Synchromystic Bob Dylan

I have connected with Bob Dylan's music for a long time. Since 1975, I've seen him perform several times - in San Francisco, Cambridge, and Portland, Maine. I appreciate his varied styles; that is all kinds of his music, whether acoustic, electric, folk, folk-rock, blues, ballads, or whatever he has to offer for the night. I have seen him grow old, as I have, and enjoy his gravelly voice as a testimony to his hard years on the road, in the studio, and on stage.

To me, Dylan is a poet. Simply and profoundly. But he may turn out to be more. His lyrics are Rorschach tests for every individual listener, and each person forms their own perceptions from his songs.

Quite literally, Dylan's newest album, Tempest is a masterpiece. Songwriter, critic, and my friend Jerry Clark, privately shared with his circle of music friends these insights: "This is among the greatest of all Dylan recordings. It holds up against just about anything in his career in its beauty and maturity."

With that in mind, I feel his new album Tempest and his concurrent interview in Rolling Stone reveal Bob Dylan as a synchromystic prophet or, at the very least, a twilight language patron. 

Others have noticed this too. Andrew W. Griffin, editor of the Red Dirt Report, early in August looked at Dylan’s upcoming Tempest album. In Griffin's excellent "A 'Tempest

On The Horizon," he wrote: "You have song titles including 'Soon After Midnight.' 'Long and Wasted Years.' 'Scarlet Town.' 'Early Roman Kings.' Of course there is 'Tempest' and the song 'Pay in Blood' with the line 'I’ll pay in blood, but not my own.' And note 'Scarlet Town.' This would echo the blood spilled in Aurora – a “red dawn” event – in the state of Colorado (Spanish for 'colored red')."

"The night is darkest just before the dawn. And I promise you, the dawn is coming." 

~ Harvey Dent, The Dark Knight, 2008.

Griffin's essay acknowledges that I've been talking about the lines in The Dark Knight Rises alluding to a "storm coming" for some time. Dylan's Tempest merely reinforces that notion.

Selina Kyle: There's a storm coming. 

Bruce Wayne: You sound like you're looking forward to it. 

Selina Kyle: I'm adaptable. 

~ The Dark Knight Rises, 2012

Griffin also notes that Tempest, despite that various details of the music were known for weeks, had as its official release the highly symbolic date of September 11th ~ symbolic individually to Dylan, as well as societally to America, needless to say.

Let's look at some segments of Dylan's songs' lyrics:

Listen to that Duquesne whistle blowingBlowing like it's gonna sweep my world awayI'm gonna stop in Carbondale and keep on goingThat Duquesne train gonna ride me night and dayYou say I'm a gambler, you say I'm a pimpBut I ain't neither oneListen to that Duquesne whistle blowingSounding like she's on a final run….Listen to that Duquesne whistle blowing
***
Listen to that Duquesne whistle blowingBlowing like it's gonna kill me deadCan't you hear that Duquesne whistle blowingBlowing through another no good townThe lights of my native land are glowingI wonder if they'll know me next time aroundI wondered if that old oak tree's still standingThat old oak tree, the one we used to climbListen to that Duquesne whistle blowingBlowing like she's blowing right on time~ "Duquesne Whistle" lyrics by Bob Dylan

I know the phantom of the train of which Dylan speaks. I sense the "rhythm of the rail" that his music invokes. If one mentions "Duquesne" (read Du Quoin, Illinois) and Carbondale, then this song is historically talking about Amtrak's City of New Orleans (although the train runs are called the Illini and the Saluki today).

The Fifties were a simpler time, at least for me and the situation I was in....It was just woods and sky and rivers and streams, winter and summer, spring, autumn. The changing of seasons. The culture was mainly circuses and carnivals, preachers and barnstorming pilots, hillbilly shows and comedians, big bands and whatnot. Powerful radio stations and powerful radio music.
~ Bob Dylan, "The Rolling Stone Interview," Rolling Stone, Issue 1166, September 27, 2012.

I grew up in Illinois in the '50s, in the time of the "Duquesne Whistle." Damn, my mother's mother, Nellie Grey, was murdered in the coal mining town of Shelbyville, Illinois, on Valentine's Day in 1940, by my mom's stepfather. A bullet from a rifle whizzed by my future mother, killing her mom on the davenport in her sister's front room. Life was simple back then. But the 1940s turned into the 1950s, and it became a time of baseball, vanilla ice cream, outside circuses, and searching in the woods for wild animals.

In the 1960s, I got out of central Illinois and I rode Illinois Central's City of New Orleans to college. Well, at least, infrequently, that is, when I had the fare and didn't have to hitchhike to Southern Illinois University in Carbondale (the home of the Salukis) in Little Egypt.

Dylan's music picks up nicely on the rattling tracks and the sway of the cars. As one academic blogger wrote, Bob Dylan’s “Duquesne Whistle,” is "the only song" he could "think of that mentions trains and Carbondale."

(I was reminded, of course, of Steve Goodman's "The City of New Orleans" too. See Goodman singing his song at the end of this posting. Goodman died at 36. I'm glad we still have Dylan around at 71.)

Griffin notices that the song "Scarlet Town," calls attention to Colorado's Aurora (literally, "red dawn"). In "Duquesne Whistle," Dylan mentions "that old oak tree." The Oak Creek, Wisconsin, Sikh Temple attack flashed into my mind when I read those lyrics.

Hauntingly, another of Dylan's lyrics says,

It's soon after midnight,And my day has just begun
"Soon After Midnight" synchs with the actual time of the Aurora shootings.
And what do we see in "Early Roman Kings"? The early early Friday morning shooting, down from the mountains of Colorado, in Aurora? Or was this a flash about the suicide that followed a month after Aurora? I penned about just such a death, without knowledge of Dylan's song, in "Tony Scott: Divine Sacrifice of the King."
All the early Roman kingsIn the early early mornComing down the mountainDistributing the cornSpeeding through the forestRacing down the trackYou try to get awayThey drag you backTomorrow is FridayWe'll see what it bringsEverybody's talkingBout the early Roman kings

Kurt Gegenhuber writes about one song when he says, "Bob has thrown Duquesne to the Dylanologists like meat to ravening wolves." 

Of course Dylan has. And none of what he wrote is really about Aurora. Or Tony Scott. Or anything prophetic, is it?

This is true about this entire album. As Gegenhuber notes, "Bob Dylan is indeed sending me — and not you — subliminal messages through his song lyrics."

But, of course, Dylan is sending all, every one of us, messages, overt and covert.

In the comment section to Gegenhuber's blog posting, Jerry Clark checks in and sends along some insights about the title song, "Tempest," which is based more on the sinking of the Titanic than Shakespeare: 

Dylan's "Tempest" is indeed based on the 1952 Carter Family version of "The Titanic." It quotes the lyrics, prominently but not exclusively the opening line "The pale moon rose in its glory" (not unique to the Carters, by the way), and the words composed by Dylan can be sung to the older melody. "The watchman" also figures in the original, and other lyrics borrow or parody the Carters's. That may be plagiarism to Joni Mitchell, but to the rest of us, it's Dylan's continuing, brilliantly employed use of the folk process.
The LA Times writer evidently missed all of this, but at least he has some marginal awareness of Titanic ballads -- albeit, it seems, not this Carter gem -- in American traditional music.
~ Jerry Clark

Bob Dylan is not playing games. He's just being an artist. And a synchromystic. And perhaps even a Fortean.

His interview in Rolling Stone is quite interesting. It tells of Robert Zimmerman's/Bob Dylan's transformation and much more.

Among the revelations in the interview is that the death in the '60s of a Hell's Angel named Robert Zimmerman, which was Dylan's real name, captivated him to the point where Dylan believes they are somehow connected, though there doesn't appear to be a family relationship. Zimmerman's death was chronicled in the book Hell's Angel: The Life and Times of Sonny Barger, written by Barger.
As Dylan explained it to Gilmore, “Look at all the connecting things: motorcycles, Bobby Zimmerman, Keith and Kent Zimmerman, 1964, 1966. And there's more to it than even that. If you went to find this guy's family, you'd find a whole bunch more than that connected.”
He says the Barger book gave him an identity. “I didn't know who I was before I read the Barger book.”

~ Steve Marinucci 

Andrew Griffin also pointed out to me that we should look at the name of the Hell's Angel who broadsided and killed his brother Hell's Angel, "poor Bobby" Zimmerman. That Angel's name is "Jack Egan." That's a spooky shadow of "James Eagan Holmes," the alleged Aurora shooter.

From reading the Sonny Barger book, which he found was about him, Bob Dylan discovered transfiguration. The interview details his feelings, his excitement, his wonder, in finding out those "name game"/twilight language details. 

Bobby Zimmerman's motorcycle-related death occurred in 1961 (the book gives the wrong date as 1964). Dylan's near-death Woodstock motorcycle accident happened in 1966. Transfiguration took place in Dylan's life, and it is reflected in his changing art.

That's synchomysticism at work, plain and simple. Yes, it evens happens through the life and music of Bob Dylan.

The carnival came to town, the carnival left and you ran off with them. It's just what you did. You don't travel to the end of the line until someone gives you a gold watch and a pat on the back. That's not the way the game works. People really don't retire. They fade away. They run out of steam....
~ Bob Dylan, "The Rolling Stone Interview," Rolling Stone, Issue 1166, September 27, 2012.

I have a younger brother, my Irish twin, who actually ran away to a carnival and worked a summer in the South. My youngest brother took off to meet his Waterloo in Napoleon, Ohio. And my youngest sibling, my sister, departed the plains of Illinois to the earthquake country of southern California. I guess I escaped to college in Carbondale, and beyond alternative service, to be transfigured into a father and a writer. Like Dylan, I'm not done yet. And most of us aren't. 

But getting there is transformative.

We all met our Buddhas in the middle of Highway 61 or Route 66, one way or another.

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Remember Steve Goodman, 

who died 28 years ago on September 20th.

 

Steve Goodman, singing his song, City of New Orleans.

Steve Goodman died at the age of 36 (July 25, 1948 – September 20, 1984). He was a Jewish-American folk music singer-songwriter from Chicago, Illinois. He wrote "City of New Orleans," which was made popular by Arlo Guthrie, John Prine, and Willie Nelson.  According to Goodman, "City of New Orleans" was inspired by a train trip he and his wife took from Chicago to "southern Illinois, not Carbondale," as he said in an interview, but "to Mattoon, Illinois," to visit his wife's mother in an "old folks home." Yes, that is that Mattoon ~ the site of 1944's Mad Gasser of Mattoon. Steve Goodman won two Grammy Awards and he made his family very proud of him. He died much too young. In April 1988, some of Goodman's ashes were scattered at Wrigley Field, the home of the Chicago Cubs.

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