"Take Me Back to Tulsa" : I've too much to carry
Impressions of the Tulsa Switchyard and World of Bob Dylan
“Take Me Back to Tulsa” is a song. By Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. Recorded in Ft. Worth, Tx in 1941, inside the Blackstone Hotel. An art deco affair with character. A lot more character than the Tulsa Switchyard’s Hyatt Regency.
But it was conceived in Tulsa, and refined inside Cain’s Ballroom.
Take me back to Tulsa, I’m too young to marry,
Take me back to Tulsa, I’m too young to marry.
So goes the Texas Playboys’ chorus.
Laura Tenschert, a podcaster I met briefly in Tulsa, stole Bob Wills’ “Take Me Back to Tulsa” for the name of her podcast impressions of the World of Bob Dylan and Tulsa.
I stole it from her.
I switched up Bob’s lyrics a little—riff and commentary. “Carry” instead of “marry,” to reflect a personal approach.
Reportage, from the “New Journalism,” which is now quite old.
Firsthand reporting, using the techniques of fiction to tell a true story involving the author. Re-port-age means to carry something back. To port: like a porter at the station, or a bellhop humpin some dame’s luggage through the elevator. And brothers & sisters, I carry a lotta baggage these days. Many memories from Tulsa.
Overwhelming amount of information, in notes and pictures, which I’m trying to use to connect the pieces. So the best place to begin is with Marshal McLuhan.
In a World of Dylan panel about the JFK ballad Bob released during the pandemic summer of 2020, “Murder Most Foul,”
connected Dylan with McLuhan, presenting McLuhan’s “Understanding Media and Another Side of Bob Dylan.”McLuhan was a media theorist ahead of his time. He had his moment in the sun, around the time New Journalism was being born. After his death in 1980, his theories were attacked or dismissed by many as vague and reductionist, the crackpot musings of one who was more poet than technological expert. Now, he’s proving prescient from beyond the grave.
Among other things, McLuhan coined the terms information “surfing” (before the internet), “global village,” predicted “feedback” loops, and a return to violence and tribalism as a “quest for identity,” in the face of information overload—remember 2020, America?
He had some ideas about how we cope with this much modern information, and they sound kinda ancient:
You cannot cope with vast amounts of information in the old fragmentary classification of patterns, you tend to go looking for mythic and structural forms in order to manage such complex data moving at very high speeds.
Electric engineers often speak of pattern recognition as a normal need of people processing data electrically and by computers and so on. It’s a need which the poets foresaw a century ago in their drive back for mythic forms of organizing experience…
—Marshal McLuhan (television interview, 1965)
In a 1968 interview, McLuhan told Norman Mailer that society needs “the artist” because they “alone in the encounter with the present can give the pattern recognition.”
“Pattern recognition” and organizing experience into “mythic and structural forms” is a primitive reaction to future-shock and information overload, and what the speaker on that Dylan panel implied Bob was up to in “Murder Most Foul.”
He called that 17-minute epic a “throwback,” in its length, to a time before recorded music. To the songs of Homer and the troubadours. Then he showed what looked like a Renaissance painting inspired by Boccaccio’s The Decameron.
I’m starting to see a pattern here. Just remembered that going through my notes.
For those of you who missed it or were bored to tears instead of laughter, last week I wrote about Boccaccio’s Decameron, the troubadours, and grotesque Humor, here.
Here’s what’s important, for the purposes of pattern recognition.
Grotesque humor is how a Russian critic named Mikhail Bakhtin described the work of the “French Shakespeare,” Rabelais. Bakhtin was fed up with Stalin, and suggested the Soviet Union could use a sense of humor like Rabelais’. He was interested in Renaissance morality and censorship, discovering the balance between forms of expression that were acceptable, and language that was impermissible. Found something useful in Rabelais’ amusing erudition, vulgarity, and extravagant wordplay.
Rabelais wrote some real X-rated shit, and I use that expletive with intention. Tales like Gargantua and Pantagruel, about a pair of thirsty-pissin father-son giants, were full of defecation and orifices, the ins-and-outs of the human body. They were unmentionably obscene, as far as the church and state were concerned, censored and stigmatized, in the years off social repression leading up the French Wars of Religion in the 1500s.
Bakhtin recognized some patterns of his own, between Rabelais’ France and the Soviet national regime. But he considered Rabelais’ grotesque humor an expression of human connectivity, laughing in the face of what’s real but rarely spoken: mortality. Bodily functions. Toilet humor and sex. The earthly cycle of life, death and rebirth.
Food goes in, feces come out. Manure plops beneath the plough, crops sprout-up the ground. Other things go in, and nine months later, come out. And when it comes to human mortality, we’re all democratic equals, in the end. From the lowliest slave to the most down-lookin’ despot atop his golden throne.
In one of Rabelais’ tall tales, his giants visit the underworld, which Bakhtin wasn’t alone in considering a metaphorical return to the womb, not to mention our ancestral troglodyte past. Land of the dead, source of life. Where we begin and end, the cave and grave. “It were all one”—to turn a Russian into Ralph Emerson—our single "Fate".
Tulsa’s where my mother’s born. So in a way, I was returning to the womb. Last time I’s there, was for my great-grandmother’s funeral.
One of my earliest memories. I shit you not. Some forty winters past.
Everything sounds poetic when you get to associating memories, recognizing patterns. I remember gettin’ a tiny little bow-n-arrow as a gift, and waitin’ a lifetime in the backseat of an Oldsmobile to cross the train tracks.
As Bob told
at Rolling Stone, according to Danny Fingeroth’s “Not-So-Unified Theory of Dylan and the JFK Assassination:”We can change the past. We can only change history.
But I’m not changin’ the past about my mother’s birthplace, nor my ancestor’s buryin’ ground. Only uncertainty’s the manufacture of that automobile—but it was the kin’s car of choice back then. The rest is family history, embellished only by an Oldsmobile.
If you’re wonderin’ why I’ve been talkin’ like an Okie lately, it’s cause I caught the virus. The Woody-Bobbie bug, thanks to Harry Hewitt. “American Hew-mer,” that piece shoulda been called. I’m talking funny cause I’m imitatin’. Bein’ a copycat. My pet theme, mimesis. Be over it in a jiff, once I exorcise the Oklahoma flu.
I’m just an author. “I am another,” in the words of Arthur Rimbaud: Je est un autre.
In the words of Harold Bloom, “the desire to write greatly is the desire to write elsewhere,” and in this case “elsewhere’s” where my mom come from.
Jumping my claim to the “Desire” here, not “great writing.” In the Sooner State.
The accent’s also indicative of some other predilections lately: rhyme and rhythm, and the border between high-and-low: literary and vernacular, proper and vulgar, sacred and profane. What’s commendable or permissible in language and what’s not.
Not to knock the high and mighty off their pedestals, but those words of Bloom and Rimbaud are lifted from one of the more snorer performers I listened to in Tulsa, in my opinion. (Don’t worry, I’ll elevate him soon enough.) One of the keynote speakers, along with Art Spiegelman,
, and Margo Price.Cass Sunstein, whose presentation was ironically-named: “Museums are Vulgar: Bob Dylan and Dishabituation.”
Mr. Museum’s are Vulgar’s a member of the Biden administration. “One of our leading intellectuals,” a Harvard Professor and expert on “law, economics, and psychology,” according to the Switchyard program. He’s also a big Bob Dylan fan, who happens to be a senior official at the Department of Homeland Security, where’s he’s mostly focused on immigration.
But, as I and others have written elsewhere, the DHS has been all sorts of tangled-up in monitoring and meddling with free expression since the pandemic and Donald Trump T-boned American democracy.
In 2008, Sunstein co-authored a paper titled “Conspiracy Theories,” proposing that:
Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action.
As a psychological expert, Mr. Sunstein calls that “cognitive infiltration.”
Now, to be fair, this was in response to 9/11, and later ISIS. But that’s where all this new Censorship Industrial Complex persecuting some of our brightest liberal journalists got started. And “conspiracy theories” means something different in 2023 than it did in 2008, now that some of them have turned out to be credible, like the probable origins of the pandemic.
Sunstein proposed a five-pronged strategy for countering conspiracy theories in 2008:
(1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing.
(2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories.
(3) Government might itself engage in counterspeech marshaling arguments to discredit conspiracy theories.
(4) Government might formally hire credible private parties to engage in counterspeech.
(5) Government might engage in informal communication with such parties, encouraging them to help.
Sunstein and his co-author also considered the practice of recruiting “nongovernmental agents”—which recalls the FBI’s use of a former mercenary to infiltrate BLM—suggesting:
[The] government can supply these independent experts with information and perhaps prod them into action from behind the scenes.
Though they’re aware that “too close a connection will be self-defeating if it is exposed"…. as propaganda or undercover informance.
Recruiting non-government agents…
might ensure that credible independent experts offer the rebuttal, rather than government officials themselves. There is a tradeoff between credibility and control, however. The price of credibility is that government cannot be seen to control the independent experts.
This is all chilling, in light of recent revelations, which you can read about elsewhere.
I’m not putting Mr. Sunstein down for his present occupation, mind you—I have no idea what his work at the DHS entails, other than immigration. But the theories in his “Conspiracy” paper have come to fruition in unintended ways, they’ve all been used against free expression, now. Not just terrorism.
In the words of the Beatles, “It’s All Too Much.” An overdose of irony.
A bigwig from Presidential admin, heading the Department of Homeland Security, who argued in favor of the sort of government subterfuge now being deployed to counter free expression using statistical algorithms, speaks of Jack Kerouac posters hanging on high-school walls while quoting On the Road and “Desolation Row.” Totems of countercultural anti-establishment expression.
In a presentation named after a satirical Playboy interview, where Dylan said:
Statistics measure quantity, not quality. The people in the statistics are people who are very bored. Art, if there is such a thing, is in the bathrooms; everybody knows that. To go to an art gallery thing where you get free milk and doughnuts and where there is a rock-'n'-roll band playing: That's just a status affair. I'm not putting it down, mind you; but I spend a lot of time in the bathroom. I think museums are vulgar. They're all against sex.
Where Bob’s sayin’ “museum’s are vulgar” because they’re not vulgar! To him, status is vulgar. Later, he says…
Folk music is a bunch of fat people. I have to think of all this as traditional music. Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes about from legends, Bibles, plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death. There's nobody that's going to kill traditional music. All these songs about roses growing out of people's brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels - they're not going to die. It's all those paranoid people who think that someone's going to come and take away their toilet paper - they're going to die.
Paranoia. Toilet paper runs. Plagues. Toilet humor. Sex. Death and Vegetables. Sounds like he’s talking about the past and predicting the future all at once.
I’ll suspend further judgement on Mr. Sunstein. He is a Bob Dylan fan after all, and I owe him some fine material and insight. Including an earlier misprision of “Death and Vegetables,” and his excellent quotes from Bloom and Rimbaud.
But there’s a lot of topsy-turvy malarkey goin-on in the space between him and his subject.
Miching mallecho. Skulking mischief.
I don’t know what to make of what some folks have made of his papers on conspiracy theories and “nongovernmental agents.” Sounds like someone talkin’ to Jack Ruby about Lee Harvey Oswald.
I owe it to Harry Hew for the history of this interview, from which Mr. Sunstein took part of his presentation’s name: “Museums are Vulgar: Bob Dylan and Dishabituation.”
In 1965, Dylan did a straight-faced interview for Playboy with Nat Hentoff. Though Bob behaved himself and played it safe, the magazine still altered his words and context, like some government types’ve been doing lately on the internet. He was not happy about that.
So he got back together with Hentoff, and the two concocted this satirical wonder, Playboy Interview: Bob Dylan, published in 1966. The questions are serious (“And that’s how you became a rock-‘n’-roll singer?”), the answers absurd (“No, that’s how I got tuberculosis”), but the whole exchange conveys more of the truth about Bob Dylan at the time than any serious interview since. “Henceforth,” Harry Hewitt said, Bob Dylan viewed his interviews as “capers.”
You might call some of the words in Bob’s interview, like those in his early surrealist album-liner notes, acts of “dishabituation.” A word that was on everybody’s lips everyday thereafter in Tulsa, which they learned from one of our “leading intellectuals” in “psychology,” borrowed from his latter field of expertise.
Dishabituation’s just a ten-dollar word for gettin’ unused to something. The pleasure of experiencing something from a different perspective. People habituate to pleasure—I know a ten-dollar psych word for that, too—“anhedonia”—til they can’t feel it anymore. When they’re exposed to something new, they experience variety and happiness.
By the end of the week, I was habituated to the word “dishabituation.”
I was itching to get out of Mr. Sunstein’s speech—not so much because the material was boring; looking back over my notes there’s some excellent content, though he coulda pepped-up the delivery—but because I wanted to experience something new and varietal myself, outside of a conference room. I was aching to get to Church Studio in time to be back for a podcaster panel later that afternoon.
Another Russian literary critic came up with a much better word for “dishabituation” about three decades before Bakhtin critiqued totalitarian censorship, and a century before I heard that word from Mr. Sunstein. “Defamiliarization”—the technique of describing common objects in an unfamiliar light, so that people see them anew.
That’s whole purpose of art, if you ask me, besides reaching for love or immortality in vain, and connecting with people. And as far as the creative process is concerned, for the artist, connecting the dots in your brain. Pattern recognition.
Which Takes Me Back to Tulsa.
There was time for a lot more talking, and a lot less music, during the official Tulsa Switchyard proceedings. Part of my that’s my fault, sheer exhaustion at the end of the day and wantin’ to set my words down each evening. There was a bus every night, to a free inclusive show (free for a $300 Switchyard pass) at Cain’s Ballroom. Which I was told I must experience.
“Go and stand in the center of the dance floor,” a caterer behind a fancy black tablecloth outside one of the evening panels told me, “and hear the sound.”
Jack White did, and it convinced him to buy a house in Tulsa. If I’m not mistaken, near the same lake where some lady once told Bob Dylan he was hanging out with a rock star, and Leon Russell almost burnt down a mansion.
Freddie King played here too, along with a hundred other stars whose faces are shinin’ on the walls.
That’s King’s drummer below, stenciled on the the bass drum of the artist I finally wound up seeing later that evening, after I heard Miss Margo Price and Jeff Slate at the Hyatt. I know cause I asked the bassist afterwards, mingling at the foot of the stage on the killing…. er, dance floor.
Sense of continuity and tradition here, one artist honoring another’s past. “The King is dead. Long live the King!” And his little white drummer boy.
Now, I had some questions later, about this bass drummer I mistook for Leon Russell or Warren Zevon. Didn’t think to question it at the time—but I don’t recall Freddie King ever playing in front of a pale hippie’s mustache. Mr. Bass Drum turned out to be Chuck Blackwell, a Tulsa institution. He backed Freddie King, Elvis, Taj Mahal, the Everly Brothers, Leon Russell, Joe Cocker, and others.
I initially mistook Mr. Blackwell for another pale hippie with a mustache playing behind Freddie King, Bazz Smith. Fortunately there’s an interesting story there.
In the late 60s, King needed a backing band for two British tours. He landed on this foursome named after a Howlin’ Wolf song, “Killing Floor.” Founding guitarist Mick Clarke recalls the night he met his namesake, on the stage where three years earlier electric Dylan was booed and derided as “Judas!” by an angry mob:
A few days into the tour we played at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester. Headliner was Howlin' Wolf! Wolf was a fantastic performer who crawled onto the stage on all fours like a great animal. When he sang he'd shake himself around and roll his eyes. He played some great harp, and his voice, of course, was phenomenal. Sitting in the circle watching him I was a little upset when he thanked all the other artists on the show and announced us as "the house band" to laughter from the audience. I'm sure he simply didn't know our name..ironic as we'd taken it from one of his songs.
There’s a story hidin’ hind every skin, even a bass drum’s. Or an honest mistake.
There’s a gallery of the descendants of Cain covering every inch of pine and cedar in the ballroom building. Colorful glossies of moderns from every genre crowding the BBQ window and dining room, and a ring of classic country music stardom in framed black-and-whites orbiting the ballroom.
But officially speaking, Cain’s Ballroom belongs Bob Wills, the man who sang, “Take Me Back To Tulsa.” Says so right there above the stage, on the proscenium arch.
Musically, “Take Me Back to Tulsa” took shape in the house of Cain, while Wills’ Western Swing outfit was based in Tulsa from 1934 to 1942. The early lyrics were described by Bob Wills as nonsense words he heard as a youth, before his bandmate wrote em down and they recorded the song in Fort Worth, Texas. In particular, the lines:
Little bee sucks the blossom, big bee gets the honey.
Darkie raise the cotton, white man gets the money.
Bob performed in blackface, in his earlier years. In his twenties, while he was attending barber school, and appearing in comedy routines working minstrel and medicine shows for money.
But he didn’t write those lines he remembered years later. They derive from the work songs of enslaved Americans, and appear in the 1880 novel My Southern Home, by William Wells Brown. An escaped slave, abolitionist, and intellectual rival to Frederick Douglass, with whom Wells Brown feuded.
In 1946, Bob Wills changed the couplet to “"Little man raise the cotton, beer joints get the money.” Modern versions are said to prefer "Poor boy picks the cotton, Rich man gets the money." But the sentiment remains the same.
Afro-American work songs, some of y’all know, are based on call and response, “field hollers.” One worker calls the call, and the others repeat the response. The caller, the individual, has license to improvise, tweak the words a little. The responders keep to a steady refrain.
The band I saw that night, with Freddie King’s drummer painted on their skin, was led by a man named John Fullbright. I don’t even know if the band’s got a name, “John Fullbright band” I guess, like Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. Least they were Playboys.
Anyway, Fullbright led a call and response with the audience. I went and stood in the center of the floor, like I’s told, right under the shiny ball hanging from the ceiling. Though the rest of their material was great, including a raucous Stone’s cover, Fullbright began to play a frankly lukewarm original, about the pandemic.
Then he played the first song off my Covid-19 playlist—I made one of those, a “plague-list.” Track number one, right above Exile on Main Street’s “Ventilator Blues”…
Song by Townes Van Zandt. We sang every word behind him, whole room together, even when the singer stopped to listen.
“Lungs.”
Well won't you lend your lungs to me?
Mine are collapsing
Plant my feet and bitterly breathe
Up the time that's passing.
Breath I'll take and breath I'll give
Pray the day’s not poison
Stand among the ones that live
In lonely indecision.
Fingers walk the darkness down
Mind is on the midnight
Gather up the gold you've found
You fool, it's only moonlight.
If you try to take it home
Your hands will turn to butter
You better leave this dream alone
Try to find another.
Salvation sat and crossed herself
Called the devil partner
Wisdom burned upon a shelf
Who'll kill the raging cancer
Seal the river at it's mouth
Take the water prisoner
Fill the sky with screams and cries
Bathe in fiery answers
Jesus was an only son
And love his only concept
Strangers cry in foreign tongues
And dirty up the doorstep
And I for one, and you for two
Ain't got the time for outside
Just keep your injured looks to you
We'll tell the world we tried
Guess me and John share part of a setlist.
There’s more stories to tell, patterns to recognize—tomorrow. Can’t report Tulsa all at once—too much to carry. Fingers are tired from walking down, my mind is on the midnight.
Gather up the gold you’ve found, you fool it’s only moonlight. If you try to take it home, your hands’ll turn to butter.
Better leave this dream alone for now, try to find another.
[This article originally stated that an image of Bazz Smith appeared on John Fulbright’s drum skin; the image actually belongs to Chuck Blackwell. The Third Ear regrets the error.]