Read Bob Dylan for Free Online Page A

too, but it’s more obvious on Self Portrait, and therefore more relevant to Art, and . . . please don’t ask about the music, really . . . )
    Now, Dylan has been approached this way for years, whether or not the word was used, and while in the end it may be the least interesting way to listen to his music it’s occasionally a lot of fun and a game that many of us have played (for example, on “Days of ’49” Dylan sings the line “just like a roving sign” and I just can’t help almost hearing him say “just like a rolling stone” and wondering if he avoided that on purpose). One writer, named Alan Weberman, has devoted his life to unraveling Dylan’s songs in order to examine the man himself; just as every artist once had his patron, now it seems every auteur has his critic.
     
    (24) Self Portrait is a concept album from the cutting room floor. It has been constructed so artfully, but as a cover-up, not a revelation. Thus “Alberta #2” is the end, after a false ending, just as “Alberta #1” was the beginning, after a false beginning. The song moves quickly, and ends abruptly. These alternate takes don’t just fill up a side, they set up the whole album, and it works, in a way, because I think it’s mainly the four songs fitted in at the edges that make the album a playable record. With a circle you tend to see the line that defines it, rather than the hole in the middle.

(25)
    Self Portrait, the Auteur, and Home Movies, con’t. We all play the auteur game: we went out and bought Self Portrait not because we knew it was great music—it might have been but that’s not the first question we’d ask—but because it was a Dylan album. What we want, though, is a different matter—and that’s what separates most people from auteurists—we want great music, and because of those three albums back in ’65 and ’66, we expect it, or hope for it.
    I wouldn’t be dwelling on this but for my suspicion that it is exactly a perception of this approach that is the justification for the release of Self Portrait, to the degree that it is justified artistically (the commercial
justification is something else—self-justification). The auteur approach allows the great artist to limit his ambition, and turn it inward. To be crude, it begins to seem as if it is his habits that matter, rather than his vision. If we approach art in this fashion, we degrade it. Take that second song on John Wesley Harding, “As I Went Out One Morning,” and two ways of hearing it.
    Weberman has determined a fixed meaning for the song: it relates to a dinner given years ago by the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee at which they awarded Bob Dylan their Thomas Paine prize. Dylan showed up, said a few words about how it was possible to understand how Lee Harvey Oswald felt, and got booed. “As I Went Out One Morning,” according to Weberman, is Dylan’s way of saying he didn’t dig getting booed.
    I sometimes hear the song as a brief journey into American history; the singer out for a walk in the park, finding himself next to a statue of Tom Paine, and stumbling across an allegory: Tom Paine, symbol of freedom and revolt, co-opted into the role of Patriot by textbooks and statue committees, and now playing, as befits his role as Patriot, enforcer to a girl who runs for freedom—in chains, to the south, the source of vitality in America, in America’s music—away from Tom Paine. We have turned our history on its head; we have perverted our own myths.
    Now it would be astonishing if what I’ve just described were on Dylan’s mind when he wrote the song. That’s not the point. The point is that Dylan’s songs can serve as metaphors, enriching our lives, giving us random insight into the myths we carry and the present we live, intensifying what we’ve known and leading us toward what we never looked for, while at the same time enforcing an emotional strength upon those perceptions by the power of the music that moves with the