Why Dylan Matters. Richard Thomas F.

      All around its bend.

      You can keep Madison Square Garden

      Give me the Coliseum.

      You can keep Madison Square Garden

      Give me the Coliseum.

      So I don’t wanna see the gladiators

      Man I can always see ’em.

      While the lyrics here are obscure, they may not be pure nonsense. We can connect “going back to Rome” with the fact that the twenty-one-year-old had actually been in Rome the month before. And when he sings, “Buy me an Italian cot and carry, / Keep it for my friend,” we wonder about the identity of the friend for whom he would buy the portable baby cot. Could it have been for Suze Rotolo herself, whose pregnancy later that year was terminated by an abortion? Suze was presumably in the audience at Gerde’s that night, having just been reunited with a Dylan much happier than the one who had been moping around the Village in the second half of 1962 while she was off in Italy.

      The song’s claim of a birthplace in Rome is an early instance of Dylan’s tendency to create environments for his various identities and characters. Another example is in the traditional “Man of Constant Sorrow” (1962), where the narrator is “going back to Colorado,” where he was “born and partly raised.” Other versions of this song have the singer “born and raised” in old Kentucky, others in San Francisco, and so on. As long as the meter of the place is the same (Cólorádo, Sán Francísco, etc.), anything works, variety and change of place and time being a natural feature of folk songs. But for Dylan, Rome is different. It is hard not to connect his staking a claim for his birthplace in Rome with other utterances that try to create a new point of origin for himself, one that makes more sense in the creative mind of this genius, like this moment in his 2004 60 Minutes interview with Ed Bradley. Questioned about changing his name from Robert Zimmerman to Bob Dylan, he replied: “You’re born, you know, the wrong names, the wrong parents.”

      Even before the trip to Rome and the penning of the song “Goin’ Back to Rome,” which followed the visit, was an even earlier song, “Long Ago, Far Away,” sung before he would have known of the Folkstudio in Rome, in Minneapolis friend Tony Glover’s apartment on August 11, 1962. Recorded in November 1962, the song shows he was thinking of ancient Roman times. It shows a debt to gospel, as it considers human cruelty throughout history, from the point of view of those who suffer, not least the crucified Jesus, with whom the song begins and ends:

      To preach of peace and brotherhood

      Oh, what might be the cost?

      A man he did it long ago

      And they hung him on a cross.

      Then the ironic, even sarcastic, refrain, implying that nothing has changed:

      Long ago, far away,

      Things like that don’t happen

      No more, nowadays

      The thrust of the song is along the lines of Woody Guthrie’s song “Jesus Christ”:

      This song was made in New York City

      Of rich man and preachers and slaves

      If Jesus was to preach like He preached in Galilee

      They would put Jesus Christ in His grave.

      Of the examples in the five verses in the body of Dylan’s song, only two specify historical moments, the chains of slaves “during Lincoln’s time,” and in the striking image of the second to last verse, absent from the official Dylan website:

      Gladiators killed themselves

      It was during the Roman times

      People cheered with bloodshot grins

      As eyes and minds went blind

      Long ago, far away

      Things like that don’t happen

      No more, nowadays

      “Goin’ Back to Rome” has “always see ’em” rhyming with “Coliseum,” and we will see this rhyme used again, a few years later, in a famous and much better song from 1971, “When I Paint My Masterpiece.” The first two verses of that song are all about Rome. It is thought to preserve the memory of another trip Dylan took to Rome, following the 1965 tour of England that was the subject of D. A. Pennebaker’s film Don’t Look Back. According to this plausible theory, Dylan went back in the company of his new Muse, Sara Lownds, whom he would marry by the end of the year. Sara left her husband, Hans Lownds, to take up with Dylan, and it is hard not to connect this reality with one of Dylan’s most iconic lines, from “Idiot Wind,” written in 1974: “They say I shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy.”

      Sara is absent in name from “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” thus allowing the singer in the scene Dylan paints to have an assignation with “a pretty little girl from Greece,” or in the official lyrics, “Botticelli’s niece,” who will be able to help out with painting the masterpiece in the title and in the last line of each verse:

      Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble

      Ancient footprints are everywhere

      You can almost think that you’re seein’ double

      On a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs

      Got to hurry on back to my hotel room

      Where I’ve got me a date with Botticelli’s niece

      She promised that she’d be right there with me

      When I paint my masterpiece

      It is worth noting that “When I Paint My Masterpiece” was the regular opener for the first of the two Rolling Thunder Revue tours in the fall of 1975, which also featured the new song “Sara.” “Sara” is pretty much the opposite of “Idiot Wind” in its lyrical and sweet memories of their decade-long relationship, children and all. The only song with a title and lyrics that are unambiguous on the identity of the lover, its last two choruses end with a hint of the breakup toward which the two were headed: “You must forgive me my unworthiness. … Don’t ever leave me, don’t ever go.” By this time, Dylan was involved with other women, and when the 1976 part of the Rolling Thunder Revue resumed in Lakeland, Florida, on April 18, 1976, “Sara” was gone from the setlist, its position taken over by “Idiot Wind”—the first public performance of the song that had come out fifteen months earlier. In a televised performance on May 23, 1976, the eve of Dylan’s thirty-fifth birthday, he delivers a glorious, impassioned version of it with his wife, children, and mother in the audience. It was likely not much appreciated by Sara, sitting there, the object of much of the song’s anger and venom. Their divorce was finalized on June 29, 1977.

      Clearly Dylan feels a connection to the antiquity of Rome, as he does with no other place. When he first traveled there in 1963, he was immediately inspired. That’s why in January 1963 he would write and sing the words “Goin’ back to Rome, / That’s where I was born.” That trip to Rome, subsequent trips, and the adoption of the city as the place where he was born seemed years later to incite a kind of artistic rebirth for Dylan, or at least it coincided with that rebirth.

      PRESS CONFERENCE IN ROME, 2001

      Bob Dylan would be back in Rome on July 23, 2001, for an interview with a group of European journalists who had been listening that morning to an advance copy of his new album, “Love and Theft,” due out the following September. This was in between concerts in Pescara, on the Adriatic coast of Italy, and Anzio, on the coast south of Rome. On this tour he performed in Scandinavia, Germany, England, Ireland, but it was Rome that he chose for the press conference that would plant a few clues about the new directions in his songwriting. One of the reporters asked an early question:

      Are you enjoying to be in Rome?

      Oh yeah.

      You’re often here in Rome.

      Pretty regular huh?

      You