Bob Dylan’s “The Philosophy of Modern Song”: An Excerpt

The title of Bob Dylan’s latest book, “The Philosophy of Modern Song,” is, in a sense, misleading. A collection of brief essays on 65 songs (and one poem), it is less a rigorous study of craft than a series of rhapsodic observations on what gives great songs their power to fascinate us.

Dylan, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, worked on these for more than a decade, though they flow more like extemporaneous sermons. The chapter on Johnnie Taylor’s “Cheaper to Keep Her,” for example, is mainly an indictment of the lawyers whose profiteering of heartbreak drives the divorce “industry.”

Elsewhere, Dylan writes in oracular riddles. His one-paragraph piece on “Long Tall Sally,” by Little Richard, likens Sally to the Nephilim giants of the Old Testament, and postulates Richard as “a giant of a different kind” who took a diminutive stage name “so as not to scare anybody.”

About half the essays in the book — his first collection of new writing since “Chronicles: Volume One,” in 2004 — are accompanied by what Dylan’s publisher calls “riffs”: even shorter, even looser pieces, in which Dylan attempts to embody the spirit — the philosophy? — of the song itself. On “Poor Little Fool,” by Ricky Nelson: “She sized you up, she was captivating and shrewd and lousy with lies. Oh yeah, you were an absolute blockhead beyond a doubt.”

In these excerpts, each featuring an essay and a “riff,” Dylan looks at songs that represented two poles of mid-1960s culture. He locates the paradox within the Who’s “My Generation” as youth’s dread of becoming what it most detests: old. Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night,” on the other hand, is a glimpse of “tramps and mavericks” hooking up in the twilight of the “Mad Men” age — though Dylan, ever unpredictably, devotes most of his ink to an apocryphal claim about the song’s authorship.

Students of Dylan have long known to just listen and not ask why. — Ben Sisario

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Strangers in the Night, by Frank Sinatra

Music by Bert Kaempfert. Lyrics by Charles Singleton and Eddie Snyder

The song of the lone wolf, the outsider, the alien, the foreigner, and night owl who’s wheeling and dealing, putting everything up for sale and surrendering his self-interest. On the move aimlessly through the dingy darkness — slicing up the pie of sentimental feelings, dividing it into pieces all the time, exchanging piercing penetrating looks with someone he hardly knows.

Tramps and mavericks, the object of each other’s affection, enraptured with each other and creating an alliance — ignoring all the ages of man, the golden age, electronic age, age of anxiety, the jazz age. You’re here to tell a different story, a bird of another feather. You’ve got a tough persona, like a side of beef, and you’re aroused and stimulated, with an ear-to-ear grin, like a Cheshire cat, and you’re rethinking your entire formless life, your entire being is filled with a whiff of this heady ambrosia. Something in your vital spirit, your pulse, something that runs in the blood, tells you that you must have this tender feeling of love now and forever, this essence of devoted love held tightly in your grip — that it’s essential and necessary for staying alive and cheating death.

Intruders, oddballs, kooks, and villains, in this gloomy lifeless dark, fight for space. Two rootless alienated people, withdrawn and isolated, opened the door to each other, said Aloha, Howdy, How you doing, and Good Evening. How could you have known that the smooching and petting, eros and adoration was just one break down mambo hustle away — one far sided google eyed look and a lusty leer — that ever since then, that moment of truth, you’ve been steamed up, head over heels, each other’s hearts’ desire. Sweethearts and honeys right from the beginning. Right from the inaugural sidelong sneak peek, the origin — the starting point. Now you’re yoked together, one flesh in perpetuity — into the vast eternity — immortalized.

By the time Frank Sinatra stepped into the studio to record “Strangers in the Night” on April 11, 1966, he had already been singing professionally for thirty-one years and recording since 1939. He had seen trends come and go in popular music and had, in fact, set trends himself and spawned scores of imitators for decades.

Still, it was amazing that the soundtrack of the summer of 1966, according to the July 2 edition of the Billboard Hot 100, was topped by that little pop song. Amazingly, in the middle of the British Invasion, “Strangers in the Night” by Hoboken’s own beat out the Beatles’ “Paperback Writer” and the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black.” Today, the charts are so stratified and niche marketed, you would never see something like this happen. Nowadays, everyone stays in their own lane, guaranteeing themselves top honors in their own category even if that category is something like Top Klezmer Vocal Performance on a Heavy Metal Soundtrack Including Americana Samples.

But Frank had to slug it out with everybody, even though “Strangers” was a song he hated, one that he regularly dismissed as “a piece of shit.” But let us not forget, Howlin’ Wolf allegedly once said the same thing about his first electric guitar and the Chess brothers put that quote in big letters on one of his album covers.

Frank may have hated the song, but the fact of the matter is, he chose it. And therein lies a tale. By the time we had heard “Strangers in the Night,” it had gone through at least two sets of lyrics and a few people had already laid claim to its authorship. It’s a confusing tale that spans a couple of continents. I present it here in the interests of entertainment and will not swear to its veracity.

Many cigar smokers have enjoyed the Avo XO, a fine Dominican cigar. The well-known Swiss tobacconist Davidoff of Geneva introduced them to the world and now more than two million a year are sold. These cigars were a rebound revenue stream for an Armenian musician, a Beiruti immigrant living in New York, who felt he had been swindled out of the profits of a chart-topping composition.

As a youth, Avo Uvezian was a jazz pianist, playing his way across the Middle East during the early forties, at one point teaching Iran’s Shah Reza Pahlavi how to correctly swing-dance. With the grateful shah’s help, Uvezian relocated to New York in 1947 and enrolled at the Juilliard School of Music.

Here is where the story gets murky. According to Uvezian, he sent one of the little melodies he composed to the only person he knew in the music industry — the German orchestra leader and composer Bert Kaempfert. Today that melody, under the title “Strangers in the Night,” is listed as a Bert Kaempfert composition.

One way or another, the song was presented to Frank Sinatra. According to legend, Frank requested the lyrics be changed. Charles Singleton and Eddie Snyder were brought in. They took the melancholy song about parting lovers titled “Broken Guitar” and returned a week later with “Strangers in the Night.” Interestingly, Charles Singleton also co-wrote “Tryin’ to Get to You,” a song recorded in 1954 by Washington, D.C., vocal group the Eagles. That song was again recorded the following year by Elvis Presley while he was on Sun Records. Other people also made claims against Bert Kaempfert’s authorship of “Strangers in the Night.” One was made by the Croatian singer Ivo Robić and another by the French composer Philippe-Gérard, though neither has held up as well as Avo Uvezian’s.

And as for him, his name is not on the record label, but it is on a lot of cigar bands. He maintained a good attitude and lived joyfully into his nineties. Though he shrugged off the music business, he did not shrug off music, performing regularly and entertaining friends with his piano playing while enjoying millions of dollars of Swiss cigar money. Not all stories have to have sad endings.

And as far as I know, no one has ever contested the writing of Frank’s hit from the following year, “Somethin’ Stupid,” though it is worth mentioning that it was written by Van Dyke Parks’s older brother Carson.

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My Generation, by The Who

Song written by Pete Townshend

This is a song that does no favors for anyone, and casts doubt on everything.

In this song, people are trying to slap you around, slap you in the face, vilify you. They’re rude and they slam you down, take cheap shots. They don’t like you because you pull out all the stops and go for broke. You put your heart and soul into everything and shoot the works, because you got energy and strength and purpose. Because you’re so inspired they put the whammy on, they’re allergic to you, and they have hard feelings. Just your very presence repels them. They give you frosty looks and they’ve had enough of you, and there’s a million others just like you, multiplying every day.

You’re in an exclusive club, and you’re advertising yourself. You’re blabbing about your age group, of which you’re a high-ranking member. You can’t conceal your conceit, and you’re snobbish and snooty about it. You’re not trying to drop any big bombshell or cause a scandal, you’re just waving a flag, and you don’t want anyone to comprehend what you’re saying or embrace it, or even try to take it all in. You’re looking down your nose at society and you have no use for it. You’re hoping to croak before senility sets in. You don’t want to be ancient and decrepit, no thank you. I’ll kick the bucket before that happens. You’re looking at the world mortified by the hopelessness of it all.

In reality, you’re an eighty-year-old man, being wheeled around in a home for the elderly, and the nurses are getting on your nerves. You say why don’t you all just fade away. You’re in your second childhood, can’t get a word out without stumbling and dribbling. You haven’t any aspirations to live in a fool’s paradise, you’re not looking forward to that, and you’ve got your fingers crossed that you don’t. Knock on wood. You’ll give up the ghost first.

You’re talking about your generation, sermonizing, giving a discourse.

Straight talk, eyeball to eyeball.

Today it is commonplace to stream a movie directly to your phone. So, when you are watching Gloria Swanson as faded movie star Norma Desmond proclaim from the palm of your hand, “I am big, it’s the pictures that got small,” it contains layers of irony that writer/director Billy Wilder could never have imagined. Of course, someone streaming something to their phone is most likely watching something even shorter and faster paced on TikTok, certainly not anything in black and white with a running time of 110 minutes.

Every generation gets to pick and choose what they want from the generations that came before with the same arrogance and ego-driven self-importance that the previous generations had when they picked the bones of the ones before them. Pete Townshend was born in 1945, which puts him at the front end of the baby boomer generation, born right after the Second World War ended. The generation who fathered Pete and the rest of the boomers has been called the Greatest Generation — not a self-congratulatory term at all.

It might be helpful to take a moment and define terms just a bit. What exactly is a generation? Currently, the common definition is the period of time that the statistically largest portion of the population born within a thirty-year period is in control of the zeitgeist. Recently, we have entered a new phase, where anyone entering the age of twenty-two as of 2019 is now a member of Generation Z. While people make jokes about millennials, that group is now old news, as obsolete as all of the previous generations — the baby boomers, Gen X, the Fragile Generation, the Intermediates, the Neutrals, the Dependable, the Unshaken, and the Clean Slate.

Marlon Brando, like Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and the first wave of rockers, fell somewhere between the greatest generation ever and the baby boomers; too young to fight against the Nazis, too old to go to Woodstock. Yet when Brando replied, “Whaddya got?” when a local girl asked him what he was rebelling against in the movie The Wild One, it set the stage for the sixties and the rebellion against the picture-perfect prefab communities the boys came home from the war to build.

Like a lot of boomers, Pete seems to have a chip on his shoulder in this song. But he’s not totally confident, he’s somewhat back on his heels. There’s a certain defensiveness. He knows people put him down just because he gets around. Perhaps he feels like he will never measure up or he knows they resent his generation’s newly abundant leisure time. He wishes they would just disappear, fade away. He hopes he dies before he gets old and is replaced like he is replacing them. Pete can’t even point the finger himself, he depends on his mouthpiece Roger to hurl the invective. That fear is perhaps the most honest thing about the song. We all rail at the previous generation but somehow know it’s only a matter of time until we will become them ourselves.

Pete would probably be the first to tell you. He has a front-row seat for the history of his generation. He could read the picket signs against hatred and war. Well, that certainly ended that, thank you for your service. Each generation seems to have the arrogance of ignorance, opting to throw out what has gone before instead of building on the past. And they have no use for someone like Pete offering the wisdom of his experience, telling them what he has learned on the similar paths he has trod. And if he’d had the audacity to do so, there’s every chance that person would have looked up at Pete and told him that he couldn’t see him, he couldn’t hear him.

And that gave Pete another idea.

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Excerpted from THE PHILOSOPHY OF MODERN SONG by Bob Dylan. © 2022 Bob Dylan All rights reserved. Audio excerpts courtesy of Simon & Schuster Audio, read by Bob Dylan, Oscar Isaac, John Goodman, Alfre Woodward, Jeffrey Wright, et.al. (P) 2022 Simon & Schuster, Inc. Used with permission from Simon & Schuster, Inc.