back. The organization of the film has fallen into smithereens till it has no shape or sense. No way of planning a day’s shooting. Everything’s at the mercy of random energy. Ideas flying every which way but no plan. Meetings up the ass. Meetings in oval-shaped, U.N.-style conference rooms, so the sense of self-important permeates you beyond control. (132)

There’s no domesticating Coyote. Time to cut and run.

Mitchell could relate. By the time she made it to New York City for the finale at Madison Square Garden, she expressed her identification this way:

I tried to run away myself

Run away and do some work on my ego

And this flame

In this Eskimo

In this hitcher

This prisoner of the fine white lines

On the free, free, free freeway

Notice that the victim reference has already disappeared. She is now the victor, and the proof is audible on Hejira. Ann Powers nails it:

Hejira sounds like Rolling Thunder Revue, even though it also sounds like the fusion Joni was deep into mastering. Its songs spin out and drift, their wheels muddy, with no choruses anchoring them. Though she was preoccupied with the lupine Shepard and all the other men who kept her away from another failed stab at domesticity, Dylan’s vagabond aesthetic is the most audible inspiration for these songs. Rolling Thunder Revue was shaggy and grand, and so is Hejira. (244)

Let Coyote slink off back to his wife and ranch. The singer isn’t running back home, wherever that might be. She’s rushing off to the studio to lay down tracks on her reel to reel. He got the temporary lover he wanted, but she walked away with much more: a timeless masterpiece.

No regrets Coyote.

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Works Cited

Atlas, Jacoba. “Joni: Let’s Make Life More Romantic.” Melody Maker (20 June 1970), https://jonimitchell.com/library/print.cfm?id=2977.

Bright, William. A Coyote Reader. University of California Press, 1993.

Mitchell, Joni. Hejira. Asylum, 1976.

O’Dell, Chris, with Katherine Ketcham. Miss O’Dell: Hard Days and Long Nights with The Beatles, The Stones, Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton, and the Women They Loved. Touchstone, 2009.

Powers, Ann. Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell. Dey St., 2024.

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Netflix, 2019.

Shepard, Sam. Back Bog Beast Bait. The Unseen Hand and Other Plays. Bantam, 1986. 303-33.

---. Rolling Thunder Logbook. Sanctuary, 2004.

--- and Patti Smith. Cowboy Mouth. Fool for Love and Other Plays. Bantam, 1984. 145-65.

Smith, Patti. Just Kids. Ecco, 2010.

Yaffe, David. Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.

I really appreciate all the positive feedback I’ve received from so many of you as I’ve posted installments of my work in progress on this site. Now I hope you’ll consider buying the book version. To help entice you, the press has agreed to offer a special discount for Shadow Chasing readers. The button below will take you to the publisher’s website. Put in the coupon code CINCY30 for a 30% discount on your pre-order. This takes the list price for the paperback down from $30 to $21 (before taxes and shipping). Not a bad deal, right?

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As a special treat, I’ve put together a bonus episode on a concert I initially skipped over in the series. The present piece does not appear in the book. It is a Shadow Chasing exclusive.

I had some pretty disparaging things to say about Dylan’s 2007 concert when I mentioned it in a previous post. I wrote that “it holds the distinction as the least compelling concert he ever played in the city.” To be fair, this says more about how good most of the concerts have been than how bad the 2007 show was. Going back to the recording, I may have been too hasty in hating on Taft ’07.

Mind you, there are still some stinkers. That’s all down to Dylan’s erratic and wolfish vocals, not to the dependably superb musicianship of this really tight NET unit. But I’ll concede that some performances which initially turned me off when I attended the show live or first heard the bootleg, have gradually grown on me. I’ve also belatedly come to appreciate certain dynamics at play in Dylan’s setlist selections that I previously overlooked. Now I come to resurrect Taft ’07, not to bury it.

This was Dylan’s first return to Cincinnati since the fantastic 2001 concert at my home base of Xavier University. In the interim, he completely overhauled the NET lineup. Only bassist Tony Garnier remained from the Cintas Center gig. Larry Campbell and Charlie Sexton had departed, replaced by Stu Kimball (NET member from 2004 to 2018) and Denny Freeman (2005-09) on guitars. They were joined by multi-instrumentalist Donnie Herron (2005-24), who would become one of the most cherished members of the NET and RARW bands. David Kemper had long since handed the sticks over to George Recile, by far the longest serving (and I think best) drummer who ever played behind Dylan (2002-19).

This same band formed the nucleus for Modern Times (2006), Dylan’s third straight stellar album following Time Out of Mind (1997) and “Love and Theft” (2001), and further burnishing his golden renaissance. He was rightly proud of the new songs and had the ideal band for showcasing them in concert. Six of the seventeen songs in the Taft ’07 setlist come from Modern Times. As we’ll see and hear, these included some really standout performances.

As for the boss, Dylan had transitioned away from guitars to keyboards, though he did play electric guitar on the first few numbers at Taft ’07. This band was new to Cincinnati, but not new to one another; according to Olof Björner, this was the 270^th concert this unit had played together. And while we’re keeping score, the show at Taft Theatre—the site of Dylan’s first Cincinnati concert 42 years earlier—was the 1,999^th of the Never Ending Tour. He remained in the area to play show #2,000 the following night, just 50 miles up the road in Dayton, Ohio.

Dylan was accompanied on this tour by two opening acts: the relative newcomer Amos Lee and the legendary Elvis Costello. I attended this show, but I must admit I don’t remember anything about Amos Lee’s set. I think I arrived late and missed it entirely. But there’s no way I would have missed Elvis freakin’ Costello. So why do I have zero memories of his set?

The answer is that Elvis never entered the building. Yes, he was part of Dylan’s tour in the fall of 2007, but he bailed on Cincinnati to play a solo show at Western Illinois University that night. The Elvis Costello Wiki provides all the details, including a setlist, multiple photos, and a review from the WIU Courier. Sorry we were denied an Elvis sighting at Taft ’07, but it’s reassuring that my memory isn’t yet as unreliable as I feared.

The Concert

When: October 15, 2007

Where: Taft Theatre, downtown Cincinnati

Opener: Amos Lee

Band: Bob Dylan (vocals, guitar, harmonica, and keyboard); Denny Freeman (guitar); Tony Garnier (bass); Donnie Herron (fiddle, mandolin, banjo, and steel guitar); Stu Kimball (guitar); George Recile (drums and percussion)

Setlist:

1. “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat”

2. “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”

3. “Watching the River Flow”

4. “Love Sick”

5. “Rollin’ and Tumblin’”

6. “When the Deal Goes Down”

7. “Blind Willie McTell”

8. “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”

9. “Workingman’s Blues #2”

10. “High Water (for Charley Patton)”

11. “Spirit on the Water”

12. “Highway 61 Revisited”

13. “Ain’t Talkin’”

14. “Summer Days”

15. “Ballad of a Thin Man”

*

16. “Thunder on the Mountain”

17. “Blowin’ in the Wind”

Since 2002, Dylan had been using an odd introduction, projected through the speakers by an announcer, offering a tongue-in-cheek distillation of his career. Ray Padgett tracked down Jeff Miers, the Buffalo News music critic who penned this profile, and shares the backstory on Flagging Down the Double E’s. The intro made its first appearance in Cincinnati at Taft ’07:

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the poet laureate of rock-n-roll. The voice of the promise of the sixties counterculture. The guy who forced folk into bed with rock. Who donned makeup in the seventies and disappeared into a haze of substance abuse. Who emerged to find Jesus. Who was written off as a has-been by the end of the eighties. And who suddenly shifted gears, releasing some of the strongest music of his career beginning in the late nineties. Ladies and gentlemen, Columbia recording artist Bob Dylan.

There’s as much lampoon as there is truth in this description. So it strikes me as appropriate that Dylan opens with “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,” a song that expresses his absurd, bawdy sense of humor as well as any.

Come to think of it, if you want a metaphor for “forcing folk into bed with rock,” you could do worse than the earnest singer trying to seduce the brazenly promiscuous woman in this song, hoping to burrow his way into her furry cap. Folk-rock fusion indeed!

I’ve reconsidered Taft ’07 in a more sympathetic light, and a good example is the evening’s second song, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” From the moment I first heard it at the venue, I loved the sound of this one musically. Donnie Herron tugs my heartstrings with his beautiful steel guitar. The other guitarists also find a solid groove during the jams before and after the final verse. Listen through to the end and you’ll hear why George Receli is my favorite NET drummer. The band has a back-porch hootenanny going, then Receli kicks through the screen door and reminds them that this is rock-n-roll.

The music is unimpeachable. But then there’s the vocal. Here are my initial notes: “Dylan keeps speeding up, slowing down, shifting his stress on the words, searching in vain for an effective rhythm, and generally fucking around. If you love this song—and what Dylan fan doesn’t?—then it’s hard not to cringe at this slipshod rendition.”

After listening several more times, however, Dylan’s performance slowly wins me over. Yes, he races through the words at times. But once I (ahem) think twice about it, the effect isn’t necessarily a sign of carelessness but could be a creative choice. Maybe he’s expressing the singer’s impatience to hustle down the road, beating a rushed retreat from the woman who set his boot heels a-wanderin’, one step ahead of the shotgun or the skillet. It’s actually not slipshod. Especially in the final verse, Dylan’s distinct enunciation and stress on certain words shows that he is paying attention to what he’s saying. And the musicianship is more than “all right”: it’s kick-ass. You know what, on third thought, I’ll be damned: I like this performance.

I’m a sucker for anything from Time Out of Mind, and the fourth song is a riveting “Love Sick.” As I wrote in my book on TOOM, this song is built around a repeated guitar lick that reminds me of Bernard Herrmann’s stabbing score for the shower scene in Psycho. But the Taft ’07 “Love Sick” includes a separate competing guitar part that is curious and cool. Since I’m not a musician, I don’t have the proper vocabulary to explain it musically, but I can describe how it feels. The singer throbs with anger, bitterness, and bloodlust—love sickness—which is aggravated by the stabbing first guitar. But then a fluttering sound descends from the second guitar, distracting his thoughts in a different direction.

To translate the mood from Dylan’s musical world to my literary one, this rendition of “Love Sick” reminds me of Poe’s “The Raven.” The brooding speaker’s thoughts are fixated on his dead lover, but the unexpected noise of a bird intrudes upon his reveries and redirects his obsession. Freeman and Kimball’s guitars sound like they’re vying for Dylan’s attention, dragging him first one way then another through this dark trance of a fever dream.

Dylan follows “Love Sick” with his first song of the night from Modern Times. “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” lives up to its name as a bluesy rocker. But lyrically we’re still wading through the swamp of a depraved mind. This singer is menacing and misogynistic. He views women as a barrel full of bad apples since the time of Eve. He complains, “Some young lazy slut has charmed away my brains” and “This woman so crazy, I swear I ain’t gonna touch another one for years.” Sometimes he’s morose: “Ain’t nothin’ so depressin; as tryin’ to satisfy this woman of mine.” Sometimes he’s threatening: “Sooner or later you too shall burn.” He may follow through on these threats, and not for the first time: “The night’s filled with shadows, the years are filled with early doom / I’ve been conjurin’ up all these long dead souls from their crumblin’ tombs.” Are these the corpses of previous victims of his wrath?

Like the singer in the previous song, he’d rather be with her than without her. In “Love Sick” he admits: “Just don’t know what to do / I’d give anything to be with you.” In “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” he tries to patch things up: “Let’s forgive each other darlin’, let’s go down to the greenwood glen / Let’s put our heads together, let’s put old matters to an end.” But there will be no happy endings to either tale. He is bound to roam and ramble, and she is bound for a worse fate, sunk in a river or buried in a field. Dylan’s fascination with murder ballads from the nineties onward continues in Modern Times with “Rollin’ and Tumblin’.” This is another character study of a brooding love-sick man with blood in his eyes and daggers in his thoughts for the woman he believes did him wrong.

After two songs in a row featuring depraved protagonists, Dylan completely shifts gears with one of the most tender love ballads of his career, “When the Deal Goes Down” from Modern Times. It’s a beautiful vow of enduring faith and unconditional love, and Taft ’07 marks its only live performance in Cincinnati.

Dylan’s voice crunches like car wheels on a gravel road, but in this case it’s an effective vehicle for the lyrics. The song catalogues life’s relentless sorrows, suffering, and loss. And yet, in the midst of this steady erosion and pain, the singer can always lean on one pillar of strength and comfort: you.

Who is you? There’s never a single simple answer to that question in Dylan. It could be a faithful lover. When I’ve taught this song in class, some students envisioned their grandparents, imagining “When the Deal Goes Down” as a deathbed vow at the end of a long marriage. The sentimental video featuring Scarlett Johansson encourages these associations. The spectator is positioned as an old widower, re-watching home movies of his dead wife after her passing. Poe’s lost Lenore reanimated for the video age.

Alternatively, “When the Deal Goes Down,” could be an affirmation of spiritual faith. Certain references invite religious interpretations, as when the singer refers to “Each invisible prayer is like a cloud in the air” or “We all wear the same thorny crown.”

Regardless of what sources Dylan may have had in mind when writing the song, when he sings it live he is unmistakably addressing it to the audience in front of him. This comes through poignantly in his touching delivery of the last verse. His gravelly voice only enhances the emotion at Taft ’07:

I picked up a rose and it poked through my clothes

I followed the winding stream

I heard a deafening noise, I felt transient joys

I know they’re not what they seem

In this earthly domain full of disappointment and pain

You’ll never see me frown

I owe my heart to you, and that’s sayin’—sayin’ it true

And I’ll be with ya when the deal goes down

I remember the thrill when I recognized the opening strains of “Blind Willie McTell.” This is one of my all-time favorite Dylan songs, but I had never seen him play it live. Indeed, this was its first appearance in Cincinnati. I wish I could report that Dylan’s performance was as sublime as this masterpiece deserves. But that’s not how it came across to me.

Dylan’s voice sounds like he’s been gargling pine cones. The wolfman is growling on this one. If I wasn’t already familiar with the song, I’d struggle to understand some of the lines, and that’s a big loss in a lyrical gem like this one. Dylan wins deserved cheers when he breaks out his harmonica for the first time tonight. Thankfully, that instrument is exempt from the ravages of time. The guys standing near the taper absolutely love it and hoot out their approval.

Don’t get me wrong. I like it. I just don’t love it as much as I want to, as much as I love the version on the first Bootleg Series. Maybe we’re meant to check all expectations and ignore all previous standards of excellence in order to be fully present and in the moment at a 21^st century Dylan concert. But there’s no Yondr pouch for one’s memory.

Others managed to grasp the greatness that eluded me in Dylan’s Taft ’07 “Blind Willie McTell.” Tim Lucas heaped praise on it for his review on Bob Links:

Then came the evening’s first “oh my God” moment with a sublime and heartfelt performance of “Blind Willie McTell,” with Herron on banjo. After the show, I compared my memory of this performance to an earlier one from Melbourne last August, and—again—the difference I heard was the distinction between playing it (possibly even learning how to play it as a unit) and meaning it. Before the song was even over, I knew that this was the finest live musical performance I’d ever seen, of one of the most moving songs ever written. It was rewarded with one of the most enthusiastic ovations of the evening.

I know FOMO means “fear of missing out.” But what do you call it when you attend the same event as the person sitting next to you but still miss out on sharing the same experience? I guess you call it a Bob Dylan concert.

After a forgettable mush-mouth performance of “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,” Dylan dials up another number from Modern Times. “Workingman’s Blues #2” displays all the greatest strengths of the album. When I first listened to Modern Times, I liked it a lot but thought the title was ironic. With melodies borrowed from Hambone Willie Newbern’s “Roll and Tumble Blues” (1929) and Bing Crosby’s “Where the Blue of the Night (Meets the Gold of the Day)” (1931), the album’s music feels distinctly old-timey.

Dylan sleuths soon unearthed quotations ranging from the classical Roman poet Ovid to the laureate of the Confederacy Henry Timrod, reinforcing Modern Times’ roots in the distant past. Lyrical clues in “Workingman’s Blues #2” suggest that the singer is a veteran, but as is often the case with Dylan’s war references, it’s anybody’s guess which conflict he’s referring to. He embodies the world-weary soldier effectively in his Taft ’07 performance, sounding haggard but resilient from his battles both abroad and at home. Dylan audibly sags beneath his load tonight. But that’s the life of a grunt, whether you’re hauling for Uncle Sam or for Amazon.

Modern Times was Dylan’s first album released during the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. With the advantage of hindsight, we also know that the 2008 global financial crisis was just around the corner. At times Dylan once again comes across as a weatherman who knows which way the wind blows.

Timothy Hampton effectively tunes in to Dylan’s contemporary social commentary in Modern Times. Hampton observes, “Borrowing its name from Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film, which examines the indignities of labor in the new world of industrial capitalism, Dylan updates the title by presenting a suite of songs about the experience of the modern worker in a post-industrial, globalized economy.”

Writing from the vantage point of 2019, during President Trump’s first term, Hampton interprets “Workingman’s Blues #2” in light of socioeconomic anxieties that contributed to Trump’s political rise. As Hampton hears it,

He sings of a world in which the traditional virtues of hard work, craftsmanship, and devotion to community have been rendered economically irrelevant. Dylan’s characters belong to a group that Donald Trump has claimed as his own, the non-college-educated working classes. […] Dylan digs into the very fabric of alienation, showing us how it works from the inside out. He represents the interiority and emotional ecology of the citizens who became stereotypical Trump voters. By exposing the psychic toll of dispossession, his songs suggest why art in our own moment—if it is to matter at all—needs to account for the suffering found there.

In “Workingman’s Blues #2,” Dylan quotes from “Tristria,” a poem written by Ovid during his exile from Rome. The ancient author’s mood translates well to modern times: “The entire point of Dylan’s song,” Hampton argues “is that, in the world of globalized capital, everyone is an exile. Even if you are at home, you are not at home. Home is just a memory, even when you are in it.”

As I emphasize throughout Dylan in Cincinnati, where and when a performance takes place matters. Look no further than Ohio for evidence supporting Hampton’s argument. For most of its history, Ohio has been a bastion for the Republican party, producing seven Republican presidents [Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, McKinley, Taft, and Harding] and a slew of powerful congressmen, senators, and governors. But Ohio is also part of the so-called “Rust Belt”: former manufacturing powerhouses that have been devastated by technological shifts and massive outsourcing of jobs overseas.

After a generation of steady post-industrial decline, Ohio voters broke with the Republican party to support Barack Obama, whose victories in the state in 2004 and 2008 were crucial to his presidential election. However, that short-lived Democratic dalliance now seems a long time ago.

Trump’s populist rhetoric of class-based grievance and his nationalist “America First” agenda resonated with thousands of angry and alienated white working-class voters across the Rust Belt states of Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, catapulting him into the White House in 2016 and again in 2024. Like the rest of us, Dylan couldn’t have imagined in 2007 that the bombastic host of The Apprentice would be President of the United States a decade later.

In “Workingman’s Blues #2,” Dylan voices feelings of displacement, disillusionment, disrespect, and economic uncertainty that Trump later exploited to political advantage with his “Make America Great Again” campaign. As Hampton observes in Modern Times, “Dylan’s songs capture the struggle to mobilize the remaining traces of stability and intimacy—the memory of ‘the place I love best,’ the fantasy of a lover’s touch—to shore up the self in an economy that thrives on psychic disorientation.” As we’ve all learned over the intervening years, Trump depends upon on psychic disorientation to peddle his nostalgic fantasies about the return of white American hegemony and a bygone era of industrial might.

This is starting to get depressing! Let’s return to the concert. After a rousing rendition of “High Water,” and before the band launches into the next song, someone in the crowd yells out: “Play something rare!” Ha! Other artist’s fans come out to hear the hits, but Dylan has trained us to lust after rarities instead. He fed this appetite during the early years of the NET, but setlists were relatively stable and predictable by 2007. Still, it’s worth noting that 8 of the 17 songs at Taft ’07 had never been played before by Dylan in Cincinnati.

One of those city debuts is “Spirit on the Water” from Modern Times. The singer opens: “Spirit on the water / Darkness on the face of the deep.” These lines echo the biblical creation myth: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:1-2). The song begins with the birth of the cosmos, but it moves toward death.

The music sounds like a shuffle from some thirties love ballad, and many of the early lines are saccharine-sweet clichés. But a darker element gradually emerges, suggesting we’re hearing another late Dylan murder ballad masquerading as a torch song.

I’m as pale as a ghost

Holding a blossom on a stem

You ever seen a ghost?

No, but you have heard of them

What’s all this talk about ghosts? Is he suggesting she might soon become one? He offers another implied threat with the lines: “I’m saying it plain / These ties are strong enough to bind.” Bind like a rope around the neck? Later he says it even plainer:

I wanna be with you in paradise

And it seems so unfair

I can’t go back to paradise no more

I killed a man back there

This song has less to do with the God of creation and more with the snake lurking in the garden, scheming to introduce death into the world.

Although I certainly didn’t notice it that night in the audience, after listening to the bootleg several times I’m struck by how frequently Dylan invokes scriptural characters and scenes in the Taft ’07 setlist:

• “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” [song #5] refers to doomsday and to the dead rising from their tombs (aka the rapture)

• “When the Deal Goes Down” [song #6] refers to prayers, souls, and Jesus’ crown of thorns from the crucifixion

• “Blind Willie McTell” [song #7] opens with a Passover reference (“Seen the arrow on the doorpost”; cf. Exodus 12), alludes to the city of God called New Jerusalem (cf. Revelation 3:12 and 21:2), and glosses “corruptible seed” (1 Peter 1:23)

• “High Water” [song #10] declares “I’m preachin’ the Word of God,” and the title image invokes (among other historical references) Noah’s Flood (Genesis 6-9)

• “Spirit on the Water” [song #11] (see above)

• “Highway 61 Revisited” [song #12] refers to God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac (Genesis 22)

• “Ain’t Talkin’” [song #13] refers variously to the mystic garden (cf. Garden of Eden), prayer, evil, mercy, cities of the plague, and heavenly aid

• “Summer Days” [song #14] declares “Standing by God’s river, my soul is beginnin’ to shake”

• “Thunder on the Mountain” [song #16] invokes God speaking to Moses on Mt. Sinai

• “Blowin’ in the Wind” [song #17] gestures toward the Noah’s dove searching for dry land, as well as scriptural associations between the wind and the Holy Spirit

Holy Moses! Dylan wasn’t overtly preaching from the stage as he did during his evangelical tours. Nevertheless, on a subtle but persistent level, Taft ’07 is the most religious concert Dylan played in Cincinnati since Music Hall ’81.

Among these Taft ’07 songs, the standout for me is “Ain’t Talkin’.” This remains Dylan’s only performance in Cincinnati, and it’s a killer (in more ways than one). Dylan’s beleaguered voice sometimes struggles to get the job done tonight, but on a harrowing song like “Ain’t Talkin’” it’s the perfect poison.

All my loyal and much trusted companions

They approve of me and share my code

I practice a faith that’s been long abandoned

Ain’t no altars on this long and lonesome road

In his Bob Links review, Tim Lucas heard those lines and made an interesting literary analogy:

At that moment, I felt that I was looking at the Don Quixote of Rock & Roll, and then I got the even stronger feeling that he just might be the real Don Quixote, too—or at least the living man Cervantes knew, the inspiration for his immortal creation—determined to walk that road to the end of his days, telling the capital T truth to every cockeyed windmill town on the map. And when he sang the chorus ‘Ain’t talkin’, just walkin’ / Eatin’ hog eyed grease in a hog eyed town / Heart burnin’, still yearnin’ / Someday you’ll be glad to have me around,’ I felt every heart in the theater pour open. I know mine did.

Mine, too. When it comes to “Ain’t Talkin’,” Lucas and I were experiencing the same concert.

However, now that I’ve belatedly picked up on the scriptural theme in this setlist, my chief reference point isn’t Cervantes but Genesis. This haunting song depicts a damned soul doomed to walk the earth as a scorned outcast. I don’t hear Quixote—I hear Cain. After committing the first murder by slaying his brother Abel, Cain was cursed by God:

What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground. And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand. When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength. A fugitive and vagabond shalt thou be in the earth. (Genesis 4:10-12)

Dylan has channeled Cain before, a subject I studied in a previous piece on Holy Outlaws. As a road warrior himself, driven by some mysterious but irresistible compulsion to wander the globe forever, he probably relates to the figure personally as well as artistically. Whatever gets him there, he raises Cain with spellbinding gravitas at Taft ’07.

How can Dylan possibly follow his cold-eyed vision of a postapocalyptic wasteland in “Ain’t Talkin’”? With the antidote to the poison: a jubilant, heart-warming, rump-shaking rendition of “Summer Days.” If you want a snapshot of this NET band’s tremendous range, just take a listen to their back-to-back performances of “Ain’t Talkin’” and “Summer Days.”

“Summer Days” is always a fun song live, but it’s an especially welcome ray of sunshine after our dark descent into the hellscape of “Ain’t Talkin’.” The whole band rises to the occasion. This live arrangement makes space to showcase each of the players individually, but then they always come back together as a musical engine firing on all cylinders.

“Summer Days” is the perfect outlet for expressing Dylan’s love of fifties rockabilly. This must be the sound that Bobby Zimmerman dreamed of creating on stage back when he was putting together his first bands. What a privilege for us at Taft ’07 to witness his teen dream come true.

Dylan and mates treat the Taft faithful to two songs in the encore. The first, “Thunder on the Mountain,” is another rockabilly barn-burner. It’s the opening track on Modern Times, and here it’s the last of six songs from the album. Dylan slurs his way through the early verses, but then the music blasting on stage perks him up. George Receli could raise the dead with his drums, and the guitars are cooking with gas. The singer in “Summer Days” boasts, “Gonna break in the roof, set fire to the place as a parting gift.” That’s what the band does to Taft Theatre on “Thunder on the Mountain”—they’re en fuego!

“Thunder on the Mountain” could have served as Dylan’s mic-drop moment. He certainly had the crowd on its feet, fired up and feeling they got their money’s worth. But instead he decides to send us home with an even more special gift: “Blowin’ in the Wind.” I’ll let my virtual seatmate Tim Lucas set the scene for you:

A huge, stomping, howling ovation brought Dylan and his band back for “Thunder on the Mountain” and the evening’s second “oh my God” performance, an unexpected band arrangement of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” No one in the audience seemed to know what was coming, as the band wended its way through the introductory passages, until Dylan leaned forward to sing the song’s opening question—and, at that moment, you could hear and feel the awe coming from the crowd, travelling from one person to the next in gooseflesh. Though Dylan has written countless songs, even countless masterpieces since this early anthem, it somehow remains the quintessence of his being in ways one can’t fully appreciate until one sees it performed live by the author. […] It can’t be topped. Show over. Onward, my Sancho Panzas, to the next town.

In his previous Cincinnati concert six years earlier, Dylan’s final two encore songs were the hopeful “Blowin’ in the Wind” followed by the foreboding “All Along the Watchtower.” In my piece on Xavier ’01, I mused about how the effect would have been different had he reversed that order. Interestingly, Dylan had closed his three previous shows (Pittsburgh, Ypsilanti, and Columbus) with “All Along the Watchtower,” and he would close his next show (NET concert #2,000 in Dayton) with “Watchtower,” too. Maybe it was just a spur-of-the-moment decision to close the Cincinnati show with “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Of course, I’d like to think that he was conscious of ending his last show in town with “Watchtower” and didn’t want to repeat himself. But I’m sure that’s wishful thinking.

One thing I couldn’t have noticed then, but which fascinates me now, is how much the opening of the Taft ’07 “Blowin’ in the Wind” sounds like another Dylan song. Listen for yourself:

Now sing it with me: “I’m searching for phrases to sing your praises….” Totally sounds like “Soon After Midnight,” right?

Except that this is 2007, and “Soon After Midnight” wasn’t released until 2012 on Tempest. The similarity could just be a coincidence, but it’s worth noting that Stu Kimball played on both the Taft ’07 “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Soon After Midnight” on Tempest. It would be awfully interesting if Dylan packed that motif away in the warehouse of his mind and brought it out of storage five years later when he was producing his next album. Maybe I witnessed the band workshopping a song that gestated for five years before it was delivered.

Attending a Dylan concert in recent years can feel like worshipping at the Church of Bob. In the first decade of the 21^st century, however, it was much more hit-and-miss: you got the maestro dispensing a virtuoso performance, or you saw the phantom engineer driving the train off the rails and over the cliff—sometimes both on the same evening, as at the Taft Theatre on October 15, 2007. I cringed more than once while listening to Dylan heave his beloved classics into the wood chipper of his 2007 voice. But then he would launch into “Love Sick” or “Ain’t Talkin’” or “Summer Days” or “Blowin’ in the Wind” and it left me starry-eyed and laughing all over again, searching for phrases to sing his praises.

If you enjoyed this bonus episode of Dylan in Cincinnati, then please consider buying the book. There I analyze concerts played in each decade from the 1960s to the 2020s, placing them within the context of Dylan’s career and the civic life of Cincinnati. Remember to use the coupon code CINCY30 for a 30% discount. As the publication date draws closer, I’ll put out one or two more special segments about Dylan in Cincinnati. Many thanks for your support!

Pre-Order Dylan in Cincinnati

Works Cited

Bootleg audio recording (LB-5438). Taper romeo. Taft Theatre, Cincinnati (15 October 2007).

Concert 2007-10-15. The Elvis Costello Wiki, https://elviscostello.info/wiki/index.php?title=Concert_2007-10-15_Macomb.

Dylan, Bob. Song Lyrics. The Official Bob Dylan Website,

https://www.bobdylan.com/.

Hampton, Timothy. “Bob Dylan in Trumpland: The Workingman in ‘Modern Times.’” The MIT Press Reader (17 June 2019), https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/dylan-modern-times-trump/.

Lucas, Tim. “In the Presence of Don Quixote.” Bob Links (15 October 2007), https://www.boblinks.com/101507r.html.

Padgett, Ray. “‘The poet laureate of rock-n-roll, the voice of the promise of the ’60s counterculture….’” Flagging Down the Double E’s (15 August 2021),

Flagging Down the Double E's

"The poet laureate of rock-n-roll, the voice of the promise of the '60s counterculture…"

19 years ago today, at the Erie County Fair in Hamburg, NY, Bob Dylan got a new introduction…

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5 years ago · 9 likes · 3 comments · Ray Padgett

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Dylan provides lots of great examples of this phenomenon, but lately I’ve been noticing it all over the place, while going to the movies, visiting the art museum, listening to music, and reading books. When inspiration comes knocking, you answer the door. Think of this installment of “Dylan + Art” less as a scholarly essay and more as a meditation, one where form mirrors content: links in the chain of the art of connection.

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Hamnet

After submitting final grades for the fall semester in mid-December, I treated myself to a matinee screening of Hamnet. I’ve taught Maggie O’Farrell’s tremendously moving novel a few times, so I had been eagerly awaiting director Chloé Zhao’s film adaptation.

The novel is spellbinding from start to finish, but O’Farrell’s conclusion is especially staggering. Shakespeare and his wife Agnes had three children: Susanna and the twins Hamnet and Judith. Their only son Hamnet died at the age of 11, presumably of the plague (at least that’s how O’Farrell depicts it). This sudden loss devastates the distraught parents, and their separate grief threatens to destroy the marriage. Back home in Stratford, Agnes is outraged when she learns that her husband has written a play called Hamlet, which she regards as blasphemy against the memory of their dead son with essentially the same name. Determined to confront him, she travels to London and attends the play’s premiere at the Globe Theatre.

At first, Agnes is infuriated by the spectacle. But as soon as the actor playing Hamlet walks on stage, she is thunderstruck. His speech, his carriage, his mannerisms, his wit—he is an avatar for her son had he lived. She recognizes Hamlet as her husband’s way of mourning Hamnet, fantasizing a scenario in which the father takes the son’s place and dies in his stead, imagining the boy reincarnated as a young man. The play utterly wins her over.

In the powerful conclusion of Zhao’s film—a scene that isn’t part of the book—Agnes reaches out from the pit for the hand of the actor playing Hamlet. Previously we have witnessed her special gift for looking into people’s souls and reading their destinies when she holds their hands. In this case, the actor serves as a bridge connecting her to her dead son, allowing her one final encounter as he crosses over into death. Here is how that moment of connection between mother and son is described by O’Farrell and Zhao in their co-written screenplay:

We suddenly find ourselves on the stage with Hamnet in the last moments before he died, as he wandered at the edge of this life towards the black gate that would lead him to the next. […] He is looking back at his mother. Her calling of him has kept him at the edge of the gate, waiting, waiting for his father to build this temple and for his mother to find him. Agnes feels her son’s gaze and looks up. There is her boy. He has been waiting for her. He has been waiting for her so she can let him go. Hamnet smiles at his mother, turns and walks into the void.

The most remarkable thing happens. When Agnes reaches out for the actor playing Hamlet, the rest of the audience moves in closer to the stage and does the same. They are moved so deeply by this play and this performer that they yearn to touch him, to make their emotional bond with him physical, tactile. What a beautiful gesture! It’s how all great art makes us feel: connected.

You know what it reminded me of? David Bowie. Awhile back I wrote a piece on Bowie, and when I saw the Globe audience reaching out toward Hamlet, irresistibly drawn toward this magnetic performer, it transported me back to Ziggy Stardust in concert.

“At the core of Bowie’s music,” observes Simon Critchley, “is a profound yearning for connection and, most of all, love” (171). This profound yearning worked both ways, shattering the fourth-wall of the stage and plugging Bowie into an electric circuit with his loving audience.

Critchley’s description of “a profound yearning for connection and, most of all, love” resonates perfectly with Zhao’s cinematic sensibilities. In a recent interview for the New York Times, David Marchese spoke with Zhao about their shared passion for the films of Terrence Malick. Marchese reflected, “There was a mysticism in The Thin Red Line, and a transcendental feeling about the natural world, that I hadn’t seen in a movie before and that I connected with so deeply.” There’s that word again: connection. “That’s really beautiful,” responded Zhao. “That is why we have art. It’s not trying to teach us something that we don’t know. It’s trying to help us remember who we are.” Describing the films that have meant the most to her, Zhao confided that they all “made me realize that this deeply uncomfortable tension I feel in my body, this yearning that sometimes feels like it’s going to consume me, this loneliness, on the other side of it is my yearning for connection and love.”

The Implorer

Still in the mood for treating myself, the next day I visited the Cincinnati Art Museum. Previous trips to this museum inspired earlier installments in the “Dylan + Art” series, beginning with a piece on Rodin. I had no idea that I was about to be floored by another bronze sculpture by Rodin’s former pupil and jilted lover, Camille Claudel.

I’m an art enthusiast, but I’m admittedly a total amateur with no expert training in the subject. I’m embarrassed to admit that I had never heard of Claudel before encountering her sculpture last month at the museum. I’ve done some homework since then. Claudel led a tragic life, and too often her personal woes have overshadowed her remarkable art. According to Emerson Bowyer and Anne-Lise Desmas,

Her passionate relationship with Auguste Rodin, mental decline, and internment in a psychiatric institution for the final thirty years of her life have provided rich fodder for a cottage industry in movies, plays, novels, musicals, and operatic scores. Despite the increased awareness of the artist that such endeavors have achieved, they have often spun sensationalist and melodramatic tales of doomed romance, victimhood, and madness. This biographical miasma has tended to obscure—or even excise—the sculptor’s art and agency. (1)

I knew none of this when I walked into the familiar gallery of European Modernists at CAM and encountered this unfamiliar statue for the first time.

My angle of approach was a right-profile view. The first thing that struck me was a sense of suspended motion, like the figure was tumbling forward and lunging toward something just out of reach. “Never let me go!” the statue seems to implore, even as she is denied the object of her desire. There’s desire for you: the object is always out of reach.

My interest piqued, I glanced at the museum label to help get my bearings on what I was seeing. Camille Claudel, pupil of Rodin—of course! The last time sculptures had stopped me in my tracks like this, it had been Rodin’s Burghers of Calais. The placard also informed me that The Implorer was part of Age of Maturity on display at Musée d’Orsay in Paris: “In the three-figure group, an older woman leads a middle-aged man away from a kneeling young woman who reaches up to him—at once an allegory of aging and a meditation on loss following the rupture in the two artists’ relationship.”

After doing some research, I learned more about Claudel’s sources. The man is modeled after Rodin, the older woman is an unflattering depiction of his longtime companion Rose Beuret, and the younger woman is a self-portrait of Claudel. The sculptor’s brother, the poet Paul Claudel, immediately recognized the identity of The Implorer: “My sister! My sister Camille. Imploring, humiliated, kneeling, this superb woman, this proud woman, this is how she is represented. Imploring, humiliated, kneeling, and naked!” (qtd. Bowyer & Desmas 191).

But in the room at the time, I was just responding viscerally to what I saw. As I moved in closer and started circling around counter-clockwise, I got my first frontal view of the woman.

Mesmerizing! I’m still haunted by those yearning eyes and grasping hands.

As the lone spectator in the room that cold December morning, it felt like she was reaching for me, trying to make a connection with me. Of course, I’m aware of the rules against touching artworks in the museum, so I promise I kept my hands to myself, dear reader. But on an emotional level, she bridged the distance and made an instant, powerful connection.

As I continued circling, I began to register the play of light on bronze. I also noticed how the spotlight above cast a shadow of The Implorer on the floor below.

This was the point at which I pulled out my phone and took my first picture. Looking back at it now, I’m strangely moved by the way her shadow merges with my own on the floor. “Shadows are falling, and I’ve been here all day” (“Not Dark Yet”). Something feels subversive about this intermingling, as if our shadows had achieved the connection forbidden by the museum’s prohibitions. “Shadows grew closer as we touched on the floor” (“Caribbean Wind”).

As I made my way to the back, I noticed the curvature of her spine, which reinforced my initial impression of movement, almost as if she were swaying to music.

I gradually became conscious of the figure’s placement within the gallery. The Implorer is powerful enough to hold a room, and indeed that was how Rodin’s Burghers of Calais had been displayed. They were set apart from the rest of the museum’s holdings, given pride of place in their own space, inviting exclusive contemplation. Not so with Claudel’s statue. She is placed in the midst of several European Modernist paintings.

On one hand, like the scene from Hamnet, The Implorer captures something essential about the art of connection. On the other hand, by situating the figure in a room full of paintings, the artwork occupies the position of a spectator—the same perspective as me, in this room for the umpteenth time, looking at those paintings on the walls.

Context matters. Individual responses are shaped by external forces and suggestive juxtapositions. For this specific display in this gallery, the sculpture reaches out toward the facing wall, grasping for Trapped Rocks (top) and White Bowl (bottom), both by Nicolas de Staël. And why not? She is a trapped rock, suspended in place indefinitely; she is an empty vessel, waiting to be filled with meaning by random passersby.

Speaking of random passersby, there’s no separating my personal response to The Implorer from the lingering effects of watching Hamnet the day before. The scene with Agnes and the audience reaching out toward Hamlet followed me like a shadow into the gallery and haunted my reaction. Surely one reason I was so struck by this statue was the uncanny sense of repetition. Here was another woman in another artwork poignantly embodying a profound yearning for connection and love.

Never Let Me Go

After Christmas, it was time to start preparing for the new semester. I’m teaching a new course on “Literature of Captivity,” and I include some novels I haven’t taught in a while. I spent part of the winter break rereading these books. I was enchanted all over again by Kazuo Ishiguro’s melancholic Never Let Me Go (2005).

The book’s title requires a lot of unpacking. It refers to a fictional song on the fictional 1956 album Songs After Dark by the fictional singer Judy Bridgewater. A cassette tape of this album is the most prized possession of the narrator Kathy, a student at a mysterious school in rural England called Hailsham.

We eventually piece together that the students there are cloned human beings created for the purposes of mandatory organ donations once they mature into adults. As clones, they have no parents per se, and they are medically sterilized to prevent them from having children. These factors become significant for appreciating a pivotal scene in the novel.

Kathy’s favorite song from the tape is “Never Let Me Go.” She explains, “It’s slow and late night and American, and there’s a bit that keeps coming round when Judy sings: ‘Never let me go . . . Oh baby, baby . . . Never let me go . . .’ I was eleven then, and hadn’t listened to much music, but this one song, it really got to me” (70). Kathy creates an elaborate maternal fantasy around this song:

I didn’t used to listen properly to the words; I just waited for that bit that went: “Baby, baby, never let me go . . .” And what I’d imagine was a woman who’d been told she couldn’t have babies, who’d really, really wanted them all her life. Then there’s a sort of miracle and she has a baby, and she holds this baby very close to her and walks around singing: “Baby, never let me go . . .” partly because she’s so happy, but also because she’s so afraid something will happen, that the baby will get ill or be taken away from her. Even at the time, I realised this couldn’t be right, that this interpretation didn’t fit with the rest of the lyrics. But that wasn’t an issue with me. The song was about what I said, and I used to listen to it again and again, on my own, whenever I got the chance. (70)

One day Kathy is alone in her room, listening to “Never Let Me Go,” when she realizes that the school patron (known as Madame) is eavesdropping on her. She recalls,

What I was doing was swaying about slowly in time to the song, holding an imaginary baby to my breast. In fact, to make it all the more embarrassing, it was one of those times I’d grabbed a pillow to stand in for the baby, and I was doing this slow dance, my eyes closed, singing along softly each time those lines came around again: “Oh baby, baby, never let me go . . .” (71)

This scene upsets Madame so much that she rushes away sobbing. Years later, Kathy confronts Madame and asks her why she reacted that way. She explains,

“When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind of world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go. That is what I saw. It wasn’t really you, what you were doing, I know that. But I saw you and it broke my heart. And I’ve never forgotten.” (272)

There it is again: Never let me go! As in Hamnet and The Implorer, art expresses the profound yearning for connection and love, and art can also lament the abrupt severing of those bonds.

In the novel, the crucible for combining these desires and fears is “Never Let Me Go.” What is Ishiguro doing with this song? Quite a lot, it turns out. Although Judy Bridgewater and Songs After Dark are inventions, there are a couple of real songs called “Never Let Me Go” that probably served as models. One was written by lyricist Ray Evans and composer Jay Livingston for the film The Scarlet Hour (1956) and sung by Nat King Cole:

The other is a ballad written by Joe Scott in 1954 and sung by Johnny Ace:

Now it’s time to reveal another link in the chain: Kazuo Ishiguro is a big Bob Dylan fan! When he was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, the year after Dylan’s controversial selection, Ishiguro was quick to thank not only the Swedish Academy but also Bob Dylan. The day of the announcement, he told journalist Anita Singh that Dylan “was the single greatest hero for me when I was growing up. Without Dylan’s words and music, I probably wouldn’t have been a writer.”

Prior to receiving his medal, Ishiguro recorded an interview for the Nobel foundation in which he credited Dylan as his first artistic inspiration:

I never really had a big ambition to be a writer until I was almost in my mid-twenties. From the time I was around 15 years-old, my big ambition was to be a songwriter. I spent a lot of time writing songs in my bedroom with a guitar. I was very much inspired by the man who won the Nobel Prize in Literature last year in 2016, Bob Dylan. I remember buying an album of his when I was 13 years-old. I still remember the album, it was John Wesley Harding. I think that’s when I first became very excited about the idea that you could use words in a very mysterious way, and create entire worlds, just with a few words. Of course, the music and the singing and all these things are also very important to me—it’s that whole combination. But the excitement about words, and that you could use them in this way, that really happened to me when I listened to my very first Bob Dylan album when I was 13 years-old.

Ishiguro estimates that he wrote “over a hundred songs myself in my bedroom, and I played them with my friends,” before making his fateful transition toward writing fiction.

Knowing his debts and devotion to Dylan, we can now hear Ishiguro invoking a sublime duet by Dylan and Joan Baez in the title song of his novel. Between October and December 1975, the pair covered Johnny Ace’s “Never Let Me Go” 24 times in the Rolling Thunder Revue. In his tribute to Dylan and Baez’s many duets over the years, Ray Padgett writes,

This cover of an old Johnny Ace song, belted at top volume, is probably my favorite of the Rolling Thunder ’75 duets. Hell, it’s one of my favorite Rolling Thunder songs period. Joan doesn’t just mirror his lines; she weaves around his vocals, darting in and out, echoing or following at times. Her occasional “whoa-oh-oh-oh”s behind him make the song.

I share Ray’s lofty assessment, and you will too after watching this video of their final performance at New York’s Madison Square Garden on December 8, 1975:

Just let me love you tonight

Forget about tomorrow

My darling, won’t you hold me tight

And never let me go

Dry your eyes, no tears, no sorrow

Cling to me with all your might

And never let me go

A million times or more dear

We said we’d never part

But lately I find you’re a stranger in my heart

Give me the right in summer or in springtime

To tell the world that you are mine

And never let me go

Dylan and Baez must have selected the song, at least in part, for its commentary on their deep personal and artistic connection, and they radiate thermonuclear heat from the stage in this burning rendition. This is the kind of emotionally charged art that makes you want to reach out to these magical performers, just like those audiences trying to connect with Hamlet and Ziggy.

Ishiguro has continued to occasionally write songs, and he has a longstanding collaboration with the American jazz singer Stacey Kent.

In 2024, they put out an album and book called The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain. I’m particularly drawn to the title song. Listen to the chorus, substitute “Europe” for “America,” and it doubles as a description of Dylan and Baez’s reunion on the Rolling Thunder Revue:

Let’s be young again, if only for the weekend

Let’s be fools again, let’s fall in at the deep end

Let’s do once more

All those things we did before

The summer we crossed Europe in the rain

In the introduction to the published lyrics, Ishiguro reflects on what songs have taught him about writing fiction. One thing he learned was a certain haunting quality, quintessential to the best songs, which Ishiguro tries to emulate in fiction. His challenge as a writer is “how do you create a story that lingers in the mind for days, months, even years after a book is finished?”

Because of my background in song, the longevity of a story’s impact has always been of paramount importance to me. When I struggle to put a novel together, I’m often struggling to figure out not so much how to grip the reader (though that too), but how to say what I wish to say in a way that might haunt people for a long, long time. (x)

This haunting quality isn’t the exclusive domain of songs, but they seem better at achieving it than the other arts.

A song lives or dies by its ability to infiltrate the listener’s emotions and memory, and, like a parasite, take up long-term residence, ready to come to the fore in moments of joy, grief, exhilaration, heartbreak, whatever. No one aspires to write a song that catches the attention only while it’s being heard, then gets forgotten. That’s not how songs work. (x-xi)

Exactly right. Regardless of genre and irrespective of subject matter, the best songs all appeal directly to the listener and plead “Never let me go!”

The art of connection might initially hit us like a bolt from the blue, but the best examples, like the ones we’ve been considering here, continue to haunt us long after the first encounter. In his Nobel Lecture, Ishiguro says that building these lingering connections is his chief aim as a writer: “One person writing in a quiet room, trying to connect with another person, reading in another quiet—or maybe not so quiet—room.”

Ishiguro proves he is a worthy descendant of Dylan when he declares the primacy of feelings for his writing. That’s the litmus test for Dylan’s art of connection, and the same holds true for Ishiguro. He declares in his Nobel Lecture:

Stories can entertain, sometimes teach or argue a point. But for me the essential thing is that they communicate feelings. That they appeal to what we share as human beings across our borders and divides. […] Stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?

How does it feel? It feels like you never want to let go.

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Works Cited

Ace, Johnny. “Never Let Me Go.” Duke, 1954.

Bowyer, Emerson, and Anne-Lise Desmas, eds. Camille Claudel. Getty Publications, 2023.

Claudel, Camille. The Implorer (1898-99; cast in bronze c. 1905). Cincinnati Art Museum.

Critchley, Simon. On Bowie. Serpents Tail, 2016.

Hamnet. Directed by Chloé Zhao. Universal, 2025.

Ishiguro, Kazuo. “My Twentieth Century Evening—and Other Small Breakthroughs.” 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature Lecture. The Nobel Prize (7 December 2017), https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2017/ishiguro/lecture/.

---. Never Let Me Go. Vintage, 2005.

---. The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain: Lyrics for Stacey Kent. Knopf, 2024.

Kent, Stacey. “The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain.” The Changing Lights. Curtis Schwartz, 2013.

Marchese, David. “The Interview: Chloé Zhao Is Yearning to Know How to Love.” New York Times (24 January 2026), https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/magazine/chloe-zhao-interview.html.

Nobel Prize. “Kazuo Ishiguro, Nobel Prize in Literature 2017: Official Interview.” YouTube (6 December 2017),

Padgett, Ray. “A Tribute to Bob Dylan and Joan Baez’s Duets.” Flagging Down the Double E’s (22 December 2024),

Flagging Down the Double E's

A Tribute to Bob Dylan and Joan Baez's Duets

In a few days, the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown hits theaters. Joan Baez plays a major role in the film, and the actress who plays her, Monica Barbaro, is excellent. So today, I wanted to pay tribute to Baez…

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a year ago · 55 likes · 9 comments · Ray Padgett

Singh, Anita. “Without Dylan, I would not be a writer: Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro.” Sydney Morning Herald (6 October 2017), https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/without-dylan-i-would-not-be-a-writer-nobel-prize-winner-kazuo-ishiguro-20171006-gyvjbl.html.

When Dylan was announced as the surprise recipient of the world’s most prestigious literary award in 2016, Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, compared his songs to the rhapsodies of Homer. Dylan himself identified closely with the ancient Greek bard in his Nobel Lecture, crediting The Odyssey as a formative influence, and concluding his recorded speech with a quotation from the beginning of Homer’s epic: “Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.” Homer and Dylan call upon a higher power to inspire their songs and confer kleos upon the heroes they praise. Dylan catalogues a number of such heroes over the course of Rough and Rowdy Ways. However, as Laura recognizes, one hero is the main focal point of his meditation and his scrutiny: himself.

He is the hero of these songs. It just so happens that he also fulfils the role of Homer as well. In these songs, the singer is addressing not just his own identity, but also how he is perceived in the world. In other words, Dylan is engaging with his own image, talking about his reputation, perhaps even actively seeking to shape his legacy. And after decades in the public eye, it is powerful to hear Bob Dylan, as he is nearing his 80^th birthday, contemplating how he will be remembered, and perhaps even insisting on defining himself.

You win the Nobel Prize, you deliver the required lecture, you cash the check . . . then what? Most recipients have been past their prime when they received this career achievement award; indeed, in most cases, they were being honored for work composed many years earlier. But some Nobel laureates continued to create significant, relevant, innovative work even after their canonization. Bob Dylan is one. William Butler Yeats is another.

In 1923, Yeats became the first of four Irish writers to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in the 20^th century [followed by George Bernard Shaw (1925), Samuel Beckett (1969), and Seamus Heaney (1995)]. Unlike the truant Dylan, Yeats traveled to Stockholm in person to deliver his lecture, “The Irish Dramatic Movement,” in which he contextualized his achievements alongside those of his friends and colleagues John Synge and Augusta Gregory. For an excellent study of Yeats winning the Nobel, read Ed Mulhall’s piece for RTÉ.

This was only the beginning of Yeats’s post-Nobel stock-taking. As with Dylan, it wasn’t until he processed his kleos through his primary medium of expression that he was able to adequately sound his depths and take his full measure. His first book of poems published after the Nobel was The Tower, arguably the single best volume of his career, and one of the crowning achievements in all of modern poetry.

There’s a lot to be learned from putting post-Nobel Yeats and Dylan into conversation. In this third and final installment of the series, I want to focus on selections from The Tower (1928) and Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020), comparing the two laureates’ ruminations on aging and endurance, history and memory, mortality and immortality, that which is left behind when one dies and that which lives on through art.

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Thoor Ballylee

In “Desolation Row,” Dylan memorably depicts Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot fighting in a tower. In The Tower, we find Yeats fighting in a tower with himself: his aging body versus his raging mind. As he wrote in Per Amica Silentia Lunae, “We make out of the quarrel with others rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry” (492). In “All Along the Watchtower,” Dylan depicts the Joker and the Thief plotting their escape from a tower. In The Tower, Yeats is likewise holed up in a tower, escaping in his mind to the idealized past. Meanwhile, his feet remain firmly planted on Irish soil, or more precisely, on the ramparts of a stone fort turned summer home in County Galway.

Go to any European country with a history of military occupation (i.e., all of them) and you’ll find castles. The English domination of Ireland began in the 12^th century. Anglo-Normans asserted control over the land and its people through a series of military campaigns, political alliances, strategic intermarriages, and cultural assimilation.

First came the conquests, then came the castles. Many of these fortifications can still be found scattered across Ireland in various degrees of ruin or renovation. Centuries after English rule was secured, smaller towers were constructed, especially in western Ireland. By design these tower houses continued to assert a sense of sovereignty, but, practically speaking, they served as domestic residences rather than military garrisons. One such tower was erected around the 15^th century in the townland of Ballylee, near Lady Gregory’s Coole Park estate.

Yeats first visited Thoor Ballylee in the 1890s. “Thoor” is an alternate spelling of “túr,” the Irish for “tower.” Yeats was intrigued by the structure, but he was especially enchanted by the place’s connections to art and beauty. He devoted an entire chapter to Ballylee in the 1902 edition of The Celtic Twilight. There he focused chiefly on Mary Hynes, a legendary beauty who lived in the townland some sixty years earlier. Making the rounds with Gregory while collecting local folklore, Yeats was regaled with stories by old folks who still remembered Mary’s unparalleled beauty. He also heard tales of the renowned poet Anthony Raftery (Antoine Ó Raifteiri), a blind bard who wrote love songs for Mary that were still sung around the turf fires.

Yeats was so beguiled by Thoor Ballylee that he eventually purchased it in 1916. He captured its magical appeal in exalted Homeric terms in his 1923 Nobel Lecture:

I have in Galway a little old tower, and when I climb to the top of it I can see at no great distance a green field where stood once the thatched cottage of a famous country beauty, the mistress of a small local landed proprietor. I have spoken to old men and women who remembered her, though all are dead now, and they spoke of her as the old men upon the wall of Troy spoke of Helen […] It was a song written by the Gaelic poet Raftery that brought her such great fame and the cottagers still sing it, though there are not so many to sing it as when I was young: “O star of light and O sun in harvest, / O amber hair, O my share of the world, / It is Mary Hynes, the calm and easy woman, / Has beauty in her body and in her mind.”

I wonder if Dylan read Yeats’s Nobel Lecture while preparing to write his own. If so, he may have stored away this tale about the Muse Mary and the Bard Raftery for future use in Rough and Rowdy Ways. But more on that later. For now, the salient point is that Yeats located Thoor Ballylee at the crossroads where eros, thanatos, and kleos met—the perfect home for a poet.

After years of composing unrequited love songs for his own Muse, and after Maud Gonne repeatedly rejected his multiple wedding proposals, Yeats abruptly got married in 1917 at the age of 52 to a 25-year-old English woman named Georgie Hyde-Lees. The couple soon started a family, dividing their time between residences in London, Dublin, and Ballylee.

Thoor Ballylee was much more than a residence for Yeats. When he took possession of this imposing tower house, he reclaimed it for the purposes of art. As fellow Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney put it,

Here he was in the place of writing. It was one of his singing schools, one of the soul’s monuments of its own magnificence. His other addresses were necessary shelters but Ballylee was a sacramental site, an outward sign of an inner grace. The grace here was poetry and the lonely tower was the poet’s sign. Within it, he was within his own mind. (24)

Yeats turned Thoor Ballylee into his Citadel of the Imagination.

From Byzantium to Key West

The opening poem in The Tower is “Sailing to Byzantium.” Let’s start with the verb: sailing. Yeats begins the book by setting sail on an adventure, the classic opening for the hero’s journey. Readers of Shadow Chasing will know that this is also a favorite trope for Dylan, who has taken us on trips upon his magic swirling ship through countless songs. He intersperses this journey motif throughout Rough and Rowdy Ways. For instance, he sets sail at the beginning of “False Prophet” with these lines:

Another day without end – another ship going out

Another day of anger – bitterness and doubt

I know how it happened – I saw it begin

I opened my heart to the world and the world came in

Whether the voyage takes place on a ship as in “False Prophet,” on horseback as in “Crossing the Rubicon,” or in a Lincoln convertible as in “Murder Most Foul,” the songs enact life’s journey toward the undiscovered country of death. It’s also a journey inward, to “the deep heart’s core” as Yeats put it in his early poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” or to “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart,” as he put it in the late poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” Both Dylan and Yeats open their hearts and their boats to their audiences and take us along on their odysseys.

Yeats’s destination for this quest is Byzantium. In his book of esoteric philosophy, A Vision (1925), he described sixth-century Byzantium as the pinnacle of human achievement: “I think if I could be given a month in Antiquity and leave to spend it where I chose, I would spend it in Byzantium […] I think that in early Byzantium, and maybe never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic and practical life were one” (190-91).

The ancient world seems much more hospitable than the modern world for the poet at the beginning of “Sailing to Byzantium”:

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another’s arms, birds in the trees,

— Those dying generations—at their song,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

The world he describes has its perks—songs and sex all summer long—but only for those virile enough to enjoy it. Yeats was feeling his age in The Tower, as Dylan was on Time Out of Mind, where he reenacted a similar scene:

I see people in the park forgetting their troubles and woes

They’re drinking and dancing, wearing bright-colored clothes

All the young men with their young women looking so good

Well, I’d trade places with any of them

In a minute, if I could

Rather than envying the young lovers like Dylan, Yeats rejects their skewed values: “Caught in that sensual music all neglect / Monuments of unageing intellect.” He sets up an opposition between mortality and immortality, a tension that animates several poems in The Tower. The poet is surrounded by the folly of youth, which thrives for a season in the sun, then withers in the winter of discontent and dies. Yeats prefers to set his sights on the everlasting.

Put another way, “Sailing to Byzantium” pits the body against the spirit, another running theme in The Tower. In the second stanza, the poet declares,

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress.

A paltry old man can become reanimated if he learns to make his spirit sing, like the dead body parts zapped to life by the immortal spirit in Dylan’s “My Own Version of You.” Song is the life force that recharges the soul. Yeats wants to leave his bothersome body behind and seek out a charging station for his spirit. He finds what he’s looking for in Byzantium:

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

As a young man, Yeats fantasized about escaping the modern world in London for an idyllic sanctuary in Innisfree. Now, at the age of 61, he longs to flee modern Ireland specifically, and the mortal world more broadly, by seeking spiritual asylum in the ancient world.

In the third stanza, Yeats calls upon “sages standing in God’s holy fire” and asks them to become “the singing masters of my soul.” He believes that the body must be sacrificed, burning away all impurities, in order to achieve perfection of the soul. He vividly describes this incandescent process of transfiguration:

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

What does it look and sound like to leave the mortal world behind and join the choir immortal? Yeats concocts a strange image for this metamorphosis, probably modeled after automata kept in the palace of Byzantine emperor Theophilus. In the final stanza, the poet trades in his mortal body for the fabulous plumage of a golden bird:

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enameling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or the come.

Yeats’s detractors love poking fun at this image. Oh, fancies himself a golden bird, does he? There he goes again, Juno’s peacock, fanning out his tail feathers to entertain the lords and ladies, turning Byzantium into a gilded Coole Park.

But let’s appreciate what Yeats is trying to do here. In choosing gold over flesh, he isn’t evoking wealth so much as lasting beauty, in the vein of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55: “Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme.” Furthermore, of all the golden figures he might have chosen, it’s telling that he imagines himself as a bird, a creature famous for its song. Remember that the opening stanza referred to “birds in the trees,” but those birds were singing for mortals, “Those dying generations.” By contrast, the golden bird is an ageless paragon singing an immortal song—and that song is “Sailing to Byzantium,” a monument of its own magnificence destined to outlive its author.

“Sailing to Byzantium” is like the opening track for the album The Tower, the first in a series of songs meditating upon “what is past, or passing, or to come.” Dylan’s opening RARW song, “I Contain Multitudes” similarly evokes dying generations and echoes the closing lines of Yeats’s last stanza: “Today and tomorrow and yesterday too / The flowers are dying like all things do.” The songs in RARW go on to chronicle “what is past, or passing, or to come.”

The musical journey in RARW eventually leads to a place where the flowers remain in perpetual bloom: Key West, Dylan’s equivalent to Byzantium. Like Yeats, Dylan has a gift for taking real places and mythologizing them into metaphysical conditions (e.g., Mississippi, the Highlands). In RARW, Key West is the portal to Heaven. The song starts with a death: the assassination of President William McKinley, or, more precisely, Charlie Poole’s song about that death, “White House Blues.” Death is the gateway key that unlocks the door to the afterlife.

Dylan has situated songs at the threshold of death before, but he typically keeps the singer suspended, unable to cross over. Think of “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” waiting perpetually at the gate of the underworld. Think of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” pleading for admission to paradise with no response. But in “Key West” it appears that permission to enter the City of Gold has finally been granted.

The singer counsels, “Key West is the place to be / If you’re lookin’ for immortality / Stay on the road – follow the highway sign.” This isn’t the Florida you’ll find at vacation resorts; this is the Florida that Juan Ponce de León was searching for in his quest for the mythical Fountain of Youth. The final verse sums up the emblematic significance of Dylan’s Key West:

Key West is the place to be

If you’re lookin’ for immortality

Key West is paradise divine

Key West is fine and fair

If you lost your mind you’ll find it there

Key West is on the horizon line

The vision I get is of the singer gazing at the setting sun, surveying this paradise from a vantage point on high, perhaps one of the island’s lighthouses or observation towers.

Standing on top of a tower, you can take in the entire horizon. This synoptic perspective gives the singer a bird’s-eye view across both space and time. In that respect and many others, Dylan occupies a position very much like Yeats atop Thoor Ballylee in his title poem “The Tower.”

Tower of Imagination

Yeats and Dylan both pay careful attention to the sequencing of their work. The order of poems in a Yeats volume is deliberate, as with the order of songs in a Dylan album or concert setlist, designed to suggest development or to set up interesting contrasts. As Hugh Kenner put it, Yeats “was an architect, not a decorator; he didn’t accumulate poems, he wrote books” (578). We can see a perfect example of Yeats’s poetic architecture at work in the first two poems of The Tower, where he stages dialectical interplay between “Sailing to Byzantium” and “The Tower.”

The opening lyric presents one solution to the problem of aging in the modern material world via escape into the timeless realm of art. “Sailing to Byzantium” is a poem of movement, a journey forward that paradoxically moves backwards in time. It is succeeded by “The Tower,” which is confined to a fixed location at Thoor Ballylee. The poet is preoccupied in both poems with “what is past, or passing, or the come.” But the image of perfect beauty and tranquility that closes “Sailing to Byzantium”—the golden bird—is unsettled by very different imagery in the opening section of “The Tower”—an old crow roosting in his nest. The temptation to escape into the past is offset by pressing matters in the present that hold him back and tether him to his tower. His imagination tries to soar in Part I of “The Tower,” but earthly worries, bodily indignities, and painful regrets keep clipping his wings.

“The Tower” begins with a question:

What shall I do with this absurdity—

O heart, O troubled heart—this caricature,

Decrepit age that has been tied to me

As to a dog’s tail?

In “Sailing to Byzantium,” he described his sick heart as fastened to a dying animal. Here he depicts old age in similar terms, like a foreign object tied to a dog’s tail. In both cases, he regards the thing that troubles him as separate and detachable, if only he could figure out how to cut the ties that bind the immortal spirit to the mortal body.

The poet also feels bound by public expectations. He insists that his artistic stamina is as vigorous as ever:

Never had I more

Excited, passionate, fantastical

Imagination, nor an ear and eye

That more expected the impossible.

Nevertheless, those tawdry, inhospitable, dying generations that he wanted to leave behind in “Sailing to Byzantium” demand that he act his age, concede his irrelevance, and quietly retire.

It seems I must bid the Muse go pack,

Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend

Until imagination, ear and eye,

Can be content with argument and deal

In abstract things; or be derided by

A sort of battered kettle at the heel.

Yeats’s screed against aging and ageism reminds me of one of Dylan’s rants from The Philosophy of Modern Song. In his commentary on Charlie Poole’s “Old and Only in the Way,” he complains,

Actually, if you google the word senicide you’ll see that many parts of the world have a push/pull relationship with their older members—the push of veneration, the pull of elimination. The United States with its chrome-plated dreams of spit-shine modernity was never much for the admiration of its senior citizens. Way before taunts of “Okay, boomer” and the calling of people with experience the pejorative term “olds,” this country has had a tendency to isolate the grizzled dotard, if not on an ice floe then in retirement camps where they could gum pudding and play bingo away from the delicate eyes of youth. (266-67)

That is no country for old men. Better sail off to Byzantium quick before they lock you away in a retirement camp. Or a tower.

Under siege from without and within, the poet broods on the roof of his tower, awaiting the next assault on his dignity:

I pace upon the battlements and stare

On the foundations of a house, or where

Tree, like a sooty finger, starts from the earth;

And send imagination forth

Under the day’s declining beam, and call

Images and memories

From ruin or from ancient trees,

For I would ask a question of them all.

Yeats enlists ghosts and phantoms to defend his Citadel of the Imagination against attack from the philistine forces of modern Ireland and from the debilitating infirmities of advancing age.

Tower of Muses

Yeats summons up various figures from the past associated with Thoor Ballylee. The most compelling spirits are Mary Hynes and Blind Raftery. Translating his previous prose reflections into poetry, he recalls,

Some few remembered still when I was young

A peasant girl commended by a song,

Who’d lived somewhere upon that rocky place,

And praised the colour of her face,

And had the greater joy in praising her,

Remembering that, if walked she there,

Farmers jostled at the fair

So great a glory did the song confer.

Mary Hynes and Anthony Raftery were long deceased by the time Yeats came along, but the love songs lingered on, and he gave them a second life through “The Tower.”

Once a song is set loose in the world, you never know how far it will go, who will sing it or hear it, and what impact it will leave behind. As Yeats records, the potent mixture of Mary’s beauty combined with Raftery’s eloquence had an intoxicating effect on listeners:

And certain men, being maddened by those rhymes,

Or else by toasting her a score of times,

Rose from the table and declared it right

To test their fancy by their sight;

But they mistook the brightness of the moon

For the prosaic light of day—

Music had driven their wits astray—

And one was drowned in the great bog of Cloone.

Mary + Raftery + Moonlight + Music = Madness

Yeats compares this formula to Homer’s epic poetry about Helen of Troy, the face that launched a thousand ships:

Strange, but the man who made the song was blind;

Yet, now I have considered it, I find

That nothing strange; the tragedy began

With Homer that was a blind man,

And Helen has all living hearts betrayed

O may the moon and sunlight seem

One inextricable beam,

For if I triumph I must make men mad.

Irish troubadour Liam Clancy picked up a version of “Mary Hynes” during his travels:

It’s a safe bet that Dylan first encountered the story through Clancy. However, when he alludes to the Irish bard and his lass in the first verse of “I Contain Multitudes,” the reference sounds closer to Yeats’s “The Tower”: “Follow me close – I’m going to Bally-Na-Lee / I’ll lose my mind if you don’t come with me.”

Granted, there is a place in Ireland called Ballinalee in County Longford. But it seems much more likely that Dylan is thinking of Ballylee. Spellings and pronunciations in Irish can be quite fluid, especially when transcribing oral lyrics and translating from Irish to English. Dylanologists before me tracked down another Raftery poem about Mary called (in English) “The Lass from Bally-na-Lee,” which would seem to put the mystery to rest. The internal evidence of “I Contain Multitudes” suggests Thoor Ballylee as the source. Dylan follows Yeats following Raftery following Mary; meanwhile, poets and listeners alike are vulnerable to losing their minds in pursuit of the Muse.

The poet strikes a defiant pose in “The Tower,” but the victory of imagination is by no means assured. All these reveries about Muses and the songs they inspire inevitably lead Yeats back to Maud Gonne. Memories of Maud are the Achilles’ heel for Yeats. She was his Mary and his Helen [cf. “No Second Troy”], the woman who inspired him to artistic achievements like Raftery and Homer, but who also led his wits astray like the man who drowned in the bog.

At the end of Part II, when Yeats finally gets around to asking the question for which he has summoned his ghosts, it revolves around Maud: “Does the imagination dwell the most / Upon a woman won or woman lost?” The answer is so obvious that it hardly needs asking. The poet pacing the roof of Thoor Ballylee doesn’t dwell upon the woman won—his wife Georgie, nesting downstairs with the kids—but the woman lost—that wild bird Maud.

Sing in me, oh Muse? Sorry, but no—this bird has flown. Instead, like Dylan in RARW, Yeats is left with the Mother of Muses, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. When thoughts of Maud come howling like an idiot wind across the ramparts of Thoor Ballylee, it chills Yeats to the heart and engulfs him in the darkness of regret and self-recrimination:

If on the lost, admit you turned aside

From a great labyrinth out of pride,

Cowardice, some silly over-subtle thought

Or anything called conscience once;

And that if memory recur, the sun’s

Under eclipse and the day blotted out.

Mother of Muses, strike me blind.

We often romanticize artists who endlessly pursue creative inspiration. But by the time Yeats and Dylan produced their late work, they had learned the hard way how exhausting it could be to spend your whole life chasing after something you can never catch. The next song is always just out of reach; the next performance is always a little farther down the road.

Yes, there is something thrilling and life-affirming about Yeats and Dylan’s continuous artistic quest. As Dylan describes it in “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You”:

From the plains and the prairie – from the mountains to the sea

I hope the gods go easy with me

I knew you’d say yes – I’m saying it too

I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you

Whether “you” is the audience or the Muse, the demands on the devotee remain the same: total commitment. As the singer acknowledges in the same song, this odyssey can also be lethal:

I traveled the long road of despair

I met no other traveler there

A lot of people gone, a lot of people I knew

I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you

Here the emphasis is less on “you” and more on “give myself”: the complete sacrifice required for following one’s artistic vocation. Pursuing the Muse must sometimes feel like a pathological compulsion, or like being a cursed ghost doomed to roam the earth forever. Perpetual motion is actually a lot like being stuck: “I know it looks like I’m moving, but I’m standing still,” as Dylan laments in “Not Dark Yet.” This is the position Yeats finds himself in at the end of Part II of “The Tower,” stranded in his tower, eclipsed by dark emotions, stuck in the past, going nowhere.

Tower of Pride

Yeats rallies his flagging spirits by setting his sights on the future. As in “Sailing to Byzantium,” the way forward leads through the past. In the final section of “The Tower,” he mounts a vigorous defense against aging and death. “It is time I wrote my will,” he declares at the beginning of Part III, turning the rest of the poem into a form of self-elegy. He bequeaths his pride to “upstanding men,” which he identifies as members of the Anglo-Irish.

Time for a little history lesson. The Anglo-Irish are distinct from the Anglo-Normans. Both groups were instrumental in the subjugation of Ireland, but their methods were markedly different. The Anglo-Normans favored cultural assimilation, so thoroughly acclimating themselves to native customs that they allegedly became, in a famous phrase from Irish historiography, “more Irish than the Irish themselves.” Not so for the Anglo-Irish. They tended to carve out enclaves separate from the locals, isolate themselves in Big House estates, and maintain aloof detachment from the majority Catholic community. The Anglo-Irish enjoyed privileged status ever since the rabidly anti-Catholic Oliver Cromwell brought an army to Ireland in the mid-17^th century, killed political enemies, seized land, redistributed it to his supporters, and installed a legal framework that advantaged Protestants and discriminated against Catholics.

Paradoxically, the Anglo-Irish also produced some of the leading lights of the Irish struggle for independence, seemingly working against the self-interests of their privileged class, and ultimately facilitating their own extinction. These Anglo-Irish nationalists included militant revolutionaries like Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet, Home Rule champion Charles Stewart Parnell, as well as the leaders of the Celtic Revival and the Abbey Theatre, Yeats, Gregory, and Synge.

After the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921), during which many of the Big Houses were burned down in protest, the Anglo-Irish found themselves marginalized by the Irish Free State but alienated from the United Kingdom—too English for the Irish, and too Irish for the English. As the sun descended on this former ruling class, Yeats chose this occasion to celebrate its achievements:

The pride of people that were

Bound neither to Cause nor to State,

Neither to slaves that were spat on,

Nor to the tyrants that spat,

The people of Burke and Grattan

That gave, though free to refuse.

Edmund Burke was an Anglo-Irish philosopher in the 18^th century who is widely regarded as a forefather of political conservatism. Henry Grattan was an Anglo-Irish politician who led the Irish Parliament at the end of the 18^th century and opposed the Acts of Union which absorbed Ireland into the United Kingdom in 1800. Their statues face each other at the front gate of Trinity College Dublin, a longtime bastion of Protestant privilege in the middle of the Irish capital. The same poet who expressed his profound ambivalence about Easter Rising martyrs in “Easter, 1916” was now lionizing Anglo-Irish dignitaries after independence had been won. One cannot overstate what a politically controversial, tone-deaf position this was to hold in 1920s Ireland. And he didn’t confine his remarks to poetry.

In June 1925, Senator Yeats made a notorious speech on the floor of the Seanad Éireann (Irish Senate) during the debate over a bill to ban divorce. He condemned this measure as a sign of the Catholic Church’s overreaching interference in Irish domestic policy, boasting that “It is one of the glories of the Church in which I was born that we have put our Bishops in their places in discussions requiring legislation.” He was only getting warmed up. In the inflammatory conclusion of his speech, Yeats trumpeted Anglo-Irish leaders for making the modern independent state possible:

I think it is tragic that within three years of this country gaining its independence we should be discussing a measure which a minority of this nation considers to be grossly oppressive. I am proud to consider myself a typical man of that minority. We against whom you have done this thing are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Europe. We are the people of Burke; we are the people of Grattan; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created the most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence. Yet I do not altogether regret what has happened. I shall be able to find out, if not I, my children will be able to find out whether we have lost our stamina or not.

It is a speech of staggering hubris and class chauvinism—and it is quintessential late Yeats. At every turn, whenever his age or his caste dictated that he should mind his manners and bite his tongue, he did the opposite. It is also a culturally specific act of kleos, honoring Anglo-Irish Protestant heroes at the very moment when the Free State was largely dumping that legacy in the ashbin of history.

If Yeats sounds proud when talking about his cultural heritage, that rhetoric pales in comparison to his grandiose claims for the omnipotent powers of the imagination.

And I declare my faith:

I mock Plotinus’ thought

And cry in Plato’s teeth,

Death and life were not

Till man made up the whole,

Made lock, stock and barrel

Out of his bitter soul.

Yeats is espousing the philosophy of subjective idealism associated with Bishop Berkeley, another of his Anglo-Irish heroes. Berkeley’s central dictum was “being is being perceived” [esse est percipi]. For the Bishop of Cloyne, this philosophy reinforced his theology, believing that all existence resides within the mind of God, the perceiver of all. For Yeats, however, this creative function is performed by human perception, whereby “Man makes a superhuman / Mirror-resembling dream.” The mind constitutes its own cosmos, made in the perceiver’s own image. Death cannot defeat the poet, who wields imaginative power capable of converting the grave into the Garden of Eden:

Aye, sun and moon and star, all,

And further add to that

That, being dead, we rise,

Dream and so create

Translunar Paradise.

Percy Shelley famously proclaimed that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Yeats goes him one better, declaring that poets are the creators of life, death, and the afterlife.

Frankly, Yeats makes a better poet than a philosopher. He may think he can outwit death with such haughty gibberish, but as a reader I’m unmoved. He is far more persuasive at the end of the poem, when he stops trying to philosophize his way out of the problem of aging and instead levels with us about how it really feels.

Tower of Death

The conclusion of “The Tower” contains some of the most poignant lines Yeats ever wrote. Ostensibly, his point is to prove that death is illusory and the soul lives on forever. However, his descriptions of the degradations of old age are so powerful that the pathos overshadows his resolve.

Now shall I make my soul,

Compelling it to study

In a learned school

Till the wreck of body,

Slow decay of blood,

Testy delirium

Or dull decrepitude,

Or what worse evil come—

The death of friends, or death

Of every brilliant eye

That made a catch in the breath—

Seem but the clouds of the sky

When the horizon fades;

Or a bird’s sleepy cry

Among the deepening shades.

Yeats strikes a supremely confident tone at the beginning of this passage, preparing for a conclusion very much like “Sailing to Byzantium.” He directs his soul to study in a learned school, echoing the previous poem: “Nor is there singing school but studying / Monuments of its own magnificence.” The monument of Yeats’s own magnificence is “The Tower,” an imposing stone structure which Yeats transforms into an enduring artwork, with himself installed at the top, singing like a golden bird on his Byzantine bough.

But the bird’s voice begins to crack as he describes the maladies that beset his aching body. A Grecian goldsmith would never construct anything resembling this old scarecrow. Heavier shadows fall as he contemplates the loss of old companions. Thinking about the death of friends and lovers causes him to catch his breath. Damn, this is harder than he thought it was going to be. What was supposed to be a song of triumph sounds more like a dirge for the dead.

Attempting to gather himself, the poet insists that his imagination can overpower these pains, transmuting them into images of beauty, serenity, and consolation, making his hardships

Seem but the clouds of the sky

When the horizon fades;

Or a bird’s sleepy cry

Among the deepening shades.

Seem? These closing images are, to quote Hamlet, “but the trappings and the suits of woe” (1.2.86). The grief is irrepressible and resists being painted over with luminous clouds or drowned out by sweet birdsong.

The tension here between melancholy for the dying body and faith in the soul’s immortality reminds me of Dylan’s touching statement after the passing of Little Richard, the musical hero of his youth. “I just heard the news about Little Richard and I’m so grieved. He was my shining star and guiding light back when I was only a little boy. His was the original spirit that moved me to do everything I would do.” Dylan tries to reassure himself that art conquers death and the soul survives in the afterlife; but those bromides are hard to swallow after the Black Rider has just punched you in the gut: “Of course he’ll live forever. But it’s like a part of your life is gone.”

Yeats dramatizes the conflict between mortality and immortality in The Tower. This tension is epitomized by the tug-of-war between the book’s first two poems, the idyllic “Sailing to Byzantium” followed by the brooding “The Tower.” Dylan stages a similar tension between the last two songs on Rough and Rowdy Ways.

The singer follows the highway signs to paradise in “Key West.” RARW would be a very different album if it ended there. But Dylan includes one more song, the longest he ever recorded, taking us on a deadly detour to Dallas. The album concludes with an elegy, not just for the assassinated President John F. Kennedy, but for an American worldview that seemed to die with him.

Once again, Dylan turns a real place into a mythical realm and metaphysical condition. He establishes these two allegorical settings as opposite poles in the album’s cosmos, one compass point facing fair and the other facing foul. “Fair and foul are near of kin / And fair needs foul,” writes Yeats in “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop.” Dylan replicates this dualism in Rough and Rowdy Ways.

Key West is the place to find your mind, and Dealey Plaza is the place to lose it. Key West is “the land of light,” and the Big D is the epicenter of darkness. Key West is the place to be for “love and inspiration,” and Dealey Plaza is “the place where Faith, Hope and Charity died.” Key West represents everlasting life, and Dallas represents inescapable death. The singer forewarns us in the album opener: “I sleep with life and death in the same bed.” How does it feel? We can judge for ourselves in the album’s closing songs. “Key West” and “Murder Most Foul” represent Dylan’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Tower of Song

As the two Nobel laureates demonstrate in The Tower and Rough and Rowdy Ways, art can build a ballast against the ruins of time, even when that ballast is constructed from individual suffering and historical wreckage. Yeats inscribed this conviction on the outer wall of Thoor Ballylee, greeting the future visitors he trusted would make pilgrimages to this site.

I, the poet William Yeats,

With common sedge and broken slates

And smithy work from Gort forge

Restored this tower for my wife George.

And may these characters remain

When all is ruin once again.

As Dylan piles up musical and pop cultural references in the final section of “Murder Most Foul,” line after line, tier on top of tier, it feels like he is mortaring together stones for his own musical monument, his RARW Tower. I suspect that, a hundred years from now, listeners will still be visiting Dylan’s tower as they do Yeats’s The Tower and Thoor Ballylee. For now, no pilgrimages are necessary. Sit tight and sooner or later Dylan and his band will probably come to you, rebuilding his tower of song in your hometown.

He has also been including some gorgeous covers in the post-Nobel concert circuit, often by artists he loves who have passed on. The most moving tributes have been delivered in cities associated with the original artists. I’m thinking especially of Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love” in Montreal, and Shane MacGowan’s “Rainy Night in Soho” in Dublin.

Listening to these moving memorials, it feels like Dylan has made his pilgrimage to place a stone on the graves of his immortal heroes. His covers effectively double as elegies and as Dylan’s Kleosophy of Modern Song. He fits these songs alongside his own, stone by stone, much as Yeats set his accomplishments beside those of his peers, heroes, and inspirations. You keep on working until your shift is done when you’re building the Never Ending Tower of Song.

I’ll leave the last word to Leonard Cohen, who made his own lasting contributions to the tower and now has a permanent home there:

My friends are gone and my hair is grey

I ache in the places where I used to play

And I’m crazy for love but I’m not coming on

I’m just paying my rent every day in the Tower of Song

Buy Me a Coffee

Works Cited

Dylan, Bob. Nobel Prize Lecture. The Nobel Prize (5 June 2017), https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2016/dylan/lecture/.

---. Official Song Lyrics. The Official Bob Dylan Website.

https://www.bobdylan.com/.

---. The Philosophy of Modern Song. Simon & Schuster, 2022.

Foster, Roy. “Roy Foster on WB Yeats and Thoor Ballylee: ‘When all is ruin once again.’” Irish Times (21 March 2020), https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/roy-foster-on-wb-yeats-and-thoor-ballylee-when-all-is-ruin-once-again-1.4198959.

Heaney, Seamus. The Place of Writing. Scholars Press, 1989.

Kenner, Hugh. “The Sacred Book of the Arts.” The Sewanee Review 64.4 (1956): 574-90.

Mulhall, Ed. “Yeats as ‘Smiling Public Man’: the Nobel Poet and the new State.” RTÉ (October 2023), https://www.rte.ie/centuryireland/articles/yeats-as-smiling-public-man-the-nobel-poet-and-the-new-state.

Sean Éireann Debate (11 June 1925). Houses of the Oireachtas, https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/seanad/1925-06-11/12/.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Second Quarto. Arden Shakespeare Third Series. Eds. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. Bloomsbury, 2006.

---. “Not marble nor the gilded monuments (Sonnet 55).” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46455/sonnet-55-not-marble-nor-the-gilded-monuments.

Tenschert, Laura. “Chapter 1: ‘Sing in Me, Oh Muse’: Rough and Rowdy Ways, the Nobel Prize & the Shaping of Bob Dylan’s Legacy.” Definitely Dylan (11 October 2020), https://www.definitelydylan.com/podcasts/2020/10/11/chapter-1-sing-in-me-oh-muse-rough-and-rowdy-ways-the-nobel-prize-amp-the-shaping-of-bob-dylans-legacy.

Yeats, W. B. “Crazy Jane Talks to the Bishop.” The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. Simon & Schuster, 1983, 259-60.

---. “The Irish Dramatic Movement.” The Nobel Prize (15 December 1923), https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1923/yeats/lecture/.

---. Per Amica Silentia Lunae Per Amica Silentia Lunae. Essays. Macmillan, 1924, 479-538.

---. “Sailing to Byzantium.” The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. Simon & Schuster, 1983, 193-94.

---. “The Tower.” The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. Simon & Schuster, 1983, 194-200.

After you’ve finished shopping in the Grafton Street markets, head north on O’Connell Street, past Trinity College, and across the bridge. Hang a right onto Abbey Street and you’ll find the National Theatre of Ireland, co-founded by Yeats.

Or continue straight and you’ll pass the General Post Office on your left, which served as headquarters for the Easter Rising. You can still see bullet holes in the pillars where Pádraic Pearse publicly issued the Proclamation of the Irish Republic on April 24, 1916.

Keep going north and you’ll arrive at Parnell Square, named after the “Uncrowned King of Ireland” who presided over Yeats’s youth and whose downfall prompted the Celtic Revival we focused on in the first installment. While you’re there, catch a glimpse of the Hugh Lane Gallery, which is currently closed for refurbishment. The fate of Lane’s collection was a source of great angst for Yeats in 1913.

Yeats experienced a great deal of anxiety, frustration, disillusionment, and rage during the period we’ll be discussing in this second installment, as a series of clashes with the Dublin public led to souring relations between Yeats and his audience.

As you know, Dylan experienced a comparable falling out with his audience, beginning with the Tom Paine Award debacle in December 1963, continuing with his creative swerve away from “finger-pointing songs” and toward rock music, and boiling over when he went electric at the Newport Folk Festival and embarked on contentious tours in 1965-66. I have already written about these events extensively, and I trust that you’ve seen No Direction Home and A Complete Unknown and read other accounts like Elijah Wald’s excellent book. So I’m going to focus primarily on the Irish side of this story: more Yeats & Dublin than Yeats & Dylan.

But as you can tell from my title, there are interesting similarities between the two artists’ experiences. Yeats could relate to Dylan’s venomous reply to his disgruntled audience in “Positively 4^th Street”:

You’ve got a lot of nerve

To say you are my friend

When I was down

You just stood there grinning

You’ve got a lot of nerve

To say you’ve got a helping hand to lend

You just want to be on

The side that’s winning

Quick caveat: if I were being completely accurate, I would have called this piece “Positively Sackville Street,” since that was the road’s name during the period we’re covering. It was renamed after “the Liberator” Daniel O’Connell under the Irish Free State government in 1924. The revised story of modern Ireland was still being drafted in the first two decades of the 20^th century, and Yeats was a leading author, painstakingly substituting English inscriptions for Irish ones. As a character in a film by the great Irish-American director John Ford exclaims, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” So be it: “Positively O’Connell Street” it is.

Buy Me a Coffee

Cathleen ni Houlihan

In 1897, Yeats, his good friend Lady Augusta Gregory, and her neighbor Edward Martyn hatched a plan for the Celtic Theatre, soon rechristened the Irish Literary Theatre. Their idea was to regularly perform in Dublin plays by Irish playwrights on Irish themes for Irish audiences. Cultural nationalists supported the concept in theory, but none of the founders had much experience writing or producing plays, and their early efforts were not very successful.

In a pointed critique published in May 1901 in the United Irishman, Frank Fay diagnosed what was wrong with Yeats’s drama and what might set it right:

They do not inspire; they do not send men away filled with the desire for deeds. Before he will be even on the road to achieving greatness as a dramatic poet, Mr. Yeats must tackle some theme of a great, lasting and living interest. In Ireland we are at present only too anxious to shun reality. Our drama ought to teach us to face it. Let Mr. Yeats give us a play in verse or prose that will rouse this sleeping land. […] This land is ours, but we have ceased to realise the fact. We want a drama that will make us realise it. We have closed our ears to the piercing wail that rises from the past; we want a drama that will open them, and in no uncertain words point out the reason for our failure in the past and the road to success in the future. (qtd. Foster I 249)

Yeats and Gregory answered Fay’s call. The pair huddled up that summer at Coole Park (her plush estate in Gort, County Galway) and collaboratively wrote Cathleen ni Houlihan. This short but powerful one-act folk play premiered in April 1902 at St. Teresa’s Hall on Clarendon Street. Cathleen ni Houlihan was an instant smash hit. The boost in popularity and ticket sales attracted sponsorship from Annie Horniman, which in turn gave Yeats and company the funds needed to acquire their own performance space in downtown Dublin: the Abbey Theatre.

Yeats stamped his nationalist passport with Cathleen, and he would flash those impeccable credentials whenever his allegiances were later called into question. But Cathleen’s gift also proved a heavy burden, particularly after the flame it ignited grew into an uncontrollable wildfire in the following decade. After seeing the original production, Stephen Gwynn prophetically wrote: “‘I went home asking myself if such plays should be produced unless one was prepared for people to go out to shoot and be shot’” (qtd. Foster I 262).

Let’s start with the title figure. Yeats had long been fascinated with Cathleen ni Houlihan, an allegorical representation of Ireland. In 1894, he wrote the poem “Red Hanrahan’s Song about Ireland” in which Cathleen bolsters the faith of those who suffer and sacrifice for Irish freedom: “Our courage breaks like an old tree in a black wind and dies, / But we have hidden in our hearts the flame out of the eyes / Of Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.”

Yeats and Gregory conflate Cathleen with another familiar personification of Ireland, the Shan Van Vocht [Sean-Bhean bhocht], translated as “the poor old woman.” There is a famous rebel ballad called “The Shan Van Vocht” which supplies the general contours for Cathleen ni Houlihan. The song begins,

“Oh, the French are on the sea,” says the Shan Van Vocht

“Oh, the French are on the sea,” says the Shan Van Vocht

“Oh, the French are in the bay, they’ll be here without delay

And the Orange will decay,” says the Shan Van Vocht

This opening refers to the 1798 Rising led by Wolfe Tone and his United Irishmen. France was at war with Great Britain at the time and so agreed to support the Irish rebellion. Yeats and Gregory set their play in 1798 in Killala, the site where the French landed in County Mayo. Their arrival is celebrated as an auspicious omen by the Shan Van Vocht:

“And will Ireland then be free?” says the Shan Van Vocht

“And will Ireland then be free?” says the Shan Van Vocht

“Yes, old Ireland will be free from the center to the sea

And hurrah for liberty!” says the Shan Van Vocht

At the beginning of the play, the Gillane family is excitedly preparing for the wedding of the eldest son Michael to a prosperous local girl, Delia Cahel. They are interrupted by a visit from a poor old woman, who is going door to door recruiting young men to join the rising. Questioned by the Gillane parents, Cathleen declares, “Sometimes my feet are tired and my hands are quiet, but there is no quiet in my heart. When the people see me quiet, they think old age has come on me and that all the stir has gone out of me. But when the trouble is on me I must be talking to my friends” (136). Asked what set her wandering, she answers, “Too many strangers in the house” (136). Asked the source of her troubles, she answers, “My land that was taken from me. […] My four beautiful green fields” (136), a reference to the four ancient provinces of Ireland.

In the original 1902 production, the lead role of Cathleen was played by none other than Maud Gonne, the firebrand nationalist who had enchanted Yeats ever since he met her in 1889. Gonne formed a very intimate connection with Yeats, but she continually spurned his proposals for marriage. His love’s labour’s loss was his art’s gain, however, as the elusive Maud served as Muse for some of Yeats’s finest poems. By all accounts, her performance as Cathleen was spellbinding, for both the characters in the play and the audience.

Cathleen’s chief motive for visiting the Gillanes is to lure Michael away from Delia by convincing him instead to fight for Irish freedom. She levels with him that the sacrifices will be severe and that he may not survive:

It is a hard service they take that help me. Many that are red-cheeked now will be pale-cheeked; many that have been free to walk the hills and the bogs and the rushes, will be sent to walk hard streets in far countries; man a good plan will be broken; many that have gathered money will not stay to spend it; many a child will be born, and there will be no father at its christening to give it a name. (139)

What could possibly be appealing about such a hard bargain? Cathleen sings the answer as she leaves the Gillane house:

They will be remembered for ever,

They shall be alive for ever,

They shall be speaking for ever,

The people shall hear them for ever. (139)

Her followers will join the pantheon of Irish martyrs who made the ultimate blood sacrifice for Ireland. Cathleen wins Michael over to her cause. He chases after her, presumably on his way to losing his life but gaining his renown in the 1798 Rising.

The memorable final line of the play belongs to the younger son Patrick. Asked by his father if he saw the poor old woman walking down the path, Patrick replies, “I did not, but I saw a young girl, and she had the walk of a queen” (140). Ah, Cathleen was so much older then, she’s younger than that now. The implication is that she has been revitalized by the transfusion of new blood sacrificed in her name.

In light of Yeats’s later ambivalence over directions his country took, it’s tempting to read a critique of Cathleen/Ireland as a vampire who feeds on the blood of young men, generation after generation. But that’s definitely not how Dublin audiences responded at the time. Cathleen proclaims, “I have good friends that will help me. They are gathering to help me now. I am not afraid. If they are put down to-day they will get the upper hand to-morrow” (138). That message crashed across the footlights, challenging spectators to enlist in the militant cause. The 1798 Rising failed to achieve independence, but the sacrifice was not in vain. The current generation of Irish men and women had both the opportunity and the obligation to pick up the blood-stained banner and carry it forward.

In Chronicles, Dylan surprised readers by confessing to his boyhood fantasy of becoming a war hero: “I had even wanted to go to West Point. I’d always pictured myself dying in some heroic battle rather than in bed. I wanted to be a general with my own battalion and wondered how to get the key to open this wonderland” (41-42). But when he became a man, he put away childish things, including those dangerously romantic illusions about war.

As a young singer-songwriter, Dylan adamantly rejected saber-rattling patriotism. Beginning in his early twenties, he wrote songs exposing nationalist violence as ideological brainwashing (e.g., “John Brown”), denouncing the greed and cruelty of the military industrial complex (e.g., “Masters of War”), challenging his generation to break America’s addiction to perpetual warfare (e.g., “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “With God on Our Side”), and praising “warriors whose strength is not to fight” (“Chimes of Freedom”). Young Dylan had little stomach for the rhetoric of blood sacrifice bandied about in Cathleen ni Houlihan. To be fair, though, Yeats would soon have cause to regret the genie he helped release from the Irish bottle.

The Playboy Riots

In the early years of the Abbey Theatre, a new playwright emerged as the most significant dramatic voice of the movement: John Millington Synge. His established his reputation with short folk plays, but his first full-length play made the biggest impact. The Playboy of the Western World premiered on January 26, 1907. It was tremendously controversial and seemed deliberately designed to unsettle nationalist audiences.

The play is set in an isolated rural pub in County Mayo. A young stranger, Christy Mahon, arrives on the scene and eventually confesses to the awful crime of killing his father. You might expect the locals to be appalled by this news, but instead they are impressed: “Bravery’s a treasure in a lonesome place, and a lad would kill his father, I’m thinking, would face a foxy divil with a pitch-pike on the flags of hell” (76).

Rather than expelling Christy, the publican Michael James Flaherty offers him a job. The locals are fascinated by the newcomer, celebrating his brash behavior and lyrical eloquence. The women of the community are especially attracted to this romantic stranger, and Christy develops a budding romance with the pub owner’s daughter Pegeen Mike. Meanwhile, we discover that his father is not dead after all. He tracks his son down to Mayo and confronts him near the end of the play.

Once the truth is exposed, the locals turn violently against Christy, physically assaulting him while they attempt to arrest him and turn him over to the police. He tries to redeem himself by attacking his father again, making the legend come true, but there is no salvaging the situation by then. The same crowd that raises Christy up as a hero turns against him and tears him down in the end. Synge knew what he was up to in naming his protagonist after Christ.

Playboy’s conclusion prophetically anticipated the play’s reception. The original production was met with hostile protests from Abbey audiences and nationalist groups in Dublin, a notorious episode in Irish theatrical history known as the Playboy Riots. Audiences in the urban East had come to expect idyllic depictions of characters from the romanticized West. Synge’s play exploded nationalist pieties about Irish rural peasantry, offering instead a satire much closer to the buffoonish “Stage Irishman” stereotype popular on the English stage.

Furthermore, and even more incendiary, Playboy was denounced as a slur against the sanctity of Irish womanhood, depicting the women of Mayo as panting with lust for Christy. Late in the play, he makes a derogatory reference to women’s undergarments—“It’s Pegeen I’m seeking only, and what’d I care if you brought me a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts itself, maybe, from this place to the Eastern World?” (109). That line lit the spark on a powder keg. Yeats was out of town at a speaking engagement in Scotland the night Playboy opened at the Abbey. Lady Gregory sent him an urgent telegram: “Audience broke up in disorder at the word shift.”

Yeats returned immediately to Dublin, entering the fray and whipping it into further frenzy. He gave an interview to the Evening Standard, blaming rowdy republicans for causing disruptions and smugly suggesting that “so far as he could see the people who formed the opposition had no books in their houses” (qtd. Foster I 360). Yeats’s biographer Roy Foster offers this blow-by-blow account of the most tumultuous week in the Abbey’s history:

Disturbances continued throughout the week, reported at gleeful length in all the Irish papers. On several occasions WBY harangued the audience from the stage. There were several arrests and fines. By the end of the week he believed “opinion had turned in our favour”; on 4 February he celebrated with a public debate in the theatre—an idea he had announced, to Synge’s evident surprise, as soon as he returned. This, together with his readiness to give newspaper interviews, proved his appetite for public confrontation. Gregory’s line was that people who came to the theatre “must take what is provided for them”; Synge’s, equally characteristic, that he “didn’t care a rap.” But for WBY the issue was one of artistic freedom and liberation from a censorship, not imposed by the Church but by dictatorial “societies, clubs and leagues”—in other words, by [Arthur] Griffith’s Sinn Féinners. (Foster I 361)

It must be conceded that Yeats doesn’t always come across sympathetically in his clashes with the Irish public. Sometimes he sounds precisely like his caricature as a chauvinist snob who fancied himself superior to the majority of Abbey audience members, or for that matter the majority of Irish citizens. One cannot imagine Dylan saying some of the things or sharing some of the values of Yeats when he stamps his foot, squints through his pince-nez, and lectures his disgruntled audiences about their uncouth literary tastes.

But Dylan could have related to the chaos of the Playboy Riots. Imagine Dylan’s experience of going electric at Newport, but then repeated night after night. Come to think of it, that’s pretty much what he did during the tempestuous tours of fall 1965 and spring 1966: The Rolling Riots Revue.

Dylan could also relate to Yeats’s fierce defense of artistic freedom. And he shares the Irish bard’s defiant refusal to bend to the will of the masses by compromising his vision. The Dylan who kept going out there, getting heckled throughout his electric set, but refusing to budge on his commitment to playing the songs he wanted to play the way he wanted to play them—that pugnacious attitude is completely consistent with Yeats’s stance during the Playboy Riots.

In both Dylan and Yeats’s cases, the pressure was coming from audiences who had been, up until these public splits, their most ardent supporters. And in both cases, audiences were essentially telling the artists that they wanted more of the old stuff they liked, and less of the new stuff that they disliked.

In his poetry, lectures, and manifestoes for the Celtic Revival, Yeats fed his audience a steady diet of heroic mythology about Ireland, and he created a cultural space for airing grievances. Now that the Abbey was producing work that questioned, undermined, or mocked nationalist excesses, the Dublin audience forcefully let the directors know that they preferred the mirror held up by Cathleen to the cracked looking-glass held up by Playboy. Likewise, Dylan’s dissatisfied audiences let him know that they preferred acoustic communal singalongs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” to blaring individualist rock numbers like “Maggie’s Farm” and “Like a Rolling Stone.”

The Hugh Lane Controversy

Burned but undaunted by the Playboy Riots, Yeats wrote a very revealing letter to Gregory in June 1907, the week he turned 42 years old:

I am not young enough to change my nationality—it would really amount to that. […] I understand my own race and in all my work, lyric or dramatic, I have thought of it. If the theatre fails I may or may not write plays—but I shall write for my own people—whether in love or hate of them matters little—probably I shall not know which it is. (qtd. Foster I 369-70)

If you study Yeats’s writings between 1907 and 1916, it sometimes feels like he hates his fellow Irish citizens more than he loves them. During this period, he repeatedly gets drawn into squabbles with the Dublin middle class, the press, the clergy, and local business and civic leaders. One small dispute that had much larger implications for Yeats had to do with the Hugh Lane bequest.

Lane was a wealthy art collector, as well as the nephew of Lady Gregory. He had acquired a considerable collection of modern art that he was willing to donate to Dublin, so long as the city council agreed to build a permanent gallery adequate for its public display. After mixed signals and repeated delays from local politicians, and a rising tide of public resentment over the costs of the proposed project, Lane withdrew his bequest and decided to place the paintings elsewhere.

Yeats was flabbergasted by what he saw as the philistinism, short-sightedness, and parsimony of Dubliners. He vented his ire in two poems, both published in the Irish Times. The first was called “The Gift,” though he later gave it the cumbersome title “To a Wealthy Man who promised a Second Subscription to the Dublin Municipal Gallery if it were proved the People wanted the Pictures.” The second and better poem is “September 1913.”

Yeats confronts the Dublin bourgeoise, accusing them of crass materialism and timid piety:

What need you being come to sense,

But fumble in a greasy till

And add the halfpence to the pence

And prayer to shivering prayer, until

You have dried the marrow from the bone;

For men were born to pray and save.

In the poem’s famous refrain, Yeats contrasts the prevailing mediocrity of his age with the heroism of bygone generations: “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, / It’s with O’Leary in the grave.” The reference here is to John O’Leary (1830-1907), the old Fenian, a veteran of Young Ireland’s 1848 Rising, and the revered mentor of young Yeats and Maud Gonne in the hallowed tradition of Irish nationalism.

They don’t make ’em like O’Leary anymore, not in this age, not in this country, not according to Yeats:

Yet could we turn the years again,

And call those exiles as they were,

In all their loneliness and pain

You’d cry “Some woman’s yellow hair

Has maddened every mother’s son”:

They weighed so lightly what they gave,

But let them be, they’re dead and gone

They’re with O’Leary in the grave.

Why did Yeats get so worked up over this tempest in a teapot? He saw the Lane kerfuffle as emblematic of a much larger problem, and he feared what it augured for the future intellectual and artistic life of Ireland. He spells out these concerns most clearly in a fundraising lecture for Lane’s gallery in July 1913. He told his audience at the Court Theatre in London:

There is a moment in the history of every nation when it is plastic, when it is like wax, when it is ready to hold for generations the shape that is given to it. Ireland is not plastic, and will be for a few years to come. […]. If Hugh Lane is defeated, hundreds of young men and women all over the country will be discouraged—will choose a poorer idea of what might be. […] If the intellectual movement is defeated, Ireland will for many years become a little huckstering nation, groping for halfpence in a greasy till. It is that, or the fulfillment of her better dreams. The choice is yours and ours. (qtd. Foster I 494)

By 1913, after devoting his entire adult life to fostering Irish pride as a precondition to Irish freedom—political freedom, yes, but also independence of the mind and the imagination—48-year-old Yeats believed that it had all come to naught. When he looked around contemporary Dublin, he saw little cause for confidence that the Free Ireland he imagined in his youth had any chance of being realized by his narrow-minded, faint-hearted, and weak-kneed neighbors. A few years later, he would be proven spectacularly wrong.

Easter 1916

On April 24, 1916—Easter Monday—several hundred members of the Irish Volunteers led by Pádraic Pearse and the Irish Citizen Army led by James Connolly seized control of key sites in Dublin and staged an armed revolution. The choice of 1916 was strategic, since British armed forces (including thousands of Irish soldiers) were fighting abroad in the Great War. The choice of Easter was symbolic, invoking Christ’s blood sacrifice and resurrection, and blessing the Rising as a holy cause. The choice of Easter Monday was practical, too, since it’s much easier to seize government buildings when they’re closed for the holiday.

Keeping control of the buildings proved much harder once British troops were sent in. They brought their big guns up the River Liffey and bombarded the city center, destroying much of downtown Dublin in the process.

After six days, the Rising had fallen. In the immediate aftermath, the majority of Dubliners regarded the insurrection as a complete disaster. However, the tide quickly turned in the rebels’ favor after British officials rounded up the surviving leaders, summarily tried and convicted them of treason, and quickly executed them, mostly by firing squad in Dublin’s most notorious prison, Kilmainham Gaol.

It had finally happened. Yeats’s generation had joined those before it in taking up arms and rebelling against British domination. This was seemingly the moment that Yeats had been preparing for, the bold and noble blood sacrifice that Cathleen ni Houlihan demanded. Homer had his Trojan War, and now Yeats had his Easter Rising.

When the Irish bard set his pen to paper in September to write “Easter, 1916,” however, what flowed from his troubled mind was not a heroic epic, but rather an ambivalent elegy for nationalists whom he feared had died for the wrong reasons. And yet, for all that, it’s probably also the best poem Yeats ever wrote.

Far from depicting the republican rank-and-file as heroes, Yeats begins by disparaging them—and himself—as fakes and fools. He replays a typical pre-1916 encounter on the street between the dandy artiste and the Dublin rabble:

I have met them at close of day

Coming with vivid faces

From counter or desk among grey

Eighteenth-century houses.

I have passed with a nod of the head

Or polite meaningless words,

Or have lingered awhile and said

Polite meaningless words,

And thought before I had done

Of a mocking tale or a gibe

To please a companion

Around the fire at the club,

Being certain that they and I

But lived where motley is worn:

All changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

Let’s unpack that first stanza. Yeats personally knew many men and women who fought and died in the Easter Rising. Before the rebellion, he had casually dismissed most of them as unserious or inconsequential. He had little patience or compassion for such people. He admits to previously seeing them as nuisances and clowns, the sort he smiled at, exchanged brief and shallow pleasantries with, and then mocked contemptuously behind their backs at the first opportunity. That is absolutely Yeats, so totally Dublin—Positively O’Connell Street.

Dylan depicts a very similar vibe in “Positively 4^th Street,” the diatribe he wrote in response to being booed by his fair-weather fans at Newport. He sets the song on 4^th Street in the heart of the Village, and recounts a likeminded encounter with a typical folkie frenemy.

You see me on the street

You always act surprised

You say, “How are you?” “Good luck”

But you don’t mean it

Polite meaningless words. Meanwhile, Dylan accuses the smiling schemers of feasting on schadenfreude and stabbing him in the back:

When you know as well as me

You’d rather see me paralyzed

Why don’t you just come out once

And scream it

Dylan’s 4^th Street in the heart of the Village runs emotionally parallel to Yeats’s O’Connell Street in the heart of Dublin. Both are places where fools (“motley” is the costume of a jester) pretend to like each other but in fact harbor secret grudges and jealous rivalries and deviously delight in each other’s misfortunes.

But after the events of Easter 1916, Yeats was forced to reconsider everything he thought he knew about his neighbors and his nation. “All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.” The most famous oxymoron in modern poetry.

Why beauty? Because these dead comrades have now joined the pantheon of Irish martyrs who died fighting to free Ireland. As Cathleen sang,

They will be remembered for ever,

They shall be alive for ever,

They shall be speaking for ever,

The people shall hear them for ever. (139)

Why terrible? Because the city lay in ruin. Because this risky gambit seemed at the time like a catastrophic miscalculation that could set the independence movement back many years. Because some very good people (as well as some rogues and rascals) died brutally, and perhaps needlessly. Because war poems are beautiful but actual warfare is ugly. Because, as Pegeen Mike put it in Playboy, “there’s a great gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed” (Synge 110).

Yeats had been working for decades writing the gallous story of Ireland, but Easter 1916 forced him to confront the unnerving possibility that, in the process, he had inspired followers to commit dirty deeds. He was haunted by the deaths in the Easter Rising, the executions that followed, the ensuing guerilla combat of the Irish War of Independence (1919-21), and the heartbreaking blood feud of the Irish Civil War (1922-23). What had he done? In the final months of his life, he was still asking that question. In “Man and the Echo,” published posthumously in 1939, he wonders,

All that I have said and done,

Now that I am old and ill,

Turns into a question till

I lie awake night after night

And never get the answers right.

Did that play of mine send out

Certain men the English shot?

Yes, it did. In fact, to name only one, the first rebel killed in the Easter Rising was Sean Connolly, an actor with the Abbey Theatre.

When Yeats finally gets around to eulogizing his fallen comrades in the second stanza, he can’t quite bring himself to praise them in the exalted terms that a Homer owes his heroes. He damns Pádraic Pearse with faint praise, suggests that Thomas MacDonagh would have been better off writing literature, and accuses his old friend Countess Markievicz (née Constance Gore-Booth) of growing “shrill” with “ignorant good will” ever since she became radicalized by nationalism.

He reserves his harshest criticism for John MacBride, the man who stole his beloved Maud Gonne away:

This other man I had dreamed

A drunken, vain-glorious lout.

He had done most bitter wrong

To some who are near my heart.

MacBride deserved these insults and worse. He was a physically abusive husband to Maud, and he sexually molested her young daughter Iseult. Yeats wasn’t sad one bit to see him dead. MacBride’s corpse was barely cold when Yeats proposed marriage (again) to the recent widow, which she declined (again). It must have been difficult choking down the gall to praise that dirty scoundrel, but Yeats swallowed his pride enough to pen this epitaph for MacBride:

Yet I number him in the song;

He, too, has resigned his part

In the comedy;

He, too, has been changed in his turn,

Transformed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

With each passing stanza, the poem gets harder to write, as the ratio of terror to beauty rises.

By the final stanza, Yeats can no longer suppress his misgivings about the Easter Rising. “Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart. / O when may it suffice?” The rebels had hearts of stone? No one would ever confuse that for a compliment. You’ll recall that Dylan used that same image in “Property of Jesus,” lashing out against those who mocked his Christian conversion:

He’s the property of Jesus

Resent him to the bone

You’ve got something better

You’ve got a heart of stone

You’ve got a lot of nerve, Mick Jagger, to say you are my friend.

Yeats’s worries just keep mounting: “Was it needless death after all?” How can the Irish bard dare to ask such a question about the martyrs of 1916? And he’s not done crossing lines and breaking taboos: “And what if excess of love / Bewildered them till they died?” One cannot overstate how inflammatory such questions would have been in the wake of the Easter Rising, and what a fundamental abdication of responsibilities this would have seemed for Yeats.

When Maud Gonne read “Easter, 1916,” she was outraged. Yeats composed the poem in September, and Gonne responded with a harsh letter in November:

No, I don’t like your poem, it isn’t worthy of you & above all it isn’t worthy of the subject—Though it reflects your present state of mind perhaps, it isn’t quite sincere enough for you who have studied philosophy & know something of history know quite well that sacrifice has never turned a heart to stone though it has immortalised many & through it alone mankind can rise to God—You recognize this in the line which was the original inspiration of your poem “A terrible Beauty is born.” (qtd. Foster II 63)

Gonne believed that MacDonagh, Pearse, and Connolly deserved much more generous praise. She even defended MacBride: “As for my husband he has entered Eternity by the great door of sacrifice which Christ opened & has therefore atoned for all so that praying for him I can also ask for his prayers & ‘A terrible beauty is born’” (qtd. Foster II 63). Cathleen ni Houlihan couldn’t have said it better herself.

To translate Yeats into Dylanese, “Easter, 1916” was his Newport moment. Let me be clear: I’m certainly not attempting to equate the magnitude of the two events. Hundreds of people died in the Easter Rising, downtown Dublin was destroyed, and the bloody reprisals that followed took a tragic toll on countless casualties for years to come. By comparison, Newport seems little more than a bunch of touchy folk purists getting their feelings hurt and their eardrums strained. But in terms of the artistic impact on two major “voices of their generations” and the evolution of their art, there is something to be learned by juxtaposing Newport ’65 with Dublin ’16.

Declan Kiberd reads “Easter, 1916” in terms that resonate perfectly with Dylan’s transformative apotheosis in 1965. He argues that Yeats’s poem “brought his waverings in the role of national bard to crisis-point. It enacts the quarrel within his own mind between his public, textual duty (to name and praise the warrior dead) and his more personal urge (to question the wisdom of their sacrifice)” (Kiberd 213). We routinely think of Newport ’65 as Dylan’s public resignation as “voice of his generation.” Up to that point, he had functioned effectively as bard for the civil rights movement, writing inspirational anthems about martyrs for the cause like Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, and Hattie Carroll. But after the Kennedy assassination, we can see him increasingly resisting this role as spokesperson, culminating in his declaration of independence at Newport.

We see Yeats making a similar pivot in “Easter, 1916.” Kiberd observes that the poem is written in two distinct voices,

and sometimes enacts in single phrases (“terrible beauty”) their contestation. The sanction of the first voice from bardic tradition was strong; but the force of the second was becoming more apparent to Yeats who increasingly defined freedom in terms of self-expression. He was abandoning the rather more programmatic nationalism of his youth for a more personal version of Irish identity. (213)

What a Dylanesque move by Yeats; what a Yeatsian turn by Dylan. In Maud Gonne’s acerbic letter, she endorsed the first voice of the Irish bard, but denounced the second voice as unworthy, self-indulgent, and insincere. She prefigures the booing “Judas!” crowd of Dylan detractors with pitch-perfect accuracy.

In “Easter, 1916,” Yeats’s calls into question his long-standing role as “voice of his generation.” If this is what the fight for Irish freedom really looks like, if this massive scale of individual and collective trauma is the necessary price to be paid, then maybe it’s time for the movement to find a different spokesman. He could not summon the voice required to praise this armed rebellion. The best he could do by the end was to list the names and pay his sorrowful respects to the dead:

I write it out in verse—

MacDonagh and MacBride

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly

A terrible beauty is born.

Importantly, the last line of the poem is the date of completion: “September 25, 1916.” Yeats is providing a snapshot in time, recounting how he felt about the Easter Rising in those first cataclysmic months. Likewise, Newport ’65 was a snapshot in time. Both events marked crucial turning points for Yeats and Dylan, epoch-shifting moments of change and costly personal growth. But neither artist was done changing, not by a long shot.

Furthermore, the rifts between the artists and their audiences were not irreparable or permanent. Both Yeats and Dylan sustained long-term love-hate relationships with their respective publics, periodically breaking up (“It ain’t me you’re looking for, babe”) and reuniting (Tangled Up in Green?). Despite very public disagreements and mutual recriminations, both artists kept the conversations going, with their audiences and with themselves.

Dylan has continued to speak for his generation in many ways since the height of his influence in the mid-sixties, regularly issuing “state of the union” songs, and increasingly serving as the “eulogist for his generation” as more and more of his friends and collaborators have passed away. For his part, Yeats continued to play a very active role in the cultural life of Ireland, and he did his bit for the Irish Free State (formed in 1922) by serving as a senator and “smiling public man” for many years. Although he quit in a huff several times, Yeats kept coming back to work on Cathleen’s Farm. And of course, the two artists also received a medal from the Swedish Academy in Stockholm that we’ll want to talk about. But we’ll save that discussion for the final installment of this series.

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Works Cited

Dylan, Bob. Chronicles, Volume One. Simon & Schuster, 2004.

---. Official Lyrics. The Official Bob Dylan Website,

https://www.bobdylan.com/.

Foster, R. F. W. B. Yeats, A Life: Vol. I, The Apprentice Mage. Oxford University Press, 1997.

---. W. B. Yeats, A Life: Vol. II, The Arch-Poet. Oxford University Press, 2003.

Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation. Harvard University Press, 1995.

Synge, J. M. The Playboy of the Western World. Modern and Contemporary Irish Drama, 2^nd ed. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. John P. Harrington. W. W. Norton, 2009, 68-112.

Yeats, W. B. “Easter, 1916.” Yeats’s Poetry, Drama, and Prose. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. James Pethica. W. W. Norton, 2000, 73-75.

---. “Man and the Echo.” Yeats’s Poetry, Drama, and Prose. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. James Pethica. W. W. Norton, 2000, 127-28.

---. “Red Hanrahan’s Song about Ireland.” Yeats’s Poetry, Drama, and Prose. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. James Pethica. W. W. Norton, 2000, 33.

---. “September 1913.” Yeats’s Poetry, Drama, and Prose. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. James Pethica. W. W. Norton, 2000, 44-45.

--- and Augusta Gregory. Cathleen ni Houlihan. Yeats’s Poetry, Drama, and Prose. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. James Pethica. W. W. Norton, 2000. 133-40.

You probably know that both men won the Nobel Prize in Literature: Yeats in 1923, Dylan in 2016. But their similarities run much deeper than that. Both artists established themselves as major forces in their twenties. Both initially identified as folkies, but they soon began engaging with major socio-political crises of their times. Both also had contentious relationships with their audiences: many supporters who once championed them as “voices of their generation” later turned against them as traitors to the cause.

Yeats and Dylan both evolved significantly over the courses of their long and prolific careers, adopting different masks and experimenting with various voices. Both were Muse poets who became expert at chasing uncatchable women through their love lyrics. Both went through intense religious periods that impacted their art—Theosophy and various occult beliefs for Yeats, evangelical Christianity for Dylan—though both ultimately proved much better poets and performers than preachers and proselytizers. Both had highly eclectic interests, producing art for multiple media throughout their careers. Finally, both Yeats and Dylan remained remarkably active, innovative, and relevant late in life. Rather than resting on the laurels of their Nobel Prizes, both men continued to explore and reinvent, offering some of their deepest meditations on mortality, legacy, continuity, and the vitality of imagination long past the age at which most artists have retired or run out of steam.

Yeats is a centerpiece of the Modern Irish Literature course I’ve been teaching regularly for nearly thirty years. I also focused a lot on Yeats in over a dozen trips to Ireland in Xavier University’s study abroad program. This is a topic close to my heart. So please indulge me while I play professor and share some observations about Dylanesque Yeats and Yeatsian Dylan. I won’t attempt to cover everything, not even close. But I think there’s enough here for a selective three-part series placing two of my all-time favorite artists into conversation with one another.

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Dylan on Folk Music

As you know, when Dylan arrived on the scene in Greenwich Village in 1961, he was completely devoted to folk music. In Chronicles, he describes its total hold over him:

Folk music was a reality of a more brilliant dimension. It exceeded all human understanding, and if it called out to you, you could disappear and be sucked into it. I felt right at home in this mythical realm made up not with individuals so much as archetypes, vividly drawn archetypes of humanity, metaphysical in shape, each rugged soul filled with natural knowing and inner wisdom. Each demanding a degree of respect. I could believe in the full spectrum of it and sing about it. It was so real, so more true to life than life itself. It was life magnified. Folk music was all I needed to exist. (236)

Dylan began writing more and more of his own songs in the early sixties, and soon these originals displaced folk standards from his repertoire. After controversially “goin’ electric” in 1965, his sound and celebrity became much more associated with rock music. However, in the fullness of time, we can look back and recognize that he never lost the faith. At key junctures when he seemed to have lost his way, Dylan turned back to folk music as his charging station and North Star, refueling his depleted energies and redirecting him toward his true vocation. See The Basement Tapes, Self Portrait, the acoustic sets of the Never Ending Tour, Good as I Been to You, World Gone Wrong, etc.

Dylan himself has explicitly testified to folk music’s enduring importance for his work. In an oft-quoted New York Times interview in 1997, he told Jon Pareles:

Those old songs are my lexicon and my prayer book. All my beliefs come out of those old songs, literally, anything from “Let Me Rest on That Peaceful Mountain” to “Keep on the Sunny Side.” You can find all my philosophy in those old songs. I believe in a God of time and space, but if people ask me about that, my impulse is to point them back toward those songs. I believe in Hank Williams singing “I Saw the Light.” I’ve seen the light, too.

He reiterated the formative influence of folk music on his art in the brilliant 2015 MusiCares Person of the Year speech:

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. For three or four years all I listened to were folk standards. I went to sleep singing folk songs. I sang them everywhere, clubs, parties, bars, coffeehouses, fields, festivals. And I met other singers along the way who did the same thing and we just learned songs from each other.

Dylan paid his debts once again in his Nobel Lecture, crediting folk music with teaching him how to write and sing the songs that earned him the world’s top literary prize:

By listening to all the early folk artists and singing the songs yourself, you pick up the vernacular. You internalize it. You sing it in the ragtime blues, work songs, Georgia sea shanties, Appalachian ballads and cowboy songs. You hear all the finer points, and you learn the details. […] I had all the vernacular down. I knew the rhetoric. None of it went over my head—the devices, the techniques, the secrets, the mysteries—and I knew all the deserted roads that it traveled on, too. I could make it all connect and move with the current of the day. When I started writing my own songs, the folk lingo was the only vocabulary that I knew, and I used it.

He knew his song well before he started singing, and its lexicon came from folk music. Dylan’s fervent commitment to this art form, interpreted within a contemporary American context, mirrors Yeats’s likeminded allegiances to folk art in a specifically Irish context.

Yeats on Folk Art

Yeats articulates the timeless appeal of folklore, folk music, and folk art in general in his early book of essays The Celtic Twilight, first published in 1893 when Yeats was 28 years old. In a section called “By the Roadside,” he recounts an epiphany while listening to Irish folk songs on the Kiltartan road in County Galway:

The voices melted into the twilight, and were mixed into the trees, and when I thought of the words they too melted away, and were mixed with generations of men. Now it was a phrase, now it was an attitude of mind, an emotional form, that had carried my memory to older verses, or even to forgotten mythologies. I was carried so far that it was as though I came to one of the four rivers, and followed it under the wall of Paradise to the roots of the trees of knowledge and of life. (232)

Unsympathetic listeners may dismiss folk music as simplistic music played by unsophisticated people, but Dylan and Yeats find profound nobility in this art form. Remember that Dylan described folk music as a “mythical realm” populated with “vividly drawn archetypes of humanity” and imbued with deep “inner wisdom.” Yeats tunes into that same frequency. He asserts, “There is no song or story handed down among the cottages that has not words and thoughts to carry one as far, for though one can know but a little of their ascent, one knows that they ascend like medieval genealogies through unbroken dignities to the beginning of the world” (232). Yeats goes so far as to claim:

Folk art is, indeed, the oldest of the aristocracies of thought, and because it refuses what is passing and trivial, the merely clever and pretty, as certainly as the vulgar and insincere, and because it has gathered into itself the simplest and most unforgettable thoughts of the generations, it is the soil where all great art is rooted. (232-33)

That same year, in a piece called “The Message of the Folk-lorist” (1893), Yeats expanded upon his belief in folk art as the soil of all great literature: “Folk-lore is at once the Bible, the Thirty-nine Articles, and the Book of Common Prayer, and well-nigh all the great poets have lived by its light. Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, and even Dante, Goethe, and Keats were little more than folk-lorists, with musical tongues.” Notice how closely Yeats’s convictions resonate with Dylan’s creed of folk songs as “my prayer book.”

Yeats became the most outspoken and accomplished artist in the Celtic Revival, a cultural movement aimed at reviving native Irish myths, legends, and folklore. That project involved rescuing Irishness from the prevailing ridicule of English misrepresentation and Hibernophobic propaganda. “The Stolen Child” (1886) is an excellent example of Yeats’s revivalist poetry.

The poem is set amid the natural beauty of “Yeats Country” in rural County Sligo. You don’t need to have visited there in person to get a sense of the place’s enchanting power from Yeats’s lyrical description:

Where dips the rocky highland

Of Slewth Wood in the lake,

There lies a leafy island

Where flapping herons wake

The drowsy water rats;

There we’ve hid our faery vats,

Full of berries

And of reddest stolen cherries.

“The Stolen Child” is a poem about faeries. By the late 19^th century, faery folklore was generally disparaged as the quaint superstition of backwards people. But Yeats approaches this subject with nuance and complexity. The speaker is a faery addressing a mortal child:

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand

The faery depicts mortal life as one of hardship and toil. By contrast, life with the faeries is a paradise of boundless pleasure and a nonstop party:

Far off by farthest Rosses

We foot it all the night

Weaving olden dances

Mingling hands and mingling glances

Till the moon has taken flight.

The scene sounds similar to Yeats’s beatific trad night described in The Celtic Twilight. However, in the final verse, after the child is persuaded to go, the faery reveals all the things the lad will miss as a complete unknown with no direction home.

Away with us he’s going,

The solemn-eyed:

He’ll hear no more the lowing

Of the calves on the warm hillside; Or the kettle on the hob

Sing peace into his breast.

Yeats addresses a subject typically dismissed as silly, or else degraded through sentimental claptrap, and gives it the serious treatment it deserves. Instead of reproducing the caricatures typical of the period, he creates a complicated poem of seduction and abduction—not the emancipated child but the stolen child—along with a folkloric renunciation of modernity’s vale of tears.

In his groundbreaking book Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, Declan Kiberd studies the dialectical relationship between England and Ireland. For hundreds of years, the English and Irish have defined themselves in opposition to one another. According to Kiberd, “The modern English, seeing themselves as secular, progressive and rational, had deemed the neighbouring islanders to be superstitious, backward and irrational. The strategy for the revivalists thus became clear: for bad words substitute good, for superstitious use religious, for backward say traditional, for irrational suggest emotional” (32). Yeats participates in just such a recuperation project in “The Stolen Child.” Employing revisionist strategies, Yeats and his fellow revivalists were able, in Kiberd’s words, “to take many images which were rejected by English society, occupy them, reclaim them, and make them their own” (32).

Dylan as Voice of His Generation

By 1963, Bob Dylan was widely embraced by thousands of young Americans as the chief spokesperson for their generation. He wrote and passionately performed songs about the subjects that politically aware, socially engaged and progressively oriented Baby Boomers cared most about. In Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties, Elijah Wald draws the battle lines in terms of generational conflict:

Many young people felt their elders had let them down, regardless of political affiliation. The leaders of the USA and USSR looked very similar, a bunch of old men in suits arguing about how many megatons of nuclear warheads each would be allowed to build and how to maintain their balance of power. Simplistic as the generational framing might be, to a lot of young Americans the old leaders looked like their parents, and they were intensely aware that their parents were part of the problem, not the solution. (155)

Dylan gave voice to his generation’s amalgamation of rage, disappointment, frustration, and disgust at the world they were inheriting from their parents, combined with a tenacious hope for change and a determination not to remain silently idle in the face of perennial injustices.

Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary declared in 1963: “‘Bob Dylan is the most important songwriter in the country today. He has his finger on the pulse of America’s youth’” (qtd. Shelton 164). That same year, Joan Baez claimed that Dylan had elevated the agitprop genre of protest songs into a true art form:

The majority of those “protest” songs are stupid. They’re without beauty. By contrast, there are Bob Dylan’s songs. They’re powerful as poetry and they’re powerful as music. Most of the others are powerful as neither. Their writers are just trying desperately to say something, but they don’t know how to say it. But Bob is expressing what all these kids want to say. (Hentoff 42)

In Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the 1960s, Mike Marqusee sums up Dylan’s relationship with his generation this way: “However you measure Dylan’s subsequent achievements (and they are substantial), they do not enjoy the same umbilical relation to the turmoil of the times as the work of the sixties. This is a body of song tied to the unfolding political and cultural drama of its era in a way that the later work is not” (3).

Of course, we know how much Dylan grew to resent these unwanted labels and all the pressures and presumptions that came along with the honorific “voice of his generation.” In the film No Direction Home, he expresses bafflement at his anointment: “At a certain point people seemed to have a distorted, warped view of me for some reason. Those people were usually from outside the musical community. ‘The Spokesman of a Generation,’ ‘The Conscience of’ one thing or another. That I could not relate to. I just couldn’t relate to it.” He vents further disdain in Chronicles:

I had been anointed as the Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest, the Czar of Dissent, the Duke of Disobedience, Leader of the Freeloaders, Kaiser of Apostasy, Archbishop of Anarchy, the Big Cheese. What the hell are we talking about? Horrible titles any way you want to look at it. All code words for Outlaw. (120)

At the end of the day, it makes little difference that Dylan resents and rejects the burden placed on his shoulders (or wrapped around his neck). He didn’t apply for the job of “voice of his generation”: the Chosen One is chosen. Resistance is totally understandable, even to be expected, but it is also futile.

Yeats as Voice of His Generation

Yeats was also known as the “voice of his generation,” but his situation was significantly different. He actively sought the role of spokesman for the Irish cause, deliberately fashioning himself as a modern Irish bard at the head of a cultural vanguard.

Yeats was still in his twenties when he published the brief but rousing “Hopes and Fears for Irish Literature” (1892), a rallying cry to Irish writers to produce new literature rooted in their home culture. He frames his manifesto in terms of both national (Irish vs. English) and generational (young vs. old) oppositions. Referring to the disengaged and decadent poetry currently in vogue, Yeats reproaches,

It is not possible to call a literature produced in this way the literature of energy and youth. The age which has produced it is getting old and feeble, and sits in the chimney-corner carving all manner of curious and even beautiful things upon the staff that can no longer guide its steps. Here in Ireland we are living in a young age, full of hope and promise—a young age which has only just begun to make its literature. It was only yesterday that it cut from the green hillside the staff which is to help its steps upon the long road.

How many roads must an Irishman walk down before you call him a man? Young Yeats contends that the road forward is the same road that leads back to the glorious Irish past:

We have behind us in the past the most moving legends and a history full of lofty passions. If we can but take that history and those legends and turn them into dramas, poems, and stories full of the living soul of the present, and make them massive with conviction and profound with reverie, we may deliver that new great utterance for which the world is waiting.

The whole wide world is watching, insists this brash young self-appointed Irish bard. The key to making good on this promise, he counsels, is to “study all things Irish, until we know the peculiar glamour that belongs to this nation, and how to distinguish it from the glamour of other countries and other races. ‘Know thyself’ is a true advice for nations as well as for individuals.” However, in the spirit of honest self-knowledge, and in words that anticipate some of Yeats’s future clashes with his Irish audience, he also contends,

We must know and feel our national faults and limitations no less than our national virtues, and care for things Gaelic and Irish, not because we hold them better than things Saxon and English, but because they belong to us, and because our lives are to be spent among them, whether they be good or evil. Whether the power that lies latent in this nation is but the seed of some meagre shrub or the seed from which shall rise the vast and spreading tree is not for us to consider. It is our duty to care for that seed and tend it until it has grown to perfection after its kind.

Yeats emerged as the leading voice of the most consequential generation in modern Irish history. As Declan Kiberd puts it, “It was the grand destiny of Yeats’s generation to make Ireland once again interesting to the Irish, after centuries of enforced provincialism […]. No generation before or since lived with such conscious national intensity or left such an inspiring (and, in some ways, intimidating) legacy” (3). Yeats’s biographer Roy Foster observes, “His best-known poetry defines for many people the Irish identity which was forged in revolution. […] He came to fame as the poet of the new Ireland, asserting its identity; his own discovery of his voice is often neatly paralleled with his country’s discovery of independence” (xxviii). To appreciate what made Yeats the “voice of his generation,” let’s turn our attention to his most iconic early poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”

Composed in 1888 and first published in 1890, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” was Yeats’s first “hit” poem. I know I’m mixing genres here, but it really was massively popular, and he was asked to recite it at poetry readings for the rest of his career, much like musicians are expected to play to play the hits in concert (looking at you, Bob). It’s no accident that, late in life, when Yeats sat down for a 1932 recording of a few select poems, he began with “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” It’s like Dylan choosing “Blowin’ in the Wind” for his 2021 Ionic recording.

Yeats was reading Thoreau’s Walden around the time he wrote this poem, and you can see that ideal of simplicity and self-reliance transplanted to Irish soil:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

For much of his young adulthood, Yeats lived primarily in London. This was a common story among itinerant Irish workers of every trade, who found more job opportunities in the imperial capital than were available back home. Kiberd explains this phenomenon in a literary context:

Yeats followed Wilde and Shaw to London in the 1880s, the approved route for an Irishman on the make in England. Once there, however, he grew rapidly depressed at the ease with which London publishers could convert a professional Celt into a mere entertainer, and so he decided to return to Dublin and shift the centre of gravity of Irish culture back to the native capital. (3)

In his memoir Four Years, Yeats recalled his initial inspiration for “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” while strolling through London in 1888:

I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street, very homesick, I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, I began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem “Innisfree,” my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music. (44-45)

Yeats translates this experience lyrically into the stirring final verse of the poem:

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

We come to realize that the poet is not writing from bucolic Innisfree. He treads the grey urban pavements of an unnamed metropolis, a stranger in a strange land. In another respect, however, he is always in Innisfree because he carries it with him in his heart.

Stuck Inside of London with the Sligo Blues Again

His family’s familiar home turf was “Yeats Country” in Sligo, so the young man could have selected any number of places as his own private Walden Pond. But as a poet, Yeats was wise beyond his 23 years in choosing Innisfree. The name combines the Irish word for island with the English word for free.

Island + Free = Free Ireland

For hundreds of years, Irish rebels had resisted English rule in Ireland. These uprisings had all been swiftly and ruthlessly squashed by the empire. In the late 19^th century, the Irish Parliamentary Party led by Charles Stewart Parnell tried instead to secure some measure of independence through political means.

Just as he was on the brink of passing the Irish Home Rule Bill, however, Parnell was brought down in scandal over an extramarital affair. The so-called “uncrowned king of Ireland” lost his parliamentary support, religious leaders turned against him in disgrace, the home rule campaign collapsed, and Parnell was hounded out of office and into an early grave. Yeats’s generation’s disillusionment after the downfall of Parnell was comparable to Dylan’s generation’s disillusionment after the assassination of President Kennedy.

But whereas Dylan began to recede from political engagement after JFK’s death, Parnell’s death was the spur that prompted WBY to deepen his involvements in Ireland, albeit with cultural rather than political objectives. As Yeats’s pointed out at the beginning of his Nobel Lecture in 1923,

The modern literature of Ireland, and indeed all that stir of thought which prepared for the Anglo-Irish War, began when Parnell fell from power in 1891. A disillusioned and embittered Ireland turned away from parliamentary politics; an event was conceived and the race began, as I think, to be troubled by that event’s long gestation.

Having witnessed the catastrophic failures of both militant and political independence movements, young Irish artists and intellectuals focused their energies instead on a cultural revival. By restoring pride in a distinct Irish identity, and by renouncing denigrating influences from England, Yeats and his peers strategically planted the seedbed for future independence.

After many generations of subjugation, the Irish people needed to imagine their way back to freedom before they could ever realistically expect to achieve independence militarily or politically. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is Yeats’s most beloved manifestation of that vision. He imagines Free Ireland into existence through an act of artistic will power and sustains it in the deep heart’s core.

We can also hear him accepting personal responsibility for participating in the freedom struggle. There is a recurring phrase in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”—“I will arise and go now”—which is taken directly from the prodigal son parable (Luke 15:18). Yeats was young when he left home, but he recognized that the time had come to return to Ireland, body and soul.

Around the turn of the century, Yeats began to spend more time in Ireland, particularly after he co-founded The Abbey Theatre in Dublin and became its first artistic director. There he began working in earnest to transform the imaginary Free Ireland into reality. He and his generation eventually succeeded, but it wasn’t easy and the casualties were severe. When the dust settled, the free nation Yeats got wasn’t the one he expected or thought he was fighting for. But that’s another story which we’ll save for the next installment.

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Works Cited

Dylan, Bob. 2015 MusiCares Speech. Rpt. Christy Moore, https://www.christymoore.com/bob-dylans-musicares-acceptance-speech-well-worth-read/.

---. Chronicles, Volume One. Simon & Schuster, 2004.

---. Nobel Prize Lecture. Nobel Prize (5 June 2017), https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2016/dylan/lecture/.

Foster, R. F. W. B. Yeats, A Life: Vol. 1, The Apprentice Mage. Oxford University Press, 1997.

Hentoff, Nat. “A Talk with Joan Baez.” Hifi/Stereo Review (November 1963), 39-42, https://dc.library.northwestern.edu/items/5e100598-ece1-493c-96af-6cf535cfd900.

Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation. Harvard University Press, 1995.

Marqusee, Mike. Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the 1960s. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005.

No Direction Home. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Paramount Pictures, 2005.

Pareles, Jon. “A Wiser Voice Blowin’ in the Autumn Wind.” New York Times (28 September 1997). https://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/28/arts/pop-jazz-a-wiser-voice-blowin-in-the-autumn-wind.html. Accessed 26 May 2020.

Shelton, Robert. No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan. New York: Beech Tree Books, 1986.

Wald, Elijah. Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties. New York: Dey St., 2015.

Yeats, W. B. The Celtic Twilight (1893). A. H. Bullen, 1902.

---. Four Years (1921). Max Bollinger, 2019.

---. “Hopes and Fears for Irish Literature” (1892), https://studylib.net/doc/8603650/hopes-and-fears-for-irish-literature-1892-doc.

---. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (1888). The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. Simon & Schuster, 1983, 39.

---. “A Literary Causerie: The Message of the Folk-lorist” (1893), https://www.lyriktheorie.uni-wuppertal.de/texte/1893_yeats1.html#text.

---. “The Nobel Prize Lecture: The Irish Dramatic Movement” (15 December 1923). The Nobel Prize, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1923/yeats/lecture/.

---. “The Stolen Child” (1886). The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. Simon & Schuster, 1983, 18-19.

I’m excited to offer this deep-dive into Bowie, an artist I’ve loved for decades but have never written about until now. This piece makes no attempt to cover the entirety of his remarkably eclectic and innovative career. Instead I’ll focus on the recurring pattern of shadows in select examples from his musical, visual, and performative art. Several categories we considered previously in Dylan—shadows rivals, shadow selves, shadow art, the shadow of death—prove just as integral to Bowie’s work.

From early on, Bowie identified a shadow relationship with Dylan, at once a big-brother mentorship and a doppelganger competition. For most of Bowie’s career, their relationship was distinctly one-sided: Bowie admiring and emulating Dylan; Dylan ignoring Bowie. However, Bowie produced some stunning work in the final years of his life, and I think Dylan took notice.

After years of chasing their own shadows, independently and on parallel tracks, their work begins to intersect in subtle but significant ways, specifically in Bowie’s Lazarus (2015) and Blackstar (2016) and Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020). Shadows provide a shared language for addressing likeminded concerns: coming to terms with internal conflicts, confronting ghosts of the past, reconnecting with one’s audience, preparing for death, and contemplating what will be left behind. In these various entanglements, for once it is Dylan who seems to be chasing Bowie’s shadow rather than the other way around.

By the way, this piece ended up running quite long, and I thought about breaking it down into two parts. But then I reconsidered and decided to just put it all out there. It’s already written, so why tease you along? Move at your own pace and cut it into bite-sized portions of your choice. Or treat it like a double-album. If you’re more interested in recent Bowie & Dylan, feel free to skip down and listen to the second disc first. Dealer’s choice. As always, I trust Shadow Chasing readers to take what you need and leave the rest.

Buy Me a Coffee

Becoming Bowie

David Robert Jones fell to Earth (Brixton to be precise) on January 8, 1947. In one of those delicious synchronicities that the universe loves to serve up, Davy Jones shares the name Robert with Bobby Zimmerman, who also has a younger brother named David. Young Davy also felt a strong affinity for Elvis Presley, as they share the same January 8^th birthday.

Bobby Zimmerman changed his name to Bob Dylan in the early sixties, his first of many acts of self-reinvention. Davy Jones followed suit in the mid-sixties by becoming David Bowie, though in his case the motive was more practical, as there was already a famous English rocker named Davy Jones in The Monkees. Bowie looked like a modish Monkee at first, but what he wanted to become was something closer to Dylan.

In a 2003 interview with Mikel Jollett, Bowie said that his first attraction to New York City and its arts scene came from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan:

I’ve had a sentimental attachment to this city since I was, like, 17. It’s because around that time, I’d bought the second Bob Dylan album—the one where he’s walking down, I believe it’s Bleeker Street. And he’s got the girlfriend with him. And I thought, “This guy is so cool looking.” […] Then I played the album. I loved the music. And it was absolute dynamite. It was like this 60 year-old guy voice in this young kid. I thought, “This is the Beats. It’s everything that’s great about America in this one album.” (388)

When he began to achieve widespread recognition in the late sixties, the music press branded him “the next Dylan.” Other artists chafed under this yoke, but Bowie seems to have welcomed it. Referring to the 1969 album David Bowie (aka Space Oddity), Nicholas Pegg observes, “But without doubt the overriding influence is Bob Dylan, echoes of whose early work ring throughout the album’s environment of acoustic guitars, harmonica solos and folksy protest lyrics” (276). Bowie himself claimed at the time that “‘he sings like Dylan would have done if he’d been born in England’” (qtd. Pegg 277).

The shadow of Dylan, and a host of other shadows, are displayed prominently on Bowie’s great early album Hunky Dory (1971). The opening track, “Changes,” establishes the theme of the shadow self:

So I turned myself to face me

But I’ve never caught a glimpse

Of how the others must see the faker

I’m much too fast to take that test

The test is presumably one of authenticity: Are you being real? Are you being your true self? The postmodern singer cannot begin to understand what that could even mean. He’s in a constant state of flux, transforming from one character into another, no sooner adopting one mask than he gets bored, discards it, and tries on a different identity.

As philosopher Simon Critchley puts it in On Bowie, “Art’s filthy lesson is inauthenticity all the way down, a series of repetitions and reenactments: fakes that strip away the illusion of reality in which we live and confront us with the reality of illusion” (24). Others may see this as being fake, but not Bowie. For him, change is the essence of life and of art: “Ch-ch-changes / Turn and face the strange.” Don’t deny it or run away from it. Confront and embrace the shadow.

My favorite song on Hunky Dory is “Life on Mars?” Like young Dylan, Bowie appealed directly to outsiders and outcasts. In this song, disaffected youth is represented by a girl whose parents constantly criticize what they can’t understand.

It’s a god-awful small affair

To the girl with the mousy hair

But her mummy is yelling “No!”

And her daddy has told her to go

But her friend is nowhere to be seen

Now she walks through her sunken dream

Rejected by her family and abandoned by her friends, she retreats into the alternate reality of movies: “And she’s hooked to the silver screen.” But even the cinema is losing its magic for her: “But the film is a saddening bore / For she’s lived it ten times or more.” Where can I find sanctuary? Where can I feel truly at home? Where do I belong? These are essentially the same questions that Dorothy asks in “Over the Rainbow”:

Somewhere over the rainbow

Skies are blue

And the dreams that you dare to dream

Really do come true

This is the fantasy that sends Dorothy from Kansas to Oz and back again.

Somewhere over the rainbow

Bluebirds fly

Birds fly over the rainbow

Why, oh why can’t I?

This is the same plea for love and acceptance that leads the girl with the mousy hair to look up and ask, “Is there life on Mars?” Because there sure as hell isn’t life for her down on Earth.

In Part 1 of my series on Dylan’s shadows, I considered his use of movies in “New Danville Girl” to draw attention to the shadow play of failed relationships. A couple goes through the motions of love like actors playing a scene: “we’re busy talking back and forth to our shadows.” The artifice projected on screen mirrors the artifice enacted off screen and vice versa. Bowie adds a similar level of meta-commentary to “Life on Mars?” After depicting the lonely girl trying and failing to make a connection with the figures on the big screen, the singer pans out and bares the device, like pulling the curtain to expose the Wizard of Oz. It turns out that the girl in the mousy hair is also a character performing a scene. The singer reveals:

But the film is a saddening bore

Because I wrote it ten times or more

It’s about to be writ again

As I ask you to focus on…

The girl watches the movie, the singer watches the girl, and the listener watches them both: frames within frames, mirrors reflecting mirrors—Bowie’s shadow kingdom.

He extends this approach on the second side of Hunky Dory in “Andy Warhol.” Warhol’s films were notoriously transgressive, built upon improvisation and baring the device of traditional cinematic conventions. Bowie gives “Andy Warhol” the Warholian treatment, beginning with ad lib chatter and concluding with audience applause. In the chorus, the singer dissolves the barrier separating reality on and off screen: “Andy Warhol, silver screen / Can’t tell them apart at all.”

Bowie then gives Dylan the Dylanesque treatment in “Song for Bob Dylan.” He steals a page from “Song to Woody,” Dylan’s direct address to his mentor Woody Guthrie, penned to the tune of Guthrie’s own “1913 Massacre”:

Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song

’Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along

Seems sick an’ it’s hungry, it’s tired an’ it’s torn

It looks like it’s a-dyin’ an’ it’s hardly been born

Bowie also looks out upon a world gone wrong and he credits young Dylan with diagnosing its ills better than anyone. Tellingly, David Robert Jones addresses the song not to Dylan but to his inventor:

Ah, hear this, Robert Zimmerman

I wrote a song for you

About a strange young man called Dylan

With a voice like sand and glue

It takes a shadow to know a shadow. Bowie sets up a binary opposition between Zimmerman/Dylan, but he also implies some sort of pairing between Warhol/Dylan. It’s not just that the two songs appear back-to-back on the album. Bowie also invites comparison through similar vocabulary. The “sand and glue” description of Dylan’s voice echoes “Andy Warhol”: “He’ll think about paint and he’ll think about glue / What a jolly boring thing to do.” Later in “Song for Bob Dylan,” he refers to Dylan’s thoughts as paintings: “Then we lost your train of thought / The paintings are all your own.” In both songs, the paintings of Warhol and Dylan are destined to hang on the wall. In the former he sings, “Andy Warhol looks a scream / Hang him on my wall”; and in the latter he sings, “You gave your heart to every bedsit room / At least a picture on the wall.”

It may have appeared at first that Bowie was honoring his elders by writing these tribute songs. In retrospect, however, his agenda seems less magnanimous and more mercenary. By depicting both Warhol and Dylan as held together by glue and pinned to the wall, Bowie implies that they are museum pieces, interesting relics from the sixties who no longer possess their original vitality and relevance for the seventies.

In his 1976 interview with Robert Hilburn for Melody Maker, Bowie spoke about his ambitions at the time of Hunky Dory:

There was a feeling of optimism and enthusiasm in the album that reflected my thinking at the time. There’s even a song—”Song for Bob Dylan”—that laid out what I wanted to do in rock. It was at that period that I said, “okay [Dylan] if you don’t want to do it, I will.” I saw that leadership void. Even though the song isn’t one of the most important on the album, it represented for me what the album was all about. If there wasn’t someone who was going to use rock ’n’ roll, then I’d do it.

Bowie comes to bury Dylan, not to praise him. This knowledge helps us unpack the enigmatic chorus of “Song for Bob Dylan”:

Ah, here she comes, here she comes, here she comes again

The same old painted lady from the brow of the superbrain

She’ll scratch this world to pieces as she comes on like a friend

But a couple of songs from your old scrapbook could send her home again

Bowie sets up another opposition: Dylan vs. the Painted Lady. At first blush, the song seems to recruit Dylan as returning hero, begging him to reclaim his fallen mantle. Joan Baez would make a similar plea the following year in her song “To Bobby,” released on the appropriately titled album Come from the Shadows.

The idea is that Dylan needs to come out of retirement so he can lead his followers out of these dark times and back toward the light. Bowie represents the forces of rising darkness with the Painted Lady, a mongrel combination of the Whore of Babylon and the Queen Bitch of the album’s next song (where Bowie does his best Velvet Underground impression). Rather than depicting the Painted Lady as some squalid femme fatale, however, I think she represents the Jungian anima, an embodiment of dark but irrepressible energies gaining force in the counterculture. I would go further to suggest that Bowie sees himself as the Painted Lady, a gender-bending ch-ch-changeling who embodies the Zeitgeist of 1971 better than Dylan.

When Bowie sings “Oh, God, I could do better than that” in “Queen Bitch,” he is bragging that he could play a drag queen better than the cruisers he sees down on the street. He makes a similar wager with higher stakes in “Song for Bob Dylan,” auditioning for the vacated position of “voice of his generation”: “I could do better than [Dylan].” The shadow rivalry is on!

Bowie got his wish. On the combined strength of Hunky Dory and his phenomenal follow-up The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Bowie positioned himself at the cutting-edge of 1970s music. Dylan was never comfortable with the position of “voice of his generation,” but Bowie demanded it, wrapping it like feather boa around his neck and flaunting it on stage. As the title song proclaims, Ziggy Stardust was part Judeo-Christian savior and part Jungian archetypal shadow: “Making love to his ego / Ziggy sucked up into his mind / Like a leper messiah.”

Ziggy whipped his disciples into a frenzy, reaching across the footlights and speaking their pain, their hope, their desire for understanding and connection. He calls out to them in “Rock ‘’n’ Roll Suicide”:

Oh no, love, you’re not alone!

No matter what or who you’ve been

No matter when or where you’ve seen

All the knives seem to lacerate your brain

I’ve had my share, I’ll help you with the pain

You’re not alone!

Simon Critchley vividly captures Bowie’s exalted role for his fans in the seventies:

Bowie incarnated a world of unknown pleasures and sparkling intelligence. He offered an escape route from the suburban hellholes that we inhabited. Bowie spoke most eloquently to the disaffected, to those who didn’t feel right in their skin, the socially awkward, the alienated. He spoke to the weirdos, the freaks, the outsiders and drew us in to an extraordinary intimacy, reaching each of us individually, although we knew this was total fantasy. But make no mistake, this was a love story. (168)

Ziggy was a funhouse mirror reflecting his audience’s image back at them, magnified and distorted. He was their Shadow Man.

Never content to remain in one place or inhabit one identity for long, the Shadow Man kept reinventing himself throughout the decade. He killed off Ziggy and replaced him with Aladdin Sane (i.e., a lad insane), only to discard him in favor of the Thin White Duke. He relocated to Berlin with producer Brian Eno, where the pair reached their artistic zenith with a sonically adventurous trilogy of albums: Low (1977), “Heroes” (1977), and Lodger (1979). Bowie also memorably played the stranded space alien Thomas Jerome Newton in Nicolas Roeg’s film The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976).

It’s important to recognize that Bowie didn’t merely bewitch and bewilder his fans—he inspired them. In addition to offering empathy, he also modeled a way to survive through personal transformation. Critchley explains Bowie’s shape-changing appeal in terms that will resonate strongly with Dylan fans:

Just as Bowie seemingly reinvented himself without limits, he allowed us to believe that our own capacity for changes was limitless. Of course, there are limits—profound limits, mortal limits—in reshaping who we are. But somehow, in listening to his songs—even now—one hears an extraordinary hope that we are not alone and this place can be escaped, just for one day. (48-49)

Bowie vs. Bowie

By the beginning of the eighties, Bowie found himself in a similar conundrum as Dylan at the beginning of the seventies. Now what? Hunky Dory features Bowie shadow boxing with his rivals—Warhol, Dylan, Lou Reed—but his work from the eighties onward is increasingly animated by battles with his own shadow selves: Bowie vs. Bowie.

Take for instance Bowie’s first album of the decade, Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) (1980). The big hit was “Ashes to Ashes,” where he resurrected the character that first won him fame, Major Tom from “Space Oddity”:

Do you remember a guy that’s been

In such an early song?

I’ve heard a rumour from Ground Control

Oh, no, don’t say it’s true

Alas, it is true, and the old boy isn’t faring well:

Ashes to ashes, funk to funky

We know Major Tom’s a junkie

Strung out in heaven’s high

Hitting an all-time low

In his book-length study of the album, Silhouettes and Shadows: The Secret History of David Bowie’s Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), Adam Steiner argues, “Through his music, Bowie tried to reassert an inner identity, the man behind the music, sick with his own shadow, haunted by characters he had created that threatened to overpower him” (25). In his book Future Nostalgia: Performing David Bowie, Shelton Waldrep amplifies this interpretation, viewing Major Tom as a double for Bowie on multiple levels:

At one level the song’s lyrics are about his character, at another drug addiction, at still another a new character, a sci-fi Pierrot, who is lost in an inner if not an outer space. The multiple voices are echoed in the choric aspects of the song and in Bowie’s schizophrenic doubling of his own voice—he sings the lyrics and then repeats them, one step behind, in a resigned spoken voice as though he is a shadow of his own self. (91)

The shadow theme is prominently established on the cover of the album.

According to Matthew Lindsay, “the decadent glamour of [artistic designer Edward] Bell’s portrait was darkened by a shadow Bowie, cigarette in hand, from the [photographer Brian] Duffy photograph, occupying half the cover’s space.” Lindsay adds, “It was like a looming image from the German Expressionist movies Bowie loved, peopled with doppelgangers and fractured personalities . . . perfect for an album whose first English line was ‘silhouettes and shadows,’ striking a stylish pose while being full of decay.”

On the cover of Scary Monsters, as well as in the video for “Ashes to Ashes,” Bowie dresses as Pierrot, a figure he long identified with. As he told Jean Rook of the Daily Express in 1976, “I’m Pierrot. I’m Everyman. What I’m doing is theatre, and only theatre. […] What you see on stage isn’t sinister. It’s pure clown. I’m using myself as a canvas and trying to paint the truth of our time on it.” Pierrot has a long history within commedia dell’arte, but he has specific associations for Bowie. In 1967, Bowie played the narrator Cloud in a production of Pierrot in Turquoise, or The Looking Glass Murders, starring the mime artist Lindsay Kemp.

Brian Duffy photographed Bowie in a state of half-dress, taking off the costume, transitioning between character and actor, Pierrot and Bowie. The subject’s silhouette is projected against the wall, accentuating the doubleness of the gesture. As Adam Steiner colorfully describes it, “The shadow has broken from the past of his body, standing at an in-between space, sucking life from the pale light of his body, already grown stiff in legend” (192).

“Strung out in heaven’s high / Hitting an all-time low.” Strung out, okay. But was Bowie at an all-time low in the eighties? As with Dylan in the eighties, the answer depends very much upon what measuring stick one uses. With his next album Let’s Dance (1983) and the “Serious Moonlight” worldwide tour, Bowie was hitting all-time highs in album and ticket sales. As a teenager in the 1980s, this was my entry-point into Bowie, and I must say that I still love jamming to “Let’s Dance” and “Modern Love.”

However, dedicated Bowie fans generally regard Let’s Dance in much the same way that folk purists viewed Dylan going electric at Newport ’65: as a blatant sell-out, abandoning his artistic integrity in exchange for commercial success and celebrity status. Eighties Bowie was more popular than ever, but just going through the motions artistically—a shadow of his former self.

In hindsight, Bowie himself has come to judge this period rather harshly, as a lapse in his commitment to the duties of true art. Bowie was one of the featured artists in Michael Apted’s film Inspirations, a documentary including interviews with artists in various disciplines, as well as footage of them at work. In a telling excerpt, Bowie shares sage wisdom about maintaining artistic integrity, implicitly contrasting this advice with his work in the eighties.

I think it’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people’s expectations. I think they generally produce their worst work when they do that. And the other thing I would say is that if you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.

Bowie vs. Dylan

Now for some kiss & tell gossip—or diss & tell. According to Bowie, he first met Dylan in New York in 1975. In his Playboy interview the following year, he told Cameron Crowe: “We don’t have a lot to talk about. We’re not great friends. Actually, I think he hates me.”

After a gig they both attended, Bowie spoke with (or at) Dylan: “I was in a very, sort of . . . verbose frame of mind. And I just talked at him for hours and hours and hours, and whether I amused him or scared him or repulsed him, I really don’t know. I didn’t wait for any answers. I just went on and on about everything. And then I said good night. He never phoned me.” This must be the same encounter where Dylan allegedly told Bowie that he didn’t like “Young Americans,” though I’d prefer to think Dylan had better manners and better taste than that.

Each time Bowie recounted this story, it got worse. The subject came up again in his 1978 interview with Melody Maker, where he told Michael Watts:

I had a dreadful time with Bob Dylan. Absolutely ghastly. I talked at him for hours. I was fairly flipped out of my head, if I remember, and I just talked and talked. The funniest part about it was that I’d been talking about his music and what he should do and what he shouldn’t and what his music did and what it didn’t, and at the end of the conversation he turned to me and—I hope it was in jest, but I have a feeling it wasn’t—he said (falling into a banal American accent), “You wait till you hear my next album.” I thought, “Oh no, not from you, please! Not that, anything but that!” I don’t know whether I was in the correct state to appreciate him, but it was the first and last time I ever met him. (90)

Don’t meet your heroes. Or your shadows.

Ava Cherry confirms that Bowie received a chilly reception from other members of rock royalty. Biographer Dylan Jones includes this anecdote from Cherry:

I remember another time we were at this party with Bob Dylan, Ronnie, Wood, all these stars, and they were all being a bit frosty to David. We walked in and there was a very chilly atmosphere, like: Who is this glam-rock guy Bob Dylan said, “Who does this guy think he is?” And David said to me, “Who do I think I am?” They tried to make fun of him, and seemed like they were jealous of him. There were lots of people like that. (Jones 212)

Judging by the look of things, the rivals got along better when they met at The Whitney in 1985 for the release of Dylan’s Biograph box set.

Is Dylan asking Bowie to produce Knocked Out Loaded? Kidding. But you’ve probably heard the rumor that Dylan solicited Bowie to produce his 1983 album Infidels before eventually handing the reins over to Mark Knopfler. Maybe Dylan trusted Bowie’s musical instincts in the eighties better than his own. As further proof that Dylan dug Bowie’s sound more than he let on, consider all the musicians Dylan has poached for his band who previously played with Bowie, such as Mick Ronson, G. E. Smith, Charlie Sexton, and Matt Chamberlain.

As far as I know, Dylan has never covered a Bowie song in concert or on record. However, Bowie has remained remarkably loyal to Dylan’s songs. In The Complete Bowie, Nicholas Pegg tracks down seven covers over the years: “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Maggie’s Farm,” “She Belongs to Me,” and “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven.” The latter song accrued an extra layer of poignancy when it was released posthumously on January 8, 2021, on what would have been Bowie’s 74^th birthday.

For his part, Bowie seems to have accepted his love for Dylan’s songs without having to win the love of Dylan the man. By the nineties and into the 21^st century, he ceased viewing Dylan as competition. He addressed the issue in a 1990 interview for the Dutch program Countdown. The interviewer asked if Bowie felt he had competitors in the music business. “I feel that, frankly, over the last twenty years or so, I’m pretty much my own man.” He drew an analogy with Dylan: “I suppose it’s pretty cheeky to put myself in the same light, but if I look at Bob Dylan, he doesn’t have competition: he’s just Bob Dylan. Whether you like him or don’t like him, whether he does good stuff or bad stuff, he’s still Bob Dylan. And you don’t compare him to anyone. It’s not a competition.”

Bowie claimed the same privileged status: “I think I probably am in the same kind of position. I’m David Bowie. I’m either good, I’m a pile of shit. Or you know, I’m accessible, I’m not accessible. I’m obscure, very commercial. I change all the time, but I’m still me. No [laughs]. My answer is no. I don’t feel I’m in a competition.” Let’s follow Bowie’s example by moving past rivalry and toward affinity in the late shadow art of Dylan and Bowie.

Lazarus: The Hero’s Journey

Great minds think alike. Bowie approached the Irish playwright Enda Walsh to write the book for a play built around his songs. The work that emerged was called Lazarus, and it premiered in Dylan and Bowie’s adopted city of New York in December 2015. Meanwhile, Dylan’s representatives contacted the Irish playwright Conor McPherson and proposed that he write a play inspired by Dylan’s songs. The result was Girl from the North Country, which premiered in Bowie’s hometown of London in July 2017. I have written elsewhere about Girl from the North Country, so I’ll focus here on Lazarus.

In his preface to the published script, Enda Walsh recalled his first meeting with Bowie, who arrived with a four-page treatment:

David had written three new characters around Thomas Newton (the stranded alien, seemingly immortal and definitely stuck). There was a Girl who may or may not be real; a “mass murderer” called Valentine; and a character of a woman who thought she might be Emma Lazarus (the American poet whose poem “The New Colossus” is engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty)—a woman in this case who would help and fall in love with this most travelled of immigrants: Thomas Newton. (viii)

The killer Valentine is a character taken from Bowie’s sinister song “Valentine’s Day” on The Next Day (2013). The allusion to Emma Lazarus is surprising. When Bowie died of cancer less than a month after the musical’s premiere, everyone assumed that Lazarus referred to the man Jesus raised from the dead. That interpretation is legitimate, but true to form, Bowie embedded multiple identities within Lazarus. Who would have suspected Emma Lazarus as a source?

The main focus is on Thomas Newton, picking up the story where The Man Who Fell to Earth left off. If it has been a while since you saw the film, Girl gives us a concise distillation:

You were sent here from another planet and you never got back home to your family. You got real rich—started a bunch of companies. You tried to leave once before and these people did experiments on you and they hurt you really bad—turned you crazy—and you wouldn’t prove what you were to them—and they stopped you leaving. And you were in love with this woman called Mary-Lou. But she left years ago—and you’re still stuck here drinking gin and not being able to die or leave. That’s why your head’s sick. You’re heartbroken over all that stuff. (18)

In both the film and the musical, Newton is a stranded exile, numbing himself with gin and television, longing to return home.

Television offers one kind of alternate reality, but an even more important shadow kingdom in Lazarus takes the form of dreams. “I suspect that dreams are an integral part of existence, with far more use for us than we’ve made of them,” Bowie told Chris Roberts of Uncut in 2013. “I’m quite Jungian about that. The dream state is a strong, active, potent force in our lives.” Like Dylan, Bowie also drew deep inspiration from dreams. But he stresses to Roberts that dreams are not some escapist fantasy for him:

The fine line between the dream state and reality is at times, for me, quite grey. Combining the two, the place where the two worlds come together, has been important in some of the things I’ve written, yes. That other life, that doppelganger life, is actually a dark thing for me. I don’t find a sense of freedom in dreams; they’re not an escape mechanism. In there, I’m usually, “Oh, I gotta get outta this place!” The darker place.

Dreams are a place for confronting the shadow side of existence, which is precisely their function in Lazarus.

In Blackstar Theory: The Last Works of David Bowie, Leah Kardos argues, “There are clear indications in the script and staging of Lazarus that suggest what the audience is experiencing is a dream sequence. The show begins and ends with Newton lying in the same location on the floor with his eyes closed” (112). Playwright Walsh confirmed that we are meant to understand the stage as Newton’s internal dreamscape. He told Paul Trynka of Mojo that the set of Lazarus, a beige room with two windows, was “‘not an apartment; it’s a head, a mind’” (qtd. Kardos 113).

Interestingly, Dylan used a similar approach in his film Renaldo & Clara. As he confided to Allen Ginsberg:

The man on the floor at the end is the Dreamer. That’s neither Renaldo nor the Chorus nor the man on the stage—the stage is part of the Dream. A man who’s walking around seeming to be alive has dreamt nothing. But the man on the floor, who’s obviously dreaming, no one asks him anything—but the whole movie was his dream. (Ginsberg 526)

Bowie described his approach to dreams as “quite Jungian,” which is compatible with Dylan’s treatment of the shadow self in several songs, as discussed in Part 2 of this series. Leah Kardos offers a compelling Jungian interpretation of Lazarus. Take for instance the sadistic character Valentine. According to Kardos, “Valentine’s bitterness at his isolated and loveless existence has given him the twisted psychology of a mass shooter (the point of view portrayed in the lyrics to the song ‘Valentine’s Day’), an incel-terrorist soured by loneliness who becomes incensed when he is ignored and sees others enjoying what he believes he can never have” (119).

In another setting, Valentine might simply be regarded as a villain. However, set within the dreaming mind of Newton, it is more accurate to see him as Newton’s shadow self. Kardos argues, “Valentine’s villainy is clearly announced as archetypal within the context of the play, which raises the suggestion that other main characters might also be visionary figments from Newton’s fragmented psyche” (99). Describing the figure in Jungian terms, Kardos asserts, “The murderous Valentine is the shadow figure of the piece […]. He is everything that Newton’s conscious ego does not identify itself with: wildly emotive, decisive and vengeful” (118).

I find Kardos’s argument persuasive, and it makes me think differently about some of Dylan’s late works, too. I have frequently written about the stalkers and killers populating several Dylan songs from Time Out of Mind onward. I have focused primarily upon those “sickos disguised as Romeos” in relation to the murder ballad tradition. I still believe that’s true, insofar as the argument goes. But I now realize that, in a larger sense, Dylan is confronting the dark side in these songs—not necessarily his own dark side, but the archetypal shadow side of the culture, or the collective unconscious as Jung would have it.

Kardos also invokes Jung in her reading of Lazarus’s conclusion, which she sees as a revision or correction of both the novel and movie versions of The Man Who Fell to Earth. “The book and film leave Newton’s fate in stasis—damaged and rendered impotent by humanity, he cannot complete the ‘hero’s journey’ and return to his realm with the reward he set out to find” (117). Newton lies back down on the ground, probably suggesting his death.

In a different play, this might be a tragic ending. However, viewed through a Jungian lens, Kardos sees the conclusion as a psychological triumph:

Newton’s heroic ending is finally written and the quest is completed. Newton accomplishes his life-enhancing return by achieving union with the self, even if it is only momentary (just for one day). In triumphing over his bullying mind, he achieves what Jungian psychology refers to as individuation, a transformative process of self-actualization brought about by the integration of the disparate elements of the personality into an assimilated well-functioning whole. The moment of Newton’s death is also the moment of his departure back to the stars […], lifting the dead man up and out of his cage on Earth and on to the next place. (125)

As if to support this interpretation of Jungian self-actualization and completion of the hero’s quest, the final song of Lazarus is a stirring rendition of Bowie’s “Heroes.”

Blackstar: The Shadow of Death

In her poem “Lady Lazarus,” Sylvia Plath famously declares: “Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well.” Forty years before he died, David Bowie told Cameron Crowe: “I’ve decided that my death should be very precious. I’d like my death to be as interesting as my life has been and will be.” Mission accomplished.

On January 7, 2016, Bowie released a haunting video for “Lazarus,” a song that premiered on stage a month prior. On January 8^th—his 69^th birthday—he released his final album Blackstar. Two days later he died. The opening lines of “Lazarus” were instantly transformed into a posthumous oracle from the deceased artist:

Look up here, I’m in heaven

I’ve got scars that can’t be seen

I’ve got drama, can’t be stolen

Everybody knows me now

Look up here, man, I’m in danger

I’ve got nothing left to lose

But the song isn’t entirely morbid. The echo of The Wizard of Oz in “Life on Mars?” is even more pronounced in “Lazarus”: “Just like that bluebird / Now ain’t that just like me / Oh, I’ll be free.” Look up here, I’m over the rainbow.

The video was directed by Johan Renck. During preparations for the shoot, Bowie privately informed the director that he was dying. Renck later told biographer Dylan Jones,

I don’t think he told me only so I could figure out what to do on the practical level for the video, to find a replacement for him, I really think he told me because he wanted death to be a third collaborator in this video; he wanted death to be there as a presence in terms of formulating all the ideas and lying as a middle instigator for his thoughts as we went onwards. (Jones 478)

That’s the thing about both Lazarus and Blackstar: Bowie’s final act is so devastating—he’s dead!—and yet so beautiful—what an exit! As Simon Critchley so eloquently observed,

Despite its massive and obvious sadness, Bowie’s was the best of deaths. If there was ever the “good” death of a major cultural figure, a dignified death, then this was it. If a death can be a work of art, a statement completely consistent with an artist’s aesthetic, then this is what happened on January 10^th, 2016. Bowie turned death into art and art into death. He didn’t die a dumb rock-star death at the age of twenty-seven. Nor did he fade out in a fog of addiction, decay and disgrace, leaving his fans to shore together fragments of a ruined life. This was a noble death in the gift of privacy with all of his fans listening to his new album. (177-78)

There are many gifts hidden in Blackstar and left for us to delight over and debate. Consider the title, which technically isn’t a word but a symbol. On the album cover, designed by Jonathan Barnbrook, the black star is dissected at the bottom to approximate the name BOWIE:

In the title song, the singer repeatedly proclaims: “I’m a blackstar.” What does that mean? Choose your poison: it could refer to a cancerous lesion, or the Jungian shadow, or a theoretical alternative to a black hole, or the planet Saturn, or a day of execution from Peaky Blinders, or a line from Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, or an abandoned song by Elvis Presley. It could be any, all, or none of these things—such is the hermeneutics of Bowieology and the elusive/allusive nature of shadow art. Dylanologists can certainly relate.

Blackstar’s avant-garde jazz score sounds amazing. Bowie and producer Tony Visconti saved one of the boldest musical experiments of their long collaboration for the very end. Great athletes refer to “leaving it all on the field,” and that’s just how Blackstar feels. The final track is titled “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” but it feels like this is exactly what Bowie has done. Having given us everything, it’s time to go.

He settles his accounts before leaving. Kardos sums it up effectively in Blackstar Theory: “Long-running themes become enriched by complex intertextual details drawn to the surface of a body of ideas, artistry and myth some fifty years in the making. Archetypal characters—the outsized egos, vulnerable animas, tricksters, tyrants and shadows that lurk in the catalogue—are confronted. Karmic ledgers are balanced. The dead are taken for one last walk” (171). Now you can seal up the book and not write anymore.

Bowie’s Shadows in Rough and Rowdy Ways

The year after Bowie died, Michael Cunningham published a remarkable essay in GQ titled “Stage Oddity: The Story of David Bowie’s Secret Final Project.” Sometime before the collaboration with Walsh on Lazarus, Bowie approached Cunningham about writing the book for a musical. Some of the elements Bowie proposed were identical to those that eventually appeared in Lazarus. But Bowie pitched Cunningham one other stunning idea—get a load of this: “David reluctantly told me that he imagined the musical taking place in the future. The plot would revolve around a stockpile of unknown, unrecorded Bob Dylan songs, which had been discovered after Dylan died. David himself would write the hitherto-unknown songs.”

What?!

Cunningham took this wild suggestion in stride: “Who could write a convincing fake Dylan song? Well, okay, that would be David Bowie, if anyone, but who (including David Bowie) would want to? And how would the actual Bob Dylan feel about that?” Your reaction is way calmer than mine, Mr. Cunningham. This blows my mind! Maybe I was too quick to declare a ceasefire in the old shadow rivalry, since this proposal sounds like the Oedipus complex and the anxiety of influence all rolled into one. Bowie fantasizes about killing Dylan off so that he can write his songs for him!

Unfortunately, Bowie fell ill with heart trouble and the planned musical with Cunningham fell through. It’s a shame that Bowie never followed through on his imaginary collaboration with/as Dylan. But in a way Dylan might have returned the favor on Rough and Rowdy Ways. I’m not suggesting that Dylan was trying to write a Bowiesque batch of songs (though he does namecheck Bowie’s “All the Young Dudes” in the opening track “I Contain Multitudes”). But I am proposing that, on an album packed with allusions, an album that resurrects the dead and takes them on a stroll through the graveyard, one of the significant shades haunting RARW is Bowie.

I love Moonage Daydream, Brett Morgen’s 2022 film about Bowie. As a Dylan fan, I was especially struck by Bowie’s comments to Mick Rock in 1972 about the shadowy nature of rock gods:

The artist doesn’t exist. The artist is strictly a figment of the people’s imagination. Dylan is, Lennon is, I will be, Jagger is. All figments. They don’t exist. None of ’em exist. None of us exist. We’re in the Twilight Zone. We’re the original false prophets. We are the gods. We’re the new gods that were gonna—you know, we’re going to hell. We set ourselves up as such. We want it all. You know, we want all the adulation, for people to read the lyrics and just play the game. I feel that same emptiness they all feel when they get there. ’Cause they know that it’s not real. It has nothing to do with them.

Readers of Shadow Chasing will laser in on Bowie’s reference above to “false prophets.” Surely Dylan is aware of this pronouncement, where Bowie calls him out by name, but I doubt that he agrees entirely with the sentiment. As Dylan writes in Chronicles, “Legend, Icon, Enigma (Buddha in European Clothes was my favorite)—stuff like that, but that was all right. These titles were placid and harmless, threadbare, easy to get around with them. Prophet, Messiah, Savior—those are tough ones” (124). In his RARW song “False Prophet,” he repeatedly insists, “I ain’t no false prophet.” No, no, no, it ain’t me, Dave.

To be fair, Bowie ultimately seems to deconstruct the myth of rock deity. It’s an illusion, a figment—a shadow projected by worshippers to fill the god-shaped void in their lives. By 1972, Bowie’s Ziggy had ascended to the same pantheon as Dylan, Lennon, and Jagger, and from that vantage point he sees what they already knew: “It’s not real. It has nothing to do with them.”

Needless to say, neither Bowie nor Dylan invented the term “false prophet,” so it could simply be a coincidence that they both use this phrase. But I don’t think so. As many listeners have noted, Dylan conjures up Ricky Nelson in “False Prophet” with the line “Hello Mary Lou – Hello Miss Pearl / My fleet-footed guides from the underworld.” This is of course a reference to the 1961 hit “Hello Mary Lou” by Ricky Nelson. In a previous piece for this site, I explored Dylan’s admiration for and identification with Nelson, as reflected in both Chronicles (13-14) and The Philosophy of Modern Song (48-53).

Lazarus contains 22 songs by David Bowie. But there is one composition not by Bowie, and it is the very first song in the play. Here are the opening stage directions: “In the darkness a sudden cacophony of televisual sounds is heard. It lights NEWTON – he sits detached – staring into a screen – the television switching between channels – Ricky Nelson’s ‘Hello Mary Lou (Goodbye Heart)’ skips/repeats in broken pieces. The sounds mix, distort and escalate—until suddenly they snap into silence” (4). “Hello Mary Lou”! The song was also used in the film The Man Who Fell to Earth, referring to one of the main characters, Newton’s earthling girlfriend Mary-Lou.

Along with the conceptual callback to “false prophets” and the shared musical echo of “Hello Mary Lou,” I sense Bowie’s shadow behind the song’s promotional imagery, too. Remember that “False Prophet” was released as a single before the album came out. The cover art featured a spooky skeleton, and this figure was eventually adopted for the RARW Tour poster as well. Dylanologists quickly tracked down the source to a couple pulp fiction covers:

It’s a cool mash-up. “False Prophet” takes the skeleton from the “Death About Town” issue of The Shadow—of course it would be The Shadow!—reverses it, and replaces the smoking cigarette with a lethal needle (or is it a Covid shot?). Then the art designer removes the shadow of death in the form of a gunman and replaces it with the shadow of a hanged man from the cover of Black Mask. Clever. However, is it just my imagination, or do you also see resemblances to the cover photo from Bowie’s Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)?

I doubt that photographer Brian Duffy was intentionally posing Bowie’s Pierrot to mirror the skeleton in The Shadow, but the resemblance is uncanny just the same, right down to the dangling cigarette. As for the distinct shadow on Dylan’s cover, some observers are convinced that this is a veiled allusion to Donald Trump being hanged as a false prophet. To my mind, however, the floppy-haired silhouette might just as well gesture toward the self-professed false prophet David Bowie. Scary times call for Scary Monsters. I look at those cover images above and I think of the chorus from Bowie’s 2013 song “The Next Day”:

Here I am, not quite dying

My body left to rot in a hollow tree

Its branches throwing shadows on the gallows for me

And the next day, and the next, and another day

Bowie’s overarching emblem for death on his final album is the Black Star. On RARW, Dylan offers his own allegory for death in the Black Rider. There’s an unholy mixture of sex and death in Dylan’s “Black Rider.”

As you know, “riding” can refer to having sex, and the singer clearly views the Black Rider as a sexual rival: “Go home to your wife stop visiting mine.” The accusation is even more graphic in the final verse: “Black Rider Black Rider hold it right there / The size of your cock will get you nowhere.” On Blackstar, Bowie uses comparable language in “’Tis a Pity She Was a Whore”: “Black struck the kiss, he kept my cock.” The swordplay isn’t just verbal in these songs.

But what’s most interesting here is how Dylan and Bowie are both measuring themselves against the king—Elvis Presley. I’ve already written about Presley’s importance for Dylan, so I won’t repeat myself. Elvis was also one of Bowie’s heroes, and not just because they shared a birthday. The flamboyantly transgressive performances of Little Richard and Elvis Presley had a formative influence on Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust persona. When he replaced Ziggy with Aladdin Sane, he signaled his debt by painting Elvis’ “Taking Care of Business” thunderbolt logo across his face.

Bowie allegedly wrote “Golden Years” to be performed by Presley. Although that coveted cover never came to pass, you can hear Bowie lapsing into an Elvis impression at times in the song. Bowie’s penultimate album The Next Day contains the song “You Feel So Lonely You Could Die,” obviously an echo from Presley’s hit “Heartbreak Hotel.”

The song most relevant to Blackstar and Rough and Rowdy Ways was not a hit, however, but an obscure deep-cut. In 1960, Elvis starred in a forgettable Western movie called Flaming Star. The working title had been Black Star, and a theme song was written by Sid Wayne and Sherman Edwards and recorded by Elvis. Once the film changed names, the earlier track was shelved and replaced, but the outtake was eventually released in 1991. It’s pretty remarkable to listen to Presley’s “Black Star” in light of Bowie and Dylan’s subsequent appropriations.

Every man has a black star

A black star over his shoulder

And when a man sees his black star

He knows his time, his time has come

When I ride I feel that black star

That black star over my shoulder

So I ride in front of that black star

Never lookin’ around, never lookin’ around

Black star don’t shine on me, black star

Black star keep behind me, black star

There’s a lot of livin’ I gotta do

Give me time to make a few dreams come true

Black star

Elvis galloping across the Valley of the Shadow of Death with his Black Star in hot pursuit—what an image! It’s easy to see how “Black Star” would have spoken with fresh urgency to Bowie while he was dying of cancer. It also appears to serve as a prototype for the cowboy Grim Reaper in “Black Rider.” Elvis is the mutual source of inspiration here, but Bowie got there first. He chased down “Black Star,” then the Black Star chased him down. Dylan took it from there, saddling up the song for one more ride.

One of the most poignant shared elements of Blackstar and Rough and Rowdy Ways is the way Bowie and Dylan reach out to listeners. Both artists reinforce the ties that bind them to their respective audiences. This is especially moving in Bowie’s case, since he knew that death was imminent. Take for instance these piercing lines from the penultimate track “Dollar Days”:

Don’t believe for just one second

I’m forgetting you

I’m trying to

I’m dying to

There’s no way to listen to these words now without hearing them as Bowie’s direct message from beyond the grave. Listen to the final song, “I Cant Give Everything Away,” and it feels like Bowie is carving his own epitaph for mourners to read after his death:

Seeing more and feeling less

Saying no but meaning yes

This is all I ever meant

That’s the message that I sent

Simon Critchley fixes upon that affirmation, of saying no but meaning yes, in On Bowie:

At the core of Bowie’s music and his apparent negativity is a profound yearning for connection and, most of all, love. What was being negated by Bowie was all the nonsense, the falsity, the accrued social meanings, traditions and morass of identity that shackled us, especially in relation to gender and class. His songs revealed how fragile all these meanings were and gave us the capacity for reinvention. (171)

The heart of Bowie’s appeal was always that deep and loving connection with his audience. They were each other’s mirrors, each other’s shadows. You’re not alone!

Bowie orchestrates Blackstar as a farewell note and final love letter to his audience. Commenting specifically on “Dollar Days,” Critchley observes,

The phrase at the beginning of the song, ‘I’m dying to push their backs against the grain,’ resolves into the song’s final words ‘I’m dying to(o).’ The words seemed to undergo a shift in meaning as I listened to them. He too knew that he was dying and he was telling us: ‘I’m falling down.’ Bowie was also telling us that he wouldn’t forget us, his audience, his fans, those who had loved him. (180-81)

Dylan didn’t need Bowie to die in order to understand the importance of his own audience. But Blackstar does offer an inspiring example of an artist renewing his vows to his fans with dignity, grace, and emotional gravitas. I imagine the record on Dylan’s turntable during the pandemic, spinning straw into gold, death into life, a perfect final album, worthy of admiration and emulation.

Fortunately for us, Dylan didn’t follow Bowie’s lead by releasing a final masterpiece and then dying. Quite the contrary, Rough and Rowdy Ways gave him a new lease on life. His relentless commitment to touring proves just how much the vital connection with listeners means to him, and to us. Fans frequently describe the RARW Tour like a quasi-religious experience, as if the crowd is a congregation gathered to worship and to take the holy communion of Dylan’s live performances. The song that epitomizes this experience most powerfully on a nightly basis is “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You.”

It’s a song of commemoration for friends and comrades like Bowie who have passed on: “A lot of people gone, a lot of people I knew.” But when Dylan performs it live in front of an audience, there can be no doubt that he is addressing it to us, his adoring fans: “I knew you’d say yes – I’m saying it too / I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you.”

Bonus Track: “Shadow Man”

I’ve been saving one final Bowie song to end with: “Shadow Man.” Bowie was still preoccupied with shadow rivalries in late 1971 when he wrote and first recorded “Shadow Man” for the Ziggy Stardust sessions. There is an early demo version, as well as an alternative version which is includes echo and vocal distortions. The song did not make the cut for The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. However, Bowie kept returning to it. In 2000, he re-recorded it for the abandoned Toy album, and it was later released in 2002 as a B-side for Heathen. This version was re-released in 2022 as part of the posthumous Toy (Toy:Box), which also included a 2021 remix by Tony Visconti. The alternate Ziggy mix was released in 2024 on Rock ’n’ Roll Star! It feels appropriate that this song remained obscure for many years and yet persistently followed Bowie around like a shadow.

“Shadow Man” is Bowie’s most overt musical treatment of the shadow trope. The singer identifies “a guy who can’t be seen” as the Shadow Man. Though he goes by many names, they are all aliases for the shadow self:

You can call him Joe, you can call him Sam

You should call and see who answers

For he promises to come running, guided by the truth

For the Shadow Man is really you

You can call him Zimmy, or you can call him Ziggy. Or, in the words of Bowie’s song, “You can call him foe, you can call him friend.” What you cannot do is put off the confrontation with the shadow forever. “He’s waiting up ahead / Shadow Man.” Commenting on this song in 1989, Bowie was quite explicit about his intentions: “‘it’s a reference to one’s own shadow self’” (qtd. O’Leary, Rebel 211).

Within the world of Hunky Dory, that shadow encompasses doppelgangers like Warhol and Dylan. Within the world of Ziggy Stardust, the Shadow Man morphs into the Starman: “There’s a starman waiting in the sky / He’d like to come and meet us / But he thinks he’d blow our minds.” Later arrangements of the song are imbued with pathos. Since January 10, 2016, it’s impossible to hear “Shadow Man” without sensing the shadow of Bowie’s death. Tony Visconti’s 2021 haunting remix delivers all the pathos of a requiem mass:

The brash iconoclastic Bowie once rushed headlong into the future, the winds of change blowing strong at his back. “Run for the shadows in these golden years.” But eventually the Shadow Man beckoned him to make his final journey across the borderline. Bowie left Blackstar behind and then crossed over.

Dylan issued Rough and Rowdy Ways four years later like a man preparing to make that same journey. Thankfully, he still has promises to keep and miles to go before he sleeps. The Shadow Man will have to wait a while longer. Still, mortality inevitably awaits us all. The Black Rider bides his time, with steely eyes and infinite patience, watching the Black Star and listening for our approach, ready to usher each of us across the threshold into the hereafter. “He’s waiting up ahead / Shadow Man.”

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Works Cited

Bowie, David. Blackstar. Columbia, 2016.

---. Hunky Dory. RCA, 1971.

---. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. RCA, 1972.

---. Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps). RCA, 1980.

--- and Enda Walsh. Lazarus. Theatre Communications Group, 2016.

Countdown Interview with David Bowie, 1990,

.

Critchley, Simon. On Bowie. Serpents Tail, 2016.

Crowe, Cameron. Interview with David Bowie. Playboy (September 1976), http://www.theuncool.com/journalism/david-bowie-playboy-magazine/.

Cunningham, Michael. “Stage Oddity: The Story of David Bowie’s Secret Final Project.” GQ (9 January 2017), https://www.gq.com/story/david-bowie-musical.

Dylan, Bob. Chronicles, Volume One. Simon & Schuster, 2004.

---. Official Lyrics. The Official Bob Dylan Website.

https://www.bobdylan.com/.

---. The Philosophy of Modern Song. Simon & Schuster, 2022.

Ginsberg, Allen. Interview with Bob Dylan (September-November 1977). Rpt. in Every Mind Polluting Word: Assorted Bob Dylan Utterances. Ed. Artur Jarosinski. Don’t Ya Tell Henry, 2006, 524-33.

Hilburn, Robert. “Bowie: Now I’m a Businessman.” Melody Maker (28 February 1976), https://www.bowiegoldenyears.com/press/76-02-28-melody-maker.html.

Inspirations. Directed by Michael Apted. Argo/Clear Blue Sky, 1997.

Jollett, Mikel. “Such a Perfect Day.” Filter (July/August 2003). Rpt. Bowie on Bowie: Interviews and Encounters. Ed. Sean Egan. Chicago Review Press, 2015. 386-93.

Jones, Dylan. David Bowie: A Life. Crown, 2017.

Kardos, Leah. Blackstar Theory: The Last Works of David Bowie. Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.

Lindsay, Matthew. “Making David Bowie: Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps).” Classic Pop (10 April 2025), https://www.classicpopmag.com/features/classic-album/making-david-bowie-scary-monsters-and-super-creeps/.

Moonage Daydream. Directed by Brett Morgen. Universal Pictures, 2022.

O’Leary Chris. Ashes to Ashes: The Songs of David Bowie, 1976-2016. Repeater, 2018.

---. Rebel Rebel. Zero Books, 2015.

Pegg, Nicholas. The Complete David Bowie, 5^th edition. Reynolds & Hearn, 2009.

Plath, Sylvia. “Lady Lazarus.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49000/lady-lazarus.

Roberts, Chris. “‘I’m hungry for reality!’ – Part 4.” Uncut (8 January 2013), https://www.uncut.co.uk/features/david-bowie-i-m-hungry-for-reality-part-4-27210/.

Rook, Jean. “Waiting for Bowie.” Daily Express (5 May 1976), https://www.bowiegoldenyears.com/press/76-05-05-daily-express.html.

Steiner, Adam. Silhouettes and Shadows: The Secret History of David Bowie’s Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps). Backbeat, 2023.

Waldrep, Shelton. Future Nostalgia: Performing David Bowie. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.

Watts, Michael. “Confessions of an Elitist.” Melody Maker (18 February 1978). Rpt. in Bowie on Bowie: Interviews and Encounters. Ed. Sean Egan. Chicago Review Press, 2015. 77-101.

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Shadow Stalkers

An important link between Dylan’s rival shadows and the more dangerous subspecies of stalker shadows appears in the Oh Mercy song “What Was It You Wanted?” On one level, the singer seems to be questioning his lover to find out if she’s been cheating on him:

Was there somebody looking

When you gave me that kiss?

Someone there in the shadows

Someone that I might have missed?

It sounds like the singer’s understudy might be warming up in the wings, ready to supplant him as the current leading man. We’ve heard plenty of these worried men with worried minds in Dylan songs before. But “What Was It You Wanted?” works on other intriguing levels.

At times, the singer seems to be the one under investigation:

What was it you wanted?

I ain’t keepin’ score

Are you the same person

That was here before?

Is it something important?

Maybe not

What was it you wanted?

Tell me again I forgot

The singer sounds trapped under a spotlight, forced to account for his actions and shortcomings by some shadowy interrogator. This is the stuff of crime drama and film noir. Or it could be a doomsday reckoning for the singer’s soul, accounting for his past sins to determine where he’ll spend eternity. Either way, “What Was It You Wanted?” fits perfectly with the noir ambience of a “Roadhouse on the River Styx” (to quote Sean Latham) in Shadow Kingdom.

It’s pretty clear from Dylan’s comments in Chronicles that he had demanding critics and fans in mind for “What Was It You Wanted?”: “If you’ve ever been the object of curiosity, then you know what this song is about. It doesn’t need much explanation” (172). This song confronts the scavengers who feed off Dylan’s celebrity and pointedly asks them “What Was It You Wanted?” As he reflects in Chronicles, “They can obstruct you in a lot of ways. It’s pointless trying to resist them or deal with them by force. Sometimes you just have to bite your upper lip and put sunglasses on” (172).

Dylan isn’t embodying the shadow stalker in “What Was It You Wanted?” Rather, he is telling us what it feels like to be an object of obsession, feeding the insatiable appetites of the dark eyes and devouring shadows that have engulfed him for decades.

He might also have had his dark-eyed producer in mind. Dylan details his many clashes with producer Daniel Lanois during the recording sessions for Oh Mercy. The recurring question in “What Was It You Wanted?” could be in part directed toward the demanding maestro who kept prodding and pushing Dylan in creative directions he resisted. Tellingly, when he recounts his first meeting with Lanois, he describes his nemesis like a shadow stalker: “He was noir all the way—dark sombrero, black britches, high boots, slip-on gloves—all shadow and silhouette—dimmed out, a black prince from the black hills” (177). The more Dylan grappled with Lanois, the more his shadow imagery proliferated.

“Art is a disagreement,” as a wise philosopher once put it (POMS 35). We can argue about a lot of things in Dylan’s art, but there’s no debate about which of his records is the darkest: Time Out of Mind. There are more shadows lurking in this album than any other. Dylan contributes to the murder ballad tradition with several songs about creepy stalkers. Keep your eyes and ears fixed on the shadows: they work as effectively as a GPS tracker for following these predators down the moonlit pathways of pathos.

Dylan establishes the theme from the beginning with the opening song “Love Sick”:

I see lovers in the meadow

I see silhouettes in the window

I watch them ’til they’re gone

And they leave me hanging on

To a shadow

This is how it starts. Unrequited love leads to resentment, which leads to bitterness toward the jilted lover, which extends to anger toward others who enjoy the love deprived from the singer, which instills a hunger for revenge—and the hunt is on. “This kind of love . . . I’m so sick of it.”

This lovesick disease is apparently spread by shadows, for everywhere you find them, you will also see signs of the infection spreading. Even the beloved outtake “Mississippi” is not immune. In alternate take #3 from the TOOM sessions, the singer laments,

I’m standing in the shadows with an aching heart

I’m looking at the world tear itself apart

Minutes turned to hours, hours turned to days

I’m still loving you in a million ways

These shadow dwellers cling to love as if it is the cure for what ails them. However, this mutant strain of love proves to be the cause of their illness. We find the singer trying to fight off the disease in the album’s second song, “Dirt Road Blues”: “I’ve been looking at my shadow, I been watching the colors above / Looking at my shadow, watching the colors up above / Rolling through the rain and hail, looking for the sunny side of love.” Unfortunately, he’s not headed toward the sunny side of love: he’s plunging further into darkness.

Viewed from this vantage point, even the seemingly sweet “Make You Feel My Love” turns sour and toxic:

When the evening shadows and the stars appear

And there is no one there to dry your tears

I could hold you for a million years

To make you feel my love

In the demo version above, as well as the track that made it onto the album, Dylan sings “shatters” rather than “shadows”; but the official lyrics read “shadows” and that’s what he has consistently sung in concert ever since. By now, we know a shadow stalker when we hear one. It’s dark, they are alone, he has her in his grasp, and he will never let her go. Cause of death: love sickness. Source of infection: shadows.

Murder ballads typically involve both crime and punishment. In the aftermath of TOOM’s crime of passion, the singer remains tortured by his lost love. The fever still hasn’t broken. In the first installment of this series, I considered “Not Dark Yet” in the Christian context of the crucifixion. However, in the present context, it could just as well depict a condemned killer on death row, awaiting execution in solitary confinement. Well, solitary unless you count the shades that haunt him:

Shadows are fallin’ and I’ve been here all day

It’s too hot to sleep and time is runnin’ away

Feel like my soul has turned into steel

I still got the scars that the sun didn’t heal

There’s not even room enough to be anywhere

It’s not dark yet but it’s gettin’ there

Like any great work of art, “Not Dark Yet” is large enough to contain multitudes. It’s not a matter of choosing the correct interpretation: is it a song about Jesus, or a song about a killer? The song is expansive and complex enough to encompass multiple levels of meaning, even contradictory ones.

Out of all the stalker shadows from the TOOM sessions, the one I find most interesting is “Dreamin’ of You.” On one hand, this is another song about an obsessive singer chasing after the shadow of his lost lover:

Travel under any star

You’ll see me wherever you are

The shadowy past is awake and so vast

I’m sleeping in the palace of pain

I’ve been dreamin’ of you

That’s all I do

But it’s drivin’ me insane

It’s such a perfect expression of the love sickness theme—maybe too perfect—so of course Dylan suppressed it and left it off the album. When the song was eventually released on the phenomenal Tell Tale Signs (Bootleg Series Vol. 8), it was accompanied by this fascinating video starring Dylan’s pal Harry Dean Stanton.

Dylan returns to the stalker shadow motif established in “What Was It You Wanted?” and amplifies the creepiness. In the song “Dreamin’ of You,” Dylan assumes the perspective of the stalker. But in the video, Dylan shifts from predator to prey, shadowed from town to town by an obsessive fan. Anderson’s character is ostensibly a bootlegger, following Dylan on the road to surreptitiously record his concerts. However, there is something unmistakably menacing about the way he tracks his quarry. We sense this threat every time he glances down at the black & white picture of a woman, presumably his lost love. It invites troubling questions: What did he do to her? What is he capable of doing next to his latest obsession? Harry Dean Stanton comes across like a copycat of Mark David Chapman. This is what a Bob Dylan stan looks like.

The dark shadows from Time Out of Mind metastasized into “Moonlight” on Dylan’s next album “Love and Theft.” Musically, the song sounds like a moon/June/spoon torch ballad, but lyrically the singer’s fangs drip with blood:

Well I’m preaching peace and harmony

The blessings of tranquility

Yet I know when the time is right to strike

I take you ’cross the river dear

You’ve no need to linger here

I know the kinds of things you like

The clouds are turnin’ crimson

The leaves fall from the limbs an’

The branches cast their shadows over stone

Won’t you meet me out in the moonlight alone?

Beware Miss Lonely! You do not want to meet this Jack the Ripper out in the moonlight alone, or any of Dylan’s other stalker shadows for that matter.

Shadow Selves

Pioneering psychologist Carl Jung referred to the shadow as an integral part of the individual psyche and an archetype in the collective unconscious. In Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, Jung defines the shadow as “that hidden, repressed, for the most part inferior and guilt-laden personality whose ultimate ramifications reach back into the realm of our animal ancestors and so comprise the whole historical aspect of the unconscious” (266). This repressed component of the personality festers in the dark corners of the unconscious, where it threatens the wellbeing of the conscious self. As Jung put it in Psychology and Religion: West and East, “Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is” (76)

The dark side of the self is often depicted artistically in the form of a doppelganger. Otto Rank wrote a groundbreaking study of the subject called The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study [first published in German in 1914 as Der Doppelgänger]. Rank studies a wide variety of doubles in literature, film, and myth, and he distills down two main strands:

[1] pathological self-love as in Greek legend or in Oscar Wilde, the representative modern esthete; [2] or in the defensive form of the pathological fear of one’s self, often leading to paranoid insanity and appearing personified in the pursuing shadow, mirror-image, or double (85-86)

These two forms of the double lead down one of two paths: “So it happens that the double, who personifies narcissistic self-love, becomes an unequivocal rival in sexual love; or else, originally created as a wish-defense against a dreaded eternal destruction, he reappears in superstition as the messenger of death” (86). Even before pioneering psychologists like Jung and Rank gave us clinical terminology for these ideas, artists were already mapping out the shadow country.

Dylan was born on May 24, 1941, which makes him a Gemini, the zodiac sign for the twins. He regards doubles, twins, and shadows as part of his astrological birthright. As he told Neil Hickey of TV Guide in 1976, “My being a Gemini explains a lot, I think. […] It forces me to extremes. I’m never really balanced in the middle. I go from one side to the other without staying in either place very long. I’m happy, sad, up, down, in, out, up in the sky and down in the depths of the earth. I can’t tell you how Bob Dylan has lived his life. And it’s far from over” (520). Sounds like a tug-o’-war with his shadow self. Note that he even refers to “Bob Dylan” like a separate person, an alien alter-ego.

Dylan’s dueling doppelgangers assume many forms. Sometimes the battle is staged between sibling rivals, as in “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum,” or the allusion to Cain and Abel in “Every Grain of Sand.” If you’re willing to stretch the definition of brother vs. brother to cover the black vs. white chess metaphor of “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” we can trace the conflict all the way back to Byron De La Beckwith stalking and killing Medgar Evers:

But when the shadowy sun sets on the one

That fired the gun

He’ll see by his grave

On the stone that remains

His epitaph plain

Only a pawn in their game

The battlefield of doubles often lies within the singer’s psyche. Think of “Where Are You Tonight? (Journey through Dark Heat)”: “I fought with my twin, that enemy within / ’Til both of us fell by the way.” Or there’s the “shadowy world” of “Jokerman,” where the singer is “Keeping one step ahead of the persecutor within.” Infidels also contains the epitome of split-self rivalry, “I and I,” with the warning “No man sees my face and lives.” God to Moses, yes, but in the present context, the song also dramatizes the confrontation of shadow selves.

Occasionally, Dylan invokes shadow imagery to depict this struggle. Funny enough, one of the earliest examples takes a comic approach. I’m referring to “I Shall Be Free No. 10” from Another Side of Bob Dylan (even the album title suggests multiple personalities). Instead of the chess analogy used in “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” Dylan moves the competition to a boxing ring: “I was shadow boxing early in the day / I figured I was ready for Cassius Clay.”

It’s a ludicrous image—the lightweight singer duking it out with the heavyweight world champ—and Dylan plays it for laughs. But the shadow imagery is no accident. He offers a similar pairing in the first verse, only this time he depicts himself as the listener’s double:

I’m just average, common too

I’m just like him, the same as you

I’m everybody’s brother and son

I ain’t different than anyone

It ain’t no use a-talkin’ to me

It’s just the same as talkin’ to you

That isn’t the first instance where Dylan depicts a shadow relationship between artist and audience. Consider “Eternal Circle,” an outtake from The Times They Are A-Changin’.

I sang the song slowly as she stood in the shadows

She stepped to the light as my silver strings spun

She called with her eyes to the tune I’s a-playing

But the song it was long and I’d only begun

This song strikes me as a beatnik variation of the Narcissus & Echo myth. The silent woman is drawn to the singer like Echo to Narcissus; Dylan even adds an echo: “As the tune drifted out / She breathed hard through the echo.” But the narcissistic singer is too enamored with his own art to answer her love in time, leaving him stuck eternally singing to his own shadow.

It’s no wonder that Dylan was attracted to the song “We Three (My Echo, My Shadow, and Me).” In true shadow fashion, this song was a hit for two separate groups in 1940, The Ink Spots and Frank Sinatra with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. Both acts took “We Three” up to (of course) #3 on the Billboard charts. The lyrics express self-fragmentation in explicit terms: “We three, we’re not a crowd / We’re not even company / My echo, my shadow, and me.” The echo and shadow from this song may even foreshadow “Eternal Circle,” as when the singer croons, “We three, we’ll wait for you / Even ’til eternity / My echo, my shadow, and me.”

Dylan covered the song (of course) three times in concert in the 1980s. Interestingly, after the first performance above (Budokan, 1986), he immediately followed it with the split-self “I and I.”

One of his most interesting and multi-layered songs about shadow selves is “Tell Ol’ Bill,” composed in 2005 for the film North Country. In the second verse, the singer is alone, arguing with the shadow in his mind:

The tempest struggles in the air

And to myself alone I sing

It could sink me then and there

I can hear the echoes ring

I tried to find one smiling face

To drive the shadow from my head

I’m stranded in this nameless place

Lying restless in a heavy bed

Later in the song, however, he claims that he is not alone:

Tell ol’ Bill when he comes home

That anything is worth a try

Tell him that I’m not alone

And that the hour has come to do or die

Well, which is it? Answer: it’s both. The shadow self is simultaneously internal and external, latent and manifest. There’s a term for what Dylan is doing here, one weighted with mystical significance: transfiguration.

It’s a concept with specific Christian connotations. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all recount a fateful trip Jesus took to a mountaintop with the apostles Peter, James, and John. According to Matthew, Jesus “was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light. And behold, there appeared unto them Moses and Elias talking with him” (Matthew 17:1-3). This is regarded as one of the greatest Christian miracles, one that affirmed Jesus as the son of God, the messiah foretold by generations of prophets (represented by Elijah) and the fulfillment of divine law (signified by Moses). God sanctifies the transfiguration, appearing in the form of a cloud to deliver his blessing: “While he yet spake, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them: and behold a voice out of the cloud, which said, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him” (Matthew 17:5).

Dylan invokes the transfiguration of Jesus directly in the opening verse of “Tell Ol’ Bill”: “The heavens never seemed to near / All of my body glows with flame.” The singer adopts the perspective of Jesus, simultaneously singular and multiple, imbued by the holy spirits of Moses and Elijah and overshadowed by God.

That’s the Christian interpretation, but Dylan has more idiosyncratic notions about transfiguration, as he tried to explain to Mikal Gilmore in his 2012 Rolling Stone interview. Dylan came prepared to discuss this subject, bringing along a copy of Hell’s Angel: The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club, written by Barger with Keith Zimmerman and Kent Zimmerman as co-authors. He asks, “Do those names ring a bell? Do they look familiar? Do they? You wonder, ‘What’s that got to do with me?’ But they do look familiar, don’t they? And there’s two of them there. Aren’t there two? One’s not enough? Right?” Obviously, the Zimmermans share Bob’s original surname, and the fact that there are two of them taps into his long-running interests in twins, doubles, and rival siblings.

Dylan is most interested in talking about Bobby Zimmerman. He has Gilmore read a passage from the book about the death of a young man named Bobby Zimmerman in a motorcycle accident. Dylan relates very personally to this event: “You know what this is called? It’s called transfiguration.” He claims that he himself has been transfigured: “I’m not like you, am I? I’m not like him, either. I’m not like too many others. I’m only like another person who’s been transfigured.” Because of his transfiguration, the man that sits before Gilmore in 2012 is no longer the same man that the Rolling Stone journalist thought he was interviewing:

So when you ask some of your questions, you’re asking them to a person who’s long dead. You’re asking them to a person that doesn’t exist. But people make that mistake about me all the time. I’ve lived through a lot. […] Transfiguration is what allows you to crawl out from under the chaos and fly above it. That’s how I can still do what I do and write the songs I sing and just keep on moving.

Dylan’s understanding of transfiguration is rather puzzling and unconventional, but he seems to conflate the Christian miracle of transfiguration with ancient Western notions of metempsychosis [transmigration of souls] and Eastern beliefs in samsara [reincarnation], mixed together with psychological and astrological figures of doppelgangers and shadow selves.

“Tell Ol’ Bill” is a shadow song in yet another sense, transfiguring two main musical sources: “Tell Old Bill” and “I Never Loved but One.” “Tell Old Bill” was in the folk repertoire of several musicians Dylan admired, including Dave Van Ronk and Joni Mitchell. Dylan himself performed a sensitive cover for the Self Portrait sessions, later released on Another Self Portrait as “This Evening So Soon.” In this recording, Dylan tips his cap to folk singer Bob Gibson as his model:

Dylan’s arrangement of “Tell Ol’ Bill” evolved significantly in multiple studio takes. Reserve an hour of your time someday and listen to the studio sessions for “Tell Ol’ Bill,” which is one of the most fascinating chronicles of Dylan’s creative process you’ll ever hear. Through its many iterations, the rhythmic heart of the song continues to beat in time with The Carter Family’s captivating “I Never Loved but One.”

I look around but cannot trace

One welcome word or smiling face

In gazing crowds I am alone

Because I never loved but one

Dylan echoes: “I tried to find one smiling face / To drive the shadow from my head.” As “Tell Ol’ Bill” deftly shows, you’re never truly alone when shadows follow wherever you go. The Carter Family famously counseled listeners to “Keep on the Sunny Side” and to find “Sunshine in the Shadows.” However, in the songs we’re considering for this series, Dylan prefers instead to pitch his tent among the deepening shades.

Shadow Kingdoms

In these final two sections, I want to contextualize Dylan’s shadows within larger traditions of shadow art. An older meaning for the word “shadow” is “mirror reflection.” For example, consider this exchange from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:

CASSIUS: Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?

BRUTUS: No, Cassius; for the eye sees not itself

But by reflection, by some other things.

CASSIUS: ’Tis just

And it is very much lamented, Brutus,

That you have no such mirrors as will turn

Your hidden worthiness into your eye,

That you might see your shadow. (1.2.51-58)

When a group of traveling players passes through Elsinore in Hamlet, the dark prince reminds them of their basic job as performing artists: “…the purpose of playing whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold as ’twere the mirror up to Nature” (3.2.20-22).

But mirrors can also be used to distort what they reflect. In that regard, “shadows” are associated with fraudulence: fake imitations of reality. That is the sense of shadows at play in this tense encounter between the ascendant King Henry and the deposed King Richard in Shakespeare’s Richard II. Richard calls for a looking-glass with which to examine his misery. Surprised to discover that he still looks the same, despite his recent ruin, he shatters the lying mirror, breaking his reflection into shards: “For there it is, cracked in an hundred shivers. / Mark, silent King, the moral of this sport, / How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face.” Henry counters him with a clever play on words: “The shadow of your sorrow hath destroyed / The shadow of your face.” Richard finds harsh truth in this charge of false appearances:

Say that again!

The shadow of my sorrow? Ha, let’s see.

’Tis very true, my grief lies all within;

And these external manners of laments

Are merely shadows of the unseen grief

That swells with silence in the tortured soul. (4.1.289-98)

Along similar lines, the OED adds a further meaning of “shadow” as an actor or a play: “Applied rhetorically to a portrait, as contrasted with the original; also, to an actor or a play, in contrast with the reality represented.” The best example of this connotation is in Puck’s epilogue for A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

If we shadows have offended,

Think but this, and all is mended,

That you have but slumber’d here

While these visions did appear. (5.2.409-12)

Performers are depicted here as figments in a mirror reality, the dream world of shadow art.

The Bard of Hibbing frequently draws inspiration from the Bard of Avon. Don’t take my word for it: read the definitive book on the subject by Andrew Muir, The True Performing of It: Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare, and then check out Andy’s further thoughts on the subject at More True Performing. Like Shakespeare, Dylan frequently blends his shadows with dreams and playacting.

We shouldn’t be surprised to encounter shadows in “Series of Dreams,” a phantasmal outtake from Oh Mercy. In a verse that appears in the Tell Tale Signs version (but disappears from The Bootleg Series Vols. 1-3), the singer conjures these dream visions:

Thinkin’ of a series of dreams

Where the middle and the bottom drop out

And you’re walking out of the darkness

And into the shadows of doubt

Wasn’t goin’ to any great trouble

You believe in it’s whatever it seems

Nothin’ too heavy to burst the bubble

Just thinkin’ of a series of dreams

Dylan’s shadows sometimes speak a dream language in which Shakespeare feels like a Rosetta Stone. In another outtake, “Can’t Escape from You,” written in 2005 for a film that was never completed, the melancholy singer muses,

I cannot grasp the shadows

That gather near the door

Rain falls round my window

I wish I’d see you more

The path is ever winding

The stars they never age

The morning light is blinding

All the world’s a stage

You can’t miss the allusion to melancholy Jaques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It:

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players.

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts. (2.7.140-43)

Dylan and director Alma Har’el bring Jaques’s proverb to life (or death) in Shadow Kingdom. “One man in his time plays many parts” indeed. The transfigured older Dylan performs songs by his younger self, sometimes dressed in white and sometimes in black, sometimes illuminated by the spotlight and sometimes shrouded in shadows. “I can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs” brags Jaques, and Dylan can make the same boast in Shadow Kingdom. Dylan and Har’el construct an alternate reality from these old songs. The shadow king and his shadow blasters perform in an underworld dive-bar for languid shades.

Shadow Kingdom isn’t Dylan’s only dream world populated by shadows. “Changing of the Guards” feels like a Tarot deck come to life: heroes and witches, merchants and thieves, towers and stairs and the wheel of fortune. I don’t know Tarot well enough to decode all the symbolism. Dearbhla Egan may be right that Dylan was inspired more by the visual imagery of the deck than to any coherent archetypal narrative.

When Jonathan Cott asked about Tarot connections to songs on Street-Legal, Dylan dodged the question: “I’m not really too acquainted with that, you know.” Pressed further, he described those songs like figments from a dream: “we’re all dreaming, and these songs come close to getting inside that dream. It’s all a dream anyway” (Cott 671). Tarot becomes just another Rosetta Stone for translating dream imagery into another Dylanesque shadow kingdom.

Another late example is “Scarlet Town” from Tempest. Dylan looks into the mirror of the classic folk song “Barbara Allen” and leads us through the looking-glass. Both songs begin “In Scarlet Town where I was born,” and both feature sweet William on his deathbed. But then Dylan veers off into an alternate reality, populating his dream with a mashup of strange phantoms, from Little Boy Blue and Mistress Mary, to nameless beggars and drug-addicted prostitutes.

Along with riffing off “Barbara Allen,” the singer echoes Vern Gosdin’s “Set ’Em Up Joe,” which itself echoes Ernest Tubbs’s “Walking the Floor,” and even sneaks in a reference to Sam Cooke & The Soul Stirrers’ “Touch the Hem of His Garment.” If you follow Desolation Row to the end of the line, you’ll find yourself in Scarlet Town. You’ll also find yourself immersed again in Dylan’s shadow art:

Scarlet Town in the hot noon hours

There’s palm-leaf shadows and scattered flowers

Beggars crouching at the gate

Help comes but it comes too late

By marble slabs and in fields of stone

You make your humble wishes known

I touched the garment but the hem was torn

In Scarlet Town where I was born

This is one of the most striking songs from Tempest, but it really came into its own later in concert. Here is my favorite live version, from North Charleston in 2018:

With Dylan hiding out these days behind his piano, lamps, and hoodies, it’s refreshing to see him out in the open, strutting his stuff at center stage and accompanied by a fantastic NET band. This performance is good enough to earn him a pardon for dropping the verse about shadows.

Shadow Chasers

Let’s complete the circle by returning to where we started in Part 1. Dylan’s first shadow chaser is the ragged clown in “Mr. Tambourine Man”:

And if you hear vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme

To your tambourine in time

It’s just a ragged clown behind

I would pay it any mind

It’s just a shadow you’re seeing that he’s chasing

This is my favorite Dylan shadow. It’s a cipher that contains so many other connotations of shadows that we’ve been considering in this series. The clown follows the musician like a shadow. Maybe he’s simply amused by the tambourine man, or perhaps he is hypnotized by the music and obeys the siren call in a trance.

Since the singer depicts himself as following the charismatic musician, too, the ragged clown is often viewed as Dylan’s self-portrait embedded into the song. Mr. Tambourine Man can be viewed as a muse, guiding the singer out of the darkness and into the dawn of new artistic possibilities. But we must also acknowledge that, like the darker versions of the Pied Piper story, the musician might actually be leading the singer toward his death. For the fatal implications of the song, see my recent comparison of “Mr. Tambourine Man” with “House Carpenter.”

In fact, it’s not entirely clear that the clown is following the musician at all: “It’s just a shadow you’re seeing that he’s chasing.” Whose shadow—the musician’s or his own? We’re drifting into the territory of doppelgangers and shadow selves again, and maybe even the kind of stalking Dylan knows all too well from obsessive fans and critics.

Once I start thinking about Dylanology in terms of shadow chasing, I’m reminded of one of my all-time favorite novels, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. It’s a brilliant first-person examination of madness and a lacerating satire of the excesses of academia and literary scholarship. Nabokov parodies critics’ relentless fixation on their subjects, fluctuating between the ludicrous and the pathological, as an imaginary annotator stalks his chosen artist and tries to throttle all the meaning out of his work. There’s plenty of self-lampoon in this portrait, too, since Nabokov was both an artist and a critic. He knows his song well before he starts singing. He spent 14 years working on a translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, which stretched to four volumes, consisting mostly of Nabokov’s exhaustive annotations.

In Pale Fire, Nabokov invents a shadow-poet named John Shade, composes Shade’s epic poem “Pale Fire,” writes an elaborate commentary on the poem by the shadow-critic Charles Kinbote, and creates a fabulous fantasy in which the delusional critic believes he is Charles the Beloved, exiled King of Zembla [“a land of reflections, of ‘resemblers’” (265)]. Charles Kinbote is Nabokov’s King of Shadows. The author orchestrates the accidental murder of John Shade by a madman, whom Kinbote imagines as a hitman sent by the regicidal revolutionary group The Shadows.

To add one final looking-glass to this dizzying hall of metafictional mirrors, there are hints to suggest that the entirety of Pale Fire was composed not by Shade or Kinbote but by Vseslav Botkin, an eccentric Russian émigré and visiting professor in America—i.e., an avatar for Nabokov himself. Mirrors within mirrors, shadows of shadows.

As you can tell, I deeply identify with shadow chasers. Dylan is the tambourine man whose shadow I keep chasing, but sometimes I’m probably just chasing my own shadow, following figments of my imagination. So be it. Fortunately for me, there are enough likeminded shadow chasers out there to form a community.

In our defense, we’re following Dylan’s lead, since he has also been on a perpetual shadow chase for over sixty years as a performer. I don’t know what he’s trying to track down, and maybe he doesn’t either, but it’s certainly not that ragged clown. After the 1960s, he has routinely dropped the third verse of “Mr. Tambourine Man” in live performance. But that seems appropriate, doesn’t it? Dylan’s quintessential shadow chaser has been permanently relegated to dark oblivion. Ah well, no worries. There are still plenty of us walking in his footsteps and continuing the search.

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Works Cited

Cott, Jonathan. “The Rolling Stone Interview, Part 2.” Rolling Stone (16 November 1978). Rpt. in Every Mind Polluting Word: Assorted Bob Dylan Utterances. Ed. Artur Jarosinski. Don’t Ya Tell Henry, 2006, 668-78.

Dylan, Bob. Chronicles, Volume One. Simon & Schuster, 2004.

---. Official Lyrics. The Official Bob Dylan Website.

https://www.bobdylan.com/.

---. The Philosophy of Modern Song. Simon & Schuster, 2022.

Egan, Dearbhla. “Changing of the Guards and the Tarot.” Untold Dylan (25 July 2015), https://bob-dylan.org.uk/archives/1417.

Gilmore, Mikal. “Bob Dylan Unleashed.” Rolling Stone (27 September 2012). https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/bob-dylan-unleashed-189723/.

Hickey, Neil. Interview with Bob Dylan. TV Guide (11 September 1976). Every Mind Polluting Word: Assorted Bob Dylan Utterances. Ed. Artur Jarosinski. Don’t Ya Tell Henry, 2006, 520-23.

The Holy Bible. King James Version.

Jung, C. G. Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 2^nd edition. Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 9, Part II. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Eds. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler. Princeton University Press, 1968.

---. Psychology and Religion: West and East. Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 11. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Eds. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler. Princeton University Press, 2014.

Latham, Sean. “Roadhouse on the River Styx.” TU Institute for Bob Dylan Studies (20 July 2021), https://dylan.utulsa.edu/roadhouse-on-the-river-styx/.

Muir, Andrew. The True Performing of It: Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare, updated edition. Red Planet Books, 2020.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. Random House, 1962.

Rank, Otto. The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study. Trans. and ed. Harry Tucker, Jr. New American Library, 1971.

Shadow Kingdom: The Early Songs of Bob Dylan. Directed by Alma Har’el. Veeps, 2021.

Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. Arden Shakespeare Third Series. Ed. Juliet Dusinberre. Bloomsbury, 2006.

---. Hamlet. Second Quarto. Arden Shakespeare Third Series. Eds. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. Bloomsbury, 2006.

---. Julius Caesar. Arden Shakespeare Third Series. Ed. David Daniell. Bloomsbury, 1998.

---. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Arden Shakespeare. Ed. Harold Brooks. Methuen, 1979.

---. Richard II. Arden Shakespeare Third Series. Ed. Charles R. Forker. Thomson Learning, 2004.

This is from the original typescript for “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Laura knew I would love it because it shows Dylan working on the line echoed in the title of my Substack site. He initially typed, “It’s just a ragged clown behind / an if his eyes look blind dont worry none for he’s just chasing round his shadow.” He later scribbled in the phrase “it’s just a shadow that he’s chasing.” It’s cool to find Dylan chasing after the image while composing the song, tracking down just the right way to phrase it.

I don’t recall spending much time on choosing my title. I wanted a space outside of traditional academic publishing for developing my ideas about Dylan’s art, getting them out quickly, and receiving immediate feedback whenever I struck a chord with interested readers. The figure of a clown chasing shadows felt right immediately. A blind fool in stumbling pursuit, always a step behind and sometimes utterly lost, groping for shadows and trying to trace their outline before the musician darted off in another direction—ah yes, there it is. Shadow Chasing.

Laura planted a seed with that innocent little text. Come to think of it, there are a lot of interesting shadows in Dylan’s work, particularly in the past decade. There is his first album of American standards, Shadows in the Night (2015). Then there is the 2021 film Shadow Kingdom, later released as an album in 2023. I even came across this 2024 Dylan painting at the Halcyon Gallery called Shadow Mountain:

Although Dylan has become acutely besotted with shadows in recent years, you can find them lurking throughout his body of work. As I began researching this subject further, I found 40 original songs by Dylan that contain the word “shadow” or “shadows,” and that’s not even counting folk songs or live covers or synonyms like “shade.” Shadows appear in Dylan lyrics from every decade of his career, including some of his most enduring songs. There’s also a remarkable variety in the range of Dylan’s shadows over the years.

I know there’s something happening here, and I want to know what it is. This piece is the first in an anticipated three-part series. The first two installments will offer a taxonomy of Dylan’s shadows, subdividing his various uses of the trope into thematic classifications. The final piece will be a select case study, putting Dylan’s shadow art into conversation with that of another likeminded artist. In keeping with the topic, I’ll keep that other artist’s identity hidden in the shadows for now.

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Hidden in the Shadows

Let’s begin with the basics. Shadows are areas of darkness shielded from the light. That’s just simple optics, without any moral implications or value judgment. But humans are meaning-making creatures, and over the millennia we’ve attached deep significance to light and darkness and the interplay between them. As a songwriter, Dylan has been endlessly curious about light/dark imagery, and he has sucked the milk out of a thousand shadows.

Darkness is a hiding place. People who are lost, vulnerable, ostracized, and forgotten live in the shadows. Dylan uses this sense of the term most famously in “Chimes of Freedom”:

Far between sundown’s finish and midnight’s broken toll

We ducked inside the doorways, thunder crashing

As majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds

Seemin’ to be the chimes of freedom flashing

Throughout this anthem, the singer expresses solidarity with outlaws and outcasts relegated to the darkness. Many of these shadow dwellers are overlooked by society, while others are fleeing from the searching eyes and grasping hands of the law.

Dylan recognizes that the shadows can provide sanctuary for misfits and fugitives, but it can also provide cover for those chasing after them. For instance, consider this enigmatic example from “Gates of Eden”:

The lamppost stands with folded arms

Its iron claws attached

To curbs ’neath holes where babies wail

Though it shadows metal badge

All and all can only fall

With a crashing but meaningless blow

No sound ever comes from the Gates of Eden

In this verse the singer describes an urban hellscape, the fallen world east of Eden, where suffering families huddle in tenements, and police officers wait outside in the dark, polishing their badges and biding their time before they swarm.

In these examples, Dylan’s sympathies unmistakably lie with the pursued in their flight from the pursuer. As a place, the shadows represent a haven; but those who seek refuge there are also referred to sometimes as shadows. Other examples spring to mind. Think of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bleeker Street”: “I saw a shadow touch a shadow’s hand / On Bleeker Street.” Or Bruce Springsteen’s “Jungleland”: “And the kids ’round here look just like shadows / Always quiet, holding hands.” Compare those musical shadows with Dylan’s great Oh Mercy outtake “Dignity”:

Wise man looking in a blade of glass

Young man looking in the shadows that pass

Poor man looking through painted glass

For dignity

One of my favorite presentations at the 2025 Tulsa conference was delivered on the final day by Timo Zwarg. He approaches Dylan from a distinct perspective as a graduate student in Kennesaw State University’s School of Conflict Management, Peacebuilding and Development. After the conference, he kindly sent me a copy of his paper on “Minimal Gestures: Dignity as a Peacebuilding Imperative in Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy.” He argues that “a central, unifying theme of the album is the systematic absence of human dignity and the quiet, often fragile, responses that arise in its wake” (1). According to Zwarg, Dylan’s intervention takes the form of “minimal gestures: foundational acts of witnessing, remembrance, and acknowledgment. Ultimately, this reading suggests that Oh Mercy offers a sustained meditation on how, when larger systems fail, the essential work of holding ground begins with the simple, understated, yet imperative act of human recognition” (2-3). It’s a compelling and profound thesis.

This central theme is epitomized by the song “Dignity”—which, in Dylan’s signature move from the eighties, he perversely left off the album. I drew your attention to the image of the shadow, but now take a second look and pay attention to the verbs:

Wise man looking in a blade of glass

Young man looking in the shadows that pass

Poor man looking through painted glass

For dignity

On one hand, the emphasis on “looking” is portrayed as a futile act since the detective-singer never succeeds in finding the dignity he seeks. On the other hand, the minimal gesture of looking—of recognition and being seen—proves fundamentally important.

As Zwarg observes, “Within this bleak context, a typology of ‘minimal gestures’ emerges as the core of the album’s restorative potential: foundational acts of recognition” (36). He cites bell hooks on “love as political resistance” and applies it to Dylan’s approach to dignity violations. In the outtake “Dignity,” and in several other songs from Oh Mercy, Dylan models “the practice of recognizing and affirming human worth precisely where domination seeks to render people invisible or disposable. By documenting pervasive violations while simultaneously centering these small acts, Dylan suggests that when breakdown feels complete, the way forward begins with the irreducible act of one human being recognizing another” (38-39). Violations of dignity reduce people to shadows. But the minimal gesture of recognizing the shadow as such, and validating that person’s experience, marks a crucial step toward restoring lost dignity.

The Shadow of Death

If we survey the entirety of Dylan’s work from high atop Shadow Mountain, we see that he most frequently uses shadows to evoke death or doom. The earliest example I could find from a Dylan original is “Whatcha Gonna Do?,” a 1962 outtake from the Freewheelin’ sessions. The song opens:

Tell me what you’re gonna do

When the shadow comes under your door

Tell me what you’re gonna do

When the shadow comes under your door

Tell me what you’re gonna do

When the shadow comes under your door

O Lord, O Lord

What shall you do?

From the start of his career, young Dylan was a self-styled Old Testament prophet warning of a day of moral reckoning near at hand.

He also uses shadows to conjure the specter of unjust institutionalized violence, particularly capital punishment. For instance, in “Seven Curses,” a 1963 outtake from The Times They Are A-Changin’, a daughter sleeps with a corrupt magistrate in exchange for her father’s pardon. However, as the lecherous judge is enjoying his conquest, he reneges on the deal and orders the father’s hanging:

The gallows shadows shook the evening

In the night a hound dog bayed

In the night the grounds was groanin’

In the night the price was paid

The next mornin’ she had awoken

To find that the judge had never spoken

She saw the hangin’ branch a-bendin’

She saw her father’s body broken

Dylan’s phrasing is interesting. The shadow is invested with supernatural power, a force of evil capable of making the evening shake, the dogs bark, and the grounds groan. The shadow emanates from the gallows; but the evil emanates from the death-dealing judge who controls the gallows, his icy grip manipulating the levers of justice.

Dylan opens “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” with one of his most vivid uses of the trope:

Darkness at the break of noon

Shadows even the silver spoon

The handmade blade, the child’s balloon

Eclipses both the sun and moon

To understand you know too soon

There is no sense in trying

The eclipse that causes this shadow is taken from the crucifixion. According to the gospels, Jesus was regarded by Roman imperial officers as a threat to the state. They arrested him as a criminal, tortured him and condemned him to death, and publicly executed him on the cross as a warning against other rebels. According to Luke, as Jesus hung dying in the noonday sun, the sky suddenly went dark:

It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, for the sun stopped shining. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Jesus called out with a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” When he said this, he breathed his last. (Luke 23:44-46 NIV)

Dylan is highly critical of his own society in “It’s Alright, Ma,” skewering American consumerism, phony propaganda, political corruption, and moralizing piety. In the final verse, the singer wonders if he, too, might eventually be branded an enemy of the state and targeted for elimination: “If my thought-dreams could be seen / They’d probably put my head in a guillotine” The law and the gallows are always shadowing Dylan’s renegades and holy outlaws.

I hear echoes again of the crucifixion, as well as self-echoes of “It’s Alright, Ma,” in Dylan’s brooding masterpiece “Not Dark Yet.” Death hangs over the condemned singer from the very first word:

Shadows are fallin’ and I’ve been here all day

It’s too hot to sleep and time is runnin’ away

Feel like my soul has turned into steel

I still got the scars that the sun didn’t heal

There’s not even room enough to be anywhere

It’s not dark yet but it’s gettin’ there

In this context, it’s worth noting that “Not Dark Yet” was included on the soundtrack Songs Inspired by The Passion of the Christ. Since Time Out of Mind was released seven years before Mel Gibson’s The Passion of The Christ, there’s no way that the song was directly influenced by the film. However, Dylan’s decision to contribute this song to the soundtrack invites a connection to the crucifixion. It’s tantalizing to interpret “Not Dark Yet” as, in part, Dylan’s effort to shadow Jesus and identify with his plight during the final painful hours of his mortal life.

Time and again, Dylan’s invocation of shadows contains religious resonances. There’s no mistaking the Christian allusion in “When the Deal Goes Down”:

The midnight rain follows the train

We all wear the same thorny crown

Soul to soul our shadows roll

And I’ll be with you when the deal goes down

However, Sometimes the connotations are more sinister, as in “Unbelievable”: “You must be living in the shadow of some kind of evil star / It’s unbelievable it would get this far.”

The tone gets downright apocalyptic in “Rollin’ and Tumblin’”: “The night’s filled with shadows, the years are filled with early doom / I’ve been conjuring up all these long dead souls from their crumblin’ tombs.”

One thing that remains consistent is that, when the shadow of death comes for you, there is no avoiding or denying your fate. Dylan spells that out most clearly in “Tempest”:

The night was black with starlight

The seas were sharp and clear

Moving through the shadows

The promised hour was near

That said, Dylan’s characters do not always approach death with dread. The shadow of death is palpable throughout Rough and Rowdy Ways, but in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” the singer walks through the darkness toward the light with acceptance and grace:

Well the Fishtail Palms and the orchid trees

They can give you the bleeding heart disease

People tell me I ought to try a little tenderness

On Amelia Street, Bayview Park

Walking in the shadows after dark

Down under, way down in Key West

In this beatific hymn, Dylan comes closest to achieving the faith and peace of mind eloquently expressed by the psalmist David: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me” (Psalm 23:4 KJV). With the Lord as his shepherd, the singer in Key West seems bound for glory: “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever” (Psalm 23:6 KJV).

Sexy Shadows

Dylan’s shadows aren’t always spiritual—some are practically panting with carnal desire. Several songs trace silhouettes of lovers, foreshadowing sex rather than death. A nice bridge between these two species of shadows can be found in “Golden Loom,” an outtake from Desire:

First we wash our feet near the immortal shrine

And then our shadows meet and then we drink the wine

I see the hungry clouds up above your face

And then the tears roll down, what a bitter taste

And then you drift away on a summer’s day where the wildflowers bloom

With your golden loom

Those converging shadows never sounded sexier than in Maria Muldaur’s sultry cover:

For the most overtly sexual shadow in Dylan’s stable, saddle up for a ride on “New Pony.” The pony is named Lucifer, which I suppose implies a religious interpretation. That might work on the page. But I defy you to actually listen to the song and come away with any impression other than throbbing, sweating sexuality.

Well now it was early in the mornin’, I seen your shadow in the door

It was early in the mornin’, I seen your shadow in the door

Now I don’t have to ask nobody

I know what you come here for

That ain’t no Bible salesman scratchin’ at the door, and it ain’t no Grim Reaper, either. We know a booty call when we hear one. Unfortunately, you won’t hear it on Street-Legal, where Dylan omits this verse. But you can hear him sing it at this Paris soundcheck in 1978:

Dylan continued to pursue shadows of seduction into the eighties. On “Emotionally Yours” from Empire Burlesque, he sings,

Come baby, rock me, come baby lock me into the shadows of your heart

Come baby, teach me, come baby, reach me, let the music start

I could be dreamin’ but I keep believing you’re the one I’m livin’ for

And I will always be emotionally yours

It’s also worth pointing out that Dylan was drawn to shadows in the songs of other artists he admired. In a 2009 interview, Bill Flanagan asked him about the songwriters he admired most. When asked his favorite Gordon Lightfoot songs, the first he named was “Shadows”:

Let it go

Let it happen like it happened once before

It’s a wicked wind and it chills me to the bone

And if you do not believe me

Come and gaze upon the shadow at your door

In 2012, Dylan played a lovely cover of “Shadows” at his concert in Edmonton. When Flanagan asked about John Prine, Dylan said his favorite song was “Lake Marie.” You may recall the memorable crime scene from that song:

In the parking lot by the forest preserve

The police had found two bodies

Nay, naked bodies

Their faces had been horribly disfigured by some sharp object

Saw it on the news

On the TV news

In a black and white video

You know what blood looks like in a black and white video?

Shadows

Shadows!

Prine’s lyrical strategy, intercutting news footage of a double homicide with the death of a marriage, reminds us that sex and death are not necessarily mutually exclusive topics. We’ll see that dynamic on stark display in Part 2 of this series. But before Dylan began writing about shadow stalkers, he explored the theme of rival shadows.

Rival Shadows

An early example of rival shadows appears in the “Billy” songs from the Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid soundtrack. In “Billy 4” he cautions,

Laying around with some sweet señorita

Into her dark chamber she will greet ya

In the shadows of the mesa she will lead ya

Billy and you’re going all alone

Stretching out on some sweet señorita’s big brass bed sounds sexy enough. But when the tryst is followed by a trip to a shadowy mesa, it sounds like Billy’s lover is leading him into an ambush and a date with death.

Sex is rarely simple in Dylan’s songs. He has a playwright’s instincts for dramatic conflict. Hooking up with a new lover often involves stealing her from someone else, or looking over your shoulder for a rival lover sneaking up from behind. There’s an excellent example of this dynamic in one of Dylan’s greatest songs, “Caribbean Wind.” I’ve never heard a bad version of the song, and Dylan apparently never heard a good version—at least not one good enough to release on a studio album. The first and only live performance came at San Francisco’s Warfield Theatre on November 12, 1980 (mislabeled 1979 on Trouble No More). “Caribbean Wind” features one of the best love triangles in all of Dylan:

Shadows grew closer as we touched on the floor

Prodigal son sitting next to the door

Preaching resistance, waitin’ for the night to arrive

He was well connected but his heart was a snare

And she had left him to die in there

But I knew he could get out while he still was alive

Dylan describes the lovers’ shadows drawing closer to signal that the couple is having sex on the floor. But the shadow of the singer’s rival also hovers over the scene. This “prodigal son” sounds like a revolutionary who was betrayed and abandoned by his lover, left to rot in a jail cell. But as long as the woman’s ex remains alive, he poses a threat to return and reclaim his lost love. The sun is sinking low (thus the shadows on the floor), but when the night comes falling from the sky, the rival shadow is poised to pounce.

Sometimes a third party isn’t necessary to sabotage a relationship. Another fascinating use of shadows, where lovers come across more like rivals, can be found in “New Danville Girl,” an outtake co-written with Sam Shepard and recorded during the Empire Burlesque sessions. “New Danville Girl” departs so radically from “Brownsville Girl” that it is essentially a different song. In one variant lyric, Dylan sings,

You know it’s funny how people just want to believe what’s convenient

Nothing happens on purpose, it’s an accident if it happens at all

And everything that’s happenin’ to us seems like it’s happenin’ without our consent

But we’re busy talking back and forth to our shadows on an old stone wall

Oh you got to talk to me now baby, tell me about the man that you used to love

And tell me about your dreams just before the time you passed out

Tell me about the time that our engine broke down and it was the worst of times

Tell me about all the things I couldn’t do nothin’ about

I quote this passage at length because a) it’s amazing, and b) it provides relevant context for understanding the shadow imagery. This couple doesn’t really communicate anymore: they talk to each other’s shadows. They recite lines of dialogue as if they’ve memorized a script. Essentially, they are no different than actors in a movie scene, which is why the film references works so effectively in this song. It’s all an elaborate form of self-imitation, of shadow theater, as the singer spells out in the final verse when he projects himself into the film:

There was a movie I seen one time and I think I sat through it twice

I don’t remember who I was or what part I played

All I remember about it was that it was starring Gregory Peck

But that was a long time ago

And it was made in the shade

Perfect! Made in the shade (darkness), made out of shades (mirror images), and made for shades (ghosts), in this case the ghosts of a dead love.

The ghosts of dead love continue to haunt Dylan’s late shadow songs. We find another one throwing shade in “This Dream of You” from Together Through Life:

I look away but I keep seeing it

I don’t want to believe but I keep believing it

Shadows dance upon the wall

Shadows that seem to know it all

Those shadows could come from a rival creeping into his lover’s room when he’s not around, or they could be paranoid figments of his imagination. Ultimately the result is the same. The singer is jealous and suspicious that his love cannot be trusted, that it has all been a dream.

My favorite treatment of this morose mindset on Together Through Life comes in the song “Forgetful Heart.” Dylan must be fond of this one, too, since he has recently revived it for his Outlaw Music Festival setlists. Check out this brazen video shot at the Cincinnati concert on June 22, 2025. There is a brief video glitch near the end, and, wouldn’t you know it, the line that gets dropped is the one about the shadow. Maybe the shadow was covering his tracks. The perspective is so intrusively close that you could just about convince yourself that we’re witnessing Dylan being stalked by his own shadow:

Here’s the full final verse:

Forgetful heart

Like a walking shadow in my brain

All night long

I lay awake and listen to the sound of pain

The door has closed forevermore

If indeed there ever was a door

If you’re a Shakespeare fan, you can’t miss the echo of Macbeth’s morbid soliloquy:

Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing. (5.5.23-28)

Note that the stage where the shadow struts and frets in “Forgetful Heart” is the singer’s brain. His perceived rival has moved from a silhouette on the wall to a shade inside his skull. There’s no cure for that, and no escape. He recognizes as much in the final line: there is no exit door from his self-imposed prison of shadows.

I’ve touched upon 20 different Dylan songs in Part 1, and I still haven’t gotten to many of the best examples. In Part 2 I’ll keep compiling this taxonomy of Dylan’s shadows with sections on stalker shadows, shadow selves, shadow art, and my favorite Dylan shadow of them all (I bet you’ve already guessed it). Then hang around for Part 3, where I’ll reveal the identity of Dylan’s secret sharer and we can watch them chase each other’s shadows.

Buy Me a Coffee

Works Cited

Dylan, Bob. Official Lyrics. The Official Bob Dylan Website.

https://www.bobdylan.com/.

Flanagan, Bill. Interview with Bob Dylan (2009). Notes from various mornings and nights (8 February 2024),

Notes from various mornings and nights

Interview with Bob Dylan — Bill Flanagan

(This interview was originally posted on the official Bob Dylan website about a month before the album Together Through Life was released, but it doesn’t seem to be there anymore…

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2 years ago · 19 likes · 1 comment · nightly_moth

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The Holy Bible. King James Version.

The Holy Bible. New International Version.

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Arden Shakespeare, 10^th edition. Ed. Kenneth Muir. Methuen, 1971.

Zwarg, Timo A. “Minimal Gestures: Dignity as a Peacebuilding Imperative in Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy.” Conference Paper. World of Bob Dylan Conference. Tulsa, 2025.

I’ll be moderating a panel on the 50^th anniversary of Blood on the Tracks. I’m honored to be joined by the Queen of Dylan podcasters, Laura Tenschert, and the King of Dylan Substackers, Ray Padgett. My paper is about Norman Raeben’s influence on Dylan. This is an updated version of the piece posted here several months ago. Today I want to take you down an adjacent rabbit hole I discovered during my research. None of this will be included in my Tulsa presentation. “The Mysterious Bert Cartwright” is an exclusive bonus for Shadow Chasing readers.

Anyone studying the Dylan-Raeben connection is indebted to the research of Bert Cartwright. He published an article in the Spring 1987 issue of John Bauldie’s fanzine The Telegraph titled “Dylan’s Mysterious Man Called Norman Raeben.” In 1990, Bauldie reprinted it as a chapter in his collection Wanted Man: In Search of Bob Dylan, truncating the title to “The Mysterious Norman Raeben.” Pretty much everything written on the subject since then, including my own modest efforts, have been footnotes to Cartwright’s groundbreaking work.

While working on my earlier Shadow Chasing piece about Raeben, I stumbled across a database entry on the Colbert Cartwright Collection of Bob Dylan Recordings and Research Files at Bowling Green State University, located a few hours north of Cincinnati. I recently struck up a correspondence with Angela Pratesi, Head Librarian at BGSU’s Music Library. She kindly granted me access to Cartwright’s research files for “The Mysterious Norman Raeben,” and she has given me permission to share some of the documents housed there.

The more I looked through Cartwright’s files, the more interested I became in the researcher himself. It turns out that he was much more than a first wave Dylanologist. I first learned about his fascinating backstory from Michael Gray in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, and I uncovered even more while working on this piece. Before we peek behind the veil of “The Mysterious Norman Raeben,” let’s first learn some more about the mysterious Bert Cartwright.

Buy Me a Coffee

Reverend Cartwright: Civil Rights Advocate

Colbert Scott Cartwright was born in 1924 in Coffeyville, Kansas. He was the son of Rev. Lin Cartwright, pastor of the First Christian Church. The elder Cartwright was deeply opposed to racism and policies of racial discrimination in Kansas, where he had several clashes with the local Ku Klux Klan. He moved the family to Chattanooga, Tennessee, in the thirties and headed up the city’s interracial council. The family then relocated to St. Louis, Missouri, where young Bert earned a bachelor of arts degree from Washington University in 1946.

Wishing to follow his father into the ministry, Cartwright enrolled in Yale Divinity School, where he earned a bachelor of divinity degree in 1948 and master of sacred theology degree in 1950.

During his long and distinguished career, he served as pastor in Lynchburg, Virginia (1950-53); Little Rock, Arkansas (1954-64); Youngstown, Ohio (1964-70); Fort Worth, Texas (1971-79); and the Trinity-Brazos area of the Southwest (1979-89). He wrote multiple books about the history, practices, and faith of his denomination the Disciples of Christ. He received an honorary doctorate of divinity from Texas Christian University in 1976. Cartwright retired from preaching in 1989 and died in 1996. The following year, he was posthumously honored with the Christian Board of Publication’s Chalice Lifetime Achievement Award.

Principled confrontation with institutional racism was a family tradition among the Cartwrights. During his first post in Lynchburg, Bert Cartwright was elected chair of an interracial Christian youth group, landing him in hot water with segregationists in the area. Later in his career, he led the Youngstown Human Relations Committee, where he fought against racial discrimination in local housing. His most active involvement in the civil rights movement came during the fifties as pastor of Pulaski Heights Christian Church in Little Rock.

With its 1954 landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racially segregated schools were unconstitutional and ordered the desegregation of American schools “with all deliberate speed.” Many political and educational leaders in the South resisted this court order. Black students attempting to enroll in previously all-white schools became targets of virulent abuse by segregationists opposed to mixing the races.

One of the most notorious flashpoints occurred on September 4, 1957, when nine Black students tried to attend their first day of classes at Central High School in Little Rock. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus called out the state’s National Guard to try and prevent desegregation of the school, prompting President Eisenhower to deploy federal troops to enforce the rule of law. An angry white mob surrounded the school to protest the admission of the so-called “Little Rock Nine.” An iconic photo of Elizabeth Eckford being showered with hatred just for trying to go to school became emblematic of Southern racism during the Jim Crow era:

The night before this showdown at Central High, Daisy Bates, head of the Arkansas NAACP, reached out for help from Dunbar Ogden, president of the Little Rock Interracial Ministerial Alliance. According to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, Bates asked Ogden “to gather a group of white ministers who would accompany the Little Rock Nine as they sought to enter the school. Ogden agreed to try, but after calling about a dozen of those he thought most likely to join, only one, Colbert Cartwright, agreed to go.”

The following Sunday, the normally soft-spoken pastor delivered a fiery sermon from the pulpit of Pulaski Heights Christian Church, praising the Christian courage of the students and deploring the wicked bigotry of the white mob. In a profile for the Arkansas Times called “A Reluctant Hero,” Roy Reed writes,

Bert Cartwright’s sermon the next Sunday was a stark description of Eckford’s trial as he watched it unfold in front of Central High School. He quoted the psalms she had read before leaving home to face the hostile crowd. He spoke of her dream of becoming a lawyer. He spoke of visiting in her home and of his shame, that week, at being white. Then he declared that the nine black students who were trying to get to Central High were human beings, and that white people who lost sight of that were in danger of losing their own souls. Eckford, he said, “has more guts than anyone present here today.”

David Andrew Lai describes the repercussions of this sermon in his study Up in the Balcony: White Religious Leaders and School Desegregation in Arkansas, 1954-1960:

Even though Pulaski Heights was a remarkably progressive church that had supported pastors criticizing internment [of Japanese Americans during World War II] and respected the freedom of the pulpit, the 8 September sermon triggered a minor schism that ultimately resulted in thirty members, about a tenth of his congregation, leaving Pulaski Heights. (74)

Even after the Little Rock School Board reluctantly began to integrate, Cartwright remained a persistent thorn in their side for years, protesting the unequal treatment of Black students in the school system. He even attracted the attention of the New York Times, which ran a piece on Cartwright in December 1960. The article opens:

The Rev. Colbert S. Cartwright, a critic of the Little Rock School Board’s desegregation policies, believes that the city’s residents “must face up to the moral imperatives of religious faith” in race relations. In an interview, Mr. Cartwright contended that religiously motivated action was necessary to break the barriers of racial prejudice in segregation in Little Rock and the rest of the South.

Cartwright told the reporter, “‘We are all to blame. Yet the enormity of our unrighteousness has become written large in the practices of those in our community to whom we look for leadership.’” He accused segregationists of being “‘blind to the signs of the times.’” The preacher denounced the actions (and inactions) of the Little Rock School Board members as morally reprehensible: “‘from a moral point of view they have not acted in good faith either with the patrons against whom they plot or with God.’”

A couple months after this article appeared in the New York Times, Cartwright delivered another incendiary sermon at Pulaski Heights. His message to the congregation on February 12, 1961—around the time Dylan was composing “Song to Woody”—was titled “Some Stern Words of Jesus.” I found a copy from Special Collections at the University of Arkansas Library. Here is the first page:

Cartwright uses passages from the Sermon on the Mount to show how Jesus’ message is incompatible with racial discrimination. He concludes with this provocation:

Jesus drops a bomb in the midst of our complacency, saying “Don’t go to church again until you correct your offense against your Negro brother.” It’s just that urgent. Well, I don’t suppose any of us are going to take Jesus that seriously, but he does shatter our complacency. He reminds us that we don’t have forever to work this problem out. The time to do something is NOW.

The civil rights struggle took a heavy toll on Cartwright, personally and spiritually. Looking back on his activism, he was skeptical about his accomplishments. He offered this harsh self-assessment in his 1993 autobiography Walking My Lonesome Valley:

I determined to work within the church and culture to transform it in companionship with Christ who had not given up on either. At some points I turned to secular political expediencies of the moment, counseling a school board how to survive by a minimal compliance with the Supreme Court school decision. Disillusioned with this approach, I turned prophet, attacking those who had generally followed my counsel. In the end I tended to conclude that attempts to work with Christ to transform the church and society were not adequate. (qtd. Lai 122)

Speaking with Roy Reed in 1990, the year after he retired from the ministry, he frankly admitted, “‘My whole self-understanding of the church and the world and God was shaken. I don’t think I got to the point of no hope, but diminished expectations.’”

Fortunately for Cartwright—and for us—around the time that his faith was at low ebb, he was buoyed up by a passion for the songs of Bob Dylan. Among his new congregation (the Disciples of Bob?), he is best known for two works. The first is The Bible in the Lyrics of Bob Dylan, published in 1985 as part of John Bauldie’s Wanted Man series, and later reissued in an expanded second edition in 1992. The other is “The Mysterious Norman Raeben.”

The Norman Conquest

What follows is a kind of meta-criticism. I’m doing research —> into Cartwright’s research —> about Dylan’s art —> influenced by Raeben’s teaching. It’s also a celebration of the delights of archival scavenger hunting, shuffling papers like treasure maps in search of hidden gems. There aren’t many audiences who would care about such esoterica, but I hope readers of this site will dig it as much as I do. Now let’s chase some shadows!

We’ll pick up the trail in December 1985, when Cartwright submitted a new manuscript to The Telegraph.

In the cover letter Cartwright told Bauldie, “I am enclosing an article on the influence of Norman upon Dylan. I do think I make the case for the importance of the subject. The material from a Dallas interview [by Pete Oppel of the Dallas Morning News] is undoubtedly fresh to most readers as I include that among other more familiar materials” (Cartwright to Bauldie, 7 December 1985).

Cartwright referred to his subject as “Norman” because he still didn’t know the man’s full name. Dylan had made oblique references to an influential art teacher in multiple interviews but intentionally withheld the name in order to protect his mentor’s privacy. The closest he came to revealing Raeben’s identity came in the 1977 Playboy interview with Ron Rosenbaum:

Just an old man. His name wouldn’t mean anything to you. He came to this country from Russia in the twenties, started out as a boxer and ended up painting portraits of women. […] His first name was Norman. Every time I mention somebody’s name, it’s like they get a tremendous amount of distraction and irrelevancy in their lives. (547)

Cartwright kept running into dead-ends in his search for the shadowy figure. He told Bauldie, “I have tried to track down who Norman is and thought I had identified him, but when contacted it clearly was not the right person. This article could possibly help turn up the right person—though if he is living I think we would not want to publish the name” (Cartwright to Bauldie, 7 December 1985).

Bauldie replied to Cartwright in February 1986, encouraging him to continue his detective work and giving him a possible new clue. “You may be interested in the enclosed note from Jonathan Cott. It’s a shame he lost the details” (Bauldie to Cartwright, 5 February 1986).

You’ll recognize Cott as the Rolling Stone journalist who conducted a series of probing interviews with Dylan in the late seventies. Bauldie specifically asked him the name of Dylan’s art teacher, and Cott replied:

I’ve checked my Dylan files and notebooks; and I’m frustrated, because I know that I wrote down Norman’s last name, but I can’t find it now. Dylan told me at the time that Norman was a Russian Jewish emigre—an older man—who taught painting at a studio in the Carnegie Hall building in N.Y.City. And I remember reading an obituary about him several years ago in the N. Y. Times, but I stupidly didn’t cut it out. I think that this man was obviously not only an art teacher, but some kind of wise “crafts”-type person—in the Gurdjieffian sense, as you suggest; though I don’t think he was part of that tradition. If I find the name—and I’m still looking—I’ll send it off to you. I really thought I had written it down in my interview notebook in 1978-79, but it’s not there. (Cott to Bauldie, 20 January 1985)

As a side note, isn’t it cool to read the personal correspondence of writers you’re familiar with, especially when they share the same forehead-smacking frustrations we all experience during the writing process?

Eureka! Cott’s recollection of the art studio’s location was the key that unlocked the mystery. Cartwright shared this detail with his friend Dalton Delan. Delan went on to become a writer and TV executive, and he was executive producer of the program at the White House where Dylan played for President Obama.

But in 1986, Delan was an enthusiastic Dylan fan on a sleuthing expedition. Using letterhead from his workplace at ABC News, Delan excitedly wrote Cartwright: “Well, we finally hit the jackpot! Thanks to your info re Carnegie Hall, I did some sleuthing on this end and hit it! His name was: NORMAN RAEBEN” (Delan to Cartwright, 12 June 1986). Delan also passed along the addresses and phone numbers for Raeben’s son Jay and his widow Victoria.

In closing, he proposed a barter: “Perhaps in return for my spadework you could send me dubs of the Houston 6/20, Austin 6/21 and Dallas 6/22 concerts if you attend any/all of them?” (Delan to Cartwright, 12 June 1986). Love it! Research assistance in exchange for bootleg tapes from the True Confessions Tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. That’s some old school Dylanology right there.

Cartwright’s response the following month was effusive: “WOW!!! The material you sent is fascinating, not only for the additional information there is, but to see how a taped interview gets translated into a printed one” (Cartwright to Delan, 26 July 1986). [Much more on that last comment in a moment.] Cartwright told Delan that he tried calling Victoria Raeben and finally reached her:

She was so shocked by my phone call that I could only get permission to call at another time. It was apparent that no one had ever called her about the topic of Dylan and she had never thought about doing any kind of an interview. After several no answers during the week I finally got through to her this afternoon. She was still jittery about it and found it difficult to understand clearly what my purpose in calling was. I am enclosing a copy of the tape I made. (Cartwright to Delan, 26 July 1986)

The online description of the Cartwright Collection says that it contains a transcript of his interview with Victoria Raeben. That teaser motivated me to contact the library in the first place. Having read the brief transcript of their conversation, however, I must report that Cartwright’s description to Delan is accurate: there really isn’t much there. She was clearly caught off guard. She distrusted this stranger who cold-called her with a bunch of questions, and she was very guarded with her responses, uncertain of the interviewer’s agenda. She did mention that Dylan visited her and Norman at their house a couple times, possibly to play chess, which I hadn’t heard before. But that’s about the only revelation to be found in Cartwright’s phone interview with Victoria Raeben. That’s the bad news. The good news is that there is a much more interesting interview transcript on file in the Colbert Collection.

As you may recall, I used the subtitle “Don’t Draw the Vase” for my previous piece about Raeben’s influence on Dylan. That’s a reference to this colorful anecdote in Cartwright’s article where Dylan recalls his first meeting with the enigmatic art teacher:

He says, “You wanna paint?” So I said, “Well, I was thinking about it, you know.” He said, “Well, I don’t know if you even deserve to be here. Let me see what you can do.” So he put this vase in front of me, and he says, “You see this vase?” And he put it there for 30 seconds or so, and then he took it away and he said, “Draw it.” Well, I mean, I started drawing it and I couldn’t remember shit about this vase—I’d looked at it but I didn’t see it. And he took a look at what I drew and he said, “OK, you can be up here.” And he told me 13 paints to get. Well, I hadn’t gone up there to paint, I’d just gone up there to see what was going on. I wound up staying there for maybe two months. This guy was amazing. (qtd. Cartwright 85-86)

I love this story, but I was disappointed to find that Cartwright failed to cite his source in the article. He’s usually pretty scrupulous about that sort of thing, so I figured it was just a rare proofreading lapse. But then I started doing keyword searches through the various published interviews with Cartwright references, and none of them contain this story. I looked in my go-to source for Dylan interviews, Artur Jarosinski’s Every Mind Polluting Word, and still nothing. Google search: nada. Where did this quotation come from, and why didn’t Cartwright cite it?

Mystery solved! “The material you sent is fascinating, not only for the additional information there is, but to see how a taped interview gets translated into a printed one” (Cartwright to Delan, 26 July 1986). Among the items Delan sent to Cartwright was a transcript of a redacted portion of Jonathan Cott’s 1978 interview with Dylan. We know that Dylan wanted to guard Raeben’s privacy. He apparently asked Cott not to include part of their discussion where he revealed his teacher’s identity and elaborated upon his time studying with Raeben.

The story about Dylan drawing the vase can be found in a 14-page double-spaced interview transcript in Cartwright’s research folder on Raeben. It is untitled and unattributed. The conversation picks up in media res, with the interviewer labeled “Q” and the interviewee labeled “A.” But it’s clear from internal evidence in Cartwright’s correspondence that the source is Cott’s two-part 1978 interview with Dylan—a redacted section not authorized for publication.

Cartwright was on the horns of a dilemma when he wrote to Delan: “I shall hold up on any decision as to the appropriate use of the transcript. I am aware of the sensitivity of the matter and I have no desire to put either Cott or you in a hot spot” (Cartwright to Delan, 26 July 1986). As a Christian preacher, Cartwright had scruples over violating Dylan’s wishes and exposing Cott, Delan, Bauldie, and himself to the man’s wrath, let alone his litigation. But as a Dylanologist, he simply couldn’t pass on such a juicy scoop.

Remember that, in his initial letter to Bauldie, Cartwright wrote, “This article could possibly help turn up the right person—though if he is living I think we would not want to publish the name” (Cartwright to Bauldie, 7 December 1985). Once he learned that Raeben died in 1978, it was full steam ahead on revealing the teacher’s identity. Cartwright led with his discovery by titling the piece “Dylan’s Mysterious Man Called Norman Raeben.” He also incorporated details about the artist’s background from the redacted portion of Cott’s interview. And he couldn’t resist sneaking in the (uncited) quote about Dylan and Raeben’s origin story.

Bauldie was privy to this cloak-and-dagger business. In Cartwright’s cover letter accompanying the revised final draft, he wrote, “I was able to smuggle some of the Cott interview in without jeopardizing the source. The sleuth that you are, I am sure you will spot the attempts!” (Cartwright to Bauldie, 1 February 1987). Bauldie knew that his readers would gobble up this feast of new revelations, so he featured the article in the very next issue of The Telegraph.

Cott’s 1978 Interview with Dylan – Unredacted

At the beginning of the excerpt, Cott and Dylan were talking about names.

Q: Could you have been successful as Zimmerman, do you suppose, doing what you’re doing now? Obviously, I’m sure you could have been.

A: Well, I don’t know. It never occurred to me. I don’t know. These names we have down here aren’t really our true names anyway.

Q: What are our true names?

A: Well, we find out when we get into the other world, what our true names are and who we really are.

This issue of true identity prompted Dylan to introduce his art teacher by name into the discussion:

I used to have this painting instructor, this guy who was Sholom [sic] Aleichem’s son. Ever heard of Sholom Aleichem? He was a writer; ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ and that stuff? I mean, I hate that kinda thing. […] But, anyway, his son—his name was Rabinowitz, Norman Rabinowitz—and this guy was one of the great geniuses of all time, really. He was 86 years old when I met him. I met him, he used to teach painting class upstairs on the eleventh floor of Carnegie Hall.

It’s interesting that he explicitly identified his teacher and used his original Ukrainian surname. Just to set the record straight, Raeben was only 72 years old when Dylan studied with him, not 86. As you can see, Dylan rated Raeben’s art and teaching much more highly than the “sentimental, wishy-washy” literature of Aleichem’s Fiddler on the Roof and Singer’s Yentl:

Friends of Sara told him about this teacher and suggested that he look Raeben up the next time he was in New York. He visited the studio and was surprised by the diverse roster of students: “I walked into his class and it was amazing. He had anywhere from twelve to twenty people up there. And they were all kinds of people. He had a off-duty policeman to investment counselors to old women from Florida to young art student rejects, stuff like that.” I love the way Dylan described Raeben’s imposing presence in the classroom:

He knew every political . . . every political game you can imagine. He knew every religious game. He knew science, he knew archaeology, he spoke eight languages. Eighty-six years old, he used to sit there in a T-shirt like Marlon Brando, and a big heavy-set guy, and he was writing a dictionary at this time.

As you can see, this is also the portion of the interview where Dylan told the story about drawing a vase for his entrance exam into Raeben’s class.

The “dictionary” referred to here was a book on aesthetics that Raeben and his wife Vicki were working on. In her phone interview with Cartwright, she told him, “He was writing a book on art in collaboration with me and we had the first chapter accepted by Doubleday, but he died, yk, before we got it written” (Victoria Raeben to Bert Cartwright, 26 July 1986). [Note that “yk” is an abbreviation for “you know” throughout these transcripts.] You can read a few of Raeben’s lectures as appendices in Carolyn Schlam’s excellent book The Creative Path.

Dylan wasn’t merely impressed with Raeben as an art teacher. He was also astonished by the man’s deep insights into his pupils’ lives.

And he’d make the rounds. And he’d see what you were doing and he’d walk up to people, walk up to a person, you’d hear him say, a little old man who’s painting this, he’d walk up to him and says, “You’re an adulterer,” yk. And he would expound on why this man is an adulterer. And then he’d walk up to somebody else and say, “You’re just living a world of fantasy.” And I’ve seen big, tough, grown men just cry, and leave the class. I saw people who came and thought they were the next Picasso, right outta art school, yk, who’d come in there, who couldn’t see what was in front of ’em.

What did Raeben see when he peered into Dylan? “I mean, the first time he looked at me he said, ‘Oh, you’re an Italian Jew.’ And he says, ‘You’re an Italian Jew from the year 1100.’ I said, ‘Oh? I’ve always wanted to know who I am, yk.’ But he said this about everybody.”

What did Raeben see when he looked at Dylan’s art? Not much that he liked. You may have heard rumors that Raeben called Dylan an “idiot” in class, and that Dylan borrowed this insult for “Idiot Wind” on Blood on the Tracks, the album he wrote and recorded in the months following his classes with Raeben. The unredacted transcript confirms it: “And one of the things which I learned or which came outta that actually was that term . . . that song ‘Idiot Wind.’ ’Cause up until that time, it was like somebody call somebody an idiot, it was like a bad thing. But in his world, everybody was an idiot. And he was right, yk.”