By Stuart Mitchner
I was out on the road at last, getting to visit the places Kerouac had written about.
—Thomas Pynchon
Taken from the introduction to Slow Learner (Little Brown 1984, 1985), Thomas Pynchon’s reference to the road in this quote follows his admission that “for the first time … I was listening to the American voices around me.” You can be sure that one of those voices belonged to Bob Dylan, whose Greatest Hits Volume 3 (1994) has been playing over and over again on my car stereo for the past two months.
I still have no idea how this extraordinary CD came into my possession. I definitely didn’t buy it, especially as it contains material from Dylan’s LPs of the 1980s which received little favorable attention at the time. In the decades before the renaissance that began in 2001 with Love and Theft, the album I knew best was Blood On the Tracks, which was released 50 years ago, January 20, 1975. I’m stressing that notable anniversary because the opening track, the joy-giving “Tangled Up in Blue,” also launches Greatest Hits Volume 3, which I’ve come to think of as much more than just another compilation, thanks to the way that spirited anthem of the road (“We drove that car as far as we could, abandoned it out west”) resonates in the rambling road-story epic Dylan all but shouts in “Brownsville Girl” (“We drove that car all night into San Anton’”), his high-octane performance fueled by raucous background vocals, as also happens on tracks 2 and 3, “Changing of the Guards” and “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar.”
Intimations of Pynchon
The songs I keep coming back to — “Dignity,” “Series of Dreams,” and “Jokerman” — all have a quality I find appealingly Pynchonesque, intimations you could say, as if while I’m listening to Radio Dylan, there’s a sudden burst of paranoia-inflected interference from Radio Pynchon. Fresh from his new novel Shadow Ticket, with a side trip to Oedipa Maas in Crying of Lot 49 (1966) thinking of “a hotel room in Mazatlan whose door had just been slammed, it seemed forever,” I’m reunited with the woman in “Tangled Up In Blue” who “opened up a book of poems and handed it to me written by an Italian poet in the thirteenth century and every one of them words rang true and glowed like burnin’ coal pourin’ off every page like it was written in my soul from me to you.”
Suspecting “Dignity”
Using the word as Webster defines it (“the quality or state of being worthy, honored, or respected”), the song begins with a “fat man lookin’ in a blade of steel, thin man lookin’ at his last meal, hollow man lookin’ in a cottonfield — for dignity.” A verse later, after a wise man, young man, and poor man are also looking for it “in a blade of grass, the shadows that pass, through painted glass,” Dignity does a film noir dissolve into a suspected killer: “Somebody got murdered on New Year’s Eve; Somebody said Dignity was the first to leave.” And like one of Pynchon’s late period private eyes, Dylan is “Searchin’ high, searchin’ low, searchin’ everywhere I know,” asking cops “have you seen Dignity?”
As it chugs along, the song seems to be searching for itself along with a blind man “with both his hands in the pockets of chance,” with Mary Lou, who could get killed if she said what she knew, with a drinking man who seems to be looking for Webster’s version in the paranoia of “a crowded room full of covered-up mirrors.” The search ends, or seems to, at the edge of a lake, with “so many roads, so much at stake, so many dead ends — Sometimes I wonder what it’s gonna take to find dignity.”
“Previously Unreleased”
In the Greatest Hits CD notes, “Dignity” is the only one of the 14 tracks listed as previously unreleased. Dylan’s account of how the recording was made and unmade in his Chronicles Volume One (Simon & Schuster 2004) hints at the reason: “The dichotomy of cutting this lyrically driven song with melodic changes, with a rockin’ Cajun band, might be interesting … but the only way to find out, is to find out. Once we started trying to capture it, the song seemed to get caught in a stranglehold. All the chugging rhythms began imprisoning the lyrics…. Every performance was stealing more energy. We recorded it a lot, varying the tempos and even the keys, but it was like being cast into sudden hell…. It was a strange bull we were riding…. I couldn’t figure out why we weren’t getting it. You work hours on something and you get dizzy. After a while you lose your judgment.” The criminality of a killer song is in Dylan’s references to “stranglehold,” “imprisoning,” “stealing,” and “sudden hell.”
Terry Southern
“We are living in a Terry Southern novel, in which insanity has been reframed as normal, so often, so astonishingly, that we barely notice any more.” So writes David L. Ulin in his introduction to Flash and Filigree (Grove Press paperback 2019), which was originally published in 1958. “Sixty years later,” Yulin notes, “we now have a president (a real one), who among other outrages, mocked a disabled reporter on the campaign trail.”
Terry Southern died at 71 on October 29, 1995, 30 years too late to behold a spectacle beyond even The Magic Christian’s billionaire trickster Guy Grand’s weirdest dreams — wherein the same president produced an AI video of himself bombarding “No Kings” protestors with showers of simulated human waste. For the foul-smelling money pit Guy Grand constructed in downtown Chicago offering FREE $ HERE, he used real manure and urine from the stockyards.
October Twenty-Niners
On October 29, 1618, after leading an unsuccessful expedition to exploit the wealth of Guiana, Sir Walter Raleigh (History of the World) was executed in the Tower of London at the behest of James I. Described by Wikipedia as an “English statesman, soldier, writer and explorer, who played a leading part in English colonization of North America,” he lands in the heart of popular culture 350 years later in “I’m So Tired,” a song by the Beatles’ John Lennon (“I’ll have another cigarette and curse Sir Walter Raleigh. He was such a stupid get”). (Full disclosure: the first cigarette I ever smoked was from a pack of Raleighs.)
Another October twenty-niner is the tavern diarist James Boswell, the great listener immortalized by the Terry Southern of Zap Comix, R. Crumb, in a “Klassic Komic,” featuring illustrated excerpts from the London Journal like the one in which Boswell is sprawled on top of a not entirely compliant wench.
A somewhat more recent member of the 1929 club is Akim Tamiroff (1899-1972), saved for literature in a J.D. Salinger story (“He’s the one who goes ‘You Make Beeg Joke, hah?”) and Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, not to mention his great admirer Orson Welles, who directed him in Touch of Evil.
One of the Four Brothers sax section in Woody Herman’s band, tenor saxophonist Zoot Sims scored on the numbers, born 100 years ago October 29, 1925, died 40 years ago, March 23, 1985. Two years later Woody Herman himself died — on October 29.
Living Members
Born October 29, 1967, Rufus Sewell, the star of The Man in the High Castle and The Diplomat, began his film career as the drug-addicted boyfriend in Twenty-One, which was released in 1991, the year Twenty-Niner Winona Ryder (Stranger Things) stole Jim Jarmusch’s Nights On Earth smoking up a storm as Corky the cabbie while her passenger Gena Rowlands also lighted up, after gently telling her “you smoke too much.” Among the most memorable driver-passenger taxi conversations in American cinema (think Humphrey Bogart and Tom D’Andrea in Dark Passage), the girl to girl exchange ranks near the top, with Winona’s delivery of the landmark line, “Guys! Can’t live with em, can’t live without ‘em.”
Pynchon Sez
Thomas Pynchon (born May 8, 1937) may not be a member of the club, nor is Bob Dylan (born May 24, 1941), but both are connected by a mutual friend Richard Fariña, who died in a motorcycle accident on April 30, 1966, three months before Dylan’s near fatal motorcycle accident on July 29. Pynchon closes his introduction to Slow Learner: “What is most appealing about young folks, after all, is the changes, not the still photograph of finished character but the movie, the soul in flux. Maybe this small attachment to my past is only another case of what Frank Zappa calls a bunch of old guys sitting around playing rock ‘n’ roll. But as we all know, rock ‘n’ roll will never die, and education too, as Henry Adams always sez, keeps on going on forever.”