Dig Yourself
Remember that in the beginning of his movie Dylan is flashing the words to Subterranian Homesick Blues on the screen. In the middle, he throws in "Dig Yourself." That's what Dylan is always trying to tell us, and the song is about what a hard time he has trying to help other people he's responsible for Saint Augustine on the new album is responsible for everyone. Staying alive is the struggle of the necessary cooperation of people to provide for themselves. You've got to work with other people. Saint Augustine expands the common struggle people share to include the necessity for a religion to explain things. If Dylan weren't trying to help people seek a comparable truth, he would not be making records like this one.
The new album represents a stylistic change in his expression. Dylan's earlier efforts to find truth as an object is replaced by songs that try to identify a truthful process. This change in what Dylan is doing I think explains why John Wesley Harding is the title song. The hero is a cowboy (your standard American mythology) who is always trying to do right (read: seeking truth). The song doesn't complete a story; we never learn what he wants or what happens. Dylan has just identified his character to be the spirit of the album--the truth seeker.
A number of major reviews of the album have said the music is Dylan's most important change. Notable was Jon Landau in the May issue of Craw-daddy!. He wrote: "On this album he is above all a musician, a singer, first, and in looking at how these over-all characteristics manifest themselves on the particular songs of the album it will help us to look especially at how Dylan is using his voice." Landau is too used to writing about rock sound. Dylan is always working on his message. The music helps him say it, but it's only the process. Mike Bloomfield was quoted in an interview in Hit Parader magazine as saying that Dylan didn't really care what the music was like when they were recording Highway 61. He would just give them a few chords, Bloomfield said, and let the band work out the rest on their own. Dylan got rid of the electric band, but probably let Charlie McCoy work out a lot of John Wesley Harding.
Maybe Dylan does believe in religion, or at least pretends to, or is trying to believe in it for a while. Drifter's Escape is a straightforward parable of the story of Jesus' trial and Pontius Pilate and Barabbas, the murderer the crowd would rather set free than Christ. The Drifter's judge shows the same reluctance to sentence execution as Pilate until forced to by the jury (crowd). The lightning bolt setting up the Drifter's escape is Christ rising on the third day to heaven. And by putting the story in a contemporary setting he's telling the people with a Bible in the desk, who think "it can't happen here," that it could and they would probably be the ones to do it (kill Jesus, or his equivalent) as soon as they got the chance.
Maybe Dylan believes in the early Christians. They were believable. The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest is the story of what happens to a modern hero who gets tempted as Christ was by the Devil in the wilderness. The hero, Frankie Lee, dies in a whorehouse that Judas Priest convinced him was some sort of heaven. In this one, Dylan twists his images a little more the way he used to. Frankie Lee is Dylan's conception of most people. "Nothing is revealed," says a little boy (Dylan) at the end. He is saying Frankie is revealed to be a nothing. And if Dylan mumbled the same inanities that I did in my childhood, then "Judas Priest" was one of the accepted nice ways to scream the epithet, "Jesus Christ."
Side two of the album is the straight side. Dylan isn't hiding anything. "I pity the poor immigrant when his gladness comes to pass," is the last line of a beautiful song that rings true as one of the most accurate social observations of our time. "And I do hope you receive it well depending on the way you feel that you've lived," is one of several great lines in Dear Landlord explaining a philosophy of interaction between two dependent individuals. There's the suggestion that Dylan is talking about his relation to God (the landlord); but I won't go into it further because the song pretty much explains itself once you've decided whom Dylan is addressing. If you think the country style is new, compare Down Along the Cove with It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry, cut three on side one of Highway 61 Revisited. And I'll Be Your Baby Tonight is there to tell us what Dylan's feeling like since his motorcycle crash and silence for two years. Wicked Messenger reminded me of something that made me wonder why I had never wondered about it before--is Dylan, the folk hero of the new generation (nee Robert Zimmerman) Jewish? Wicked Messenger is a parable for Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt; the song echoes Dylan's earlier messages of the importance of believing in something and working with pepole. He is Jewish; about two years ago there was a press report that he was back in Minnesota for his brother's Bar Mitzvah. But the blessing is lost on him because he clearly grew up being taught both ends of the Bible. It's in all his songs.
Another thing that Country Joe told us was that he didn't really like the way Dylan had copped out on politics, including the anti-war scene. But Dylan's message isn't with organizations. His message reaches its most advanced state of development in three songs he's written recently. One's in the middle of the first side of the new album; the other two he wrote for a couple of other groups.
Pushing Skag
The Mighty Quinn he wrote for the Manfred Mann. It's just recently fallen off the tunedex. It's also about a guy who's pushing skag. Want proof? "When Quinn the Eskimo gets here, all the pigeons gonna fly to him." and "When Quinn the Eskimo gets here, everybody's gonna want a doze." The last is a pun on "want a doze." and "want a dose." Of course the whole scene is a lot like Waiting for Godot, which brings in God and religion and which sounds right for Dylan. And maybe H can be a religion. What this song's got in common with the other two is the message in the following lines: "Everybody's building ships and boat; some are building monuments; some are jotting down notes. Everybody's in despair. Every girl and boy. But when Quinn the Eskimo gets here, everybody's going to jump for joy." People are despairing because what they're doing--building monuments or jotting down notes to songs like Dylan--is as useless as Dylan said it was in Visions of Johanna.
Too Much of Nothing, sung by Peter, Paul, and Mary is another song Dylan wrote. The Nothing is the same nothing Dylan saw in Frankie Lee and Judas Priest. "Too much of Nothing," Dylan writes, "can turn a man into a liar. It can cause some men to sleep on nails, the other men to eat fire. Everybody's doing something, I heard it in a dream." Sleeping on nails and eating fire are obvious acts of faith, and are at least some kind of answer to a life where a man who "don't know a thing" can be made a king. Again-the idea is that our society, where the Protestant Ethic places the highest value on the work of businessmen, has no meaningful purpose or values--is nothing.
Finally, All Along the Watchtower is so unsettling that some people are afraid to listen to it when they're on mind drugs. "There are many here among us that feel that life is but a joke ... let us not talk falsely now;