Last week, Bob Dylan became the first rocker to win a Pulitzer, snagging a special citation “for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.” Fine. I have no problem with that. As long as the committee can explain the meaning of “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”
Last week was also a milestone for another bard: Dewey Cox. He didn’t win any awards, but since Tuesday the DVD of “Walk Hard” has proudly worn the accolade of “recently released” at Netflix. Dewey (played by John C. Reilly) is the lonesome troubadour, the outlaw poet, the renegade wordslinger who stood and stung and flung these words over the blighted pop prairie in his anthem, “Royal Jelly” (Watch It Here):
Allegory agencies of pre-Raphaelite paganry
And Shenandoah tapestries
Compared with good mahogany
Collapsing the undying postcard romance
With feline perspicacity
By the university
That night I held a paucity
Which you deemed common courtesy
I wasn’t what you thought I’d be
I shouldn’t have invited you to dance
Compare Cox’s words (actually written by Dan Bern) with these from the new Pulitzer awardee:
The lamppost stands with folded arms
Its iron claws attached
To curbs ‘neath holes where babies wail
Though it shadows metal badge
All and all can only fall
With a crashing but meaningless blow
No sound ever comes from the Gates of Eden
This song, “Gates of Eden,” (chosen randomly from the page that my copy of “Bob Dylan Lyrics” happened to fall open to) and a lot of others are the reason I’m talkin’ Bob Dylan Phone-‘Er-In Songwritin’ Blues.
Bob Dylan has given us much. In a unDylaned universe, we would never have had “Blood on the Tracks,” “Just Like a Woman” or the 1997 Christian Slater/Morgan Freeman classic “Hard Rain.”
But talk about a crashing but meaningless blow. Start out by eliminating the Important Poetry Going On Here line breaks and take a look at, say, “On a Night Like This”: “So glad you came around. Hold on to me so tight and heat up some coffee grounds.” Heat up some coffee grounds? Does that sound like an innovative new way to make coffee (what do you do with the coffee grounds once you’ve heated them? Press them to your forehead?) or the first thing that popped into Dylan’s head when he needed a rhyme for “around”? The same song gives us this: “Put your body next to mine and keep me company. There is plenty a-room for all, so please don’t elbow me.”
Please don’t elbow me in a love song? I’ll take Dewey Cox: “Let me touch you where the royal jelly gets made.” “Don’t elbow me” isn’t even a passable rhyme for “keep me company.”
“Million Dollar Bash” gives us, “I took my potatoes down to be mashed, then I made it over to that million dollar bash.” Even the best albums bump along through lyrical potholes. Take “Buckets of Rain,” from “Blood on the Tracks”: “Little red wagon, little red bike, I ain’t no monkey but I know what I like.”
The first-rhyming-word theory is the only way to grasp Dylan’s weirdest moments. “Santa Fe, dear Santa Fe, My sister looks good at home, she’s lickin’ on an ice cream cone, she’s packin’ her big white comb, what does it weigh?” We have to wind up with “weigh” because we started with “Fe.” As for “Cone,” “comb” and “home,” how many cliffs must a song walk off before you can call it a bust?
Dylan once wrote with barbs and bombs and visions, but whenever he runs short of ideas he writes to fill up space, building songs by spinning his Mad Folk Prophet word generator (favorite nouns: cowboy, train, highway, Mama, Papa, babe, border; verbs: walkin’, talkin,’ travelin,’ gamblin’.) His 2001 album “Modern Times” featured lines like these: “Tweedle-dee Dum and Tweedle-dee Dee, they’re throwing knives into a tree, two big bags of dead man’s bones, got their noses to the grindstones.”
Dylan said it, not me: “I used to care, but things have changed.”