Maybe Orpheus had his reasons for thinking twice, looking back at Eurydice.[1] Thus, like Dylan’s repeated ‘no, no, no,’ to answer the excess claims made by the woman ‘outside his window’, posterchild of scorn, Orpheus has no interest in the Maenads. Jankélévitch keeps the tension: ‘Orpheus died victim to the Thracian Bacchantes, the drunken Maenads, that is to say, of the fury of passion, which tore him into pieces’.[2]
Dylan’s lyrics emphasize his lack of interest in the desire of the stalking other where announcing a lack of interest, as Hegel reminds us, secures the desire of the other, think Naomi Wolf’s borrowing of de Beauvoir’s Kojevian observation, rather more pithily: ‘what girls learn is not the desire for the other but the desire to be desired’.[3]
In Dylan’s case, writing as Willis writes – she says Dylan does this repeatedly, taking three stanzas – to explicate ‘the spiritual possessiveness of woman’.[4] In the 1964 live version of the song Dylan sings with Joan Baez, at her invitation, Dylan good naturedly ad libs: and I’m not alone, the geniality lending ambiguity. Dylan’s lyric (three stanzas buys a lot of logic) is clearly reasonable: no hurry, she can remove herself at her own ‘chosen speed’.
His demurral is not unreasonable in the logic of ressentiment but her demands are. As our modern Orpheus, the singer singing, Dylan suggests someone else might want to fulfil her (excessive) demands. Her ‘spiritual possessiveness’ thus corresponds to her desire for someone willing to make sacrifices for her men do not make. Not for women. And we recall that the most extreme sacrifice, so Plato emphasizes in the Symposium, the sacrifice of a life, as Alcestis makes for Admetus (Sym. 179), Orpheus does not make for Eurydice.
This woman has not learned the tune:
But it ain’t me, babe
No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe
It ain’t me you’re lookin’ for, babe.[5]
Like the repeated ‘no’, the repeated diminutive: ‘babe’, is a provocation, including elements of contempt along with indulgence and confidence and the same rock music analyst, who found Dylan empathetic to the woman he is singing about, unpacking various performances, argues that Dylan ultimately directs his anger ‘at the audience’.[6] Baez, writing the haunting “Diamonds and Rust”, not about some mystery boy (like Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain”), expressly refers to Dylan, ‘the unwashed phenomenon’ (cited, with Baez’ permission, including discussion, in my The Hallelujah Effect, 70) – and in 2015 Dylan acknowledges Baez, saying it’d be ‘remiss’ not to.
To read both his critics and his fans, Dylan owed his fame to many others — including Baez. She calls him on stage at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964,[7] inviting him to sing this song with her, handing him the guitar — go check it out on YouTube — like a victor’s wreath. The guitar would be an issue a year later when Dylan brought out his own electric and so rock guitar to the ‘folk’ crowd’s displeasure.[8]
Dylan’s recollection underlines Baez for his part as a star, like others, who already had everything, unlike his disadvantaged self,[9] for Dylan, Baez had had all the luck: she, not he, was always in the right place at the right time, the reason for her success opportune: she was never (really) into protest songs as opposed to his own allegiance to the spirit of music and Woodie Guthrie — a claim long disputed[10] but to Dylan’s recent incarnation by way of Timothée Chalamet, and very much following Dylan’s own account,[11] in James Mangold’s 2024 A Complete Unknown.
Thus, Dylan
had used and bumped many people. Singers at Gerde’s [Folk City] told many stories of having Dylan walk in and take over the stage. Stories abounded in the Village about his mistreatment of Suz-Rotolo. Rumors about Dylan’s penchant for money were plentiful. Esquire may have labeled Dylan the voice of a generation, but many of his contemporaries disliked and envied him intensely.[12]
If Willis explains that folk composing had its ‘Angel’ in Baez who ‘would record their songs and sing them at racial demonstrations and peace rallies’ together with Dylan, ‘the Sachem’ (no need for Willis or anyone else to say why), she adds that ‘among the dozens of folk singers; who covered his songs there would be Baez ‘(at whom he had once sneered, ‘She’s still singing about Mary Hamilton. Where’s that at?’)”.[13]
Willis has no illusions. Musing as Dylan does that their destinies were ‘linked,’ matches the outcome of that destiny: more Orpheus. Baez’s song is a reflection, ‘hand on a telephone’, remembering Dylan’s own ressentiment — since vindicated with a Nobel Prize (take that Ellen Willis) – ‘my poetry was lousy you said / where are you calling from?’.[14]
[1] See Jan Bremmer, “Orpheus from Guru to Gay” in: Ph. Borgeaud, ed., Orphisme et Orphée (Geneva: Droz, 1991), 13-30. 1991 as well as Sarah Burges Watson, “Orpheus’ Erotic Mysteries: Plato, Pederasty, and the Zagreus Myth in Phanocles,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Vol. 57, No. 2 (December 2014): 47-71 and Merrill Cole The Other Orpheus. A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality (New York: Routledge, 2003).
[2] Vladimir Jankélévitch, music and the ineffable, Carolyn Abbate, trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003 [1961]), 5.
[3] Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth (New York: William Morrow, 1990), 157; cf. Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe, 2 Vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1949).
[4] Ellen Willis, “Dylan.” Cheetah. Online: https://musichistorian-blog.tumblr.com/post/23707148115/dylan-by-ellen-willis.1967.
[5] Bob Dylan, The Lyrics: 1961-2020 (New York: Simon & Schuster 2020), 131.
[6] Leland A. Poague, “Performance Variables: Some Versions of Dylan’s It Ain’t Me, Babe,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Jul. 1979): 79-97, here: 93.
[7] 1964 would not be the first time)
[8] Willis, “Dylan” and R. Serge Denisoff and David Fandray, “‘Hey, hey Woody Guthrie I wrote you a song’: The Political Side of Bob Dylan,” Popular Music and Society, Vol. 5, No. 5 (1977) : 31-42, here: 35, Hagberg 2021, 57f.
[9] Dylan, Chronicles. Volume One, 43.
[10] Cf. Denisoff/Fandray, “‘Hey, hey Woody Guthrie I wrote you a song.” Yet contrast that with Dylan’s like me/not like me reflections on Baez, “Queen of the Folksingers,” Dylan, Chronicles. Volume One, 254-256.
[11] See Dylan, Chronicles. Volume One, 227ff. (and throughout) for his account of his relation to Guthrie.
[12] Denisoff/Fandray, “‘Hey, hey Woody Guthrie I wrote you a song’,” 35.
[13] Willis, “Dylan.”
[14] See for citation and discussion, Babich, The Hallelujah Effect (London: Routledge, 2016), 70f. and again, Willis, “Dylan.”