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A saxophone someplace far off played
As she was walkin’ by the arcade
As the light bust through a beat-up shade where he was wakin’ up
She dropped a coin into the cup of a blind man at the gate
And forgot about a simple twist of fate
In a radio interview with folksinger Mary Travers in April 1975, Dylan said of Blood on the Tracks, “A lot of people tell me they enjoy that album. It’s hard for me to relate to that. I mean, it, you know, people enjoying the type of pain, you know?” That’s the point, as Dylan, here deliberately disingenuous, well knew. His artistic genius—in his words, music, and voice—create pain, but precisely because of the brilliance of his art on this album, these songs produce recompense for the loss of love and the memory of what had once been. This is the quite intentional goal of songs like “Simple Twist of Fate,” “Idiot Wind,” or “If You See Her, Say Hello.” These songs also hold the trace of a hope that all might not be lost: in “Simple Twist of Fate” the man “Hunts her down by the waterfront docks where the sailors all come in / Maybe she’ll pick him out again,” this also giving the point of view of the character in the song; or the switch at the end of “Idiot Wind” from “You’re an idiot, babe” to “We’re idiots, babe.” Sharing the blame; or at the end of “If You See Her, Say Hello,” “Tell her she can look me up, if she’s got the time”—though in other versions, any hope is pretty remote, as we’ll see. To have lived through more than forty years with all of the music and poetry of these songs, from the album and in performance, is a source of good fortune and of genuine pleasure and deep contentment, even—or especially—with the pain the album so exquisitely expresses.
Much of the album focuses on nighttime, the time of day when the relationships in its songs seem to fall apart, perhaps also the case with Dylan’s real-life relationships. The first line of the first song of the album, “Tangled Up in Blue,” seems to start on a bright note: “Early one mornin’ the sun was shinin’ / I was layin’ in bed,” but within a moment that feeling is illusory, as the relationship is suddenly no more: “Wonderin’ if she’d changed at all / if her hair was still red.” The singer’s early- morning memory eventually gets back to the evening breakup, after driving out west in a car that the couple abandons as they “Split up on a dark sad night / Both agreeing it was best.” The next song, “Simple Twist of Fate,” begins with a twilight encounter, now in third-person narration: “They sat together in the park / As the evening sky grew dark.” After a one-night stand that could in the narrator’s mind have led to something, in the morning he finds that she’s gone: “He woke up, the room was bare / He didn’t see her anywhere.” In “Meet Me in the Morning,” morning and night frame the song, which begins with “Meet me in the morning, 56th and Wabasha,” and ends with the “sun sinkin’ like a ship,” and in between “They say the darkest hour is right before the dawn.” The year after Bob and Sara Dylan’s divorce, finalized on June 29, 1977, Dylan seemed to recall this aspect of the album’s songs: “I don’t have anything but darkness to lose. I’m way beyond that.” A good deal of the melancholic and painful power of this album, whatever the realities of Dylan’s personal situation, comes from these moments, all shadows in the night, a time of day that would continue to be the temporal setting and condition for the best of Dylan’s song.
In the beautiful “If You See Her, Say Hello,” the narrator’s memories of what has been lost in the relationship also come as night falls, in the second verse: “But to think of how she left that night, it still brings me a chill,” and then again in the final verse: “Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past.” I single out this song for its intense lyric qualities, and not so much for the painterly qualities so apparent elsewhere on the album. The gift of lyric poetry resides in its ability to precisely capture the condition of individuals in their sorrows, joys, loves and losses, desires, hatreds and jealousies. Such poetry is intimately connected to song—again, lyric from lyre, the guitar of the Greeks and Romans. Like song, it enables us to read ourselves into the situations that the poetic voice creates in aesthetically compelling modes. “If You See Her, Say Hello” is another such lyric song-poem. Its five verses are an elaboration of the title, a request by the singer for someone to say hello to a woman who walked out on him, its first verse closing with the rawness of the singer’s feelings: “She might think that I’ve forgotten her, don’t tell it isn’t so.”
This song actually exists in two versions, and in performance with many variations. The first version that Dylan released, on Blood on the Tracks, as quoted above, was actually recorded on December 30, 1974, effectively revising and for many years canceling out an earlier version, which was recorded in September 1974 and eventually released in 1991 on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3. In this version, the messenger was a rival, at least in the singer’s imagination: “If you’re makin’ love to her, kiss her for the kid.” The change makes a world of difference, as the element of jealousy complicates things and makes it a different song, as do multiple other changes in yet other versions, including the first known live performance, at Lakeland, Florida, on April 18, 1976, during the second Rolling Thunder Revue, as the Dylans’ marriage was falling apart: “If you’re making love to her, watch it from the rear / You’ll never know when I’ll be back, or liable to appear.” Other parts of the song change in different performances over the years, replaced by brilliant absurdist lines, “Her eyes were blue, her hair was too, her voice was sort of soft,” or a brutal closing to the song in concert in 2002: “If she’s passing back this way, and it couldn’t be too quick / Please don’t mention her name to me, you mention her name it just make me sick.” And the third stanza is gone altogether, absent from official collections of Dylan’s lyrics. But what I heard all those years ago in Ann Arbor was the pure, lyrical version from the 1975 album, and that’s the one that has stayed with me over the years: “Tell her she can look me up if she’s got the time.”
LEAVING AND COMING BACK TO DYLAN
In the fall of 1977, I left Ann Arbor for Cambridge, Massachusetts, to begin teaching in the green pastures of Harvard University, about fifteen years after Dylan met folksinger Eric Von Schmidt in those same pastures. By then my Dylan collection had been topped up. Dylan’s Muse also seemed to have returned in what looked somewhat like a second classic phase, matching the first from a decade earlier. In early 1976, he had released Desire—not quite up to Blood on the Tracks, but fine enough. With Dylan’s next album, Street Legal, appearing in 1978, the winds of change were again beginning to shift in his music. The opening lines of its first song, “Changing of the Guards,” are vivid and allusive: “Sixteen years / Sixteen banners united over the fields,” inviting the listener to look back those sixteen years to the beginning of Dylan’s career, and take stock of how far he’d come and think in the apocalyptic lyrics of the song about where he might be headed: “But Eden is burning, either brace yourself for elimination / Or else your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards.” There are some good songs on this album, chiefly for me “Is Your Love in Vain,” but the album as a whole was flawed, as Dylan clearly felt by the best index available: only one song, “Señor,” truly entered the repertoire of Dylan performances, and most he didn’t play after 1978.
For the most devoted Dylan fans who have followed his music through each new stage, his songs and all they evoke become a part of us, with each new album adding another layer. For other fans, he effectively disappeared at various points, starting in 1964 or 1965, quitting their world of folk and protest songs to create a different kind of art. To these fans, Dylan had sold out to a hipster look, and had traded acoustic for electric, with all that connoted for the causes with which they had identified him. But what he gave them in those first two years endured, along with the bittersweet memory of what he had been to them, kept alive by new covers of those particular songs by generations of folksingers who came after. Some disappointed fans stuck around through 1966, hoping that Dylan’s sound, which alternated in performances of that year between solo acoustic and electric with supporting musicians, would return to the former. When it didn’t, these people booed at his concerts, and eventually either came to see what was happening there and found something in it that made sense, or decided to leave for good.
The next crop of Dylan fans to take their leave did so for different reasons, in 1979, when the changing of the guards had come to pass as he started writing and singing Christian songs, often preaching from the stage about hellfire and damnation before launching into his performance. That version of Dylan just didn’t fit in with where they were in their lives or what they believed, or didn’t believe in, or with the Dylan they thought they knew from 1966 or 1975 or some other moment. And so it has continued with Dylan’s constant evolution through the decades, with some fans disembarking and others coming back on board, and newer, younger ones signing up for the first time. It is an essential part of Dylan’s genius that he is constantly evolving as an artist. This is not true of the artists of similar longevity, say Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Van Morrison, or Bruce Springsteen. Inevitably that constant evolving creates periods of experimentation and exploration, some less successful than others, but always moving restlessly toward something, and with the music of the last twenty years now having reached, and sustained, a third classic period.
Dylan’s art works in elemental ways, not just through his words and music and voice, but also through his look and appearance. This is also part of his art, from his look of youthful, potent frailty in his early twenties, to his hip and sexualized look on the 1966 tour, through to the powerful maturity of his middle years. His look during the Rolling Thunder Revue tours of 1975–76, which you can see on YouTube and in the 1976 TV movie Hard Rain, is part of the appeal of those performances: 1970s hipster in his mid-thirties, dressed in denim and leather, sometimes sporting a bandana or turban, sometimes with an ornate floral arrangement in his hatband, frequently with white face paint, or with a straggly beard. And into recent years with his elegant, expressive, weather-beaten face, and his scrupulous attention to costume: outfits and hats that at times turn him into a Civil War officer, at times a cowboy, at times the vaudeville performer. In all of these evolutions there is an enigmatic presence that can’t quite be comprehended or described. With Dylan, everything is performance, and all aspects of performance—the words, the music, the voice, the bands, and the look—coming together to create the unique phenomenon that is Bob Dylan.
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DYLAN AND ANCIENT ROME: “THAT’S WHERE I WAS BORN” (#ulink_ae2f310b-f579-5eb6-bac5-3c75c9d128a6)
GOIN’ BACK TO ROME / THAT’S WHERE I WAS BORN.
—BOB DYLAN, “GOING BACK TO ROME,” 1963
IF YOU WERE BORN AROUND THIS TIME OR WERE LIVING AND ALIVE, YOU COULD FEEL THE OLD WORLD GO AND THE NEW ONE BEGINNING. IT WAS LIKE PUTTING THE CLOCK BACK TO WHEN BC BECAME AD.
—BOB DYLAN, CHRONICLES: VOLUME ONE, P. 28
In March 2007, I traveled to the University of Minnesota for a symposium in Bob Dylan’s home state titled Highway 61 Revisited: Dylan’s Road from Minnesota to the World. The conference was designed to coincide with the exhibition Bob Dylan’s American Journey, 1956–66, concurrently taking place at the university’s Weisman Art Museum. Many of the best-known Dylan scholars were in attendance: Michael Gray, C. P. Lee, Greil Marcus, Christopher Ricks, Stephen Scobie. The symposium was evidence that Dylan had become part of the academic mainstream. But that fact alone was not what drew me to the north woods along with the other Dylanologists. It was something more: the opportunity to come together to discuss Dylan in this place where his genius had first come into being, at the university where Bob Zimmerman was technically enrolled in 1959–60, just a few blocks from Dinkytown and the coffeehouses where he began in earnest to practice and perfect the art he would take out into the world.
The day before the conference, like many of the others attending, I signed up for a guided bus tour of Hibbing, Minnesota, the town where Dylan grew up. Hibbing is situated about seventy miles northwest of the city of Duluth, built on the rich iron ore of the Mesabi Iron Range, and at the edge of the town lies the world’s largest open-pit iron mine. Dylan was born in Duluth on May 24, 1941, and grew up in Hibbing after his family moved there when he was six years old. The bus ride itself was memorable and scenic, as we headed north from Minneapolis on Highway 61, the road that follows the Mississippi all the way down to New Orleans, and rode through pine stands, past the Frank Lloyd Wright gas station in Cloquet, then on into Hibbing. We were a busload of about forty-five Dylanologists and assorted Dylan fans, including a young guy whose name tag read Jack Fate—the character played by Dylan in the underappreciated 2003 film Masked and Anonymous, as he was eager to explain to the few who needed explaining. Jack was handing out Highway 61 bumper stickers.
We eventually found ourselves standing in the library of Hibbing High—the magnificent “Castle in the Wilderness,” as it’s known—from which Robert Zimmerman graduated in 1959. Our tour guide, John “Dan” Bergan, a now-retired English teacher at Hibbing High, had been a classmate of Dylan’s younger brother, David Zimmerman. David graduated five years after Bob and was “a terrifically talented musician in his own right,” according to Bergan. Our busload of pilgrims was also treated to a talk by eighty-three-year-old B. J. Rolfzen, who had once been Dylan’s English teacher. You could tell he must have been a dynamic teacher fifty years earlier, engaged by poetry and with a fire for conveying the magic of literature to his students. Music journalist and cultural critic Greil Marcus has described this moment from Rolfzen’s talk:
Presumably we were there to hear his reminiscences about the former Bob Zimmerman—or, as Rolfzen called him, and never anything else, Robert. Rolfzen held up a slate where he’d chalked lines from “Floater,” from Dylan’s 2001 “Love and Theft”: “Gotta sit up near the teacher / If you want to learn anything.” Rolfzen pointed to the tour member who was sitting in the seat directly in front of the desk. “I always stood in front of the desk, never behind it,” he said. “And that’s where Robert always sat.” He talked about Dylan’s “Not Dark Yet,” from his 1997 Time Out of Mind: “I was born here and I’ll die here / Against my will.” “I’m with him. I’ll stay right here. I don’t care what’s on the other side,” Rolfzen said, a teacher thrilled to be learning from a student. With that out of the way, he proceeded to teach a class in poetry.
The Hibbing experience was all part of what later came to seem to me a carefully staged tour. It reminded me of a visit I’d taken a few years earlier to Max Gate, the house that novelist and poet Thomas Hardy designed and lived in on the outskirts of Dorchester in Dorset, England, from 1885 till his death in 1928. Or else it was a bit like visiting the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut. As a 2016 headline in the CTPost put it, “Mark Twain fan visits his Hartford mansion, finds it’s like communing with a long-lost friend.” Whatever we think we are doing on such journeys, what moves us is the sense of being at the wellspring of artistic creation, where creative genius began to form the art that would become central to our own lives and imaginations. In Hartford, we’re looking for Huck or Tom. In Dorsetshire, we’re hoping to run into some sign of Tess or the mayor of Casterbridge. Likewise, in Hibbing, we were all there looking for something to connect us to the Dylan we had known back in our youth and been with ever since. We were hoping to find it in the magnificent Hibbing High auditorium, where the fifteen-year-old Bob Zimmermann had played with his band, singing and pounding out a Little Richard tune on the piano, as recalled by his then friend John Bucklen:
He got up there … in this talent program at school, came out on stage with some bass player and drummer, I can’t remember who they were, and he started singing in his Little Richard style, screaming, pounding the piano, and my first impression was that of embarrassment, because the little community of Hibbing, Minnesota, way up there, was unaccustomed to such a performance.
I think we could all imagine that event, but in 2007, fifty years after the show, it was hard to get close. Bob wasn’t there, but it was also easy to imagine him up on the stage looking out at the audience in the elegantly upholstered seats of the 1,805-capacity auditorium of which Dan Bergan, who wrote a booklet on the school, rightly noted, in language that, like the auditorium, seemed remote from the hard realities of the Iron Range:
Nowhere in the United States can one find a high school auditorium—perhaps any auditorium—of such incomparable beauty, of such ornate and elaborate decoration … the auditorium features a 40- by 60-foot stage, framed by its 20- by 40-foot proscenium arch whose borders are marked by massive pillars with composite capitals in gold rising on each side of the stage.
Dylan would soon enough be performing at Carnegie Hall in New York and at the London Palladium, but that stage in Hibbing was not a bad place to start. This auditorium must be emblazoned in his mind. The nostalgia involved in the activation and exploration of memory is something that is essential to Dylan—as he said in 1967, “You can change your name / but you can’t run away from yourself.”
After visiting Hibbing High, our group, a little ragged from the warmth of the early spring day, made the short three-block walk from the school down Seventh Avenue, now “Bob Dylan Drive,” to the corner of Twenty-Fifth Street, and the house Bob Dylan grew up in. According to the Iron Range Tourism Bureau, it is no longer open to the public—“drive-by visits only”—but on that day the owner had actually opened its doors and allowed us to go into the front living room, where he had set up a display of Dylan memorabilia on a coffee table. There was a Dylan song playing, I can’t quite remember which one, and I think all of us felt a combination of pleasure at having arrived at such a place, along with slight embarrassment to be intruding in the inner sanctum. I was relieved that a request to visit the bedroom was declined, though some went around the side of the house to look up at its window. The owner of the house told us about Dylan’s own occasional visits over the years. He would spend time up in the bedroom of his old house, presumably making contact with memories of listening on the radio to the music that would form him, first gospel blues and country, later rock and roll. He surely found his teenage self on these occasions.
Lunch was at Zimmy’s, which has since closed as the town continues its economic decline. Some of us bought very unauthorized-looking Zimmy’s T-shirts, along with copies of B. J. Rolfzen’s memoir, The Spring of My Life, a self-published book in ninety-five pages of Courier font—and an interesting account in its own right of growing up poor in post-Depression America. The bus also took us a few miles out of town for a visit to the famous iron ore pit that you can see from the moon. The best ore was long gone, even when Dylan was growing up, and it was easy to connect to the song “North Country Blues” from The Times They Are A-Changin’—a mining blues folk song Dylan would sing at the Newport Folk Festival on July 26, 1963, then once again, for the last time at a concert, at Carnegie Hall, on October 26 of the same year. “This is a song about iron ore mines, and—a, iron ore town,” he said at Newport. The song is in the voice of a woman, as we discover only in the fourth verse, brought up by her brother, who falls victim to the mines, following the same end as her father. In a final blow her husband deserts her and her three children. Dylan had written the song following a trip back to Hibbing, before the public discovered that he had grown up in the town. Andrea Svedberg broke the news of that reality in a Newsweek article published the Monday after the Carnegie Hall concert.
Once the Hibbing connection was made, “North Country Blues” was too easily situated in Hibbing and to the background of Bob Zimmerman, despite its narrator’s female voice and the far different details of its story. Maybe that was why Dylan sang it only once more, in 1974 at a benefit concert for the Friends of Chile. By 2001, when “Floater (Too Much to Ask)” came out, Dylan cared less about people knowing where he came from, and B. J. Rolfzen in his talk is not the only one to have detected autobiographical undertones to the song, both in the lines he quoted and in the ending of the same verse, on the young people of the town:
They all got out of here any way they could
The cold rain can give you the shivers
They went down the Ohio, the Cumberland, the Tennessee
All the rest of them rebel rivers
By the time of that song, 2001, Dylan’s real identity and background was even more beside the point. While “North Country Blues” is a song that can be tied to the hard lives of those who worked and died in the mines of Hibbing, Minnesota, it is even more a song that came more from the folk tradition of mining songs, and especially from the fertile mind of Bob Dylan. Like Dylan, our group soon enough boarded the bus and headed south, following his fifty-year-old trail, to the University of Minnesota, and the next day for coffee in Dinkytown, where he went in the fall of 1959 to take up the art of folksinger performance on his way to Greenwich Village and destiny. The conference itself was memorable enough, but what has stuck in my mind most is that day, spent in the little Minnesota town of Hibbing.
LATIN AND THE LATIN CLUB, HIBBING, 1956–57
As the only classicist in the group, I was also in Hibbing looking for something else, for traces of a bond I shared with Bob Dylan that for me dated back to 1959, when I began studying Latin at the age of nine. Following lunch at Zimmy’s, I slipped out and walked the two blocks to the Hibbing Public Library. One of the waitresses had told me there was a Dylan exhibit there, featuring a copy of the Hematite, Dylan’s high school yearbook from 1959, the year he graduated. The Hematite was named for the mineral form of iron oxide that brought wealth to the town, and had in the days before the main lode dried up paid for the building of its magnificent school. I had already seen page 76 of the yearbook, at a Dylan exhibit in Seattle in 2005, and in the Scorsese documentary No Direction Home, so I knew what to expect. On that yearbook page the life and career of the future Nobel laureate was summed up in just three details:
Robert Zimmerman: to join “Little Richard”—
Latin Club 2; Social Studies Club 4.
Plenty has been written about Bob’s early interest in Little Richard, one of the foundational singers of rock and roll, whose hit “Tutti Frutti” shot up in the charts at the end of 1955, when Bob was a freshman at Hibbing High. By the following fall, backed by the Shadow Blasters, his name for the first band he had put together, Bob Zimmerman was himself now imitating the songs and stage antics of Little Richard. Indeed, the head shot of Bob Zimmerman at the top of that same yearbook page even alluded to the identity his notice craved, in the form of his trademark Little Richard pompadour hair style. This was well before he started taking on the persona, and the look, of Woody Guthrie as he headed for the folksinging scenes of Greenwich Village.
But few have paid much attention to his membership in the Latin Club. With his newfound performing interests, and from the evidence of his dropping off the honor roll from 1956 to 1958—he made it back on for his last year—his later claim to be interested in nothing beyond his music (liner notes, Biograph, 1985) might seem credible enough, though mostly on piano, not yet guitar. But right around this time he was also turning up to Latin class and to Latin Club meetings, and he certainly posed for the group photo of the club that came out in the 1957 Hematite. Bob Zimmerman’s enrollment file “disappeared” years ago from the meticulously kept records of the school, but we know that he was taking Latin and learning about Rome that same year he put his first band together. In addition to the yearbook, the school paper, the Hibbing Hi Times, for November 30, 1956, in the regular “Club Notes” column also gives us a unique rarity, a record, unimpaired by the potentially creative memory of those friends who later recalled this or that detail—part of a day in the life of the fifteen-year-old:
SOCIETAS LATINA HOLDS INITIATION
Societas Latina [Latin Club] held its annual initiation party and ceremony for new members recently in the high school cafeteria. Several associated members of the club were present also.
Second-year students vied on a mock TV program, answering questions on Roman gods and goddesses and identifying words dealing with various phases of Roman life. Winners were awarded prizes. After the formal pledge of allegiance by new members, initiates received badges and were raised from the status of slave to that of plebeians. Members then adjourned to the punch bowl where Consul Mary Ann Peterson and Anna Marie Forsmann, in Roman dress, presided.
Consul Joe Perpich, assisted by Dennis Wickman, Bob Zimmerman, and John Milinovich, was in charge of the formal induction and radio program.
For whatever reason, interest in the Roman gods and goddesses, helping with the radio, or the favorable gender imbalance (fifty girls to fourteen boys)—or all three—Bob Zimmerman was a member of the Hibbing High Latin Club. The only other information about the Latin Club comes with the paper’s issue for March 15, 1957, in the spring of Bob’s membership year, under the headline LATIN CLUB EDITS IDES OF MARCH NEWS:
Societas Latina members today published a paper to celebrate the death of Caesar on the Ides of March (March 15). The paper included Roman history, an original poem, cartoons, and many other items with a Roman background.
Any trace of that paper is long gone, but it is safe to assume Bob Zimmerman played some role in the celebration. Almost sixty years later, as we’ll see, Dylan was quoted as saying, “If I had to do it all over again, I’d be a schoolteacher—probably teach Roman history or theology.”
We can’t be sure what got Bob Zimmerman interested in Latin and the Romans, but it looks as if those interests started in the years before he walked into Miss Irene Walker’s Latin class in the fall of 1956. Bob’s uncle owned the Lybba, named after Dylan’s great-grandmother, one of the town’s four movie theaters, along with the State, and the Gopher, like the Lybba both just a few blocks from his home, the fourth a drive-in. The early to mid-1950s saw an intensification of movies about Greece and Rome, the latter in particular, along with biblical movies, with or without Romans. This was part of a post–World War II, Cold War–generated escape into the relative security of antiquity: swords and sandals, rather than the atom bomb. At the same time, these years saw the height of McCarthyism and the blacklisting of Hollywood actors, producers, and directors. The ancient world could be used as a medium for camouflaging contemporary red-baiting while depicting persecutions emanating not from Washington, D.C., and the House Un-American Activities Committee, but rather from the city of Rome: between 1950 and 1956, when Bob decided to take up Latin, any number of such movies were available for him to have seen, including Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1953 hit version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, starring Marlon Brando, one of Dylan’s favorites, who got the best actor nomination for his role as Mark Antony.
In these years the following movies about the ancient world were available for Bob Zimmerman to see, free at the Lybba, or at either of the other two theaters, opening on the following dates:
Serpent of the Nile: Gopher, July 26, 1953
The Robe: State, January 1, 1954 (and its sequel):
Demetrius and the Gladiators: Lybba, June 24, 1954
Julius Caesar: State, February 9, 1955
The Silver Chalice: State, February 11, 1955
Jupiter’s Darling: Lybba, March 11, 1955
Helen of Troy: State, March 4, 1956
Alexander the Great: Lybba, June 16, 1956
In 1951 he may have been too young for Quo Vadis, with Peter Ustinov as the lyre-playing emperor Nero, but it probably made a return visit in the years that followed. By the time Ben-Hur came out in 1959, Bob Zimmerman was moving on, though he claimed in an interview that the book on which the movie was based was part of the scriptural reading he did in his youth, just as he mentions The Robe and the 1961 King of Kings as early influences. There is not much else to do in Hibbing, particularly in the cold of the northern Minnesota winter, whether or not the theater is owned by your uncle.
I know I’m not the only classicist who was attracted to the world of Rome by Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 movie, Spartacus, starring Kirk Douglas, which I first saw as an eleven-year-old. That movie opened at the Lybba on December 29, 1961, when Bob Dylan was back in Hibbing from his first year in Greenwich Village, for the end-of-year holidays—a year later he chose to visit Rome, and on his return to Greenwich Village sang a song he had just written, “Goin’ Back to Rome.” These movies were beginning to peter out when Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton gave us Cleopatra and Mark Antony in Mankiewicz’s lavish 1963 epic, Cleopatra. Such things happen. Bob Zimmerman moved on, dropped Latin and stuck with his music, and became Bob Dylan. But my contention is that the memory of his contact with classical antiquity, like the memory of everything else, stayed with him, and had a similar early influence on the evolution of his music, as did the poetry he read in B. J. Rolfzen’s English class and his own extensive and varied reading.
According to Dylan’s own account in Chronicles: Volume One, published in 2004, the Rome of Hibbing makes one more appearance in his high school days, by way of the Black Hills Passion Play of South Dakota, a touring group that came to town to act out the suffering, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus. It seems they also needed locals to play the part of extras, as Dylan fondly recalls:
One year I played a Roman soldier with a spear and helmet—breastplate, the works—a non-speaking role, but it didn’t matter. I felt like a star. I liked the costume. It felt like a nerve tonic … as a Roman soldier I felt like a part of everything, in the center of the planet, invincible. That seemed a million years ago now, a million private struggles and difficulties ago.
Who knows what year this was, perhaps Dylan’s sophomore year of high school, when members of the Hibbing High Latin Club got to take on such roles. If he was a Roman soldier, he presumably participated in the scene depicted in the gospels where Roman soldiers cast lots to see who will get the tunic of the crucified Jesus—both scenes familiar to him from The Robe and King of Kings. Bob Dylan revisited that scene in the 1975 song “Shelter from the Storm,” where the singer’s role is different, but reminiscent of the play he refers to in Chronicles. First “she walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns,” suggesting an identification with Jesus Christ, and four verses later “In a little hilltop village, they gambled for my clothes / I bargained for salvation an’ they gave me a lethal dose.” It doesn’t matter whether his role as a Roman soldier was a reality or one of the many inventions and embellishments in his memoir, though the former seems more likely in this case. In his mind, back in 1957 and an epoch later in 2004, the road from Hibbing, like all roads, led to Rome. Dylan went back to Rome again, and to his role as a Roman soldier, in his Nobel lecture, delivered on June 5, 2017. In the lecture, he discusses three books that influenced him since grammar school, All Quiet on the Western Front, Moby-Dick, and the Odyssey, and describes the experience of Paul Bäumer, the soldier-narrator of All Quiet as being like “You’re on the real iron cross, and a Roman soldier’s putting a sponge of vinegar to your lips.”
In Dylan’s 2006 song “Ain’t Talkin’,” the narrator says, “I’ll avenge my father’s death, then I’ll step back.” While the avenging of a father’s death may initially suggest Hamlet, one of Dylan’s favorite plays, I believe the echoes of the line may also lead to Rome, and to the aftermath of the killing of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March, 44 BC, the event celebrated by the Latin Club in 1957. As is now well known, “Ain’t Talkin’ ” steals a number of verses from the exile poems of the Roman poet Ovid, banished in AD 8 by the emperor Augustus to the desolate shores of the Black Sea. When Augustus took control through civil war and came to rule over the Roman Empire, he presented himself as restoring the state from the slavery imposed by Brutus and the other assassins of Julius Caesar:
Those who killed my father I drove into exile, by way of the courts, exacting vengeance for their crime. … I did not accept absolute power that was offered to me.
The reality was otherwise, of course. Augustus maintained the trappings of republic, but in effect his power was absolute; he avenged his father’s death, but he did not step back.
Whatever the impulse, for Bob Dylan the city of Rome, and along with it the culture of the ancient Romans, came to hold a special place over the years. We’ll never know for sure what all those movies and his membership in the Latin Club have to do with this productive association, but the fact is that Rome and the Romans turned up in his songs from early on, and they continue to play a role in his creative imagination.
DYLAN AND CATULLUS
Folk music and the blues may be seen as the primary reservoir of Dylan’s words and melodies for pretty much all of his music that followed. Rock and roll was the musical staple of his high school years, and it remained a part of him as he soaked up the various folk traditions, in Dinkytown in Minneapolis, and later in Greenwich Village. But folk was the old from which the new would emerge. For the youth of America, rock and roll was generational; it belonged to them. It cleared out the music of their parents, the era before immediately after World War II, the Great American Songbook, given voice by Perry Como, Frank Sinatra, and Tony Bennett—the mine to which Dylan would return, starting with the 2015 album Shadows in the Night. With what was happening, musically and culturally in the mid-1960s, Bob Dylan’s genius was in the right time and the right place.
Something similar was happening in the middle part of the first century BC in Rome. Traditional forms of literature, drama, and early epic poetry were coming to be perceived as old-fashioned, precisely as society was opening up in other ways. A clash of cultures was taking place in Rome during this period, similar to the clash that would begin to take place in post-sixties America. Among other now-lost poets of antiquity, flourishing in the two decades before Julius Caesar was killed, was a rare survivor, an ancient Roman poet who can usefully be compared to Dylan, the avant-garde lyric poet Catullus. He died young (c. 54 BC) after creating a body of work that electrified Roman readers, reflected the turmoil and the modernity of Roman times, and changed the course of literary history.
Catullus has long been one of my favorite poets. For me, no other poet, except maybe Dylan, has been able to convey a sense of the pain caused by the loss of love as intensely as Catullus. Dylan wouldn’t begin to make creative use of the poetry of ancient Greece and Rome until the albums he released in the twenty-first century, even though he had long been living in the Rome of his memory and imagination.
In his 2007 movie, I’m Not There, director Todd Haynes used Dylan’s 1966 song “I Want You” for a scene in which Heath Ledger and Charlotte Gainsbourg, playing the roles of Robbie and Claire, immediately recognizable versions of Bob and Sara Lownds, first fall in love. The song encapsulates first love, joyous, and just right for that moment, with its highly poetic verses and its simple, direct refrain: “I want you, I want you / I want you so bad / Honey, I want you.” Catullus too captured in his poetry the first flush of love, for instance in one of his “kiss” poems: “Suns can set and then come back again, / When our short day sets once and for all, / our night must be forever to be slept. / Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, / then another thousand and second hundred, / then still another thousand, then a hundred.”
But the lyrics of Catullus and of Dylan mostly share a focus on love that is lost, that doesn’t work out—that’s where the poetry is. So, for instance, Catullus Poem 11, one of his last poems to Lesbia, the name he gave to the Muse (recalling Sappho, who lived on the Greek island of Lesbos), who inspired his love song. He begins with an address to two acquaintances, whose task it will be to take a message to Lesbia: “You who are ready to try out / whatever the will of the gods will bring / Take a brief message to my old girlfriend / words that she won’t like. / Let her live and be well with her three hundred lovers, / Not really truly loving them / but screwing them all again and again.” The poem ends by shifting the brutal tone and bringing out the hurt and the love that is still there: “Let her not look back for my love as before / which through her fault has fallen like a flower on the edge of a meadow / nicked by the blade of a passing plough.”
By 1975, whatever the realities of his relationship with his wife, Sara, Dylan was, like Catullus as time went by, approaching the end of a relationship in trouble, and he constructed a lyric voice that made art from that situation. The song we already saw, “If You See Her, Say Hello,” is similarly about a relationship that is over:
If you see her, say hello, she might be in Tangier
She left here last early spring, is livin’ there, I hear
Say for me that I’m all right though things get kind of slow
She might think that I’ve forgotten her, don’t tell her it isn’t so
The song, separated from the autobiographical, is like Catullus’s poem, and is there for anyone who has shared that loss and hurt. Like Catullus, Dylan too imagines the rival who has supplanted him: “If you’re making love to her …” Back in Ann Arbor, I was reading the Latin poetry of one, and listening to the songs of the other. And that is how Catullus and Dylan, both lyric poets, sharing common human situations across twenty centuries, have become inextricably linked in my mind, and why they belong together.
Catullus would have been much more familiar in America in the early 1960s, as is clear from an early scene from Cleopatra. It was the highest-grossing film of 1963, won four Academy Awards, and still lost money, so costly was its production. It is highly likely that Dylan, like millions in America and around the world, saw it that year, as I did back in New Zealand. Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra, kittenish and scantily clad on her couch in Alexandria, receives a visit from Rex Harrison’s Julius Caesar. Richard Burton’s Mark Antony is waiting in the wings, and will take over after the assassination of Caesar on those Ides of March. Her spies have reported on Caesar’s movements:
CLEOPATRA: This morning early, you paid a formal visit to the tomb of Alexander. You remained alone beside his sarcophagus for some time. … And then you cried. Why did you cry, Caesar?
CAESAR, CHANGING THE SUBJECT: That man recites beautifully. Is he blind?
AN ATTENDANT: Don’t you hurt him.
CAESAR: I won’t. Not anyone who speaks Catullus so well.
CLEOPATRA: Catullus doesn’t approve of you. Why haven’t you had him killed?
CAESAR: Because I approve of him.
CAESAR, TO THE YOUNG SINGER, HIS WORDS MEANT FOR CLEOPATRA:
Young man, do you know this of Catullus?
Give me a thousand and a thousand kisses
When we have many thousands more,
we will scramble them to get the score,
So envy will not know how high the count
And cast its evil eye.
Several scenes later, once Cupid’s work is done and Caesar and Cleopatra are lovers, she lies back on her bed and volunteers, “I’ve been reading your commentaries, about your campaigns in Gaul.” He, skeptical: “And does my writing compare with Catullus?” She, suggestively: “Well, it’s [slight pause] different?” “Duller?” he asks. “Well, perhaps a little too much description.”
Unlike today’s audiences, those watching the film in 1963, including Dylan, would have gotten these references. Ancient Rome and its spoken language, Latin, the biggest language club at Hibbing High and elsewhere, used to be much more relevant. As late as January 28, 1974, the cover of Newsweek could show Richard Nixon, H. R. Haldeman, and Rosemary Woods encoiled by the Watergate tapes in an image that was a clear allusion to the twin snakes in Virgil’s Aeneid that devour the Trojan priest Laocoön, who is trying to urge his people not to bring the Greeks’ fateful horse into the city. Readers of Newsweek, Dylan included, would have gotten it, either from their knowledge of Virgil or of the ancient statue of the scene, now in the Vatican. Until 1928, enrollments in Latin language courses in the United States outstripped all other languages combined. Spanish took over as the years went by, but in 1962 there were still 702,000 students studying the ancient language. Sputnik, the Cold War, and the perceived need for more science and practicality in U.S. school curricula put an end to all that. The decline began when the National Defense Education Act of 1958 omitted Latin from the curriculum—a year after Bob Zimmerman had been in Latin class at Hibbing High. It took some time to see the full effects of that measure, but by 1976 the number of Latin students had dropped sharply to 150,000, helped by the difficult nature of the language, along with its association with the church, discipline, and authority. Latin hardly fit the ethos of the counterculture.
The paradox here is that Catullus’s poetry is in fact completely modern in the themes and sentiments it expresses. Those who understand his work read it for the beauty and the music of his verse, for the intensity of the personal voice, and for solace when they have loved and lost. Catullus was among the most-read poets of a number of the Beat poets. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, laureate poet of Victorian England, visiting the ruins of Catullus’s house on Lake Garda in northern Italy, thought of Catullus’s poem to his dead brother: “Came that ‘Ave atque vale’ [hail and farewell] of the poet’s hopeless woe / Tenderest of Roman poets nineteen hundred years ago.” The historian and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859) could not read Catullus’s Poem 8 without weeping. It has been a favorite since Thomas Campion, the poet, musician, and doctor, translated it and put it to music in the early seventeenth century. Unlike many in our age, Campion obviously saw no distinction between poem and song. The poem is a self-address, urging strength and resolve, after the loss of Lesbia’s love:
Poor Catullus, you should stop being a fool!
Should realize what you see is lost is gone for good.
