“Like a ghost”: The masterpiece Bob Dylan can’t remember writing
In The Mystery of Creativity, Bob Dylan discusses how songwriters can never truly be sure where their songs come from. With that in mind, he proceeds to quote Hoagy Carmichael, the Tin Pan Alley songwriting maestro of the early 1900s, on the matter: “And then it happened, that queer sensation that this melody was bigger than me. Maybe I hadn’t written it all. The recollection of how, when and where it all happened became vague as the lingering strains hung in the rafters in the studio”.
Dylan continued: “I wanted to shout back at it, ‘maybe I didn’t write you, but I found you’,” he said before the original vaganbond added: “I know just what he meant”.
This motif crops up with notable recurrence when Dylan muses over the alchemy of his craft at its apex. In the early days, he used to look back at his work with wonderment and marvel over how he managed to do it. “I don’t do that anymore,“ he adds. “I don’t know how I got to write those songs. Those early songs were almost magically written,” he humbly told CBS.
In truth, the creative haze he was in is self-evident in his output. He released Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde, all within 15 months. In fact, all told, from his debut being released in March 1962 through to the close of the decade, he released nine albums, and none of them fell short of at least four stars—about three could easily be classed as the greatest of all time, too.
For one man – and a very young one at that – that’s movement at a mercurial pace. Dylan himself was even stupefied by the blur of his own mastery, and he picks out one song, in particular, as the pinnacle of his proud bewilderment: his 1965 anthem, ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’. He picks out the opening verse as one he couldn’t possibly have written without magical intervention:
“Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child’s balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying.”
“Try to sit down and write something like that. There is a magic to that. And it’s not a Siegfried & Roy kind of magic, it’s a different kind of penetrating magic,“ he says. Once more, in his memoir, he recounts the mystic intoxication of creativity at its most unbridled while celebrating his 1989 return to form record, Oh Mercy. Although it was his best record for years, Dylan speaks with a touch of lamentation about not being able to provide his friend and producer Daniel Lanois with the utmost spiritually profound music of old, citing the examples ‘Masters of War’ and ‘Gates of Eden’.
He explains that to reach such sagacious summits, “You have to get power and dominion over the spirits. I had it once, and once was enough.” He’s happy to admit that he “can do other things now“, and indeed he can; his live shows are where the unguarded and inviolable sincerity of playing with pure possessed passion still shines through, but it is harder to channel that energy onto a blank page now that his pen has already bled out myriad masterpieces in frenzied nights.
As he has explained: ”Music filters out of me in the crack of dawn…you get a little spacey when you’ve been up all night, so you don’t really have the power to form it. But that’s the sound I’m trying to get.” His shapeless masterpiece that soared from spacey depths as though he was simply funnelling words of viscera floating from the ether was ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. He sat down with reams of paper one night, and before he knew it, he had written a song, ”Ten pages long”.
”It wasn’t called anything,” he told the Saturday Evening Post at the time, ”Just a rhythm thing on paper all about my steady hatred directed at some point that was honest. In the end, it wasn’t hatred, it was telling someone something they didn’t know, telling them they were lucky. Revenge, that’s a better word.”
This was a revelation for Dylan. ”I’d never written anything like that before, and it suddenly came to me that was what I should do,” he told CBC about how it broke his creative uncertainty. ”After writing that, I wasn’t interested in writing a novel, or a play. I just had too much, I want to write songs.”
After its release, Dylan would opine that it was the best song he had ever written at that point. In truth, it was probably the best of its kind that the world has ever heard, and maybe it still is, but one thing that’s for certain is that there is a mysticism lingering in its refrains. All the endless analysis and interpretations often pore over the literal and satirical corroboration that you can prise from the song, there is also undoubtedly something entirely implacable about it, an ethereality that the dagger of the song can’t pierce.
In truth, even Dylan doesn’t fully know it, as he told Robert Hilburn: ”It’s like a ghost is writing a song like that, it gives you the song and it goes away. You don’t know what it means. Except that the ghost picked me to write the song.”
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