The song that Bob Dylan says was “magically written”
Some people write in a stream of consciousness, but Bob Dylan writes in a flow of cognisance akin to a tsunami. Or at least he did. He once said, ”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.”
Those late nights have since dwindled in his later years, and he looks back at many of his early songs with an almost awed sense of wonder. As Randy Newman opined, “Dylan knows he doesn’t write like he did on those first two records.“ That’s not just a quip regarding the quality; he quite literally doesn’t write the way he used to, a fact that Dylan admits in his memoir when he explains, “You have to get power and dominion over the spirits. I had it once, and once was enough.”
Psychologists call this creative flow. “There’s this focus that, once it becomes intense, leads to a sense of ecstasy, a sense of clarity: you know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the other; you get immediate feedback,” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi proclaimed in a public lecture. “You know that what you need to do is possible to do, even though difficult, and sense of time disappears, you forget yourself, you feel part of something larger. And once the conditions are present, what you are doing becomes worth doing for its own sake.”
In the 1960s, it would seem that Dylan was tapping into this void with great ease. Thankfully, the products of his endeavours didn’t need much editing after the fact, either. In only three years, he managed to write a steady stream of masterpieces in the form of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963), The Times They Are a-Changin’ (1964), Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964), Bringing It All Back Home (1965), Highway 61 Revisited (1965), Blonde on Blonde (1966). These were not only prolific records, but they changed the face of music more than any other golden run.
So, it hardly comes as a surprise that there’s a degree of misbelief about their creation, even from the man who mustered the feat. “I don’t know how I got to write those songs. Those early songs were almost magically written,“ he told CBS before quoting the opening verse from his 1965 anthem, ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’:
“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. In one fell swoop, the song channels his biblical readings, autobiographical exposition, snipes a cynics who do nothing but bemoan the world, and this stream remains prescient to this day.
Alas, if, like Kurt Vonnegut once claimed, there is the odd snippet of nonsense strewn in, that can surely be forgiven because he wrote it in a night, willingly turning on, tuning in, and dropping out to create a maelstrom to serve to society when it needed it most.
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