On the Off-Ramp to Weirdness City with “The Philosophy of Modern Song”
This one is for Sonny Webster, Ben Rollins, Nina Fitzgerald-Washington, Lester Hawkins, and all the gang at Elmo’s.
“Being a writer is not something one chooses to do. It’s something you just do and sometimes people stop and notice.” ~ Bob Dylan
The Holy Trinity
“There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”
The ghost of Elvis Presley haunts Bob Dylan’s “The Philosophy of Modern Song.” If you count the chapter featuring his namesake, the word “Elvis” appears 57 times in “Philosophy.” The King himself claims 47 of those mentions. In comparison, the next closest contender is Frank Sinatra, whose name Dylan invokes a mere 15 times.
The frontispiece of “Philosophy” features Presley — or a Presley look-a-like — in a Memphis record shop contemplating “Here’s Little Richard,” a long-playing album which includes both “Tutti-Frutti” and “Long Tall Sally.”
“A Tribute to James Dean,” a quickie exploitation LP of instrumental selections from Dean’s three movies issued after his death, can be seen directly under Little Richard’s album.
You could guess that both records might be found in 16-year-old Bobby Zimmerman’s Hibbing bedroom in 1957. If there had been a photo of the Holy Trinity of Little Richard, Elvis, and James Dean together — the artist the young Dylan wanted to become; the artist he later feared he could become; and the artist who stopped time when he died in a road accident — that photo might be gracing the cover of “The Philosophy of Modern Song” instead of the next-best substitute that designer Coco Shinomiya could find.
The “Go-Go Guy” and the “Bye-Bye Gal” in the Fun Capital of the World
Ironically, there’s no picture of Elvis accompanying the “Viva Las Vegas” essay. Instead in we get a photo of mop-top Paul McCartney trying his luck against a one-armed bandit as well as some stock shots of gamblers. You kinda wish there was at least one of Elvis dancing with hellcat Ann Margret, for a time another woman billed as “the female Elvis Presley,” and arguably one with a better claim to the title than “Philosophy’s” cover girl Alis Lesley.
A common Mandela Effect memory is that Elvis and Ann Margret performed “Viva Las Vegas” together in the movie. Although they recorded four different duets in the studio, none were “Viva,” and the only one to appear in the movie was the insipid “The Lady Loves Me.”
While having more dancing than duetting, you could also count the much better a-rockin’ “Come On Everybody,” written by frequent Elvis songwriter, Joy Byers. Byers was the wife of Bob Johnston, who would go on to produce several Bob Dylan albums and who would later claim he wrote all of Joy’s credited songs.
All these things are connected, as a certain deejay liked to say on “Theme Time Radio Hour.”
Maybe it’s just as well that Elvis and Margaret didn’t perform “Viva Las Vegas” together. The on-screen chemistry of the two was at such a flash point that the film stock would have melted; the cameras explode; the cast blinded by holy light and all Las Vegas disappearing in a fireball bigger than the fucking Sun if they had. Instead Elvis did the Doc Pomus/Mort Shuman song solo in one long, unedited shot, the first and only time that would be done in an Elvis movie.
Riffing
“Riff” — 1) a short repeated phrase in popular music and jazz, typically used as an introduction or refrain in a song. 2) a rapid, energetic, often improvised verbal outpouring, especially one that is part of a comic performance.
Dylan’s riffs in “Philosophy” have a feel of improvisation to them — they often read as if he’s answering a verbal Rorschach test, saying the first idea that comes into his head and then running with it to exhaustion. Nearly every essay in “Philosophy” begins with some variation on “This song is about…” to the point where I was flashing back to Dan Hick’s jokey introduction to one of his songs “…this is kinda a love story about… about… well, it’s about three minutes long.”
Here’s a hypothetical: Dylan fishin’ buddy and one-time “Theme Time Radio Hour” producer, Eddie Gorodetsky, would play random song roulette with Mr. D. and the two would riff back and forth on the selection, coming up with more and more outrageous scenarios for what “This song is about.” Those riffs were recorded, transcribed, and later adapted into essays for “Philosophy.”
Recording/transcribing would address a problem Dylan had run into while writing “Chronicles: Volume One,” a problem he complained about in several interviews: “… the rereading it and the time it takes to reread it — that for me is difficult… that was time-consuming, and I came to figure that there had to be a better way. I know what that is now. You need a full-time secretary so that you can get the ideas down immediately, then deal with them later.”
That might also explain why Dylan’s portions of the “Philosophy” audiobook sound as if they’re done with a hand recorder in one of his echoey Malibu bathrooms, especially compared against the professional production supplied to the other narrators. “Bob’s not going anywhere during the pandemic,” one of the myriad of “Theme Time’s” associate producers might have told Simon & Schuster. “We’ll send you the files with his narrative.”
This wouldn’t be the first time that Dylan’s narration was marred by amateur production. The initial recordings of “Theme Time,” produced on the fly by Mr. D. and Eddie G., reportedly sounded so bad that they couldn’t be aired, forcing associate producer Sonny Webster to hire sound engineer ‘Tex’ Carbone to not only supply the two with better recording equipment, but also to oversee the final editing and production of each show.
And it might explain why it took a decade for “Philosophy” to see the light of publication. The dozens, perhaps hundreds, of hypothetical recorded riffs produced over 10 years were eventually culled down to 66, some organized around different themes — war, money, the pleasures of life on the road, the dangers offered by the female of the species — others simply because they worked better than others, still others maybe because Dylan needed to fill out his book even if all he had left was a short riff on the Biblical Nephilim.
“Step on them by all means — you won’t like what happens”
However they came to be, it’s an interesting group of essays, covering some 154 years and including a hit song written by a teenage female high school student; another once recorded by the poet Carl Sandburg; yet another taking a stanza from a Rudyard Kipling poem; yet another that had predator-eyed Zelda Fitzgerald as inspiration; one that came from the pens of William Saroyan and the father of Alvin and the Chipmunks; and one being the only hit song ever written by a U.S. vice president and Nobel prize winner.
One of the best and funniest essays in the book is on Carl Perkin’s “Blue Suede Shoes,” where Dylan goes into rhapsodic paeans on the attributes of the eponymous footwear while repeatedly warning that he won’t be responsible for the consequences if you scuff them. Of cerulean blue leather, originally owned by the god of thieves and tricksters, they’re shoes of augury, priceless beyond measure, and would win any elected office they deigned to run for. Forbear from stepping on them.
Dylan also perfectly captures the chaotic mystery of The Temptations “Ball of Confusion,” “a song about the human condition,” as well as providing an instructive recommendation for his readers to search out the version stripped of all but the Temptations’ vocals, which will make you think of the song in a totally different way.
It is a shame that Mr. D. or Eddie G. didn’t also provide the backstory of “Ball of Confusion’s” Great Googa Mooga, which Dylan frames as a prayer to the narrator’s personal deity. The phrase is actually an exclamation of incredulity first immortalized in song by the Magic Tones in 1953 as ‘“Good Googa Mooga.” It was later bastardized by a host of R&B and soul artists including Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, and Muddy Waters as “Great Googly Moogly,” before being co-opted — oh, the irony — first by Frank Zappa and later used by Madison Avenue for a candy bar commercial.
It’s all ‘Love and Theft,’ baby. You’ll find it everywhere, especially when you’re not looking for it.
A lot of “Philosophy’s” essays work — the ones especially about songs performed by artists Dylan knows and likes, the Grateful Dead and Willie Nelson, for example. In fact, any road song, even crap like “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves,” seems to spark up Mr. D., maybe because he’s reminded that when on the road he’s not at home dealing with Malibu neighbors who give him the stink-eye every time the wind shifts and the smell of unemptied Porto-Potties fills the land.
The piece on John Trudell’s “Doesn’t Hurt Anymore” may be the best in the book, with Dylan fully engaged in promoting his love of both the song and the artist. Thirty-six years earlier, in a 1986 interview in Rolling Stone, Dylan called Trudell’s “AKA Graffiti Man” — recorded with “Oklahoma soul brother” Jesse Ed Davis — the best album of the year.
Pussy Bites Back (or a Bad Case of Vagina Dentata)
O n the other hand, a lot of “Philosophy’s” chapters don’t work. Dylan is right that Rosemary Clooney’s rendition of that candy confection of a song, “Come On-a My House,” does have a weird vibe to it — super-spookiness mostly thanks to Stan Freeman’s fever dream harpsichord, which sounds as if it would happily kill, dismember, and bury the other instruments before breaking into “The Addams Family” theme.
Clooney, who hated “Come On-a My House” with a venom as deadly as Sinatra’s hatred of “Strangers in the Night,” might have been delighted with Dylan’s essay and might have wished that Mitch Miller should still be alive just so it could put him straight into his grave. If the book had included “Que Sera Sera,” yet another song beloved by its audience but despised by its singer, “Philosophy” reviewers might be speculating on how Bob Dylan really feels about “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
But Dylan’s riff that “Come On-a” is a song about a pedophilic mass murderer feels like being in a club watching a stand-up routine that isn’t working, maybe one of those nights late in Lenny Bruce’s career where he would alternately read the Constitution aloud interspersed with news stories about his arrests. Glasses clinking, audience murmuring, the silence so deep that you can hear a drunk muttering, “what the fuck is this guy talking about?”
His act dying a slow death, Dylan the stand-up comic shifts gears, takes a deep breath and tries something else, “Take my wife, please. She’s a real bitchy woman. I mean, witchy woman. Speaking of taking her, I took her to the doctor yesterday and he says she’s got a real bad case of vagina dentata. I ask, ‘what’s that, Doc?’ and he says it means she’s got teeth in her twat. I say, what, I got to take her to the dentist now too?”
Badda-boom.
Gaslighting
Dylan’s essays on “Come On-a My House” and “Witchy Woman” may be just two of many examples of the gaslighting of his audience in “Philosophy.” Although the phrase has evolved in these modern times to describe toxic manipulation and emotional abuse, it was more basically defined until recently as “the act of grossly misleading someone, especially for one’s own advantage, after the title and plot of the 1944 movie.
As gaslighting goes, “Philosophy” is a cornucopia of gross misleading. Here’s a few examples…
- The clothier Nudie Cohen didn’t dress four US presidents or two Popes. Nor was Neil Armstrong buried in a Nudie suit.
- There’s no research, nor even legend, maintaining that gypsies were “forced from their home country by African workers… who eventually overran the indigenous people.”
- Col. Tom Parker didn’t dub artists with various weird sobriquets, such as “the Mortician Plowboy” or “the Big River Boy.”
- Stan Lee, as even the meanest intellect knows, was a comic book writer, not an artist (c’mon, Eddie G.).
- There’s no evidence of Rick Nelson ever being offered roles as Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” or Lonesome Rhoads in “A Face in the Crowd.”
- While the Cheka was responsible for the deaths of as many as 200,000 during the Red Terror, “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky never suggested to Lenin that they could arrive at an accurate number of victims by counting the shoes left behind and dividing by two. It was another genocidal maniac who said that.
“And so on, and so on, and scooby dooby doo,” as the Carter Family song goes.
Gaslighting, in its original meaning, was always a favorite routine of Eddie G. and Mr. D.’s during “Theme Time’s” run. Our Host dead-panned his way through a variety of outrageous claims including misattributing quotes about bees, relativity, money, and kissing to Albert Einstein; making the very dubious assertion that Ronald Reagan was a “friend of the black man,” providing a surreal recounting of the Nixon/Khrushchev kitchen debate; and claiming that all U.S. Presidents except Jimmy Carter were Freemasons.
“Theme Time” even occasionally did reverse gaslighting, such as when a listener call-in to the second “Money” episode insisted that deejay Bob play The Beatles single, “Can Buy Me Love.”
“I think it’s ‘Money Can’t Buy Me Love,’” a bemused Dylan pointed out. “I know you’re Mister `60s, but I have the record,” the caller replied. “It’s ‘Can Buy Me Love.’”
“I’m not Marilyn Manson, am I?”
Elvis drew a laugh from the crowd when somebody asked what his next recording will be. He started to sing “Out in the West Texas town of El Paso…” He interrupted the cheers by saying, “Whoops, I’m not Marty Robbins, am I?”
~ El Paso Times, 1960
A s well as gaslighting, Freemasonry and conspiracy theories involving Freemasonry seem to be a favorite theme Dylan keeps returning to in various forms, including “Theme Time,” “Murder Most Foul,” and in his essay on Marty Robbin’s great narrative ballad, “El Paso.”
Dylan starts off his essay on the straight and narrow, noting that “El Paso” “is a ballad of a tortured soul. But he quickly takes the off-ramp to Weirdness City in a riff mixing references to the Illuminati, genocide, the Trinity atomic test site, Toltec architects, numerology, transmigration, the ritualistic killing of the king, and El Paso’s Kern Place Gate.
To digress for a moment, Dylan seems to be a huge Marilyn Manson fan, at least when he’s in need of an out-there occult reference. While the Kern Place Gate already had its own Ripley’s “Believe It or Not” true history (go Google it), Manson created an urban legend for the gate out of whole cloth to promote his “Holy Wood” album, calling it a Masonic “gateway to death” and the mystical entrance to the Jornada Del Muerto, both terms re-used by Dylan in his “El Paso” essay.
“To clarify any unnecessary rumours…Peter Kern, a turn-of-the-century Mason, built a ceremonial entrance to his land to represent an esoteric gateway to death. This is the Jornada del Muerto, the journey of the dead man. Some believe that JFK passed through here on his way to Trinity and on to Dealy Plaza. It is located near El Paso.” ~ Marilyn Manson to his fans and followers.
That’s just the entrance to the rabbit hole you can descend into if you want to follow, just like you can have an entertaining, if mind-bending, few hours following Dylan’s references to Freemasons, the George Bushes elder and younger, Skull and Bones, and the possible location of Geronimo’s and Pancho Villa’s earthly remains in his chapter on “The Whiffenpoof Song.”
It’s all fun until somebody’s eye gets put out, as my mom used to say, and while the light-weight “Whiffenpoof Song” and the puerile Skull and Bones secret society don’t deserve better, Dylan does a disservice to “El Paso” with all the mystical nonsense that few readers will understand. Just as he does a disservice to Webb Pierce’s “There Stands the Glass” with a riff that sounds ripped wholesale from the pages of one of the old-school men’s magazines like True or Argosy.
Pierce’s narrative of a man’s losing a stare-down with his “first one today” stands on its own as a tale of alcoholic pain and suffering without the need for Dylan’s pulpy backstory, just as Robbin’s tale of a cowboy who loves, murders, flees, and then returns to El Paso like a moth destined to die in flame doesn’t need Masons or mystics.
Dylan however, does get in one of his best — and sourest — lines in “Philosophy,” with an observation that “El Paso’s” unnamed narrator is brought down, “… not for the taking of life… but for horse stealing.”
At the end black-eyed Felina, the murdered wild young Dixiecrat, the hunger for Texas, the pain in his heart all meant nothing. The Code of the West demands death for the violation of its main tenet. Never steal a man’s horse.
Without a Song
“Did you ever stop to think,” Sinatra began, “what the world would be like without a song? … It would be a pretty dreary place. . . . Gives you something to think about, doesn’t it?” ~ “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” Gay Talese
I n September 2022, photos of a few pages of “Philosophy” were leaked online. They were quickly deleted, probably at the strong encouragement of Simon & Schuster. From what you could see, the pages, taken from the “Without a Song” essay, curiously seemed to be more about Perry Como than the singer better associated with “Without a Song,” Frank Sinatra.
In fact, the leaked page with a description of Como on stage with the audience entranced, “…not by the clothes on his back or the drink in his hand. Not by the last starlet he kissed or the car that he drives” sounded more like Sinatra in concert than of the straight-laced and comparatively bland Como.
It turned out that when you finally saw the full essay, that was the point Dylan was making. As he notes earlier in the essay, “Perry Como was the anti-Rat Pack, like the anti-Frank; wouldn’t be caught dead with a drink in his hand… Perry is also the anti-American Idol. He is anti-flavor of the week, anti-hot list, and anti-bling.”
Quick, tell me anything you know about Perry Como. If you’re of a certain age, probably all you remember of him are Christmas specials, lots of family with him on set, and strange Christmas sweaters. He didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke, he didn’t get into messy scandals. Perry Como is so anti-pop culture everything, that all you’re left with when faced by him… is the song. He’s the original “I’m Not There.”
That’s apparently why Bob Dylan approves of Perry Como. As he notes in the “Pump It Up” essay, it should always all about the song, not the singer. “Knowing a singer’s life story doesn’t particularly help your understanding of a song… It’s what a song makes you feel about your own life that’s important.”
It’s a theme he returns to over and over again in “Philosophy.” In the “Old Violin” essay, Dylan notes that the man who “Philosophy” is dedicated to, Doc Pomus, wheelchair bound by polio, wrote “Save the Last Dance for Me” after watching his bride dance with his brother on their wedding day. But… “as amazing and heartbreaking as this story is,” Dylan notes, “one can argue that it diminishes it as a song.”
The Transmigration of Elvis Presley
Doc Pomus, the co-author of “Viva,” reappears in the essay about the song, with Dylan sarcastically noting that Doc quit the chancy world of songwriting for almost a decade to work in the much more stable field of professional gambling.
Gambling was much of the reason that Elvis remained in Vegas during the ‘70s. But gambling wasn’t his reason. Elvis had many addictions by then, but gambling wasn’t one of them. It was Colonel Tom Parker who had a gambling problem.
Elvis played Vegas for the first time in April 1956 after the Colonel signed him up for a gig at Vegas’ New Frontier. He was just 21, paid $15,000 for two weeks, was touted as “The Atomic-Powered Singer,” in honor of the bigger than the fucking Sun explosions happening out in the Nevada desert, and performed on a bill that included comedian Shecky Greene and the Freddy Martin Orchestra.
Vegas in the mid-‘50s was more Shecky’s than Elvis’, scene, with show audiences mostly middle-aged mafioso or Joe Citizen gamblers with middlebrow tastes who weren’t bringing the wife or the girlfriend to a lounge act to watch some hip gyrating greaser finocchi.
Elvis didn’t really bomb in 1956, but he didn’t return to Vegas until 1969, when the Colonel got Elvis a four-week engagement for $100,000 a week. On July 31, 1969, the King launched his run, and now, 13 years after Elvis’ first appearance, the middle-brow audience was his audience. All grown up, with change in their pockets, and ready to worship at the throne of The King that they remembered.
Elvis would perform in the city of the meadows until December 1976. He’d be dead less than a year after that.
Bob Dylan makes a curious assertion in the “Viva Las Vegas” essay that “it’s important to remember that there would have been no King to be brought low without the Colonel’s hard work and unwavering faith.” Curious, as I said, for a man who had had his own managerial problems and who may have staged a motorcycle accident in order to get out from under them. Most accounts of their relationship have the Colonel as the villain and if not directly responsible for Elvis’ downfall, certainly contributed to it.
Maybe it’s another case of gaslighting, given Dylan’s wry statement that Parker was so loyal to his client that he stayed in Las Vegas long after Elvis’ death to ensure tributes were kept respectful, “…though cynics often pointed out that the Colonel allowed himself to become a tourist attraction to continue paying off his own steadily increasing gambling markers.”
But perhaps what Dylan was thinking was how all cultural revolutions eventually become commercialized. The songs Elvis sang at the beginning had been magical, mystical, nuclear, transgressive, the stuff that made parents run into your room and throw the record player out the window. Now Elvis’ songs were emasculated, irrelevant, impotent, just nostalgic waypoints in a Vegas act.
At the end it wasn’t the songs but the experience of Elvis that people came for, even though he eventually became a bloated, near-immobile entity without a song. Until he finally destroyed the thing he had created… which was himself.
A realization that Bob Dylan might have come to about himself and decided to act upon one July 29 in 1966.
Coda — “Kings is Kings”
“S’pose people left money laying around where he was — what did he do? He collared it. S’pose he contracted to do a thing, and you paid him and didn’t set down there and see that he done it — what did he do? He always done the other thing. S’pose he opened his mouth — what then? If he didn’t shut it powerful quick he’d lose a lie every time…
“All I say is kings is kings and you got to make allowances. Take them all around, they’re a mighty ornery lot.”
~ Mark Twain, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”
