Bob Dylan — the epicenter of lyrical music

Bob Dylan — the epicenter of lyrical music

By Yancy Pelter

For me, Bob Dylan is the epicenter of lyrical music. Everything that came before him was a prelude to his genius. Everything that came after was possible because of him.
I am too young to have remembered his early days when he “rambled out of the Wild West” and roared into New York City on a snowy day in 1961. I came of age musical age about ten years later.

The experience that blew me away was the utter brilliance of Blood on the Tracks. I think I may have read Pete Hammil’s piece on the back jacket before I even played the album. Hamill’s tribute changed my life. I had to find out more about Dylan and this “oracle of Camus.”

So I did. It was 1974, and I somehow scrounged up enough coin to buy all his back albums. The highlight of this pivotal purchase was the frenzied trilogy of Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. I played them over and over that summer, much to the dismay of my sister who was in her Jesus Christ Superstar phase and my father, who thought Dylan was a communist with a sore throat.

There was a particular song on Blonde on Blonde that hypnotized me with its expressive brilliance and enthralling beat. Performed with a slow, methodical tempo by a host of venerable Nashville session musicians, Visions of Johanna contains the most astonishing lyrics I’ve ever heard to this day. In fact, Great Britain’s Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, pronounced that it contained “the greatest song lyrics ever written.”

To hear someone sing: “ The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face, where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place,” was not only new to me, it was as if these words were not possible before Dylan—in the same way that Willie Mays’ famous catch in cavernous centerfield of the Polo Grounds in the 1954 World Series was not possible before he came along.

The best way to read the song is to take it all in at once, as if you are studying a painting in a gallery. Dylan is master manipulator of time, so expecting the song to follow a liner progression is futile. Instead, the time sequence, not to mention the point-of-view of the narrator, changes line-by-line. By the end of the song, I feel just like the narrator when Dylan concludes:

He writes ev’rything’s been returned which was owed
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes
The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain.

Yes, my conscience explodes and all that is left is the art itself – the visions of Johanna.

It’s 30 years later I still am trying to find out more about Dylan. He is constantly changing and retooling – staying ahead of expectations. How does a 21-year-old write Blowing the Wind, or a 24-year-old write Like a Rolling Stone or even a 57-year-old write Highlands. No one has the answer to that, not even Dylan. I really believe he tapped into the vast creative pool of the collective unconscious, and we are the fortunate recipients of his effort.

My top ten Dylan songs:
1. Visions of Johanna
2. Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again
3. Like a Rolling Stone
4. It’s a Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall
5. Tangled up in Blue
6. Masters of War
7. Tombstone Blues
8. Hurricane
9. Ballad of a Thin Man
10. Ain’t Talkin’