Art from Tragedy – Dylan’s Tangled Up In Blue

I will ask for patience here at the outset, for once again indulging in my admiration for Bob Dylan’s otherworldly skill with words. For the frustrated poet in me, a man who has spent a lifetime on his knees at the altar of words, I simply feel bound, if not also a little obsessed, to circle back to this particular song that is perhaps the most dazzling example of lyrical songwriting ever penned by this Shakespeare of modern music. Don’t roll your eyes. I imagine there may be some who would consider that a reach, but understand that if there is disagreement… I will bring weapons to the debate; not guns or knives, but words…..his words, which will only work to slap down any critique presented.

Dylan should absolutely hold the same level of literary respect, particularly in regard to his innate understanding of our psychological complexities and all the various emotional tripwires that so easily entangle us. The man was even awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature. Consider that for a moment. A Nobel Prize in Literature to a “songwriter?” And that is precisely what I’m going on about here. Dylan is of another category when it comes to lyrics and has penned single sentences, even without the surrounding context, strong enough to inspire novels, lines that may stretch only an inch or two wide on a page but can travel miles deep emotionally. Just consider these.

“She learned a lot about things, even once tried suicide” – From “Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”

“I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin” – From “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”

“And the silent night will shatter from the sounds inside my mind” – From “One Too Many Mornings”

My original essay a few years ago (2018) focused on just four songs from his 1975 masterpiece, “Blood on the Tracks” as I briefly attempted to express the lyrical depth he mined in those songs, particularly with this song, but now feel that I didn’t do it justice, because the imagery here is so dazzling in its complexity, yet fluid in form, that Dylan’s genius easily flies under the radar and escapes into the ether without us realizing precisely what we’ve missed.

To quickly lay down the context behind the album, it’s key to understand that Dylan was in the process of ending his 10-year marriage to Sara (Lowndes), which explains the title of the album, suggesting that’s he and Sara’s life together had been hit by a train. Another significant plot thread is that Dylan had been largely forgotten by the public at this point in his career and had spent the better part of a decade in a creative slump, if we contrast it against his peak in the mid 60’s. Simply put, the public had moved on to newer, flashier music. Dylan was certainly a mid-60’s phenomenon, and significantly redirected the course of popular music, but a new wave of songwriters had emerged, creating music that he helped inspire, yet exploded with creativity that simply lapped him. To the point that Dylan was considered something of a relic by the time this album was released in 1975.

That should fill in the basic context behind this drama, professionally running on creative fumes, while also navigating the breakup of his family. Not the best of mental places to be, but as I mentioned in that original essay, artists often respond to personal tragedy with an incredible sense of clarity and purpose, with fresh inspiration oozing out of their every pour at the turmoil ripping through them. Fueled by all of this, Dylan’s creative spark jolted back to life and the resulting album reminded everyone what they had casually forgotten, that lyrically, Dylan was an order of magnitude beyond the pack when his imagination caught fire. This was Shakespear coming back on stage for his second act while most of the audience had left to beat the traffic. What other artist could casually drop 600 densely packed words into a radio friendly song that left even jaded critics stunned by its originality.

A unique feature of his wordplay across the album, and particularly this song, can only be explained by his influence by several Cubist painters at the time due to their ability to present alternating perspectives from a single line of sight. Dylan clearly imagined a literary response to this visual innovation and wanted to incorporate their type of multi-dimensional and multi-layered threads into his lyrical writing, which he accomplished brilliantly. Or as one reviewer described it.

“(Tangled Up In Blue) is the most dazzling lyric ever written, an abstract narrative of relationships told in an amorphous blend of first and third person, rolling past, present and future together, spilling out in tripping cadences and audacious internal rhymes, ripe with sharply turned images and observations and filled with a painfully desperate longing.”

To offer an example of its “…audacious internal rhymes” and “sharply turned images and observations”, let’s take a look under the hood at a clever and amusing verse. Keep in mind the song does not have a long-winded bridge occupying chunks to lyrical space, but rather a single phrase, “Tangled up in Blue”, which plays a role in each verse. For example, Dylan used a common rhyming pattern as one might expect, A-A, B-B, C-C (underlined below), but in the last line of each verse, he adds an additional few words not only to sum up the on-going verse, but to rhyme with the bridge as well, and Dylan manages this so seamlessly that its brilliance is hardly noticed.

She was workin’ in a topless place
And I stopped in for a beer
I just kept lookin’ at the side of her face
In the spotlight so clear

And later on as the crowd thinned out
I’s just about to do the same
She was standing there in back of my chair
Said to me “Don’t I know your name?”

I muttered somethin’ under my breath
She studied the lines on my face
I must admit I felt a little uneasy
When she bent down to tie the laces of my shoe
Tangled up in blue

If that isn’t dazzling enough, then consider this jewel. Even within this whirlwind of shifting perspectives, Dylan managed to include an exceptionally nuanced reference (from the 5th verse), which subtly exposed the personal underpinnings at play.

Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet
From the thirteenth century
And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burnin’ coal
Pourin’ off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you
Tangled up in blue

That “Italian poet” clearly refers to ‘Dante Alighieri’, and that book of poems was his masterpiece, “The Divine Comedy”, which he had dedicated to ‘Beatrice’, the muse for all his writings. So, here Dylan is dropping an intriguing inference, just to inform us that he was also losing his muse during this unfolding train wreck.

And yet Dylan still wasn’t finished with his cleverness as he again drops hints buried beneath the song’s secrecy. In the 6^th verse, he wrote that,

I lived with them on Montague Street
In a basement down the stairs
There was music in the cafes at night
And revolution in the air

The first clue here is “Montague”, which is Romeo’s surname in Shakespeare’s classic play. And Dylan’s reason for mentioning it is that there was also a music venue on Montague Street in Greenwich Village called “Capulets”, which happened to be Juliet’s surname, so clearly Dylan is reinforcing the allusion that his song is about two star-crossed lovers destined to have their love fall apart. This is literary artistry at the highest level.

Then from within the same verse, Dylan shifts from first person to third person narration at several different points as he reveals the underlying fissures of their failed marriage. The first being that “he” and “Him” (third person) started dealing with slaves, alluding to the music industry, as Dylan had a long history of referring to the relationship between the industry executives and artists as ‘masters and slaves, and the struggle took its toll. Then he tells us of Sara’s breaking point as “she had to sale everything she owned and froze up inside”, referring to the successful modeling career Sara gave up to become wife and mother. Then he returns by shifting back to first person, “I became withdrawn”, and the only path he saw for himself was to continue move forward, to get on with it.

Then he started into dealing with slaves
And something inside of him died
She had to sell everything she owned
And froze up inside
And when finally, the bottom fell out
I became withdrawn
The only thing I knew how to do
Was to keep on keepin’ on like a bird that flew
Tangled up in blue

This is quite simply a masterclass in creative wordplay, which Dylan had no peers. Remember this song consists of 600 densely packed words, with an anemic bridge, meaning this song is all protein. There are no empty calories anywhere to be found. And along with his shifting perspectives and trippy wordplay, notice the fluid timelines, as each sequential verse addresses different points along their time together, which is precisely how we remember our lives. None of us catalog our lives in a linear order, but rather as significant moments that we experience, which do not flow in an orderly timeline. Random memories will simply burst into the room, memories that only vaguely align themselves with a point in time. That is the brilliance Dylan intuitively understood while crafting this haunting narrative. He had no reason to structure the verses in a tidy flow from marriage to divorce, because that isn’t how memory works.

So, to wrap this up, allow me to reiterate that this level of artistry, even when constrained to the confines of a pop song vying for time on popular radio, is simply unheard of. No one comes close. I could throw Lennon’s name into the hat as a potential peer with his wildly creative wordplay on such songs as “I am Walrus”, but he never wrote anything close to this, not in poetic complexity, nor in the sheer volume of words. Bruce Springsteen, Roger Waters, and even Bono occasionally approached the bar Dylan had set in poetic expression, but none of them could match him when he was on fire.

On my bookshelf, I have a book containing all the lyrics Dylan wrote from 1962 through 1985, and it’s insane to fathom that one man penned them all. Even the preeminent, Voltaire, with nearly 60 years of literary production to his credit would be impressed, for the book consists of 500 pages of penetrating poetry, in addition to album liner notes that he often wrote for his records, which could span a thousand of words or more of creative musings, where one can sense that he could have kept going indefinitely with his verbal energy.

Stating the obvious as simply as I am able, Dylan is no mere “once in a generation” poet, but rather one I expect to stretch across several centuries. In fact, I believe Dylan represents a test case for a 21^st century consideration. With AI (artificial intelligence) growing more advanced by the year, I believe it will be an existential interest to everyone involved whether computer algorithms could soon create poetry this nuanced. My money is on the Darkhorse……that it will not.

Early one mornin’ the sun was shinin’
I was layin’ in bed
Wondrin’ if she’d changed at all
If her hair was still red
Her folks they said our lives together
Sure was gonna be rough
They never did like
Mama’s homemade dress
Papa’s bank book wasn’t big enough
And I was standin’ on the side of the road
Rain fallin’ on my shoes
Heading out for the east coast
Lord knows I’ve paid some dues gettin’ through
Tangled up in blue

She was married when we first met
Soon to be divorced
I helped her out of a jam I guess
But I used a little too much force
We drove that car as far as we could
Abandoned it out west
Split up on a dark sad night
Both agreeing it was best
She turned around to look at me
As I was walkin’ away
I heard her say over my shoulder
We’ll meet again some day on the avenue
Tangled up in blue

 I had a job in the great north woods
Working as a cook for a spell
But I never did like it all that much
And one day the axe just fell
So I drifted down to New Orleans
Where I happened to be employed
Workin’ for a while on a fishin’ boat
Right outside of Delacroix
But all the while I was alone
The past was close behind
I seen a lot of women
But she never escaped my mind and I just grew
Tangled up in blue

She was workin’ in a topless place
And I stopped in for a beer
I just kept lookin’ at the side of her face
In the spotlight so clear
And later on as the crowd thinned out
I’s just about to do the same
She was standing there in back of my chair
Said to me “Don’t I know your name?”
I muttered somethin’ under my breath
She studied the lines on my face
I must admit I felt a little uneasy
When she bent down to tie the laces of my shoe
Tangled up in blue

She lit a burner on the stove
And offered me a pipe
I thought you’d never say hello, she said
You look like the silent type
Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet
From the thirteenth century
And everyone of them words rang true
And glowed like burnin’ coal
Pourin’ off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you
Tangled up in blue

I lived with them on Montague Street
In a basement down the stairs
There was music in the cafes at night
And revolution in the air
Then he started into dealing with slaves
And something inside of him died
She had to sell everything she owned
And froze up inside
And when finally the bottom fell out
I became withdrawn
The only thing I knew how to do
Was to keep on keepin’ on like a bird that flew
Tangled up in blue

 So now I’m goin’ back again
I got to get to her somehow
All the people we used to know
They’re an illusion to me now
Some are mathematicians
Some are carpenters’ wives
Don’t know how it all got started
I don’t know what they’re doin’ with their lives
But me, I’m still on the road
Headin’ for another joint
We always did feel the same
We just saw it from a different point of view
Tangled up in blue

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTdGv6-85pk&list=RDiTdGv6-85pk&start_radio=1

I want to add a brief addendum before I close this out, because I came across an interview with Jakob Dylan, the youngest of their five children, when he made a poignant point regarding his parents divorce, when he was five years old. He said, “Husband and wife failed, mother and father didn’t.”