Dylan and Existentialism

“All the existentialists concur that it is through our choices that we become who we are.”
― Gordon Marino, Ethics: The Essential Writings

In June, the Magnolia Salon at Oldenburg House hosted a dialogue between Gordon Marino, author of The Existentialist's Survival Guide, and philosophy prof Steven Ostovich of St. Scholastica. The evening discussion stirred in me fond memories of a trio of philosophy professors I had at Ohio U, especially my introduction to existentialism class and another on existential literature.

There's a sense in which our philosophical stance becomes a lens by which we interpret our observations of reality in all its aspects. In this blog post I simply wanted to share a few quotes and links that might interest readers with a philosophical bent.

This first is from a blog post titled Dylan, Sartre & Existential Connections (2011)

Jean-Paul Sarte and Bob Dylan are two individuals with huge intellects and an unprecedented way of observing history, society, and deep philosophical issues with such incredible insight and poetic artistic creations. They were also two men who were at nature fundamentally human. Driven by desires we all face, standing on unique foundations of past experiences to motivate their artistic publications. These two men parallel each other in ways that are only coincidental, but today can now be seen as bizarre connections that prove they were historical counterparts to a philosophy and political view of existentialism and commentaries on political currents and cultural advancements (good and/or bad).

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The Daily Nous is an online community where philosophical discussion is the central theme. When Dylan won the Nobel Prize they featured a discussion titled Philosophers On Bob Dylan’s Words, Ideas, and His Nobel Prize Win. If you like philosophy, you may wish to bookmark this site and return to it, and if a Dylan fan you will for sure wish to make time to read this thoughtful contribution to the theme.

Liel Leibovitz's 2014 essay in response to the release of the Basement Tapes bootleg is titled, Bob Dylan, Existential Hero. It's a quick snapshot of a time when Bob Dylan was changing, after the motorcycle crash and his extended stay in Woodstock. The music scene was changing, too.

Here's another interesting slice of insight from a NYTimes opinion piece on the meaning of Dylan's silence after being award the Nobel Prize. Yesterday I wrote about "My Back Pages" and the recording of Another Side of Bob Dylan in 1964. The Times piece points out how later that year the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. "That fall, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre played a variation on the same tune in a public statement explaining why, despite having been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, he would not accept it." Coincidence? It's an intriguing opinion piece by Adam Kirsch.

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And finally, here's one more, from a Wade Hollinghaus blog post titled Bob Dylan and the Grand Canyon: Existentialist Thinking. Hollinghaus cites an observation by Saul Bellow of how American Existentialism is different from European Existentialism, after which he writes, "It seemed to me, as I was cruising past an unending series of blank Arizona horizons, that much of what Dylan writes about, in his musical explorations of Americana, tends to be more in touch with Bellow’s American Existentialism. The hobo figures that have littered Dylan’s hundreds of songs, are a testimony to that—'Highway 61,' pretty much all of Blood on the Tracks, the references seem endless."

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One More Time
Bob Dylan and Philosophy: It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Thinking)

Meantime, life goes on all around you. Engage it!

Story of the Great White Wonder -- the Original Basement Tapes Bootleg

"If the past isn't alive in you, the future will be empty." 
~Greil Marcus on The Basement Tapes

This year's Duluth Dylan Fest culminates with a concert featuring musicians performing songs from The Basement Tapes. There are a whole host of activities slated to make this year an especially special week. Dylan will be 75 on Tuesday, an occasion is being marked with events around the world. You're invited to join us. Learn more at the Duluth Dylan Fest Facebook Page.

Most of the events are free, starting with the opening of the film contest at 7 and Dylan Trivia Contest at 9 p.m.
At Carmody's. With prizes. For events requiring tickets visit the Duluth Dylan Fest connections at Eventbrite. The Basement Tapes: Great White Wonder concert tickets are on sale here. The concert, "curated" by Gene LaFond, is a fund raiser and awareness raiser for the Armory Arts & Music Center.

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Most Dylan fans already know the story of how Dylan and the Band ended up in Woodstock after a world tour that was met with hostile reactions toward his "new sound." Nevertheless, with each telling from various points of view a new picture emerges. Below is a YouTube video that offers up some of the significance of that moment in time. There are also a few additional links to Bob himself sharing how the songs were created and Robbie Robertson telling his story.

Watching this video brought back a few memories for me. The Basement Tapes bootlegs were probably the most famous in history, though they weren't the only bootlegs being circulated. Pirating music has become a whole different animal in the digital age. In the days of vinyl, bootlegs were a physical product sold under the counter. When I was in high school, we had a little record store in Somerville, NJ where I used to buy albums. One day I heard about a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young bootleg that was available. I was told to be discreet, so when no one was around I asked the long-haired guy behind the counter for a copy of the bootleg. I was a very straight-looking kid in high school, so the guy studied me suspiciously, but I knew the record was going for three bucks and threw three George Washingtons on the countertop. He reached under the counter and pulled out an album sheathed in a white, unmarked album cover. It had a real cloak-and-dagger feel to it. As I left the store I couldn't wait to get home and play it.

As you watch this video you'll see how the Basement Tapes bootlegs went global. In one scene you can see how some folks in L.A. stamped the unmarked white cover and gave it a name. Hence, the Great White Wonder.

Eventually, as in eight years later, the Basement Tapes was released as a real album. In the 1990's the "Official" Bootleg Series was initiated, currently comprising 12 sets of outtakes from the various periods of Dylan's career. The Basement Tapes (2014) is called Bootleg Series: Volume 11, and is available as a six CD or two CD set. Or, if you desire, in as three vinyls for those sensitive to the sound fidelity.

Greil Marcus, Clinton Heylin and Sid Griffin talk about this chapter in history.

Here's a soundtrack of Bob Dylan talking about where the songs came from that he wrote there at Woodstock that year. And here's a segment where Robbie Robertson talks about the making of Basement Tapes. And for an in depth account of this period read Levon Helm's This Wheel's On Fire.

Meantime, life goes on all around you. Go for it... in Duluth.

Too Much Of Nothing -- Dylan and the Basement Tapes

When Bob Dylan arrived in New York he famously introduced himself as a folk singer. There was a socialist aspect to this kind of music. There was an intelligence to the songs. Folk music was for the common man, about the common man. And Dylan adopted this approach, emulating his idol Woody Guthrie, frequently singing songs about drifters, outlaws, down-and-outers and people on the fringe.

Another feature of the folk scene included song sharing. You borrowed what you loved and shared it. Hence, Dylan's first album was a collection of covers penned by others, though absorbed and re-engineered in his own inimitable style. And the wider public learned about Dylan from the performers who borrowed the songs he himself had begun writing and performing and soon recording.

Two groups that especially helped propel Dylan into the national spotlight were The Byrds and Peter, Paul & Mary. The Byrds covered so much Dylan that a whole album could be assembled from their recordings of his early songs. Though abbreviated, Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" (and the album by that name) put the Byrds on the map as international folk rock stars.

Peter, Paul & Mary likewise adapted a number of Dylan's songs and scored hits with them, pulling "Blowing in the Wind" and "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright "from his Freewheelin' album, as well as a number of others.

When Dylan morphed into a rock star there was a lot of confusion amongst some of his fans who pegged him as a folk singer. Instead, he was returning to his earlier roots, which included a fascination with the rock 'n roll of the Fifties, ripping it up with an electric guitar in a band called The Golden Chords. This time around, though, he was writing the songs, and the band he'd assembled was indeed ripping into it, pulling out all the stops as they circumnavigated the globe.

The crash came next. And the quiet transitional period in Woodstock. His band, the former Hawks, was invited to join him there and like all lovers of music they made music together. Lots of songs were generated, and tapes recorded. (You can read a great insider perspective from Levon Helm's This Wheel's On Fire.) It was a gestation period during which Dylan morphed into yet another iteration of himself, with John Wesley Harding emerging next.

But in between, there were these basement tapes. Others were aware of these new songs, and "Too Much of Nothing" was one of them, made popular by Peter, Paul and Mary. In point of fact, by the time The Basement Tapes came out in the summer of 1975 most people were only aware of the version by the folk trio.

There are key differences between the versions. Dylan's version is a haunting tune that corresponds with the lyrics, whereas Peter, Paul and Mary sing with a lilting cheerful tone that does little to convey the song's bleakness. Dylan sings mournfully and the chord structure is solemn.

But another contrast is the chorus. Peter, Paul & Mary sing, "Say hello to Valerie, say hello to Marion, send them all my salary on the waters of oblivion." Dylan originally wrote and sang, "Say hello to Valerie, say hello to Vivien..." This may seem like a small difference of little relevance, but the names may have had an origin. T.S. Eliot's two wives were named Valerie and Vivien and there may have been more intentionality to the name selection than to simply make a nice rhyme.

Nevertheless, we borrow what we love and I suppose have the freedom to make it our own. Paul Stookey purportedly says Dylan thought less of the group after this incident.* It's a much darker song than Peter, Paul and Mary delivered.

Too Much Of Nothing

Now, too much of nothing
Can make a man feel ill at ease
One man’s temper might rise
While another man’s temper might freeze
In the day of confession
We cannot mock a soul
Oh, when there’s too much of nothing
No one has control

Say hello to Valerie
Say hello to Vivian
Send them all my salary
On the waters of oblivion

Too much of nothing
Can make a man abuse a king
He can walk the streets and boast like most
But he wouldn’t know a thing
Now, it’s all been done before
It’s all been written in the book
But when there’s too much of nothing
Nobody should look

Say hello to Valerie
Say hello to Vivian
Send them all my salary
On the waters of oblivion

Too much of nothing
Can turn a man into a liar
It can cause one man to sleep on nails
And another man to eat fire
Ev’rybody’s doin’ somethin’
I heard it in a dream
But when there’s too much of nothing
It just makes a fella mean

Say hello to Valerie
Say hello to Vivian
Send them all my salary
On the waters of oblivion

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NOTE: This year's Duluth Dylan Fest concert will feature musicians performing songs from The Basement Tapes. There are a whole host of activities slated to make this year and especially special week. Dylan himself will be 75 and the occasion will be marked in events around the world, I'm sure. You're invited to join us here. Learn more at the Duluth Dylan Fest Facebook Page.

*see the Wikipedia entry on this particular point.

This Wheel's On Fire: An Insider's Take on Life with The Band

Not quite finished but far enough along to throw my two cents into the ring regarding Levon Helm's version of his life, The Band and the roots of Rock and Roll. Born Mark Lavon* Helm in Turkey Scratch, Arkansas in the heart of "Tornado Alley" seems as far removed from fame as you can get, so it just goes to show where dreams can take you when you apply yourself.

In addition to being a musician with The Band, the team of musicians Dylan selected to back him on his first tour when he went electric, Helm went on to have a career in Hollywood, playing Loretta Lynn's father in Coal Miner's Daughter, and Chuck Yeager's pal in The Right Stuff among other things. What gives the book its chops is his eye-witness experiences during the emergence of rock and roll, and the manner in which black Mississippi Delta R&B crossed into the popular culture.

Helm's account of life as a boy in Turkey Scratch is as interesting as life in Woodstock making music with Dylan after his motorcycle crash. The houses on stilts, the floods, tornados and the amazing synthesis of black and white culture in shared rural poverty where music carried the human spirit aloft all proved formative for Helm. It was a period of history that will not be repeated as the times changed for rural farmers everywhere.

Like many musicians who got the bug to play, Levon Helm hung out in places he was too young to be and began performing as a guitar player at a very early age. When Ronnie Hawkins invited him to play with his band the Hawks, Helm headed north to Canada to where their rockabilly energy set them apart from everyone and everything.

The story is told sequentially about how this band was formed, one by one brought on for their talent as other dropped off -- primarily to settle down because these were some wild cats. Most of these fellows came from rough backgrounds, not quite the starched collar kids from prep school, and they weren't afraid to mix it up when necessary (drunk boyfriends of the girls who they seemed to attract like flies.) After six years of performing -- in Canada, the Deep South and the Jersey Shore -- Dylan contacted them to join him in a world tour. He was doing something new, a 2-part concert in which the first set would be acoustic and the second electric.

The Hawks had been Ronnie Hawkins' band, shaped after the back-flipping leader's vision of what a band should be, but eventually even Hawkins dropped out for a more domestic life. When the Hawks were recruited to surround Dylan with sound, their name became what we now know as The Band. Being associated with Dylan certainly helped strengthen their cred and a record contract led to songs most everyone is familiar with such as The Weight, Up on Cripple Creek, and The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.

You know from the outset it's going to be a sad book. Helm begins with the suicide of Richard Manuel, foreshadowing the stresses their success would bring them later in the story.

(L to R) Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Richard Manuel.

As with everything in life, nothing remained the same as circumstances evolved. Success did not make them happy as drugs and greed got in the way. This book is Helm's version of how the whole thing fell apart. Martin Scorsese's film The Last Waltz, produced by Robbie Robertson, proved to be the nail in the coffin for the group.

Here's an accurate review of the book at Amazon.com by someone named Marian:

"Technical writing flaws make This Wheel's On Fire hard to read in spots, but the description of a remarkable collaboration from the inside is brilliant. Any creative person will benefit from reading it. And, of course, mild through his description is of the legal/copyright betrayal of the other four by the guitar player, there's a hard lesson on view for creative people."

I picked up the book for a little more background for Dylan's latest Bootleg Series #11: The Basement Tapes. Helm was there and pulls no punches. It sounds authentic and fair. The book gets mostly four and five star reviews at Amazon, but some of the problems I had with the book were shared by others a few times. Here's my short list:

The book is co-written by Stephen Davis, who frequently incorporates narratives and stories from other people who were there at various points. The problem is, on numerous occasions I didn't catch who was talking so it became confusing and hard to follow. I got tired of the extra work required to try to figure it out.

For me it was a little too boastful. I lost track of how many times Levon Helm stated that The Hawks were the best band ever, or statements to that effect. On one occasion he states that he believed they were better than the Beatles and the Beach Boys. This would be overlooked had he not also included numerous references to how good looking he was.   

The real power in the book comes from his candid assessment of the events that unfolded as the Band disintegrated. You could feel his pain.

And for anyone serious about a recording career, you'll gain plenty of insight on the importance of reading your record contracts and knowing your rights. All too often we can't see the dark side of success because we're blinded by the lights.

I still believe it was an important book. 4.5 stars out of 5. 

*Though born Lavon, so many people mispronounced or spelled his name wrong that he just went ahead and changed it to Levon. 
EdNote: Like all the members of The Band, Helm was a multi-instrumentalist. I have pictured him singing while playing drums, but he began with a guitar and took up mandolin while in Woodstock, among other things.
Photo source: Wikipedia / Heinrich Klaffs via Flickr

This Wheel's On Fire, Woodstock and Marketing the Basement Tapes

It's been a month since release of The Bootleg Series #11: The Basement Tapes, and though I've yet to weigh in I'm tilling the soil and planting seeds. There's plenty of chatter these days with almost everything Bob Dylan does. He's become an icon of our culture (though he famously disdains labels, so as soon as I wrote that I wanted to take it back.)

For the past month I've been listening to RAW, the 2-CD version of this bootleg collection, as opposed to Complete, the full 6-CD version. Simultaneously I have been paying attention to the reviews, some in surprising places. I've already noted the New Yorker feature, and I can't imagine a release of any Dylan music without a Rolling Stone feature. I suspect that marketing data is available to show that any time they can find an excuse to get a Dylan cover they increase sales by 10%. Just guessing, because those are the only ones I buy.

What's interesting about the Rolling Stone cover and the New Yorker piece is that they both rely on photos which originally appeared as part of a Saturday Evening Post feature in which a photographer and journalist went up to see what was happening with regard to Dylan's recovery from his motorcycle accident. I have had a copy of that Saturday Evening Post for so long that you can see how faded the ink has become when you compare the two pictures here. Perhaps the Rolling Stone photo looks richer because it's been re-mastered somehow. You can certainly see that it's been recycled from the same shoot.

Well, as I was saying above I've been prepping to weigh in on this latest Bootleg Series and one of the ways I've been gearing up is by reading Levon Helm's This Wheel's On Fire, a book that I will also review during another space of time. Helm was one of the original members of The Hawks, the band recruited to join Dylan in his new "electric" phase. You may recall from Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966 how these concerts generally unfolded. The first half of the concert would be Dylan solo, acoustic guitar strapped across his should, with a tight hold on his audiences. Part two would be Dylan pugged in, The Band (formerly The Hawks) producing a blistering sound that had the same effect in town after town: loud boos. The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert in Manchester culminated in one fan famously bellowing "Judas."

The tour began in the U.S. though before Dylan took it abroad, and with the exception of Texas, the results were the same everywhere, and Levon Helm really disliked it. He and the Hawks were accustomed to crowds embracing and loving their performances. Suddenly they were being disdained, almost violently. Ironically, Dylan loved it. Helm didn't say it this way but Dylan seemed to consider the publicity from this insulting treatment to be equivalent to writers who get tagged as "Banned in Boston."

Before they left the country Helm split the tour. Helm skipped about passing time in various ways including briefly bussing tables in Florida and working oil rigs off the Gulf coast. After Dylan's motorcycle accident Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko and gang were invited up to Woodstock, as was Levon Helm, and something magical happened. The creative energy was uninhibited, channeled into a different kind of sound independent of performance driven material. Whereas the Hawks cut their teeth as performers, this was a whole different gig, hanging with Bob and just letting the juices flow.

Fast forward. One of the tunes Dylan and Rick Danko co-wrote was "This Wheel's On Fire." It later became the title of Helm's book about the history of The Band (and his personal history). It also became the selected song from The Basement Tapes for this promotional video narrated by Jeff Bridges and released today to promote the Bootleg Series Volume 11. Watch it here.

After the Fall: The New Yorker Weighs In On Dylan's Basement Tapes

“As I walked out of the lovely old Paramount Theater the last three nights after seeing Bob Dylan and his band, one word kept coming to mind: sublime.”
 ~Mitch Meyer, reviewing Bob Dylan's recent Oakland concerts.

November is the beginning of another busy time for Northland Dylan fans. First there’s the release of the latest set of songs from the vault, Bootleg Series #11, The Basement Tapes. Second, there’s the epic collection of lyrics from the entirety of his catalog, titled simply The Lyrics: Since 1962. And finally, Dylan himself is returning home to Minnesota, some fans already vowing to not miss a concert included the rumored unscheduled one that I can’t talk about.

The quote atop this page is from a review at BobLinks.com, the “go to” source for Dylan concert followers and more.

Regarding the Basement Tapes The New Yorker gave its reviewer plenty of ink to play with in this week’s edition. He begins with a recount of the famously obscured motorcycle accident that is all part of the Dylan legend, hence the title of the review, which begins this way...

On July 29, 1966, Bob Dylan became distracted while riding his motorcycle. Nobody knows what caught his eye—he told Sam Shepard that it was the sun; he told the biographer Robert Shelton that he hit an oil slick—but he ended up at the bottom of a hill in Woodstock, New York, with his Triumph beside him. His thoughts could have been distraction enough.

And so it goes, what really happened nobody knows. What we do know is that Dylan took a break from touring and proceeded to leave an extensive collection of recordings that answer the question as regards how he spent his time during his Woodstock years after leaving The City and The Road.

After an appropriately elaborate setup, author Sasha Frere-Jones digs into the news, which is the occasion for this multi-page review.

Next week, [November 4 to be exact] a six-CD set called “The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 11,” featuring a hundred and thirty-nine songs, will be released. It is not exactly an album, and was never intended to be. Some of the songs began circulating in 1969, on an album that came to be called “The Great White Wonder,” and brought the word “bootleg” into the context of music. Six years later, sixteen songs from these sessions, plus eight written and recorded by The Band alone, were enhanced with overdubs and officially released as a two-LP set, under the name “The Basement Tapes.” Several months before the release, Dylan gave his first radio interview in nine years and said, “Somebody mentioned it was a good idea to put it out, you know, as a record, so people could hear it in its entirety and know exactly what we were doing up there in those years.”

The author does more than talk about this latest Dylan set and it’s 139 songs of uneven importance. He offers a detailed autobiographical overview of how he beame a Dylan fan. His first brush with Dylan’s music failed to connect with him. But then, somewhere along the way, like tens of thousands before him and since, a single line or stanza from a single song hits home with force. For Frere-Jones the song was “Mama You Been On My Mind” from the Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare and Unreleased.)

It's good article, worthy of The New Yorker. You can catch it in full here.

And in the event you don't have your tickets yet for the Midwest portion of his Never Ending Tour, here's the place to plug in, at BobDylan.com. Three nights in Minneapolis, three more in Chicago and a seventh night in Cleveland, home of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Keep on truckin'. Bob. Let it roll.