An artist has got to be careful never really to arrive at a place where he thinks he’s AT somewhere. You always have to realize that you’re constantly in a state of becoming. And, as long as you can stay in that realm you’ll sort of be alright.
      - Bob Dylan

Creativity is a funny thing. When we’re inventing something, we’re more vulnerable than we’ll ever be. Eating and sleeping mean nothing. We’re in “Splendid Isolation,” like in the Warren Zevon song, “The world of self,” Georgia O’Keeffe alone in the desert. To be creative you’ve got to be unsociable and tight-assed. Not necessarily violent and ugly, just unfriendly and distracted. You’re self-sufficient and you stay focused.
-   Bob Dylan

 The Beatles and Bob Dylan to a great extent changed songwriting and people’s attitudes towards voice. Bob has not got a particularly great voice, but it’s expressive and he knows where to put it, and that’s more important than any technical beauties of voice. It’s almost anti-singing. But at the same time what you’re hearing is real.
- Keith Richards from his autobiography Life

Certain figures in the history of the arts inspire those that follow. Picasso and Matisse described Cézanne as a trailblazer, as have other prominent painters. Rimbaud in poetry. Apollinaire as a poet and a writer about painting; he championed cubism and surrealism well before their significance was recognized. And Bob Dylan in music: Living his own truth, however much that truth contradicted the facts. Dylan created his own world, his own reality, and sang it.  

These artists somehow give us “permission.” They are the creators of new, courageous art that embodies freedom. It often doesn’t make much sense on the surface, at first glance. But sit with it for a while and a wisdom emerges, perhaps a wisdom that can’t be described. They are storytellers; they create mythology. Above all, they invite us to honor our own imaginary world. Without them our culture would be kind of flat, kind of unimaginative.

In his autobiography Chronicles One, Bob Dylan talks about stumbling upon the song “Pirate Jenny” (listen to the Nina Simone at Carnegie Hall version) from The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Within a few minutes, he felt that he “hadn’t slept or tasted food for about thirty hours. I was so into it. . . This was a wild song. Big medicine in the lyrics. Heavy action spread out. Each phrase comes at you from a ten-foot drop, scuttles across the road and then another one comes like a punch on the chin. And then there’s always that ghost chorus about the black ship that steps in, fences it all off and locks it up tighter than a drum. It’s a nasty song sung by an evil fiend, and when she’s done singing, there’s not a word to say. It leaves you breathless.”

You gentlemen can say, "Hey gal, finish them floors!
Get upstairs! What's wrong with you! Earn your keep here!
You toss me your tips
and look out to the ships
But I'm counting your heads
as I'm making the beds
Cuz there's nobody gonna sleep here, honey
Nobody! Nobody!
Then one night there's a scream in the night
And you say, "Who's that kicking up a row?"
And ya see me kinda starin' out the winda
And you say, "What's she got to stare at now?"
I'll tell ya.

There's a ship, the black freighter
turns around in the harbor
shootin' guns from her bow . . .
     - from “Pirate Jenny,” lyrics: Bertolt Brecht/Marc Blitzstein, melody: Kurt Weill

Dylan writes about taking the song apart, trying to find out what made it tick. The song reminded him of Picasso’s painting Guernica. “This heavy song was a new stimulant for my senses, indeed very much like a folk song but a folk song from a different gallon jug in a different backyard. . . I took the song apart and unzipped it — it was the form, the free verse association, the structure and disregard for the known certainty of melodic patterns to make it seriously matter, give it its cutting edge.”

As he studied the song, he decided that what he really wanted to sing were songs that didn’t exist — songs that transcended the information in them, the character and the plot. He needed to write his own songs. The first efforts were rough, didn’t quite work. He kept trying. Dylan connected with John Hammond, legendary talent scout for Columbia Records, a short while later and Hammond gave Dylan a record by an obscure bluesman, Robert Johnson. Again, Dylan studied the music.

“Over the next few weeks, I listened to it repeatedly, cut after cut, one song after another, sitting staring at the record player. Whenever I did, it felt like a ghost had come into the room, a fearsome apparition. The songs were layered with a startling economy of lines. . . I copied Johnson’s words down on scraps of paper so I could more closely examine the lyrics and patterns, the construction of his old-style lines and the free association that he used, the sparkling allegories, big-ass truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction — themes that flew through the air with the greatest of ease. I didn’t have any of these dreams or thoughts but I was going to acquire them.

“John Hammond told me that he thought that Johnson had read Walt Whitman . . . I couldn’t imagine how Johnson’s mind could go in and out of so many places. He seems to know about everything, he even throws in Confucius-like sayings whenever it suits him. As great as the greats were, he goes one step further. You can’t imagine him singing, ‘Washington’s a bourgeois town.’ He wouldn’t have noticed and if he did, it would have been irrelevant. 

“In a few years time, I’d write songs like “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” “Who Killed Davey Moore,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” and some others like that. If I hadn’t gone to the Theatre de Lys and heard the ballad “Pirate Jenny,” it might not have dawned on me to write them, that songs like these could be written. In about 1964 and ’65, I probably used about five or six of Robert Johnson’s blues song forms, too, unconsciously, but more on the lyrical imagery side of things. If I hadn’t heard the Robert Johnson record when I did, there probably would have been hundreds of lines of mine that would have been shut down — that I wouldn’t have felt free enough or upraised enough to write . . . Everything was in transition and I was standing in the doorway. Soon I’d step in heavy loaded, fully alive and revved up. Not quite yet though.”

He did his own thing in his own way. After writing his own folk music for a while, Bob Dylan, folk musician, became Bob Dylan, folk rock musician. He took his music electric. Crowds booed him. They came to hear the Dylan they knew, the Dylan whose albums they owned. He dismissed them. He’d stand up in front of the booing crowd and say, “I don’t believe you,” and then he’d play his music. In a 1966 Playboy interview, addressing the negative initial reaction to his electric music (Like A Rolling Stone, now regarded by some as the greatest rock and roll song ever written) Dylan said: 

“I was doing fine, you know, singing and playing my guitar. It was a sure thing, don't you understand, it was a sure thing. I was getting very bored with that. I couldn't go out and play like that. I was thinking of quitting. Out front it was a sure thing. I knew what the audience was gonna do, how they would react. It was very automatic. Your mind just drifts unless you can find some way to get in there and remain totally there. It's so much of a fight remaining totally there all by yourself. It takes too much. I'm not ready to cut that much out of my life. You can't have nobody around. You can't be bothered with anybody else's world. . . They can boo till the end of time. I know that the music is real, more real than the boos.”

As artists, the courage of those that came before can inspire us to do our own thing in our own way. Dylan spent some months sleeping on friends’ couches before he was successful, but not long. He hit the timing just right. We can’t count on that. Still, we can get inspiration from his courage of vision, courge of inspiration, courage of conviction.

Some closing thoughts by Dylan:

“People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent.”

“I change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else.”

“Life is a struggle. If you want to do business and create work, then you struggle; if your struggle shows, then you make it. It’s all about hard work, plough sharing.”

Be constantly in state of becoming. Be a different person when your head hits the pillow at night than you were when your feet hit the floor in the morning. Never arrive.

Journaling question:

In what direction would you take your art if you knew you could not fail?
That’s what we need from you.