on Wilfred Mellers’s A Darker Shade of Pale:
A Backdrop to Bob Dylan
19859
This is a confused and confusing book about a confused and confusing figure: Bob Dylan, born 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota, as Robert Alan Zimmerman. He first made himself known in the early sixties as self-proclaimed heir to Dust Bowl balladeer Woody Guthrie, singing songs of social change that got him named conscience of the nation’s youth; in the mid-sixties, halcyon times, he emerged at once as throwback to the dandyist bohemians of Baudelaire’s Paris and would-be king of rock ’n’ roll, offering metaphors no one could figure out and everyone could understand, all powered by a sound so fierce and grand neither he nor anyone else in popular music has ever matched it; as the decade turned and shattered he stepped back as sly and quiet private investigator of the ethics of place. In the seventies he performed as walking legend and stumbling troubadour; in 1979 he became a born-again Christian (“His mother’s probably sitting shiva for him right now,” his producer told me as news of the conversion hit), damning the weak of spirit and the corrupt of soul with all he had, which wasn’t much; as I write he has supposedly come back to the world. On the surface, a trail so dizzying not even a hired Indian could track it; beneath the surface, a peculiarly American search, reaching a peculiarly American verge. Bruce Springsteen used to tell a story about a house he once saw in the Arizona desert: a sculpture, really, built by a solitary Navajo out of highway junk. The dirt road leading to the place was headed by a handmade sign: “This is the land of peace, love, justice—and no mercy.” Or perhaps that metaphor is far too perfect, the search merely personal, its rhythm Dylan’s, not common or shared. “What’s it like,” a friend asked me about Dylan’s first Christian album. “It’s sneering,” I said, “it’s sanctimonious, there’s not a hint of compassion—” “Oh, well,” she cut me off. “You wouldn’t expect him to change, would you?”
Wilfred Mellers was an editor of Scrutiny when Bob Dylan was in kneepants. For many years he was a distinguished professor of music at the University of York; in a nation where the notion of American culture still brings forth jokes about Australian wine, he has stood almost alone in taking American music seriously. For that matter, few if any American musicologists can approach Mellers’s knowledge of American music—the oldest white ballad traditions, minstrelsy, the 19th century genteel tradition, 20th century art music, jazz, Broadway, blues, country and western, rock ’n’ roll—and few display his patent love for it. In Mellers’s writing knowledge is a form of love: it seeks unities. His unmatched Music in a New Found Land (1964) allowed Charles Ives, thirties Mississippi bluesman Robert Johnson, Marc Blitzstein, Charlie Parker, John Cage, and hundreds of others to speak the same deep-structural language, and without ever compromising their own voices; Mellers caught meaning in every shading of tone. Taking his cue from D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature (and perhaps Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel), Mellers let Cooper, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, and Whitman map the territory American musicians would have to inhabit to say anything worth saying about their particular version of the human condition; then he translated. It is scandalous that Americans have not followed his lead.
A Darker Shade of Pale frames Bob Dylan in these Americanist terms, but the presentation is off from the first note. “For more than twenty years,” Mellers writes in his introduction, “Dylan has been a spokesman for the young . . . he has become the mythic representative of a generation and a culture.” The second claim is the case Mellers means to make, but the cracked cliché of the first begs all kinds of questions. Is Mellers buying the sixties fantasy of permanent adolescence? The young for whom Dylan has long since ceased to be a spokesman are superannuated. (“Mr. Masterson has been known as a distinguished American ‘angry young man’ for the past twenty years,” Frederick Crews wrote in his Pooh Perplex parody of Leslie Fiedler—in 1963.) After clumsy curtain-raising, Mellers warms up his New-Found-Land roadster—and drives straight out of his own book. “The Backdrop,” which takes up the first half of Mellers’s study, traces white folk music traditions from ancient Scottish waulking songs to Elvis Presley, but despite the bizarre pronouncement that “when history comes to be written it may seem that [the] significance” of such towering modern representatives of this tradition as Dock Boggs, Roscoe Holcomb, Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family, Hank Williams, and Presley himself “is as precursors of Bob Dylan,” Mellers’s account of the white vernacular does not lead to Dylan. Mellers doesn’t follow it into his section on Dylan proper, he doesn’t build on it; a reader forgets the first half of the book a few pages into the second.
A reader forgets because if “The Backdrop” doesn’t lead to “Bob Dylan,” it doesn’t particularly lead anywhere else. While wondering where the black music version of “The Backdrop” is (not in this book, even though Mellers ends the section insisting that a mature American pop music, i.e., Dylan’s, must synthesize “white euphoria with black reality”), the reader is continually battered by such Mellersisms as the categorization of all performances as “positive” or “negative,” not to mention the categorizations of white euphoria and black reality—and without the fully developed themes of Music in a New Found Land the result is a collection of musical facts not endowed with social meaning but stripped of it. The echoes of Mellers’s once-lucid sense of wholeness are here—such part titles as “The Monody of Deprivation” and “The Liquidation of Tragedy and Guilt”—but they are only echoes. Mellers’s brief but intense tributes to, say, the underappreciated Holcomb, or the far more obscure, wonderfully named Nimrod Workman, are interesting, just as his multiple attacks on Scott Weisman as a country music meliorist are misplaced (though the one-time folk singer Wiseman presumably drove Mellers nuts in the thirties and forties with his duets and comedy routines with his partner Lula Belle, he defines trivial), but neither Workman nor Wiseman are made to speak to each other, let alone to Dylan.10 The basic impression one takes away from “The Backdrop” is that as white American musical culture oscillated between positives and negatives lots of stuff happened over a long period and now it’s 1962 and time to talk about the first Bob Dylan album. Why not? Got anything else you’d like to talk about?
Mellers’s language collapses along with his conceptual apparatus. Throughout, A Darker Shade of Pale lacks the clarity and quirky eloquence of Mellers’s earlier books; down-to-earth forthrightness is replaced by what seems to be an attempt to sound hip, which only ends up sounding condescending—and I don’t think Mellers could intentionally condescend to American music at the point of a gun. Still, the horrible example, one of many, screams out of the book: you can no more call Elvis, who as a boy attended Pentecostal churches, “initially a Jesus freak” than you can communicate anything by calling Jonathan Edwards a cult leader. The links between Edwards, Pentecostalism, and contemporary fundamentalism are real (it’s Dylan who is, or was, the Jesus freak), but this sort of thing disposes of them. It’s the literary equivalent of eating with your hands.
Tracing Dylan’s career, Mellers listens closely, but little connects. There’s no drama, no sense of risk or vision—until Mellers reaches the mid- to late seventies, when he takes up Dylan’s soundtrack music for Sam Peckinpah’s film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Dylan had a small and spooky role as one “Alias”), Desire, the band-of-hangers-on Rolling Thunder tour and Dylan’s resultant film Renaldo and Clara, the awful Street Legal, and finally crests with an analysis of the Christian albums, from Slow Train Coming in 1979 to Shot of Love in 1981. Here, examining Dylan’s least expressive singing, his most stolid and mute accompaniments, and his most literalistic lyrics—examining work in which Dylan’s links to American musical traditions, secular or sanctified, are almost completely absent, where the poverty of the work justifies itself as wealth by the grace of having God on its side—Mellers does not exactly orchestrate his story, but he does press down harder on his material. That done, he reaches his last chapter—and insists on Dylan not merely as representative of a generation, or a culture, but as ur-representative of the American mythos: “Jewish Amerindian and White Negro,” Pagan Christian and Insider/Outsider, plus, for good measure, Male Female. Mellers stops short only of claiming Dylan as part buffalo. Nothing has prepared the reader for this; it’s all done by fiat. What’s going on?
In the mid-sixties, when Bob Dylan made the music on which his legend is still based, when he produced the capital the interest on which he has been living off since, it was common to hear ordinary, everyday conversations invaded by his lyrics: “Let me eat when I’m hungry / Let me drink when I’m dry / A dollar when I’m hard up / Religion when I die,” Dylan sang in an early unreleased recording, changing the second person of the old “Moonshiner” folk song to the first person. One can suspect that the Americanisms of A Darker Shade of Pale, which make little sense when they are clean-cut and are sometimes tortured into the realm of the weird (Mellers wants at least a poetic acceptance of the 16th-17th century theory that as survivors of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, Amerindians were Jews), are mainly a pretext for what Mellers really wants to talk about.
Even in Music in a New Found Land, Mellers revealed a weakness for the Transcendentalists as against the Nostalgiac (Cooper), the Orgiast (Whitman), and the Blackhearts (Hawthorne and Melville); the essential American experience, he wrote, is that of being “born again,” though he wasn’t speaking religiously. Even in the sixties, explicitly Christian metaphors were woven into Dylan’s songs, and into his persona (“I expect to be hung as a thief,” he said at a devastating press conference in 1965; around the same time he posed on his knees clutching a rough wooden cross). Reading A Darker Shade of Pale, it’s hard not to think that it is less four centuries of American music, or two decades of Dylan music, than Dylan’s notorious conversion from nominal Jew to radical Christian that has brought forth Mellers’s eighth-decade exegesis.
For more than ten years, this great critic has been obsessed by the problem of transcendence: from Twilight of the Gods: The Music of the Beatles (1973) to Bach and the Dance of God to Beethoven and the Vision of God to the more circumspectly titled Dylan book, which could be called The Message of Bob Dylan: Believe or Die. To close the last, Mellers quotes Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, that fabulous text which, like the culture of American democracy itself, can provide all things to all people, so long as one takes care not to stand in one place too long. “I doubt whether man can support complete religious independence and entire political liberty at the same time,” Tocqueville wrote. “I am led to believe that if he has no faith he must obey, and if he is free he must believe.” (Why hasn’t someone told Solzhenitsyn this?) Dylan’s evangelism may appear to go “beyond the bounds of common sense,” Mellers says (“not to mention common charity,” he adds), but “the evolution of American industrial technocracy” has produced a situation “that may be one with which common sense is incompetent to deal.” It’s the great deus ex machina of postwar aesthetics: the Bomb. Even Perry Miller dragged it onstage to close Errand into the Wilderness —though not, I think, with Mellers’s message of believe-or-die attached.
As A Darker Shade of Pale ends with its flurry of cross-cultural, cross-racial, cross-gender amputations and grafts, one arm remains outstretched toward the light. Dylan’s last word “need not be interpreted in narrowly Christian terms, even by Dylan himself”—still, the “Christian answer may be the most valid in that it is both historical and revelatory” (the Anti-Defamation League and the Muslim Benevolent Society raise their voices: ours aren’t?), and anyway, that answer, like all answers, “must be seen as a beginning rather than as an end,” which is to say that (by this time the reader is asking, “It does?” even before the reader has been told what the it is) Dylan is correct in affirming that if we are not “born again, our vaunted civilization, whether Christian or pagan, is finished; and will deserve its fate.”
Back in 1963, in “Let Me Die in My Footsteps,” Dylan sang a protest song against fallout shelters; this is a critic’s fallout shelter. Mellers has left himself a lot of outs, but not enough of them. Yes, as the self-invented creature whose mind and soul are as blank as the continent before him (Mellers waves back to John Locke), the American must be born again, and again, and again, if he or she is to be American at all—but what does this tell us about Melville, Lincoln, Faulkner, or Ned Cobb (the real name behind Theodore Rosengarten’s All God’s Dangers: The Autobiography of Nate Shaw), who are the most American Americans we know, and whose works and days were defined by what they imagined they remembered? The white American must be born again in a “creative interfusion” (Mellers) with black and red—so said Melville in Moby-Dick, Twain in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Lawrence, and Fiedler—but weren’t they thus saying that the new man or woman is helplessly borne back into the sins and guilts of his or her past? When Dylan kept company with these writers—in the mid-sixties, with the albums Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde—he sought not answers but questions. But what Mellers is talking about is the surrender of the Antinomian will (out of which the new woman or man makes herself or himself)—a surrender to God’s order, a subsuming of human diversity into an at least symbolic messiahhood (Dylan as white-black-red-Christian-Jewish-pagan-male-female-leftist-rightist) as the only alternative to nuclear holocaust. A few years ago, I read a profile of Stanley Marsh 3, the Texas millionaire and patron of the Ant Farm’s celebrated Cadillac Ranch; he talked about his late nights with the paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey, who would put down his drink, stare hard at the man who could, if he so chose, fund Leakey’s next project, and explain to Marsh exactly what lay behind his digs for stray scraps of one-, two-, three-million-year-old bones, which was nothing so tame as the mere mystery of human origins. No, If I can prove that all humanity derives from a common ancestor, and therefore that as we are all one war is folly, then there would be no more war—
Remember Bob Dylan? In 1965 he had a hit with “Like a Rolling Stone.” In 1984 he told an old friend, a man he had known since they were students and folk-music fans at the University of Minnesota in 1960, that he was stymied. People demanded the old songs, or simply the ones they knew. He had just dutifully put out Real Live, a redundant, fourth-time-around set of greatest hits; his label’s alternative was a five-record archive fit for a dead man. He felt like a dead man, he said. When he sang people sat still like receptacles; he had turned into a reification and his audience had willfully made itself into another. He wanted, Dylan told his friend, to get out of the big halls where expectations were sealed by the ads announcing the arrival of a legend. He wanted to play small clubs—maybe South America. There he would be only a rumor. He could arrive without encumbrances, traveling, as Melville wrote to Hawthorne in 1851, with “nothing but a carpet-bag—that is to say, the Ego.” But Dylan’s managers, promoters, his record company, would not hear of it; they had already forced him to stud his evangelical program with old favorites, and then to perform only those evangelical songs that could themselves be presented as old favorites—Real Live, had any Bob Dylan album ever carried a title so flat, so stupid, so nihilistic? Compared to that, Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, Vol. II, was poetry.11
We are not talking about the fate of the world. We are talking about an individual struggling to find his way to the next audience, and thus to the next song worth presenting to that audience, or to the next song which might gather that new audience: the pop equation, the pop paradox. We are talking about the next hit, and whether or not Bob Dylan, forty-four-year-old pop singer, can ever produce anything that could make people forget “Like a Rolling Stone.” As a pop music artist, Bob Dylan will be born again only when he creates something that will make people forget his greatest hit, and who and what he was when he made it.
Mellers is correct when, glancing over the ugliness of Dylan’s 1977 divorce from his wife of twelve years—an event which seems to have led straight to the fundamentalist Christianity which contained the anti-feminist theology necessary to justify the breach—he says that an artist’s biography is ultimately irrelevant to an artist’s work. Finally, we see what we see, read what we read, hear what we hear, in our own ways, and it’s the task of the critic to help us see, read, and hear. Criticism based in personal or social facts only controls work that can’t escape such facts; confronted head on by Moby-Dick or Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, nobody really cares about who was who and what was what, then. But if biography is irrelevant, metaphysics may be as meaningless as making connections is fecund.
Mellers’s book is set up to make connections, but its goal is elsewhere. When, in 1964, in Music in a New Found Land, Mellers wrote about Robert Johnson, dead since 1938, Johnson remained little known. An album collecting his recordings from 1936 and 1937 had been released in 1961; few had heard it. Mellers did not merely register Johnson’s existence. In a paragraph, he set out what he heard in the hidden violence of Johnson’s rhythms even more than in the explicit violence of Johnson’s words: the fulfillment and the superseding of the Mississippi country blues, a form, made by a few men in a small, out-of-the-way place, that would decades later shape pop music all over the world. It’s all been blown to pieces, Mellers wrote: they lie here, and those who can pick them up will, and will be remembered, and those who cannot, won’t be. Nothing so powerful as this music can ever be killed, Mellers was saying, and indeed it is the explosion itself that has made the once-narrow form accessible to anyone. This was more than prescient for 1964; even in 1973, for Dylan to dedicate his Writings and Drawings “To the magnificent Woodie Guthrie and Robert Johnson, who sparked it all off” was only half-obvious. But in A Darker Shade of Pale everything is scrambled; what is at stake is not the American musical past (“The Backdrop”), nor even its recent, individualized version (“Bob Dylan”), one person trying to put the pieces together and make a common language new, but a demand for a language which is not particularly American at all, a language which is a good fifteen hundred years older than America black or white. The true weight of Mellers’s book is that Bob Dylan—as the ultimate incarnation of what Emerson called the representative man, as “the first white American poet-composer-singer whose genius is both creative” (he writes his own songs) “and interpretive” (based on other people’s)—can save the world. No wonder he wants to perform in Tierra del Fuego.
Over the past two decades both Mellers’s work and Dylan’s have imploded—but perhaps Dylan can take it as a sign of life that A Darker Shade of Pale says more about Mellers’s career than his own. Maybe his new album will be as good as the advance word says it is; if it’s not, Highway 61 Revisited, which I have played a dozen times while writing this, still defines what pop music can be. In that record, a string of positive negatives beginning with the unlimited reach of “Like a Rolling Stone” and ending with the long fall of “Desolation Row,” containing the shades of Dock Boggs, Robert Johnson, Roscoe Holcomb, Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, and hundreds of others, Dylan created music that today remains utterly unsatisfied by the world that music meant to make—or, as the dandy-thief Lacenaire says in Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise, unmake. Dylan merged white euphoria with black realism; Beethoven and Ma Rainey “unwrapped a bedroll”; as in “The Whiteness of the Whale” and the crew’s reply to Ahab’s speech on the quarterdeck, as in Lincoln’s “every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be repaid with another drawn by the sword,” Dylan shouldered all debts in a spirit of providential ecstasis. On the margins of A Darker Shade of Pale, Mellers is right—but it must be to Bob Dylan’s comfort that the book that could explain how and why remains as unwritten as the end of his career.
Wilfred Mellers, A Darker Shade of Pale: A Backdrop to Bob Dylan. New York: Oxford, 1985. This was Mellers’s fourteenth book; he published nine more after it. I’ve returned to it many times over the years, for stray passages on waulking songs, odd mountain singers who for Mellers represent the poetic heart of their traditions even if those who sell the traditions have never heard of them, even a photo caption:
Dock Boggs the whirligig.