By Stuart Mitchner

Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull
From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol…

Allen Ginsberg called “Idiot Wind” one of Bob Dylan’s “great great prophetic national songs,” with “one rhyme that took in the whole nation.” Dylan wrote it 50 years ago this summer, first recorded it in New York that September around the time Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, and recorded it again in December before releasing the final version in January 1975 on the album Blood On the Tracks, which I’ve been listening to ever since Dylan’s 83rd birthday on Friday, May 24.

That same day, with election year winds blowing the word trial trial trial like “a circle around my skull,” I began rereading Franz Kafka’s The Trial, looking ahead to the centenary of Kafka’s death, June 3, 1924, the day Max Brod took charge of the unpublished work that delivered a great writer to the reading world.

Connections Happen

While listening to Dylan and reading Kafka, I noticed the way the first sentence of The Trial — “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K” — resonates in the first line of “Idiot Wind” — “Someone’s got it in for me, they’re planting stories in the press.” Although there’s no evidence that Dylan himself made such a connection, it’s helpful to have a source like his book Chronicles Volume One (2004) close at hand.

Some of the most unbridled venting Dylan allows himself in Chronicles is about the downside of being famous: “It’s hard to live like this,” he writes in the third chapter. “My house was being battered, ravens constantly croaking ill omens at our door…. I wasn’t the toastmaster of any generation, and that notion needed to be pulled out by the roots …. I didn’t like what was being thrown at me. This main meal of garbage had to be mixed up with some butter and mushrooms and I’d have to go to great lengths to do it. You gotta start somewhere.”

One of the glories of 1975’s “Idiot Wind” is the way it expresses the same dilemma without 2004’s “butter and mushrooms.” It’s especially interesting that before Dylan gets to the passage about the “ill omens” of early fame, he makes this curious claim almost 30 years later: “Eventually I would even record an entire album based on Chekhov short stories — critics thought it was autobiographical.” As I later discovered, the album he’s disguising from the “someones” of the press is Blood On the Tracks, of which Jakob Dylan once said, “The songs are my parents talking.”

Kafka’s Drifter

Listen to “Idiot Wind” often enough, and it will blow you back to John Wesley Harding (1967) and “All Along the Watchtower,” where the thief tells the joker “let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late,” and as the song ends, “Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.” The wonder of the song is that it never ends, it’s still happening, the riders are still approaching, the wind’s still howling almost 60 years later and if you happen to be reading Kafka’s Trial, you find yourself listening with special interest to the next track, “The Drifter’s Escape,” in which he’s carried away from the courtroom, lamenting, “I still do not know what it was that I’ve done wrong.” When the jury “cries out for more,” Dylan slings a bolt of lightning at the courthouse, knocking it “out of shape” and enabling the drifter to escape.

But then Kafka never intended to let Joseph K. escape. As Stanley Corngold observes in Expeditions to Kafka (Bloomsbury Academic 2023), the scene of K.’s “ghastly execution” was composed “right at the outset.”

Memorial Day

On Memorial Day, I’m wearing my uncle’s dog tag and lighting up one of the remaining cigarettes in the crushed, 80-year-old pack of Camels that was found on his body after a freak accident brought down his B-52 near Las Vegas in February 1944. I’m out on the back deck, the sun’s shining, and after thinking about my mother and the soulmale she called Brother and never stopped mourning, I’m haunted by thoughts of Tomorrow Is Forever (1946), the wildly improbable wartime soap opera I saw last night. I’m imagining what Dylan could do with it along the lines of “Brownville Girl,” the story in song that he doesn’t sing so much as declaim, about “this Gregory Peck movie” where Peck played a famous gunfighter “shot down by a hungry kid trying to make a name for himself.”

“This Orson Welles Movie”

If Dylan built a song around Tomorrow is Forever, which covers the era from World War I to the Invasion of Poland in 1939, he might focus on Welles as he did on Peck because this is easily one of the most bizarre films Welles ever over-and-under acted in and that’s saying something. Last weekend I’d looked at clips from his spectacular directorial reimagining of Kafka’s The Trial (1962), and although there’s no indication that Welles had a hand in directing Irving Pichel’s film, he walks away with it, cane in hand, lumbering and looming as only Welles can loom, the dark-bearded embodiment of the European War in a big black overcoat (with a heavy accent), limping massively into a well-to-do American living room to find Claudette Colbert, his wife from 20 years before, married with a grown son (his son, he didn’t know, nor does the son ever know). Welles makes the whole shameless soap opera worth watching right up to the moment he refuses to admit to the wife who’d thought he’d been dead for 20 years that he, Erich Kessler, is in fact her first husband, John Andrew McDonald, come back from the dead thanks to the noble plastic surgeon who rebuilt his war-ravaged face. At the end when his wife finally realizes who he really is, and wants him to admit it, he steadfastly refuses, telling her to forget the past and live in the present, because “tomorrow is forever.”

The Wind’s Still Howling

Long before Dylan imagined it, the “Idiot Wind” was blowing “through the buttons of our coats” and “the letters that we wrote,” the Great War over, the Second on the horizon, Welles making Citizen Kane, Dylan being born, Kafka being published, and, as Dylan sings, “There’s a lone soldier on the cross, smoke pourin’ out of a boxcar door … You didn’t know it, you didn’t think it could be done, in the final end he won the wars …. After losin’ every battle.”

On Hate and Fear

A couple of months ago, on Ovid’s birthday, I put aside a quote from The Unquiet Grave by Palinurus (Cyril Connolly, 1944) that was inspired by a passage from Lucretius on Dogs, Furies, Snakes and burning lakes and all the “vain infernal trumpery”: “There is no hate without fear. Hate is crystallized fear, fear’s dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear is lurking. Thus we hate what threatens our person, our liberty, our privacy, our income, popularity, vanity and our dreams and plans for ourselves.”

Time to Yawp

“I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world,” so sings the “untamed, untranslatable” poet in “Song of Myself 52.” The more I hear of Dylan’s untamed singing in “Blood On the Tracks,” the surer I am that “Idiot Wind” is his own variation on Whitman’s Yawp. You can also hear it in the damn-the-octaves ecstasy of songs like “Tangled Up in Blue” and “A Simple Twist of Fate,” where every word rhyming on “fate” is a whoop and a yawp.

Walt Whitman’s birthday is this Friday, May 31, which means it’s “Time to Yawp” at the Whitman Initiative’s Fifth Annual Virtual “Song of Myself Marathon,” June 2, 3-6 p.m. on Zoom. For more information, go to waltwhitmaninitiative.org.