The Top Ten Songs by Bob Dylan
I read some articles and listened to some of the tapes of his autobiography Chronicles I. His kindred spirit, Sean Penn was chosen to be the voice of Bob Dylan. Sean Penn has the same kind of honest and heartfelt immersion in the human drama. I also read about Bob Dylan’s respect for Billie Holiday as a greater than great musician. I share that opinion. She had the same honest and heartfelt approach in telling the story of the complexities of love and as we all know, sometimes it is not always good. I read about his loyalty to his friends. His love and affection for the epic folk singer/songwriter Woody Guthrie. His contributions to the American folk scene included This Land is Your Land and Tom Dooley sung by an array of the a generation of folk singers like the Kingston Trio. Behind the scenes Guthrie’s music and art was honed by the blowing sands and dirt of the Dust Bowl era. He traveled with the itinerant farm workers and day laborers from his home state of Oklahoma to California in search of work. He suffered the sorrow of a lost childhood that extreme poverty provides.
Guthrie inherited a crippling genetic disorder inadequately misdiagnosed in part by the times, but equally in part to funds. It is far easier to simply label someone as a mental misfit than to take the necessary steps to trace the debilitating and often confusing symptoms of Huntington Chorea. A horrendous disorder that strikes its victims at the height of their youth and viciously robs them of their ability to function and ultimately reduces its victims to a mass of uncontrollable jerks and spasms and then slowly kills them by mid-life. He suffered the indignities of this ravaging physical disorder and at the same time wrote from his broken heart about the spirit of man to survive and make some beautiful sounds. Inspired by John Steinbeck another kindred spirit who put these emotions to words in The Grapes of Wrath. Injustice exists and it is darn mean.
I have seen the same film Guthrie viewed of The Grapes of Wrath and the dialogue I will never erase from my mind is when the mother speaks to her son about going to jail for the crime of in fact being a labor organizer, but of course charged with a more common law crime like trespass and prays he will not get meaner and lose his innate good heart in the jail experience. Guthrie expresses in song the real picture by some to rise up and make a sound when those sounds are most unpopular. He was deemed to be a malcontent, communist, alcoholic pain in the side of a rising entrepreneurial mind set. A mind set that celebrates the power of the almighty bottom line and eradicates any entry which may impact the plus sign A dispassionate theory, but nonetheless an acceptable social means to an end. As in Guthrie’s short, but meaningful life his compassion and his fight for personal deliverance as well as his fellow man provided him a profile that may appear on an FBI watch list or worst at the end of a rope on the local hanging tree in Utah as happened to Joe Hill.
And who was it that visited him in the hospital during this time of abject hopelessness, it was Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan who rallied their community of songsters to aid the children of Guthrie and to preserve his memory after he was gone. Dylan sings the same song with the same conviction. He isn’t preachy about it. The answers my friend to all the injustices witnessed by Guthrie and Dylan are Blowin In The Wind. “How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man? Yes n’ how many seas must a white dove sail, before she sleeps in the sand. Yes n’ how many cannon balls must fly before they’re banned.” The answers are sometimes if not always is “blowin in the wind.”
Another thing about Bob Dylan is his lack of arrogance. Everybody is a player, everybody can sing along, everybody has had something that made them sad, glad or mad. One of his songs of this expression of all humanity is Ain’t No Man Righteous. ” When a man he serves the Lord, it makes his life worthwhile. It don’t matter ’bout his position, it don’t matter ’bout his lifestyle. Talk about perfection, I ain’t never seen none and there ain’t no man righteous, no not one.” A simple, but profound statement of the supposed basis of all religion. No matter who you are, not what what you have in the eyes of the Lord, you are equal. This profound truth is perhaps the glue that keeps all people grounded, but sometimes lost in Modern Times. “Keep a talkin baby till you run out of alibis, someday you’ll account for all the deeds you have done.” That ingrained promise to the poor and vilified that someday and probably not in this life, the bottom line will be judged by One who knows all and sees all. It is this belief that keeps the world glued together. Only a few like Bob Dylan are able to speak of the terrible price paid in this life.
Then Dylan comes and complicates the mix a little by showing his romantic side. At the heart of every artist is the romance of life. Without it, there is a template of great syllogisms, profundity to the max, but just a little too pristine to adequately paint the image of life among the living. Love sought, love won, love rejected, love for the image of love, sex interwoven with connections of some mysterious and sometimes illusive rationale for connection. Sometimes exquisite or down right ugly. Feelings that may be fleeting, but contemporaneously viewed as the achievement of a life time. Permeation beyond the colors of a gigantic palette. Encompassing every natural human response, fear, satisfaction, exuberance, anger to name just a handful. His Lay, Lady, Lay is one such tribute to love. “Lay lady lay across my big brass bed, stay lady stay with your man awhile. Until the break of day, let me see you make him smile. His clothes are dirty, but his hands are clean and you’re the best thing that he’s ever seen.” Again, it is Dylan paying homage to the love and romance of the working man and the pure hearts that meet and for a while are transported to a brief interlude with each other. I imagine and smell Castle soap or Cornhuskers or a light fragrance of some drug store shaving cream. I think of oil rigs, farm equipment, carburetors, finger nail brushes. People who work hard for their money and work hard to bring a little joy into their lives. A romantic novel of love without the ruby slippers reminding us that there is no place like home. Love is just standing in front of you.
At this point Bob Dylan and I get personal with one another. I have never actually spoken with him. I have seen him. I have been in the same physical area as he, I’ve caught his eye, but I would have to say I really don’t know him. Thus, my impressions of him are tempered by my own experiences and the points in time when he and his music intersected my life. One such time was his concert in June, 1978 at the Universal Amphitheater. I went to the concert and as most know who have been there it is open, airy and has good acoustics. Not as good as the Hollywood Bowl or Carnegie Hall, but good. It was a time for me of conflicting sentiments. I had personally satisifed an objective by picking up a degree at UC. I had seen the duplicity and devastation of an ill conceived war in my generation from the vantage point not from the streets or the concert hall, but from the point of view of a participant in keeping friends and strangers hopes alive in a military base ICU that reminded me of All Quiet on the Western Front. A story of disillusionment from World War 1. The lack of adequate facilities, the dank and depressing gloom of shades of dying green colors against the perpetual fogs of Monterey. Hadn’t we learned anything? At the same time, a sort of dark humor abound with some of the most brilliant surgeons and medical staff coming up with innovations of putting someone back together with super glue and aimed solely at making it work. By it I mean, we were going to get our generation back on its feet. It was not all bad. I needed and found academia accepting and tolerant. I was comforted by the fact that I learned people like Satre, Augustine, and hundred like them had throughout history seen the ravages of hatred among men and vowed to make things better. I read but was not entirely convinced that the more things change, the more they stay the same. I certainly was not personally aware of the vehement reactions of the status quo if it feels even slightly uncomfortable. In academia as it was, ideas are challenging regardless of their popularity. Growing up along Seal Way in Seal Beach had its collection of white collar, blue collar, plaid shirts, hawaiian prints, and no shirts at all there was no mention of the right and only path.
I had taken on a spring/summer job at the local tomato factory working in the lab and collecting time cards around the plant. I was existing in two different planes or maybe more if you throw in a personal life with its sharp and round edges. The culture of the realities of a work force who had for decades been predicated on appeasing the “floor ladies, plant supervisors and the caprice of tomatoes rotting in the field as well as the fairly new union hoops and loops that hoped to transform the old system of patronage and pecking order with another form of pecking order, but with authorized breaks and seniority. The wages were better with the union, but the reality that became clear was the personal impenetrable relationship between the worker and the overseer.
Regardless of the inequities of the old system built on the assumption you do good by me and you work. Each and every one celebrated the achievements of their shift of production by bestowing gifts of food and hand made presents to their “Floor Lady.” It was personal, no birthday was forgotten. So, while I had studied the genesis of the working man, my world conflicted with the actual evolutionary status of the reality of work for the most people. It was unaltered from the time Woody Guthrie sang his tunes and Bob Dylan put his fingerprint on its gross inequities. It became equally self revealing when as a young labor lawyer I took an assignment in Montana for the labor department and found in the mid 1980s the “Floor Lady,” is still the prevailing practice. Small is not necessarily beautiful. You can hide a whole lot of discrimination and familial cruelty in the abundant pot holes. It does not matter what the written word says, constitution or otherwise, you will work, if it works for me. That inextricable relationship between the overseer, the bottom line and thee. Today this is coupled with a scriptural reference as from the past providing for the meek as the great inheritors of the world. The result, a haven for summer homes for the very wealthy and a resident workforce coming in at number 50. Not surprising, when the going gets tough, you kill the messenger. A closed economy, but a beautiful state for vistors. Above all, blame the other should be the motto. A well known saying is Don’t Californicate Montana.
I recall my 1978 concert with Bob Dylan as if it were yesterday. Oddly, while the dates have changed one would be hard pressed to note significant changes in these Modern Times. l was seated fairly close to the stage and listening to familiar tunes, Mr. Tambourine Man, play your song for me. I remember clearly, Just Like A Woman, thinking yeah just because you can make love like a woman in some instances and under the right circumstances we do break down like a little girl. When someone or something crushes our images or something tangible. At that point, I would guess we all seek someone from our childhood who made things all right. For me my mom, dad or grandmother who let me know it was temporary or gave me some form of reassurance that things would turn out okay. But, what about a large segment of people who had to play that tambourine and that tambourine was their only means of reassurance. A round pie shape object with little symbols attached, was it?
So what does Bob Dylan do, he calls this concert tour, album Stop Crying. It is the essence of Bob Dylan, sure wipe those Tears of Rage because it just ain’t healthy. It is pretty hard to get much done when you are crying. So you wipe those tears and you get up and you grab One More Cup of Coffee, and if necessary, Seek Shelter From the Storm and always keep in mind, “we always did feel the same, we just saw it from a different point of view,” we were Tangled Up In Blue. So, how does it feel to be all alone Like a Rolling Stone? There is always a way home and particularly if you possess talent. Mr. Dylan will never have to answer that question. He has written well over 200 songs that will live on past his fleeting time on this earth. He has earned an A ticket to make home wherever his heart takes him. Not only because of his works, but the effort he has put into life by his friendships, his loyalty to humanity and the sheer tenacity to stay alive. For the rest of us we get there the best way we can, but we can be assured that he will be there When The Deal Goes Down.
