Wigwam – Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan’s 1970 album Self Portrait was disdained by almost all fans and critics, in large part because many of the songs were considered a farce and it seemed Bob wasn’t taking his songwriting seriously. What Bob was doing here was a long way removed from their little darling image of him as the prophet of their generation and pure folk hero. I get that – he had raised the bar, which is putting it mildly.

What most people didn’t get at the time – and the quote I like to refer to on occasion from Edward Norton, which astutely and deftly sums up Bob Dylan’s artistry – is the following:

“There’s never been anybody who was more like, ‘Oh, you like what I’m doing? I’m gone. I’m over here. Like, enjoy. You’re gonna not like it because you like what I just did. Now where I’m going, you’re gonna be discombobulated and upset, and eventually you’re gonna catch up. And then when you catch up, I’m gonna move on to something else… He was so punk rock.’”

So when Dylan did songs on Self Portrait like All the Tired Horses, which repeats the same lyric over and over, and today’s featured track Wigwam, which contains variations on Da da dah da da de throughout, people might have frowned upon them, not unlike that fan’s scathing reaction after Dylan’s concert in ’66: “like he is crawling through the bloody gutter, just making a pile out of it. Yeah, he’s making a pile out of people…”

Though I didn’t live through those specific times when he confused the heck out of regular Bob listeners, I can say I enjoyed the heck out of these two aforementioned tracks from Self Portrait when I eventually got to hear them. Further to that, my appreciation of them has only grown over time, which of course is a frequent perk with a lot of his music. Also, his changing the modus operandi from one record to the next is part and parcel of the Bob Dylan package.

I also get a real kick out of when Wigwam appears in one of my favourite Wes Anderson movies, The Royal Tenenbaums. The whole soundtrack is peculiarly marvellous, and each song just enhances the tone and feeling of the movie. There’s something about the use of Wigwam here which gets me every time. The song in general displays Dylan’s uncanny ability to be so melodious and versatile. There’s also an underlying sense of conviction and meaning beneath its simplicity.

What I never realised about Wigwam until researching it here is that it was a hit single, reaching the Top 10 in many countries around the world, including Belgium, Denmark, France, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Singapore and Switzerland. It was a Top 40 hit in Canada and Germany and reached No. 41 on the US Billboard chart.

A wigwam, literally, is a traditional dwelling associated with some Indigenous peoples of North America. Dylan had already used “wigwam” as a phrase in his songwriting. During the Blonde on Blonde sessions, an early working title for what became “Pledging My Time” was “What Can You Do for My Wigwam?”, which might suggest the word was part of Dylan’s private vocabulary or songwriting imagination rather than necessarily having a specific symbolic meaning.

References:
1. Wigwam (Bob Dylan song) – Wikipedia

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“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”- Michel Legrand