Dylan's Visions of Sin

... Ricks approaches Dylan's work with the meticulousness of a scholar-editor and the energy of a teenage fan. On the wall of his BU office, among black-and-white photographs of 20th-century literary luminaries like T.S. Eliot and Robert Lowell, are a framed poster from an early-'60s Dylan concert and an autographed color glossy of Dylan onstage, circa 1975. On the floor of his Cambridge (Mass.) dining room, and in the cupboards of a nearby front room, are stacks of CD jewel cases containing about 1,700 Dylan bootlegs and studio outtakes -- "my Dylan," Ricks calls them. A friend has indexed much of the collection by song title; even if Dylan never gets around to recording the obscure death-row lament "Stone Walls and Steel Bars," Ricks will always have five different live versions at his fingertips. Tiny red stickers on the spines of some cases denote especially good recordings. Poorer reproductions, the sort of thing Ricks wouldn't want to listen to "except in the interest of research," are kept in the basement.

The marks of this obsessive attention are all over "Dylan's Visions of Sin." Ricks catches Dylan rhyming "owed" with "the nightingale's code" in two stray performances of "Visions of Johanna," one from 1965, the other from 1966; he introduces this bit of esoterica to buttress his claim that a 1997 Dylan song reflects the influence of John Keats. "`Not Dark Yet,"' Ricks writes, "is owed to a nightingale."

Ricks, of course, is not the first fan to subject Dylan's lyrics to microscopic scrutiny, even at book-length. Along with countless dissertations and web pages, Dylan's songs have inspired such distinctive investigations as Michael Gray's "Song & Dance Man," which has grown across three decades and as many editions into a comprehensive critical companion, and Greil Marcus's "Invisible Republic," a meditation on Dylan's legendary ("bootlegendary," Ricks calls them) Basement Tapes and the shadowy "old, weird America" from which they emerged.

But Ricks brings a unique set of credentials to the subject. He himself is a Dylan-like figure in the world of literary criticism -- someone whose last name alone is sufficient to identify him. His first book, "Milton's Grand Style" (1963), permanently changed the way readers approach "Paradise Lost." According to Harvard professor Helen Vendler, Ricks's contribution was "to look at Milton primarily as a writer rather than as a thinker or an activist in politics -- to take his language less in the service of his ideas than as it made a linguistic fabric of its own, and a gorgeous fabric, too."

Subsequent studies of Keats and Tennyson were similarly influential, solidifying Ricks's reputation as a peerless close reader. T.S. Eliot's widow asked Ricks to edit a collection of her husband's early poetry; Oxford University Press invited him to choose poems for the latest edition of the "Oxford Book of English Verse"; and W.H. Auden famously called him "exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding." So when Ricks calls Bob Dylan "the best contemporary American user of words," as he has on at least one occasion, people take notice. ...

Whenever I see a story about Bob Dylan on FR, I feel the urge to post the lyrics to one of his better songs: Neighborhood Bully. The song describes in sarcastic tone how the nation of Israel does her best to survive in a world where she is attacked daily...Israel is a land that loves freedom and wants protection...and yet, Israel is the one being accused of being a bully.
The song even describes the bombing of an Iraqi nuclear facility...gosh, looking back 20+ years, this song might even be somewhat prophetic about the United States in 2003. Enjoy.
NEIGHBORHOOD BULLY
by Bob Dylan

Well, the neighborhood bully, he's just one man,
His enemies say he's on their land.
They got him outnumbered about a million to one,
He got no place to escape to, no place to run.
He's the neighborhood bully.

The neighborhood bully just lives to survive,
He's criticized and condemned for being alive.
He's not supposed to fight back, he's supposed to have thick skin,
He's supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in.
He's the neighborhood bully.

The neighborhood bully been driven out of every land,
He's wandered the earth an exiled man.
Seen his family scattered, his people hounded and torn,
He's always on trial for just being born.
He's the neighborhood bully.

Well, he knocked out a lynch mob, he was criticized,
Old women condemned him, said he should apologize.
Then he destroyed a bomb factory, nobody was glad.
The bombs were meant for him.
He was supposed to feel bad.
He's the neighborhood bully.

Well, the chances are against it and the odds are slim
That he'll live by the rules that the world makes for him,
'Cause there's a noose at his neck and a gun at his back
And a license to kill him is given out to every maniac.
He's the neighborhood bully.

He got no allies to really speak of.
What he gets he must pay for, he don't get it out of love.
He buys obsolete weapons and he won't be denied
But no one sends flesh and blood to fight by his side.
He's the neighborhood bully.

Well, he's surrounded by pacifists who all want peace,
They pray for it nightly that the bloodshed must cease.
Now, they wouldn't hurt a fly.
To hurt one they would weep.
They lay and they wait for this bully to fall asleep.
He's the neighborhood bully.

Every empire that's enslaved him is gone,
Egypt and Rome, even the great Babylon.
He's made a garden of paradise in the desert sand,
In bed with nobody, under no one's command.
He's the neighborhood bully.

Now his holiest books have been trampled upon,
No contract he signed was worth what it was written on.
He took the crumbs of the world and he turned it into wealth,
Took sickness and disease and he turned it into health.
He's the neighborhood bully.

What's anybody indebted to him for?
Nothin', they say.
He just likes to cause war.
Pride and prejudice and superstition indeed,
They wait for this bully like a dog waits to feed.
He's the neighborhood bully.

What has he done to wear so many scars?
Does he change the course of rivers?
Does he pollute the moon and stars?
Neighborhood bully, standing on the hill,
Running out the clock, time standing still,
Neighborhood bully.

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