Blonde on Blonde

Blonde on Blonde

Bob Dylan’s Mercurial Masterpiece

By Jochen Markhorst

Independently Published – £10.74

All of it true and not true, as usual with Dylan. The poet Dylan is not a reporter. He connects fiction with memories, is a poetic realist who, from his everyday impressions and personal musings, knows how to grasp universal values, how to transcend the individual experience, how to paint a condition humaine. Driven by little more than the desire to write a song. Paul McCartney expresses this drive in a pleasantly sober manner in his Conversations with Paul du Noyer (2015): ‘’When I write, I’m just writing a song, but I think themes do come up. You can’t help it. Whatever’s important to you finds its way in.’’ And that is in accordance with what Dylan reports […].

(‘Just Like A Woman’)

happy trails, translator.

(‘Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands’)

As with all things Dylan, idiosyncratic interpretation reigns supreme. It is what essentially accounts for a great deal of its quintessential interest – of both the esoteric/intrinsic persuasion might I add.

Hence, the many didactic Dylanologists scattered throughout the world, along with the inexorable number of books that continue to be written. All endeavouring to decipher just what it is that makes Bob Dylan’s work so unquestionably beguiling and brilliant.

Blonde on Blonde – Bob Dylan’s Mercurial Masterpiece is one such example, although it comes replete with a twist.

Rather than merely endeavour to decipher, Jochen Markhorst both expands and embellishes upon much of what we may (or may not) already know. In so (entertainingly) doing, he informs the reader by way of the most trajectorial, yet relative information: ‘’I’m not just up there re-creating old blues tunes or trying to invent some surrealistic rhapsody. It’s the sounds and the words. Words don’t interfere with it. They… they…punctuate it. You know, they give it purpose. [Pause]. And all the ideas for my songs, all the influences, all come out of that. I’m not doing it to see how good I can sound, or how perfect the melody can be, or how intricate the details can be woven or how perfectly written something can be. I don’t care about those things’’ (‘Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands’).

To be sure, the entire section on ‘Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands’ – a song which Tom Waits has described as ‘’a dream, a riddle and a prayer’’ – makes for the most compelling of reading.

This is especially the case where Markhorst writes about synaesthesia: ‘’What are warehouse eyes, what is a geranium kiss, what are matchbook songs?

Untranslatable actually, as even the more persistent translators have to recognise. In almost every line the translator has to make a choice between sound and meaning, weighing whether the sound is more important than the image evoked by the content of the words.’’

And on it goes: choices, choices, aligned with the relentless, inevitable deconstruction of the maestro’s huge catalogue of genius.

Jochen Markhorst enables us to get just a little closer to the edge.

David Marx