The Older The Artist The Better!
Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, an apology to the poets I offended and a penance
You wanna read it? DO IT! Wanna listen to it? It’s right there below! Thank you! COMMENT and I will love you forever!!!!!! Please!!!!
Well folks, I stepped into a real bees nest last week. I upset a few poets and they reprimanded me with their most power weapons…WORDS.
If you haven’t read my piece from last week, it’s about the culture of censoriousness that I have seen infect some of the theaters where I have performed over the years. It’s filled with a lot of coarse language and hot takes. I wrote it because I enjoy things that make me uncomfortable and I love pieces of work I initially feel are inappropriate. Part of this must come from my evangelical upbringing, enough people in churches tell you what you shouldn’t listen to or why you shouldn’t watch that and that just makes it more attractive. I was warned about the dangers of The Sopranos, Harry Potter, Notorious BIG, South Park and Chris Rock all things that I have came to love. Well, in my passionate defense of theater that may offend, I defamed poetry and poetry shows in particular. Here was the offending paragraph:
‘I have never and probably will never see a poetry show. I think I would rather watch 2 hours of Jerry Sadowitz’s cock than see anyone’s poetry performance. I can’t think of a more boring night than watching someone on stage, reciting their little worlds, organized in their little order. I bet his poems are the type that don’t rhyme either, so I am like…wait…what's the difference between a poem and just someone talking? Then everyone snaps instead of claps, the beat movement is over, we got over poetry folks.’
The person that called me out is a friend in New York who is a published poet and has performed many live readings of his poetry. He jokingly texted me, ‘I HAVE NEVER BEEN SO OFFENDED BY YOU.’ Maybe my joke fell flat to him, but listen, poets aren’t exactly known for their easy going dispositions. But it did get me thinking about the power of words. So I thank him for his response to my piece, after all, all I really desire with this place is for people to read what I write and react and their reactions got me thinking deeply about my favorite poets. Tom Waits and Bob Dylan.
When Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature Tom Waits released a statement that read:
Before epic tales and poems were ever written down they migrated on the winds of the human voice and no voice is greater than Dylan’s' -Tom Waits
It’s part congratulations and part preemptive defense to those that would jump up and say ‘HEY! HE WRITES SONGS! THAT’S NOT LITERATURE.’ When I read that statement I was reminded how much I love Tom and Bob’s voices. Their poetic voices and their singing voices. Whenever I played Tom Waits growing up my Mom would say ‘Oh yay, we get to listen to Cookie Monster.’ As Dylan has grown older his voice resembles Tom Waits muppet like gargle more and more.
In 1997 Bob Dylan released an album called Time Out of Mind at age 56. It featured one of his most popular songs ever, To Make You Feel My Love. It’s been covered by Adele, Garth Brooks, Pink, Billy Joel, Kelly Clarkson, Neil Diamond and Michael’s Bublé and Bolton! That reads like a list of my mom’s dream music festival.
This song is placed in the middle of an album that is all about lost love, hopelessness and death. It is a single hopeful song amidst other titles like Cold Irons Bound, Love Sick and Tryin’ To Get To Heaven (Before They Close the Door). The album also features one of my favorite Dylan songs Not Dark Yet. It can be hard to discern if Dylan’s lyrics are ever personal but it’s hard not to see this song as meditation of his mortality and eventual death. Which is what makes the Michale Bublé version all the more impactful. Just kidding, he didn’t cover that song but damn, that would be hilarious.
What strikes me most about this album is that if Bob had died in 1997 it would have been the perfect capstone to a storied career. He doesn’t have to add anything to his body of work to become any more influential or appreciated. We just needed his ‘I am older and gonna die soon album’ and that’s a wrap. And yet after this album he has released 5 more albums of original songs, 5 albums of American standards, plus a Christmas album that I would encourage everyone to listen to each December. Imagine if Cookie Monster sang Little Drummer Boy. It strikes me how much of a gift these albums are because to many they aren’t necessary because they will never touch the cultural impact of Blonde on Blonde or Highway 61 Revisited. So it’s easier to accept them as a gift from a special person. Those Mount Rushmore level albums don’t occur to me as a gifts anymore because they loom so large in the cultural consciousness they feel more like an entire holiday. If Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks is Christmas itself, then 2001’s Love and Theft feels more like the travel toothbrush my mom puts in my stocking every year, something I didn’t know I needed but damn I am glad I have it.
Prince and Tom Petty both died in 2016 and 2017, both with fentanyl and opioids in their system. Well, since we got Sign O’ The Times and Purple Rain, Damn the Torpedos and Wildflowers it is easy to forget that they died of drug overdoses. Since they weren’t in the 27 club like Amy Winehouse or Jimi Hendrix we don’t think of the loss of two of our greatest artists to drugs, Tom Petty at 66 and Prince at 57. Bob Dylan was 56 when he released his masterpiece mediations on death and mortality and he is still alive at age 81. Just two years ago Bob Dylan released a 17 minute mediation on the assassination of President Kennedy and a few years before that he also released a psychotic music video of him in a wig at a rager of a house party for the song Must Be Santa. I would’ve loved to know what Prince was singing about at age 83.
All of the great stuff those artists made came from the same place as the forgettable or weird stuff. They just were writing some words and melody’s that came to them and then recorded it. It is hard to come to terms with the fact that it’s not effort that makes those great pieces of work great. If anything, it’s the lack of effort and planning and forethought that lead to those iconic moments of divine creativity. Dylan himself is well aware of that, in 2004 in a 60 minutes interview he acknowledges as much.
"I don’t know how I got to write those songs... Those early songs were almost like magically written -- darkness at the break of noon, shadows even the silver spoon, the hand-made blade, a child’s balloon. Well, try to sit down and write something like that. There’s a magic to that and it’s not Siegfried and Roy kind of magic, you know, it’s a different kind of penetrating magic, and I did it at one time." -Bob Dylan
I recently finished Letters to a Young Poet, a collection of letters Rainer Maria Rilke sent to the young poet Franz Xaver Kappus. It is a short read about 40 pages but it is packed with wisdom, both practical and the type of transcendent spiritual wisdom that can only be applied as life’s years continue to add up. One of the clearest pieces of practical wisdom he gives to Kappus is what to write about.
Seek those (subjects) which your own everyday life offers you;
describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and
the belief in some sort of beauty -
describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity,
My friend, the poet, who I deeply offended, has lived by this advice whether he has meant to or not. Many of his poems are beautiful observations of little joys and little sorrows, they are personal and feel like the thoughts that float through our minds before they are put to words. Those thoughts never sound as interesting as when they lived in our brains unspoken. His do. When I asked if I could publish one of his poems he assured me that there was no need for penance for my blasphemy. I assured him that it would be my honour to publish his little words in his little order.
I drove my old truck to the store
To get you some I’m not over
you soup.
I will just leave it on the porch
And ring the bell.
All my friends
Got ideas
For my brain.
All my friends
They all start to sound the same.
I’ll never change.
Would you mind if I left it on
your porch?
But I’m sure you don’t live there
anymore.
Harlan Alford ‘Soup’
Another sage piece of wisdom Rilke gives Kappus: You are only 19 years old…Do Not Write Love Poems Yet.
Do not write love-poems; avoid at first those forms that are too facile and commonplace: they are the most difficult, for it takes a great, fully matured power to give something of your own where good and even excellent traditions come to mind in quantity. -Rainer Maria Rilke
When I read this advice it occurred to me that my favourite poems were written by Bob Dylan and Tom Waits and they are some of their most facile and commonplace subjects. At age 40, Dylan wrote Every Grain of Sand a song about how no matter how crazy the world and life may seem, God is in control. At age 50, Waits wrote a song about how the love inside of a house is what makes it beautiful. They are both simple songs with only light piano and guitar and at times, sung almost like a whisper. Cookie Monster’s animating spirit is nowhere to be found in these songs, they are sung more like Big Bird or Snuffaluffagus.
I have gone from rags to riches in the sorrow of the night.
In the violence of a summer’s dream, in the chill of a wintry light
In the bitter dance of loneliness fading into space
In the broken mirror of innocence on each forgotten face
I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me
I am hanging in the balance of a perfect finished plan.
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand.
Bob Dylan ‘Every Grain of Sand’
So if you find someone, someone to have, someone to hold
Don't trade it for silver, oh don't trade it for gold
'Cause I have all of life's treasures and they're fine and they're good
They remind me that houses are just made of wood
What makes a house grand ain't the roof or the doors
If there's love in a house, it's a palace for sure
Without love, it ain't nothin' but a house
A house where nobody lives
Without love it ain't nothin' but a house
A house where nobody lives
(Click the titles to go to Youtube and hear the poems sung by Tom and Bob!)
The Moral of the Story: I LOVE POETRY! I LOVE WORDS! AND I LOVE POETRY SHOWS! I actually think little words in their little order are the most important thing that we have in this world. I am so thankful to everyone who puts their work out into the world. I love all the great seminal works that changed all of culture as we know it and I love those tiny little songs and albums and books and movies and poems that are just weird little things that are hard to figure out why they even exists. It exists because a little idea popped into a person’s head and they recorded it on paper, on film or tape for themselves and for us.
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