Ask Greil: December 11, 2024

I saw this clip on the internet of Timothée Chalamet being given a copy Bob Dylan’s Chronicles to sign, and Chalamet appeared to be laughing it off. I had two thoughts about this. One, if it were me I’d sign “Wrong guy. Best wishes...” Two, if Chalamet were a true method actor he’d be able to do a perfect Bob Dylan signature. (I bet every time he signs his name he regrets that ee with an accent thing.) Anyway, it got me curious: Do you know what Dylan’s attitude about signing autographs is and was in the old days? —ROBERT FIORE

TC can do what he wants (it’s just too much trouble to type the whole name—seven vowels in six syllables—the day is long but life is short). My sense is that you don’t sign someone else’s book. My name is on Lester Bangs’s Psychotic Reactions but I’ve always refused to sign it because it’s his book, not mine, and everyone who’s ever asked has understood.

I don’t know what Dylan and autographs were in the ’60s. I first saw him as a guest at a Joan Baez show in a field in New Jersey in August 1963. There was no real backstage, but afterward he was squatting in the dirt behind and no one was asking him for anything. I saw him five or six times more in Berkeley up to the end of 1965 and don’t recall any autograph action. As of today—well, I had a dream the other night where I was at a restaurant in Minneapolis where we’d gone the night before and Dylan, looking as he did in photos from the “Like a Rolling Stone” sessions, was sitting alone at a nearby table. I thought of asking for an autograph—I don’t think I’ve asked anyone for an autograph since Y.A. Tittle of the 49ers, and the only one I still have is a 1959 Willie Mays card, which my father got for me—but decided not to. Given the rumors that Dylan doesn’t like people who work for him, some, anyway, to look him in the eye, I’d doubt if these days he’d put himself in a position to be asked. But I don’t know.

But really—I just came out of the Main in Minneapolis where we saw the Jesse Eisenberg movie A Real Pain. The marquee read THE MAIN WELCOMES TIMOTHEE CHALAMET FOR A COMPLETE UNKNOWN—he was here last week hanging around the U of M campus and Dinkytown for an unannounced screening. Before A Real Pain there was a trailer for A Complete Unknown. In cuts where TC is in the studio recording, in long shots, he’s believable for the second or two they last. The side characters in split seconds—Johnny Cash, Pete Seeger—more so. But in the longest takes, where TC is supposed to be playing a person, it’s hopeless. He speaks in a thin, reedy, mannered accent that calls up no real world referents—I mean, nobody ever talked like this. He’s pretty before and after he’s anything else. All I could think of was how much I’d rather see Eisenberg playing this Bob Dylan, and so what if he’s 41—he looks 32 and TC playing a 24 year old is 28.

I hope I’m wrong. The Johnny Cash movie came off the screen, but Joaquin Phoenix is an actor and TC is a model. Jay Cocks wrote the screenplay and that can only help. Ed Norton is the most inventive and internally convincing actor there is. I’ll be there Christmas Day. But I wouldn’t bet a nickel.

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Around me, while the Harris lawn signs came down immediately, the Trump flags still fly high. Usually on the same pole with the Stars and Stripes. Giving me the unsettling feeling that the Republicans have taken over the country and seceded from it at the same time. It made me think about Constance Rourke’s three American archetypes: the Yankee peddler, with his slick sales patter; the backwoodsman, with his tall tales; and the blackface minstrel, with his pantomime of another identity—all of them, in one way or another, con men. Is it possible, do you think, that Trump is not the horrible aberration of America that I believed, but its apotheosis? —CHUCK

The way you put Trump into Rourke’s frame makes great sense. Of course he’s not and never was an aberration. But he’s no more our apotheosis than P.T. Barnum or Jeffrey Dahmer—or Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, Madonna or Bonnie Parker, Percival Everett’s James or Philip Roth’s Coleman Silk. The more Trump rages, you see a very small, scared man who has a preternatural ability to draw people to him, a figure who can break all rules, commit any crimes, and face no consequences—that is, for some people, he embodies freedom, and if they support him, they can imagine that they deserve to be him, if only in their own lives, homes, streets, incel platforms.

What is truly stop-you-dead complete about what you say is the idea that a movement has both seized the country and seceded from it at the same time. It’s as if when the Confederacy formed the Constitutional government just vanished as if it had never been. You have gotten as close as anyone to the abyss we may be looking into, the abyss that is also a vortex. Who will our Ishmael be after Tashtego has nailed the flag to the mast and gone down with the ship?

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Regarding “Gates of Eden,” I agree to a large extent with what you said in the Nov. 26 Ask Greil: “...the song is horribly overblown and unrelievedly, self-consciously profound—one thing you won’t find inside the Gates of Eden is humor.”

However, I don’t find that in a version of the song from a jam session with George Harrison. Dylan does dummy DaDa lyrics for the first verse which convey much more real feeling than the “profound” words in the studio version. The rest is a playful romp in which Dylan has fun with the words.

Part of Dylan’s brilliance is that he can put a song across with how he sings the words, separate from any meaning the words may have. This is clearly evident in the dummy lyrics at the start of “The Man in Me” and for all of “Wigwam.” Any real words there would have given less meaning.

[Here’s a link to the bootleg “Gates of Eden” with George Harrison, at 10:00. —ANDREW HUTTER

Well, it’s always good to hear another version of “Matchbox,” which will probably outlast any other song here (look for the Paul McCartney-Carl Perkins version, which is touching and hilarious). But I’ve always found this little George and Bob afternoon progressively tiresome. I think that however many times “Gates of Eden” has been sung, performed, recorded, it’s one too many.

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Hi Greil: I hope you’re well. I noticed you’ve written an Afterword for the book Six Sermons for Bob Dylan by Lucy Sante. I remember buying the Trouble No More Bootleg Series and finding a DVD of actor Michael Shannon delivering Sante’s sermons. I though they were OK but less colourful than the sermons I heard on the Goodbye, Babylon box set, sermons by Rev. J. C. Burnett, Rev. J. M. Gates and others.

I also have the book Saved!, edited by Clinton Heylin, containing transcripts of sermons preached by Dylan from the stage during his evangelical phase in 1979 and 1980. The language used is extraordinary. I just opened the book at random and found this:

Satan is the God of the Self. Called the God of the Self. He’s the defeated foe. There really isn’t any self, it’s just a big bluff. So if you’re a descendant of Adam— anybody here a descendant of Adam? Well Adam got those keys to Paradise offa you, and Jesus Christ went to the Cross to get those keys back. (Buffalo, May 1, 1980)

Pungent stuff. The thought occurred to me: Wouldn’t it have been bolder to release these Dylan sermons, rather than the more literary creations of Sante? I’d be interested in your thoughts on Dylan’s sermons.

With thanks for your critical insights—MICK GOLD

Lucy Sante says in her introduction that Dylan did not want to use his own religious speeches from the period. The little Saved! book is a heroic work of compilation and probably my favorite of Clinton Heylin’s Dylan books, since there’s none of his own writing in it. No one knows more about Bob Dylan, but I’m not sure he knows what he knows. It spews out in a torrent of envy and resentment. When I read him, I feel as if I’m reading someone who from start to finish hates what he’s writing about, because even though he knows more about Dylan than Dylan does, even though he understands Dylan’s songs better than Dylan does, it is an irreducible fact that, as long as he is still alive, Bob is Bob Dylan (even though he’s not REALLY Dylan, Dylan is a fiction, a lie, a con, a fraud. . .). Clinton is not, and this Dylan construct gets the last word.

I love that little book. It’s so interesting and demented and funny and American. For years I taught a seminar on Prophecy and the American Voice at Cal and Princeton where I used that book along with sermons from John Winthrop, speeches by Lincoln and Martin Luther King, and Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra.”

What Lucy has collected now are the full texts of what she wrote for Michael Shannon. They come off better on the page. Drawing explicitly on the Rev. J.M. Gates and other popular black radio preachers of the 1920s and ’30s, she heard and extends their discourse as a form of stand up comedy. To me it works, but then, I contributed (my afterword will run here soon). Read Lucy’s sermons out loud and see how they work.

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During a recent rainy weekend, I lost a chunk of Saturday reading archived editions of Ask Greil. As one who prefers holding a book to a screen, is there any chance past Ask Greil columns might be collected in book form? A volume collected to the Dylan conversations might be the closest thing we ever get in book form to a conversation from such a cross section of his listeners.

Also wanted to mention the recent passing of Barbara Dane. She seemed like a good woman. I liked what you wrote about “It Isn’t Nice,” a song that she did with The Chambers Brothers. That entire album of theirs has been a good balm.

Thanks always for this column —BILLY INNES, San Francisco

It’s been talked about but would be a huge mass of unedited material—I don’t see any point of cleaning it up. I might be able to find a publisher who’d take it on a print on demand basis, which means you might end up with the only copy outside of myself and editor. But you know, I got lost in the 2019 archive recently, looking for something specific, and it was pretty interesting.

After writing that item about Barbara Dane I found that my friend Steve Wasserman of Heyday Books on Berkeley was publishing her autobiography. Through him I got in touch with her and we made plans to meet. But she or I got the time and dates mixed up. I was there, she wasn’t, but most likely because she wasn’t supposed to be. One thing happened and then something else and we never connected.

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Hi Greil: A few years ago, I was visiting Jim Morrison’s grave. An older woman (my age!) was berating her young charge for not appreciating the moment. “That’s Jim Morrison’s grave goddamnit!” she kept shouting. The kid didn’t give a shit and continued to stare at his phone. How do we break on through to teach kids to appreciate the world we live and its history? I mean come on, Jim Morrison’s grave! —DAVID BREITHAUPT

We cannot teach younger people to respect our objects of cultural affection. Nor should we. To impose one’s cultural legacy on others as hegemony is depriving people of their own moment in history and arguing implicitly or directlythat they can’t or shouldn’t make their own history, or that if they try it will never measure up—so why try?

That said, the one time I saw the grave few of the people there were anywhere near Jim Morrison’s age, or mine. And I remember when I was standing in line to see Oliver Stone’s The Doors and the person with me said, “Who are all these people? They’re all in their 20s. Why are they here?”

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