Rock - what are you listening to?

[cybot]

I’ve been listening a great deal to Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde recently and, in particular, Visions of Johanna, a song that has haunted me since the first time I heard it in my early teens. I vividly remember buying this album and marvelling at the wordplay but what really struck me was the interplay between the melody line and the lyrics. Ultimately, this is the primal bedrock of all songwriting, whether it’s a simplistic pop song, or something more sophisticated. This interplay born out of a magical sense of intuition is where the emotional connection between listener and song is formed. The funny thing is that this magic can happen regardless of the quality of the lyric. You can take an ostensibly banal song like The Beach Boys’ I Get Around but what makes it linger in the mind is the singer’s command of vocal phrasing which simultaneously echoes the musical arrangement as well as communicating the passionate intensity in the songwriter’s mind at the point of conception. And, in the case of I Get Around, you overlook the simplistic lyrics but are swept away emotionally by what the singer is attempting to evoke (and provoke) in the listener’s mind. When you move on to a song of the quality of Visions of Johanna, you have a more literate series of lyrics which can be taken on their own terms and interpreted independently from the melody line, but what unites it to a song like I Get Around is the way in which Dylan phrases his words in such a deliberately pointed way that it is only by listening to the man sing his song (as opposed to simply reading the lyrics) that one truly understands the song and the forces that shaped the song. When I first began listening to this song, before I really understood the lyrics, it was a subconscious connection that I made with Dylan’s vocal phrasing of the melody that really hinted at the inherent majesty of the song. Of course, Dylan’s work is legendary and everybody is aware of his immense reputation as a wordsmith, but, as an ignorant young music listener, I had to approach his work not from the summit but start from first principles at ground zero and gradually work my way up the foothills slowly. Many of the lyrical details and subtleties bypassed me completely, but the lines I repeatedly honed in on were the refrains which close each verse:


These visions of Johanna that conquer my mind
These visions of Johanna have now taken my place
These visions of Johanna, they keep me up past the dawn
These visions of Johanna, they make it all seem so cruel
These visions of Johanna are now all that remain


There was something about those words that literally haunted me and made me return to that song over and over again in a quite obsessive way. I did not understand the verses but, on a subconscious level, I believed that I somehow intuited what Dylan was trying to express. To my mind, which was by then totally enchanted by the music on Blonde on Blonde and would regularly stay up late listening to it over and over again, I recognised an obsessive quality, both in my own approach to the music and also in what Dylan was trying to express. To me, at that point in my life, the visions of Johanna simply represented the music which had conquered my mind.


Over time, I have realised that Dylan was speaking about the growth and development of the artist as a young man. This is not a song about the mindset of a young man in 1965 who, by then, had been universally acclaimed for his quite unprecedented union of words and music, but, to me, it represents Dylan as a young man of 20, who after leaving his home town in Minnesota behind him would travel to New York to visit his ailing hero, Woody Guthrie, and to absorb the sights and sounds of the burgeoning folk scene in Greenwich Village. It is a song about the very real pressures of the anxiety of creative influence, of being confronted with genius and its concomitant responsibilities, as exemplified by the unspeakably hard questions that the young artist must ask of himself. It is about the profound self-doubt of the anguished artist on the cusp of something extraordinary, languishing under the pressure of his creative influences, whilst trying desperately to give a voice to the voices burning a hole deep inside. I vividly think of the young Charlie Parker working for nine dollars a week as a dishwasher at a restaurant just so that he watch Art Tatum at work, or Miles Davis so humbled by the sight of Parker and Dizzy Gillespie on the stages of 52nd Street clubs in New York that he abandoned his schooling at the Juillard School of Music to work these clubs night after night. The images that flashed into the minds of these young men whose story had yet to be written must have been very similar to those that were to the forefront of Dylan’s mind when he first emerged on the Greenwich Village scene. The pressure of creative influence - referred to by Igor Stravinsky as “the artist feeling his heritage in the grip of very strong pincers”, or what Arnold Schoenberg experienced even more vividly as a painful sense of compulsion - is more than most can bear and it takes a precious few to respond appropriately, reject derivative gestures of flattery toward one’s idols and push the music onwards by creating something that is genuinely original. And, for those few who can “respond appropriately”, what of the personal sacrifices that one is obliged to make to ensure longevity? I think of Dylan in the classic “Don’t Look Back”, filmed on his controversial 1966 tour, when he was alienating many of his most loyal fans, and he was visibly shaken by the crowd’s violent responses to his change of direction and the media’s intrusiveness on his personal life, and, in particular, one moving scene where he sat rocking back and forth, head cradled in his hands, wearily muttering that he simply wanted to go home. The answer may well lie in the following lines from Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now: “But now it’s just another show/You leave ‘em laughing when you go/And if you care, don’t let them know/Don’t give yourself away.”


Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're tryin' to be so quiet?
We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it
And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin' you to defy it
Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there's nothing, really nothing to turn off
Just Louise and her lover so entwined
And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind

In the empty lot where the ladies play blindman's bluff with the key chain
And the all-night girls they whisper of escapades out on the "D" train
We can hear the night watchman click his flashlight
Ask himself if it's him or them that's really insane
Louise, she's all right, she's just near
She's delicate and seems like the mirror
But she just makes it all too concise and too clear
That Johanna's not here
The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face
Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place


The first two verses portray Dylan sitting in a room in the Chelsea Hotel with his then-wife, Sara Lownds - in this song represented by “Louise” - during an electricity blackout. From the very first line of the song, we can sense Dylan’s profound sense of discontentment. He is trying to think, but is distracted constantly by his physical surroundings. He has also found himself in a marriage with a woman with whom he has very little in common. So absent does he feel from her, the perspective switches to the third-person - “Louise and her lover so entwined” - when discussing himself and his wife. He feels suffocated in this relationship, but, more importantly, he feels stranded within his own mind. It is not just his physical relationship that is upsetting him, but a more profound malaise surrounding his sense of place and identity in the world around him - “these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind”. The night watchman of the second verse strongly suggests the figure of Time to me impatiently clicking his flashlight as he observes Dylan with disdain living his life. (To recall W.H. Auden: “Time watches from the shadow/And coughs when you would kiss”.) The physical proximity of “Louise” to Dylan is something that unsettles him because her presence highlights the absence of “Johanna”, who epitomises his creative ideal of a muse. It also strikes me as important the fact that Dylan refers to “Louise” as a mirror because all of his shortcomings as a person are reflected in her face. The one advantage to the electricity blackout is that the darkness obscures this for a few moments, thereby allowing images of Johanna to coalesce and take his place in her face. The violence at the heart of the words, “The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face”, and the nakedly plangent force with which Dylan sings these words indicate both the internalised sense of rupture within himself and between himself and his physical surroundings.


Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously
He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously
And when bringing her name up
He speaks of a farewell kiss to me
He's sure got a lotta gall to be so useless and all
Muttering small talk at the wall while I'm in the hall
How can I explain?
Oh, it's so hard to get on
And these visions of Johanna, they kept me up past the dawn


The third verse shifts the narrator’s perspective suddenly to that of “Louise” and we get a very real sense of the self-disgust that Dylan feels about the way he has treated his wife. The tone is one of baffled anger as she observes the “little boy lost”, selfish and self-obsessed, and inconsiderate of the people that he professes to love. There is a strong indication here that Johanna is a direct reference to Joan Baez as well a cipher for his creative muse - “he speaks of a farewell kiss to me”. The nakedly confessional nature of these lines indicate a strong sense of disgust on the part of Dylan as well as an awareness of the sheer anger that his wife must have felt at his utter selfishness and sheer lack of empathy. (The lonely image of Dylan “muttering small talk at the wall”, however, is a touching and revealing portrait of the man caught in an unguarded moment.) The closing lines of “How can I explain?” and “Oh, it’s so hard to get on” indicate the utter frustration and helplessness that “Louise” felt during her life with Dylan. To her, these visions of Johanna that keep her up past the dawn are the ever-present images of Dylan abandoning her to be with Baez.


Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles
See the primitive wallflower freeze
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze
Hear the one with the mustache say, "Jeeze
I can't find my knees"
Oh, jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule
But these visions of Johanna, they make it all seem so cruel


The fourth verse shifts the attention back to Dylan’s perspective, and it is here that we get the clearest view in all of Dylan’s lyrical work, of the creative pressures that formed him as an artist. He resists any kind of codifications that academicians have used to pigeonhole and straitjacket great works of art. He eschews the over-refined and wholly inaccurate critical approach of treating the artist and his/her work as a piece of delicate Dresden china, and the absolute ignorance that this entails of the very messy and painful process of artistic creation. Did these artists create this works solely for the edification of an educated elite or were they simply scrabbling desperately to appease some kind of creative demon that lay deep within them? Does “salvation” for an artist simply lie in the empty pursuit of critical plaudits and of the self-compromise that that would entail? There is an indication here of an empathy with the Surrealists who sought to expose psychological truths by actively dismantling conventional and literal forms of dissemination. Dylan recognises in these artists virtues which he wishes to become hallmarks of his own work but he is acutely aware of the personal sacrifices that this would entail and the life he will have to choose if he wishes to emulate their canonic achievements. It is only in the forging of a genuinely original vision that will guarantee a survival into posterity. This ever-present and terrible knowledge is what makes the visions of Johanna so cruel.


The peddler now speaks to the countess who's pretending to care for him
Sayin', "Name me someone that's not a parasite and I'll go out and say a prayer for him"
But like Louise always says
"Ya can't look at much, can ya man?"
As she, herself, prepares for him
And Madonna, she still has not showed
We see this empty cage now corrode
Where her cape of the stage once had flowed
The fiddler, he now steps to the road
He writes ev'rything's been returned which was owed
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes
The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain


The sense of self-disgust at the person he has grown into continues into the final verse. He sees himself as a cheap peddler of songs that is parasitically feeding off his wife while she, he believes, feeds off him. Louise’s weary response of “Ya can’t look at much, can ya man?” signals a belief that he is bereft of any semblance of empathy or compassion for other human beings. There is also a real and very frightening awareness of the encroaching passage of time in the final verse. Madonna/Johanna “still has not showed”, and it slowly dawns on Dylan that he alone will have to give a voice to the inchoate mess of words that is festering in his mind. Nobody else can write these songs for him. As he is thinking these things over and prevaricating on his life’s purpose, he is keenly aware of time passing by. The empty trappings of fame, as epitomised by the now-corroded gilded cage of fame, have faded and Time the fiddler is preparing to pass everything on to Death, which is represented by a fish truck that loads on a daily basis old and mouldy fish. (To recall Auden: “In headaches and in worry/Vaguely life leaks away/And Time will have its fancy/Tomorrow or today”.) He is suddenly jolted from his reverie when this terrible image comes to mind - “my conscience explodes” - and he is returned to the all-too-present physical world of the here-and-now: where the harmonicas are playing outside in the street where the rain is falling, and the wife he is embracing feels like a stranger, and he feels like a stranger to himself and he desperately wants to tear himself away from this all-too physical reality and find some time and space to himself to find and set down on paper those elusive words that would truly appease his creative demons and put his mind to rest. The very words that will define him long after he has passed away, “these visions of Johanna are now all that remain”.


It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers, they were gone;
The clocks, they had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.

(from “As I Walked Out One Evening” by W.H. Auden)

A humble thank you Paul for taking the time to show us that it takes an 'artist' to elucidate what we ourselves go through in this crazy, mixed up life of ours.....even when we only get the gist of what he/she is trying to say. This is where a genuine music lover like yourself who is prepared to dissect/understand what the 'artist' has to say and make it easy for us to 'get' it....

[mcq]

Many thanks, Dermot, for your kind words. It's worth reiterating just how friendly a forum Tir na HiFi is, and it is to the credit of all who post here that that tone has been maintained for as long as I've been around these parts. It means a great deal to me that I can post my personal ramblings on the music I dearly love without fear of mockery. I do appreciate it.

[Seán]

Many thanks, Dermot, for your kind words. It's worth reiterating just how friendly a forum Tir na HiFi is, and it is to the credit of all who post here that that tone has been maintained for as long as I've been around these parts. It means a great deal to me that I can post my personal ramblings on the music I dearly love without fear of mockery. I do appreciate it.

Paul, to be honest I don't "get" Bob Dylan but I really do love your writing and I admire your passion for his music, thanks for sharing your thoughts with us.

[mcq]

Thank you, Sean, you're very kind.

[jadarin]

Another brilliant review,paul.Dylan himself would have a smile on his face reading
your personal ramblings as you call them.Please keep them coming..

[cybot]

Many thanks, Dermot, for your kind words. It's worth reiterating just how friendly a forum Tir na HiFi is, and it is to the credit of all who post here that that tone has been maintained for as long as I've been around these parts. It means a great deal to me that I can post my personal ramblings on the music I dearly love without fear of mockery. I do appreciate it.

You can ramble all you like Paul! I/we love to read them.....As John has already said, even his Bobness himself would be honoured to read your 'ramblings' :)

[dhyantyke]

Great read indeed on 'Johanna' and I also found your reflections on the creative character & process very interesting.
Keep the posts coming whenever the urge to 'ramble' takes you!

(I will post in the Books thread a volume which you may find interesting)

[mcq]

Many thanks Jadarin, Dermot and Dhyantyke, for all of your kind words. I will proceed to ramble on in due course.

[Claus]

WOW! I had just read the Dylan interview in Rolling Stone on my way back from Denmark when I read your extensive piece on "Visions of...". I think your writing goes way beyond rambling and I would listen to your truly enlightening analysis any day of the week. I will buy/supply the pints/wine, just name the day! :D

[dhyantyke]

When I was a student in the early 70's I had one lecturer who referenced Bob Dylan and Carlos Castaneda while lecturing on 19th century french poetry, notably the work of Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud (the latter two invoked by Dylan in 'You're goin to make me lonesome when you go' on Blood o t Tracks). Being a Dylan 'head' at the time and into Castaneda too, I definitely became more interested in french poetry!!
Listened to 'Blonde' again last night. While I don't have the same immediate emotional/visceral response as in the past, it's still great stuff.