The Philosophy of Modern Song

The Philosophy of Modern Song comes as a nifty package with some great pictures, tho you have to go on the Internet to figure out who is who on some of them. The cover is part of the package, not that you can tell a book by the cover. On the Internet there's some discussions to figure out Who is the young woman rocker on the cover pic with Little Richard and Eddie Cochran? I couldn't guess. The Guardian put some heavy legwork into trying to figure out who and why. It’s Alis Lesley. Why? Why does there have to be a why? You have to think that somebody showed Dylan the picture and he said THAT’S IT! Just as he did when he put Claudia Cardinale in the set of inner sleeve artwork on the original copy of Blonde on Blonde. The photographer had the picture there on the drafting table and Dylan said YEAH, THAT. Later editions switched it out.

But we weren’t waiting baited breathily for for the pics! Bob Dylan is a frigging Actual Institute in himself. He is where artists study the meaning of America, and a big school in that institute is the Bob Dylan School of American Song. The chance to hear his take on song writing was something a lot of people had to be looking forward. He doesn’t let us down, but our presumptions mean naught to him, andhe surprises us at every turn, alternating between stark gravity and hipster goof mode.

Dylan's the great songwriter, whimsical but a dedicated life-long student of the form.  Of course, he's just an immense artist. And he takes song pretty seriously line-by-line in this book. He starts off with Bobby Bare’s “Detroit City”- “I want to go home” is the refrain. Yknow how it goes .. “Last night I went to sleep in Detroit City, dreaming of the cotton fields back home.” Dylan digs into that, and what it would mean to a listener. “You went to sleep last night Detroit City. This morning you overslept, dreamt about white snow cotton fields, and had delusions about imaginary farmsteads.” Dylangets into the lyrics and seems to understand what they could evoke to people that cared. Bobby sings “Home folks think I’m big in Detroit City.” Dylan analysis: “From the postcards and junk mail that you dashed off, everybody assumes you’re a bigwig, that things are cool and beautiful, but they’re not, and the disgrace of failure is overwhelming. Your life is unraveling.”

Bob Dylan continues the forensic, and pulls no punch: “Everywhere you go people treat you like you are dead. Everywhere you go, you uncover more lies. If only they could read between the lines, they could figure it out. It wouldn't take much guesswork.”

Next up: My Generation: “You’re talking about your generation, sermonize, giving a discord, Straight talk eyeballs to eyeballs.”

Or,  how about veering into Dylanesque atmospherics? : El Paso: [To Rosa’s Cantina,  yknow  the place ‘where Felina would whirl?” ] -  In this book it is “The same cantina over and over again. The symbolic Rosa. The black gown and the Bishop's ring,  the wine blood of Christian martyrs, blood that dyes the White Rose red.”

Dylan came up in a time when the writing of Thomas Wolfe or William Saroyan or John Steinbeck were echoed in film, cabaret and theatre approach to folk music performance. You’d look to the song for its underlined story and drama…and that is what he does through out the book. I just got going with it, and as Alice Cooper said, I still got a long way to go.

Dylan loose formula is to take a song, take the lyrics and imagine them in their significance deeply. And sometimes a bit of life where he steps aside and talks about the artist and so on and so forth with trivia but there is no such thing as trivia in the canon. You could pull out a lot of great philosophical quotations, as well as troublingly odd conundrums.

Songs and artists in this little omnibus .. here are just some..of the some 60+ :

Detroit City by Bobby Bare
Without a Song by Perry Como
There Stands the Glass by Webb Pierce
My Generation by The Who
Long Tall Sally by Little Richard
Poor Little Fool by Rickie Nelson
I Got A Woman by Ray Charles
It’s Cheaper to Keep Here by Johnny Taylor
CIA Man by the Fugs
Big Boss Man by Jimmy Reed
Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood by Nina Simone
Key to the Highway by Big Bill Broonzy and Little Walter
War by Edwin Starr
You're Cheating Heart by Hank Williams

How's it end, Hoss? Dylan writes: "... so it is with music, it is of a time but also timeless; a thing with which to make memories and the memor itself...Music transcends time by living within it, just as reincarnation allows us to transend life by living it again and again."

Really there's an insightful kick in the face in almost every square inch of this book thanks to tremendously unique troubled troubadour and spokesman of a generation: Bob Dylan! -Jack Vaughan

Side note 1 : Dylan acknowledges cites and thanks Eddie Gorodetsky in the opening to The Philosophy of Modern Song. He is cited as a source of a lot of input and excellent source material. This project has some of the feel of some other Dylan projects in which Eddie was involved : His sampler for Starbucks, the Theme Time Radio Show, the crazy Christmas record - all bear the stamps of Eddie who was a Blues DJ here when he went to Emerson College, before heading to NY to write for SNL and LA to produce 2 ½ Men, and to Malibu to become Bob Dylan’s fishing buddy. I had a great time meeting Eddie when I was A&R man for Airways records, and have discussed that before.

Side note 2 : # Kind of Odd: I first heard this song when my dormitory mates sang it in unison at Marquette Schroeder Hall. The Hall had just been in the middle of the night fire-bombed – it was the time of Cambodian Invasion and Kent State – and the fire drill was wicked intense. So, as we returned to interrupted slumber some of the boys sang “I want to go home” Detroit City refrain.