How does it feel?
As he prepares to pickup his Nobel Prize, Dylan continues to grind axes
Bob Dylan performs this weekend in Stockholm, where he’ll also pick up yet another award. This one is fairly major: The Nobel Prize for Literature. Organizers say Dylan will not present a Nobel lecture. A taped lecture will be presented at a later date, or so they say.
Maybe that’s for the best. In the absence of new commentary from Dylan, his MusiCares Person of the Year speech from 2015 keeps recirculating online, a fascinating and maddening piece of commentary in which the writer laid out his path from music student to music creator, while inexplicably grinding axes along the way.
By most music metrics, Dylan has it all. His discography — dozens of studio recordings, live albums, odds-and-ends collections — has pulled in enough well-reviewed stars as to resemble the Milky Way. He’s received an armful of honors. He has the respect of his peers and two generations of reverence from his students. And now distinction from the literary establishment, such that it is. So instead of taking a victory lap, why is he quick to play the victim?
Twenty years into an admirable creative run that has been met with fawning critical consensus, Dylan has made himself strangely human with thin-skinned complaints about critics and criticism. Some of my industry friends and acquaintances have shared the MusiCares speech with enthusiasm. I found it off-key and tainted by a slighted tone that doesn’t reflect Dylan’s esteemed standing as a writer.
Should he get around to a Nobel speech, a pivot in tone would be refreshing.
In his MusiCares comments, Dylan dismissed Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller outright for “Yakety Yak” and “Charlie Brown,” which are admittedly simplistic songs. He said he preferred the darker work of Doc Pomus, as do I. But among their hundreds of credits, Leiber and Stoller also wrote “There Goes My Baby,” a song that busted rhyming conventions common in 1959. The song also presented an opaque dynamic between its narrator and the object of his affection — an ambiguous and smart piece of writing.
“Merle Haggard didn’t think much of my songs, but Buck Owens did,” Dylan said. “I love Merle, but he’s not Buck.”
Is he not? Such disputes provoke strong opinions, all of them with foundations poured in subjectivity. Dylan makes no case in his commentary to suggest the guy who wrote “Hungry Eyes” was the lesser talent. Just an expression of irritation and the sound of ax and stone.
Tom T. Hall was a curious target, at least to my mind. Dylan recalled an interview with Hall from the 1960s where Hall said he was confounded by a James Taylor song.
“Now some might say Tom is a great songwriter,” Dylan said in his speech. “I’m not going to doubt that.”
But in his careful phrasing, he did just that, and — it pains me to add — with a sly Trumpian panache.
Kris Kristofferson, Dylan posited, was the songwriter who shook up Nashville, quoting the rudderless narrator of Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down” who guzzles two beers in the morning before facing the day. “Sunday Morning Coming Down” is a very good song.
Tom T. Hall wrote “Mama, Bake a Pie,” which included this passage:
The letter that she wrote me said goodbye She couldn’t wait and lots of luck The bottle underneath the blanket feels Just like an old friend to my touch I know she’ll come and see me But I bet she never once looks at my legs Naw, she’ll talk about the weather And the dress she wore the July 4th parade Lord, I love her And I don’t believe this bottle’s gonna get her off my mind I see here in the paper Where they say the war is just a waste of time
When Hall wrote that song, he was living and working in Nashville, hardly anyone’s idea of an anti-war epicenter. His words weren’t blowing in the wind or with the wind, they were blowing against it. There’s no mystery, no unnamed Mr. Jones in his song. Hall was directly criticizing small-town jingoism and an American government that sent young men to war to come home with fewer limbs and fewer prospects.
Hall wasn’t above shucking a corny novelty. But his success as a liberal country music singer-songwriter (the emphasis shouldn’t fall on singer) in Nashville was at least as culturally remarkable as the sweet spot Willie Nelson found between cowboys and hippies in Austin years later. Nelson changed Austin more than Hall changed Nashville, but one of them wasn’t situated in a college town.
“Now, listen, I’m not ever going to disparage another songwriter,” Dylan said, after doing so. “I’m not going to do that.”
Hall’s conversational narratives are remarkably constructed to my ear. And while they’re utterly devoid of the blues, they play well into an aural folk music tradition nevertheless.
I don’t doubt the sincerity of Dylan’s sensitivity to a half century of criticism. The outrage of 1965 and 1966 — when he began playing folk music a little louder and dressing like a dandy — sounds quaint today. But at the time the stakes must have felt higher and resonated with him for years.
It bothered him enough to tell Mikal Gilmore in a testy 2012 interview, the opening night show in his grievance tour: “All those evil (expletive) can rot in hell.”
Dylan turns 76 on May 24, one day before Tom T. Hall turns 80. The difference must have seemed like a generational rift when they were younger. Not so much now.
This essay first appeared on Gray Matters. Merle Haggard didn’t think much of it, but Buck Owens did.