Bob Dylan's Instagram Posts Part 2

The Hidden Story

Since my essay thirteen days ago about Bob Dylan’s first flurry of four Instagram clips, he has posted seven more times, not including two entries advertising the Spring Tour. The six videos and one still shot with audio were released from January 31 to February 3, beginning a couple hours after I published that last essay. It’s obvious, by their eclectic nature, with no promotional purpose, that Dylan himself was responsible for these new clips.

The same story I shared about the first videos continues with these posts. With puns on movie titles, humor from the Twilight Zone, and the lyrics of old songs, Dylan is mirroring material from my book-in-process: “I Don’t Love Nobody”: Hidden Stories from Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, as published on this platform.

I know, it’s damn brazen of me to make such a claim. Many will say ridiculous. Why would Bob Dylan respond to the writings of a blogger with only a couple hundred followers? Because, as recounted in “I Don’t Love Nobody,” he mirrored imagery and events from my memoir, The Golden Bird, to write one of his most beautiful songs—the very last track on his last album: “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” He is responding to my chapters because “I Don’t Love Nobody” tells the real story about Rough and Rowdy Ways, the record he’s been touring behind for four years.

Bob Dylan is not, as some would like to believe, merely an old dude up late in his PJs putting out Instagram clips he likes for fans, although that’s a sweet picture, as far is it goes. What he is, mostly, is the major artist of the last century. Dylan acts with purpose and every public action serves his calling: his “search for the Grail” and his “contract with the Lord.” These seven latest Instagram posts, like the first four, highlight the spiritual power of song, as reflected in Dylan’s use of The Golden Bird.

(Yes, I also believe the tweets are meaningful. I’ve got a story about several of those too, for another time.)

Here’s a quote from Dylan’s interview with Doon Arbus in Richard Avedon’s book, The Sixties:

One of the feelings [of the folk movement] was that you were part of a very elite, special group of people that was outside and downtrodden. You felt like you were part of a different community, a more secretive one … That’s been destroyed. I don’t know what destroyed it. Some people say it’s still there. I hope it is … I hope it is. I know, in my mind, I’m still a member of a secret community. I might be the only one, you know?

What happens up on the top is never as interesting or as important as what’s happening down under. The Golden Bird is obscure to the point of invisibility; it’s only available directly from me. (Feel free to inquire.) Dylan is much in the news right now, but nearly all of that press is Hollywood movie hype and the endless rehashing of old news. The Golden Bird and “I Don’t Love Nobody” are not products of mass culture. They are too literate for the casual music fan and too crazy for academia. They are stories of secret community.

I’m glad you’re here.

Let’s look at the Instagram posts in order. First up, less than two hours after my last piece on his earlier clips, we get Tony Rice playing “Church Street Blues” by Norman Blake. On the surface, Dylan is simply sharing the talents of a lesser known virtuoso. Rice’s playing is phenomenal and this video has sent me and probably many others to look up his whole catalog. Looking a bit deeper, however, we see that the song’s narrative mirrors the theme of “I Don’t Love Nobody”: the spiritual power of song. Blake’s “Church Street Blues” is is the tale of a musician, a guitar player, away from the farm, watching some “good-time Charlie,” who is “driving me insane.” The singer has got a bad case of the “thin dime, hard times, hell on Church Street Blues.” What’s his answer? He’s going to sit in a rocking chair and play. He’d join a band if he had some new guitar strings, but in the meantime, he’ll just “stay right here and sing awhile, Try to make me some change and give those folks a smile.”

How do you lose the “hell on Church Street Blues?” In one of Dylan’s earlier posts, we saw that Les Paul got healed in Eddie Van Halen’s “Cathedral.” Here, Tony Rice’s beautiful flat-picking and beatific smile makes him feel better, and us too. And where might we find our minds when we lose them, when those “good-time Charlies” of the world begin to drive us insane? Where might we lounge in a rocking chair with a view?

Key West is fine and fair
If you lost your mind, you’ll find it there
Key West is on the horizon line

As I showed in Chapter One of “I Don’t Love Nobody,” this triplet from “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” appearing in the second and final verses, holds a phrase—“lost mind”—found twice in The Golden Bird, at the beginning and end of the concise section Dylan mined for his imagery.

The next clip Dylan posted is a minute or so of the 1956 Western, The Searchers, by John Ford. The segment features Ken Curtis as Charlie McCorry, playing “Skip to My Lou,” to Vera Miles as Laurie Jorgensen. In the movie, McCorry has designs on Laurie, who is beholden to another. Ken Curtis was lead singer of the Sons of the Pioneers, a seminal midcentury country-western band. Bob probably saw The Searchers as a 15-year-old in Hibbing, at one of the theaters owned by his uncle. As we’ll see, Bob’s teenage years feature strongly in many of these clips.

I’m sure Dylan is suggesting that this legendary film is worth watching, but down under the surface in “Key West,” he’s offering two mirrors: the film’s title, and a reference to the uncanny world of folk song.

First, let’s consider the title. In “Hindu Rituals and Gumbo Limbo Spirituals,” the chapter I posted on January 23, a week before this barrage of Instagram posts appeared, I highlighted Dylan’s admonition, upon the release of Rough and Rowdy Ways, to “stay observant.” In the context of that essay, I pointed out Dylan has fondness for a joke and that his phrase is a multi-layered pun. In this clip of Ford’s movie, Dylan throws another pun back. Who is staying observant? The searchers. The ones looking below the surface. If you think that’s a reach, please read on. Dylan the punster is just getting started.

One of the things this searcher has found buried all through Rough and Rowdy Ways is allusions to songs with mystical effect, songs that puncture concepts of time and space. As I shared in Chapter One of my book, from Dylan’s Chronicles Volume One:

Folk songs were the underground story. If someone were to ask what’s going on, “Mr. Garfield’s been shot down, laid down. Nothing you can do.” That’s what’s going on.

A reference to a folk song is a reference to an underground story. The writer Greil Marcus coined the phrase “Invisible Republic” for the vast and strange world of folk music associated with Dylan and the Bands’ Basement Tapes recordings. In Chronicles, Dylan not only mentions Marcus and gives approval to the term, he riffs on a similar idea throughout the book:

Folk songs are evasive—the truth about life and life is more or less a lie… A folk song has over a thousand faces and you must meet them all if you want to play this stuff. A folk song might vary in meaning and it might not appear the same from one moment to the next.

(Lest you think a story like mine is completely out of the blue, recall that Dylan has a history of commenting on the commentary. Dylan’s response to Marcus in Chronicles is not unique. He replied positively to Paul Williams in the late 1970s, and in the mid-00s, on the other side of the ledger, bitterly denounced some unnamed “wussies and pussies.”)

The reference to an underground story in this post, the folk song in this clip, the mirror to my writing in “I Don’t Love Nobody,” is “Skip to My Lou,” a 19th Century children’s dance tune about stealing or swapping partners. “Hindu Rituals and Gumbo Limbo Spirituals” features at its conclusion a story of romantic betrayal in the Colorado mountains, as told in The Golden Bird. It tells about an evening of life-altering synchronicity between a violent storm and an incantation of “Hindu rituals.” It describes, via the poets Eliot and Dylan, the voices of angels at the Pentecost—“cloven tongues of fire”—and the terrible cost of an infidelity. See my chapter for the full story.

It sounds kind of nuts and that’s the point. Folk songs are not the language of the rational world. They are the language of mythological forces. In Chronicles, Dylan says, “They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality.” He calls folk music “reality of a different dimension.”

And if you’ve lost your mind, you know where you’ll find it.

In Dylan’s next Instagram post, the time traveller takes us to multiple eras at once and mirrors my commentary about “Mystery Street,” in Dylan’s mythical city of “Key West.” That long rock and roll avenue runs from the convent home of the Sacred Heart, next door to where the baby Zimmerman was born at St. Mary’s Hospital, all the way to “Key West,” where the elder Dylan is “walkin’ in the shadows after dark.” In Chapter One of “I Don’t Love Nobody,” I showed how “Mystery Street” is a road of faith and destiny, and that one of the main points of interest, alluded to in the next line of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” about Harry Truman, is the Duluth Armory, where the teenage Dylan saw Buddy Holly in the early days of 1959.

The video clip shows the reunited Band, absent Robbie Robertson, on stage in 1983, performing a 1958 song by Johnny Otis, “Willie and the Hand Jive.” Otis was a key figure in mid-century rhythm and blues and early rock and roll. He played drums and claimed a cowriting credit with Leiber and Stoller on Big Mama Thornton’s 1952 recording of “Hound Dog,” which later became a hit for Elvis Presley. So in this clip of the Band, we are back in Dylan’s senior year of high school, the same year he saw Buddy Holly at the Armory, when his love of rock and roll was a powerful spiritual inspiration. We are back on “Mystery Street.”

This Instagram post also alludes again to the subterranean and cosmic reality of folk song. Levon Helm and Garth Hudson feature prominently, and because of his recent death, we think of Hudson especially, whom Bob praised, after his passing, as “the real driving force behind The Band.” Hudson recorded and preserved The Basement Tapes reels and was responsible, through his organ work and effects, for much of the ethereal sound of the songs. For many years, until their full release in 2014, most of the mystic Americana Dylan and the Band invented and covered on The Basement Tapes was only available on bootleg. Anyone really interested could get a hold of them, but they were only available underground. Finally, this post also takes us right to the end of “Mystery Street,” to the liminal, near-death land of “Key West,” where Hudson, just the other week, climbed that spiral staircase, to “paradise divine.”

The next clip Bob posted is from She Done Him Wrong, a 1933 film starring Mae West and Cary Grant, set in the 1890s. The film is masterpiece of cinema, and surely Bob is recommending that we have a look, but once again we’re talking puns. The title of She Done Him Wrong concisely describes the scene from The Golden Bird I mention above, recounted in “Hindu Rituals and Gumbo Limbo Spirituals,” in which a tree felled by a violent storm smashes into my girlfriend and her lover. By no coincidence whatsoever, one of the delights of She Done Him Wrong is Mae West’s many quips and double-entendres. Similarly, by the way, in my piece about the first four Instagram posts, I missed that the title of the Fritz Lang film, Clash by Night, featuring Marilyn Monroe, also neatly summarizes the same event. And it’s pretty damn funny.

So if you’ve been reading all this with a cocked and skeptical eye, consider that the titles of these films, The Searchers, She Done Him Wrong, and Clash by Night, all pun on my commentary in a chapter in which I point out the essential nature of Dylan’s humor and punning.

Just to drive home the idea, we get more of the same in the last three Instagram posts. First, let’s look at the Twilight Zone clip. Apparently those aliens aren’t as helpful as they pretend:

Mr Chambers! Don’t get on that ship!” The rest of the book, To Serve Man, it’s a cookbook!

Here Dylan shows explicitly and with humor that in some of these Instagram posts, the pun is the thing.

Then we have the song “Spectator” by the persecuted Native American singer and activist John Trudell, from his album Bone Days. Dylan has mentioned his admiration for Trudell more than once, most recently in The Philosophy of Modern Song. In this clip, we hear of a man who has been a spectator—an observer let’s say. Maybe even a searcher. Certainly a great believer in the power of song. In The Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan writes about the “ancient spirit” and “ancient wisdom” in Trudell’s music. Also, in the opening lines, we hear:

In the way angels kiss

We have this time around

It comes back to this

Where we are going is where we are bound

Dylan refers to those angels again in his last Instagram post: Bobby Darin playing “Dream Lover” on the Ed Sullivan show in May of 1959. The song was a big hit that spring, in the year Dylan graduated from high school, a few months after the Buddy Holly show at the Armory. Here we are back on “Mystery Street”; soon Dylan would turn to folk, but the musical influences of his teenage years would keep rolling around in his huge sponge of a brain: Johnny Otis, Ricky Nelson, Jimmie Rodgers and many others. Nothing affected him quite like Buddy Holly (until a guy named Woody), but Dylan clearly had admiration for singers like Darin and Nelson. In Chronicles, Bob says he had been a “big fan” of Nelson, but in the same sentence, he says “that type of music was on the way out. It had no chance of meaning anything.” He then compares it to his new found love of folk music, which “had the power of spirit.”

Dylan may or may not intend a contrast in this post of “Dream Lover” (and the earlier one with Nelson), between the simple pleasures of the teen idols and the supernatural resonance of folk, between the predictability of some early rock and his own electric poetics that changed the nature of popular song, but he is certainly, one more time, making a pun. Here’s the lyric I referred to earlier, from the penultimate verse of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” from which I’ve taken the title of my book:

Fly Around my Pretty Little Miss

I don’t love nobody - gimme a kiss

Down at the bottom - way down in Key West

In Chapter One, I trace the origin of the rhyming couplet to three popular songs and to an episode in The Golden Bird describing a waking dream, an astral flight, in which my character and another, two people crazy for Christ, make love. Love without the burden of bodies. Once again, I refer you to that essay for the full story. Briefly, however, here are the three songs: first, an old fiddle tune about a boy in pursuit of a girl who is up in the air, who is “like to drive me crazy.” Next, that 1896 racist Lew Sully song, redeemed by Elizabeth Cotten in the 1950s and recorded by one of Dylan’s main musical and “spiritual” (Bob’s word) inspirations, Mike Seeger. Third, a jazz standard called “A Kiss to Build a Dream On,” sung by many great artists of the mid-20th Century, including Louie Armstrong and Peggy Lee:

Give me a kiss to build a dream on

And my imagination will thrive upon that kiss.

Bob Dylan, with his Instagram post of Bobby Darin’s “Dream Lover,” is punning on the title of my story about “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”: “I Don’t Love Nobody.” A title I borrowed from a line in his song. A line he created by marrying my image about dream lovers with a very old folk song.

It’s all about the mirrors.

With his unprecedented sequence of Instagram posts, Bob Dylan is directing those with the eyes to see, those who are interested in the hidden stories, the underground stories, to “I Don’t Love Nobody” and to my memoir, The Golden Bird.

How’d I do, Bob?