- Post Road Magazine

Chan Marshall, Author of “Visions of Johanna”

by Rick Moody

My pretexts for the following are: Bob Dylan, The Bootleg Series Vol. IV: Bob Dylan Live 1966, known informally as the Royal Albert Hall gig.
Cat Power, Cat Power Sings Bob Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert.
Both titles are unwieldy! As though history and context, the secret and slippery ingredients of each release, are indicated by the sheer density of language.
And my other pretext: “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” by Jorge Luis Borges, first published in 1939, in the dark days before the last world war.
Throughout these notes, remember: the theory of appropriation in the modern and especially postmodern or conceptually driven context of contemporary art. Sherrie Levine’s After Walker Evans series of photographs, which rephotograph the images of Evans (from out of a catalogue of the same), “exactly” reproducing them.
Or: the borrowed Marlboro images of Richard Prince’s work, or the borrowed text of The Catcher in the Rye of Richard Prince’s work of the same name, or the borrowed Instagram images of Richard Prince, etc.
It bears mentioning that some work of appropriation has been committed by the artist Bob Dylan himself, for example in his paintings, which closely adhere to the composition of other artists’ photographs, retaining all the elements of the original—see, e.g., “Bob Dylan Accused of Painting Plagiarism,” by Matthew Perpetua, Rolling Stone, September 28, 2011, etc.
These charges of pastiche and mulching and collating orbit around Dylan’s memoir as well. See, e.g., Scott Warmuth’s elaborate notation of “intertextualities” in Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One,which include unfootnoted borrowings from sources both sacred and profane, including passages from Kerouac, Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and a travel guide to New Orleans. These unquoted quotations run, it is said, into the hundreds of instances.
Others have also noted the substantial similarities between Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech and a SparkNotes discussion of Melville’s Moby Dick.
(If he were writing the speech today, he would probably just use AI.)
Two of Dylan’s best albums from his wilderness period of the early nineties are uniformly fashioned from covers, viz., other people’s songs, and in some cases, Dylan borrowed particular arrangements without entirely crediting the original, as in the controversy surrounding “Canadee-I-O” on the Good as I Been to You album, which is very strongly associated with British fingerpicker and preservationist extraordinaire Nic Jones.
Nic Jones’s version of the song is a truly powerful and deeply moving thing, a milestone of the early British folk period.
Nic Jones’s version is additionally poignant because: after Jones’s car accident of 1982, he had injuries significant enough that he could no longer play the guitar professionally. And this was one of the extraordinary players of the era, up there with Nick Drake and Davey Graham and Bert Jansch. (Circa 2015, he did occasionally sing in public while his son played the guitar in accompaniment, but he has since retired from that work too.)
There was, back when Good as I Been to You came out, considerable discussion about whether Dylan’s recording of “Canadee-I-O” was so reliant on Jones’s arrangement that royalties might be just and fair, especially in light of Jones’s condition.
The most recent editions of Good as I Been to You do credit Jones, indicating that the discussion produced results.
(The appropriation discussion almost always seems to find its most passionate debates when it closes in on: who got paid.)
Of course, Dylan’s early songs were also famously reliant on preexisting folk melodies, which, for publishing purposes, like A. P. Carter before him, Dylan claimed as his own. The cases of this are numerous, but one obvious example is:
“Ballad of Hollis Brown,” which tracks very close to the melody of folk standard “Pretty Polly.” (See, e.g., the Dock Boggs recording thereof.) Thereby transforming a murder ballad about sexual exploitation and violence against women into a murder ballad about economic privation and rural isolation. While the melody does exactly the same work.
There are other examples, in the work of Bob Dylan, in abundance, and he has even commented on it: “That’s songwriting.” (I can’t find the source for this quotation anywhere, which may mean it is a vision I had, or it may mean that I have appropriated it without citation, for which, forgive me.)
Therefore, my argument is thus: if the Chan Marshall recording of the Dylan Royal Albert Hall concert, which was not originally performed in the Royal Albert Hall, is a reperformance, and thus a de facto appropriation, then one thing it reperforms and appropriates is the tendency to appropriate on the part of the original performer.
I am not now nor have ever been a member of any religious cult that takes as its constitutive principle the works of songwriter Bob Dylan, nor do I engage with the work of Bob Dylan as though this work is hermeneutically encoded, nor do I believe that it otherwise conceals in superabundance the wisdom of the ages, nor do I believe Bob Dylan is touched by God any more than you are, nor do I believe that he has special access to God or to God’s intermediaries, nor do I think he knows something special about love.
He’s just an occasionally incredible songwriter.
I own certain Dylan bootlegs but was a child at the time of Great White Wonder, and likewise at the time of the original Royal Albert Hall recording and its early bootlegs.
Like many, I incline toward the view that bootleg recordings by Bob Dylan are often superior to “official” releases, though the differences between the two may now be insubstantial.
In public, on one occasion, I advanced the theory that Blood on the Tracks was the single best record ever made. That occasion predated the release of More Blood, More Tracks,which catalogues the New York sessions that Dylan later re-recorded for the finished album. I do think that More Blood is in some ways better (see, e.g., the acoustic version of “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”—it’s really so much better).
My criterion for preferring the original New York recordings is: vulnerability.
And the sound of Dylan’s cuff links, or, perhaps, the buttons of his sleeve, on the side of his acoustic guitar.
I learned about the 1966 not–Royal Albert Hall gig in earnest when it was released on compact disc in 1998.
Say what you will about the compact disc! Arguably, the obscene profit margin on these plastic objects incentivized a great wave of archival releases, which in turn had a significant impact on popular music—for example, the 1997 CD release of the Anthology of American Folk Music and the subsequent release, soon after, of many volumes of The Alan Lomax collection, etc.
The Bootleg Series Vol. IV by Bob Dylan, featuring the not–Albert Hall recordings, was such a release, a release of significant impact. (The guitarist and songwriter Steve Gunn is among others who have spoken of the revelation of this particular album for those who didn’t already know about the gig.)
Cat Power, which is the band name used to denote recordings made by Chan Marshall, was, at about this same time (the later ’90s), emerging from a period of early independent obscurity, which is to say that the Dylan “official bootleg” was released the same year as Moon Pix, the first mature, fully realized work by Cat Power.
Moon Pix is a bit of an indie rock masterpiece.
The following release by Cat Power, The Covers Record, appeared two years later, and this includes two tracks originally recorded by Bob Dylan. The Covers Record replaces some of the indie rock psychedelic drone of Moon Pix with vulnerable and idiosyncratic solo performances of a variety of relatively canonical tunes.
The most electrifying recording on that album, The Covers Record, a spooky and memorable thing, is the recording of “I Found a Reason” by the Velvet Underground.
What does vulnerability mean?
It means humanness.
What does humanness mean?
It means poignancy and openness and wisdom and bearing witness and seeing things as they are, not as you wish them to be.
It means thrownness.
There are many such things on The Covers Record—for example, “Naked, If I Want To” by Moby Grape. Also electrifying. (Written by Jerry Miller, but Marshall’s recording nonetheless also has about it a perfume of Skip Spence, the troubled member of Moby Grape, whose Oar, his only solo album, was also a memorable CD re-release circa 1999.)
The Bootleg Series Vol. IV by Bob Dylan is a very striking collection of songs.
It seems to be recorded by a songwriter who has no real limitations, who can incline in whichever direction he likes, who can spellbind at his quietest, and at his loudest, and for whom performative confidence is no issue.
He knows how good he is.
And he is very good.
Those songs are, well, just about as good as any songs anyone had written to that point. They are immensely powerful, and recalcitrant, irritable, outraged, vulnerable, and moving, and shrouded in some fairy dust of the obscure, in a way that causes one to wish to unlock them.
They are anticonfessional in a way. Both vulnerable and impregnable. Sung with studied melancholy and also a certain ferocity.
I should make clear an unpopular opinion here and say that I don’t really find the electric set on Vol. IV very compelling.
Is it the recording?
Did he have a monitor for his vocals? The general supposition would be that there were not wedges onstage till the late sixties (the Buffalo Springfield and the Grateful Dead were early supporters), and thus the performers in the early and midsixties didn’t often use them (monitors) and thus they sometimes could not hear themselves onstage.
Is it possible that Bob Dylan and the Band could not hear themselves?
Perhaps there was also crowd noise, legendary crowd noise, the supposed booing, the outrage of British folk enthusiasts, who weren’t bothered by an electric public address system or a microphone during the acoustic set, but for whom some amplifiers in the second set caused feelings of betrayal.
Betrayal!
Judas!
Or was that just one uptight guy who really felt like the music had to come from the dust bowl or from the Mississippi Delta and had to be played by the rural poor and had to render their discontent, preferably African American discontent, had to oppose certain geopolitical adventures, had to stake out a position against Cold War oppressions, had to sympathize a little bit with large-scale redistribution of wealth, had to look the other way on some Stalin-era famines, had to think the Cultural Revolution looked shiny, new, and pretty legitimate, had to redress social injustice, had to be on the right side of a generational divide, had to hate Lyndon Johnson, and so on?
Wasn’t he, this one guy, this one audience member, a guy everyone moved a couple of seats away from at the pub?
Anyway, it should be, of course, the legitimate right of Robert Zimmerman that he should play the electric guitar, that he should add a chorus to the song, and some drums, that he should change and grow in any way he sees fit, play the bouzouki, play songs that Tony Bennett sang better. So the feeling-betrayed guy in the audience, the guy booing or shouting Judas!, is the equivalent of the Twitter or Instagram troll who is mad Billie Eilish isn’t wearing baggy pants this year. Just another sadist itching to pounce, for whom the pouncing is nearly carnal.
However, all of this doesn’t mean the electric set is good.
It’s not.
It’s invulnerable, somewhat angry, a bit distant.
Except for “Like a Rolling Stone,” of which more below. By then they knew they were about to leave the stage.
The acoustic set, in contrast, is luminous, spooky, indelible, obscure, magnificent, hushed, urgent.
The two unassailable gems on the album, or so it seemed to me in 1998, were “Desolation Row” and “Visions of Johanna.”
The original studio recording of “Johanna,” from that year’s album Blonde on Blonde, features a band, and in doing so, it puts an extra layer of varnish between you and the words. That boring, tinny drum kit, on the studio recording, doesn’t add very much.
I knew the song in 1998, but it was as though I had never heard it till then, until Vol. IV. Sometimes it takes decades to get a Bob Dylan lyric. So it was in this case. In 1998, I suddenly understood about “Visions of Johanna.”
(Here’s a related case: I always disliked the endless, slack digressions of “Highlands,” from Time Out of Mind, until I heard “Murder Most Foul” in 2020. Now I think “Highlands” is mordant and sharp in a nice way.)
That said, despite the clarity of purpose on Vol. IV, I do think that, in some interesting way, “Johanna” is abstract. It will not tell you directly what it has to say. It is veiled to the seventh degree. This has been much discussed, and I will not unravel what wants to stay knotted.
Except to say:
Yes, the song seems to be “about” two women, Louise and Johanna, and one is there in the room, is fleshy, and real, with a lover entwined.
The other woman is fogging the mind of the narrator, perhaps in memory, but if in memory, why is “visions” the right word? Why not “Memories of Johanna”? Harder to sing?
The envisioning here is not mnemonic but spiritual/ecstatic.
“Johanna” scans like “Jehovah,” which is another way of saying “Yahweh,” which is a name that should not be named, because the way that can be named is not the true name, and thus Johanna, a woman’s name, stands in perhaps for a spiritual/ecstatic name that cannot be named, because, once named, the vision crashes to earth and becomes actual.
Two women.
So: womanhood is under scrutiny, and that is a thing that “Visions of Johanna” indicates, an intensity of feminine power, feminine iteration, by naming the power of being and grace, the source of creative power Johanna.
Look, everybody knows Bob Dylan occupies all the cultural positions with respect to the feminine, and everybody knows that Bob Dylan is sometimes confused about the woman, the woman in his songs, and we might point to a song like “Idiot Wind,” which features the irredeemable line: “You’re an idiot, babe/it’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe,” which Dylan nonetheless attempts to redeem in the end by converting it to the first person plural: “We’re idiots, babe . . .”
As distinct from “Oh, Sister” or “Sara,” both from Desire,both of which try harder to understand.
The redemptive image of the woman as victim of history in the West appears in the Dylan songbook (“Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” let’s say), yes, but we also know the line of images that depict the woman Dylan is impure, and that the language is occasionally ambiguous, or even retributive, that a feeling of being misunderstood is there too.
It’s all right out there, in the Dylan concert from 1966, in the opening song “She Belongs to Me” and in “Just Like a Woman” further in, in the acoustic set, and then of course in the concluding number, one of the few successes of the electric set, the screed-like “Like a Rolling Stone,” certainly one of the greatest songs ever written, and one of the fiercest put-downs ever. And what did she do to merit that song exactly? Did she simply fail to require him?
All of these images of the woman pass through the 1966 concert, but “Visions of Johanna” is of a different cast. Different in ambition, different in execution.
How urgent is a rendering of the feminine in this time, the time that these lines are written, a time when contested discussions of gender create an anxiety of representations, especially, perhaps, an anxiety of the feminine, an inability to understand “woman” as a lexical unit, as a signifier. An enormous number of people, a majority of people, are walking around today being woman or presenting as woman, with feelings thereof, longings pertinent thereto, and yet how infrequently (still) are they anxious about discussing/representing, about the word woman. Above all, now, there is the anxiety, which is a thing of categorical instability.
I can well understand if you don’t trust Bob Dylan to be a portraitist of the feminine; I can well understand if he is perhaps ruled out, but my contention for the purpose of this essay is: you very much should consider trusting Chan Marshall.
“Visions of Johanna” addresses this “feminine” exactly.
And, to speak of the feminine, let’s speak about the “visions” of the “Visions of Johanna.”
In particular, let us speak to the words “visions of Johanna” when sung (embodied)(interpreted) by a woman (and I use this word woman because Marshall has used this word to describe herself (see postscriptus no. 1, below).
First, a particular ambiguity adheres, in this song, in this lyric, to the preposition “of.”
In one configuration of the phrase “Visions of Johanna” the lyric is depicting Johanna. This Johanna is object of the lyric. This Johanna is perhaps imago Johanna, male-gaze Johanna, a glimmering-of-romance Johanna, but with a bit of icon Johanna included, a Johanna who has about her a bit of immemorial femininity, a consoling image of the feminine for a masculine subject in some crisis, let’s say, or for whom desire exceeds the earthy and sensual desire vessel known in the song as Louise.
This is the triangular Johanna, triangular-vertex Johanna, the one who perhaps demonstrates and/or participates in a tradition of woman reifying heterosexuality, though that is not a component of necessity, but not reifying it in the way Louise, not an eros of the feminine, but an agape of the feminine.
And yet: the “of” in the title might be possessive, indicating possession or belonging, so that the visions of Johanna are a feature belonging to Johanna, they are hers, and they are her narrative deployment system, one that runs parallel, nonidentically, to a conventional reality-testing narrative of the routine. This is perhaps the Chan Marshall interpretation of the song, an experiential one.
I have no wish to diagnose or pathologize these visions.“Ain’t it just like the night/To play tricks when we’re trying to be so quiet.”
Visions are what the night does.
Visions are what call “mind” into question, that call forth the ghosts of electricity, that can in fact replace the narrator, take his/her/their place, rendering subjectivity or subjecthood inert or perhaps small-minded, they are what salvation feels like, they cause Johanna both to be there and not there, a shimmering of being and nonbeing.
Like in Heidegger’s celebrated translation of Heraclitus: disclosure loves to hide.
Visions, let’s say, are calibrated rhetorically on a larger scale, are what is taking place in the testaments of the prophets; visions animate the Book of Revelations, in the manifold refractions that postdate it; visions are the engine of the Qur’an; visions are, for our purposes, the ancient things, the sublime things, the liberated things, not the things to be pathologized.
In the lore of the nineties, meanwhile, the time of music from “outside,” noncanonical music, a music opposed to the industry, it was said that Chan Marshall had visions (also called nightmares in some reports) before coming to write the songs on Moon Pix.
Chan Marshall went to Australia to record with members of the Dirty Three, and some weeks went by and no songs were getting recorded, and then Chan Marshall had these visions, or nightmares, and the album emerged, composed itself.
Maybe the lore is itself a vision.
A vision is a compositional romp.
There has always been a lot of diagnostic language that hovers around Chan Marshall, assigning to her this or that illness. All the accounts of the early performances of Cat Power were quick to note the fragility of the performer.
This diagnostic language is inhumane and doesn’t suggest the full subjectivity of the artist.
The purpose of diagnostic language is to wrest control from the sublime.
The purpose of diagnostic language is to reconfigure the sublime so that it requires treatment.
Such is the lot of other possessors of visions (like Holderlin, John Clare, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Artaud, Darger)—they must be diagnosed so that the power of the visionary can be constrained, leaving interstate commerce unmolested.
The visionary who is a woman presents a particular vexation to interstate commerce and is consigned to the visionary in the way that Freud consigned her to the category: hysteric.
And thus Chan Marshall was and is a necessary, perhaps even inevitable, performer of “Visions of Johanna,” performing it in the way that Artaud performed in The Passion of Joan of Arc, near to the visionary, perceiving the visionary, sympathetic to the visionary, having had the experience of the visionary, and so on, arguably in ways that Bob Dylan did not achieve himself until his collapse, just prior to the evangelical period, when perhaps he, too, had visions.
I mean that a great many of these songs, the Royal Albert Hall songs, need to be sung by a woman in order to be understood, and, additionally, “Visions of Johanna” needs to be sung by someone having had visions, who inhabits the visionary, in order to be rendered profitably, and thus Chan Marshall is the most appropriate singer of “Visions of Johanna”; indeed, it is almost as if the song was written for her, though she wasn’t even born until somewhere between New Morning and Planet Waves.
Chan Marshall is so appropriate to her act of appropriation that, well, her vision of Johanna’s visions exceeds Bob Dylan’s recording of 1966.
Her version is better.
Some reviews have indicated that Marshall’s recording of the Albert Hall songs duplicates Dylan’s down to identical harmonica breaks and identical arrangements and identical fingerpicking patterns and so on, that Marshall somehow changed nothing. This is utterly dim.
As if duplication were actually possible.
There is, as noted, the fact that Marshall is a woman, and I use this word as though it were easy at this moment. But her being woman is not the only difference.
There are stylistic differences having to do with the ways these two singers sing.
Chan Marshall has almost nothing of the blues singer about her.
For example, Marshall really loves a suspended fourth. She goes to the fourth before hitting the third or the fifth a lot. She passes through there. To my ears, it gives the melodies a mild psychedelic quality that they never had before. In this way, Marshall summons, e.g., a bit of Janis Joplin that has been effaced by history, the Big Brother version, perhaps.
The other influence that feels relevant in Marshall’s singing is Nico, the Nico who was briefly a member of the Velvet Underground, or perhaps even more relevantly, the Nico of the extraordinary sequence of solo albums beginning with Chelsea Girls, which of course has a very good Dylan cover on it (“I’ll Keep It with Mine”).
There’s a clear, lucid, contralto-ish tone that Cat Power shares with Nico, the Nico of the solo albums.
And I summon Nico because Nico was in and around the milieu in which “Like a Rolling Stone” was composed, and if it’s not about Edie Sedgwick, why not about Nico, each of them, in that time, doomed examples of femininity, struggling through the male gazes, struggling to gaze back in reply, incarnating a constrained femininity, and in the process (in Nico’s case) casting off the blues (the flatted seventh, the flatted third), the legacy of West African music, in favor of the psychedelic (Indian) fourth, which invokes a non-Western mysticism as a replacement for the blues.
(More and more it seems to me that Bob Dylan’s genre is the country blues.)
Thus: despite the logistical rigors of “duplicating” an arrangement vocabulary from sixty years ago, though that duplication is in most ways impossible, these two singers, Marshall and Dylan, could not be more different. One of them is, arguably, a country blues singer recently (at the time of the original live recording) recovering from an obsession with Woody Guthrie, while the other is an indie/psychedelic punk who really knows her Velvet Underground.
They’re both walking past the Chelsea Hotel but seeing there completely different scenes.
This comparison of melody and timbre (and gender, perhaps) leaves out the most important argument, for which I have been preparing myself, and that is the argument pertaining to context.
Chan Marshall’s recording is from 2023, and Dylan’s is from 1966.
Marshall’s recording is from the year of the Israel-Hamas War, Dylan’s is from the Vietnam War; Dylan’s is from the space race, Marshall’s is from the time of Space X; Marshall’s is from the time of the social network, Dylan’s is from the time of social realism; Dylan’s recording is by a secular Jew with gospel leanings, Marshall’s is by a lapsed Southern Baptist with millenarian leanings.
Maybe both singers now only understand God through song, the song as an evocation of God, a being with God. But from different moments in history, and thus with vastly different nuances.
History means differently in them.
When the narrator of Borges’s story “Pierre Menard” advances the argument that Pierre Menard’s Quixote text is superior to Cervantes’s, he quotes from a passage about time, as shown here:
“. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and advisor to the present, and the future’s counselor.”
(My assumption is that James Irby, who translated the Borges story in Labyrinths, did his own translation of the Cervantes passage cited here, from I, IX, but one assumes that Borges himself had opinions as a fluent speaker of English. And naturally we could imagine the effect on this colossal passage, this red line in the history of literature, if Borges’s story had a different translation, for example the translation coeval with Chan Marshall, the excellent Edith Grossman: “. . . truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, repository of great deeds, witness to the past, example and adviser to the present, and forewarning to the future”)
Forewarning!
You remember, of course, you reader of these lines, that in the Cervantes original this is the passage wherein Cervantes (or the narrator in his stead) alleges to have found the manuscript at a certain market, that it, the text, was in Arabic, that he would need to have it translated, etc. In other words, in a passage of greatest bunk, in a book full of wondrous bunk, sheer invention and play and frothy simulation, we find this passage about truth and time.
Clearly, Borges chooses the passage with care for what he says next in the fictional account of Pierre Menard.
You know about Pierre Menard, correct? He who wishes to spontaneously reproduce the composition of Don Quixote? Not by copying it down somehow? Not by making a modern approximation? Not by using a lesser character or two, Sancho, e.g., and letting this lesser character have their own book? He wishes to compose the exact contents of Don Quixote but in a different context! (In France, e.g., at the turn of the 19th century, with one eye on Verlaine and one, we might suppose, on Poe.)
Menard failed to complete his chef d’oeuvre, as described in Borges’s pseudo-essay, another work of frothy simulation, and only a few short passages remain, including the passage I have quoted.
The narrator of Borges’s story quotes the passage twice, once each from Cervantes and Menard, and, of course, the passage are identical.
Then he, the narrator, pronounces (in my assessment) the passage by Menard as vastly superior, more wise, more knowing about truth and time, more improbable, more arresting, more original.
And note that truth is the “mother” of history, not the father, a distinction that can’t fail but to remind us of the line from Nietzsche, at the outset of Beyond Good and Evil: “Supposing Truth is a woman?—what then?”
If Borges’s story, which pretends not to be a story, is not the very first rationale, the very first full-scale “defense,” of appropriation (notwithstanding its being very funny, even satirical, at the same time), it is the surely a most vital early document, nearly coterminous with the R. Mutt sculpture, which was, according to some, appropriated twice over.
Chan Marshall’s performance of “Johanna” in the Dylan Royal Albert Hall concert in a sequence of songs identical to the original, with very similar arrangements, appropriates key strategies of Pierre Menard’s attempt to reproduce the text of Don Quixote. She does not, like Menard did not, attempt to duplicate the historical context that produced the producer of “Visions of Johanna,” as Menard did not try to reproduce, for example, the war record of Miguel de Cervantes.
Chan Marshall did not, that is, convert to Judaism, move to Hibbing, Minnesota, or obsess over the works of Woody Guthrie, meeting Guthrie in the hospital during the terminal phase of his Huntington’s disease, nor did she play exclusively acoustically (on the contrary) on her early albums, trying to learn Dylan learning Guthrie, nor only (or mainly) in the “engaged” folk genre, nor did she take up with an illustrious folk singer of the opposite sex, prior to performing the Dylan songs from the midsixties in an attempt to produce the exact historical context of the songs and their composition. Indeed, Marshall seems to wish to inhabit the songs while painting her identity as a younger woman from the American South whose early work was primarily in punk and indie rock, albeit with a pronounced interest in the work of Bob Dylan and other precursors.
To go further, as in the passage that the narrator of the Borges quotes—“truth the mother of history”—is there a passage in “Visions of Johanna” that most transparently demonstrates the differences between the version recorded live by the original composer of the song and the much younger woman from the American South, in the process demonstrating the vast superiority of the Chan Marshall recording?
I choose the following couplet: “The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face/where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place.”
I need to confess here, in order to proceed, that there is one stanza of “Visions of Johanna” in which I find the lyrics unsatisfying, even a bit juvenile, namely the verse about the museum, “when the jelly-faced women sneeze,” etc. I mean, every now and then in the midsixties you can hear Dylan’s dalliance with Beat methodology, with the first-thought-best-thought model, where an image goes untransformed straight into the song and does not get altered at any later date, with, perhaps, the idea that the subconscious meaning will emerge in the fullness of time, and that is as it should be.
The “museum” verse seems to lob some darts at art culture in general, finding it (the Art World) a bit wanting. There’s the stiff breeze of judgment in “jelly-faced women” and surrounding lines, and the less said about this verse the better. Or: it appears that we have here carping about the Art World from a guy who now shows at Gagosian, the gallery of occasional appropriation artist Richard Prince.
“The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face” seems, when Bob Dylan sings it, to come from a similar place as the “jelly-faced women” sequence, a Beat place, a neosurrealist place, a first-thought-best-thought place.
Let’s look at this couplet closely. First, there’s a mixed metaphor in effect here, in “ghost of electricity,” which to me overcooks the image slightly. Saying “electricity howls” would be, in truth, nearly as effective as “the ghost of electricity.” I become confused by “ghost of electricity” because electricity is already a metaphor for what the narrator perceives in Johanna (I think she is the “she” in this line, though this could perhaps be debated at some later point); “electricity” already says what needs to be said about the primal energy of creation, electromagnetism, so why, then, is a ghost required?
Certainly a ghost “howls” better than electricity howls—well, maybe, but then you might argue that the electricity is merely supplemental. The combination of ghost and electricity neutralizes the figurative language somewhat. They make the image slippery, hard to grasp.
And why “in the bones of her face” but not in her face generally speaking? Metonymic? Strictly speaking, how does the narrator verify what’s happening in the bones of Johanna’s face? Are they not hidden from view? And why are the bones preferential to a wholeness of face?
(And compare this image with the clarity of the line: “She studied the lines on my face,” from “Tangled Up in Blue.”)
The second line in the couplet poses even further problems. “Where” would seem to append the second line to the first, as a modifying clause, attaching specifically at “bones” or “face.” But if that’s the case, then the first-person narrator seems himself to inhabit the bones or face of Johanna (or Louise), at least until the visions of Johanna replace him.
(I’m just reading this couplet literally here, which, by way of reminder goes thus: “The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face/where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place.”)
The abbreviated summary, where the second line is concerned, would suggest that the narrator has been “replaced” by visions. There is no perceiving self there. Only an onslaught of visionary material, as indicated in the first of the two lines.
That is, the first line in the couplet is a frankly visionary line. It’s precisely its syntactical ungainliness, its homely nonliterary weirdness, its St.-Mark’s-Poetry-Project-meets-the-decadents quality, that helps to sharpen its visionary impact.
So: the second line is an indicator that the visions have in fact done the replacing. And yet:
How can the narrator narrate if he has been replaced by visions? This utterance of the nonself, the unselfed self, is sort of logistically impossible, but also, as such, kind of profound.
As we have said, the “psychedelic” in music didn’t quite exist in 1965, didn’t quite yet have a name, though “Eight Miles High” was about to come out, in March of 1966. But this couplet by Bob Dylan, not a noted contributor to the psychedelic idiom, in its complex evocation of the subjectivity of the narrator, feels protopsychedelic.
The Beatles first ingested LSD in April of 1965.
(Some accounts hypothesize that Bob Dylan took acid in 1964.)
Nevertheless, there’s an aspect of Bob Dylan’s performance of “Visions of Johanna” that preserves a schizoaffective or permeable subjectivity that might in theory correlate with period-specific hallucinations on the part of the original composer.
(Dylan rarely, if at all, writes lyrics with this hallucinatory quality in the 21st century. Now he is more about a certain tragicomic historical clarity.)
(“Early Roman Kings” is a good example of a 21st-century Dylan song—all slippery jokes about the mafia and death and decay.)
The permeable subjectivity of the couplet we’re looking at closely serves two functions.
First, as it does not identify a specific “her,” whether Johanna or Louise, it leaves open the possibility that the “her” in the couplet is a third feminine character, thus making room for a Chan Marshall–like presence in the song.
Second, because the visions replace the narrator, leaving only Johanna’s subjectivity behind, specifically her visions, the couplet demonstrates the necessity of a feminine-presenting interpreter of these words, in particular.
The couplet is premonitory.
For all these reasons, these lines, in the Chan Marshall performance are superior, indicating a truth that singer Bob Dylan cannot quite manage, truth being, after all, the “mother of history.”
This moment of greatness on the album Cat Power Sings Dylan is nonsingular. There are others. Is it not obvious how much better “Just Like a Woman” is when sung by a woman, and when sung specifically by Chan Marshall, with her specific life experiences and episodes of anguish and visionary possession, her specific permeable subjectivity?
And “She Belongs to Me,” a song all about the male gaze, possessive qualities thereof, is so substantially better when sung by Marshall that it constitutes a different song—
As when Richard Prince cropped slightly those photos of cowboys and made them his own aspirational vision of the masculine.
As noted above, in general, I am not interested in questions about Bob Dylan’s “going electric” during the second set. Those are just songs, and they are not Finnish death metal or Minnesotan hardcore. The Band, his backing group, was not Vanilla Fudge or Cream.
Accordingly, Cat Power’s second set is sort of midrange.
It sounds like The Wallflowers a bit.
As Marshall is a singer of nuance, she has to fight to preserve subtlety and gestures of restraint in the second set even though the band is electric and has multiple guitars and keyboards.
That said, she improves “Ballad of a Thin Man” and seems to enjoy the polysyllabic sprawl of “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.”
(With “Thin Man,” the song seems to benefit a lot from Marshall’s greatness at singing vowels too—the sign of a singer who knows her craft—like on the word “Joooones.”)
However, the gem of the electric side is “Like a Rolling Stone,” where, in a way, the electricity howls through the bones of her face.
Now, we have no reason to suppose that this very well-known song, this overexposed song, is confessional.
We have no reason to suppose it is not.
We have no reason to suppose that the protagonist is Edie Sedgwick.
We have no reason to suppose it is not.
As noted above and elsewhere, the original composer denies that he is a confessional writer (in this way, I think, disavowing his single greatest album, Blood on the Tracks),and we have no reason to doubt him.
Or: we have every reason to doubt him.
Every work of art is autobiographical.
Every work of art expresses. Even Donald Judd’s industrial-inflected sculptures. Even Richard Serra’s “Tilted Arc.” Even Carl Andre, e.g., when he says, “There are no ideas in those steel plates.” Even language poetry expresses. Even field recordings. Even surveillance cameras that have no operator. Even the plates that record the movements of tectonic plates or the subatomic particles in the colliders of the world.
Every work of art expresses, and the implications of this expression belong to the audience.
Somehow, oddly, even appropriated work expresses, and sometimes it expresses even more.
When I have made collage poems (which I have done for many years), I often feel they tell more truth about me, no matter how randomized the collecting strategy, than when I attempt to express myself directly.
It is not, then, the artist who expresses in the medium. It is the medium that expresses in the artist.
Music creates Van Morrison, music creates Bob Dylan, music creates Joni Mitchell, or Marvin Gaye, or Smokey Robinson, music creates James Hetfield, or Yousou N’Dour, or Keith Richards, or Taylor Swift, or Kendrick Lamar. They aren’t there, the artists aren’t there, until the songs are there.
Language expresses the user, creates the user who was not otherwise there.
So: “Visions of Johanna” created Bob Dylan.
And: “Like a Rolling Stone” created Bob Dylan, and in the process, Bob Dylan created an idea of Edie Sedgwick, even if he didn’t intend to, or even if he never had a relationship with her, or just imagined he did, and yet his idea of Edie Sedgwick never felt complex, like a human being does. It always felt a little bit like an Old Testament prophet was ranting about some woman who didn’t sit quite right with him, until, that is—
“Like a Rolling Stone” was sung by Chan Marshall.
Chan Marshall incarnates “Like a Rolling Stone.”
As she likewise incarnates the visions in “Visions of Johanna.”
It is true that when Bob sang “Like a Rolling Stone” he knew the privations depicted therein.
But he was never a woman knowing these privations.
Marshall sings “Like a Rolling Stone” as both narrator and protagonist, she who sits in judgment and she who is judged.
All the judging in her version is: very gentle.
Second person as first person by other means.
In the live recording from The Tonight Show, she stays in the groove, constantly hinting at the epiphanic moments in the chorus, but backing away from them, like she can feel the enormity of the song, its reputation, but also like she doesn’t have to belabor this reputation, like it’s a bit of fun, or like it’s confessional and merely interpretive at the same time.
And yet, to conclude:
It is on “Visions of Johanna” that Marshall, like Pierre Menard before her, spontaneously recomposes the song, and becomes its author in the present moment.
By present moment we might point to: a post-Roe United States; a United States with a massive drug crisis in the cities of the fentanyl-xylazine variety; a United States teetering from the moral vacancy of the shipping north of refugees by southern governors; a United States somewhat unmoored from the world war on multiple fronts; the specter of authoritarianism and domestic violence in the American body politic, heading into a rather terrifying election year.
We can see her becoming author by possessing the visions of the song “Visions of Johanna,” and by visions we might mean the “numen,” through which she passes on the way to expressing the moment now.
Or we might mean that she means according to the discipline of metanoia, which is both a crisis in material being, a kind of spiritual aspiration and a rhetorical stance, depending.
In this reading, the reading associated with metanoia, the line “where these visions of Johanna have taken my place” has an especial meaning that Bob Dylan can never inhabit exactly.
Bob Dylan can’t mean the same line in the same way, contextually speaking, and thus Chan Marshall has reauthored it, and by extension, like Pierre Menard, has become its truest author.
It took sixty years for this context to appear.
What a transportive event to see this composition made anew.
It’s true of course that the reperforming gesture is quite common these days: Rufus does Judy, VKB Band covering Tom Waits, Pussy Galore covering Exile on Main Street, Taylor Swift covering her own albums, The Beatles attempting to release new music as The Beatles, Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend pretending to be The Who, Van Morrison covering all of Astral Weeks. Obviously, sample culture in hip-hop comes from a similar place, where appropriation is a basic compositional building block.
And don’t forget the guitarist in Japan who has devoted his whole life to performing every note played by Jimmy Page in the exact same way on the exact same equipment.
Most of these other acts of appropriation do not rise to challenge ideas of authorship, but Chan Marshall’s does.
It makes her record exceedingly powerful.
Postscriptus 1: a paratext or premonitory prefiguration of “Visions of Johanna,” a vision of those “Visions,” is to be found on the woefully underrated Cat Power album called Wanderer in the case of the immensely powerful song called “Woman.”
Postscriptus 2: Recently, in the episodic sale of books by the estate of Tom Verlaine, I purchased a two-volume collection of paperbacks previously owned by Tom Verlaine (and I’m holding one of these books right now, previously held, at one point by the man himself), The Visions Seminars,by C. G. Jung, a relatively free, discursive collection of dream interpretations, which imputes to dreams the value and importance of visions, rather than consigning them merely to the materialistic “dream work” of Freudian psychoanalysis. Here’s a bit: “So here the peacock assumes the role of a sort of ghost that possesses the man. But we might cling to our original hypothesis that this is the animus again, that this is the man in her [in the dreamer], and now this vision is that behind her man, behind the animus, is a new principle that possesses him. It is his genius that sits behind him like the king’s hawk, or the eagle of Zeus. This is the peacock-ghost of unfolding, of beauty, of spring—of everything that is symbolized by the peacock. It is an almost prophetic vision” (p. 11). A prophetic indication, in case you still needed one, of what we mean by “visions,” in this case from a copy of a book owned by the guy who wrote: “Last night a moon came out / she replaced my eyes.”
Postscriptus 3: I have written most of this essay from the deepest, loneliest part of the night, where the morning star appears each day just before dawn, Ain’t it just like the night.

Rick Moody is the author of six novels, three collections of stories, and three works of non-fiction. He writes a frequent column on music called “The Home Key” for Salmagundi magazine and teaches at Tufts University.

Chan Marshall, Author of “Visions of Johanna”by Rick Moody

Chan Marshall, Author of “Visions of Johanna”

by Rick Moody