Dylan's Visions of Sin (46 page)

“Some of”: these well-judged words stay with their thought (taking the time of four syllables, not of only two). Only some of these bootleggers, don’t forget.
The bootleggers are the fire-water ones of Prohibition, not the cassetteers to whom Dylan in concert mostly turns a blind eye. It is blind, not just blind drunk, that the bootleggers’
concoctions may make you if the bootleggers have made not good but bad stuff. (“I can see”, “open up your eyes”: no harm done, as yet.) But this prospect is tinged with a
characteristic comedy when the rhyme is of “good stuff” with “bad enough”.

As the lines make their painstaking quick-witted way, they often pause and look up, alert. He who hesitates may be saved. For instance, there is that cocked “if ”.

A thousand times less vigilant, these words would be here if – instead of the pitch and swivelling poise in “here if” – you were to take them at the run
of the page, toeing the line of the printed lyrics:

Anyway the bootleggers doubly earn their living in the song, given what is hidden (street-legal and road-wise) in the word: boots, legs. Get on down the road. For my part,
I’m not on the road for now.

Again, the staid humour, with “to stay with” being both very like and very unlike “to live with”. Swap them, handy dandy? He could, after all, have
been living with Aunt Sally (especially as she’s not really his aunt), and then in life there are some memories that you learn to stay with.

Aunt Sally may or may not be a lady, and where she lives is not dwelt upon. But where the ensuing ladies live, this location is stayed with, “Darktown” occupying in its time twice
the usual space, not four syllables but two. The dark is so intense.

One of the things that you’ve got to be prepared for is having the break in the voicing be somehow against nature.

True to human nature, though. As for the limit of which this verse goes on to speak (“There ain’t no limit to the amount of trouble women bring”), the breaks
have set their own limits with a feeling for both caution and brinkmanship: “down in / Darktown”, “got to / be prepared but / you never know for what”. Just so.

Since in the midst of life we are in death, be on the
qui vive
. Tread carefully. Which means moving your foot carefully forward, here in Darktown where we all live, respectful of
“of”, and “can”, and “and”, feeling for the ledge or step:

Insecure, we all are, you do have to feel. It is only in the last half of the final verse that there arrives a certain security of mind.

True, there is still a touch of the cautious or the tentative at some of the unit-breaks: “have / broken many a heart” is itself a broken effect; “a way of /
tearing the world apart” does find itself torn apart in the utterance; and “Just as / sure as we’re living” cannot but sound less sure than it claims. But at least each of
the four central breaks, or caesurae, is at last at one with the sense of the phrasing, so that “and mine is surely one” can stand surely on its own feet, as can “Love, see what
you’ve done”, and “just as sure as you’re born”, and “’fore Gabriel blows his horn”. At long last, it has become time to modulate in the final
refrain from “You ain’t got no brains, no how” to “You ain’t got no sense, no how”. From “the light is too intense” to “you ain’t got no
sense”.

What makes me think that this is the line to take with and to this song? A couple of contrasts. First, the contrast with the rhythm and movement of other Dylan songs that imagine being on the
road.

Jaunty, the manner and movement of that. Not that
Sugar Baby
just says fare thee ill, but it does feel Darktown bound, and it does think twice and even suggest Do Think
Twice, It’s All Right.

“Get on down the line”? Take
Walkin’ Down the Line
. What it does with the road is hit it.

There he may go on to sing “I got a heavy-headed gal”, but the song is never heavy-headed and is always light-hearted even when you might have expected otherwise.
Its gait never trips, it trips along, for all its troubled mind.

She ain’t a-feelin’ well, but he might as well keep going now.

Even a particular break in the timing that might have been expected to call up the tone of
Sugar Baby
turns out to feel nothing like the later song. Never mind the quality, feel the width
between this and that. Between this positioning:

And this, which is from
Sugar Baby
, thirty-eight years later and light-years away:

But a more intense light is thrown by a song of 1928 without which
Sugar
Baby
would never have been born in 2001: Gene Austin’s
Lonesome Road
.
³³⁰
Right from the opening instrumental bass-line, in which Dylan’s melody totally immersed itself –

dark dark Darktown     dark dark Darktown     dark dark Darktown     dark . . .

– the resemblances would be uncanny if they were not canny.

Sugar Baby
is full of things that are not to be found in the fine song
Lonesome Road
. But is it fine for Dylan to have treated Austin so? Yes, partly because of
the comedy that enters with the crucial verbal borrowing (the music is its own other matter), “Look up, look up and seek your Maker, ’fore Gabriel blows his horn”. In both of the
songs, the Maker is the Lord. But in Dylan’s song there is this further maker, Austin. For us there is another further maker, Dylan. Anyway Dylan is not blowing his own horn. And he achieves
his own re-working and re-playing of the original by being, himself, in certain respects original with the minimum of alteration (the phrase is T. S. Eliot’s): that is, by having
Sugar
Baby
exercise its imagination
in a particular way that Austin never does. Austin positions his words securely even when poignantly. At every point in Austin, the words
and the music and the voice are fittingly in place. In Dylan, they are at odds. They move as the spirit takes them, and their spirit engages not only with the precious but with the precarious.

“Look up, look up, seek your Maker”: behind Dylan is Austin, and behind Austin is a long tradition from which such an urging derives. It is there for all to hear (at least, all who
can spare a moment not only to look up but to look up a medieval moment) in Chaucer’s
Balade de Bon Conseyl
, his ballad of good counsel to the pilgrim who is to get on down the
road:

Truth will deliver you. The highway is that of the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. They answered him, We be Abraham’s seed, and were never in bondage to any man: how sayest thou, Ye shall be
made free? Jesus answered them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin.

(John 8:32–4)

Fortitude

Blowin’ in the Wind

Dylan’s greatest hit is a song that sustains fortitude in an appeal for justice. Two of the four cardinal virtues for the pricelessness of one.

“Equality, liberty, humility, simplicity”: in due course,
No Time to Think
came to be sardonic about such abstract nouns and their lending themselves so obligingly to
sloganry. But Dylan is aware that these concepts are indispensable aspirations. In
Blowin’ in the Wind
, simplicity is everything, the everything that sets itself to promote equality,
liberty, and humility. (Fraternity, too, my friend.) Which means that to expatiate on
Blowin’ in the Wind
is to risk detracting from its simplicity. Yet it would be a detraction to
suppose that simplicity has no truck with the subtle or suggestive or wayward. For it is characteristic of true simplicity that there may radiate from its utmost directness a good many glinting
things.

The refrain of
Blowin’ in the Wind
is simplicity itself, simply repeated:

Could it be that by now we all know these words too well, and that we no longer listen to them but only hear them? It would be good if they could again become a surprising thing
to hear. The refrain, even while it sounds like an assurance or reassurance, ought on reflection to continue to give us pause, ought even to be understood as insisting that there will always be
some pause that we human beings will have to be given.

“This land is your land”. “We shall overcome”. “Which side are you on?” Those are words entirely without misgiving, and there are good things that such a way
of putting it can give us.
³³¹
But “The answer is blowin’ in the wind”? This is a very different proposition.

There ain’t too much I can say about this song except that the answer is blowing in the wind. It ain’t in no book or movie or TV show or
discussion group. Man, it’s in the wind – and it’s blowing in the wind. Too many of these hip people are telling me where the answer is, but oh I won’t believe that. I still
say it’s in the wind and just like a restless piece of paper it’s got to come down some time . . . But the only trouble is that no one picks up the answer when it comes down so not too
many get to see and know it . . . and then it flies away again.
³³²

What Dylan has to say there about the refrain is corroborated or authenticated by his comments’ taking up so many of the words that constitute the song. Over and above
the simple quotation (“the answer is blowing in the wind”), there are these overlappings of the song’s words with those of Dylan thinking about it: