The Poetry of Pop By Adam Bradley

FARRAH KARAPETIAN, SOUNDSCAPE 36, 2015, UNIQUE CHROMOGENIC PHOTOGRAM, METALLIC, 40″ X 45″. COURTESY THE ARTIST AND DANZIGER GALLERY.

Most of us don’t need a small group of learned Swedes to tell us that Bob Dylan is a poet. We likely forged our opinion on the matter long ago, somewhere between “Talkin’ New York” (1962) and “Thunder on the Mountain” (2006). But let’s not stop at Dylan. Why not call all Bobs poets? Bob Marley, Bob Seger, Bob Weir. Add in the Bobbys and Bobbies, too, for that matter: “Blue” Bland, Brown, Gentry. It’s an eclectic group. But if we relinquish the idea that the term “poet” is a kind of coronation, we’re free to understand it as a descriptive term for someone who works with words in concentrate, which all of these Bobs and Bobbies do.

Perhaps Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature can be a beginning—of closer attention to lyric craft; of richer conversations among songwriters, poets, and the rest of us. The poetry in pop songs can be masterful or careless, disposable or timeless. It can be in the service of well-crafted narratives (like Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe”) or more abstract tone pieces (like Bob Weir and the Grateful Dead’s “Jack Straw”). It can result in works that endure (like Bobby “Blue” Bland’s signature song “Turn On Your Love Light,” covered dozens of times including, famously, by Bob Weir’s Grateful Dead) or works that capture a moment and then recede into nostalgia (like Bobby Brown’s chart-topping 1989 hit “My Prerogative”).

In my new book, The Poetry of Pop, I make the case for taking pop songs seriously—without being too serious about it. Few of us first encounter song lyrics on the page as poetry or as sheet music. Instead, we experience lyrics as sound, usually recorded and sometimes live. Page-born poems and song lyrics are not the same things, but they are drawn together by affinities of sound and silence, patterns of language, and shared games with words.

What follows is a selection from the book’s appendix, which is made up of lists like “Fifteen Lyrics that Effectively Rhyme ‘Moon’ with ‘June,’ ” “Some Whispers, Some Screams,” and “Twenty Epistolary Recordings.” My favorite list is the one included here, in which I asked nine poets to suggest a song lyric that they believe rewards close attention. Their selections span nearly half a century of sound, crossing multiple genres and inviting the kind of interest that will make you pull up a second tab on your web browser and listen to the song for yourself.

How do poets listen to pop songs? Do they hear things the rest of us don’t? Do they count the rhythms of the lines? Do they separate the half from the full rhymes? Do they feel the song more fully because of their knowledge of the inner workings of syllables and sounds, or does that knowledge get in the way of listening? These nine poets answer affirmatively that poets do, in fact, notice things in song lyrics that might otherwise escape our attention. Their sensitivity and vision can guide us.



So read pop songs like poems. Sing poems like pop songs. Both acts may seem unnatural, perhaps even perverse at first. Some parts won’t fit. Some sounds will clash. But the practice brings new clarity and insight. Poetic tools of sound, meaning, and feeling are at work in even the most banal pop song, just as they are at work in even the most trite ode or sonnet. The dance of word and music makes songs act on our imagination and emotions just as the best poems do. Attentive readers, like the nine poets below, unlock mysteries of lyric expression through the poetics of form, as well as through ineffable qualities of voice and music. This is the poetry of pop.

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H. L. Hix picks Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe” (1967). It will surely be the most uncool choice in this playlist, and it was long “before my time” (I didn’t encounter it until many years after it had disappeared off the charts), but Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe” brilliantly achieves (in a song that is all lyrics—the guitar just keeps the rhythm) a poetic value I find powerful: subordination of event to situation. “Ode to Billie Joe” seems ostensibly about events: the narrator and Billie Joe throwing something off the bridge, Billie Joe jumping off the bridge, and so on. But although those events get named, they are mostly withheld: we don’t know what the pair were throwing off the bridge, we don’t know why Billie Joe killed himself. What is revealed with utter clarity is the narrator’s situation: she is spoken to and spoken about within the poem, but she herself is never allowed to speak; she is closely monitored (told to wipe her feet, interrogated for not eating, observed and reported on) but not recognized at all; she is kept in place by her society, but is afforded no place in her society; kinship relations are enforced on her from without, but the kinship she feels is denied her. In Gottlob Frege’s terms, “Ode to Billie Joe” obscures reference in order to disclose sense. In Aristotle’s terms, “Ode to Billie Joe” inverts the tragic focus on mythos for a lyric focus on ethos. The narrator makes no explicit criticism of her society, but her implicit critique is devastating. She does not declare her social alienation and erasure, but I feel it all the more strongly for its not being declared. Her protest takes the form of lamentation. I experience “Ode to Billie Joe” as a most robust fulfillment of Emily Dickinson’s advice to “tell all the truth but tell it slant.”

Kyle Dargan picks Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler)” (1971). Anyone who has taken a workshop with me has heard my idea about writing poetry being like building the lightest possible plane that will fly. Sometimes, that is. There is a place for excess, for everything in poetic intent, but, staying with this idea of efficiency and vicious concision, Marvin Gaye and James Nyx’s “Inner City Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler)” has impressed me for a long time by capturing so much depth and nuance with so little. The sense of being caught in an inescapable, economic spiral builds over the verses, but let’s start with the second: “Inflation, no chance/ to increase finance. / Bills pile up sky high./ Send that boy off to die.” “Inflation, no chance” is an economics white paper in itself, but the juxtaposition of all four lines makes it possible to see a connection among poverty, loss of economic ground, and the pressures to enlist (and die) in the army. A sparse, quiet but wrenching verse that creates space for the “holler” to emerge as the chorus.

Evie Shockley picks Joni Mitchell’s “Hejira” (1976). Set with an impossible task (pick one??), I default to the songwriter who, for me, set the standard of song lyrics as poetry. “Hejira” is not my top Joni Mitchell song for listening, but these are definitely the lyrics I’d most want to read. From the gorgeous one-word title (an Arabic word signifying a flight from danger or journey to a more congenial place), we move into the “melancholy” meditation of a woman who travels to escape from “the petty wars / that shell shock love away.” She’s recovering from a relationship that seems to have been overpowering— relieved to be released back to herself, but at the same time in withdrawal. The quatrain that moves me perhaps most of all carries forward both her theme of duality and her breathtaking talent for making abstractions tangible through metaphorical images: “In the church they light the candles / And the wax rolls down like tears / There’s the hope and the hopelessness / I’ve witnessed thirty years.” There. One image does double duty, daring us to pretend that the fire burning within us is not also burning us, or that we can avoid for long being “suck[ ed] … back” into connection with others by our need to and for love.

Raza Ali Hasan picks Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” (1980). W. H. Auden reputedly mined the Beatles songbook in his search for new influences for his own work. I am no Auden, but in the poem “British Steel,” which is the last poem in my newest poetry collection, Sorrows of the Warrior Class (2015), I riff on lines not from the Beatles but from an American band: “Once in a Lifetime, / you may find yourself, / pondering how the English,” is the first stanza. The line “you may find yourself ” appears another three times, and “you may tell yourself,” twice. The final stanza goes like this: “You may say to yourself / Same as it ever was. / Same as it ever was.” Yes, you guessed it, I am talking of Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.” The British, as the title of the poem implies, steal in three different ways. In the poem, the British are stealing steel-making technology from India. The poet (that’s me) is stealing lines from the pop song in order to call the British imperialists. But the truth is, I wasn’t stealing in order to call the British first-class thieves but to do something about the long-standing hold this song and its lines have on me. Call it jealousy, not sought-out influence. I stole those Talking Heads lines and used them verbatim in my poetic world—at last making them mine.

Douglas Kearney picks De La Soul’s “I Am I Be” (1993). It all comes together on this one—the opening chorus collage of “I am ——; I be ——” statements is the sonic predecessor of A Tribe Called Quest’s Midnight Marauders cover, but lyrically it sets up a cascading and layered anaphora (which Pos reprises at the head of his first verse and that envoi of a third; and which Dove revises in a kind of phrasal chiasmus as his last line of the second verse). Within the verses themselves, Pos remixes clichés from common English (including “I am an early bird but the feathers are black / so the apples that I catch are usually all worms”); alludes to past examples of people misunderstanding who he is and what he does (“ … to bring the peace, / not in the flower / but the As-salaam Alaik’ and the third I am.”); and, in one of the song’s loveliest moments, says simply: “I cherish the twilight”—a thorn rhyme line (though it’s assonant with “maximized” and “right size”) that, when voiced, sounds almost like a sigh relieving the density of his flow. Dove, ever underrated, abstracts his imagery to the point that I feel I can turn his words like three-dimensional objects shaped in letterforms and what he’s describing. My favorite bars—and I quote this every chance I get to show how dope he is: “I bring the element H-to-the-2 / so you owe me what’s coming / when I’m raining on your new parade”—of course, H2O, thus water. But also, H(ip) H(op) and rap’s association with water (flow, spit); “raining on your new parade” suggests battling but also De La’s place as sly critics of peers from within hip-hop culture. Please. Listen to it right now.

Noah Eli Gordon picks Jawbreaker’s “Lurker II: Dark Son of Night” (1995). Although the band’s single major-label release ultimately failed to garner them the success of their peers like Green Day and other post-punk acts of the early nineties, there’s a near cultlike following for Jawbreaker, due in no small part to Blake Schwarzenbach’s emotionally tinged, sonically attuned lyrics. Rather than the story behind domestic failure and dejection, Schwarzenbach condenses into a series of objective correlatives the emotional tenor of events—the core feelings associated with a postmodern Prufrock: “Two room condo, treeless cul-de-sac. / A nun’s dark habit. All arm, no follow through.” Here, that “All arm” also carries with it the homophonic echo of alarm, doubling the sense of a fraught relationship that is already over just a few lines later: “Hook up the Sega. Have sex alone.” True to his dexterous balance between the sonic and referential potential of words, Schwarzenbach, later in the song, offers another gem of an image in this line about a tree’s fallen fruit: “Dead in sunshine, decomposing there.” That “Dead in” is also a dead end, as well as something deadened. There is between the page and the performance, between the words as written out and the echo each carries when heard aloud, a transformative polysemy, one that, thankfully, keeps Jawbreaker very much alive.

Major Jackson picks the Fugees’ “How Many Mics” (1996). “Problem with no man / Before black, I’m first human / Appetite to write like Frederick Douglass with a slave hand.” The above excerpt from “How Many Mics,” one of the tightest cuts on the Fugees’ classic and impactful album The Score, has graced and blessed my writing space for nearly twenty years now and served as an example of how allusion and metaphor can harness and expose deeper levels of meaning. Of the talented and distinctive trio members whose cypher-like, improvisatory rhyming skills turned them into household names overnight, Wyclef, Lauryn Hill, and Pras, it is Wyclef who slips this bit of subtle black history onto the album and in one of their most successful tracks. Emcees and poets either live or die by metaphor or allusion. In the best-case scenario, metaphors and allusions create bridges, reaffirming shared knowledge, and tap into a reader or listener’s awareness and consciousness, or at worst, they can leave them hanging by their sheer unfamiliarity and novelty. No matter the genre of music, rock, hip-hop, or R& B, I have always gravitated towards those lyricist who reference history, literature, or current events: as a teenager, I thrilled in recognizing that U2’ s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” was a direct address of the Troubles in Ireland or that the Cure’s “Killing an Arab” was a lyric in the persona of Meursault, Albert Camus’s protagonist in the novel The Stranger. I guess listening to one of my mother’s favorite Marvin Gaye albums, What’s Going On, encouraged me to demand more from song lyrics. It could be said Wyclef built his reputation as a rapper by name-dropping, showcasing his wide range of allusions, and in “How Many Mics,” they are plentiful: by the time he has finished his portion of the song, he plays golf with David Sonenberg; runs through Crown Heights screaming mazel tov; makes deals with Tommy Mottola; wishes to survive like Seal in the song “Crazy”; notices drug fiends dance like John Travolta in the movie Grease; and narrates once getting hit by Guinness stout. But it is his reference to the famous slave narrative The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass that resonates most with me. I have always felt that hip-hop, like poetry, is a question of liberty attained through literacy, one of creation and maintenance of style that sings an individual’s life. To express oneself in words on a page or in a song is one of the highest acts of freedom. As an enslaved descendant of Africans in America, Douglass yearned for freedom, and like many black folk, found learning how to read and write the ticket toward a greater self-awareness and independence. Douglass not only writes himself into freedom but writes himself into existence, inscribes his humanity. That ongoing hunger among black folk, and indeed, in all of us, is reflected in Wyclef ’s words of immense power, yet said so succinctly and wittily, I might add.

Adrian Matejka picks Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” (1997). “When I am king, you will be first against the wall / With your opinion, which is of no consequence at all.” Sometimes, Thom Yorke’s lyrics are deeply encoded and need musical gestures to open up for the listener. But other times, as with “Paranoid Android” and many of the songs on OK Computer, the lyrics are so tight and generous to their disconnected, pre-Millennium listeners that no musical exposition is necessary. Yorke’s false bravado in these lyrics captured my frustrations and insecurities (back then and now) with being housed in our amorphous, digital neighborhoods.

Julie Carr picks Cake’s “Short Skirt/Long Jacket” (2001). John McCrea sings through my car and through my son who is singing along. He’s seventeen. This song, he says, is a lesson in negative space. There’s that break, that longgggg silence just after the first “longgggg jacket”—it’s the Citibank lit up late, the empty moment between swiping your card to unlock the door and the door unlocking. There’s the little exhale after the next “long jacket,” like the breath between high school and college when you’re riding shotgun with your mom but almost done. There’s that gap between McCrea’s “I want a girl” and the backup’s “hey, ho,” “na-na na na na,” which is the space between being the boy dreaming a girl and being the woman who once was one. Then there’s the empty space at the back of the throat, what we named “flat affect” just when he was born, those Citibank years, those temp years, those liquid years strolling on even flatter Brooklyn streets. And then finally there’s that nothing, that rest or that dead space, when the song just cuts right off and the boy is gone.

Adam Bradley is professor of English and founding director of the Laboratory for Race & Popular Culture at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop and The Poetry of Pop.

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Seven Questions for Bob Dylan

How do you like your eggs, Bob Dylan, How do you like your eggs? You're walking on broken legs, Bob Dylan, But you still make us beg, Bob Dylan. So how do you like your eggs?*

You can't look at him. If you work at one of the arenas where he plays, you're not allowed to look at him when he makes his way from the bus to the stage. If you play at one of the arenas where he plays—if, like Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, you're a fellow musician, sharing a bill—then you have a decision to make, occasioned by the privilege and problem of proximity. You'll be standing around and suddenly there he'll be, and you have to figure out if you're allowed—if you allow yourself—to behold Bob Dylan.

* We asked Mr. Dylan's representatives what he eats for breakfast. Their response: "Next question."

Tweedy didn't think he was when he was traveling last summer on Dylan's Americanarama tour. "First or second show of the tour, I was standing out in the middle of the dressing-room area—you know, a bunch of trailers in a U-shape. The show was about to start for Dylan, and he came through with his dressed-to-the-nines gang. He saw me, and I figured I was just supposed to avert my eyes, because I didn't think I was supposed to be where I was, standing in the way."

Tweedy was about to stare at the ground when he heard Dylan say, "Hey, Jeff, how's it going, man?"

That's all he said and all he had to say. "It was the biggest thrill of my life," Tweedy says. "I was like, I hope people saw that—that it was real."

How do you sleep at night, Bob Dylan, How do you sleep at night? The morning sun's so bright, Bob Dylan, Your band is still so tight, Bob Dylan. So how do you sleep at night?**

Bob Dylan is either the most public private man in the world or the most private public one. He has a reputation for being silent and reclusive; he is neither. He has been giving interviews—albeit contentious ones—for as long as he's been making music, and he's been making music for more than fifty years. He's seventy-two years old. He's written one volume of an autobiography and is under contract to write two more. He's hosted his own radio show. He exhibits his paintings and his sculpture in galleries and museums around the world. Ten years ago, he cowrote and starred in a movie, Masked and Anonymous, that was about his own masked anonymity. He is reportedly working on another studio recording, his thirty-sixth, and year after year and night after night he still gets on stage to sing songs unequaled in both their candor and circumspection. Though famous as a man who won't talk, Dylan is and always has been a man who won't shut up.

** We asked Mr. Dylan's management about Dylan's sleeping habits. The response: "Next question."

And yet he has not given in; he has preserved his mystery as assiduously as he has curated his myth, and even after a lifetime of compulsive disclosure he stands apart not just from his audience but also from those who know and love him. He is his own inner circle, a spotlit Salinger who has remained singular and inviolate while at the same time remaining in plain sight.

It's quite a trick. Dylan's public career began at the dawn of the age of total disclosure and has continued into the dawn of the age of total surveillance; he has ended up protecting his privacy at a time when privacy itself is up for grabs. But his claim to privacy is compelling precisely because it's no less enigmatic and paradoxical than any other claim he's made over the years. Yes, it's important to him—"of the utmost importance, of paramount importance," says his friend Ronee Blakley, the Nashville star who sang with Dylan on his Rolling Thunder tour. And yes, the importance of his privacy is the one lesson he has deigned to teach, to the extent that his friends Robbie Robertson and T Bone Burnett have absorbed it into their own lives. "They both have learned from him," says Jonathan Taplin, who was the Band's road manager and is now a professor at the University of Southern California. "They've learned how to keep private, and they lead very private lives. That's the school of Bob Dylan—the smart guys who work with him learn from him. Robbie's very private. And T Bone is so private, he changes his e-mail address every three or four weeks."
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How does Dylan do it? How does he impress upon those around him the need to protect his privacy? He doesn't. They just do. That's what makes his privacy Dylanesque. It's not simply a matter of Dylan being private; it's a matter of Dylan's privacy being private—of his manager saying, when you call, "Oh, you're the guy writing about Bob Dylan's privacy. How can I not help you?"

Hey, do you eat meat, Bob Dylan, Will you eat some meat? You're on the Mercy Seat, Bob Dylan. You're selling "The Complete Bob Dylan," Pledged to your own defeat, Bob Dylan, So will you eat some meat?***

It's because of us, of course—because of us that he practices privacy as an art, because of us that he abjures politics, because of us that he retreats from us, because of us that he no longer talks to us from the stage. "What the hell is there to say?" he has asked, adding that no matter what he says, we would want him to say more. We would want him to lead us. We would want him to tell us the meanings of his songs. We would want him to play his songs the same way every night, the same way he played them on his records. We would want him to join our causes. We would want him to deliver prophecies. We would want him to tell us about his family, and if he didn't answer, we'd reserve the right to go through his garbage cans.

*** We asked if Dylan is a vegetarian. The response: "Next question."

"I've always been appalled by people who come up to celebrities while they're eating," says Lynn Goldsmith, a photographer who has taken pictures of Dylan, Springsteen, and just about every other god of the rock era. "But with Dylan, it's at an entirely different level. With everybody else, it's 'We love you, we love your work.' With Dylan, it's 'How does it feel to be God?' It's 'I named my firstborn after you.' In some ways, the life he lives is not the life he's chosen. In some ways, the life he leads has been forced upon him because of the way the public looks upon him to be."

That's the narrative, anyway—Dylan as eternal victim, Dylan as the measure of our sins. There is another narrative, however, and it's that Dylan is not just the first and greatest intentional rock 'n' roll poet. He's also the first great rock 'n' roll asshole. The poet expanded the notion of what it was possible for a song to express; the asshole shrunk the notion of what it was possible for the audience to express in response to a song. The poet expanded what it meant to be human; the asshole noted every human failing, keeping a ledger of debts never to be forgotten or forgiven. As surely as he rewrote the songbook, Dylan rewrote the relationship between performer and audience; his signature is what separates him from all his presumed peers in the rock business and all those who have followed his example. "I never was a performer who wanted to be one of them, part of the crowd," he said, and in that sentence surely lies one of his most enduring achievements: the transformation of the crowd into an all-consuming but utterly unknowing them.

"We played with McCartney at Bonnaroo, and the thing about McCartney is that he wants to be loved so much," Jeff Tweedy says. "He has so much energy, he gives and gives and gives, he plays three hours, and he plays every song you want to hear. Dylan has zero fucks to give about that. And it's truly inspiring. The joke on our tour was that his T-shirt should say PISSING PEOPLE OFF SINCE 1962. If you dropped people out of a vacuum from another planet and planted them in a field somewhere so that they could study us, and there's a guy half-decipherably singing jump-blues songs almost in the dark, and there's people watching him—well, it wouldn't make any sense… ."

It makes sense only in the terms that Dylan has established for himself: His life and his art have combined to create the oral and written parts of a continual test that most of us fail. The only way to pass is to go to the shows, for as Dylan told Rolling Stone a few years ago, "The only fans I know I have are the people who I'm looking at when I play night after night." He's notorious for creative disruption—for rendering the old chestnuts unrecognizable—but as he's gotten older, so have his fans, and the test has grown more rigorous still. He's not only "chosen not to deliver the set that his old fans would like to hear," as one of his longtime promoters, John Scher, says. "He's chosen to play in a stand-up situation, which is not a situation that his older fans enjoy." That is, when booking his tour, his agent prefers that the shows are to be general admission, with no seating. That is, he makes the geezers stand, as if to say, in Scher's words, "If you can't stand up, you shouldn't be there."

It is not that Dylan is necessarily more private than McCartney or Van Morrison or Neil Young or Bono—we know as little of their lives as we do of his. It is that Dylan has perfected the dynamic that makes his privacy simultaneously possible and intolerable: The poet needs the asshole. The asshole needs the audience. And when you go to a Dylan show, both the poet and the asshole have you right where they want you.

How do you get your mail Bob Dylan, How do you get your mail? You've put yourself in jail, Bob Dylan, Are you still chasing tail, Bob Dylan? That's been your third rail, Bob Dylan, So how do you get your mail?****

Here is a Dylan story, featuring neither poet nor asshole. Tweedy heard it from his bass player. His bass player heard it from a girl he knows. The girl lived it. She was walking down the street in Memphis, Tweedy thinks it was. "She looked into the basement windows of a hotel, and she saw Bob Dylan swimming in the pool with his bodyguard. She decided, 'Let's go see what happens if I say hi.' She walked into this hotel, and she walked over to the pool and said hi, and he took pictures with her. She said that she was a big fan and he said, 'How many times have you come to see me?' She said, 'Twenty-five.' And he said, 'Oh, man, how can you take it?' "

**** We asked if Dylan uses e-mail. His representatives would only say that he might. Or might not.
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There are a lot of stories like this—Dylan with the carapace of celebrity removed; Dylan like a girl, pretty and lonely, finally asked out by a suitor uncowed; Dylan the shy midwesterner; Dylan taking extra time to sign autographs, hesitating

only when someone asks him to sign vintage vinyl, because he knows he's being used; Dylan posing with the daughter of a father who's waited by the wings of the stage; Dylan dutifully and graciously going about the business of fame; Dylan gratified to be finally treated as another human being. There are enough of these stories to prompt the question: Is being treated as just another human being all that Dylan wants?

The answer is probably no, for Dylan is also known for staring straight ahead, stone-faced as a judge, when people approach him, until they go away.

And what makes Bob Dylan stories interesting is that the only person who can decide their outcome is Bob Dylan, so you never know how they're going to go. For instance, last summer Wilco and My Morning Jacket went on tour with him. Both were led to believe that they'd be playing with him, but only Jim James of My Morning Jacket expected to hang out with him and, like, jam. The result, though predictable, played out like a metaphor for the vagaries of salvation: Jim James, with his expectations, had his expectations dashed; Jeff Tweedy, with his resignation, came home with stories to tell, such as the time, waiting in the wings, when Tweedy told Dylan that Mavis Staples said hello. Tweedy had produced Staples; Dylan had been friends with her since the Greenwich Village days, so he responded with one of those utterances he specializes in, gnomic and innocent, with the same surprising spin as the lines of his songs:

"Man, tell Mavis she should have married me!"

The question of who Dylan will or won't speak to is one of the animating questions of his public life; and neither friendship nor eminence have anything to do with the answer. He is rumored not to have spoken to his pal Willie Nelson on a recent tour, and Ron Delsener, who's been promoting Dylan for decades, says that when he arranged a Dylan–Van Morrison tour through the UK in 1998, he eventually had to approach Dylan's road manager with a plea: "He's got to talk to Van." Hell, when Dylan accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama, he wore shades and barely stuck around for the postceremony reception.

There is not a person in the world who is not at his feet, and that his humanity exists as the last beating heart inside the last inner circle of celebrity is what makes his humanity perishable and perhaps beside the point. It's the question people have been asking for centuries: How human does the king want to be? More specifically, how human does the king permit himself to be? It's not hard to find out: All you have to do is ask him the same questions you'd ask any other human being, and you'll get your answers soon enough.

How do you do the deed, Bob Dylan, How do you do the deed? You're a walking centipede, Bob Dylan, Oblivious to need, Bob Dylan. You're as old as Harry Reid, Bob Dylan! So how do you do the deed?*****

What do we want from Bob Dylan that he hasn't given us already? The answer is axiomatic: We want that which he won't give. "The list of stupid questions you can ask Bob Dylan is endless," says John Scher, and, of course, the most stupid is the one question he has never answered: How does he live? The things we can find out about almost anyone in the world, including the president, are precisely the things we can't find out about Dylan. Does Dylan use e-mail? Does he have a smartphone? Does he eat meat? Does he sleep through the night? Is he kind? "Oh, my God, this is Bob Dylan you're talking about," says someone who knows him well. "How can you ask these questions?"

***** We declined to ask about Dylan's romantic life.

So this is what we know about how he lives. He has homes all over the world, one of which, a manor he owns with his brother in Scotland, is for rent. He lives primarily in Malibu, on a promontory leaning into the Pacific called Point Dume. He has a lot of land surrounded by a corrugated-metal fence, with a horse ring for relaxation and a guardhouse for vigilance. There are junked cars and large commercial shipping containers parked out front as a sort of intentional eyesore, an impediment to prying eyes. He has six children and ten grandchildren, and is said to be very proud of them. He's in shape; he likes to swim and box when he's on the road, and so do members of his band. He's a dog guy. He wears hooded sweatshirts and either combat boots or running shoes. He wore a wig for Masked and Anonymous and kept wearing it when filming was over, at least for a time. Though there are rarely any Dylan sightings, he is not unreachable. When Ron Maxwell, the director of Gods and Generals, got it into his head to ask Dylan for an original song, his music coordinator laughed at him. But when he asked, he got a reply from Dylan's management right away, and both Maxwell and his wife wound up listening to "Cross the Green Mountain" with Dylan and his band at a studio in the Valley. "He was there in his New Balance shoes," Maxwell says. "He was a bit shy, I want to say. We said hi and shook hands. When they played the song back, he was looking away. I heard the whole thing, taking notes. At first I was thinking, 'That's a lot of verses.' Then it was finished, and I stood up and he looked at me. I said, 'I really like it.' He said, 'You do? You like it?' I said, 'I more than like it—are you kidding?' And he relaxed and all the band members relaxed. The tension left the room. They let me know they were all fans of [Maxwell's first Civil War movie] Gettysburg and watched it over and over again on the bus."

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He spends a lot of time on the bus for a string of engagements dubbed the "Never-Ending Tour" by the press but called a variety of names by Dylan, one of which is the "Why Do You Look at Me So Strangely Tour?" He rides in a star coach; his band rides in a tour bus; they stay on the ground floors of chain motels, where Dylan can smoke; they use the pool; Dylan doesn't eat where members of his or other bands eat; he doesn't use the dressing rooms; he goes surprisingly light on security, but his security detail is bracingly efficient getting him to and from the bus, as his bus driver is bracingly efficient getting him close to the doors.

His life is often portrayed as an allergic reaction to fame; but he is a creature of fame no less than he's a creature of music and art. Ask people who know him for a description of Bob Dylan outside the prerogatives of fame and the obligations of art, and they have to stop and think; there's just not that much left. The best answer came from Arthur Rosato, his production manager in the mid-seventies and early eighties: "He lives his own life, and that's it. You deal with what's in front of you with him and that's it. He's his own person. He has opinions, but he's not opinionated. He's open, but he doesn't broadcast a lot of stuff. I've had issues, and when you confront him, he listens. He's a different kind of person, because you could say whatever you want to him. He's pretty much one-on-one. In group things, he'll slip into the background. No matter who the people are, he's the same, and he's very attentive to them. That's how he gets along."

That's also how he keeps his privacy without having to talk about it. He knows that the people around him are loyal, and they know that if they weren't loyal, they wouldn't be around him. They not only know not to talk; they also wouldn't think of talking. They listen, then issue their gentlemanly demurrals; when a potential source called Dylan headquarters to ask if he should comment for this story, he was not told no, but rather asked, "What do you think you should do?" It's an honor system, left to the participants to uphold, even when the participants are far from the inner circle. "I didn't get any sense of how he lives," Tweedy says, "and the sense I did get … Well, anything that I did learn, I almost feel like I'm betraying him to share."

It's also a system of omertà, enforced by the threat of expulsion. Those who say that Bob Dylan has never ordered them not to speak also say that if they did speak, they would never be able to work for him again. A member of a band that once opened for Dylan recently published a piece recounting how a friend of Dylan's was banished from the tour for revealing that Dylan had caught a cold; in a recent interview, David Hidalgo of Los Lobos fretted that Dylan hadn't called him since Hidalgo had revealed that he had been in the studio with Dylan, working on a new album. Dylan doesn't say anything because he doesn't have to say anything; he communicates his expectations concerning his privacy in the same way that he communicated to Jim James and Jeff Tweedy how he wanted them to come onstage and play the cover of "The Weight," which he played in the final shows of the Americanarama tour. "We played that song in a different key every night," Tweedy says. "It was never in the same key. The tour manager would say, 'It's in A flat tonight.' Or we'd already be out onstage, and we'd talk to Tony Garnier, the bass player, and somehow ask him which key and he'd say, 'A flat.' And that's in front of a lot of people. But Dylan never told us. I think he likes putting himself and his band into a corner, to see if they can play their way out."

What kind of car do you drive, Bob Dylan, What kind of car do you drive? You're good at staying alive, Bob Dylan. But the bee dies in the hive, Bob Dylan. So what kind of car do you drive?******

It sounds lonely being Bob Dylan, because Bob Dylan likes being around other Bob Dylans, and there are not many other Bob Dylans around. He had to become Bob Dylan, after all, and the ceaseless force of that becoming has been what has given life to his music for as long as he's been making it. Who else is like Bob Dylan? Any human being growing old finds himself in a depopulated world, but Dylan's world was depopulated to begin with—he has remarked that when he was growing up, he felt like he'd been born in the wrong place, to "the wrong parents." The people who know him say they like him, and that he laughs and cries like any other man. But they never say that he's like any other man. And so his community is a community of saints: He loved George Harrison; of course he did—George was a Beatle. George stayed in Dylan's house when George went to L. A. to get experimental treatment for his cancer; but then George died. Dylan also loved Jerry Garcia. And when Jerry died, an addict rather than a seer, Dylan went to the funeral and on his way out told Jerry's advisor, John Scher, "That man back there is the only one who knew what it's like to be me."

****** We asked what car Dylan drives. The response: "Next question."
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There is nothing about his life that has not been foretold in his songs. He is an old man now; believing, he says, in "a God of time and space," he sings almost exclusively of memory and loss. Oh, sure, he might be singing about the Duquesne whistle in one song and about a woman named Nettie Moore in another, but those are all just MacGuffins—they all just allow him to sing about his own comic persistence and the fulfillment of his own strange fate.

Who's that on the bus, Bob Dylan, Who's that on the bus? It sure ain't one of us, Bob Dylan. You've never had no trust, Bob Dylan. Your sleep never rusts, Bob Dylan. You'll never slake our lusts, Bob Dylan. But who's gonna carve your bust, Bob Dylan, If not one of us?*******

A few years ago, he was picked up by the police in Long Branch, New Jersey, for the crime of walking in the rain, dressed in sweatpants and a hooded sweatshirt, and peering into the window of a home for sale in a dodgy neighborhood. The news was greeted with a lot of predictable headlines—NO DIRECTION HOME, A COMPLETE UNKNOWN, etc. But here's the obvious question, asked by a friend of his: "Do you really think that's the first time that he's done that? He does a lot of walking no one would expect. He'll walk through neighborhoods undetected and talk to people on their front porches. It's the only freedom Bob Dylan has—the freedom to move around mysteriously."

******* This is a rhetorical question.

People say that a lot about Dylan: His privacy is all he has. It's an odd thing to say. It assumes he's powerless and needs to be protected. But Bob Dylan has never been powerless. Even when his songs stood up for the powerless, he was always pioneering new ways to use the power of his fame, of which the two-way mirror of his privacy is the ultimate expression. Yes, it's cool when Ron Delsener says, "I've seen Dylan walk down Seventh Avenue in a cowboy hat and nobody recognize him. I've seen him eat at a diner and nobody come over to him"—it makes you think that Dylan is out among us, invisible now, with no secrets to conceal, and that at any time we might turn around and see him. But we never do; nobody ever does, even where he lives. What a woman who works the tunnel between the buses and the backstage area at an arena outside of Atlanta remembers about Dylan is not that she saw him; what she remembers is "I was not allowed to look at him."

He was, of course, on his way to the stage when he passed her averted eyes—on his way to be looked at and listened to. It sounds like a paradox typical of Bob Dylan, worthy of Bob Dylan, but it's really pretty straightforward as an exercise of star power. The crossed relationship between Bob Dylan and his audience is the most enduring one in all of rock 'n' roll, and it keeps going—and will keep going to the last breath—because from the start he laid down a simple and impossible rule:

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