Tarantula - Bob Dylan

 TARANTULA - BOB DYLAN

First published in 1966, Tarantula is Bob Dylan's only ever work of fiction published in book-form unless, of course, you're someone who subscribes to the notion that everything Dylan has ever done is fiction and therefore Tarantula is simply business as usual? It's a moot point.

It's a book I first read as a teenager and at that time, a book I failed to understand. I had been baptised in the unholy waters of hardcore punk rock and what that had given me was a near-cleansing of the doors of perception. Never mind what Mott The Hoople had once said about 'who needs TV when we've got T-Rex?' How about who needs lysergic acid diethylamide when we've got punk rock?

The Year Zero concept promoted in some quarters of the punk fraternity where the past is erased as in 'No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones' was always mere posturing, I always thought, and was never really something I went along with. Patently, punk rock didn't just come out of nowhere. It might well have been 'here today gone tomorrow' for some but it was never 'here today not there yesterday'. In fact, punk rock actually presented the keys to the past where a whole treasure trove of culture and experience lay waiting to be ransacked. And so ransack it I did. Pillaged it, even.

During the years of the Punk Wars, Dylan had been cast as anathema and his songs almost as crimes against humanity but for me this actually made him a person of interest. It was Caroline Coon who hit the nail on the head with all this when she rebuked Johnny Rotten for him denigrating hippies. "The newspapers are going to come after you in the same way they came after the hippies", she told him. And she was right. So, Dylan being such a cultural icon and an ever-looming presence over the 1960s was obviously someone who demanded investigation and so investigate him I did. Which is how I first ended up reading Tarantula.

Not that they're fully-honed now at all but back then my critical faculties weren't even in their infancy. I'd had no education to speak of but school had at least taught me to read and like so many other others before me, I found that reading was the route to the root of the world. 'A house without books is like a body without a soul' as Roman philosopher Cicero said, so to the public library it was along with visits to the second-hand bookshops of Bristol. 'Libraries gave us power', as the Manic Street Preachers once sang, and it's true. This being one of the very few things of note they've ever come out with, I might add.

On first encountering and reading Tarantula I didn't understand it at all. It was stream of consciousness stuff without punctuation or form. It was gobbledygook. It was gibberish. It made no sense in the slightest and even searching out the odd, single slither of a line containing a hint of meaningfulness was a task too far. There was nothing in there of any note. Nothing to latch onto apart from a sense of cleverness for the sake of being clever but even this was quashed by the much larger sense of it not being half as clever as it presented itself to be.

There was a smugness about it, as if it was talking its own language and if you didn't understand that language it was because you were 'square'. You just wasn't hip to the beat, daddio. You were nowheresville. It was all just Greek to me, however. Double Dutch. Couldn't make head nor tail of it. I was failing to catch the wind. Falling at the first hurdle of the acid test.

So, years later and on reading Tarantula again does it now make any sense? The answer, not surprisingly, is 'No'. It's still very much gobbledygook, still very much gibberish. I have, however, now become wise to it. Tarantula is a vanity project that if written by anyone else other than Dylan would have been binned immediately. It's a disservice to book publishing. It's a fraud. An insult to intelligence. A waste of time and a waste of paper. It should never have seen the light of day let alone be presented as 'essential reading' and 'verbal playfulness and spontaneity'. 

It serves no use. It serves no purpose. It's the literately equivalent of erectile disfunction except it's not even literature. Rather than the works of Shakespeare, it's what a thousand monkeys clattering away on typewriters for a thousand years would come up with. It's rubbish. Utterly. Never in a million years would Dylan himself consider giving it a second glance let alone reading it, so why should anyone else? Why not instead consider destroying it, that's if anyone could even be bothered spending any energy on doing so? That's right, wipe it from the face of the earth metaphorically at least. Slap a sticker on every copy in the world like those 3 for 2 Waterstones ones as a public health warning stating something like 'Pretentious drivel. This book can seriously waste your time'.

John Serpico

Like A Rolling Stone - Greil Marcus

 LIKE A ROLLING STONE - GREIL MARCUS

Greil Marcus drills down into Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone and I'm intrigued, not so much by Dylan or the song itself but by the idea of a whole book being written about a single song. How do you do that? Like A Rolling Stone is six minutes and six seconds long so from the start is double the length of a normal song but how do you wring 258 pages of text from it and that's not including the Acknowledgements and the Index. How do you do that?

Marcus is the author of Lipstick Traces: A Secret History Of The 20th Century, where he was the first writer to thoroughly link the Sex Pistols and Situationism, joining all the dots and making a pretty convincing case for it. John Lydon scoffed, of course, and dismissed the very idea that the Sex Pistols had been linked in some way to history and a secret one at that. As did writer Stewart Home scoff but only because Marcus got there first. Marcus was also the editor of Lester Bangs' collection of essays Psychotic Reactions & Carburetor Dung, and if you know anything about Lester Bangs then that in itself should qualify any writer for practically any job.

So yes, if anyone can write a whole book about a single song then it's going to be Greil Marcus though the question remains: How do you do it?

Like A Rolling Stone was first released in 1965 so Marcus sets the scene, describing the world at that time in terms of politics, racial discrimination, civil rights, riots, Vietnam and so on; as well as highlighting other records populating the same musical landscape such as Petula Clark's Downtown, Sam Cooke's A Change Is Gonna Come, and the Supremes' Stop! In The Name Of Love. Of course, it's always been relatively easy to chart the Western world by songs and 1965 was no exception, it being a year of iconic releases including the Righteous Brothers' You've Lost That Loving Feeling, the Rolling Stones' (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction, and interestingly the Byrds' version of Dylan's Mr Tambourine Man that actually reached number one in the Charts, something that Dylan has never done himself.

Marcus then maps out how Dylan was being perceived at that time and how he will probably always be perceived right up to the point when his obituary is one day written, that being as a 'protest singer'. Brought about primarily by his recording of Blowin' In The Wind, it's a perception that Dylan was never really happy about. When asked for his political opinions, Dylan would feign outrage: "I'll bet Tony Bennett doesn't have to go through this kind of thing. Does Smokey Robinson have to answer these questions?", implying that it was ridiculous to ask mere pop singers about the state of the world, and of course, he was right.

The problem, however, was that Dylan wasn't just a 'mere pop singer' but was instead something more akin to a conduit, a marker - a key figure within the zeitgeist who just happened to have the insight, the foresight and the talent at the right time and the right place. Dylan fulfilled a role - as did the audience - though he complicated things by also having the wherewithal to break expectations and subsequently confuse the audience, him being called 'Judas' for going electric being a case in point.

According to critic Robert Ray, the sound of Bob Dylan's voice changed more people's ideas about the world than his political message did and it's this that Marcus riffs on and when it comes to describing Like A Rolling Stone, going into metaphor overdrive on the sound and the feel of the song.

'As a sound the record is like a cave,' he writes 'where light flickers off the walls in patterns that seem almost in rhythm'. It 'stays in the air, its challenge to itself to stay up for six full minutes, never looking down.'

He describes the verses as Dylan chasing the person to whom the song is directed and harrying her before the chorus vaults him in front of her and as she flees him he appears before her, pointing and shouting "How does it feel? How does it feel?" And then suddenly it's no longer just the girl in the song being addressed but the listener of the song

But what is the song actually about? What is the actual meaning of Like A Rolling Stone? According to Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone magazine it's about growing up and discovering what's going on around you, realising that life isn't all you've been told. And then there's the Jimi Hendrix version as performed at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 where Hendrix famously lit his guitar on fire and prayed to it, a version that writer David Henderson described as being about Hendrix's own life and the desperately winding path he has travelled before ending up at Monterey and his crowning glory.

Herein, however, lies a problem with Marcus's book because after 258 pages of convoluted prose he fails to pin down a definitive meaning to the song. We can only presume this is intentional, suggesting there are actually multiple meanings to it though it makes you wonder what was Dylan's meaning? There are two answers to this, the first being that the meaning is very simple, black and white, and uncomplicated. The second being that Dylan himself distorted any meaning when composing it which has consequently led to further distortion from practically every single, individual listener of the song. It's a mark of greatness, of course, when a song talks to people and is interpreted personally, which is why a lot of song writers decline to explain their songs or even have their lyrics printed so as not to pin them down like so many dead butterflies.

Myself, I always thought Like A Rolling Stone was about Edie Sedgwick - Andy Warhol's muse and one of his Factory superstars - and the time when Dylan was in a relationship with her. It fits the timeline as in the period they were seeing each other, their split, and the release of the song. The words fit as well where the Miss Lonely character in the song is Sedgwick and the Diplomat is Warhol and in these terms the song makes total sense, particularly when you know that Dylan didn't think very highly of Warhol. The strange thing is that Marcus mentions Sedgwick only once in the whole book and so fleetingly that her name isn't even included in the Index. 

So this, it would appear, is how you write a book about a single song: Process, setting, descriptive prose, metaphors, high praise, smoke, mirrors, a wink, a nudge and far too many words to the wise when a brief explanation would suffice.

John Serpico

Writings And Drawings - Bob Dylan

WRITINGS AND DRAWINGS - BOB DYLAN

Regarding Bob Dylan being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature recently, the only question that needs to be asked is 'Why has it taken so long?'. You don't need to be a fan (and you don't need a weather man) to acknowledge the fact as Allen Ginsberg stated years ago that Dylan is the world's greatest living poet. Where's the argument in that?

Published in 1973, Writings And Drawings is a collection of Dylan's lyrics, sleeve notes and drawings dating from his very early songs, through all his albums from Freewheelin' in 1963 to New Morning in 1970. What's immediately apparent when reading it is how the lyrics stand up as poems in their own right rather than being just words to songs and of course, this is one of the reasons why he's been given the award.

There's an art to writing song lyrics and there's an art to writing poems, and it's actually not that often that the two forms are successfully combined to create a whole other. In respect of modern pop culture, Dylan was quite possibly the first to achieve this.

Throughout the book there are many classic songs and lines from songs, familiar if not by being sung by Dylan himself then being covered by other bands and artists: A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall - Bryan Ferry, Mr Tambourine Man - The Byrds, I'll keep It Mine - Nico, Quinn The Eskimo - Manfred Mann, This Wheel's On Fire - Julie Driscoll, Wanted Man - Johnny Cash, All Along The Watch Tower - Jimi Hendrix, etc, etc.

Dipping into the book at random you land upon such lines as this: "I'm ready to go anywhere, I'm ready for to fade. Into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way. I promise to go under it." And this: "You've thrown the worst fear that can ever be hurled, fear to bring children into the world. For threatening my baby, unborn and unnamed, you ain't worth the blood that runs in your veins."

Andrew Motion eat your heart out.

Writings And Drawings isn't really a book to be read cover to cover but rather to browse through appreciatively. It looks good on a bookcase also, or on the side of your table desk, particularly as it's out of print now...

And whilst on the subject of Bob Dylan, for what it's worth his best album (in my opinion) is Desire, from 1976. I remember first hearing it years ago in Athens, in a Greek hostel, sitting in the communal area drinking a coffee before setting off to catch a boat to Crete. The track One More Cup Of Coffee was being played over the hostel's sound system and the words would resonate with me for years after: "One more cup of coffee for the road, one more cup of coffee 'fore I go - to the valley below."

I landed on Crete and I remember a hippy lady saying to me "You look like the man who fell to earth," meaning Thomas Jerome Newton as played by Bowie in the film. I was seventeen, my hair was dyed yellow and my head buzzing with Anarcho Punk ideas.

Right.

Icarus descending.

Any right-thinking acolyte of Dylan should own a copy of this book. I do - and I'm not even really a fan; Patti Smith and Leonard Cohen being more my preference. I appreciate good art when I see it though and Bob Dylan is nothing but an artist and Writings And Drawings nothing less than a very good art book.

John Serpico