This is the scene: My girlfriend and I walk over to KGB Bar to attend a forum featuring Ben Hedin author, Bob Levinson scholar, Mary Lee Kortes of Mary Lee's Corvette, Robert Polito scholar, David Remnick, New Yorker editor and Alex Ross, New Yorker music critic. They are there, we've read, to discuss the new Bob Dylan album, "as well as his place in American culture and myth."If I were David Remnick, I would never participate in a forum like this ever again. By the end of the abbreviated discussion, it was pretty clear that the night had been a failure and the "experts" for whatever reason, were unprepared or unable to discuss Dylan or the album in any meaningful way.
"People want to find a 'meaning' in everything and everyone. That's the disease of our age, an age that is anything but practical but believes itself to be more practical than any other age."
Pablo Picasso
In the tomato sauce colored bar, we were packed like sardines. After all, this night got alot of press and the panelists were certainly, on paper, qualified to be there. It's not often the Editor in Chief of The New Yorker makes a free roundtable appearance in a forum not directly related to his writing or magazine efforts. The panel was assembled by Bob Dylan anthology editor Ben Hedin. We're in good shape, no? No. By the end of the night, all we had, dear readers, was a mouthful of their titles to swallow, as the panelists, with small exceptions, gave us nothing else worth appreciating, yet plenty of hot air.
Apparently Hedin, who put this night together, did not bother to create an agenda or give any of the panel any sort of prompts or ideas on which they might have prepared themselves for discussions. After showing a movie (no introduction, no explanation of its point), they sat down, introduced themselves, and starting talking in obnoxious, overly reverential and superficial soundbites, exactly the sort of bullshit that makes talking about Dylan in any sort of worthwhile manner so difficult and usually worthless.
If assembling a half-dozen Dylan experts to analyze him was the sole point of the evening, the panel needed to find an intelligent, unpretentious way to explain and parse the effect that he's had on music and society. It's profound. It's worth talking about. Yet it's not something easily discussed, because it's wrapped up in a cult of personality problem. Talking about Dylan almost invariably sounds like "talking about Jesus." Discussions are full of circular logic, ad hominem arguments, and tautologies. Take, for instance, the bizarre ramblings of guys like AJ Weberman, who at various points cursed at Remnick, told the panel they knew nothing about Dylan, hypothesized every word in Dylan's lyrics really stands for another, secret word, and went on to illustrate his hypothesis by telling the assembled that Bob Dylan was out to get him for once throwing a birthday party on Dylan's front lawn, forcing Dylan to move. Whatever drugs Mr. Weberman has been on, it's obvious he's done far too many of them for far too long. And yet this voice carried above all others on the panel.
One of the writing professors turned into the A/V guy and almost got into a fight with the bartender (who seemed to be content in opening bottles and chuckling at our collective obnoxiousness) while attempting to cue up a few tracks for the crowd to listen to. Mitch Blank, the music archivist, brought along an old Bing Crosby track to compare to Dylan's new CD, but the explanation and logistics of comparing the two tracks were completely ignored, so the crowd instead sat in silence as the writing professor fumbled with the sound system. Then we listened to the wrong track and the bartender muttered to himself about 'fucking jerks who are trying to sound important.'
If one person on the panel avoided fitting that description, it was David Remnick. His opening statement was a personal story of growing up in Jersey listening to Dylan on WNEW, which, when I was in high school, was still playing Dylan. (Oh how I miss the old 102.7.) Remnick tried to steer the discussion towards something meaningful: the personal impact of music on the listener. No one needs to hear, as other panelists decided to say, that Dylan is a force in music, a, truly great musician, a seminal artist, etc, ad nauseam. It's obvious we would not all be packed into a bar, collectively sucking in our stomachs, to talk about him if that were not the case. Tell us, panelists, what Dylan means to you. Or talk about these three topics, which I've bracketed to indicate they aren't part of the review but rather my own thoughts.
Tell us why Dylan named an album full of old timey arrangements "Modern Times." It seemed lost on everyone that maybe Modern Times referred not to our times, but the times of literary modernity, of Woolf and Eliot (and thankfully Remnick mentioned Eliot at one point, but no one parried with him to expound on why.) No one seemed to think it ironic and maybe a joke that "Modern Times" is a CD full of the antithesis of the bleak, surrealistic movements of art and literature and music from the period that Dylan is sampling here (the 20s-40s, some say 50s). It's CD of backroom populist numbers, no jazz or soaring orchestral arrangements. What's modern about these old sounds?
From there, what about the musical omnivore Dylan has become? He rode in on folk, turned electric, went through the whole loop of guitar and now organ driven music, and is now mining the past, relentlessly looking to discover what he might've missed the first time around. It's amazing. Did anyone think, when listening to Blonde on Blonde in the 60s, that Dylan might ever put out anything that sounds like this?
How about the Jonathan Lethem article in Rolling Stone, the one where Dylan says the last twenty years of music are shit? How about how Springsteen and Pete Seeger might factor into that equation? How about Louis Menad's writeup on a new compedium of Dylan interviews in The New Yorker? How about something, damnit, other than self-importance and reputation standing in the place of thoughtful discussion?
The panel conversation ended 45 minutes early, (thankfully) because everyone on stage had run out of things to say. A bizarre final comment by Mary Lee Kortes had something to do with rape or women in rock or something, I can't even recall anymore because at that point the wasted opportunity of the evening had really draped over the entire room. No one was into it. As Hedin abandoned ship, everyone mingled, except Remnick, who understandably tried to get the hell out there as fast as he could. I should note I was expecting to see a Town Car idling outside, but didn't. Does he take the subway?
The problem, in the end, was that this was treated as a lark by Hedin and most of the panelists. It's very easy, I admit, to sit at my laptop and criticize a free program from a remove. But just because it was free doesn't mean one shouldn't get some satisfaction from it. Just because it's free doesn't mean it's not worth doing a good job for. I write for free every day, and I try my best to make it substantive. The underlying problem was that Hedin and his panel really had no reason to do a good job. Quite frankly, I'd rather have seen 6 record store clerks up there.
Addenda: Beers were $5 and there were no bar snacks. Someone's knee was in my back for most the night, and crazy AJ Weberman was directly behind whoever owns that knee. The projector screen had a crinkle in it, so the anonymous Dylan movie we watched looked even artsier thanks to the rip and shadows. A couple of the panelists looked like mobsters. Hedin looked like he was trying really hard, but he was much younger than every other panelist and as such seemed like the wrong person to be in charge.
