Poison Headache: Risk, Mess, and Sustainability in the Work of Bob Dylan
Tim Tomlinson (NYU Shanghai)

Eighth session:
Street Sense: Chaos, Idealization and Sustainability
Wednesday, June 12
14:00 – 15:30
Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

     She said, “Boy, without a doubt/Have to quit your mess and straighten out./You could die down here, be just another accident statistic”
                        -- “Slow Train,” Bob Dylan

This paper will explore the relationship between mess-making and creativity in the work of perhaps the maestro—the messtro?—of the mess method, the musician Bob Dylan.  How important is risk, and mess-making to Dylan’s fifty year career?  What, if anything, might other creative artists borrow from Dylan’s technique to help sustain their own output?

The paper will focus on two types of messes, mess in the work, and mess in the life, starting with 1965’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” a song distilled, Dylan tells us, from twenty pages of “vomit.” Next, the messy divorce that led to the messy mid-1970s masterpiece, Blood on the Tracks, and the subsequent, near manic mess-making tours characterized by various types of rock star excess. Excess led to breakdown and, ultimately, Dylan’s conversion to fundamentalist Christianity, a risky conversion that generated harsh reviews and a loss of audience, with an accompanying loss of muse. Perhaps the hit-and-miss method of mess-making and clean-up had run its course?

The paper concludes with the strange case of “Blind Willie McTell,” a song that ranks among Dylan’s greatest, but which Dylan withheld from release for over eight years, during the rough, uneven patch of his career that in his memoir, Chronicles I, Dylan refers to as years of feeling lost.

The presentation will include lyrics to referenced songs. To illustrate points, I’ll include two or three moments devoted to listening to short excerpts.