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Dylan meets Brecht
October 8, 2006 2:19 PM

It's unbelievable that Bob Dylan has gone mainstream with his collaboration with Twyla Tharp on Broadway in the new musical, "The Times They Are A-Changin'."

“It’s bizarre,” said Michael Gray, who wrote “The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia,” this year’s oversized compendium of all things Dylan. “If you like Bob Dylan, why would you like a Broadway musical? There are theater types and there are music types, and they are rarely the same person.”

The article continues:

Sometimes they are. Among the stew of influences that Mr. Dylan identifies in his 2004 memoir, “Chronicles: Volume One,” is the invigorating Off Broadway theater scene that sprang up in Greenwich Village in the early 1960’s, during some of his most formative years. At one point Mr. Dylan raves about a 1963 production he saw of “The Balcony,” a play by the French existentialist Jean Genet.

“It portrayed the world as a mammoth cathouse where chaos rules the universe, where man is alone and abandoned in a meaningless cosmos,” he writes, adding that it would have been as relevant 100 years ago as it is today. “The songs I’d write would be like that, too. They wouldn’t conform to modern ideas.”

After seeing a musical revue in 1963 entitled, "Brecht on Brecht," Dylan writes:


“My little shack in the universe was about to expand into some glorious cathedral, at least in songwriting terms,” he writes, describing his reaction to the music. “They were like folk songs in nature, but unlike folk songs, too, because they were sophisticated.”

He was struck in particular by “Pirate Jenny” from “The Threepenny Opera.” This bracing song, with music by Kurt Weill, tells the story, from the point of view of a maid, of an ominous black ship coming into town.

“Each phrase comes at you from a 10-foot drop, scuttles across the road and then another comes like a punch on the chin,” he writes in “Chronicles.”

“This piece left you flat on your back and it demanded to be taken seriously. It lingered. Woody had never written a song like that,” he says, referring to Woody Guthrie. “It wasn’t a protest or topical song and there was no love for people in it.”

After seeing the show, he writes, he painstakingly took apart the song’s structure, lyrics and melody to figure out what made it work. “It was the form, the free verse association, the structure and disregard for the known certainty of melodic patterns to make it seriously matter, give it its cutting edge. It also has the ideal chorus for the lyrics. I wanted to figure out how to manipulate and control this particular structure and form.”

He continues, “I could see that the type of songs I was leaning towards singing didn’t exist and I began playing with the form, trying to grasp it — trying to make a song that transcended the information in it, the character and plot.”

So, “totally influenced by ‘Pirate Jenny,’ ” he writes, he began experimenting with his own songwriting.

Later that year Mr. Dylan composed “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” the song that Ms. Tharp uses for a title and that is plastered across the marquee of the Brooks Atkinson Theater, where the show, now in previews, is scheduled to open Oct. 26.

Dylan goes mainstream. Yes...The Times They Are A-Changin'.

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