Bob Dylan’s “Tempest”

Listening to a new Bob Dylan album is a strange experience—like reading a newly-discovered Shakespeare play or a just-added book of the Bible.

His latest, Tempest, was released on September 11th, and it took me a couple weeks just to digest it. Songs of faded love, murder and plunder, sinking ships and revenge, all sung by a gravelly-voiced combination of Edgar Allan Poe and Rhett Butler. It’s one of his best.

The real treat of Tempest is the title song, a thirteen-minute-plus, jaunty-sounding tune about the sinking of the Titanic. The song encapsulates just about everything you need to know about Bob Dylan:

He likes to write long, long songs.

Starting with “Desolation Row” in 1965, Bob Dylan has periodically written long—at least ten-minute-long—songs. These songs tend to tell some kind of story, sometimes surreal, sometimes not.

In one way, this shows Dylan’s kinship with the epic bards of old. In another way, it shows his dissatisfaction with given forms—he wants to push popular song to its outer limits until it just about breaks.

Perhaps not uncoincidentally, Dylan’s first “long song,” “Desolation Row,” mentions the Titanic:

Praise be to Nero’s Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
Everybody is shouting
“Which side are you on?”

He freely borrows from others.

The Carter Family back in the early Fifties sang a song about the Titanic, and it began thus:

The pale moon rose in its glory
She’s drifting from golden west
She told a sad, sad story
Six hundred had gone to rest

Dylan’s new song—with no credit given to the Carter Family—begins like this:

The pale moon rose in its glory
Out on the Western town
She told a sad, sad story
Of the great ship that went down

The Carter Family’s song also contains the character of a sleeping watchman:

The watchman was a-dreaming
Yes, dreaming a sad, sad dream
He dreamed the Titanic was sinking
Out on the deep blue sea

Dylan recycles this character and much of the wording:

The watchman he lay dreaming
Of all things that can be
He dreamed the Titanic was sinking
Into the deep blue sea

Now, if you think this is a simple case of plagiarism, you probably don’t know much about the folk tradition—or Dylan.

In folk and blues music, authorship is not a simple affair. First of all, some folk songs are so old that they have no attributable author. Others were changed or added to so much over time that the author really was a corporate entity of ghosts.

And before the days of copyright, lyrics were swapped in and out of songs and added to different melodies and put into totally different contexts. Some old folk songs are kind of Frankensongs in which strange images and ideas are juxtaposed—an effect Dylan has exploited to great effect throughout his career.

But Dylan doesn’t only borrow from old folk and blues songs. He’s been known to “sample” lines from writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Shakespeare, as well as more obscure writers like the Civil War poet Timrod and a Japanese book called Confessions of a Yakuza. It recently came to light that Dylan borrowed a few lines from Henry Rollins as well.

He’s a part of the folk tradition.

Before the release of Tempest, when rumors were swirling that Bob Dylan had a long song about the Titanic on it, many people scratched their heads. You mean he’s treading the same ground (or water) as James Cameron?

Well, the Titanic started inspiring music ever since it sank. The Carter Family, of course, recorded a song about it, as well as people like Leadbelly and William and Versey Smith, whose “When That Great Ship Went Down” was included on the Anthology of American Folk Music.

Dylan was probably inspired more by people like the Carter Family and Leadbelly than James Cameron. But he does make a sly reference to the film in the song:

Leo took his sketchbook
He was often so inclined
He closed his eyes and painted
The scenery in his mind

More than any of his other recent albums, Tempest is a folk album. Dylan started his career as a card-carrying folk singer, grew uncomfortable with the categorization, but starting in the early Nineties, with the release of two collections of all-acoustic folk and blues covers, he has become more comfortable with the title again. In a recent wild Rolling Stone interview, he says as much.

He’s obsessed with the past.

There is little on the album to indicate that the songs on it were written at the dawn of the Twenty-First Century. No cars, no telephones, no computers, no televisions appear in the lyrics. There are, however, train whistles, chamber doors, blades and knives, old oak trees we used to climb, harlots, and horses.

Although Dylan may have an innate love for old things—old music, old literature, old fashions—nostalgic he’s not. As the boat sinks, we’re treated to this scene in the song “Tempest”:

Brother rose up ’gainst brother
In every circumstance
They fought and slaughtered each other
In a deadly dance

As far as we know, though there may have been some fisticuffs on board the ship as it sunk, there weren’t any murders. What explains this strange liberty with the historical record?

It seems he’s using the past as a mirror for the present. This allows one to strip away superficialities and get at the heart of human nature. What he’s saying about human nature here is that it’s not innately good. The whole album—with its blood and jealousy and thirst for vengeance—says the same thing.

He’s religious—but who knows in what sense.

There’s still much speculation about Dylan’s religious leanings. In the late Seventies, he went through a very earnest “born again” period—two of his albums, Slow Train Coming and Saved, were unmistakably evangelical Christian in form and content. People were shocked at the time, and he drew more ire from fans than when he went electric.

Somewhere along the line, however, if not losing his faith, he at least took a few steps back from his fundamentalism. He continues to perform some of his religious-oriented songs live and he also sporadically covers old gospel songs like “Rock of Ages” at his concerts—but there’s also evidence he’s returned to his Jewish roots.

Whatever the case, the God in Tempest is the Old Testament angry, unknowable one, but the people in the song and the album as a whole are still striving for some kind of New Testament ideal of forgiveness and redemption:

Jim Dandy smiled
He’d never learned to swim
Saw the little crippled child
And he gave his seat to him

He saw the starlight shinin’
Streamin’ from the east
Death was on the rampage
But his heart was now at peace…

When the Reaper’s task had ended
Sixteen hundred had gone to rest
The good, the bad, the rich, the poor
The loveliest and the best

They waited at the landing
And they tried to understand
But there is no understanding
For the judgment of God’s hand.

In Bob Dylan’s world, we’re all on the Titanic.