Bob Dylan's Covid Treatment

How Dylan broke the silence of the Ides of March

It was over two years ago that Bob Dylan broke the silence of our quarantine.  On March 26, 2020—11 days after our Ides of March—78-year-old Bob Dylan came out of nowhere.  He had been on the road well into 2019, but it had been eight years since he released any original songs.  Now he had something for us, his first as a Nobel Laureate. “Greetings to my fans and followers with gratitude for all your support and loyalty over the years,” he announced, yes, on Twitter.  “This is an unreleased song we recorded a while back that you might find interesting. Stay safe, stay observant and may God be with you.”   

A song we might find interesting.  A voice from that old world of civil rights anthems and divorce purgations and Jesus and Lenny Bruce and that Victoria’s Secret ad and everything else all the way to the Nobel.  Dylan traveled a long way into this new, unbearable moment to give us a message.  Dylan, born in 1941 (the same year as Bernie Sanders), emerged to remind us that he still walked the Earth.  And he delivered the longest song he had yet released, a 17-minute dirge called “Murder Most Foul.” 

The track’s title was a line uttered by the Ghost in Hamlet, and its subject, sort of, was the Kennedy assassination and all that happened in 1963, a big year to be Freewheelin’.  “Blowin’ in the Wind” was the anthem of the Freedom Summer; he was set to perform on The Ed Sullivan Show but then stormed off the set after clashing with network censors; he would sing with Joan Baez at the March on Washington before Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech; and then he nearly derailed his career in December when he remarked, while accepting an award, that he identified with Lee Harvey Oswald.  In full meltdown mode, (Newsweek discovered he changed his name, faked his backstory, and claimed his parents, who were about to see him play Carnegie Hall, were dead) Dylan bunkered with Joan Baez and did not write a song about the Kennedy Assassination in its immediate aftermath. 

It was another songwriter in the shadow of Dylan, a young Paul Simon, who captured the moment with “Sounds of Silence.”  He wrote it in obscurity, as a 21-year-old Queens College undergrad in his parents’ tiled bathroom in Kew Gardens (hence “Hello darkness, my old friend”), in February, 1964.  “Sounds of Silence” was not specifically about the Kennedy assassination, but it was about the mood, a collective feeling beyond utterance, the mourning broken by Beatlemania.  It was first hidden on a 1964 Simon and Garfunkel record that flopped, one that covered “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” to no immediate effect.  Tom Wilson, who produced “Like a Rolling Stone,” overdubbed a rock band on it—including Al Gorgoni and Bobby Gregg from the Dylan session—then, whoosh, it went to number one.   Simon and Dylan toured together in 1999 and they performed the song together every night.  “Sounds of Silence” became a go to anthem for national tragedy.  Simon sang it with an FDNY cap in front of the smoldering Twin Towers after 9/11.  And it was eerily prescient for those first, bleak days of Covid, when Simon performed the song from home on YouTube as a gesture of comfort.  “Hello darkness, my old friend” was more than a metaphor.  Young, brooding Simon was telling us that we felt less alone if we were miserable together.  I’ve talked to Paul Simon about craft, and the darkness was on the table, ready for analysis.  Unlike Dylan, he is happy to illuminate.  But some things stay dark anyway.

So it was Paul Simon who captured the aftermath 11/22/63 when it was fresh.  Dylan eventually got there, in his way, shortly after the Ides of March,  2020.  Did he still identify with Lee Harvey Oswald?  Probably not.  With rumbling drums and rubato chords—played by an uncredited Fiona Apple--the glacially paced “Murder Most Foul” started out sounding like a prayer. At first the lyrics are violent, forensic: “The day they blew off the brains of the king/ Thousands were watching, no one saw a thing.” But after a while, it was no longer really about the assassination—and definitely not about 1963. It was really about an anachronistic crew coming to mourn Kennedy but actually to grieve for much more. Dylan sang “Rub a dub dub” before the mourners gathered and made elaborate requests, summoning the dead and invoking the future: “Play Art Pepper, Thelonious Monk/ Charlie Parker and all that junk” before mentioning the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Who, the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Queen.  It went way past 1963.  All these years later, he still refuses to say the right thing about the Kennedy Assassination.   “I’m a patsy,” he quipped, “just like Patsy Cline.”

Dylan had lived a million lifetimes since 1963. He went electric and survived a motorcycle accident, marriage, children, Rolling Thunder Revue, divorce, Jesus, disappointments, setbacks, comebacks, constant touring, constant reinventions. His voice dropped to a cement-mixer croak. And, in a gift to the quarantined, he revisited the Oswald comment that nearly destroyed him.  Dylan emerged to cheer us up.  The joke was on everyone.  It was his first #1 single as a recording artist. 

Rough and Rowdy Ways would be released on June 19.  The album title came from a Jimmie Rodgers song.

I may be rough I may be wild I may be tough and countrified
But I can't give up my good old rough and rowdy ways

That was 1929.  What could go wrong?  Fuck age, said Dylan.  Fuck quarantine, we wanted to say, even as we played by the rules. 

Many were wondering what Fiona Apple was doing playing piano on “Murder Most Foul” or singing the “oooohs” on “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” the central track on Rough and Rowdy Ways. But then why wouldn’t she be there?  She had been keeping her listeners in turmoil, too.  It had been eight years since Dylan released Tempest, and eight since she released her last album, The Idler Wheel.  Her own songs were brewing.  Playing keybs for Dylan was worthy.  George Harrison had been a session musician for Dylan, too.  Apple was about to pounce. 

A Key West of the mind was a place for the muse and all it went through to be exactly what it was.  The imperfections would feed the beauty.

Key West is the place to be
If you’re lookin’ for immortality
Key West is paradise divine
Key West is fine and fair
If you lost your mind you’ll find it there
Key West is on the horizon line

We were all looking for someplace tranquil, peaceful, fine and fair, even if it was an illusion, even if the real Key West was uncomfortably close to Mar-a-Lago.  By the time I had yet another inscrutable Dylan song in my head, I had lost my mind a few times.  “Key West” would be as mysterious as “Tangled Up in Blue.”  Like the woman reading the lines of an Italian poet from the thirteenth century.

And every one of them words rang true

And glowed like burning coal
Pouring off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you

Between November 13, 1975 and August 28, 2018, Dylan performed “Tangled Up in Blue” 1,685 times.  For a while he kept rewriting it, only to go back to the Blood on The Tracks version, still tweaking it here and there.  Starting at age 15, I began playing and singing the song, trying not to imitate Dylan, but to find my own way.  I threw in jazz voicings here and there, experimenting with chords, while the words remained a mystery. 

I knew a girl named Windy who played cello.  We kissed once when we were 14, and the cello was between us.  She had strict parents who never let her go out.  One day, I was in her living room, playing “Tangled Up in Blue.”  I was 18, throwing in some modality, giving it my all, trying to impress her, I guess, but none of that seemed important.  She pointed out that the “bird that flew” flew into a blue sky, that the “laces on my shoe” were tangled, perhaps blue laces.  Tangled Up in Blue.  She saw the landscape.   Neither of us needed to say that the blue of the song was also the blues but we both felt it.  I will never forget that living room, her face, her skin, her hair, the sight of her playing the cello, every time I hear “Tangled Up in Blue.”  A song of opacities became illumination.  Seeing Dylan sing it a few times did not feel as clarifying.  Some things can never be untangled. 

Wallace Stevens, in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” wrote of a singer who “sang beyond the genius of the sea.”  In cruellest April, we were all looking for transport, for unsolved mysteries and beautiful, inscrutable lines, and indelible memories.  Where were these lines leading me?  Where could the rest of us go?  “At the last outback at the world’s end,” Dylan announced a few albums earlier.  If you lost your mind, you’ll find it there. Were we there yet?  I didn’t know.  No one knew.  We were stuck inside.  Entangled.  We couldn’t—or shouldn’t—go to the actual Key West, but we could try going to this one.