I recently listened to an audiobook of Sean Wilentz’s Bob Dylan in America. It’s great, and there will probably be a few more posts inspired by it.

In discussing Dylan’s underappreciated 2003 film Masked and Anonymous and its incredibly complex allusivity, Wilentz writes:

The film is layered, moves abruptly from one later to the next, is filled with visual quotations and allusions, and thus is difficult to comprehend on a single viewing. Some of the themes are immediately recognizable to anyone who has attended to Dylan’s earlier work: politics, religion, the mass media, celebrity, entertainment, betrayal, and fate. The materials from which it is constructed are also Dylan’s materials: circus performers, the blues, vaudeville-style jokes and puns, the Bible, old movies, Gene Pitney’s song “Town Without Pity,” the down-and-out, Shakespeare. And it is constructed out of Bob Dylan himself: one layer of Masked and Anonymous, shot along some forlorn, lack-love, vagrant avenues in Los Angeles, is a film called Desolation Row Revisited. (288-89)

I want to focus on the words in bold. If “Town Without Pity” is part of “Dylan’s materials,” we should see it somewhere else in Dylan’s vast output. So, do we?

We do!–Specifically, in the great opening track of the great Empire Burlesque (1985), “Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anyone Seen My Love),” we find this:

You want to talk to me
Go ahead and talk
Whatever you got to say to me
Won’t come as any shock
I must be guilty of something
You just whisper it into my ear
Madame Butterfly
She lulled me to sleep
In a town without pity
Where the water runs deep
She said, “Be easy, baby
There ain’t nothin’ worth stealin’ in here”^[1]

There are other references in the song, too. In the first verse, it seems likely that the lines “Someday maybe/
I’ll remember to forget” refer to Elvis Presley’s “I Forgot to Remember to Forget.”

Shortly after this, he sings, “I’m gonna get my coat/I feel the breath of a storm.” The phrase “breath of a storm” is found in chapter 9 of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Hyperion: A Romance. It is unclear to me whether there’s any reason to think Dylan had it in mind here; then again, there seems to be some overlap between the subject of the song and the novel, and there is perhaps another echo later in the song. Here is Longfellow:

The hearts of some women tremble like leaves at every breath of love which reaches them, and then are still again. Others, like the ocean, are moved only by the breath of a storm, and not so easily lulled to rest.

Compare that to what was already quoted as well as to this:

Madame Butterfly
She lulled me to sleep
In a town without pity
Where the water runs deep

From a search on Google Books (whence I found the Longfellow passage), it appears that the phrase “breath of a storm” is, perhaps surprisingly, not at all common in English literature. So Dylan may have gotten it from Longfellow after all.

“Madame Butterfly” is itself an allusion–either to the Puccini opera, the short story by John Luther Long, or both. This particular region of artistic history would later inspire Weezer’s sophomore album Pinkerton (1996).

Then, later:

Well, they’re not showing any lights tonight
And there’s no moon
There’s just a hot-blooded singer
Singing “Memphis in June”
While they’re beatin’ the devil out of a guy
Who’s wearing a powder-blue wig
Later he’ll be shot
For resisting arrest
I can still hear his voice crying
In the wilderness
What looks large from a distance
Close up ain’t never that big

Three things here: “Memphis in June” is a song by Hoagy Carmichael; I take “powder-blue” as an internal allusion to “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” (the only other time he uses that adjective, also in a song that includes an arrest: “The waitress he was handsome/He wore a powder-blue cape”; the kaleidoscopic dream-sequence feel of this verse bears comparison with the earlier track); and the description of John the Baptist from the Gospels (“The voice of one crying in the wilderness” (Matt. 3:3 KJV, quoting Isaiah 40:3), which is here apparently applied to the costumed man being beaten. Curiously, John the Baptist–who wears camel’s hair and leather, not a blue wig–does not resist arrest, though he is executed by the government (blade rather than bullets).

The biblical connection is continued in the song’s conclusion that immediately follows.

Never could learn to drink that blood
And call it wine
Never could learn to hold you, love
And call you mine

This stanza has to do with naming. While it possibly represents a realist account of the Lord’s Supper (i.e., the wine is actually and in fact Jesus’s blood), the difference between appearance and reality is used here as a parallel for the vicissitudes of love (i.e., “I have you, and yet you’re not mine”).

Conclusion

Though his post-Time Out of Mind work has perhaps received the most attention with respect to allusivity, Dylan’s songwriting has almost always had the character of a palimpsest. Yes, the details change over time (it’s different on Highway 61 Revisited and Blood on the Tracks, different again on Desire, again on Empire Burlesque, again on Modern Times), but a clever, playful, and suggestive engagement with artistic tradition, in both its “high” and “low” forms, is almost always there. This is just one more example.