Dylan is great media. Unlike the Beatles, he isn't producing a sound, but rather a poetry with music worked in as an important cohering force and part of the emotional message. If D. A. Pennebaker's film on Dylan is any indication of the way he walks around thinking and talking (and I think it's close enough), then Dylan's mind is always popping with the same kind of surreal and often religious imagery that he strings together in his songs. And his desire to find out only what's true and his rabid hate for cant are sincere. The message is that Dylan's a bookish intellectual who thinks to melodies and casts his ideas in scenes. The message is that Dylan is great media because he writes songs as his natural outlet of expression about things he's thinking about because of the way he lives.

The message is Don't Look Back.

Some Children

Someone from Newsweek asks him how many children he has. "Some," Dylan answers. It's funny. The point is also that you don't look back. Ideas flash into your mind; you find truth where it is instead of lying in wait for it. You call to mind experiences and ideas and characters you've read before when the occasion makes it right to use them. You DON'T try to go back over ideas you've had before to tell a Timemagazine reporter what the message of your songs is. And when someone from Newsweek asks about your children who are no-where near, you don't try to remember all the births. You say what's most relevant -- "Some."

If Dylan is living some sort of stream of consciousness, it's in a certain meaning of the phrase. One kind of stream of consciousness (represented in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse) is a highly sensitive awareness limited to what is actually happening around the character and the immediate associations the environment brings. Dylan's is more historic, but in an abstract sense. On the personal level of experience, Dylan and the characters of his songs (most of whom are "I") never worry about the past or future. But most of his songs are based on echoing previous abstracted intellectual experience (like what Woody Guthrie meant to him or religious imagery in Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands). Maybe what he has read is sort of a "cumulative present" in his mind. But those are just words. The way he works his past abstracted experience into his songs, thus interpreting the present, is remarkable.

Look at what Dylan does with time. The past is sung as if it were just happening now. The present becomes the only kind of reality. The future isn't mentioned unless it's predetermined; if the future is determined, its reality is already there in the present. Take Dylan's story of God and Abe. As a historical anecdote it only has meaning in the way it relates to the present and in the way it is happening in slightly different contexts right now. So Dylan slips almost unnoticeably from "God said" to "God say." There's no difference between the two for Dylan or anyone else. The past is the present.

Now catch what happens to time in Desolation Row. He presents a rambling view of the half real, half surreal things famous characters from books and fairy tales are doing. The tremendous feel for the immediacy of what happens Dylan gives us in the chronological one-after-another present tense. But actually the whole story is a Dylan-modified version of a letter he read "yesterday." "All these people that you mention. Yes I know them they're quite lame. I had to rearrange their faces and give them all another name." Dylan tells his correspondent that it's too difficult for him to understand the people who aren't on Desolation Row, and he tells us that the only reality he sees them in is the present. He describes a raid on Desolation Row, which is presumably a refuge of social dropouts and intellectuals. "At midnight, all the agents and the super-human crew come out and round up everyone that knows more than they do." The raid could have happened in the past--Dylan could have read it in the letter or just remembered it. Or it could happen in Dylan's imagined future. But it could not be happening in the moment of the song, when Dylan is remembering the letter he received. Dylan sings it in the present, though, and we understand unquestioningly because that's where the raid's reality and meaning is.

The message is in the new album. John Wesley Harding.

When Ken Emerson, the rock reviewer for Avatar, and I interviewed and photographed Country Joe a few weeks ago, we asked him what he thought of Dylan's new album. "You know," said Joe, "I used to really dig Dylan and what he was doing. The new album, I'm not really sure. That hillbilly stuff just isn't our kind of scene. You know, all those Okies." I figured he just missed the whole album. There is only one song, the last one, where the message is the Okie sound. Though that one really threw people because Dylan had never put anything like it on his albums before. When you think about it, his records just before the last one were almost restricted in the way he stuck to hard electric sound and dirty big-city imagery. The messages of the songs on Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited were generally pessimistic and unloving, though it's almost totally absurd to generalize about any group of Dylan's songs.

Life Before Death

Take for example Visions of Johanna, one of the half dozen best songs Dylan has ever written. Listen to it. Dylan is lying in bed with his girl, named Louise, wondering about Johanna, salvation (life after death), and life before death. He constantly abstracts himself into the third person, first as Louise's "lover," then as a little boy. He sings: "Now a little boy lost. He takes himself so seriously. He brags of his misery. He likes to live dangerously. And when bringing her name up, he speaks of a farewell kiss to me. He's sure got a lot of gall to be so useless and all, muttering small talk at the wall while I'm in the hall. How can I explain? It's so hard to get on. And these visions of Johanna have kept me up past the dawn." The Dylan that is out in the hall is the Dylan that's lying in bed wondering about what the "little boy" Dylan has been doing up to now. His songs are "muttering small talk at the wall." Later he wonders in his visions if life after death ("salvation") is a museum of all of history complete with sneezing old ladies looking at everything. He thinks that Dylan has a lot of gall for being so useless and all; but later asks anyone to show him a man who isn't a parasite. Get it? The message is, "Dylan's got no excuse. But the people making noise in the street are worse. So where do we go from here?"

After Blonde on Blonde a lot of people said they thought Dylan was into suicide. I doubt it. He had a motorcycle accident that the public wasn't told about, and spent a long time recovering, first in a hospital, then in a neck brace. For two years he didn't put out a record. Rumor has it that he was trying to break his recording contract with Columbia because he had wanted the two records of Blonde on Blonde to be released individually instead of in a package. He lived in Woodstock, New York, making a new film and editing one that had already been shot. He was reworking a book he had finished titled Tarantula. The book is reported to have been quite bad. It was just about to be printed, the plates already having been made and the publicity posters already printed, when Albert Grossman, his manager, told the publishers that Dylan had decided not to release it. The cover of his new album was photographed in Woodstock with, upon Dylan's insistence, a Polaroid. For the last year Dylan is said to have been working very hard producing up to ten songs a week. Rolling Stone magazine printed a list of song titles early last fall that the magazine had heard would be on the new album; only a few made it. He got out John Wesley Harding by the beginning of this year.

The message in John Wesley Harding comes through with Dylan's same brilliant expression, and is imbued with all his earlier philosophy. It's only the sound that's changed from big-city to country. About this being an Okie record: there are three ways Dylan has made the sound different. 1) The music; he's cut out Mike Bloomfield and the electric guitars, and put a drum and bass beat through the whole record that makes all the sound vaguely similar. 2) The language: he puts his songs in the country idiom (instead of the hip) by using a lot of twisted cliches, saying "whom" a lot instead of "who," and throwing awe-struck interjections to "the Lord" into the speech of his characters. 3) The stories in his songs: he's put plots with beginnings and endings and protagonists other than himself into the songs. Some of his earlier songs--Corrina, Corrina, and Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance -- are heavy imitations of Country & Western sound. Dylan comes from Hibbing, Minnesota, a town he describes with great amusement on the printed insert that comes with The Times They Are A-Changin'. A college classmate of the wife of a former editor of mine went to high school with Dylan, and said he was small and nobody talked to him.

Dylan, on the new album, is doing something that's similar to his early folk style, but he's not going back to anything. The message of these songs is so amazing, put across so convincingly that a friend told me, "Wow, think of all the people who are going to hear this and then turn around and look over their shoulder and wonder where they've been going."

Listen to I Dreamed I Saw Saint Augustine: "And I dreamed I was amongst the ones that put him out to death. And I awoke in anger, so alone and terrified. I put my fingers against the glass and bowed my head and cried." Saint Augustine is a despairing Christian philosopher who tears around trying to convert the un-Christian. Dylan admires him tremendously. Not because he believes Christianity is cool or because he even necessarily believes in God. The message is that it's really important to believe in something, anything, any religion, anything meaningful enough to tell you why we're around and to answer all the questions he asked in Visions of Johanna. Saint Augustine has "a voice without restraint"; and Dylan, who doesn't preach anything, can't say he was wrong and doesn't doubt the sincerity of his actions. Sincerity, what a great thing.