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- [00:00]
Ian
Jokerman podcast is brought to you by Distrokid and their new direct to fan tool. Allowing any artist to sell merch. Distrokid Direct allows artists to create a merch store in minutes without any upfront costs or any technical skills or know how they'll take care of all the logistics and the nitty gritty. And as with distribution through Distrokid, they never take a cut of the proceeds. You, the artist, keep 100% of your earnings. Once again, that's Distrokid Direct. Open a store today@distrokid.com direct. Welcome back to Jokerman In Conversation. I'm Ian. Today we're throwing it back to classic Jokerman 1.0. Shit talking all things Late era Bob with the great Robert Polito, author of fantastic new book on late era Bob. Exclusive and explicitly. What a wonder that a whole book has been published about this particular corner of the man's career. After the Flood, Inside Bob Dylan's memory palace. Fantastic look at everything since 1991. Obviously he talks a little bit about the early Bob Dylan stuff, boring Bob Dylan stuff, but tracing things back to the legendary. A Grammy Lifetime Achievement award that Bob received from, from Jack Nicholson. Robert begins his narrative there and then traces things right up until today. And it touches on, you know, basically any and every aspect of Bob's last 30, 35 years that you could, you could ask for from the records, of course. World Gone Wrong, Good As I've Been to youo Time, out of Mind, Love and Theft, Modern Times, Plenty about rough and rowdy ways, but also, you know, several, several other tangents. So much of what we love about Bob's late era is the non music aspect of his work. And Robert doesn't give that material short shrift either. Masked and Anonymous Chronicles, Theme Time Radio, the painting, the posting, the. There's even stuff about Bob on Instagram in here. The Dookie Chase tweet, I think it's quoted direct. I mean this is just. It is, it is. It's like the last five years of my brain have just been spilled out into a 300 page book full of smoky and interesting and three dimensional artistic, frankly, prose about the man. Really rewarding book. Really rewarding conversation. Here's Robert.
- [02:36]
Robert Polito
Well, all right. Yeah, well, my dad, he didn't leave me too much, you know, he's a very simple man and he didn't leave me a lot. But what he told me was this. He did say, son, he said.
- [03:00]
He.
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Said so many things, you know.
- [03:07]
Ian
He.
- [03:07]
Robert Polito
Said, you know, it's possible to become so defiled in this world that your own mother and father will abandon you. And if that happens, God will always believe in your own ability to mend your own ways. Thank you.
- [03:23]
Ian
Robert Pilla, thank you so much for joining us on Jokerman.
- [03:26]
Robert Polito
Well, Ian, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
- [03:28]
Ian
Pleasure is all mine. I mean, I honestly can't think of a more appropriate person to be speaking to or more appropriate subject to be speaking about. Because if Jokerman was ever a book, it would be this book, after the Flood, Inside Bob Dylan's Memory palace, which is a fantastic read and a lot to talk about. But, I mean, let me just say right off the bat, I enjoyed every moment of it. Could not put it down from beginning to end.
- [03:54]
Robert Polito
Well, thank you very much. You're very kind. I appreciate it.
- [03:58]
Ian
You're very kind for having written the book. For those of us or for those of listeners out there who aren't familiar with it or maybe haven't read the whole thing already like I have. Can you give us just like an elevator pitch, Something to just sort of start off the bat?
- [04:14]
Robert Polito
Sure, I'll try. Anyways, me. You know, it's a book basically, on the. On the second 30 years roughly, of. Of Bob Dylan's career. It's. It starts in 1991 and ends at the end of 2024. And it's about how somebody reinvented himself in his 50s with a new way of writing songs, a much more collage way of writing songs, but also lots of. Lots of touring and live performances. In some cases over 100 shows a year. I think in one year, close to 120 shows. And last year, even at, you know, well into his 80s, I think he did 82 shows, if I'm not mistaken, something like that. And so it's somebody who kind of reinvented himself with touring, but also writing books and writing a movie and doing a radio program. And, you know, and the subtitle of the book is Inside the Bob Dylan's Memory Palace. And. And my focus, in a way was on what those songs know, what those songs remember, and kind of all that they know, you know. And I was really struck as I, you know, kind of listened to the records as they came out, you know, kind of how. How capacious Dylan was, you know, how kind of large, particularly in relation to American history and American literature, but literature in fact. And that he had kind of advanced a sort of almost like poetics of embodiment in some ways in. In which he would write about something like the Civil War, but he would also collage into a song about the Civil War. You know, language from poets on both sides of the. Of the conflict, for instance. And I was just struck by. By, you know, that it was about, you know, as sophisticated, really, as anything I know. And I think even now, I mean, Dylan's career tends still to sort of be, for most people, 1961 to 1966, with, you know, an occasional kind of afterthought or footnote for the Rolling Thunder review. And, you know, in the 1970s. And I think that the second half of the career is just really extraordinary.
- [06:47]
Ian
Amen. You are speaking to. You're preaching to the choir here. The second half of the career. That is the founding ethos behind our whole project here. So an actual real meaty piece of literature, scholarship, analysis, criticism, I think is, like I said, this could not be more well suited here. A lot to talk about specific details in the book, which I want to get to momentarily, but would love to start just by hearing a little bit more about your history with Bob over time. If you could maybe contextualize that. You write a little bit in the book about, I think, picking up Highway 61, I want to say, or your dad buying Highway 61 for you.
- [07:34]
Robert Polito
I borrowed it from a friend when I was in high school, and I just didn't want to give it back. I kind of carried it everywhere, even though it was very unlikely that there would be a. A handy stereo that I could play the record on. And so I was very obsessed with Dylan in the 1960s. And I saw Rolling Thunder, and I went to the concert for Bangladesh. But at some point in the 1980s, I kind of drifted away. And I would have friends, poet friends, who would kind of like everything, you know, that Dylan did. And. And that struck me as kind of almost cultish in some ways.
- [08:22]
Ian
And.
- [08:25]
Robert Polito
And the book, you know, the book has a number of beginnings, but one of the real beginnings for the book is. Is the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award that Dylan received in 1991. And that kind of remarkable speech that he, you know, that he gave about sometimes you could become so defiled in this world. And I think that, like most people saw that and thought, like, you know, Dylan's career is over. You know, this was it. Like, this was the gold watch. And, you know, and he was kind of being put out to pasture. And that night, Dylan really defined, you know, his kind of lost 80s as a spiritual failing, you know. And I think what happened is that that was the start of his reinvention. It was soon after that, you know, that he recorded Good As I Been to youo and World Gone Wrong. And he's touching base with his original sources of inspiration. And I also think that he was teaching himself how to sing again through those, through those songs. I mean, I think that his singing in 1980s is very erratic. I think when people, you know, when comedians make fun of Dylan, it's usually the 1980s,'80s bomb. They're actually, you know, that they're actually, you know, ventriloquizing. And, and so I think that, you know, it was really like after that performance that, you know, I think Dylan started to pull himself together and he committed himself to having his own. His own band, for instance, which he hadn't had for a long time. He would just rely on the Grateful Dead or Tom Petty or, you know, and, and I think in, in, in Chronicles, but also interviews, Dylan is pretty candid about, you know, how, how lost he was in the, you know, in the 1980s. And, and so he records these, you know, these albums of folks and blues songs. But, but that's when he started touring a lot and, and rearranging in. In really interesting ways. His, you know, his, his own early songs and older songs and, and everything kind of leads to Time out of Mind, which was, you know, the first album of. Of new songs in that second half of his career.
- [11:04]
Ian
World gone wrong. Good as I've been to you. I think you write about brilliantly in the book, and I was so glad to see you spotlight those records because I feel like those often get short shrift, even from people who are interested in the second half of Bob's career.
- [11:18]
Robert Polito
No, I mean, his singing is beautiful on those records and his interpretations are radical. You know, even that video, even the one he did as a video, like, you know, Blood in My Eye. You know, Blood in My Eyes. Yeah, you know, you know, when you go back to the, to the Mississippi Chic's version, which I think is from 1931 or so, it's just. It's a completely different sounding song. I mean, he, he really reinvents that for himself.
- [11:48]
Ian
Yeah. And you talk about, you know, what, what do these songs remember, you know, for. For my money, at least, you know, as a somewhat younger man, like the Mississippi Sheiks, like, I would not even be aware of them or anyone really. That is from this memory palace of Bob's Big Bill Brunsey, Blind Lemon, Blind Willie Mattel, whoever, were it not for Bob Dylan himself.
- [12:14]
Robert Polito
No, absolutely. And that was true for Me, even in high school, listening to the early Dylan. I mean, maybe I would have read Rambeau, but I'm not certain I would have read Rambo, you know, as quickly as I did if he hadn't mentioned it. Or the. Or the beat writers that he referred to, like Ginsburg and in Kerouac, But. But also the music that he was listening to, like Robert Johnson and. And all of that, you know, I mean, it became sort of like the, you know, the lingua Franco of a generation, too, or multiple generations.
- [12:49]
Ian
Absolutely. Can you explain a little bit? Just about. Or maybe just give me some insight into the. I'm maybe going to butcher the pronunciation of this word, but is it abecedarium structure of the book?
- [13:02]
Robert Polito
Yeah. I mean, abecedarium, it's. It's a fancy word, but as the word kind of implies, it virtually spells it out. It's. It's a book that. In which either the chapters or the lines or whatever it is you're talking about are arranged kind of in alphabetical order. So my book is 26 chapters from a to Z. And my model, in some ways, is a long poem that I just adore James Merrill's the Book of Ephraim, which is volume one of his trilogy about contacting the dead over a Ouija board. And, you know, I came to see Dylan both as a kind of medium for all of these voices that we're talking about inside his memorial palace, the medium for all of these voices that kind of speak through the song. But there's also something kind of impish and spirit like about him as well. So he's simultaneously the medium and the spirit. And part of what I liked about the adversary advecedarian form for a book like this is that the alphabetical order allowed me to be chronological when I needed to be chronological in a way that A comes before B. Sure. But it also allowed me to be topical and subject driven when I wanted to be subject and driven and kind of move out of chronology and, you know, and, for instance, like, write about, you know, Dylan and noir films the way that one chapter is. And, you know, and. And to record kind of episodes of him being hidden in plain sight for another. For another chapter. So it was a kind of loose form that allowed me to move in the multiple directions with the multiple angles that I wanted to have.
- [14:54]
Ian
That was great. Yeah, it's very. It's flexible, it's playful, I think, but also, like, very logical and makes a lot of sense for this particular subject. And it was something I had never. I don't think I'd ever encountered it before in any, you know, prose poetry or whatever. So I was just kind of tickled by it. So thank you for indulging me. Going back to the title real quick before we get into more nitty gritty details here. The Memory palace itself, we've touched on that a little bit, but can you just maybe unpack that a little bit more? Like, why that metaphor makes particular sense for Bob?
- [15:26]
Robert Polito
Yeah, it's a magnamic device, a kind of classical magnanimic device. And I first probably encountered in a book by Jonathan Spence called the Memory palace of Matteo Ricci, who was a Jesuit missionary who went to China. But there I would have read that it was a form that kind of went back to the Greeks and Romans, to people like Cicero, for instance. And what it was was a kind of spatialization of memory. Like if you wanted to remember something, you would invent a setting, whether it was a house or some other sort of dwelling. And you would put certain things in certain rooms and you could mentally sort of retrieve them from their locale. And it seemed to me that that was an interesting metaphor for what these songs are kind of trying to do. The way that they remember the Civil War or. Or genocide of Native Americans or the War of 1812, but also the way that they remember lots of cultural things, like you mentioned a few minutes ago, all the blues and folk and country artists that Dylan has retrieved and made present. And so it was really about. The book became about, like, what those songs know and what those songs remember for us, in a way.
- [17:07]
Ian
Yeah. And it starts. I think it begins to me at least as sort of like. Like I said, a metaphor, you know, a mental technology. But then by the end of it, you kind of like, invert the concept or, like, physicalize it. Like when you start talking about the hippocampus, like, side. Like the literal physical size of the hippocampi of the London taxi drivers and.
- [17:28]
Robert Polito
Yeah, but that was something I read kind of like late in the. You know, in kind of my writing of the. Of the book was. You know, was. I found that in a kind of obituary of a. Of a scientist and she had done studies of London cab drivers that are forced to remember or required to remember is probably a better way of phrasing it. You know, every street in. In London and someone did autopsies on them after they died. And it turned out that they're, you know, that the hippocampus wasn't. Was literally enlarged.
- [18:05]
Ian
It's fascinating in the.
- [18:07]
Robert Polito
In the case of them. Yeah. That it really almost like it was, you know, a kind of literal memory palace.
- [18:14]
Ian
Right. And that dovetails nicely, I think, with. I forget who it is specifically, but there's. One of the chapters is just all quotes, you know, from either people delivering quotes about Bob or quotes from poems or text.
- [18:29]
Robert Polito
Yeah, I think it's Q. Yeah, yeah.
- [18:31]
Ian
Q. There you go.
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Robert Polito
Yeah.
- [18:32]
Ian
Q for quotes, duh. Should be easy to remember for me. But one of those lines in there or one of those quotes in there, I think about Bob, whoever it was that was saying. It was saying, like the man has a photographic memory. He remembers everything he's ever seen. And that's why. That might be part of the reason why so much of his music is so historically weighty, particularly as it has, you know, gotten on into the latter half of his career.
- [18:59]
Robert Polito
And I think that person was. Was basically saying that he could. He could recount conversations that they had had decades before, virtually word for word, you know, and because it was interesting, like when I would look at things in the archive, I mean, the way that most writers would do the kind of quotations and collage that Dylan and do is that. That, you know, they'd have the. Whatever it was, the Ovid or the Homer or the Virgil or, you know, the. The 19th century American poets in front of them. And there'd be little check marks, like in the margins of the. Of the lines that they wanted to use. And. And as far as I can tell, like, there's. There's nothing in the Dylan archive that would kind of correspond to that. Like when you see in a draft of a song a quotation from. From somebody, it's. It's written out the same way as, you know, is the lines that aren't quotations from. From someone. And you know, so that it does seem to be like part of his retrieval process for this. For this work.
- [20:07]
Ian
And how do you. I guess, you know, a lot of people, certainly a lot of. A lot of Bob heads have their own mental model for these things or their own sort of ethics about it, whatever.
- [20:17]
Robert Polito
But.
- [20:20]
Ian
That concept connected to quotation and maybe thievery, to use a slightly more sharp term there. How do you. I guess, what's your read on. Because that is one of the defining qualities of late era Bob work is the reference, quotation, thievery, you know, the.
- [20:41]
Robert Polito
Literature that first impressed me in a way. Way, like growing up was modernism, you know, And. And it seems to me the. One of the two ways of looking at this in Dylan is he's just Basically a modernist in the tradition of. Of T.S. eliot and James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, I mean, and Ezra Pound, who's, you know, whose work is also collaged from, you know, thousands of years of, you know, of, of world literature. You look at the poem, a poem like the Wasteland or, or a novel like Ulysses. And my guess, and this is only a guess, is that Dylan came at it from folk process. His early songs are very much involved with folk process. I mean, most of his early songs have another song, or at least one song and often more song kind of behind them. And that's very much the folk tradition. But I think it must have occurred to him at some point that he could expand folk process to include literature, to include history, to include speeches. So it really was actually a very small but I think incandescent and important lateral move, you know, from folk process to basically modernism for Dylan, in which, you know, he could treat a 19th century novel or a 19th century poem or, you know, a translation of Ovid or a translation of Homer, the same way that he would treat a child ballad in those early songs.
- [22:20]
Ian
Right. And where that gets complicated or tricky is obviously in contemporary pop cultural landscapes where the question of ownership and trademark is so much a part of the art making and distribution system that for Bob, or for the folk processes you're describing that never even factored into it in the first place?
- [22:43]
Robert Polito
Well, I just don't really have a lot of patience with people who talk that way about it. I mean, it just seems to me to be a very naive way of, you know, addressing works of works of art. I mean, it seems to me that, like Shakespeare plays, for instance, you know, look at, look at all the, you know, the, the literature that's behind those plays. All the writing that's behind those, you know, those, those plays. I mean, and I guess I see, you know, the. The history of literature is a kind of series of conversations in a way, you know.
- [23:28]
Ian
Absolutely.
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Robert Polito
You know, the way that. That Shakespeare's plays are in conversation with Latin poets and Latin historians and.
- [23:38]
Ian
You.
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Robert Polito
Know, or the way that Joyce and Elliot are in, you know, are in conversation with earlier writers. And I think that's how literature gets written. How writing gets written.
- [23:54]
Ian
Absolutely. As Bob says, as he puts it very succinctly. And you quote from this interview in the book, that stuff's for wussies and pussies. Wise words from the Bard. I was glad to see so much about carnivals pop up throughout the book, which I think of as sort of like one of the formative influences on Bob, like Rosetta Stone in some ways. He talks about this to a great extent in no Direction Home. And obviously carnival influences pop up all throughout the songbook and in imagery and just kind of the old weird America, you know, to quote Grail.
- [24:34]
Robert Polito
Yeah, Best and anonymous.
- [24:35]
Ian
Absolutely, exactly.
- [24:36]
Robert Polito
And the radio program that he did.
- [24:39]
Ian
Yeah, yeah, just what's what, Bob? Carnivals. What's the deal there?
- [24:43]
Robert Polito
You know, it seems to me that, you know, the history of America is very strange, you know, I mean, you know, you have.
- [24:53]
Ian
Say that again.
- [24:54]
Robert Polito
You know, you have a country that originates in genocide, is sustained by slavery, but is absolutely convinced that it's God's country at the same. At the same time. And American literature is kind of the same, same way. I mean, you know, it starts with an. Basically American fiction, starts with a novel by Charles Brockton Brown called Wieland, in which a man thinks he hears voices telling him to murder his family. You know, that's not, you know, the height of classicism in any possible way. And then you work your way through writer like Hawthorne and Melville and Poe. And I think the strangeness there is, in a way, very much the strangeness of carnivals in some ways too, you know, I mean, you know, because I think that, you know, carnivals aren't just jokes. There's something kind of dark about them at the same, you know, at the same time that they're entertaining and they're places where you encounters spiritualism, but you also encounter con men too. And sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between those two entities. And so I think Dylan was just kind of fascinated by that world of that kind of self invented world of the carnival, didn't he?
- [26:30]
Ian
My memory, huh, might be failing me, but I seem to recall, I think sometime in his early days he was telling tall tales about having worked as a carny and traveled on the carny circuit before showing up in New York.
- [26:44]
Robert Polito
Yeah, I mean, I think it was a big part of his imagination of himself that that's what he came out of.
- [26:51]
Ian
Absolutely. The book is sort of bookended, beginning and end, with a couple rough and rowdy ways. Rough and rowdy ways? Very much. Yeah. Murder Most Foul at the beginning and then Key west at the end. And you sort of advance the argument that Rough and Rowdy Ways is the real Nobel lecture. Talk about that a little bit.
- [27:15]
Robert Polito
Yeah, I mean, you know, as I was listening to the record when it came out and kind of playing it over and over again, it occurred to me, to me that. That almost every song on the album is about the making of art in some. In some way. And, you know, so that you have a song like. Like Murder Most Foul, in which Dylan takes you through, you know, 80 something other songs that have, you know, that, you know, impinge in some way upon the Kennedy assassination. And so, like, he's, you know, he's in that song, he's kind of telling and more importantly, in a way, showing us where he comes from. And, you know, and a couple of times on the album, he. He all but, you know, glosses the. The medal that he would have been given in that, you know, private ceremony and private Nobel ceremony, you know, where, you know, there's a line in Latin on the back of the. The medal about doing things for the benefit of mankind, you know, and. And he quotes that. And Mother of Muses is also an allusion to that medal. And so that my own version of you. I think one way of reading that only slightly allegorically is that it's him talking about the way his songs are collaged and drawing upon Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as a kind of model for. For, you know, the sort of collage that he's doing. And it seems to me that all through that album, you know, I've made up my mind to give myself to you. You know, that's a song that's about a lover. It could be about God, but it also seems to be, at least in part about Dylan's audience, you know, and his relationship to his audience. So everything on that record seemed to be radiating around, you know, the. The making of art. And it struck me that it was Dylan's acknowledgment of his Nobel Prize in his. In his own idioms and styles. And I think it was. It was a very different and, to my read, more effective response to receiving the Nobel Prize than the actual Nobel lecture that he delivered.
- [29:41]
Ian
Yeah, the series of Cliff Note, summary of Moby Dick.
- [29:46]
Robert Polito
He was, you know, when he was younger, whereas this was, I think, a much more sophisticated response to the, you know, the history and imagery of American literature that he clearly comes out of.
- [30:01]
Ian
Absolutely.
- [30:02]
Robert Polito
How did you.
- [30:03]
Ian
I guess when did you kind of arrive or how long were you working on this concept in general? Because I think I recall you mentioning in one point, I think, when you're talking about, like, the archives towards the end of the book, that you had been doing research for this project as early as 2015, 2016, obviously some number of years before, rough and rowdy ways. But that record ends up being becoming sort of a. I Don't know, a spine to the. To the text.
- [30:30]
Robert Polito
2020. I mean, it took me a long time to figure out what the book was about. You know, I was pretty sure from the beginning that I wanted to write about, in a way, the second half of the. Of the career. And, you know, if. If that Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award was one, you know, way in Rough and Rowdy Ways was another way in, like, Rough and Rowdy Ways really gave me a structure for the book, you know, and it really gave me an angle, because it seemed to me that in following that record, you know, one was in part, I mean, following his own sense of what he had accomplished and how he did it and why he did it.
- [31:18]
Ian
We talk about this all the time on any number of podcasts. I'm just curious, for your take, do you think there's going to be another record?
- [31:24]
Robert Polito
I hope so. I really hope so.
- [31:26]
Ian
Yeah, me too.
- [31:26]
Robert Polito
I mean, his singing, like, last year was just extraordinary.
- [31:33]
Ian
It's fantastic.
- [31:34]
Robert Polito
I mean. Yeah. And, you know, everyone kind of talks about this, but the, you know, like, the set list doesn't change very much, except that from night to Night, it seems like, like, 17 different songs from the night before, you know, and I'd be really surprised if he's not kind of writing something.
- [31:59]
Ian
I would be, too, but I would be, too, you know, at the same time, like, Rough and Runaways feels like such a perfect finals. Like, you couldn't script it better to be a final statement. And yet, obviously, as we know, he's about to go out on the 2026 rough and rowdy Ways tour, so.
- [32:16]
Robert Polito
Exactly.
- [32:17]
Ian
There's no such thing as final with this guy.
- [32:19]
Robert Polito
Yeah. And, you know, and even ending Rough and Rowdy Ways with Key west, you know, this. This song that's very much about, you know, transcendence, but as it. But as he sings on that album, I mean, you know, that's my story, but not where it ends, so maybe it won't be where it ends.
- [32:35]
Ian
You know, we got to keep our fingers crossed here.
- [32:37]
Robert Polito
Yeah. What do you think? Do you think there'll be another record?
- [32:41]
Ian
You know, I know that there is other stuff there. I know that he's writing. I remember there was an interview that I think he gave with Jeff Slate a couple years ago at the Journal, and he said that he had written a song called you'd don't say, which we always joke about just imagining the Bob Dylan song titled you don't say. He might be pulling your leg on that type of thing. But of course, he's written material. It's just. The question is, are we ever gonna see it? I would tend to say yes, but I don't know. I mean, it's already been half a decade. It's going on. It'll be the six year anniversary of Rough and Rowdy in June, which feels like we're rapidly creeping up on the amount of time it took between Tempest and Rough and Rowdy.
- [33:25]
Robert Polito
Yeah. No, and that's roughly how long he's been taking during the period that I wrote write about between records.
- [33:32]
Ian
Absolutely. On that note, actually, if you don't mind me picking a nit here, the one instance in which he didn't do that, 2009 together through life. A scant three years after Modern Times and three years before Tempest. I don't think that there is a chapter on Together through Life in the book. Why not?
- [33:51]
Robert Polito
Yeah, there is no chapter on it. I mean, as I was thinking about whether to include it and I guess I. I probably should have included a kind of explanation of why I wasn't really kind of focusing on it. But, you know, since he co wrote the lyrics of I think all but one of the songs on that and in the archive, if I remember correctly, there were only, you know, four instances from that record in the archive.
- [34:23]
Ian
Interesting.
- [34:24]
Robert Polito
Three of which were very fragmentary, or at least two of which were very fragmentary. One of which seemed to be a type transcription. And it was kind of impossible for me to figure out like, what he had actually written of it, you know, and I'm guessing he wrote a lot of it, but there was no way to see what he had written and what Hunter had written, you know, and, and, you know, the book might look kind of encyclopedic in some ways, but I never intended it to be, you know, like covering everything. Only retrospectively do I realize that, oh, I should have written about it maybe in the. In the chapter where I, you know, where he goes on tour with the Grateful Dead or something like that as a kind of appendix to. To that. Is it one of your favorite records or.
- [35:28]
Ian
It is one of my favorite records. At least to think about, if not to listen to. Necessary. I mean, there are some fantastic songs on there. If you ever go to Houston is one of my favorites. And that obviously is a song that has quite a bit of history behind it. Other songs on there, it's all good and I feel a change coming on, I think are also fantastic. Um, but it is, it's. It's so fun to think about to me, because it's so, like, it's remarkable in how unremarkable it is, you know, especially in the 21st century stuff where, like, every record. Other record, I should say.
- [36:02]
Robert Polito
Yeah.
- [36:03]
Ian
Is so weighty and low.
- [36:05]
Robert Polito
Yeah. I mean. Yeah. Every other record kind of takes the top of your head off.
- [36:09]
Ian
Right.
- [36:10]
Robert Polito
You know, and. And I think some. You know, at least when I'm not listening to it, my memory of it can be maybe a little bit more generic than it really is, you know?
- [36:23]
Ian
Sure, Absolutely. And it kind of is generic, is the thing. And, like, that's sort of what I like about, like, the casualness. Like, every other thing is so considered and fully fleshed out from top to bottom. And this just sort of seems like a bit of a lark. And that's.
- [36:40]
Robert Polito
Yeah. Like, it started off as a soundtrack song, and then.
- [36:44]
Ian
Right, exactly.
- [36:45]
Robert Polito
For the money control. And all of a sudden. Yeah.
- [36:47]
Ian
Yeah.
- [36:48]
Robert Polito
And all of a sudden you've got a whole album there.
- [36:51]
Ian
Yeah, there's. There's just. There are some records. It's that one. And then it's the record right before your book begins, under the Red sky that I just. I can never get enough of. Like, they're not the best records, certainly not in under the Red Skies case, but I just. I cannot stop thinking about them, at least just because they're such strange objects to me. Speaking of the early 90s, I think you write about that era a little bit later than red sky, but 92, 3, 4, and listening to a lot of those tapes, which are some of my. Probably, honestly, my favorite incarnation of the Neverending Tour, if not the one that I think is the best, but just 94 in particular is kind of unbeatable.
- [37:37]
Robert Polito
Well, 94 is just amazing. It's unbelievable, you know, that. You know, that performance in Japan at nara, you know, of A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall.
- [37:48]
Ian
With the symphony.
- [37:49]
Robert Polito
Yeah, with the symphony. And it's Dylan doing the kind of singing that he. That he never has to do. I mean, there's a way in which. Whether he's performing acoustically or with a band, his voice is the lead instrument, and the band follows him. You know, the man. The band follows his voice as he moves through a song. But. But in the. When he's. When he's singing with the symphony for those three songs, he has to follow them. And. And he really rises to the occasion in an. In an extraordinary way. And then that's also the. The year of Woodstock, which. Which is another amazing performance. And it's also the. The year of the MTV program. If I'm Remembering it that correctly.
- [38:38]
Ian
Yeah, he performs. He played those shows end of 94. I think it was broadcast in 95. But yeah.
- [38:43]
Robert Polito
Yeah. You know, and I think in kind of every way but writing. He's back by 1994, you know, and he looks like a completely different person than he did at that Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
- [39:01]
Ian
Oh, yeah. No, he's completely. He isn't quite like, you know, the image and appearance that he's going to start to put out by the time Time out of Mine rolls around. But he is much closer to that than the early 90s with the pork pie hat and the little, like, shapeless sport coats and the hoodies and stuff.
- [39:18]
Robert Polito
Yeah. I mean, he just. He just really looks like somebody who doesn't want to be there in those, like, late 80s shots.
- [39:26]
Ian
Oh, man, those do hold a special place in my heart, I must confess. You write about one of my favorite images or series of images of Bob, which is Ginsburg taking pictures of him around Pumpkin Square, I think, in 1990, and he's just in the weirdest outfit ever. Yeah, yeah, that's.
- [39:45]
Robert Polito
Well, I mean, it's somebody who clearly. Clearly. Or at least seems to not really kind of know who he is anymore, you know. And, you know, and I think the way that he would talk about it later, both in chronicles and interviews, is that. But, you know, he had to come to this legend thing as he sometimes, you know, identifies it before he could really do any kind of original work. And I think the person that Jack Nicholson hands that Grammy Lifetime achievement is just somebody who's kind of trapped inside, you know, the legend of Bob Dylan and doesn't know how to get out of it yet. And then he figures out how to.
- [40:26]
Ian
Get out of it, and, boy, does he.
- [40:29]
Robert Polito
Yeah, yeah.
- [40:32]
Ian
You write about Bob's. Bob's a spiritual man in one chapter in particular. I mean, you touched on that several times. I wonder what you just kind of make of where he's at. Maybe not necessarily his, like, specific religiosity, because who the hell knows? But.
- [40:51]
Robert Polito
Yeah, I mean, who knows? I mean. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of amazing in a way, for such a public figure, how. How little we actually know, you know.
- [40:59]
Ian
Sure.
- [41:01]
Robert Polito
You know, he has kind of. He kind of has or has had, like, houses all over the world, like one. You know, where does he actually live, like, most. Most days? Is he married or not? You know, how many children are there? You know, that. That kind of thing. And. And. And I think, you know, the religiosity is. Is kind of the same way, I mean, there's a real spiritual underc. I think, over the, you know, the entire 60 plus year career.
- [41:31]
Ian
And.
- [41:32]
Robert Polito
But, but I think only at certain moments is it linked to any specific religion or not, you know, and, but I mean, you know, Key west to me seems to me to be a very tentative, self skeptical, self suspicious in some ways a kind of assertion of transcendence, you know, and, and to me, the power of that song is. Is in part that line. You know, Key west is on the horizon line. The way that the horizon line is kind of halfway between earth and heaven. And. And there's something kind of so moving and poignant about, you know, you know, in. In a way, his refusal to choose either. Either side of the line, you know, and to kind of focus on both of them at the same time. The horizon line. And, and so that part of. I think the way that, you know, he understands his own songwriting on, you know, rough and rowdy ways is in fairly explicitly spiritual terms, you know.
- [42:44]
Ian
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it is pretty remarkable how, especially considering how much was written about him and certainly how many photographs were taken of him and how just like the world was just awash in Bob Dylan biographical detail, you know, the first however many years of his career. And then, you know, basically this entire span of time that you write about here, you know, we picked up little things here and there, but it is just remarkable how even the basics, the marriage thing, for instance, is a great call. Like how little we know about the guy now. Yeah, but obviously he wants it that way.
- [43:20]
Robert Polito
Yeah. The phrase that just kept occurring to me was like hidden in plain sight. Because he's not really a recluse. I mean, he does things, clearly he does a lot of things. And those famous stories about him taking the tour of John Lennon's house or going to, you know, shows that his son gives and things like that. And, you know, and just being in the audience or, you know, attending Girl from the north country the Musical twice. But. But not telling anybody involved with the production that he was going, you know, because he, he knew that if. If they knew he was there, it wouldn't be the same production that anybody else would see. And that's kind of remarkable. I mean, it's a real kind of. It's really sort of smart and creative, but it's also a real insistence kind of on his own freedom.
- [44:22]
Ian
Yeah. On the note of Key west, you know, talking about that a moment ago, you know, one of the central images or components of the song is the radio and you know, I think radio itself comes up in any number of contexts throughout the book. Not only in songs, but also, obviously, through theme time. Talk a little bit about, you know, the radio as it relates to Bob Dylan.
- [44:45]
Robert Polito
Well, yeah, I mean, the radio really connects to, you know, the form of the book in a way, because, like, you know, as I was saying a little while ago that, you know, the form of the book comes from James Merrill's poem about, you know, contacting the dead over a Ouija board. And. And Dylan talks about radio almost in ways that are like that, you know. You know, that. You know, that there's something kind of magical and otherworldly about the radio. That it really is almost like this. These voices from other worlds. And. And I think that's how it comes up a little bit in Murder Most Foul. You know, on the Record, it's certainly how. It's. How it's viewed in. In. In Key West. But it. But it's. But. But I think that, like, you know, maybe all of us have favorite media in some ways that we think of, like, oh, you're a movie person or you're a. A records person or. But it seems to me that Dylan's a radio person, you know, like, I mean, that the, you know, that. That. That somehow listening to the radio when he was growing up gave him, you know, access to another world. And I think that's. That seems to have never stopped for him.
- [46:09]
Ian
Yeah, there is something. And. And I feel like I kind of came along too late for it, or at least, you know, maybe even if I didn't. You know, I just didn't listen to the radio much growing up. My family, you know, we listened to CDs in the car mostly. But there is something about the radio for artists of a certain age. Donald Fagan, I think, is another one who talks about this a lot. Like the Night Fly, the whole song cycle about the Disc jockey.
- [46:36]
Robert Polito
And Lou Reed, too.
- [46:37]
Ian
Lou, absolutely.
- [46:40]
Robert Polito
That.
- [46:42]
Ian
I don't know, it just. It had a mental kind of purchase on these people in a way that it sort of just. It seems like that doesn't exist today in a way.
- [46:54]
Robert Polito
Like, the. The world that I grew up in was like a world in which you were constantly being exposed to things that you didn't know about it, you know. And, you know, I remember, like, when I was in high school listening to WBCN and in Boston and. And how many, you know, bands and performers that radio station would open up for me that I had, you know, I had never heard before. And I Think people growing up now, I mean, you have access to everything, you know, I mean, it just seems to me that at any given moment you can probably play almost every record ever recorded somehow. You know, whether it's through Spotify or, you know, some Internet bootleg source or something like that. And there's something, you know, having access to everything for a lot of people can be a little bit like having access to nothing in a way. In a way, like it's. It's too much. It's overwhelming, you know. And the. The radio just seemed to me to be a way of when I was younger, like I, you know, I listened to it at night after, you know, after my parents thought I was in bed and asleep. And suddenly you were. You were hearing things that you never knew existed. And then you could go out and try to find them and buy them the, you know, the next day or the, you know, or the. Or the next weekend. And. Bookstores were the same way too. Sure, I think, you know.
- [48:41]
Ian
Absolutely. Yeah. I think that the lack of buy in or the lack of consent that you get with radio, where you just flip it to the dial and whatever's on is on and, you know, like that's the magic element of it, you know, as opposed to now, like you were just saying where you can just kind of dial in a search term for whatever you want and just get it. Exactly, yeah.
- [49:10]
Robert Polito
I mean, you know, like I was giving a talk from the book last week and, you know, and I wanted to play Dylan's Blood in My Eyes next to the Mississippi Chic version of it. And, you know, not that long ago that would have required an extensive, vast search across. Across archives to do. But you just now plug in Mississippi Sheiks Blood and Blood in My Eyes and, you know, half, you know, half a dozen versions of the same song come up. You know, half a dozen different versions, but it's everywhere, you know.
- [49:45]
Ian
Yeah. And going a little bit further with the radio aspect, obviously Bob himself ends up, you know, playing the role of the disc jockey storyteller in many ways. You know, kind of framed around these themes in the theme time radio hour. What was he? I guess to me it has always sort of read as an extension of what he was doing in Chronicles and certainly a predecessor to what we're gonna get in Philosophy of Modern Song. It seemed like he just wanted an opportunity to talk about music. But anyone else's music other than his, you know.
- [50:23]
Robert Polito
Yeah, but was also in a very. Character was too wave for Dylan. It was based on a radio Program that Alan Lomax had decades before.
- [50:33]
Ian
Right.
- [50:33]
Robert Polito
You know, in which he also played records around themes, you know, topics and. And subjects. And. I don't know. I mean, it seemed to me that, like, the. The radio show in a lot of ways, was the. The most focused of. Of Dylan's memory palaces, in a way. It was the one we wanted. One where it was almost like literally a memory palace. I mean, he was. He was introducing you to songs that he wanted you to know and he wanted you to have heard and wanted you to have access to. And. Seemed to me that, like, you know, when you're thinking about forms, like when you're asking me about the Abecedarium, you know. You know, the idea of theme time radio lends a fascinating kind of formal coherence to each week of that show. You know, I mean, it would have been a very different program, I think, if. If it wasn't organized around themes. If at any given moment he could play any song in the world, like, after any other song in the world. But. But. But the form kind of, you know, gave him something to work with and work against that all of the songs had to kind of circle around night or love or, you know, whatever the theme was that week. And, you know, it seemed to me to be very much, you know, the way that a poet would work with a form like a villanelle or a sistiner or a sonnet or something like that, you know, that it was a kind of restriction that he imposed upon himself that paradoxically allowed for a tremendous, you know, capaciousness and freedom worth noting.
- [52:21]
Ian
Of course, also, Woody Guthrie was a radio broadcaster for some period of time, so several of his heroes and predecessors, he's following in their footsteps there, I guess, continuing down this line. Bob doing things other than being Bob Dylan, you know, songwriter and musician. His visual art that seems to have become more of a focus of his over the last couple decades, at least, you know, this current iteration of it. Yeah, you know, he's always been interested in sketching and. And, you know, visual art, but he. He seems to be more deliberately focused on certainly the paintings and even the, you know, the metal. The metal work as well. What is.
- [53:08]
Robert Polito
I find the metal work incredibly beautiful. I find those gates really, really beautiful. I think they're. They're really remarkable. And, you know, and. And I think that a lot of the paintings that, you know, that I've seen over the years at either various shows or in catalogs of the work, I mean, for me, anyways, they connect very directly to what we were talking about the collages in some ways. I mean, they're often based on photographs or movie stills or movie pr. Movies photographs and things like that. And in the book, I write a lot about the ones that are, you know, directly connected to film noir because I think, you know, film noir, you know, it's an. It's an obsession of mine, but I think it's also a kind of obsession of his. I think. You know, I mean, I think, you know, film noir gives access to what. What you and I were talking about a little while ago, about the kind of strangeness of America, the violence and the. And the secrets and the suppressions of, you know, of America. And I think that the way that the past works and, you know, people think they've overcome the past and, you know, it turns out that they haven't. And I think that's. That's something that, you know, that dynamic is something that he's. That he's really fascinated with.
- [54:35]
Ian
Absolutely. Yeah. The paint. The paintings are so fun. I just. When they're just like. Like line for line, just reproductions of movie stills.
- [54:47]
Robert Polito
Yeah.
- [54:48]
Ian
It's so funny to me.
- [54:50]
Robert Polito
Well, it's also an interesting connection between the other great artists of the 1960s, of course, is Indy Warhol, you know, and there's a. There's a kind of connection in a, you know, in a way to, you know, the. The Great Warhol paintings that are based on, you know, photographs and images like that.
- [55:10]
Ian
Yeah, yeah.
- [55:11]
Robert Polito
Like the Death and Disaster series that he did, for instance.
- [55:14]
Ian
Sure, absolutely. It's so funny how, like, his. As he's grown more, to me as a songwriter, more sort of spectral and has this sort of capacity to travel through time and just the sky's the limit in terms of how creative he can be as a writer. His. His visual art, at least as it extends to, like, painting and stuff, has become much more, like, didactic and sort of focused on reproduction compared to some of those sketches that he used to do, you know, in the 60s and 70s.
- [55:48]
Robert Polito
That's a very good point. That's a very. I mean, they're. They're. They're kind of literal in a way that the songs almost never are.
- [55:55]
Ian
Right, exactly.
- [55:56]
Robert Polito
Yeah.
- [55:58]
Ian
Well, I guess everyone needs to indulge in some literalism from for now and then, and I guess. And painting is where Bob's going to do it, because Lord knows, literal is not. It's not how he's going to write his songs these days, but also, like, what we're.
- [56:12]
Robert Polito
What we're circling was one of the. Maybe the things that might surprise, you know, kind of casual listeners of Dylan the most to be, you know, kind of how hard he works, you know. Sure, there are a lot of paintings.
- [56:26]
Ian
There are. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and seemingly more coming every day. He just. I bought. I bought this. What's it called? Book of Recent Sketches that just came out like, two, three months ago. Point Blank.
- [56:41]
Robert Polito
It's called Point Blank.
- [56:42]
Yeah.
- [56:42]
Ian
Yeah, exactly.
- [56:42]
Robert Polito
Wonderful book.
- [56:43]
Ian
Yeah. Yeah. With. It seems like they're all sketches that he was doing maybe on, like, the bus during, like, the 22, 23 legs of rough and Rowdy. It's amazing. Speaking of which, you know, Rough and Rowdy, you write several times about The Beacon Fall 21 shows that you were there for. I was there for the Saturday one of those. Flew all the way out from San Francisco to catch that.
- [57:09]
Robert Polito
Great. Yeah.
- [57:11]
Ian
Have you caught any more shows since then?
- [57:14]
Robert Polito
Yeah, I mean, last year, just through a series of coincidences, I think, was the first year I didn't see any Dylan shows since I started going in 1991. Again.
- [57:30]
Ian
Wow.
- [57:31]
Robert Polito
And, you know, in some years it would just be one or two shows, but. But a lot of years, you know, I would try to go to all of the. You know, if there were New York residencies, I would try to go to all of them. Or if there were were tours in the summer that involved, you know, multiple dates upstate, I would. You know, upstate New York, I. I would try to go to those. But. But I think that, if I'm not mistaken, I think last year was the first year that I can't remember that I didn't go. And I was actually looking the other day on, you know, about the tour that's about to start, you know, and I was thinking of, you know, in terms of my schedule at school, where could I. Where could I fly for two days and go see one? And, you know, I seem to be narrowing in on Detroit if I, you know, in terms of my own schedule.
- [58:24]
Ian
Sure.
- [58:25]
Robert Polito
I think that's early April for one day.
- [58:27]
Ian
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're going down to. To Texas for the. The last couple shows in Tyler and Abilene.
- [58:34]
Robert Polito
Oh, great. Great.
- [58:36]
Ian
In Abilene in particular, I'm so excited to see Bob there. Just.
- [58:39]
Robert Polito
No, I know.
- [58:40]
Ian
I mean, legendary spot, you know, if.
- [58:42]
Robert Polito
I can figure out a way to make those work in terms of the other things I have to do, you know, my. My teaching, I'll see it. Because, I mean, those seemed. I mean, those seem to be the ones that, you know, have had the most kind of history and poignance around them.
- [58:59]
Ian
Absolutely. What do you. I guess. How do you conceive of the now into its fifth year Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour? You know, you make a lot. As Bob himself made a lot of 2021-2024. You know, that was what the tour was supposed to be. And you referenced that several, several times in the book. And now here we are. We had it in 25, now we have it in 26. Like, what, what. What's he up to there?
- [59:25]
Robert Polito
I don't know. Maybe. Maybe that's why, like, he's. He, He. He might be thinking, God, I've got to put out another record, you know, just so that I can, you know, you know, live up to my claims for the, you know, for the tour being over at the. At the end of that. I don't know. I mean, you know, I have. I have no particular angle on that other than, you know, what we were talking about before about how, you know, he's. He's working with a fairly limited canvas from night to night, in which he almost invariably, except when there's a, you know, a special occasion and in a particular city, you know, doing a very consistent set list that doesn't play that way, you know, from night to night. Yeah, I mean, I love the way that, like, you can go online and hear, you know, five different versions of Key west in a row single, you know, on a single side, each of which sounds radically different from the other. They may as well be different songs, you know, from.
- [60:35]
Ian
Absolutely. Shout out to all of the hardcore folks doing the work over there at Expecting Rain, I was glad to see the website get a mention in the acknowledgment section of the book.
- [60:48]
Robert Polito
Well, I felt I had. There are certain things that one couldn't have written the book without.
- [60:55]
Ian
Absolutely, yeah. The tour. The Never Ending Rough and Rowdy ways. He's found a way to put together the Never Ending Tour and the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour at this point. It is the Never Ending Rough and Rowdy ways to her. It perplexes me, it baffles me, and it frustrates me just a little bit because it has been the same thing, at least in terms of set list. You're so right, obviously, about the performances from Night to Night, but I guess the saving grace to me, and what I love about it is how deep and weird and out of the way he's willing to go on these tour legs at this point. This latest one. Tyler Abilene Dothan, Alabama Just like nowhere. Just nowhere. You compare it to the types of dates that people of his ilk are performing. The Rolling Stones are doing football stadiums. Neil Young is doing giant amphitheaters in big cities or just outside. And Bob is just as far off the map as you can get. I mean, there's something magical about that to me.
- [61:59]
Robert Polito
Yeah. It's almost like he's. He's on a road trip himself and then, you know, every couple of days has to play someplace, you know, I mean, you know, to kind of, you know, pay his way to the next, next town by bus. You know, it's like, yeah, yeah, he's.
- [62:14]
Ian
Busking his way across the country.
- [62:16]
Robert Polito
Yeah.
- [62:17]
Ian
And you know, God bless him for. Because Lord knows I probably would never be going to Tyler or Abilene in Texas were it not for Bob Dylan concert, you know, taking place there. So in his own way, the same way that he has shown me so much about music, he's also showing me a little bit about these United States.
- [62:35]
Robert Polito
Yeah. The geography. Yeah. The landscapes.
- [62:38]
Ian
Thank you for that, Bob. A couple more notes. You write about this a little bit in I think chapter X towards the end of the book, Bob's activity on social media recently. And, and you even mention these just like completely out of left field, baffling Instagram posts that he's done that are like seemingly AI generated vocals of transcripts of characters speaking from beyond the grave. Talk about things that are endlessly fascinating for me to think about. Do you have any read whatsoever on what's going on there?
- [63:18]
Robert Polito
No. Kind of, of angle that you wouldn't have or somebody else wouldn't. Wouldn't have. It's not like I have any special knowledge about any of this, but, but I just think that, like, you know, who would have guessed that, that, you know, Bob Dylan would be on social media at all? You know, I mean, I think it's another way of the, the kind of hidden in plain sight aspect of, of him, you know, and, and those, and those voices from beyond the grave, I mean, that's, you know, that's another place where my book started in a way. You know, like the abecedarium form coming from the Ouija board in a way, you know, and, you know, you know, or Key west is on the horizon line, halfway between this world and another world. You know, I mean, I think that he's always been kind of fascinated by these voices of the, of the dead and these voices from, you know, the other world. And I think that's, that's one of the ways in which I think his imagination works.
- [64:26]
Ian
Sure. Have you seen his latest Instagram contributions? These like quotes from a non existent book that.
- [64:33]
Robert Polito
Yeah.
- [64:37]
Ian
Each post is just stranger and more confusing than the last. I hope it never stops. Yeah, well, I guess maybe to wrap it here and feel free to demur if you need to, or if you would prefer not to go any further in detail, but one of the most titillating moments that you write about just very briefly here again towards the end of the book is Bob and Pynchon. Thomas Pynchon. There's just like one paragraph on like a little kind of anecdote, second hand overheard type of thing. Just. Can you shed any further light on your knowledge of that subject?
- [65:15]
Robert Polito
Not, not really. Like, like, not, not beyond what I say there. Except that like, you know, Thomas Pynchon was very much part of that folk world, you know, that Dylan comes out of. I mean, I'd be surprised if, if Dylan hadn't met, you know, Thomas Pinchin decades ago.
- [65:34]
Ian
Sure.
- [65:35]
Robert Polito
And I think that like, who else is he going to be friends with, you know, in a way, you know.
- [65:42]
Ian
Weird, reclusive, great artists.
- [65:44]
Robert Polito
Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, Pinch, I mean, I've never met Pynchon or I've never seen him that I, that I know of. But I mean, but I think Pynchon is another person who's very much hidden in plain sight, you know. You know, I mean, presumably he does all sorts of, you know, ordinary New York things like, you know, going to bookstores and you know, like, I think the few times he's been photographed in the modern era, Pynchon's like, was photographed kind of picking up his child at school, you know, I mean, what's, what's more everyday than that, you know.
- [66:23]
Ian
Yeah. Similar to Bob and his just, you know, wearing his hoodie and his jacket, walking around. You know, there's this pictures of him I think in like Brazil or something where he's just like taking selfies with people on the street one day.
- [66:35]
Robert Polito
Yes, well, yeah, or even, you know, I mean, I think, you know, there's a story in the book that you know about like, you know, somebody who was kind of scoffing at this idea of, you know, Dylan going to his, his son's concerts dressed in the hoodie. I mean, what, you know, how could he get away with that disguise? And the guy kind of looks a couple of feet away from himself and there's, there's Dylan watching, watching the show, dressed exactly the way that, you know, you would expect.
- [67:09]
Ian
You, you have heard him to dress in such occasions. Yeah, the man loves a hoodie. Okay, well, geez, I feel like we could keep going for hours, but I've already eaten up plenty of your time. Maybe just one last one. Because this is another subject that's near and dear to my. On this program, but the standards records. Thumbs up, thumbs down. Where you at on those?
- [67:29]
Robert Polito
Oh, you mean like the American Songbook record?
- [67:32]
Ian
Yeah. Shadows Fallen Angels and Triplicates.
- [67:34]
Robert Polito
Yeah. Oh, I like those a lot. I mean, I like those a lot. I mean, you know, and I think the ways that. I mean, part of what I love about them is the singing, but also part of what I love about is that is the arrangements. I mean, the way that he has taken those big band arrangements or those almost orchestral arrangements in a number of cases and reinvented them for, you know, his own band, I think is. Is really, really extraordinary. And you know, and you know, I've never understood the people who complain about Dylan's voice in a way. I mean, I, you know, I think Dylan, Dylan is the great white singer after Frank Sinatra in some ways, you know, in terms of phrasing and, and I think that's part of, I think what he was getting at in those, in those records, it was, you know, it was a kind of homage to, to Sinatra and, and I think Sinatra had. Had either recorded all of those songs or all but one or two of those songs. Something like that.
- [68:35]
Ian
I mean, I think you said everything except for bragging if, if my memory.
- [68:39]
Robert Polito
Yeah. You know, and those stories of, you know, of, of Dylan and Sinatra talking after the tribute show. That, you know, part of it, yeah, it's, it's, it's very moving and poignant, I think. You know, I mean, Sinatra was a great singer, you know. I mean.
- [69:00]
Ian
Sure, no arguments here. Yeah, yeah. I think the atmosphere of those records just cannot be overstated as well. I like, I've been listening to. We have one of our, One of our more annoying habits is listening to these late era Van Morrison records that he seems to be churning out with a shocking degree of speed every couple months. And Van's voice sounds great, you know, as great as ever really. But like the. He does a lot of these standards, you know, covers at this point and they just, they. Everything is so kind of one note and like has a, has a sheen to it and a gloss. And you know, the Bob songs, even if they are written by similar songwriters and come from same areas, there's just this, I don't know, this smoky three dimensional ethereal quality to them that, I don't know, just marks from a production and atmosphere standpoint alone.
- [69:54]
Robert Polito
Well, in a real darkness to most of them too, you know, a real darkness that, you know, that, that for me also again connects to kind of film noir. You know, I mean, that there's, that there's. And I think this is even true of like Dylan's, you know, absorbing of the kind of classical world, you know, like whether it's Ovid or Virgil or Homer. And I think that, you know, sometimes that's misread as a kind of, you know, celebration of the classical world. But I think he was. He's. He's fascinated by the. By the focus on Empire and the focus on violence and the focus on colonialism that's in that literature. The darkness of it. And I think that's also what he brings out of those great American Songbook lyrics too, is something really devastating.
- [70:49]
Ian
Absolutely. They are to me one of the key releases or projects that he's undertaken forever, basically dating all the way back to the very beginning, but certainly over this last 30 years of his career.
- [71:05]
Robert Polito
And I think he's also somebody that, you know, has. Has really absorbed kind of, you know, all of American music.
- [71:14]
Ian
Sure.
- [71:14]
Robert Polito
You know, and I think that those great American Songbook lyrics are. Are a big part of. Of Of American music and, and you know, and. And very connected to the. To the other kinds of American music that one more readily associates with Dylan.
- [71:35]
Ian
Yeah, yeah. It's, you know, I've always thought of him as. As a. A Not like a writing of a historical wrong necessarily, although maybe a little bit of that. Because this is like. It's the style of music that Bob Dylan himself killed. And he has a quote along those lines. And then for him to return to it and not just kind of as a lark with a one off thing, but like devote so many years of his career and so many records for five records worth to representing these songs again to someone like me, who I never would have heard. There's a flaw in my flu word for Bob Dylan singing that song. That's one of my favorite songs and.
- [72:11]
Robert Polito
I don't know, but like the devastation of like I'm a fool to want you. Yeah, yeah.
- [72:16]
Ian
Incredible stuff. Yeah. I mean, shadows, I think as far as records go, I think that's the one, you know, top to bottom, that is the strongest statement. But you know, triplicate is just the.
- [72:29]
Robert Polito
Yeah.
- [72:30]
Ian
The chutzpah of something like that cannot be.
- [72:33]
Robert Polito
And in their own way they're, you know, they're analogous to world Gone wrong. And good as I've been to you, certainly. Yeah.
- [72:41]
Ian
Yeah. Okay. Well, I think we can maybe put a pin in it there tonight, Robert. I don't want to give the whole book away in one conversation.
- [72:54]
Robert Polito
Thank you for a great conversation, Ian. I really appreciated it. Thank you for the thoughtful questions.
- [73:01]
Ian
Absolutely.
- [73:01]
Robert Polito
And comments and observations too, please.
- [73:04]
Ian
Thank you for the brilliant book again after the Flood Inside Bob Dylan's Memory palace, available now. Like I said, if ever the podcast was a book and it was also a book written by a brown brilliant thinker and writer instead of just, you know, a schmo like me, this would be that book. So everyone out there, run, don't walk to your local bookseller to pick it up.
- [73:28]
Robert Polito
You're too modest. You're too modest. But thank you very much for the kind words and thank you for a.
- [73:35]
Ian
Great experience and hopefully see you down in Texas.
- [74:07]
Robert Polito
Say it to me.
- [74:08]
You got something Took him fast. What a whole lot about it. He was going out slow I heard it on the wireless radio.
- [74:26]
Ian
Way down.
- [74:26]
Robert Polito
Early one morning Way down in keyword I'm searching for.
- [74:36]
Ian
Thanks again to Robert Polito. The book after the Flood Inside Bob Dylan's Memory palace, available now from Literate. Seriously, anyone who listens to this show. Anyone who's listened to this show, certainly the the Jokerman Early Days crew. This book is is your thing. If you haven't already picked one up, do so at your earliest convenience. It'll be great plane material when you're all flying here and there everywhere across this country to the next date of the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour on your Bob concert going experience. We'll see you down in Tyler Abilene and wherever the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour may head next on Jokerman.
- [75:27]
Robert Polito
Inside.
- [75:33]
Us is fine and fair if you lost your mind you'll find it there us is on the horizon. I was side on the railroad track Ginsburg and Ko and Kacalu Jimmy and.
- [76:02]
Ian
Bunny.
- [76:06]
Robert Polito
And all the rest but that might not be the thing to do But I'm sticking with you.
- [76:18]
Ian
Through and.
- [76:19]
Robert Polito
Through out on the bottom when I'm in P.E. I got mobile feet rats fell on.
- [76:33]
Ian
The ground.
- [76:35]
Robert Polito
Got my right hand high with a thumb down Such as life, such as happiness Hibiscus flowers go everywhere here give me a wear one but.
- [76:57]
Have your ear down on the bottom.