Opinions on Bob Dylan's Abstract Mid 60s Period

Apologies if a thread like this has been made already, but it's difficult to search for. I have a feeling it's something that's been discussed considering how long this forum has been around.

It's pretty clear that Bob Dylan's '65-'66 trilogy of Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde remain Dylan's most popular, and most critically acclaimed albums, besides maybe Blood on the Tracks. I want to point out that I am a fan of Bob Dylan and I think he's a cultural icon, someone who will be listened to 100 years from now, no question. I am just puzzled by the popularity of the three abstract albums he made in the mid 60s. BIABH isn't as cryptic as the latter two albums, but many of Dylan's songs in this period, like "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again" seem to be nearly impenetrable. Sometimes I feel like some of the songs don't necessarily have a deeper meaning, and are meant to be silly, like what John Lennon thought of the aforementioned song, or maybe I'm just bad at interpretation. Sure, the albums have a playful feeling and are pleasant to listen to, but it's strange to me that the same people who call him the greatest songwriter of all time (a claim I am not discrediting at all), revere the Mid 60s trilogy albums as his magnum opus, in spite of how opaque many of his songs from this period were. I'd think albums like The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, The Times They Are a-Changin', or Blood on the Tracks would be viewed more highly of due to their serious subject matter or more accessible lyrics (without sacrificing quality). Now, I read an opinion recently (might have been on Ultimate Classic Rock) which stated that Dylan would never have been as popular as he is now if he kept on writing bare bones folk protest songs, as that would have been passé, which I agree with. His electric turn was inevitable. I just wonder if his songwriting took an intellectual step forward or not at this period. I know this is a debate that's been going on for years, but I'd like to hear what others have to say.

Sometimes I feel that people love him just because he is Bob Dylan, and his enormous reputation. This reminds me of a quote from the author Raymond Chandler on Ernest Hemingway in one of my favorite books, Farewell My Lovely:

“Who is this Hemingway person at all?”
“A guy that keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good."

I suppose that is Dylan blasphemy

I want to point out again that Bob Dylan is one of my favorite artists, and I do enjoy listening to his music, but I just have a couple questions for people to ponder:

- Are the abstract lyrics from Bob Dylan's mid 60s period hiding a deeper meaning, proving Dylan to be a literary genius, or are they just absurd surrealism packaged as genius, as someone on another website stated harshly:

"abstractionism . This sums up Dylan pretty much. abstractionism sold as genius to the those that drink the coolade."- Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again | Untold Dylan »

- Why are the three Mid 60s albums viewed as his best, rather than his albums with more clear songwriting? Is it mostly based off of reputation?



I thought this would be a very interesting thread to pose here. These forums have some of the most knowledgeable music fans on the internet, and I anticipate some enlightening responses.

I'll end with a very pertinent Dylan lyric that I think best describes this period:


"Something is happening here / But you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mister Jones?"

 

Many of the songs are stream of consciousness mixed with surrealistic images - it's what was pouring out of Dylan at the time, under the influence of various substances. Not meant to make sense or be understood as definitively "meaning" something, they mean what they say - a series of kaleidoscopic images that create moods or feelings - anger, frustration, resignation, bemusement, longing, tenderness, bitterness, etc. I've always felt Dylan, even in the earlier "message" songs, was more about evoking an emotional reaction from the listener than trying to get a political message across. He just found a different way of doing it in the 65-66 trilogy.

 

Never found it important to dissect or interpret the lyrics, they are words that fit the music. Like Symbolist poetry they flow at a certain meter and involve you in what they are.
The wonder of language, placed beautifully.

 

That is essentially my listening strategy for these albums, admire the sound of his bluesy stream-of-conscious lyrical style, attempting to decipher the lyrics but realizing that it's a hopeless effort for many songs. I've always thought though that the duty of lyrically-centered music, such as folk and hip hop, is first and foremost meant to convey a meaning through their lyrics, because what else are you going to do with lyrics? If there is no meaning to the lyrics, sometimes it seems trivial, but at the same time, a song like "Subterranean Homesick Blues" can be admired as a stream-of-consciousness surreal tour-de-force, which shows that maybe there are multiple ways to approach lyrics. I still feel that meaning is most important in lyrics, but I do find Dylan's mid 60s trilogy to be playful, fun albums to listen to, but not ones I take too seriously. There are some songs that are hard to crack, but seemingly do symbolize something, such as "Visions of Johanna".

 

Great writing, and especially great poetic writing, has been described as existing in a kind of ground between sound and sense, where, instead of being bogged down all time time in literal meaning that can only have a single thing to say and is locked into a kind of prosaic lining out of what a listener is intended to feel, can deliver a complex array of rich, multiple, and sometimes even contradictory meanings and can imbue in the listener a kind of direct experience of emotion unmitigated by being "told" what to feel. Furthermore, like poetry, the words of a song can have a music of their own, and the music of the words can be as important a part of how the work to make the listener feel something as the meaning of the words. It's like music itself -- you don't need programmatic music that intentional tells a specific literal story to be made to feel something, in fact, often that kind of music is corny and limited and stilted and phony feeling. Same thing with representational art -- you don't need a paint to be a painting of a representational object or place to mean something or to make you feel something. Dylan's lyrics then and now are kind of fantasia borrowing from America folk song (like the line about the railroad men drinking up blood like wine), history and literature; drawing too on personal experience; and often being governed and led along by sound and rhyme itself to evoke mood and emotion while providing a kind of kaleidoscopic, surreal narrative of effects which feel like the have a beginning, middle and end and seem to exist in a kind of eternal American present. You never miss the mood; you don't mistake the venom in "Like a Rolling Stone," the world weariness of "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues," the longing in "Visions of Johanna"....you can hear something like the harmonica playing the skeleton keys in the rain and feel your bones chattering in a line like that in a way you never can in a line like "May God bless and keep you always/May your wishes all come true." Not that a kind of prayer or toast can't be moving, but it's kind of tell not show writing that tells you what to feel instead of making you feel something. No, Dylan's mid-60's stuff isn't overrated, nor is his more prosaic writing, for the most part, his best writing.

 

The beauty of all this, is that the meaning of each of these songs are left to your own interpretation, or imagination.

 

This is a fantastic response. You made a good point that sometimes if lyrics are too literal, that can be a fault. I agree that the beauty in art is everybody's unique interpretation. I can see how the bizarre, surreal landscapes Dylan creates in his mid 60s period can serve as a playground for the mind, in which every listener gets something different from it. Perhaps these songs do exist on a higher plane than direct, literal lyrics which tend to not age as well. I do still find The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan and The Times They Are a-Changin' to still stand up as excellent songwriting, but just in a different way than his mid 60s work.

 

Trying to understand the meaning in some of his songs is part of the fun. Peeling back the layers, putting pieces of the puzzles together. Ultimately, it's left to interpretation. I don't need to fully understand what Stuck Inside.. means to enjoy these strange pictures that Dylan has painted inside my head. Desolation Row is endlessly entertaining because the places you are taken to in the strange world he created via his poetry are always so real, yet just unreal enough to make it intangible, & makes me want to revisit the song often. I don't know what all of Mr. Tambourine is really about, but it bombardes you with one gorgeous line after another, in a similar way that It's Alright Ma hits you with dark, apocalyptic ones. Highway 61 is a never ending journey into different settings that exists in his mind, & the character studies of people who also live in there(who might all be Dylan in some form) & many times he leaves the judgment of these character up to us. On Blonde, he still taking us on journeys, but his own, personal feelings become even more apparent on most of the songs. It's more about how Dylan himself takes all the changes, events, & people in and his reaction to it. It feels more personal, & we get an even clearer glimpse at Dylan's perspective on things.

 

No doubt you can write in very direct ways and it can be effective and emotional. I mean, Hank Williams' songs aren't without the poetic tools of imagery or the music of the words, but they're also pretty plainspoken and direct, and they're often intensely emotional. And in some ways it's harder to write that directly, at least harder to do that and not sound corny or flat. But there's power and complexity and emotional affect that you can achieve with writing that's elliptical and allusive (and illusive) and musical and even surreal and abstract that you don't necessarily get with writing that's simple and direct. I mean you can read The Waste Land and you can pull it apart and search through it's dense literary allusions and try to reflect back on Elliott's own biography and relationships and that can be exciting, but you can just read it too, even without 100% literal understanding of every reference and relationship and still be immediately struck by the sexual disgust and self loathing and revulsion and sense of alienation from one's self and one's time and all of the emotional stuff of the poem -- all of that can hit you like a ton of bricks instantly before you even start to try to unravel it, or whether or not you ever try to unravel it in a more literal fashion. And then, in some ways, when you start trying to peel apart a piece like The Waste Land, all that stuff starts to seem in some ways almost like a disguise for the emotional content, and then the apparent act of disguise carries another layer of emotional content itself.

 

the great thing about some of the surrealistic songs is when bob does let in something that seems more personal (last lines of Tom Thumbs Blues and Desolation row) its really effective. But its not just the lyrics that work on those three albums its the music, bob could be singing in Yiddish theyd still work

 

All I know is "I Want You" and "Just Like A Woman" were the first two songs he'd ever written that included bridges, which is probably what made them obvious choices for singles.

 

You're forgetting "Ballad of a Thin Man".

 

I stand corrected.

 

I think John Lennon nailed it when he tried to describe how he wrote I am The Walrus..... “In those days I was writing obscurely, ala (Bob) Dylan, never saying what you mean but giving the impression of something, where more or less can be read into it. It’s a good game. I thought, ‘They get away with this artsy-fartsy crap.’ There has been more said about Dylan’s wonderful lyrics than was ever in the lyrics at all. Mine, too. But it was the intellectuals who read all this into Dylan or The Beatles. Dylan got away with murder. I thought, ‘I can write this crap, too.’ You just stick a few images together, thread them together, and you call it poetry. But I was just using the mind that wrote ‘In His Own Write’ to write that song.”

That style was not anything new as well. It was prevalent in many of the French symbolist poets.

 

it's not as abstract as his European Tour of '91. Now THAT'S far out! And incomprehensible too, as true art tends to be. I especially liked the song "Dooaheeyaohmn" or its little cousin "Lerrrdlalay".

Seriously though, i love the mid-60s period, though i must say that Highway 61 Revisited is actually my least favorite of that bunch.

 

Four word suffice:
"Pete Seeger was wrong."

 

Fantastic. He was on a creative roll and everything just seemed to pour out of him. Surrealistic and groundbreaking in rock, pop.

 

Brian Eno once said in an interview that back when he was writing songs, he always wrote and recorded the music first. He would then play a song over and over, singing along using any words that came into his head that fit the music. He found that eventually something that more or less made sense, and sounded great with the melody, would emerge.

I have a feeling Dylan wrote in a similar way. He'd sit down at the typewriter with the melody running through his head, typing like mad until he came up with a set of words that, when sung, perfectly complemented it. Among the words were some really cool images, some funny lines, some nonsense, but most of all lyrics that Dylan could sing with his amazing, inventive phrasing. When you listen to the sessions on The Cutting Edge, you can hear that phrasing evolve over a series of takes. The final result, on the released albums, was just incredible. The final version of "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again" is so much better vocally than the earlier takes.

Dylan has taken a lot of flack for both his singing voice and his impenetrable lyrics, but he in fact delivered some of the finest creative vocalizing this side of Ella Fitzgerald. His voice may sound unpleasant, and he doesn't enunciate like Sinatra, but his singing in this period was unmatched by anyone in the rock world.

 

Compare Blonde On Blonde to David Blue's self-titlted album of 1966 and you'll understand the difference between someone who knew what he was doing (Dylan) and someone who was just throwing together images in the hope that people would be taken in.

 

I suppose branching off of what some have said, is that if there is artistic merit in having ambiguous lyrics (as in allowing everyone to have their own interpretation, entering the listener into the world of the song, etc.), where do you draw the line between plain silly, "artsy-fartsy crap" and actual art? This kind of reminds me of early Beck. A lot of songs on Mellow Gold ("Loser", of course) are just a collection of random phrases that sound cool and ironic but are pretty meaningless nonetheless. I have a hard time seeing art in that because I'm not really feeling myself put into another world with the lyrics, like what is possible with the best abstract Dylan songs. At the same time, there's definitely plenty of Dylan songs from this period that are just silly, but I can agree that some are art as well.

 

Also, I'm not sure how many people are aware of this book, but I own it, and it goes over the story of every song in Dylan's canon. It usually gives an overview of the song's contents which is really interesting. One of my favorite books as I will treasure it for as long as my ears can hear music.

 

Those 3 albums are bottled lightning ,
i don't overthink them , just gape in wonder .

 

Good synopsis.
However, Dylan's singing voice, in my opinion, has never sounded unpleasant to me. In fact, his singing from "Times" up to "Desire", are some of the most real, honest, poignant vocals ever heard in recording history...
His later vocals from. "Oh Mercy" onward, are also fitting, albeit weathered with age.

 

I've always hated when people criticize Dylan's vocals. It's folk music, he's not supposed to sound like Sinatra. Folk music is all about authenticity, so the raw, unpolished vocals are the entire point of the music...

 

Dylan took an "experimental" approach to lyric writing on these albums, diverting from the traditional style of lyrics on earlier albums. Building on the experimentations of the Beat poets - cut-ups, stream of consciousness via drugs, etc. These lyrics are not to be interpreted as a coherent narrative, but are to be experienced for their rhythmic sounds, and for what they evoke in you.

A comparison is to 20th century experimental music. It's not based on the rules of harmony, and can't be listened to with the same expectations. In comparison, it is based on producing controlled tones of dissonance and consonance.