Bob Dylan's Nobel Lecture
When I first
received this Nobel Prize for Literature, I got to wondering exactly how my
songs related to literature. I wanted to reflect on it and see where the
connection was. I’m going to try to articulate that to you. And most likely it
will go in a roundabout way, but I hope what I say will be worthwhile and
purposeful.
If I was to
go back to the dawning of it all, I guess I’d have to start with Buddy Holly.
Buddy died when I was about eighteen and he was twenty-two. From the moment I
first heard him, I felt akin. I felt related, like he was an older brother. I
even thought I resembled him. Buddy played the music that I loved – the music I
grew up on: country western, rock ‘n’ roll, and rhythm and blues. Three
separate strands of music that he intertwined and infused into one genre. One
brand. And Buddy wrote songs – songs that had beautiful melodies and
imaginative verses. And he sang great – sang in more than a few voices. He was
the archetype. Everything I wasn’t and wanted to be. I saw him only but once,
and that was a few days before he was gone. I had to travel a hundred miles to
get to see him play, and I wasn’t disappointed.
He was
powerful and electrifying and had a commanding presence. I was only six feet
away. He was mesmerizing. I watched his face, his hands, the way he tapped his
foot, his big black glasses, the eyes behind the glasses, the way he held his
guitar, the way he stood, his neat suit. Everything about him. He looked older
than twenty-two. Something about him seemed permanent, and he filled me with
conviction. Then, out of the blue, the most uncanny thing happened. He looked
me right straight dead in the eye, and he transmitted something. Something I
didn’t know what. And it gave me the chills.
I think it
was a day or two after that that his plane went down. And somebody – somebody
I’d never seen before – handed me a Leadbelly record with the song
“Cottonfields” on it. And that record changed my life right then and there.
Transported me into a world I’d never known. It was like an explosion went off.
Like I’d been walking in darkness and all of the sudden the darkness was
illuminated. It was like somebody laid hands on me. I must have played that
record a hundred times.
It was on a
label I’d never heard of with a booklet inside with advertisements for other
artists on the label: Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, the New Lost City
Ramblers, Jean Ritchie, string bands. I’d never heard of any of them. But I
reckoned if they were on this label with Leadbelly, they had to be good, so I
needed to hear them. I wanted to know all about it and play that kind of music.
I still had a feeling for the music I’d grown up with, but for right now, I
forgot about it. Didn’t even think about it. For the time being, it was long
gone.
I hadn’t
left home yet, but I couldn’t wait to. I wanted to learn this music and meet
the people who played it. Eventually, I did leave, and I did learn to play
those songs. They were different than the radio songs that I’d been listening
to all along. They were more vibrant and truthful to life. With radio songs, a
performer might get a hit with a roll of the dice or a fall of the cards, but
that didn’t matter in the folk world. Everything was a hit. All you had to do
was be well versed and be able to play the melody. Some of these songs were
easy, some not. I had a natural feeling for the ancient ballads and country
blues, but everything else I had to learn from scratch. I was playing for small
crowds, sometimes no more than four or five people in a room or on a street
corner. You had to have a wide repertoire, and you had to know what to play and
when. Some songs were intimate, some you had to shout to be heard.
By listening
to all the early folk artists and singing the songs yourself, you pick up the
vernacular. You internalize it. You sing it in the ragtime blues, work songs,
Georgia sea shanties, Appalachian ballads and cowboy songs. You hear all the
finer points, and you learn the details.
You know
what it’s all about. Takin’ the pistol out and puttin’ it back in your pocket. Whippin’
your way through traffic, talkin’ in the dark. You know that Stagger Lee was a
bad man and that Frankie was a good girl. You know that Washington is a
bourgeois town and you’ve heard the deep-pitched voice of John the Revelator
and you saw the Titanic sink in a boggy creek. And you’re pals with the wild
Irish rover and the wild colonial boy. You heard the muffled drums and the
fifes that played lowly. You’ve seen the lusty Lord Donald stick a knife in his
wife, and a lot of your comrades have been wrapped in white linen.
I had all
the vernacular all down. I knew the rhetoric. None of it went over my head –
the devices, the techniques, the secrets, the mysteries – and I knew all the
deserted roads that it traveled on, too. I could make it all connect and move
with the current of the day. When I started writing my own songs, the folk
lingo was the only vocabulary that I knew, and I used it.
But I had
something else as well. I had principals and sensibilities and an informed view
of the world. And I had had that for a while. Learned it all in grammar
school. Don Quixote, Ivanhoe, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s
Travels, Tale of Two Cities, all the rest – typical
grammar school reading that gave you a way of looking at life, an understanding
of human nature, and a standard to measure things by. I took all that with me
when I started composing lyrics. And the themes from those books worked their
way into many of my songs, either knowingly or unintentionally. I wanted to
write songs unlike anything anybody ever heard, and these themes were
fundamental.
Specific
books that have stuck with me ever since I read them way back in grammar school
– I want to tell you about three of them: Moby Dick, All Quiet on the
Western Front and The Odyssey.
____________________
Moby Dick is a fascinating book, a book
that’s filled with scenes of high drama and dramatic dialogue. The book makes
demands on you. The plot is straightforward. The mysterious Captain Ahab –
captain of a ship called the Pequod – an egomaniac with a peg leg
pursuing his nemesis, the great white whale Moby Dick who took his leg. And he
pursues him all the way from the Atlantic around the tip of Africa and into the
Indian Ocean. He pursues the whale around both sides of the earth. It’s an
abstract goal, nothing concrete or definite. He calls Moby the emperor, sees
him as the embodiment of evil. Ahab’s got a wife and child back in Nantucket
that he reminisces about now and again. You can anticipate what will happen.
The ship’s
crew is made up of men of different races, and any one of them who sights the
whale will be given the reward of a gold coin. A lot of Zodiac symbols,
religious allegory, stereotypes. Ahab encounters other whaling vessels, presses
the captains for details about Moby. Have they seen him? There’s a crazy
prophet, Gabriel, on one of the vessels, and he predicts Ahab’s doom. Says Moby
is the incarnate of a Shaker god, and that any dealings with him will lead to
disaster. He says that to Captain Ahab. Another ship’s captain – Captain Boomer
– he lost an arm to Moby. But he tolerates that, and he’s happy to have
survived. He can’t accept Ahab’s lust for vengeance.
This book
tells how different men react in different ways to the same experience. A lot
of Old Testament, biblical allegory: Gabriel, Rachel, Jeroboam, Bildah, Elijah.
Pagan names as well: Tashtego, Flask, Daggoo, Fleece, Starbuck, Stubb, Martha’s
Vineyard. The Pagans are idol worshippers. Some worship little wax figures,
some wooden figures. Some worship fire. The Pequod is the name of an Indian
tribe.
Moby
Dick is a
seafaring tale. One of the men, the narrator, says, “Call me Ishmael.” Somebody
asks him where he’s from, and he says, “It’s not down on any map. True places
never are.” Stubb gives no significance to anything, says everything is
predestined. Ishmael’s been on a sailing ship his entire life. Calls the
sailing ships his Harvard and Yale. He keeps his distance from people.
A typhoon
hits the Pequod. Captain Ahab thinks it’s a good omen. Starbuck thinks it’s a
bad omen, considers killing Ahab. As soon as the storm ends, a crewmember falls
from the ship’s mast and drowns, foreshadowing what’s to come. A Quaker
pacifist priest, who is actually a bloodthirsty businessman, tells Flask, “Some
men who receive injuries are led to God, others are led to bitterness.”
Everything
is mixed in. All the myths: the Judeo Christian bible, Hindu myths, British
legends, Saint George, Perseus, Hercules – they’re all whalers. Greek
mythology, the gory business of cutting up a whale. Lots of facts in this book,
geographical knowledge, whale oil – good for coronation of royalty – noble
families in the whaling industry. Whale oil is used to anoint the kings.
History of the whale, phrenology, classical philosophy, pseudo-scientific
theories, justification for discrimination – everything thrown in and none of
it hardly rational. Highbrow, lowbrow, chasing illusion, chasing death, the
great white whale, white as polar bear, white as a white man, the emperor, the
nemesis, the embodiment of evil. The demented captain who actually lost his leg
years ago trying to attack Moby with a knife.
We see only
the surface of things. We can interpret what lies below any way we see fit.
Crewmen walk around on deck listening for mermaids, and sharks and vultures
follow the ship. Reading skulls and faces like you read a book. Here’s a face.
I’ll put it in front of you. Read it if you can.
Tashtego
says that he died and was reborn. His extra days are a gift. He wasn’t saved by
Christ, though, he says he was saved by a fellow man and a non-Christian at
that. He parodies the resurrection.
When
Starbuck tells Ahab that he should let bygones be bygones, the angry captain
snaps back, “Speak not to me of blasphemy, man, I’d strike the sun if it
insulted me.” Ahab, too, is a poet of eloquence. He says, “The path to my fixed
purpose is laid with iron rails whereon my soul is grooved to run.” Or
these lines, “All visible objects are but pasteboard masks.” Quotable poetic
phrases that can’t be beat.
Finally,
Ahab spots Moby, and the harpoons come out. Boats are lowered. Ahab’s harpoon
has been baptized in blood. Moby attacks Ahab’s boat and destroys it. Next day,
he sights Moby again. Boats are lowered again. Moby attacks Ahab’s boat again.
On the third day, another boat goes in. More religious allegory. He has risen.
Moby attacks one more time, ramming the Pequod and sinking it. Ahab gets
tangled up in the harpoon lines and is thrown out of his boat into a watery
grave.
Ishmael
survives. He’s in the sea floating on a coffin. And that’s about it. That’s the
whole story. That theme and all that it implies would work its way into more
than a few of my songs.
____________________
All Quiet on
the Western Front was
another book that did. All Quiet on the Western Front is a
horror story. This is a book where you lose your childhood, your faith in a
meaningful world, and your concern for individuals. You’re stuck in a
nightmare. Sucked up into a mysterious whirlpool of death and pain. You’re
defending yourself from elimination. You’re being wiped off the face of the
map. Once upon a time you were an innocent youth with big dreams about being a
concert pianist. Once you loved life and the world, and now you’re shooting it
to pieces.
Day after
day, the hornets bite you and worms lap your blood. You’re a cornered animal.
You don’t fit anywhere. The falling rain is monotonous. There’s endless
assaults, poison gas, nerve gas, morphine, burning streams of gasoline,
scavenging and scabbing for food, influenza, typhus, dysentery. Life is
breaking down all around you, and the shells are whistling. This is the lower
region of hell. Mud, barbed wire, rat-filled trenches, rats eating the
intestines of dead men, trenches filled with filth and excrement. Someone
shouts, “Hey, you there. Stand and fight.”
Who knows
how long this mess will go on? Warfare has no limits. You’re being annihilated,
and that leg of yours is bleeding too much. You killed a man yesterday, and you
spoke to his corpse. You told him after this is over, you’ll spend the rest of
your life looking after his family. Who’s profiting here? The leaders and the
generals gain fame, and many others profit financially. But you’re doing the
dirty work. One of your comrades says, “Wait a minute, where are you going?”
And you say, “Leave me alone, I’ll be back in a minute.” Then you walk out into
the woods of death hunting for a piece of sausage. You can’t see how anybody in
civilian life has any kind of purpose at all. All their worries, all their
desires – you can’t comprehend it.
More machine
guns rattle, more parts of bodies hanging from wires, more pieces of arms and
legs and skulls where butterflies perch on teeth, more hideous wounds, pus
coming out of every pore, lung wounds, wounds too big for the body, gas-blowing
cadavers, and dead bodies making retching noises. Death is everywhere. Nothing
else is possible. Someone will kill you and use your dead body for target
practice. Boots, too. They’re your prized possession. But soon they’ll be on
somebody else’s feet.
There’s
Froggies coming through the trees. Merciless bastards. Your shells are running
out. “It’s not fair to come at us again so soon,” you say. One of your
companions is laying in the dirt, and you want to take him to the field
hospital. Someone else says, “You might save yourself a trip.” “What do you
mean?” “Turn him over, you’ll see what I mean.”
You wait to
hear the news. You don’t understand why the war isn’t over. The army is so
strapped for replacement troops that they’re drafting young boys who are of
little military use, but they’re draftin’ ‘em anyway because they’re running
out of men. Sickness and humiliation have broken your heart. You were betrayed
by your parents, your schoolmasters, your ministers, and even your own
government.
The general
with the slowly smoked cigar betrayed you too – turned you into a thug and a
murderer. If you could, you’d put a bullet in his face. The commander as well.
You fantasize that if you had the money, you’d put up a reward for any man who
would take his life by any means necessary. And if he should lose his life by
doing that, then let the money go to his heirs. The colonel, too, with his
caviar and his coffee – he’s another one. Spends all his time in the officers’
brothel. You’d like to see him stoned dead too. More Tommies and Johnnies with
their whack fo’ me daddy-o and their whiskey in the jars. You kill twenty of
‘em and twenty more will spring up in their place. It just stinks in your
nostrils.
You’ve come
to despise that older generation that sent you out into this madness, into this
torture chamber. All around you, your comrades are dying. Dying from abdominal
wounds, double amputations, shattered hipbones, and you think, “I’m only twenty
years old, but I’m capable of killing anybody. Even my father if he came at
me.”
Yesterday,
you tried to save a wounded messenger dog, and somebody shouted, “Don’t be a
fool.” One Froggy is laying gurgling at your feet. You stuck him with a dagger
in his stomach, but the man still lives. You know you should finish the job,
but you can’t. You’re on the real iron cross, and a Roman soldier’s putting a
sponge of vinegar to your lips.
Months pass
by. You go home on leave. You can’t communicate with your father. He said,
“You’d be a coward if you don’t enlist.” Your mother, too, on your way back out
the door, she says, “You be careful of those French girls now.” More madness.
You fight for a week or a month, and you gain ten yards. And then the next
month it gets taken back.
All that
culture from a thousand years ago, that philosophy, that wisdom – Plato,
Aristotle, Socrates – what happened to it? It should have prevented this.
Your thoughts turn homeward. And once again you’re a schoolboy walking through
the tall poplar trees. It’s a pleasant memory. More bombs dropping on you from
blimps. You got to get it together now. You can’t even look at anybody for fear
of some miscalculable thing that might happen. The common grave. There are no
other possibilities.
Then you
notice the cherry blossoms, and you see that nature is unaffected by all this.
Poplar trees, the red butterflies, the fragile beauty of flowers, the sun – you
see how nature is indifferent to it all. All the violence and suffering of all
mankind. Nature doesn’t even notice it.
You’re so alone.
Then a piece of shrapnel hits the side of your head and you’re dead. You’ve
been ruled out, crossed out. You’ve been exterminated. I put this book down and
closed it up. I never wanted to read another war novel again, and I never did.
Charlie
Poole from North Carolina had a song that connected to all this. It’s called
“You Ain’t Talkin’ to Me,” and the lyrics go like this:
I saw a sign
in a window walking up town one day.
Join the army, see the world is what it had to say.
You’ll see exciting places with a jolly crew,
You’ll meet interesting people, and learn to kill them too.
Oh you ain’t talkin’ to me, you ain’t talking to me.
I may be crazy and all that, but I got good sense you see.
You ain’t talkin’ to me, you ain’t talkin’ to me.
Killin’ with a gun don’t sound like fun.
You ain’t talkin’ to me.
Join the army, see the world is what it had to say.
You’ll see exciting places with a jolly crew,
You’ll meet interesting people, and learn to kill them too.
Oh you ain’t talkin’ to me, you ain’t talking to me.
I may be crazy and all that, but I got good sense you see.
You ain’t talkin’ to me, you ain’t talkin’ to me.
Killin’ with a gun don’t sound like fun.
You ain’t talkin’ to me.
____________________
The Odyssey is a great book whose themes
have worked its way into the ballads of a lot of songwriters: “Homeward Bound,
“Green, Green Grass of Home,” “Home on the Range,” and my songs as well.
The
Odyssey is a
strange, adventurous tale of a grown man trying to get home after fighting in a
war. He’s on that long journey home, and it’s filled with traps and pitfalls.
He’s cursed to wander. He’s always getting carried out to sea, always having
close calls. Huge chunks of boulders rock his boat. He angers people he
shouldn’t. There’s troublemakers in his crew. Treachery. His men are turned
into pigs and then are turned back into younger, more handsome men. He’s always
trying to rescue somebody. He’s a travelin’ man, but he’s making a lot of
stops.
He’s
stranded on a desert island. He finds deserted caves, and he hides in them. He
meets giants that say, “I’ll eat you last.” And he escapes from giants. He’s
trying to get back home, but he’s tossed and turned by the winds. Restless
winds, chilly winds, unfriendly winds. He travels far, and then he gets blown
back.
He’s always
being warned of things to come. Touching things he’s told not to. There’s two
roads to take, and they’re both bad. Both hazardous. On one you could drown and
on the other you could starve. He goes into the narrow straits with foaming
whirlpools that swallow him. Meets six-headed monsters with sharp fangs.
Thunderbolts strike at him. Overhanging branches that he makes a leap to reach
for to save himself from a raging river. Goddesses and gods protect him, but
some others want to kill him. He changes identities. He’s exhausted. He falls
asleep, and he’s woken up by the sound of laughter. He tells his story to
strangers. He’s been gone twenty years. He was carried off somewhere and left
there. Drugs have been dropped into his wine. It’s been a hard road to travel.
In a lot of
ways, some of these same things have happened to you. You too have had drugs
dropped into your wine. You too have shared a bed with the wrong woman. You too
have been spellbound by magical voices, sweet voices with strange melodies. You
too have come so far and have been so far blown back. And you’ve had close
calls as well. You have angered people you should not have. And you too have
rambled this country all around. And you’ve also felt that ill wind, the one
that blows you no good. And that’s still not all of it.
When he gets
back home, things aren’t any better. Scoundrels have moved in and are taking
advantage of his wife’s hospitality. And there’s too many of ‘em. And though
he’s greater than them all and the best at everything – best carpenter, best
hunter, best expert on animals, best seaman – his courage won’t save him, but
his trickery will.
All these stragglers
will have to pay for desecrating his palace. He’ll disguise himself as a filthy
beggar, and a lowly servant kicks him down the steps with arrogance and
stupidity. The servant’s arrogance revolts him, but he controls his anger. He’s
one against a hundred, but they’ll all fall, even the strongest. He was nobody.
And when it’s all said and done, when he’s home at last, he sits with his wife,
and he tells her the stories.
____________________
So what does
it all mean? Myself and a lot of other songwriters have been influenced by
these very same themes. And they can mean a lot of different things. If a song
moves you, that’s all that’s important. I don’t have to know what a song means.
I’ve written all kinds of things into my songs. And I’m not going to worry
about it – what it all means. When Melville put all his old testament, biblical
references, scientific theories, Protestant doctrines, and all that knowledge
of the sea and sailing ships and whales into one story, I don’t think he would
have worried about it either – what it all means.
John Donne
as well, the poet-priest who lived in the time of Shakespeare, wrote these
words, “The Sestos and Abydos of her breasts. Not of two lovers, but two loves,
the nests.” I don’t know what it means, either. But it sounds good. And you
want your songs to sound good.
When
Odysseus in The Odyssey visits the famed warrior Achilles in
the underworld – Achilles, who traded a long life full of peace and contentment
for a short one full of honor and glory – tells Odysseus it was all a
mistake. “I just died, that’s all.” There was no honor. No immortality. And
that if he could, he would choose to go back and be a lowly slave to a tenant
farmer on Earth rather than be what he is – a king in the land of the dead –
that whatever his struggles of life were, they were preferable to being here in
this dead place.
That’s what
songs are too. Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are
unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read. The words in
Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in
songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page. And I hope some of you get the
chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in
concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days. I
return once again to Homer, who says, “Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell
the story.”
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