Interview
December 1993
For the second time in less than a year Bob Dylan has released an unproduced, acoustic-guitar-and-harmonica collection of traditional blues and folk songs. A small voice from the sidelines—even the wilderness—in its own way World Gone Wrong traces the renunciations of fame, responsibility, and authority Nirvana tries and fails to enact on In Utero, their response to the stardom that followed Nevermind, which they now see as a failure because too many people liked it. Dylan won’t have that problem.
Good As I Been to You, his 1992 Election Day special, was his most striking music since . . . since the last time he cut the ground out from under your feet, whenever that was. It stopped at number fifty-one on the Billboard charts and didn’t make the Village Voice national critics poll chart at all. Their loss: Dylan came to life in the old clothes of “Canadee-I-O,” “Hard Times,” “Frankie & Albert.” As he does on World Gone Wrong, he came to life as a singer; then as now, as a singer, in the hesitations and elisions of his phrasing, he came to life as a philosopher.
On both records, the music is all about values: what counts and what doesn’t, what lasts, what shouldn’t. The performance is modest, but anything but casual. Finding the fatalism—the foreboding—in the old, twisting melodies of “Love Henry” and “Jack-a-Roe” on World Gone Wrong, as he did with “Jim Jones” and “Blackjack Davey” on Good As I Been to You, as a philosopher Dylan comes to life as a gatekeeper, a guardian. “I have to think of all this as traditional music,” he said in 1966. “Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes about from legends, Bibles, plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death. All these songs about roses growing out of people’s brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels—they’re not going to die. It’s all those paranoid people who think that someone’s going to come and take away their toilet paper—they’re going to die. Songs like ‘Which Side Are You On?’ and ‘I Loves You Porgy’—they’re not folk-music songs; they’re political songs. They’re already dead.”
This is precisely the talk Dylan talks in the liner notes to World Gone Wrong, where he says where the songs come from and explains what they’re about. “What attracts me to the song,” he writes of “Lone Pilgrim” (the only composition on World Gone Wrong credited to a named author, as opposed to a blues or folk progenitor), “is how the lunacy of trying to fool the self is set aside at some given point, salvation & the needs of mankind are prominent & hegemony takes a breathing spell.” Regarding “Stack A Lee,” archetypal tale of the black outlaw and perhaps the best-known number on World Gone Wrong, “what does the song say exactly? it says no man gains immortality thru public acclaim. truth is shadowy . . . the songs says that a man’s hat is his crown. futurologists would insist it’s a matter of taste.” On Blind Willie McTell’s “Broke Down Engine”: “it’s about variations of human longing—the low hum in meters & syllables. It’s about dupes of commerce & politics colliding on tracks . . . it’s about Ambiguity, the fortunes of the privileged elite, flood control—watching the red dawn and not bothering to dress.”
Dylan is claiming absolute and infinite meaning for the songs he’s now singing. The trick is to hear in these songs even a fraction of what he hears: whether it’s McTell’s 1931 “Broke Down Engine” or Dylan’s, Dylan’s “Blood in My Eyes” or the Mississippi Sheiks’ 1931 original, William Brown’s 1942 “Ragged & Dirty” or the same story half a century later. Dylan hears a whole world, a complete millenarian opera, in every tune; the person who buys the record, takes it home, puts it on, is going to hear a small-time drama into which intimations of the uncanny (“roses growing out of people’s brains and lovers who are really geese”) occasionally, inexplicably intrude. “Ragged & Dirty,” a coy blues, is first of all carnal; the way Dylan slides into the piece, barely speeding the pace, is a one-verse seduction. “Stack a Lee” is quickstep true crime, graveyard humor: “Taken him to the cemetery, they failed to bring him back.” But Dylan hears as much mysticism in these prosaic American jokes a he does politics in the almost Arthurian “Love Henry,” where a parrot bears witness against its murdering mistress.
In “Blood in My Eyes,” a man is trying to get something going with a prostitute. You can feel the age in his voice; you can also feel he’s probably impotent. The weariness, the fear of humiliation, the despair in the man’s voice as he describes the situation, the way he hopes he’ll get what he wants, is almost too painful. Only that moment when he drifts out of the dollars and cents of the day’s concern and into the chorus, “Got blood in my eyes / For you,” is sweet. It’s so sweet, summoning desire so plainly outside the realm of fulfillment, that the man’s loneliness overwhelms anything else he might bring into his life. And yet, when you’re as lonely as Dylan has now made this man—as he’s made you, if he has—you’ll bring anything into your life in an attempt to turn that isolation into something else: an adventure in a foreign land, a lover’ murder, God’s kiss.
As World Gone Wrong plays, with Dylan’s scratchy, seemingly disdainful voice quickly growing full, earnest, urgent, then delicate, all these things do turn into one another. The music traces a circle from which there need be no exit. And if you pick up Dylan’s cues and hunt down the originals of the songs as he names them—the Mississippi Sheiks’ “I’ve Got Blood in My Eyes for You,” on their Complete Recordings, Vol. 3, or Doc Watson’s “Lone Pilgrim,” on The Watson Family—you might find a certain discontinuity between the old versions and the new. The older singers often sound eager to please; Dylan doesn’t. He sounds as if his goal has been to get all the way into these old songs, and then get lost.
Bob Dylan, on traditional music, to Nat Hentoff, “The Playboy Interview” (Playboy, March 1966), collected in Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, edited by Jonathan Cott. New York: Wenner Books, 2006, 98.
———. Good As I Been to You (Columbia, 1992).
———. World Gone Wrong (Columbia, 1993).
Mississippi Sheiks, “I’ve Got Blood in My Eyes for You” (1931), on Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order (1931-1934) (Document, 1991).
———. “The World Is Going Wrong” (1931), on Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order, Volume 3 (15 December 1930 to 24 October 1931) (Document, 1994).
Doc Watson, with Gaither Carlton, fiddle, “The Lone Pilgrim,” from The Watson Family (Folkways, 1963; Smithsonian Folkways, 1993); field recordings by Ralph Rinzler, Eugene W. Earle, Archie Green, and Peter Siegel, 1961-1963.