Bob Dylan's "The Philosophy of Modern Song": Gumshoe narration from a Washington Square soapbox - by Harold Lepidus
Bob Dylan's "The Philosophy of Modern Song": Gumshoe narration from a Washington Square soapbox - by Harold Lepidus
The Philosophy of Modern Song is everything you’d expect from a Bob Dylan book with such a provocative, all-encompassing title. Taking a circuitous route through a seemingly random selection of 66 compositions that spans many decades and genres, Dylan is not going to give it to you straight. Does he ever? He taught us to question everything. Which means we must also question him. Probably to his eternal annoyance.
The following are some initial, random thoughts on the book. I will try to steer clear of giving you too many specific examples in advance, hopefully just enough to whet your appetite. Part of the fun of reading the book is following the unexpected twists and turns, especially the occasional punchline, or a baffling/challenging observation.
I pictured Dylan either typing on an old-fashioned typewriter, or possibly writing this all out on piles of yellow legal pad pages, somewhat amused that he even ended up in this situation. How seriously is he taking all of this? Both very, and with a bit of a wink. Humor has always been Dylan’s secret weapon. I’ve tried to avoid most reviews as I wanted to come up with my own interpretation(s). However I’ve seen some headlines about how we’re reading what Dylan really thinks about things, or that these songs influenced him. To the uninitiated, that might seem how it feels. However, as we all know, Dylan is almost always masked.
What follows, in order to place this book in context, are a handful of observations, some based on Dylan’s previous work.
When Dylan released his 1970 double album Self Portrait, on the surface it appeared to be completely devoid of any sort of self analysis. It was a collection of mostly the compositions of others, and some rather minor ones of his own, and it was initially dismissed by many. Yet after many years of Dylanologistic analysis, it did give us some insight into what Dylan was like - not only at the time, but during his formative years. It may not have been what we wanted to hear, but it was honest, and eventually gave us a better understanding - a portrait - of the artist.
The same thing is happening here. On the surface, Dylan is writing about dozens of songs, but in reality, he’s writing about himself. Not in an autobiographical way, but when he riffs on things, it feels like he’s doing it for his own amusement, in addition to trying to illuminate what these songs are about. He’s funny, clever, insightful, puzzling, prodding, idiosyncratic, and most of all, challenging.
No song is too sacred, nor any song too minor, or obscure. Like his songwriting, the narration in The Philosophy of Modern Song is rooted in many sources. The randomness echoes Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour satellite radio program. This is not surprising since Eddie Gorodetsky, a.k.a. Pierre Mancini, that show’s producer and narrator, is one of the few thanked in the book (as Dylan’s “fishing buddy”.)
Gorodetsky has roots in Boston. I used to listen to him on Emerson College radio, and, if I was lucky, WBCN, “The Rock of Boston.” He had a music trivia show - “Trivia, not trivial.” as he would instruct at the beginning of every weekend program, where listeners would call in and try to stump the hosts. He also had an early, but now extinct, website called something like “The Music That Time Forgot,” which chronicled the history of very bizarre albums, which has been copied by many other websites since. The web design featured cartoon drawings of dinosaurs.
Gorodetsky worked at Saturday Night Live, and Letterman, when Dylan was a guest.His encyclopedic esoteric musical knowledge, along with his sense of humor, must have endeared him to Dylan. In the mid-80s, when I bumped into Gorodetsky at a record store in Greenwich Village, I asked him what Mr. Dylan was like. He responded, “He’s a very private man.”
When Gorodetsky was writing for the sitcom Dharma and Greg, Dylan appeared as a guest. He also wrote the liner notes for a Rhino collection of cover versions of Dylan songs that had not been released by their composer at the time, and a collection of Christmas Party songs, released on Dylan’s Strikin’ It Rich label. He also appeared in the 2001 “Love and Theft” commercial, and the 2003 film, Masked and Anonymous.
(If Dylan can riff, why can’t I?)
Dylan’s writing is not that unlike his mid-60s surrealistic mindfuck of Tarantula, or his album liner notes from 1965, albeit here it is presented with proper punctuation. However, when taken as a whole, I’d say it’s more like “Murder Most Foul - Part Two.” In The Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan time travels throughout history, occasionally touching base to emphasize a point. Random stream of consciousness, connecting the dots from far reaching constellations.
The first example I will give here is at the end of the chapter about Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti.” I won’t spell it out for you, but let’s just say that while I was home alone reading it, and came to the final observation, I burst out laughing. Either Dylan was being completely sincere, or pulling my leg. In either case, it was unexpected, and hilarious. The fact that it was probably heartfelt does not distract from my appreciation, or interpretation.
Dylan oscillates between the arbitrary and the sincere. The best parts, for me, are when he’s writing about what makes a song, a recording, or a performance, a success. In the second part of his chapter on Hank Williams’ “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” he goes into detail about what’s wrong with music these days (“...we are spoon-fed everything.”) For the Osborne Brothers’ “Ruby, Are You Mad?”, after riffing on the name “Ruby,” (including Jack Ruby, another connection to “Murder Most Foul”), Dylan clarifies the difference between “tradition” and “calcification” when it comes to old records.
On the other hand, or maybe it’s better to say, when the shoe is on the other foot, in the chapter on Carl Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes,'' he puts the importance of said shoe in context by going into great detail about the history of footwear.
One of the most deep, and detailed, chapters is Dylan’s take on Edwin Starr’s “War.” Here, Dylan gets serious. Deadly serious. Powerfully, the author of “Masters of War” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” questions the song’s purpose, and intent. This goes for all so-called “protest songs,” and he connects it back to the very first Motown single. Brilliant, insightful, chilling.
The tone of the narrative sometimes feels like a parody of a know-it-all. You know the type: Some guy in a bar with his drunk friends, or maybe playing poker, all trying to top each other by proving their expertise in minutiae as if it's a matter of life of death, or maybe trying to one-up his friends in a competition of who is more “masculine,” whatever that means. The guy is gonna win the argument, whether he has to lie, cheat, or steal.
It crossed my mind last night that this entire book could be, in part, Dylan’s wry take on musical obsessiveness, like … um … people like you and me. People who over analyze music, just like I’m doing here. You know… “Dylanologists.”
There’s something mischievous about Dylan’s writing. He’s clearly knowledgeable, but sometimes he’s so over the top, you can almost picture him quietly laughing at his own cleverness. Sprinkled throughout the book, as one would expect, are slang terms from bygone eras, like it was part of the dialogue of a film noir gumshoe. For Johnny Taylor’s “It’s Cheaper To Keep Her,” Dylan takes the song to its (il)logical conclusion, riffing on divorce and polygamy. To me, it works (as a white male) because I think he’s purposely trying to disrupt the parade of political correctness. Does he really support polygamy? To me, it seems like he knows what he’s doing: He’s poking the bear. It’s just something that tickled his fancy and went with it. But who knows? But even if he really believes it, so what? Who cares? Don’t follow leaders … He’s riffing like an edgy Greenwich Village nightclub comic in the early 60s, or one of those guys pontificating from a soapbox in Washington Square.
He’s always a few streets, or a million miles, ahead of us. Like the Tower of Babel, we’ll all come away from this book with our own language, our own interpretation. But it is a self portrait, whether he wants it to be or not. But it’s not only a portrait of him, it’s a portrait of us as well. With Philosophy of Modern Music, Dylan, once again, has given us something to think about. Sometimes, he even writes about it.
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