Bob Dylan's Creative Notes
"dry vermouth / and you’ll tell the truth"
‘Tis the season to write about Bob Dylan, considering that a new movie about the Nobel-Prize winning, genre-defying artist will be in theaters next week.
I’d guess that Dylan is right when he claims the film will offer “a version of me.”1 I’ve wanted to write about Dylan’s notes for a while, and now feels like the perfect time. I’m excited to share a few secrets to Dylan’s creativity hidden in his notes.
Dylan’s Working Methods
According to his friends, Dylan was always scribbling in his notebooks. Sybil Weinberger recalls how Dylan would stop on a street corner to note ideas. “It was almost like he couldn’t write fast enough,” she recalls.2 Other friends talk about how Dylan wrote lyrics to multiple songs at once, flipping through his notebook.3
Dylan, himself, explained that he’d collect phrases and ideas in his notebooks.
I just jot down little phrases and things I overhear, people talking to me, stuff like that.4
If Dylan likes the sound of something, he’ll capture it in one of his notebooks or on a scrap of paper because he knows he might use it later.
Bob would work with whatever writing tools were at his disposal. He was known to use napkins, hotel stationary, or the back of a bank deposit slip:
Dylan’s Notes for “Like A Rolling Stone”
Bob Dylan would be the first to claim that creativity is shrouded in mystery—even he doesn’t always know where his songs originate. As he explained while discussing “Like a Rolling Stone”:
It’s like a ghost is writing a song like that, it gives you the song and it goes away. You don’t know what it means. Except that the ghost picked me to write the song.5
It’s not as though Dylan can just sit down and write a classic, era-defining song. Rather, ideas percolate in his mind. Consider that “Like a Rolling Stone” started out as a twelve-page draft that Dylan described as a “long piece of vomit.”6
Even when we get to a later four-page version, we find lyrics that didn’t make the final cut, for example instead of “You used to laugh about / Everybody that was hanging out” Dylan considered
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was down and out
before crossing out the last three words and underlining “hanging out,” signaling his final choice.
A second page of this draft has the wonderful, though discarded lines
dry vermouth
and you’ll tell the truth
These pages reveal Dylan playing with rhymes to match that famous refrain.7 For example, here, he plays with alternate rhymes for “How does it feel?”
How does it feel to be on your own
It feels real (Dog-bone)
Does it feel real
newno direction homewhen the weeks have flown
Shut up and Deal like a Rolling Stone
Get down and kneel
Raw deal
Watch Dylan perform “Like a Rolling Stone,” and revel in the perfection of the finished work:
Dylan’s Unconscious and the Telescope Technique
When Dylan claims a “ghost” wrote “Like a Rolling Stone,” it’s more likely that his unconscious did the work. As he explained in another interview,
It’s nice to be able to put yourself in an environment where you can completely accept all the unconscious stuff that comes to you from your inner workings of your mind. And block yourself off to where you can control it all, take it down…8
Dylan’s unconscious mind provides ample creative grist because Dylan feeds it well.9 He has a talent for absorbing information—the history of folk music, Romantic poetry, the characters he encountered in mid-century New York. And then, over time, he condenses it all into a single line—this is Dylan’s “telescoping technique.”
In his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, he explains how he wanted to learn and think in a manner that recalls a telescope, which slides into itself to become smaller.
…I wanted to understand things and then be free of them. I needed to learn how to telescope things, ideas. Things were too big to see all at once, like all the books in the library—everything laying around on all the tables. You might be able to put it all into one paragraph or into one verse of a song if you could get it right.10
The telescoping technique is one reason that attempts to pin a single meaning on Dylan’s songs rarely work. Most of his songs contain multitudes.
Even if Edie Sedgwick inspired “Miss Lonely” in the lyrics (as some Dylanologists claim), she would have been one of many inspirations. Dylan’s songs wouldn’t work as well if they were so singular.
Dylan labored over his drafts, adding layers of meaning and hidden references. He also maintained an entire archive of his notes that are housed at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa Oklahoma.
In this week’s postscript, we’ll explore how Dylan used his cache of references to craft “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”
Notes on Dylan’s Notes
Write on anything: As I’ve said many times before, brilliant writing does not require expensive notebooks.
Collect options: A draft is a wonderful place to collect different versions of a line. This is something we’ve seen with Emily Dickinson’s and Eminem’s notes. As Dylan wrote “Like a Rolling Stone,” he collected rhymes he could choose from for the final version. Take your cue from these three great writers and indulge in writing out multiple options.
Don’t underestimate your unconscious: Dylan is a keen social observer and an expansive reader. He let ideas percolate in his mind until he was ready to use them. The sociologist Niklas Luhmann thought of his notecards as “conversation partners;” Dylan’s use of the unconscious made me think how all our experiences, all our memories, all the books we’ve read or songs we’ve heard are also our conversation partners. If that’s the case, then it behooves us to experience as much as we can with as much depth as possible to enrich our inner conversation.
Noted is fueled by you. Your ❤️’s and comments inspire me. As always, I would love to know your thoughts.
Yours in Note-Taking,
P.S. Paid subscribers, look out for more of Dylan’s notes later this week!
Smith, Larry David. Writing Dylan: The Songs of a Lonesome Traveler. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2018, p. 24.
Mikki Isaacson recalled: “He had a spiral notebook, a small steno book, and he must have had four different songs going at once. He would write a line in one and flip a couple of pages back and write a line in another one.” Quoted in Smith, Writing Dylan.
Worrell, Denise. “Bob Dylan: It’s All Right In Front.” TIME, 18 Apr. 2005.
Hilburn, Robert. “Rock’s Enigmatic Poet Opens a Long-Private Door.” Los Angeles Times, 4 Apr. 2004.
Margotin, Philippe, and Jean-Michel Guesdon. Bob Dylan All the Songs: The Story Behind Every Track Expanded Edition, Black Dog & Leventhal, 2022, p. 186.
The way Dylan lists rhymes reminds me of Eminem’s boxes of notes.
Check out Maria Popova’s “Bob Dylan on Sacrifice, the Unconscious Mind, and How to Cultivate the Perfect Environment for Creative Work.” The Marginalian, 21 May 2014.
Unsurprisingly, Jack Kerouac influenced Dylan.
Dylan, Bob. Chronicles: Volume One. Simon and Schuster, 2004, p. 61.
Love Dylan and love this post, Jillian.
This is delightful. Thank you!