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Hey everyone, this is Jim Salvucci of the Dylan Tons. Welcome to another episode of what is it about Bob Dylan? Today I am thrilled to have Scott Warmoth. Scott is a writer and musician from Albuquerque, New Mexico.
His research and observations on the writing strategies of Bob Dylan are widely acknowledged and frequently referenced, notably in Bob Dylan's lyrics, 1983 to 2000. In 2014, the writer Joan Araskin dubbed warmth the dean of dylanologist. Welcome, Scott.
[00:00:48] Speaker B: Hey Jim, thanks for having me. Glad to be here.
[00:00:51] Speaker A: So what is it about Bob Dylan?
[00:00:54] Speaker B: That's a great question, and I think it changes. I'm 58 years old now, and I probably started listening to Bob Dylan when I was eight. When my dad brought home desire when I was a kid, it was those songs are different than the other songs. They're hot chili peppers in the blistering sun, pistol shot rings out in a barroom night. I married Isis on the fifth day of May and being drawn in by wow. Those songs are not like other songs. And then the depth of that, as a teenager, late teens, I really dove into a lot of the records and listening to them carefully and thinking about the lyrics and then what really brought me back in and made me pay attention and made me focus much more on the work of Bob Dylan than I'd ever had before was the release of Love and Theft in 2001. With that album being such a spectacular record that is so densely packed in terms of how it's constructed. And besides being a great record to listen to, you can pop that record in, you can listen to the cd that's great music and you can certainly enjoy it. But if you dive in even deeper into that, it reveals a whole world of Bob Dylan's writing strategies, his approaches. What is he doing with the title of Love and Theft? And how does that expand out into his other work, into chronicles, volume one, or the script to masked and anonymous, the albums that came out after that, into his interviews, or when he writes about his painting and into his visual art? That there's this expansive world that despite all the praise that's been heaped on Bob Dylan, there's been no shortage. Nobel Prize in literature, Academy Award, all of that. I think there's still so much more going on that we're just barely starting to pick up on and to work out. And that keeps me really intrigued and coming back into the work again and again to see how things are interrelated, or how he might have thought something through what books he was reading, what records he might have been listening to when he was working on his stuff. And it just remains endlessly fascinating for me.
[00:02:50] Speaker A: Tell me a little bit about your background. Tell us who you are, what you've done. You've had a really interesting life. So I'd like to lay it out there for us.
[00:02:57] Speaker B: I'm originally from Long island, born in Islip. Actually, Harold Lapidus and Seth Rogavoy and I were all born in the same hospital in Islip, for what that's worth. I don't know if there's something in the water in Islip, but I grew up on Long island, an hour outside of Manhattan in a Levitt community. Big rock and roll fan since I was a little kid. We had three Beatles albums in my house. When I was a kid, it was meet the Beatles introducing the Beatles, which is on VJ Records, and the Beatles second album. For me, those were the records that I would listen to a lot and branch out from. There. Had a big box of 45s that my mom gave me as a kid. I remember going through them and figuring out, okay, Everly brothers go in the good pile. Elvis Presley goes in the good pile. Wasn't such a big fan of Mister Blue by the Fleetwoods or finding novelty records in there, listening to all those Everly brothers sides. And started playing guitar when I was eight, so been a lifelong musician. Big fan of early rock and roll stuff as a kid and punk rock music, and spent a lot of time in my bedroom listening to records, learning to play guitar, playing with friends, having rock and roll bands in high school and college. Went to State University of New York at Stony Brook. I think they called the university at Stony Brook. They had, really a pioneering popular music program in the eighties. There weren't a lot of places that did that. They used to call Stony Brook the Berkeley of the east, because they had a pretty good popular music program at Berkeley. And I had the good fortune to study with a couple of good professors. Is a great professor named Peter Winkler that I studied with who really pioneered that popular music program there. I was a music minor in college. He had some great courses in popular composition, which were essentially songwriting courses. So studying songwriting, writing your songs, bringing them in, taking critiques, and working on those. I did that in school and moved out to New Mexico in 1996. New York's great, but its cost of living is very high, and the prospects of moving into Manhattan didn't seem all that promising. There's a beautiful life out here in the southwest so I think that was a really good move. Been out here over 25 years now. They've stopped calling me a newcomer and I blend in a little bit more. But I might have been tightly wound for New York and I was certainly tightly wound for New Mexico. So I've been unwinding here in the southwest and working as a radio disc jockey for years and years. Music director both for non commercial and commercial stations. My high school had a 5000 watt radio station that I had a weekly show when I was 15 years old. Stony Brook has a great station called WUSB. Its a community station and I worked there for. Volunteered there for years. I was the music director there and worked professionally as a disc jockey in New York and in Albuquerque for years. Worked as a corporate trainer for a long time. One of the best things I ever heard was our morning man at a station I worked at recorded a person calling in, a listener calling in and he was talking about how much he liked the station and he mentioned me and he said what he liked about me was I can give you information without making you feel stupid which was one of the nicest things anybody ever said for me. So working as a trainer works out well because things that might be easy for me systems navigation or understanding how to read through this text or why the computer isn't working I can very often get their quickly but I won't make you feel stupid while trying to get you there. So that ended up being a pretty good fit for a long time. Yeah, out here in Albuquerque for a while amassing an even larger record collection. I've got maybe five or 6000 lp's in the room that I'm sitting in. So I've got no shortage of music to listen to. That's like an occupational thing and just a passionate music fan for life. I also have a house full of guitars as well. The answer to how many guitars do you need? Is always just one more. So I lost track of how many guitars I have if that's any inclination. And other stringed instruments. I play electric bass and mandolin and mandola harmonica, a little bit of banjo and played in all sorts of different from rock and roll bands to hardcore punk rock bands to sitting in with old time string band musicians to electronic music. I mess around a lot with synthesizer oriented music. It's not necessarily a nutshell but that's.
[00:07:11] Speaker A: A little bit about me that raises a burning question. With all these guitars and mandolins and instruments do you play a lot of Dylan?
[00:07:22] Speaker B: I can I don't necessarily do that. I like maybe a lot of the songs that he covers. I can do a pretty good when I paint my masterpiece if I the need arises. People don't typically often ask, I don't feel the need to necessarily do that, but I can. I'm pretty well versed in folk and blues and country music, and so I can get by with that. What I always like when I play with people is trying to find space for someone else and watching them. And I like those cues you can do just with a tap of a foot or a turn of the head that lets you know where the change is coming up and figuring out how to best support somebody else. I always try to make myself as small as possible in instances like that. And that can be a way to be an effective player with other people is to recognize, I'm not going to step on that. I'm going to step back. I'm going to let you shine here. What can I do to make you do your thing, which is different than if you're playing by yourself or recording by yourself? I can sit down with a digital workstation and record a song start to finish with me playing all the instruments. I'll use electronic drums or recording of a drum machine. I can't play drums, but besides that, I can play all the instruments and double my vocals and produce it the way I want. So there's a mix of different types of skills that come into that from working in radio, too. So I'm producing radio commercials for years and years. So if you need to use car dealer commercial, I've got those chops. They're ridiculous chops. There's a lot of exclamation points in that copy typically.
I love it.
[00:08:48] Speaker A: I love that background.
So let's get into Dylan a little bit. And your take on Dylan, if people don't know you, they should and know your work, because it's really, I've always been impressed with what you've been doing over the past really couple decades. So tell me about your take on Dylan as an outlaw appropriation artist.
[00:09:08] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's an effective way to frame some of the stuff he's been doing from maybe time out of mind forward, and he makes some broad gestures that allow for that. One of the pieces I've talked about is in chronicles, volume one. It's the early sixties in the book, and he talks about meeting an artist named Robin Whitlaw at a party and how she would later get arrested for breaking into someone's house and stealing a painting. And he writes incredulously. She got off and she was let free. And that artist doesn't exist, except in a. An essay by art critic named Ralph Rugoff. It initially ran in LA Weekly called the illuminating disappearance of Robin Whitlaw. It's an April Fool's Day essay. So Bob Dylan has incorporated this April Fool's Day character who doesn't exist. And when he says incredulously, he means that he didn't mean incredibly, he meant incredulously. You can't believe this because it isn't true. I actually found a review on Amazon where someone said Dylan needed a better editor for Chronicles, volume one. And that was the example that he used was incredulously. And I was like, oh, he really did mean that. And I think that expands out into what we're seeing with, especially, I think, with love and theft. That's such a dense work, where musically there are components that are borrowed from other songs. He's got so many borrowed lines from so many different places, very often pairing them together in interesting ways. And you want to think about who are Bob Dylan's contemporaries. You can talk about Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen or Warren Zevon or Hank Williams, the song writer, or Willie Dixon, who's up there in that tower of song. But I think thinking about Dylan's interaction and friendship with the artist Richard Prince is an effective way to frame that. Richard Prince, of course, known for his work along those lines. I read a deposition for Richard Prince on the stand for a recent court case that was just settled, and he talked about Bob Dylan not only being his mentor, but being his friend. And I think there's a blurring of the lines between where one ends and one begins. I don't know wherever we're getting any straight answers about that. I don't know that I necessarily want straight answers about that. But I think, you see, Richard Prince writes the intro to the Asia series, and it's in the catalog for that. And he posts endlessly about Bob Dylan and his social media stuff, quoting Dylan lyrics all the time. So I think that is an interesting way to look at it, especially when you branch out. How is he constructing this stuff? It's different than the folk process. I heard this song, all that line kind of floats around. It's in a bunch of different blues. Songs were different from that. I think we're seeing different writing strategies. I think thinking about how William Burroughs would approach writing is interesting from the notion of cut ups, where those might have been more randomized. You cut open the pages and see if the future spills out or whatever might be there. But he also has an essay he wrote about artistic theft, where he talks about, you want a good cloudy sky? You steal it from Edward Hopper, you want this. He used to take these characters, you mix them around, you steal everything, and everything is grist to make stuff out of. And I think there's also some parallels between both of those writers, William Burroughs and Bob Dylan, when it comes to how they both use the work of Ernest Hemingway. I wrote a long piece about how Dylan uses in a hidden way in chronicles, volume one. You really have to piece it out. But he does use bits from the snows of Kilimanjaro when he's talking about that hand injury in Chronicles, volume one. And it's really this sets this subtext about how he might have been neglecting his own muse during that timeframe in the late eighties. And William Burroughs was also very focused on that same exact short story and referenced it for decades in letters, in his own writing, quoting it, misquoting it, ultimately writing his own version of it. A short story that's set in maybe thirties or forties, gangsters, that's called where was he going? And it's in a late book that came out in 89 called the Tornado Alley, that's collected. And I think those parallels are interesting in terms of this notion that you can take whatever you want and repurpose it to reuse it. And I think one of the things that Dylan has been doing is incorporating so much between these that they tie together. If you take a look and follow strings that he's left, pieces he left in, say, chronicles or an interview or in his paintings. And I think there's a lot more going on in his visual art. But any of us are really picking up on that, is just beneath the surface, if you dig enough.
[00:13:42] Speaker A: One of the things that I find really interesting, and I'm wondering if you've thought about this, and if not, maybe you'll do some thinking on it right now. You've done tremendous work on the lyrics, and you've done tremendous work on chronicles, and you've done tremendous work on the paintings and the visual art. But Dylan's sculptures are sourced right, and they're hunks of metal tools, found objects welded together brilliantly, I think, into fascinating images or shapes or patterns. But people get really uptight about his borrowings. We'll say his sourcing, as you say, for his lyrics, for chronicles, for his paintings.
But they don't get upset about his borrowings, his sourcing his sculptures. Why do you think that is?
[00:14:33] Speaker B: I think they get a pass because it's so easy to spot all the components. That is a monkey wrench, that is this type of spring. And I think you do see some interesting components in there. In parallels. He's got a set of sculptures called gangster doors. I don't know if you're familiar with them. They're just rusty. Old doors look like they have bullet holes through them. And they've got a sheet next to them with a description of John Dillinger or whoever the door might suppose to be, which I think are interesting. And there's a parallel set of gardor sculptures in the work of Richard Prince as well. He's got other ones that are Carr hoods, but he did a whole series of, I think they're called the doors as a reference to the band when Richard Prince does it. So I see those parallels there, but I think a lot of those, the gates or there's the one looks like a railroad cardinal, I don't get as much attention, but I think in terms of the photos of him in his workshop, where he's got all those pieces, find those pieces, put them together, see what works. He does what doesn't work, and I think maybe we'll see more of that. I don't know if there's more at play within those works. I think a lot of them speak for themselves on just that visceral level of, wow, look at all that stuff welded together. Looks cool. But there may be more going on there. And certainly I see those parallels between the gangster doors and the Richard Prince. Doors works as well.
[00:15:51] Speaker A: Yeah, Dylan just can't help himself, can he? He's got to make those parallels. He's got to make those connections.
Everything's connected.
[00:15:58] Speaker B: I think that's where if you're going to try to piece together what he's doing, it's keeping those components in mind that he's a person who's not only doing that in the lyrics or in his memoir, but he's doing that in interviews. Interviews that were probably emailed back and forth. And most people are not incorporating hidden subtext into their interviews, but Bob Dylan clearly is. And I don't know that there's enough focus on that and the interview as an art form, the interview as something that stands side by side or in combination with other components to set other things up, other hidden elements that may not be as readily apparent, where the interviews can provide clues. For instance, in 2009, I posted a piece on my blog about how in an interview. Dylan had used some bits from a specific translation of the satires of juvenile, and he took some of the characters that he talked about, seeing it as sideshow performers as a kid in Minnesota that are straight out of this one particular translation. And it's talking about Atlas the dwarf and some other characters. And I noted that. That was interesting to see that. And then it's years later when the different translation of the satires of juvenile starts showing up in the lyrics on Tempesthe, and then start showing up again on the lyrics of rough and rowdy ways with that famous line about the size of your something will get you nowhere.
[00:17:25] Speaker A: I believe the word is chicken.
[00:17:26] Speaker B: It could be, yes. But he planted the initial seeds for that in 2009. I just happened to catch it, and then noticing it. Oh, it did. So when lines turn up later on, oh, I had an inkling that he would be doing that. He's not using the same translation. He changed it to a different translation. Like which translation of Chaucer is he using? Which translation of Homer is he using? And the role of the translator, I think, is an interesting one to consider when looking at Dylan's work, because very often the translator is playing a significant role in how things are communicated, because that's an intermediary that doesn't often get as much attention. And they're the ones who are good at it, are really making that work come across as best they can, or that they think the intent has of the initial writer. And I think that plays a big role in what we're seeing in Dylan's work.
[00:18:15] Speaker A: You talk a lot about subversion in Dylan's work, and I'm a little obsessed, maybe, with subversion. I see it as a very important and overlooked part of satire. And I also see Bob Dylan as a rather superb satirist throughout his career. So I'm wondering if you could just talk a little bit about how Dylan manifests subversiveness in his work and why it matters to you, or why does it matter to us?
[00:18:44] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's certainly there. One thing I saw recently was looking at the italian translation of Dylan's Nobel Prize lecture, translated by Alessandro Carrera. And he has an essay in there. And he actually quotes me talking about Dylan and subversion in that essay, which was cool to see by quote, in the Nobel Prize lecture. And the quote I'd mentioned, Dylan on theme time radio hour says, the first rule of being subversive is don't let anyone know you're being subversive. He says it on an episode of theme time radio hour now. Theme time radio hour is, Eddie Gordetsky was the producer of that. And if you look, he had actually said that exact same quote, I think, maybe to the Los Angeles Times a few years early, but earlier. So that notion, maybe even his notion of what he says about subversion is something he took from someplace else or has worked into that. But I think there are elements of that, and he's not really interested in explaining it out or expressing it as doctrine is one of the things I said in the interview that's quoted in the Nobel Prize lecture essay. So I don't think it makes sense to look for straight answers or anticipate straight answers, but anticipate that there are things going on that are intentional, maybe just to have fun, maybe just to play with language, maybe just to play with people's minds. And that's going on, and it's on a much larger scale than people might suspect. I think a key example is in Chronicles volume one, where he's writing about his mysterious music theory system of threes. And it turns out when he's doing that, he's incorporating all of these lessons from a book by Robert Greene called the 48 Laws of power. The chapter is called the science of charlatanism, or how to start a cult in five easy steps. And hes applying those lessons, thats a subversive thing to do. And to find that hes doing that makes you question everything else. And then those types of things continue where hes planting seeds for that.
And theyre there if you can find them. And I think it makes sense to go back and try to reevaluate what he might have been up to. What is going on with some of those things? For instance, I wrote a piece about the beaten path, the series of paintings, a bunch of years ago. And one of the things I wrote about were two paintings within there that drew my attention. One was called the Morning in Pittsburgh, and the other is called Pittsburgh at dawn. Now, I'm from New York. I looked at those paintings, and I said, that's the Brooklyn Bridge in the one painting, and that's the Manhattan Bridge and the other painting. So it's certainly not Pittsburgh. And something is going. What is going on here? I'm trying to think, what else can we bridges in Pittsburgh. I mean, think of, like, they got a bridge named after Andy Warhol in Pittsburgh. Is it that? No, it's not that. And then as I kept digging, I figured out what I thought was almost certainly going on. The day we're recording this happens to be the 40th anniversary of the release of Bruce Springsteen's born in the USA album. And in the eighties, Reagan tried to co opt born in the USA. And in a speech in New Jersey called out Bruce Springsteen in a positive light. And Springsteen was clearly not thrilled by this. And onstage in Pittsburgh a day or two later, he talked about it. And he says, I don't know what records he was listening to. I bet it wasn't the Nebraska album. And then he gave a longer interview to Rolling Stone, where he talked at length about why this concerned him.
And he talked about Reagan's it's a new morning, it's a new dawn, et cetera. And Springsteen says, literally, it's not morning in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh. It's not morning in these places. And talked about why he didn't like his work being co opted that way. So I thought, morning in Pittsburgh. That kind of makes sense. That's probably where that title got. But the other one is Pittsburgh at dawn and what's going on with that? And it wasn't until years later, and at that point, I knew that a bunch of those paintings, many of them were based on films. But that specific one about Pittsburgh at dawn, it's actually a shot of from the french connection with the Manhattan bridge. In it, Popeye Doyle. Detective Popeye Doyle is about to come walking out of that bar. So he's paired them together. There's a painting that's involving a detective, and there's another painting that involves some detective work to get there. And was that intentional? Yeah, I didn't create those paintings and title them Pittsburgh titles and put the bridges from New York in them. Those are there to ask questions and make a. Sometimes it could just be mislabeled. Whatever. He's got paintings that say they're in New Mexico and actually the gas station he's painting is in Texas. That has a huge meaning. But I think in this case, he was specifically referencing Springsteen and then also playing the detective role there. And I think we see that continue with detectives in his paintings. And he's got a number of them. He's got a whole bunch of paintings that involve New York City in the seventies, Times Square and detectives in Times Square from films. There's a couple from shaft, the french connection, and there's some additional ones as well. And I think if you take some time and look into those, he's playing those same types of games where he's planting detectives and asking you to see, can you find, are you up for the task? A painting that really drew my attention was one called newsstand. It's a photo that's based on a shot from a film. It's a guy at a newsstand at a subway entrance in Times Square. It's in the seventies, guys buying a newspaper.
One thing I noticed initially when I first looked at it is in this. There's magazines on the newsstand. And one of the magazines is actually one of Dylan's earlier paintings. He had done a revisionist art series of magazine paintings. So he put his own painting within this painting, which drew my attention. And so I thought, what does he want me to look at? I'll go back and take another look at that painting, of course. And it was a Dylan fan out of Greece who goes by skinny Moo, who pieced together. That painting is based on a shot from a film called Massage Parlor Hookers, an exploitation film from the early seventies, used to play on double bills with titles like Flesh Pot on 42nd street, which is another movie that Dylan did a painting from. So I started looking at that painting and thinking, okay, that guy at the newsstand is a detective in the film. So it's another detective. And there's that other painting within it. It's a country music magazine. It's got LBJ on the COVID It's loaded with all sorts of text.
And I started looking at it, going, what's going on here? And then one of the things I noticed is the name Sherlock in there. And I think, okay, Sherlock. Could be Sherlock Holmes. Could be any old Sherlock. But then I noticed there's another name on there. That's Watson. So you got Sherlock and Watson. So that's very likely he's planted in other detectives in this earlier painting. And I'm looking at it and thinking, what is going on? What am I supposed to be looking for in this? And then in the painting, I noticed one of the things says Connie Arnold signed to Columbia, and Bob Dylan's been signed to Columbia forever. But who's Connie Arnold?
And I got to thinking, I recognize that it's not one person, it's two. Connie and Arnold are the main characters in Joyce Carolot's short story where are you going? Where have you been?
Which he dedicated to Bob Dylan. It says, for Bob Dylan. And I'd actually started writing about Dylan's paintings and that short story years ago regarding one of the paintings that's in the Asia series.
And it's an anomaly in the Asia series because it's a magazine cover painting of Life magazine, an issue of life. And it is a precursor to the magazine paintings that we see in the revisionist art series, which were all magazine covers, imagined and pretend, strange text through them. On Dylan's own Instagram account, they described it as his first foray into conceptual art, was that series of paintings, the painting that I'd initially written about from that Life magazine cover, it's got all new text on it, changed out. And one thing I think is keyed into the back cover of the revisionist art catalog has a rewritten review of the revisionist Art show. Roberta Smith at the New York Times panned the show and wrote a very negative review. And on the back of the revisionist art cover, it's been completely written by Robert a. Smith. And it's a rave. And it's not only a rave, but it also includes some text. And it's almost certainly written by Dylan, if not approved. One of the lines within the rewritten piece is they are full of double meanings and are carefully plotted with several stories happening at once.
I think that's an important thing to keep in mind. Now, on that Life magazine cover, added text on there includes the shadow and the mask, which may not mean anything to you unless you spend a lot of time taking apart chronicles volume one and noticing that it's filled with sax armors, fu Manchu novels all over the place, all different sorts of quotes out of those. And there's the shadow of Fu Manchu and the mask of Fu Manchu are two of those books. That's one set of stories going on in there. The other one, the last two items on that list, on that magazine cover painting are thinking outside the box and what happens next? And my interpretation of that years ago was, what happens next? Thinking outside the box. Well, it could be the next issue of Life magazine, which happens to be the issue that has the story that Joyce Karoloz was inspired by to write where he was going. Where are you going? Where? At the bend. And I thought that was interesting.
In an interview about his paintings, Dylan started dropping details from essay that Joyce Carol Oates had written for Newsweek about boxing. He's talking about his painting, but he's including really peculiar components, multiple ones, where he's clearly referencing her writing in the context of his paintings. Why is he doing that in an interview? And there's also a passage in Chronicles, volume one where he's talking about metallic sunglasses and seeing everything in miniature that parallels almost exactly a passage in the Joyce Carol Oates story. So I think what's going on is there's a series of paintings with this hat and mouse game, with the writing of Joyce Carol Oates that he's playing, probably in paying homage to you, dedicated this story to me. But that's an interesting way to work. Who's planting detectives and hidden detective paintings? And it sounds out there if you don't have the pieces nailed down and can see and read through them. But I think there's more of that going on and that type of thing going on in his work, and I think that's where some interesting exploration can go, and I think there's much, much more to be found there.
[00:29:39] Speaker A: This stuff is just fascinating, just all these connections, all these layers, all these different sources, all these references.
What's the end game? What's he trying to do?
[00:29:51] Speaker B: That's a good question. I think some of it is just he's having fun, personally. I think he just enjoys doing some of those things. I actually asked this question. I did a post on Instagram the other day, and I was asking, who is he doing this for? There's like, for instance, I think very often the most cursory interpretation gets the biggest play, and very often I don't agree. For instance, in Sugar baby, he sings some of these bootleggers, they make pretty good stuff. You find no shortage of people going, oh, yes, he's commenting on the bootleg record industry. If you stop there, you're not getting it at all. That could be a thing. Sure. But if you take a look at those lines and thinking about what is he doing in love and theft, he is taking lines, he's pairing lines, he's crafting them, he's creating different voices, parallel voices. And the lines, there are some of these bootleggers, they make pretty good stuff. Plenty of places to hide things here if you want to hide them bad enough. Now, one of the things he's doing throughout love and theft is quoting songs recorded by the new lost city Ramblers and Mike Seger throughout. And I think that's why modern Times is called modern times, because that's the name of one of the albums that he quotes from multiple times. And there's a song on a new Lost City Rambler's album. It's called American Moonshine and Prohibition. It's all songs about prohibition and moonshine. And there's a song called Kentucky Bootleggers. It's one that John Cohen sings. And one of the lines goes, some moonshiners make pretty good stuff. Bootleggers use it to mix it up. So there's a thread of all of those new lost city Rambler songs. But he's paired it with another line from the writer Larry Brown.
Jim Dickinson, who plays on Time out of mind, brilliant musician, sun recording artist, said that Dylan told him that he read every word that Larry Brown wrote. And he's got a short story called Kabuku rides. This is it. And it's about from the point of view of an artist alcoholic who is hiding booze, hides thematically to what a bootlegger would do is hiding booze. And the lines in there that he specifically uses are lots of places to hide things. You want to hide them bad enough. Ain't like Easter eggs, like Christmas presents, life and death. So that's an interesting way to work. Who's reading listening to the new law city ramblers go, yeah, that's a good line about bootleggers. And you know what? Hiding things, plenty of places to hide things or want to hide them bad enough. And then pairing them together and doing that. He does that. And then also that it mentions Easter eggs in the writing. And he's planting Easter eggs everywhere, I think, just for the heck of it. And he comes back to that piece in chronicles volume one, I think when he quotes a couple of lines from Larry Brown's book faye a novel, there's a passage where he's going to visit son Rob, not son ra son pie. Freudian sub. I'm a big son ra fan.
[00:32:50] Speaker A: Yeah, I am too. And I always doubt the existence of senpai like Ray Goose and Chloe Kyle or Robin Whitlaw.
[00:32:57] Speaker B: Or Robin Whitlaw. Yeah, Dylan writes, you could be doing something worse, he says, pauses. I used to do some of that and nodded in the direction of the blue cop bike. Look around if you want to. Got some pretty nice stuff in here. And he's quoting these two different passages because he does two to make sure you know that it's not an accident he's got one. And there's enough signifier there to say, yes, I did mean this. He'll often do too, within the same page of the next paragraph to knock it down for you. So Larry Brown, he's written look around if you want to. She's got some pretty nice stuff in here. And I think it eyes back. It's a callback to the bootleggers making pretty good stuff in the song. Does that. And who is that for? That's the other question. And chronicles volume one is written like that. And the works are intertwined that way. Where there's a piece in chronicles volume one that is tied to stuff going on in the masted anonymous script or the interviews are tied to the paintings. I think part of it is just gives him something to do. I think he's an artist who works on so many different levels. I think he's intrigued by that. Maybe he does it for the close reader like me. Who's he doing that for? Or he's doing it for a Mister Jones type who's never going to get that. I don't need to know a straight answer, but I can certainly see moving parts and draw, I think, reasonable connections between them and have a rational discussion about it without going off into JFK conspiracy theory land.
[00:34:21] Speaker A: At some point, it becomes impossible not to think that the sourcing, the references, the inner text, is the point. In other words, that's the message. If you want to find the message in all these works, it's that sourcing. And I think you've uncovered a lot of that. Right? Like, these things make more sense.
They're not just throwaway lines in a song. When you see those connections, they suddenly become more meaningful.
[00:34:50] Speaker B: And to write on that level and to make it, if you didn't know any of that, you can read chronicles, volume one, and go, wow, that was a really good memoir. You can listen to 11th life go, that's a really great record. And then, you know, there's all this other stuff going on that they can't give them enough awards, give them another Nobel Prize in literature, because why not? And the one I always say he should get is there's a mystery editors association. They have the Edgar Allan Poe awards. And I think he should get an Edgar Allan Poe award because there's another writer named Robert Zimmerman. He was RD Zimmerman writing his mystery novels. And Dylan takes some stuff from one of his mystery novels and from pasting pages and weaves them into chronicles, volume one is some kind of mojo. And this is the guy who lived in Minnesota and hates being compared to Bob Dylan, and gets woken up at two in the morning by scandinavian Bob Dylan fans and calls Bob Dylan the dreaded him. And the other, is there anything more pro esque than that guy ultimately changing his name to Robert Alexander in writing his historical fiction, like the Kitchen Boy, which gets a lot of accolades that Bob Dylan is messing with him on an invisible level. And so I say get him the Edgar Allan Poe award because he's a brilliant mystery writer as well. There's so much mystery going on. And I think part of the point is indeed, what are these sources? And I'm a richer person for having read some of them. I'm not a fan of every single book that Bob Dylan has used, material from an Encyclopedia of desks, is an interesting reference book, and I still wonder why he was using bits from that. But to sit and go carefully through the short stories of Ernest Hemingway, or to go back through some of the classic literature he's doing, or the jazz autobiographies that he's using, or the Baudelaire poetry and thinking about it in a different way, or to read through the letters of Thomas Wolf, which at one point in Chronicles volume one, Dylan takes bits from six different quotes across a series of different letters and just weaves them seamlessly into this whole section. And he's adopting Thomas Wolfe's voice invisibly and perfectly. And if you see the moving parts, you go, how did he do that? And what was his eye drawn to? Was it in the top corner of the page? Or what was the context for that? If you like reading, a great reward to have all those books and all the records, too.
[00:37:07] Speaker A: So Bob Dylan is, his work is the esoteric archive of our culture?
[00:37:15] Speaker B: Yes, I think so. I think he is giving back for all the things that he's been gifted with and creating such rich work. Especially, they say there are no second acts in american life, and he's got some more touring going to go on. We'll see what else comes out. We'll see what else comes out of the work that's already there. I think there's still plenty that we haven't looked at, some stuff that I'm still trying to figure out. How do I even approach this or talk about this publicly? Because it's just, there's so much of it. And to draw, what are some of the common themes and threads? What are the most interesting ones through that, certainly not of interest to everyone and the material.
And you can have an interest in that work, whatever it is, if it's just the music, without knowing any of these things. But I think it makes it so much more rewarding, and I think there's so much more going on to dive into that. And hopefully someone, an interviewer will get a chance to ask some of these questions. I don't know that I've ever seen him ask questions that weren't the most baiting ones, are going to get an insulting, inflammatory answer and response for that. So I don't know that we've seen an adept interviewer who wants to broach these subjects, and maybe he's not open to broaching them, or maybe you never get a straight answer. Anyway, I don't necessarily want one but I'd rather see an attempt at a reasonable conversation. But talk to us about this approach, these approaches, what's going on in these paintings. How do you do that, Larry? Charles talks about you coming in with an ornate box filled with scraps of paper. Talk about how you get those scraps of paper. Larry Brown said he never saw Bob Dylan with a book when they were working on the masted anonymous script. I know he had a lot of books because I got a big pile of them. I think you might have some talking to people who wrote with him and get some more detail that way. So remains ever fascinating for me. I'll put it down. I'll come back to it. I have a rich life doing other things. Besides, it's not just I just sit there in a tunnel and just do this all day, every day. It might seem like that because some of the work is labor intense, but I put it down, do other things, come back to it, see with a fresh set of eyes. And it's always rewarding.
[00:39:09] Speaker A: I'm glad you dispelled the myth that you sit in a room and do nothing but Google Bob Dylan and read books.
[00:39:17] Speaker B: Some people have that impression. I read a book. The guy said, book came out last year. The guy said it had a black heart because that's what I do. And I was like, this guy doesn't know me from a hill of beans. And they say I have a black heart because of my method. For some people, I think maybe even looked or considered that work, or they don't want to. But I thought it was unfair to say that I have a black heart in your crummy book, which I'm not going to buy.
I won't name the guy, but I saw it and it didn't go.
[00:39:42] Speaker A: That's just rude. And I guess for some people, you're in a weird way, you're demystifying it. But at the same time, for me, it's more mystifying that he can do this, that there's a meaning to this. There's a reason he's doing this. This is an unbelievable project. It's a lifetime of work. He's 83 years old and he's still doing this.
[00:40:00] Speaker B: He is. And I see it sometimes dismissed as maybe train spotting or stamp collecting. First you gotta gather what the pieces are and then take a look and see. How do these function? How do they connect? Do they connect? They don't have to. They don't necessarily have to. Sometimes it might just be something cool that he saw in a book that's oh, that's a good line. There's one of these days I'll end up on the run I'm pretty sure she'll make me kill someone is one of the lines in my wife's hometown. That's straight out of Chaucer. That's straight out of Canterbury tales.
Okay. He's reading through that. That's a blues line. And he recognized that, which I thought was cool. I think sometimes it's as simple as that, but sometimes it's much, much more intense with multiple themes going on. I think especially with Tweedledee and TweedlEdum, you've got competing themes. You've got. The whole sections of this song functions as an answer record to the Grateful Dead's Uncle John's band in a range of different ways by quoting new lost City Rambler's songs. One of the things I found rewarding is I'd written about that. And there's a wonderful documentary about John Cohen from the new Lost City Ramblers that's been making the festival circuits called different johns. And it follows him, John Cohen, through his trips to South America, his trips to Appalachia, his work. And one of the things the directors and producers did where they're doing a montage scene of what was Greenwich Village like in the late 1950s, when John Cohn was really getting established there. And the music they use is Uncle John's bongos, the song that is the musical template for Tweedledee and Tweedledum, a song that I say, and I think convincingly argued is an answer record to Uncle John's band in a song that is about new law city Ramblers. So they heard that, read my essay, and included that in there, and they sent me a link so I could watch the movie, too. So I give it full thumbs up. You should go and watch different johns, especially if you like this type of stuff. You're gonna like the work of John Cohen. There's those components going on. And then in that same song, he's got all these other threads going on. He's got all these twins that he's incorporated in secret ways. One of them I'd written about was from a minstrelsy sketch called Box and Cox. It's about a scheming landlady who rents the same apartment to two guys, one who works in the day, one who works in the night, doesn't tell about each other, and they pass each other in the night. And there's a couple of lines from that show up in the song, and there's other hidden twins within that. One of the things I liked in mixing up the medicine, the new book that came out is it's got some drafts and there's a draft for Tweedledee and Tweedledum. I took a look and I noticed, oh, that's a weird line. You know what? Let me take a look. And it turns out it's another line that didn't get used from that same minstrelsy sketch. There's still pieces like that to come out. I think the archives and looking at the drafts and being familiar with what some of those moving parts are can help to identify more of what the strategies were, what the process was like. And I think that's where more work goes. Looking at a version of high water for Charlie Patton, Milk and Markhorst asked me to take a look at a specific line and I recognized it as, okay, I think that's what he's saying. And was able to piece together in short order that it was from Bartleby the Scrivener, a short story by Herman Melville. Okay, here's an unused line from Melville. And of course, does Melville play into the work of Bob Dylan? Of course. And he talks about them at length in the Nobel Prize lecture. It was just sitting right there, but it was in chicken scratch and pencil and it's hard to figure out. And so some of it is, I think that's where more nitty gritty fine grain worked can get done in terms of piecing more of this out is lets see whats in those drafts that are available and what was that process like? What got left on the table? And does that tell us more about how he was putting these things together? Because I think how do you write a Bob Dylan song? Thats a great question. Hes got lots and lots of good songs. Theres probably lots of different ways, but these strategies are part of that. And those songs are just so powerful. And how do you get there? And that road to the final draft and the version that's cut and how did the songs change when he plays them live? I think there's still plenty more to spot if we look through those drafts.
[00:44:12] Speaker A: Man, I'm going to dumb this down, give our listeners a break here. This is mind blowing. And I've read so much of your stuff. And so a lot of this I've heard before and it still always blows me away, even on the second, 3rd, fourth and fifth time. Have you ever seen Dylan live?
[00:44:31] Speaker B: Oh, sure, yeah, plenty of times. Probably about a dozen times. I, first time I saw him was in Jones beach on Long Island, a big shed on the water early never ending tour show with Ge Smith on guitar. And I think I've seen him every time he's played in Albuquerque since I moved here. I saw him most recently on rough and rowdy waist ride. I had great seats right on the side of the stage. You could see behind the piano and watch him through the whole thing plenty of times. I saw one show where he did all these covers when he still had Larry and Charlie in the band. I think that's my favorite lineup. Is that the band that's in mast and anonymous? And I saw that band a bunch of times where he did brown sugar, he did Neil Young's old man. He did a Warren Zevon tune. He played in the garden for the first time in forever. And that was, I really liked that bandaid. Would Charlie try to different instruments and the vocal harmonies with that? And when they would open with COVID songs and do Johnny and Jack songs, they'd do Johnny and Jack's Hummingbird.
And so yeah, live is always a treat to see. You never know what's going to happen. Sometimes he gets stuck behind the person who's going to scream Bobby the whole time. And so it's not always a thrill depending on where you might be seated, but in terms of him bringing stuff to the table or got to see him with Willie Nelson opening up with Merle Haggard opening up, see Merle Haggard and Bob Dylan in the same bill. And there's no one sang like Merle Haggard, so it's always a treat to see Bob Dylan live. I hope he comes back to Albuquerque. We got, we got venues.
[00:46:01] Speaker A: I saw him with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp and it was one of these outdoor, it was a minor league baseball stadium in Maryland, in Aberdeen, Maryland, and Thunderstorm was coming and Willie Nelson did his Sethe in double time. It was the weirdest thing I ever saw. He ran his whole set. I guess he doesnt get bait unless he does this set. And then we waited out the rain and end Dylan came on was brilliant. So it was a great concert to see, but it was the silliest thing you ever saw. Bully Nelson singing very fast, got through everything.
[00:46:33] Speaker B: And Merle Haggard would do shtick. He would do the first twelve bars of Okie from Muskogee and talk about how its the wrong crowd. And he broke into silver wings and it was just soaring. So yeah, every time he comes, I'll go see. I went to see him in Denver one time. I'm certainly where people see many more shows than me. But he does come through my neck of the woods. So that's always a, it's like his job, right? And, but to still do that and to still do all those tour dates and I can pay a couple of bucks and go see him 15 minutes from my house. What a time to be alive.
[00:47:05] Speaker A: I always imagine he has that ornate box on his bus.
Hes never far from the box.
[00:47:12] Speaker B: PrESTON when I talked with John Cohen a couple of years ago, he talked about going to see Dylan after one of those shows at one of those minor league baseball stadiums and talking with him and giving him the latest cd that he had put together on an artist. And Dylan said, have you got my latest cd? And John Cohen said, no. And he ran into the bus and came out and gave him a copy of modern times. And he looked at it and goes, modern times. We had an album called Modern Times and Bob Dylan, John Cohen said, bob Dylan said, yeah, I know. And Cohen said that people told him that he saw that. People spotted a whole bunch of his other new law city Ramblers records kicking around on the bus, too. Who knows? I always imagine a big pile of books. There's a piece in Chronicles volume one where he talks about how he needs to learn how to telescope things, ideas. And you might be able to get all into one paragraph or one verse of a song if you could get it right. He's paraphrasing Hemingway, but he talks about all the books on all the tables. So that's what I visualize is all the books on all the tables. Maybe a bookshelf and a lot of dog eared books. Maybe a page is torn out and stuffed into a box. That's what do the books look like? I wanted to know, really, if you want to dumb it down, what were my goals? If you listen to an interview I did with NPR in 2006, that's a while back, I talked about, I was interested in what's in Bob Dylan's bookshelf and what's in his record collection. And ive been able to piece together lots of that. Ive got 100 plus books and no shortage of records that may not be as readily apparent to spot. And with some gumption and some work and having some good tools, I was able to put that together. So do I know the books? And thats what I want to know about anybody. I love that your backdrop that I can see here shows a photo of your bookshelf because thats how I would judge people. Whats on your bookshelf? Whats in your record collection. Thats what I want to talk to you about. And thats what my initial goal was. That was my mission statement. What books does Bob Dylan read?
What records does he listen to? How does that impact him play into his work? And so from the most basic standpoint its there now I can info dump on you forever. And thats one of the things I think trying to find a balance. I can write lots of too long didnt read essays but how do you get those points across? And ive been trying to use the application formerly known as Twitter for a while for that which a lot of people have stepped back from for notable reasons. Instagram has become a really good way to do that recently. One of the things that Instagram has added is the ability to add songs to your posts. So I've been doing a whole series of posts recently where I'm here's the specific verse from the new lost City Rambler song that I'm talking about. Here's a photo of the lyrics from Dylan. Here's how these lyrics look in the liner notes. There's a whole series of songs from a box set on the Bear family label of early Nashville countrysides that Dylan quotes from a lot on a lot of the different songs throughout love and theft. So being able to exploit a resource like Instagram to break these down into bite sized chunks and then if you want to take here's 15, here's 20 bite sized chunks. And I've done that with a lot of the text as well. Here's a pass contrast compare. Here's the underlined portion. Here's how you can see it in context on the page. I think that's been another way besides writing a full length book describing this, capturing the best of it, how can you break it down to bite sized chunks that someone can go okay, there is something going on there and that continues to gain traction with people that I'm interested in having conversations with or people interested in music and the arts and want to have a rational, interesting discussion back and forth with that. So trying to take advantage of those platforms and Instagram, especially with the addition of being able to add music recently has become, I think a much more effective way to communicate some of those components. So ive been trying to take advantage of some of that.
[00:50:57] Speaker A: I was one of those people used to follow you on Twitter but a step back im on there but I dont ever post or even really look at it. I should check you out on Instagram. Whats your handle?
[00:51:05] Speaker B: Its just my name. Scott Wormwith I keep it easy.
[00:51:08] Speaker A: Excellent. Scott, this has been amazing. Fantastic time talking to you. I love everything you're doing. I love what your insights, your research, the way you put things together. I think it's invaluable to the Dylan studies community, whatever you want to call it. You were a premier dylanologist out there and I'm really honored to have you on the show. So thanks for this.
[00:51:29] Speaker B: I appreciate it. When I started doing some of this work, a lot of it didn't seem plausible to many people, and you were an early adopter. Read some of the things I was doing with things I wrote in your classes that you were teaching, and it meant a lot to have a voice saying, oh, I see what you're talking about, Scott. I really appreciate this and I'm going to tell some other folks about it. So it meant a lot to me. And that was more than a decade ago, and I've been following all the stuff you've been doing now. So it's been a real pleasure to get a chance to sit and talk at length. So thank you for having me.
[00:51:58] Speaker A: Yeah, thanks for reminding me. I used to use this in your stuff in class that used to freak my students out to no end.
[00:52:05] Speaker B: It was good for them.
[00:52:06] Speaker A: So thank you for that, Scott. This has been great. Thanks a lot.
[00:52:09] Speaker B: My pleasure. Take care.
[00:52:12] Speaker A: Thank you for listening to the Dylan Tons podcast. Be sure to subscribe to, have the Dylan tons sent directly to your inbox and share the Dylan tons on social media.
