Graley Herren & Time Out of Mind

Substack Intro

This posting is a review of Graley Herren’s: Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s "Time Out of Mind" (Anthem Studies in Theatre and Performance) Hardcover, 2021 paperback 2022. It has not previously been published because I came to a stop in writing around this time, despite having undertaken much research that was ripe for turning into finished work. However, I’ll pick that story up again and its relevance to this Substack, after the book review:

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Dreams and Dialogues
in Dylan’s Time Out of Mind

Noting the importance of the number three to Dylan, this study of Time Out of Mind has three main sections, comprising readings based on the themes of Murder Ballads, Religious Allegory and Race. Not only that, but we have other triptychs within the chapters, a structural device that aids the reader in keeping his bearings through the sometimes complex topics under discussion.

The introduction, consequently, examines three speeches from the latter part of Dylan's career framing the overall study. In addition to being introduced to the book itself, many of the attributes that make the main chapters shine are already in evidence here, such as Professor Herren's attention to detail. The mortality surrounding people in Dylan's circles at the time, for example, and the adept way an interview comment from Dylan talking to Mikal Gilmore about this is utilised: maybe it doesn't deal with my mortality, it maybe just deals with mortality in general. It's the one thing we have in common, isn't it?"

A significant strength of the book, as in this example, is Herren's use of Dylan interview quotes. These are employed with a keen eye for their contextual significance and the paths down which Dylan is obliquely pointing. Graley Herren does not just take a Dylan quote; he analyses how and where it was used and to what deeper likely purpose. That approach leads to fascinating insights and a genuinely inspired reading of the much-examined quote: "Those old songs are my lexicon and my prayer book."

For the purposes of this study Time Out of Mind includes "Red River Shore," "Marchin' to the City", "Dreamin' of You," and "Mississippi". Consequently, when I refer to the album as addressed by the critic in this review, these are to be taken as part of the whole[i]. The writings on these 'extra' tracks contain some of the best insights in the book, unsurprisingly, as Mr Herren regards "Dreamin’ of You" as a microcosm of the album as a whole and "Red River Shore" and "Mississippi" as two of its most outstanding achievements in song.

Numerous songs from elsewhere in Dylan's oeuvre are discussed, where appropriate. Thus, for example, we find “The Ballad of Emmet Till”, “Blind Willie McTell”, and “Nettie Moore” in the section on race relations and slavery.

Murder Ballads

Graley Herren begins his examination of TOOM (a homonym-acronym the author likes to employ, and it undoubtedly suits his purposes) with murder ballads as the first of his three main themes. After describing their prominence throughout Dylan's career, starting with the debut album, Herren concentrates on the two cover albums that preceded Time Out of Mind. Dylan, as the author notes: "had hundreds of songs at his disposal. It is striking, therefore, how many murder ballads he selected for the two albums." Furthermore, it is pointed out that both album titles are taken from such ballads.[ii]

Taking on board Stephen Scobie's remark that: "it's not too fanciful to describe Time Out of Mind as World Gone Wrong 'written by' Bob Dylan."… our writer proceeds to demonstrate how every track evinces the substance and imagery of the murder ballad tradition. Furthermore, he traces the start of a recurring story in certain Dylan songs to a surprising source: "Compare "Make You Feel My Love" to its offspring "Moonlight" from "Love and Theft" (2001), "Spirit on the Water" from Modern Times (2006), "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'" from Together Through Life (2009) and "Soon after Midnight" from Tempest (2012). All feature sickos disguised as Romeos, serenading their targets." This eye-catching last line is one of many where the writer steps out of academic tone to make a point with brio.

Herren’s investigation into murder ballad tropes and resonances throughout the rest of the songs is compelling. Only rarely do I find myself unconvinced, and then only at the granular level of a single line in one song, and perhaps merely a solitary word in “Till I Fell in Love With You”. Otherwise, I am carried along with him until the statement: "Time Out of Mind functions on one important level as a song-cycle of murder ballads. The narrator dreams about stalking and killing his lost love. Dylan obscures this narrative by scrambling the chronology." This was a step too far for this reader; why would Dylan tell a story and then jumble up the 'chapter-songs' so that the reader-listener has to rearrange them to get a linear story? I realize that Dylan likes games, jests and so forth, but I fail to see that such a strategy would bring any artistic merit to the recordings.

These quibbles should not be over-stressed as I am in danger of highlighting the one area with which I am at odds in a study packed with valuable insight and commentary. It would be a mistake for anyone to do this at the expense of all the positive features which provide much illumination.

Overall, this first leg of the triptych constitutes a highly impressive investigation into Dylan’s history of singing murder ballads and how their tropes and techniques resonate throughout all the songs from the TOOM sessions.

Religious Allegory

As Dylan sang, over four decades ago: It's the ways of the flesh to war against the spirit /
Twenty-four hours a day. That concept is at the core of this section as a Bunyanesque pilgrim is faced with a Kafkaesque maze rather than the traditional linear journey. Herren opens with an introduction to the history of allegory and the concept of allegoresis, that is, the audience who ‘reads’ the allegory as allegory. Otherwise that ‘dialogue’ is never engaged, which is similar to, as is observed, the fact that intertextuality only succeeds as intertextuality if it is recognised. These aspects are part of the reason we can have different “dreams and dialogues”, when listening to Dylan, from each other or at different periods in our lives. I will return to this in my conclusion but for now, let us return to our modern-day pilgrim and the non-linear route he undertakes, which results in even deeper swings between faith and doubt.

The narrator becomes a form of Everyman, and echoes Christ’s own despair and doubt, when on the cross. Observing that Dylan and Martin Scorsese “have long admired each other’s work”, Graley Herren postulates that TOOM “stages a fascinating intertextual dialogue” with the latter’s 1988 movie, The Last Temptation of Christ. Herren sees this as being particularly strong in “Standing in the Doorway”, a song which features strongly in each of his three ‘dream’ readings.[iii]

“Red River Shore”, viewed here as “an ardent psalm”, and “Highlands” are two of the outstanding interpretations in this section, while the changeable identity of Herren’s “dreamer” is explained in terms of ‘metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls’. To avoid giving away too many ‘spoilers’, I will now turn to the third in our trio of ‘dreams’, this one being from the viewpoint of a slave on the run and encompassing much of import on the subject of race both in US life and Bob Dylan’s songs.

Runaway Slave

There are obvious parallels between a fugitive slave and a fleeing killer, with both being hunted by their pursuers. This time it is the victim that is running, not the psychopath, and this particular race takes us deep into the subject of race itself. Herren skillfully navigates through the thorny topics surrounding the history of racism and slavery in the United States, and how Dylan has handled these in songs from “The Ballad of Emmett Till” through “Blind Willie McTell” to Time out of Mind and beyond.

‘Thorny topics’, above, refers to the multiple social and artistic conundrums arising that are so sensitively probed in this study. The issue of white voices expressing black pain is never going to be a straightforward development and, within that complicated terrain, by adding an artist such as Bob Dylan who is never known for taking an easy path, the situation becomes ever more complex. Bob Dylan, as we all know, specialises in tackling essential topics head on and blasting his own path through prickly surroundings. Herren places Dylan in the context of contemporary thought, art and debate on the subject. In doing so, he provides a telling contribution to one of the areas I expect to be most explored by US academics writing on Dylan in the coming years.

As he writes: Above all, Dylan’s dream-songs represent some of his most provocative confrontations with the legacy of slavery. These confrontations have remained central throughout Dylan’s work, and form a, if not the, core theme of Dylan’s 21st-century art. Blackface minstrelsy especially dominates in such seminal works as “Love and Theft” and Masked and Anonymous. The seemingly straightforwardly despicable tradition is, as ever in this field, anything but straightforward. Its history is, instead, devilishly complex, as Dylan has so brilliantly illuminated in his art. Herren, here, adds to my understanding of both the subject itself and Dylan’s achievements in exploring its complexities.

Radical Uncertainties

The reader may be pondering how the songs express three divergent ‘readings’ simultaneously. Surprising as this may appear at first, it is, instead, inevitable given the nature of Dylan’s art. There is never ONE “answer” to Dylan’s songs. They are not crossword puzzles open to only a solitary correct “solution”. Murder ballads, the struggle between the flesh and the spirit and the impact of race/slavery on the US are perennial Dylan themes. As such, it is hardly surprising to see them overlap, interpenetrate and for all three of them to ‘haunt’ each song.

As we have seen with intertextuality and allegory, different ‘dialogues’ and different ‘dreams’ appear depending on what each listener brings to them or, what any listener at different stages of their lives brings to the listening experience.

Furthermore, as an artist matures, they have more and more past art to draw and reflect upon – including their own earlier work. As Shakespeare did with increased intensity as his short career drew to its end, Dylan has done in this last quarter of a century. In both cases, the increased intertextuality deepens an already inherent ambiguity and mystery that engages the audience whose responses, in turn, have to contribute to the ‘meaning’ they attain from the art.

This is a deepening of something that is always at the heart of both writers’ output. What Professor Emma Smith refers to as the ‘gappiness” and “radical uncertainties” of Shakespeare are very much evident in all Dylan’s albums, although they undoubtedly become even more central to those from Time Out of Mind forwards.

Smith writes of Shakespeare in a paragraph readily adaptable to Dylan:

This book has presented a Shakespeare whose plays are constitutionally incomplete. I've tried to show how their gappiness and their ambiguities produce creative readings. These radical uncertainties function as dramatic and intellectual cues to readers, playgoers and theatre-makers. Just as these dialogues direct audiences to make up their own minds, so Shakespeare's characters, plots and unanswered questions provide space for us to think, interrogate and experience different potential outcomes. Shakespeare's plays aren't monuments to revere, or puzzles to resolve. They are partial, shifting, unstable survivals from a very different world which have the extraordinary ability to ventriloquize and stimulate our current concerns.[iv]

Conclusion

Graley Herren’s study is highly recommended. It deepened my appreciation of the album as well as Dylan songs from elsewhere in his canon, and one cannot ask for much more than that. There were some outstanding insights, and it was extremely well written with the writer’s own prose being an extra delight. Disagreements with other writers’ opinions are politely and respectfully framed, while full accreditation is always given, something that one could once take for granted but which has recently slipped even in academic realms, far less the wider world where disregard for it often reaches shameful levels.

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Substack outro

As you can see, by the end of the review, my mind was back on matters Shakespeare and Dylan, ‘more true performing’, you might say. Murder ballads, that is, for me as a subset of Shakespeare, Dylan and ballads and the particular scenarios to which Dylan keeps returning. The same thoughts continued to pre-occupy Graley Herren, too. In his series on Dylan in Cincinnati, Herren’s 2013 review included the following: “And what he has to say is all brooding menace. “Love Sick” is the first song on Time Out of Mind, an album deeply influenced by the murder ballad tradition. From the start, Dylan presents us with a psycho issuing threats under his breath. Woe to the woman being pursued by this jilted lover, stalking her through streets that are dead with blood in his eyes.” [v]

Given that I had followed the ‘psycho killer trail’, in my then recent book on Dylan and Shakespeare, especially in regard to “Moonlight” and “Soon After Midnight”, I was soon exchanging emails on this and other Dylan matters with Graley. I had often wondered about the verb "make" in the song, “Make You Feel My Love” as it is so far in meaning from, say, "let". I had not, however, previously considered this, wildly popular outside 'Dylan circles', song as the progenitor of Dylan's twenty-first century songs focussing on femicide. In our correspondence, Graley extended his work on Dylan and murder ballads back in time and I noted how it was still growing into Dylan’s later work. For example, by the chilling rewrite of "To Be Alone With You" on Shadow Kingdom, with its darkly sinister lines: "I’ll hound you to death – that’s just what I’ll do” and “ Did I kill somebody? Did I escape the law?”.

by Severin Roesen from The Philosophy of Modern Song

Arguably, further extensions of the same theme came in The Philosophy of Modern Song where Dylan’s chapter on Rosemary Clooney’s 1951 release: “C’mon On-A My House” concludes; “This is the song of the deviant, the pedophile, the mass murderer. The song of the guy who’s got thirty corpses under his basement and human skulls in the refrigerator. This is the kind of song where a black car rolls down the street, a window rolls down and a voice calls out, “Do you want to come over here for a second, little girl? I got some pomegranates for you and figs, dates, and cakes. All kinds of erotic stuff, apples and plums and apricots. Just come on over here for a second.” This is a hoodoo song disguised as a happy pop hit. It’s a Little Red Riding Hood song. A song sung by a spirit rapper, a warlock.”

Additionally, in the chapter on Elvis Costello’s “Pump It Up”, we are confronted by: “Why all the monotonous and lifeless music that plays inside your head? And what about that little she goat that won’t go away? You want to maim and mangle her. You want to see her in agony, and you want to blow this whole thing up until it’s swollen, where you’ll run your hands all over and squeeze it till it collapses.”

Meanwhile, Laura Tenschert was also podcasting with in-depth analysis on Dylan and murder ballads, Graley Herren and “Make you Feel My Love”. In the latter, Tenschert remarks on: “…how Dylan uses their tropes as well as violent imagery in his songs. I actually went down a real rabbit hole and all this before realising that this would lead way too far for this episode but … I do really recommend the Graley Herren book because he provides a really fascinating historical context for murder ballads as well as writing about how they figure into the album Time Out Of Mind.” [vi]

“Down a real rabbit hole”, yes, indeed, that’s exactly how it felt. Additionally, given the way it led me back to Shakespeare and his deep and complex relationship to balladry in general, and femicide in particular, I found that the rabbit holes were multiplying all around me . I was deep down inside an ever expanding warren of burrows on Dylan, Shakespeare and Broadside Ballads. Yes, I had written about them in my book, Dylan and Shakespeare: In The True Performing of It , but there was so much more to explore there that I left bundles of research at each hole entrance and hopped on to the next.

For contributory reasons plentiful, yet with the ultimate cause still unknowable to myself, I suddenly stopped and left the warren, my research and all writing behind. The primary aim of this Substack site is to return to that work, hence the name More True Performing and making this my own “influenced by the past and a bridge to the future”, as Dylan said half a century ago, moment. There may be one more article before I begin those particular postings. If so, it will be another from the time of Greenwich Village, as that period seems to be much in the news of late for some mysterious reason.

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[i] This was all before the Fragments collection came out. We should start a campaign for Graley Herren to update his book to incorporate that release. There’s a handy 30^th anniversary date approaching, just saying Graley, just saying….

[ii] It also does not escape Herren’s attention that Eric Lott's book, Love and Theft, “ was published in 1993 as Dylan was transitioning from his two folk albums and beginning the gestation of songs for Time Out of Mind” This further deepens his earlier exploration of the two cover albums which precede Time Out of Mind.

[iii] Interestingly, some three decades ago, Dylan critic John Stokes wrote on specific parallels to the previous Lanois produced album, Oh Mercy and Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Jesus Christ. Indeed, so insightfully did John expound on these correspondences that the office of Martin Scorsese requested a copy of the article from its publishers (Look Back fanzine)

[iv] Smith, Emma This is Shakespeare Pelican Books, UK 2019 pp 332

[v] Dylan in Cincinnati: July 2013 - by Graley Herren

[vi] "Her heart blood did flow": Bob Dylan's Murder Ballads of the Early 1960s — Definitely Dylan and https://www.definitelydylan.com/podcasts/2023/3/24/make-you-feel-my-love-the-marmite-of-bob-dylan-songs