Like a Fire on the Sun

Out of a generation that gave birth to some of the greatest song-writers of all time, there is one man that stands above all the others. Yes, this is a big call. Yes, the music world has created some great lyricists. The sixties themselves produced some of the greatest and most accessible wordsmiths in the history of modern man. Though while Lennon had his 'Glass Onion's' and his 'Warm Guns', Morrison, his acid-laced visions of Los Angeles, Young and Mitchell, their bleeding-heart felt musings, Paul Simon, his heroes on the fringes of society, The Jokerman - Bob Dylan occupied his own spot ahead of a very talented bunch, in pure ability to write, to describe, and to perceive the changing world he lived in.

Dylan has canvassed most all topics important to men, women, life and living in his long career. His early days (up to Blonde on Blonde) were marked by protest songs, and social commentaries that contained some of the most memorable lyrics in modern music. Songs such as Oxford Town, A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall, Masters of War, and The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll all spring instantly to mind. In Oxford Town, Dylan addressed the civil rights violence in specific cases during the early 60s, while ‘Hard Rain’ speaks of injustice, and suffering…

I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it
I saw a black branch with blood that kept a-drippin’
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’,
…and it’s a-hard, it’s a-hard, it’s a-hard, it’s a-hard,
And it’s a-hard rain’s a-gonna fall.

[A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, Bob Dylan, The Free Wheelin Bob Dylan, 1962]

Bob was so many more things in verse too. His biblical references and obscure literary hooks have won admiration from intellectuals for years. He drew on poets such as Rimbaud, Eliot, Yeats, and most obviously Dylan Thomas and folk-poet Woody Guthrie for inspiration. He counted the Beats as great inspirations, and was good friends with Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure. With his most notable literary achievement, Dylan is the only the song writer to ever be nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature, securing his status, perhaps as a modern day poet.

It would be careless to not include love as one of Dylan’s great topics. Dylan wrote so expertly of the joy, and pain, and misunderstanding of love. He was lucky enough to have some strong women in his life – his muses, if you will. The early albums contained multiple references to Suze Rotolo and Joan Baez. Its All Over Now, Baby Blue, that most tortured of love ballads, described his bleeding heart and the end of his relationship with Baez. In later times, women such as Clydie King and Carolyn Dennis provided him with beauty and turmoil, and he had a child with both.

But it is the famous Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands Sara Lownds that became one of the most written-about women in the history of modern art. Lownds was that rare woman – the ultimate muse. In her, Dylan found all the perfection, imperfection, beauty, pain, strength and weakness that he would ever need. And his songs of her … wow. To anyone who hasn’t heard it, listen to the album Blood on the Tracks. Up there with On the Road, Visions of Cody and Leonard Cohen's Songs of Love and Hate as life-changing art for me. It is the best description of lost love ever. I could quote literally dozens of Dylan songs her but I’ll make it just two.

With your sheets like metal and your belt like lace,
And your deck of cards missing the jack and the ace,
And your basement clothes and your hollow face,
Who among them can think he could outguess you?
With your silhouette when the sunlight dims
Into your eyes where the moonlight swims,
And your match-book songs and your gypsy hymns,
Who among them would try to impress you?

[Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, Blonde on Blonde, 1966]

People tell me it's a sin
To know and feel too much within.
I still believe she was my twin, but I lost the ring.
She was born in spring, but I was born too late
Blame it on a simple twist of fate.

[Simple Twist of Fate, Blood on the Tracks, 1975]

Dylan and Lownds were married for 12 years, and the two had four children together. Yet her legacy will be eternally infused with his. Few women in the history of modern music, and even the history of verse (an except perhaps Yeats’ Maud Gonne) have had such an affect on an artist as Lownds had on Dylan.

I could write continually about Bob Dylan, his themes, his art and his fine lyrics. But it will all be just words. Instead I encourage you to listen to Dylan, starting with his early stuff, his raw, angry verse, and then onto the Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde tracks, and into John Wesley Harding, and Blood on the Tracks. Admittedly some of his recent stuff is harder to decipher, but we all grow old and cynical. Everyone can find something honest and good in what Dylan has to say.