A few years after winning the Nobel prize for literature, Bob Dylan published this curious book of essays on songs. It has had mixed, largely positive, reviews, though with some dissent. Almost all of them talked about Dylan's knowledge of song and insightful listening. Sometimes, reviews talked about 'invention' and 'joyful zest'; if you liked it less, I think they used the word 'perversity'. What they didn't do, and I think really missed, was to say that these are
funny.
There isn't enough analysis of Bob Dylan's humour. I think that it is easy to miss this, especially if you tend to see him through the prism of protest, but he always been funny.
Bob Dylan's 115th Dream is a funny song. In Love and Theft, one of his songs includes the line 'Calls down to room service, says, "Send up a room". ' It's just often forgotten. He's not the only one. There's a convincing analysis out there that
Okie from Muskogee is
also meant to be funny and everyone got caught out by the reception.
This book is a joke from the start. He knows this isn't a philosophy book. It's a joke. Nor is it the only one. Here he is on The Great Pretender - 'like many things even pretenders got devalued between the fifties and the seventies.' On Sony Bono - 'his greatest achievement was as a congressman, where he helped pass the Sonny Bono Act, which extended copyright terms for all songwriters.' Some of the jokes need a bit of a build up. Like this on Don't take your guns to town - 'Stories are simple. We all know them. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy steals crust of bread. Boy gets gunned down in town square. Girl kills boy’s wife. Child grows up searching for father’s murderer. Girl marries boy. Boy burns down town.' These are all jokes.
And there are more elaborate, madcap sections too. Like this line on Your Cheating Heart - 'This song can be taken a couple of different ways. In one, for instance, you’re a psychic....' Equally, there is an elaborate set up about the distinction within I've always been crazy, when he imagines the following scenario - 'Suppose Waylon was on trial for murder and this song is Waylon telling his lawyer that he does not want to use the insanity plea when going in front of the judge. He’d rather be crazy and just take it like a man. The insanity plea would cut him off from the world.'
My favourite of all though is his analysis of Little Richard's Long tall Sally, where he writes, and this is the entire section - 'Long Tall Sally was twelve feet tall . She was part of the old biblical days in Samaria from the tribe called the Nephilim. They were giants that lived back before the cataclysm of the flood. You can see shots of these giants’ skulls and such. There were people as tall as one-story buildings. They’ve uncovered bones of these giants in Egypt and Iraq. And she was built for speed, she could run like a deer. And Uncle John was her counterpart giant. Little Richard is a giant of a different kind, but so as not to freak anybody out he refers to himself as little, so as not to scare anybody.'
Someone here is laughing, though possibly not as much as Bob Dylan. We don't need to find these funny, though I did, but Dylan certainly does. That's what he's doing. Note that his portrait of Johnny Cash notes that 'his best records are playful and full of wordplay and humor, miles from the august solemnity of the murder ballads, hardscrabble tales and Trent Reznor covers that his fans came to expect.' Bob Dylan likes people be playful, because so is he.
As an aside, I also thought much of it was acutely well observed. I loved his description of Ruby, are you mad at your man as 'this song is church Latin, has plenty of backbone, and pieces of the whirlwind in it.' It really really is.
