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the riley rock reportthen meets now Author: Tim Riley
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Something Is Happening
Sunday, 7 December, 2025
Musicologists have avoided Dylan longer than most other academics, in part because of how folk culture enters intellectual frames only gradually. Academics also need to invent new terms to deal with vernacular speech and how recorded sound differs from written notation. I took aim at this in Hard Rain: A Dylan Commentary (1992): “Bob Dylan’s voice can crook emotion the way a prism refracts light…” to contrast against the “written” studio ethic the Beatles developed at Abbey Road (in my first book, Tell Me Why: A Beatles Commentary, 1988). Guitarist and theory professor Steven Rings has now bridged more of this gap in What Did You Hear? from University of Chicago Press. Tim Riley: Well, Steven, what a wonderful book. Man, do I love this book. It’s so valuable, it’s so interesting, and I’m so taken with it. The first things I wanted to mention were that I just love this analysis of “I Believe in You,” the gospel song, and the high notes that he can’t hit with each pass. And then he finally hits the high note and it’s very satisfying. And then you’re left to wonder, well, is that all just for show? Just really a wonderful, wonderful reading of that song.Steven Rings: Oh, thank you.Tim Riley: And then I love the way you write about “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met),” and then you go to the live version of it, and then that is the first thing he says to the audience when he gets heckled. Oh my God, that is just a bullseye. How have we never noticed that before? I mean, that’s just really, really great. [I’m curious about] what your specialty was as a young music theorist, what you focused on, and how you arrived at the University of Chicago, all of [00:01:00] that. So, the pre-history here.Steven Rings: So, my prehistory… I grew up in Minnesota, though not Bob Dylan’s Minnesota. I grew up in the southeastern part of the state. It’s really a different world. I grew up in the Scandinavian, Lutheran Minnesota. I’ve learned a lot about Hibbing, in the Iron Range, over the course of this. There’s this wonderful book by Dave Engel about his background in Hibbing, and all the ethnic groups that came to work in the mines up there, and it’s a different world. But in any case, Bob Dylan was everywhere as I was growing up.I was a guitar player early on. I also played piano as a little kid, like, dutifully did my piano lessons, but it was the guitar that I really took off with around age 10, played in a lot of bands, and that kind of thing.Some things you never get used to. Other things come free in your inbox bi-weekly: But then I switched to classical guitar in my teens, [00:02:00] and that’s what my first career was. I did an undergraduate degree in that, and then I taught in Portugal for a little while.So, that was my kind of, I mean, in the music world, people would sometimes say legit, that was my legit phase. But then I developed a hand injury in the late ‘90s, and that ended my performing career.So, I pivoted into academia. I always knew that I had a knack for music theory, and decided to pursue that. I went to one of the programs that’s the conservative home of American music theory, which is Yale, and ended up doing a first book that was very technical, mathematical music theory. But I always wanted to return to my pop music roots.I had been a Bob Dylan fan for a long time, and really felt that as a research project it would scratch [00:03:00] an itch. I just wanted to spend time with the music, and now that I’d gotten my first book out the door, I could choose a little more what I was spending time with.The other part was that I wanted to write about something that I figured academic music theory would have very little ready to say about. Bob Dylan doesn’t use very many harmonies, forms are pretty straightforward, and so on.And yet, there is so much richness, and so much complexity, in this music of a different kind, that has to do with performative idiosyncrasy, performative inconsistency, all of these things that I talk about in the introduction to the book. And you know, to be honest, early on I felt like, wow, why did I set myself this challenge?I found it really hard to grapple with at first, and to think about [00:04:00] how to engage his music. But by the time the book was finished, I was cutting enormous amounts of things, cutting chapters, I had so much more to say. So, it almost strikes me as kind of comical that early on I was, like, oh, how do I even engage this? I ended up having so much to say.I say this with a caveat: I think some of these things are quite deliberate. I think others are not. I think there are a lot of things that show that this is just his musical way of being. He’s a very, very experimental musician. And I don’t mean that in the sense of post-war avant garde. I mean it in the sense that experiment is just his thing, and a lot of experiments go sideways and sometimes you hit gold with them. And so, I think sometimes it’s much more a question of trying something out and seeing what sticks.Tim Riley: Well, I’ve read a lot in this space, and music theorists really do have trouble with this aesthetic. I think you do a really good job of describing the challenge and then providing lots of visual and oral examples as the evidence of what you’re talking about, and how you’re making sense of it.I’m really curious how the music theory people embrace this book, ‘cause in my lifetime (and my background is classical [00:05:00] piano), when I was going to school there was just high and low culture. And high people just did not have any patience for low culture. In my lifetime, I have seen those distinctions largely evaporate. Now, people like us can teach this material at the college level, and it’s entirely respectable. It was not respectable 40 years ago, 50 years ago. And I think there’s been a lot of challenge for exactly how to do it.I’ve always thought [Twilight of the Gods musicologist] Wilfred Millers was funny, when he says that the E major chord at the end of Sgt. Pepper is reminiscent of [Gustav] Mahler’s E Major chord at the end of his Fourth Symphony. And I was a young buck, but I was really tough on Christopher Ricks for writing a book about Dylan that did not mention Woody Guthrie [Visions of Sin, 2004]. This just seemed to me, like, how is that possible? And yet, he’s full of insight. He’s full of really interesting textual analysis. You can’t write him [00:06:00] off, but it’s just from such a completely different plane.So, I’m curious how you think about it. The way I try to explain it to my students is that we have two very strong traditions: We have a written tradition, and we have an oral tradition. And most of academia was obsessed with the written tradition for the longest time. Now, we’re seeing this oral tradition. It has landed mostly in ethnomusicology departments. However, you see political scientists engage with rock studies. You see literary people engage in rock studies. So, there’s a number of different portals, and it’s sort of like we’re waiting for it to land, you know?Jazz is interesting because jazz combines the two. Sometimes it starts as oral, and it winds up getting written down. Other times, you’re using a lead sheet and that’s the starting point.Steven Rings: Or in the swing era, it’s usually elaborate charts, and so on. Tim Riley: Right. [00:07:00] I find your approach really persuasive and convincing. Steven Rings: Thank you. In answer to your question, the book is sort of just out, so I only have a hint of how music theorists are reacting to it. Music theory as an academic discipline has been in a moment of reckoning since 2020, and is in the process of reorienting from a highly textualist classical music paradigm, to a paradigm where non-notated traditions are central. At this point, the most work is being produced in popular music… more * What Did You Hear? The Music of Bob Dylan, by Steven Rings (Chicago University Press, 2025)* Scott Warmuth: on Chronicles, Vol. I, and “borrowing”…. * University of Chicago, Department of Music* Just Like Bob Zimmerman’s Blues: Dylan in Minnesota, by Dave Engel (Amherst, 1997) Motown’s Back Pages"Ross was a space oddity, an outlier, and so became the natural object of others’ lust and disgust ('b***h-goddess'). She was the only Motown star you could imagine dancing with fellow freak Groucho Marx, her snaky shape in mid-frug just as semiotically recognizable as his cigar,” Devin McKinney in "The Motown Story: The First Decade, or A Star Is Born," American Music Perspectives, Vol. 4, No. 1, SPECIAL ISSUE: MOTOWN, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2025 (Tim Riley, issue editor). With more from Riley, Olivia Davis, Kit O’Toole, and Ben Greenman. noises off* Coming soon: all the lists, and Cameron Crowe write a memoir, again, and Peter Richardson’s forthcoming Brand New Beat, on the history of Rolling Stone Magazine* Don’t forget the archives: more on Dylan, the regrettable Philosophy of Song, and Love and Theft; how the Brahms piano concertos saved the symphony (on Andras Schiff); and sixty years of one-hit wonders with author Sarah Hill. * riley rock index: obits, bylines, youtube finds, reference sites, pinterest, beacons.ai, random deep link This is a public episode. 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