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Last Thoughts on “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie”
Losses of creativity, inspiration, disappointment,
disillusionment, failure to truth, artistic uncertainty, fear of
scrutiny and rejection, suspicion of praise. The need to find something
special, the need for a solid rock! The need to develop that brave
intelligence capable of rejecting materialism, with the knowledge of
life’s falseness. To realize that our heroes are not our saviours. If
one can have an awareness of all the aforementioned, then this surely
would be the awareness brought about by experience. Voiced perhaps by
some wise old sage. Amazingly this awareness sprang from the pen of one
not yet twenty two years old, in the form of “Last thoughts on Woody
Guthrie”. Bob Dylan very bravely chose to wind up his first major New
York concert at the town hall on April 12th 1963 with an eight minute
poetry recital.
In last month's Freewheelin’ I blathered on about “Dylan’s inner
struggle” in relation to his 1964 ‘Halloween’ concert, and as to how I
perceived him to be almost, although his performance were beyond
excellence, embarrassed by his own songs. “Last thoughts on Woody
Guthrie” is a poem sure enough, but it is much more than that. In the
light of Dylan’s brilliant career in song writing and performance, I see
the poem as an avowal to be true to his muse. I see it like that now
with the knowledge of that wondrous thing that we call hindsight, but
the absolutely amazing thing is that he saw it then!
In this, Dylan’s first major concert performance, he seems to know
instinctively of his own success, that his destiny, and up to a point
ours, are of his own making. “Last thoughts on Woody Guthrie”
foreshadows his eventual Christian conversion, and states categorically
that there are only two roads in life, only two choices. It says
farewell to the Guthrie imitator acknowledges the arrival of the likes
of P.F. Sloan and knows that to walk in a straight line while being
faithful to oneself is the way to enlightenment. How many people have
called Dylan a genius? Well he knows his onions, is all I can say! The
poem also goes a long way to explain certain Dylan actions down the
years. For example after the conclusion of the English tour in 1965,
Dylan announced his “I quit” decision. We now know the reason behind
this, and also for his quick reversal of that decision .To my mind the
tour, though a huge success, was a fall from grace in Dylan’s eyes, and
one which he compounded intentionally and with irony in the title of
D.A. Penebaker’s documentary film ‘Don’t Look Back’. Though Dylan’s
performances of this time in 1965, would have been thoroughly satisfying
to a member of the audience, and after all they should have been, the
artist was giving more than an adequate account of himself, they were
not great performances, his grasp of “that evenings empire” that he
tells us of in song, in other words that something special from
somewhere special was just beyond him.
The restlessness that makes Bob Dylan such a great artist was beginning
to show the previous October of 1964 with his hugely successful New York
Philharmonic Hall appearance- still enough! If you are even slightly
interested in my babblings about that performance ,and if you haven’t
already read them, you will have to do your own backtracking to last
months Freewheelin’. By the time Bob Dylan showcased his fabulous
catalogue of songs in England in 1965, the fire, the drive to perform,
the “one hand waving free” was missing. I don’t believe for one minute
that Dylan ever doubted the worth of his material .He was, as we now
know, becoming bored with the mode of delivery, he now wanted and needed
something new (and not necessarily a band) to achieve full expression.
The outcome of 1965, with the success of the tour and five hit singles
in Great Britain, will have been little consolation to Dylan, the same
Dylan that was only a dawn away from “Like a Rolling Stone” and the
breath taking charge of those 1966 performances, where he did indeed
“Dance beneath the diamond sky”. Those achievements of 1965 would have
been little consolation to Dylan, who knew and anticipated the pitfalls
of any complacency. To Dylan who knew contentment is not a condition in
which great art is usually created.
When yer head gets twisted and yer mind grows numb
When you think you’re too old, too young, too smart or too dumb
When yer laggin’ behind an’ losin’yer pace
In a slow- motion crawl or life’s busy race
No matter what yer doing if you start givin’up
If the wine don’t come to the top of your cup
If the wind’s go you sideways with one hand holdin’on
And the other starts slipping and the feeling is gone
And yer train engine fire needs a new spark to catch it
And the wood’s easy findin’ but yer too lazy to fetch it
And yer sidewalk starts curlin’ and the street gets too long
And you start walkin’ backwards though you know that it’s wrong….
It might seem totally ridiculous to some that I seem to be equating one
of Dylan’s most successful periods with words like complacency. Of
course I am not, Dylan has never been complacent. His greatest fear is
boredom and thankfully he uses that fear as a constant springboard to
new creativity. Dylan’s startling ability to deal with his own creative
process, while furthering it’s cause, is nothing short of amazing. In
‘Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie’ he faces up to life’s challenges by
challenging himself. It is a great work! Another instance of this is “Mr
Tambourine Man” where Dylan faces his muse head on. The moment that he
is at truth with himself “Though I know that evenin’s empire has
returned into sand, vanished from my hand, Left me blindly here to stand
but still not sleeping” is the moment that he is without sin, in sublime
creation, in other words, the moment of his confession is the moment of
his reconciliation, this is spiritual stuff ! Dylan is talking to no
other than himself in “Mr Tambourine Man” The moment Dylan found the
words “Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free”
was the moment that he was actually dancing under it! revelling in his
creativity. Could that place beneath the hard imagery of a diamond sky
be the very place where “that thin wild mercury music” first
crystallized in Dylan’s brain? Listening to “Mr Tambourine Man” on
‘Bringing It all back home” this seems to me to be the pivotal moment,
the quantum leap into the bright hard world of ‘Highway 61 Revisited’
and Dylan is an artist who lets his work speak for him. Little wonder
that he is loathe to explain further what he has already laid out for us
so eloquently. These are my thoughts linking what I consider to be some
of Dylan’s best works. I get to thinking all sorts of crackpot stuff now
and again, but generally there is no harm to me.
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