`A Momentary Homer & Milton'

Sunday morning, as we drove to Cleveland Hopkins Airport – my oldest son bound for Albany, N.Y., and I for Houston – he played songs from the Basement Tapes, recorded 40 years ago by Bob Dylan and the musicians soon to rechristen themselves The Band. In Invisible Republic (1996), later retitled The Old, Weird America, Greil Marcus gave us the definitive account of these sessions, and in the process wrote his finest book. Dylan was 26 and had already recorded his best albums – Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde and Blonde. In the Basement Tapes, recorded in West Saugerties, N.Y., in the basement of the house known as Big Pink, we hear six young men channeling the history of popular music in the United States and, incidentally, American history itself, from colonial times to the Vietnam War. We also hear six young men (four of them Canadians) having a raucous and very stoned good time.

Around the same time, Dylan was writing Tarantula, published five years later as a novel. The book is nearly unreadable, like a teenager’s diary or anything committed to paper by Jack Kerouac, but in it Dylan wrote “the only thing that keeps the area going is tradition -- as you can figure out – it doesnt [sic] count very much -- everything around me rots.” Dylan is an artist – Charles Ives, William Faulkner and Philip Roth are others – who doesn’t make a move without acknowledging the traditions in which he operates, a succession of forebears who have passed along a useful set of tools. Without tradition, Dylan implies, without cultural inheritance, we’re left with entropy.

On our trip to the airport, we had time to hear “Please, Mrs. Henry,” “Apple Suckling Tree” and “Lo and Behold,” all of which display what Marcus called “the rambling, random, often obscene humor” so often present of the Basement Tapes. Earlier, Joshua, who started reading Moby-Dick for the first time last week, had challenged me to identify two Melville allusions in Dylan’s lyrics. I could only come up with “Captain Arab [sic]” from “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream.” He reminded me of the other, from “Lo and Behold”:

“I come into Pittsburgh
At six-thirty flat.
I found myself a vacant seat
An' I put down my hat.
`What's the matter, Molly, dear,
What's the matter with your mound?’
`What's it to ya, Moby Dick?
This is chicken town!’
Lo and behold! Lo and behold!
Lookin' for my lo and behold,
Get me outa here, my dear man!”

That a smutty, improvised reference to Moby-Dick shows up in one of his songs proves only that Dylan is a magpie, a conduit for American culture, high and low, taking what he needs wherever he finds it. Listening to the Basement Tapes, I’m simultaneously aware of musically gifted young men having a grand old time, and of an echo chamber of American history, circa 1967. It reminds me of the next album Dylan recorded, John Wesley Harding, which is saturated with an awareness of the Vietnam War (and released just two months before the Tet Offensive), though he never once makes an overt reference to the still-escalating conflict. In Dylan’s hands, music is an immense web, sensitive to the faintest and most violent of events. On April 11, 1835, Emerson wrote in his Journal:

“Glad to hear music in the village last evening under the fine yellow moon; it sounds like cultivation, domestication. In America where all are on wheels one is glad to meet with a sign of adorning our own town. It is a consecrated beautifying of our place. A bugle, clarionet [sic], & flute are to us a momentary Homer & Milton. Music is sensuous poetry.”

This passage echoes with Dylan and much else. In “If You See Her, Say Hello” (from Blood on the Tracks) he wrote: “Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past/I know every scene by heart, they all went by so fast.” And this, from “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” on the Basement Tapes:

“Buy me a flute
And a gun that shoots
Tailgates and substitutes
Strap yourself
To the tree with roots
You ain't goin' nowhere."

And, of course, also from the Basement Tapes:

“This wheel's on fire,
Rolling down the road,
Best notify my next of kin,
This wheel shall explode!”