"When I Paint My Masterpiece" [nice essay]
Will Dockery
Subject: 'When I Paint My Masterpiece': Dylan, Europe and a wild goose chase
(long)
In 'When I Paint My Masterpiece', we find Dylan coming face-to-face,
in an unusually direct way, with his European roots. No white American
can ultimately escape his or her origins from the Old Continent and/or
its offshore islands, and of course the purely musical European
influence on Dylan, via the English/Scottish/Irish ballads, has been
obvious from the beginning. The ambivalent weight of the European
cultural heritage is visible enough in 'Desolation Row' or, say, the
Mona Lisa reference in 'Visions of Johanna', but it is rare for Dylan
actually to locate a song in Europe (the only other example that
occurs to me is 'TV Talkin' Song', set in London). In 'Masterpiece',
however, Dylan engages directly with the American-in-Europe theme, as
present in American literature (Hawthorne's 'The Marble Faun', James'
'The Wings of the Dove' or 'The Aspern Papers') and cinema (Vincente
Minnelli's 'An American in Paris', or, most recently, Woody Allen's
'Everyone Says I Love You'). This is also a song in which Dylan
implicitly presents himself as an American _artist_, in the fictional
disguise, not of a musician, but of a painter.
A word on the text is required before proceeding with the analysis, as
'Masterpiece' is a song for which, in a sense, no definitive text
exists. The first released version was not by Dylan but by the Band,
on their 1971 album 'Cahoots'; Dylan's own version followed on 'More
Greatest Hits', later in 1971. There are considerable lyrical
differences between the two, and one cannot in this case automatically
give Dylan's version precedence, since the Band's version came out
first (it is also that version that has been re-covered twice since,
by the reconstituted Band - or, perhaps more accurately, Danko, Helm,
Hudson and friends - in 1993 on the 'Dylan 30th Anniversary Concert'
album, and by Emmylou Harris on her 1996 box set 'Portraits'). The
official Dylan lyric book does not solve the problem, as the text
given is an eclectic combination from _both_ recorded versions. The
lyrical differences (I refer to the rival versions as 'Band' and
'Dylan') are as follows (five in all): the painter has a date with 'a
pretty little girl from Greece' in 'Band', but with 'Botticelli's
niece' in 'Dylan'; the line in 'Band' 'when I ran on the hilltop
following a pack of wild geese' becomes 'as the daylight hours do
retreat' in 'Dylan'; the two-line 'gondola/Coca-Cola' bridge does not
appear in 'Dylan'; the painter arrives in Brussels in 'Band' 'on a
plane-ride so bumpy that I almost cried', but in 'Dylan' 'with a
picture of a tall tree by my side'; and, finally, we have: 'everyone
was there to greet me when I stepped inside' ('Band'); but: 'everyone
was there and nobody tried to hide' ('Dylan'). In the absence of an
authoritative single text, I shall use both versions for my analysis,
identifying them as appropriate. It should be noticed that the 'Dylan'
version, though inferior in some respects (e.g. it leaves out the
brilliant 'wild geese' image - see below), does nonetheless put more
stress on the narrator's being a painter ('Botticelli's niece',
'picture of a tall tree').
The narrator is obviously an American, as is made clear by the bridge
('Band' only): 'Sailin' round the world in a dirty gondola/Oh to be
back in the land of Coca-Cola'. These two lines might seem throwaway
on first hearing, but the comic rhyme 'gondola'/'Coca-Cola' (perhaps
worthy of Byron, of whom more later) in fact points up a crucial Old
World/New World contrast: our American painter, it may be, had at
least hoped to find in Europe authenticity and tradition, as
symbolized by the gondola, rather than the brash Stateside
commercialism and materialism all-too-well represented by a certain
Atlanta beverage.
The song presents the narrator's experiences in two European capitals,
Rome (stanzas 1 and 2) and Brussels (stanza 3). The choice of cities
is surely more than casual: the former capital of a great European
empire is contrasted with the administrative capital of today's
European Union (or European Economic Community, as it was back in
1971); one may also presume an ironic contrast, within Europe itself,
between the ancient (the Rome of the Coliseum) and modern (Brussels'
not-very-aesthetic Zaventem airport). Further dimensions of the
European cultural heritage are introduced: in 'Band', Venice (the
gondola) and Greece ('a pretty little girl from Greece'); in 'Dylan',
the Florentine Renaissance ('Botticelli's niece', or a modern Italian
woman beautiful enough to have stepped out of the 'Birth of Venus' in
the Uffizi Gallery, Florence). In the 'girl from Greece' variant , the
image of the painter's encounter with a young Hellene in a Rome hotel
room implies a synthesis of Europe's two ancient classical cultures,
of what another American, Edgar Allan Poe, called, in his poem 'To
Helen', 'the glory that was Greece/and the grandeur that was Rome';
the Botticelli variant, by contrast, suggests the continuity between
ancient Rome and the Italian Renaissance, presenting the European
heritage as an age-old but linear tradition.
The city of Rome occurs quite frequently in Dylan's work, although
'Masterpiece' offers the most detailed picture. Ancient Rome appears
via 'Nero's Neptune' in 'Desolation Row', as the 'City of Seven Hills'
in 'Caribbean Wind', and as the epitome of empire (alongside Egypt and
Babylon) in 'Neighbourhood Bully'; Renaissance/Baroque Rome is present
in 'Don't Fall Apart on Me Tonight' with the 'palace of the Pope' - St
Peter's, which was, of course, decorated by Michelangelo, who appears
in 'Jokerman'; and modern Rome is implied in the allusion in
'Motorpsycho Nitemare' to Fellini's film 'La Dolce Vita' (with its
famous Trevi Fountain sequence). In 'Masterpiece', the topography of
the city evoked by the painter includes both the ancient (the Coliseum
and its lions) and the relatively modern (the eighteenth-century
Spanish Stairs in Piazza di Spagna); in 'Band' (only), there is a
further ancient reference, in the line 'when I ran on the hilltop
following a pack of wild geese', which, as I will show below, recalls
a legend from early Roman history. This imposing cultural and artistic
heritage is, of course, not all sweetness and light: the Coliseum was
a theatre of cruel death for of the early Christians, a point not
without significance if we are talking about Dylan.
What, then, does Dylan's painter seek in Rome, and what does he find?
At this point it may be useful to recall another visitor to Rome a
century and a half before, namely Lord Byron. Dylan's narrator may,
indeed, be following not only in the 'ancient footprints' of the
Caesar, but also in the Romantic footsteps of the English
poet-in-exile. In the fourth canto of 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage'
(1818), Byron contemplates the ruins of ancient Rome and finds nothing
but chaos - broken dreams and relics of ancient cruelty. In the
Coliseum, he imagines a dying gladiator from Dacia, 'butcher'd to make
a Roman holiday' (CXLI), and juxtaposes the ancient 'bloody Circus'
(CXXXIX) with the 'enormous skeleton' of the modern ruin (CXLIII).
Byron perceives the city as a whole as a space strewn with fragments
and debris, visible signs of decayed power testifying to the vanity of
human aspirations:
'Oh Rome! my country! city of the soul!
The orphans of the heart must turn to thee,
Lone mother of dead empires! ...
Come and see
The cypress, hear the owl, and plod your way
O'er steps of broken thrones and temples' (LXXVII).
In this empire of the dead, the visitor's hopes of finding
transcendence or absolute meaning are momentarily raised, only to be
dashed to pieces:
'But Rome is as the desert, where we steer
Stumbling over recollections; now we clap
Our hands, and cry " Eureka " - it is clear -
When but some false mirage of ruin rises near' (LXXXI).
Dylan's narrator meets a curiously similar fate in his pilgrimage to
Rome (I refer to 'Dylan's narrator', rather than Dylan himself; it is
true that Dylan himself paints, as we know from a number of Dylan and
Band album covers and the Highway 61 CD-ROM, but painting is not his
primary means of artistic expression, and I believe the protagonist of
'Masterpiece' is best seen as a fictional American painter who
nonetheless bears some traces of his historical creator, Bob Dylan).
We may presume that the narrator has come to Europe and Rome in search
of artistic fulfilment, hoping that with ancient scenes around him he
will achieve the vision that will enable him finally to 'paint his
masterpiece'. The creation of the perfect painting is imaged in both
pictorial and musical terms (again suggesting convergence, but not
identity, with the artistic project of Dylan himself): 'Some day
everything is gonna be smooth like a rhapsody/When I paint my
masterpiece'. The 'rhapsody' image is striking, evoking as it does
both the Hellenistic tradition (the word is originally Greek) and - a
rare reference in Dylan - the lineage of western classical music (as
in Brahms' 'Alto Rhapsody' and Liszt's 'Hungarian Rhapsodies'). The
painter is, then, aiming high - indeed, he may have epic traditions
(the Concise Oxford Dictionary defines 'rhapsode' as a 'reciter of
epic poems, esp. those of Homer in ancient Greece' - 'open the door,
Homer'?). At the same time, the narrator links artistic with sexual
fulfilment by imagining that erotic climax with his lover met in Rome
(Greek or Italian, depending on the version) will coincide with his
high peak of artistic creation ('She promised that she'd be right
there with me/When I paint my masterpiece').
But if the painter has come to Rome hoping to find the empire of the
imagination, what he discovers there, following in the tracks of
Byron, is heaps of fragments, perceptual distortion and emotional
confusion. He finds 'the streets of Rome are filled with rubble', as
if the famous ruins - Byron's 'broken thrones and temples' - were no
more than blind heaps of stone; the 'ancient footsteps ... everywhere'
can be imagined criss-crossing randomly in all directions, going
nowhere; staying out 'on a cold dark night' - like the nocturnal
pilgrim Byron, listening to the owl - he feels his perceptions
becoming deceptive and hallucinatory: 'you could almost think that
you're seeing double'. The Coliseum throws up images of lions, placing
the dreamer in the vulnerable position of the Christian martyrs, about
to be devoured: 'oh those mighty kings of the jungle, I could hardly
stand to see'em' (the man-eating lion will recur in a later song,
'Foot of Pride'): the whole scene suggests not imperial dignity but
cruelty, uncertainty and, ultimately, absurdity ('Coliseum' and
'see'em' form another anticlimactic rhyme-pair in the style of Byron's
own 'Don Juan'). Things are no better when the painter explores the
Capitol. Haunted by his past ('train-wheels runnin' through the back
of my memory'), he is unable to escape from it: 'I ran on the hilltop
following a pack of wild geese'. In a remarkable linguistic tour de
force, Dylan's writing here combines into one ancient legend (the
geese that saved the Capitol) and familiar phrase (a wild goose
chase). According to Plutarch ('Life of Camillus'), the sacred geese
of the temple of Juno on the Capitol miraculously preserved Rome from
a nocturnal invasion by the Gauls, by waking up the garrison in the
nick of time with their cries. However, in Dylan's song, these heroic
creatures become absurd and meaningless, subsumed into the notion of a
wild goose chase, a pointless search for a non-existent
will-o'-the-wisp. It seems that the quest for meaning that brought the
painter to Rome has become illusory; as in 'Childe Harold', a brief
cry of 'Eureka' dissolves into chilly confrontation with 'some false
mirage of ruin'.
Having failed to find what he sought in Rome, the narrator takes the
plane to Brussels, the modern capital of Europe. In the 'Dylan'
version, he is carrying a canvas - 'a picture of a tall tree' - which
may be his own work, but is obviously not the masterpiece itself.
There is no sign of the Greek/Italian maiden, either: clearly he is
alone again. The crowd that welcomes him ('everyone was there to greet
me', in the 'Band' version; the narrator is, whether or not Dylan
himself, visibly some kind of celebrity) is perceived as grotesquely
comic: pompous 'clergymen in uniform' (a very long way away from the
Christian martyrs); 'young girls pulling muscles' (Rubens-style,
fleshly Flemish women, the 'flamandes' ironically celebrated in song
by Jacques Brel - no doubt a far cry from Botticellian grace; there
may even be a comic pun on 'mussels', the typical dish of Brussels);
intrusive paparazzi - 'newspapermen ... held down by big police'. The
whole airport scene suggests a modern world whose unaesthetic chaos
scarcely seems superior to the dreamlike ruins of Rome.
We may conclude that the painter will return to the US without having
painted his masterpiece: Rome and Brussels, Europe ancient and modern,
have failed to yield up the imaginative freedom he sought. The whole
song is ironic, fragmentary, yet strangely haunting: the listener is
left with the impression that, despite everything, the narrator's
visit to Europe has been necessary, and has put him back in contact
with his European roots - even if the experience was not what he had
expected. In other words, American-European dialogue may be a
salutary, if not crucial, encounter for the US artist - the American
in Paris, or Rome, or Brussels (or Venice, for Woody Allen in 1997).
Indeed, if we do finally choose to identify the song's painter with
Dylan himself, we may conclude that 'back in the land of Coca-Cola' he
did finally manage to paint that masterpiece. It was, after all, not
so long after he wrote this song that, at the end of 1974, Dylan
produced 'Blood on the Tracks', the album which many believe to be ...
_his masterpiece_ - with, in some versions of the vinyl and CD
releases, a Bob Dylan painting on the back cover, as if in concrete
pictorial proof!
Note: I am aware of the connection made by Michael Gray and Barney
Hoskyns between this song and Scott Fitzgerald. However, I wanted to
explore another approach, via Byron.
Any comments, please email me!
Chris Rollason
Christopher Rollason
Metz, France
roll...@dialup.francenet.fr
'but would not change my free thoughts for a throne' (Byron)
Jim (Guitar Centre Records)
Jim :0)
"Will Dockery" <irony...@knology.net> wrote in message
news:3fe5d...@news1.knology.net...
Zuke
> > The narrator is obviously an American, as is made clear by the bridge
> > ('Band' only): 'Sailin' round the world in a dirty gondola/Oh to be
> > back in the land of Coca-Cola'. These two lines might seem throwaway
> > on first hearing, but the comic rhyme 'gondola'/'Coca-Cola' (perhaps
I wonder if Dylan is making a sly reference to the Andrews Sisters
"Rum and Coca-Cola". That's a great song for my money.
Later,
Zuke
BGR200
>'oh those mighty kings of the jungle, I could hardly
>> stand to see'em' (the man-eating lion will recur in a later song,
"Dodging lions and wastin time" in the arena of those "that hide behind desks"
the movers and shakers of the music industry,makes the road to "my masterpiece"
, indeed "a long hard climb"
mariav
you might call in a few psychoanalysts to work with the
"material".Glad to learn here.and if it's gotta be done,welcome to
it.I bet it's a lot more fun reading this sort of writing than to be
one who attempts analysis.mv
Will Dockery
news:bs73is$f94$1...@titan.btinternet.com...
> Thanks for the fascinating post.
Jim :0)
I couldn't resist!
Will
"Mirror Twins" Mp3, free preview:
http://www.lulu.com/content/29085