On the Lyft ride to the Portland airport, en route to Tulsa Switchyard’s “national festival of art, music and ideas,” I was chatting up the driver—or rather, he was chatting up me, as drivers often do.
On the way to where we were going, we were talking about where’d we been, where we come from. Austin came up. He wondered how, like Portland, that once-livable city had been transformed. Now the epicenter of the tech-celebrity universe—the home of Elon Musk, for example, and Joe Rogan, who recently opened a comedy club there.
At the last moment, the driver mentioned he used to be a stand-up comedian in L.A.
Pulling-up to the United terminal, I asked him about his favorite comics—Jerry Seinfeld. Probably the least offensive comic around, except for Jim Gaffigan, whom he also mentioned.
We never got around to why Rogan opened The Mothership, or Seinfeld refuses to play college campuses anymore.
I respect stand-up, I told the driver. A gutsy art form, beyond my reach. Where we dance cross the line of what’s socially acceptable and what’s not. Comics say what they really mean, and audiences laugh at what we’re all thinking but not saying out loud. And, I said, it’s all about timing and rhythm.
That, like music, I get.
The driver added it’s also about tone and delivery. He was de-livering me. To the airport.
Bob Dylan said it better:
As in comedy, where a seemingly simple sentence can transform into a joke through the magic of performance, an inexplicable thing happens when words are set to music. The miracle is in their union.
—The Philosophy of Modern Song
The Lyftie laughed, and said he left L.A. ‘cause of cliquey in-fighting, backstabbing among different groups of comics. And people stealing his material.
I thought that was part of the comic’s code, sacrosanct—ya don’t steal jokes. I’s also under the impression that comics formed tight-knit little communities to support each other, over drinks, after routines, developing material and camaraderie.
He said yeah, well, actually, clawin’ their way up, lotta comics do steal jokes. And there are little community circles, but they often fight amongst themselves for prestige. He also admitted he had stage fright—but that didn’t matter.
Once you get up there, all you see and hear are stage lights and footlights, the sound of ice cubes clinking and patrons drinking, and, on good nights, laughter from the back of the room.
At the beginning of Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical film Almost Famous, the 15 year-old version of Crowe, a wunderkind Rolling Stone journalist at the time, is milling around the loading terminal behind the San Diego Sports Arena. Waiting with a trio of groupies—“bandaids”—trying to sneak into Black Sabbath.
Out of the stadium bursts Sapphire, another female devotee, offering everyone backstage access to Sabbath. She throws her body into a crucifix, spreads her booze-baring arms and legs and yells: “Does anybody remember laughter?”
On the threshold of this witches’ Sabbath—sneaking into a concert by the Satanist bat-eaters Lester Bangs once called the first truly “Catholic rock & roll band” (can’t believe in Hell without believing in Heaven, in that tradition)—Sapphire riffs on Robert Plant, ad-libbing a performance of “Stairway to Heaven” at Madison Square Garden, from Led Zeppelin’s concert film, The Song Remains the Same.
In the Garden, Plant warbles: “…and the forests will echo with laughter…does anybody remember laughter?”
That’s the question I came here to ask.
I’ll have to ask it in yet another undelivered, imaginary speech in the presence of rock critic
, who was perched just a few seats down the row from me next to his wife, or some nice lady—in front of the Horton Records ballroom stage. During a Switchyard panel on Bob Dylan and Humor.This time, we were both in the audience.
It was poetic, since Marcus had just delivered a rhapsodic critique on Dylan and film noire an hour before. Now we were gathered to discuss the the lighter side of things, to talk about Dylan’s humor.
The speakers onstage included
, a writer for The Daily Show who, thanks to the writer’s guild strike, found time to attend the Tulsa Switchyard. To present: “It Takes a Lot to Laugh: Bob Dylan as Humorist.”Dylan was, and remains, seriously funny.
The Mystery Tramp partially imitated The Tramp himself, Charlie Chaplin. And was pegged to play Buster Keaton on HBO.
By Larry Charles (Seinfeld, Borat, Religulous, Curb Your Enthusiasm), who compares Dylan to Andy Kaufman. (See his funny encounter with Dylan here.)
Some one-liners from Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour, that the Daily Show writer found funny:
“I read about the evils of drinking, so I quit reading.”
(Saw a good ol’ boy at the Denver airport on the way here—probably not a Dylan fan—wearing a version of Bob’s humor on his sleeve: “When I read that beer is bad for you, I stopped reading.”)
Some more Theme Time one-liners quoted by The Daily Show scribe:
“I always thought I might want to be a doctor. Where else can you ask a woman to take off her clothes and send a bill to her husband?”
Of the jokes that are mentioned, some are all quite lame.
“Roses are red. Violets are blue. Some poems rhyme. This one doesn’t.”
Bob introducing his band:
“At the back, the meanest drummer in the world. When we played the Middle East, he killed the Dead Sea… David Kemper!”
“You might be wondering what’s written on his shoes — those are footnotes!”
Dylan “dad jokes.” I can relate.
Another panelist was
editor and illustrator, and Stan Lee’s biographer, Danny Fingeroth, discussing: “The Comic Book and Me: Bob Dylan and Comics.”Comic Book Guy’s upcoming work is darker—a book about the assassin of JFK’s assassin, Jack Ruby, who shot Lee Harvey Oswald. (A topic of much discussion this week, after the 2020 pandemic release of Dylan’s JFK ballad, “Murder Most Foul.”)
Here’s a lyric from 1963, the year Kennedy was assassinated.
“I Shall Be Free,” The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan:
Well, my telephone rang it would not stop
It’s President Kennedy callin’ me up
He said, “My friend, Bob, what do we need to make the country grow?”
I said, “My friend, John, Brigitte Bardot
Anita Ekberg
Sophia LorenCountry’ll grow”
Pretty sure that’s a boner joke, in case you missed it. It’s certainly sexual innuendo, addressed to the President of the United States. Six months before he was murdered.
But the kid who really killed onstage that night was a skinny-little version of baby-fat Dylan, some youngster named Harrison Hewitt, talking about:
“How Long Can We Falsify and Deny What is Real: Bob Dylan is the Funniest Person Alive, and Why We Need to Talk About It.”
Hewitt compared Bob to Lenny Bruce. Said “Lenny lived on a lighting bolt,” and that’s how Harry’s presentation struck me.
Here he is talking to Greil Marcus after the show. Might look like he’s scratchin’ his crotch, but he’s taking praise from Caesar.
Hewitt killed because he was funny. And a skilled imitator. Doing deadpan impressions of Bob Dylan throughout his speech.
Now… Bob Dylan began his career as an imitator, a mimic. A “Woody Guthrie jukebox,” called his early self. It’s fitting that he chose to deposit his life’s work in the Dylan archives next to Woody’s in downtown Tulsa, in the same structure. Two sides of one building, the House of the Muses. But I’ll talk about that later, on down the line.
What’s important is that Harry Hew asked the same question and gave the same answer I would have, in different words. The question and answer to celebrating the “Funniest Person Alive, and Why We Need to Talk About It,” to me, is: Does anybody remember laughter?
Is our Freewheelin’ sense of humor, like Bob Dylan’s Kennedy joke in the wake of some horrific event—dead?
To Hew’s point: we need to talk about Bob’s humor “to bring new people in” to the cloistered “World of Bob Dylan” (the original nucleus of the Tulsa Switchyard festival), to “bring down walls, in a society of walls.”
We need to talk about Dylan’s humor for the same reason we need to talk about American Humor in general: to unite people, with a diverse group of perspectives and backgrounds, through the release-valve of laughter. In this world of tribal warfare, cliques and claques and oppositional hacks, humor heals.
Don’t quote me on this, but the word humor probably goes back to a hilarious medical theory that prevailed from the 3rd century through the Middle Ages, started by the Greco-Roman physician Galen—“Galenic medicine” or “humoral theory.” The idea that health is constituted by the balance of blood, bile, phlegm, and other “humors” in the body.
Galen’s humor theory might sound laughable today. But laughter is still the best medicine.
So… the gist of the stillborn speech. I said a lot of what follows, during my week in Tulsa, in my own voice. From the audience.
But here’s some of what I might’ve added had there been guts enough and time, bile and humor. I would’ve walked to the foot of the stage at the top of Q&A, hogged the mic from Hew, argued that I paid my dues with how much it cost t’get here, and done my best impression of stand-up improv.
In other words, my best impression of Harry Hew, the funny young speaker, doing his best impression of Bob Dylan, who once did his own impressions of Woody Guthrie.
Remember now, I ain’t too funny. Can’t do stand up. At the suggestion of an editorial friend, I toned down the Dylan-Guthrie dialect. Wasn’t workin. But an artist has to take risks, somebody once said, and everybody starts by copying somebody, and reaching for something else. So forgive me if I lapse into the vernacular, from time to time, for the sake of rhythm.
Here goes…
Mr. Marvel—you were talkin about Bob Dylan and comic books. How there’s a lot of comic books about Dylan, but not much about comic books in Dylan’s songs—'cept for that one lyric about “The comic book and me, just us, we caught the bus,” from The Basement Tapes.
Well, I was listenin to Artie Spiegelman the other night. Told me he got his idea for Maus from a filmmaker friend, showed em some footage of 1930s minstrel cartoons. Said Mickey Mouse was just Al Jolson with whiskers. Got his big idea for race in America and abroad—minstrels and rats and Ku Klux Kats, and all that.
Other day, another person was talkin Dylan.
, discussin “Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones.” Blackface minstrel characters and Dylan’s “Nelly Was a Lady”—the chapter about the Stephen Foster composition in The Philosophy of Modern Song. Where Bob said:“A lot of sad songs have been written but none sadder than this. Both the lyrics and the melody. Alvin Youngblood Hart’s version is as good a version as you’ll ever hear. Alvin sings the song in its pure form.”
Real interesting. Connected Stephen Foster and Edgar Allan Poe, and Dylan’s “Knock Knock Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” to the rappin’ of the Raven on Edgar Allan’s door. The presenter wondered whether Bob was whitewashin’ burnt cork, or just acknowledging the recessive gene of blackface minstrelsy in the history of American song.
We talked a lot about Eric Lott, and I stood up there on the spot, and said: “Bob Dylan’s fulla shit!”
Somebody handed me a microphone.
“In No Direction Home, he told Martin Scorsese his first two high-school girlfriend’s names were ‘Gloria Storia’ and ‘Echo’—you believe that?!”
“Bound for Glory is the name of Woody Guthrie’s life story, his autobiography. ‘Bound for Glory Book made a deep impression on me,’ Dylan said more or less in that interview—‘Gloria Storia?”
“And Echo well, she’s the nymph of sound and reverb! Distracted Juno from her lil affair with Jove by talkin her ear off, until the goddess finally got wise, shut er up and stole her voice for good. Could only repeat the last words someone else said.”
“Hell, I dunno. Could be true. Sure sounds like old Bob’s pullin’ Marty’s leg to me.”
“He’s a liar! A signifier,” I said.
Another speaker on that panel talked about the “riff and commentary” in Dylan’s work, the “two voices” in “Dylan the Gemini’s” Philosophy… and as far as I know, riff and commentary is what Skip Gates calls signifyin’, in the African-American tradition—copying and altering, to the artist’s advantage. “Changing the joke and slipping the yoke,” as Ralph Ellison said.
I’m a Gemini, by the way. Always was a lil shamed of it til I heard Dylan was too—we’re two-faced snakes, s’posedly.
According to one “Gemini: Bob Dylan” astrologer, I looked up later, just for fun:
Robert Zimmerman was born under Gemini, the most agile, restless and ambiguous sign of the zodiac. Ruled by the planet Mercury, the wing-heeled messenger of the Gods, Gemini is the sign of mind, speech and movement. Like the Twins that are its symbol – separate but forever joined together – Gemini’s nature is dualistic, always exploring, relating, analyzing, with a butterfly mind flitting this way and that. Pinning down a Gemini is always difficult.
I don’t know how many you people believe in astrology. But in the words of Jim Morrison…
"I dooo!” squealed a starstruck Doors fan one night in Boston, 1970.
“Are you Sagittarius???” cooed another.
“Yeah that’s right baby, I’m a Sagittarius,” the singer started riffin’…
“So am I-I-I-I,” the Sagittarius swooned.
“The most philosophical of all the signs,” a half-pompous Morrison began to joke. Before he’s interrupted again. “Anyway I don’t believe in it...”
“I don’t eeither!”—I thought Gemini’s were two-faced. Miss Sagittarius’ll say anything.
“I think it’s a buncha bullshit, myself.”
I’m tempted to agree with Jim. Still, flattering to hear I’s born under the same star as Bob.
Back to what I was saying to that earlier panel.
The speaker mentioned that after “Nelly Was a Lady,” Stephen Foster turned away from black minstrel dialect. Dylan argues there’s real human empathy in that song. And if you listen to Alvin Youngblood Hart’s version in its “pure form” at Dylan’s suggestion, I think you’ll agree. That black man may be imaginary, but he’s lost his wife, and you can feel it.
“Dylan’s a TRICKSTER,” I said. “A minstrel. Only whiteface minstrel I know. He’s a magpie, a mocking bird, a copier and collector. A Crow.”
I asked the speaker, “Far as you know, did that blackface minstrel come from the African trickster, the flyin’ Crow?”
He said, “yes he did, I believe that’s so.”
I said, “In Love and Theft, Eric Lott called blackface minstrels like Jim Crow, a ‘symbolic resolution to an intractable social dilemma’—slavery. Workin’ symbolism through magic and imitation. Jim Crow crossed the line. Stirred things up. Advocated for abolition as well as bein’ a racist clown.”
I once asked Greil Marcus [now seated right there next to me]—online, behind my digi-fied mask—to explain the unexplainable. An ouroboros mystery.
To account for the incredible coincidence that Jim Crow went from being an African folk figure, to a blackface minstrel, to a pejorative term for black folks, to the name of segregation itself. And finally, through the magical metamorphosis of rock & roll—black & white musicians imitating each other—helped bring down the color line.
Literally lowered Little Richard’s rope. Toppled the stanchions and crashed the cordon at his shows—that silly velvet string seperatin’ different-colored audiences on the dance floor, at concerts like his and Chuck Berry’s.
In other words—the Crow turnt into himself. A Trickster, mediatin’ between worlds.
A magical avian flew from Africa to America. Winged his way from spiritual mediation to racial segregation, and alighted on integration. Went to hell and back and towards the sky. Tricked us into takin’ one small step for humanity, brought us one inch closer to our blue heaven: true democracy. Over the course of two centuries, an animal trickster became a human one. Turned Yoruban magic into American reality. Now how do you explain THAT?
“Help,” I pleaded Mr. Marcus, “The snake is eating its tail.”
The Holy Greil uttered three cryptic words, over the ethernet: “Read Constance Rourke.”
I did.
The book was, American Humor: A Study of the National Character.
Rourke, a woman writin alongside Woody Guthrie in the 1930s, saw HUMOR as what brought us together as a baby nation. A primitive nation, divided. With a primitive sense of humor. I consider rock & roll primitive—that’s how Al Kooper described his keyboard playin’ on “Like a Rolling Stone,” but I’ll talk about that elsewhere.
Anyway, right up there with Rourke’s three primitive American archetypes: the swindlin’ Yankee (talkin’ Donald Trump); the backwoodsmen, such as Davy Crocket (saw a picture of Dylan at the archives, wearin’ a coonskin cap in The Basement) … among these three American folk heroes and trickster suspects was the blackface minstrel.
An American comic original, like Dylan, for better or worse.
And people, black and white and everywhere in between, performed and laughed at Jim Crow. A focal point, a magic medium, for sussin’ out people’s feelings about anger and abolition. Name of his dance even became synonymous with “radical political instability,” supporting abolition, jumpin’ the line. Name of his dance, “Jump Jim Crow” meant “joining the opposition,” according to a scholar in one of Greil’s anthologies.
He may’ve even symbolically stirred-up the Civil War, which as Mr. Fingeroth mentioned a few days ago, Dylan was always passionately interested in. Bob said, quote:
“Back there, we was put on the cross, crucified, and resurrected.”
…if I scribbled my notes down right.
I still don’t know how to account for how an imaginary trickster became a real one—but I guess an actor named T.D. Rice just happened to be copyin’ a black stablehand imitating an African folk figure’s song and dance, and things went up and down from there.
Today we consider the blackface minstrel racist—which, of course, he/she often was. Opposite of funny. “Grotesque,” is the word often used. That word’s also applied to Poe’s horror stories and Southern Gothic literature in general.
Butcha know what that word means, grotesque? It means hybrid. Mixed.
Tell you a story.
In the 15th century, some Roman commoner fell through the earth. Right through a covered-up hole in the ground.
Pulled himself up off the floor, scratched his head and said whatfor… and found himself inside the ruins of old Nero’s Golden Palace, buried neath the centuries.
On the walls were strange paintin’s, of mixed creatures, hybrid human-animal forms, mixed with plants and vegetables. Wasn’t long ‘fore Michelangelo and Raphael themself were descending into the underworld to gaze at the emperor’s paintings—weren’t painted by Nero, understand, but he was quite the artist and musician himself, unlike the resta the emperors.
They chased that artist-emperor right outta his House o’ Gold, just before they murdered him.
Anyway, the paintin’s on Nero’s walls were the opposite of Renaissance painting—no chiaroscuro, sfumato, balance and perspective, an’ all that. These images were primitive fantasy and myth. Creatures n’ monsters—which is all a monster really is, a hybrid. Thinka Frankenstein, or the Wolf-Man.
But it musta give Mick and Ralph some ideas. This chance discovery added salt to the Renaissance—the “rebirth”—and especially later, to the Baroque, that “misshapen pearl” of a period, which was fulla hybrid “grotesques.”
Out of the past came the future. From the underground came some new ideas influencing the “highest” Western art—cave art. Grotto means cave in I-talian. Grotesque. Grotto-esque.
Mixture of high and low, man and beast, earth and vegetation.
In the 1940s, a Russian philosopher turnt himself into a literary critic. He was lookin’ at the past too, in the tales of Rabelais, the “French Shakespeare,” who was scribblin’ around the same time that Roman fell through the earth into Nero’s House of Gold.
Rabelais’ tales were about Medieval n’ Renaissance carnival—celebrations during the Catholic church calendar, when Fools were crowned as Kings, Boys as Bishops, people elected a Lord of Misrule, and even led an ass to the pulpit, to bray instead of pray. A comedic Black Sabbath. Devils ran through the street in costume. Travesty and parody.
“Carnival inversion,” that Russian reading-and-writing about Rabelais called it. Puttin’ things upside-down and backward.
It all goes back to Roman Saturnalia, maybe, a time of licentiousness during the winter solstice, when people let loose and prayed for the return of spring, slaves were masters for a day and vice versa. A Roman, then Medieval-Renaissance version of ancient sacrifice and fertility ritual—agricultural and human renewal.
Musta look halfway like this, where Carnival’s duking it out with Lent.
But more like this. The earthy underground. “The Old Weird America,” as someone once said.
People sang folk songs.
They ate too much, drank too much, had a lotta open sex, and pissed and shat, in Rabelais’ tales. It was all about connectivity, the cycle of life and death and rebirth. Carnival—carne— “flesh.” People got naked, men an’ women switched their clothes around—travesty, “transvestir.” They slaughtered animals to eat, mashed grapes t’drink, saw their insides, then it all passed through ‘em and replenished the earth as fertilizer. An’ I reckon a few people got pregnant.
Heard someone quoting Bob Dylan complaining about folk music earlier, when he was lookin’ to renew himself, by going electric. Bobbie said somethin’ like:
Folk music is a bunch of fat people. Those songs are all old, they’re not goin’ anywhere. They’re all about death and vegetables.
Amen. That Russian couldn’t a-put it better himself.
That Russian philosfer, writin’ in the 1940s, was named Mikhail Bakhtin. Sure summa you learn-ed scholars heard of him. He called Rabelais’ tales “grotesque realism,” describing a “culture of popular laughter”—everything and everyone was connected, through humor. Sex, comedy, the nether regions, toilet humor, eatin’ and shittin’, drinkin’ and pissin’, all that. Knockin’ the high-falutin’ off their pedestals and elevating the lowly. Bringin’ everybody down to earth and rejuvenating em through medicinal laughter.
Death and vegetables. And re-creation.
Bakhtin had the gall to present Rabelais and His World in front of some important Soviet government types.
Now, just yesterday, I heard a joke. That Stalin musta been awful funny, because a lotta people laughed at his jokes—when they were stuck inside a room with him behind locked doors, with armed guards standin’ on the other side of em.
At the time, there were sanctions on laughter and religion inna atheist Soviet Union, just like in Rabelais’ 16th-century Catholic France. Certain things you couldn’t poke fun at. Bakhtin used Rabelais’ World as a slippery commentary on his own, by talking about the past and—under the table—comparin’ it to the present.
They ate it up. One of them Soviet apparatchiks even got the notion that somethin’ like carnival might be useful to the state as a “social release valve.” Give the Russian people a chance to let off a little steam for a minute, before returning to the daily grind of their oppressive, routine lives.
Kinda like Fat Tuesday before Lent, or Saturday night at the honky tonk or juke joint, followed by Sunday morning hungover inna church pew.
Bakhtin thought of carnival and grotesque humor as revolution itself—the fun kind, not the sorta re-union that led to the Soviet Union. One where everyone is connected to each other and the earth on equal, non-state-mandated footing.
He said with carnival, “There are no footlights.”
Meaning, there’s nothing separating the audience from the performers—priests, kings, despots, divas, whoever—elevated onstage. Or the people from their so-called superiors.
At the beginning of that book about Rabelais, Bakhtin wrote, or quote:
“It would be interesting to write the history of laughter.”
He sure did. Part of it anyways.
Now Harry Hew, speakin’ like me, was just saying that if you listen to early bootlegs of “Desolation Row” live, the whole audience is cracking up, laughin’ at every line.
“Going to the carnival tonight on Desolation Row,” Bobbie sang.
Later, and to this day, since Dylan is now taken “seriously,” no one laughs at that song anymore. Hew saw that when others around you are laughing, it’s contagious. Okay to laugh. When they’re not, it’s not. We’re social animals—sheep, mostly.
Some of us are wolves in sheep’s clothing, regal lions, good-memoried elephants, or gluttonous pigs. Vultures feedin on the misfortunes of others. People with 20-20 vision are “eagle-eyed.” Some of us are clever, or sexy, foxes. Magpie collectors. Crazy cuckoos. Snakes in the grass.
A flock of Crows is called a “murder”—ever wonder where that come from?
Better not—curiosity killed the cat. Some of us are copycats. Imitators or apes. Mick Jagger chattered, “I’m a monkey…man!” You see where I’m goin’ with this?
The oldest metaphors are animal metaphors. Aesop’s fables—humorous and entertaining as well as instructive.
Men or women as beasts. Some unfortunate half-dead souls, heartless people used to call “vegetables.” But that’s a tragedy, and I’m talkin’ about comedy.
A fondly-cited example of Dylan’s humor, mentioned just a minute ago, is some footage from D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary, Don’t Look Back. Where Dylan’s brought his 1966 electric tour to England, and half the audience is booing while the other half’s cheerin’. And the shows themselves were half-n-half. First half was acoustic, second electric.
In the scene from that film, Dylan’s back at his hotel, where someone’s just informed him about a death threat against him. A threat from a “lone wolf,” we might say today. Dylan’s a little rattled, pacing around his room like a caged animal, but he’s working his anxiety out through humor.
Laughs and says:
“I don’t mind being shot, man. I just don’t dig being told about it.”
Then he jokes to his drummer, Mickey Jones:
“Don’t worry Mickey, I’ll protect you.”
As Mr. Marvel noted, who does Dylan think he is? Who else would think he could stop a speedin’ bullet but Bob Dylan?
Batman? Catwoman? Black Panther?
The slide photo from Mr. Marvel—Danny Fingeroth’s presentation—reminds me of the label for Leon Russell’s old Shelter Records, now Church Studio, just across town.
Dylan hung around with Leon there, found shelter and sanctuary, you might say. Not sure how much recording he got done. But during his time in Tulsa, a local woman told Bob he was hangin’ around with a rock star, Leon Russell. Didn’t recognize the name Bob Dylan.
The old Shelter Records label is an inverted Superman logo. At least, it was before DC Comics sued em to change it.
The Neve 8068 mixing console now at Church Studio, née Shelter Records, is the same one in the background of Daniel Lanois’ blurry album photo for Time Out of Mind, minus a few parts. Taken from El Teatro in L.A. Mailed from a Mexican movie house.
The docent at Church Studio told me that when Leon Russell began converting what used to be one of the first interracial places of worship in Tulsa into a recording studio, Shelter Records in 1972, it was in shambles, in the middle of a bad neighborhood.
When the current owner of Church Studio, Teresa Knox, bought the building in 2016, there were avian and rodent carcasses, along with syringes, strewn beneath the pews of the old Grace Methodist Episcopal Church (est. 1915)—hidin’ in the Church basement.
Before that, the church housed the Indian Council for Drug Abuse and Addiction, which also offered dance and acting lessons—to the first Native Honorary Oscar winner, Wes Studi. Self-described “electric Indian.”
As a Native American understudy, Studi once played an Indian. Supporting “Asian-face” kung-fu character David Carradine, who was also playin’ an Indian. A medicine man, in the American Indian Theatre production of Black Elk Speaks, in Tulsa.
Will Sampson, a.k.a. “Chief”—Ken Kesey’s Electric Kool-Aid Indian from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—also played ‘longside David Carradine’s Black Elk, for the same company, round the same time.
Today those Native Oklahomans are at least as famous—and less infamous—than the actor they once supported in Tulsa, David Carradine.
At some point, between Shelter Records, the Indian Council for Drug Abuse and acting, and Church Studio, junkies were squattin’ in the a-band-oned church.
Now the Church recording facility is part of Studio Row, a musical pilgrimage destination. A working museum. Church of a different sort.
That place is thrice resurrected. Once by Leon Russell in the 1970s, twice by the Indian Council in the 80s, thrice by a woman named Teresa Knox, who’d only seen the exterior. Owners were afraid to let the buyer see the interior, what with the animal-death and hypodermic needles—the ugly inside guts.
In 2016, Teresa Knox bought it sight unseen. Now that’s Guts.
That’s Faith. Mother Teresa, I call her.
I’ve heard several versions of this tale—but I’ll tell you the one Mother Teresa told me, peppered with a few details from a story I heard from a Church docent named Bob.
Bob once gave a Church Studio tour, to a former sound engineer for Saturday Night Live. Happened to work some other East Coast studios as well—possibly Electric Lady land.
For forward-lookin’ technology people, the cherished Neve mixing console was once considered an abandoned relic of the past —by digital revolutionaries. For others, the analogue world has always maintained its faithful acolytes.
That SNL engineer told Bob (the guide at Church Studio) that in the 90s, at the beginning of the digital revolution, he had to go divin’ through dumpsters and plying pawn-shop shelves, lookin’ for the necessary parts to piece this Frankenstein back together.
Teresa Knox told me that after she bought the Time Out of Mind Neve off Lanois, it took her four and a half years looking for the necessary parts, and customizing others, to build her own version of Dan’s console anew. Bought it for a pretty penny in the past, bout a third of what it’d fetch today.
Now it’s worth a million bucks.
When Time Out of Mind engineer Mark Howard was trying to get the sound Dylan wanted outa his 1997 album, he tried a million things to satisfy Dylan for the final cut. The best tape, tubes, a vinyl lathe. Finally, he ran the signal from the most expensive mastering equipment available, mixed with what’s now a million dollar Neve console… back through a cheap TASCAM tape deck.
And at last the sound was just right, for Goldilocks there. Man on the album cover. Rumpelzimmerman, spinnin’ straw into gold, or gold into straw, depending which way you look at it.
—[Bob’s engineer tells that story on Dylan.FM, to the man who told me.]—
Now, if all this about Church and Shelter and Neve and TASCAM ain’t a metaphor for grotesque humor and turning high things into low and back again, I dunno what is. From an interracial chapel to an artist-and-addicts shelter and into Church Studio.
Above the stairs, going down to the basement of Church Studio, the words of Freddie King, one of the earliest Shelter recording artists—interesting Echo there—“King,” kinda sounds like Emperor—are painted.
The next line of that song goes, “Got my feet in the window, got my head on the ground.”
The King is fallin’ upside-down!
The painted stairs at the Bob Dylan Center, on the other hand, lead up. To a Shaker religious paintin’ on the wall.
According to the description, the Shakers were: a “United Society of Believers,” started in the mid-18th century, and their “Gift Drawings” were “considered literal translations of a spiritual experience, vision, or directive,” created by “instruments”—“mostly women, who received and recorded these spiritual events.”
The stairway to Shaker heaven is painted with the words: “I’ll let you be in my dreams, if I can be in yours.” Celestial sentiment.
From “Talking World War III Blues”—as hellish a theme there is: nuclear war. From the same album where Dylan made that Kennedy “growth” joke, Freewheelin’ :
Well, now time passed and now it seems
Everybody’s having them dreams
Everybody sees themsel[f]
Walkin’ around with no one else
Half of the people can be part right all of the time
Some of the people can be all right part of the time
But all of the people can’t be all right all of the time
I think Abraham Lincoln said that
“I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours”
I said that
God-Damn. Holy Hell. This train of thought has left the station an’ jumped the rails. “Blood on the Tracks!” Went from humor to heaven and hell. Lemme just say a few more words, before I return to laughter and democracy by way of the troubadours—trial and love.
Laura Tenschert—podcaster and musician up there in the front row, said podcasting was “democratizing the process” of communication. And that there oughta be more women like herself, and all sorts of other people, in the World of Bob Dylan.
In her presentation, “Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” Laura talked about Dylan’s “slippery game,” and “refusal to explain” himself. Said the “Gemini” speaks with “two voices” in The Philosophy of Modern Song.
He “invites us to disagree” in that book, using controversial, sometimes offensive language, with multiple meanings. Think she riffed on Dylan saying, “what is lost is a shared cultural baseline,” through algorithms, and the loss of that invitation to disagree and discuss—loss of dialogue and democracy. By way of contrast, she said, “Dylan’s songs are democratic.”
I think maybe Harry Hew was making a similar point just now, but feel free to disagree.
“Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”—the Animals’ song and title of Laura’s presentation… maybe she prefers Nina Simone’s version but Animals is more suited to my theme here—I believe “Oh Lord, Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” is the Animals’ translation of an old Yoruban trickster prayer-song (which you can read about here):
“Do not falsify the words of my mouth,
Do not misguide the movements of my feet.
You who translates yesterday’s words
Into novel utterances,
Do not undo me,
I bear you sacrifices”
Laura, I’ll take the liberty of sayin, shares her name with the idealized beloved of another person who dug up the past and translated it to the future, and really kindled the first spark of the Renaissance—Petrarch.
Dante had Beatrice, Boccaccio had his “Little Flame,” Fiammetta, and Petrarch had Laura. Rather, none of em had any of em. They were unattainable ideals—“Beautiful Dreams,” to riff on Stephen Foster.
Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch were riffing, whether they knew it or not, on the tradition of chivalric romance sung by courtly troubadours—romancin’ married women with noble husbands for the sake of flattery, with no intention of consummatin’ the affair. “Love, oh love, oh” unrequited love.
Laura—not the one sittin up front, the lady from the 14th century—was married to a distant ancestor of the most infamous sadist in history. The Marquis de Sade. Guess she’s lucky she wasn’t born about three centuries later. Coulda been a different story. Whips instead-a words, sadism instead of chivalry.
“Look Out!”
Courtly chivalric romance coincided with the rise of Catholic Mariology—idolizin’ the Virgin Mary. Might even say it was a form of feminism, worshippin’ women. Course, we all know the flip side of that coin, in the male mind. There’s the Madonna… and there’s that type of woman associated with Babylon. Not to me—according to psychology.
For the high-class troubadours, ensconced in their royal courts, songs and poetry came to be about courtin’ untouchable women. Little Virgin Marys.
The travelin’ troubadours who came first, whose songs are mostly lost to history, were lowdown and bawdy as hell, and probably practiced what they preached, or sang. Or tried to, anyway. These were more commonly called minstrels. “Ministers,” Latin for servants, lessers—“minus.” Or jongleurs—jugglers. Performers, sometimes with circus-type animals.
Petrarch’s pal Bocaccio is the only troubadour-inspired poet of the three who wrote bawdy and funny, despite the name of Dante’s most famous work, The Divine Comedy.
Bocaccio’s most famous work is closer to prose, actually, not poetry. He referred to it, like Balzac half a millennium later, as a “human comedy”—more down to earth than Dante’s. And he stole a lotta his material for The Decameron, his “century” of stories, from Eastern and Asian tales, and minstrel folklore.
He laughed at chivalric romance, smiled at the hypocrisy of priests and nuns, and told tales of love and minstrel debauchery. You might say he was the Italian Rabelais, a century before the French one come along. In the middle of the Black Death, Boccaccio wrote what someone called the “book of the love of life.”
But like Dante and Petrarch, and the chivalric romantics of the royal court, Boccaccio was inspired by an unattainable, idealized love, Fiammetta. Like Petrarch’s heavenly Laura, Bocaccio’s love for Little Flame went unconsummated—‘cept in his prose, that is.
In that way, I suppose, he’s got a little of the high-and-low in him.
Bocaccio and Petrarch both wrote during the plague of 1348 (kinda like Dylan in 2020), which swept Laura away and Petrarch off his feet. Also extinguished Little Flame, and half of that city of flowers this trio of hopeless romantics was exiled from or wrote about, Florence.
Troubadour songs, a lotta people think, come from the Arab world. A tradition of love poetry initially sung by, and about, women and concubines, that traveled from Persia and Arabia. Across North Africa, up through Moorish Spain and Sicily, to southern France and Italy, and on to the minnesanger love-singers of Germany, England, and so forth. Thanks to the Crusades and Muslim Conquests. A mixture of East and West, North and South, Christendom and Islam. Poetry, love, and lute—last one’s an Arabic word for a minstrel’s preferred instrument, al-lude, which means “to play.”
I’m a-lluding right now.
Troubadour, depending on who you ask, might relate to a word for “to try” or “to pluck” (their instrument), or “to play” (don’t quote me on that)—but I’m sure some of ‘em did. Try, that is, being “players,” for love. Attemptin’ to pluck the topmost apple.
Like I said, the song of the low-life travelin troubadour was full of bawdy, erotic humor. Fabulous humor. They drank from the well of fabliaux, and their fabula, or folklore fables, were raunchy. Real raunchy. Fulla animal lust.
And aside from tryin’ to woo women, or men, troubadour minstrels improvised—another form of trial, or tryin. A lot of early troubadours were probably women themselves, since there was a prohibition on “puellarum cantica,” or “girls’ songs” in church, suggestin’ a connection between sinful songs and sinful female singers outside the walls of the cathedral.
Other people say troubadour means “to invent,” “to find or discover” or even “to disturb” or “discuss.” I like all those meanings. Whichever way, the original troubs were traveling minstrels, folk musicians singing in an early vernacular, secular tradition. And they sang songs of love, songs of sin, and songs of jest.
According to one book, it was “St. Francis who composed the first song in vernacular Italian in direct imitation of the sinful troubadours of the thirteenth century.” Imagine that—Saint of the Birds, imitatin’ lowdown minstrel “servants” and singin’ in a peasant’s dialect… to twist the words of
. Part of a long road from Islam to Christianity, Latin to vernacular, secularism to spirituality, and female slavery to royal adulation.Petrarch, who had more in common with the high-class chivalric tradition of his day, rediscovered the writings of Cicero and Virgil and Seneca, scoured the peninsula and Europe lookin’ for scraps of Greco-Roman art and literature to preserve and update. So did Boccaccio, to a lesser extent, later in life. Found him some pieces of Homer, tried to learn Greek so he could read em. You might say such people were talking to the past, and it was talkin’ back to them. Petrarch literally wrote letters to dead people—St. Augustine, Homer maybe, Virgil, can’t recount em all.
I do that myself from time to time, after a fashion.
Petrarch’s also the first mountaineer. First person to mount a summit for the pure pleasure of it. On the way up, he crossed paths with a shepherd. Only other guy who’d climbed that hill, but not for fun. For sheep.
When he got to the top, he read some St. Augustine, found God or somethin’ outside of himself, then come down again to his rebirth, which was reading and translating what would become the Renaissance.
And writing sonnets about Laura, whom he hardly knew, and penned for, long after she died. He saw her in church, one Easter weekend, and that’s about it. Same with Boccaccio and Fiametta, ‘cept she was attending service on Holy Saturday instead of Good Friday.
I think Francesco Petrarca said that.
Don’t know if Laura’s heard that story, the livin’ one, about Boccaccio and Little Flame, and Petrarch mountin’ his heavenly heap. “But we’ll climb that hill no matter how steep, when we come up to it.”
I said that.
As a joker on another panel said: “The older I get, the more I remember things that didn’t happen.” But I’m fairly certain I got most of that story about Nero an’ the commoner, Bakhtin and Rabelais, Bocaccio and Petrarch, Little Flame and Laura, troubadours and minstrels right.
Shoot me down to earth if I didn’t—just don’t tell me about it.
A joker on that other panel (“Close Encounters of the Bob Kind”) told his own story. About the time he was a cabbie in Manhattan, and spotted the words “Rolling Thunder Review” on the marquee upside Madison Square Garden one early afternoon. Parked his cab, ran inside, and saw Bob and the rest of his circus settin’ up for that night’s show.
Then he went in the bathroom, sat on the toilet. Readin’ his copy of The Godfather he was totin’ around, for a few hours until showtime. When he realized he was hidin’ in the women’s restroom. As soon as the ladies left, he waltzed right out, and into a free Rollin’ Thunder Review show. Stole Bob’s Thunder.
Now that’s funny. Grotesque humor.
One more example of Bob’s humor, that Hew mentioned and I recently came across from the MTV era, about Bob—the man once bugged about bein told about bein shot. It has to do with guns. And a humorless MTV reporter interviewing Dylan and Carlos Santana around the year 1993.
MTV: [Real serious] Do you think the availability of guns is a big problem, today?
Bob: I don’t think there’s enough guns.
MTV: [Stunned] What about guns among kids. Do you think it’s just, too prevalent?
Bob: Toy guns. [Sidelong glance and a smile]. There’s more toy guns than real guns, really.
MTV: [Perplexed] Where do you think… where do you think kids get these guns?
Bob: [Without missin’ a beat] They get em at a toy store.
To inch towards the question, which I already kinda answered—since this is, technically speakin’, a Q&A…
Today it’s not people like Bob Dylan have to worry bout being told about bein’ shot on stage, or John Lennon gettin’ gunned down in the street, to everybody’s dismay. It’s not even presidents, like tragic young JFK.
Or foolish old Trump, who I couldn’t help thinkin’ of the first time I heard “Murder Most Foul,” for some reason. “Is this where we been?” I wondered, “Or where we’re headed again?”
Both. Neither. Any way you wanna hear it.
If anyone’s ripe for a sacrificial inversion ritual, I figured, it’d be the vaude-villain. (One-a his biographers actually called him that—a vaudevillian. Orange-faced clown.) Always figured he’d wind-up hangin like Mussolini by his ankles from a piano wire, once his followers got hip to the con.
Or his opponents, in which case the con was lettin’ him get our goat, hate our other halves. No one got hip. Set a shaky gallows for the Veep and ourselves instead. We’re all Oswalds, as Dylan notoriously said of himself. Patsies. Rubes.
Anyhow, our sacred cows and sacrificial lambs are no longer presidents, or rock & roll stars.
They’re comedians… and writers.
Anyone who disagrees or has a sense of hybrid humor.
Salman Rushdie, mutilated in cyclopean fashion by a zealous fanatic rushin’ the stage.
Dave Chappelle, nearly stabbed during a performance with a blade shaped like a pistol. (Only in America could you sneak a knife into a theater if it looks like a gun, one joker quipped.)
Chris Rock, smacked onstage at the Oscars, during the Academy Awards, for makin’ a joke.
A hundred other scribes and comic citizens afraid to speak their mind and work new material in front of an audience.
Little inoffensive Jerry Seinfeld, scared to tie his shoes and go to school, for fear of bein’ scapegoated on campus.
“Look Out!” up there, Mr. Hew. (Mr. Comic Scholar onstage). An’ “Don’t Look Back.” Or maybe do. Might learn somethin’.
My question is:
Where’s the United States, the art of disagreement, and democracy?
Where’s more twin-folk like Miss Margo Price? The magic-mushroom-gobblin’, gun-totin’ Southern songbird who has her own brand of weed, and was also brave enough to speak-and-sing about abortion and addiction last night, along with Dylan’s doppelgänger Jeff Slate, onstage?
Where are the people who walk the line and also cross it from time to time, like Harry Hew and Dylan too? Talkin’ democracy, inviting us to disagree, and defendin’ Dylan’s offensive, sometimes controversial use of language, like Laura Tenschert? People unafraid to laugh and dance and sing. At the Switchyard. The Crossroads.
Where are we in “the history of laughter?” What’s the state of humor in this day and age? Is it healthy?
Is it “busy bein’ born,” or is it “busy dy-ing’” … in the words of somebody we all know and love.
To quote a groupie bandaid, standing outside a Black Sabbath, riffing on an improv version of “Stairway to Heaven” …
Does anybody remember laughter?