Ron Rosenbaum’s latest book, Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed, is not a biography. It is instead a “kind of biography”—which is a distinction with a difference. It is, in keeping with Rosenbaum’s long record of fine-tuned literary analysis mixed with historical and, yes, biographical detail, a study of Dylan’s songwriting and a reckoning with his moral, philosophical, and religious imagery and fixations. “Dylan has remade American speech, American thought, American attitude,” Rosenbaum writes. Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed is an examination of how he remade those things, with a particular emphasis on “theodicy” and what Rosenbaum calls Dylan’s “argument with god.” Steering clear of the usual cloud of hagiography that hovers above most writing about Dylan, it’s a book that instead focuses on what makes him unique. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Rosenbaum and I discussed Dylan’s lyrics, voice, and music; the moral and philosophical content of his songs; and our own fandom.
I wanted to start by talking about one of the most controversial—maybe the most controversial—things about Bob Dylan: his voice. It is one of the most derided and mocked singing voices of all time, but I was really heartened reading your book to find that you are also a fierce defender of Dylan’s singing.
There are still people in the comments section on YouTube who say, “This guy can’t sing! He has no voice!” I describe it as an “iron ore bucket voice.” It’s a rasp, but it’s a really human rasp. There’s no other voice like it. I’ve found that, strangely enough, there’s a region in what is now Russia—it was once Poland—where violinists like Jascha Heifetz came [from]. The only violinists in the world who could make their instruments talk like a human voice come from this region. And I have a feeling that far back in the past there was a Dylan [ancestor]. On the other hand, there are some really cruel things that are said about Dylan’s voice that just don’t understand that melodious bluebirds singing is not what he’s after.
I sometimes joke that there are only really three covers of Dylan songs that are as good as the originals and only one that really surpasses it—Jimi Hendrix’s version of “All Along the Watchtower.” But it’s always struck me that more talented singers approach Dylan’s songs differently than he does.
Before I heard Dylan sing a song, I heard Joan Baez’s cover of “Boots of Spanish Leather.” What a beautiful song—talk about remorse and regret. It’s funny, there were a lot of lefties who left the city and started giving me Weavers albums, things like that. Joan was not really particularly a leftie, but she came along with that. So I heard a lot of Dylan before I heard Dylan. That song in particular struck me dead.
But what makes Dylan Dylan, he doesn’t go for these big brass cymbal-crashing anthems—he sings to another person, not to the whole wide USA.
And the voice to me is utterly sincere, even if the persona also isn’t.
He does have this thing about authenticity and sincerity. I think he’s a metaphysician. When he keeps telling me or telling everyone, “That person [Bob Dylan] doesn’t exist; I’m not there, etc., etc.,” it’s like a metaphysical trick to be able to say this is the first time I’ve sung it. Those people in the past don’t exist. You get the refreshment of authenticity every time. I don’t know if he believes it, but it kinda works.
You mentioned listening to Baez and the Weavers covering Dylan. What are your early memories of Dylan himself?
I lucked out and heard his August ’65 performance at Forest Hills, where he debuted “Desolation Row.” There was a song that no one has ever done. I called it a “funeral march for Western Civilization” [in the book]. Romeo and Juliet, Cinderella, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot.… I was just stunned by something completely new.
There were rumors that they were booed. I was there. The band was not booed the way they were in Newport. People in New York City are more sophisticated than these folkie rubes at Newport.
I know the first time I heard “Like a Rolling Stone” I thought, “Oh my god, he’s speaking to me.” And “Like a Rolling Stone,” I think is great because it’s both about the princess who loses everything and the greatness, in a way, of being out on your own. You only learn something by being out on your own.
The so-called “Dylanologists” come in for a lot of deserved scorn, but I do think a lot of the songs are less complicated than people make them out to be.
In his post-Jesus period, he did a lot of songs that were disconnected, [with fragmented phrases], you couldn’t make plain sense out of them. And then someone told me a story about when he had a movie contract and all these movie people—supplicants—came to see him saying, “What do you want, Bob? What do you want, Bob?” He would take out a cigar box and turn it over and dump it out so there was a snowflake storm of little cuttings, pieces of paper, stuff like that. It suddenly occurred to me that they were unified in some way by his consciousness. For some reason, every little bit meant something to him. He just put them in a song even if it didn’t make sense to anyone else; it made sense to him. The box become sort of famous. I first figured this out when I was trying to figure out the song “Things Have Changed,” which had 11 different voices.
Twelve—at least that’s what you say in the book.
They’re not connected, but it seemed to me that they were connected in his mind—that it all made sense to him. Someone once talked about the one consciousness of Dickens, how everything in Dickens in some way related in some way to everything else even if it didn’t make complete sense. There’s one consciousness of Dylan—in his mind, it’s all related. I think of John Ashbery and the abstract expressionists who don’t make sense to anyone but themselves—but they do in some beautiful way.
It’s genius, I suppose.
I find when I talk to people who are geniuses that they all say that they have some system they hang onto. It’s really not true. It’s really their own genius and talent, but they want to give people something they can hang onto.
He always surprises you with what he can do with words—and music. It’s really interesting to me that he claims he’s not a melodist, that he has no real ability to come up with melodies—that he just steals from old music, old folk songs—and comes up with something great and immortal.
One of the things that frustrates me is when people reach for descriptions of Dylan that omit the music—that he’s a “poet.” But he isn’t! He’s a songwriter. That strikes me as being at the core of what actually makes him great. I think a hyperfocus on his lyrics—in my opinion at least—often obscures more than it reveals.
That’s very true. But I also think that if you stripped away the music and you compared it to what passes for contemporary poetry you would find that his work outdoes [it]. Why is it that contemporary poetry has never really grabbed anyone, really? Dylan managed to grab not only hundreds of thousands of people here but all over the world. That talent is unique. I don’t know of anyone who has that talent.
I can’t speak for the poets, but it is true that his written work—Chronicles, especially, but also the Nobel Prize lecture—is often extraordinary.
The Nobel Prize really makes you work! He had to write a lecture about what books influenced him as Mr. Nobel Prize in literature. He told them Moby-Dick and The Odyssey.
And All Quiet on the Western Front, which you write about.
[In my book], I was searching for what made Dylan Dylan—the dark, sarcastic, sardonic Dylan. The enemy of propriety, of official civilization. He said [in the Nobel lecture that] as a youth he read All Quiet on the Western Front and that it convinced him that civilization is a morass of butchery and that all the philosophers—Aristotle, Plato, Socrates—did nothing to protect us from the horror that we allowed ourselves to fall into. People wonder what Dylan’s so upset about. Why isn’t he nicer? In my book I find it almost impossible to separate who Dylan is and who Erich Maria Remarque is in the trenches. I lose track of it. He writes his most ferocious prose or poetry, whatever you want to call it, [on that subject]. I think I set out in writing this book in some way to find out what made Dylan Dylan, and I think curiously, unexpectedly, All Quiet on the Western Front really is the source of his dyspeptic view of civility.
From the very beginning, he always seemed intertwined with literature and literary sources as much as he was with the folk tradition—Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, whatever.
I have a chapter title, “Dylan’s Argument With God.” I think a very serious but not advertised part of his sensibility is this theodicy. The epigraph of my book is, “God said to Abraham, ‘kill me a son’ / Abe said ‘man you must be putting me on.’” This is like the fundamental basis of both Christianity and Judaism, the sacrifice of Isaac—a defense of child murder. I go off into an attack on Kierkegaard, whose Fear and Trembling is a defense of the absurd leap of faith that allows Abraham to just about put the blade to Isaac’s neck until God, who is a prankster, almost, [stops him].
You interviewed Dylan during one of those arguments—on the Warner Bros. backlot, right as he was converting to Christianity. What was that like?
He was having a lot of trouble. His marriage was breaking up. He had thousands of feet of film [he had shot for Reynaldo and Clara]. He hated me when I called it a “conversion”—well he didn’t hate me, he objected to me. But that was I think driven by his anger at the Old Testament God for failing to lift a finger to rescue his—capital H-i-s—people from the Holocaust. Not that the New Testament God did anything, either. But nonetheless, he was brought up as a Jew and taught that the Jewish God was all powerful, had superpowers, was just, was loving—and yet abandoned a million and a half children in the Holocaust.
I think a turning point in my thinking about theodicy and this book was my interview with a guy named Yehuda Bauer who was at that time recognized as the foremost historian of the Holocaust. He was a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He said this thing I still can’t get over. He said, why do I need this God, who allows the Holocaust, who has superpowers and does nothing—he is either Satan or a nebbish, meaning a fool.
I talked to allegedly pious and brilliant Jewish theologians—Emil Fackenheim being one of them; Yitz Greenberg being another. Yitz Greenberg was the source I believe of Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People. This was a pretty bad thing. Basically, Yitz Greenberg’s answer was, “Well God did nothing, but he was a presence there.” I remember Yehuda Bauer saying, “I don’t need a presence, I need someone to rescue my people!”
You make a pretty provocative argument about the song “Mississippi,” arguing that it’s—at least in part—a song reckoning with his Christian period.
He put three versions of that song on [The Bootleg Series Vol. 8—Tell Tale Signs]. The line that I think was the turning point was in the refrain: “Stayed in Mississippi, just a way too long.” I think it’s him saying, “I stayed in this Christian mishegoss just too long.” He also says, “You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way.” That’s the thing—I think he came back more than all the way.
“Mississippi,” for what it’s worth, is my favorite Dylan song, and I think it’s his best one. It’s certainly one of the best songs ever written about regret.
I have a line in my book—Dylan owns regret. His songs of regret are some of his most beautiful. From the beginning, “Girl of the North Country”—he regrets the fuck out of this. He does another on Blood on the Tracks—“If You See Her, Say Hello,” which is, again, a post-breakup song where he just wonders if it’s possible that something can happen to bring them together again.
Remorse in particular is his emotion.
