Jitterbugging for Jesus

That show was in Dallas in what was the last concert of his highly acclaimed tour with his buddy Paul “Rhymin” Simon and Dylan’s weary heart was definitely not in it; it was obvious he wanted to get home a while. It was so bad he forgot the words to his songs a couple of times. (See more about that tour and its kickoff here.)

Things got no better when, at the end of his hour opening (which he cut short by 30 minutes, he called out Simon to join him for their set together. He mumbled and stumbled his way through it and it was hard to watch.

Dylan looks like he’s thinking, “Are we there yet?”

After a break, Paul Simon–who was at the peak of his career at the time (or one of his peaks)–came out and killed it for two hours in a performance that still gives me goose bumps thinking about it.

But oh well, I did get to see an artist who will go down in history as one of the world’s greatest ever.

So now for the Dylan news.

The intriguing thing about Dylan has always been his chameleon-like ways. He’s constantly changing directions (like somebody with no direction home?) and reinventing himself in fearless ways.

Dylan (finally!) got around to giving a lecture for receipt of his Nobel Prize for literature,*–which he recorded in Los Angeles and sent in–and it was worth the wait.

It includes an explanation of why he ignored it at first.

Always changing, reinventing himself with some new persona.

(And who else but Bob Dylan could ignore an award as prestigious as the Nobel without alienating everybody in the world? Dylan does it and the world shrugs and says, “That’s so Dylan! That’s so cool!”)

Said the great one:

When I first received this Nobel Prize for Literature, I got to wondering exactly how my songs related to literature. I wanted to reflect on it and see where the connection was. I’m going to try to articulate that to you. And most likely it will go in a roundabout way, but I hope what I say will be worthwhile and purposeful.

He goes on to give a review of his earliest musical influences, starting with his powerful connection to Buddy Holly.

If I was to go back to the dawning of it all, I guess I’d have to start with Buddy Holly. Buddy died when I was about eighteen and he was twenty-two. From the moment I first heard him, I felt akin. I felt related, like he was an older brother. I even thought I resembled him. Buddy played the music that I loved – the music I grew up on: country western, rock ‘n’ roll, and rhythm and blues. Three separate strands of music that he intertwined and infused into one genre. One brand. And Buddy wrote songs – songs that had beautiful melodies and imaginative verses. And he sang great – sang in more than a few voices. He was the archetype. Everything I wasn’t and wanted to be. I saw him only but once, and that was a few days before he was gone. I had to travel a hundred miles to get to see him play, and I wasn’t disappointed.

He was powerful and electrifying and had a commanding presence. I was only six feet away. He was mesmerizing. I watched his face, his hands, the way he tapped his foot, his big black glasses, the eyes behind the glasses, the way he held his guitar, the way he stood, his neat suit. Everything about him. He looked older than twenty-two. Something about him seemed permanent, and he filled me with conviction. Then, out of the blue, the most uncanny thing happened. He looked me right straight dead in the eye, and he transmitted something. Something I didn’t know what. And it gave me the chills.

I think it was a day or two after that that his plane went down. And somebody – somebody I’d never seen before – handed me a Leadbelly record with the song “Cottonfields” on it. And that record changed my life right then and there. Transported me into a world I’d never known. It was like an explosion went off. Like I’d been walking in darkness and all of the sudden the darkness was illuminated. It was like somebody laid hands on me. I must have played that record a hundred times.

Then he goes on to talk influential books–going back to those that wowed him back in grammar school:

I had all the vernacular all 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.

But I had something else as well. I had principles and sensibilities and an informed view of the world. And I had had that for a while. Learned it all in grammar school. Don Quixote, Ivanhoe, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Tale of Two Cities, all the rest – typical grammar school reading that gave you a way of looking at life, an understanding of human nature, and a standard to measure things by. I took all that with me when I started composing lyrics. And the themes from those books worked their way into many of my songs, either knowingly or unintentionally. I wanted to write songs unlike anything anybody ever heard, and these themes were fundamental.

Specific books that have stuck with me ever since I read them way back in grammar school – I want to tell you about three of them: Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Odyssey.

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*It’s worth the whole read here.

The temperamental one feeling pretty good with the Dead. Of course the mood was no doubt enhanced by herbal means.