Dylan's Christmas Lights: A Scholarly Treatise

I used to do this every year. Then I stopped in 2020. But....

On this, the eve of another holiday , I thought I would take a moment to review for you my long rich one-sided seasonal holiday history with Bob Dylan.

I have loved Bob Dylan since high school when my friend and I hitch-hiked to Berkeley and saw him perform at The Berkeley Community Theatre. When we got there, they were selling the last few tickets and ours got us seated in folding chairs on the stage. It was a great show made doubly exciting because I was sitting about 12 inches from Mr. Dylan while he performed.

The 90’s found me living in Malibu, California where I learned that he had a house in my neighborhood. I have been told he is a compulsive home buyer and owns houses all over the country. I have never seen the one that is about a mile from my house because it is hidden behind a number of gates and hedges but my husband and I regularly go past there when we take a walk through the neighborhood that we refer to as “A Full Bob.”

Starting in December 2008 we noticed that the hedges in front of his property were decorated with a string of Christmas lights. We stopped to look at them because the average version of a decorated yard in my neighborhood looks more or less like an outdoor courtyard at a four star hotel. Many of the residents seem to hire the same company to wrap their trees and shrubbery for them. Those houses all look somewhat like this;

But Bob’s house looked distinctly different. He (or someone on his staff who carries out his tasks for him) had wedged a small, decidedly uneven, single strand of Christmas lights into the hedge in front of his estate.

I was moved to photograph it because, much the way he forged his own path in music, he was exhibiting an independence of style in his Christmas decorating. His approach, conjuring images of a string of loose lights having been casually tossed into the hedge by someone in a hurry, seemed to be making a faux-naïve statement, not unlike a Matisse or a Chagall. Because I grew up in a world where nothing that Mr. Dylan ever did was too insignificant not to be worthy of serious intellectual scrutiny, I immediately understood that this was no ordinary, haphazardly arranged, string of colored lights. It had to contain a deeper meaning.

So I returned in 2009, to once again observe the ever more erratically shaped curvi-linear structural of this deceptively haphazard lighting construct. And the more I contemplated it, the more apparent it became that what at first glance appeared erratic was in fact the complete opposite. I began to sense that Mr. Dylan was trying to tell us something important using the vocabulary of Christmas lights as his medium. Moving forward, I was able to uncover so many heretofore hidden layers that I was inspired to embark on an annual quest. My goal: to contribute to the existing body of knowledge about this legendary poet, songwriter, painter, filmmaker, born again Christian and born again Jew, paterfamilias to a whole generation of creative offspring and now holiday sage.

And thus did I return, season after season, much like the holidays themselves, to continue to uncover the subtext behind his deceptively simple annual statements.

2010 was the year I noticed that the angle and pitch of the lights had become more extreme. At first I thought he was making a celestial statement by recreating The Big Dipper. But later that night, after a bit of Googling, my jaw dropped when it was revealed to me what he had actually done: He was making a statement about something we tend to forget during the holidays by arranging his lights to mimic the Monthly Unemployment levels in the U.S. throughout the year.

Christmas of 2011, brought a lighting display that was both truncated and minimal. I sensed immediately that it was too simplistic to conclude that there were fewer bulbs this year because some had burned out. So I gave more thought to the ones that remained and it dawned on me that they might be articulating something in the other language in which Mr. Dylan has always been fluent. Thus did I, with the help of someone more musically knowledgeable than myself, attempt to read the lights of 2011 by superimposing their architecture on to sheet music.And when we did, the following acutely sophisticated avante-garde, almost atonal, Christmas composition was revealed, clearly influenced by modern composer George Crumb in the vein of his revolutionary Christmas themed piece “A little Suite For Christmas”.

Here it is being played in concert.

2012 began on a very auspicious note since it was the year that was supposed to mark the end of the world, as predicted by the end of the Mayan calendar. Facing his own mortality, Mr. Dylan’s lights showed him to be in a more somber mood than usual. And thus did he create a deeply personal self-portrait in lights that told the tale of the triumphs, and tragedies he faced as he continued to move forward with his Never-Ending-Tour, undaunted in the face of an possible apolcaylpse.

On to 2013, which was a very good year for Mr. Dylan, as he clearly illustrated with his surprising but optimistic addition of a second string of lights.

2014 found Mr Dylan in a more painterly almost abstract expressionist mood, still employing the characteristic touches of personal symbolism. This year certain vertical lines were more emphasized, dominated by a prominent 7 shape. A seven and yet also, a symbolic wishbone? Was he starting a new band and calling Wishbone Seven? I only ask these questions. I no longer answer them

In 2015 I confess I was prepared to throw in the towel on this project, believing that I had examined its theme from every imaginable angle. But then, for old time’s sake, I drove past the house and noticed that the hedge had a brand new look! Bob had gotten new lights! Game on !

The lights of 2015 appeared to be located further up the hedge…perhaps indicating a rebirth of high spirits and energy for Bob. Yet the stylings were still similar and distinctly from his hand as he created an homage to the seasonal temperatures in his birth place  of Duluth Minnesota.

Further examination revealed Bob taking a more playful approach this year, as seen in this lighthearted homage to his fired manager, the legendary Albert Grossman.

By 2016, I had decided it was definitely time to call a halt to this project. I felt my work here was done. But then the events of 2016 left me little choice but to continue. In a year that took both David Bowie and Leonard Cohen and left us with Donald Trump, it was impossible to ignore the fact that the world was in desperate need of Mr. Dylan’s timely lighting- based reflections. It was also the year that he won The Nobel Prize in Literature. And The Nobel Committee needed to look no further than Mr. Dylan's 2016 Christmas decorations for a surprisingly blunt X-ray in the shape of a big N that explained in astonishing detail his decision not to attend its ceremony. The answers are all right here in red, white, and green, subdivided into 21 distinct points that begin in the lower left-hand corner of the "N" and continue to its uppermost right-hand corner.

Which brings us to 2017. I can’t remember precisely why but I just wasn’t up for delving into Mr. Dylan’s maze-like psychological approach to decoration any further. Yet people were now calling out to me for further examinations. So I acquitted myself with this simple cell-phone video.

Then came 2018. With the holidays approaching, on November 9, 2018, Malibu caught fire. The residents who were not out on ‘a never-ending tour,’ (like me) were forced to evacuate our homes until almost the first of December. 150 homes in the nearby area burned to the ground. While Mr. Dylan and I were both miraculously spared, the legendary hedge that in year’s past housed his annual lighting display, along with the wooden fence on which the hedge rested, was badly burned. Given the sobriety of this new situation, it was impossible to guess if there would be any attempt at exterior holiday décorating. I assumed there would be nothing to write about. But then… something miraculous appeared behind the newly deforested cyclone fence that was apparently always hidden behind the other fence. What was revealed was every bit as radical a departure for Bob as his most legendary one in 1965 at The Newport Folk Festival when he caused such an uproar because he “went electric."

Quickly I set about deciphering the new message he was obviously sending by juxtaposing two common plaster and resin garden angel statues beside an inflated waterproof nylon TCP Global Christmas Master’s-brand crèche depicting the Blessed Birth of The King of Kings.

Was the Nobel Laureate trying to tell us that renewed spiritual values and our very salvation were as simple as a quick trip to Home Depot? Or was he perhaps saying that all too often 21st century spirituality had become disposable, cloying and full of hot air? Could this be a dispatch pointing out that even the baby Jesus himself had become, at this point in our culture, no better regarded than any other simply rendered cartoon character we might find in some hastily produced stop-action special about Frosty the Snowman? Intrigued by these challenging questions, I retired to my home to assess them. But when I returned for a second viewing, I gasped. Because there, in the very spot where once the Holy Family sat inflated and bathed in LED… THERE WAS NOTHING AT ALL. It was gone, literally and figuratively.

A Christmas mystery! What happened? Was Bob once again confounding all of our expectations by making a Buddhist statement about the transitory nature of all things? Or was it possible that even so legendary a figure as Bob had been seduced by an irresistible inflatable decoration he’d hastily acquired before ever checking its ghastly reviews on Amazon Prime?

And then, a day later, another holiday miracle occurred—a brand new, far more carefully arranged, entirely different yet shockingly more traditional lighting display was unveiled for 2018 in the very same spot where once stood the magnificent hedge of yore. After a full decade of seemingly improvisational, almost slapdash looking lighting tableaus from a master of every creative format, here now was a design as fluid with symmetry as it was conversant in the language of negative space. The new arrangement was breathtakingly classical in its Hellenic formality while at the same time taking a giant step forward into the unknown. Who could have predicted that the terrifying fires that had almost destroyed Malibu would have somehow reduced everything for Bob to their most fundamental decorative lines and shapes? And in so doing, allowed him to now reach out to a whole new audience that might have resisted the more erratically arranged lights of yesteryear? Unsurprisingly, what these new lights had to say was as crucial an annual message as any that had come before.

More importantly Bob’s lighting message of 2018 turned out to be as profound as the one sent by John Lennon’s first solo album where he confounded all expectations by making a return to a simpler, more basic approach. With this new, more classically arranged format, Bob was reminding us that the true spirit of Christmas can best be found in a return, for our country, to the classic values of democracy to which it used to aspire. He is telling us that it is time, once again, to welcome the disenfranchised, make protecting the environment a priority, re-instate the traditions of intelligent civil discourse, revive the two party system of debate, begin in earnest to fight against gun violence, and for the protection of all of our rights, regardless of gender, race, or ethnic heritage. And yes… re-commit to the ideals of democracy for all. Bravo, Bob!

Of course 2020 brought us Biden, and a lot of Covid. Unsurprisingly, Bob’s lights got quite a bit more traditional, revealing his first nearly standard pattern of lighting placement. He was predictably feeling a wide variety of emotions: relief, rage, fear etc.

And with that, I decided that Bob had fulfilled the destiny of his lighting poetry and that my scholarly examinations had come to an end. To honor the moment, I went home and put up some lights of my own, as an homage to my mentor. And myself.

Which brings us to the present. It’s been five years since I bothered to delve into the Christmas stylings of Mr. Dylan. But a couple of days ago, as I was contemplating publishing this important scholarly wrap up, I was feeling nostalgic. So I drove past his house. And I must confess that what I saw shocked me. There, on the brand new hedge that has grown in since the fire, was displayed Mr. Dylan’s first really traditional lighting arrangement! Did my probing commentary browbeat him into greater conformity? Or did the person who puts up his lights for him join a 12 Step Program? What could this radical shift possibly mean?

Sorry. I’m out of the Dylan business these days. You decide.