What We Know and What We Can Guess About Bob Dylan’s “Shadow Kingdom”
The Wise Old Owl and the Callow Youth of America return to discuss the meaning of “Shadow Kingdom” and Mr. D.’s upcoming streaming concert
Callow Youth of America: Hey Woo! Long time no see. Wazzup!
The Wise Old Owl: It’s pronounced “Who,” youngster, and unless you’ve been living under a rock you’ve heard about Bob Dylan’s streaming concert coming on July 18th.
CYA: Clue me in, daddy-o.
WOO: Here’s the June 16 Live Nation press release verbatim…
BOB DYLAN CONCERT SET TO AIR ON VEEPS JULY 18, BROADCAST PERFORMANCE WILL BE THE ARTIST’S FIRST IN NEARLY 30 YEARS
On Sunday, July 18, at 2pm PT, Veeps will present Bob Dylan in an exclusive concert performance. Shadow Kingdom will showcase the artist in an intimate setting as he presents renditions of songs from his extensive and renowned body of work created especially for this event. Tickets are $25 and access to this concert event will remain for 48 hours after the initial airing.
Shadow Kingdom will mark the artist’s first concert performance since December 2019, after his planned tours were cancelled due to the global pandemic, along with those of virtually every other touring artist. It will also be Dylan’s first performance since the release of his universally acclaimed album, Rough And Rowdy Ways, which debuted in the Top Ten in 16 countries, and was the artist’s 18th studio album to debut in the U.S. Top 10. Rough And Rowdy Ways also debuted at #1 on Billboard’s Top Album Sales Chart.
“It’s an incredible honor and a high point for us all at Veeps to have the opportunity to be working with Bob Dylan, and to be a part of what is sure to be a truly special and historic performance, not only as professionals, but as music fans too,” said Joel Madden, co-founder of Veeps.
Tickets go on sale at 9:00AM PT on Wednesday 16 June at bobdylan.veeps.com
Bob Dylan has released seven studio albums within the past 23-years; a creative span that also included the recording of an Oscar- and Golden Globe-winning composition, “Things Have Changed,” from the film Wonder Boys, in 2001; a worldwide best-selling memoir, Chronicles Vol. 1, which spent 19 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List, in 2004 and was recently named the greatest rock memoir of all time by Rolling Stone. He is the recipient of the Officier de la Legion d’honneur in 2013, Sweden’s Polar Music Award in 2000, a Doctorate from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and numerous other honors.
Bob Dylan has sold more than 125 million records around the world. Rough and Rowdy Ways is the artist’s 39th studio album. An up-to-date overview of Bob Dylan’s career can be downloaded at: https://bit.ly/3vYTop3
About Veeps: Veeps is a direct-to-fan experiential platform, custom-built for artists, by artists. Founded in 2017 by Benji and Joel Madden, it is the music industry’s leading, premium live-streaming platform. Since then, Veeps has hosted hundreds of live-stream shows and events, in partnership with Live Nation, Veeps continues with a mission to power artists in the most critical early stages of their development, all the way through the biggest, most important moments of their careers.
WOO: A few things worth noting about the press release. The “artist’s first broadcast performance in nearly thirty years” line refers to his “MTV Unplugged” TV special of 1994. That was the last time he did any kind of televised full “live and in concert” performance, and in fact was only the second since the broadcast of the “Hard Rain” NBC TV special of 1976. There have been rumors of other recorded but never-broadcast Dylan concerts over the years, and if you want to pick nits, this isn’t Dylan’s first rodeo with streaming , as he did a 50-minute set, including a duet with Norah Jones, in 2005 that was privately streamed as part of Amazon’s tenth anniversary celebration.
And in late-breaking news, an unconfirmed Twitter report on June 18 claims that the concert won’t be a live stream but was “recorded in May at a small venue in Santa Monica, with new arrangements of classic songs with new musicians.” True? Not true? Take with as many grains of salt as needed.
CYA: Okay, cool, so the Man is doing his first public streaming concert at, what like, age 100? Good for the old dude. I can see why he’s having it at 2 in the afternoon on a Sunday, too. Him and his Boomer audience probably couldn’t make it much past 9…
WOO: Y’know, you’re not too old to spank.
CYA: Okay, okay, sorry. How come now rather than last year, when he had all that noise about “Murder Most Foul” and then he released “Rough and Rowdy Ways.” You think he’d want to get on the road again with his Eveready Tour now that the pandemic is starting to wind down.
WOO: It’s the Never-Ending Tour, you chucklehead. Why he’s doing a streaming concert now is anybody’s guess, and before we move on, I’ll note that most of the rest of this article is just that, guesses and pure speculation. If you want facts, go back and read the press release. Okay?
Anyway, as someone on Twitter noted, “the man is incapable of doing anything remotely like a normal person would do it” which is good a description of Bob Dylan’s career as you’re likely to find.
The “Shadow Kingdom” concert may be a prelude to a reboot of the NET and Bob Dylan back to being “live and in concert” sometime later this year. The “new arrangements and new young musicians” claimed in the Twitter post might be the warm-up for a full re-organization of band and music in preparation for a return to the road.
But at age 80 after a year’s enforced break, it could as well be Mr. D’s decision to say farewell to live performance. Streaming is the best way to give as many people as possible an opportunity to see his last concert, albeit with possibly new arrangements and a new band, something certain to freak Dylan’s fan base if it is his last concert and which he might find amusing to do to them.
Who knows, maybe he has a new song or even a whole new album that he’s calling “Shadow Kingdom” and he’s going to unveil it July 18. Unless your name is Bob Dylan, your guess is as good as mine.
CYA: “Shadow Kingdom?”
WOO: When he was making fun of the Never-Ending Tour concept in his “World Gone Wrong” liner notes, Dylan claimed the NET was just one of many named tours, including The Money Never Runs Out, Southern Sympathizer, Why Do You Look At Me So Strangely, The One Sad Cry of Pity, Principles Of Action, Outburst Of Consciousness, and Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down tours. Whether it’s a one night stand or the first leg of a brand-new tour, “Shadow Kingdom” is the latest.
CYA: Any reason he’s calling it “Shadow Kingdom?”
WOO: Okay, grab your garters. Things are going to get weird.
CYA: No! Don’t tell me it’s Masons again!
WOO: Nope, at least not any I’ve found. This time we’re looking at a fictional Atlantean soldier; his creator, a Texan pulp writer who was the father of the sword and sorcery genre; a Russian mystic; and a conspiracy theory that makes “Masons on the Moon” sound rational in comparison.
But before we start, let’s reflect on Bob Dylan’s love of pulp fiction, a love which has many examples, including;
- The cover of his 1984 album, “Knocked Out Loaded” reworked from the cover art for the January 1939 issue of a pulp magazine, “Spicy Adventure Stories.”
- The virtual cover of his 2020 single, “False Prophet,” reworked from the 1942 cover of “The Shadow” magazine.
- Chronicles: Volume One’s dozens of references to the pulps, including a very specific reference to one pulp title when Dylan writes about a hand injury he suffered in the late 1980s.
- And some very strange allusions to the movie Pulp Fiction in his visual art.
“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” ~ Matthew 7:15
Although he might have randomly picked some phrase from “Shadow Kingdom” out of his Burroughs Cut-Up Box, it’s likely that Dylan had been thinking about Robert E. Howard’s 1929 short story, first published in the “Weird Tales” pulp magazine, for quite awhile, maybe even when he was writing “False Prophet.”
“The stories I wrote about [Kull] seemed almost to write themselves, without any planning on my part; there was no conscious effort on my part to work them up. They simply grew up, unsummoned, full grown in my mind and flowed out on paper from my finger tips. To sit down and consciously try to write another story on that order would be to produce something the artificiality of which would be apparent.” ~ Robert E. Howard in a letter to H.P. Lovecraft
Marking the first appearance of Howard’s “Kull the Conqueror” character, a precursor to his better-known Conan the Barbarian, “The Shadow Kingdom” takes place shortly after Kull has sacked the kingdom of Valusia and established himself as its new ruler. The Atlantean discovers that Valusia is controlled by a secret cabal of Serpent Men, who have not only replaced the kingdom’s guards and Council, but who also attempt to put a Serpent Man duplicate of Kull himself on the throne.
“The Shadow Kingdom” is a fast, entertaining read, holding up surprisingly well some 90 years after its original publication. Of more interest than the plot is the opium dream atmosphere that Howard establishes, with Kull spending much of the story reflecting on the nature of masks, illusions, and reality.
“…sometimes it seemed to Kull that he moved in a dream. Strange to him were the intrigues of court and palace, army and people. All was like a masquerade, where men and women hid their real thoughts with a smooth mask.”
“… he seemed to see their faces as things of illusion, things unreal, existent only as shadows and mockeries of substance. Always he had seen their faces as masks, but before he had looked on them with contemptuous tolerance, thinking to see beneath the masks shallow, puny souls, avaricious, lustful, deceitful; now there was a grim undertone, a sinister meaning, a vague horror that lurked beneath the smooth masks.”
“…a kingdom of the shadows, ruled by phantoms who glided back and forth behind the painted curtains, mocking the futile king who sat upon the throne — himself a shadow.”
“And what, mused Kull, were the realities of life? Ambition, power, pride? The friendship of man, the love of women — which Kull had never known — battle, plunder, what? Was it the real Kull who sat upon the throne or was it the real Kull who had scaled the hills of Atlantis, harried the far isles of the sunset, and laughed upon the green roaring tides of the Atlantean sea? How could a man be so many different men in a lifetime?”
“Am I Kull? Do I stand here or is that Kull yonder in very truth, and am I but a shadow, a figment of thought?” ~ excerpts from “The Shadow Kingdom” by Robert E. Howard
WOO: Illusion, masks and the idea of “how could a man be so many different men in a lifetime?” The pocket history of a song-and-dance man who has spent his career manipulating all three shadow themes.
CYA: Okay, don’t know what any of that has to do with his concert, but interesting, I guess. What about the Russian and conspiracy theory?
WOO: Things get weird quickly, as I said. Several researchers think Howard got the germ of the idea for his “Serpent Men” from Helena Blavatsky’s “The Secret Doctrine” which refers to a super-society of “‘dragon-men’ who controlled Lemuria, a lost continent that was reputedly located in either the Indian or Pacific Ocean. Blavatsky writes that Lemuria eventually suffered the same fate as Atlantis when the dragon-men’s misuse of magic brought about the end of their civilization.
CYA: Whoa. More sword and sorcery, huh?
WOO: Unlike Howard, Madam Blavatsky’s dense, turgid, and sometimes racist writing was deadly serious nonfiction. Blavatsky co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875 and became the leading proponent of the Society’s tenets, known as “Theosophy,” an attempt to forge common ground between Western Science and Eastern Mysticism.
At the time of Blavatsky’s death in 1891 the Society had a membership well over 100,000, and the Theosophical movement was still well-known during the 1920s and 30s when Robert E. Howard was writing. Blavatsky’s writings had something of a resurgence in the 1960s, apparently catching the attention of one Bob Dylan at some point.
CYA: Jesus, and about time, too.
WOO: Sorry about the digression, but context is important. Anyway, Scott Warmuth makes a solid argument that Dylan borrows phrases from Blavatsky’s “Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology” for use in his memoir, “Chronicles: Volume One.”
Blavatsky was criticized for rampant plagiarism in “Isis Unveiled,” as the book regularly re-uses full blocks of text from other occult works without any acknowledgement of the source. An irony probably not lost on Bob Dylan, who also borrows liberally from another accused plagiarist, Jack London, for “Chronicles.”
Half sick of shadows
But in her web she still delights
To weave the mirror’s magic sights,
For often thro’ the silent nights
A funeral, with plumes and lights
And music, came from Camelot:
Or when the moon was overhead
Came two young lovers lately wed;
‘I am half sick of shadows,’ said
The Lady of Shalott. ~ The Lady of Shalott by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
CYA: And are we finally going to get to the conspiracy theory now?
WOO: Sure, in two words: “lizard people.”
CYA: Dude, lizard people?
WOO: Lizard people, aka reptilians, saurians, or draconians. Whatever your preferred flavor, the basic conspiracy theory has it that there are reptilian shapeshifters among us who are in the process of gaining political power with the end goal of controlling human society. The leading proponent of the theory claims that many world leaders are reptilians.
And yep, the whole conspiracy theory can be traced right back to “The Shadow Kingdom” and Madame Blavatsky. In fact, Bob Dylan may even know a reptilian, as Mick Jagger is supposed to be one. Personally, I would have guessed Keith Richards, but you never know.
CYA: But it’s a joke, right? Nobody believes in real lizard people.
WOO: According to a survey conducted in 2016, about 12 million Americans do. Even discounting trolling, 12 million is a pretty big number. Of course, that’s small change compared to the 160 million who believe there’s a conspiracy behind the assassination of John F Kennedy.
And here we are full circle.
CYA: My head hurts. But Dylan doesn’t believe in lizard people, does he?
WOO: As I said way back in our “Murder Most Foul” discussion, who knows what Bob Dylan believes? I’d say it’s hardly likely that he believes in reptilian conspiracies, not least because the whole lizard people thing is uncomfortably close to anti-Semitic blood libel conspiracy theories — the shadowy Other secretly trying to take over society, eating babies, drinking blood. Very hard to ferret out since they’re so good at impersonating us. Using masks, illusions, hiding in the shadows.
CYA: The Shadow Kingdom.
WOO: Yeah, the Shadow Kingdom. Of course, my theory puts a lot of weight on the foundation of just those two words. But Dylan seems to be thinking a lot about the nature of reality and illusion and the damage that conspiracy theories and those who promote them can wreak if “Murder Most Foul” “False Prophet” and now “Shadow Kingdom” are evidence.
In Plato’s cave, a group of people have spent their lives chained, facing a blank wall. They watch shadows dancing on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them. For the prisoners the shadows are their reality.
It’s possible for someone who is freed from the cave to come to understand that the shadows are not reality at all, But most of the cave dwellers have no desire to leave their Shadow Kingdom, even when their chains have rusted to the point where they could be parted with one snap. Instead, they spend their time weaving elaborate theories about the shadows’ meaning.
They would kill anyone who attempted to drag them out of the cave.
Do you think about mortality often?
I think about the death of the human race. ~ Bob Dylan to Douglas Brinkley, 2020
More thoughts from The Wise Old Owl and the Callow Youth of America in Masons, Mobsters, and Spooks, O My! A Field Guide to Bob Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul”
Have a comment or question? Email me at fhbals@gmail.com
