It was Bob Dylan's 72nd birthday last Friday and like everyone else, I dove into his archives to post a line or two from his vast repertoire on Facebook. I chose a song I'd always liked, "Mr. Tambourine Man," and quoted the last verse.
"Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free/silhouetted by the sea/circled by the circus sands/with all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves/let me forget about today until tomorrow."
The song presents some pretty vivid images ... but to me, that's always just what they were. Simply images. There seemed to be no connection to anything resembling a theme. It was free-form, word association, metaphor upon metaphor, and it was something he kept going back to, time and again, during that mid-1960s period when he was working on reinventing himself from a modern-day Woodie Guthrie to something the world had never seen.
What he started, for example, in "Mr. Tambourine Man" he perfected later with "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and other pieces that just seemed to be a loosely-connected jumble of lines that presented their own messages as they were sung. You couldn't dwell on them long, because if you did, you wouldn't hear the next line, or the one after that.
This is why no one knew what to make of him. Who, people wondered, thinks of this stuff? Don't follow leaders, Watch the parking meters? Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift? Maybe the one line everybody could understand was "you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."
It must be drugs, they supposed. And maybe it was. But we're coming up on fifty years since a lot of these songs happened, and I'm becoming less and less patient with people who dismiss the entire smorgasbord of 1960s music as a 100 percent drug-induced purple haze.
That's not fair. People who didn't grow up then don't understand. These were baby-boom kids just careening into adulthood, better educated and more worldly than most of their previous generations. Their education sparked more creativity, and, yes, perhaps that creativity manifested itself in their choice of substances. It was all one package. And Dylan certainly was in the middle of it.
I had to find the right version of "Mr. Tambourine Man" to post, though. YouTube has a collection of Dylan singing strictly acoustic versions of the song live. And, well, sorry. Dylan wasn't always good live. In fact I went to see him once and almost walked out. He was three-quarters the way through "Like A Rolling Stone" before I even knew that's what he was singing. Finally I caught a "didn't yooooouuuuuuuu?' in there and said, "ah, 'Like a Rolling Stone'."
Ditto "Ballad of a Thin Man." There was lots of noise and a bunch of unintelligible lyrics that ended with "Misaaaaahhhhh Jones," before I knew what the hell he was singing.
I used to joke that it was easy to do Dylan. All you had to do was get a newspaper and read any story with that nasal, rhythmic wheeze we all know and love. Every so often, you elongated a word.
"Three members of a family were taken into custody toDAAAAAAAAAAAAY for having a MEEETH lab in their BAAAASEEEEEEment." I even tried it out on a couple of my cousins, who had to admit, I was right. It sounded like a Dylan song,
(Before we continue, back when "We Are The World" was recorded, and Dylan sang his bit at the end, a "how-it-was-made" video was shown on MTV, where Quincy Jones had to coax "the jester" to "Sing like Dylan ... you know." Whereupon he imitated how he wanted Dylan to sound, which ended up being similar to "Like a Rolling Stone.")
I found the right version. It is actually the version he recorded on "Bringing It All Back Home," which is just him, his ever-present harmonica, and a very subdued and beautifully counterpointed electric guitar. And I found it hypnotic.
Interpreting songs is so much easier today. All you do is go on Wiki and if the song's important enough, they'll tell you what it means. Apparently "Mr. Tambourine Man" was important enough, because every cock-eyed interpretation of this song is on there, from the obligatory "drug references" to something that rang a little truer to me: he was singing about his muse.
I think that's closer to what the song means. Except I don't think he's singing about his muse ... I think he's singing to it.
Dylan began to write "Mr. Tambourine Man" in early 1964 after being at the Mardi Gras. He was unable to sleep and, apparently, got up and wandered around Bourbon Street in the wee hours of the morning, when everything was being taken down and packed up. One can only imagine that at some point during the party, he saw someone banging on a tambourine.
I know this feeling! I know restlessness. And I know what it's like to be stuck on something you're writing to the point where it eats away at you in the middle of the night. It can really creep you out, yet at the same time it's an exhilarating feeling.
You've got your finger on something, but you don't know what. You're struck wide awake at 2 a.m. by a dream that spells it out for you clearly (well, at least I have) and you're afraid that if you don't get up right now and get it down on paper, you'll either forget it entirely or, at the very least, you won't be able to put it into words once you get the opportunity. In other words, you whiff.
It may be exhilarating, but it's also frustrating. I've been startled awake by more stories that seem wonderful as I'm emerging from REM sleep ... yet when I try to reconstruct them in the real world, as opposed to the surrealistic theater of the dream world, I can't.
I see "Mr. Tambourine Man" as kind of a reflection of that. It seems that he, too, was struck awake by something. Only what?
Without sounding too ponderous, here's what I think: Dylan was always a reluctant "spokesman" for a generation. He sang what he felt, but I don't think he was ever comfortable being the "prophet" for the disaffected youth of the sixties. He's even said this. But the mid-sixties, he was pulling away from the traditional folk stuff and being pulled toward a much more mind-expanding method of expression ,.. and it was something that, Lord knows, was truly unique to him. Whether these were images or vibes he felt while he was stoned, or whether he just sat up all night thinking about them didn't matter. There were his ... they reflected how he felt, and the images were intensely personal.
I think Bob Dylan, first, last and always, felt his songs belonged to him ... and not to the ages.
So, I pose the question: What if "Mr. Tambourine Man" was Dylan's way of trying to figure it all out? What if he was asking his "muse" which way to go? You don't need to be too deep to understand the basic premise: He was putting himself into the hands of his muse, and vowing to go where it took him. If it meant foregoing the folk scene forever, so be it. If it meant pissing off the folkies in Newport by playing an electric set, well, they were going to have to deal with it. He was going where the muse took him.
So I heard lines like "take me on a ride upon your magic, swirling ship/my senses have been stripped/my hands can't feel to grip/my toes too numb to step ..." and saw it as a plaintive plea to his muse to lead him somewhere, anywhere, because he couldn't move anymore where he was. He needed a place where he could find music that gave voice to his ever-growing consciousness (whether unduly influenced by drugs or not!).
And this line just jumps out at you: "the ancient, empty street's too dead for dreamin'."
Now, he could have been talking about the fact he was wandering around New Orleans, unable to sleep, and seeing the remnants of the party that had been going strong just hours earlier. But in keeping with my metaphor, he could also mean that he'd gotten all he could out of his folk muse. It had dried up. And he needed to find another one to rejuvenate himself. I don't know. I may be full it here, but I think one of the things that make brilliant people brilliant is that they're forever searching for new challenges. They're never satisfied ... forever restless ... they understand that to stagnate is like dying a slow death, artistically. Change is vital, even if the change isn't always understood, or accepted, by those around you.
If you need an example, there's Brian Wilson. He obviously got bored writing and singing surfer songs, and he should have been. He was a genius when it came to constructing music, and his surfer-boys songs, as much fun as they were to listen to and sing, were probably only taxing one-tenth of his abilities. Maybe even less.
And when he tried to break out of the the box, he met with intense resistance from the rest of the group, who didn't understand (and more to the point, didn't want to understand) his need to challenge himself. But he did ... first with "Pet Sounds" and afterward with "Good Vibrations." Neither was popular at first with the likes of Mike Love, who was quite content to wear the uniform and sing about cars and waves. "Pet Sounds" was an enigma to fans who only saw the Beach Boys as metaphors for summer fun in the sun. But Brian Wilson passed the test of time. Those are beloved pieces of music now. "Pet Sounds" is considered one of the best albums ever recorded ... far ahead of its time, perhaps, but -- today -- the seen as the forerunner to the type of "concept album" that was later perfected by the Beatles and "Sgt. Pepper." As for "Good Vibrations," is there anyone who doesn't like that song?
This, I believe, is what Bob Dylan unleashed with "Mr. Tambourine Man." He was lucky in one sense that Roger McGuinn and David Crosby liked it, and recorded a stripped-down version of it (one verse only) with The Byrds. It made the song accessible and familiar to a generation of fans who would have never heard it otherwise.
I see the song, today, as a validation of all people for whom restlessness is a way of life ... for all people who find that being stuck in ruts ... even if the ruts are making them fabulously successful and wealthy ... can just drag you down. No Dylan ... no "middle period" of the Beatles, where their songs started to be a lot more mature, and centered around adult experiences. No "Rubber Soul." No "Revolver." None of that music that, almost 50 years later, still stands as their best.
This is what Dylan was looking for. To dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free. He wanted to sing his music, his way, wherever it took him, and to be able to experiment with it.
You see, I get it. I've been there. I'm forever feeling the creative constraints of a job I've been doing for more than 40 years. It's a nice job, and I've made a decent living doing it. But I also know that somewhere within me, there's more. There's better. It's terrifying. And it keeps me up at night all-too-often.
Let me forget about today until tomorrow. Can a brother get some sleep????
"I'm ready to go anywhere/I'm ready for to fade/into my own parade/cast your dancing spell my way/I promise to go under it."
