Prodigal barbarian at the gate

Dear Bob, Congratulations on your Nobel Prize. More than that, congratulations on your Nobel Prize lecture, which someone had the cunning to record over a bed of jazzy piano chords and promulgate on the Internet last week. It was a welcome diversion from the crazy going down out there beyond the garden wall. You earned your 8 million krona.

I listened to all 27 minutes and agree with the wags who say it’s the best recording you’ve put out this year. Unlike some of them, I don’t mean as it a knock on Triplicate, the triple-CD collection of pre-rock American standards you released a month or so ago.

I adore the idea behind Triplicate, your way of reconciling your iconoclastic career with the great tradition of the western canon. Once upon a time you took credit for killing tin pan alley, for making it possible for ordinary people with ordinary voices to write and record their own songs. But now you’ve brought it all back home, so to speak, by paying homage to Sinatra and the writers who supplied his material. It’s a reconciliation familiar to those of us who came back to our parents’ record collections after a few years estranged. Turns out we loved Marty Robbins all along.

Seems we have to kill our fathers before we can understand them. (Like that old Irish song almost says, you gotta whack mo’ the daddy-os.) We’ve got to see them in all their glorious mortality. We’ve got to know that they don’t know it all, that they are, like us, only human. Like you said, “even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.”

Some people profess to love a god, but it’s blasphemous to empathize with one. Gods fill us with awe, set us to trembling. They don’t read newspapers or make mistakes. (Well, the Greco-Roman ones do, which is why their mythology is so entertaining. But monotheism admits no fallibility; our lonely God will not be mocked, he discerns your goings out and lyings down, you can’t fool him, you Trickster, you.)

Like you said in the lecture, you did look a bit like Buddy Holly. But dude, this wasn’t a Buddy the Baptist moment, he had no more idea about your coming down the pike any more than he knew the music was going to die in an Iowa prairie a few days hence. He didn’t think you special—he did that for everyone. You just had the right sort of tinder primed; you made yourself available at the right moment.

Someone had already loaned you the Harry Smith folk song anthology (Ever return it? Didn’t think so) and you’d heard something in those murder ballads and Coo Coo Birds. All those common American weirdos, all that cool violence, hot blood and cold clay. It got to you. I can see how it could.

All of us have to pretend before we are; you almost became Bobby Vee’s piano player though you could only play in the key of C. The Teen Idol saw the talent; even given your limitations, he’d have taken you on had you had your own piano—one of those cheap little Wurlitzer spinets would have done just fine. Maybe everybody would have been happy with that, you’d had a cozy little gig, folk music would have stayed in its lane, somebody else would have to come along to make rock ’n’ roll a medium worthy of would-be artists’ attention. And surely someone else would have turned the Beatles on, right?

But we can’t assume a double play. It’s a knotty hypothetical: if you hadn’t invented this Dylan character, who would have carried so much of the past forward at precisely the time that the companies had figured out how to commodify and market this messy, miscegenated culture that had its most obvious expression in rock ’n’ roll? This Dylan contained multitudes: Woody Guthrie and Blind Willie McTell. Hank Williams and Little Richard. The Beats and the Greeks. He was a magpie pirate snatching all manner of shiny loot, gold and tinsel alike.

While there will always be archivists bent on keeping tradition alive, this Dylan was some Macumba priest who meant to resuscitate the corpses and set them walking for his own purposes. (Put it another way, an honest man has to eat what he kills.)

People acted surprised that you brought up Moby Dick and The Odyssey in your lecture. I might have seen Ahab and Brave Ulysses coming, but hey, All Quiet on the Western Front? I never would have figured Paul Baumer for one of your fictional touchstones, but that was genuinely insightful. It would have been too on the nose to cite Jay Gatsby, your fellow Minnesotan, fellow shape-shifter, fellow great pretender who ended up floating in a pool like William Holden at the end of Sunset Boulevard.

But it’s not dark yet. Just time to integrate the mongrel canon into the old one, to bring Ol’ Stack-O-Lee into the agora to throw dice with Homer and Rousseau. The prodigal barbarian is at the gate.

As Sir Paul McCartney says, “Let ’em in.”