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Hey everyone, this is Jim Salbucci from the Dylan taunts and welcome to a million dollar bash.
[00:00:21] Speaker C: It's that million dollar bash.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: It Bob Dylan's 31st studio album, Love and theft, was released on September 11, 2001. And while some folks have made much of that pretentious co occurrence, for instance, seeing the destruction depicted in high water for Charlie Patton is an uncanny, if not mystical, counterpart to the tragedy of 911. It really is just a coincidence. The album's title is the only Dylan title that includes quotation marks and is apparently derived from historian Eric Lott's book about minstrel shows, love and theft, blackfaced minstrel sea, and the american working class. The album's lyrics are among the first to be heavily researched for references to and lifts from other works, and there are many, perhaps most notably some lines from japanese true crime writer Junichi Saga's confessions of a yakuza. The songs are rich with characters, men and women, real and fanciful, and events as devastating as a flood and as benign as the sound of fornication in the room next door. And there is humor, including some hardcore dad jokes.
Sonically, the album is as eclectic as any Dylan has released, spanning such genres as rockabilly, old timey torch ballads, and some of the most hard driving blues Dylan has ever produced.
Speaking of production, this one is by Jack Frost, Dylan's nom to production. The album before was the brilliant time out of mind from 1997 and would be another five years before he would release modern times. In the hiatus, he released his genre defying movie Mask and anonymous in 2003 and published his unreliable memoir Chronicles Volume one in 2004.
Love and theft, mass and anonymous and chronicles form a cross genre trilogy of sorts, all reflecting on memory, transition and destiny.
So I want to introduce our regular panel of million dollar bashers, and we're going to start with rock and Rob Virginio.
[00:02:31] Speaker C: Hi Jim.
[00:02:32] Speaker D: Hi everybody.
[00:02:33] Speaker E: Thank you very much for having me.
[00:02:35] Speaker B: Next up is Nina goss.
[00:02:37] Speaker C: Hello.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: How is everyone?
[00:02:39] Speaker B: Hey, Nina. And we got Cork Carney.
[00:02:41] Speaker C: Hey Jim. Hey, everyone.
[00:02:43] Speaker B: Gray Lee Harry. Sorry, Grayley Herron.
[00:02:49] Speaker D: That's good. That sounds more like confederate general, doesn't it? Gray Lee Aaron, which is appropriate for this album. Happy to be here.
[00:03:00] Speaker B: Happy to have you. And then Ernie Callahan.
[00:03:03] Speaker A: Hey everyone.
[00:03:04] Speaker F: Thanks for having us, Jim.
[00:03:06] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. It's always a fun time and one day I'm going to get nicknames for everyone not just Rob.
All right, so I told people at the beginning of this, I didn't plan anything. There's so many things we could talk about. And instead of asking questions and doing that sort of a thing, having all the stuff set up beforehand, I usually have at least a cheat sheet. This time I figured, let's wing it, so let's have some fun with this album. I'm just going to throw the doors open. Who wants to talk about love and theft?
[00:03:36] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:03:37] Speaker D: I'm the one who selfishly suggested this, because I had been diving back into the album recently, working on the most recent installment of my substac, Shadow Chasing. I was doing a concert from November of 2001 that Dylan played at my own campus, Xavier University, and this was his first concert since 911, but also his first concert since the release of Love and theft on that same day. And five of the songs featured in that concert, by far more than any other album, were from love and theft. And they were awesome. They were the highlights of the show. And so I've been thinking a lot about this album. Way back when Jim first interviewed me for the Dylan Tuts, and we focused a lot on my book on time out of mind, jim asked me, what was your first reaction to time out of mind? And I loved it from the start. But Jim, I think, like a lot of folks, it took a while to warm up to the album. I came to appreciate it, but not immediately. That's my experience with love and theft. I love it now. I didn't totally love it immediately. I thought some of the songs, his voice didn't sound awesome. I thought I could appreciate the variety of musical styles, but a lot of those musical styles just didn't seem like something I was that into Bean Crosby era music. And so it took a while for me to appreciate it. And weirdly enough, by far my favorite performance in that 2001 Xavier show is Sugar Baby. And I actively disliked Sugar Baby. When I first heard it. I thought it sounded so morose and it sounded so bitter, and it sounded virulently misogynistic. There's no limit to the troubles women bring and you ain't got no brains know how. I just didn't like it. But I've come to appreciate that song Sugar Baby on multiple levels, partially as a kind of dialogue with Doc Boggs, sugar baby. But I also think I've just come to embrace what a great vehicle it is for Dylan's vocal performance. And though the version on the album is good, I mean, that version at Xavier is great, and it's great in the way that you can appreciate, say, sir Anthony Hopkins playing Hannibal Lecter or James Gandolfini playing Tony Soprano. You don't like the character, but you can appreciate what a great performance it is and how much it gives a great performer to work with. And I feel that way about multiple songs on this album. But Sugar Baby, I think, is the one that the pendulum has swung the farthest for me, from actively disliking it to now really appreciating it as one of Dylan's great vocal performances.
[00:06:30] Speaker B: Yeah, I like how you talked about the character, right? Because he's playing a character and he does that throughout this album in a variety of ways. I is never Dylan in this album at all, which is true of a lot of his songs, but really decidedly in this album. And as I mentioned in my intro, this is an album that's just full of characters. In my first experience of it, almost the opposite now, I have to say I was all turned around by the events of 911. Having lived in DC at the time, we were a little concerned, so it was hard for me to get into it the first little bit. But once got beyond that, I was totally into this album and I've only come to love it even more. It's one of my favorite Dylan albums of all time.
What else do we have to say?
[00:07:13] Speaker C: I think it's interesting that Grayley picks up on Sugar Baby because that was the one that I was going to spend some time with. It's such a great fucking song.
I hadn't listened to it that much. I think those 2001 shows, there's some great bootlegs, I think Graham Hayley, you're absolutely right. It takes a different sort of thing going on.
But I've been not connected to this. But throughout February, I was reading a lot of James M. Kane and then Raymond Chandler, who I've never dug into. And so I was reading the long goodbye, which is there are some issues with that book. I know it's reading in 2024, but I'll say straight up, that is just the most stunning novel I've read, maybe in years and years. But then going back to Sugar Baby within the context of that, it's like this is exactly the same sort of patois, the same language, the same character building, the same scene mean. And we can go back to the Sugar baby as a theft, as a musical theft. We can go back to the Sugar baby as a borrowing. I think there is an entire book length exegesis on this song in terms of what he's doing in love and theft with that song.
But I was just really blown away returning to this record that I had always liked, but I hadn't really listened to it a long time and just realized just every single song is, like, worth revisiting. I will also say, I don't know the last record other than this one where he plays all of those songs live, like this album. All the songs become part of the live set. Some of these songs become massive hosts in the live world for the next couple of decades. Like, he really does. Some of those songs he's playing 800 times. So every song gets played. That's not the same. He can say for a lot of his other records, and they all become live performances and they all become something maybe a little different. But I was really happy to go back over the next few weeks to.
[00:09:09] Speaker B: Look at this record.
Yeah, I had fun listening to it in preparation for this as well. It always just blows me away. And Sugar Baby is one of his great endings. And for an artist who produces so many great album endings, that's saying something.
[00:09:25] Speaker A: Grayley, listening to the album again and thinking about it made me think of Grayley's time out of mind project and how these two albums, and also Grayley's saying that it's resistant to love when you first hear it, and time out of mind and love and theft. It's with time out of mind that he introduces this sudden, antiquarian, timeless world. Illusions and references that you're lying if you say you get them all. Sean Willens would be lying if he said he got all the references and love and theft. And so there really is this feeling that there's an understory, there's a coherent understory to these records. And that vexation of trying to locate what the subterranean narrative and the ground that the reality of this life that's being portrayed in the albums is really interesting to me, this pull to find the metaphysical narrative behind it. And I did. Listening to it again, I was struck by how carefully and terrifically he creates this character, this Persona, who alternates between brutality and flippancy and sentimentality and arrogance. And really the brutality and the sentimentality in this album are so striking and create such a character who, to me, in Sugar Baby, and I heard the most amazing performance of this in Glasgow, of all places, just breath. If you find November 2005 Glasgow, it will blow your mind.
In Sugar Baby, I hear this character who's been just fighting with himself and everything around him, exhausting himself. He's depleted in Sugar Baby, and remember, Gabriel blows his horn, and then what's the next thing we get is thunder on the mount and the sound. So I found that really interesting, this tool to narrate this world that he done.
[00:11:50] Speaker B: So, Nina, when you're talking about a character in the album, are you saying there's one coherent character, maybe a speaker or narrator of some sort?
[00:11:58] Speaker A: See, then I felt a coherence. I felt, this time around, that there's such a pattern of desire and exhaustion and really brutality and the minstrels like humor throughout it. And I think we will. I'm sure we'll get to talking about what this has to do with lot and love and theft. But I did feel a man trapped and exhausting himself throughout the album.
[00:12:34] Speaker B: Wow, that's a great quote. A man trapped and exhausting himself. I love that.
[00:12:38] Speaker E: And I think the sentimentality and the brutality go hand in hand.
They absolutely go hand in hand. I mean, what is sentimentality but a kind of emotional illusion of the brutality that subtends life in America?
[00:12:58] Speaker B: You got to elaborate on that, man.
[00:13:01] Speaker E: Well, I mean, to be sentimental is to idealize. A past is to idealize. And, I mean, you get that by and by. You get that in moonlight. But then there are always creeping into those songs the hint or the trace of the brutality of american life. And I think, for me, at least, and I won't go off into theory land, I've got a lot of different ideas here about intertextuality. The quotes around love and theft, for me, mean much more than the title. But the love and the theft of african american music that Dylan, I think, is really exploring in this album. The minstrel show both sentimentalizes the plantation slave. But then, of course, the whole act of sentimentalizing the past in that way is a brutal dehumanization. And so you can't take the two things apart. They're two sides of the same coin.
[00:13:58] Speaker B: Yeah, and there's something like that in mass and anonymous, too, right? There's that sort of nostalgic feel to it. Yet it's set in some sort of weird dystopian future, I guess, or present that the carnivaleesque aspects, literally a carnival, but very old timey. The dumb jokes, some of the acting, some of the characters, that same idea. But it is a brutal movie. It ends with a murder and an arrest.
Robbie, I'd love to hear a little bit more about your theories.
[00:14:25] Speaker D: I want to hear about the quotes. Sorry.
[00:14:29] Speaker E: Well, I mean, for me, I'll anchor this in an anecdote. And it dovetails with my current book project on John Wesley parting. But what's interesting to me is that the intertextual nature of this album, and I mean that in, well, the intertextual nature of this album when I was reading, and I love Michael Gray and I love his book song and dance man, but he's got this chapter called even post structuralists ought to have the pre war blues. And he does a really generous reading of Stephen Scoby and Aiden Day, the only two scholars that really take post structuralism and Dylan seriously. But what he does is he critiques Aiden day for using jargon which is dismissive. It's not really the point here. But then what he does in that chapter is he provides these exhaustive footnotes, just page after page of footnotes, that trace and track every possible blues reference that Dylan is making. And the problems present themselves for Gray in this way. I think for one, his plethora of illusions and intertextual gestures on Dylan's part strengthen, I think doesn't weaken a need for a kind of more involved critique of this intertextual artist instead of just tracking down sources and doing a Scott Warmouth sort of thing.
[00:15:59] Speaker D: Right?
[00:15:59] Speaker E: And secondly, what he does inciting all of these blues texts is ignores theorists like Houston Baker, Jr. Who look at the blues as a, if I can quote him, the blues as at the intersections of experience where roads cross and diverge. The blues singer this is Houston Baker, Jr. From his book Blues Ideology. In african american literature, the blues singer and his performance serve as codifiers, absorbing and transforming discontinuous experience into formal, expressive instances that bear only the trace of origins, refusing to be pinned down to any final dualistic significance. It's an opening up, even as they speak, of paralyzing absence and ineradicable desire. Their instrumental rhythms suggest change, movement, action, continuance, unlimited and unending possibility. Like signification itself, blues are always nomadically wandering like freight hopping hobos. They are ever on the move, ceaselessly summing novel experience. And so for me, I think what Dylan is doing on love and theft is really exploring an intertextual poetics in order to address the off, silenced, but nevertheless present languages expressions and primarily through the blues. For Dylan, the expressions of african american voices, if that makes any sense.
[00:17:34] Speaker D: Yeah, sure does.
[00:17:35] Speaker B: And speaking of jargon, just for those folks out there who haven't immersed themselves in textual studies for their entire careers, the term inner text is beyond just a synonym for illusion. It's not just a textual reference, but an inner text is an interaction. It could be on purpose. It could be by accident. It just happenstance.
But it links the two texts. That inner is very important. So there's a reference in one work to another work, whether intentional or be.
We're suggesting that there is something there connecting their meaning. It's not mystical, but it is interesting.
[00:18:12] Speaker E: And it destabilizes the subject. And it also is a term that's often used in Dylan's studies. To just mean illusion. Literary illusion.
[00:18:21] Speaker B: Which isn't incorrect in itself, but not.
[00:18:23] Speaker E: Yeah, right.
[00:18:25] Speaker A: Can I put in here with something that is right with what Rob is saying. And it's something that I found in Lott's book. That really speaks to what Rob is talking about. And what the album's time out of mind. Specifically in love and theft, opened up in Dylan. This complex relationship to the blues and black music. Because I really think this is. And then we don't have to talk about this stuff any. But I really wanted to. So lot writes, but with antebellum blackface performers. A set of racial attitudes and cultural styles. That in America go by the name of bohemianism. First emerged. And there was a utopian or emancipatory moment. In their often clumsy courtship of black men. I am not interested in romanticizing those performers. While I believe they were, to some extent drawn to, quote, blackness, unquote. This fact should also interrogate the racial logic. Usually hidden in our romantic notions. Of the bohemian, the beat, capital b, and the hipster. We ought to recognize the degree to which blackface stars. Inaugurated an american tradition of class abdication. Through gendered cross racial immersion. Which persists in historically differentiated ways to our own day. So my question is. And even when Lott was interviewed and talked about. How do you feel with Bob Dylan apparently naming his album after you? And he talks about the appropriation, and he excoriates Michael Bolton. And these appropriators. Who are clumsy and cheapening the original material. And he says, oh, but Bob Dylan is working with this at a different level. And I think, why does Bob Dylan get this special treatment in this realm? This is a really pointed and rich critique. I think that Lot is giving. And I get that the text is dense. And may not travel that well over in the pod sphere. But there's a way that we exempt Dylan. Or we valorize the appropriation work that he does. And I'm curious about.
We give him this pass because he's Bob Dylan. And he's a singular magnificence upon the planet. That's why everyone's nodding.
I guess that's why okay, I'm done with the theory.
[00:21:21] Speaker B: Because he's Saint Dylan. I don't know.
I'd love to hear response to.
[00:21:30] Speaker F: I mean, I don't know, Nina. I think it's something that I wrestle with a lot. Like why is it that it's okay for Dylan? It's what you're asking, why is it okay for Dylan? But we're critical of other artists doing it. And I have no good answer for that because anytime I think of, we can ask the question why Dylan studies isn't more diverse. Because there are other artists in other areas, in african american studies or other minority studies that actually speak the voice of those folks. And so what interest do they have in Dylan? And so I think you're asking that on the flip side, like why does he get a pass? And I don't have any good answer for that. But to what, Grayley? My mind is finally working, by the way. So to Grayley's, your comment about the eclectic song mixture, I thought that maybe he was saying in some way that in all of these genres we have stolen from black culture, and so he's going to include all of them. And it's a simple answer, but that was the one that I reconciled when I was listening to it. And then there's just a really weird memory I have from being at the aerial theater in Houston 2003, swing dancing to summer nights and general admission. I think you're right though, Nina. I don't know why he gets a pass. Why did he get a pass? As pointed out in the Buddha Kong Minder notes during punk, like everyone else is passe, but Dylan is like, why does Dylan always get a pass? And you said to me, nina, when I was trying to defend Dylan and some of the misogyny, and you said, you can't make him what he's not. And so why do we try to make him what he's not? We're always shifting to or contorting ourselves intellectually to try to exonerate him in some way.
[00:23:15] Speaker D: There was a line I used, and it was with respect to time out of mind, but it applies directly to the questions Nina is justifiably raising with love and death, too, that I felt like so much of the oxygen had been sucked out of the room in debating Daniel Anwa and his production interventions on time out of mind, and that these other interesting but also potentially disturbing aspects of the album have been overlooked, the murder ballad side of it, but also what I take to be a whole lot of cross racial performance of Dylan's essentially singing in first person about african american experience through the voice of a black character. And I feel that's going on in Mississippi as well, which started out as a time out of mind song, but then showcased on love. And I said that time out of mind has been too controversial for the wrong reasons and not controversial enough for the right reasons. And that's true of love and theft, too. I mean, ultimately, if that is what Dylan is doing, is not just tipping his hat to the roots in popular music and culture, to the blackface menstrual tradition, but at times, performing in first person voice through african american characters, that is and should be a very controversial move on his part. And you're right, we probably shouldn't be giving him a free pass on it, though. There is a sense that at least he's done his homework and has thought through these issues in a way that a lot of lesser artists are just exploiting for commercial appeal. But, yeah, that is only one step in the direction of explanation. It doesn't go so far as full exoneration.
[00:24:59] Speaker F: You mean Michael Bolton is not quoting Henry Timrod?
[00:25:05] Speaker C: I think there's another angle to this, though, and I think that where I love all of you all, and where I'm a little underserved in my own connection to this material is because I'm not from a literary perspective. And I learn so much every time any of you all talk.
So this record came out. I was in graduate school. I was in history.
I'd already read lot. Lot was something that was part of this world. I was working on early jazz, so my dissertation was on jazz in the. Then in 2001, love and theft in quotes comes in. And I'm not saying that I saw this at the time, but looking back on it, and I'm tiptoeing into kind of another, larger project that I'm playing with. It's history angled. And I think that, not to say this is why we can exonerate him or whether exoneration is even necessary at this point. But I think there is a pulse of history within this record that he's doing something that's not superficial. He's not just borrowing for a one off.
And this is the best example, as a cohesive record of how he's able to magnify this stuff in a way that's creating something way broader that doesn't give him a pass. But I think there's an interesting pulse here. And I think that the other element of this is that this is by far. I was thinking about this for the last couple of weeks. I can't think of another album like his. By far his most southern record. Southern in the expansiveness of the region. Not just the black south, which he, of course, is playing with. But he's also talking about the south generally. Every song. Not every song, but most songs lyrically come to the south. And every song you can at least put within the southern musical tradition, too. And I think that there's a historical piece that's playing here. Where he is connecting and gluing these different stories. To something that's maybe more of an excavation of the past.
More so than a direct response as to the blues equals this or this plus Dylan equals that. I think that's there. I think what's the beauty of this record is, I think what Rob was saying. And every time Rob talks. It's like the old commercial, I guess.
Gotta get my pen out for some notes. Which is exactly what I did. I think it's a record that allows for that.
And then there's this other piece that comes into it. Which is sideways and saying. It's also a meditation on the past. It's a meditation on history. It's a meditation upon meditations of the past. And that, I think, is not why Dylan gets a pass. But I think it is showing how this is such an elevated piece of art. That he's able to do this in a way that is also melodic. It's pretty intense, if you think about it. The other thing I'm going to say, and this goes back to Aaron's point. Is that on a less lofty summer days. Is one of those beautifully recorded drums and bass. In Dylan's whole world. The drums and bass in that song. Sound like they were recorded at a dance hall somewhere. They're gorgeous. They're roomy. They're boomy. And that takes us back to Chris Shaw. Jack Frost gets all the points. But Chris Shaw is sitting there in midtown Manhattan. Creating this. Helping create, as the engineer. The most evocative soundscape that he's had in a long time. That goes to modern times. Well, it goes back to. Things have changed, right? That's a key point. Goes to modern times. And then it goes into, what? Rough and rowdy Ray Wade, he's there again.
Jack Frost is this enigmatic figure. But Chris Shaw is less enigmatic. He's right there. And I think that he needs some play here. If you go back and listen to summer days and buy him. Some of those songs are just really gorgeous. The way they're capturing the live feel. Of the drums and Tony. And it is something that I've just been awestruck by going back to it. So there's a lot of pieces into this, but I think it's an album that can contain all of.
[00:29:01] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:29:02] Speaker B: One of the things about Shaw as the engineer, he had to capture live feel, but it was live, right? Which is incredibly hard to do in the studio. And he's even said that half the music's coming through Dylan's live mic as he's singing. These songs were performed by Dylan's roadband in the studio. They just multiple takes, but that's very little any sort of overdubbing at all. And a couple of the songs, apparently Dylan turned his back to the room, Robert Johnson, and sang into a corner of the room. All this is remarkably good engineering. And it's also a remarkable way to record an album in 2001.
[00:29:45] Speaker C: Isn't it great, though, that you have this kind of probably really nice, cool midtown Manhattan studio, and then within this, you piece together all these songs that are a reflection of the 20th century, 19th century into the 20th century. And then on top of that, you're like, let's put a japanese crime novelist into this. I mean, it really is cool. Like, it's really fun. Not as a game. There is a game to it, but it's just fun that his mind is able to just put all that together into something that is. I think it's incredibly coherent statement. I'm not saying that what that statement necessarily is, but I think it's a coherent piece. And I'm not sure. I'm not good at this, and I'm not sure if it is all these different people singing different songs from different characters. I don't know. That's not ever how I go to. I'm not saying that's not there, but that's not my normal mindset. It's like when you hear about Rem's monster and then types like, every song was written as a movie from another character. Like, oh, that's cool. I had no idea. But I think that's an interesting perspective to that as well. But I think there's something in this record that I think is just. I don't think he's tapped into until the last record. I really think that those two records are tent poles for something massive.
[00:30:59] Speaker D: I agree.
[00:31:00] Speaker E: I think that those two records together, he's deeply thinking about history and those two records, american history for sure. I agree 100%.
[00:31:12] Speaker A: See, I really meant it as an open question. I don't think he gives himself a pass. I think he sees himself as part of this beloved theft mint. You'll see. He's willing to stand in his truth that he's part of the. As a white performer, he is part of this tradition. And he ratchets that up to such a level of just commitment and ingenuity and brilliance. He ratchets that up to see, look, I'm part of this.
And he makes that tradition transparent because he's mastered it so incredibly so.
I think that's.
There is no pass. There's just the truth of what he understands he is part of. And that makes him entirely different from the Michael Bowles or whomever who are trying to costume themselves in post racial love of black music.
That's not what he's doing. He knows there's no such thing as a post racial world. And that is so clear, I think, in something like this.
[00:32:37] Speaker C: And that's exactly why Minstrel C works in this. Because Minstrel C is not a simplistic act. It's a very complicated act. I mean, it can be very racially coarse and derogatory and negative. But in other parts of it, it's something that's really complicated. And to deconstruct all the meaning out of that is not simple. And that kind of is why I think it touches onto the lot book, too. It's not a simple putting on a mask or a costume. It's something very different. And it's like we were joking. Like, is it because he provides footnotes? But in some ways it is because. Has he done the re. Yes. Here's his syllabus for this book, for this record. But I don't think that. Again, I think it's just showing that there's a depth of understanding here that he's tapping into that popular music doesn't normally do. Except that popular music is the exact source material for why all these things have occurred.
[00:33:30] Speaker E: If I can read a quote from Eric Lott's later book that Grayley wonderfully uses on his to rook. I'm citing this quote because it amplifies exactly what Nina's absolutely brilliant point about Dylan recognizing that he is in the midst of this love and theft. He's not exonerated from it. Loss, inevitably. This is Lott saying that it's a melancholy album, that there's melancholy that pervades it. And he says, loss inevitably undergirds the self in this view. And if that tends in a variety of ways to haunt us, it also connects us concretely and materially to the past. To history. And so we're caught in that movement between present and past. And that quote just left to mind with Nina's brilliant comment there.
[00:34:26] Speaker D: That relates back to an earlier quote you gave us from Houston Baker, Rob. And I mean, there was a lot packed into that, so I'm not going to unpack at all. But the image that stood out to me was talking about that resistance to, what was it? Dualistic signification, something like that. And so that kind of pendulum swing or that back and forth in the in betweenness that lies between two poles. And yet in order to appreciate that, you have to set up the two poles. And I feel like Dylan's doing that right from the start with the first song, Tweedle D and Tweedledum, right, which is a perfect opening song for this album. You're quoting already from another recognizable source. From the start, you've got the Lewis Carroll characters, right? It is, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, I'd never noticed this until re listening before prepping for today's talk. I think it's the only third person voice song on the whole album. I think everything else has first person characters. We can debate whether it's one single character or a series of masks, but for whatever reason, this is telling the story about clearly two other characters, Tweedledee and Tweedledum. But what are they? They're Tweedledee and Tweedledum. They're tain and Abel, how we get that reference to the land of nod. So definitely not accidental. So these kind of sibling rivals, they're the north and the south. If you want to talk about civil War, it's black and white, too. If we want to talk about menstrual show. And given Dylan, our great Gemini artist, who constantly is talking about warring against versions of himself, I fought with my twin, that persecutor within. There's a sense that even internally, if you want to read these as deep profiles of a character that is sometimes sentimental and sometimes brooding and morose and violent, maybe that there are this tug of war going on within the character or characters in the album as well. And so it's just such a rich album, one that is unique in Dylan's discography in certain ways and in other ways is quintessential because it just touches. It's got tendrils reaching out, tentacles reaching out in every direction, and all the things you love about Dylan, and it's all right here in this album.
[00:36:53] Speaker B: I love the fact that you brought up Twiddle D. Twiddle dumb. The other thing I brought this up in a conference paper years ago. The thing about Toodle D and Twiddledum is we learn, like maybe the third line of the song, they're dead.
They're two big bags of Dead Men's bones. That describes a corpse. Right. And that theme pervades this album. Death, one could argue floater, is a man moving toward death or a man who's already dead and is just reflecting on his life. You see this throughout high water, which I mentioned before all throughout this album, and you saw something similar in time out of mind. And you go on and definitely see it in rough and rowdy ways. Death haunts Dylan's albums.
[00:37:35] Speaker C: Any of the lit scholars going to help us with the Shakespeare in here? There's a lot of Shakespeare's in that. There's that great Briar's line that always throws me. Where is that going to come from? And what's he going to do with it every time he finishes it?
[00:37:48] Speaker A: But those Shakespeare parodies are from minstrel, the Ophelia line.
That's right out of a minstrel show. That was a crucial part of them, these capering parodies of Shakespeare.
[00:38:08] Speaker C: Well, I think it's also the idea of that high culture, low culture, mid culture blurring that the century is doing, and then spits out all these sort of weird sort of juxtapositions. And then he's doing the same thing. But in a way, right? I mean, he's doing high culture, low culture and blurring it into something else. But I think it's.
There is one writer who was talking about this, but the idea of how he uses space in these lyrics a lot, too. I think sugar baby is a good example. Other things where he's using, like where's he going to go with this? Because it's blues, but he's so brilliant at it. He's using blue structures, but he's very inventive about it. And so you know what's going to be coming on. But when he hits the word briars, you're not thinking immediately my heart desires. Right. But it's like that's exactly where he goes to it. And he does this a little bit, I think, in time out of mind, but he does it here a lot where it's like, really, where is he going to go? And then, of course, you have what we haven't brought up at all. Samantha Brown. Right. We haven't talked about the travel show, the wonderful Samantha Brown, and how that comes into really, it's really just a bonkers record on some level, but it's just so amazing. I can't tell you how much more I appreciate it now than I ever have. I was like, wow, this is, you know what? Dylan's pretty fucking.
He has the capacity of being pretty good. Let's say that.
[00:39:29] Speaker D: Pretty good. Yeah. For the benefit of our listeners asking for someone else and not myself. No, truly, I'm going to admit I actually don't get your Samantha Brown reference. I don't know what you're talking about there, Corey. Could you explain that to me?
[00:39:43] Speaker C: Doesn't he mention Samantha Brown on this album? He doesn't.
[00:39:47] Speaker D: Yeah, I think he.
[00:39:47] Speaker B: I think she.
[00:39:51] Speaker C: Brown was. Well, she is. She's a travel correspondent for you all know. This is Notland, isn't it? It's one of the few references I got. I was like, I don't get the Ophelia Samantha Brown.
[00:40:06] Speaker D: I could google it, but she's a travel person.
[00:40:10] Speaker C: She's like a Rick Steves or something. And she goes around and has a travel show that was popular. Well, I guess she's still around, but she had a travel show that was like the pre bourdain world of travel.
Okay, maybe it's contemporary to Bourdain. I don't want to say that. And I'm not saying that any value judgment, because I think Samantha Brown is great. But it is a funny reference that comes up into it and they make sure that it was chased. Right? Is that the whole story, like a chased relationship?
[00:40:38] Speaker B: I get sleeper. Three even.
[00:40:40] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:40:40] Speaker D: And Sally reference too. But my apologies to Samantha Brown if she's listening. And please don't unsubscribe. Or Michael Bolton, I suppose if he's listening.
[00:40:50] Speaker C: Great travel tips. Grayley.
Grayley goes on tweedled and Tweedledum and doesn't even touch on the most obvious thing that everyone talked about for weeks after that record came out.
[00:41:03] Speaker D: Uncle John's bongos or. No, that's floater. No, it is Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
[00:41:09] Speaker C: Well, he's clearly talking about the election. Right?
[00:41:14] Speaker D: Yeah, I forgot that.
[00:41:16] Speaker B: Not about that election.
[00:41:18] Speaker C: You have all these like 75 tendrils that come down. But also it could be just be Bush. I don't know. Bush. Gore might as well, I think. Just to say this, I think that between the panelists here, taking myself out of it, obviously, but I think it was one of the most intriguing collection of thoughts that we've had on one of these things. I'll be thinking about this and I will say this too, just as the word subterranean has come up like 15 times this week. So tell me what tarot driven divination I have to go to. But why is subterranean this week's word? I need to figure that out, too. But that's for me and my palo santo after this. But anyway, yeah, great talk, everyone.
[00:42:01] Speaker B: I love just another word for underground, man.
[00:42:05] Speaker C: I didn't mean what it meant, Jim.
What does it mean?
[00:42:10] Speaker B: So we're all going to live in.
[00:42:11] Speaker C: A few years after the nuclear bombs fall subterranean, in quotes. I don't know.
[00:42:17] Speaker B: We're going to have a cave gap. Right?
Bomb shelter gap. All right.
Subterranean gap. Well, thank you, everyone. This has been another fantastic conversation. I mean, this stuff blows me away, and I live for this. This is great. I can't wait to get this out there. So thank you to everyone, and till next time, thank you for listening to the Dillon Taunts podcast. Be sure to subscribe to, have the Dillontans sent directly to your inbox and share the dillonts on social media.
