Dylan's Visions of Sin (77 page)

Sign Language: duet with Eric Clapton on his
No Reason to Cry

Sign on the Window:
New Morning

Silvio:
Down in the Groove

Simple Twist of Fate:
Blood on the Tracks

Slow Train:
Slow Train Coming

Solid Rock:
Saved

Someone’s Got a Hold of My Heart:
the bootleg series
, volume 3

Something’s Burning, Baby:
Empire Burlesque

Song to Woody:
Bob Dylan

Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again:
Blonde on Blonde

Subterranean Homesick Blues:
Bringing It All Back Home

Sugar Baby:
“Love And Theft”

Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues:
the bootleg series
, volume 1

Talkin’ World War III Blues:
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan

Talking New York:
Bob Dylan

Temporary Like Achilles:
Blonde on Blonde

Things Have Changed:
The Essential Bob Dylan

Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love):
Empire Burlesque

Time Passes Slowly:
New Morning

The Times They Are A-Changin’:
The Times They Are A-Changin’

Tomorrow Is a Long Time:
More Greatest Hits

Tonight I’ll be Staying Here with You:
Nashville Skyline

Trouble in Mind: single (B-side)

True Love Tends to Forget:
Street-Legal

Trust Yourself:
Empire Burlesque

Union Sundown:
Infidels

Up to Me:
Biograph

Walkin’ Down the Line:
the bootleg series
, volume 1

Watching the River Flow:
More Greatest Hits

Watered-Down Love:
Shot of Love

We Better Talk This Over:
Street-Legal

Went to See the Gypsy:
New Morning

What Can I Do For You?:
Saved

What Was It You Wanted?:
Oh Mercy

When He Returns:
Slow Train Coming

When I Paint My Masterpiece:
More Greatest Hits

When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky:
Empire Burlesque

When the Ship Comes In:
The Times They Are A-Changin’

When You Gonna Wake Up?:
Slow Train Coming

Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat):
Street-Legal

Who Killed Davey Moore?:
the bootleg series
, volume 1

Winterlude:
New Morning

You Angel You:
Planet Waves

You’re a Big Girl Now:
Blood on the Tracks

You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go:
Blood on the Tracks

Endnotes

1
He says as much, and more, on
Biograph
, the anthology of his work that came with a commentary by him.

2
Interview with Jonathan Cott,
Rolling Stone
(16 November 1978).

3
A verse translation, by Robert Mannyng, of a manual of the sins, by William of Wadington.

4
In the Summertime
. Proverbs 14:9: “Fools make a mock at sin.”

5
Interview with Scott Cohen, Spin (December 1985).

6
Interview with Neil Spencer,
New Musical Express
(15 August 1981).

7
Simple Twist of Fate, Pressing On, Gates of Eden, Dirge, Something’s Burning, Baby, Ballad in Plain D, Who Killed Davey
Moore?, Bye and Bye, Foot of Pride, and Quit Your Low Down Ways
.

8
Coincidence is one of the few pleasures left in life. So: Dylan, “fortunes . . . the red dawn” / Empson, “for the
Red Dawn” (
Note on Local Flora
). Dylan, “flood control” / Empson, “Glut me with floods” (
Aubade
). And Dylan, “the privileged elite . . . not
bothering to dress” / Empson, “In evening dress in rafts upon the main” (
Your Teeth are Ivory Towers
). But it is time for flood control.

9
Seven Types of Ambiguity
(1930, second edition 1947), p. x.

10
Seven Types of Ambiguity
, p. xiii.

11
Empson,
Obscurity and Annotation
(1930), in
Argufying
, ed. John Haffenden (1987),
see this
page
.

12
USA Today
(15 February 1995).

13
The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism
(1933, second edition 1964),
see this page
,
see this page
.

14
By Graham Ashton and / or John Bauldie.

15
Later in
Hiding in Plain Sight
, ed. Wendy Lesser (1993).

16
Ginsberg’s sleeve-notes to
Desire
.

17
Interview with Ron Rosenbaum (November 1977),
Playboy
(March 1978).

18
To Robert Shelton,
Melody Maker
(29 July 1978).

19
Anthony Scaduto,
Bob Dylan
(1971, revised edition 1973),
see this page
.

20
New York City (January 1968);
Newsweek
(February 1968);
Bob Dylan in His Own Words
, compiled by Miles (1978),
see this page
.

21
USA Today
(15 February 1995).

22
Press conference / interview with Ralph J. Gleason (1965),
Rolling Stone
(14 December 1967, 20 January 1968).

23
Probably Chicago (November 1965);
Bob Dylan in His Own Words
,
see this page
.

24
Los Angeles (16 December 1965);
Bob Dylan in His Own Words
,
see this page
.

25
Press conference / interview with Ralph J. Gleason (1965),
Rolling Stone
(14 December 1967, 20 January 1968).

26
Paris Review
interview (1982);
Required Writing
(1983),
see this page
.

27
On the Origin of Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue
(1865);
The Note-Books and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins
, ed. Humphry
House (1937),
see this page
.

28
Interview with Robert Shelton,
Melody Maker
(29 July 1978).

29
A talk published in the
Threepenny Review
(1990) and then in
Hiding in Plain Sight
, ed. Wendy Lesser (1993).

30
New Yorker
(10 May 1999).

31
Whaaat?
(the 1965 interview with Nat Hentoff, in full, differing from
Playboy
, March 1966),
see
this page
.

32
Essay, Supplementary to the Preface
(1815).

33
Introduction to Samuel Johnson’s
London
and
The Vanity of Human Wishes
(1930).

34
Alan Brownjohn, in
Agenda
(Winter 1991),
see this page
.

35
TLS
(27 September 1928).

36
Playboy
(March 1978).

37
All What Jazz
(1970, 1985),
see this page
.

38
I draw here on a piece I wrote for the
Sunday Times
(7 January 1968).

39
Whaaat?,

40
Tarantula
(1966, 1971),
see this page
.

41
With Sam Shepard, of stage and screen.

42
The Liner Notes that Sank
, in the
Telegraph
(Winter 1994).

43
The excellent mock-raking magazine the
Onion,
in its collection
Our Dumb Century
(“100 Years of Headlines from
America’s Finest News Source”), excelled itself with its front page for the
Titanic:

44
For Dave Glover
, programme for Newport Folk Festival (July 1963); bootleg reprinting in
Bob Dylan in His Own Write
,
compiled by John Tuttle,
see this page
.

45
Playboy
(March 1966).

46
Los Angeles (16 December 1965);
Bob Dylan in His Own Words
,
see this page
.

47
The Note-Books and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins
,
see this page
.

48
Cheetah
(1967).

49
Observer
(11 June 1978).

50
15 January 1976. Ginsberg wrote in his sleeve-notes for
Desire
: “By the time Dylan made the great disillusioned
national rhyme
Idiot Wind
– ‘. . . Blowing like a circle round your skull / From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol . . .’ – he must’ve been ready for another
great surge of unafraid prophetic feeling.”

51
Dylan in 1991; Paul Zollo,
Songwriters on Songwriting
(1997),
see this page
.

52
Dylan rhymes
cents / fence
in
Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence.

53
A Chat with Jacques Levy
(Isis, April / May 2000). And Ginsberg, sleeve-notes to Desire: “Half-month was spent
solitary on Long Island with theatrist Jacques Levy working on song facts phrases & rhymes.”

54
Jacques Levy: “We had a great time coming up with ideas though; we were laughing a lot and we were enjoying coming up with
these rhymes like ‘
contagious
’ and ‘
outrageous
’.”

55
For instance, in
Day of the Locusts there is diploma / Dakota
, and in
When I Paint My Masterpiece, Brussels /
muscles
. In
Union Sundown
there is a bravura performance: “El Salvador” rhyming with “dinosaur”, “raw”, and “law”, but with a line tucked
in among them: “They used to grow food in Kansas”. Now if it had been
Arkansas
. . .

56
The Influence of Italian Upon English Literature; The Writings of Arthur Hallam
, ed. T. H. Vail Motter (1943),
see this page
.

57
Few, not none. Thomas Campion, Dylan’s great predecessor as the creator of the music and the words, has some exquisite
instances. Pre-eminent is
Rose-cheekt Laura, come.

58
As a brief reminder of the variety that the rhyme on “free” may manifest: Donne,
The Apparition
: “When by
thy scorn, O murderess, I am dead / And that thou think’st thee free / From all solicitation from me, / Then shall my ghost come to thy bed . . .”. Crabbe,
The Hall
: “Those
who believed they never could be free, / Except when fighting for their liberty.” Edward Thomas,
Words
: “Let me sometimes dance / With you, / Or climb / Or stand perchance / In
ecstasy, / Fixed and free / In a rhyme, / As poets do.” Rhyming on “rhyme”, too.

59
To Criticize the Critic
(1965),
see this page
.

60
Here are some more words that in various ways relate metaphorically to the nature of rhyme, and that occur in Dylan as rhymes:
“again”, “chains”, “coincidence”, “complete”, “control”, “correct”, “cure”, “empty”,
“escape”, “fit”, “follow”, “happen”, “knot”, “loyalty”, “next”, “place”, “plenty”,
“reach”, “reflection”, “relief ”, “remain”, “revealed”, “reward”, “same”, “satellite”,
“satisfied”, “timed”, “tomorrow”, “unresolved”.

61
Is Keats to be heard in Dylan’s “And I’m just like that bird”? Keats’s “stream” might
enter “in midstream”, later in
You’re a Big Girl Now
.

62
Press conference / interview with Ralph J. Gleason (1965),
Rolling Stone
(14 December 1967, 20 January 1968).

63
Isaac Barrow at the foreign shores of death in 1670. John Aubrey (1626–97) began to compile his
Brief Lives
in
1680.

64
Jim McCue gave me this.

65
Zollo,
Songwriters on Songwriting,
see this page
.

66
11
Outlined Epitaphs
, in
Lyrics
1962–1985 (1985),
see this page
.

67
Interview,
USA Today
(15 February 1995). See also
see this page
.

68
Zollo,
Songwriters on Songwriting
,
see this page
.

69
Aphorisms
, tr. R. J. Hollingdale (1990),
see this page
.

70
Rolling Stone
(21 June 1984).

71
Andrew Marvell,
An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland
.

72
“Now a very great man once said / That some people rob you with a fountain pen”.

73
See this page
.

74
D. W. Harding: “Her books are, as she meant them to be, read and enjoyed by precisely the sort of people whom she disliked;
she is a literary classic of the society which attitudes like hers, held widely enough, would undermine.” Some of this would go for Dylan and his subterranean underminings, of glassy
self-confidence, for instance, in
Like a Rolling Stone,
or of sales-talk in
Clean-Cut Kid.
Likewise, perhaps, with Harding’s closing words in 1939: “I have tried to
underline one or two features of her work that claim the sort of readers who sometimes miss her – those who would turn to her not for relief and escape but as a formidable ally against things
and people which were to her, and still are, hateful.” (
Regulated Hatred and Other Essays on Jane Austen
, ed. Monica Lawlor, 1998,
see this page
.)