Bob Dylan's Instagram Posts

The Hidden Story

Four posts. Actually, make that five, with one Ricky Nelson song replaced by another. Yesterday, on an Instagram account used mostly to mention the anniversary of album releases and other promotional notes, Bob Dylan put up a series of vintage film clips.

Dylan is a musician, a trickster, and most of all, as long as he lives, a performing artist. So what’s he up to, posting five Instagram clips in a day: four musical segments and a movie scene?

I believe I can show you. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s all about the mirrors.

First up, and then down again: Ricky Nelson playing “Lonesome Town” with a band on The Ozzie and Harriet Show, 1958. Replaced at some point by Ricky performing “I Believe What You Say,” from the same program. Next, we get a cut featuring Marilyn Monroe from Fritz Lang’s film, Clash by Night. Following on, in footage from a 1988 concert in New York, guitarist and musical innovator Les Paul introduces Eddie Van Halen, who then shreds on the song “Cathedral.” And finally, we see a clip from the late 30s film, Le Jazz Hot, of virtuoso jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt playing a song called “J’Attendrai.”

How are these Instagram posts related? Through Dylan’s lyrics, as described in my own writing about Rough and Rowdy Ways.

Six days ago, on this platform, I published Chapter Six of my book-in-process: “I Don’t Love Nobody”: Hidden Stories from Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways. The chapter title is “Hindu Rituals and Gumbo Limbo Spirituals.” Here’s the first paragraph:

Rough and Rowdy Ways is a record of muses and prophets, disguised and in plain sight, from Marilyn Monroe to Billy Emerson, from Walt Whitman to Stevie Nicks. In “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” Bob also includes, covertly, a reflection of his own inspiration over a young person’s life—a boy born in St. Paul in the very moment Zimmerman became Dylan in a cafe just across the Mississippi River. In this chapter I offer more detail about how the artist used imagery from my memoir, The Golden Bird, to tell a story about the spiritual power of song in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).”

Marilyn appears in “Murder Most Foul,” in this couplet:

Guitar Slim - Goin’ Down Slow
Play it for me and for Marilyn Monroe

I wrote about these lines in Chapter Five, “Prophets, True and False: Bob Dylan’s Search for the Holy Grail.” I discussed how Marilyn is one of the many “prophets” of Rough and Rowdy Ways, a Goddess of Amor, the reconciliation of Eros and Agape. I told how Bob gave a shout-out to Monroe at a show in Phoenix, in the spring of 2022, saying “We’d all like to swim with her!” and I discussed Dylan’s citation of Jimmy Oden’s “Goin’ Down Slow,” which is a blues prayer for mercy at the time of death. I showed how the track is placed as a mirror in two songs on Rough and Rowdy Ways. In the lines above, that mirror holds Guitar Slim’s short creative life, Marilyn Monroe’s short creative life and right there with them, the elderly Dylan, still circling the world, still singing his songs of love, songs of betrayal.

In Chapter One, “The Underground Stories of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),”” I wrote about how “Goin’ Down Slow” also appears in that song’s lyrics, in Dylan’s rewrite of “White House Blues”:

McKinley hollered - McKinley squalled
Doctor said McKinley - death is on the wall
Say it to me if you got something to confess
I heard all about it - he was going down slow

So the mirror that holds Marilyn and Bob and Guitar Slim also holds McKinley, dying from gangrene over the period of a week, and just beyond him, one of her boyfriends, JFK, dying on his way to Parkland hospital. Read my chapter to see how it also includes John Lennon, bleeding out in the driveway of the Dakota in NYC in 1980. Yes, it’s a big mirror, and everyone in the reflection is goin’ down slow, over long-suffering minutes or long-suffering decades, and everyone is saying it to the doctor, if they got something to confess: from McKinley with “Nearer my God to Thee” (again, see Chapter One) to Guitar Slim calling out to his mama to pray for him, to Bob himself with “Every Grain of Sand,” performed at the conclusion of nearly all of the Rough and Rowdy Ways shows.

The Instagram clip of a strong and sassy Marilyn, facing off with her boyfriend, is about how even she in that moment, as a vision of Amor, the life force itself, was goin’ down slow, and about our shared human need for the spiritual power of song.

Which leads to Les Paul and Eddie Van Halen. Paul was an incredibly creative guitarist, a survivor of two near-death tragedies, and the inventor of musical marvels, including essentials such as the harmonica neck brace (!!) and multi-track recording. He was nothing less than a musical prophet. In the 1988 clip Dylan posted, Paul and Eddie share some intimate chat and appreciation before Van Halen goes into full Rock God mode on the song “Cathedral.”

Seems pretty clear. The spiritual power of song.

In 2021, Dylan opened the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Tour in Milwaukee, near Paul’s birthplace, and before the encores, Dylan dedicated the show to the great innovator. So while on the surface, the film segment seems unrelated to Dylan’s last record, when we look deeper, we see that the post directly references the live performance of Rough and Rowdy Ways.

Which, as I show through dozens of examples in my book, is a record about the spiritual power of song.

Now let’s see how Ricky Nelson fits in. Also in Chapter Five, I wrote about how Nelson is another of the prophets of Rough and Rowdy Ways. Two of his songs are featured, the first in “False Prophet”:

Hello Mary Lou - Hello Miss Pearl
My fleet footed guides from the underworld
No stars in the sky shine brighter than you
You girls mean business and I do too

Dylan includes himself again, this time in a reference to his musical brother’s big hit, “Hello Mary Lou,” and tells us that just like those muses from the underworld (down under, way down, down on the bottom, in “Key West”), he means business. I showed how Dylan links another brother, Roy Orbison, to Nelson and himself via a passage in his memoir Chronicles, when he writes that Orbison, AKA Lefty Wilbury, whose voice could “jar a corpse,” also “meant business.” And to show how Bob completes this connection, this circle between himself and Roy and Ricky, I cited the next verse of “False Prophet”:

I’m the enemy of treason - the enemy of strife
I’m the enemy of the unlived meaningless life
I ain’t no false prophet - I just know what I know
I go where only the lonely can go

“Only the Lonely” was a huge hit for Orbison in 1960.

Nelson, meanwhile, appears again in the beautiful “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You”:

Take me out traveling, you’re a traveling man
Show me something that I’ll understand

In my chapter, I discussed how Dylan also mentions “Travelin’ Man,” the flip side of “Hello Mary Lou,” in Chronicles, and writes that Nelson’s unpopular mid-career shift in music made him realize the two musicians had a lot in common.

Roy Orbison, Ricky Nelson and Bob Dylan: they all mean business. They are all enemies of the unlived meaningless life. They all carry the spiritual power of song.

But why “Lonesome Town?” Why “I Believe What You Say?” In Chapter Six, published a week ago, I shared this quote from one of Dylan’s finest “gumbo limbo spirituals” (see that chapter for the hidden meaning of the phrase), “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven”:

You broke a heart that loved you
Now you can seal up the book and not write anymore
I’ve been walking that lonesome valley
Trying to get to heaven before they close the door

I showed how Bob combines Biblical allusions in this verse with the word “lonesome,” and I mentioned, rather vaguely I’m afraid, how the word appears in various Hank Williams and Carter Family songs. I pointed out that Dylan often mixes spiritual yearnings with country blues phrasing to create “gumbo limbo spirituals.” Well, apparently I missed Nelson’s “Lonesome Town,” and the obvious role of early rock and roll in Dylan’s song-writing mythos. (Although I covered it in Chapter One, writing about Buddy Holly and “Mystery Street.”)

Hey, I wasn't even born yet in 1958! But thanks for the reminder, Bob.

The inspiration a young person receives, listening to the “pirate radio” or watching a rock and roll hero on stage, can be an intensely spiritual experience. Those teenagers in the Ozzie and Harriet clip seem pretty high. Dylan himself would have been seventeen at the time of that show. I shared in Chapter One, and originally in The Golden Bird, my own tale of such a life-altering event at the Blackbushe Aerodrome in 1978, the concrete field in Surrey where this whole beautiful mess started. I described how I lost my mind and eventually fell so deeply in love I could hardly see. I showed how Bob used a concise part of my story for the backbone of his imagery in his lovely meditation, “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).”

I know it’s crazy, but I believe that in his Instagram posts, because it’s all about the mirrors, Dylan is reflecting back my story about his story, again. I believe that I should take the Philosopher Pirate at his (Ricky Nelson’s) word: “I Believe What You Say.”

Finally, let’s really lose our minds and see if we can find them again in “Key West.” In “Hindu Rituals and Gumbo Limbo Spirituals,” I showed how Dylan has used the gospel plea, “How much longer,” a prayer to the Lord to hasten His coming, in several songs, including “New Pony” and “Crossing the Rubicon.” I focused particularly on a “gumbo limbo spiritual” from Time Out of Mind, a fantastic song that Dylan and his band have performed live 232 times: “Can’t Wait.”

The title of “J’Attendrai” by the guitar virtuoso and jazz God Django Reinhardt, translates as “I will wait.”

In 2025, at the age of 83, with the help of the masters who came before him, with the help of Les Paul and Django Reinhardt, with the help of his musical brothers Roy and Ricky, with the help of Marilyn and some earthly Amor, with the help of the spiritual power of song, Bob is again preparing to go out on tour. He’s still singing and he’s still goin’ down slow. Long may he live and rock.

Want to know more about the hidden stories of Rough and Rowdy Ways? “I Don’t Love Nobody” is the true tale of Bob Dylan’s most recent poetic art. In his unprecedented series of Instagram posts this week, I believe the artist is inviting you to have a look. If you’ve got the wits and the daring, please come on along, and go deep with me. Read my chapters from the beginning.

Writers often trot out that old trope about Dylan—“he’s cryptic”—and leave it at that. While that’s true on the surface, down deep, down on the bottom, way down in “Key West,” Bob Dylan shares a gleaming horde of buried treasure concerning the spiritual power of song.