Dylan's Visions of Sin (21 page)

Far from being socially committed, it looks as though it might be an escape song, and is so, in that a tambourine man is a peddler of pot. Yet Dylan says he’s “not
sleepy”, even though there ain’t no place he’s going to; and his pied piper myth encourages us to follow the unconscious where spontaneously it may lead us. This is subtly
suggested by the wavery refrain and by the irregularity of both verbal and musical clauses, which pile or float up like smoke rings. As the rings unfurl, we are liberated.
¹⁵⁸

Dylan himself has not felt liberated by any such readings of
Mr. Tambourine Man
: “Drugs never played a part in that song” (
Biograph
).

What clearly did play a part is Dylan’s sense of how precariously thrilling the whole matter of
following
may be. The Pied Piper is there all right, but with all the mixed feelings
that we ought to feel about the story of someone who was cheated by “the city fathers” and who took his revenge by making off with the city children, “the sweet pretty
things”, as they are called in
Tombstone Blues
. “The town has no need to be nervous”? Rather the reverse, as is clear when
Tombstone Blues
goes on to imagine a king
who “Puts the pied pipers in prison”.

The Pied Piper has a dancing spell that he casts their way. The Pied Piper was wronged, and then was the wronger. “And Piper and dancers were gone forever”: those words are Robert
Browning’s, in
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
. For words of Dylan’s:

If you really must follow the sound, then better the jingle jangle than the triangle tingle.

“Don’t follow leaders”. Might it be safe to follow the children that follow the Piper? “Wherever the children go I’ll follow them”.
¹⁵⁹
No, on further thought, don’t follow anything. Even an enthusiasm.

Jazz is hard to follow; I mean, you actually have to
like
jazz to follow it; and my motto is, never follow
anything
. I don’t know what the motto of the
younger generation is, but I would think they’d have to follow their parents. I mean, what would some parent say to his kid if the kid came home with a glass eye, a Charlie Mingus record and
a pocketful of feathers? He’d say: “Who are you following?” And the poor kid would have to stand there with water in his shoes, a bow tie on his ear and soot pouring out of his
belly button and say: “Jazz, Father, I’ve been following jazz.”
¹⁶⁰

So is it folly to follow? “& he say ‘just you folly me baby snooks! jus you folly me & you feel fine!’”
¹⁶¹
Cock some snooks at him, that’s my advice. And yet perhaps just this once, it would truly be fine: “Yes, to dance . . .” In the jingle jangle morning, who
knows what music might be made, and how? Not “swingin’ madly across the sun”, but by courtesy of it.

The Ethiopians, over whom Memnon reigned, erected a celebrated statue to the honour of their monarch. This statue had the wonderful property of uttering a melodious sound every
day, at sun-rising, like that which is heard at the breaking of the string of a harp when it is wound up. This was effected by the rays of the sun when they fell upon it.

(John Lemprière,
Classical Dictionary
)
¹⁶²

Struck by the sounds that were struck by the sun, I knew the night had gone.

But not for good. Immediately following (on
Bringing It All Back Home
) the melodious sound of the words “I’ll come followin’ you”, there is heard a different
evocation of light and darkness:

The trees of Eden are haunting frightening trees, true. In the fullness of time, the dawn will be back: “At dawn my lover comes to me”. But evening’s empire
will return, likewise. To return to Lemprière and “the foreign sun”: “At the setting of the sun, and in the night, the sound was lugubrious.”

Lust

A note in
Biograph
says unassumingly of
Lay, Lady, Lay
: “It became one of Dylan’s best-known love songs, almost by accident.” “Almost by
accident” is good, like love and its felicities.

A best-known love song,
Lay, Lady, Lay
is all the better for knowing about carnal knowledge. Love, good. Lust, bad? Meanwhile
Desire
, Dylan’s inspired title
for an album, is a word that knows too much to argue or to judge: its lips are sealed, for the moment. Then there is concupiscence, a lasciviously lissom word that stands in need of banter if it is
not to come on too strong: James Joyce having fun with
The Old Curiosity Shop
as the old concupiosity shape, or Wallace Stevens opening with rounded imperiousness a severely sad poem,
The
Emperor of Ice-Cream
:

“Call the roller”: an injunction (“Listen to me, baby”) is likewise the launching of
If You Gotta Go, Go Now
, a song that consists not of taking
out an injunction, but of making one out, not an injunction to stop someone from entering but to discourage someone from leaving.

One happy effect of this regular conclusion, “Or else you gotta stay all night”, is that it does have the decency not to contract itself into the warning or threat
that would be the two opening words alone:
or else
. (“The alternative to be imagined”, as
The Oxford English Dictionary
explains the menace.
¹⁶³
) Another other happy effect is the song’s giving of patently bogus grounds. Don’t misunderstand me, it pleads – or better still, I know I can count on you to
understand that I am laying myself open. (How about you?) A girl with a sense of humour (and why else would I want to be with you, gal? . . .) is sure to get it.

Does that do the trick, make you tick? Not really? Then try this:

Deft, the move from the opening “There’s something you must see” to the closing, “It’ll be too dark for you to find the door”. Canny, the
respect for her sense of humour, her seeing through the tomcatfoolery, that is implied by the obligatory invoking of
respect
:
¹⁶⁴

“A guilty conscience, too”? No, because you and I both know that in this particular gamble I am parlaying the innocent. There is no sarcasm in the song, only witty
panache (as in Marvell’s complicated compliment
To His Coy Mistress
), and no self-respecting girl would ever leave a room that housed such self-knowledgeable effrontery. Stay, lady,
stay? Stay, baby, stay.

There is comparable comedy in
All I Really Want to Do
, another desirous song of seducing or inducing (or educing – let me call out of you an admission of what you too want to
do):

Sometimes the question to ask in life is
Is this true?
Sometimes (again) it should be
What truth is there in this?
Irony, which disagrees with its single-minded
brother sarcasm, enjoys the flesh-brush friction that comes of there being an element of truth in what the other person is maintaining, even when what is said is self-serving and is not simply to
be credited. (When it is simply to be discredited, the effect is usually cheap.) The vivacity of the song, which is on the side of life, comes from its meaning what it says, or at any rate kinda
meaning it, meaning it in its way. Desire likes the thought of liking those whom it desires. Love and friendship love to curl up. Strictly speaking (but do you really want to speak strictly?), it
is not true that
All
I really want to do is, baby, be friends with you. But nor is score the
only
thing I really want to do. Far more than the protest song, it is the protestation
song that Dylan has always loved. And there is always not only play, but a play within the play, something dramatized. “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” The gentleman, on this
occasion, not so?

True, and standing there as the very last thing said in the song before its final assurance,

“Feel like me / See like me, or be like me”? No. To
like
me, now that is certainly hoped for, but not those three hopes, “Feel like me / See like me, or
be like me”, for the song does not identify with the self-absorption that postulates something called “identifying with”. That is not how the song is voiced on
Another Side of
Bob Dylan
, what with the vocal ogling and the yodelled “do”. There is a counterpointing of the torrential rhyming against the evenness of rhythm and of delivery, the voice
throughout self-possessing a sheer comic persistence (I shall no more weary of assuring you than I shall of you, I assure you), heard in his tender laugh at “Frighten you or uptighten
you”. Living seems a laugh, and so does loving, especially at – of all places – “uptighten you”. Only someone uptight would object to the slangy creation
“uptight”. (From 1934, “in a state of nervous tension or anxiety”; from 1969, “strait-laced”,
The Oxford English Dictionary
.) But you will look in vain in
the dictionary for a verb, to uptighten. This is a turn of the screw, and apparently one that Dylan turned to along the way, for the printed lyrics have “or tighten you”. Relax. You
have my word. Sometimes the comedy takes a melodramatic turn:

– with “do you in’ then giving to what could be an abstract word, “dissect”, a cutting edge:

The song constitutes an extraordinary list of all the ways in which you can mistreat somebody: are there
any
that don’t figure somewhere in it? And yet how benign
the whole exhibition is.

There “Finalize” gets its pouncing power from a sense of how finality fleets away,likeanadvertisement (“Finalize you,oradvertise you”)–from its
being such a shrug of a word. And one might, in making a passing, notice Dylan’s dexterity with “knock you up”:

The cunning propriety tactfully, pregnantly, separates “knock” from “you up” for a couple of words; after all, the preceding “shock” would
more suggest “shock you” than “shock you
up
” – though one of the things that Dylan is doing is giving a shake to the phrase “shake you
up”.
¹⁶⁵
New Pony
shook people up in the 1970s. No way to treat a lady.

Oats, wild and there for the having, and animal spirits: these often animated the young Dylan, or (more precisely) his songs. (His life is
his
business; his art is
something else, not being business but a vocation, even while – like Shakespeare’s – it earns his living.) Fun and games, much of this. Not all of it, for there are occasions when
the devil and sin have their insinuations.

That is
Trouble in Mind
and in body, but only a prig or prurient prude would hiss “the sin of lust” when hearing the knowing words