From the Archives: Eighty Years of Whwaongg

My Birthday Retrospective that was published in the very first issue of Dylanology, when Dylan turned 80. Now it's time for another anniversary, and I've updated the text.

Eighty Years of Whwaongg

A Birthday Retrospective

One day in 1960, Bob Dylan’s girlfriend Bonnie Beecher got him his first harmonica holder. He was captivated. “My friends would come in and they would just go, ‘Uurgh! Who is this geek?’,” she told a biographer. “I wanted him to play guitar, which he could play well and which I knew would impress them, but he just wasn’t having any of it. He was saying, ‘Naw, I wanna get this – hwang! Whwaongg!’”

The anecdote is a good starting point for an eightieth-anniversary retrospective glance at the musician Bob Dylan. It highlights two different aspects of his music making. One of these is quite familiar, almost a commonplace (if that is a concept that fits Dylan at all). The other is more elusive, and there is a risk that it may deepen the mystery of the jubilarian and his art rather than clarifying it – which is a risk worth taking and well in line with his work itself.

Whwaongg, take #1: The Uncompromising Pathfinder

Take #1 of the idea of the Whwaongg is the story of Dylan’s insistence on going his own way, regardless of what his audience wants from him. When his girlfriend wanted to impress her friends, he tortured them with his harmonica; when the folkies wanted to hear his harmonica, he tortured them with his electric guitar; when the hipster crowd wanted to hear more of his electrified mysticism, he turned simplistic country crooner; when Elvis died, Dylan switched to God and gospel; and when his touring band had finally become the greatest rock’n’roll combo on earth, he went and found Sinatra. There’s always a Whwaongg with Dylan.

This is the essence of the Myth of Dylan: that he has always stuck to his own Whwaonggs and never let anyone else decide for him. To be able to do this signals confidence and trustworthiness, integrity and purpose. And in this, there is also a hint of the prophetic: surely, he must have seen something that the rest of us can merely glimpse?

Prophetic Genius or Naked Emperor?

There’s just one catch: how do we know that the sounds of warped harps, sonic quirks, nasal whines, and wolfman’s growls are any good, really?

We endure it, because we trust that our patience will be rewarded. We expect something good to come out of it, despite the hardship. And we are convinced that it does. Many of us even reach the point where we like the whines and the whwaonggs.

But how do we know that we’re not being fooled?

I’m writing this while listening to Stuttgart 1991, the show that is frequently ranked as Dylan’s worst show on record. The erratic piano plonks during the opener, “The Man in Me”, are usually mentioned, as well as the fact that he was supposedly drunk. The bootleg from the show is called Name That Tune, a mocking reflection of the bewildered reaction from the audience to the strange, unrecognizable song versions.

My problem is: I like it a lot.

Those summer shows in 1991 – there’s so much emotion in his voice that I sometimes have to switch to something less committal, less uncompromising, just to cool down.

So, to wield my own rhetorical weapon against myself and my taste in music: have I been fooled? Is it just crap after all – a washed-out, besotted has-been from the Sixties who has managed to sell snake oil for so long that people believe it’s the cure for cancer?

When is the little boy going to show up and say: “But he isn’t wearing anything at all!”?

Whwaongg Take #2: Learning by Doing

Which brings us to the second aspect of Whwaongg: it actually represents Dylan exploring and learning by keeping at it like a stubborn four-year-old, right before our eyes.

If Dylan is God (as any creator is) and God is the Word, then what we are looking at in those glimpses is the Word itself learning to talk.

And that is a bewildering picture.

Artists usually don’t let us see this kind of thing – rehearsals are done in private, and the result is presented when ready – but with Dylan there seems to be different rules for what is embarrassing and what is not. We sometimes get to witness the Whwaongg.

“Play it again, Steve”

The most puzzling footage of Dylan ever captured is a scene from the recording of “We are the World”, the USA for Africa project in 1984.

We see Stevie Wonder trying to teach Dylan his one line of the song. What makes the scene both confusing and painful is that Dylan apparently needs to have this snippet of song played for him over and over again. What Dylan sings is not the melody, of course, but his own nasal, two-note reduction or translation of the pop tune into Dylanese or Dylandic or whatever his musical language is called.

One would think that he should be able to sing anything in Dylanese in his sleep. But no: here he is, the bard, the voice of a generation, again and again pleading: “Stevie, can you play it one more time?”

He has recorded professionally since he was 20, he seems to know every song ever written and he does covers of everything from the Clash to the Carter Family off the cuff, he loves to change the keys songs are played in just to keep his musicians alert – but here, when someone else is in charge in the studio, he has to be told to step closer to the microphone, and he jumps in shock and bewilderment when the band modulates up a semitone (“uuugh… what’s that?!”).

Who is this man? He defined modern popular music, and he can’t even sing 11 seconds of a simple pop tune without rehearsing it to death?

Lakes of Pontchartrain

The clip reminds me strongly of Paul Brady’s story about how he was asked to teach Dylan how to play “Lakes of Pontchartrain”, Brady’s signature tune. Brady plays it in open G tuning. This is a tuning Dylan himself has used, around the time of his first album, but this time Brady had to take Dylan’s fingers one by one and place them on the fretboard, and he still wasn’t able to play it.

When Dylan eventually included Lakes in his own concert repertory some years later, he played it quite differently, of course. Here is the second live rendition, from Berkeley, 10 June 1988:

“That wasn’t any good!?”

What is there to learn from these stories?

I think one key to the riddle can be found in the USA for Africa clip. After one of the many, many attempts to get the 11 seconds right, everyone in the studio are cheering and hollering like it’s the best piece of singing ever caught on tape. Dylan then looks up at producer Quincy Jones, and says – partly confused, partly joking: “That wasn’t any good!?”

There’s a world of sentiment to be read into that look, among other things a genuine insecurity and a surprising lack of self-confidence, which makes one wonder if he has some kind of savant-like learning (dis)ability.

But more importantly, I see it as a key to the art form that Dylan practices. I believe that what he was rehearsing was not so much 11 seconds of two-note melody, but how to incorporate a specific song expression into his own style; getting a feel for that particular line of song, those particular words set to that particular line of music, and figuring out: what does this particular combination of sounds – language sounds and musical sounds – mean? How can I sing that line convincingly, as if those were my own words, coming out of my own experiences and feelings?

It is as if Dylan needs to internalise whatever he’s doing; he needs to have it under his skin, whatever it takes. Dylan is evidently not the kind of musician who can jump in and do just anything – he would be a terrible studio musician (just as he is a terrible duet singer, except on the few occasions where he has a partner who can handle him, like Joan Baez). But once it’s there, there is no limit to what he can do with it.

When Two Whwaonggs Make One Right

And that is why the many whwaonggs are crucial to his art. Most immediately, they are what give him the unpredictability that makes us hunt down tinny concert recordings from 1991 and go to show after show, year after year. This is the obvious response to whwaongg #1: there is always a pleasant surprise in there somewhere.

But whwaongg #2 is equally rewarding, only on a different level. Many artists, especially those in the risk-taking business, have expressed the fear of the ridiculous. The countertenor James Bowman once reflected that what he does – sing classical music in falsetto in the female voice register – is in fact rather ridiculous, and that the only way he can prevent if from actually being so, is to pretend it’s not.

That is not enough, of course: there needs to be substance as well – Florence Foster Jenkins was not a great singer, no matter how much she pretended. But there is a thin line between godlike authority and ridiculous cockyness, and to balance on that ridge is what every artist must do, one way or the other.

What Dylan does in addition is to lay bare what the risks are, and how he deals with them. He shows us where he might fall, where the hike up the mountain side is boring, and where the views are stunning. He’s like a magician who explains his tricks and still manages to thrill us. That’s why whwaongg #2 is so rewarding.

Happy birthday, Bob!