Bob Dylan's descriptions of Dave Van Ronk, Robert Johnson, and Pirate Jenny

From Chronicles Vol. One

I think along with his descriptions of New Orleans these might be my favourite parts of the book. I have noticed some similarities between the New Orleans and the Robert Johnson descriptions — He uses a scene in Van Ronk’s apartment to begin this,

“Dave looked up, peering at me over a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. I had the thick acetate of the Robert Johnson record in my hands and I asked Van Ronk if he ever heard of him.”

Earlier he said of Van Ronk,

“He also never phrased the same thing the same way twice. Sometimes I’d hear him play the same song that he’d done in a previous set and it would hit me in a completely different way. He’d play something, and it was like I’d never heard it before, or not quite the way I remembered it. His pieces were perversely complex, although very simple.”

..and of course just earlier in the chapter he said,

“I was greatly influenced by Dave.”

“He put everything into a hat and—presto—put a new thing out in the sun”

.. After leaving Van Ronk, “I let Dave go back to his newspaper”

Bob Dylan describes hearing the record had left him like he had been hit my a tranquilizer bullet. Later on he describes how he examined the “lyrics and patterns”… “The construction of his old style lines and free association that he used, the sparkling allegories, big-ass truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction—themes that flew through the air with the greatest of ease.” ..

This could be something that could be ‘expected’ in The Philosophy of Modern Song.. Although, maybe this could be a description of The Philosophy of Modern song..

Which relates to what I was attempting to suggest here, which is how it seems to me that the book refers to itself within the book — how it is written, through descriptions of other people, of other songs, and so on. I have noticed something similar in The Philosophy of Modern Song.

People have previously realised that Bob Dylan has used lines and parts from other books in Chronicles Vol. One .. To me seems that this is referred to and suggested in different ways within the book, in a similar way to how a Bob Dylan song might be.. It seems that since the first time that I read Chronicles Volume One (I think within the first day or two of it being released), I read it in a similar way to how I would listen to a Bob Dylan song. Years later when I noticed people picking up that people found a line here from somewhere, this paragraph based on such a scene, or whatever it was they found… to me that didn’t even give a flicker of a surprise or sense that this was somehow a ‘deception’ or that it somehow changes something I ‘know’ about what I have read. I would be interested of course if I found lines, or links to something in songs myself, and over the years have sometimes got a sense of that. For example, many years ago I found a website with all Anton Chekhov’s short stories on. For many years, during and after work in this underground bar I would go to, I would read these stories — I found the humour, the abrupt endings, the descriptions, everything about them ‘right up my street’. It always struck me how ‘new’ they seemed. I had I suppose read the quote from the Bob Dylan interview, where he is asked if Blood on the Tracks is ‘based’ on the break up of his marriage, and he replies, ‘No, it’s based on Chekhov’s short stories” ..

I wrote recently here, how I described my view of this, in a reply to Patti Smith in 2021, https://nightlymoth.substack.com/p/patti-smith-post-about-being-invited

I considered that many would suspect that this wasn’t the truth, that the album was ‘based’ on what they said.. (at the time of my first listening to Blood on The Tracks, I knew nothing of his marriage, or Chekhov’s short stories .. but as I described it the post linked above, the song that I initially listened to over and over was Lily, Rosemary, and The Jack of Hearts, and many ‘scenes’ that I saw through the other songs — more just glimpses here and there, certain lines, ‘the flowers bloomin’ crazy’ .. ‘on the hilltop they gambled for my clothes’ ‘I woke up, the room was bare, I didn’t see here anywhere.. told myself I didn’t care’.. ‘we'll meet again sometime on the avenue’ .. ‘revolution in the air’ .. — I would see these visions through the scene from Lily, Rosemary, and The Jack of Hearts.

“I know I’ve seen that face before,” .. “Outside the streets were fillin’ up, the window was open wide / A gentle breeze was blowin’, you could feel it from inside” .. “Rosemary started drinkin’ hard and seein’ her reflection in the knife”

“There’s something funny going on,” he said, “I can just feel it in the air”

.. Which I would tend to link to the “revolution in the air”… The drilling in the wall, the gentle breeze that was blowin’, the flowers bloomin’ crazy .. and then onto these scene,

“I woke up on the roadside, daydreamin’ ’bout the way things sometimes are

Visions of your chestnut mare shoot through my head and are makin’ me see stars”

.. On listening to this I would see a scene in this same landscape, this place I saw when I first heard Blood on The Tracks. Listened to it all afternoon, on bright, Spring afternoon. The window open. I could feel the breeze from inside. (Just a cool breeze encircling me).. Deciding that I wanted to listen everything this person has ever recorded, and going back to something Bob Dylan said about Robert Johnson,

“When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armour.” .. and then,

“I immediately differentiated between him and anyone else I had ever heard.”

Somehow this line always gets me. I recall listening to Blood on the Tracks for the first time on that bright afternoon.

Either way, years later, reading one of Chekhov’s short stories, over the course of one story, I was sure these scenes somehow related to the song Up To Me, which was of course left off the album.. (I will maybe post about that some other time, when I come across the story again). Unrelated, I have noticed a few times over the years I have seen people suggest that ‘Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts’ is not really part of the album, and could be ‘left off’.. I have found that quite funny, that someone would think that. To me it’s the opposite. Without it on there…

Also, just linking the suggestion I was making earlier, about how the book seems to refer to itself .. I suppose really It’s more referring to something that Bob Dylan even says 'he hasn’t yet got these types of visions’, but he will’ how he describes Robert Johnson, how that later on if Bob Dylan was to write anything, a song, a book, this would be part of it naturally. Speaking of Johnson, Dylan says,

“Songwriting for him was some highly sophisticated business.”

..and then following on from that, a part that I find interesting,

“The compositions seemed to come right out of his mouth and not his memory”

.. “It’s not that you could sort out every moment carefully, because you can’t. There are too many missing terms and too much duel existence”

It seems Bob Dylan could be in a way describing a part of his possible self.., one of the multitudes … He spoke in the New Morning chapter about reading a book as it might help ‘in learning how suggest only shadows of my possible self’… The shadows are falling, I’ve been here all day long…

Bob Dylan then goes onto say,

“There’s no guarantee that any of his lines either happened, were said, or even imagined.”

To me it seems that Bob is really putting down a lot in this chapter — there is a lot going on.

“Johnson’s car song is way beyond metaphor, too” ..

Bob Dylan then tells us,

“I didn’t have any of these dreams or thoughts but I was going to acquire them.”

Bob Dylan is being serious here, I know it.

He then refers to an audience that Johnson must have seen “off in the future” .. “That only he could see”.. I could imagine Dylan seeing an audience only he could see during the 1966 tour. Kind of related to this, I wonder about Bob Dylan’s iron structure folk-art monkey bars I heard someone describe them well as … “May you climb on every rung” … “My dreams are made of iron and steel” .. could be for some distant audience in the future (after most of human civilisation has been destroyed in some kind of nuclear exchange). Either way, he then says,

“There’s nothing clownish about him or his lyrics. I wanted to be like that, too.”

Which of course is the case.

I hear that there are many parts of the book taken from other books, but I wonder if any of that would change the glimpses of light within the shadows, inside this book ~ shadow kingdom. Just these few sections here, to me say, a lot. They take me somewhere anyway. By the light of the moon.

Earlier I mentioned the similarities between these parts and the New Orleans descriptions, which I wrote about here,

https://nightlymoth.substack.com/p/bob-dylan-chronicles-volume-one-the

One part that I was referring is when Dylan describing how he listened, staring at the record player,

“Whenever I did, it felt like a ghost has come into the room, a fearsome apparition.”

From the Oh Mercy chapter, describing New Orleans,

“The ghost race towards the light, you can almost hear the heavy breathing—spirits, all determined to get somewhere.”

“Lets hope they found mercy in their bone filled graves” … Precious Angel.

There are other parts, but I will leave that for another time.

Referring to the ‘Pirate Jenny’ descriptions,

“On the small stage, objects were barely discernible—lampposts, tables, stoops, windows, corners of buildings, moon shining through roofed-in courtyards—grim surroundings, creepy sensations. Every song seemed to come from some obscure tradition, seemed to have a pistol in its hip pocket, a club or a brickbat and they came at you in crutches, braces and wheelchairs. They were like folk songs in nature, but unlike folk songs, too, because they were sophisticated.”

~

“Black Rider Black Rider tell me when - tell me how

If there ever was a time then let it be now

Let me go through - open the door

My soul is distressed my mind is at war

Don’t hug me - don’t flatter me - don’t turn on the charm

I’ll take out a sword and have to hack off your arm” (Black Rider)

.. “Within a few minutes I felt like I hadn’t slept or tasted food for about thirty hours, I was so into it.”

.. Similar to the tranquilizer bullet line.

Dylan on Johnson’s lines,

“Also, all the lines had some weird personal resonance.”

To me it seems that Dylan’s lines describing something are doing the thing that he is describing. I think this also happens in The Philosophy of Modern Song.

Towards the end of the Pirate Jenny segment, Dylan speaks of attempting to write a song, he says that he

“Started with using the other song as a prototype, and piled lines on, short bursts of lines, … and used the first two lines of the “Frankie and Albert” ballad as the chorus. .. I liked the idea of doing it, but something didn’t come off. I was missing something.”

Earlier on Dylan describes a conversation with Van Ronk, which I found interesting (whether it actually happened or not). Van Ronk pointed out,

“That this song comes from another song and that one song was an exact replica of a different song. He didn’t think Johnson was very original.”

Dylan then goes onto say something that I think relates to some of what might be termed ‘appropriation’ in some quarters, and as I said previously, relating to the book Chronicles Volume One itself,

“I knew what he meant, but I thought just the opposite. I thought Johnson was as original as could be, didn’t think him or his songs could be compared to anything.”

Of course Bob Dylan himself can be described in this way. I also think his books Chronicles Vol. 1 and The Philosophy of Modern song are as original as could be.

I find it interesting that Bob Dylan uses the Van Ronk scene to lay out this aspect of songwriting — He had just described in clear terms how he was influenced by him.. and how he himself “put everything into the hat” and made something new to lay in the sunlight.. I suppose it could be that Van Ronk didn’t think that Robert Johnson mixed things up enough in the ‘hat’ …

Dylan on ‘Pirate Jenny’

“I could see that everything in it was apparent and visible but you didn’t notice it too much. Everything was fastened to the wall with a heavy bracket, but you couldn’t see what the sum total of all the parts were, not unless you stood way back and waited ‘til the end.”

~

nm.