'A ballad for a friend': Wilentz writes an essay for Bob Dylan

As hard as he may try, Bob Dylan can't seem to escape Princeton. The poet-songwriter received an honorary degree from the University in June 1970 and wrote his song "Day of the Locusts" based on the event — hint to those who picked the Frist Campus Center quotes: The comparison of Princeton Commencement to the Apocalypse is not a complimentary one.

He gave a concert in Dillon Gymnasium on Nov. 17, 2000 as part of senior week. And now, Sean Wilentz, history professor and head of the American studies program, has written one of the features on bobdylan.com—an essay on Dylan's latest album, "Love and Theft."

Wilentz, who grew up in Greenwich Village in Manhattan when it was Dylan's haunt, said "Dylan's people" contacted him to write the essay.

"I got an e-mail sometime in mid-to-late August," he said. "They asked if I would be interested in writing a piece [about the new album]. I had gotten an advance copy and loved it, so I jumped at the chance."

Personal knowledge of Dylan's career persuaded Wilentz to do the job.

"When I was a little kid [in Greenwich Village], he was around all the time," Wilentz said. It was in Wilentz's uncle's apartment, above The Eighth Street Bookshop, that Dylan met Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who proved a strong influence on Dylan's music.

"When he was here [last year], we renewed a very old acquaintanceship," Wilentz said. "I just know the story of his life pretty well as far as it's been written about."

Wilentz's essay discusses the new album's title, "Love and Theft," and its relation to Eric Lott's book of the same name that discusses "the origins and character of American blackface minstrelsy," as Wilentz describes it.

In Blackface minstrelsy, a phenomenon of the early nineteenth century, Wilentz writes, "young working-class white men from the North began imitating Southern slaves on stage," both out of racism and "envy and desire and love."

Throughout the rest of his essay, Wilentz explicates the idea of theft — of form, material and identity — in Dylan's music, and especially in "Love and Theft." He describes Dylan's skilled adoption of folk, blues and country, his poetic rhythm, and his allusions to Tennessee Williams, Donizetti, Shakespeare and the Bible.

Dylan has fun with the "theft" Wilentz describes, and openly acknowledges it. At a performance in Pittsburgh in 1991, he said, "Anyway, got to apologize to Neil Young for copy, ... er ... stealing his harmonica riff. Thanks Neil!"

Even though the connection of "Love and Theft" and minstrelsy seems intentional, and Wilentz's essay outlines the reference so conscientiously, Wilentz is reluctant to state whether Dylan meant the link.

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"God knows whether he meant it. Certainly he gives me enough hints from the title on out to put him in that frame. But it's just one way of understanding what he does. I think it's a useful way, an informative way," Wilentz said. "That connection [to the minstrel] made sense to me, put his whole style into context into a way I haven't quite thought about before."

Wilentz has reason to be so careful; maddeningly evasive about the meanings and thought behind his songs, Dylan sometimes seems amused at his fans' efforts to understand them. In an interview in Playboy in March 1978, he said, "If I wasn't Bob Dylan, I'd probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself."

"Dylan is a very conscious craftsman," Wilentz added. "And his craft has gotten larger and larger and larger over time. He's very aware of his connection to many different parts of American cultural life."

The strength of Dylan's latest music, Wilentz writes in his article, is unrivaled by any of his previous works. Ironically, it may be in part Dylan's efforts to shun the spotlight that could win him a lasting place as an American icon.

"He denounces idolhood," Wilentz said. "He didn't become a graven image to understand and then move on. He's recreated himself repeatedly, musically and spiritually."

It seems that the meaning of words written on his honorary degree more than 30 years ago still seem not only to hold true, but to have expanded:

"As one of the most creative popular musicians of the last decade, he has based his techniques in the arts of the common people of our past and torn his appeals for human compassion from the experience of the dispossessed.

"Paradoxically, though known to millions, he shuns publicity and organizations, preferring the solidarity of his family and isolation from the world. Although he is now approaching the perilous age of 30, his music remains the authentic expression of the disturbed and concerned conscience of young America."

More than the authentic expression of young America, Wilentz implies in his essay, Dylan is the expression of all parts of America, from all times, the early nineteenth century to the present.

And he still can't seem to shed that Princeton connection.