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Bright were the suns that once shone once for you
When you would go wherever she would lead you.
That girl loved as no other will ever be.
Many playful things happened then,
Things you wished and she then wanted too.
Bright indeed the suns that once shone for you.
Now she doesn’t want you. You should be the same.
The poem continues, with the poet unable to get beyond the love that is lost, as he imagines her with another: “Whom will you kiss, whose lips will you nibble.” Or, as Dylan put it in refrain of the 1997 song “ ’Til I Fell in Love with You”: “I just don’t know what I’m going to do / I was all right ’til I fell in love with you.” Or at the end of “Love Sick,” from the same album:
I’m sick of love; I wish I’d never met you
I’m sick of love; I’m trying to forget you
Just don’t know what to do
I’d give anything to be with you
This is the art of Catullus and the art of Bob Dylan, then a fifty-six-year-old songwriter, the essence of which he sums up in Chronicles: Volume One: “experience, observation, and imagination”—qualities he shares with the Roman poet.
Another poem of Catullus, his shortest, was translated by Abraham Cowley, English Civil War poet, in the seventeenth century:
I hate and yet I love thee too;
How can that be? I know not how;
Only that so it is I know,
And feel with torment that ’tis so.
In spirit these poems share much with the songs Dylan was writing in the second half of 1962, when he was wasting away in the Village, pining for the absent Suze Rotolo, and producing some of his best work because of that absence. Perhaps he even knew the Catullus poem above—Miss Walker may have shown it to the Latin class, given its simplicity and brevity—as we seem to hear its echoes in a letter he wrote to Suze in 1962:
It’s just that I’m hating time—I’m trying to … bend it and twist it with gritting teeth and burning eyes—I hate I love you.
The songs of this period come across as heartfelt, and reflect a reality, but like the poems of Catullus, they come into being and endure through the artistry with which they capture the human condition. The connection between the lyric genius of these two poets may be coincidental, but Dylan’s interest in the city in which Catullus lived, loved, lost, and died young is a very real thing.
DYLAN VISITS ROME
Bob Dylan would pay the first of many visits to Rome, also his first time in Europe, in January 1963, a side trip after performing in a BBC film in London the month before, during what was also his first trip to England. The summer before these trips, in June 1962, Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s girlfriend and Muse of those years, had been taken off to Italy by her mother. Mary Rotolo disapproved of her young daughter’s relationship with Dylan, and Suze herself was troubled by the stress that Dylan’s exploding fame was beginning to cause. Originally scheduled to return by Labor Day, she stayed on past the summer, studying art for the rest of the year in the Umbrian city of Perugia. But Dylan’s trip to Rome had nothing to do with retrieving Suze, who by then had returned to New York. So why did he first visit Rome, and not Paris, Berlin, or Madrid? The liner notes to his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, mention that he actually performed on this first trip to Rome, at the Folkstudio in the bohemian region of Trastevere (“across the Tiber”), “in its heyday a Greenwich Village–style club with three or four performers every night and a generous open-stage policy.” It seems likely that Rome and its fascination had existed in Dylan’s imagination, dating back just a few years before the trip to his study of Latin and the Latin Club, all those movies, and his stage debut as a Roman soldier, with the highlights of the eternal city, not least of all its Colosseum (or “Coliseum”) and gladiators, appealing to his young mind.
Dylan’s separation from Suze Rotolo gave us some of his greatest songs, written while they were apart: “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” “One Too Many Mornings,” “Girl of the North Country,” and of course, “Boots of Spanish Leather,” its first six verses a dialogue between the singer and his lover. Dylan and Rotolo had corresponded during her absence, and the seventh verse of the song captures the pain of the man who has been left behind:
I got a letter on a lonesome day
It was from her ship a-sailin’
Saying I don’t know when I’ll be comin’ back again,
It depends on how I’m a-feelin’
Dylan and Suze would later get back together, but written during those first days that Dylan spent in Rome, it preserves the evidence of a painful memory of separation, “across that lonesome ocean.” Dylan would sing the song on Studs Terkel’s show in May 1963. Terkel asks for a love song. Dylan: “You wanna hear a love song?” Terkel: “Boy meets girl. Here’s Bob Dylan, boy meets girl.” Dylan strums a chord or two—and corrects Terkel, “Girl leaves boy.”
Dylan’s trip to Rome also gave us a song called “Goin’ Back to Rome,” which he would perform on February 8, 1963, at Gerde’s Folk City, once he returned from his trip. “Goin’ Back to Rome” is not copyrighted, or included among the songs on Dylan’s official website, but it is preserved on the bootleg recording “The Banjo Tape,” transcribed here correctly for the first time:
Hey, well, you know I’m lying
But don’t look at me with scorn.
Well you know I’m lying
But don’t look at me with scorn.
I’m going back to Rome
That’s where I was born.
Buy me an Italian cot and carry,
Keep it for my friend.
Buy me an Italian cot and carry
Keep it for my friend.
Go talk to Italy
All around its bend.
You can keep Madison Square Garden
Give me the Coliseum.
You can keep Madison Square Garden
Give me the Coliseum.
So I don’t wanna see the gladiators
Man I can always see ’em.
While the lyrics here are obscure, they may not be pure nonsense. We can connect “going back to Rome” with the fact that the twenty-one-year-old had actually been in Rome the month before. And when he sings, “Buy me an Italian cot and carry, / Keep it for my friend,” we wonder about the identity of the friend for whom he would buy the portable baby cot. Could it have been for Suze Rotolo herself, whose pregnancy later that year was terminated by an abortion? Suze was presumably in the audience at Gerde’s that night, having just been reunited with a Dylan much happier than the one who had been moping around the Village in the second half of 1962 while she was off in Italy.
The song’s claim of a birthplace in Rome is an early instance of Dylan’s tendency to create environments for his various identities and characters. Another example is in the traditional “Man of Constant Sorrow” (1962), where the narrator is “going back to Colorado,” where he was “born and partly raised.” Other versions of this song have the singer “born and raised” in old Kentucky, others in San Francisco, and so on. As long as the meter of the place is the same (Cólorádo, Sán Francísco, etc.), anything works, variety and change of place and time being a natural feature of folk songs. But for Dylan, Rome is different. It is hard not to connect his staking a claim for his birthplace in Rome with other utterances that try to create a new point of origin for himself, one that makes more sense in the creative mind of this genius, like this moment in his 2004 60 Minutes interview with Ed Bradley. Questioned about changing his name from Robert Zimmerman to Bob Dylan, he replied: “You’re born, you know, the wrong names, the wrong parents.”
Even before the trip to Rome and the penning of the song “Goin’ Back to Rome,” which followed the visit, was an even earlier song, “Long Ago, Far Away,” sung before he would have known of the Folkstudio in Rome, in Minneapolis friend Tony Glover’s apartment on August 11, 1962. Recorded in November 1962, the song shows he was thinking of ancient Roman times. It shows a debt to gospel, as it considers human cruelty throughout history, from the point of view of those who suffer, not least the crucified Jesus, with whom the song begins and ends:
To preach of peace and brotherhood
Oh, what might be the cost?
A man he did it long ago
And they hung him on a cross.
Then the ironic, even sarcastic, refrain, implying that nothing has changed:
Long ago, far away,
Things like that don’t happen
No more, nowadays
The thrust of the song is along the lines of Woody Guthrie’s song “Jesus Christ”:
This song was made in New York City
Of rich man and preachers and slaves
If Jesus was to preach like He preached in Galilee
They would put Jesus Christ in His grave.
Of the examples in the five verses in the body of Dylan’s song, only two specify historical moments, the chains of slaves “during Lincoln’s time,” and in the striking image of the second to last verse, absent from the official Dylan website:
Gladiators killed themselves
It was during the Roman times
People cheered with bloodshot grins
As eyes and minds went blind
Long ago, far away
Things like that don’t happen
No more, nowadays
“Goin’ Back to Rome” has “always see ’em” rhyming with “Coliseum,” and we will see this rhyme used again, a few years later, in a famous and much better song from 1971, “When I Paint My Masterpiece.” The first two verses of that song are all about Rome. It is thought to preserve the memory of another trip Dylan took to Rome, following the 1965 tour of England that was the subject of D. A. Pennebaker’s film Don’t Look Back. According to this plausible theory, Dylan went back in the company of his new Muse, Sara Lownds, whom he would marry by the end of the year. Sara left her husband, Hans Lownds, to take up with Dylan, and it is hard not to connect this reality with one of Dylan’s most iconic lines, from “Idiot Wind,” written in 1974: “They say I shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy.”
Sara is absent in name from “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” thus allowing the singer in the scene Dylan paints to have an assignation with “a pretty little girl from Greece,” or in the official lyrics, “Botticelli’s niece,” who will be able to help out with painting the masterpiece in the title and in the last line of each verse:
Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble
Ancient footprints are everywhere
You can almost think that you’re seein’ double
On a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs
Got to hurry on back to my hotel room
Where I’ve got me a date with Botticelli’s niece
She promised that she’d be right there with me
When I paint my masterpiece
It is worth noting that “When I Paint My Masterpiece” was the regular opener for the first of the two Rolling Thunder Revue tours in the fall of 1975, which also featured the new song “Sara.” “Sara” is pretty much the opposite of “Idiot Wind” in its lyrical and sweet memories of their decade-long relationship, children and all. The only song with a title and lyrics that are unambiguous on the identity of the lover, its last two choruses end with a hint of the breakup toward which the two were headed: “You must forgive me my unworthiness. … Don’t ever leave me, don’t ever go.” By this time, Dylan was involved with other women, and when the 1976 part of the Rolling Thunder Revue resumed in Lakeland, Florida, on April 18, 1976, “Sara” was gone from the setlist, its position taken over by “Idiot Wind”—the first public performance of the song that had come out fifteen months earlier. In a televised performance on May 23, 1976, the eve of Dylan’s thirty-fifth birthday, he delivers a glorious, impassioned version of it with his wife, children, and mother in the audience. It was likely not much appreciated by Sara, sitting there, the object of much of the song’s anger and venom. Their divorce was finalized on June 29, 1977.
Clearly Dylan feels a connection to the antiquity of Rome, as he does with no other place. When he first traveled there in 1963, he was immediately inspired. That’s why in January 1963 he would write and sing the words “Goin’ back to Rome, / That’s where I was born.” That trip to Rome, subsequent trips, and the adoption of the city as the place where he was born seemed years later to incite a kind of artistic rebirth for Dylan, or at least it coincided with that rebirth.
PRESS CONFERENCE IN ROME, 2001
Bob Dylan would be back in Rome on July 23, 2001, for an interview with a group of European journalists who had been listening that morning to an advance copy of his new album, “Love and Theft,” due out the following September. This was in between concerts in Pescara, on the Adriatic coast of Italy, and Anzio, on the coast south of Rome. On this tour he performed in Scandinavia, Germany, England, Ireland, but it was Rome that he chose for the press conference that would plant a few clues about the new directions in his songwriting. One of the reporters asked an early question:
Are you enjoying to be in Rome?
Oh yeah.
You’re often here in Rome.
Pretty regular huh?
You write songs about [Rome].
Quite a few.
It is interesting that Dylan doesn’t limit himself to just the obvious song or to any one song, but “quite a few.” The journalist misses his observation, and is just thinking of the song in question:
“Paint My Masterpiece.”
Exactly.
You speak exactly of this here. …
Exactly. This is it … Spanish Steps.
The Hotel de la Ville, where the interview took place, was a little way along the Via Sistina from the top of the Spanish Steps—another prop for the interview. As the press conference continued, Dylan proceeded to lay down a trail for journalists to follow:
My songs are all singable. They’re current. Something doesn’t have to just drop out of the air yesterday to be current. You know, this is the Iron Age, we’re living in the Iron Age. But, what was the last age, the Age of Bronze or something? We can still feel that age. I mean if you walk around in this city, you know, people today can’t build what you see out there. Well at least, you know when you walk around a town like this, you know that people were here before you and they were probably on a much higher, grander level than any of us are. I mean it would just have to be. We couldn’t conceive of building these kind of things. America doesn’t really have stuff like this.
This looks close to being scripted, preplanned, and he gets back to it later in the interview after the journalists fail to pick up on where he was going:
