Something's Gotten Hold of My Chassidic Heart:

having forgotten to remember Empire Burlesque's 25th

anniversary (come Michael, help me)

like those old movie houses that the Hasidim used to picket ...
(from a mystery e-motion picture not featuring Liz Taylor)

The is the story, the untold part of it, of Empire Burlesque: a moving tale of
Chassidic esoter[ot]ica (erotic esoterica and esoteric erotica) whereby mid-
Eighties mid-forties-adult-in-life-crisis Bob Dylan declares to boyhood-silver-
screen-living-dream-fantasy Liz Taylor, the shiksa-Jewess, his unconsummated
desire to make love to her after catching her 'off of' Richard Burton – albeit it
in befuddled conflation with a Lubavitch-lily-among-thorns-Christ.

I would like to apologize profusely, emotionally, to the Dylan world for being
lackadaisical about making, or even remembering, the deadline for celebrating
this much-loved album; I would like to apologize in particular to the
omnipresent, even overwrought, Michael Gray – a man without pit(ne)y or
emotion for the album (Song & Dance Man III, 2000). He's gotta know what's
making my heart sing: you, you, you! But you're not him. He's not you.
(Rimbaud is another.)

According to Wikipedia, Empire Burlesque was released 10 June 1985;

according to amazon.com 8 June. (According to Anthony Varesi in The Bob
Dylan Albums, May.) Opposite sides of the Atlantic? Who cares. In any case,
it does appear I have missed the boat by what has just now become a fourth
day at least. And this brings me to something somewhat fortuitous, kind of:
item 18 of expectingrain's Sunday 13 June 2010 entries, 40 Years of Self
Portrait – posted even at the site linked to, muddywatermagazine.com, some
five days 'late'. Which gives me hope – against hope.

This calendar trip is pretty oppressive; it even seems to have caught the
precision-mongering Mr Brown off guard. (Perhaps he was detained preparing
Sounes's tefillin/phylacteries for playing the role of an attentively sloppy Dylan
biographer? If I don't mix up my metaphors anachronistically.) Orthodox Jews
think they've got it bad. But that is nothing compared to 'suffering under the
law' of the Dylan calendar. (On a recent TV program about the making of the
bible an orthodox Jew conceded the appeal of Jesus in letting the Christian off
the hook of the daily minutiae of the Jewish Law – but he remained unmoved.)

Strangely, 8 June is also the date Self Portrait was released. Can Mr Brown
furnish me with, if not a revised-later-date correction for Empire Burlesque's
release to release me from transgression of the Law of Dylan Calendar by
giving me more time, a 'rabbinical' interpretation of the Law which would still
give me the rest of this month to comply with the Law of Dylan-Calendar-
Anniversary? Then this assessment that you feel in the wind would not be quite
so upside down. Cott willing.
Note how bobdylan.com no longer provides the release dates of albums; tell
me that has nothing to do with an 'American jump' eleven years early (to the
day) – and I'll tell you something to go down like a lead balloon. Or throw
knives at your tree, which you're all far more comfortable with – just like cut-
and-paste having only begun in 2001.

In his possibly overwrought chapter 16, 'Oh Mercy ... the Second Half of the
1980s', including a substantial treatment of Empire Burlesque, in which he
mentions the 'overwrought' Gene Pitney's Town Without Pity in tight
connection with Empire Burlesque's opening song featuring that title as a lyric,
Michael Gray omits mention, even one time, of another Pitney song, whose
resurrection in the form of a duet with Marc Almond somewhat got a hold of
my heart in 1989: Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart. I'm playing it over
and over now. Its refrain, if I'm using the word correctly, 'echoes' the 'You,
you, you, you!' exclamation Dylan utters, and I believe 'cuts and pastes', prior
to official fan permission to do so with the discovery of Confessions of a
Yakuza in the early 00s, into the beautifully sleepy and jaunty then-unreleased
variant of Empire Burlesque's opener which surfaced on the later-released
Bootleg Series I-III (1991), Someone's Got a Hold of My Heart. Although geek
wisdom dictates that the latter is the earlier, it effectively 'drops', albeit
backwards in time, the 'town without pity' lyric and consequently the tight
connection with that Pitney song, Dylan's two versions themselves remaining
tightly connected – with each other and Pitney. Sort of.

Unlike with his assessment of Infidels, where truth is so far off, Gray does in
fact manage to touch, albeit briefly, on Empire Burlesque's thematic 'code in
the lyrics', a term Dylan first used when talking of Norman Raeben's influence
on Blood on the Tracks. Or one important aspect of it: the tension within Dylan
between his Jewish heritage and his 'Christian calling' – arguably more
apparent in that other version of the album's opener (which Michael makes a
point of tightly connecting with the earlier Infidels sessions – in terms of
chronology but ironically in no other way, a characteristic Grayesque slip) as
opposed to the 1985-released Tight Connection to My Heart. For all his
identification on the album of lines from films, whether from first-hand
knowledge or from his army of often-uncritical admirers and emailers and
back-issues of every Dylan magazine under the sun, there are other important,
perhaps more important, sources Gray has not identified in Dylan's '85
charade. Although he spent 'most of the Nineties' on Song & Dance Man III,
he suggests in the chapter including treatment of Empire Burlesque that
'someone with the time' could track down the rest of the film quotes. Hmm.
I'll remember them when I've forgotten all the 'rest' (including working on the
sabbath to cover them all).

Well, perhaps someone with the time or knowledge would like to tell me what
film the following phrase comes from: ' ... like those old movie houses that the
Hasidim used to picket.' Don't stay up too late not getting a life, as Michael
accused Eighties Dylan of. Michael, p 551: 'There were movie houses named
Empire Burlesque.' See also footnote 7 there on mention of the Empire
Burlesque in Philip Roth's The Anatomy Lesson (1983) and a characteristically
misleading explanation by Dylan to Allen Ginsberg. (I'd hate to breach
copyright.) Moving too fast, Michael misses tight connections here.

When I asked Michael in person whether he reads rec.music.dylan he became

rather snotty and dismissive. 'No, I don't, I really just don't ... You could spend
your whole life on it.' While I did not mention the worldwide web more
generally, specifically so to speak, I rather took his dismissiveness to include
websites. And websites he has clearly visited, but either without reading them
properly or cross-checking their information. Actually both, not either.
It could appear that Michael spends his whole life on Blind Willie McTell
(because Dylan did a song 'about' him) and the Bob Dylan Encyclopedia,
especially when you include the latter's manifestation in the form of a web
blog, which serves a particularly valuable dual function for him on what he
dismisses in a footnote in Song & Dance Man III as 'the muddiest
superhighway in the universe'. Well, it has, I only recently notice, got even
muddier as former Dylan musicians and lovers on the road full of mud started
slinging it back at him. Quite some time ago. Sorry if my own life is too short
(and empty) to keep up (or some attacks are poorly 'researched') ....

An artist as immoderately compelling as Bob Dylan is to those he gets his hook into
inevitably attracts oceans of this specious amateurish commentary, as you will know if
you have ever wandered through the websites and newsgroups devoted to him – the
muddiest superhighway in the universe ... [p 566]

(Michael remains unmoved – emotionally and intellectually detached from all

this.) No, Michael, I really just don't – except when I'm checking up on your
sometimes-shoddy research. Won't those amateurs be the same ones reading
this dismissal of them (like with the broadsheet concert reviews attacking the
demeanour of the Dylan fan)? For Spin magazine Dylan told Scott Cohen in
1985, 'If the media don't know about it, it's not happening'. (Off the record or
on?) We could re-work this to, 'If Michael doesn't know about it, it's not
happening'.

Michael isn't going to like this, but on Empire Burlesque Dylan has conflated, in
a monumental act of lyrical genius (naturally), the 'overwrought' Gene Pitney
with the divine(ly underwrought) 'You, you, you' of Hasidic/Chassidic
mysticism; call it cut and paste if you like, some sixteen years 'early'.
(Evidence below for structural reasons; articles like this are challenging to get
down.) Implausible, perhaps, if not for the tight 'town without pity' lyric
connection with the Pitney song of that title – which Michael identifies in tight
connection with Tight Connection to My Heart. Yet Someone's Got a Hold of My
Heart 'loses' that – backwards in time. But it has a title very similar to that
other Pitney song. In addition to the shared refrain line?

Sources, precise, for the Chassidic divine 'You' as an influence on Dylan at the
time? Well, certainly not from me before complimentary copies of all Michael's
tomes arrive in the post – in addition to the Chronicles index (I'm not bothered
about the signature – but I am wondering about the professional indexing
qualification); considering that mudcake creatures on the superhighway are,
and will be, appropriated into Michael's subsequent revisions – in this lifetime
or another. Hand me my unraveling shoes (much hipper than the Brit double
'l'). For his friends Michael would turn his pockets inside out. But that is
another subject. (Or is it?)

But going by the view counts on Scribd, it seems most of you are far more
interested, on an astronomical scale, in Dylan taking a piss at a UK motorway-
services urinal, albeit ironically during the very period in which Michael tells us
Dylan was 'pissing away his stature as an artist'. All over the Chassidim. His
stature, not his piss. But he seems to have been pissing with the Chassidim
rather than on or at them, spiritually speaking; whether quite in tandem or not
I'll leave to the experts on Dylan's relationship to his 'heritage' and 'roots'.
Such as Michael. But, quite honestly, I'd prefer him to leave that to Dylan's
Jewish fans – the ones from whom, some of them, he misappropriates material
– 'specious' material. Michael has a tendency, not unlike Richard Dawkins, to
branch out suddenly into other fields he assumes his known one automatically
qualifies him for. But if you can take the muddy flak, why not?

Back to the sources for the divine 'you, you, you' of Chassidic mysticism. Well
now that the cat is out of the bag, what are you waiting for? You've got Scott
Warmuth, given that you like it to be served up on a virtual plate. But then
there's my articles I wrote a few years ago. If I access my CDRWs, will it be as
simple as that, or will they be corrupted? And if not, will I want to keep on and
on, as is my wont, perfecting them – in a way that a certain genius with sloppy
prose syntax who still, quite ludicrously, uses a typewriter could never hope to
do because of the diabolical combination of his impatience on the one hand
and his obsolete technology on the other? (In fact, Dylan's publisher's
tolerance of his use of obsolete and impractical technology parallels the
Lubavitch-Chassidim's falling over themselves to have him do Torah readings
and attend Yom Kippur services and so on without extracting any renunciation
of Jesus Christ: only Dylan could get away with either. The Torah actually
requires Dylan to be stoned to death for failing to renounce Jesus. Dylan is
certainly not shomer shabbat. As for copy editors, which Dylan seems to have
skirted around, they work only from electronic format. No one else would get a
book published like that.)

Piss stature; piss stats.

If Michael wants an unemotional town without the overwrought Pitney, he'd

better pack his bags and head straight for the foreign shores of Babylon (which
has about the same number as Germany). Something is dragging my soul to a
beautiful land. Something has invaded my night ...

On this 25th anniversary of Empire Burlesque I feel, er, emotional, choked up

even. Michael has a penchant, when dismissing in vitriolic manner Dylan songs
and albums he doesn't like, for snarky (a word I picked up from the Yanks)
puns (more of which in due coarse); but sometimes I wonder if they are in fact
laden with dramatic irony – like a gift (Dylan gave 'Sting' a bullet at his 40th
birthday party). Of Emotionally Yours he said, p 572:

The 'And' becomes 'But' to signal the song's end. Nothing else moves, in any sense.
But, in addition to the moving power of Liz Taylor (below the belt), for whom
the song was written, I hear (source?1), the word 'emote' is etymologically
rooted in, strangely enough, emotion, moving out(wards), movement,
migration, which is related to exile, a significant motif in the album. 'I bin to
Babylon and I got to confess ... ' (Babylon equalling or approximating to a
town without pity – however 'speciously'). The Jewish experience. Michael
could be learning, even yearning, to see behind the closed doors of Dylan's
clumsy attempt (however short of Michael's linguistic glory it may fall) at
impressionistic use of language to 'convey' elements of the Jewish experience.
(He had to move fast to get Song & Dance Man III out - as fast as the Jews in
the Exodus.) I also believe Dylan, having had some oriental Madame Butterfly
thing going on, as the Tight Connection video corroborates, had also been
'unraveling' to the 'impressionist' composers, namely Maurice Ravel. And here
I believe the frequency of the word 'dream' or 'dreaming' on the album is
significant. In Some Other Kinds of Songs ... (jacket notes), Dylan wrote:

some of my friends
my very best
have even looked
like the japanese
at certain times
i myself think they're
grand ... make great radios
do you ever see liz taylor
down there
pack is heavy ...

Does Dylan see Liz as having oriental features? Ravel was fascinated by and
influenced by the Orient, seeking to fuse East and West in his music. (I almost
digress, but not really.) And what the Empire Burlesque 'code in the lyrics'
does is seek to explore a tension, a dialectic, between, amongst other things,
knowledge and learning on the one hand, and yearning and emotion on the
other. (Shadows and light, too.) East and West?

Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second.

Maurice Ravel

Pitney:

Something's gotten hold of my heart

Keeping my soul and my senses apart ...

This very lyric may have been Dylan's inspiration for the Empire Burlesque
'code in the lyrics', the underlying conceptual core. Indeed, the second verse of
the album's opener, albeit in its (paradoxically) more tightly Pitneyesque
connection-manifestation on the Bootleg Series, tells us this:

1
Ken Brooks says in Bob Dylan: the Man in Him (1999), a syntactically challenging work, on p 188, that Emotionally
Yours 'was written for Elizabeth Taylor. Bob and Michael Jackson sang a duet at her 55th birthday party.' But as she was
born in 1932, that would have been in 1987 – two years after Empire Burlesque. This is one for the geeks, not me.
Gettin’ harder and harder to recognize the trap
Too much information about nothin’
Too much educated rap
It’s just like you told me, just like you said it would be

In his Ginsberg biography, Barry Miles, no apparent fan of Dylan or his

'amphetamine babble', records a conversation between Ginsberg and Dylan,
which appears to have been around 1990, though I am not sure:

Allen: Did you study kabbalah?

Bob: Well, yeah, but it's complicated and not very satisfactory.

Too much educated rap from the Lubavitch-Chassidim, those most intellectual
of Hasid 'simpletons'? A too-tight connection, as biographer Heylin reported
Helena Springs to have commented on Dylan's Vineyard experience? Specious
amateurish commentary from me? Every street is crooked (like a literal-
figurative Jerusalem? see Revelation 11:8)?

Someone’s got a hold of my heart

Someone’s got a hold of my heart
Someone’s got a hold of my heart
You—[you, you, you]
Yeah, you got a hold of my heart ...

(Bobdylan.com does not care for more than one 'you'.) Indeed, in typical
Dylan-paradox style, the divine 'you, you, you' of Chassidic mysticism may in
'fact' be Christ. The messianic Jewess Ronnie Keohane was very keen to
identify the 'lily among thorns' as Christ; and allegorical interpretation of the
Song of Solomon has of course so identified the lily among thorns therein.
What got a hold of Dylan's heart might just have been a Lubavitch Christ. Is
that such Chabad idea after all? And what could be more 'perversely' Dylan,
who is never happier than when miserably boxed within tight paradox,
nowhere to escape, by 'they'? Sugar Town-Mississippi?

On the subject of exact observance of anniversaries, Karl Erik of the

expectingrain website cannot be moved on the subject, remaining splendidly
aloof in all his editorial detachment – trigger-happy enough as he may be
whenever he gets anything he likes (or has not fully read).

Which reminds me, to remember. To learn not to forget. Important events in

the calendar: Jewish, Christian and Dylan. Involving blood, bread and wine.
After all, I don't wanna see the 'Dylan world' bleed. Empire Burlesque is strewn
with ambiguous (of course) allusions, even references, to Jewish 'or' Christian,
dare I say Judaeo-Christian (no such thing, say the rabbis), ritual and
sacrament. What do Jews do on holy days? Remember and remind themselves
and each other. Of what? Not to forget. Not to forget what? Well, various
things excluding a lily among thorns (though a rose of Sharon may be more up
the Jewish street).
There's plenty going on in Empire Burlesque. And over the heads of
intellectuals ill-disposed to emotionalism (which, paradoxically, the Chassidim
are also known for; not all Chassidic sects are the same). But Michael was far
more interested in getting overwrought, in over-emoting (about how unmoved
he was), about lines from films, repetitive shallow lyrics and 'baby talk' – this
latter being a joke that, for all his alertness to and indulgence in language and
reflexivity, he appears to have missed. Quit now. Emotionally Yours, says
Michael, p 571:

makes no comment, other than by default, since anyone alert to language themselves
will be warned off by the clumsy untruth at its core.

(Michael cuts to the core – though I did not think untruths had cores. How
many layers of meaning does wanting to catch Liz Taylor 'off of' Richard Burton
and make love to her really require?) So why emote about it so much? As I
forgot, in my irreligiousness, the album's 25th anniversary, it seems too late to
make amends or atone. Even with blood. Perhaps some lily among thorns
might consider remembering to remind himself or herself to teach me and
reach me about learning not to forget next time, in another 25 years when it
will be Empire Burlesque's jubilee. Baby. Do CDRWs keep that long?

If so, then we might be seein' the real Empire Burlesque at last? (As if you
needed me.) Sorry I missed it and the opportunity to do it justice – under the
Law. Pity about those articles of mine – revealing sources and going into more
detail and analysis of Dylan's Eighties dearth of 'language alertness'. Hey, beat
the devil out of me. But now for the climactic big bang (that Sounes so teased
Mr Brown with but never delivered – but only because his biography was
littered with little more than [little] bangs, its only unifying concept): clumsy
sexual intercourse with Liz Taylor('s well-worn core).

By Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev

(1740 - 1810)
English version by Perle Besserman

Where I wander -- You!

Where I ponder -- You!
Only You everywhere, You, always You.
You, You, You.
When I am gladdened -- You!
And when I am saddened -- You!
Only You, everywhere You!
You, You, You.
Sky is You!
Earth is You!
You above! You below!
In every trend, at every end,
Only You, everywhere You!

Chassidic panentheism. Even pantheism, maybe – at every hairpin curve. (Not

very trendy in 1985.) I can feel it in the dust of Song & Dance Man III. I
found the above on the web, last night, but I might prefer this version, slightly
different, which I have since last night dug up off CDRW (but I'm not giving
you everything – for the fore-stated reasons). Quote from a reference work:

The rabbi of Berdichev used to sing ‘The Song of You’, part of which is as follows.

Where I wander—You!
Where I ponder—You!
Only You, You again, always You!
You! You! You!
When I am gladdened—You!
When I am saddened—You!
Only You, You again, always You!
You! You! You!
Sky is You! Earth is You!
You above! You below!
In every trend, at every end,
Only You, You again, always You!
You! You! You!
([source snipped – because mud that goes around comes around, and doesn't] p 212)

Compare the following couplet from the official album's When the Night Comes
Falling from the Sky, second half of the fourth verse, with the more 'Chassidic'
one. Empire Burlesque:

You’ll know all about it, love

It’ll fit you like a glove
When the night comes falling from the sky.

This 'becomes' something like as follows in beautifully Dylanesque (still-

structured) free-form I'm-not-there conflation:

You’ll know everything my/I knove

Down below and up above ...

Or does it? (Actually, I more than suspect this lyric was earlier, especially
should the song have been, like Someone's Got a Hold of My Heart, originally
part of the Infidels sessions, though I think not – but I cannot be bothered to
research this, yet another thing, for the moment. It's just all too much just for
one thousand invisible readers who aren't paying my bills or even going to
comment on my hard work. To re-work a saying of my father's, why have Mr
Brown and bark yourself? You geeks will know anyway.) But do let this clean-
cut kid know if my hearing is upside down. What's up is down. What isn't is.
Indeed, Gene Pitney sings:

Cutting it's way through my dreams like a knife

Turning me up, and turning me down
Making me smile, and making me frown ...

Dylan's 'lexicon'. On 'development of American burlesque', Wikipedia states:

Put simply, burlesque means "in an upside down style". Like its cousin, commedia
dell'arte, burlesque turns social norms head over heels. Burlesque is a style of live
entertainment that encompasses pastiche, parody, and wit.

'Code in the lyrics'. Does it never occur to the album's detractors that Dylan
was 'taking the piss out of' the Eighties? That was obvious to me as soon as I
saw the cover. What I am going to do here is paste an excerpt from an old
article from a few years ago, which nobody has ever seen and which effectively
expands on the immediately foregoing, above and below so to speak, about
When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky.

The learned Jonath-n Cott in his book Dylan (1985), p 240:

In thinking about Bob Dylan and his protean and mercurial ways, I’m reminded of a saying of the
late-eighteenth-century Hasidic master Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav:

“The world is like a revolving die, and everything turns over, and man changes to angel and angel
to man, and the head to the foot and the foot to the head. So all things turn over and revolve and
are changed, this into that and that into this2, what is above to what is beneath and what is
beneath to what is above. For in the root all is one, and in the transformation and return of things
redemption is enclosed.”

Nice aphorism. Just to reiterate (below and above):

You above! You below!

In every trend, at every end,

The real Hasidic Bob at last?

Didn't I rise above it all for you,

The most unfortunate circumstances?

Maybe not. But let’s explore that, to quote a phrase from Idiot Wind, ‘everything is a little
upside down’ aspect diffused throughout Empire Burlesque’s songs. Something is
Burning, Baby:

I can feel it in the wind and it's upside down

I can feel it in the dust as I get off the bus on the outskirts of town
I've had the Mexico City blues since the last hairpin curve

And, Clean-Cut Kid:

They said what's up is down, they said what isn't is

They put ideas in his head he thought were his

Who did? Are these Hasidic thoughts mine? Who am I? Rimbaud or another? [But
getting back to that second half of fourth verse of] When the Night Comes Falling
from the Sky, the Empire Burlesque version:

I can't provide for you no easy answers,

Who are you that I should have to lie?
You'll know all about it, love,
It'll fit you like a glove
When the night comes falling from the sky.

2
Christian into Jew and Jew into Christian?
The messianic nightfall. Nightfall with a twist. Evangelical glee, as Michael put it
concerning Precious Angel’s ‘can they imagine the darkness’, now replaced, if Ginsberg is
to be believed, with ‘Jehovaic theism’ – replete with messianic posturing gone mad.

The Bootleg Series version, if I hear(d) and remember it ‘correctly’ [I’m not currently able to
check at all, technology wise], goes like this:

You'll know everything I know,

down below and up above

But that is mentally translated, when it sounds, to me, more like:

You'll know everything I knove, down below and up above

(or is it: “You'll know everything [my?] I know, up below and down above”?)
Which obviously rhymes better, although not as real English, and is, would be, evocative
of the love/glove lyric of the half- or fully-Bake(de)rised version. Arthur Baker. In any
case, it is, to my ears, like he is somehow rhyming, in his quasi-garbled diction, according
to the same ove/ove pattern we get on Empire Burlesque whether it comes out technically
as English or not. Or trying to3. So he is achieving or contriving an ove/ove or ow/ow
pattern even if words as we knove them get mangled in the ‘process’4. Did it come off,
anyway? Why didn’t Dylan just sing:

You'll know everything I know, up above and down below(?)

Maybe he did, but I am not convinced. Or was it:

You'll know everything I know, down above and up below(?)

Or:

You'll knove everything I know, down belove and up abow(?)

Etc? My beloved lily among the garbled dictions.

I always found the diction beautifully confusing and hypnotic in terms of the mental
transpositions, conflations and revolutions going on within my brain both within this version
and between the two; even the Empire Burlesque one has a touch of this know-love
ambiguity to my ears at least. So Dylan that. I'm a Brit, honorary at least, but I can still
hear the lyrics better than AJ Weberman. And of course the Song of Solomon is 'about'
'knowing' someone in the biblical sense. Didn't Joan Baez cover Just Like a Woman in a
Dylan voice? 'Everybody knoves'. Or am I getting confused with Simple Tvist of Vate?

Of course the ambiguous diction constitutes a 'beautiful', even 'genius' for you geeks,
outworking of the Nachman quotation about revolving: above, below; below, above - for in
the root all is one. (Even if it's just an accident. Compare Terry Kelly:

In certain moods, I feel some Dylan criticism is ultimately a form of intellectual wishful thinking, with
academics discerning literary structures and intentions, tropes and apparent lyrical significance
which are more truly the result of happenstance, serendipity, plain good luck and the exigencies of
3
Cf Gray p 595 on Everything is Broken as shambolic unrehearsed mumble-syllables: ' … resorts instead to the
deliberate slurring of non-words – of feigning words … '
4
Cf Robert Shelton, who somewhere marvelled at Dylan’s rhyming of Buenos Aires with January in Groom Still
Waiting at the Altar
rhyme than part of any grand artistic game plan5.

Well, I'm actually trying to discern what's there. As for the esoterica, I'll leave that to Prof
Ricks.) But would that include Vineyard and Louvre-itch6 in its scope as one single
tangled-up 'point of view' concerning which both sides, in an extra-Dylanological inversion
of Tangled Up in Blue, feel very far from ‘the same’ way? That's for a different article.

In fact, let's take a closer look at that know-love thing going on seemingly even on the
album. Compare the versions between the second half of the second verse. Empire
Burlesque version:

Well, I've walked two hundred miles, now look me over,

It's the end of the chase and the moon is high.
It won't matter who loves7 who,
You'll love me or I'll love you
When the night comes falling from the sky.

So says the website anyway. Now the Bootleg Series version (not documented at
bobdylan.com because, unlike the opening song of Empire Burlesque, there is no
discrepancy in title between the two versions), which seems to segue from ‘know’ to ‘love’,
but, hey, who knoves for sure? (Especially when your old cassette broke and you haven't
replaced it with a CD.) I’m slightly deaf in one ear (but not as deaf as AJ – although he
might be onto something with the camp clothes/cat clothes, mama).

It won't matter who knows who,

You'll love me or I'll love you
When the night comes falling from the sky.

Or is it:

It won't matter who knoves who,

You'll knove me or I'll love you
When the night comes falling from the sky.

Or whatever confusing combination thereof. Was Dylan cobbling together Hasidic

aphorisms, before deciding to go more with the film quotations? Is the work accessible
purely in terms of the work itself? Who knoves. Or cares.

But getting back to Michael the Omnipresent, whose spun web now extends
even beyond the real world and into the virtual which he at one time professed
to despise before ultimately being engulfed by its allure as a marketing tool,
not to mention inescapable omnipresence (like a 'series of mouths'), he writes
on pp 254-5:

There was nothing deranged, or very interesting, about Jonathon Cott's half-way
house book Dylan (1985) but the photos were terrific.

Nice Michaelesque put-down there; accentuate the positive. 'I never asked you
to set yourself up for a fall'. And neither did Jonath-n. I guess language just
isn't Cott's bag (of tricks); especially since he lost his memory – as Michael
5
Ginsberg once said Dylan is not afraid to improvise and 'make 'em up on stage'.
6
Lubavitch
7
Even this sounds like ‘knoves’
kindly notes and expands upon elsewhere (the 'encyclopedia'?). As for
Michael's half-way movie-house attention span for the etymology of
'burlesque', he moved too fast – but really didn't have to.

Did the loquacious laconic Jonath-n Cott finalize that book for his publisher
prior to release of Empire Burlesque8? Or after? I don't recall him mentioning
the album in the book, which an acquaintance lent to me a few years ago, so I
no longer have access. But the sequencing here is definitely one for Mr Brown,
not me; I like to race on like Dylan, one of the unworthy swift. As Clint said, 'A
man has got to know his limitations'. Maybe this time tomorrow I'll know
better, when my memory is not so short as Cott's. (Elsewhere Michael tells us
about Cott's loss of memory and his book about it, a world where life and
death are memorized, while still forgetting9, or being insufficiently alert to,
something that would have made his burlesque chapter on the second half of
the Eighties more nearly encyclopedic – albeit without ever fully unraveling.
Baby, baby, baby. Oh, did I say that already? We could question Cott on the
sea of [his] memory, but what would be the point?)

Michael could, in addition to mooing wherever he's chewing (p 569), be

w*ndering whe*ever he's pondering. Where I wonder about Dylan, Michael.
Where I ponder Dylan, Michael. Michael, above, below, everywhere – like a
jack-in-the-box. Always Michael. Sky is Michael, earth is Michael, Bob is
Michael (Michael is Bob). Though I am flirting with the possibility of escape. If
only. (But on reflection, in my tear-drops, this article is unavoidably best read
on the back of Michael's [inescapable] chapter, as his exhaustive treatment
may in fact ultimately be more exhausting than exhaustive, albeit very
interesting and informative. It is, after all, unscholarly to ignore
previous/concurrent scholars. Not that I am one, personally. I am, you
understand, you know, too emotional, too emotive. Weberman calls himself
one.) He'll know everything Bob knove, down below and up above. Don't look
for Bob, he'll see you ...

And I guess John Gibbens, champion of 'fearful symmetry' throughout Dylan,

should have known better (seems he had some rotten nights in 1985) than to
picket Empire Burlesque:

I started writing about Dylan in the mid-1980s, at a time when he was really an
embarrassment to all but loyal diehards10. He made a record called Empire Burlesque:
“I know it was all a big joke,” he sings, “whatever it was all about.”

But he wasn't singing about the album, even if in 'gonna quit this baby talk
now' he may have been. Baby. But I appreciate John's insights in various
areas, some of which I had already seen myself, perhaps slightly differently,
and others not; we see different things according to our interests and
experiences. I also appreciate Scott Warmuth's appropriation, brazen
plagiarism even, of Greil Marcus's term 'building a richer house' - even if what

8
I think the commentary finishes with Infidels
9
some six years on from Song & Dance Man III's publication
10
It was actually the die-hards who picketed the album; the casual fans liked it; my mother said, 'That sounds like the
best thing he's ever done'.
a song really means is what it means to 'you, you, you'. So why are you
reading this? Was Empire Burlesque, which the garrulous Michael found to be
so garrulous, a charade? Certainly. Check out the etymology:

1776, from Fr. charade (18c.), from Prov. charrado "long talk, chatter," of obscure
origin, perhaps from charrar "to chatter, gossip," of echoic origin. Cf. It. ciarlare, Sp.
charlar "to talk, prattle." Originally not silent, but relying on enigmatic descriptions of
the words or syllables; the silent form was dumb charades. Welsh siarad obviously is
a loan-word from French or English, but its meaning of "speak, a talk" is closer to the
Provencal original.

In Empire Burlesque's Chassidic Bob, Bob, Bob I am 'lost for a lifetime' after
this 25th anniversary I forgot to remember in time - in another world where it
is memorized. Self righteously. Is Mr Brown going to release me, through
facts or legitimate rabbinical re-working of them, from suffering under the law?

I'm gonna quit this baby talk now. So a mystery quote:

Do you know who the Christ was? A simple Jew like your father. A kind of Hasid.

Not nearly as intellectual as the Chabad-Lubavitch Chassidim. (Or, for that

matter, Madonna, Mick Jagger and Robert De Niro; we'll have the esoterica,
but screw the repentance. Nothing new under the sun since Eden's tree of
knowledge. Esoteric Buddhism.) Dumb-ass Dylan couldn't get his pea-brain
around the abstruse mystical concepts – in a town without Pitney. So he
copped out by conflating Gene Pitney with Chassidic mysticism. Who would
have thought it? Not Michael. Yes, Eighties Dylan sank even lower than even
Michael realized: making a rabbi out of the overwrought Gene Pitney. So why
did thick-as-shit Dylan have so much trouble learning and knowing abstruse
kabbalistic concepts? Here is why: Max Dimont in (if I haven't smoked my
eyelids or called my blood wine here, conflating or mis-attributing sources like
a certain genius in his memoir) Indestructible Jews p 230:

By mid-eighteenth century, Hasidism was in decline. It fell because the Hasids were
ignoramuses, incapable of thought beyond an aphorism.

Or, you might say, a paradox. Enter Lubavitch-Chassidim (that is for another
article). By the mid-Eighties, Dylan was in decline – say the experts. He
declined (fell short of Michael's glory) because he had become an ignoramus,
incapable of thought beyond a movie quote – which is all Empire Burlesque
consists of. Oh, what Dylan had been reading at the time? Put it like this: if
Michael doesn't know about it, it's not happening – just 'like those old movie
houses that the Hasidim used to picket'. (Let Michael's worldwide network of
unpaid moles, who then pay him for the privilege of being able to see their
submissions reflected in the sweat-drops of his print, get to work on that.
Thanks to the muddiest superhighway in the universe and its Dylan-geekdom
predecessor, Bob Dylan fanzines, the films from which Dylan draws, some of
them, are well known. Ken Brooks says, in Bob Dylan: the Man in Him (1999)
p 186:
I was reliably informed that Bob had inserted into the lyrics at least eight lines from
Humphrey Bogart films. Key Largo, The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep were all used,
but surely lines from Bob's songs could be extracted from many films. On the other
hand Bob might just be playing another of his games with us. If the latter is true then
it really must have been a person with a brilliant film brain that located them. All you
have to do dear reader is find them, here is one, “I'll have some rotten nights, but
that will pass”, The Maltese Falcon, now its your turn.)

Emote, move, movie, e-motion picture – wherever you're traveling, or, if

outside the US, travelling (to foreign shores). If you don't see the etymological
and thematic connections, just get in touch with someone 'alert to language'
like Michael or consult a good dictionary. Who knoves; he may get round to
laying on theme weekends on it; he could be unraveling. (Ever gone the
opposite of what the experts say? Tell me.) But move fast – the night might
come fallin' from the sky ...

Come Michael, help me (and remind me in 25 years; 'maybe you'll be around')

– instead of (emotively) picketing Empire Burlesque ...

Emotionally Liz Taylor's (where he once begun)

Now Eisenhower, he's a Russian spy,

Lincoln, Jefferson and that Roosevelt guy.
To my knowledge there's just one man
That's really a true American: George Lincoln Rockwell.
I know for a fact he hates Commies cus he picketed the movie Exodus.

'Appendix'

John Gibbens: on 'fearful symmetry':

The larger form is the artist’s body of work and also the “order of words” that
Northrop Frye speaks of, the total form of literature.

Add up all the 'baby's on Empire Burlesque to get a secret kabbalistic-code

number? Big joking aside, in fact, just like I expected, the number of these
comes to exactly 36, which is, according to Chassidic lore, the number of
righteous men, or 'worthy', in each generation, 'known' (incognito) as the
tzaddikim. Any one individual tzaddik of these 36 may be the Messiah. But
only if the generation is 'worthy'. This is alluded to in I and I on Infidels, the
preceding album. But the unworthy experts on Dylan's Eighties work,
incapable of thought beyond a Dylan aphorism, failed to divide the word of
truth. And so we get biographer Sounes dismissing Dylan's Eighties work, in a
garrulous contribution to a BBC6 radio program in December 2009, called Bob
Dylan's Changing Times, as having 'no unifying concepts'.

As for Michael's delight in picking up on Dylan's emotionalist breadcrumb sins

(or emotionalist vacuum) in Empire Burlesque, he would do well to atone for
his own sins of omission, critical or otherwise.
Ravel prefaces Tom Thumb with a quote from Perrault: “He thought he would easily
find his way, thanks to the bread he had scattered wherever he had passed, but he
was quite surprised when he couldn’t see even a single crumb of it. Birds had come
along and eaten every bit.” Ravel shows us Tom Thumb’s meanderings—the meter
changes often and unpredictably—and also, unforgettably, the birds making off with
the crumbs.

Michael, who lost his way on the Eighties, should watch out for birds of prey
(and pray. But not pray, which isn't his bag of tricks. Why? Because people in
the bible lived, mythically, to implausible ages like 120. Well, some people live
to 110 even today!). Time to unravel – 'all across the telegraph' since 1987.
My mother's precious birthday money lining Michael's savvy and not-so-savvy
pockets (from the proceeds of inside-out concepts); isn't marketing a powerful
tool when focused on people not sure what to buy? Somewhere in Michael's co-
edited volume named after that lyric, someone berates Emotionally Yours's
'unraveling' as serving no purpose other than a convenient rhyme. (I just don't
think they could Handel it; Michael handled Infidels poorly – by failing to see
the album as a whole, which is why he gave the songs other than Jokerman
cursory treatment. He pissed away his stature as a critic – in a small-minded
cheating kind of way.)

Postscript

(Note that putting song titles and so on in quotes is too much hassle unless
you want to pay me ... )

I just spotted something – beat Mr Brown to it. Pitney's original version in

1967 does not feature the 'you, you, you' line that the 1989 duet with Marc
Almond does. Empire Burlesque was 1985. Anachronism. Sheez – glad I
spotted that before Mr Brown did. Can't be too careful. I guess what's up is
down, what isn't is, and somebody put ideas in my head that I thought were
mine. I can feel it in the wind and it's upside down. My reality and credibility as
a Dylanologist forever cast to the wind the instant I go public and preach. (Did
Dylan put ideas in Pitney's head that he thought were his? But thanks in any
case to Mr Brown for putting an idea in mine – even though it backfired.) ...
Oh, well. Dylanology is a pile of shit – think I'll give it up. (As AJ told me in
December, 'This is the last book I ever write on that sicko'. Physician heal
thyself – with a shot of love.)

I live in another (dream)world where Empire Burlesque is memorized,

remembered (albeit too little too late) ...

I'm gonna get my coat (finally, my Ricksian final end) ...

Copyright 2010 Paul Kirkman, 'messianic' Dylanologist. All rights reserved