Bob Dylan’s Desire
Last week, I posted about Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane,” his song about Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, who was twice convicted for a triple homicide and spent almost twenty years in prison before being exonerated in 1985. Carter became a controversial cause célèbre in large part because of Dylan’s song, which was the centerpiece of Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour in 1975 and 1976 and the introductory song to his popular album Desire, released in the midst of the tour and featuring the same musicians. As we saw, Dylan took a few threads of truth from the case and spun them into a tangle, generating criticism and a lawsuit. As we also saw, Dylan’s showmanship during the tourdidn’t do much to simplify things.
“Rolling Thunder Revue Poster”
The other songs on Desire about murder, death, and injustice only made things more complicated, most notably “Joey.” Another song “ripped from the headlines,” in many ways it is a companion piece to “Hurricane.” “Joey” tells a story about the life and death of Joey “Crazy Joe” Gallo, a notorious mobster with a violent history who was gunned down by rivals while eating at a New York clam house in 1972.
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| Headlines announcing Gallo’s death |
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| The media following Gallo’s casket during his funeral service |
As Dylan sings him, Gallo is a decent man unjustly accused and undeserving of his fate. “I never considered him a gangster,” Dylan said. “I always considered him some kind of hero…An underdog fighting the elements.” In addition to these similarities in topic and tone, “Joey” also mirrors “Hurricane” in its narrative structure and style. Like “Hurricane,” it’s long (twelve minutes), with expository lyrics that are full of “real crime” details and direct quotes from the people involved. Also like “Hurricane,” the song has rarely been covered by other major artists. Let’s listen:
Dylan presents Gallo as a tragic hero caught between two corrupt systems, “the mob men and the men in blue.” Not only are the terrible things people say about him not true, according to Dylan, they are “far from the truth.” In Dylan’s song, Gallo is not a vicious criminal but someone who avenges the wronged, protects children, empathizes with the oppressed, and generally seeks to go about his business in “quiet and peace.” He is also really good-looking and wears great clothes. (“He dressed like Jimmy Cagney and I swear he did look great,” Dylan sings.) He’s got heart, he’s got a conscience, and he’s got style. Why, as the song asks repeatedly, would anyone want to kill him?
In reality, Dylan got only one thing right about Gallo: he did look good.
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| Joey Gallo — mean on the streets but nice on the eyes |
In fact, before he was gunned down, Gallo became a widely recognized cultural figure because of his looks and style. He hobnobbed with celebrities, was covered in the society pages when he testified — in black Ray-Bans — before the U.S. Senate on organized crime, and generally helped coin the term “gangster chic.”
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| Gallo testifying before the U.S. Senate |
But that’s where the line between Dylan’s “Joey” and the actual Joey Gallo can be drawn. In his “examination of Dylan’s transparent dishonesty,” critic Lester Bangs memorably called Dylan’s song “one of the most mindlessly amoral pieces of repellent romanticist bullshit ever written.” In reality, Gallo was, by most accounts, a brutal psychopath who initiated and carried out one of the bloodiest organized crime conflicts in American history. A hired hit man, he was also accused of kidnapping, battery (including of his own wife and children), rape, exploitation, and extortion, among other serious crimes. In addition to his handsome mug, you can easily find photos of his bloody crime scenes online.
What to make of Dylan’s wanton misrepresentation of Gallo juxtaposed next to his representation of Rubin Carter? Nothing good. “Dylan doesn’t give a damn about Rubin Carter,” charged Bangs, along with numerous others. Bangs kept fuming:
As for Desire, much has been made of Dylan’s support for [Carter’s] defense…but I think there are grounds for questioning his motives. Does Bob Dylan really care about Hurricane Carter, Joey Gallo, and, in retrospect, George Jackson?…The answer can only be found in Dylan’s handling of these people in his songs, which purport to convey the folk/street truth behind the headlines. I am not so much interested in Rubin Carter…as I am in whether Dylan is being straight with me or not. The man does, after all, have a reputation second only to David Bowie for image-mongering, and second to none for mythmaking. One tends to wonder if the myths he has made, even when they deal with actual historical personages, might not devolve into an endless alienated outlaw narcissism; if he has, in fact, been talking about himself all the way down the road. (source)
Whatever you think about Dylan’s concern for Carter or Gallo, the romanticist strain Bangs identifies here is clear throughout Desire. The album is a rich tapestry of myth, legend, folk tales, and exotic settings. It plays like a series of dramatic vignettes in which all of the main characters — including Carter and Gallo — experience heroic extremes of loss, isolation, violence, and death, either by the hands of other men or by cruel acts of Nature and Justice.
“Romance in Durango,” another murder ballad on the album, is about a fictional murderer and his lover who are on the run in Mexico. Dylan adopts the first person voice, singing the part of the murderer. “Do not cry my dear,” he calls out to his lover as they make their escape, “God is watching us.” As the song concludes, however, the outlaw is shot and dies. His last words describe the sensation of the bullet entering his body as he hands over his gun to his lover.
You can watch Dylan performing the song live during the Rolling Thunder Revue tour here. The most notable covers are translations: Fabrizio De Andre’s “Avventura a Durango” and Raimundo Fagner’s “Romance no Deserto.”
This song is one of my favorites — it’s beautiful and illustrates the cinematic quality of Desire. In fact, one reviewer described “Romance in Durango” as “the climax to an unmade Sam Peckinpah movie in song.” That’s fitting. Peckinpah’s epic The Wild Bunch (1969), about a murderous outlaw gang on the Mexican border trying to grapple with the modern world, was probably an influence.
But given Peckinpah’s reputation for glamorizing violence, exploiting women and minorities, and spinning myth about the West, this comment is also another way of claiming that “Romance in Durango,” too, is “romanticist bullshit.” With lyrics like this, I have to agree:
Past the Aztec ruins and the ghosts of our people
Hoofbeats like castanets on stone
At night I dream of bells in the village steeple
Then I see the bloody face of Ramon
Was it me that shot him down in the cantina
Was it my hand that held the gun?
Come, let us fly, my Magdalena
The dogs are barking and what’s done is done
No Ilores, mi querida
Dios nos vigila
Soon the horse will take us to Durango
Agarrame, mi vida
Soon the desert will be gone
Soon you will be dancing the fandango
At the corrida we’ll sit in the shade
And watch the young torero stand alone
We’ll drink tequila where our grandfathers stayed
When they rode with Villa into Torreón
But it’s still beautiful. Also beautiful are the widely loved and widely covered songs on Desire that, though not murder ballads, are also about confronting death. In the celebrated, mystical travel narrative “Isis,” for example, the first-person narrator leaves his wife and sets out with a companion to rob a grave, but ends up scurrying home after a mind-bending look into the grave’s abyss.
Here’s Dylan performing “Tangled Up in Blue” and “Isis” (at 4:30) during the Rolling Thunder Revue:
A nice cover by The White Stripes:
“One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below),” the most widely covered song on Desire, is also about drifters, outlaws, and looking into the abyss. In this case, the abyss is not just the grave but also the human heart. The song tells the story, again in the first person, of a man who must leave the woman he loves to go “down to the valley below.”
There are some truly great covers of this song, including those by Frazey Ford, The White Stripes again, Calexico and Roger McGuinn, and Robert Plant.
As a fitting last note to Desire, Dylan offers “Black Diamond Bay” followed by “Sara.” In the former, he tells a fictional tale about the destruction of a small island by a volcano, seen first from the perspective of those who die and then from the perspective of a first person narrator in the United States who, with disinterest, watches Walter Cronkite report their deaths on the news while drinking a beer.
Notably, this disinterested first person narrator gets the facts wrong about the nature of the disaster. Earthquake, volcano — it doesn’t really matter, it’s just another “hard luck story.” The details blur.
I was sittin’ home alone one night in L.A
Watchin’ old Cronkite on the seven o’clock news
It seems there was an earthquake that
Left nothin’ but a Panama hat
And a pair of old Greek shoes
Didn’t seem like much was happenin’
So I turned it off and went to grab another beer
Seems like every time you turn around
There’s another hard-luck story that you’re gonna hear
And there’s really nothin’ anyone can say
And I never did plan to go anyway
In the final song on the album, “Sara,” Dylan returns once again to real life, protesting against the suffering of actual people with the same kind of expository detail that we see in “Hurricane” and “Joey.” In this case, however, the people are himself and his wife, Sara, whose marriage is falling apart. Here’s a clip of the song from the film Renaldo and Clara, with Sara Dylan starring as Clara and featuring concert footage from the Rolling Thunder Revue:
In this live television version from 1975, Dylan dedicates the song to “someone watching out there I know, she knows who she is”:
But did Sara recognize herself in the song? Did Dylan get the facts right? Could she tell from this song if he really cared about her? Can we? Or, here too, in dealing with himself and his wife as “actual historical personages,” does Dylan devolve into “alienated outlaw narcissism”? Did Sara dab a tear from her eye as she listened, or did she roll her eyes, pick up the phone while muttering something about “romanticist bullshit,” and call her attorney?Or both?
The answer, my friend, is blowing you know where. The answer is blowing you know where.