To accompany the our latest podcast, Dylan.FM S03 E08 Jokerman, here is an extended excerpt from the 50 page Chapter 5: Jokerman.

Chapter Five: Jokerman

‘Jokerman’, alone among the released tracks from the “Infidels” sessions, is a song you can inhabit, as you can so much of Bob Dylan’s earlier work. It isn’t a sermon or a pop song but a real creation, a work you can wander inside, explore, breathe in, pass through, wrap around you. It looks different in different lights. It’s always shifting, but this is because it’s alive, not because it’s nebulous (though it may be that too). Its complexity isn’t off-putting, nor distancing. On the contrary, Dylan sings you through the complexity with almost as much generosity of expression, almost as much bestowing of concentrated warmth, as he gives out on, say, ‘Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands’, a nebulous and complicated song from another lifetime.

It is as much the warmth as the substance of ‘Jokerman’ that makes it such a welcome item in Dylan’s corpus. The two qualities cohere in Dylan’s openness toward the listener in confessing his fondness for the song itself, and in his palpably strong desire to communicate it (a desire often absent in 1980s Dylan).

I wouldn’t have used the word “substance” of ‘Jokerman’ when I first heard the recording. On the contrary I found it a curiously skeletal thing, as if it were the piece of paper with the dots on from which you might construct and colour in a Bob Dylan Song By Numbers. This effect was owing partly to the sparsity of its noises (an attractive sparsity, but an undeniable one: what you hear is the huge amount of empty space between the ultra-simple rhythm-section, the minimal keyboards and guitar-playing and the strongly echo-chambered vocal line, making for a production as on no other record I know, by Dylan or anyone else) and partly to the way in which the song’s title and the words of its chorus seem like pale, thin shadows of that great prototypical Dylan song, ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’:

Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune,
Bird fly high by the light of the moon,
Oh——– Jokerman.

— Bob Dylan

Not only does this remind us of ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’, but it reads more like somebody’s notes, a hasty summary of a lyric heard fleetingly, than like a finished lyric. Strip it down by only two or three more words (the definite articles) and it could be one of Harry Smith’s celebrated summaries — “JOKERMAN DANCE TO NIGHTINGALE TUNE. BIRD FLY HIGH BY LIGHT OF MOON. OH OH JOKERMAN” — directly comparable, for instance, to his summary of the song ‘Present Joys’: “PRAISE LORD OF HEAVEN AND EARTH. PRESENT JOYS PASSING FAST. HEAVEN AT LAST.”

The chorus of ‘Jokerman’ may be skeletal and derivative, fleshed out only by Dylan’s extraordinary vocal resourcefulness (naturally he never sings it the same way twice), but the verses are richly textured and freely imaginative — carefully, densely structured yet rhapsodically fluent blocks of writing that glow with inspiration, recognisably of Bob Dylan’s making without ever being “Dylanesque”. There is many a lightly thrown out biblical allusion, but the lightness makes clear that these are valued more for their relishable poetics than for any sermonising usefulness. Starry-eyed and laughing with deft, acute touches only Bob Dylan could alchemise, in the writing and performance, ‘Jokerman’ is essentially a song like no other.

Sometimes Dylan seems to be singing about himself and sometimes about Jesus, but the whole is too fluid to need from the listener any analytic effort at separating out the one from the other. The intertwining of the two is, in any case, part of what the song evokes: one theme of ‘Jokerman’ is surely Dylan’s mocking of the distance between his own fallibilities and the omnipotence of his Saviour: a recurring self-mockery that laughs at the superficial parallels between Dylan, mythic public figure and Artist-Creator, and Christ, mythic public figure and Son of The Creator. The post-Evangelical Period Dylan seems ruefully to acknowledge here that there had been foolish moments when he had taken such parallels solemnly. At the same time, Dylan also seems sceptical of the idea that Christ’s powers are altogether a good thing — a hint that Christ too seems risible — and this in turn suggests both another rueful parallel (a real resemblance between two dodgy heroes) and one further opportunity to instance the singer’s own failings — for to admit to such scepticism is to confess yet another failure: to confess that even in his much-vaunted embrace of Christ he is now faltering.

Thus the song begins with a nice mockery of superheroes and the singer’s own mythic pretensions, in an opening verse that at once reveals that here is a work of a high order — chiselled, clever, complex, compressed and unapologetically articulate, yet carrying itself lightly, with likeable grace and poise, entirely free of solemnity or the didactic, and delivered with unguarded generosity of spirit:

Standing on the water casting your bread
While the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing.
Distant ships sailing in through the mist
You were born with a snake in both of your fists while a hurricane was blowing.

— Bob Dylan

There is so much here, and so adroitly put together. The opening line neatly combines Christ’s walking on the water, a New Testament story emphasising his godly power, with the well-known proverb “Cast your bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days”, an Old Testament injunction to humankind. This latter, from Ecclesiastes, is the textual basis for the Jewish Passover ritual in which people take bags of breadcrumbs and throw them into the river to symbolise the casting out of their sins — hence Dylan’s lovely “breadcrumb sins” in ‘The Gates Of Eden’.

The combining of these two Biblical moments in one modest line is one of Dylan’s skilful and intelligent achievements, quietly acerbic and inspired, like one of his bumpings-together of two clichés. It makes for a splendid piece of self-mockery, since it evokes so simply yet vividly the picture of the pretender, the ‘Jokerman’. In the incident being mimicked, Christ is not only godlike but, just as importantly, purposive: He “went unto them, walking on the sea”; but Dylan refuses “Walking on the water”, despite the tempting alliterative appeal of that phrase for use in a song sewn through with alliteration and internal rhyming.

He chooses instead to show himself caught in a pose: in the comically functionless, dithering position of “Standing on the water”. The implication is of “standing around”; and the further effect of this inaction is to stress the physical impossibility of the act. You can almost credit that by dint of a swift and light enough stepping forward, a not staying in one place long enough to put your weight on it, you might briefly walk across water; you cannot but picture that standing still will make you sink. That the self  Dylan is addressing here is standing there casting his bread emphasises that his real position, far from being godlike, is that of the humble sinner quite rightly in the act of contrition. The contrast between that hopeless bravado and this humility makes the situation still more comic.

The conjunction of the two biblical allusions in ‘Jokerman’’s opening line achieves a further compression of meaning, deepening the import of the song. What Dylan bumps together here are two texts that are associated with opposite notions. Christ’s walking on water may show him to be godlike, but also shows him urging upon his followers one of his favourite messages, namely that anything can be achieved if you have sufficient faith. Peter tries walking on the water immediately after Christ, and fails, we’re told, only through lack of wholehearted faith. Jesus catches him and asks (in Matthew 14:31) rhetorically: “O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?” (As we shall see, this insistence of Christ’s on the power of faith — on its superhuman physical power: power like a mythic hero’s — is alluded to again in at least two other lines of ‘Jokerman’.) Dylan bumps his allusion to this story about the power of faith into his allusion to a proverb from Ecclesiastes — famously the one book in the Bible which gives space and patience, a sympathetic airing, to Doubt.

Bob Dylan, then, opens ‘Jokerman’ with this fusing of allusions to a unique embodiment of the power of faith and a unique embodiment of the legitimacy of doubt. Thinking of Christ, he is also glancing into the mirror of Ecclesiastes.

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