‘Brownsville Girl’ is as cunning a song as Dylan has ever
devised, and yet it smacks as little of contrivance as anything he’s
written. The song is pure serendipity. It just unwinds along a palpably
untrodden path of memory and desire opened up by the recollection of
images from the obscure old movie - The Gunfighter - with which it begins.
And it unwinds with an extraordinary illusion of spontaneity, as if
Dylan (and co-writer Sam Shepard) had no idea where it was leading,
let alone how it was going to get there. The lyric teems with observations
- ‘It’s funny how things never turn out the way you had
‘em planned,’ or ‘I don’t remember who I was
or where I was bound’ - that seem to refer as much to the experience
of composing the song as to its narrative. The song’s narrative
plotting often feels as if it were being conjured on the spot as a symbolic
representation of the composers’ experience in writing the song.
‘Brownsville Girl’ - the song - is itself, at any rate,
the only certifiably factual evidence of the tragicomic misadventuring
it ostensibly recollects. We can’t get it out of our heads - any
more than Dylan has been able to shake the memory of ‘this movie
I seen one time’ - because in the final analysis art is, in its
own way, just as messy and unfinished as life. Art heals, but it also
draws fresh blood.
This is an old theme for Dylan - Aidan Day treats it rather extensively
in his book Jokerman - but I don’t think Dylan has ever treated
the limits of his art as compellingly or as accessibly as he does in
‘Brownsville Girl’. Perhaps much of the credit for this
should go to Sam Shepard, if not for his contributions to the lyric
- I suppose we’ll never know who wrote what - then at least for
getting Dylan to loosen up and let down his creative guard. ‘Brownsville
Girl’ isn’t the first song in which Dylan allows his muse
to take him on a wild ride, but it may be the first in which he declines
to cover her tracks and conceal his own bewilderments along the way.
‘Brownsville Girl’ is a sort of mirror image of ‘Isis’,
the 1976 Dylan/Levy song that - not coincidentally perhaps - is the
only real rival to ‘Brownsville Girl’ as the best of Dylan’s
co-written songs. ‘Isis’ started out as a ‘song about
marriage’ but quickly turned into a long parable about masculine
identity and male bonding, before returning for conclusion to its original
subject. ‘Brownsville Girl’ starts out as a seemingly casual
meditation about male identity. Halfway through the song’s third
verse, this matter is abruptly supplanted by the inner appeal of some
anonymous female who - by the end of the song anyway - figures as a
mythic muse and mother as well as a long lost lover.
The theme of lost love - treated in a manner that recalls ‘Tangled
Up in Blue’ rather than ‘Isis’ - nearly takes over
the remainder of the song. Only in the final verse of each of the last
three of the song’s four major sections does Dylan manage to wrench
his song back to its initial subject, the solitude of male heroism.
But each time the repeated chorus, which divides the song into its four
strophes, dissolves this re-assertion of male values in a celebration
of the matrix of desire that authorizes and empowers the male ethos:
the female who, ‘shining like the moon above’, will ‘show
me all around the world’. ‘Isis’ is a song about a
man who, seeking refuge in marriage from the burdens of his male identity,
discovers that marriage itself requires him to be re-initiated into
the male world. ‘Brownsville Girl’ is a song about a man
who, seeking to recover and reaffirm his primal bond to other males,
discovers that access to the male world is mediated by an interior paramour
with whom he has all but lost connection.
Witnesses
and Mutineers Bob
Dylan and Warren Zevon in October 2002
Friday October 4th, in Seattle, was the first concert on the latest
leg of Bob Dylan’s Never-Ending Tour. There was no reason to expect
any very startling changes. I had seen Dylan in two concerts scarcely
a month before, in Edmonton and Calgary. Both had been decent shows,
with Calgary the more interesting setlist, the more engaged performance.
The band was playing up a storm, with ‘Summer Days’ especially
providing an opportunity for Larry Campbell and Charlie Sexton to cut
loose. In the interim, there had been reports - at first asserted, later
denied - that Charlie was planning to leave the band. And advance rumours
contended that, in any event, this fall ‘02 stretch would be the
last leg of the Never-Ending Tour as we’d known it. Next year,
the reports said, Bob would be cutting back, playing fewer and shorter
gigs. These last few weeks of 2002 would simply be a rounding out of
what had gone before. So there was no reason to suppose that Seattle
would produce anything out of the ordinary, anything fundamentally different
from what we had seen in Alberta a month before.
Boy, were we wrong!
My friend Renée always likes to rush the stage, and find a place
in the front row, literally at Bob’s feet. In Seattle she got
a head-start on the crowd, and was into the venue ahead of anyone else;
so she was making a bee-line for her favourite spot, front row centre,
when, half-way across the floor of the Key Arena, she stopped dead.
What the fuck?
There, in the middle of the stage, where Bob ought to be, was an electric
keyboard.
What was going on? Was Larry moving to centre stage? Where was Bob’s
mike? Surely he couldn’t be playing keyboards? Was there a new
band member? Should she move to the left or the right? Was she even
in the right place on the right night?
For a long moment Renée stood there, trapped in an existential
dilemma only a truly fanatical Dylan follower can appreciate. Then the
rest of the crowd appeared behind her and pushed her forward, and yes,
she held her line, ended up front centre, at the foot of whoever it
was who was going to be playing keyboards.
Which turned out to be Bob.
We were all amazed.
Any Dylan fan knows that Bob does sometimes play keyboards, and always
has - right back to those legendary performances at Hibbing High School,
when, imitating Little Richard, he broke the pedals on the school’s
grand piano.
Over the years, there had been occasional piano flourishes, such as
the brilliant 1966 Eat the Document out-take of ‘Ballad of a Thin
Man’, or on albums like New Morning, and in one or two scattered
concerts where he had wandered over to the side of the stage and played
on piano a single song like ‘Disease of Conceit’. But for
the keyboard to be front and centre on the stage, for him to stand at
it (and dance away from it) for two thirds of a total concert - this
was revolutionary, unheard of.
As the setlist spread over the Internet that evening, the amazement
grew. All over the Internet Dylan world there was a collective thud
as jaws hit the floor. Over the next few nights of the tour, it quickly
became accepted. Ho-hum, Bob’s on piano. But that first night,
that night in the Key Arena at Seattle, we were all like Mister Jones:
something was happening, but we had no idea what it was.
A
Tale of Two Questions
As the NET trundled towards these shores in 2002, two reviews caught
my eye. In Sweden, Michael Gray seemed to suffer a nervous breakdown.
Gray explained, in The Daily Telegraph, that he was appalled
by Dylan’s stage mannerisms, appalled by the seedy Stockholm
suburb he found himself in, and perhaps appalled by his own life on
the trail of Bob. More than anyone in this country, Michael has personified
Dylan fanaticism at its most intelligent. His 900 page Song &
Dance Man III is an awesome labour of intellectual love. When
Michael Gray despairs of Dylan’s antics, can Doomsday be far
behind? In The Observer, Sean O’Hagan was equally miserable
in Docklands.
A question in your nerves is lit
Yet you know there is no answer fit to satisfy
And show you not to quit
The
weird thing was that I wasn’t surprised by their despair. Love
of Dylan and despair of Dylan are closely linked – as the very
title of this journal reminds us. Dylan’s most faithful fans
have been quick to disown him and denounce him throughout his career.
In The New Yorker, Alex Ross published a fine essay on Dylan
(The Wanderer, 10 May 1999) which began with the words: “If
you look through what has been written about Dylan in the past thirty
years, you notice a desire for him to die off, so that his younger
self can assume its mythic place. When he had his famous motorcycle
mishap in 1966 at the age of twenty-five, it was assumed his career
had come to a sudden end: rumors had him killed like James Dean, or
maimed like Montgomery Clift. In 1978, after the fiasco of “Renaldo
& Clara”, Mark Jaocbson wrote in The Village Voice, ‘I
wish Bob Dylan died. Then Channel 5 would piece together an instant
documentary of his life and times. Just the immutable facts.’”
By staying alive, by staying on the road, by re-inventing his back
catalogue every night, Dylan challenges all our assumptions about
him. He tests his own career to the point of destruction. He rewards
us while simultaneously trying the patience of his greatest fans.
Michael Gray’s moment of doubt made me want to ask every Dylan
fan and critic these two questions:
1. Why does Bob Dylan keep touring?
2. Why do we keep going to see him?
I’ve e-mailed a lot of people, and I’m truly grateful
to everyone who responded. Michael Gray and Clinton Heylin were not
in the mood to contribute. But they’ve already had their say.
Right now – “Let a hundred flowers blossom, let a thousand
Dylanologists contend.” – as Chairman Mao used to say.
In one sense, the answers to these questions are very obvious. But
in another sense, they’re as elusive and as Protean as Dylan’s
career – as elusive as life itself.
Mick Gold
The following
people give their answers in issue four:
Derek
Barker
Jon Blishen
Ben Clayton
Alan Davis
Michelle Engert
Peter Doggett
Mick Gold
C.P.Lee
Greil Marcus
Andrew Muir
Paul Williams
