Corcoran - Do you, Mr Jones?: Bob Dylan with the poets and professors

Bob Dylan with the Poets and Professors

EDITED BY NEIL CORCORAN

PIMLICO

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Copyright in Selection and Introduction Neil Corcoran 2002

Copyright in the individual essays lies with the named contributors 2002

Neil Corcoran has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the editor of this work

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First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus 2002

Pimlico edition 2003

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Neil Corcoran is Professor of English at the University of St Andrews.

In the 20th century, the fan had a language.

Alice Fulton

Im a fan, of course, as well as a critic and a professor. This is why.

I had an American friend at school called Hughes: at that school we were all known by the priests who taught us, and more or less knew one another, by our surnames, and in any case he didnt stay at the school long so I cant now recall his first name. His father was stationed at a US airforce base in Lincolnshire and every summer the family returned to New York. This seemed very glamorous to me, and Hughes was an adventurous and exceptionally mature person, in the way of much-travelled children, so probably he actually did what he said hed done one summer, when we were both only twelve or thirteen: hed been to Greenwich Village and seen someone called Bob Dylan in concert. I remember liking the spelling of the name. He brought back to school Dylans first album, Bob Dylan, and played it for me in Fr Benignus ORourkes house room in Lincoln House, Austin Friars School, Carlisle, in 1962 clandestinely, I remember, which would have given it a sheen of even greater glamour. But only if Id been ready for it. I wasnt. I quite liked Cliff Richard and the Shadows at the time, and Dylan pretending to be an old blues man was completely beyond me, although I did register the attractiveness of his impudent, scruffy, knowing surliness on the album cover.

So that was the first time I listened to Dylan, but not the first time I really heard him. That was a year or two later during a school trip to Stratford where, in one still intensely memorable week, I discovered the joys of live Shakespeare (David Warner, the Russian Richard II), Wimpy Bars (they were different then, and this one, the Judith Shakespeare, was the first time most of us had ever eaten a hamburger), illicit beer (in the Dirty Duck, where we encountered the gangling Russian Richard himself, hunched beneath the rafters), and Dylans second album, The Freewheelin Bob Dylan. I saw it in the window of a record shop and immediately liked its title, the chunkily elegant lettering of its design, and of course the perfect, James Dean-influenced icon of its snowy New York City cover image, Dylan huddled against the weather in an immensely desirable and entirely inappropriate little suede jacket, Susie Rotolo adoringly clutching his arm but looking as though she had a mind of her own too. I bought it and played it over and over again in the early pre-performance evening on the old Dansette in the hostel we were staying in. Its songs, ever since, play in the back of my head when I read Richard II, I wasted time and now doth time waste me forever ghosted by A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall.

I saw him first in Newcastle during the 1965 tour, the one commemorated in Donn Pennebakers movie Dont Look Back. What I still remember, vividly, from the Newcastle concert is a little thing he did with his shoulders; perhaps this is what Patti Smith is referring to: a kind of shrug or twitch, which seemed a register of privacy, just something people didnt do on stage, a deconstruction of the pretence of it while still also a performance. It was alluring, dont-give-a-damn, a little come-on that was also a put-off: it was Dylanesque, and a new style entered the world with it.

One way in which he carried his audience along with him during that concert was in knowing pretty accurately what its primary constitution was: students of the Humanities, I imagine, at school or university, whom he flattered with such changes to the recorded versions of the songs as that in Talkin World War Three Blues, where Abraham Lincoln said that became T.S. Eliot said that If there was ingratiation in this, there was also just fun and, I suppose, a sly little acknowledgement of at least one source for some of the astonishing lyrics we were hearing for the first time; and in retrospect, of course, we know how irrecoverably far from ingratiation hed travelled by the time he returned to England the following year. (As far as his behaviour to his audiences goes, thats more or less where hes stayed.) It was also a nod to the fact that many members of this audience were probably more accustomed to poetry readings than to whatever this thing Dylan was doing might be called; and there was, indeed, a moment during the concert which has always been for me definitive of a transitional ethos in Dylan and in the Sixties. At the line in World War Three Blues, I was down in the sewer with some little lover some girls in the audience screamed Beatles-type screams, while others (me included) made outraged shushing noises. No prizes for guessing which side the person Sam Shepard has called true Dylan must have been on, laughing behind his hand.

Since these things just vanish from the world and doesnt Dont Look Back, for all its virtues, always raise the deeply frustrated desire that an entire 1965 concert filmed by Pennebaker should exist for posterity? I want to put on record two things Dylan said during this concert. He sang Gates of Eden, not yet available on record, without introducing it, and afterwards said, simply, That was called Gates of Eden. He followed it immediately with If You Gotta Go, Go Now, again without introduction, and, finishing this hilarious and still in 1965 risqu song (in Newcastle, if not New York) of sexual innuendo and invitation, said, That was called Gates of Eden too. He did introduce Love Minus Zero / No Limit, by saying, This song is like math, you know, a fraction and he drew a line in the air with his hand with Love Minus Zero on the top line, and No Limit on the bottom. He paused and shuffled a bit he was a great shuffler in the sixties, Dylan and then said, I made the title before I made the song. This Dylan, charmingly communicative, even flirtatious, with an audience, has long since vanished from the world too; but the word made has high sanction, and makes him, in one certain sense, very much a poet before he is anything else: since, as Sir Philip Sidney tells us in his sixteenth-century